When a whole business category is fubar, and its members together exemplify enshittification better than each does alone, I suggest we speak of their collectivity as a fecosystem. I’ve been u…

Join visiting scholar Doc Searls for the “Beyond the Web” salon series, presented by IU’s Ostrom Workshop and Hamilton Lugar School, explorin...

Anu Bradford’s book, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford, 2019), hardly exaggerates the EU’s influence. Many EU regulations have global reach, especially…

USGS: “This true-color image was taken by the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) sensor aboard the Landsat 7 satellite on September 12, 2001, at roughly 11:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Savings …

Shots of thunderstorm cells at sunset on a flight from Newark to Indianapolis.

Turing Testings Like “Goldie Boone,” whom I wrote about here last month, “Lana Azul” (above right) is a fake singer. Pure AI. Her music too, I suppose. I’m sure of it.…

How Claude marks AI-generated content is the most self-destructive utterance I’ve ever heard coming out of an AI company. Wow: When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imper…

The largest coming conflict in the new AI world is not the one between AI giants or the one between those giants and governments. It will be the conflict between containment and expansion of person…

Being old, I get lots of ads for Chair Tai Chi, Chair Yoga, and other positional challenges toward staying alive, limber, and not much closer to dead than you are without them. So this one occurred…

As Q&A with AI chatbots replaces search, the Web is starting to look run-down, and in some ways is being abandoned. If that continues, what happens to the Web’s architects, authors, and i…

This image is clipped from one in the story below, about how people in Sofia mark potholes so the city can debug them. In my Oofday post, I shared a post in Hackernoon titled We Treated Potholes Li…

Google Trends of searches over time. The agentic thing is hot right now. It also needs to be personal and not just corporate. In Know your .agent, Esther Dyson suggests that we need a DNS-like…

Today I flew from IND to DEN— Then from DEN to LAX— —Where I had plenty of time to fantasize about what could or should be done with the iconic but idle Theme Building in the heart of the airport, …

You can listen on your own time. That’s just one optionality. Near the end of this Pivot podcast, starting at about the 55 minute mark, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway give a great summary of…

Join us for an exciting talk given by Hardvard faculty fellow Judith Donath as part of the “Beyond the Web” salon series piloted by Ostrom...

There is no organisation on Earth with a more audacious purpose than this one: This isn't shooting for the Moon. It's shooting for the whole world of business. What Customer Commons wants to restore isn't just what was lost when the Internet got real. (For example, privacy.) Customer Commons also wants to restore personal agency…

Delhi street scene, July 5, 2018. I was invited by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, to contribute my thoughts to their latest study, tit…

David Weinberger once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” It’s the future now, and he was right, or close enough. Because today we live in a world w…

I’m kinda proud of the stars we’ve been bringing to our salon series here at Indiana University since 2021. And there are none I’m more excited to welcome than Helen Nissenbaum, w…

50+ weather layers, weather radar and satellite

The front page of today’s Los Angeles Times. I can read it, because I subscribe. I also recommend that everyone subscribe to newspapers, because facts still matter to those troubled entities,…

Surveillance pricing already has its own page in Wikipedia. It also has its own authority: Abbey Stemler, Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics and Weimer Faculty Fellow in Business Law &a…

That’s a screen grab of an email we’re sending out for the MyTerms launch in London. Links: To attend online: To attend in person: Be there in a Zoom square. Or in old-fashioned reality…

A trick for opening a stuck lid. I’ve been young a long time. My chronometer says 78.4685 years, which is long for a human but short for a rock. I know a lot of rocks. It helps to have perspe…

YouTube video by MyTerms

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

Bloomington Community Radio

Here’s the flyer for the next talk in our salon series here at Indiana University: Elettra is one of the most interesting, smart, accomplished, caring, and effective people I know. She is als…

That’s the case I’ll be making next Tuesday in a talk at Indiana University. The subject is big—maybe the biggest in your online life. That’s because MyTerms is the only way you&#…

As a devout window-sitter on planes, SeatGuru was a must-have for avoiding misaligned or absent windows on booked flights. But now it’s gone, because its owner, Tripadvisor, failed to keep it…

Surf’s up. North. Here is the auroral oval, right now: And here is the K Index, also via NOAA: Remember that the aurora’s curtains of light stand up to 800 miles above their base, about…

M.G. Siegler says AI is Breaking the Browser's Back. His problem starts with OpenAI's GPT Atlas, which some publishers won't let view their contents on the Web. For example, if you a…

What see ye? I shot the photo above last night on approach to SFO. My window seat was on the left side of the plane. Tell me where this is, what the two most standout features are, and what was hap…

Go to HUD.gov,  and you’ll get this: Go to USDA.gov, and you’ll get this: Seems to me these violate the Hatch Act, aka “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.” I…

In the natural world, privacy is a social contract: a tacit agreement that we respect others’ private spaces. We guard those spaces with the privacy tech we call clothing and shelter. We also…

The first thing R.C. Ward taught in our biology class at Guilford College was his eponymous Law: “If it works, it’s good.” He frequently mentioned Ward’s Law by name and req…

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We know more than we can tell. That was how Michael Polanyi distinguished between tacit and explicit knowing. We may know tacitly how we form speech, ride a bike, or sense when to shake hands with …

Having personal AI is like having a personal computer. It’s yours. It’s not AIaaS (AI as a Service), which is what we get from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, Meta, an…

When I read that some conversations with ChatGPT had appeared in Google searches, I did a search for “Doc Searls” ChatGPT and got a long and not-bad but not entirely accurate AI summary…

For the good of both. Customers need privacy, respect, and the ability to provide good and helpful information to the companies they deal with. The good clues customers bring can include far more than...

Pratik Joshi had been living in London for six years. A software professional, he’d long dreamed of building a life abroad for his wife and three young children, who stayed back in India. After...

A few decades back my teenage son and I approached Las Vegas at night while traveling south on Interstate 15. When the skyline of the city began sparkling into view, the kid said, “Wow. Think…

Trump will be flying Qatar One instead of (or as) Air Force One: Aaaand,,,, Call your mother, if she’s still around. If she’s not, remember her anyway. I did that here. I’m pointi…

For the final seven decades of the last millennium, most people in the developed world scheduled their evenings by answering a simple question: What’s on? For the first two of those decades, …

IEEE P7012, nicknamed MyTerms—much as IEEE 802.11 is nicknamed Wi-Fi—is a standard we expect to go from draft to done later this year. But that should not stop us from developing for it. Because what ...