The lost center

Listening to SCAN on the radio this last week, especially on the AM band—and then watching and listening to much of the Impeachment trial on TV and radio—it became clear to me that the Republican and Democratic parties are like divorced parents fighting over children who are also taking sides. Typically of people who don't get along, they make broad and demeaning assumptions about each other, full of characterization and dismissiveness. Whether they are right or wrong about each other are beside this simple point: they are locked in a conflict that will only be resolved, unhappily, when one or the other wins.

The Republicans will win this round. I think they'll win in November as well, with Trump crowing all the way about putting down "the coup."  But they'll lose in the longer run, because the demographics and the economy won't keep working for them, and Trump's celebrity will wear out. Some Democrat will be elected president in 2024, with a tide of other Democrats winning both houses of Congress. But it won't be pretty in the meantime. Trump will pack the Supreme Court while remaining a dishonest egomaniac whose corrupt history will catch up with him one way or another—while the Democratic party will split between young and old, socialist and traditionalist. Its center will not hold.

The center in the country as a whole is already gone, lost in the divorce. (I did a TEDx talk about that center, here.) I suspect the new center in Democratic politics will be a socialist one, because the giant problems—global warming, pandemics, economic disasters, rotten infrastructure—will be ones government will seem to be in the best position to solve.

I'm not saying any of what I just said is true, by the way. It's just what I'm thinking on a Saturday evening in February 2020.

Big Online Tab Closing Sale

Onion online advertising timeline. As tragically funny as every other Onion piece.

The Correspondent: The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising. I started writing about this in 2008, in a blog post titled Why online advertising sucks, and is a bubble. It was first on a list that is now 128 posts, articles, podcasts and essays long. (And it's far from complete.) If anyone wants to help me make that into a book, let me know. it should be.

About personal scale. Spread that word.

Sogeti: Utopia for Executives. An excellent report, and not just because it sources me. Here's how the Table of contents (as best I can copy/paste it),

• Welcome to the post-technology era p.3
• Vision I. The new golden age: A short history of the future p.8
• Carlota Perez - Beyond the technological revolution p.9
• Vision II. Power shift: Living in a self sovereign heaven p.13
• Doc Searls - Turning the system around p.14 (it continues to p. 18)

Lesbians Who Tech want speakers.

Bob Metcalfe on the first Ethernet LAN.

https://www.apple.com/privacy/ keeps changing. Not saying that's in a bad way. Or a good one. Just observing.

EFF Report Exposes, Explains Big Tech’s Personal Data Trackers Lurking on Social Media, Websites, and Apps: User Privacy Under Relentless Attack by Trackers Following Every Click and Purchase.

The Customer: Data Transparency and Ethical Data Harvesting aren’t just Buzzwords: CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) is a comprehensive legislative package that many experts are saying will become standard baseline rules for consumer data practices here in the U.S. – soon. Very soon.

Ray Dalio: The World Has Gone Mad and the System is Broken.

Parliament.uk: Right to privacy “may exist on paper” – but not in online “Wild West”, says JCHR

From The New York Times' 13 November Sunday Times magazine:

• So the internet didn’t turn out the way we hoped. Where do we go from here?
• The Internet Dream Became a Nightmare. What Will Become of It Now?
• Online Cesspool Got You Down? You Can Clean It Up, for a Price
• China’s Internet Is Flowering. And It Might Be Our Future.
• Finding Truth Online Is Hard Enough. Censors Make It a Labyrinth.
• We’re Stuck With the Tech Giants. But They’re Stuck With Each Other.
• Even Nobodies Have Fans Now. (For Better or Worse.) 
• What Do Teens Learn Online Today? That Identity Is a Work in Progress.

The Times on the next day (14 Nov): Cities Worldwide Are Reimagining Their Relationship With Cars

The Conversation: Emperor Penguins could march to extinction if nations fail to halt climate change

Mozilla's State of the Internet wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/State_Of_The_Internet . I just tried writing to the email address there, but it bounced. Not sure what's up with that.

Three Reason essays. (If you're going to read Right, Reason is the best. As you see here, they agree that climate change is real.)

• Climate change: How Lucky Do You Feel?
• Clean Free Market Policy Beats a Carbon Tax. Here's Why.
• The Climate Debate Should Focus on How to Address the Threat of Climate Change, Not Whether Such a Threat Exists

Where does facial recognition go?

FightForTheFuture has put up BanFacialRecognition, a site where you can join a long list of people and companies endorsing this statement:

Facial recognition surveillance is biased, invasive, and it violates my basic rights. I urge you to pass legislation that bans the government from using this dangerous technology to spy on the American public. Thank you.

Nice and simple. Also incomplete, because it leaves the private sector at liberty to do all the facial recognition it wants.

If you're going to ban facial recognition, why not ban it completely?

Simply put, because it won't work, at least not across the board. Facial recognition will still be developed and used by countless companies in many countries, some of which see it as a huge advantage.

Even if the UN bans facial recognition, countries such as China (which loves it) are still going to do it, and encourage its private sector to do the same. Both those sectors are massive.

So this isn't a situation where the cat is out of the bag, but where there are countless cats, all are robots, all of them can know faces, and some can carry guns while obeying orders from whomever or whatever controls them.

For more on that scenario, see the IEEE's Slaughterbots* debate:

• Why you shouldn't fear slaughterbots
• Why you should fear slaughterbots

It's an 8-minute movie that's too scary to watch. Also fully imaginable, which is why it exists.

It should help to remember the first rule of technology: What can be done will be done—until people realize what shouldn't be done. Example one: nuclear power.

With some technologies it's hard to imagine all the things that can, can't, should, and shouldn't be done. This one's easy.

So, since slaughterbots go in the lower left box, what can be done to prevent them now? Is it a petition such as this one? Something else? What?

Bonus link: About face.

A positioning fail

One of the also-ran browser makers (not on the list to the right here) sent me a survey explaining how they are "introducing new paid subscriptions and would love to know what kind of protection" I would value. It has three plans, at $0, $5 and $14 per month, to "suit your privacy needs." Below that is a grid of ten kinds or levels of protection, each unexplained. Typically, they are called "Basic," "Plus" and "Premium." They also gave me a place to expand on the choice it wasn't clear that I made. Here's what I wrote, with some personal stuff subtracted:

Too complicated. Also too typical. Let me explain.

First, I'm fairly technical and a very involved in all this stuff*, and I'm not sure exactly what "Browser Protection" or "Priority Support" (among other listed things) are, and doubt that I (or anybody other than lawyers) will read the details if the description (which should be linked to under the headings in the left column) is longer than a simple paragraph.

Second, there are already too many variables for most people within and between all their browser choices. That's both within and between those browsers and their many possible add-ons and other connections (such as to VPNs and password managers). What's needed is a simple and global approach to privacy that comes *before* the browser, in some kind of master control the user operates for herself. See https://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/2015/02/15/a-master-app-to-give-customers-scale/ , http://customercommons.org/2016/03/15/customers-need-scale-of-their-own/ , https://medium.com/@dsearls/customertech-will-turn-the-online-marketplace-into-a-marvel-like-universe-in-which-all-of-us-are-ea6adcfc94f1 and other pieces. You could rocket ahead of all your competitors if you start there rather than inside the highly competitive and mature browser field, where you're is a distant ... what, fifth? sixth? Instead, be the *first* in a category that gives users leverage they should have had in 1995. It's open territory.

*Look me up: https://www.google.com/search?q=doc+searls . Also http://searls.com. And if you want to talk, write me at doc at searls dot com. Glad to help.

Cheers,

Doc

I'll let you know how it goes.

Meanwhile, here's what the headline means.

The Universe is still just a startup

Earth is 4.54 billion years old. It was born 9.247 years after the Big Bang, which happened 13.787 billion years ago. Meaning that our planet is a third the age of the Universe.

Hydrogen, helium and other light elements formed with the Big Bang, but the heavy elements were cooked up at various times in an 8 billion year span before our solar system was formed, and some, perhaps, are still cooking.

Earth's own time as a life-supporting planet is maybe 3 billion years. Nobody really knows how long, but scientists do know that in a billion years or less the Sun will be too large and hot to allow the persistence of photosynthesis, and that eventually the Sun will morph into a red giant and cook Earth in the process. 

Some additional perspective: the primary rock formation on which most of Manhattan's ranking skyscrapers repose—Manhattan Schist—is itself about a half billion years old. In The Bronx there are rocks 1.5 billion years old.

In another 4.5 billion years (long before the Sun exhausts all of its fuel), our galaxy, the Milky Way, will merge with Andromeda, which is currently 2.5 million light years distant but headed our way on a collision course. The two will begin merging (not colliding, because nearly all stars are too far apart for that) around 4 billion years from now, and will complete into a combined galaxy about 7 billion years from now. Both galaxies have been around for most of the Universe's history.

Here's a simulation of that future. Bear in mind when watching it that it covers the next 8 billion years.

I'm sharing all this less in support of a theory than in support of a perspective: that the Universe is still getting started, and that maybe... just maybe... the forms of life we know on Earth are just early prototypes of what's to come in the fullness of time, space and evolving existence.

What forms of radio will keep floating as legacy terrestrial radio sinks?

In response to posted news (shared on Facebook's I Love AM Radio group) that KIDD-AM 630 and KNRY-AM, both in Monterey, CA, were donated by radio legend Saul Levine to a religious broadcasting group, I said,

When AM radio finally dies (not a knock: all things do), its last living cells will be religious broadcasters (also not a knock: just an observation).

To which another person there replied,

Doc, there will be more than just religious broadcasters. Here in SoCal there's Spanish (a lot), Chinese (on a 77kw Mexican signal), Sports (3 from L.A., 1 in San Diego now), a couple of music stations (one is playing "Adult Hits" out of Texas on a 50k signal) - There's Middle Eastern radio, and more. The trouble here is in the numbers. Can you imagine how it would be if there were 10+ stations playing the same music? That's kinda like how it is here. What we used to call "broadcasting" on AM is turning into "narrowcasting" - driving more and more people away. There are at least 15 ethnic stations, 2 News-Talkers and one all news station covering more than 15 million people. Not a knock either. It's reality..a sad reality!

And to that I replied,

Here in Santa Barbara, with a salt water path bringing coastal AMs (all the way to Rosarita, NL) in like locals (and tropo doing the same for FMs much of the time), it's clear that both bands, in different ways, are turning into narrowcasts: religion, ethnic groups, sports, partisan political talk. The list goes on. The one conditional exception is public radio, which tries hard to hold a political center it can't have because, except for the local stuff, it's based in Washington, where policy, governance and academic specialties are the lenses through which everything in the world appears.

I think the reason SiriusXM succeeds is that it offers a much wider range of channels programming on its "dial" than anything anywhere in terrestrial radio. It also has the good fortune to have stayed alive and thriving in an economy that is moving economically from a free basis to a subscription one.

What SiriusXM can't (or doesn't) offer yet is what will keep terrestrial radio alive: exactly what you're talking about—ethnic,sports and other forms of narrowcasting.

The big challenge for all of it will be getting future devices to hunt from one "band" to another: over-the-air, satellite and streaming over the Internet. This is do-able, but in the long run only if the whole combined system is digital.

This is why I have some hope for full-digital AM radio. The open question is whether the gear-makers (especially for cars) will be willing to do the work. I suspect they won't, especially if the transmission and reception ends require costly proprietary encoding and decoding, and just one source of parts. This, more than anything else, is what's killing HD Radio. (Forget the actual engineering details. What matters is that HD Radio is a market captive to Ibiquity. Unless I have that wrong. And tell me if I do.)

Just thought I'd share that. If the thread grows, I'll add to it here.

World Wide Whiteboard

Back in the '00s, I said blogging was "like sending email that's 'cc:world'." That was kind of the way my old blog (1999-2007) worked.  The subject was the headline and each post was as short or long as I liked—as an email also might be. And, like an email, it was personal. I was speaking for myself.

These days I write on four blogs:  my personal one, ProjectVRM, Customer Commons, and here. Of those four, only this one is fully* personal, and only this one runs on a writing platform like my old blog had. (No surprise there, because both platforms were creations of our blogfather, Dave Winer.) Sometimes I also cross-post to Medium, which is now less leveraged than it used to be. (I can explain later, but it's beside the point of this post.) And I tweet. 

*A bit of explanation: my personal blog is a Harvard one, and so is ProjectVRM's. Customer Commons' is also not mine. And I'm mindful of those institutions when I write there. Here the institution is me.

Bigger than all four of those blogs is Linux Journal, where I wrote a great deal, including what amounted to blog posts on its website, for 25 years. That ended when Linux Journal ceased business in August. Also, as of today the entire site, with all its archives, is offline, erasing a third to a half of what I've written online so far.

While I'm hoping that the owner will bring the site back up again (they did promise to keep it up), the prospect of losing the whole thing has shaken my belief that the Web itself will ever be a true place for archiving anything. Instead it's a whiteboard.† And writing on a whiteboard is not a prospect that energizes me. Quite the opposite, in fact. Especially when so much of my online work is gone. (Again, at least for now.)

Here's another depressing thing: Google and Bing searches are now biased for traffic rather than links. I know this for two reasons. One is that I planted keyword easter eggs in some old and well-linked-to blog posts, which both search engines used to find; and now they bring up goose eggs: nada. (I'd tell you the keyword, but that would blow the test.) The other is that links to this blog don't cause it to show up in search engines, but visits to this blog do cause it to show up—at least for me—presumably because Google and Bing watched one person come here, and customized the search result just for that person (moi).

Or so it seems. I really don't know.

Are there studies on any of this... about how the Web is a whiteboard, or how search engines are becoming biassed for observed visits rather than for inbound links?

I suppose studies like that would be hard or impossible, given the operational opacity of search engines, their tendency to change constantly, and the ways they are rigged to personalize results.

So I'm in something of a liminal state right now, wondering where to invest my ceaseless writing energies. At the moment the Web is looking less appealing than ever. My mind might change, especially if we succeed in getting Linux Journal back up. But that's where I am right now.

†I first wrote about this in Linux Journal back in 2003, noting a split between the "static" Web that was like a library (with its "locations," "sites," and "domains" you could "visit" and "browse"), and the "live" web of blogs and posts. I also wrote about it at greater length in 2005, when we had the first hints toward what became social media. Here's a link to it I just found on Google. It currently goes nowhere. And, if the Linux Journal site doesn't come back up, Google's search engine will forget it, and the live Web's whiteboard will be wiped clean.

Good morning

So I'm up early in Santa Barbara, where I'm alone for the week. Usually my bladder wakes me up around 4am. After doing my business in near-dark (so bright light won't start my day), I go back to bed.  Half the time I fall back to sleep. 

This time was different, because a sound in the house woke me up. I doubted it was human, or even animal. Most likely mechanical. But... what?

So I sat still for 20 minutes, listening through the nothing of house sounds... a ticking clock on the kitchen counter... the hot water recirculating pump in the basement... relying on hearing that is not what it used to be but also not what it will be when I finally need hearing aids. (I've been tested: I don't yet.) And I heard: nothing. So I went back to bed, where the loudest sound was my heart. And didn't sleep.

Then came the sound of a weight shifting somewhere. Something slid, maybe, and a floorboard creaked. So I walked around, hearing nothing new, and finally stood still in the kitchen for a minute or two. And there it was again. The follicles in my scalp tried to stand their lost or doomed hairs on end, and my body froze in place

I listened for another few minutes, stone still, hyper-alert. Nothing. 

Then I said fuck it to the whole worry, turned the lights on, started the espresso machine (which makes heating noises), and went up to my office, yawning my way into the day.

Postscript: this happened two days in a row, and on the second I heard news that there had been small earthquakes in Ventura. When I checked the timing, sure enough, three of the earthquakes matched exactly when I heard the noises. Mystery solved? I dunno. Maybe.

Daily Tab 2019_11_05

Elizabeth Renieris in BKC: Distracted by Data.

Jeff Abromowitz in Wired: How wi-fi almost didn't happen.

A Privacy Manifesto is in constant draft form in the ProjectVRM wki. Also in Medium. I'm looking at how Julie Cohen's work—Turning Privacy Inside Out and Law for the Platform Economy pertains.

The Conversation: Inequality in DNA.

Toby Philips in Aeon: We have the tools and technology to work less and live better

Roger McNamee in Time on Facebook.

This is going on right now at Berkman Klein Center + Harvard Law School, and I'm bummed to be missing it.

Charlie Warzel in the NYTimes: Pierre Delecto, QAnon and the Paradox of Anonymity—In 2019, it’s somehow both easier and harder than ever to be anonymous. 

Chris Faraone in Boston Magazine: No News is Bad News.

@AdrianShahbaz of @Freedom House: Freedom on the Net 2019,The Crisis of Social Media—What was once a liberating technology has become a conduit for surveillance and electoral manipulation.

Rafi Letzter in Space: The Universe Might Be a Giant Loop.

Harbingers

Dig:

• The globe is indeed warming.
• India's economy is slumping. A lot. 
• Birds are disappearing. 
• Political correctness is getting more nutty.
• And nobody is showing up for Pac-12 football.
• The Hong Kong protests may not do shit.
• The Internet is breaking into four parts.
• Distrust is a thing.
• Narratives and counter-narratives all suck.
• A $9.99 book (Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics) on Kindle is $71.23 in hardcover. 
• Democracy in the UK is worse off than we thought.
• Boeing is doomed. Or so it seems.

A TV sound mystery

Looking for help solving a mystery among TV sound connections here.

Our Samsung TV gets video and sound from two sources—a Spectrum cable box and an Apple TV box. It then sends audio to a stereo amplifier and its speakers through an optical cable that goes from the TV into the Spectrum box, then out through a right and left audio cable (with RCA plugs) into the Aux input on the amp. 

This worked fine for a few weeks, and then sound stopped working for the Apple TV. A long session with Apple on the phone, with lots of changed settings, made no difference. So did switching HDMI inputs, and completely replacing both HDMI cables. Samsung also had no idea when I talked to them on the phone.

The optical connection on the TV is the only way sound gets out to other devices. The AppleTV's only audio-out is through the HDMI connection to the TV.

The Spectrum cable sound works fine. So we know the optical sound from the TV back to the cable box is fine. As is the connection from the cable box to the amp. The whole problem is between the Apple TV box and the Samsung TV.

Any ideas, Lazyweb?

Metapersonal data

Look up "personal data" on Google and you'll get 220 million results. Atop all those is the European Commission's:

Personal data is any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual. Different pieces of information, which collected together can lead to the identification of a particular person, also constitute personal data.

This is the definition behind the commission's General Data Protection Regulation, better known as the GDPR.

The problem here isn't one with the definition itself, but with the absence of distinction between data a person has or holds (such as what's in our hard drives and not out on the Internet, and could with minimal ambiguity be called "personal data") and data about a person. 

Since data about data is generally called "metadata," I suggest that data about a person be called metapersonal data.

As of today, here's what Google says about that: "No results found for +metapersonal data."

Maybe that'll prove useful. Or maybe not. Either way, you heard it here first.

Today's reading

That whole crazy populist right wing thing? Blame TV. Seriously.

Althea.net is an approach to Internet service that's an internet itself, sort of. Naturally, blockchain is involved.

When I was a kid, every house had an outside TV antenna that looked like this.

Dana Blankenhorn goes full Godwin with Tolerance, Technology, and the American Hitler. Most Godwinian analogies leave me cold, but this one didn't. Read it.

No surprise that trust is going to hell. (Sez Pew, via NiemanLab.)

Help the feds (heaven) help us all with AI.

If the porn sites don't respect your privacy, who will? (A deep and  useful academic read.)

Says here the tracking cookie is dead and contextual advertising (an old thing) is the new real thing. Note: if the tracking cookie was really dead, most of those cookie notices you see would say "Our cookies are for our site's use only." They don't, they're not dead and killing them is still a worthy cause.

Rising seas vs. Kirabati.

Says France's CNIL, "On the one hand, simply continuing to browse a site can no longer be viewed as a valid expression of consent to the deposit of cookies . On the other hand, operators who operate tracers must be able to prove that they have obtained the consent." The one hand is good. The other hand is same-old, and continues to suck. So does sites needing to provide users with "a device for withdrawing consent that is easy to access and use." Users should have their own damn device: one that can work the same standard way across all the sites on the Web.

Umair Haque says agency "makes us suppose that one day, with enough “agency”, we can be omnipotent super-beings. The real question is: where does agency, which is to say power, come from?" I say it comes from tech that made to make us exactly that. Encouraging that has been my work, pretty much ever since Cluetrain.  Also, Ray Dalio explains why I'm optimistic about that work.

Danny Weitzner and Cameron Kerry on Rulemaking and its Discontents, from Brookings.

No surprise that, in Australia, people trust outfits that don't do shitty stuff with their personal data.

The most powerful FM transmitter in Canada (CKOI's on 96.9 in Montréal) has finished moving from this thing on the top of the CNIL building downtown to this one on the top of Mount Royal. Formerly 307,000 watts, it's now 148,000 watts, but not shadowed to the north by Mount Royal itself. Mouse over that last link for details on that antenna, if you're one of the few people who care. All those links, btw, are informed by Fagstein.

On the Radio Lockdown Directive. My opinion on this is not yet sufficiently informed by facts that will include the ones here.

Went to the Redpath Museum a couple days ago. It is, indeed, "a museum that belongs in a museum." It also has no air conditioning and was so fucking hot that the third floor (the one with the mummy in that link) was closed.

I'm pretty sure everyone named Englert here is a relative. That link is to a cemetery in Utica, New York, where my great-grandparents, Christian and Jacobina (née Rung) Englert grew hops for the beer they made, and where both died, though they are buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx.

iPhone photo import question

I need to get photos off an iPhone. 

Used to be Photos (Apple's photo app) provided a choice to erase imported photos after they were imported. That appears to be gone, but may still be a choice somewhere or somewhow. Apple also has another app, Image Capture, that allows you to choose a destination folder for imported iPhone photos, and "delete after import." But that app never deletes photos, ever. Meanwhile I have accumulated thousands of photos on my iPhone that need to be erased. I'm hoping there is some easy way to do that. If anyone has clues, send them along.  Thanks.

I finally called Applecare, and found this out: neither Photos nor Image Capture will delete photos after importing them from an iOS device if iCloud is turned on... somewhere in Settings that I can't find right now.

For RightsCon

I wish I could crash RightsCon today.  It's not too far (Tunisia) from where I am now (in Spain), and lots of friends and fellow activists are there. But I'm at work here, and that's good too. In the meantime, I've been wondering about what I might like to share with RightsCon from across the Mediterranean. Maybe this will help. It's from A Line in the Sand, in February's Linux Journal: 

At a deeper level, what (some of us)  have been trying to do all along is prove that free people are worth more than captive ones, both to themselves and to everyone and everything else. In terms of The Matrix, we want to make each of us a Neo.

Working to free people from The Matrix is hard, because it's not just about making the software and hardware we need. Relatively speaking, those are low-hanging fruit. So is getting publicity for it.

The hard thing is that the big money and demand for work is mostly in making The Matrix less bad.

And it's true: we do need people pushing the status quo in a helpful direction. We also need activists to reform all our standing institutions, from politics to health care to education to social media and its platforms. It's also good that these kinds of work tend to pay, through credentials, experience and money. And let's face the fact that it's easier to see what's wrong in the world as it is, and to fight for changing it, than it is to see first causes at a deeper level, and then work to change damn near everything above that level with a few good hacks.

But it can be done. We did with all the free and open-source protocols and code bases on which our networked world now utterly depends. We can do it again to make free individuals more valuable than captive ones.

And that's the line we need to draw here: one between what we want for people as independent agents of themselves and all the ways people can work to improve the status quo for both institutions and the people who depend on them.

We can sort this out with a two-part question:

1. Are you working to give people their own ways of dealing with companies and other organizations in the world, at scale? (By scale, I mean giving people single ways to deal with many others, such as we already get with protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP, IMAP, SMTP and FTP, and with apps, such as browsers and email clients.) Or...
2. Are you working to help companies and other organizations (for example, governments) treat people better than they do already?

Neither side is wrong. I want to make that clear. I also want to make clear that the deepest work we need to do—the truly radical and world-changing stuff—is on the first side. And that's the side that needs us the most.

...

Last April, in "How Wizards and Muggles Break Free from the Matrix", I put up a punch list of 13 different things already being done to help break everyone free of institutions that would rather hold them captive—and to build bases for far better institutions in the process.

At the time I wrote that, I assumed that the GDPR would clear paths for work already moving forward within all 13 items on that muggle-liberating punch list. Alas, the GDPR's single positive achievement so far has been shaking things up. The worst thing the GDPR has done is encourage surveillance capitalists to keep doing the same damn things, only now with the "consent" of "data subjects" clicking "agree" to misleading cookie notices everywhere.

But the work proceeds (and the list of places where it's proceeding is now up to 17 items), and all of it can use your help.

So please, let us know which side of the line you stand on and what you're ready to do about it (or, better yet, already doing). Thanks.

Please let's save TV from adtech

I just posted this comment under When It Comes To Attribution, It Feels Like TV Is Selling Last Year's Model by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese

The problem with "attribution" is that it's a virtue of direct response marketing (best known offline as junk mail), not of advertising. Wanting "a better way to correlate media exposure with consumer actions like clicks, downloads, 'conversions,' purchases and repurchases" is a road to hell for broadcasters, and it gets steeper on the downhill side with every new data-rationalized pitch for broadcast advertising to get as accountable as possible at the personal level.

Broadcasting's greatest virtue as an advertising medium is its effects on populations, not on how it gets individuals to act.

Consider this: I don't own a Ford, but I know the company's trucks are Ford Tough. I don't have insurance with Geico, but I know fifteen minutes can save me fifteen percent on my car insurance if I choose Geico. I know those things because I watch and listen to a lot of sports, which are sponsored by Ford and Geico. That lots of people know the same thing is great for those brands. And broadcasting made it great.

Sponsorship is the great dividing line, and it's a huge advantage of brand-building media that have not yet bit the poison apple of wanting everything to be "attributable."

Broadcasters should know what publishers are only beginning to learn, probably too late to save their asses: that adtech—tracking based "behavioral" digital advertising to individuals (euphemized by its perpetrators as "relevant," "interest-based" and "interactive")—is about tracking eyeballs and advertising at them wherever they go, not about sponsoring a station, a network or a show. Adtech will mark eyeballs in one place, track them elsewhere, harvesting personal data along the way, and then pelt them with ads at another: ads aimed by spyping on those eyeballs.

Adtech is the very antithesis of sponsorship. it's also a big reason why ad blocking on the Internet, which may top two billion people by now, is the biggest boycott in world history.

Broadcasting has been blessedly safe from corruption by adtech. It should be working hard to stay that way.

The image above is the familiar "ban" symbol, atop the Ad Choices logo, featured on ads that want to spy on people. AdChoices is as bullshit as an advertising conceit can get, and will do here as an image standing for spying-based adtech itself. For more on why adtech sucks, there's a lot to read here.

This thing is bigger than journalism

Savejournalism.org wants me to join their fight against Big Tech. They say

 JOURNALISM IS AT RISK
Over the last 10 years, newspaper newsrooms have declined in size by 45%, and in 2019 so far, the media has shed more than 2,400 jobs.

and 

BIG TECH IS TO BLAME
Google, Apple, and Facebook are using their tech muscles to monetize news for their own profit, but at the expense of journalists.

All due respect (and much is due), I don't agree.

First, journalists have been working for magazines, broadcasters, newsletters and themselves for dozens of years, or for centuries. So journalism isn't just about newspapers. Second, because so many journalists have long made livings in those other media, the loss of work is far larger than the 2,400 gone from newspapers. It's truly massive. I don't know any field where the loss of jobs is larger. Not taxi driving, not hospitality, not retail, not manufacturing... not anything I can think of. (Well, maybe nuns. I don't see many of those these days.)

And yet there is more journalism than ever: in blogs, social media, podcasting and other media. Most of it doesn't pay, but that doesn't disqualify it as journalism. Hell, I'm doing it here and this doesn't pay.

Second, Big Tech is more effect than cause. (I'll explain why shortly.) And it's way too easy to blame.

And hey, if you're blaming Big Things, why stop at those three tech companies? How about Amazon, which is in the middle of destroying and re-making all of retail and distribution? Or Netflix, which has turned all of television into one big streaming subscription business, much of it with no advertising (which once paid big news operations)? Or, within television, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, which have morphed into the trampoline-like walls of partisan echo chambers? They used to be where you went for news. Now they're mostly opinion, most of which is one-sided.

The cause for all of it is digital technology plus the Internet. Simple as that. And damned hard to understand, because we're pickled in it, and it's still just starting. Everything we're experiencing with digital technology on the Internet today is a radical hack on our minds and our lives.

Every new technology, McLuhan says (in The Medium is the Massage), "works us over completely." And no new medium, no new technologies, have ever worked us over more than digital tech.

A few months back I had a brief conversation about this with Joi Ito. I asked him how big he thought the digital transformation was. Bigger than broadcast? Print? Writing? Speech? Stone tools?

"No," he replied. "It's the biggest thing since oxygenation." In case you don't recall, that happened around 2 billion years ago.

Journalism is just one collateral casualty of digitalization. Also a beneficiary, methinks. But I don't yet know, and I won't ever know. Life is too short, and the change is too long.

But we do need to understand it as best we can in the meantime.

Here's one outfit working on that. I don't buy everything pitched at that link (at least partly because it's novel and not the easiest grok), but I think the work is important and it's a good start, which is why I weigh in on it.

I also don't expect journalists to take much interest in it, because digitalization (if that be the right word) isn't a story, which is journalism's stock in trade. I explain a bit about journalism's "story problem" in this TEDx talk. 

Still, some journalists are on the case, including me. Love to have others join in.

The Daily Day

The tide is turning against all of digital advertising, and not just adtech. This Wall Street Journal article suggests the same.

I loved Mac Rebennack, akd Dr. John. Bummed that he's gone.

Good piece on fake news, in The Atlantic, which Privacy Badger says is no longer spying on me. That's why I just screen-shot the image on the right. 

Later: what I reported in the last paragraph appears to have been an anomaly. Privacy Badger now reports 13 potential trackers at The Atlantic, including ib.adnxs.com, c.amazon-adsystem.com, as-sec.casalemedia.com, bidder.criteo.com, static.criteo.net, securepubads.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com, adservice.google.com, www.googletagmanager.com, www.googletagservices.com, and fastlane.rubiconproject.com. I list those because I invited none of them into my browser, and in fact use Privacy Badger to block them.

By the way, that's much the same list I tweeted about, inviting the magazine to come this third rail: that they're just as guilty of spying on people as Google and Facebook, which they're glad to give shit for violating personal privacy. Naturally, the third rail remains un-grabbed.

Firefox now blocks third party trackers by default. Thank you.

New York Times videos on Russian Disinformation. Also, "Privacy Badger detected 19 potential trackers on this page." It finds two here on this blog: Facebook Connect and Google Analytics. I block cookies from both, because I don't want to be tracked. At Linux Journal we dropped Google Analytics because about 60% of our readers block tracking one way or another. And Google Analytics relies on tracking.

It was sad to see the utterly defeated look on the faces of the Warriors last night. Prediction: the Raptors will win on Monday, Canada will go nuts, and Kawhi will stay.

A tweet replying to @linuxjournal @make and @makerfaire: Sad indeed. Make and Makerfaire have long been models for me of how a specialty magazine and a specialty event ought to be done. The @hackaday piece does leave open a glimmer of hope that @dalepd can pull something together. Hey #makers, can you make #ReMake a project? This is now part of a thread.

One of my favorite old Onion pieces. 

Thanks to e-Patient Dave for pointage to the song Gimme My Damn Data. He writes, "Watch this three minute video, and wonder: why would three Deloitte consultants (plus two sons and a wife) record a music video about patient access to the medical record?" More e-Dave on the topic from way back.

Searls.com is down, which is why the image above no longer appears. (Later... it was an outage in the network, apparently concentrated around Dallas, where Searls.com sits in a rack.)

The new normal

My old password stopped working with @VanityFair's website. So I did the new password thing. In the email with the password resetting link, "the Vanity Fair editors" said "Clicking on this link will allow you to change your password to something you will remember." Which makes no sense, since I already have hundreds of login-password combinations, and the whole idea of passwords now is to make them as unguessable as possible. Meaning also not memorable to human beings.

After I used @Dashlane to generate a strong password (which I didn't see and only my Dashlane account remembers), Conde Nast told me on the website that my new password will work across all Conde Nast websites. But I see I'm still signed in to the @NewYorker.

Toward an all-subscription media future

Here's my comment under a story at RadioINK:

All the big group owners are moving from over-the-air to OTT: over the top. In TV, that’s over the top of cable, which replaced over-the-air (OTA) for most people decades ago. In radio, it’s over the top of OTA, via streams and podcasts on the Net. In both cases, the final imagined product is subscription-only, with group owners competing in a silo-vs.-silo way. We see a drift in that direction with iHeart’s urging the listening world onto its app. and we see it more clearly in Entercom pulling its streams off the open Net (so they no longer appear, for example, on the TuneIn app, which prior to that move played all the streams in the world) and isolating them inside its own proprietary Radio.com app. In the course of that, Entercom is saying “IP addresses on the Net are not the new radio dial at all. In fact there is no radio dial in the digital world. There are only proprietary isolated systems competing against each other for subscribers.” The end state is one where “stations” exist as fossil remnants with call letters and slogans within closed and proprietary subscription systems providing a mix of streams and podcasts. Localization is part of that, but it’s still a freaking mess while the future arrives, unevenly.

The Unexpected

I learned in the last two days that two people I knew had died "unexpectedly"—or so said their obituaries.

Yesterday it was Sandy Ostby, a friend from my North Carolina days, pictured there on the right. Today it was Ron Schott (@rschott). Both died young: Sandy at 61 and Ron at 49. Both also died some time ago: Sandy in 2012 and Ron this past May. Their obituaries are at those links.

I met Sandy at a dance in 1983. She grabbed me out of a crowd and we just started swinging. I was a spaz and she was a pro, so she led and I followed. That was my first and last experience of feeling like a good dancer. We got to be friends, but fell out of touch after I moved to California in 1985. Yesterday I looked her up on a whim and found that obituary.

The cause of Sandy's death remains a mystery to me, though I'm glad to know one mystery in her life was solved. The last I talked to her (I'm guessing in 1985), she thought her brother Steve, then already long missing, was possibly dead. But Steve was one of those writing kind words on Sandy's obituary page. Another person there mentioned that she and Steve had recently reunited. So I'm glad that happened.

I learned about Ron just a few minutes ago. I had tipped my hat to Ron and other geologists in one of my tweets, and Andrew Alden (@aboutgeology) in a private reply gave me the news that Ron had passed. He also told me that, best he could recall, Ron had died of heart failure.

Ron was a leading field geologist specializing in the hard rocks of the American West. He was also a first-rate gigapan photographer. See here. And here. The last of those was taken just a month before he died. Next to John McPhee, I learned more about geology from Ron than from anyone else. He was a great correspondent by email and Twitter. Callan Bentley (@callanbentley) calls Ron— 

a giant in geoscience outreach on the internet. He was an early adopter of just about every technology you can think of: Google Earth, GigaPan, Twitter, Google+, geological apps for augmented reality. He was always pushing to innovate for the public good with these technologies, making publically-accessible “Geology Office Hours” on Google hangouts and inventing new geo-ed hashtags like #weatheringWednesday and #btgt (“Been there; GigaPanned that”). He was the king of “Where on Google Earth?” so much so that the players of that game invented “the Schott Rule” in his honor. He was kind and inclusive, encouraging and thoughtful. His omnipresence on geology Twitter was pretty much unmatched. When I announced his death there last week, the outpouring of grief was unprecedented.

And now I'm grieving too. 

So will the rest of ya'll please stay alive? Thanks.

And if you have any specifics you're willing to share about Sandy or Ron, write to me. I'm doc at searls dot com.

Some thoughts about self-sovereign identity

Susan Morrow (@avocoidentity) tweets, 

Three critical questions about self-sovereign identity - I need answers folks Self-sovereign identity: 3 key questions (link: https://www.csoonline.com/article/3366261/self-sovereign-identity-3-key-questions.html) csoonline.com/article/336626… via @csoonline #selfsoverignID #ssi #digitalidentity #identity @trbouma @ChristopherA @WomeninID @IdentityWoman @IBM @msiddev

I replied,

I'd like to read the whole thing, but I'd need to register, and I have no faith that a site that wants to plant (@PrivacyBadger says) up to 26 trackers in my browser has any respect for my privacy, much less for my sovereignty. Fix the spy system and I'll read the rest. Thanks.

Since that was not helpful (no way CSO will cave to that demand), and I really would like to help out here (and, if you follow the thread, Susan does pull her two hidden questions out from behind the registration wall), here are some thoughts which, far as I know, nobody other than my wife (a trustee of the Sovrin Foundation) and I are thinking. I'm not saying these thoughts are right, or fully formed or informed. Just that we've been co-thinking about them out loud for the last couple of days. Here goes.

In the natural world, where we are embodied beings, we are by default anonymous when to go about the world outside the social circles where we are known by name. By anonymous I mean nameless. Literally. (That's what anonymous means. To be nameful is to be onymous.) This is a grace of civilization. We don't need to wear name badges when we walk on a city street. If we pay cash at the coffee shop, we don't need to identify ourselves by name, and if the barista needs to write our name on our cup, we can give them a pseudonym. Even if we pay with a credit card for something, the polite thing for the other person in the transaction to do is not look at the name on our credit card, because that would be kinda icky.

Why is that? Why is it weird when a waiter processing our credit card looks at it and thanks us by name? Or when anybody gets a bit too familiar with us.  I've always wondered about that. What should we call the boundary we put around the public selves we present to others anonymously? 

I got a good answer yesterday when I was walking to a medical appointment in far-uptown Manhattan. Along the way, none of the hundreds of people I passed knew, or wanted to know, my name. Nor did I want to know theirs. The same was true of every store I passed, before showing up at the doctor's office, where I was onymous  for a good reason.

The answer came through my earphones, which were playing Christopher Lydon's latest Open Source Radio podcast, titled Andre Dubus III: How “The Fighter” Became The Writer. About eleven minutes into the podcast, Dubus speaks about "that membrane of inviolability that should be around every human being." Expanding on that, he adds, "You can't violate someone's sacred space without asking." Then, "but in a fight you have to violate it right away, and once you learn to do that, you can always do it."

Those two points—that we have a sacred space inside a membrane of inviolability, and that once we violate another's sacred space we can make a habit of it— lay out the challenge for self-sovereign identity in the digital world.

In the natural world, we presume that every human being maintains that membrane of inviolability, even as they become onymous with others who have reason to know their names (or whatever they choose to call themselves).

In the digital world we don't have that. We can't walk around there in an anonymous way (unless we are geeky enough to know tricks for doing that). Here in these early decades of digital life on Earth, we have at most the illusion of inviolability. We become disillusioned when we learn that the unseen headers in our browsers disclose virtual fingerprints of our hardware and —and that everywhere we go online, we carry cookies injected into our browsers by nearly every site we visit, so we can be identified, not only by those sites, but by countless third parties behind those sites, mostly for personalized advertising purposes, but also for God knows what else.

Our onymity in the digital world is conferred mostly by what digital identity geeks call identity providers. Others who need to know our provided identities are called relying parties. Every identity provider maintains an identifier for us in a namespace. We get a new one of these every time we create a login and a password. (According to my password manager, I now have 1208 login/password combinations.)

The idea behind self-sovereign identity, or SSI, is that each of us maintains our own portfolio of ways to present what are called verifiable credentials that are similar in ways to how we use the credentials we carry in our wallets to prove, for example, that we are licensed to drive, a member of a club, or old enough to be served alcohol. I'll let others fill in the blanks there, or correct what I just said. What matters about SSI is that it at least begins to equip us with something like the membrane of inviolability we enjoy in the natural world. And, if it becomes normative, SSI should equip us to create and respect the natural state of anonymity we should each enjoy in our sacred private spaces, even as we walk about the digital world in clearly human forms.

Saying yes to ads and no to tracking

Dave has questions about Adweek:  "If you go there with an ad blocker on you get this scolding. So if you turn the ad blocker off, you still can't read the article. This is supposed to make you do what? Subscribe? Not really, I wonder if they user-tested this."

I'm sure they tested it with their lawyers and their circulation people (if they have some of those). Certainly not with readers, who would surely have said the scolding is insulting and a turn-off.

If you're cool with ads but not tracking, the best choice is tracking protection. Here's a list of those.

Bloody data

Imagine if the only medical specialty was hematology, and that our biggest problem as human beings was being attacked constantly by fleas, mosquitos, ticks, vampires and other creatures that want our blood.

This is exactly where we are in respect to data. Yes, it's a big part of what we do online, just like blood is a big part of being a working animal; but we make a mistake when we assume that data is what being online is all about.

What we do online depends on data, but can't be reduced to it, any more than driving can be reduced to internal combustion or telling time can be reduced to the gears of a clock.

We care about data because we're being taken advantage of by things that suck. But we have to start thinking and working above that level.

That level we want is agency. 

Rediscoveries

Just rediscovered this interview from (I gather) around 2013. It's part of the Riptide series: "An oral history of the epic collision between journalism and digital technology, from 1980 to the present." As I recall, it was recorded in the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The prime mover behind it is Martin Nisenholtz (@martinn123), who started work on the project as a fellow at Shorenstein.

The interview is a literal transcription of a pair of videos that are also at that first link.  Reading the transcript and watching the videos is a stark reminder that I speak fairly well (having what they call an "announcer's voice"), but not in final draft. Or even close. This means that the video interviews themselves are far more watchable, and listenable, than the transcripts are readable.

But that's a quibble. Riptide is a great series, and I highly recommend digging into it.

My interview is in Chapter 8, titled Birthing the Blogosphere, and it follows the opener with Dave Winer. The picture on the right is from my interview page.

A matter of principal

*The subject of signatures came up the other day, and I thought about the best signature I had ever seen: one that was better—to me—than John Hancock's.

It was the signature of George F.R. Buletza, who was the principal of Maywood Junior High School, in Maywood, New Jersey, when I served time there (1959-1962). So I looked him up, doubting he would still be alive. That guess was correct; but he had a good run, passing at age 92 in 2009. Here's his obituary.

So far I can't find samples of his signature online, but I have found something else that's cool: he last (and long) lived in Charlotte, Michigan, county seat of Eaton County, both of which were pioneered by the Searls family in the early 1800s. See here and here. From the former: "The Searls brothers were experts with the broadaxe and hewed boards (leaving no score marks) for many houses."

I also remember Mr. Buletza as a good guy. Especially to one of his worst students: me. Among other good things, he blessed my parents' decision not to send me on to our town's public high school, but instead to pursue academic correction at a boarding school somewhere. Which they did.

If any of Mr. Buletza's relatives or friends are reading this, I send my warm regards to them, and my belated thanks to him. And also greetings to all classmates and fellow alumni of MJHS.

(The photo is of Eaton County Courthouse. My Junior High was (and still is) in Maywood Avenue School.)

*Later: After I posted a pointer to this post on Facebook, Diane Baker Castino came through with a copy of Mr. Buletza's signature. See it here.

A year isn't enough

"Life is a loaf," my friend Britt Blaser (@brittb) says. "Some loaves have a lot of slices. Some just a few. But every life is a loaf." He first told me that when we both had many fewer slices than we do now. 

As a veteran wartime aviator, Britt has also come closer to having his loaf baked than I have. I mean, literally. As he tells it in Fire Flight at Katum, "Everything went pretty much according to plan until one day when the wing started burning off."  Among his conclusions is this gem: "Five strong young sphincter muscles acting in unison on seat cushions CAN keep a C-130 in the air one minute longer than it has a right to fly."

Here's the thing about life's loaf slices: the more there are, the thinner they get. Every year seems a little bit shorter. Because for each of us, it is. That's why every retrospective on our current passing year seems a little less meaningful, a little more trivial, a little less adequate a way to tell of stuff that matters.

Delmore Schwartz:

I no more wrote than read that book which is
The self I am, half-hidden as it is
From one and all who see within a kiss
The lounging formless blackness of an abyss.
How could I think the brief years were enough
To prove the reality of endless love?

Delmore's loaf was nineteen short of my own count so far. But he's saying stuff there that matters fully. Such as that years are brief and love is endless.

Here's another: At every moment we are all almost finished and barely started.

And there you have three reasons why robots will never replace us.

Not next year. Not ever.

What if the reason for riots in France isn't a story?

Buzzfeed blames Facebook for riots in France.  Found it via @BuzzFeedBen (the editor in chief), via @DaveWiner. Written by @broderick, Buzzfeed's Deputy Global News Director. 

It appears to be well researched , and I assume it's accurate. It's also a story, and stories have a format: character(s) + problem(s) + movement. If something important doesn't fit that format, it doesn't get reported. Or if it does, it's probably a "mego" (for My Eyes Glaze Over)*.

Facebook is the main character in this one. Says so right in the headline: "Here’s How Facebook’s Local News Algorithm Change Led To The Worst Riots Paris Has Seen In 50 Years."

I think the main problem here is much deeper than Facebook, but has no character, so it's a mego to write about. If anyone is interested in hearing more about that, let me know. Maybe we can make that a story after all.

Bonus link: The Story Isn't the Whole Story.

* Thank you, Bill Safire.

On Cluetrain's 2nd decenniversary

Retrospectives:

1) The original site and book are online in full at http://cluetrain.com and http://cluetrain.com/book

2) The 10th anniversary edition has new chapters by the four original authors, plus additional ones by JP Rangaswami, Dan Gillmor and Jake McKee.

3) David Weinberger and I posted an addendum to Cluetrain in 2015 called New Clues: http://cluetrain.com/newclues

4) The word "cluetrain" is more or less constantly mentioned on Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=cluetrain

5) A search in Google books https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=cluetrain brings up more than 13,000 results, almost nineteen years after the original was published.

6) A search in Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/scholar?en&q=cluetrain brings up more than 4,000 results.

7) A dig through old emails just turned up the earliest evidence  (at least to me) of Cluetrain's inception: a draft of a joint JOHO (David Weinberger's email list) and EGR (Chris Locke's list) posting, vetted for input by yours truly. This was when the three of us were first sharing the co-thinkings that became Cluetrain in early 1999. That email is dated 30 October 1998, meaning that more than two decades have passed since this thing started.

Testing

Testing.

I've posted this, then set a headline and updated...

And now I'll set an image. Should be jelly beans.

Good, worked.

Now I'll try to write a headline and post an image in the prior post.

Headline worked. It's Broken Dish.

Now the image: a broken dish with HBO as the shard.

That worked too. Nice.

Broken Dish

Dish Network is in the midst of a dispute with HBO, so HBO and Cinemax are gone from the service. There is nothing about this on the index page of the website, nor have I received a single text or email on the matter.

So, when I went to the Dish website to start digging around, and found nothing, I hit the feedback tab, where it said this...

We're Listening
Some of our best ideas come from our customers - and we would like to hear yours. If you would like the ability for us to respond, please provide your email address.
If you have a question about your current DISH service, please contact us.

I wrote this in reply:

All I want to know is if there is hope for HBO and Cinemax returning. There should be information about that on the Website and in emailings and/or textings to subscribers. I have not received a single email on the matter, and there is nothing on the front page of the website. That's simply wrong. Thanks.

Our only choice for HBO now is to subscribe directly for $14.99/month.

Our only choice for old-fashioned TV is Dish. Two reasons.

One is that our set top box has to be in a cabinet, and for that we need an radio (RF) remote rather than an infrared (IR) one you point at the box. Our local cable provider, Cox, doesn't support that. I think DirectTV does now, but there's still the other reason..

Most of our TV watching isn't here at home in Santa Barbara. It's on the road over a laptop or the AppleTV in our New York apartment, using DishAnywhere, which is a server in our Dish box here. It works amazingly well. 

Meanwhile, what we have is one more example of the bundled entertainment economy (cable/satellite) breaking into shards in the larger and increasingly fractured subscription economy.

The next question is When will we reach Peak Subscription?

GM drafts radio a suicide note

As if life isn't hard enough for radio in an increasingly digital world, along comes GM, sort-of floating the prospect of tracking drivers and hitting them with personalized advertising, just like the digital kids do in the commercial online world. Or so suggests Why Did GM Track Radio Listening Habits of 90,000 Drivers? in RadioInk. It begins with this: 

It’s all about the data. Last week at The Radio Show in Orlando, a lot of time was dedicated to data and what radio stations can do with it to generate more revenue. General Motors has gotten into the data collection business and the automotive giant is using radio as a way to collect it
GM conducted a three-month test using in-car Wi-Fi, tracking the habits of drivers. The goal was to explore whether there’s a relationship between what drivers listen to and what they buy. A GM spokesman also tells The Detroit Free Press that the data from this study could also help GM develop a better way to measure radio listenership, something advertisers would love to get their hands on, so they could target their ads.

My response in the comments below:

It's not "all about the data." It's about preserving the sweetly private experience radio has always given the drivers and passengers in cars. GM is nuts to sacrifice that for the unholy grail of "relevant" and "interest based" advertising aimed by spyware hidden in dashboards

The biggest advantage of radio advertising over the kind people hate on their computers and mobile devices is that radio's advertising is NOT personalized and NOT based on tracking people like marked animals. By not doing that, radio is perfect for making and sustaining brands.

Perhaps a $trillion or more has been spent so far on tracking-based advertising, and not one single brand known to the world has been made by it. That's because tracking-based advertising isn't really advertising. It's digital junk mail, operating on the same moral and economic model as spam.

Countless brands have been made by radio advertising. I may never get insurance from Geico, but I sure as hell know "fifteen minutes will save you fifteen percent" with them. I know Geico, Progressive and ZipRecruiter bring me the sports shows I like. I also can't help appreciating that brands are sponsors.

Tracking-based advertising isn't interested in sponsorship. Its interested in using whatever opportunity it can to get personal with consumers, wherever they happen to be. Most of the money spent also goes to intermediaries, not the station or program itself. That's another way brand advertising is more efficient.

Ad blocking took off in the digital world, becoming the biggest boycott in human history (1.7 billion worldwide at last count), exactly when the tracking-based advertising business (led by the IAB—the Interactive Advertising Bureau, its trade association) decided not just to ignore polite Do Not Track requests, but to mock and dismiss those requests with a smear campaign against its main advocate: Mozilla and its Firefox browser. (Details here.)

Please, radio: be proud of your advantages over pure digital advertising media: that you're perfect for brands, sponsorship, and listeners who appreciate what both make possible. 

On Radio's Last Advantage

In this Radio Ink piece, a guy calls for completely lifting ownership limits for radio stations. Here's my comment under that:

I can already see a future Onion headline: "Sirius, Murdoch Buy the Rest of Radio."

Substitute other names if you like. Amazon, Apple and Google are all possibilities.

Even if that doesn't happen, the big clue to the future will be what's on dashboard infotainment system screens. Bear in mind that there's already more radio on phones than on any radio dial, and that most new cars come with a cell connection and a satellite antenna. The old whip antenna, which is still the best way to receive AM and FM signals, has been replaced by inferior substitutes embedded in windows. AM is already gone from electric cars such as the Tesla. In time, the land on which most AM transmitters sit will be worth more on the real estate market than their stations will be in the broadcast one—if that isn't the case already.

The real trend is from analog to digital. But don't think of Google and Amazon as models for the digital world. They're the trilobites of digital's Cambrian explosion. (See https://www.theonion.com/evolution-going-great-reports-trilobite-1819571228.) Bet instead on people. Those have already mounted the biggest boycott in human history—against the kind of spying-based advertising Google and Amazon specialize in.

Perhaps radio's last advantage in advertising is that it *doesn't* spy on people. Meaning radio may be the last medium where listeners still have privacy. More on all that here: http://j.mp/adbwars.

Yum.

At the Mass we attended a couple weeks ago, the priest opened his homily by asking the congregation to close their eyes and think about one meal they especially enjoyed with friends or family. It doesn't matter what his point was, because he made the mistake of getting his first answers from children, who deflected him totally.

It started when a boy of about seven raised his hand. The priest walked over. "And what was your favorite meal?" he asked

"Jesus body!" said the boy.

The congregation laughed, and muttering followed.

"Nobody's getting anything past that kid," said one.

"Yum!" said another.

"That's, um, a good answer," said the priest, but not the one I was looking for."

He turned back to the congregation. "What I want is for you to remember one meal you've had with other people that stands out in some positive way."

A little boy eagerly waved his hand from a pew on the other side. The priest pointed to the boy and walked over. "How old are you?"

"Four!" said the boy.

"What's your answer?

"Jelly beans!" the boy yelled.

Guy in the congregation, sotto voce: "Beats a communion wafer."

A back-and forth followed.

"Did Jesus break jelly beans at the last supper?"

"He didn't serve hard little discs."

"What's actually in those?"

"Grout."

"C'mon. It's unleavened bread."

"That's not bread."

"What is it? Hammered flour?"

The priest went on to make some point involving his own childhood and pizza.

"If Jesus had the last supper today, it would be pizza," whispered a guy.

"Makes sense. Got its own blood," said another.

"Come on, shoosh."

"Not a bad idea. The host could be tiny pizzas."

"Shoosh!"

So the lesson of the homily was about kids. Including the grown-up ones.

Respect

In the summer of 1968 I made great money every day selling ice cream from an ice cream truck I drove in suburban New Jersey towns. (In fact, that's how I paid for my junior and senior years at Guilford college.)

All the way, every day, I would listen to a Sony radio I hung from the pulled-out (and always empty) ash tray in the dashboard. My taste in music was all over many maps: classical, rock, folk, bluegrass, whatever. And at night on the way home I'd listen to WBAI/99.5fm, which was then a boundless source of anti-war sentiments, live performances, cultural everything, and fully interesting and engaging personalities.

One of those was Julius Lester, who had just published Look out, Whitey, Black Power Gon' Get Your Mama. And one night, on my way home, Julius commanded his listeners to pull over, stop their cars, open their windows, and revel in the best song ever written about its title: Respect, sung by Aretha Franklin. And the best performance as well.*

My car at the time was my parents' yellow 1966 Volvo 122s. The radio was a Blaupunkt. The speaker was under the rear window. The back of the speaker was open into the trunk of the car. So I pulled over, turned the radio up all the way, opened the trunk, sat on the back bumper and listened to the Queen of Soul pickle my own in the brine of perfection.

Because that's what it was: perfection. 

News came she died today. Julius, I just found out, died in January. Two perfect souls, still in position to pickle our own in what only they could give us.

* Aretha played piano on that recording, and was backed by her sisters, now also deceased.

When shit is the only choice

On one of the social networks, a friend wrote something sensible that came down to these points:

1. Maybe VRM has it wrong about customers, because—

a. People just click through the tracking permission request boxes, meaning 

b. They don't value their data highly enough, and 

c. They're not feeling the pain of their poor decisions enough.

2. Companies buy tracking-backed adtech because it converts better than un-targeted advertising.

3. People seem contentment with news sources that support their strongly held views (confirmation bias).

4. In respect to #s 2 and 3, personalization is seen by people as preferable to the lack of it.

I replied, I hope just as sensibly, 

Nobody wants to be followed like a tracked animal. Nobody wants a zillion logins and passwords. Nobody wants a different "experience," controlled by the other party, at every commercial website. And adtech works like slavery worked for slave owners. Like smoking worked for tobacco companies and retailers. Like alcoholism works for bars.

The simple fact is that tracking people without their invitation, express permission or a court order is flat out wrong. And there are endless studies that show most people make what they know is a shitty compromise with The System when they "accept" terms that quite simply fuck them. One example: The Tradeoff Fallacy: How Marketers are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them Up to Exploiitation, by Annenberg/Penn in 2015. TRUSTe had a long and good series of studies in the UK and the US showing 90% of people online felt their privacy was compromised and wanted something better. 

Acquiescence is not the same as demand. People put up with shit when shit is all there is to put up with, and shit is the system we have.

We can do better. That's what's driven our work with ProjectVRM and Customer Commons from the start. And we invite all who are fed up with shit choices to join us in commons cause.

Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wemeantdemocracy/253341820

Long live radio—on other devices

The great boat called terrestrial radio is sinking, yet listening is doing better than ever, because the lifeboats are actually larger than the broadcast bands ever were. Here's the inventory:

1) Computers (using browsers) and mobile devices (using apps);

2) Car entertainment systems, now being fed cellular and satellite signals that work over far larger geographies than AM/FM ever could; and

3) Smart speakers, which can carry everything car entertainment systems can, but with a much easier user interface, once they’re set up.

The choices of programs, music, personalities and other interest-grabbing “content” (as the marketers like to call it) on these devices so far exceeds what’s on the broadcast bands that the game for those bands could hardly be more over, even though, well...  the bands play on.

What we listen to on those bands are still called stations. Which of those will survive on these new devices and listening methods?

I think the branded stations—the ones listeners feel most connected to in their lives—will survive. The rest will go down.

There are simply too many stations on the air in the U.S., with too few formats still left, and too many other ways to listen than AM/FM stations can possibly provide.

And the radio business has already botched two forms of what could have been life support for stations.

One is RDS, which lets a car radio carry a station from one signal to another over large geographies, and which the U.S. rejected in the ’90s in favor of a crippled replica called RDBS.

Another is DAB (digital audio broadcasting), which would have been a much better way for stations to move to digital than HD Radio, which is too proprietary, too hard for listeners to figure out, too poorly implemented in the radios that have it, hated by too many engineers, and a failure-in-progress in the marketplace. 

But even DAB has problems of its own, mostly thanks to its geographical and technical boundaries, placed by different implementations in different countries. 

What DAB has done, however, is obsolesce AM and FM radios wherever those countries make it the only choice left for radio listening. And there are more of those all the time. The US won’t be one of them. But then, it hardly matters. The Internet is the new broadcast band. Its coverage is worldwide, and there's no limit to what you can do on it.

This began as a comment under How smart is your station at RadioInk.

Adventures in unsubscription

I'm unsubscribing to all emails that might be tracking me. So far I've unsubscribed from dozens, I'd guess.

The latest is @ShellyPalmer's list. It's not personal. I'm unsubscribing from every list that might be spying on me, and I can't tell which are, which aren't, or (if they are), how. Because there's nothing in the cruft that follows a link that tells me anything about the purposes of that cruft.

In my unsubscribe note to Shelly's list, which I posted under "Other (fill in reason below)," I wrote, "I like the list (and Shelly personally), but I'm also zero-basing all my email subscriptions. I'll re-subscribe to lists I like that don't track me personally. Unfortunately, I can't tell the difference yet. (Are you listening, MailChimp?) So, to clarify, I don't mind if this link ( https://shellypalmer.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c45bf0ae5539b15b901766ddd&id=e8d435f600&e=eab3b67a56 ) tells Shelly "a reader clicked on this" but do mind if it says "Doc Searls clicked on this." Is there a way to tell the difference? Either way, let me know: [email address]. Thanks! Bonus link (so you know where I come from on this): http://j.mp/adbwars ."

By the way, I only noticed Shelly's email service is MailChimp's because the unsubscribe page's favicon was theirs.

[Two days Later, and no word yet from either MailChimp or Shelly.]

Is the Age of Advertising ending?

AdAge buries this news under today's Starbucks story:

To compete with Netflix and other rivals, TV networks are cutting down on commercial interruptions. But as Ad Age's Jeanine Poggi writes in a deep-dive on the topic, the economics of that are "daunting." And exactly how much extra should advertisers be paying for ads in a less cluttered environment?

I just posted a response in AdAge to the second link:

Here's the hard thing: there is no demand by people on the receiving end for ads, and many more ways to avoid ads in our digital age.

Netflix's success owes both to content (they have more than anybody) and to the absence of advertising. For viewers, absence of ads is a giant relief after seventy years of suffering annoying time-sucks between what people tune in to watch.

Yes, there are still program types—notably live sports, talk and breaking news—that tend to hold people still for ads, but even there the growing range of choices support avoidance. For listening to what used to be radio, a sports fan can jump between almost too many channels to count on SiriusXM (http://satelliteradiousa.com/channels/sports.html), and do the same among sports stations on a phone app such as TuneIn Radio, or on their smart speaker from Amazon or Google—in addition to choices left on old-fashioned terrestrial radio and cable/satellite TV.

For long-form listening, they can also go to podcasts and hit that little circular arrow to jump forward fifteen seconds at a time to get through the ads—if there is advertising at all. Adtech—the spyware-aimed advertising that caused the GDPR (look it up) in Europe, is also a fail, especially for branding. (After a $trillion spent, not one brand known to the world has been made by it.)

So here is an existential question: is the Ad Age (literally) ending ? I asked that two years ago http://bit.ly/adsg0die and so far the answer is no. Still...

Then I ran out of space. Fortunately I've said plenty already, here.

The Trojan Web

Back around the turn of the millennium, there was a great talk on an @LinuxJournal Geek Cruise, given by a guy named Paul Kunz (here, thanks to @ValaAfshar), about how the Net, or at least the Web, actually took off. Here’s a piece about Paul, and that talk, that I just found on an old Stanford site. Alas, his talk has since disappeared from the Web and isn't in Archive.org.

What’s missing from the account at that link (which thankfully survives) is what Paul said about how high energy physicists were the primary actors in spreading the Web outward from CERN, starting with SLAC, and where Paul was one of those scientists. When Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT machine first made a Web connection outside of CERN, the story went, it was to Paul's NeXT machine at SLAC in California.

Specifically, the physicists in Europe (Tim himself? I don't recall) went to their national phone companies (called PTTs there—the equivalents of what Ma Bell was before the U.S. feds broke her up) and said they wanted to exchange high-energy physics documents with each other, and would it be cool if they used this new HTTP protocol over this other protocol called TCP/IP. 

Without knowing the implications, the phone companies said yes. And here we are.

In other words (I'm talking now, not Paul), the phone companies accepted into their midst a Trojan Horse with the whole digital world inside. They did that because they didn’t see that these protocols connected everything digital without restriction and at no cost, obviating their billing-the-shit-out-of-everything business models.

The coup was complete after graphical browsers appeared and the only “backbone” within the Internet (of many nets using the TCP/IP protocol) that specifically forbid commercial activity (in its Acceptable Use Policy)—NSFNet in the U.S.—stood down on 30 April 1995. After that the digital life we enjoy today went through a Cambrian Explosion.

The phone companies, it turned out, were glad to have that explosion, because they still found much to bill. But they couldn’t see any of it at the time because they were blinded by what was overly familiar to them. And the physicists didn’t know what they offered was a Trojan Horse. It was just a nice convenience for them that out to be good for everyone.

Toys R Screens

Most of the kids I see these days aren't playing with real toys. They're playing with glowing rectangles.

I know that's not the only thing that killed Toys R Us. Amazon was another reason. So was a massive debt load. 

But so too, I think, was the lost charm of the small Main Street toy store. Soon as real toys adapted to the Big Box habitat, they became dinosaurs.

Or so it felt to me the first time I took my now middle-aged kids to a Toys R Us. Hated it.

So I'm shedding no tears.

The Real Pirate Radio Story

I wrote this originally as a comment under Tougher Legislation To Fight Pirates On The Way, in RadioInk. It hasn't been published yet there, and may never be, which is why I'm putting it here.

Some weekend evening, drive to the hilly end of Manhattan: Hudson and Washington Heights, Inwood, Fort George. Take one of the bridges across the Harlem River to Morris, University, Fordham or Kingsbridge Heights. Head down University Ave to Highbridge, Mt. Eden. Go out to Tremont through Mt. Hope. Explore the Pelhams, the West, East and South Bronx. Take another bridge or two to the outer regions of Queens, and work your way down to the less hip sections of Brooklyn.

All along the way, keep hitting SCAN on your car radio. Most of what you'll hear that's not in Obvious English will be pirates. In any one spot, such as were I live in a part of Manhattan the locals call Washington Depths (down along Broadway north of 181st), you'll hear not just one or two pirates, but dozens. On your whole trip you might hear a hundred or more. Some you'll hear for miles on your journey. I once listened to a pirate on 89.7fm all the way to JFK Airport and back. For most of the trip, it destroyed reception of adjacent WKCR/89.9.

All these stations serve either the obsessions of their operators or communities licensed broadcasters don't serve or abandoned long ago. I suspect in most cases it's both.

This phenomenon needs to be understood, and cannot be reduced to the "piracy" label alone. It's too big for that.

From what I can tell, few outside the phenomenon understand what's going on. Not the industry, not lawmakers, and especially not the mainstream media.

In fact, most of the coverage I've read is what I've written about every two years or so: https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2013/09/13/pirate-radio-lives-big-time-in-new-york/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2015/06/18/the-untold-pirate-radio-story-in-new-york/ and https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2017/11/29/pirate/ .

So, since you might be asking, here's why I think it's a Thing:

1) It's cheap. Do this search and see how easy it is to put out a pirate FM signal: https://www.google.com/search?q=fm+transmitters . For a studio, use your iPad. For an antenna, run some cable TV co-ax to a 30-inch whip antenna on your building's roof.

2) New York's licensed FMs are weak, by design. All are Class B (50kw/150m max), and there are no high-power grandfathers. To get above the city's concrete canyons, most of New York's Class Bs radiate only 6kw from the master antenna near the top of the Empire State Building, 413 meters above the ground there. Soon there will be six other structures higher than that in Manhattan.

2) A signal from midtown reaching a low floor at the north end of Broadway in Manhattan will pass through, around and over a hundred-plus blocks of other buildings and terrain to get there—and will sound like crap. (Perhaps oddly, listening in HD helps a lot, if the signal is still there.) This leaves lots of room for hyper-local pirates to step in, especially in the hilly places I named above.

3) Nearly all the pirates are in Spanish or some other language (or English dialect). Being into Hispanic Radio, you guys should care about this. If you do, come visit. I'll show you around.

4) It's social. This matters a lot.

Anybody up for actually covering this thing? Just wondering.

BTW, this comment seems to have failed moderation, at least so far, at RadioInk.

Also sprach Camille

Last night I was in conversation with a collection of strong women who were discussing the #MeToo movement. The sense of it was in alignment with what Camille Paglia says in this interview here.

If you just want to scan it, ignore the Hugh Hefner stuff. It's kinda interesting, but off the MeToo topic, which shows up here:

So we're now in a period of sexual boredom and inertia, complaint and dissatisfaction, which is one of the main reasons young men have gone over to pornography. Porn has become a necessary escape by the sexual imagination from the banality of our everyday lives, where the sexes are now routinely mixed in the workplace.

With the sexes so bored with each other, all that's left are these feminist witch-hunts. That's where the energy is! And meanwhile, men are shrinking. I see men turning away from women and simply being content with the world of fantasy because women have become too thin-skinned, resentful and high-maintenance.

And American women don't know what they want any longer. In general, French women — the educated, middle-class French women, I mean — seem to have a feminine composure, a distinct sense of themselves as women, which I think women in America have gradually lost as they have won job equality in our high-pressure career system.

Just sharing. Much to chew over (or eschew) there.

Right enough

I've now read Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury twice, and have seen nothing in the news since the book went to bed (last November) that has me doubting what's in it. Even if not a single thing in it is factually accurate, all of it rings true.

See, what Michael wrote is a portrait, not a photograph. And it's an artful one, since Michael is a helluva good writer. He's also the best media critic we've got. And Trump is, above all, a media character. So are, or were, all the many characters who surrounded Trump in the book's story of the administration's first eleven months. Now only three of those characters are left: Kellyanne Conway, John Kelly and the dual entity Steve Bannon calls Jarvanka.

Jared Kushner is under the bus now. Will Ivanka follow? I dunno. What matters more is that the country and its media—of all sizes—have normalized around Trump. Like or hate him, Trump is running things, just by tweeting constantly, saying and doing wild shit, thrilling his base and freaking the rest of us out.

It's a way that was, and remains, very much to the liking of Steve Bannon, who is the lead character in Michael's book. (And, I gather, the leading source for the book as well.) 

Bannon is also the real Russia, because Trump wouldn't have won without him. Though exiled from the White House and Breitbart, Bannon remains hugely smart about the world, and is worth reading and listening to, whether one agrees with him or not. If you're up for that, dig this GQ interview.

Bonus link.

One more reason not to sweat the robot takeover

Long ago a high school friend wanted to connect through Classmates.com. We fell out of touch, but Classmates did not. It kept spamming me with stuff about my long-dead high school until I got it, somehow, to stop.

Now I just got a mail from Classmates.com tempting me to know more about a classmate of mine from "Calabasas Academy Calabasas, CA Attended ’95-’99." Classmates' marketing robot calls me Jim and has a mailbox for me (see the image to the right) containing three promotional emails from itself.

My high school was at the other end of the country, and I graduated in 1965.

I also just checked, and I'm not even sure Calabasas Academy exists. (There is an all-female academy of dance, but no Academy.) 

I only bring this up to highlight for the zillionth time how much marketing robots suck at guessing not only what people might want, but even who they are and what they've done in the world, even when the person being guessed at is fully exposed online. 

Mazing, that.

A Morning Musical Digression

This morning's music: best of Skip & Flip.  It's not a big catalog. Or good. Just interesting.

Skip was Clyde Battin, and Flip was Gary S. Paxton, both of whom enjoyed long careers in more notable bands, doing more notable work, with longer hair and less formal clothes. (Skip and Flip were the names of dogs one of them owned.)

Though best known for "Cherry Pie" and "It was I," the Skip & Flip recording that stands out for me  is "Fancy Nancy," a dumb novelty song from 1959 that deservedly got only to #71 on the US Billboard chart. Call it up on your music-summoning app of choice, and listen with headphones. You'll hear how primitive recording studio art was before they could mix channels. (Actually, they could before then, but here they chose not to.) So you get vocals on the left, all other instruments on the right, and nothing in the middle.

Listen for the electric rockabilly guitar bridge with riffs and licks that would become familiar in the decade that followed. One of those later works that stands out for me is Lonnie Mack's instrumental version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee" (though the hit version was by Johnny Rivers). Just titled "Memphis," it charted in the summer of 1963. A landmark work.

From that last link, "According to musicologist Richard T. Pinnell, Mack's upbeat, fast-paced take on electric blues-guitar in "Memphis" was unprecedented in the history of rock guitar soloing to that point, producing a tune that was both "rhythmically and melodically full of fire" and "one of the milestones of early rock and roll guitar". Well, not quite unprecedented, unless that was Lonnie on that Skip & Flip session.

Alas, all but Johnny Rivers are now gone. 

Watching Radio Die in Slo-Mo

I hang a lot at the north end of Manhattan, where pirate radio on FM is so thick on the dial that many legit New York signals (WBGO 88.3, WNYU/89.1, WKCR/89.9, WFUV/90.7, WNYE/91.5, WEPN/98.7, WBAI/99.5, WFAN/101.9 and WQXR/105.9) are nearly unlistenable at least some of the time, thanks to pirates on adjacent channels.

Since nearly all of the pirates speak in Spanish or some Caribbean English dialect, and to mainstream media downtown the outer boroughs (including "upstate Manhattan") might as well be Canada, the topic is approximately never covered. Except by me, every couple years or so:

Pirate radio lives, big time, in New York (2013)

The untold pirate radio story in New York (2015)

Still no serious coverage of pirate radio (2017)

And, in the midst,

The slow sidelining of over-the-air radio (2016)

I see the day, not long from now, when some museum will replicate the radio listening experience with genuine OTA (over the air) radios of various vintages, over which one can listen to in-house low power AM and FM transmitters, simulating what listening to radio sounded like in, say, 1935 (serials, soap operas), 1959 (rock and roll), 1973 (disco), 1982 (album rock), 1996 (rap, hip-hop) and 2018 ("and on your smart speaker").

But not 2025. Because by then much of what used to be radio will have moved to streams and podcasts over the Net, satellite and DAB in Europe and elsewhere. (DRM—Digital Radio Mondiale—is a technology in which a few old stalwarts continue to invest hope, but there is none, save what little shows up here, last updated in 2016. Coulda been a contenda, but: nah.)

That last link is but one page among many at Ydun’s Medium Wave Info news page, where over-the-air radio, worldwide, can be seen going down, down, down, up a little, down... well not quite yet, but yeah, down...

For bad guys, Facebook is too big not to use

In Facebook appears Russia’s biggest useful idiot in Vladimir Putin’s bold war, Samuel Scott examines the full-text Mueller indictments, calls it "a perfect example of a well-executed digital marketing campaign," and adds many other useful observations. For example,

As a character in a 2017 episode of the US satirical cartoon South Park stated, Zuckerberg created a platform that provides a monetary incentive for people -- or governments -- to spread misinformation.
The Facebook founder seems to have been so obsessed with creating a global, self-service direct marketing platform that he never thought about how social media would influence global politics as well as human relationships and society as a whole. 

Almost all he suggests I agree with. The problem is, Facebook can't be fixed. It's the world's biggest Humpty, and it's already down.

Google Condemns the Archival Web

The archival Web—the one you see through the protocol HTTP—will soon be condemned, cordoned off behind Google's police tape, labeled "insecure" on every current Chrome browser.

For some perspective on this, imagine if suddenly all the national parks in the world became forbidden zones because nature created them before they could only be seen through crypto eyeglasses.

Every legacy website, nearly all of which were created with no malice, commit no fraud and distribute no malware, will become haunted houses: still there, but too scary for most people to visit.

It's easy to imagine, and Google wants you to imagine it.

What will happen to calls on HTTPS sites that go out to HTTP sources, for example of images? That's what we have with the image you see on that post. That image lives on http://searls.com, an old server that sits in a rack somewhere in Dallas. One of these days I may get around to updating everything there to an https address, and then going back to posts like this one and re-composing the linkage.

 But probably not, because I'm too busy doing other stuff.

As Dave put it way back here, the costs are prohibitive—in time, money, hassle and all the rest.

Most legacy blog sites—ones created long before HTTPS became a thing—will just sit there forever behind Google's police tape. I hope my old one, http://doc.weblogs.com, stays up. I have countless links pointing into it since I stopped writing there in 2007. But many visitors driving Chrome browsers will be scared off because it's labeled "insecure."

Yes, people can still go under the police tape. The old houses that stay up will still be open in some cases. But the original Web will cut off, starved of traffic, left to die as one big old ghost town. And that's a damned shame. Literally.

When OTT is the new bottom, advertising loses.

Disney is looking to create an OTT ESPN channel, @AlexWeprin writes in @MediaPost. (For those not hip to broadcast jive, OTT means Over The Top of cable. In other words, on-Net but not on-cable. Examples: YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon.) Here is my comment below that piece (the only one so far):

I'm a sports fan, and ESPN is the only reason I haven't cut the cord on cable. And I'm sure that's typical of millions of other sports fans.

But this new OTT thing doesn't interest me. It reads too much like a side show. Who are the stars, the personalities? Where's Stehpen A? Wingo and Golic? SVP? Betcha they're not on this thing, or ESPN would be talking them up.

At some point Disney and ESPN face the fact that OTT is the new bottom, and the world of video viewing will finally become what the Internet wanted it to be from the start: fully unbundled, any-to-any, at trivial connection costs, with some content free and other content costing money.

That covers the subscription side of things. Advertising will be harder, because the simple fact is that people have always hated ads (except, of course, on the Super Bowl, an irrelevant exception).

Today it is easy to skip over and around ads on streams and podcasts, so the only place left where people suffer live ads is on live sports broadcasts. But even there many people wait an hour to start watching and skip forward past the ads, expertly. (Time out? Two clicks on the —> button, :30 each. Major break? Four or eight clicks.)

Some of us now listen to ESPN radio only on podcasts, because the spot breaks are shorter it's easy to skip over them.

My point: the only final incentive alignment that will work is the one in which ads are minimized or eliminated. This has huge implications for the sizes and influences of sports broadcasters, and finally for the sizes of pro player salaries, most of which derive their heft from all those ads.

Best to start preparing now for the day of reckoning when what's obvious for viewers and listeners dawns on the supply side of the marketplace.

What's really going on with ESPN and FiveThirtyEight

Now comes news that ESPN is trying to scrape off FiveThirtyEight. My comments (under that post) follow...

FiveThirtyEight was never a fit at ESPN, and wasn't at the NYTimes either. The difference now is that ESPN is stressed, and that's the bigger factor.

Cable/satellite TV, which ESPN is propping up through bundling, is also fracturing and moving to subscription/ad-free models. ESPN might be the last to go that route, and when it does other Disney properties will probably have done the same—and the biggest loser, long-term, will be sports talent, which have been overpaid downstream by brand advertising to captive cable/satellite viewers (which include those watching on other screens using their cable/satellite logins).

When the whole mess becomes pay-per-service and/or pay-per-view, we'll have a whole new market with greatly flattened costs and incomes on the supply side.

We've already passed peak subscription. ESPN will surely be among the winners in the new game of musical chairs for who wins viewers' time and money, because appetites for sports won't go away; but how ESPN wins will be the main question in the meantime.

As for FiveThirtyEight, I always thought it made the most sense as a standalone entity. If it had stayed that way and grown on its own, it might by now have become an alpha brand that owned other brands. Instead it's a depreciated asset for sale by a stressed owner. Kinda sad, but not surprising.

A different approach to equal pay

I want to start by making this much clear: my wife is the smartest person I know. She's especially smart about business, and has done quite well at it.

This morning, while we were working in the kitchen and listening to news about how Michelle Williams was paid 1/1000th what Mark Wahlberg got for doing the same thing, on the same movie, she had this idea: "Here's a great way to equalize pay in a company and save money as well: start paying men no more than what women get for doing the same job."

Reminded me how, not long after I met her, she said "I'm not interested in equality with men. Why deal down?" (Yes, she was joking. Still, a memorable utterance.)

Just thought I'd share that.

How radio gets smart

(This expands on my comment under “Alexa” Battles “Home” at CES. Radio Should be Watching. in Radio Ink.)

Station identification for ESPN radio shows now include the ESPN app. For NPR stations, it's now "your local station or your smart speaker." So it's clear that radio is moving from over the air to over the Net, and what we (soon) used to call "coverage" is no longer limited by range over geography, but by access over Internet devices.

That's one upside.

Another upside is that radio can now be interactive, meaning the listeners can do the talking as well. They can also sing back, sing along, join in with their own instruments, record streams and create mixes to distribute or share back. Those are all within the technical horizon of smart speakers today.

The downside is that smart speakers, so far, are a form of premium subscription cable radio, and what you can get is limited by what Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Sonos or some other company facilitates. And much or all of that facilitation is in those companies' "clouds," rather than on your own independent device. Worse, those systems are closed and proprietary, meaning they don't get along well with each other, on purpose. That's so you get trapped inside those companies' "silos" or "walled gardens." Worse than that, you have levels of privacy—at least with some of them—that are hardly above zero. (Apple is an exception here, or at least tries to be.)

Another interesting effect of smart speakers (and satellite speakers in, for example, Sonos and Bose systems) is the end of stereo sound outside the headphone, car and home theater environments. Today only audiophiles still care deeply about the science and art of stereo music through speakers.

The human solution to Facebook's machine-produced problems also won't work

In Facebook CEO Vows To Rid Social Network Of Bad Info, Actors, @mp_gavin says Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook post promising "To cleanse his social network of trolls, purveyors of false and misleading information, and other bad actors" is "his most ambitious pledge yet."

He'll fail.

See, what we're talking about here is trying to fix just one kind of awfulness produced by the world's most consequential algorithm—one designed to allow anybody on earth, at any budget level, to micro-target ads at highly characterized human beings, using up to millions of different combinations of targeting characteristics (including ones provided by parties outside Facebook, such as Cambridge Analytica, which have deep psychological profiles of millions of Facebook members)—by giving actual human beings (not just fancy machine systems doing AI, ML and other cool hot tech stuff) what The Wall Street Journal calls "The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook." 

This is not only ironic in the extreme (in case you missed it in my too-wordy paragraph above, we have humans fixing the unavoidable errors of machines meant to understand humans), but also impossible to pull off.

Facebook's message-aiming system (good for fake news as well as ads) is too complex, too massive (Facebook has many data centers, each the size of a Walmart or few), too difficult and expensive to rebuild, and too good at what it does. It would be like turning a cruise ship into an aircraft carrier.

And, to a creepy degree, both the ads and prejudice-stoking postings actually work well enough—at least for the people and organizations placing them. That it works for bad guys as well as good guys—and is bad for culture and democracy—is a feature, not a bug. Again, it was designed to do exactly what it does.

You know Goethe's (or hell, Disney's) story of The Sorceror's Apprentice? Look it up. It'll help. Because Mark Zuckerberg is both the the sorcerer and the apprentice. The difference with Zuck is that he doesn't have all the mastery that's in the sorcerer's job description. He can't control the spirits released by machines designed to violate personal privacy, produce echo chambers, and to rationalize both by pointing at how popular it all is with the billions who serve as human targets for messages (while saying as little as possible about the $billions that bad acting makes for the company).

Switching metaphors, Facebook is Humpty-Dumpty, and it's already on the ground. None of King Mark's horses (e.g. better algorithms) or men (and women, doing icky jobs) can put it together again. 

Look at what's happening for Zuck in terms of grief stages: denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance.

At first he denied that the problem was there—even as fraudulent and misleading ads ran right next to the post where he did the denying. I suppose he went through the anger stage in private. Now he's at the bargaining stage, betting that humans with awful jobs can halt the rising tide of outrage and embarrassment. 

He's not alone. In How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us, Roger McNamee, an investor and old friend of Zuckerberg's, deeply examines What Went Wrong, and teams up with ethicist Tristan Harris to produce an eight-point prescription for fixing Facebook, and all the awful shit it's doing to us.

It won't work, because it can't.

John Battelle explains why in two pieces published in his magazine NewCo Shift. The first, which went up last September, is Lost Context: How Did We End Up Here? The second, published today, is Facebook Can't Be Fixed. As his subhead explains, "Facebook’s fundamental problem is not foreign interference, spam bots, trolls, or fame mongers. It’s the company’s core business model, and abandoning it is not an option." That nicely compresses my main point here.

The best thing all of us can do, both for ourselves and for Facebook, is face both what it has become and how terminal it is.

The best thing for Zuck to do is get the hell out, let it finish failing, and start over with something new and better, based on what he and others have learned from the experience. (Which tends to be the best teacher. And hell, he's still young.) It should help him—and all of us—to know that all companies fail; they just fail faster in Silicon Valley.

Google has the same problem, by the way, but is more aware of it, more diversified, founded on far better intentions (e.g. that nice stuff about gathering and sharing all the world's knowledge) and therefore more likely to survive, at least for awhile. 

It helps to remember that all companies have souls born of founding purposes. And there's a helluva big difference between a search engine meant to find "all the world's knowledge" and one meant to find hot girls on a college campus.

Yet what matters far more than Facebook and Google is that we all live digital lives now, on a network that puts us all a functional distance apart of zero. (When we're connected, that is. The distance apart when we're not is infinite).

This is new to human experience.

What we know about digital life so far is largely contained within what we've retrieved from the analog ones that preceded it. To wit,

• Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon might all deal in digital goods, but their structures and operating methods mostly improve on the ones modeled by Carnegie, Ford and J.P. Morgan.
• YouTube and Netflix are TV 3.x (where over-the-air is 1.x and Cable is 2.x).
• BuzzFeed, Verge and Vox are all print magazines in digital drag.
• Podcasts are shattered remnants of radio.
• The Web is networked Gutenberg.
• Search engines are library card catalogs.
• AI systems just automate decisions based on how shit gets remembered.

Marshall McLuhan says all technologies are extensions of ourselves. Hammers, pens, binoculars, cars and computers all give us ways to do what we can't do with our brains and bodies alone. What I just listed are early rudiments of what will surely come.

It helps to recognize that we are still going through early stages in our new Digital Age. Everything we know about digital life, so far, is contained within prototypes such as Facebook's and Google's. And all of those prototypes are just projects. If you don't doubt it, look at your computer and your phone. Both are either new or to some degree already obsolete. Hell, even the new ones are old. Nothing will feel older a year from now than today's latest Samsung and Apple mobile thingies.

It isn't turtles all the way down, it's scaffolding.

So let's at least try to look below what big companies, Trump and other dancing figures in the digital world are doing, and try to look at the floor they're dancing on—and the ground under it. That ground is new and unlike anything that precedes it in human experience. Nothing matters more than at least trying to understand it. 

Say it ain't so, Dish

AdAge just published DISH NETWORK CAN NOW MEASURE ALL ITS ADDRESSABLE ADS NO MATTER WHERE THEY AIR, by Jeannine Poggi (@jpoggi) It ends, "Dish Network began selling ads for Sling TV in programmatic auctions last summer. And in the fall it allowed marketers to buy addressable ads across Dish and Sling TV in a single buy."

My comment::::

"Addressible" suggests personal. So does "programmatic auctions," since those tend to match ads with people carrying spyware injected into their apps and browsers.

Will Dish or Comscore anonymize the Dish customers these ads target? Will personal or household data about Dish customers be shared by Dish or Comscore with advertisers or other third parties?

If I find out either is the case, I'll ditch my Dish account instantly. And I'll do it with great regret, because I like Dish very much and have been a loyal customer since they were Echostar.

One of advertising's charms is that it's not personal. Personalizing an ad turns it into direct marketing, which is a different species—and one hated by consumers even more than advertising. That's why we call direct marketing's most familiar form "junk mail."

The advertising business is now so drunk on the kool-aid of personalization and data-driven-everything-at-all-costs that it has lost track of what made branding work in the first place.

After perhaps a $trillion or more has been spent on personalized "adtech," can anyone name a single brand known to the world that has been made by it?

Targeting ads on TV should be done by program, network and location. Fine-tuning beyond that risks getting creepy. And aiming it with harvested personal data is an affront to personal privacy and morally wrong on its face.

So please tell us if Dish and Comscore are doing that. We customers need to know.

I hope Jeannine and AdAge follow up on that.

It is essential on the receiving end to know when and how ads get personal—and to have ways of turning off the spying that aims them. 

Making that happen is the bigger story here. And it can't be more important, because it is only by obeying the wishes of its consumers that advertising will save the soul it sold to the devil of spying-based adtech.

Bonus link.

After the fire

Taking a moment early in our new year to highlight two future stories about the Thomas Fire.

First is that the largest wildfire in recorded California history certianly involved enough large and harrowing scenes, and enough heroism, to warrant telling in a movie—especially since it involved what I assume was (and to a small degree remains) the largest firefighting effort ever mounted as well: over 8500 firefighters, from every state west of the Mississippi, and close to 1000 fire trucks and many aircraft, bulldozers and other vehicles, plus miles of fire hoses draped all over a very rough landscape. The story should be about how those firefighters, saved Ojai, Mussel Shoals, La Conchita, Oak View, Much of Dulah, Mira Monte, Wheeler Springs, Santa Paula, Filmore, Carpinteria, Montecito and finally Santa Barbara—after losing enough homes and businesses to comprise a whole town, mostly in Ventura, when the fire began.

Second is that Santa Barbara especially took a huge business hit this holiday season. After the most common sign in the windows of retail establishments was "for lease," the town got smoked out before half its people were evacuated, its parades and other events canceled and visitors headed elsewhere. Thus the "retail apocalypse" became something like the real thing. This is an important business story, and it won't end soon.

#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 8:54pm PST

It's 11:50pm here in New York (8:50pm in Santa Barbara), and KEYT is mostly showing best-of video from daylight fire fighting (punctuated by some cool live coverage of the night-flying helicopters).

Main thing: I see by Socal Edison's power outage page that the whole South Coast is dark.  (See the image above.) The explanation is here.

Good time to sleep. See you in a few hours. If you want to keep up with the #ThomasFire, go to the top link above.

#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 6:02pm PST

The #ThomasFire is now burning in spots inside the Santa Barbara city limits, most obviously in Parma Park, which is a  rural park on the north side of Stanwood Drive/Highway 192. But there are still no reports of structures lost. Clearly many more are being saved. (Scroll to the bottom of this post for updates.)

There are 973 fire engines deployed on the Thomas Fire case, with at least 500 engaged or ready to go in Santa Barbara and Montecito. Or so KEYT just said, live, here.

I've put up a set of screen shots at http://bit.ly/thmsfr . The last of these is a map (also above) showing just the last six hours of VIIRS satellite fire-spotting.  Plotted on Google Earth, they show active fire in roughly these places:

• The end of Terra Cielo Lane
• East of Gibraltar Road, and north of West Mountain Drive
• Alongside West Mountain Drive at a location VIIRS calls "Latitude: 34.45667, Longitude: -119.6801"
• At the end of a private road on the north side of Mountain Drive, west of Coyote Road
• East Mountain Raod and Upper Hyde
• In the viscinity of the Tea Garden (where the Tea Fire started, nine years ago)
• A region of huge estate homes on a private unnamed drive off of East Mountain Road, which VIIRS calls "Latitude: 34.45327, Longitude: -119.65039"

Note that VIIRS is a satellite that scans the whole Earth, pole to pole and doesn't pass over any one spot more than once per (I think) 24 hours. So this is not current. But it is kinda specific, and I'm not seeing this data unpacked elsewhere. So I'm sharing it here.

6:03pm: Capt. Zaniboni wants people to go to bed feeling optimistic. There are lots of firefighters, and equipment, dealing with the fire effectively, and the wind is slowing down. It can be gusty, but he feels good about it.

8:11pm: Water-dropping helicopters piloted with the aid of night vision headgear are being deployed against the fire. KEYT is covering that, and has night vision of its own. Again, go here for live coverage.

#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 1:09pm PST

The #ThomasFire is now the third largest in California history, in terms of acreage. It has a good chance of overtaking the #CedarFire, which was near San Diego a few years ago.

It's a good thing that KEYT is now carrying its live coverage at that link, and seems also to have eliminated the clickbait #adtech on the index page as well. (It's still on the page with the live coverage of meetings.) They still have the misleading "Latest Breaking News" ad on the app. I clicked on it once before seeing it was actually an ad, and avoided going farther after looking at the advertiser's privacy policy, which involves handing personal data over to third parties for advertising purposes. They say they protect personal privacy, but I don't see how, and don't believe it.

The data connection to the Dish system at our house has now sphinctered down to a trickle. But I can still watch KEYT's live coverage here.

A new fire has started near Los Alamos, a small town in the Santa Ynez Valley. One passes through it on Highway 101 approaching Santa Maria from the south.

The live VIIRS and MODIS fire data is way behind, I am sure because the two satellites doing the detection haven't passed over recently.

KEYT is working to confirm that flights in and out of Santa Barbara's airport (SBA) are canceled. United's are suspended for sure.

101 is now re-opened both ways at Sea Cliff.

I now need to take a shower and head out to Newark airport to pick up our kid, coming back from college for the Holidays. The timing is good (for me at least): it's clear that KEYT is now kinda filling time with chat. This is not a bad thing. Reassuring, in fact.

#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 11:58am PST

Santa Barbara Sherrif Commander Kelly Moore just explained on KEYT that  "the back side of the Riviera" is the main #ThomasFire fighting area right now. The fire is crossing Mountain Road, in the direction of Coast Village Road and Salinas Street, west to Sycamore Canyon. In this area are the viscinities of Westmont College, Eucalyptus Hill, Cold Spring School, Parma Park... the list goes on. If you're a local, you know where I'm talking about.

11:38am: KEYT reports a slackening of the wind. Smoke is now flowing upward, rather than across the landscape. That means some aircraft can get in. The sound of some choppers can be heard. Planes are seen far overhead. Flight is restricted right now in that area, so any aircraft that can be seen have official reasons for being there.

The current main fire fight is on East Mountain Drive between Oak Creek and Cedar Creek. There are "structure protection" engines in the 300 block of East Mountain Drive in Montecito, which the fire chief Capt. Dave Zaniboni calls the "urban interface."

11:55am: Talking to KEYT's John Palmenteri, Capt. Zaniboni says has had no reports of structures burned. Without looking at the Captian, I would take his voice to be Governor Jerry Brown's. They're close to identical.

I think the wind drop is a turning point. They can get aircraft in there, and the burned areas are now fire breaks. Still, the weather forecast is for high winds tonight in the direction of Santa Barbara.

#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 11:26am PST

The picture is from 10:39am, when the winds were toward the south, and the #ThomasFire was vectored toward Santa Barbara, and everything you see was under mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders. Mandatory areas were all in the uphill areas. Our own house is somewhere in that picture. Since this shot the wind has moved more toward the east.

If you're in the Santa Barbara area and have any #ThomasFire concerns that require official attention, call 211 or 805-681-5542. Note that the former is for Q&A and has had trouble, KEYT says.

There is an evacuation center at the UCSB rec center.

Links from KEYT: @countyofsb, County of Santa Barbara.

KEYT is open sourcing its audio for any radio station to use. KTMS/990am, KTYD/99.9fm, KSBL/101.7gm and KIST/107.7fm are all carrying KEYT's audio right now, the station says. All have the same owner, and similar looking websites. KTMS and KTYD both broadcast from Gibraltar Peak, while both KIST and KSBL are on West Camino Cielo, which is west of 154 on the far side of town from the fire. KSBL also has a construction permit to radiate from 20 miles offshore on Santa Cruz Island.

During the Ventura phase of the Thomas Fire, when all the main hills and mountains on the north and west side of town burned, most of the FM stations that broadcast from high places there were at least temporarily knocked off the air. Last I listened, on Thursday, some were still gone. In Santa Barbara, most FM stations radiate from Gibraltar Peak, which is a high point along Gibraltar Road, leading up to East Camino Cielo on the Santa Ynez mountain ridge behind town. Gibraltar Peak was in both the Tea Fire and Jesusita Fire burn areas.

A friend just called from Buellton, in the Santa Ynez Valley (the wine district that starred in the movie Sideways) reporting many fire trucks coming and going, as fire fighters catch some sleep at the local hotels there.

#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 10:37am PST

"Flames are now overtaking the #TeaGarden..." says KEYT (10:19am PST). and you can see it live. Winds are too strong for aircraft to fly in with water or retardant.

The winds appear to have shifted toward the east-southeast, and no longer toward the south, which means toward Montecito more than Santa Barbara.

KEYT earlier reported that Corey Iverson, the firefighter from San Diego who perished in the Thomas Fire above Filmore (the east flank of the fire, more than 40 miles from the action in Montecito), succumbed of "thermal injuries" and "smoke inhalation," during a backfire exercise that turned on his crew. That's according to the autopsy report.

We are now watching at least one structure (I think an out building near the Tea Garden) burn on live TV. Again, I'm watching this on our home Dish Network TV box, which we can see over the Net via Dish Anywhere. Very handy.

http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc and all of blogs.harvard.edu are still down.

#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 9:55am PST

I have now received a text from the Emergency Preparedness Office (I think it's called), and just now an automated phone call as well. (I pressed 1 to confirm receipt.)

KEYT, on "TV Hill" they call it—actually the east end of the Mesa—is in a perfect vantage for watching Santa Barbara, Montecito, the Santa Ynez Mountains and the "front country" that is now on fire.

Road closures: Northbound 101 near Turnpike (on the west side of town), gasoline from an overturned tanker truck had to be cleared somehow, and the road repaved (!), so that's still closed. So is 154, and a partial on 101 near Sea Cliff to facilitate evacuation of Santa Barbara toward Los Angeles. "Southbound" 101 (actually eastbound, on the South Coast) is open there to maximize evacuation. Only La Conchita (local Sea Cliff) residents are allowed northbound toward Santa Barbara. Otherwise it's closed to allow emergency vehicles maximum easement toward the fire area.

With way over 8000 fire fighting personnel on the Thomas Fire, this may be the biggest deployment against a fire. Dunno though.

#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 9:35am PST

I'm reporting on this from our apartment in New York, while working the Web and watching the KEYT/KCOY/KKFX app on my iPhone and on my iPad over the Dish Anywhere app, which gives us a way to watch our home Dish Network TV system. On that I'm currently watching KEYT's over-the-air (Channel 3) broadcast. This will work as long as the house has power and an Internet connection. As of 9:15pm Pacific Time, it still is.

I would normally be writing about this on my blog at Harvard, but all of blogs/harvard.edu seems to be down. Bad timing. So I'm glad I have this channel, and thank @DaveWiner for that.

9:32am PST: Most of Santa Barbara is now under either voluntary or mandatory evacuation. This includes all the Riviera and downtown.

On Flickr, I just put up screen shots of KEYT coverage. Shortlink: http://bit.ly/thmsfr

I'll post this now, and date/time this and subsequent posts in the titles.

Folding rodents

When our New York apartment building developed a mouse problem, they brought in an exterminator (or pest control, or abatement, or whatever they call those services now) to take care of things. The company put out sticky sheets of cardboard all around the perimeters of our rooms, plus little boxes of poison. A crew would come back from time to time and check on these things, all of which did exactly nothing other than cost the landlord money.

So I went to a nearby hardware store, bought some old fashioned mouse traps, which ought to be called mouse killers, because that's what they are. Mounted on a small piece of wood is a rectangular bar on strong spring, which cocked has the power to whap down on a mouse and fold it in two. The trap snaps when the bait moves and releases the bar holding the kill-bark cocked. Those worked. We knew the mice were gone when none were left to touch the bait and get snap-folded in two.

Here at our Santa Barbara place, we've had a similar problem lately, with rats. Or, a rat. Every night around 12:30am, it would make loud noises in the space under our bathroom cabinet. We don't know what path it took to get in there, because it appears to be completely sealed from all times; but it apparently comes and goes because it also feasts on tomatoes in our kitchen pantry. So this time I got a rat trap, which is a big brother of the mouse trap. It's by the same Victor brand that's been making these things since the 19th Century. I baited it with some Trader Joe's no-salt organic crunchy peanut butter and put it on the floor of our pantry. Sure enough, around midnight a loud SNAP! echoed through the house. I went to the pantry, and there was our rat, folded in two. 

I've got another trap set now, so we'll see if our late rat had companions. I kinda don't think so, because the noise in the bathroom cabinet was also gone last night. But we'll see.

Compared with the fires, which are now snowing the cremains of Ventura County all over our house and yard—and scaring the shit out of the whole South Coast—the rat is a small thing. But an old fashioned trap does beat the more expensive options, and that's cool.

Radio's slow (m)arch toward death

Tennyson called now—the present moment—"an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move." 

We tend not to see far through that arch. Hunter-gatherers still, we are built to walk, run, grab and build through a range of anticipations that run from microseconds to years in the future, with nearly all our attention on what's in the very next stage of now.

So we miss the big breakdowns that take a lot longer than now to happen. We also mistake persistence for success.

And such is the state of radio: a topic I can't help obsessing about, because it was so much a part of my life for so long. I like to think we'll miss it when it's gone, but I suspect not.

Here's one interesting fact: there is far more variety on the only (and therefore the monopoly) provider of satellite radio in the U.S. than you'll find anywhere in the country on terrestrial radio bands. Not in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago or San Francisco. Those places all have some innovative radio stations, but not the buffet of formats featured by SiriusXM.

Anyway, those are a few ruminations while I try to remember a few radio websites maintained by individuals far more obsessive than I. A list:

• US AM station pattern maps, which is by
• Radio Timetraveller, which sadly seems to have stopped in mid-2016
• Radio-Locator
• FCC-Info
• Mediumwave News

Note: In response to this post, @samueljscott points  to this good news for what's left of radio. by @martindave. 

BTW, that image at the top is from this Wikipedia entry on Bambergers, the department store. WOR, still a landmark New York station, started atop that store in Newark. In those days they thought transmitters belonged on buildings, and achieved electrical height with "clothesline" and "bedspring" antennae suspended between towers. Those were arch-like, which serves as a metaphorical coincidence here; but have long since been replaced by free-standing or guy'd towers. WORs three stand in the Meadowlands outside Newark near the west spur of the New Jersey Turnpike. It's the third site since the one on the store. For those who dig this kind of history, it's hard to beat REBUILDING A LEGEND: REBUILDING WOR RADIO FROM THE TIP OF THE MIC TO THE TOP OF THE TOWER, by Thomas R. Ray, III CPBE. Other interesting bits are here, here (that's deceased transmitter #3) and here (the transition from #3 to #4). To me #2 was the best. If you want to know why, ask. :-)

Just saying

There is so much I'm not saying, because I need to focus. Just letting ya'll know.

Cringe vs. Binge

I love @DaveWiner's BingeWorthy Hot List, mostly so I know what I might want to watch if I'm ever laid up without a keyboard and screen of my own. Until then, I'll be mostly a wannabe binger. 

See, on a couch I'm more of a monkey than a potato: too hyper to sit still  for long periods of time. Even movie theaters make me antsy. 

True, I am a desk potato. But at least I can type when I'm there, such as now. In front of a TV, the most I type is a search string. I do that into a bluetooth keyboard for the TV, the Dish receiver or the Apple TV box. (For that I have a cool cheap bluetooth keyboard that has three sets of settings: one for each device. Nice.)

Okay, all that said, here's where I am on the Hot List:

Gore, murder and gross sex are no fun for me, so Game of Thrones turned me off in the first episode (two beheadings, multiple dismemberments, one undead child and another pushed out a window after he witnessed doggie-style incest).

I’m saving The Wire for my next hospital visit, if I ever have one.

Mad Men bored my ass off after two episodes. Or maybe fewer. I forget.

The Sopranos was too close to home. (I'm from New Jersey and knew some of those people. Not fun.)

I liked West Wing a bit, back in the decade, but I only co-watched it with my mother and sister when they were visiting addicts to it. (Mom, as a former Alaskan, loved Northern Exposure.)

Tried and failed to get into Battlestar Galactica.

Liked Six Feet Under a bit. Saw maybe five episodes, which is a lot for me. The last one was perfect.

Tried Handmaid’s Tale on the flights to and from London last week. Fell asleep on the outbound and got bored on the return and  punched out.

Black Mirror left me wanting the much shorter and punchier Twilight Zone again. (I binge-watched that show… damn: sixty years ago.)

The only modern show I’ve binge-watched is Silicon Valley, and I’m not even sure it’s good. It's just familiar, meaning I've seen nearly all of it before, in the real Silicon Valley.

My wife got into Downton Abbey on a plane and wants to see the rest of it. at some point. She’s also into The Collection on PBS, which is about the fashion business in Paris, where she is right now. It’s current with weekly episodes, so not binge-able yet.

That's about it. Main thing is that a show needs to upstage news and sports, which is about 90% of what our TVs get used for, and even then not very often. (More when guests visit than when we're home alone.)

Companies are projects

Companies, like every life form, tend not to last forever. Or even for more than a few dozen years.

Even durable ones, like Hewlett-Packard, live by splitting into multiple companies or becoming different entities than they were in the first place. 

Sure, HP may still be around as a legal entity that makes money in a bunch of ways; but how much if any of that company still draws from artesian well of good sense that was Bill and Dave's HP Way? How much is Apple still about what drove the Steves to create it? How much is Google still doing what Larry and Sergey wanted to make in the first place? At most the answers are "some, but not enough."

Projects have purposes bounded by completion. As with life forms, they are made to live and do good things and participate in the world, but also to be done. It is no accident that founders of venture-backed companies have to plan from the start for an exit.

Thought: how is going public not a return of a company's substance to nature? By not throwing their people and property into the public domain they stay alive, walking dead, like zombies. 

Yah, that sounds harsh, but think about it: how little do most stockholders care about a company beyond what shares of it sell for on stock markets? And how little does that one thing matter to what a company actually does? Nothing could be farther from the founding missions of Bill, Dave, Steve, Steve, Larry and Sergey.

There is something brain-deficient about the fiction that a company works only for its stockholders, or to throw off profit like a burning house throws off heat. (Let's throw another bedroom in here, Charles. Need to keep this thing going.)

I know I'm being way too simplistic here, and maybe outright wrong; but I'm just thinking out loud and jet-lagged on a Saturday morning, happy to be home and unable to keep things out of my head that might be worth talking about.

What I know for sure is that every purpose is temporary. Thus seeing everything as a project seems more sensible than all rationalizations toward boundless persistence across time. Everything ends. That's purpose too.

We're no different. When we're moving fast toward our purposes, it's not much help to watch for an exit. But eventually we take one. Or vice versa.

You can't beat this food

If you like yogurt, especially plain yogurt—you know: the Real Thing, full of fat (none of that 0% shit)—you need to get yourself some kefir cheese. 

It's actually yogurt*, but thicker: so thick you can stand a spoon in it. Not dense enough to to be called cheese, but it is anyway.

And tasty. O so tasty.

The kind pictured on the right is the latest we picked up, this time at a Costco in Oxnard, California. Our local Costco near Santa Barbara doesn't have it. But there is hope. The container is the one above, from Karoun Dairies, which says it's sold in several other stores around here. One of those stores has been gone for years, so I'll make inquiries before I go running around. (I'm also about to leave for a packed week in the UK, so it'll be after that.)

We got turned onto kefir cheese by a Russian deli near our place in New York. They sell several varieties of it, from several sources. Some are called labne, or labneh,  two Eastern Mediterranean nouns, either instead of kefir cheese, or along with kefir cheese, as does the Karoun we just finished. The traditional labne I've known (mostly through a Lebanese family in L.A. I'm close with) is not as thick as kefir cheese, but is otherwise similar.

Whatever. Get some. Even if you don't like yogurt, get some. It is so damn good. 

* I know, because I've used it as starter for homemade yogurt.

Why "the cloud" sucks

The problem with "cloud" isn't its meaning, which is roughly "where offsite storage and computing happens." The problem is that the tech industry uses "cloud" to blur where stuff actually is and where it is happening. It's a sleight-of-noun trick that causes far more harm than good. It bloats cognitive overhead, wastes time and forecloses countless opportunities.

Let's start with time. Exhibit A: Apple's iCloud.

It isn't just that Apple has blurred what the hell iCloud is and what it's for, but that the company has a fully annoying way of putting stuff in iCloud that used to be on one's device or devices. It does this on the incorrect assumption that it is unhelpful for the individual to know where computing takes place and files get stored.

After Apple did that to me during an iOS upgrade to my phone last month, I spent hours talking to AppleCare, trying to figure out what the fuck happened and how to fix it. Never mind why, because the damage was already done. The main problem was trying to figure out how to get the music back on my phone, so I could listen again when I go offline, which I do a lot. For example, in subways, on boats, on planes, in countries where cloud use is spinctered, or driving around the middle of Wyoming.

Apple has also done its ironic best to both popularize podcasting and to make listening to podcasts as hard as possible. The worst thing it has done, of course, is locate podcasts in iCloud, while making it nearly impossible to figure out where the hell one's podcasts are. 

All this blurring also masks loss of autonomy and agency, and increased dependency on what amount to feudal overlords. It's getting to the point where, if you're not a hacker with a full suite of tools and skills for remaining independent in the connected world, you are in a state of at least partial slavery.

I'd write more, but I gotta go deal with shit before I fly again to elsewhere. Hopefully I'll be able to listen to music and podcasts along the way.

Today's public notes

I put up about 20 years' worth of headshots.

Fred Wilson has a better way to do bike sharing.

In The Lie of Transparency, Bob Hoffman (aka @AdContrarian) points at the lovely hair shirt Emperor Adtech isn't wearing but says it is. Even reputable journalists believe it, too.

Maybe the reason political divisions haven't been this deep since the '60s and Vietnam is that now, like then, one side is simply wrong.  Back then supporting the Vietnam war was a huge mistake. Now supporting Trump is exactly the same.

Twitter didn't kill the First Amendment, as Tim Wu says here, but it sure didn't help.

The Swarm Project looks interesting.

The World Economic Forum on Bitcoin vs. Banks.

Kottke.org goes subscription. 

Here in Santa Barbara La Casa de la Raza now has its own FM station: KZAA/96.5. It's just 100 watts from the .org's headquarters in town. But it covers the city itself, which is the idea. Not much about it on the website, but there is a Facebook page too.

Always good to re-read Andrew Oldlyzko's Network Neutrality, Search Neutrality, and the Never-ending Conflict between Efficiency and Fairness in Markets. Andrew rocks at this stuff. I see some potential overlap between where Andrew goes and where Michael Elling has been for some time too: "If network A has 1 million users and network B has 1000 users, the value of network B to network A is up to 2000x greater with terminating settlement than with just bill and keep, or no settlement. Therefore it is in A’s interest to 'fund' B’s network via a terminating settlement to capture and retain that increased value. This is also known as the network effect or Metcalfe's law."

Adam Gopnik: "What we should fear is not a deep state but a state robbed of its depth."

Let them eat content

Study: Fake News Threatens Audience Trust In Digital Pubs, by Sara Guaglione (@SPGuaglione) in MediaPost, correctly laments exactly the point its headline makes. Yet stories like this, good as they are, also misdirect attention from another story that's closer to home: how "content marketing" pays publishers to undermine trust in themselves.*

For example, in my email subscription to Google News for articles about ad blocking, the big G sent me to this piece of non-news in The Drum: Header bidding is the future of publisher income says Sovrn’s chief marketing officer. The smaller print says Sponsored by: Sovrn. The CMO has Manafort smile. Not good.

Then there's AdAge's "data driven TV" story. I just noticed some small print that says it's from "publishing partner" AT&T AdWorks. The byline says "By Rick Welday, President, AT&T AdWorks."

So let's look at the collateral damage here, both to the reputations of publishers who run this kind of shit, and to journalism itself.

To me as a reader, the two items above cost The Drum and AdAge my trust and respect for them. (Slightly less so for The New Yorker, which runs one clearly marked "Paid Post" in its daily emailings. I get why they do it—for the money—but those two words make sure I won't read it.)

As for journalism, there's my personal experience. For example, in this post yesterday I said I want big-name publishers who can afford to pay journalists to do exactly that. In a perfectly tweeted response, @dmarti tells publishers, "When you don't pay, you get "how and why you should buy stuff from http://example.com " by #contentMarketers at http://example.com."

Now I'm wondering if The Drum and AdAge pay free-lancers at all. I'll bet they don't, because that's the clear message a publisher sends with every (literally) fake news piece some content marketer pays a publisher to post.

Bonus links:

1. Cluetrain's New Clue #66, which says "...how about calling 'native ads by any of their real names: 'product placement,' 'advertorial,' or 'fake fucking news'?"
2. On "native" advertising, which calls content marketing "a Borg that wants to assimilate all the media it pays to fill with itself."

*To Sara Guaglione's and MediaPost's great credit, their latest is Domino Opens Office Sponsored By Brands. (Disambiguation: Domino is a magazine about interior decor. Domino's delivers pizza.) Pull-quote: 

The new office is not just a stylish workplace for Domino’s employees. CRO Beth Brenner told PD the space also acts as a studio for the magazine's content and can highlight their brand partners. A “large paid deal” with Bosch, for example, is behind the appliances in Domino’s kitchen, which are also featured in an online series, Brenner said.

Maybe my headline should have been Souls For Sale.

Dis Content

This morning an editor with a big-name magazine asked me by email if I would write an op-ed for it. When I asked what they paid, he replied, "We can’t pay for content unfortunately," adding, "We’ve actually found someone else to write this in the meantime, so let’s stand down. Hopefully next time!"

There won't be a next time. First, I refuse to contribute free labor to a magazine with a brand as august (or so I assumed) as this one. Second, I don't write "content." The reason is illustrated in the graphic here. (The full-size original accompanied How True Advertising Can Save Journalism From Drowning in a Sea of Content.)

I gather the magazine is also funded entirely by adtech, since Privacy Badger detects an unusually high number of trackers on its index page alone: 81.

The free work I'm glad to do is saving publishing. I want to do that by bringing the incentives of readers, writers, publishers and sponsors into alignment. More about all that in this series here.

Rolling notes du jour

Scott Adams tweets his endorsement of the cryptocurrency movement. Here's his post. I find his pro-Trump stuff fascinating and insufferable at the same time (for reasons that require more time and braining than I'm willing to commit right now). This, however, is different. Not sure how, but it is. By the way, this is his girlfriend. Just sharing facts here. You can't have opinions about facts. (For thus spake Prof. Peter Schickele on this album, which I still have somewhere.)

Yesterday on my main blog, I posted Revolutions take time. This morning I appended a long comment, following an observant question by a reader.

A video, shot last month at the University of Southampton in the UK, in which I bring Eric and Marshall Mcluhan's tetrad of media effects to bear on The Future of Text and on digital life in general.

Nikon is closing a plant for making entry level cameras: a market 90% eaten by smartphones.

Joi Ito on resisting reduction. He goes deep: "In order to effectively respond to the significant scientific challenges of our times, I believe we must view the world as many interconnected, complex, self-adaptive systems across scales and dimensions that are unknowable and largely inseparable from the observer and the designer. In other words, we are participants in multiple evolutionary systems with different fitness landscapes at different scales, from our microbes to our individual identities to society and our species. Individuals themselves are systems composed of systems of systems, such as the cells in our bodies that behave more like system-level designers than we do." Very good stuff. Dig it.

9spokes (@9spokes) looks like a very cool dashboard for small business, which is nearly all business. I assume it works with Xero and Quickbooks, and see possibilities for Lemeno.us as well.

Now that Walmart will be tracking me for the purposes of selling adtech trained on my ass by Walmart's own crosshairs, the chances I'll ever shop there are verging toward zero.

Superteams aren't, it seems. The Cavaliers lost at home, bigly, to the Knicks last night. The Patriots yesterday were a few dumb moves and bad calls away from losing at home to the Chargers. The Warriors lost at home for the second time in a young season, this time to the Pistons.

Distractions du jour

We've passed peak venture capital. No mention of ICOs.

Interesting to note the prevalence of saloons among businesses listed in Fremont County, Wyoming in 1890.

No surprise that MySpace, which apparently still exists, is fulla fraud.

Hierarchy is bad.

The Coalition for Better Ads (which nobody on the receiving end wants, expects or cares about) still thinks the problem is "annoying"ad formats rather than boundless tracking.

Oracle, which makes one of its livings doing creepy personalization, asks a question about when that happens.

Here's a Guardian feature on a Danish video that does the best job I've seen of demonstrating the problem. Irony::::: according to Privacy Badger, the Guardian was at the same time attempting to follow me with 27 potential trackers.

Yuval Noah Harari video interview. Bookmarked here. Haven't seen it yet. Tomorrow, then.

Is numeracy natural or not? I say if it happens in nature, it's natural.

I hate "the platform economy." Not the article linked to there. That's fine. Just the notion that it's a Good Thing. It's not.

This lamp comes on every time Trump tweets. Watch it without the music. Or save the time. I just told you enough.

If Trump is a black hole, will this let you escape?

More on advertising and what sucks about it

The Onion: Future of Advertising is More and Better Advertising, Advertising Industry Says. Just kidding. The Onion didn't say that, and the link goes to my anti-bullshit series on advertising. More fodder follows. 

Top Ten Reasons Why Online Advertising Must Change, by the great Bob Hoffman, aka @AdContrarian and author of Bad Men and other good books. Why isn't this in AdAge or MediaPost? Sorry, dumb question. We all know why. Colonel Jessup explains.

Juniper Research in BusinessWire: Digital Advertising Spend to Reach $420 billion, Despite Impact of Ad Blockers.

Speaking of ad blockers, says here: 1) According to GobalWebIndex,t 37% of all mobile users, worldwide, were blocking ads by January of 2016, and another 42% would like to; 2) There are than 4.77 billion mobile phone users in the world today; 3) 37% of 4.77 billion is more than 1.7 billion; and 4) that's more than 2x the population of the Western Hemisphere (565.265 million in North America and 420.458 in South America). And that's just mobile devices.

White Ops Predicts that up to $3.5 Billion in Ad Spend Could be Lost to Fraud in Q4. Champion investor Michael Burry in The Big Short: "One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud." Hm.

IAB: Online Video Spend Overtakes Banner Ads for First Time. As if anybody on the receiving end likes either of them.

Forbes: What Is the Right Response By Marketers To The Rise Of Mobile Ad Blocking? By Brian Handly, CEO of Reveal Mobile, "which helps companies generate more revenue via highly accurate location data," for the Forbes Technology Council Elite ("CIOs, CTOs & execs offer firsthand insights on tech & business"). How about respecting what is clearly the biggest boycott in human hstory? (But they won't. See Col. Jessup, above.)

LA Times: Why bad ads deserve to die, and what might replace them. Completely misses the tracking issue. By the way, the LA Times is one of the worst tracking offenders. My browser reports "Privacy Badger detected 49 potential trackers on this page."

Mediapost: "GDPR is like a meteorite hurtling toward earth." Yep. Like I say here, with another metaphor.

Mediatel: TV sponsorship - the answer to all of advertising's woes? Answer: no, but to some.

Business Insider: Google's plan to block some ads has ad-tech companies scrambling — and calling it a dictator. This is like a bad bug zapper arguing with doomed bugs.

Recode: Former Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile wants to save the media industry by blocking ads—His new startup, Scroll, will charge consumers once for an ad-free experience across many news sites on all platforms. Bookmarked: need to know more about this one.

TPM: Josh Marshall on what Apple is doing against advertising. This one too.

AdAge: HOW TO TRANSFORM YOUR TRADITIONAL SELL-SIDE AD ORGANIZATION. That's what we used to call the "publishing" or the "advertising" department. It's what mostly got fired when adtech showed up.

A Triumph of French Genius Over French Engineering

On a Facebook thread I was reminded that I drove a '66 Peugeot 404 wagon from '69 to '74.  So I thought I'd share a very late review of the thing.

Positives: enormous room in back, comfortable seats, great ground clearance and the ability to go pretty much anywhere, when it ran.

Negatives: screw-on hubcaps, ease-of-rust, dashboard vents that collected water from outside and dumped it on your feet soon as the car started to move, a distributor cap that kept cracking, failing window cranks, spark plugs hidden inside the valve cover at the base end of easily cracked bakelite sleeves, a pointless resonator tank thing above the exhaust manifold that fell apart easily, impossible to start on cold winter days unless one (no kidding) heated the engine compartment for a few minutes with a blowtorch.

I sold it for almost nothing after driving it from New Jersey to North Carolina. During that trip the resonator on the exhaust manifold fell apart, meaning actual explosions in the engine blasted unmuffled into the car, along with exhaust as well. The noise also echoed off the pavement and up through holes in the floor that got larger through the trip as rusty pieces seemed to fall off on every bump.

I would be amazed if any of these cars are still on the road anywhere.

How long before the main selling point of a car is that it doesn't spy on you?

Neustar, J.D. Power Partner For Data Tracking, writes Tanya Gazdik (@TanyaGazdik) in Mediapost. Excerpt:

Neustar has had long-standing relationships with automotive clients and has invested heavily in providing advertisers with audiences that are based on the behaviors, psychographics and demographics of real people to increase digital advertising relevance.
The partnership with J.D. Power, an industry-recognized expert in automotive, will offer the first-ever automotive audiences powered by near real-time transaction data. It will combine J.D. Power’s PIN data (lease data, incentive buyers, cash buyers, down-payment, make, model, series data) and Neustar’s identity mapping capabilities – taking PIN data and matching it to the household level. It will give advertisers best-in-class actionable audiences for targeting across offline and online channels, including mobile, OTT and addressable TV, says Julie Fleischer, vice president of product marketing at Neustar.

My comment, the only one there so far: 

This is hideous.
Can you imagine a car ad that features the "digital advertising relevance" people want because their "behaviors, psychographics and demographics" are being tracked?
The simple fact is that nobody buys a car to be in the "audience" for anything, least of all when they are in a "microsegment" of one. They buy cars to drive and ride.
Want to know why 1.7 billion people now block ads on their digital devces? Because of crap like this.
By the way, the E.U. has made this kind of thing pretty much illegal, with potentially huge fines for privacy violations, starting next May 25. And U.S. companies can be fined if infractions are against European citizens, no matter where they are, including in U.S. cars. Stay tuned for more on that. The news will only get more dire for deals like this one.
Bonus link: http://j.mp/adbwars.

An easy fix for a broken system

AdAge makes an understandable mistake in ANA pulls an ad that mistakenly landed on Breitbart via programmatic buy, by E.J. Schultz. That mistake is assuming that the ad in question was placed by mistake.

In fact the system probably worked in exactly the way it was designed to.

In other words, the ANA's programmatic buy wanted to place ads in front of readers who fit a certain multi-factor profile, and at least one of those readers showed up at Breitbart, where the ad was placed there specifically for them.

See, if the ANA wants to hit, say, a typical Wall Street Journal reader with an ad, and the programmatic system finds that kind of reader on Breitbart, the system shoots an ad at that reader in Breitbart.

In a brilliant post on how all this works, Don Marti sources Walt Mossberg's description of how blatantly fucky to everybody this all is:

[W]e were seated next to the head of this advertising company, who said to me something like, “Well, I really always liked AllThingsD and in your first week I think Recode’s produced some really interesting stuff.” And I said, “Great, so you’re going to advertise there, right? Or place ads there.” And he said, “Well, let me just tell you the truth. We’re going to place ads there for a little bit, we’re going to drop cookies, we’re going to figure out who your readers are, we’re going to find out what other websites they go to that are way cheaper than your website and then we’re gonna pull our ads from your website and move them there.”

Only programmatic adtech makes this possible, and it's essential to know it's not advertising as we used to know it, but only looks that way. As with magic, it's pure misdirection.

What we miss is that adtech isn't advertising. It just magically looks that way.

Let's examine the differences.

In the old advertising world, advertising wasn't personal. It was aimed at populations defined by the media people read, watched or listened to. Advertisers sponsored those media directly, because they wanted to reach the kinds of readers, viewers and listeners who liked particular papers, magazines, radio and TV stations, networks and programs.

Sponsor is what they did, and that's what Walt Mossberg heard that Recode wasn't going to get from programmatic adtech—straight from the magician's  mouth.

With programmatic adtech (tracking-based advertising), ads follow eyeballs. In the online print world, readers are tagged with spyware in their browsers or apps and tracked like animals. Personal data and metadata about those readers are harvested and munched by machines, which place ads against profiles of reader types, no matter where they show up.

The result on the receiving end looks like old-fashioned advertising, but it's really direct response marketing (née direct mail, aka junk mail), which has always wanted to get personal, has always demanded that every ad get direct results, and has always excused massive negative externalities, such as the simple fact that people fucking hate it. 

But nearly everybody covering the industry falls for it. So does the industry itself. As I wrote in Separating Advertising's Wheat and Chaff, "Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself."

And the misdirection works.

Jennifer (@marketeer2u) fell for it when she tweeted ".@ANAmarketers NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Your ads are running on Breitbart. Fix it. @slpng_giants." So does Sleeping Giants in their campaign against "racist and sexist media," because they think the problem lies with advertisers. But the advertiser has little or no control, as long as they distribute ads through eyeball-chasing adtech.

But they do have control if they go back to sponsoring publications directly. As I suggest in Let's get some things straight about publishing and advertising, we need a word, a symbol or a hashtag that says an ad is not tracking-based adtech. There I suggest #SafeAd.

Programmatic at best can only blacklist a site like Breitbart, and program that blacklist into one or more of the thousands of systems that might aim an ad (and many may be in the supply chain between advertiser, agency and publication). But that's not going to fix the problem. Advertisers need to fire adtech. Simple as that. This is what AdAge, the ANA, Sleeping Giants and everybody else who wants to save advertising's ass should be urging.

Adtech is a cancer on advertisers, publishers, and everybody it tracks.

We already have one form of chemo in ad blocking. According to PageFair’s 2017 Adblock Report, at least 11% of the world’s population is now blocking ads on at least 615 million devices. According to GlobalWebIndex, 37% of all mobile users, worldwide, were blocking ads by January of 2016, and another 42% would like to. With more than 4.77 billion mobile phone users in the world by 2017, that means more than 1.7 billion people are blocking ads already: a sum exceeding the population of the Western Hemisphere.

This easily amounts to the biggest boycott in human history. Yet a measure of the industry's cluelessness is that it treats ad blocking as a problem rather than as a clear and legitimate signal of demand by the marketplace for something better. Which they had in plain old-fashioned media-sponsoring brand advertising, before they let their brains get eaten by adtech.

It's no coincidence that ad blocking took off in 2012-13, when the advertising and publishing businesses together gave the middle finger to Do Not Track, which was never more than a polite request for what in the offline world we call good manners. (Think about it: what customer visiting a store would want to leave with a tracking beacon stuck to their butt like a wood tick, reporting their activities back to parties unknown, just so they can get a better "advertising experience" or whatever?) Its also no coincidence that the rise in ad blocking also traced the rise in retargeting by adtech: an obvious reveal that one is being followed. (Woman Stalked Across Eight Websites By Obsessed Shoe Advertisement is a typically right-on Onion story.)

And don't fall for the story that tracking-based ads are "acceptable" as long as they aren't annoying." That's just more misdirection.

From Brands need to fire adtech:

It’s adtech that spies on people and violates their privacy. It’s adtech that’s full of fraud and a vector for malware. It’s adtech that incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism. It’s adtech that gives fake news a business model, because fake news is easier to produce than the real kind, and adtech will pay anybody a bounty for hauling in eyeballs.

Oh, and a $trillion or so has been spent so far on adtech without one single familiar brand being made by it. Yet plenty of brands have been harmed by it. For example, the ANA itself in the case AdAge reports.

The advertising business can't save itself. It needs help from the very people it intends to reach. That's why I co-founded Customer Commons, and why we're working on terms any one of us can assert that are friendly to advertisers and publishers. The first, called #NoStalking, says "Just show me ads not based on tracking me." Nothing could be simpler, more do-able or more far-reaching.

We'll also need this fix before the GDPR, Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, comes into effect next May, with potentially enormous fines for spying on EU citizens, no matter where those citizens' eyeballs may be.

I explain exactly what we need to do here. I'm hoping friends old and new in the publishing and advertising businesses (to both of which I've devoted much of my life) will join us next week at VRM Day and IIW, where we'll be working on solving exactly this problem.

Also on the table will be what Don Marti calls for. "Measure the tracking-protected audience," he says. "You can’t sell advertising without data on who the audience is. Much of that data will have to come from the tracking-protected audience. When quality sites share tracking protection data with advertisers, that helps expose the adfraud that intermediaries have no incentive to track down."

Apps killed by iOS 11 that I miss

Seismograph

The original Bejeweled

Iapetus

How do I get my music library back on my Apple devices?

iOS 11 moved my music library to the cloud. This makes the Music app useless—

• on planes
• on oceans
• anywhere with no or limited cloud access, which rounds to most of the world's surface

Since I travel where there's no or little cloud access, I want my music library back on my iPhone, iPad and laptop music apps.

How do I get this?

AppleCare doesn't know.

Geeks at the nearby Apple store don't know.

Somebody must know.

Please tell me. Thanks.

#ThingsThatSuck

All printers.

All USB hubs.

The fucking cloud.

iTunes (which has now moved all my music to the fucking cloud, so I have to download what I want before I can listen to it on planes, subways, oceans and Wyoming).

Bluetooth.

USB Micro-B connectors and jacks.

Proprietary apps you can't get rid of.

Purposely slow upstream.

"Plans" with data caps.

iOS, or what's become of it.

The gone headphone hole.

The gone MagSafe power connector.

The gone function keys.

The gone SD card reader.

Power cables in two sections: one that can be easily wound for storage, and the other that can't be wound at all because it's too thick and stiff.

Trackpads that are too small (e.g. on the Apple TV remote) or too big (e.g. on the new Apple laptops).

Silos.

All cable and satellite TV set top boxes.

Adtech, and every other business and business model that relies on uninvited spying on people.

When some other party uses the first person possessive pronoun "my" for me, when it's really for them.

Absent cheap and easy offsite storage for people like me who have terabytes of data on drives scattered in places where the possibility of obliteration by fire or earthquake is greater than zero.

Absent good HD radios, or good new radios at all.

"Soundbars" for TV, which have eliminated the simple and clear sound stage that old-fashioned stereo provided for decades.

Books too big for shelves.

All "infotainment" systems in cars.

Wipers that keep wiping a few more times after you turn them off.

Little shitty power supplies for big honking external drives.

Un-illuminated (or -illuminating) grey labels on black electronic devices likely to be used in dark rooms or spaces, such as remote controls and entertainment gear.

All light switches with dimmer gimmicks that will be obsolete and non-replaceable within a few years.

Car seats designed only for people in the middle 60% of the bell curve for body heights.

Overly rounded and faux muscle-shape body types in cars, which have together reduced storage space and views outward, especially to the rear.

The persistent belief that "spectrum" is scarce and requires federal controls, along with auctions for rights to use parts of it, which is like selling colors of sunlight.

Burners on home gas stoves that could heat a warehouse but won't simmer.

All microwave oven UIs.

The fact that it's 2017 and we're still using logins and passwords.

Movies worth re-watching

The 86 Most Rewatchable Movies Of All Time says more about BuzzFeed and its readers than it does about movies.

FWIW, I've seen 35 out of the 86.  Love a few (e.g. Princess Bride), walked out of one (Home Alone), and punched out of a few (e.g. Labyrinth) when they were on the small screen.

My own list, just off the top of my head: Godfathers I and II, The Matrix (Matrices? ... mostly the first, but still the whole trilogy, since the story does have an arc), Princess Bride, E.T., Jaws, On the Waterfront, La La Land, Something About Mary, Unforgiven, The Green Mile, Searching for Sugar Man, Finding Vivian Meyer, Inception. This isn't "best movies," btw. It's the ones that, for me, bear re-watching.

There are many I'd like to see but never have. Fight Club and Mean Girls, for example. Others I've seen once and liked but don't feel the urge to see again. Interstellar is one.

I could go on, but this needs to be a deep long thread rather than a blog.

Apps I miss that iOS 11 killed

iSeismometer. It showed scrolls of vibrations on the X, Y and Z axes, all at once. None of the newer apps do that. You have to chose a view. I hate that. It's from ObjectGraph LLC, now 404'd.

The original Bejeweled. It didn't want to be Candy Crush, had an endless mode that was perfect for slow adults on subways

Iapetus. The world's tectonic history in three dimensions you could rotate.

2017_10_06 Links

Shades of Christo, at the Mexico border wall. On the Mexican side, of course.

Phil Windley on Distributed Ledger Technologies in Decentralized Identity.

Tom Petty on SiriusXM. Great for fans. FWIW, I always thought that Petty was as important an artist as Springsteen, but it was kind of like the Stones vs. the Beatles. Time will prove him out, though. He was a Real Deal.

An interview with Tim O'Reilly. This is my bookmark. I've already pre-ordered the book.

Europe's proposed e-privacy regulation.

Enabling Competition & Innovation on a City Fiber Network, from the Berkman Klein Center.

A freaking amazing conversation between Vinay Gupta and Scott Nelson in London recently. I was in a conversation with both a few days before this was recorded. This link unpacks the larger sense of that conversation, and gets it down on the record (to the degree there is one here, wherever this is).

Obama tried to warn Zuckerberg. That our democracy was hacked remains a proper outrage that isn't happening because we're all somatized by Too Much Information, which Duran Duran knew in what, '82 or something?

Some thoughts in not yet passing

From a note sent to some friends recently:

As a member of our chronological advance team, I can report that one grace of being young a long time is realizing you have no choice but to give without expectation of return, because the best you give will stay good far longer than you’ll be around to benefit from it.

My iPhone 5s seems to be out of gas. Now what?

I just finished restoring and upgrading my iPhone 5s to iOS 11.1. This took many tries during which I was told, in mid-fix, that my phone was disconnected. Now that all the apps are restored, I'll see how it goes, but I'm still not happy with the small size, slowness and poor photo colors that are now a feature of this old phone. 

I want a bigger phone, and one with a much better camera. My wife has a 6s and that's already a lot better. But I've A/B'd that with a 7 and liked the colors in the 7 much better. I haven't A/B'd the 7 with the 8, and all the comparisons I've seen so far have been between videos, and I care much less about that than I do about still photos.

Mostly what I'm interested in is differences in photo quality.

I'm also not taking Androids off the table, though I'm inclined to stay with the iPhone system.

A customer service moment

An excerpt from my answers to survey questions from Cox, my cable Internet provider in Santa Barbara...The person on the phone was terrific. Very helpful. But note that I needed to call because I couldn't solve login problems on the website, nor get an answer to five questions: 1) Do all service plans have data caps? 2) Am I better off with my current plan? 3) Do I need a new modem to get the "ultimate" upstream of 30MBps? 4) Is there hope of getting more upstream than 30MBps without fiber? 5) Is fiber coming to Santa Barbara? (The answers were yes, yes, yes, yes and doesn't look like it.)

Only VRM can fix CRM

Which is better for the economy—

1) For every company to control its relationships with all its customers in its own way? or

2) For every customer to control her relationships with all her companies in her own way?

What we get with the first is what @JohnBattelle complains about in Why the F*ck Can't We Fix "CRM"? 

What we get with the second is VRM: Vendor Relationship Management.

What CRM gives the economy is a zillion different companies trying to manage relationships with customers in a zillion different ways, even if they all use one company's (e.g. Salesforce's or Oracle's) software or cloud services. 

That's the first reason why CRM can't fix itself. Not matter how much better CRM makes "the customer journey" or "the customer experience," it's just one comppany's way.

Clicklings

One reason I use shortlinks is to see how many clicks something gets. 

http://bit.ly/chlngrt, a shortlink for Accidental Lessons: Reflections on the Challenger Tragedy, has had nine clicks in the 47 minutes that have passed since I posted it, and then tweeted pointage to it.

I'm posting this here only to mark something in time. Not because I'm drawing conclusions from it.

Perspective: yesterday my Flickr site got more than 8500 visits.

A small tribute

Bummed  to hear Don Williams has died. He was one of the truly great country music composers and performers. One of Don's songs, Amanda (written by Waylon Jennings), was a big hit for the country radio station I worked at in the early 70s. There's a female backup vocal on it, gently rising two octaves or more above Don's baritone, sung only during the word "Amanda," that still haunts me. Listen to it at the link above. Doesn't get more country than that, and I mean that in every good way.

He was 78 and had a good long life, at least for a smoker. (See the image at the first link.) Now 70 and still young, I can't help noticing that most of the people my age that I once knew and are now dead were smokers, and the ones still with us either quit long ago or never took it up. In fact I know nobody my age, or even within ten years of it, who still smokes.

A clever way to drop a pile of FM signals into the Salt Lake market

When I was driving up to watch the eclipse, I naturally (for me) took an interest in what was happening on radio along the way. I have way too much to report on that (and I probably never will report most of it), but I'll unpack one small discovery for the few (or none) of you who might be interested. It's from notes I took en route but didn't post because there was no connection.

Among the stations we heard heading through northeast Utah and southwest Wyoming was a collection of ten huge signals, all Class C (the biggest allowed, with 100,000 watts at 2000 feet above average terrain), most radiating on channels called Class A (107.1, 102.3, 103.1... ) which are normally reserved for local signals (max of 6000 watts at 300 feet), though the rules got more lax about that in recent years.

The site they transmit from, I discovered, is Humpy Peak in the Uintah mountains (far east of Salt Lake). They share a Shively 6016 panel antenna stacked 20 high (good sale for Shively), to maximize gain toward the horizon. All the stations put out 89,000 watts at 2,123 feet, which is equivalent to 100,000 at 2,000 feet, and they do it with transmitters that are just 7,900 watts eacj. While that's a good way to save watts, it's highly unusual. Almost... insincere. 

What are they really up to with this? I wondered. Is it just so all these signals can reach Evanston, Wyoming, population 12,000, 43 miles away and the only population center to which these giant signals have a clear shot? (FM stations want to be high up because FM is mostly a line-of-sight band.)

Here's the reason, and I'd love to know who thought it up.

See, while the signals of all these stations are terrain-shadowed in the Salt Lake market by the Wasatch Mountains, the site is close enough to put the predicted signals' primary service area over the Salt Lake metro, but far enough from Farnsworth Peak (home of all the big Salt Lake FMs) to allow Class C signals to drop in on second-adjacent channels, which are mostly those Class A's. That way all the Humpy Peak FMs can put up boosters, some with powers up to 20,000 watts, at elevated locations on the east side of Salt Lake, Provo and Ogden, to fill in that shadowed terrain, which is full of people and business.

I just read that one of those stations was just sold for $1.1 million. What the new owner got was those boosters. Not the giant place-holder signal serving mountain goats in the wilderness.

For the record, such as it is, the stations are KZNS-FM/97.5 Coalville UT, KYMV/100.7 Woodruff UT, KEGA/101.5 Oakley UT, KDUT/102.3 Randolph UT, KSQN/103.1 Coalville UT, KNIV104.7 Lyman, WY, KBMG/106.3 Evanston WY, KEGH/107.1 Woodruff UT and KUMT/107.9 Randolph UT.

Of those only KDUT, KBMG and KNIV don't have a raft of booster signals into the Salt Lake and adjacent valleys that are terrain-shadowed by the Wasatch Range from these powerful signals coming from the east.

A sale is also pending for KUMT, which will go to Brigham Young University. The booster for Provo is a highly directional 1.75kw one, radiating to the NNW from below the Y on the side of Y mountain, above the BYU campus.

A message for @Medium

What I like about Medium:

1. The WYSIWYG UI, and how easy it is to write there and to update what I write.
2. That it has no ads and no tracking. I cannot praise this highly enough.
3. That @Ev is principled about #2, and staying the course, even though he gets lots of shit about it. Hats off.
4. That it pays writers.

What I dislike about Medium:

1. The clapping thing. I hate ratings and heart-clicks already, but this is even worse. But that's me. Your sentiments may vary.
2. That every comment is also a standalone post in which, like it or not, the first line is the headline, whether or not the writer troubles to make it one. (Meaning what you see is not what you get, at least in this one case.) Also that comments are not threaded in some obvious way (unless I'm missing it).

Obviously, the former outweighs the latter or I wouldn't keep writing there.

@Ev, if you're reading this, love to talk. Been too long.

Getting a little prolific lately

Latest postings:

• Here's what P&G should do. (4 September 2017 in Medium. It answers a Marc Canter question posted in response to this set of earlier inline comments I wrote in response to this comment by Marc, which was in response to "Markets are about more than marketing," below.)
• We need customertech. Simple as that. (4 September 2017 in Medium. It’s also an answer to Francine Hardaway's comment under “Markets are more than marketing,” below.)
• Good news for publishers and advertisers fearing the GDPR (3 September in ProjectVRM).
• Markets are about more than marketing (2 September 2017 in Medium).
• Some new ways to look at infrastructure (30 August 2017 in Doc Searls Weblog)
• How the personal data extraction industry ends (27 August 2017 and 28 August 2017 in Medium).
• 2017_08_21 Total Solar Eclipse (21 August in flickr/photos/docsearls).
• 2017_08_21 Love Ranch Homestead (21 August in flickr/photos/docsearls).
• 2017_08_19 Ivanpah Solar Facility (19 August in flickr/photos/docsearls).
• 2017_08_19 Kolob Canyons (19 August in flickr/photos/docsearls).

All in a big rush to get stuff done before flying to the UK tomorrow. After that, Santa Barbara, NYC and points unknown.

Loose links float ships

How Facebook works: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-02/facebook-exposed-you-are-product, http://veekaybee.github.io/facebook-is-collecting-this/, 

The robot takeover: https://www.axios.com/report-retail-work-is-likely-to-vanish-2479270155.html

GDPR: http://www.osborneclarke.com/insights/the-gdpr-10-things-adtech-businesses-need-to-know/ , https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/pk_pdfs/whitepapers/Whitepaper_EU-Data-Protection.pdf, http://www.gdprsummit.london/, 

Ad blocking: https://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2017/32615/the-who-what-where-when-why-and-how-of-ad-blocking-infographic, 

Infrastructure: http://www.globalinfrastructureinitiative.com/voices/march-2017, 

Bullshit: http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/08/when-it-comes-to-the-academic-study-of-fake-news-bullshit-receptivity-is-a-thing/

Not gone and gone

I just discovered that 120 East 122nd Street in Harlem is still there.  It was the home of my great-great grandfather, Thomas Trainor, who came over from Ireland at 15 in 1820, had a carriage business at 200 West Broadway in Greenwich Village, and is buried with the wife he outlived and perhaps seven other family members, including two kids he outlived as well, in just two graves in one plot in Calvary Cemetery, the country's largest. (It's that giant field of headstones you pass through where the Long Island Expressway crosses the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.)

Dear Left: stand for something better than taking down statues. Here's one idea.

At a time when the U.S. is (or at least seems to be) growing more polarized than at any time since the Civil War approached, and when the two poles need more than ever to understand each other, and to respect what the other pole knows best (and not just what the other pole believes—a subtle and important distinction), maybe the dumbest thing the left pole can do is start taking down, defacing and (o shit, there it is: hanging) statues. 

Andrew Young explains why. 

I'll add this: statues are symbols imbued with all kinds of deep and unspoken emotions: good, bad, too mixed to separate—and all to various degree historically inaccurate, regardless of what political point one views them from. They are also distractions away from the real work that needs to be done, starting with listening and caring. All you can do with them, at least politically, is attack or defend them. There are better things to do.

(The dumbest things the right pole did were to elect Trump and keep supporting him after it became vividly clear that he's a monomaniacal narcissist—in other words, everything Judith Donath, David Roth and Matt Taibbi say about him.)

Instead of taking down statues, the left needs to stand for what it knows best, which is good (not just bigger) government, caring about people, and civic life as a whole. None of this is well expressed on the left (least of all by the Democratic party), which would rather fight Trump and his most awful supporters: a sucker's game that Trump is much better at than they are. (He's one big attention sink, for everybody.)

What the left needs most to do begins with understanding what the right forgot when it repurposed itself (with talk radio and Fox News) around throwing shit at the left. Specifically, understanding business—especially the small kind.

Depending on where you draw the line, small business is between 97% and 99% of all business in the U.S. and at the high end of that range in the rest of the world. From Small is the New Big:

Nearly all of what happens in business is too small and ordinary for Wall Street to care much about. Same goes for investors, business reporters and politicians. Even economists don’t pay much attention. What they see are the waves and weather on the surface of the world’s economic ocean, when what matters most is the mass of water below... None of them want to grow their businesses any larger than they need to be. None thought about an exit when they started up. None call themselves “entrepreneurs,” or go to expensive conferences. Instead they socialize at bars, clubs, gyms, restaurants, churches, city parks, beaches, ball games and on the street. They tend to have roles rather than jobs. When you need one, you look for a mechanic, a painter, a lawyer or a driver. All of them also help each other out, side by side, face to face, in the physical world.

Of course this is an opportunity for both the left and the right. But the right abandoned small business when it moved its center of economic interest from Main Street to Wall Street, and decided that all business needed was "draining the swamp" and cutting taxes, especially for rich people.

What makes this an opportunity for the left is that it's a new place it can care about people. And the opportunity is there at all levels of government, from local on up.

I don't know if that's possible, since I've always been amazed (as a political independent who has leaned left since fighting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War in the '60s) at how little the left understands business, or outright dislikes it.

But I'm telling ya, the opportunity is there. Stop using "capitalism" as an epithet and start looking at ordinary people's business opportunities, as well as their problems. Look for paths to small business success. Create openings for both ordinary and exceptional business ambitions. And yes, put cutting taxes and government red tape on the table. Republicans are right about those, even though they care far less about those things than about getting funded by the Koch Brothers.

And please drop the statue thing, at least for now. It's bad strategy.

Bonus link from @GeorgeLakoff.

A good deal going from bad to wurst

The problem is Isaiah Thomas' hip.

If Isaiah(+Jae)-for-Kyrie deal falls through it will be an NBA-record clusterfuck. Isaiah and Jae don’t want to come back to the Celtics, and we know Kyrie still wants out of Cleveland. My guess is that the Celtics will throw in another draft pick just to get the deal all the way done.

BTW, Isaiah’s bad hip is just the first shoe to fall. (And with it that he’ll never be full strength again. Hope that's not true, but I think it is. I know hips.) The other shoe is that LeBron hasn’t been full strength since before the playoffs. An 80% LeBron is still super, but from what I saw late in the season something isn’t quite right with that guy and it hasn’t come out yet. But it’ll still help an 80% LeBron a lot to have even a 70% Isaiah on the floor. He may not move as well as he used to, but he still has infinite heart, and shoots the hell out of the ball.

The Cavs, btw, are still very scary. Their whole team, bench included, is pretty deep with name-brand talent. And betcha they’ll sign Dwayne Wade soon too.

Meanwhile, Boston, who are most of these guys?

Hells on wheels

In the last few days I've driven in California, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Utah, New York, New Jersey and New York, in that order. In that sampling, which totaled about 1800 miles, the clichés obtained. From what I saw, eastern urban driving is on the whole aggressive, though not always competitive. Drivers just want to make the light, merge, cut the other driver off, and honk. Western driving can get competitive, meaning there seem to be a lot of drivers who want to win, which they do by getting ahead of other cars and trucks. Speeding is even more standard than elsewhere, perhaps because posted speed limits are 70 and 75. There is also much less honking.

California drivers are, in my ample experience outside this trip, relatively polite, meaning they're more willing to let somebody cut in, or to wave somebody through an intersection. I think that's because 4-way stops are standard throughout California (far more than anywhere else I've been), and the protocols are well understood. Californians also understand that the official protocol for merging traffic is to alternate. This was not understood very well during our time in Wyoming, but all my evidence gathering was in the worst traffic jam in the state's history, when visitors in the dozens of thousands who came to see the eclipse departed en masse from their temporary stations from Lander east past Riverton and Shoshone. It took us six hours to creep west through those three towns, a distance of about 40 miles. License plates on the cars, trucks, campers and RVs we saw were from all over the West (with a few from the east, including our van, registered to Virginia but rented out of Santa Barbara). And it seemed like nobody other than folks with Wyoming plates were willing to let merging traffic in.

Strangest and most dangerous were the drivers eager to pass slower traffic that was already going the 70mph speed limit westbound on 2-lane Wyoming highway 28. We couldn't count how many cars passed on blind hills in oblivity to the possibility of oncoming cars they might hit head on. As my son said, they seemed to be motivated more by anger than impatience. After sitting for hours in stopped traffic, they were damned if they would let any opportunity to get ahead go by.

After so long on the road in that van, it was good to get back into our nice little new '05 Subaru in New York. It amazed me by starting right up and running perfectly. The only bummer was two months of sparrow guano and rotted juniper berries on the hood and the windshield. Next trip: New England next week.