And now we are hear

Our vacationing crew likes The Rippingtons, so I played some of their music through CarPlay on the rental car’s dashboard while sitting in the Lihue Costco parking lot. The above came up.

How to enjoy bad but not worse weather

Dig the webcam at Poipu beach, on the south side of Kauai, near where I’ll be for a week, starting tomorrow. Also, the turtles, in calmer weather.

I love me a water matrix printer

This fountain in Moravian Square (Moravské náměstí), in the Czechian city of Brno, prints the time in falling water.

Two stories, one slo-mo tragedy

Radio World: How AM and FM station totals have changed in ten years. And Cord Cutter News’ story about it.

I dunno why, but I did give it an image

This was my most-visited blog post yesterday.

They’re watching us too

Hundreds gather to watch turtles on Poipu Beach in Kauai.

Overheard. In Hawaii:

“I was only following odors.”

“I didn’t catch his name. I think he said “Mahalo.”

Your next Aurora

From Spaceweather.com (slightly edited to explain stuff):

A NASA model predicts a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun) will arrive on March 19th, mere hours before the northern vernal equinox (~10  AM EDST)

This is perfect timing because auroras love equinoxes. It’s called the “Russell-McPherron effect.” At this time of year, the magnetic field of Earth can link to the magnetic field of the sun, providing a superhighway for solar wind to enter our planet’s magnetosphere. Even a weak CME can can penetrate to spark mid-latitude auroras. NOAA is currently predicting a G2-class geomagnetic storm.

There’s more: A New Moon on March 19th will provide dark skies for long exposures. Even if you can’t see the auroras, you might be able to photograph them. Point your smartphone at the sky and take a nighttime exposure. You could be surprised by what appears on the screen.

Here in Hawaii, we’ll miss it. But we have Hawaii stuff, such as the big turtles.

So here’s one

Iain Henderson: If I Had a Place to Stand and a Lever I Could Fix The Internet … Excerpt: “Endless positive possibilities become possible when we move beyond the weaknesses in the current architecture, and build genuine digital capability on the side of the human.”

But I still miss the damn thing

My spleen was removed on this day in 1961. The doctors did it because they thought without a spleen my low hematocrit (~32%: anemic, technically) would go up. All they knew at the time was that the spleen’s job was filtering out old red blood cells (erythrocytes). Mine were mostly misshapen (resembling spheres, rather than frisbees), making them suboptimal at carrying oxygen and too easy for the spleen to destroy. But my hematocrit never went up.

Decades later, after science improved, doctors at Bethesda treating my sister (an officer in the US Navy) triangulated several medical disciplines to re-diagnose the problem we share (she’s anemic too). Rather than spherocytosis, we have dyserythropoietic anemia type II, which is also herditary (congenital), but doesn’t automatically suggest spleenectomy as a treatment. Instead (at least in our cases), they do phlebotomies (take blood). This reduces the amount of iron in solution in the blood system, which risks hemochromatosis, a kind of iron overload. But I also haven’t needed that in years.

Bottom line: my sister and I both have a mild form of the disorder. So we are fine, though down one spleen apiece.

Back when I was a kid (guessing around eleven), and they told me I was anemic, I asked what that meant. They said, “You probably can’t run a mile without collapsing.” So, the next time I was at the beach, I ran a mile. In high school, I ran a mile on an indoor track in under seven minutes. I also loved playing soccer and basketball. And skiing. So, no worries. I’m fine.

I’m fascinated by Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia mydas), which bask on the sands of Poʻipū Beach, here on the south shore of Kauaʻi. Known locally as honu, they typically range from 200 to 400 pounds, but some have weighed in north of 800 pounds. They can also live more than 90 years, are the largest hard-shelled sea turtles, and range across all the ocean’s non-frigid seas. They also migrate up to hundreds of miles, can dive to 1500 feet, and are herbivores, living mostly on seaweed.

The Hawaiian population is unique to the species in their choice to bask on beaches. Other green sea turtle populations come ashore, but only to lay eggs. These guys, however, don’t lay eggs where they bask, preferring instead to repopulate on remote outlying islands such as French Frigate Shoals.

They also aren’t green except on the inside, where their fat and cartilage have a verdant hue. And they are a protected species, so don’t try to check that out.

Here is an album of turtle shots I took yesterday, and another I shot four years ago. It’s possible some of the same turtles are in both sets. The number of people observing the turtles these days, however, is a high multiple of what I saw the first time around.

Misappointment

I hoped to get into the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) today here on Kauai, because (unlike the last time I was here), they now allow visitors to pay $25 admission after a background check (which I was willing to risk). Alas, the guy next to the guy with the AR-15 said they are open Monday to Friday, but the background check people are off on Friday, so it was a no-go. But, with a couple brothers-in-law we had a fun day trip anyway.

I did get to see and shoot the PMRF from a boat back in 2021.

Bad News

LA Times: CBS News shuts down radio unit amid division-wide cuts, leaving 700 stations without  their CBS news feed. Axios has a mostly budgetary angle. Neither says that radio is largely dependent on “barter,” which is free programming paid for on the providers’ side by advertising, with holes in the schedule for local ads that are the stations’ actual source of income. I know that most or all syndicated talk programming is bartered. I don’t know if the CBS News audio (radio) feed is bartered as well. If not, I suspect the paying market for CBS radio news has been going away. I’ll dig into it when I get a chance. (Still on vacation in Hawaii here.)

Time for her own Wikipedia page

I just ran across Aiyana Lee. She's good. More.

Bonus link.

Rutilance

The FCC has green-lit Nexstar's purchase of Tenga. This will move much of local TV into the red, politically. Wrote about that here and here back in September. Pull-quote:

Trump and Carr want MAGA-aligned affiliates. Simple as that. Sinclair is already there. Nexstar is leaning that way. If Nexstar gets the green light to acquire Tegna, we can assume that all the former Tegna stations will also veer from mainstream to redstream.

Hope he doesn't block my double-shot

I took Luke Kornet's coffee test, scored high, and wrote a comment.

Go there

I spent most of today writing Making a New News Business over at the ProjectVRM blog. It begins,

In the dawning decades of our new Digital Age, the news business has shrunk from a galaxy of bright stars to a loose collection of white dwarfs glowing in otherwise dark empty spaces. The empty spaces are called “news deserts.”

In the meantime (at least in the US), the redstream is the new mainstream, while more and more people get news (or what passes for it) from social media and each other. Countless sources are also faked up by AI.

Less metaphorically, the news business has de-institutionalized. How can we re-institutionalize it in digital ways that can also be trusted?

Answers follow. I'm still working on more.

Getting ahead of my selves

I'm up in a few hours to fly from LAX to ORD to IND tomorrow. So I'm getting a few tabs out of the way here before I finish packing.

Speaking of flying

Jim Fallows, writer and pilot (among other things), explains some of what happened to Air Canada Flight 8646 at LaGuardia. I go to Jim first when things like this happen.

Black eye

Scott Fybush on CBS Radio News shutting down.

New frontiers for reality

In case you’re wondering how MyTerms will change everything (for example, by getting you real privacy online and obsolescing cookie notices), the first proofs-of-concept will be coming from JLINC. Here’s the open protocol. Here’s the blog. And here’s Iain Henderson’s blog, which does a great job of explaining how MyTerms opens paths between demand and supply that are closed in an online world where personal privacy is an insincere corporate promise rather than a working feature.

By the way, we were lucky that Craig Burton lived long enough to sing the praises of JLINC long before it evolved into what it is and does today. Thank both Craig and Iain for my prior mentions of JLINC here and at ProjectVRM. That’s Craig on the left

And, conveniently, JLINC, MyTerms, and other future necessities for fully working markets will be front and center at VRM Day, the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW #42), and the Agentic Internet Workshop (AIW), all at the Computer History Museum, March 27 to April 1 (Monday-Friday). Don’t risk your futures by missing them.

I’ll still probably be late for stuff

I think I’m back on Eastern, after jumping here from Hawaiian time. Best things about Hawaiian and Pacific Times: evening games are all earlier.

And free

I’ll be saying more about Helen Nissenbaum’s talk here at Indiana University next Tuesday, but meanwhile you can read more about it here, and sign up. It’ll be live online.

Some public notes::::

How can one not appreciate AI as a teacher and problem-solver? ChatGPT just taught me how to make a .ics file to put on emails out to people who should attend an event. Here’s my first, for Helen Nissenbaum’s talk next Tuesday. Click on it if you’d like it in your calendar. It even has the Zoom link you’ll need.

nissenbaum

In The Ozempicization of the Economy, Kyla Scanlon discusses “the shift from infrastructure that served everyone to technologies built around the mobile, private individual.” She concludes, “Despair right now is extremely convincing and extremely profitable. Hope would be the opposite – something that doesn’t need you to feel desperate in order to work.” It’s all over the place, but a worthwhile read.

This post on Antipodes is getting some action.

Algorhythms is going on here at Indiana University. If you’re here, be there.

My blog on infrastructure is getting a facelift soon: from an ancient WordPress theme to a modern one.

“Broadcast” still gets mentioned a lot. As far as I know, I am the only person in my town to watch broadcast (over-the-air) TV. You know, with an antenna.

A Reddit thread on the Canada Air flight crash at LaGuardia is frozen but interesting as it stands. It starts with a passenger who was on the plane.

Music streaming is a bad business.

Once an airport is gone, it doesn’t come back.

The Corporate BS Generator echoes BuzzPhraser, first published in the early ’90s and still there!

Somebody pointed me to this talk, which I gave back when I still had hair. Interesting how the exterior of one’s body ages while one’s voice does not. (So far.)

The four roads to the intention economy are still open.

Dr. Barkhuff‘s stoic approach to the Trump matter.

Hadn’t watched Parks and Recreation until last night. It’s funny, as promised. We were also charmed to find the show set (as are we) in Indiana.

A little reliving of a warm and fuzzy past of mine, with WQDR radio in Raleigh, in its rock years.

Now that we’ve left, Hawaii is looking great.

Please enjoy Eddie Dalton.

Remembering Kai Tak, Hong Kong’s amazing and scary waterfront airport in the heart of the city.

Is this wrong? I think so.

Overheard: “Does your body prove a concept?”

Despite my pushback, a search for “intention economy” is still thick with bad PR.

In an email response to this Wall Street Journal story about how much people hate seeing ads on their Samsung refrigerator screens, I wrote this:

Advertising corrupts, and digital advertising corrupts absolutely.

Samsung TVs come with Samsung’s own collection of channels. Two thousand of them, it seems. The UI prioritizes those, robo-subordinating the streaming services, over-the-air, cable, and your own HDMI-connected devices to places as far as possible away from the action on your screen, so you get dark-pattered into looking through those channels (old westerns, stations from Wichita and Fort Wayne, no-name news and weather services…) instead of what you want. Why? Because Samsung sells ads on those channels. Probably personalized, because they want to spy on you as well. If they go to that much trouble, and junk up their UI so much on their own TVs, why not do that on a full-screen fridge?

I’m kinda proud of the stars we’ve been bringing to our salon series here at Indiana University since 2021. And there are none I’m more excited to welcome than Helen Nissenbaum, who will be here on Tuesday to speak both in person and on Zoom. The title of her talk is “Why Obfuscation is (still) Needed (more than ever).”

Helen is the North Star of personal privacy—a role she earned by changing how the whole field understands what privacy is: specifically, that it’s not about secrecy or control, but about appropriate information flows. This was detailed in her landmark book, Privacy in Context, : Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, and backed by her work on practical tools such as the Adnauseum browser extension.

Her day job is as Professor of Information Science and the founding director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech. Visit that page to get a small sense of her range of involvements and influences.

Helen has been an influence on my own privacy work, most notably with MyTerms. If privacy matters even a fraction as much to you as it does to me, come or tune in to her talk, and be prepared with questions.

That’s next Tuesday at 4 pm Eastern. You can register and join the crowd here.

Or click on this to put it on your calendar:

Time/Place capsule

My shots of Delhi in 2018.

CSAT journalism!

Karl Bode, via Gary Marcus: “CEO said a thing!” Karl: “‘CEO said a thing!’ journalism involves parroting the claims of a business leader or executive with absolutely no context, correction, or challenge whatsoever, no matter how elaborate the delusion.” His examples—from Altman, Musk, Zuckerberg—are spot-on. Reminds me of why no major tech magazine ever hired me. (Mainly, I didn’t want to do vendor sports coverage.)

Look toward your nearest pole

Spaceweather: Might have auroras tonight.

Before the Fall

Pop was a Republican in the same way he was a fisherman, a carpenter, a Brooklyn Dodgers (and later a Mets) fan, and a Ford man. As a kid, I thought of myself the same way. Republicans stood for fiscal prudence, limited government, personal freedom and responsibility, stuff like that. But then I went to a Quaker college and became a pacifist who marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Later, as a journalist, I thought it was best to register as an independent, which I’ve been ever since.

But I have never lost touch with Pop’s sympathies, especially around personal freedom. I am also sure that, were he alive today (he died in 1979), he would hate what Trump has done to the Grand Old Party, to conservative norms, to the whole world.

So Pop came to mind this morning when I read what Wired says about the many ways the Trumpist GOP is fucking with (small d) democratic norms, and democracy itself. I hope as many perps as possible get voted out next November. And I say that as a partisan for democracy, not for the Democratic Party. We need conservatism, but not this kind.

It's not too late

Come join us for this at 4 pm Eastern today.

Also on the privacy front

One thinks of Thomson Reuters as a source of good information on issues (Thomson) and news (Reuters). That's the brand. Alas, it's also a source of information about you and me to ICE, Palantir, and others. That's what The Minnesota Star-Tribune reported back on March 3rd, and 404 Media does again today.

And so do all the others, no?

Will Lockett: 

Sam Altman just went on record saying intelligence **_will soon be sold on a meter, “like electricity or water.”
_**If you don’t understand what he just said, let me tell you.
He is not building a chat interface. He is building the grid for human cognition. And he intends to charge you for your own relevance.
They stole all this data from us, the people. Our life’s work, our creativity, our art. They devoured the open internet and blew through every copyright law on Earth.
And now they want to “sell it back to us” in the form of a utility?!

Only in America

Cory Doctorow explains how ICE in airports "hanging around like a bad smell and being totally useless" is a warm-up for their armed and masked presence at every polling place in November. He has concrete suggestions for stopping that, which he addresses to Democrats. Wise Republicans should be on board, too.

David Weinberger once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” It’s the future now, and he was right, or close enough. Because today we live in a world where the power to publish and distribute no longer belongs just to institutions, but to everybody. Me included. Here are some stats for this very blog:

At its peak, this blog had dozens of thousands of visitors daily. But that was in the ’00s, when blogging was a small pond, and I was a large fish in it. That was also when big newspapers and broadcast networks were still mountain ranges on the media landscape. Now those mountains have worn down to hills amidst fresh volcanoes: stars new and old, gushing out “content” on podcasts, social media, YouTube, and the rest. They’re the ones with readers, viewers, followers, and subscribers in the dozens of millions.

While that’s interesting, the media landscape has widened exponentially as millions of consumers have also become producers. In sum, their flow is immense: far larger than what we get from the old hills and the new volcanoes. Let’s call it the allstream.

It’s not “the media” anymore. It’s too different. Let’s explore how.

First, “the media” is a modern label, dating from the 1940s. Here’s Google’s Ngram Viewer, which charts mentions in books.

As a topic, “the media” hockey-sticked when Marshall McLuhan made “media theory” a thing in the 1960s:

Meanwhile, the expression “major media” seems to have come and gone—

—while “mainstream media” is hot shit:

Why has “mainstream media” gone up while “major media” has gone down?

Politics. Writers and talkers on the right and the left both have lots to say about “the mainstream media.” It seems (at least to me) that talkers on both political wings think the old mainstream media—big newspapers, TV networks, broadcast giants, news wires—are still mountains. Or, to follow the stream metaphor, rivers.

But those old rivers were self-limiting. They controlled the production and the flow. That’s what made them main. It’s also what made them costly. Printing presses were expensive. Broadcast licenses were scarce. Regulations ruled. Editors and producers were gatekeepers because there were gates to keep.

Then came the Internet, followed by the Web, blogging, podcasting, cheap digital photography and video, and all the other means by which anybody with a keyboard, microphone, phone, or just an idea could put something into the world. The threshold for expression has fallen to trivial.

One reason was that RSS—really simple syndication—made distribution simple for everyone. Nobody had to ask permission from a publisher, a platform, or a network. It gave individuals the power to speak and flow into the allstream.

Every creator wants to be valued and followed by at least a few people—especially the right people—rather than by large populations. We each have our own public. (At least for this moment, reader, you’re in mine.)

In place of the mainstream, we now have wide slopes of braided rivers:

In the allstream, everybody can publish, distribution is easy, and the number of flows exceeds anyone’s ability to count or follow them all. Their variety is also extreme: blogs, podcasts, newsletters, YouTube channels, TikTok feeds, posts in Mastodon, BlueSky, Threads, X, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Flickr and Smugmug photos. Substack essays. Discord chats. Group texts. Private forums. Comment sections. Local news outlets (many written and published by just one person). Transcripts. Some are public. Some are semi-public. Some are private. Some are generated by AI or by humans with AI assistance. The scale of each is small by old media standards. But the aggregate is far more immense than what we call “the media” ever were.

In The Redstream Media, I described how partisan flows of news and opinion had already turned the mainstream into a sidestream. But it’s not just happening with politics. Expertise streams around institutions. Communities stream around beats. Hobbyists stream around trade publications. Local knowledge streams around outside authorities. People with cameras, microphones, and keyboards stream around organizations that have long monopolized distribution.

Of course, much of the allstream is noisy, false, manipulative, repetitive, trivial, and thick with propaganda, junk, spam, AI slop, outrage bait, and viral bullshit. It can produce confusion faster than clarity. But the old mainstream had propaganda, junk, exclusions, class filters, geographic biases, advertiser pressures, and institutional blind spots.

But scarcity was the media’s main feature. To see, hear, or read it, you needed a TV, a radio, a subscription, or a newsstand. Through those spincters, the few spoke to the many while the many lacked the means to speak back, or out. Now they have the means. All of them can stream too.

When I look at how far my readership has fallen from the heights it enjoyed in the golden age of blogging (and at Linux Journal in its peak years), I’m glad to have the readers I’ve got. The same goes for my photo collections here and here on Flickr. For two decades, those got ten to fifteen thousand views a day. Now they get a few hundred. I’m fine with that too, because the totality of all the flow on the Net is beyond measure, and growing.

The allstream is everywhere, and no longer only (1.0) or mostly (2.0) on the Web. It has spread across too many places for an old-fashioned search to encompass. As Gemini tells me, Google would rather be your “helpful assistant” than your librarian.

And that’s your new sphincter.

Big AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, Claude, Perplexity, et. al.) stands between you and the allstream and says, “I’ll handle this.” So the sphincter moves from the point of publication to the point of retrieval. (My assistant, ChatGPT, gave me that quote and the sentence that followed. Everything else in this essay is mine.)

When we (David Weinberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, and I) wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, we saw lowering the threshold of public expression as a plus for civilization. We published Cluetrain in March 1999, 27 years ago. Here is the “one clue” (from Chris Locke) that precedes the 95 theses that followed:

And dammit, we are still seats, eyeballs, end users, and consumers. Our reach still fails to exceed the grasp of the surveillance fecosystem. And none of big tech (or big anything) is dealing with it.

But we are more numerous than ever. Our tail is long and wide. What if we get real power? We didn’t have it in 1999. We four Cluetrain authors thought we did. But Web 2.0 came along, and we got all the personal agency the platforms allowed.

And we are still there. All of us can produce video, but if we want it seen, we’ll need to use YouTube, which has a monthly reach of 2.7 billion people. It’s a wide gate, but Google keeps it.

Can we ever get the high degrees of personal and collective agency we saw coming when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto?

I think we can, if online service providers agree to our terms, instead of us to theirs. That’s why we created MyTerms, and why I’ve written so much about it. (And I won’t stop.) The case we need to make is that an intention economy built on customer agency will be richer, wider, deeper, and larger than what we have here and now, in the final stage of the old industrial age.

Once we have the agency, we will need new and better forms of economic signaling and money flow than we have so far. Everyone who publishes anything should have a piece of the allstream action (whatever that might mean). MyTerms will tee that up as well.

I’ll leave you with a question: What will happen when the landscape across which the allstream flows is a worldwide commons of self-empowered customers?

If you have an answer for that, you can also inform the future of Customer Commons, which we created in 2013 to make good on what I promised in The Intention Economy in 2012. Both pushed forward the body of ideas we started assembling with ProjectVRM in 2006, but actually began forming with the Internet in the 1970s and ’80s, and the Web, Linux, and open source in the ’90s.

Everything takes time. Let’s make a better future happen sooner rather than later.

1

You’re welcome

I don’t hate April Fools Day. I’m just too busy to participate. So this is a fooling-free blog post.

Much to munch on

Getting great hang time with Jon Udell (who also manifests here) lately. Here are two of his recent publishings ya’ll might dig:
• Introducing XMLUI
• Beyond The Dip

Is there also a Gander?

Just discovered Goose.

Also, while we’re not at it, A2UI.

Bad try

This appears to be an interesting story, and available to free (as well as to paying) subscribers, but the shakedown is so hard and blunt that I moved on.

Good song title

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling.

Another example of how BigAIs have become the Great Typicalizers of Everything

Florian Roth is tired of reading AI-written posts. His main take: “They all sound like the same guy.”

I fear that guy is, at least in part, me. The sentence fragments, the short paragraphs, the em dashes. (These: —.) As source material, my writing is thick on the Web’s ground, going back to the early ’90s. Example.

I’ll cop to one of his tells: absurd certainty. Some of mine turned out to be the opposite of absurd. Examples: personal computing, outlining, the Net, the Web, Linux, open source, Cluetrain, blogging, smartphones. And some not (at least so far, or not yet in a big way): home Web servers (or “personal clouds”), desktop Linux, VRM, EmanciPay, the intention economy, MyTerms, personal AI, news commons, market intelligence that flows both ways…

Anyway, AI-style writing is now like Received Pronunciation in the UK: the way things are done.

Something I didn’t know

Ben Collier in the MIT Press Reader: The Secret History of Tor: How a Military Project Became a Lifeline for Privacy

Not  looking good

Thomas P.M. Barnett on the current war:

History doesn’t grade on effort. It grades on outcomes. And right now the outcomes are running about 3-to-1 against anything resembling the vision that justified the operation in the first place.
As usual, the postwar is everything.

Free at last

NiemanLab: The Salt Lake Tribune will drop its paywall.

Might do the same for you

In The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis, the latest episode of the Founders podcast, David Senra compresses by Sebastian Mallaby's book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, into 55 minutes of pure inspiration. Not just because Demis is a hugely inspired and driven dude, but because a pile of ideas came to me while I was listening.

Big fact

YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly users.

Here's almost looking at you

Imagine scattered bits of coffee grounds, floating in space in front of your face, a few inches to a few feet away. Among them, blurred filaments float around, like zero-gravity worms. These are bits of debris inside my left eyeball, not far from my retina, exfoliated, I am told, by my cornea, which is slowly healing from the effects of cataract surgery that required a somewhat aggressive emulsification of the lens before a new replacement lens was installed.

An interesting thing: if I don't move my eyes, the debris slowly vanishes, erased by my brain as if by Photoshop's healing brush. Then they reappear when I move my eyes. Strange shit.

Observations

Explore these observatories. Read what they are about and how they are produced. One more way (within which are many more ways) that the world will never be the same. Bonus link in the same vein. Big HT to Jim Cowie of the Berkman Klein Center, the Internet History Initiative, and much else.

Unanswered

I still have questions about two Dorothy Parker quotes.

I was invited by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, to contribute my thoughts to their latest study, titled Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the Age of AI: Experts Call for Radical Change Across Institutions, Social Structures, which just came out. Here is the full report, which runs 376 pages. I am generously sourced on pages 11, 16, 142, and 358. There is a lot of great stuff in the report, which I highly recommend. For what it’s worth, here is the full text of what I sent them.

We are digital beings in a digital world. That’s the main thing. And this world is still very new.

We’ve operated in the natural world for as long as we’ve been a species, and we are experts at it. But the digital world is not only new, but sure to be with us for many years, decades, centuries, and millennia to come. And we still lack countless graces we take for granted in the natural world, such as privacy and independence from algorithmic manipulation.

Making full sense of this new world is very hard because we understand everything metaphorically, and natural world metaphors mask what’s really going on in the digital world. So, while we speak of “domains” with “locations” that we “build” and “own” (though we only rent them), and speak of “loading” and “transferring” “packets” of data in “up” and “down,” data are actually collections of ones and zeroes that are by design immaterial non-things that are instantaneously both here and elsewhere, even though “where” only makes full sense in the natural world. How will all this change and make whole new kinds of sense after a few more decades of digital existence?

Progress is the process by which the miraculous becomes mundane. In the digital world, that transition is now happening almost instantly, and in many domains, because AI is endlessly useful.

Big AI does its best to ingest the totality of human expression in all digital forms, and then to make any and all of it available in the most useful ways it can. At the moment (for me, Noon in The Bahamas on February 2nd, 2026), it does this by bringing hunks of that expression back to us, on demand, in constructive conversational forms. Big AI is the world’s largest Magic 8 Ball, within which floats a polyhedron of answers with trillions of facets, each ready to help.

As with all tech, Big AI has its downsides. (Just ask Gregory Hinton or Gary Marcus.) But its usefulness verges on absolute, so we can’t stop using it, no matter how abyssal some credible prophesies may be.

But there is one saving upside. It’s the same one that saved us from HAL 9000 in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s our humanity and independence. Specifically, in the form of personal AI.

We need personal AI for the same reason we need personal homes, shoes, and computers. We need it to know our natural and digital selves as fully as possible, and to participate with full agency in society, its economies, and its governance.

Think about all the data in our personal lives that is not in our full control, and could use some AI help: our schedules, our past and future work, our property, our finances, our obligations, our writing and correspondence, our photographs, our sound recordings, our videos, our travels, our countless engagements with other persons online and off, our many machines, you name it.

Truly personal AI—the kind you own and operate, rather than the kind that is just another suction cup on a corporate tentacle—is as hard to imagine in 2026 as personal computing was in 1976. But it is no less necessary and inevitable. When we have it, many of the questions that challenge us will have new and better answers. And new challenges.

Every form of life, from the microbial to the human, is fraught with challenges. Personal AI is necessary for us to meet and surmount our challenges in the digital world, and to answer all the questions posed to us in this very research exercise.

Amara’s Law says we overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long. I’ve been doing both all my life, and in all my answers to good questions asked by Pew over the years.

Perhaps the most glaring example of short-term overestimation was my response to a request by The Wall Street Journal in 2012 to compress my new book, The Intention Economy, to a single cover piece for the paper’s Marketplace section. My editor at the Journal suggested writing about how the intention economy would look ten years in the future, which is three years ago as I write this. The piece I wrote was titled (by the WSJ) “The Customer as a God.” In retrospect, I was wrong. The economy I described still hasn’t happened. We are not gods in the marketplace. But there are encouraging signs, and I’m still sure my prophecy will prove out. Meanwhile, the first half of Amara’s Law applies.

I’ve been young for so long that I now have the life expectancy of a puppy. So I don’t expect to see personal AI or the intention economy prove out in my lifetime. But I am sure both are worth working toward, so that’s what I do. And I advise anyone wishing to make the world better to look for their best work to manifest somewhere beyond their own life’s horizons.