Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

  • Dept. of Overstate

    Yes, it’s AI. Gemini in this case. I couldn’t find my own lizard photos.

    Pull almost-quote: Never mistake malice for stupidity

    Says here that 4% support for the U.S. taking over Greenland is in the lizardman range.

    When will he come to the US?

    Peter Bence is an amazing pianist.

    Made it a bit punchier

    I just gave The Only Way to Get Privacy Online a fresh edit, based on good feedback. That’s also the title of the event we’re holding in London and online, on 28 January.

    QOTD

    Mark Hurst in The upside of child sacrifice: “It appears, increasingly, that a primary goal of our interconnected digital system is to sacrifice as many children as possible, as fast as possible, with as little friction as possible.”

    Wasn’t an act

    A lot of planes disappeared during a geomagnetic storm in 2024.

    A thought

    He’s not a King. He’s a Caesar.

    Being fully enshittified, it’s one giant fecosystem.

    Dentsu says global ad spend will exceed $1 trillion this year.

    Ethical Marketing News says the number is $1.19 trillion, 71.6% of which is “algorithm-driven.” Of that $1.19 trillion, “Alphabet, Amazon and Meta take a combined market share of 56.1% excluding China this year – equivalent to $556.6bn – rising to 58.0% in 2026.”

    Of course, we know when we are on any of those three companies’ platforms, or use any of their products, we are being spied on. But we may not know that nearly every website with a cookie notice is in the same business, and personal data about you is harvested there as well, regardless of what you click on in the subset of cookie notices that give you a way to opt out of tracking. See here and here.

    As it says, “Advertising corrupts, and digital advertising corrupts absolutely.”

    The big dog is eating the new dog’s lunch

    The two AI chat systems I use most are ChatGPT and Gemini. The results from both are about even. Both are good and getting better. Both keep a history, which is essential for me, because I often need to revisit and search old Q’s and A’s.

    The main differences are rates of improvement in speed, quality, and service offerings. Gemini is much faster in getting me answers (it seems ChatGPT is purposely slow). Gemini’s rate of answer improvement is increasing faster. And ChatGPT’s desktop and mobile apps remember all my history. Not the case (far as I can tell) with Gemini. Not yet.

    Alphabet was clearly on the path to providing useful AI services for everybody when ChatGPT suddenly jumped in front of it, and a pack of other AI dogs, in 2022. And in some ways, ChatGPT still has the edge. That’s why I pay for ChatGPT and not the others. But there are trends to weigh here, and resources to consider. Some numbers from Gemini:

    AI ChatbotMarket Share (Jan 2026)

    AI Chatbot Market Share (Jan 2026) Trend (YoY)
    ChatGPT (OpenAI) ~64% – 68% 📉 Down from ~87%
    Gemini (Google) ~18% – 21.5% 📈 Up from ~5.4%
    DeepSeek ~3.7% – 4% 📈 Rising (Global)
    Grok (xAI) ~3% – 3.4% 📈 Rising (Social Integration)
    Claude (Anthropic) ~2% – 4% ↔️ Stable (High Enterprise)
    Perplexity ~2% 📈 Rising (Search/Citation)
    Microsoft Copilot ~1.1% ↔️ Stable (OS Integration)

    ChatGPT doesn’t disagree, citing this from Android Central.

    So you might say…

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  • Everwhat

    A shot of power, transport, and city, shot with an iPhone 11 from northbound car on the NJ Turnpike.

    Um…

    Shanaka Anslem Perera: The Megawatt Mirage: NVIDIA’s $4.5 Trillion Valuation Depends on a Grid That Cannot Deliver. Chips Ready. Software Ready. Power Infrastructure? Eight-Year Queue. Credit Markets? Flashing Red. The tweet version:

    “Microsoft’s CEO admitted GPUs are sitting in warehouses unplugged.

    Not demand. Not defects. Power.

    Transformer lead times: 4 years

    Grid interconnection queues: 8 years

    NVIDIA backlog assumes: 18 months…

    $4.5 trillion valuation depends on infrastructure that does not exist.

    The chips are ready. The grid is not.”

    Logisms

    I like “everwhat” and “everwhen.” Just wanted to say that.

    Still trying

    “Life is a casino with no house, so go ahead and influence your own bets. The future is a black swan hatchery that will produce colors other than black and white. Every species is a mistake that works. Best to make new ones.” —The Intention Economy

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  • Distinctions

    Scott Adams’ brilliant take on old skool Unix geeks. For a long time I thought the bearded dude was my old boss Phil Hughes (who gave us Linux Journal), but am convinced now it was Jon Maddog Hall.

    Remembering Scott Adams

    Scott Adams understood business, and especially its innate absurdities, better than anyone else in the world. That’s why his Dilbert comic strips were so right-on and popular. He also correctly predicted the results of the 2016 election (as did I), but I think he was off-base on why. I think he was also wrong about a lot of other stuff, which was why I stopped paying attention to him (although I did read and enjoy his book Win Bigly, even though I disagreed with some of that too). From what I’m now reading about his health, the last year or more of his life was almost pure misery. His passing today, while in some ways a blessing (he had earlier talked of taking suicide drugs), is a huge loss. He was a one-of-one, and there will never be another.

    Divide and —?

    Axios: “The nation is splitting into three distinct economic realities: the Have-Nots (stalling) … the Haves (coasting) … and the Have-Lots (rocketing to greater wealth)…This shift, if it holds, will rattle economics, politics and AI throughout 2026 and beyond. We’re already seeing it in rising inequality, pessimism about the future and AI opposition.”

    So mark me down as doubtful.

    Facebook invites me “to start making money with our new content monetization program.”  Guess that means their AI hadn’t been trained on the large corpus of things I’ve written about creepy adtech and why it needs to die.

    Mortal words

    Thousands of years ago, in the late ’80s, President George H. W. Bush was a guest on Rush Limbaugh’s talk show. After a caller criticized Bush and his policies at great length, Bush didn’t defend anything. He just said, “Guess I’ll mark you down as doubtful, fella,” and moved on to the next call. Hence the subhead for the item above.

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  • Securing the right to be let alone

    We’ve had privacy tech in the natural world for millennia. Can we bring it to our new digital world?

    In What destroyed ‘the right to be let alone’, Tiffany Jenkins in the Washington Post argues that demolition of personal privacy began in the postwar years and became normative in 1973. That was when PBS ran An American Family: a cinéma verité exposure of the Loud family in Santa Barbara, and the inaugural example of what came later to be called Reality TV.

    And now we live in a digital world where, as she says,

    Intimacy floods the public realm while light shines on the private. Instead, we have embraced a narrow, impoverished conception of privacy, always a protean concept, not as protection from authority and public scrutiny, and as a sanctuary for the inner self and a shelter for intimacy — but merely as data protection.

    Through it all, we blame the convenient scapegoat of the moment: the internet. But this gets the timeline wrong. By the time social media arrived, we were already living in a post-private world. The digital revolution simply gave us more efficient tools to do what we were already doing: performing our identities, seeking validation through revelation, and treating intimacy as a public commodity.

    She concludes,

    All the digital detoxing and platform regulation in the world won’t restore what was lost long before the internet was ever invented. Far better, then, to face up to how we voluntarily dismantled the very idea that some things should remain hidden, that mystery and restraint might be virtues, and that not everything must be shared.

    The business models of technology giants like Google and Facebook clearly violate people’s privacy, as does state surveillance. But we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that technology alone has undermined the moral status of privacy and private life. The cameras that Lance Loud invited into his hospice room were not smartphones or CCTV cameras. They were the logical expression of a cultural revolution that began decades earlier. We invited them in.

    Can we reverse that history, now that we live in a digital world as well as the natural one?

    One might think not. After all, in this new world we have mass surveillance by governments and the adetch fecosystem, in addition to the strange new fact that everyone with a phone can record anything anywhere and share it with everyone else.

    But the digital world is still new—decades old at most—while the natural world has been with us for as long as we’ve been a species. We have also had the privacy tech called clothing and shelter since not long after we started walking upright. For just as long we’ve had ways—both obvious and subtle—to signal our privacy preferences to each other. We don’t have any of that yet in the digital world.

    No reason not to start, despite the enormities of Google, Meta, the adtech fecosystem, and the inadequacies of privacy regulations that are at constant odds with the sad fact that spying on people pays well. It’s still early, folks!

    To get us started, a bunch of us, with help from the IEEE, have come up with a new standard for signaling and securing our privacy online, and framing up business models and incentives that pay better than spying on people. It’s called IEEE P7012, nicknamed MyTerms.

    MyTerms makes “the right to be let alone” a contract and not just a promise. It obsolesces consent by cookie notice and replaces it with a choice of privacy agreements that you proffer as the first party, and the website or service agrees to as the second party. This sets the stage for both parties to trust each other and develop mutually respectful relationships if they wish. Optionality is maximized, from “let alone” at one end to “trusting relationship” at the other.

    MyTerms is due to be published later this month. I believe it is the most important and far-reaching standard of this millennium, and that it will deliver on the promise of full personal agency that the Net and the Web both promised us in the first place.

    We don’t have to start by attacking the big and the bad. As Hugh McLeod put it long ago,

    The rich target instead is the hundreds of millions of websites and services that don’t participate in the adtech fecosystem and would be glad to be among the first pioneers to civilize the Net and the Web—and to wear their choice to agree with people’s privacy requirements as a badge of honor:

    Whole markets will follow as soon as they see MyTerms are good for business. Which will happen, simply because far more business can be built on trusting relationships in free and open markets than on trustless surveillance in captive and closed ones.

    Now that we have the standard, all we need is the tech (some of which is in the works) and to spread the word. I’m doing that now, and so can you. Thanks!

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  • Keeping the Light On

    TV or Not TV

    Trying to watch the Patriots-Chargers game on NBC here. Logged in (we have NBC on Dish in our home system), but I just get the spinning spokes. Tried a different browser and that one is stuck in "Coverage will resume shortly." Trying another browser… That one worked.

    Fun epitaphs

    I WAS ALMOST FINISHED
    STEP TO THE LEFT PLEASE. THANK YOU.
    THAT'S OKAY. I HAVE ANOTHER PLAN.
    I NEVER DUG THIS
    SORRY I'M ON MUTE
    SHOULDN'T YOU BE SOMEWHERE?
    THIS IS EARTH? NOT MARS?
    WAIT FOR IT!

    Until I saw this

    I never cared much about Bohemian Rhapsody

    From the Dept. of Brevity

    I think this short video by NotebookLM does a pretty good job of condensing an hour-long talk I gave at Indiana University about MyTerms. 

    2 B

    Bob Weir is gone. He and Jerry Garcia were (at least to me) the sonic and vocal backbone of the Grateful Dead. He was less than two months younger than me. Jerry was older, but dead at 53. Phil Lesh made it to 84, dying in October 2024. Bill Kreutzmann is still with us at 79. Ron "Pigpen" McKernan croaked at 27. Mickey Hart's still cookin' at 82.

    I didn't see much of The Sopranos, but I remember hearing The Doors' "When the Music's Over" during one of the late episodes. The line in the lyrics following the title one is "Turn out the lights," foreshadowing the ending of the whole show. It's my favorite track on my favorite Doors album. Two of the band members, John Densmore and Robby Krieger, are still with us at 81 and 80, the milestone our President (who shall remain nameless, because algorithms) will hit in June, and I'll hit two Julys later, if I'm still here.

    Which brings me to a fact that might seem a theory: that death is not a state. One does not exist when dead, though to say one is dead suggests that it's a state. When we die, we are gone. Existence for us has ceased, except in the hearts and minds of others, and in whatever works we have left among the living.

    If death is a state, then life is the exception to it. But if life is a state, death is its absence, and no more.

    To say one is no more is also to say life is nothing but more.

    More breathing, more heartbeats, more thoughts, more of what Whitman celebrated.

    Most of Whitman's body was interred in Camden, New Jersey, in a house-like vault. His brain was removed for study and then either spoiled, went splat, or both. Hard to know.

    In closing Song of Myself, Whitman says,

    If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.
    You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.
    But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.
    And filtre and fiber your blood.
    Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged.
    Missing me one place search another
    I stop some where waiting for you.

    He isn't dead, because nobody is. He is just inaccessible in living form. 

    But here he is. Same as Bob and Jerry and Jim and Ray.

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  • Whoosiers!

    Not any more.

    The last thing David Hodskins emailed to me was “Don’t become a Hoosiers fan.”

    It was David who made me a Duke Blue Devils Basketball fan. David was an Iron Duke—an alumnus who contributed to the program and bought season tickets. He made me a fan by bringing me often to fill the other of his two seats in Cameron Indoor Stadium. This was between 1977 and 1984. At the beginning of that stretch, Duke had been in a long slump following the Vic Bubas era and only got good near the end of the Bill Foster years, peaking in ’77-’78, when they had what the late great John Feinstein called Forever’s Team. While that team may have been the best in the country, it lost in the championship game to Kentucky when Goose Givens went nuts and scored a zillion points. 

    But the Duke Dynasty started much later. Mike Krzyzewski replaced Bill Foster in 1980, when Duke was good but not great. The greats of that time were, among others, Louisville, NC State, North Carolina, Georgetown, and—most hated of all—Indiana under Bob (then still Bobby) Knight. It’s easy to forget that Coach K’s early years were kinda blah. His teams didn’t make the final four until ’86, and his first (of five) championships didn’t come until ’91.

    My point here is that I got into Duke basketball when they were far from the much-hated overdog they’ve been for close to four decades. That’s my excuse. Anyway, David Hodskins didn’t want me to become a Hoosiers fan.

    But I’m a Hoosier. Indiana is where I work (as a visiting scholar at IU), and Bloomington is where I live. (Yes, I also live in Santa Barbara, but that only complicates things other than sports.) Bloomington is also where The Greatest Story in College Sports is happening right now, with Indiana Football. 

    One thing making this story the Greatest Ever (yes, perhaps, and we’ll see) is that it’s hard to overstate how lame Indiana Football has been. Not for years, or decades. For generations. For example, until this year (when Northwestern exceeded it), Indiana University held the record for the total number of losses in college football: 715.

    It was at that number at the start of this season. And there it remains, because this year’s team is undefeated, #1 in the country, and about to play for the championship, against the Miami Hurricanes.

    I won’t cite other stats, but will instead repeat what Hoosier lifers told me last night after a bunch of us watched our team drown the Oregon Ducks. (This was after doing the same a week before in the Rose Bowl to the Alabama Crimson Tide. The Hoosiers will probably do the same to Miami in the championship game a week from Monday.)

    “We were the doormat of the Big 10,” they said.

    Whether IU wins the championship or not, it’s hard not to be invested in the story. Because it’s happening now, and there has never been another story like it. The movie is being performed right now by real characters.

    Consider this for a cast: the largest population of alumni in the country: 805,000. No wonder they filled the Rose and Fiesta bowls. Betcha most of the spectators in the stands at the championship game will also be Hoosiers, even though it will be played at the Miami Hurricanes’ home field: Hard Rock Stadium. Indiana’s (yes) perfect quarterback, Fernando Mendoza (who has had more touchdown passes than incompletions in recent games), grew up in the same Miami neighborhood, making the game local all around.

    The inevitable movie about the Hoosiers’ football turnaround won’t be brilliant fiction, like Hoosiers (a truly great sports movie, written by Bloomington native Angelo Pizzo and directed by fellow Hoosier David Anspaugh). It will be a documentary. And I already have a title.

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  • Saturday Quarterbacking

    Just got a pile of these t-shirts for $16.99 each at Sam’s Club.

    Team!

    Teams change. They have to. Players get injured, age out, or stop fitting. Other players come and go for various reasons. The big one lately is salary caps. Oddly, a “good salary” underpays a valuable player. And the draft brings in rookies every year. Some work out, some don’t. Some only work out when they get replanted with another team.

    But there are times when teams are teams, and just work. I think that’s the Knicks right now, even though they’ve lost five of their last six games. One does learn by losing as well as winning. I’m sure that’s happening now.

    What I’m saying there is Don’t make any trades. Keep the team together. If you do, and everyone stays healthy, they’ll win the East, and maybe the championship as well.

    Sports polygamies

    I grew up in a town in New Jersey that is closer to Manhattan than much of Brooklyn and Queens. The city skyline combed the horizon east of my bedroom window. As a kid in the ’50s, my main teams were the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Knicks. When the Dodgers divorced Brooklyn and married Los Angeles—and the Giants did the same when they ran off with San Francisco—I was lost along with millions of other local National League (aka Anyone But the Yankees) fans until we were all adopted by the New York Mets. That happened in ’62, when I was 15. I loved those Mets immediately and still do.

    But I also move around. In 1965, at age 18, I went to college in North Carolina, where I fell in love with college basketball. (My school, Guilford College, was at the top of the NAIA, and won the championship in ’74. Bob Kauffman was the big star during my first three years there.) I also started playing pickup and intramural basketball then, and fell in love with that too. (All I was good at was shooting if nobody defended me. I had no other skills and had the leaping ability of a parking lot. But shooting got me chosen other than last for pick-up games, and if I got the first shot in a game of HORSE, there was a fair chance that I’d win. Now old and arthritic, I shoot about 3% from out there. Or anywhere. (Caution: the best line ever uttered by New Jersey senator Cory Booker was in response to a question about his skills as a high school football player: “The older I get, the better I was.” Same goes for me and pickup basketball.)

    When I went back to New Jersey for a stretch between 1969 and 1974, I fell in love with the New York Knicks. I had liked them before I went to North Carolina, but not the way I liked the Mets. But between the Mets’ World Series win in 1969, the National League Pennant in ’73, and the Knicks’ NBA championships in ’70 and ’73, I was in sports heaven.

    But then I moved back to North Carolina, where I became fully invested in college basketball, which is almost a religion there. The family fave (I have many kin in NC) was, and remains, the Wake Forest Demon Deacons. But I couldn’t help digging all of ACC basketball, especially the North Carolina Tar Heels, because I lived mostly in and around Chapel Hill. Starting in the Fall of ’77, I started going to all the Duke games I talk about in my Whoosiers post, which made me a Duke fan.

    Then, in 1985, I joined David Hodskins in Palo Alto, to set up our business there. College basketball in the Bay Area was small stuff at the time (still is, mostly), so we got season tickets to the Golden State Warriors, to which I stayed a loyal fan until I moved to Santa Barbara in 2001. During that time, I also enjoyed following the San Francisco Giants and 49ers, and the Oakland A’s (though not the Raiders). I never stopped loving the Nets and the Knicks, though I didn’t follow them closely.

    Though the Southern California teams—Dodgers, Lakers,  Angels, Clippers, Chargers—enjoyed some loyalty among locals in Santa Barbara, I had rooted against all of them too much over the years to develop any new loyalties. Though now I’m ready to dig the A’s, because my favorite Met, Jeff McNeil, was just traded there. Though I’ve never met Jeff, his mom is our bookkeeper in Santa Barbara, and I’ve followed his career a bit through her.

    Anyway, in 2007, we moved to Boston, just in time for the Celtics, Red Sox, and Patriots all to have great seasons (the first two won championships in ’08, while the Pats were undefeated in the regular season, but lost in the Super Bowl, inviting the third-best second-best Onion headline of all time*). Our son was 10 years old when we arrived, and he and I got totally involved in the local sports scene. If you told me when I was growing up that I would become a fan of any Boston sports team, I’d have thought you nuts, but that’s what happened: I had an affair with all three teams. Still do, though I continue to love the Mets and the Knicks. (I was never crazy about the New York football Giants and Jets, though I did like them.)

    I think my loyalties are kind of like those of a coach. You love the one you’re with. And when you’re away from all your sports loves (as I am now from New York, North Carolina, California, and New England), you kind of root for all of them in some ways.

    But the blood runs deepest. I’m a son of New York, and will be until I’m gone.

    * The second best was Skip navigation Sony Releases Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work. The best was Anti-Spam Legislation Opposed By Powerful Penis-Enlargement Lobby.

    Look over there

    I just made what I had here into its own post: Whoosiers!

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  • Paths

    We're in the phone book! We're real now!

    MyTerms now has a YouTube channel. The one item there, so far, is a short and remarkably good NotebookLM summary of my hour-long talk, The Case for MyTerms, at Indiana University.

    Also, Gemini failed. I still don't know who she was.

    I think we could have powered two cities with the work Gemini just did, thinking slowly to help me identify the actress that my old pal Drew Youngs sings about in his video (and musical composition) Betty the Bloop. In an unrelated matter, somewhere I have still photos (remember those?) of the work Drew's dad's body shop did fixing the crushed rear end of my new 1985 Toyota Camry after it was crunched by a drunk driver on Alma at Chruchill that same year in Palo Alto. Best car I ever had, by the way. 

    Be in charge

    Phil Windley waxes wise on authorization. Here's why this topic matters: In the future, the companies and organizations you deal with won't do anything without your permission and guidance. (Thank MyTerms for getting that ball rolling.) You will need tools of your own rather than those entities' internal systems, all of which (at least the way business works today) are captivity traps.

    Adrian Gropper, M.D. has been all over this topic (and adjacent ones) for many years. If you care about your health (or anyone's), dig the work happening here in Github. Here's the readme.

    Like I said

    the other day.

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  • How the Past Models the Future

    This is a PageXray of Wired.com:

    Well, not really. I just want to give you a good idea of what PageXray does, which is far more than show you that a typical website stuffs your browser with cookies.

    For example, a PageXray shows all the unseen places to which information about you flows, thanks to the surveillance those cookies enable:

    If you zoom out all the way on that graphic, you’ll get this:

    What you see there is the explosion of paths down which data about you oozes out to almost countless places known and unknown.

    By contrast, here is a PageXray of Craigslist.org:

    I ran that study after reading Is Craigslist the Last Real Place on the Internet? by Jennifer Swann in Wired. It shows Craigslist doing no tracking at all, which totally retro and morally correct.

    Craigslist also doesn’t interrupt your experience with a cookie notice, because it doesn’t play the cookie game. And it’s been that way since Craig Newmark founded the service 31 years ago, on March 1, 1995, at the very dawn of the commercial Web.

    But I’m not here to knock Wired, or Conde Nast, which runs the advertising show for all its publications. What they do is pro forma in what we might call Web 2.99.

    But rather than jump to Web 3.0, how about a reset to version 1? For a sense of that, here’s an excerpt from the Wired piece:

    The site is what Jessa Lingel, an associate professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has called the “ungentrified” internet…

    “It’s not a perfect platform by any means, but it does show that you can make a lot of money through an online endeavor that just treats users like they have some autonomy and grants everybody a degree of privacy,” says Lingel. A longtime Craigslist user, she began researching the site after wondering, “Why do all these web 2.0 companies insist that the only way for them to succeed and make money is off the back of user data? There must be other examples out there.”

    Examples, that is, of retro enterprises that don’t participate in the adtech fecosystem. Take the IEEE, which was born in 1963, long before Web Zero. Here’s the IEEE’s PageXray:

    That’s especially cool, since the IEEE hosts the working group for P7012 – IEEE Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, which I chair. That standard is now done, and will be published later this month. Its nickname is MyTerms (much as the nickname for IEEE 802.11 is WiFi).

    MyTerms’ purpose is to deliver on the promise of full personal agency that we got from TCP/IP (the Internet) and HTTP (the Web), way back in 1.0 days, and lost in Web 2.0, when surveillance mania spread to the far reaches of human tolerance.

    With MyTerms, privacy is a contract between you and the sites and services of the world. You’re the first party, and they’re the second party. You proffer one of a short roster of possible agreements listed publicly by a disinterested nonprofit. Both sides keep identical records of agreement. Here’s a diagram that unpacks it:

    This treats both parties as independent equals, while establishing solid grounds for trusting each other and doing business going forward. That’s it. Some possible initial agreements are described here at MyTerms.info.

    I’ve written a lot about MyTerms, most recently in Toward a Proof of Concept for MyTerms, which I posted yesterday, and have been revising since, as feedback comes in.

    The purpose of this post is to challenge Craigslist, the IEEE, and other website and service operators whose hearts never left Web 1.0 to help us put MyTerms to work. (I just checked and see that DuckDuckGo and Mozilla also pass the PageXray test. So this is a challenge to them too.)

    We don’t need much to get started: a browser plugin, a web server plugin, methods for recording identical agreement records on both sides, and other items listed in the last link.

    For sites online where the terms people choose to proffer will be listed, we already have Customer Commons in the U.S. and MyTerms.info in Europe. The model for both is Creative Commons. Put simply, MyTerms will do for personal privacy what Creative Commons does for artistic licenses. We thank them for paving the way.

    I also thank Dr. Augustine Fou of Fou Analytics for making PageXray such a helpful and revealing tool.

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  • Thrustday

    The human kind

    Fourteen years ago, agency had lost its original meaning, and was mostly applied to forms of business (real estate, advertising) and government bureaus (farm service, emergency management). That's why I devoted a chapter of The Intention Economy to what agency meant in the first place. Wrote about it again last year in Real Agency. Now the word is even hotter shit than it was then. The latest: Humanizing AI. Look at how many of its pieces here are about the first and best forms of real agency.

    Overheard

    "When somebody you're talking to about something important interrupts the flow by saying 'I just bronzed my dogs,' what can you say to get things back on track?"

    A model for the future

    What I first posted here is now a longer standalone post here.

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  • Toward a Proof of Concept for MyTerms

    I’m thinking out loud here about how to get development rolling for MyTerms. Right now I see three pieces required for a proof of concept:

    1. Browser plugin
    2. Web (content management system, or CMS) server plugin
    3. Data storage and retrieval

    When we first thought about this at ProjectVRM in the late ’00s, we saw a browser header that looked like this:

    The ⊂ and the ⊃ are for the personal and website sides of potential or actual MyTerms agreements. Popdown menus next to both could detail choices or states. The upper example might show that no agreement yet exists between the person and KQED. The lower one shows that there is agreement, and might further show (in drop-down menus next to both symbols) if there is an additional state of relationship. So these two symbols and the menus under them might constitute or point to VRM + CRM dashboard.

    Browser and web server plugins are easy to imagine and develop. Today there are:

    • ~112,000 extensions for Chrome (see here and here)
    • ~74,000 add-ons for Firefox (see here)
    • Doubtless thousands for Safari (all come through the Apple Store, which is not a useful source for that one)
    • ~60,000 WordPress and 5400 Code Canyon plugins (see here, here, and here)
    • ~50,000 Drupal modules, including ~8,000–10,000 Drupal 10/11 compatible modules

    Data storage and retrieval are harder. Here is what I have thus far. Please help me (or anyone) improve on it or replace it.

    First, adtech “consent strings” described in IAB Europe’s Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF). These seem optimized to capture preferences, store them locally and broadcast them to vendors. They create a “TC String” and record storage/access details, but they are not designed as a mutually signed/identical contract record between the individual and the site, which MyTerms requires. They do, however, provide compact and interoperable encoding and widespread use of tooling. So they at least point in the right direction.

    Second, consent receipt / consent record standards:

    • Kantara Consent Receipt frames a “receipt” as a record given to the individual, in standard JSON.
    • ISO/IEC TS 27560:2023 describes an interoperable information structure for consent records/receipts. This includes support for exchange between systems and giving the individual a record.
    • W3C DPV (Data Privacy Vocabulary) is cited in MyTerms (IEEE P7012) and is good for indicating privacy preferences and maintaining records. It also has guidance for implementing ISO 27560 using the DPV.

    What we have in the world so far, however, is framed around consent to processing, not reciprocal agreement to contractual terms. We still need bitwise-identical records on both sides. That’s what MyTerms requires.

    Third, we might want to create a model that looks like receipt + contersigned agreement artifact + lightweight state token.

    For that combination, we might define a canonical MyTerms Agreement Record, or MAR. Note that this is something I just made up. So, rather than taking it with a grain (or a larger measure) of salt, help us by replacing or improving that label, and anything I’m saying here.

    Some possible fields:

    • Agreement ID (UUID, for Universal Unique IDentifier)
    • Parties (site identity + individual agent identity/pseudonymous key) Important: MyTerms should not be dependent on a universal identity system. All that matters is that both parties have a record of agreement with each other. That means all they need to know is how to remember each other. That’s it.
    • Terms pointer(s): roster ID + exact version/hash (so “same terms” is provable)
    • Context: site origin, date/time, version of a given term agreed to
    • Decision: accept / refuse / counter-offer choice (Note that the MyTerms standard is not about negotiation. It’s about choice, and that one is provided by the individual as the first party. At the person’s discretion, they can provide the second party—a site or service—with a first and second choice of agreement, but no more than that.
    • Signatures: individual agent and site/agent countersigned signatures.

    I think the MAR (or whatever we call it) might be canonical JSON (or CBOR) so both sides can compute the same bytes, then sign the same digest, which I think will make identical records concrete. But I am sure there are other ways.

    We can borrow structuring ideas from ISO 27560 / Kantara receipts (timestamps, identifiers, machine readability) while changing semantics from “consent to processing” to “contractual privacy terms” (which still address processing, which is what the GDPR cares most about).

    Then, rather than store the MAR in a cookie, store a state token for performance/processing and UX. These can be “myterms_agreement_id,” or “myterms_agreement_hash,” or maybe a status flag, so the browser and the site server can quickly recall state, leaving an authoritative record in each side’s database and turning the likes of ⊂ and ⊃ into meaningful UI elements.

    The MAR also needs to record refusals. These might be something like “decision=refuse” or “counter-offer-rejected.” (Note that ignoring a MyTerms signal is a refusal.)

    We should also have additional annotations (e.g. reasons for refusal, if the counterparty gives any), and perhaps some kind of signature from the site certifying the refusal.

    On the WordPress side, plugins can store MARs in a custom table with records indexed by “agreement_id,” origin, the other party’s pseudonymous key, “terms_hash,” timestamps”… plus “active agreements,” “export/audit trail,” refusals, and other variables, including endpoints for choosing and retrieving the agreement by ID for audits and disputes.

    As for where records live, at least on the individual’s side, digital wallets make sense. There are many approaches to wallets today, including the Solid Project‘s pods. (More here.)

    As for who productizes any of this, we have—

    • Browsers (either as a built-in feature or with a plugin)
    • Password managers (which already store structured secrets + metadata, and use both browser extensions and standalone apps)
    • “Identity / verifiable credential wallet” vendors (with which “countersigned agreement receipts,” which are forms of credentials)
    • Personal data store projects (e.g. Solid pods)
    • Browser, Web/CMP server, and plugin/extension/module makers

    A thought: If we want compliance auditing to have teeth without a regulator in the loop, how about an “append-only transparency log” that is conceptually similar to certificate transparency. So “I agreed / you agreed disputes become easy, and refusal logs can be corroborated without revealing private details, how about—

    • Both sides submit the agreement hash (not the full agreement) to a public/neutral log. (Possibly a blockchain. I add that to attract developers who are fond of those.)
    • The log returns a proof.

    I am sure experts in ODR (online dispute resolution), a well-developed field, will want to weigh in here.

    That’s all I have for now. I’ll add more (and perhaps subtract some as well) as folks respond to what I have so far. Thanks.

    Bonus links:

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  • Mittwoch

    Overheard

    Copilot is the new Clippy.

    Another one bites the sky

    In NiemanLab, Joshua Benton asks, Will Pittsburgh become America’s most important city without a newspaper? Sure, if you're just counting the size of the city. But the paper itself was kind of a mess anyway, at least as Joshua tells it. I'm guessing that ways will be found to take up the slack. Journalists and philanthropists tend to do that. Businessfolk, less so. There is money to be made, just not much of it. My big question is what happens to the archives. I write about that, and much more, here.

    Just (not) saying

    I don't write on Substack, but I share an account: Reality2cast. It's for a podcast I do with Katherine Druckman, who produces it. The podcast has been idle for a while, and I haven't written on the newsletter side of the site since this in 2023. Still, I get an email whenever somebody new follows me/us there, which feels weird because I'm not saying anything there.

    Is there a way to robo-write back to those people and tell them I'm here, or on one of my other two WordPress sites?

    Why German keyboards wear out faster

    I need to keep coming up with new titles for blog posts that might end up being on any number of subjects. Mittwoch jumped into my head because it's German for Wednesday. I took two years of German in high school, one of them twice, and gave them all back when I was done. But some stains remain, so I at least know the days of the week, auf Deutsch. 

    Mittwoch, being German, makes more sense than Wednesday, because Mitte  means middle or center, and Woche means week. On the other hand, says Wikipedia, Wednesday "is derived from Old English Wōdnesdæg and Middle English Wednesdei, 'day of Woden', reflecting the religion practised by the Anglo-Saxons, the English equivalent to the Norse god Odin. In many Romance languages, such as the French mercredi, Spanish miércoles or Italian mercoledì, the day's name is a calque of Latin dies Mercurii 'day of Mercury'." 

    Before I started writing this post, I had assumed that Mittwoch was probably what the Saxons brought to the Anglo-Saxon language that became English, but deeper digging reveals that the Anglo-Saxons called the fourth day of the week Wōdnesdæg. And Mittwoch is a modern German thing. So::::

    • Old English: Wōdnesdæg (Woden’s Day)

    • Middle English: Wednesdei

    • Modern English: Wednesday

    And old gods still live in modern English. Besides Woden (aka Odin), we have Thor (Thunresdæg), and Frigg (Frigedæg).

    German also inconveniences its writers by capitalizing all nouns. So Web and Internet are both still correctly honored, being names, as proper nouns. But the damn shift key gets a workout, since there is no shortage of nouns. German also inconveniently features gendered articles, and not the usual two, such as we have in Spanish and French.  Or the one (the, an) we have in English. German features three definite articles: die (feminine), der (masculine) and das (neuter). From Mark Twain's The Awful German Language:

    …a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female–tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and NOT according to the sex of the individual who wears it–for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.

    I suppose that's one more reason why I remember so little German. And why, of course, I expect (and welcome) correction of any or all the above.

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  • O’Hare can you see?

    Just one short section of the jetway at O’Hare’s gate C6

    Always buy in the past

    In 1991, my bride bought us both lifetime memberships in United Airlines’ airport lounge, then called the Red Carpet Club. I forget the price, but it was cheap, considering. I’m guessing it was less than what one would pay now for just a year’s worth of club membership. Naturally (and perhaps wisely), United discontinued the offer. Now here I am, thirty-five years later, sitting in what’s now a United Club in Concourse C at O’Hare in Chicago. Indianapolis is next. An irrelevant report: it’s just as rainy here as it was when I left LAX. My connection to Indianapolis is also via gate C6, an outdoor corridor that looks like an endless Severence hallway.

    True

    Jim Sterne: Why AI Agents Behave Like Your 3 Worst Employees.

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  • On Customer Captivity

    Think about all the things that give you global scale online:

    • The Internet
    • The Web
    • Email
    • RSS
    • Cash
    • Credit

    Now think about what traps you:

    • Every loyalty, membership, and rewards program
    • Every subscription
    • Every account with a login and a password
    • Every system with its own private ways to manage you, control you, keep you locked in

    And now think about how much business the latter system prevents rather than enables. Such as having your own VRM tools for working with all the world’s CRM systems. Among other graces, VRM+CRM would give both customers and companies common ways to exchange useful information about product usage, new or changed service offerings, and other forms of useful intelligence that are now isolated and different for every company with systems built to hold customers captive.

    I think these systems needs a label, because we need to position them. Make them characters in stories about business.

    Here are a few I’ve come up with:

    • Captivity commerce
    • Capture commerce
    • Custody commerce
    • Coercive commerce
    • Roach motel retail
    • Hotel California commerce

    I could go on, but I like the first one best, which is why I’ve boldfaced it. If you think of a better one, let me have it. Because it’ll be a chapter title of the next edition of The Intention Economy. And it’ll be one of the norms that fall when MyTerms succeeds by making customers partners rather than captives—and fully loaded Cluetrains run from customers to companies.

    What do we call the opposite of captivity commerce? The Intention Economy is one choice, which I provided in that book sixteen years ago. But now there might be others. Lemme have ’em.

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  • Rethinkings Out Loud

    The melting edge of the ice cap on the world’s largest island.

    Anchors Away

    Nothing is more North Atlantic than Greenland. If the US siezes it, NATO will transform from an alliance to a war zone, where allies become combatants. Does anyone outside Trump’s amen corner want that?

    But what if the US buys Greenland from Denmark, like it bought the Louisiana Territory from France and Alaska from Russia? Or what if the US donates more money to its citizens, enterprises, and territorial government than they get now from Denmark? Those would be more sensible (if one wants to possess Greenland) than a military takeover. Of course, that’s no longer the way things swing in the US government, so those are probably off the table.

    By the way, if any country other than Denmark should want or deserve to annex Greenland, none make more sense than Canada, where natives are biologically, culturally, and linguistically kin to natives in Greenland. (Note that Stephen Downes, below, says that Canada is not interested.)

    [Update from Reuters on 9 January 2026: Exclusive: Trump administration mulls payments to sway Greenlanders to join US. Told ya.]

    The best car you probably won’t buy

    Holy shit: the Xiaomi electric car. Watch the whole thing.

    Just one more bit of logic

    United just kindly upgraded me to First for my flight tonight from LAX to ORD, but to an aisle seat. I’d like a preference setting that says Don’t upgrade me if it means losing my booked window seat. Here is why. I’m betting I can trade my aisle for somebody’s window, but I still like the idea of the setting.

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  • On the Scariest Roller Coaster Ever Built

    The original Cyclone roller coaster at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, built in 1927. The photo is by my father, Allen H. Searls, who helped build it and turned nineteen that year.

    I just discovered that the original Cyclone roller coaster at Palisades Amusement Park has its own Wikipedia article, and that the two photos in it are ones I posted on Flickr in 2008 with a permissive license that encouraged re-use. Above is the first. Here is the second:

    George W. Searls, at the bottom of the shot, is my grandfather. He was, as the story goes, a (or the) foreman of the crew that built the Cyclone. One of the workers was his son, my father, Allen H. Searls. Grandpa would have been 67 when this was shot in 1927, as the coaster was being completed. Allen would have been turning 19.

    George’s name on the photo is in Grandma’s handwriting. The photographer might have been Grandma, Allen, older sister Ethel or younger sister Grace. I seem to recall hearing that Ethel shot it. If so, it is possible that one of the two guys at the top of the coaster was Allen.

    There is a family story that sister Ethel talked Allen into swapping his ass for some sandbags when they were testing the coaster. That must have been fun. Wikipedia:

    Construction of the Cyclone ran into difficulty when dealing with the uneven, rocky terrain and limited space[4…quite near the cliff edge of the Palisades.[5]…As with the other Giant Cyclone Safety Coasters, the first Cyclone at Palisades was notorious for a rough ride. Although no fatal incidents were reported, park operators reported occasional broken ribs and collarbones.[6] It is thought that this coaster may have been the roughest of the “Terrifying Triplets”.[2] The steel structure of the coaster on the unforgiving Palisades terrain and the design adjustments needed to accommodate it are thought to be partially responsible.[5][4] The spiral element common on Giant Cyclone Safety Coasters was the tightest on the coaster,[2] as were the turns.[5] The ride incorporated the rapidly undulating “Jazz Track” common amongst steel-framed, Traver-designed coasters.[2]

    About the Terrifying Triplets:

    The Terrifying Triplets was a nickname given to three roller coasters which were opened or built by Traver in 1927.[1] The Crystal Beach Cyclone was the first to open, followed by the Revere Beach Lightning and then the Palisades Cyclone.[3] Each coaster had the characteristic steel-frame structure with wood-laminated steel track typical of Traver-designed coasters. The rides were relatively short in duration but notable for their lack of straight track.

    The Triplets were in a family called the Giant Cyclone Safety Coasters. They were, um, innovative:

    The geometry of Giant Cyclone Safety Coasters was extreme compared to their contemporaries, featuring very tight turns, spirals, and figure eights.[3] These elements drew inspiration from the swoops and spirals of earlier Prior and Church roller coasters like The Bobs. Curves on Giant Cyclone Safety Coasters were often banked to much steeper angles, with some approaching 85 degrees.[7] Beyond the many curves, another element common to the steel-framed Traver coasters were undulating “jazz tracks”, meaning that Traver’s Cyclones had almost no straight track in their entire course.[3]

    I’ve also read somewhere that, while the Terrifying Triplets had an identical design, the Palisades version had to fit the same height onto a smaller footprint, requiring steeper drops and more highly banked turns, making it the most terrifying of the three. It also had the shortest lifespan, and was demolished in 1934.

    For what it’s worth, Pop didn’t report any problem with that first ride. But then, he was kind of a thrill seeker, following his employment on the Cyclone with rigging cables at altitude for the George Washington Bridge. Later he built trestles for the Alaska Railroad (where he met my mother), and re-enlisted in the Army at age 35 to fight in WWII. Ballsy dude.

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  • Discoveries

    Overheard

    "This TV isn't just HD. It's ADHD."

    "What does the AD stand for?"

    "Advanced Digital, I think."

    How about Water Stain?

    I still hate Liquid Glass. As a design language it mumbles. I'm especially turned off by semi-transparent type that makes stuff such as the time on my phone semi-readable. Let's give it a better name.

    Bad space

    Loading low earth orbits (LOEs) with Starlink and other satellites makes a Kessler event look more and more inevitable. vua phys.org

    Also, Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson are great singers

    Went to a movie theater last night and watched Song Sung Blue with about ten other people. All of us clapped when it ended. It was that good. Playing Neil Diamond was mostly a no-no on the rock radio stations I worked with in the 70s and 80s. This movie is a moving correction for that omission. Neil and his music were both damn good.

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  • Fry Day

    Not good

    The forecast for New Year's Day in Pasadena is rain. We will be there with lots of friends for the Rose Parade and Bowl (where our team, the #1 Indiana Hoosiers, is playing Alabama). 

    Time fries when you're faving hum.

    Just a pause in the midst to say a year is too short for good retrospectives and forecasts. So I avoid all of them, as I have since 1947.

    The other big thing that happened in 1492

    The Second Coming of Double-Entry Bookkeeping is getting action more than nine years after it went up. One highlighted passage: "Networked markets connect two ways: between businesses and people, and between the functional parts of companies. These connections have long been facilitated through double-entry bookkeeping, the deep virtues of which have mostly been ignored or forgotten in our digital age. If we recall what double-entry bookkeeping did, and can do again, we may have another useful path toward The Intention Economy."

    How about Linklessin?

    I've never liked LinkedIn, but I grudgingly participate because, well, ya gotta. So I'll hold my kvetching to a single gripe: LinkedIn's aversion to linking. Since they won't change that practice, how about changing their name? To what?

    I still won't play

    Despite living in the Midwest, I hadn't heard of pull tabs until today. (Alas, paywall.)

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  • Everwhen

    Same cancer, different tumor

    Show of hands: Who wants surveillance pricing?

    Sez Wikipedia, at that link, “Surveillance pricing is a form of dynamic pricing where a consumer’s personal data and behavior is used to determine their willingness to pay.[1] This form of price discrimination assesses price sensitivity for a products or services based on an individual’s characteristics and behaviors including location, demographics, browsing patterns, shopping history, and inferred data emotional or financial states.[2][3]

    Don Marti does a deep dive today on the topic, with lots of links to news and sources, including what I started writing here earlier today and finished over at the ProjectVRM blog.

    By the way, open your calendars and mark down “The Effects of Surveillance Pricing and How to Stop It,” a talk in our salon series here at Indiana University. Thursday, 19 February. The speaker will be the brilliant Abbey Stemler, who has done much research on the topic.

    Except for those of us who have always been that way

    Ted Gioia on why we need to get weird again.

    Humans 1, Robot 0

    The Wall Street Journal fuzzed the non-brain of a trial vending machine operator.

    Dreck Marketing

    In The Death of Merchandising in an Online World, Dana Blankenhorn correctly observes that brand value is declining as merchandising shifts from stores to online services, and influencers themselves become stores.

    I think there’s also something else: the shift from real advertising to the online equivalent of junk mail, which is what you see with nearly every ad you encounter on your browsers and apps.

    I say more where I just moved most of this sub-post: to When Branding Means Relating, over at ProjectVRM. Go there to read the rest.

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  • Our Chive

    Lake Manicougan, which I shot while vectored from London to Chicago in September 2009. It’s a circular lake filling the inside walls of a crater formed by a meteor 214 million years ago.

    You start with a crater

    That’s how you make a town like this. Or, if you’re Canada, a reservoir.

    And exactly which one were you looking for?

    Anna’s Blog says Anna’s Archive has backed up Spotify’s entire music library: “This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.”

    So It Begins

    The Winter Solstice happened this morning at 7:03 AM Pacific Time (where I happen to be for the holidays). That was about exactly when the Sun came up here. But we were in fog. That’s a July thing in Santa Barbara, and out of character for December, when it would rather be clear or rain. Christmas, they say, will be very wet.

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