Doc Searls Weblog

I live a full and active life. In fact, I’m probably more engaged than I’ve ever been, with faith that at least some of my ideas will play out in constructive ways over the coming years and decades.

But, at 78 (still a year younger than the current US president), I am also more mortal than ever, and I know it, especially since I figure at least a third of the guys I grew up with are now gone, or ahead of me in the checkout line.

My heart seems fine, but I’ve had an ablation to stop occasional atrial fibrillation. I take blood thinners to prevent another pulmonary embolism (I had a scary one in ’08, but none since). I have a bit of macular degeneration. My genetics are long on longevity (my paternal grandma lived to almost 108), but I have some risk factors as well. The main one, however, is plain old mortality. We’re here for the ride, but the ride ends. And I know that.

So I’ll be devoting more of my bloggings to surfacing valuable lessons and stories left in my care by those now gone, and to making clearer what I’m bringing to generations after mine.

Here is one of the biggest lessons: life really is short. By design, we only get a few dozen years. My 78 went by fast. And each year goes by faster, since it’s a narrower slice of one’s pie of life.

Another way to look at it: Life is exceptional, and death is its most durable feature. Of the carbonate rocks that comprise a quarter of the Earth’s surface, most were once alive or close enough. The limestone in the henge above was living muck before it turned to rock.

My point is that we all need to get out of here. Still, I operate in willful oblivity to the inevitable, because that’s more fun and productive than worrying about it. And being an inveterate creature helps for doing that.

Go to HUD.gov, and you’ll get this:

Go to USDA.gov, and you’ll get this:

Seems to me these violate the Hatch Act, aka “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.” It was passed in 1939 and amended a couple of times since then. I am not a lawyer, but I know some, and I can read. One useful source is this guidance from the Office of the Special Counsel.Reading that tells me all this stuff crosses the Hatch Act line. But there are maybes in there. For example, this: “…activity directed at the success or failure of a political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group — then the expression is not permitted while the employee is on duty.”

Whatever, seems to me this will come down to what the OSC decides. How free of politics is the OSC? Its About page says,

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) is an independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency. OSC’s statutory authority comes from four federal laws: the Civil Service Reform Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act, the Hatch Act, and the Uniformed Services Employment & Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA)…

In addition, OSC enforces the Hatch Act, which puts certain restrictions on partisan political activity by government employees…

So, if the OSC believes the Hatch Act is being violated here, its focus will be on the government employees behind those clearly (to me) partisan website banners.

But will it do anything? The last guy to run the OSC was fired by President Trump early this year. It has been musical chairs since then. Jamieson Greer is currently the Acting Special Counsel. Trump’s earlier choice (and the Special Counsel in Waiting?) was Paul Ingrassia. Read about those guys and draw or redraw your own conclusions.

Look, I avoid politics here, because algorithms and an absent appetite for arguments that go nowhere. I’m a registered Independent and think leaders of both major parties are mostly fulla shit in what they are saying about the issues involved in the current government shutdown— and about each other. Meanwhile, the national debt is 37ドル.64 trillion, up 2ドル.17 trillion during the last fiscal year. Just one item.

Anyway, seems to me this is news. The AP, ABC, The Guardian, and others agree. Public Citizen has already filed nine complaints based on the Hatch Act. Government Executive is also on the case.

So I’m taking public notes about this, while shit’s going down. Here is what I have so far (as of 11:07PM on 3 October 2025). The partisan phrases are boldfaced.

US federal government websites with partisan notices:

Site	Exact wording on the site	Additional sources
https://www.atf.gov/	"Democrats have shut down the government. Department of Justice websites are not currently regularly updated."	(ATF)
https://www.cdc.gov/	"Mission-critical activities of CDC will continue during the Democrat-led government shutdown... During the government shutdown, only web sites supporting excepted functions will be updated."	(nccd.cdc.gov)
https://www.cms.gov/	"Mission-critical activities of CMS will continue during the Democrat-led government shutdown. Please use this site as a resource as the Trump Administration works to reopen the government..."	(Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services)
https://www.dea.gov/ (via DEA Museum pages on dea.gov)	"Democrats have shut down the government. Department of Justice websites are not currently regularly updated."	(museum.dea.gov)
https://www.ed.gov/	Website: I saw now partisan wording on ed.gov pages. My sister reported voicemail changes heard by callers to the Department.	—
https://www.fda.gov/	"Mission-critical activities of FDA will continue during the Democrat-led government shutdown." (this also appears on FDA event postponement pages)	(U.S. Food and Drug Administration)
https://home.treasury.gov/	"The radical left has chosen to shut down the United States government... Treasury’s websites will only be sporadically updated until this shutdown concludes."	(U.S. Department of the Treasury)
https://www.hud.gov/	“The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government…” Others also captured this wording: "The Radical Left are going to shut down the government...“	(CBS News)
https://www.omb.gov → https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/	OMB redirects to a WhiteHouse.gov OMB page, atop which is a banner that says “DemocratsHave Shut Down the Government” followed by a live count-up of days, hours, minutes, and seconds.	(The White House)
https://www.sba.gov/	"Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal funding bill (H.R. 5371), leading to a government shutdown..." (This appears across SBA pages as "Special announcement.")	(Small Business Administration)
https://www.state.gov/	"Due to the Democrat-led shutdown, website updates will be limited until full operations resume."	(State.gov)
https://www.usda.gov/ (and sub-agencies like ERS/FNS)	"Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open..."	(USDA)

US federal government websites without partisan notices, listed alphabetically:

https://www.army.mil/
https://www.bea.gov/
https://www.cbp.gov/
https://www.cbo.gov/
https://www.census.gov/
https://www.commerce.gov/ (though it does feature The Trump Gold Card, which seems kinda partisan to me)
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/
https://www.cpsc.gov/
https://www.doi.gov/
https://www.dol.gov/
https://www.eeoc.gov/
https://www.epa.gov/
https://www.faa.gov/
https://www.fbi.gov/
https://www.fcc.gov/
https://www.fdic.gov/
https://www.fema.gov/
https://www.federalreserve.gov/
https://www.gao.gov/
https://www.gsa.gov/
https://highways.dot.gov/
https://www.loc.gov/
https://www.marines.mil/
https://www.maritime.dot.gov/
https://www.nasa.gov/
https://www.nhtsa.gov/
https://www.nih.gov/
https://www.nist.gov/
https://www.nlrb.gov/
https://www.noaa.gov/
https://www.nps.gov/
https://www.nrc.gov/
https://www.ns f.gov/
https://www.opm.gov/
https://www.sec.gov/
https://www.ssa.gov/
https://www.transit.dot.gov/
https://www.tsa.gov/
https://www.uscg.mil/
https://www.usgs.gov/
https://www.usmarshals.gov/
https://www.ustr.gov/
https://www.usps.com/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/
https://www.war.gov/ (formerly Department of Defense)

My purpose here is to give readers and fellow journalists some lists they can check while following this story.

Disclosure: ChatGPT made me the table and alphabetized the lists, which I compiled myself after visiting (yes) all those sites.

I invite corrections, subtractions, revisions, and other improvements.

This blog is mine. While it is hosted somewhere, it could be anywhere. The main thing: it isn’t on a platform, and doesn’t have to be.

I publish it on my own, and syndicate it through RSS.

This puts me in a publishing ecosystem that is wide open and full of interop. If you want to know more about how the blogging ecosystem works, read Dave. He’s the blogfather, and pioneering in many useful and fun directions.

Blogging is an ecosystem because it’s open, as are ecosystems in nature. It’s not a plant in the atrium of some giant’s hotel.

In fact, I think “ecosystem” should apply only to open systems that welcome participation, while we need another word for what happens only on a given platform or inside a given silo. For example, the Net, the Web, and the blogosphere are all ecosystems. The Apple’s and Google’s closed and verticalized worlds are something else. Find a word.

Substack is a platform. I am told that one can move from Substack to Ghost or wherever. And, if that’s the case, that means it operates in a larger ecosystem. I’d say the blogosphere. But lots about it looks and feels closed to me.

I bring all this up because today in my email came the newsletter version of Substack is a social media app, by Hamish McKenzie. My instant response was a mix of Huh? and Yuck. Because until then I thought Substack was blogging host with a newsletter business. Meanwhile, social media as we’ve known it is all silo’d and in deep ways very icky. Calling Substack “a social media app” is, at least for me, a huge downscale move. I felt the same way when I read about OpenAI going into the social app business.

Blogging is just publishing, plus whatever grows naturally around that. It’s a how, not a where, which makes it a much better what. And that what isn’t “a social media app.”

Anyway, my thinking isn’t complete on this, and may never be. But what Hamish wrote in that newsletter turned me off to ever blogging on Substack. I like my freedom and independence.

By the way, if people want to subscribe to my blog in newsletter form, they can do that. Look on the right (or on mobile, at the bottom) for “Get New Posts By Email,” and subscribe. I have 92 subscribers so far. Just remember that I almost always keep editing what I write. For example, my last two blog posts started as one, and I’m still not happy with either of them.

Kind of like life. It’s all provisional. What’s the best ecosystem for that?

[Update on 3 October 2025…] I just learned last night that my sister, @JanSearls, a retired officer with the U.S. Navy and a graduate of the Navy’s War College (among other distinctions) has a Substack. So far, it’s all restacks (a term I just learned), but she’s a good writer, and I hope she will post some original stacks as she gets comfortable operating in Substack’s corner of the greater blogosphere.

This is Part 2 of a post that began with a Jimmy Kimmel monologue, but really wasn’t about that. It was about the grave situation in which over-the-air (OTA) TV finds itself. Here is Part 1.

Even people who don’t like leftish comedy should admit that Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue after he returned to the air was brilliant. It was also, judging from this—

—a success.

And yet, says Stephen Levy in Wired, Broadcast TV Is a ‘Melting Ice Cube.’ Kimmel Just Turned Up the Heat — After Sinclair and Nexstar pulled Jimmy Kimmel off air, the old affiliate model looks shakier than ever. Even Disney might do better without broadcast.

So let’s dig into that.

The “affiliate model” is the current TV show distribution system. Simply put, networks (primarily ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and PBS) sell programming to affiliates, which are TV stations with channel numbers.

Put another way, they wholesale it. Payments by affiliates to networks for programming is called reverse compensation. It’s “reverse,” because from the 1940s to the late 1990s, networks paid stations to carry programming. Now it’s the other way around. (I suppose the same applies to the lesser networks—ion, CW, Daystar, Bounce, Cozi, etc.—but nobody cares much about those.)

Here is a table of major affiliate station owners:

Top U.S. Owners of Big Four Network Affiliates

Owner	Total TV Stations (owned/operated)	Big Four Affiliates	Notes	Source
Nexstar Media Group	~197	~28–32 ABC (subset shown); majority of portfolio is Big Four	Largest U.S. station owner; more than 200 owned/partner stations across 116 markets.	Wikipedia; Nexstar; WTOP (ABC count)
Sinclair Broadcast Group	~294	~41 ABC (subset shown); also major owner across NBC/CBS/Fox	Among the largest owners of Big Four affiliates nationwide.	Wikipedia (station list); NY Post (ABC count)
Gray Media	~180	Largest owner of NBC affiliates (28); strong on ABC & CBS as well	Name changed from "Gray Television" to "Gray Media" in 2025; expanding via pending deals.	Wikipedia (station list); Wikipedia (NBC=28)
Tegna	68	56 (22 NBC, 15 CBS, 13 ABC, 6 Fox)	Largest owner by audience reach of NBC affiliates; portfolio is predominantly Big Four.	Wikipedia (counts by network)
E. W. Scripps	60+	42 (18 ABC, 11 NBC, 9 CBS, 4 Fox)	Mix of Big Four & CW/MyNet; numbers exclude recent pending swaps until closed.	Scripps investor highlights
Hearst Television	~34–35	~28 (15 ABC, 11 NBC, 2 CBS)	Heavy ABC/NBC footprint; minimal Fox.	Wikipedia (affiliate mix)
Cox Media Group	~12	Primarily Big Four in major markets	Portfolio trimmed in recent years; still holds key ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox outlets.	The Desk (count)
Allen Media Broadcasting	~28	Mostly ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox	Exploring station sales; partial divestiture to Gray announced Aug. 2025 (pending).	Wikipedia; TheWrap

Sources :

• Nexstar station total and footprint; ABC subset count via recent reporting. Nexstar Media Group, Inc.

• Sinclair total and ABC subset. Wikipedia

• Gray total and NBC=28 claim (plus active list). Wikipedia

• Tegna totals and per-network counts. Wikipedia

• Scripps Big Four=42. ir.scripps.com

• Hearst totals and affiliate mix. Wikipedia

• Cox current station count. TheDesk.net

• Allen Media size and 2025 divestiture news. Wikipedia

Notes: Counts are from those sources, as of late September 2025. “Total TV stations” often includes stations that are not owned outright, but operate in one of these other ways:

• Local marketing agreement (LMA)
• Joint sales agreement (JSA)
• Shared services agreement (SSA)

If you follow those links to understand how this stuff works, note that Wikipedia’s LMA article covers JSAs and SSAs. The SSA page redirects to the LMA page, and the JSA section is anchored on that same page. Complicated shit, but I feel it’s my duty to lay it out.

I don’t list PBS stations because all PBS affiliates are independently owned. While PBS stations also buy programming wholesale from the network, they retail it to viewers as well as to corporate sponsors.

When Trump and Carr want to politically correct (MAGA-align) station owners by threatening to revoke their broadcast licenses, they are mostly talking about the Big Four networks’ O&O (owned and operated) stations, most of which are in major markets. Here are those, in four tables:

NBC — NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations

Market	Station
New York	WNBC
Los Angeles	KNBC
Chicago	WMAQ-TV
Washington, D.C.	WRC-TV
Philadelphia	WCAU
Dallas–Fort Worth	KXAS-TV
San Francisco–Oakland–San Jose	KNTV
Boston	WBTS-CD
Miami–Fort Lauderdale	WTVJ
San Diego	KNSD
Hartford–New Haven	WVIT

ABC — Disney’s ABC Owned Television Stations

Market	Station
New York	WABC-TV
Los Angeles	KABC-TV
Chicago	WLS-TV
Philadelphia	WPVI-TV
San Francisco–Oakland–San Jose	KGO-TV
Houston	KTRK-TV
Raleigh–Durham–Fayetteville	WTVD
Fresno	KFSN-TV

CBS — CBS News and Stations (Paramount Skydance)

Market	Station
New York	WCBS-TV
Los Angeles	KCBS-TV
Chicago	WBBM-TV
Philadelphia	KYW-TV
Dallas–Fort Worth	KTVT
San Francisco–Oakland–San Jose	KPIX-TV
Boston	WBZ-TV
Miami–Fort Lauderdale	WFOR-TV
Baltimore	WJZ-TV
Detroit	WWJ-TV
Minneapolis–St. Paul	WCCO-TV (with satellite KCCW-TV)
Denver	KCNC-TV
Pittsburgh	KDKA-TV
Sacramento–Stockton–Modesto	KOVR
Atlanta	WUPA (CBS since Aug. 16, 2025)

FOX — Fox Television Stations

Market	Station
New York	WNYW
Los Angeles	KTTV
Chicago	WFLD
Philadelphia	WTXF-TV
Dallas–Fort Worth	KDFW
San Francisco–Oakland–San Jose	KTVU
Washington, D.C.	WTTG
Houston	KRIV
Atlanta	WAGA-TV
Detroit	WJBK
Tampa–St. Petersburg	WTVT
Minneapolis–St. Paul	KMSP-TV
Phoenix	KSAZ-TV
Orlando	WOFL (semi-satellite WOGX)
Austin	KTBC
Milwaukee	WITI
Seattle–Tacoma	KCPQ

Note that some sources (at those links) also list subchannel affiliations as well. Subchannels are secondary channels that stations transmit along with their main affiliate channel (ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox). This is why, when I said in Part 1 that I would watch Jimmy’s monologue on WRTV channel 6.1, rather than just “channel 6,” it’s because WRTV also mooshes a bunch of these subchannels into the same signal. From Wikipedia’s WRTV page:

Subchannels of WRTV

Channel	Res.	Aspect	Short name	Programming
6.1	720p	16:9	WRTV-HD	ABC
6.2	480i		Grit	Grit
6.3			Laff	Laff
6.4			QVC	QVC
6.5			HSN	HSN
6.6			HSN2	HSN2
29.2	480i	16:9	WTTV4.2	Independent (WTTK)
29.3			COZI	Cozi TV (WTTK)

Note that the channel with the highest resolution on that list is 6.1, the ABC channel called WRTV. They ever say “-HD” on the air, mostly because why bother, but also because a resolution of 720p is barely HD. If WRTV-HD channel 6.1 were full HD, it would be 1080i or 1080p. But WRTV broadcasts its main channel in lowest HD resolution because it wants to all those subchannels inside the limited bandwidth of its OTA TV channel (in WRTV’s case, channel 25). All OTA TV stations with a mess of subchannels like this one suffer the same trade-off between picture resolution and subchannel count. If you watch TV network streams over the Internet, however, you may get higher resolutions, including 4K. That’s an advantage of having an Apple TV 4K, Roku, Fire TV, or Google TV plugged into one of your TV’s HDMI inputs.

Channel-packing like this was a big advantage in the early days of digital OTA TV. Those subchannels were meant to take up shelf space on cable guides, thanks to must-carry rules. Back then the best TVs were also “full HD,” which was 1080i or 1080p (the latter is better). Now all the good TVs sold are 4K. You won’t see Best Buy or Costco showing off a 4K TV using an OTA or cable station, because the resolution is too low, and the compression artifacts are too obvious, especially on the largest screens.

Back to the political game being played here.

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.

But, as broadcast television dies off, those moves will matter less and less. Broadcasting’s viewers and listeners are already herded into their political echo chambers by algorithms that optimize for rage, because that’s what best drives engagement.

The economics of local TV are also awful. For example, the Indianapolis station I most like to watch for local news is WISH/8, which is locally owned by Circle City Broadcasting. Alas, MSN reports, WISH-TV scrubs these names off its ‘Meet the Staff’ page after 21 employees depart station. Here’s an excerpt (the italics are theirs):

IndyStar examined WISH-TV’s “Meet the Team” page on its website using the Wayback Machine, which archives billions of webpages across the internet. Between Aug. 24 and Sept. 9, the profiles of more than a dozen employees were scrubbed off the site.

The WISH-TV employees listed below were either terminated or they resigned, left voluntarily after their contract expired, were not offered a new contract, or are otherwise missing from WISH-TV’s current staffing page. They include:

1. Jeremy Jenkins, daybreak anchor
2. Brittany Noble, daybreak anchor
3. Kody Fisher, investigative reporter
4. Reyna Revelle, Hispanic culture reporter
5. Kyla Russell, reporter
6. Danielle Zulkosky, reporter
7. Felicia Michelle, lifestyle host
8. Parker Carlson, digital journalist
9. Emily Reuben, digital content producer
10. Jason Ronimous, digital and assignments manager
11. Kyle Fisher, photographer
12. Guillermo Lithgow, photographer
13. Kat Lowder, news producer
14. Al Carl, vice president of news at WISH

IndyStar public safety reporters Noe Padilla and Ryan Murphy contributed to this article.

John Tufts covers trending news for IndyStar and Midwest Connect. Send him a news tip at JTufts@Gannett.com. Find him on BlueSky at JohnWritesStuff.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: WISH-TV scrubs these names off its ‘Meet the Staff’ page after 21 employees depart station

I include all that linky credit-passing because professional journalism is shrinking away, and we need to recognize and support the journalists who are still among the employed.

Since newsroom employment turned negative after 2008, U.S. newsrooms have shrunk by about 26%—from roughly 114,000 jobs in 2008 to about 85,000 in 2020—with newspaper newsrooms down 57% over the same span. And those numbers are from a Pew study published four years ago, when the broadcasting’s melting cube was much larger.

As a professional journalist, I’ve been unemployed since 2019 (after 24 years with Linux Journal). But that’s fine with me. I’ve aged out of the talent pool and would rather focus on remaking the way news is done, from the ground up. That’s what my News Commons series is about.

What I want is to see is What’s On replaced by What Matters. It will take some time for us to institutionalize that. But I believe we will.

I’ve split this post into two parts, because it’s important to unpack how legacy TV works, and why the whole thing is falling apart, with OTA—over-the-air—TV dying first and fastest. Here is Part 2.

I haven’t watched Jimmy Kimmel Live, or any late-night talk shows since Carson, and I didn’t watch much of him either. But I am familiar with Jimmy, through his Oscars hosting gigs, his friendship with Howard Stern (for whom, with Jeff Jarvis, I have been a devoted fan since forever), and from YouTube clips when somebody points me to one and I actually go there, which isn’t always.

But I’ll watch tonight, because I’m curious about what Jimmy will say about his hiatus, and because I can get him without cable: a fun challenge for me. I do that this way:

Being old, I remember when no suburban house was complete without an antenna on the roof. You wanted one because that was the only way you could get a good picture from your city’s TV stations. Sure, you could put a rabbit-ears antenna like this on top of your TV—

—but the picture probably wouldn’t be ideal, or good on all the available channels.

But cable (which began as CATV—Community Antenna TV) would bring you a good picture on every channel, plus lots of new cable-only channels: dozens or hundreds of them.

Then, starting with the Digital Transition in 2008, all the over-the-air (OTA) stations had to broadcast on channels that were best for data, which meant moving to the UHF band (channels 14 and up), or the “high” VHF channels (7-13). Even if a station was already on one of those channels, it may have had to move, sometimes more than once, as the feds auctioned off UHF channels 37 and up (now used mostly for cellular Internet) and stations had to “repack” on new channels. That meant viewers had to make their TVs re-scan repeatedly to get the whole available channel lineup, which tended to come from fewer signals than could be received back in the Analog Age. Thanks to all that, most people didn’t bother to hook up an antenna of any kind.

But I’m a rare exception. Getting OTA TV is like fishing for me. I’ve always been a broadcasting science nerd, and I like hanging out a lure to see what I get. For now, it’s a pile of channels from Indianapolis, plus our nearby PBS station. Yay me.

Back to Jimmy Kimmel.

His network is ABC, carried here by WRTV/6. We’ll be able to get Jimmy tonight, because WRTV is owned by the E. W. Scripps Company. Were WRTV owned by Nexstar, we wouldn’t see the show, because Nexstar won’t carry it on their many stations, for reasons they give here. Sinclair, which also owns many stations, also won’t carry Jimmy, for the same reasons. So, Axios says, all these areas are blacked out:

I’ll let that sit while we visit Nexstar’s plan to buy Tegna, a competing station group company. If that deal goes through, this will be the legacy commercial TV network lineup in Indianapolis:

• CBS — WTTV/4 and WTTK/29, owned by Nexstar
• NBC — WTHR/13, owned Nexstar (acquired from Tegna)
• ABC — WRTV/6, owned by Scripps
• FOX — WXIN/59, owned by Nexstar

Meaning only WRTV would not be owned by Nexstar.

That’s homogenization at work. It is also economics. Legacy (also called “linear”) TV has been in decline for decades. Some links:

• Linear TV Networks Lost 35% Of Reach From 2014 To 2024 “…progressive loss of reach for linear TV networks over the last 10 years, with research from MoffattNathanson and Nielsen indicating a 35% decline across all networks from 2014-24.” (The Measure, May 2025)
• Netflix Leads Streaming Growth in June on the Strength of Multiple Big Titles in Nielsen’s 50th Report of The GaugeTM “On the whole, broadcast viewing was down 5% to represent 18.5% of total TV, marking the first time the category has fallen below a 20.0% share.” (Nielsen, June 2025)
• Cord Cutting Statistics 2025 – Market Trends & Latest Data “…estimated that 80.7 million households in the United States will cut the cord by 2026!”(evoca.tv)

In OTA’s future looks shaky despite local live sports’ return, nScreen Media said OTA viewing stood at 13.3%. That was in August 2024. In July of this year, TVB said the number was 16.3%. I doubt both.

First, in cities like New York, where we had an apartment for the last 13 years (we finally let it go in July), you are getting almost nothing from an antenna unless you have line-of-sight to One World Trade Center, from which all the city’s stations now transmit. In the Analog Age, you’d get pictures that looked like crap with a rabbit ears, but you at least got something. At our daughter’s house in the L.A. suburb Redondo Beach, an indoor antenna in her house window got one Spanish station—and nothing else—from Los Angeles’ TV transmitting tower farm on Mt. Wilson. Here in Bloomington, I look at a lot of rooftops to see who has a working antenna. Far as I know, I’m the only viewer in town fishing the TV airwaves. Except for the local PBS station (WTIU/30), nearly all the major network Indianapolis stations (those four above) are too hard to get here without an expensive and fancy antenna such as mine. And I’m advantaged by living on a hill that faces Indianapolis. If you’re between hills or on the backside of one here, even a fancy antenna like mine won’t catch much.

We have a similar situation at our other house, in Santa Barbara. There we’re 500 feet up a steep hill overlooking the city, but we are “terrain shadowed” (as the broadcast engineers say) from all the local TV signals. We used to get occasional signals from San Diego, when those were still gettable and the weather was right. Here’s how some looked in 2008, when our Dish TV receiver had an over-the-air tuner in it. That TV and receiver are long gone, and our new-ish 4K Samsung TV can’t get any of those channels from the same roof antenna. Scanning for signals brings up nothing.

One reason might be the quality of the tuner. Another is that the makers of new TVs don’t want you watching free OTA TV. That’s the message I get from Samsung and TCL. We have three Samsungs and one TCL, and all of them make it hard to scan for channels, and then to access them afterwards. They moosh the locals into a hard-to-use guide of almost countless channels that look cable-like, but aren’t. In the case of our TCL/Roku TV, locals disappear once you’ve scanned them. It doesn’t matter if you’ve made them favorites or not.

One reason for this is that TV makers want to insert personalized ads of their own (based on watching you, like advertising does on the Internet), and they can’t do that through OTA signals they don’t control.

Far as I can tell, nobody in the broadcast business is urging the TV makers to make getting OTA channels easy. Again, the opposite seems to be the case.

Broadcast TV is, as economists say, a distressed asset. That’s bad enough. But hastening the medium’s demise by politically correcting stations—and getting help with that from a censorious FCC—is just dumb all around.

And I’m not saying any of that for political reasons. The station owners and TV makers were no smarter during the Obama and Biden administrations.

For many decades, Local TV was a center that held our civilization together. That the mainstream is drifting into the redstream is beside a much larger point: the selection of TV-like programming on glowing rectangles now rounds to infinite. You can get whatever from whomever and wherever, over the Internet. The best stuff will be subscription-based, mostly. On Demand, as they say. Welcome to now.

So I’ll start up channel 6.1, see what Jimmy has to say, and go to bed. I have more important things to do tomorrow. G’night.

[30 September 2025…] Jimmy’s monologue was brilliant. But that’s beside the points I make in Part 2 of this post.

---

*Here’s the antenna, in case you want to get one. It’s for stations transmitting on high-band VHF (7-13) and UHF (14-35). If one or more of your city’s stations are still on low-band VHF (2-6), as is the case in, say, Boston (WGBH/2 transmits on channel 5), you will need an antenna such as this one. For guidance toward your chances of getting anything, the best source is RabbitEars.info. Go to the signal map here to see what the fishing is like. And note, again, that you’re looking for the RF signals (the channels stations actually transmit on) rather than the virtual channels (the ones they identify with and display). The RF channels are in parentheses in your Rabbitears search results.

We had a party recently that required cooking an enormous number of baby back ribs. To acquire a volume of barbeque sauce sufficient to soak all the slabs, we took a run to our nearest Costco (an hour away on the south side of Indianapolis), where thee were plenty of Kinder’s and Sweet Baby Ray’s.

While my personal taste runs more to North Carolina vinegar-based sauce, I can still swing with Texas-style, such as we have with these two. My wife, a confirmed supertaster, preferred the taste of the two mixed together. But if I had to pick just one, it would be Sweet Baby Ray’s. The taste, for me, was a bit more complex and spicy.

Knowing Costco, both might be gone by now, but I thought that much empirical data was worth sharing with the carnivores out there.

The other day I bought a refrigerator at Costco. When a guy rolled it out on a flat to help me lift it into the car, he said, “This isn’t going to fit in there.” Then it did.

It might not have fit in some SUVs. And while it would have fit in the bed of a pickup, I would have had to drive around a pickup all the time. Instead, I’m driving a quiet, comfy, and zippy little car with lots of cargo space.

When SUVs first came along, I craved one. I loved backroads, camping, and what one could do with four-wheel or all-wheel drive. But eventually I realized that the percentage of time I’d spend doing chancy things in places AAA wouldn’t go was sub-minimal, and that I would still need cargo space. So at various times I opted for boxy little cars:

1. 1966 Peugeot 404 Wagon
2. 1985 Subaru Legacy
3. 2000 Volkswagen Passat
4. 2005 Subaru Outback
5. 2017 Volkswagen Golf Alltrack XLE

I’ve only loved the Volkswagens.

The Peugeot was a bizarre piece of shit—though it was big as a hearse in the back.

The first Subaru had a stick shift and four-wheel-drive, but one couldn’t get it into that mode if all four tires hadn’t been worn to the identical tread depth. Seriously. It was also a noisy rattletrap.

The second Subaru was a mostly good car, but not comfortable for long drives. But, like the others, it held a lot of stuff.

The Passat was great all around. It needed a lot of work*, but it was good to 211,108 miles, when I was told the transmission was toast. So I sold it on Craigslist for 125ドル to a guy who replaced the transmission fluid and said it was actually fine.

*It was only 5 years old and worth 15,000ドル when I bought it for 5,000,ドル but I then put >10,000ドル into it.

The VW Alltrack is close to ideal. The cargo space is smaller than the others, but not by too much. (Hell, it ate a refrigerator.) It’s a great fit, so I don’t feel like I drive it so much as wear it.

Of course, it’s discontinued. The Alltrack line ran from 2017 to 2019, and that was it. Meanwhile, generations of Subaru Outbacks since the ’00s have morphed into wagon-like SUVs.

To find which station wagons are still sold in the U.S., ask an AI. Or two. Or three. I just did, but pasting a linky copy of the results requires a bunch of HTML post-processing.

I can at least say this: the closest new car to the old VW Alltrack line is the Audi Allroad Quattro. The styling is more pinched in the back than the Alltrack, so it might not ingest a whole refrigerator, but at least it’s a nice small wagon, and luxe as well. I don’t want to look closer at them because I might want one.

And right now I don’t, because I just spent 4,000ドル replacing all four tires (worn Yokohamas for new Michelins) and two wheel bearings (one front, one rear), straightening two bent rims, aligning the wheels, and fixing something leaky (I forget what) in the cooling system. Now it feels like a new car. It is quieter than when I bought it (18k miles ago), and it handles better than ever. I loved the improvement so much that I spent half a day driving around the hilly Southern Indiana countryside, digging every turn and straightaway.

Now, during our brief sojourn to Southern California, we’re getting around in a very nice 2020 Camry XLE Hybrid. It’s still new, with less than 30k on the odometer. Smells like it too. There is much to like about the Camry, especially 45mpg on the cheapest gas, and the sense that it’s a solid and competent machine. But it also feels like, well a very good rental car. And in the trunk is mainly good for the usual: groceries and suitcases. You’ll never get a refrigerator in there.

In the natural world, privacy is a social contract: a tacit agreement that we respect others’ private spaces. We guard those spaces with the privacy tech we call clothing and shelter. We use language and gestures to signal what’s okay and what’s not. “Manners” are as formal as the social contract for privacy gets, but manners are also the bedrock on which we build civilization.

We don’t have privacy online. Not when the owner of a store who would never think of planting tracking beacons inside the clothes of visiting customers does exactly that on the company website. Tracking people is business-as-usual online. And that’s a big reason why civilization online is hardly developed. It can’t be when privacy is almost entirely an insincere promise by those incentivized to violate it.

The reason we can’t have the same social contract for privacy in the online world as we do in the offline one is that the online world isn’t tacit. It can’t be. Everything there is digital: ones, zeroes, bits, bytes, and program logic. If we want privacy in the online world, we need to make it an explicit requirement.

Policy won’t do it. The GDPR, CCPA, and the DMA are just inconveniences for the $trillion-plus adtech (tracking-based advertising) fecosystem. The biggest violators look at paying a billion-euro fine as a cost of doing business.

“Consent” through cookie notices doesn’t work because you have no way of knowing if what they call “your choices” are followed. Neither does the website, because it jobs that work out to OneTrust, Admiral, or some other CMP (consent management platform). And those companies also don’t know or much care. Their job is mostly to bias “your choices” toward agreement to keep being tracked.

Polite requests also don’t work. We tried that with Do Not Track, and by the time it finished failing, the adtech lobby had turned it into Tracking Preference Expression—as if we wanted to be tracked all along.

What we need are contracts—ones you proffer and sites and services agree to. Contracts are explicit, and the only way to make personal privacy work in the online world. They’re also backed by contract law, which has been with us since civilization began.

This is why we’ve been working for eight years on the IEEE P7012 Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, aka MyTerms. With MyTerms, you are the first party, and the site or service is the second party. You present an agreement chosen from a limited roster posted on the public website of a disinterested nonprofit, such as Customer Commons, which was built for exactly this purpose. When the other side agrees, you both keep an identical record. (The idea is for Customer Commons to be for privacy contracts what Creative Commons is for copyright licenses.)

MyTerms might look scary to business-as-usual. But so did the PC, the Internet, and the smartphone. All did far more for business than the incumbent systems they obsolesced. When customers and companies start relating as partners who fully respect each other and create value together, the range of what’s possible in business widens much farther than what the old tracking-based fecosystem would ever allow.

We can explore those frontiers in other posts. Right now, I just want to make clear that contract is the only way we can obtain personal privacy online. And MyTerms will get us started.

---

*Intentcasting is how you let a market of qualified sellers know what you’re looking for, in ways that preserve your privacy. For why that’s much better for business than surveillance and attention-grabbing, read When Customers Set the Terms: How the Intention Economy and ‘MyTerms’ Enable the Great Unwinding: A technical and economic foundation for customer sovereignty is here, by Nitin Badjatia.

The first thing R.C. Ward taught in our biology class at Guilford College was his eponymous Law:

“If it works, it’s good.”

He frequently mentioned Ward’s Law by name and required it as an answer to nearly every test. As Richard Nilsen explains here, Professor Ward was not a normal dude:

It was 1966 and I was a freshman in college taking an intro to biology class with Richard Carleton Ward, a teacher of peculiar manners and prejudices. I could write a whole chapter on him, the way he spoke out of the side of his mouth in a gravelly grunt, the way he bought conspiracy theories, his suburban house blocked from view in a bourgeois neighborhood by a jungle of bamboo, vines and weeds. He wrote an article for the underground newspaper I was publishing in which he complained ferociously about students’ inability to spell the word, "spaghetti."

From another Richard Nilsen post:

One day, he brought a potted plant to class, and as the bell sounded, he held it up in front of us. "This is the sacred lotus of India," he said through his teeth. "It sheds water as we are supposed to shed our sins." He took up a pitcher of water and poured it over the plant, dripping onto the floor, saying to us in biblical voice, "Go forth and sin no more."

In that same post, Richard reminded me of another Ward’s Law:

His explanation of sex on campus was: "Some do, some don’t."

He pronounced “some” with a whistled s. That went for every word with an s or a c that sounded like s, such as in the word “pronounced.” All came not just with an ssss sound, but with a 😗.

So let’s call those Ward’s First and Second Laws:

1. If it work😗, it’😗 good.
2. 😗ome do, and 😗ome don’t.

There is a lot more about Professor Ward in Green-Wood.com‘s WWII project, featuring biographies of deceased soldiers with surnames running from Pizza to Zeldmann. Scroll way down and you’ll find eight paragraphs above this shot of his grave marker:

Because you probably won’t click on the photo or the link above it, and I want to give the man and his laws full respect, here are those paragraphs:

WARD, RICHARD CARLETON (1916-2005). Sergeant, United States Army. The Ward family members were among the early English settlers in Rhode Island, arriving in the 1670s. John Ward had been an officer in one of Cromwell’s cavalry regiments, arriving in America from Gloucester, England, after the accession of King Charles II. Another ancestor married the son of Benedict Arnold. Burr H. Nicholls and Rhoda Holmes Nicholls, Richard Carleton Ward’s maternal grandparents, were both noted artists. Burr Nicholls was an oil painter and Rhoda Holmes Nicholls was a painter, water colorist, and art editor in the early 1900s.

The 1918 Darien, Connecticut City Directory records the Ward family living on Runkenhage Road in the Tokeneke neighborhood. On March 19, 1927, Richard Ward was listed as sailing from London, England on the SS American Shipper, arriving in New York on March 30, 1927, with his mother Olive Nicholls Ward, age 39, and his sister, Alida Carleton Ward, age 18. Richard, 10 years old, was listed as having been born in Darien, while his mother and sister were listed as born in New York City.

The 1930 federal census lists Richard Ward’s father, Henry Marion Ward, who was 59 and a lawyer at a law office. His mother, Olive, was 42 and an interior decorator. Sister Alida was 15 and Richard was 13. The home they lived in was valued as 60,000ドル. Richard’s grandparents were all born in New York, except for his maternal grandmother, who was born in England. The family also had a female servant living with them, listed as a 46-year-old "Negro" born in North Carolina.

Richard Ward registered in Darien for the draft on October 16, 1940, when he was 24 years old. He listed his date of birth as August 17, 1916, in Darien, and his residence as on Runkenhage Road in Darien. His contact was his mother Olive Nicholls Ward who also lived at that same address. Richard worked at S. W. Hoyt Jr. Co., Inc. on Washington Street in South Norwalk, Connecticut. He was 6′ 41⁄2" tall and weighed 165 pounds, with a light complexion, blue eyes, and brown hair. He had a small scar on his left shoulder. He signed his registration card as "R. Carleton Ward." He enlisted in the United States Army on December 17, 1943, and was discharged on November 5, 1949, according to Department of Veterans Affairs records.

Family trees on the ancestry website indicate that Richard married Antonina Pavlova in Canada in 1949. Per Antonina’s obituary in the Greensboro News & Record, she was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, had been a prisoner of war and, after being liberated by the Allied Forces in Austria, she met United States Army Sergeant Richard Carleton Ward there. The 1950 federal census confirms their marriage, showing Ward’s age as 31 and Antonia’s as 26. Per the 1950 United States census, they were living in New London, Connecticut, along with their newborn daughter, who had been born in Canada in August 1949, but was an American citizen. The additional information for Ward shows that he had been living at Westerly, Rhode Island, the previous year, that he had finished one year of college, and that he had served in World War II, but there was no job listed, although he was not noted as unemployed.

Antonina Ward’s 1954 naturalization record, issued in 1954 in Hartford, Connecticut, shows her residing at Bay Road in Amherst, Massachusetts. In the 1950s, Richard Carleton Ward was a botany instructor at the University of Vermont, holding a Bachelor of Arts degree and appointed in 1954, according to the school’s catalogs for 1954-55 and 1955-56. The 1956 Burlington, Vermont City Directory lists Richard and Antonina as living in Vermont. Ward was active in botanical societies and contributed to collections in many parts of the United States. For example, in 1961, he submitted several samples to the Southern Appalachian Botanical Club. Later, he was a biology professor at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina.

According to Ward’s daughter Tanya, Ward and his wife had three daughters, Tamara Olive Ward, Lalla Ward Reid, and Tanya Ward Feagins. The 1970 North Carolina Divorce Index shows that Ward and his wife were divorced on November 30, 1970, in Guilford, North Carolina. In 1994, Ward was living at 8101 Oak Arbor Road in Greensboro, North Carolina and, in 1995, at 410 Guilford Avenue, Greensboro, North Carolina. Per Social Security records, Ward passed away on December 2, 2005. The Piedmont Bird Club of Greensboro, North Carolina, posted an obituary of Ward in their February-April 2006 newsletter. He was known as Carl and was active in the club for many years. He was an activist and lover of nature.

Ward was interred on October 10, 2007, in the same section as his father. His daughter Tamara’s 2014 obituary in the Greensboro News & Record, states that she was laid to rest in what was termed "the Ward family ancestral burial site." "Professor Ward Devoted to Preserving the Environment" is carved on his gravestone. Section 77, lot 72.

Some possibly interesting bonus facts:

1. I started hunting down data on Professor Ward when I wanted to credit the source of Ward’s First Law, which I haven’t forgotten in the sixty years since I learned it. Short on luck in my diggings, I asked ChatGPT for help, and it produced both of the sources I used above.
2. One of those sources, Richard Nilsen, was a year behind me at Guilford, so I am sure that, being a small college (around just 800 students), we at least breathed some of the same air now and then.
3. Richard is a known—and excellent—writer, and much else. It is a treat to have discovered him after all these decades. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we are both from New Jersey. Related fact:::
4. New Jersey, until the last few decades, was bereft of state colleges and universities of any prestige, other than Rutgers. So New Jersey exported more college students to colleges and universities elsewhere than any other US state. In fact, I was accepted at Guilford only because, despite bad grades and SAT scores, I wasn’t from North Carolina and would commit to come on “early decision.”
5. I can’t find an image of one, but I recall seeing blue bumper stickers that said, “DUKE The University of New Jersey at Durham.”
6. My two oldest kids are related to the Ward family. That’s because Professor Ward’s daughter Tanya married David Feagins, son of Professor Carroll S. Feagins, who headed the Guilford Philosophy Department, where I majored. David’s brother married the sister of my first wife (both kids of Hiram H. Hilty, another faculty member), and their daughter is a first cousin to both of my kids by that first wife, making Professor Ward their great-uncle by marriage. I think I have that right. I hadn’t thought about any of that until I read the long biography above.
7. Guilford in those days required that graduating students prove proficiency in a second language. I studied no language at Guilford, and my joke about German was that I took two years of it in high school—one of them twice—and gave them back when I was done. But, German was the only second language I might claim, I submitted to a test by the German expert at Guilford: Mary Feagins, wife of Carroll S. Feagins, and future grandma to my kids’ first cousin. Her test required that I read two pages of German out loud from a textbook, and then translate it. She passed me, saying “I’ve never met anyone who could pronounce a language better while understanding it less.”
8. Guilford has had financial woes in recent years, which is why, five years ago, I made a radically simple recommendation for it. They haven’t followed my advice, but I still stand by it.

It’s a battle of the holidays at the Sam’s Club here in Bloomington: Christmas on one aisle and Halloween on the next one, back-to-back. Hey! Come in and stock up on stuff that occupies otherwise useful space for 350 partially overlapping non-seasonal days of the year!

At least this stuff (at Sam’s Club in June) tends to get used up, and not stored in your attic:

Unless you’re in Indiana, I suppose. Wondering what percentage of customers store their un-launched fireworks at home, I’ve found nothing about Indiana or the U.S., but I did find Consumer Behaviours and Attitudes to Fireworks in the UK. An excerpt: “Once bought, two-fifths (43%) of people store fireworks in the house, a fifth (20%) in the garage and a sixth (15%) in the shed.” So there ya go.

I wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019, and have been involved with IIW since I helped start it in 2005. So, in an effort to help substantiate a future Wikipedia article on IIW, I wanted a list of all my Linux Journal contributions mentioning “IIW” and/or “Internet Identity Workshop.” (Never mind that my founding role with IIW may disqualify that list from citation. I still wanted it.) So I asked Gemini and ChatGPT separately to provide me with one, and in chronological order. Gemini gave me just three. ChatGPT gave me the whole list, which I already knew by looking through the /linuxjournal/ directory on my hard drive. (I just didn’t want to hand-organize them chronologically.) So, surfacing the effort, here ya go:

• Let’s go bust some silos
• Can we relate?
• Getting beyond Brad’s Paradox
• An open source approach to fixing public media funding
• EOF – Driving Markets from Our Own Kernels
• Who Controls Your Data?
• Cluetrain at Fifteen
• The True Internet of Things
• Dealing with Boundary Issues
• Identity: Our Last Stand
• New Hope for Digital Identity
• Cookies That Go the Other Way
• How Can We Bring FOSS to the Virtual World?

FWIW, https://www.linuxjournal.com/search/ at Linux Journal no longer works. Images are also gone from most of the pieces themselves. But it is truly great that Linux Journal is still alive, and the archives are there and link-able. Hats off to Slashdot Media for keeping it up.

---

For a time in the ’00s, I wrote a newsletter for Linux Journal that isn’t anywhere online. I think I’ll put that up somewhere at searls.com, eventually.

In case you didn’t click on the photo collection above, the link is here.

Please find pricing labels that stick well enough to do their job, and the customer can get off without too much work.

Thanks!

P.S. In an unrelated matter, Grammarly suggested rewriting that second sentence this way:

Please find pricing labels that adhere well enough to perform their intended function, yet can be easily removed by the customer without excessive effort.

Which is better? (Note: I’m posting this thing in a rush between runs to a Costco an hour away from here.)

In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis notes that the city at the center of a circle containing the largest population within a one-day drive is Dayton, Ohio. You can kinda see that in the map above, which I discovered through Brilliant Maps. They got it from the highly precient Defining US Megaregions, published by the Regional Plan Association in 2009, long before interstate highways across the US became flanked by transport transfer buildings big enough hold five Costcos, and trucks hadn’t yet threatened to outnumber cars on major highways.

When we got a place in Bloomington four years ago, we thought the town was basically isolated. But we quickly found that we were kinda close to a mess of major league cities. Indianapolis is closest, less than an hour up I-69. Louisville is a bit under two hours away. Cincinnati is about two and a half hours. Columbus is three hours. Chicago is a bit under four hours. Same with St. Louis. Detroit is five hours, and Milwaukee a few minutes more. Cleveland is five and a half. All of these cities are options for a day trip, and we’ve been doing our best to visit them all.

On trips to these cities, we’ve noticed that open country between them is part of what makes them cohere as a region: a feature rather than a bug— especially as the truck traffic between them gets thicker:

There is something new about all this.

What’s old are Designated Market Areas, or DMAs, also known as TMAs, or Televsion Market Areas:

These are (or were) defined by the collections of TV stations that households watched most. My company was once hired by the three major network stations in the Greenville-New Bern-Washington DMA to help pull viewers in Nash, Wilson, and Wayne Counties away from stations on the same networks in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill market. All stations on both sides had built 2000-foot towers to maximize their signals across overlapping counties. It was quite the war. (One we lost, but that’s another story.)

By now, TV watching has drifted from “What’s On” to “What’s Where.” And there are a zillion choices of “where”: everything on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, on-demand subscription streaming services such as Netflix, HBO, Prime, Disney+, and your nearby cities’ TV stations. Inside that broad and growing mix, TV stations’ slice of the pie is smaller every day.

Regions now are defined more by commercial connections. Across transport “corridors,” forests and farmlands contextualize connected cities with wide rural frames. In McLuhan’s terms, the medium sending the message is the countryside flanking transport corridors between cities. I suspect this is true of all these megaregions, in different ways. Even the highly urbanized Northeast megaregion has lots of wild and open rural areas packed between their cities.

And what organizes the flow of all that commerce? Logistics. Which is digital, and for decades has been full of AI.

My thoughts on all this are just starting rather than finishing. I think a good place to do that together is by reading the study that got this started.

What I like best about Keith Teare‘s latest essay, Who Owns The Front Door to AI? If it isn’t you, its game over, is that it sounds like he’s setting up the case for personal AI.

But he’s not. He’s describing how our AI-assisted lives will get sucked through better interfaces deep into one or more of AI’s giant castles, as “the chat interface replaces the browser as the primary user interface for computing on the web.”

His case is not pretty, but it is clear, thoughtful, knowing, and well-described. He concludes, “Bottom line: Winners will own a trusted front door with standards and auditing and settlements behind it—and help teams actually change how they work and consumers find what they want without dethroning content owners. Everyone else will keep shipping demos into a narrowing feed.”

Note that the winners are giants. You and I? We’re just consumers. Our agency in this system will be no greater than what these giants allow us. Each giant will be (hell, already is) a hotel with a know-it-all concierge who can get us what we want, within the hotel’s confines. But the space is not ours. So, what Cluetrain said in 1999—

—will remain untrue.

And the only way our reach will exceed their grasp is with our own personal AI. Simple as that.

Happy for my sister and me, who are both still alive and well. I’m also happy for the thirty-three years Eleanor and Allen made a life and a family together. They were great people, great parents, great teachers, great friends to many, and much more. Both are still missed. Some links:

• Their wedding
• Eleanor Searls
• Allen Searls

Later… I also did some digging through 2011 correspondence with local realtor Tom Dunn, who said the wedding took place at the late Grace Methodist Church. This Facebook post says the church was at “2125 Thirty Third Avenue North,” but that does not appear to be a valid address. But the photo matches this one in the Hennepin County Library’s digital collection. It’s 2501 NE Taylor Street in Minneapolis. The closest match on Google StreetView is this one here. Tom sent literature on the property, which was then for sale. About the building, it says, “The Church community at the property began in the 1880s when the first sanctuary was built. Then, between 1915 and 1918, a new sanctuary was constructed alongside.” The church was being sold off because its congregation merged with a larger one in 2011.

Still, it could be that Mom and Pop got married at a different Methodist church in Minneapolis. Possibilities:

• 2125 Thirty Third Avenue North, Minneapolis. According to this 2017 piece in Medium, it is “a church building now housing the Spirit and Truth Worship Center. The original occupant was Grace Methodist Episcopal Church, subsequently Grace United Methodist Church. The original part of the building, on the left of this photo taken from Penn Avenue, dates from 1920.” Here are some historic photos, via the United Methodist Church.
• Grace United Methodist (often called "Grace–Lowry") is the building at 2510 Cleveland St NE, on the corner of Cleveland & Lowry, one block west of Taylor St NE. The congregation still meets there today under the name Northeast United Methodist Church. Google’s latest StreetView, in 2023, shows building renovation going on.

I’m sure there is correspondence from that time in my sister’s archives or mine that will shed more light on the question. No rush, though. What matters is that the wedding happened, and so did the kids and the grandkids.

What does the Internet make of us? was hard to find until I found it. Now it’s easy to find. What did Google learn, and how did it learn it?

The law professors to whom I made The Case for MyTerms two weeks ago seemed to buy it. What, if anything, will happen next?

When I read The Power of the Swarm: How Collective Intelligence is Reshaping Our World, I thought PI meant personal AI. It means predictive. Which is fine, but we need the personal kind, just like we need personal computers, phones, and shoes. Just saying.

The Consent Management business, which give us cookie notices and all of us hate, is hot and growing. Will MyTerms give it a better reason than consent (which actually fails) to live and grow?

Wholly shit! Github.org, now redirected to Github.com, just turned into a thing that says “Join the world’s most widely adopted AI-powered developer platform.” Is Micorsofting now a verb?

We know more than we can tell.

That was how Michael Polanyi distinguished between tacit and explicit knowing. We may know tacitly how we form speech, ride a bike, or sense when to shake hands with someone, or hug them. But we can’t explain all the signals and mechanisms involved. Not explicitly.

In the natural world, privacy is almost entirely based on tacit understandings. Clothing, for example, is a privacy technology that both covers private regions of the body and signals what the person might or might not welcome in respect to those regions—plus much else, none of which can easily or completely be described explicitly and in detail.

The digital world, however, is entirely explicit. There is no tacit there. As users of tech, we have tacit understandings of how digital things work, but for programming to happen, for logic to operate, we need bits, bytes, and data upon which logical operations can work.

And that is the problem with privacy in the digital world. We lack ways to make our privacy requirements explicit. That’s the main reason why it has been almost impossible for marketers to resist spying on us constantly. We are naked and defenseless. In the absence of digital clothing and ways to signal personal privacy requirements, we have an entirely corporate-side “consent”-based fecosystem that manifests in shit like this:

These “agreements” do less than nothing to give us privacy, or even the faintest sense of it. Even if a site provides a choice such as this—

tracking-choice

—we have no record of our decision to not allow tracking, and no faith that our “setting” in their system will be respected.

The status quo here is not new. It was established in the industrial age, and best explained by this guy:

Friedrich Kessler (1901-1998) was a self-described legal realist whose most widely cited work is Contracts of Adhesion—Some Thoughts About Freedom of Contract (Columbia Law Review, 1943). In it, Kessler argues that contract law is individualistic by nature, and “closely tied up with the ethics of free enterprise capitalism and the ideals of justice of a mobile society of small enterprisers, individual merchants and independent craftsmen.”

He also laments that this ideal was sidelined by giantism in the industrial age. Freedom of contract had become, he explains, “a one-sided privilege.” Specifically, “Freedom of contract enables enterprisers to legislate by contract…in a substantially authoritarian manner without using the appearance of authoritarian forms. Standard contracts in particular could thus become effective instruments in the hands of powerful industrial and commercial overlords enabling them to impose a new feudal order of their own making upon a vast host of vassals.”

The pro forma standard form contract, Kessler explained, forced the weaker party—the ordinary consumer or customer—into “subjection more or less voluntary to terms dictated by the stronger party, terms whose consequences are often understood only in a vague way, if at all.”

He called these agreements “contracts of adhesion,” and á prendre ou ai laisser (translation: “take it or leave it”). These contracts are ones the weaker party adheres to and the stronger party can change. So it’s glue for you and me, velcro for the world’s sites and services.

This industrial age convention got leveraged in spades on the Internet, where every corporate entity—not just giants—enjoyed freedom of contract while you and I could not. This status quo became so normative that Bruce Schneier was already writing about the “feudal Internet” twelve years ago.

Thanks to this status quo, our digital world today looks like this:

This is not only a locked-up hell of too many logins, passwords, and second-factor authentication gauntlets. It’s a place where we have an equal number of adhesive “agreements” that aren’t, and which the feudal lords can change while we cannot. Their velcro, our glue.

Are we stuck here? Do we have to be?

No, because there is nothing about digital technology that requires it. And digital technology gives us boundless ways to design and program a digital world that works for people as well as it works for companies—and make it better for companies as well.

Kessler says the legal realist is “constantly testing out the desirability, efficiency and fairness of inherited legal rules and institutions in terms of the present needs of society.” I submit that our most pressing present need is to move past surveillance capitalism and into an intention economy where the demand side of the marketplace can better signal its wants, needs, and ability to engage in mutually beneficial ways. If we have that, the supply side can stop spending $trillions on wasteful and unwelcome surveillance-fed guesswork. We can do that by starting with personal privacy.

I also submit that there is only one way for people to secure a measure of privacy online, and that is through contract. People need to be able to proffer their own privacy terms as first parties to sites and services performing as second parties—and to do that at scale.

And now they can, using a new standard called P7012 IEEE Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, nicknamed MyTerms. (Much as IEEE 802.11 is nicknamed WiFi.) The IEEE approached Customer Commons with the idea for making personal privacy terms machine-readable in 2017. Today the draft is done and due to become official by early next year.

Freedom of contract can be far more useful to both customers and companies than what companies today get out of adhesive contracts and “consents” (such as the one above) that are typically written to obey the letter of privacy laws (such as the GDPR, the DMA, and the CCPA) while violating their spirit.

Here is how MyTerms works:

Lots of business can be built on top of this simple system, which at the ground level starts with service provision without surveillance or unwanted data sharing by the company with other parties. New agreements can be made on top of that, but MyTerms are where genuine and trusting (rather than today’s coerced and one-sided) relationships can be built.

When companies are open to MyTerms agreements, they don’t need cookie notices. Nor do they need 10,000-word terms and conditions or privacy policies because they’ll have contractual agreements with customers that work for both sides.

On top of that foundation, real relationships can be built by VRM systems on the customers’ side and CRM systems on the corporate side. Both can also use AI agents: personal AI for customers and corporate AI for companies. Massive businesses can grow to supply tools and services on both sides of those new relationships. These are businesses that can only grow atop agreements that customers bring to the table, and at scale across all the companies they engage.

Here are some of the possibilities that open up, and I explained at ProjectVRM:

1. CMPs—Content Management Platforms—can provide sites & services with easy ways to respond to MyTerms choices brought to the table by visitors. Let’s call this a Terms Matching Engine. The current roster of terms we’re working with at Customer Commons (abbreviated CuCo, hence the cuco.org shortcut) starts with CC-BASE, which is “service provision only.” It says to a website, “just give me your service, and nothing more.” In other words, no tracking. Yet. Negotiation toward additional provisions comes after that. Those can be anything, but they should be in the spirit of We’re starting with personal privacy here, and the visitor sets the terms for that.
2. There is a whole new business (which, like the VPN, grammar-help, and password management businesses, people would pay for) in helping people present, manage, remember, and monitor compliance with their terms, and what additional agreements have been arrived at. This can involve browser add-ons such as the one pictured on the ProjectVRM r-button page. CMP companies can make money there too, adding a C2B business to their B2B ones.
3. Go beyond #2 to provide real VRM. Back in the last millennium, Iain Henderson pointed out that B2B relationships tend to have hundreds or thousands of variables over which both parties need to agree. Nitin Badjatia, another CRM veteran (and a Customer Commons board member like Iain and myself), has also pointed out that companies like Oracle have long provided AI-assisted ways for B2B relationships to arrive at contractual agreements. The same can work for C2B, once the base privacy agreement is established. There can be a business here that expands on what gets started with that first agreement.
4. Verticals. There can be strong value-adds for regulated industries or companies wanting to acquire and signal accountability, or look for firmer ways to establish a privacy regime better than the called consent, which doesn’t work (except as thin ass-covering for companies fearing the GDPR and the CCPA). For example: banks, insurers, publishers, health care providers.
5. For people (not just corporate clients), CMPs could offer browser plugins or apps (mobile and/or computer) that help people choose and present their privacy terms, track who honors them, notify them of violations, and have r-buttons mean something. Or multiple things.

Here is an example of r-buttons in a browser:

Real relationships, including records of agreements, can be unpacked when a person (not a mere “user”) clicks on either the ⊂ or the ⊃ symbols. There are golden opportunities here for both VRM and CRM vendors. And, of course, companies such as Admiral and OneTrust working both sides—and being truly trusted.

So, if we want to de-enshittify the Internet—and to make it work well for all of us—the best way to start is with MyTerms.

I wrote the original version of this post for the March 2018 issue of Linux Journal. You can find it here. Since images from archival material in the magazine no longer load, and I want to update this anyway, here is a lightly edited copy of the original. Bear in mind that what you’ll read here was at the idea stage seven years ago. Now we’re at the action stage. Let’s make this happen.

Since the turn of the millennium, online publishing has turned into a vampire, sucking the blood of readers’ personal data to feed the appetites of adtech: tracking-based advertising. Resisting that temptation nearly killed us. But now that we’re alive, still human, and stronger than ever, we want to lead the way toward curing the rest of online publishing from the curse of personal data vampirism. And we have a plan. Read on.

---

This is the first issue of the reborn Linux Journal, and my first as editor-in-chief. This is also our first issue to contain no advertising.

We cut out advertising because the online publishing industry has become cursed by the tracking-based advertising vampire called adtech. Unless you wear tracking protection, nearly every ad-funded publication you visit sinks its teeth into the data jugulars of your browsers and apps, to feed adtech’s boundless thirst for knowing more about you.

Both online publishing and advertising have been possessed by adtech for so long that they can barely imagine how to break free and sober up—even though they know adtech’s addiction to human data blood is killing them while harming everybody else as well. They even have their own twelve-step program.

We believe the only cure is code that gives publishers ways to do exactly what readers want, which is not to bare their necks to adtech’s fangs every time they visit a website.

We’re doing that by reversing the way terms of use work. Instead of readers always agreeing to publishers’ terms, publishers will agree to readers’ terms. Specifically, we’re doing it with a new standard called IEEE P7012—IEEE Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, aka MyTerms.

The first of these terms will say something like this:

That scrawled statement appeared on a whiteboard one day at IIW when we were talking about terms readers might proffer to publishers. Let’s call it #NoStalking. Like others of its kind, #NoStalking will live at Customer Commons, which will do for personal terms what Creative Commons does for personal copyright.

Publishers and advertisers can both accept that term, because it’s exactly what advertising has always been in the offline world, and still in the too-few parts of the online world where advertising sponsors publishers without getting personal with readers.

By agreeing to #NoStalking, publishers will also have a stake it can drive into the heart of adtech.

Teeth for enforcing this idea will erupt from the jaws of the EU on 25 May 2018. That’s the day when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes full enforcement effect. The GDPR is aimed at the same data vampires, and its fines for violations run up to 4% of a company’s revenues in the prior fiscal year. It’s a very big deal, and has opened the minds of publishers and advertisers to anything that moves them toward GDPR compliance.

With the GDPR putting fear in the hearts of publishers and advertisers everywhere, the likes of #NoStalking may succeed where DoNotTrack (which the W3C has now ironically relabeled Tracking Preference Expression) failed.

I want to make clear here that we are not against advertising. In fact we rely on it. What we don’t rely on is adtech. Here is the difference:

• Real advertising isn’t personal, doesn’t want to be. To do that, adtech spies on people and violates their privacy as a matter of course, and rationalizes it completely, with costs that include becoming a big fat target for bad actors.
• Real advertising’s provenance is obvious, while adtech messages could be coming from any one of hundreds (or even thousands) of different intermediaries, all of which amount to a gigantic four-dimensional shell game no one entity fully comprehends. Those entities include SSPs, DSPs, AMPs, DMPs, RTBs, data suppliers, retargeters, tag managers, analytics specialists, yield optimizers, location tech providers… the list goes on. And on. Nobody involved—not you, not the publisher, not the advertiser, not even the third party (or parties) that route an ad to your eyeballs—can tell you exactly why that ad is there, except to say they’re sure form of intermediary AI decided it is “relevant” to you, based on whatever data about you, gathered by spyware, reveals about you. Refresh the page and some other ad of equally unclear provenance will appear.
• Real advertising has no fraud or malware (because it can’t—it’s too simple and direct for that), while adtech is full of both .
• Real advertising supports journalism and other worthy purposes, while adtech supports "content production”—no matter what that “content” might be . By rewarding content production of all kinds, adtech gives fake news a business model. After all, fake news is “content” too, and it’s a lot easier to produce than the real thing. That’s why real journalism is drowning under a flood of it. Kill adtech and you kill the economic motivation for most fake news. (Political motivations remain, but are made far more obvious.)
• Real advertising sponsors media, while adtech undermines the brand value of both media and advertisers by chasing eyeballs to wherever they show up. For example, adtech might shoot an Economist reader’s eyeballs with a Range Rover ad at some clickbait farm. Adtech does that because it values eyeballs more than the media they visit. And most adtech is programmed to cheap out on where it is placed, and to maximize repeat exposures wherever it can continue shooting the same eyeballs.

In the offline publishing world, it’s easy to tell the difference between real advertising and adtech, because there isn’t any adtech in the offline world, unless we count direct response marketing, better known as junk mail, which adtech actually is.

In the online publishing world, real advertising and adtech look the same, except for ads that feature this symbol:

Only not so big. You’ll only see it as a 16×16 pixel marker in the corner of an ad. So it actually looks like this:

Click on that tiny thing and you’ll be sent to an “AdChoices” page explaining how this ad is “personalized,” “relevant,” “interest-based” or otherwise aimed by personal data sucked from your digital neck, both in real time and after you’ve been tracked by microbes adtech has inserted into your app or browser to monitor what you do.

Text on that same page also claims to “give you control” over the ads you see, through a system run by Google, Adobe, Evidon, TrustE, Ghostery or some other company that doesn’t share your opt-outs with the others, or provide any record of the “choices” you’ve made. In other words, together they all expose what a giant exercise in misdirection the whole thing is. Because unless you protect yourself from tracking, you’re being followed by adtech for future ads aimed at your eyeballs using source data sucked from your digital neck.

By now you’re probably wondering how adtech came to displace real advertising online. As I put it in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.” That happened because Madison Avenue, like the rest of big business, developed a big appetite for “big data,” starting in the late ’00s. (I unpack this history in my EOF column in the November 2015 Linux Journal.)

Madison Avenue also forgot what brands are and how they actually work. After a decade-long trial by a jury that included approximately everybody on Earth with an Internet connection, the verdict is in: after a $trillion or more has been spent on adtech, no new brand has been created by adtech; nor has the reputation of an existing brand been enhanced by adtech. Instead, adtech damages a brand every time it places the brand’s ad next to fake news or on a crappy publisher’s website.

In Linux vs. Bullshit, which ran in the September 2013 Linux Journal, I pointed to a page that still stands as a crowning example of how much of a vampire the adtech industry and its suppliers had already become: IBM and Aberdeen‘s The Big Datastillery: Strategies to Accelerate the Return on Digital Data. That link goes to the Internet Archive snapshot of the page. Give it time to load. If it doesn’t, go here. Or just click on this .jpg I just made from the .pdf verion of the thing:

Big Datastillery

The “datastillery” is a giant vat modeled on a whiskey distillery. Going into the top are pipes of data labeled “clickstream data,” “customer sentiment,” “email metrics,” “CRM” (customer relationship management), “PPC” (pay per click), “ad impressions,” “transactional data,” and “campaign metrics.” All that data is personal, and little if any of it has been gathered with the knowledge or permission of the persons it concerns.

At the bottom of the vat, distilled marketing goop gets spigoted into beakers rolling by on a conveyor belt through pipes labeled “customer interaction optimization” and “marketing optimization.” Those beakers are human beings.

Farther down the conveyor belt, exhaust from goop metabolized in the human beakers is farted upward into an open funnel at the bottom end of the “campaign metrics” pipe, through which it flows up to the top and is poured back into the vat.

Look at this image as an MRI of the vampire’s digestive system, or a mirror in which the reflections of IBM’s and Aberdeen’s images fail to appear because their humanity is gone.

No wonder ad blocking became the largest boycott in human history by 2015. Here’s how large:

1. PageFair’s 2017 Adblock Report says at least 615 million devices were already blocking ads by then. That number is larger than the human population of North America.
2. GlobalWebIndex says 37% of all mobile users worldwide were blocking ads by January 2016, and another 42% would like to. With more than 4.6 billion mobile phone users in the world, that means 1.7 billion people were blocking ads already—a sum exceeding the population of the Western Hemisphere.

Naturally, the adtech business and its dependent publishers cannot imagine any form of GDPR compliance other than continuing to suck its victims dry while adding fresh new inconveniences along those victims’ path to adtech’s fangs—and then blaming the GDPR for delaying things.

A perfect example of this non-thinking is a recent Business Insider piece that says “Europe’s new privacy laws are going to make the web virtually unsurfable” because the GDPR and ePrivacy (the next legal shoe to drop in the EU) “will require tech companies to get consent from any user for any information they gather on you and for every cookie they drop, each time they use them,” thus turning the Web “into an endless mass of click-to-consent forms.”

Speaking of endless, the same piece says, “News sites — like Business Insider — typically allow a dozen or more cookies to be ‘dropped’ into the web browser of any user who visits.” That means a future visitor to Business Insider will need to click “agree” before each of those dozen or more cookies gets injected into the visitor’s browser.

After reading that, I decided to see how many cookies Business Insider actually dropped in my Chrome browser when that story loaded, or at least tried to. Here’s what Baycloud Bouncer reported:

That’s ten dozen cookies.

This is in addition to the almost complete un-usability Business Insider achieves with adtech already. For example,

1. On Chrome, Business Insider‘s third party adtech partners take forever to load their cookies and auction my “interest” (over a 320MBp/s connection), while populating the space around the story with ads—just before a subscription-pitch paywall slams down on top of the whole page like a giant metal paving slab dropped from a crane, making it unreadable on purpose and pitching me to give them money before they life the slab.
2. The same thing happens with Firefox, Brave, and Opera, though not at the same rate, in the same order, or with the same ads. All drop the same paywall, though. It’s hard to imagine a more subscriber-hostile sales pitch.
3. Yet I could still read the piece by looking it up in a search engine. It may also be elsewhere, but the copy I find is on MSN. There, the piece is also surrounded by ads, which arrive along with cookies dropped in my browser by only 113 third-party domains. Mercifully, no subscription paywall slams down on the page.

So clearly, the adtech business and its publishing partners are neither interested in fixing this thing, nor competent to do it.

But one small publisher can start. That’s us. We’re stepping up.

Here’s how: by reversing the compliance process. By that I mean we are going to agree to our readers’ terms of data use, rather than vice versa. Those terms will live at Customer Commons, which is modeled on Creative Commons. Look for Customer Commons to do for personal terms what Creative Commons did for personal copyright licenses.

It’s not a coincidence that both came out of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. The father of Creative Commons is law professor Lawrence Lessig, and one of Customer Commons’ parents is me. In the great tradition of open source, I borrowed as much as I could from Larry and friends.

For example, Customer Commons’ terms will come in three forms of code (which I illustrate with the same graphic Creative Commons uses):

Legal Code is being baked by Customer Commons’ counsel: Harvard Law School students and teachers working for the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Klein Center.

Human Readable text will say something like “Just show me ads not based on tracking me.” That’s the one we’re dubbing #DoNotByte.

For Machine Readable code, we now have a working project at the IEEE: 7012 – Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. There it says,

The purpose of the standard is to provide individuals with means to proffer their own terms respecting personal privacy, in ways that can be read, acknowledged and agreed to by machines operated by others in the networked world. In a more formal sense, the purpose of the standard is to enable individuals to operate as first parties in agreements with others—mostly companies—operating as second parties.

That’s in addition to the protocol and a way to record agreements that JLINCLabs or some other protocol will provide.

And we’re wide open to help in all those areas.

Here’s what agreeing to readers’ terms does for publishers:

1. Provide real GDPR compliance, by recording the publisher’s agreement with the reader not to track them. Note that contract is one of the six lawful reasons the GDPR lists for processing personal data. See item (b) here. Note that (a) is for consent, which is clearly now a fail.
2. Put publishers back on a healthy diet of real (tracking-free) advertising. Which should be easy to do because that’s what all of advertising was before publishers, advertisers and intermediaries turned into vampires.
3. Restore publishers’ status as good media for advertisers to sponsor, and on which to reach high-value readers.
4. Model for the world a complete reversal of the “click to agree” process. This way we can start to give readers scale across many sites and services.
5. Pioneer a whole new model for compliance, where sites and services comply with what people want, rather than the reverse (which we’ve had since industry won the Industrial Revolution).
6. Raise the value of tracking protection for everybody. In the words of Don Marti, “publishers can say, ‘We can show your brand to readers who choose not to be tracked.’” He adds, “If you’re selling VPN services, or organic ale, the subset of people who are your most valuable prospective customers are also the early adopters for tracking protection and ad blocking.”

But mostly, we get to set an example that publishing and advertising both desperately need. It will also change the world for the better.

You know, like Linux did for operating systems.

---

Now, eight years after the MyTerms working group started drafting its standard, the draft is finished and likely to be published early next year. Meanwhile, there is nothing to stop work based on that standard, which is simplified here.

By the way, third-party tracking is disallowed in all thirteen of Customer Commons’ current set of draft agreements (which we hope to publish soon). The base agreement, currently nicknamed CC-BASE, says “service provision only.” This is what we experience in the natural world. If your business is selling clothes, we expect to see clothes, not to get infected with spyware. If one wants some spyware later, that offer can go on the table later.

MyTerms is the table on which future agreements are set, under the complete control of the individual operating as the first party—and at scale across all the sites and services the individual engages.

The only way we will ever get full agency in the digital world is through contracts. Full stop. And full start.

I grew up under the red star, and right now I’m just to the right of it, on the third and top floor of the smallest residential building in northern Manhattan.

When it hit, my wife and I both said, “That’s an earthquake.” We’ve experienced many in California, and know the feel.

But none of the quake sources online noted it in real time, or close.

Now the details are in. Nothing big, just interesting.

How do we make a mutual sense of our co-existence in the natural and digital worlds? To see how hard that is, consider this: There is also no “on” in “online.” No “in.”

Think about the prepositions we use to make sense of the natural world: in, on, under, around, through, beside, within, beneath, above, into, near, toward, with, outside, amid, beyond. All are made for our embodied selves. In the natural world up truly is up, and down is down, because we have distance and gravity here. We don’t have distance or gravity in the digital world. We are not embodied there. However, the digital world is no less real for the absence of distance, gravity, substance, shape, and the very real whatevers that we see, smell, hear, weigh, touch, and feel in the natural world.

Cyberspace is beyond ironic. It is oxymoronic, self-contradictory. It’s a spaceless non-place except in an abstract way. When people in Sydney, Lucerne, New York, and Tokyo meet on (or through, or with—pick your preposition) Zoom, they are not in a physical where. They are co-present in a non-space that Craig Burton called a giant zero: a hollow virtual sphere across which any two points can see each other, connect, communicate, and work.

But we treat this zero as a real place, because metaphors are how we make sense of the world. And all metaphors are wrong. They are like what they represent, but are far from the same. Time is not money, but we save, waste, spend, invest, and lose it. Life is not travel, yet we arrive, depart, get lost, jump on board, and fall off the wagon. This is why we make sense of cyberspace with real estate metaphors: domains with locations on sites where we construct or build the non-things we call homes. Or with publishing ones, by writing, authoring, posting, and syndicating or work. Or with transportation ones, for example with packets that we upload, download, transport, trace, and so on.

All these thinkings came to mind this morning when I read two pieces:

• Peter Thiel Just Accidentally Made a Chilling Admission. Five Decades Ago, One Man Saw It Coming. By Nick Ripatrazone in Yahoo News
• What’ll happen if we spend nearly 3ドルtn on data centres no one needs? by somebody behind the FT paywall. But I could read it here, so I did, and maybe you can too.

The first speaks to living disembodied lives along with our embodied ones.

The second speaks to the mania for Big AI spend:

It’s also worth breaking down where the money would be spent. Morgan Stanley estimates that 1ドル.3tn of data centre capex will pay for land, buildings and fit-out expenses. The remaining 1ドル.6tn is to buy GPUs from Nvidia and others. Smarter people than us can work out how to securitise an asset that loses 30 per cent of its value every year, and good luck to them.

Where the trillions won’t be spent is on power infrastructure. Morgan Stanley estimates that more than half of the new data centres will be in the US, where there’s no obvious way yet to switch them on.

I now think at least some of that money will be far better spent on personal AI.

That’s AI for you and me, to get better control of our lives in the natural world where we pay bills, go to school, talk to friends, get sick and well, entertain ourselves and others, and live lives thick with data over which we have limited control at most. Do you have any record of all your subscriptions, your health and financial doings and holdings, what you’ve watched on TV, where you’ve been, and with whom? Wouldn’t it be nice to have all that data handy, and some AI help to organize and make sense of it? I’m talking here about AI that’s yours and works for you. Not a remote service from some giant that can do whatever it pleases with your life.

It’s as if we are back in 1975, but instead of starting to work on the personal computer, all the money spent on computing goes into making IBM and the BUNCH more gigantic than anything else ever, with spendings that dwarf what might be spent on simple necessities, such as the electric grid and roads without holes. Back then, we at least had the good fortune of Steves Jobs and Wozniac, Adam Osborne, and other mammals starting a personal computing revolution underneath the bellies of digital dinosaurs. Do we have the same kind of pioneers working on personal AI today? Name them. Tell us what they’re doing. We need them.

Note that I’m not talking about people working on better ways to buy stuff, or to navigate the digital world with the help of smart agents. I’m talking about people working on personal (not personalized) AI that will give us ways to get control of our everyday lives, without the help of giants.

Like we started doing with personal computers fifty years ago.