Doc Searls's Blog

I shot this image of the great Leonard Cohen on the side of a building in Montréal in 2019

Canadian universities are poaching American academics who could use a more hospitable work and research environment. Here’s McGill’s brag on its bags, one of which is my good friend Ethan Zuckerman, who will be leaving his beloved job at U.Mass Amherst to take a new and promising position at McGill, in Montréal. He explains,

Canada is offering me and my lab sufficient funding to support a core team of students for 8 to 12 years. That’s a level at which I’ve never been able to even dream, never mind plan…

Meanwhile,

The Canadian government saw an opportunity to recruit academics at the precise moment when the US government is making life difficult for universities in two big ways. Cuts to NSF, NIH and other grantmaking agencies are making it hard to build research teams in the US. Most of the support for my work has come from generous private foundations. that funding, which has always been highly competitive, has become exponentially more so as federal support has evaporated.

Second, the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants have made coming to a US university a risky proposition for international students. At schools like UMass, international students are both an important part of our community and of our economic picture. As we lose students who cannot get visas to the US – or choose not to study in a country that appears actively hostile to them – our enrollment shrinks, and we’re left with another set of financial pressures.

The hostility to international students also creates a moral risk: can I feel good about inviting students to study with me, knowing that we take on controversial topics and methods, and that I cannot guarantee that their work won’t have consequences for their immigration status?

This mirrors what some colleagues are saying at Indiana University, where I currently hang. Here’s one story. Another. Another. Another. Another. Another.

I wish Ethan and other northbound academic migrants well. And I wish stateside universities luck.

Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. That’s what Reuters says The Information says. The latter is behind an expensive paywall, so I’ll take Reuters’ word for it.

In The Price Of Independence Was $5.9 Billion, AI Secret says,

How this hits reality: Last year, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation. The stated reason was protecting the community from a single company’s influence. This month, Nvidia offered $12.9 billion for the whole thing. Hugging Face said yes. The principle did not change. The price did. Every speech about community independence has a number. Hugging Face just found it. The open-source AI world now has a landlord, and the rent was $5.9 billion above the original offer.

Key takeaway: Hugging Face said no to Nvidia at $5 billion. It said yes at $12.9 billion. The difference is not a change of heart. It is a reminder that every community’s independence is for sale. The only question is the price.

Sounds like Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub.

GitHub is a place where developers put code, while Hugging Face is a place where developers put models. If that’s not an exact analogy, it’s close enough, or Hugging Face wouldn’t be called “the GitHub of AI.“

Microsoft seems to have done a good-enough job of keeping GitHub independent, or GitHub wouldn’t continue to grow. Will Nvidia do the same with Hugging Face?

What do ya’ll think?

And loved them all

Among Money Inc.'s wealthiest college towns, I've lived in numbers 2, 3, 4, 10, 13*, and 20. I've also had good hang times in 5, 9, and 15. Oddly, I've never been to #1, and I grew up in both North and South Jersey.

*Same as 2, really.

Before robots took over, a flagger would be standing here with a stop sign and a walkie-talkie.

It can happen where you are too. No data center required.

Spotted and obeyed on West Bloomfield Road in Bloomington, Indiana: a robot traffic control flagger.

Hard to wear, but that’s not the point

My wife just reported from the Iris van Herpen show in Brooklyn. Wow.

I remain charged about both

Wired has a good review of electric toothbrushes. I’ve had both the brands that Wired names winners: a Sonicare and an Oral B. The Sonicare was an early model that I bought late in the last millennium. One battery charge lasted for weeks, and it didn’t crap out until 2019, when I replaced it with an Oral B from Costco, which I bought only because it was a good deal. (And there were two units in the package. Very handy, because I left one behind on a trip.) One dispute with the review. It says, “Oral-B says the battery lasts about a week, but we squeezed out 10 days in testing. That’s decent, though not as long as some other models.” While I’ll agree that my old Sonicare’s battery life was amazing, I’ve taken the Oral B on two-week trips without worrying about losing the charge. I do believe that electric toothbrushes like these beat the manual kind.

My life

Do some stuff
Sleep like a dog
Do some stuff
Sleep like a dog

Or watch the play from a seat close to a door

“Hell is other people.”—Jean-Paul Sartre

Philosopheasy explains,

What makes another person’s gaze so powerful? According to Sartre, we exist in two radically different ways.
In our own minds, we are a “Subject.” We are a limitless current of intentions, possibilities, memories, and dreams. We are not a fixed thing; we are a constant process of becoming. When you are alone, you experience this freedom most purely. You are the author, director, and star of your own reality.
The moment another person looks at you, however, you are ripped from that role. Under their Gaze, you are instantly transformed into an “Object.” You become a thing in their world, defined by external properties they assign to you: “tall,” “serious,” “well-dressed,” “nervous.” Your infinite inner world collapses into a finite, external label. And the most terrifying part? You have no control over what that label is.
Their perception becomes a prison. Their judgment, even if unspoken or indifferent, builds the walls. Every encounter, then, is a silent battle for subjectivity. Who gets to be the free consciousness, and who is forced to become the defined object?

But what if the look is of love? Of acceptance and understanding? Of respect? Of easement toward your privacy and personal space? Does Sartre leave room for Whatever? Guess I need to read No Exit again.

But I will run out of days

Will I ever run out of names for days? Probably not.

Glad for it. Also think he's over it by now.

Listening to Like a Rolling Stone, Positively 4th Street, and Don't Think Twice (one of the most passive-aggressive songs ever), it dawns on me, half a century later, that Bob Dylan did a lot of first-rate complaining.

Prophesy

When MyTerms succeeds, CMP—Consent Management Platforms—will mean Contract Management Platforms.

From the Annals of Enshittification

Seth Godin on The Amazon Tax: "Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve."

And here we are

JA Westenberg in The Intellectual Circle Jerk and Why We Can't Stop, subtitled The Citation Shell Game: "You don’t build your audience by making your audience feel like they’ve got some bloody hard work to do; you build an audience by making people feel like they’re already a murder of geniuses, and by flattering their existing positions." The conclusion:

The obvious answer is to read people you disagree with. That’s true but insufficient, because most people who think they’re doing this are actually reading the version of the opposing view that their community has already refuted. The strawman tour. The more useful practice is to look for the strongest version of a challenge to your existing framework, find the smartest person who holds it, and take seriously the possibility that they might be right and you might be wrong.
Most intellectual communities are not set up to reward this. They’re set up to reward the defense of shared positions. Changing your mind on something important is more likely to cost you status than gain it.
So the circle jerk continues. The same twelve thinkers, the same citation layer, the same books that make us feel smarter than we were.
And every now and then, someone will write a piece pointing this out – and it will be widely shared among people who already agree with it.
Including, possibly, this one.

Because "consent" is a fiction

Pre-consent tracking is the norm.

Worth reading

A Reddit discussion among and about our local homeless.

I was overheard to have said

Exhumed this from a Facebook comment to repost here:

About advertising, there have been two state changes in the business.

One I unpacked eleven years ago, here: https://dsearls.medium.com/separating-advertisings-wheat… The most quoted line from that one is “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.” What that says is that surveillance-based online advertising—adtech—is the latest (hopefully final) evolutionary stage of junk mail. Back-burnered is old-fashioned brand advertising, which was aimed at whole populations rather than on followed eyeballs and eardrums. But car and TV makers have been working quietly and mightily to deep-six over-the-air broadcasting so spied-on drivers, passengers, and couch-riders can have ads microtargeted to them as well.

The other is AI, which is making microtargeting sharper than ever.

I wish David Hodskins and Ray Simone were both still around to help us think and talk through all this. They were my partners in Hodskins Simone & Searls, our pretty successful Silicon Valley ad agency in the 80s and 90s. One of our stated purposes was to improve the media environments in which our clients’ ads ran. But I think all three of us had misgivings about the business itself. Today I believe that advertising corrupts, and digital advertising corrupts absolutely. It has made lots of money for Google, Amazon, Adobe, Meta, and other companies for which it started as an add-on, and it has corrupted them all. Even Apple is corrupted, or it wouldn’t have made IDFA (ID For Advertisers) a hook for robot ad-spies to grab in every iPhone. Yes, it’s opt-out, but it never should have been there in the first place. And “Ask app not to track” is also weak shit. “Stop app from tracking” would be the right box to click.

Oh, and Netflix is running ads too now. They’re in its cheapest tier. Same with Amazon Prime. How long before ads are in all the premium streaming services?

My own photo. Not AI. Everything is real, including the ?.

I posted what follows more than twenty-six years ago on Searls.com, which now brings up a danger warning because it’s still http and not https. (Yes, I’ll fix it.) It makes interesting reading today for several reasons, one of which is that much of what it (and The Cluetrain Manifesto, which had just come out) promotes still hasn’t happened. And all the companies that have died. (Though Cluetrain is still alive.)

Listen Up

By Doc Searls
April 16, 1999

“All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value! So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!'”
— Howard Beale, in Network, by Paddy Chayevsky

Bob Davis is the CEO of Lycos, Inc., whose growing portfolio of companies (excuse me, portals) now includes Lycos, Hotbot, WhoWhere and Tripod. I’m sure Bob is a great guy. And I’m sure Lycos is a great company. A lot of people seem to like them both. And you have to admire both his ambition and his success. To witness both, read his interview with PC Week, where he predicts that the Lycos Network (the sum of all its portals) will overtake Yahoo as “#1 on the Web.”

Lycos will win, Davis says, because “We have a collection of quality properties that are segmented into best-of-breed categories, and our reach has been catapulting.”

I can speak for Hotbot, which is still my first-choice search engine; but by a shrinking margin. I often test search engines by looking for strings of text buried deep in long documents on my own site. Hotbot always won in the past. But since Lycos bought it, Hotbot has become more of a portal and less of a search tool. Its page is now a baffling mass of ads and links. And its searches find less.

In today’s test, Infoseek won. Last week, Excite won. Both found pages that Hotbot seems to have forgotten.

Why? Bob Davis gives us a good answer.

“We’re a media company,” he says. “We make our money by delivering an audience that people want to pay for.”

Note the two different species here: audience and people. And look at their qualities. One is “delivered.” The other pays. In other words, one is cargo and the other is money.

Well, I don’t care if Lycos’ stock goes to the moon and splits three times along the way. The only #1 on the Web is the same as the only #1 on the phone: the people who use it. And the time will come when people will look at portals not as sources of “satisfying experiences” (another of Davis’ lines) but as useless intermediaries between supply and demand.

Words of Walt
You there, impotent, loose in the knees,
open your scarfed chops till I blow grit within you.
Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets.
I am not to be denied. I compel.
It is time to explain myself. Let us stand up.
I know I am solid and sound.
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow.
I know that I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself
or be understood.
I see that the elementary laws never apologize..
— Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself

“Media company” guys like Davis are still in a seller’s market for wisdom that was BS even when only the TV guys spoke it — back when it literally required the movie “Network.” That market will dry up. Why? Because we’ve been mad as hell for about hundred years, and now we don’t have to take it anymore.

Three reasons.

Humanity. This is what Walt Whitman reminded us about more than a hundred years ago. We are not impotent. Media companies may call us seats and eyeballs and targets, but that’s their problem. They don’t get who we are or what we can — and will — do. And the funny thing is, they don’t get that what makes us powerful is what they think makes them powerful: the Internet. It gives us choices. Millions of them. We don’t have to settle for “channels” any more. Or “portals” that offer views of the sky through their own little windows. Or “sticky” sites that are the moral equivalent of flypaper.Demand. There never was a demand for messages, and now it shows, big time. Because the Internet is a meteor that is smacking the world of business with more force than the rock that offed the dinosaurs, and it is pushing out a tsunami of demand like nothing supply has ever seen. Businesses that welcome the swell are in for some fun surfing. Businesses that don’t are going to drown in it.Obsolescence. Even the media guys are tired of their own B.S. and are finally in the market for clues.

Alvin Toffler had it right in The Third Wave. Industry (The Second Wave) “violently split apart two aspects of our lives that had always been one… production and consumption… In so doing, it drove a giant invisible wedge into our economy, our psyches … it ripped apart the underlying unity of society, creating a way of life filled with economic tension.” Today all of us play producer roles in our professions and consumer roles in our everyday lives. This chart shows the difference (and tension) between these radically different points of view — both of which all of us hold:

Producer viewConsumer viewMetaphorBusiness is shipping (“loading the channel,” “moving products,” “delivering messages”)Business is shopping (“browsing,” “looking,” “bargaining,” “buying”)OrientationBusiness is about moving goods from one to many (producers to consumers)Business is about buying and selling, one to oneMarketsMarkets are shooting ranges: consumers are “targets”Markets are markets: places to shop, buy stuff and talk to peopleRelationshipsPrimary relationshiphs are with customers, which are more often distributors & retailers rather than consumersPrimary relationships are with vendors, and with other customers

These are all just clues, which are easily deniable facts. Hence a line once spoken of Apple: “the clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.” But Apple was just an obvious offendor. All of marketing itself remains clueless so long as it continues to treat customers as “eyeballs,” “targets,” “seats” and “consumers.”

For the past several months, I have been working with Rick Levine, David Weinberger and Chris Locke on a new railroad for clues: a ClueTrain.

Our goal is to burn down Marketing As Usual. Here is the logic behind the ambition:

Markets are conversations
Conversations are fire
Marketing is arson

The result is here — in what The Wall Street Journal calls “presumptuous, arrogant, and absolutely brilliant.”

Take a ride. If you like it, sign up. Feel free to set fires with it, add a few of your own, or flame the ones you don’t agree with. What matters is the conversation. We want everybody talking about this stuff. If they do, MAU is toast.

Here is my own short form of the Manifesto (inspired by Martin Luther, the long version has 95 Theses). Feel free to commit arson with (or to) any of these points as well.

Ten facts about highly effective markets:Markets are conversations.
None of the other metaphors for markets — bulls, bears, battlefields, arenas, streets or invisible hands — does full justice to the social nature of markets. Real market conversations are social. They happen between human beings. Not between senders and receivers, shooters and targets, advertisers and demographics.The first markets were markets.
They were real places that thrived at the crossroads of cultures. They didn’t need a market model, because they were the model market. More than religion, war, or family, markets were real places where communities came together. They weren’t just where sellers did business with buyers. They were the place where everybody got together to hang out, talk, tell stories, and learn interesting stuff about each other and the larger world. ‘Markets are more about demand than supply.
The term “market” comes from the Latin mercere, which means “to buy.” Even a modern market is called a “shopping center” rather than a “selling center.” Bottom line: every market has more buyers than sellers. And the buyers have the money.Human voices trump robotic ones.
Real voices are honest, open, natural, uncontrived. Every identity that speaks has a voice. We know each other by how we sound. That goes for companies and markets as well as people. When a voice is full of shit, we all know it — whether the voice tells us “your call is important to us” or that a Buick is better than a Mercedes.The real market leaders are people whose minds and hands are worn by the work they do.And it has been that way ever since our ancestors’ authority was expressed by surnames that labeled their occupations — names like Hunter, Weaver, Fisher and Smith. In modern parlance, the most knowledge and the best expertise is found at the “point of practice.” That’s where most of the work gets done.Markets are made by real people. Not by surreal abstractions that insult customers by calling them “targets,” “seats,” “audiences,” “demographics” and “eyeballs” — all synonyms for consumers, which Jerry Michalski of Sociate calls “brainless gullets who live only to gulp products and expel cash.”Business is not a conveyor belt that runs from production to consumption. Our goods are more than “content” that we “package” and “move” by “loading” them into a “channel” and “address” for “delivery.” The business that matters most is about shopping, not shipping. And the people who run it are the customers and the people who talk to them.Mass markets have the same intelligence as germ populations.
Their virtues are appetite and reproduction. They grow by contagion. Which is why nobody wants to admit belonging to one.There is no demand for messages.
To get what this means, imagine what would happen if mute buttons on remote controls delivered “we don’t want to hear this” messages directly back to advertisers.Most advertising is unaccountable. Or worse, it’s useless. An old advertising saying goes, “I know half my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” But even this is a lie. Nearly all advertising is wasted. Even the most accountable form of advertising — the junk mail we euphemistically call “direct marketing” — counts a 3% response rate as a success. No wonder most of us sort our mail over the trash can. Fairfax Cone, who co-founded Foote Cone & Belding many decades ago, said, “Advertising is what you do when you can’t go see somebody. That’s all it is.” With the Net, you can go see somebody. More importantly, they can see you. More importantly than that, you can both talk to each other. And make real markets again.