Doc Searls's Blog, page 13

Overhearings

Strange but true enough. Why I've been farting less in 1996.

From the Undersecretaries of Overstate. My phone bings with notifications from my weather apps saying there is a Dense Fog Advisory in effect—just as the clouds part and vanish, opening a clear blue sky and a bright new day. Where weather forecasts used to say (on radio and TV, back when those still mattered) there would be "afternoon and evening thundershowers," we now get "SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING" sent to our phones. But maybe that will end after NOAA (and hell, the rest of Commerce) gets thrown into the wood chipper.

Not too oldie but still goodie.I was just reminded that I guested on Joseph Jaffe's podcast three years ago yesterday.  Starts about eleven minutes in at that link.

The Offing of What’s On

Parody of a page from TV Guide, circa 1978

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, the question was “What’s on the radio?” For the next five, it was “What’s on TV?”

Guidance toward answers were provided on newspaper pages covering entertainment, and in weekly magazines. The biggest of those was TV Giude, at its peak the most popular magazine in the U.S. *with 20 million customers, plus some multiple of pass-along readers.

In the guide were stations (such as those above), which belonged to networks. The biggest of those—CBS, NBC, and ABC—migrated over from radio. PBS and Fox came later.

To get TV stations, you needed an antenna. Rabbit ears worked if you had strong signals, but the picture looked best only if you had a roof antenna. The best of those looked like the skeleton of a 10-foot tuna on a spike:

A dead TV antenna I spotted recently in Oden, Indiana. The flat feed line says it dates from the 1970s or earlier. The tower was next to a house, and the antenna was about 40 feet above the ground. Back in the Analog Age, it probably got stations from Indianapolis, Louisville, Evansville, Terra Haute, and maybe even St. Louis. Here in the Digital Age, it would get a handful of signals from stations within about 50 miles, but nothing from the bigger markets.

In rural areas, you needed a big one, ideally high above the ground, on a tower of its own or strapped to a chimney, with a rotator so you could spin it around. The one I used in Chapel Hill, back in the ’70s and early ’80s, could get every station within two hundred miles. I got channel 7s from Washington, NC, and Roanoke, VA. On channel 3, I got Charlotte and Wilmington, both in NC.

Cable began as CATV—Community Antenna Television. When I lived in far northern New Jersey in the early ’70s, we were shadowed by terrain from New York City and Philadelphia signals, but our CATV provider gave us the 12 VHF channels of both cities. Gradually, cable companies added lots of channels that were cable-only. That gave folks a lot more answers to “What’s On?” and kept that era going.

But that era is mostly over, because optionality vergest on absolute. This happened because, as Clay Shirky put it,

Now you can produce a show on your phone almost as easily as you consume one on a TV. You can share it with the world on YouTube, Vimeo, your blog, or wherever. This is why there are more than fourteen billion videos on YouTube alone. There are also four and a half million podcasts, and countless millions of musical selections available over streaming services. Against all of this, broadcast radio and TV are dead technologies walking.

Interesting fact: What makes a TV a TV is its antenna connection:

Without that and the tuner inside, it’s just a monitor.

So let’s compare:

And that bottom line is where we’re at. “What’s on?” has become an archaic expression, like “prithee” and “forsooth.”

And we’re changed by that. As Marshall McLuhan is said to have said (yes, he meant it, but didn’t say it—see that last link), we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.

So, what’s our shape now? Are we becoming phono sapiens?

I think it’s more like… where are we now?

Clearly, we are in a state of massive optionality, but the mass itself is not optimized, and won’t be until we get much better control over our lives, and our personal data, than we have now.

For that we need personal AI. We don’t have it yet. Not the collective we, including all the Muggles.

The wizards are having fun with MCP, for example. Just learned oday about BrowserMCP. I’m eager to get going on KwaaiNet.

Anyway, it’s important to note in passing that What’s On is mostly Off.

 

Departments of Correction

Fortunately, we've already got it here: unlimited 2GB/s symmetrical service for $59/month. Bloomington's city fiber rollout has been paused by the mayor. Here's square's story about it, which is also in Bloomdocs—an example of a news commons at work.

One more reason to move off Chrome? A URL that begins with chrome-extension://efwhaddfugisallthisjiveepwnj/ before it gets to http:// is not a URL.

My record is about 20 feet—in opposite directions. And under furniture that's hard to move. You drop your AirPods case on a hard floor. How far do the pods fly away from their popped case?

Also wanted: knobs and switches. Buttons are coming back to dashboards.

Their advice: If you want mail to be postmarked today, hand it to a human at the window. Letters we dropped off through a slot at a Los Angeles post office on April 9 were not postmarked and sent until the 15th. The reason: they were slammed and shorthanded.

Re-reading Material

On our new digital age:
Some New Ways to Look at Infrastructure was the first draft of
What does the Internet make of us?, but is worth reading because the stuff about infrastructure mattered and was dropped in the second piece. (2017)
Will Our Digital Lives Leave a Fossil Record? (2020)
How early is Digital Life? (2020)

On the decline of over-the-air broadcasting:
The new business of free radio (2008, with additional remarks by Jonathan Marks)
What happens after TV's mainframe era ends next February? (2008)
What happens after TV's mainframe era ends next February? (2008)
Doc Searls on VRM and the future of radio (2009)
The past and future of radio (2010)
March Madness and radio's future (2010)
Why music radio is dying (2011)
How to rescue radio (2013)
The holy grail of radio (2013)
AM radio declared dead by BMW and Disney (2014)
A conversation with Doc Searls on the future of radio (2014)
How will WMAL survive losing its transmitter? (2015)
DIY radio with podcasting (2016)
The slow sidelining of over-the-air radio (2016)
FCC is just making a bad thing worse (2016)
Where Public Radio Still Rocks (2019)
How long will radio last (2020)
How the once mighty fall (about WMAL, above, in 2020)
A look at broadcast history happening (2023)
The Tall Tower Market Collapses (2024)
Radio's Death Knells (2025)
When TV Went Digital (2025)—a reposting of the second item from the top of this list, with some updates

TGI-Fi

Whole Lotta Badshit Going On. The latest 404 has a weekend worth of it.

Surprised this one didn't come sooner. Want the feds to stop funding public broadcasting? Fine. There's an argument for that. (I made one, way back in 2008.) But bias, which is everywhere (because the voice from nowhere is insincere and boring), claimed by POTUS, is the wrong reason. Woulda been better to just say public broadcasting should stand on its own. (Which, for the most part, it has been, for decades.)

Visitations

It's still creepy. World showed off its Orb a few years ago at IIW to approximately no applause at all. A lot seems to have happened since then. Here's what Wired says about it.

Such as the "@ username" in the Profile setting. I'm in a group zoom-like conference call (is it a "call"?  a "session"? not sure) on Signal, where I'm learning (partly on my own) how Signal is changing. For example, one has up to three IDs: the handle you use in conversations, your phone number, and an @username, which is new to me. There's an appearance feature that lets you hide it in case somebody gets unwelcome access to your unlocked phone. Other stuff too. My main issue with Signal is how different it is on the phone and on the computer. Also, the conference (zoom-like) thing needs chat. I don't see it there. Some things are still not clear to me, which is okay, I guess.

Old writing style, new habit. Wordland is easier than tweeting. Postings also go straight onto my blog, not onto some platform that (trust me, or Dave) that has to work hard not to enshittyfy itself.

That aren't by an AI. Writings about AI: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, & Co.: They Are Not Brains, They Are Kernel-Smoother Functions, "Attention", "Transformers", in Neural Network "Large Language Models", and everything here.

Same nightmare. David Strom expands on the privacy perils of the connected car. 

As I recall, anyway. Just learned from Bill Wendel that firstpodcasts.org exists, and is mostly right. 

The other Durant. Got some nice comments to The best 3-point shooter you never saw, which I posted four years ago.

Shall I try Kagi? Google search is woefully enshittified.

Grifting away

According to Joseph Cox at 404, the U.S. government registered the domains

thetrilliondollardinner.gov,dinnerforamerica.gov, andthetrillion.gov.

All of these (correct me if I’m wrong) are about enriching the U.S. president, his family, and favored friends through a memecoin scheme by which anyone (say, Putin) can buy influence.

There is nothing conservative about this. Nothing republican. Nothing that will make America, or anyone, great, much less again.

It’s a something with an intrinsic worth of nothing, and a scam straight out of the old playbook.

There is no pale beyond which shit like this cannot go.

Flyings

Neither here nor there, yet. At BWI, about to board an SWA flight to IND. There are thunderstorms between the airports and more on the way, but no delay so far. Meanwhile, this gives me  chance to talk weather apps. My current fave is Windy, which visualizes winds at all altitudes, real time lightning (with visuals and sounds), temperatures, satellite and radar imagery, changes past and future, and more. Second choice is Weatherbug.  I'd say more but need to board.

Of possible interest

In reply to the question "Which blog post took the most work?" the answer is From Hollywood Park Racetrack to SoFi Stadium, which spanned 2005 to 2024 and involved taking many dozens of aerial photographs on approach to LAX, doing research, and writing about it, hoping it helps historians along the way.

Two angles on one story. Noozhawk says Tri-County Produce, an independent local landmark store, has been saved by a longtime employee and his son. MSN says the purchase was made possible by local customers Eric and Wendy Schmidt.

Arendt called it terror. Steven Weber on radical uncertainty, in Barron's.

Signs of enshittification. SiriusXM's app sucks. It used to have Favorites, which were like buttons on an old car radio: a collection of channels you chose to put on a simple collection that you could arrange your own way. That's gone. Now the front of the app has Based on your morning listening and Channels for you below a bunch of tabs: For you, Music, Talk & Podcasts, Sports, and Howard. What used to be Favorites is now "Library" on the bottom right of the screen. These are topped by "New episodes," and then go down a list that changes based on… I don't know. Probably guesswork by an algorithm. Also on the bottom are Discover, Channels (remember those?), and Search. Imagine a grocery store where at the entrance you have to get past a pile of stuff that's some algorithm's guess at what you like, and everything you come for isn't where it was before, and won't be in the same place tomorrow. That's SiriusXM now.

The pain is coming. Am I seeing less marine traffic to the U.S. than ever? Looking for historical data. I'm sure many are digging deep into intermodal and logistics stats to gauge the effects of tariffs and economic uncertainties caused by White House wackiness. Got links? [Readers answered! Logistics Managers Index (and the latest stats), CNBC on falling traffic in Los Angeles and Long Beach. HT to old pal Chip Hoagland.]

Where safety is a slogan. Wired says your car is snitching on you. As Mozilla made clear almost two years ago, privacy is an inconvenience: for the car makers, for their commercial "partners," and for the cops. Consumer Reports says the same is true for TV makers.

Nice! I just noticed that Wordland now lists all my (too many) categories. Taking advantage of that now.

Today's title is how I view everything I write.

Terminations

Looks like The Terminator took out a bunch of Starlink satellites. (SpaceWeather.com)