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.

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.

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.