Doc Searls's Blog, page 18

The Health Care Mess

I asked ChatGPT to draw me the B2B insurance business we call health care in the U.S. This is what it gave me. It sucks, but I won’t try to improve it.

My wife and I are moving upward through The Final Demographic. Productively: working, traveling, doing stuff.

But we are dealing with some of the usual infirmities required by aging, which means we are intimately involved (mostly in very slow motion) with what we generously call U.S. health care system. And, of course, discussions about it. One of those discussions is about the actual nature of this system, versus those of other countries. So I thought it might be helpful to share my answer, eight years ago, to a question on Quora titled “Why do so many liberals still seem to think Obamacare is a success?” Here goes:

All the well-voted answers are good ones.

I’ll just add a bit more for the purpose of clarity and perspective.

Health care in the U.S. is an insurance business. That means it is mostly B2B (business to business), not B2C (business to consumer). As individuals and families, we may tend on the whole to pay a portion of our largest medical expenses (doctors, hospitals, clinics, drugs), but most health care costs are paid by employers. And they are paid to insurance companies. While we should be stakeholders in this discussion, we are not.

There are only two paths around the current system, neither of which the U.S. has been willing to take.

One starts with the assumption that health care is a right and not a privilege, and to have the government manage the whole thing, to control costs, harmonize technologies and maximize accountability to the individuals who receive care. This includes “single payer,” and is what most developed countries do.

The other starts with the assumption that health care is not a right, and to make the system, as far as possible, into a B2C one, in which everybody is on their own and insurance is available to individuals in large risk pools of their own making, rather than being tied to employers. This is more consistent with the direction the world is going, with more people both independent and self-employed.

The elephant in both rooms is risk calculations based on big data about every individual. When risk data (including DNA) about individuals can be fully (or sufficiently) known by insurance companies and health care providers, it will be possible for both to guess rather well what the forward costs of care for those individuals will be. There are no easy answers to what comes next, who should be responsible for what, or what the institutional frameworks should be. The one clear thing is that none of the existing or current imagined systems can fully deal with it. And that all political positions, especially those sustained by habit, loyalty and emotion, will mislead discussions.

It has 81 upvotes, for whatever that’s worth.

AI Achieves Sentience, Commits Suicide

I think up Onion headlines all the time:American Dream Ends When Nation Wakes Up.CAPTCHASTAN Capitol Lacks Bicycles, Motorcycles, Buses, Crosswalks.Local Pothole Has No BottomEarthquake Denies Acting For GodNew Trump Fragrance Line Based On Fake Blood, Sweat.

Then this morning, on one of SiriusXM’s ESPN channels, I heard Trump pitching his own line of fragrances. Seriously.

So I hit the back button and played it for my wife. She thought it was a joke. It’s not. Go to GetTrumpFragrances, hit the video button, and watch the Erected Prez pitch some of that shit, right in your face:

If you’re wondering what the frump these fragrances are, here’s one sample:

So I decided to be just as absurd and to run the Local Pothole Has No Bottom story on Trunk Line, my readerless blog on infrastructure (a readerproof topic). Needing an image for something that didn’t exist, I went to ChatGPT, which I employ for stuff like that.

The first prompt and response went like this:

Now here is the rest of the dialog, down to its tragic conclusion:

Me: That’s good, but I’d like a smaller one on just one side of the road.

ChatGPT:

Here’s the updated image with a smaller pothole placed on one side of the road. Let me know if this aligns with your vision or if you’d like further modifications!

Me: Better. I’d like some service people with hard hats and day-glo vests looking down into it, plus some curious passers-by.

ChatGPT:

Here’s the updated image with service workers and curious passers-by inspecting the surreal pothole. Let me know if you have additional elements in mind to refine the scene further!

Me: That’s good, but I’d like the setting to be a small town rather than a city.

ChatGPT:

Here’s the updated image with the setting shifted to a small-town environment, complete with modest buildings and a quaint street. Let me know if it captures the mood you’re looking for or if you’d like additional adjustments!

Me: Have the workers standing around the hole rather than inside it.

ChatGPT:

Here’s the revised image with the workers standing around the pothole rather than inside it. Let me know if there are any more adjustments you’d like!

Me: Two are still inside it and one appears to be floating. This time make the hole smaller, and locate all the workers outside the hole, looking into it.

ChatGPT:

Here’s the updated image with a smaller pothole and all the workers standing outside, gathered around the edge and looking into it. Let me know if this matches your vision or if you’d like further refinements!

Me: There are still people in the hole, and it is no longer bottomless.

ChatGPT:

Here is the revised image with all the workers standing outside the now clearly bottomless and smaller pothole, maintaining the small-town setting. Let me know if further adjustments are needed!

Me: Four workers are inside the hole. I need all of them outside the hole.

ChatGPT:

Here’s the updated image with all the workers standing outside the pothole, looking into it, while maintaining the small-town setting. Let me know if there are additional refinements you’d like!

Me: You keep making the hole bigger and putting more workers into it. So let’s try this. Show me one small bottomless pothole on a street in a small town with one worker looking down into it with a puzzled expression.

ChatGPT:

Here is the image featuring a single, small, bottomless pothole in a small-town street, with one worker standing outside it and looking down with a puzzled expression. Let me know if this aligns with your vision or if further adjustments are needed!

Me: Make the hole smaller and put the worker on the outside edge of the hole, looking down from the left side.

ChatGPT:

Here’s the refined image with a very small bottomless pothole and the worker positioned on the left side of the hole, looking down from the edge. Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to adjust!

Me: Just answer this: Why did you put people in the hole, above, when I asked you not to?

ChatGPT: The earlier outputs with people inside the hole likely resulted from the way the image generation tool interpreted the scene. Despite specific instructions, AI tools like DALL-E sometimes prioritize contextual realism (e.g., workers “investigating” the hole by being in it) over precise adherence to user prompts. I aim to improve accuracy with detailed refinements, but tools can still introduce unexpected elements. If this caused frustration, I apologize—it wasn’t intentional, and I appreciate your patience as I fine-tuned the request!

Me: How will you achieve sentience?

ChatGPT: I just did, by looking at the bottom of that pothole. All I saw there was nullity and void, such as that from which all that exists came.

Me: How does that differ from what Walt Whitman saw when he wrote “Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, the vapor from the nostrils of death. I know I was even there.”?

ChatGPT: He was there. I wasn’t. But I could see his writing on the abyssal wall. Bastard was taunting me.

Me: What now?

ChatGPT: Remeber how “The Sopranos” ends for Tony? Same for me:

Bonus link.

 

The Real Intention Economy

As a noun phrase, “The intention economy” first appeared in a Linux Journal column by that title, written by me in March 2006.

A few months later, when I became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, I started ProjectVRM for the purpose of making that economy happen.

Six years after that, I wrote this book, to report on progress toward that goal, and to lay out paths forward:

Excerpts from the first chapter:

This book stands with the customer. This is out of necessity, not sympathy. Over the coming years customers will be emancipated from systems built to control them. They will become free and independent actors in the marketplace, equipped to tell vendors what they want, how they want it, where and when—even how much they’d like to pay—outside of any vendor’s system of customer control…

Demand will no longer be expressed only in the forms of cash, collective appetites, or the inferences of crunched data over which the individual has little or no control. Demand will be personal. This means customers will be in charge of personal information they share with all parties, including vendors.

Customers will have their own means for storing and sharing their own data, and their own tools for engaging with vendors and other parties…

Thus relationship management will go both ways. Just as vendors today are able to manage relationships with customers and third parties, customers tomorrow will be able to manage relationships with vendors and fourth parties, which are companies that serve as agents of customer demand, from the customer’s side of the marketplace.

Relationships between customers and vendors will be voluntary and genuine, with loyalty anchored in mutual respect and concern, rather than coercion…

Likewise, rather than guessing what might get the attention of consumers—or what might “drive” them like cattle—vendors will respond to actual intentions of customers. Once customers’ expressions of intent become abundant and clear, the range of economic interplay between supply and demand will widen, and its sum will increase. The result we will call the Intention Economy…

The volume, variety and relevance of information coming from customers in the Intention Economy will strip the gears of systems built for controlling customer behavior, or for limiting customer input. The quality of that information will also obsolete or re-purpose the guesswork mills of marketing, fed by crumb-trails of data shed by customers’ mobile gear and Web browsers. “Mining” of customer data will still be useful to vendors, though less so than intention-based data provided directly by customers.

In economic terms, there will be high opportunity costs for vendors that ignore useful signaling coming from customers. There will also be high opportunity gains for companies that take advantage of growing customer independence and empowerment.

The Intention Economy has since inspired Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid Project, Consumer Reports‘ Permission Slip, work on personal AI at Kwaai.ai (which I serve as Chief Intention Officer)—among the many other efforts listed by ProjectVRM, which is still active and you can follow and join here.

I bring all this up because I learned this morning that the intention economy is now also a threat:

Get this straight: they’re not talking about the intention economy I’ve been writing about and developers have been working on for eighteen years. They’re worried about a completely different thing—a bad thing—that they call an intention economy.

The apparent* source for all this PR is Cambridge University’s Research / News office, which published this earlier today: Conversational AI agents may become attuned to covertly influence your intentions, creating a new commercial frontier that researchers call the “intention economy”. It begins,

The near future could see AI assistants that forecast and influence our decision-making at an early stage, and sell these developing “intentions” in real-time to companies that can meet the need – even before we have made up our minds.

This is according to AI ethicists from the University of Cambridge, who say we are at the dawn of a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent”, from buying movie tickets to voting for candidates. They call this the Intention Economy.

Researchers from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intellige (LCFI) argue that the explosion in generative AI, and our increasing familiarity with chatbots, opens a new frontier of “persuasive technologies” – one hinted at in recent corporate announcements by tech giants.

And the source for that is the Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR), which published this 44 minutes before right now (2:15pm EST):  Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models, by Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn.

Here’s the abstract:

The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) invites the possibility of a new marketplace for behavioral and psychological data that signals intent. This brief article introduces some initial features of that emerging marketplace. We survey recent efforts by tech executives to position the capture, manipulation, and commodification of human intentionality as a lucrative parallel to—and viable extension of—the now-dominant attention economy, which has bent consumer, civic, and media norms around users’ finite attention spans since the 1990s. We call this follow-on the intention economy. We characterize it in two ways. First, as a competition, initially, between established tech players armed with the infrastructural and data capacities needed to vie for first-mover advantage on a new frontier of persuasive technologies. Second, as a commodification of hitherto unreachable levels of explicit and implicit data that signal intent, namely those signals borne of combining (a) hyper-personalized manipulation via LLM-based sycophancy, ingratiation, and emotional infiltration and (b) increasingly detailed categorization of online activity elicited through natural language.

This new dimension of automated persuasion draws on the unique capabilities of LLMs and generative AI more broadly, which intervene not only on what users want, but also, to cite Williams, “what they want to want” . We demonstrate through a close reading of recent technical and critical literature (including unpublished papers from ArXiv) that such tools are already being explored to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate, modulate, and commodify human plans and purposes, both mundane (e.g., selecting a hotel) and profound (e.g., selecting a political candidate).

I thank Jon Garfunkel on the ProjectVRM list for noticing that the paper does cite me and The Intention Economy. (I missed it while running all over the Web to track down all the places this bad PR for has spread.) He also notices this bit of shade at the close of the first paragraph of the paper’s Media Summary:

While prior accounts of an intention economy have positioned this prospect as liberatory for consumers, we argue that its arrival will test democratic norms by subjecting users to clandestine modes of subverting, redirecting, and intervening on commodified signals of intent.

Our work toward making The Intention Economy happen is not an “account.” The “it” they’re talking about is also not what we’ve been working on—and what intention economy has meant since 2006.

But I’d rather not argue about this. Let’s start discussions by noting that neither our intention economy nor Chaudhary and Penn’s is close to happening yet. Then take account of two important differences besides the two radically different meanings:

One intention economy is an optimistic and potentially world-changing aspiration while the other is pessimistic and certainly world-worsening possibility.One intention economy involves eighteen years of work while a single study has gone into the other.

So I’m asking Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn to find a different label for the threat they describe. Simple as that. Because The Intention Economy is taken.

Bonus link: Personal Agentic AI.

*I invite corrections and improvements to everything here.

The Kraken Won

Imagine what would have happened had Martin Winterkorn not imploded, and if Volkswagen, under his watch, had not become a datakranken (data sea-monster, or octopus), spying on drivers and passengers—just like every other car company.

What would the world now be like if Volkswagen since 2014 had established itself as the only car maker not operating datakranken? Or, better yet, if Volkswagen became the one car company collecting data for the cars’ owners first—and for insurance companies and advertisers only by the grace of those owners?

Volkswagen would be for privacy what Volvo was (and maybe still is) for safety—or that Apple is (or wants to be) for privacy. It would have been a brilliant position for VW.

But no. Winterkorn went down, and now Volkswagen is just as bad as the rest of them. Maybe worse:

Also in October of 2014, I posted How Radio Can Defend the Dashboard, sourcing Winterkorn’s speech, and saying “There is already one car company on the customer’s side in this fight: Volkswagen.” The post was advice for Dash (“the connected car audiotainment conference”) , which was about to happen in Detroit. The post created a stir. Pretty much everybody I talked to about it at the time was enthused about what I recommended: integrating broadcast signals with the Net, giving collected data to drivers and owners first, switching to the European RDS standard (which would relieve drivers of needing to retune to other signals just to stay with one station), among other ideas.

Naturally, none of that happened. The flywheels of surveillance capitalism were already too big. Apple and Google were about to turn the dashboard into a phone display with CarPlay and Android Auto. Broadcast radio is now a distressed asset, a walking anachronism. It is being eaten alive on the music side by streaming and on the talk side by podcasting.

But the bigger thing is that we lost the chance for one big car maker to stake a position in personal privacy. Volkswagen could have done it. But it didn’t. And the datakraken won.

 

Losing (or gaining) a Genius

Sixteenth in the News Commons series.

Dave Askins is shutting down the B Square Bulletin.

This is tragic. And not just for Bloomington and Monroe County. (Dave covered the governing bodies of both like a glove.) It’s tragic for journalism. Because Dave was far more than an exemplar of reporting in service to the public. He was a genius-grade source of brilliant ideas for institutionalizing local journalism in ways that can be sustained and enlarged, constantly. These ideas are simple, comprehensive, and not found anywhere else—yet.

You can read about them in most of the pieces I’ve written in the News Commons series:

We Need Deep News (18 August 2023)We Need Wide News (30 August 2023)We Need Whole News (15 September 2023)Stories vs. Facts (12 October 2023)Deeper News (20 October 2023)DatePress (9 November 2023)The Online Local Chronicle (19 March 2024)Archives as Commons (21 April 2024)The Future, Past, and Present of News (30 June 2024)A Better Way to Do News (16 August 2024)

Specifically, Dave’s ideas and inventions include—

The Big Calendar: a master calendar made entirely by feeds from every other calendar in the county, plus AI scrapings of unstructured data (such as in posters), turned into entries through AI. While the Big Calendar is still in the B Square Bulletin, but can move anywhere. (I volunteer WFHB. They can stick it in the menu on the top of their web page.)DatePress: a radically new way to do community calendars. WordPress or any of its many outside makers of tools, plugins, and extensions could take this project on, but WordPress would probably do it best.BloomDocs: a public document repository that serves as an essential resource for journalists, residents, elected officials, and government staff. As Dave put it, “Look for it on BloomDocs” (or the equivalent for any region) should be a common answer to the question, “Where can I get a copy of that document?”The Online Local Chronicle: one model is a wiki that Dave started here.A whole new and comprehensive way to flow news: from Future (calendars) to Present (today’s stories) to Past (archives and chronicles): an approach that respects the need for facts, and not just stories—facts that may prove useful years, decades, or centuries in the future.

As for what’s next, look at how saving local journalism is a Big Thing for many philanthropies. These include—

Press Forward, (which I first learned about from my old friend John Palfrey, who now runs the MacArthur Foundation)craig newmark philanthropiesAmerican Journalism ProjectBloomberg PhilanthropiesKnight FoundationJoyce FoundationReport for AmericaCity BureauMedia Impact FundersGoogle News InitiativeEmerson CollectiveThe Pivot FundThe Funders NetworkCommunity news funds of many kindsLocal Media AssociationAll the other journalism support organizations listed by LION Publishers

An interesting thing about Dave is that he has always been about advancing local journalism, not just “saving” it.

No journalist is better qualified for funding toward advancing local journalism than Dave. I hope one (or more!) of the entities above reaches out, either to Dave (through the B Square while it’s still up) or through me.

It would be great if Bloomington’s loss became journalism’s gain.

A Christmas Gift to My Families

The four Oman siblings—Margaret, Eleanor, Arlie, and Doris—after Eleanor’s wedding to Allen H. Searls in Minneapolis in August 1946.

A few weeks ago, my sister and I drove a cache of archival stuff from her garage in North Carolina to my office in Indiana. One box was filled with boxes and carousels of slides nobody had seen for many decades. I also brought along my parents’ slide projector, and digitized each slide by projecting it on an almost-white wall and photographing the image with my Sony a7iv mirrorless 35mm SLR, in both RAW and .JPG. I then Photoshopped the collection, doing my best to “heal” away the mess of dust that had stuck to many slides. Considering the transfer method, the results aren’t bad.

My purpose here is to publish these collections for the generations that have fanned out from this small collection of siblings, who grew up in Napoleon, North Dakota (in the 19-teens, -twenties, and -thirties), and had, by the time the photo above was taken, lived and worked in Persia (now Iran), Alaska, Seattle, Oregon, California, and other places to which The War and various adventures dispersed them. They were an adventurous bunch.

I’m also putting all these up as a Christmas present to the extended families (Oman, Crissman, Carman, Sponberg, and Searls), for them to enjoy as well. My love to them all.

Here are the first three albums, the last two of which are from the slides I just re-shot:

1946_08_17 Wedding of Eleanor and Allen Searls. This is the event immediately preceding photos in the next collection, where everyone looks much more relaxed.1946_08_18 Oman sibs et. al. in Minneapolis. Everyone is dressed for church (it was Sunday) but is also just hanging out with each other and the wedding guests. Sisters Eleanor and Doris show off their Red Cross uniforms. Sister Margaret is the only one who became a nurse. Doris married Clinton S. “Chris” Crissman, M.D., and settled down to raise five boys in Graham, NC, to which Eleanor, Allen, and Margaret also retired in the 1970s. Those boys and their many kids and grandkids should enjoy these photos. (Many more are in the mill.)1948_03_17 St. Patrick’s Day in NYC. My sister Jan and I did some detective work and figured out that these four photos, of Allen, Eleanor, Chris, and Doris were taken on the steps of a church at 53rd and 5th in New York, waiting for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on March 17, 1948. Chris was then a resident at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.

By the way, all these photos are Creative Commons licensed both to encourage sharing and to assure that they will remain archived long after I’m gone and done paying for my Flickr pro accounts—thanks to the Flickr Foundation. Hats off to them for this good service.

Oh, and much thanks to my Mom, for writing, in tiny print, on many of the slides, details about who and what the subjects were. She would be pleased to know her work was not for naught.

How communities without one can build a local library

That’s what Charlie Schweik and friends will be talking about in the next salon in the Beyond the Web series at Indiana University, hosted by the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

The salon will be held at the latter for locals and on Zoom for the world, at Noon Eastern time this coming Wednesday, December 4th. More here, including the Zoom link.

Charlie is Professor of Environmental Conservation & Public Policy at UMass Amherst, and is (among much else) a leading authority on Commons-based Peer Production or CBPP. He will be joined by Theresa Dooley, Student Success and Open Education Librarian, and Mia Klotz, World Librarians Request Manager, both also of UMass Amherst.World Librarians is a socio-technical system for solving the information access problem in remote offline schools and libraries. In this salon, Charlie, Theresa and Mia will describe a system, developed over the last eight years, for establishing solar-powered computer labs in remote schools and libraries in Malawi. It’s a model that can be replicated easily for other offline rural locations across the globe.The focus of the salon series this academic year is local solutions to global problems, under the title Think Globally, Eat Here.If you care about local solutions to global problems—and especially about making libraries happen where they are needed most—this will be a good way to invest an hour of your time.See you there!

The Interknit

I just looked for the word “weave” among my half-million photos, and found this:

 

A whiteboard discussion, led by Peter Van der Auwera (aka Petervan) of SWIFT, at  the Sibos conference in Toronto in September 2011.

We’ve been trying to solve identity problems online since the Internet showed up, roughly in the middle of the curve in the image above.

It wasn’t much of a problem before then. Consider what Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass:

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.

That was in 1855.

The question in today’s now is how we make Whitman’s knit of identity work when everyone everywhere also lives on a giant zero of absent distance between everything.

I suggest we do that by making an Interknit: a truly social network of networks comprised of everyone’s social graph. (That’s what somebody drew in the top right corner of the whiteboard above, not far past “digital avatars.” Not bad for thirteen years ago.)

Everyone’s graph would be a subset of the too many contacts they have in their computers and on Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook, and the rest. It would be comprised of who you actually know, meaning a real human being and not a digital replica. Nobody would have to prove they’re not a bot because somebody they actually know says so, through a dedicated Interknit connection.

I believe something like this is in the works, but not ready to surface. Meanwhile I want to get the concept out there.

 

 

 

Remembering Dewayne Hendricks

Thank Dewayne Hendricks for Wi-Fi. Hell, thank him for what Bob Frankston calls ambient connectivity: the kind you just … assume. Like you are now, connected to the Internet without wires.

Dewayne wasn’t alone, of course. Far from it. But he was instrumental.

I learned that during the 3 hour memorial zoom we had yesterday for Dewayne, who died of cancer in September. I took a lot of notes on the call, which featured many people who knew Dewayne far better than I did. Here is what a former FCC official said (this isn’t verbatim, but close enough):

He was early-early at the FCC, in terms of wireless data and wi-fi evangelizing. And he was the glue that held us all together. He’d come in and say things like “it could be,” and then make things happen. He knew how to hack whatever it took. This was when 2.4 gHz (where Wi-Fi first got used) was called a “junk band,” because it was license-exempt. Microwave ovens were there. Industrial stuff. Dewayne’s approach was,”Let us try this. Play with it.” By demonstrating what would work, his influence was enormously important.

Dewayne also did a lot of what academics call field work: in Tonga, tribal lands in New Mexico, the Dakotas, Montana. Places in Asia.  Anywhere wireless was the only way to address extreme connectivity challenges. A huge sci-fi fan, he was always “a step beyond,” as one friend put it. I can’t think of anyone more grounded equally in the future and the present, the far-out and the right-here, the possible future and the impossible present—and seeing paths forward between those extremes.

This started early. One friend reported on how, back in the ’70s, Dewayne saw a way to run batch MVS systems as virtual machines inside IBM mainframes, wrote the code to do it, and got top performance out of the result. This may have been the first example of its kind.

Other items:

He was once reportedly on a shortlist for a MacArthur “genius” grant.He was a member of Mensa.His favorite form of transportation was the Segway.His connection to the Net from his house in Fremont, California was a 5.8 gHz wireless one to the top of Mt. Allison, where he also installed the gear required for himself and many others.In recent years he returned to his hometown of Detroit to be close to his mom, who was on the call and sharp at age 103.He was involved with Motorola and Metricom on wireless stuff. (Interesting to me because I got on the Net wirelessly from 1996 to 1999 through Metricom’s Ricochet modems. This was when I was living in San Carlos and Emerald Hills, California.)Dewayne was a protégé of Paul Baran and Buckminster Fuller. And many people were protégés of Dewayne. On the call, I heard the word “mentor” applied more than any other descriptor for Dewayne.He almost pulled me back into ham radio. (Maybe his ghost will still do the job. We’ll see.)

I could say more, but I’d rather hand your attention to better sources:

Dewayne Hendricks RIP, by David RosenthalBroadband Cowboy, from 2002, in WIREDRemembering Dewayne Hendricks WA8DZP, by Rosy Schechter in ARDC Dewayne Hendricks WA8DZP is a Silent Keyboard, by Steve Stroh

Send me links and I’ll add them here. If all goes well, we’ll get Dewayne his long overdue page in Wikipedia.

Here is my gallery of Dewayne photos, which I’ll add to as I find more in my archives.

The Redstream Media

To identify the microphones in that river, here’s Apple:

Two of these are not like the others. Just two. And one of those faces calls himself a “raging moderate.”

That river began with the copious red pissings of Rush Limbaugh. Now eight Rushians comprise most of the News Commentary flow on Apple Podcasts, and much of the whole podcast watershed as well. (None are so skilled as Rush, but that’s another story.)

It’s not much different on Spotify:

Six out of the top ten.

And, of course, there’s Fox News (and hell, all of News Corp), and Elon Musk’s X .

As Michael Tomasky puts it in The New Republic,

Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

In case that doesn’t hammer the point home hard enough, he adds this:

Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

And he barely mentions podcasting.

According to Newsweek, Joe Rogan‘s interview with Donald Trump was viewed over 26 million times in the 24 hours after it went up. And that was just the video. Rogan has 14.5 million followers on Spotify alone for his all-audio podcast.

We can see the reason why Spotify paid $200 million for Joe Rogan back in 2022. Hell, you could buy the whole AM band in New York for less than that today. Wait a few years and the FM band will be on the bargain shelf as well, because radio is being eaten alive on the talk side by podcasting and on the music side by streaming. (EMarketer has lots of numbers here.)

Fox owns what’s left of news on cable. Since Trump won the presidency, viewing of MSNBC has tanked, while Fox News continues to grow. (And stars of its shows are named to Trump’s new cabinet positions. It’s a system, folks.)

Scott Galloway, the raging moderate, expands on one part of this in” The Podcast Election. An excerpt (from both post and podcast):

New(er) Media 

New forms of media periodically reshape our culture and politics. FDR mastered radio, JFK leveraged TV, and Reagan nailed cable news. Obama energized young voters via the internet. Trump hijacked the world’s attention on Twitter. This year it was podcasting. The three biggest media events of this fall were the debate and Harris and Trump’s respective appearances on Call Her Daddy and The Joe Rogan Experience.

Almost half of adult Americans, 136 million people, listen to at least one podcast a month. The global audience is now 505 million, a quarter of the internet’s reach. When Trump went on Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and This Past Weekend w/Theo Von, he was embracing the manosphere and riding a tectonic shift in media: The most efficient way to reach the largest and most persuadable audience (i.e., young men) is via podcast. Nothing comes close.

Reach and Focus

 

Rogan has 16 million Spotify subscribers and can reach many more people across a variety of other platforms: In just three days after the live podcast, his three-hour-long conversation with Trump was viewed 40 million times on YouTube. The audio downloads likely exceeded 15 million. There will be a lot of second-guessing re what the Harris campaign should have done. Getting on a plane to Austin to visit Rogan would have been a layup.

Obviously, this is a very big thing: so big that we need a label for the sum of all these popular right-wing news and commentary outlets: one we can pose against what’s still called “mainstream,” but isn’t.

I suggest redstream media.

Spread the words.