Doc Searls's Blog

Questions

Is Conditional Consent compatible with MyTerms? This—_Instead of "accept all" or "reject all" per site, users define rules across three dimensions: cookie purpose, website category, and third-party processor. Allow analytics on shopping sites but deny tracking on news sites — your preferences, your logic._—suggests the answer is yes. Or at least maybe.

When your intentions are inferred by surveillance and AI guesswork, are they really your intentions? This is the question raised for me by MasterCard, with this:  When AI starts buying for you, trust becomes the product—Mastercard introduces Verifiable Intent – a new, standards-based trust paradigm for agentic commerce, co-developed with Google. My answer is, No, it's not.

Is Sam Altman going to sink OpenAI/ChatGPT? Links:

—Casey Newton: What is OpenAI going to do when the truth comes out? Sam Altman’s deal with the Pentagon seems too good to be true. What happens when the public realizes that?

—Gary Marcus: BREAKING: Sam Altman’s greed and dishonesty are finally catching up to him

—Keith Teare: Missing in Action: Real Leadership

Why not to "verify" your Linkedin identity

Rogi: I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Actually Handed Over.

It's all about making The Inention Economy happen.

Dave Lockie: We Get to Decide What the A in AI Stands For. This follows The Intent Stack: A New Design Space for Human-AI Collaboration. Also dig Intent-Driven Commerce: What E-commerce Can Learn from AI Agents and DeFi.

Dialing out

Cumulus Media, one of the three big owners of commercial radio stations, just filed for bankruptcy. Audacy, another of the big three, did that two years ago. iHeart, the third, did it in 2018, came out later, and today is less weak than the other two. But the whole commercial radio station business is doomed.

For the civilized world, radio was for many decades the main way to hear music, news, and talk over the wireless connection we called "signals," which came from "stations" and heard on devices called "radios." Now we can listen to an infinite variety of music, news, and talk using smartphones, which are also required for much else in our civilized lives. Want a radio for your house? You won't find one at CVS, or even Best Buy. (Well, maybe online.) But you're likely to find one at a thrift shop or an antique store.

The value of AM stations is diving to zero. When Cumulus took its off-the-shelf conservative talk programming off KSFO/560, and put it on its 810 AM signal, it turned off the 560 signal completely, and erased the KGO callsign on 810, ending KGO's century-long landmark existence, during which it ruled ratings for something like eighty years. Apparently, there is no market for the 560 AM signal, even though it could easily be diplexed onto any number of other stations' AM towers around the Bay. Nobody wants to spend money on AM at all.

In cars—the only places where broadcast radio still has listeners—the makers are burying radio functions behind others on dashboard "infotainment" systems. Gone are knobs for tuning. What people mostly want now is to put their phone screens on the dashboard, with Android Auto or CarPlay, and then play whatever they like.

I have a lot more to report on this, but I will save it for another post somewhere. Meanwhile, I will say I have hope for noncommercial (public, religious) radio. I think they'll be most of what's left after the market collapses, simply because their listeners will pay for it. Advertising at most has been a side thing for them.

See you there!

Eli Pariser will address the question What Might “Public Parks of the Internet” Look Like? at 4 pm Eastern today. Register to attend here. And here is the Zoom.

Brief observations of a perfect place

Photos of Pink Sands Beach on Harbour Island: January 31st, February 2nd.

Haste makes Trash

For reasons unknown, I had two posts called Headnesday (because I had to name it something), and I trashed the wrong one because I was in a hurry. Then I

No app shows more, FAIK

Windy is by far the best site and app for weather geeks. Right now we have a thunderstorm in Bloomington, and Windy reports the location of every lightning flash. Such as right now, here.

Coach in Peace

The great Lou Holtz died today, at 89. Two stories. First, Coach Holtz did a kindness for my ex-wife when she was stuck somewhere, and as a UNC fan found then-NC State coach and asked for help finding her a ride, which he did. Second, he coached my cousin Andy Heck during Notre Dame’s college championship season in 1988. Andy is now the offensive line coach for the Kansas City Chiefs.

Still beautiful, I guess

Camp Aheka, the Boy Scout camp where I was homesick but had fun in the Summer of ’59, is long gone and now an estate for sale.

Though attendance is low

The Moon has hot spots.

Blame Canada

The LA Times reports that California’s wine industry is taking a big hit these days.

Your kids have a new god

I didn’t know Ms. Rachel was a real thing until I read this Onion story.

Your kids have a new god

I didn't know Ms. Rachel was a real thing until I read this Onion story.

Let the Games Continue

I didn't know what Figma was until I heard that Danila Poyarkov created an alternative called OpenPencil, explained here. 

This news came in a thread where I gave my wish list for old-app resurrection by Muggles using AI. Here it is:

Raise MORE from the dead. MORE was the best writing tool ever invented. It ran only on Macs and died around the turn of the 90s, but I continued using it into the late 90s. I still miss it every day.

Raise Phase One Media Pro, formerly Microsoft Expressions, originally iView Media Pro, from the dead. I explain here how it was, for me, the best workflow software ever made for photography.

Raise Adobe GoLive from the dead. It was a great WYSIWYG HTML editor. I don't need something that complex, but I miss writing with it.

Hell, combine #1 and #3. I don't care.

God (now with AI!) help us all.

I always hated time as a measure of work. I sucked at keeping time sheets, and even screwed up punch/time clocks before that: for example when, in the late '60s, I made 60¢ an hour in the Guilford College kitchen, and 83¢ an hour delivering food and washing dishes at Wesley Long Hospital. Both still exist: the places, that is, not the pay scales and systems. Anyway, toward life after all that, Joe Mandese writes, Billable Hours Are Dead, AI Killed Them, Here's How To Survive. Of course, AI helped Joe write it.

Seriously. Read them both.

Connect these dots—

Jordan Klemperer:  Moltbook's alleged AI civilization is just a massive void of bloated bot traffic.

Tim O'Reilly: A Conversation About What I Lack or: Why AI Needs You.

Moving on

Jeffrey Epstein is a black hole topic: a gravity well of human interest and consequence into which everyone with a connection to him falls and no light escapes. Joi Ito is one of those people. In hope of shedding light, Joi has issued a public statement describing how he used Epstein to raise funds for the MIT Media Lab. Joi is an old friend. I thought (Epstein aside) that he did a great job with the Media Lab when he ran it. While I also don't think anyone with connections to Epstein (and no connections were good ones) will ever fully recover, I hope that Joi, like everyone else, can get on with a productive and happy life.

We won’t have better news until we have better ways of paying for it. EmanciPay is one we thought up at ProjectVRM almost twenty years ago. Maybe the time is finally ripe for it.

I learned that a small plane landed on the Hudson near Newburgh, NY* from a notification on my laptop that said the story was from WNYC. So I went there. Found nothing. Then I went to Google News and searched for plane+hudson. Wanting to give some linklove to one of the local news (formerly newspaper) outlets, I went to the Times-Union, which accused me of blocking ads (which I don’t: I block tracking) and tried to shake me down for a subscription, which I don’t want because I don’t live there. But (this is key) I am glad to pay a small amount using EmanciPay. which doesn’t yet exist, but should.

I make the case for EmanciPay in many places, the most recent being The New News Business.

Bear this in mind: the Web is all hypertext. Files on it are meant to be linked. When you defeat that purpose, you defeat the Web itself.

Stop now and read The Longing, one of David Weinberger‘s chapters in The Cluetrain Manifesto. David wrote it in 1999, or maybe earlier. But it’s still spot-on about what the Web is, and what we risk by losing it. Excerpts:

There are many ways to look at what’s drawing us to the Web: access to information, connection to other people, entrance to communities, the ability to broadcast ideas. None of these are wrong perspectives. But they all come back to the promise of voice and thus of authentic self…

The voice that the Web gives us is not the ability to post pictures of our cat and our guesses at how the next episode of The X-Files will end. It is the granting of a place in which we can be who we are (and even who we aren’t, if that’s the voice we’ve chosen).

It is a public place. That is crucial. Having a voice doesn’t mean being able to sing in the shower. It means presenting oneself to others. The Web provides a place like we’ve never seen before.

We are losing that place today. Google is doing it by turning search from a librarian to a “helpful assistant” who forgets what’s in the library. News outlets large and small are fighting the Web’s library by putting a paywall in front of every different periodical in the Web’s Reference section.

Maybe the way to save both the Web and these periodicals is to come up with a better way for people to pay what they like, in countless small amounts, like we have with the convention called tip jars.

So far, I haven’t seen anything better than EmanciPay for doing that. Because only EmanciPay starts by giving readers their own way to pay whatever they like, wherever they like, automatically and with minimal friction. Installing mechanisms and valves on the sell side alone works for a few large publication, but fails for all the rest of them.

We need solutions that start on the readers’ side. EmanciPay is one of them.

*Credit where due: that link goes to the Mid Hudson News, and reported by Hank Gross, who founded it. It has no paywall. Hats off.

We’ll never have civilized life in the digital world while people have no way of their own to signal and enforce their privacy preferences and requirements, as they do in the natural world with what we call manners and clothing. In the absence of personal agency over privacy, adtech has normalized violating privacy by building a vast surveillance fecosystem. MyTerms will obsolesce that fecosystem. But it won’t start there. It will start where adtech’s moon don’t shine: with sites and services that don’t depend on adtech and surveillance. There are millions of those. Hi, guys!

MyTerms is Status Go toward markets based on full personal agency. Adtech is a $trillion Status Quo based on full agency for corporate entities alone and full subordination of the persons who depend on them: a one-sided power asymmetry manifest in every cookie notice.

But, while it is easy to characterize MyTerms as a way to flip the script on cookie notices, and to imagine hordes of people fed up with surveillance storming the walls of Business-as-Usual, the smarter and simpler approach for MyTerms is to start with websites and services that aren’t part of the Ye Olde Fecosystem. There are a lot of those:

Meanwhile, on the regulatory front, officials concerned about personal privacy and mindful of the consent system’s failures, typically continue to look for ways to fix things from the corporate side, because that’s where all the power is. It is hard to imagine that people are more than “data subjects,” and can be just as capable as companies to act as first parties in privacy agreements.

So we have two challenges on our hands. One is to get MyTerms implemented where the surveillance fecosystem doesn’t operate. The other is to remind regulators that contracts are laws that any two parties can make for themselves. And that enforcement can happen inside the framework of plain old contract law (plus plain new ODR—Online Dispute Resolution).

We don’t need a fix for consent that strengthens the status quo and prevents MyTerms from making operative Art. 6 GDPR 1.(b), which specifies contract as one of six grounds for lawful processing of personal data.

Bonus link: The Case for MyTerms.

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In case you’re wondering about the title image, it contains an improvement on this seat I’ll bet is the oldest and most isolated privy in Wyoming. It was built in the very early 1900s by John Love, whose pioneering is immortalized in John McPhee‘s Rising From the Plains (best read as a chapter of the Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Former World). I write more about Love Ranch here.

Here in Bloomington, Indiana, we have a lot of these large-eyed, big-eared roaming free-range cattle that seem not to care much about the two-legged kind and are mindful of traffic. For example, I was headed east on Howe the other day, approaching Euclid, and spotted these two girls on the sidewalk:

After walking to the corner, this one looks first back up Howe behind my car:

Note that her left and right ears are up and down the cross street, which is Euclid. She’s on Howe. Next, she looks straight north up Euclid:

Note that her ears are still trained in both directions. Next, she looks to the right, down Euclid to the south:

Again, ears in both directions. Don’t you wish your dog could do that? (Cats can. Watch for it.)

After that, I kept driving east on Howe, and saw both these girls in my rear view mirror crossing Euclid. Didn’t get a picture, but I did notice them ignoring a two-legged pedestrian nearby.

Jeremiah Johnson is correct: We are ruled by underpants gnomes.

Luke Kornet has a blog on Medium. And he's strong with it.

An on-point Marketoonist cartoon.

Eve Maler has a book on identity coming out. It'll be great. Eve is an IIW veteran who has earned many battle ribbons in the Identity Wars.

The Onion: Anyone Else Have Those Weird Dreams Where Sobbing Future Generations Beg You To Change Course?, by Sam Altman. Also Casey Newton: What is OpenAI going to do when the truth comes out? — Sam Altman’s deal with the Pentagon seems too good to be true. What happens when the public realizes that?