Doc Searls's Blog

Facebook Marketplace, from which I have only bought cheap local furniture, recommends (no shit) that I buy (and I quote by plaintext copy/paste) a 2001 Prevost H345 Prevost H345 Team bus $35,000 Louisville, KY.

Jim Fallows on air travel.

Neal Stephenson on a weird kind of big bad reporting.

Antenna on TV subscriptions.

Paulina Borsook was right, and now you can't buy her book.

That’s me, with George F. R. Buletza, the principal of Maywood (NJ) Junior High. I was in the 8th grade, five-foot-three and eighty-three pounds, still with hair, no body fat, and obsessed by sciences in general and radio in particular.

From my bedroom window I could see the lights atop the towers of New York’s major AM radio stations. The closest was the biggest: WABC/770, a clear channel giant that transmitted from a 655-foot tower a mile south across Route 17 in Lodi. The signal from WABC was so thick in the air that you could hear it in the toaster and on the TV when it was off.

I wanted so much to learn how radio worked that I became a novice ham radio operator. My callsign was WV2VXH. Here I am at my rig:

The gear:

On that stuff I talked in Morse to other hams as far away as Sweden. But I was far more interested in DXing radio stations, especially on the AM band. Between that Hammarlund and my Zenith Royal 400 seven-transistor portable radio, I logged more than a thousand different AM stations. That’s about ten per channel. (There were 107 of those between 540 and 1600 kHz on the AM band.)

Listening to faraway stations and locating them on maps gave me a profound sense of geography. I also learned a lot about local and regional concerns and speech characteristics. I would listen to faraway baseball: the Cubs and White Sox on WGN/720 and WMAQ/670, the Tigers on WJR/760, the Red Sox on WBZ/1030, the Cardinals on KMOX/1120.

I also fell in love with space science and astronomy. From what I learned about the ionosphere, I knew that when I listened to KFI/640 from Los Angeles and KNBR/680 from San Francisco, their signals bounced off the E layer twice, and off the ground at the midpoint, somewhere on the plains of Eastern Colorado.

And I took a lot of what I learned and put it into my exhibit at the school science fair.

First (with my father’s help), I took an aluminum “Flying Saucer” sled, drilled holes in it, and wired lights and button switches to a battery strapped to the bottom. On top I glued a map of the U.S. and mounted pieces of plexiglass sheets and rods to demonstrate The Propagation of Radio Waves (the glued-on title). The finished work was four exhibits in one:

1. The transmission pattern of a four-course or Adcock radio range for aircraft navigation. I showed how the Morse Code N (-.) in two opposite directions overlapped with the A (.-) in the perpendicular directions, producing a solid tone in the overlap. In those days, there was a five-tower radio range just south of Newark Airport, and another for LaGuardia, just west of the north end of the Bronx Whitestone Bridge. I was familiar with them because we drove by both often, and they looked like AM arrays, but were not. (See the LaGuardia one here.)

2. Layers of the ionosphere. There were curved lines for E, F1, and F2. The E layer reflects AM (aka MW or mediumwave) frequencies back to earth at night.

3. A skywave, demonstrated by a plexiglass rod bent in the middle.

4. A satellite communication path, illustrated by a plexiglass rod. Satellites were brand new then, and the one I had in mind was Echo 1, a shiny 100-foot-wide reflective balloon. Telstar was planned but not yet launched.

I used plexiglass because it would glow when you put light into its ends or edges, and you could also light up surface scratches with light fed into an edge. Plexiglass was also easy to heat and bend, with help from an ordinary lighter (plentiful in those days).

The buttons lit up red bulbs under the edges or ends of the plexiglass pieces. It was a fun project, and I was proud of it. (Though I don’t remember if it won a prize. Having that photo in the paper was a big enough win for me.)

A bonus item is that the school principal, George F.R. Buletza, on the right in the photo, later (his obituary tells me) settled with his family in Charlotte, Eaton County, Michigan. That was a town and region pioneered by my great-grandfather and his brothers in the early 1800s. (In 2018 my sister and I visited the Searls/Searles graves there.)

What I remember most about Mr. Buletza was his signature. On a Maywood Schools group chat, somebody shared a sample of it, here:

Anyway, that exhibit was the high point of my academic life in the Maywood Public School system. I was a good learner but a poor student: what today they would call an ADHD case, though I’d call it ASO. I’m pretty sure I never got better than a B in any course through the 9th grade.

But I did have fun, and never lost my curiosity about everything.

The puppet is not human and doesn't work for you

Just a question: Can Big Ai make more money selling your brain to advertisers than the surveillance-based adtech fecosystem does now? I suspect both OpenAI and Google believe the answer is yes.

Along those same lines, Ted Gioia reminds us that Big AI is already our hive mind.

Imagine no more cookie notices.

Imagine no more Internet of Nothing But Accounts.

Imagine no more surveillance panopticons.

Imagine no more privacy in the hands of everybody but you.

Imagine no more creepy adtech.

Then thank MyTerms for making those possible.

It’s not a new idea.

It’s what we got with the Internet and its founding protocols, TCP and IP (1974).

It’s what we got with the Web and with its founding protocol, HTTP (1989).

It’s what we got with dozens of other members of the Internet Protocol Suite, plus other graces, such as RSS, which we can thank every time we hear “and wherever you get your podcasts.”

It’s what we got with all those and other protocols that are end-to-end, i.e. peer-to-peer, by design.

It’s not what we got from business-as-usual, which thought the Internet and everything that made it work was for them, and not for all of us. They saw us as mere users and consumers of their products and services, and not the independent and self-sovereign free agents the Internet and its protocols supported in the first places.

Want evidence of the mentality involved? Listen to marketing folks calling us “targets,” to “acquire,” herd through a “funnel,” and then “manage,” “control,” and “lock in” as if we were slaves or cattle.

We’ve been working on getting us out of this mess since the last millennium. Examples: The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999), the Buyer Centric Commerce Forum (2004), ProjectVRM (2006), The Intention Economy (2012), Customer Commons (2013), and finally, IEEE P7012 (2017).

All those efforts have now borne fruit in the completion of IEEE P7012, which is nicnamed MyTerms, much as IEEE 802.11 is nickanmed Wi-Fi.

And now MyTerms has its own website: https://myterms.info.

MyTerms is a standard that the P7012 working group, which I chair, has just completed after eight years in the works. It is due to be published by the IEEE on January 22, 2026.

MyTerms describes how the sites and services of the world agree to your terms, rather than the other way around. It says your agreements with those sites and services are contracts you both agree to, rather than the empty promises that come when you click on cookie notice “choices.” These agreements are ones both sides store in ways that can be audited and disputed, should the need arise.

The process is made simple—by limiting your chosen agreement to one among the handful kept on a roster in a site published by a disinterested nonprofit, such as Customer Commons, on the model established by Creative Commons. There will be a number of those sites, for different countries and regions.

We’re starting with five agreements. The default one is SD-BASE, which says “service delivery only.” SD-BASE says what you get from a site or a service is what you expect when you walk into a store in the natural world: just their business, whether it be luggage, lunch, or lingerie. Not to be tracked elsewhere like a marked animal or to have information about you sold or handed over to other parties—which is the norm today in the digital world.

Other variants cover data portability, data use for AI training, data for good, and data for intentcasting.

In the natural world we worked out privacy many millenia ago. We started with the privacy tech we call clothing and shelter. Then we developed social contracts that were almost entirely tacit, meaning we knew more about them than we could tell, but everyone understood how things worked.

But there is no tacit in the digital world. Everything there needs to be made explicit: written into code. In the absence of explicit agreements about what privacy is, and how it works, we’re stuck with this icky tacit understanding by business-as-usual: that following people without their express invitation or a court order is just fine, and worth $trillions.

With MyTerms we can have $trillions more. Because far more business is possible when customers have scale, and an abuncance of mutually trusted market intelligence can flow both ways between customers and companies in the open marketplace.

Obviously, we can use help. If you’re interested in putting your shoulder to any of the wheels we’re pushing forward, write to contact@myterms.info.

And the Green Season begins

The fire season is officially over in Santa Barbara and the rest of Southern California. Noozhawk: "The recent storm brought more than 9.5 inches of rain to the city of Santa Barbara, marking the wettest start to a rainy season in 127 years of recordkeeping."

In case you thought there was real competition in Big AI

Steven Levy says there is only one AI company. He calls it The Blob.

S****iri will use Gemini?

That's what it says here. Also, for reasons I don't know, the word "Siri" in the subhead above is typed exactly that way, yet turns into "S****iri" when published. In the vernacular of medicine, this is a "fascinoma."

We need, and still don't have, truly personal AI

John Battelle: 

Imagine a GPT chatbot that you own, trust, and control. Let’s call it a genie, because honestly, that’s the most appropriate word for this new entity. This genie has access to everything you do on your phone, your computer, and sure, why not — your Alexa, your car, basically every digital surface with which you interact. Imagine it’s bounded by immutable rules that state you and you alone can tell it what to do, what information to share, what services to connect to, on what terms, and so on. Now imagine you can ask that genie to perform all manner of magic on your behalf — pretty much any question you can think of, it will figure out an answer… How about negotiating a way better deal with your healthcare provider by threatening to move to competitors? Done! Once you’re happy with that healthcare provider, can you ask your genie to file all your claims and make sure you get reimbursed by checking your bank statements? Why yes you can! Your wish has been granted!

My point was this: That “genie” should work for YOU, not for OpenAI, Target, or your health insurance provider. You.

Hiss

After AM Cuts, Tesla Dropping FM Radio From Entry Level Models.

I want one

Companion Intelligence looks very close to what I've been calling for here.

What's the opposite?

Darius Van Arman has a lot to say about market concentration. (For reasons I can't grok, the long headline is uncopyable.)

Daniel Barkhuff has a serious one-liner bio (“Husband, Dad, Emergency Medicine physician, Veteran”) and speaks with earned authority from all of them, especially the last two. His latest, On Living Memory, reminds me of two dads.

One is my father, who re-enlisted in 1944 at age 35, because he wanted to fight in The War. Among other things, he participated in liberating a concentration camp. Afterward, he hated dentistry because drilling teeth smelled like burning bone. That was all he wanted to say about it. He also avoided fireworks because his main job in the Signal Corps was running ahead of blasting cannons on advancing lines, laying communication cables to forward locations, getting as close as possible to enemy positions.

The other was  Jim Hodksins, father of David, my long-time business partner, and three other sons. The obituary text on Jim Hodskins’ FindaGrave page says this: “Jim saw combat action in Europe, and served until he was badly injured in January, 1945. For his service, Jim was awarded the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, the Infantry Combat Badge, and several other achievement ribbons and medals.” David told me his dad seldom talked about The War, despite or perhaps because of all those ribbons and medals. His pride was invested elsewhere.

Both those dads are now gone, and with them the memory of what they fought and why. Read what Barkhuff says about that.

Bonus link.

Busy Day Today

I'm giving this talk at 4pm Eastern today. The longer I work on it, the more audacious it seems.

In November no less

There's a thunderstorm going on. Bright flashes, deep booms. And it's just 44° out there.

Just a question

If we Thank God It's Friday, should we Blame Satan It's Monday?