Doc Searls's Blog, page 25

Getting Us Wrong

Prompt: ” hardscrabble farms next to a suburb full of volvo station wagons”

Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called “Volvo Wagons” or something.

My current zip, in Bloomington, Indiana, features five out of PRIZM’s 68 numbered types:

48 Generation Web—Low Income Younger Family Mix47 Striving Selfies—Lower Midscale Middle Age Mostly w/o Kids15 New Homesteaders—Wealthy Middle Age Mostly w/ Kids51 Campers & Camo—Lower Midscale Middle Age Family Mix66 New Beginnings—Low Income Younger Family Mix

None of which describes me or my wife.

Sort of close is 05 – Country Squires: “Members of this segment fled the city life for the charms of small-town living. Many have executive jobs and live in recently built homes.” Except we didn’t flee and our home was built in  1899 or 1915. (Sources differ.) But we are building a house, so maybe that counts.

A bit closer is 20 – Empty Nests: “Most residents are over 65 years old, but they show no interest in a rest-home retirement. With their grown-up children out of the house they pursue active, and activist, lifestyles.”

But all of that stuff is just name-calling against typified populations—a form of -ism not much different than racism, sexism, or ageism. That’s why, on the receiving end, we tend not to like it, even if it brings us ‘relevant’ messages from sellers. (Which happens far less than sellers think.)

All of us are as different as our faces and voices. Being different than everybody—even ourselves five minutes ago—is among our most human qualities. We all grow and change constantly, whether we want to or not.

Marketing didn’t get that when PRIZM was invented in 1980, and it doesn’t get it today, for the simple reason that marketing was not built for talking to people. It was built for typifying people.

Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine, and I all thought there was hope for marketing when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999. We saw the Internet as a radically new way to connect the demand and supply sides of markets directly, and personally.

But marketing instead used the Internet to spy on people, and to typify them more than ever. PRIZM persists, entrenched as ever. And conversations among customers and marketers happen in two very different and disconnected echo chambers.

For a sense of how thoroughly disconnected those chambers are, see any of Tom Fishburne’s Marketoons. They’re brilliant and spot-on.

They also make clear, at least to me, that Cluetrain won’t prove right until marketing gets out of the way.

Which it won’t on its own. Our side—the customers’ side—needs to obsolesce it.

The image above was generated by the prompt in the caption under it, using what currently calls itself Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer (aka https://www.bing.com/images/create/), which persists Microsoft’s long tradition of creating aversive and unmemorable names for products.

A Moment of Applied Holiday Robotics

Bing Image Creator’s response to the prompt, “A baby with a halo in the arms of a robot, surrounded by a loving family at Christmas”

I asked ChatGPT and Bard to “List all Christmas holiday tunes in chronological order, by the year they were written, running from oldest at the top to the newest at the bottom.” ChatGPT gave me a lame list. Bard gave me a much better one, improved by my follow-ups. Here ya go:

While creating a definitive chronological list of every Christmas tune throughout history is near impossible, I can offer you a comprehensive, categorized timeline of notable Christmas music spanning centuries, from ancient hymns to modern-day pop hits. Keep in mind this is not an exhaustive list, and some dates may be approximate:

Pre-Renaissance Era (Before 1450)

4th Century: “Hymnus ad Natales Domine Jesu” (attributed to Hilary of Poitiers) – One of the earliest known Latin hymns referencing Jesus’ birth.13th Century: “In dulci jubilo” – Traditional German carol celebrating the joy of Christmas.14th Century: “O Come, All Ye Faithful” – Latin hymn, believed to be of English origin, later translated into many languages.

Renaissance Era (1450-1600)

15th Century: “There Is No Rose” – Traditional English carol referencing Mary as a “spotless rose.”15th Century: “Deck the Halls” – Welsh carol with pagan roots, originally a celebration of the winter solstice.

Baroque Era (1600-1750)

1642: “What Child Is This?” – English carol based on a poem by William Chatterton Dix.1678: “Silent Night” – German carol written by Franz Xaver Gruber and Joseph Mohr.

Classical Era (1750-1830)

1818: “O Holy Night” – French carol originally titled “Cantique de Noël” with lyrics by Placide Cappeau and music by Adolphe Adam.

Romantic Era (1830-1900)

1865: “Jingle Bells” – American song originally written by James Lord Pierpont with lyrics unrelated to Christmas.1874: “O Little Town of Bethlehem” – American carol written by Phillips Brooks.

20th Century and Beyond

1934: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” – American song written by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin for the Judy Garland film “Meet Me in St. Louis.”1942: “White Christmas” – American song written by Irving Berlin for the film “Holiday Inn.”1953: “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” – American rock and roll song written by Johnny Marks.1964: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” – American song written by Johnny Marks, based on the poem by Robert L. May.1973: “All I Want for Christmas Is You” – American pop song written and performed by Mariah Carey.1984: “Last Christmas” – English song written by George Michael for Wham!1994: “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” – American song written by J.C. Sprink and Haven Gillespie.2019: “All Is Well” – British song written and performed by James Arthur.

This list showcases the evolution of Christmas music through various eras and genres. Remember, Christmas music is constantly evolving, with new carols and songs emerging every year.

Happy Holidays!

Then, “What about A Chrismas Song, by Mel Tormé? Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas? Frosty the Snowman? Mary’s Boy Child?”

You’re absolutely right! I apologize for omitting those wonderful Christmas classics from my previous response. Here’s where they fit into the timeline:

1946: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” – As mentioned previously, this beloved song by Judy Garland was written in 1934 by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin.1951: “A Christmas Song” – This charming and introspective tune by Mel Tormé perfectly captures the bittersweet sentiment of Christmas.1950: “Frosty the Snowman” – Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson penned this playful Christmas carol about a jolly snowman in 1950.1956: “Mary’s Boy Child” – This moving gospel carol was written by Jester Hairston in 1956, based on an African American spiritual.

My apologies for the earlier oversight. These songs undoubtedly deserve their place among the cherished Christmas tunes throughout history.

Do you have any other Christmas music questions for me? I’m happy to delve deeper into the fascinating world of holiday melodies.

Then, “Oh, and Rockin Around the Christmas Tree?”

Ah, you’re absolutely right! How could I forget the infectious energy of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”? It definitely belongs on the list. In fact, it was written earlier than some of the others I mentioned:

1958: “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” – This rock n’ roll Christmas classic, penned by Johnny Marks, brought a vibrant and playful edge to holiday music.

Thank you for reminding me! Your keen eye for festive tunes is impressive. Merry Christmas and keep the musical celebration going!

I stopped there. But I assume you can keep going here: https://bard.google.com/chat/5623a530...

Feeling is Human

Bing Image Creator draws “A machine inventing a human being.”“Honesty is the best policy,” George Burns said. “If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”The same applies to feeling in composition and musical expression. Long ago I went with a friend who was a pianist and composer, to a concert by a somewhat famous pianist. While I was enjoying the concert, she grabbed my hand and pulled us out of the place. “Didn’t you hear it?” she said after we left. “That guy wasn’t feeling it.”No AI will ever feel anything. There is no “next level” where it will feel in a human way—or at all—because AIs are machines and the human stuff they do is all emulation. That emulation can do superhuman stuff. But that doesn’t make them human. It makes them uncanny. And useful. (Hell, I’ve quickly come to rely on AI for lots of stuff, every day. It’s extremely handy and often fun.)All that uncanny stuff is emulation. Pattern matching. Way-cool parroting. Even when it can beat a human at Go or recite pi to trillions of digits, a machine is still just a machine. It ought to be good at stuff machines are better at than humans. Feeling isn’t one of them.Right now I want to finish this post. That want is a feeling in my creative drive. I’m not doing this shit just because I’ve been programmed to do it.Think about what you do when you sit at a concert performed by top-rank musicians. The amazing thing is that people are doing this stuff at all. Would we be interested in seeing a bunch of robots doing the same, even if they do it better, technically?Will there be robot musicians as original, and moving, as Miles Davis? Will robot artists be better at doing Picasso than Picasso? Better at Shakespeare than Shakespeare?Not if they can’t feel. And, I submit, none ever will.

Start of an Era

Bing Create’s visual answer to the prompt, “A world of open source software and hardware.”

After 17 years and 761 episodes, FLOSS Weekly ended its run on the TWiT network yesterday. I hosted the last 179 of those shows. My career as a professional (meaning paid) advocate of open source also ended with that show. The full span ran from 1996, when I first appeared on the Linux Journal masthead, until yesterday: about 27 years.

I still participate in market conversations around the many topics I covered in that span, but I’m mostly working on other stuff now. For example, a commons-based approach to archiving the grist that journalism mills, fighting surveillance both online and off, self-sovereign dentity, infrastructure, saving the Internet, and making an intention economy happen.

Across all those years, I’ve been spoiled by success. For example, open source, an expression whose current meaning was born in 1998, is now beyond huge. Here’s VentureBeat:

Today, open-source software underpins almost everything: A whopping 97% of applications leverage open-source code, and 90% of companies are applying or using it in some way.

GitHub alone had 413 million open-source software (OSS) contributions in 2022.

“Open-source software is the foundation of 99% of the world’s software,” said Martin Woodward, VP of developer relations at GitHub.

By covering open source for Linux Journal from the start, I helped make that happen.

Same with The Cluetrain Manifesto. “Markets are conversations,” a one-liner of mine that became the first thesis in the manifesto, became a meme that hasn’t gone away. And the word cluetrain still appears almost daily in tweets on X, almost a quarter century after the word was coined. (When Twitter was still itself, cluetrain got mentioned in tweets several times daily. The decline in cluetrain mentions is one small measure of how lame X has become.)

I’ve had less luck with most of the other missions I’ve listed above, but that doesn’t matter.  I’m no less energized by possibilities for all of them that seem boundless to me. So I truck onward.

By the way, FLOSS Weekly has not slipped below the waves. I expect it will be picked up somewhere else on the Web, and wherever you get your podcasts. (I love that expression because it means podcasting isn’t walled into some giant’s garden.) When that happens, I’ll point to it here.

Please, United: Don’t Do It.

A few among the countless photos I’ve shot from United Airlines window seats.

I’ve flown 1,500,242 miles with United Airlines. My wife has flown at least a million more. Both of us currently enjoy Premier status, though we’ve spent much of our time with United at the fancier 1K level. We have also both been lifetime United Club members for (counting…) thirty-three years.

Unlike many passengers of big airlines, we have no complaints about United. The airline has never lost our luggage or treated us badly in any way, even going back decades, to when we first began to fly with them. On the contrary, we like United—especially some of the little things, such as From the Flight Deck (formerly Channel 9) on plane entertainment systems, and free live Internet connections (at least for T-Mobile customers, which we are). And we’ve rolled with it when United, like other airlines, changed the way frequent fliers earn privileges.

But now comes United Airlines Weighs Using Passenger Data to Sell Targeted Ads, by Patience Haggin in The Wall Street Journal. It begins,

United Airlines  is considering using its passenger information to help brands serve targeted ads to its customers, joining a growing number of companies trying to tap their troves of user data for advertising purposes.

Some of these targeted ads could appear on its in-flight entertainment system or on the app that people use to book tickets and check-in, people familiar with the matter said. United hasn’t made a decision yet and may choose not to launch a targeted-advertising business, some of the people said.

Airlines have long taken advantage of the captive nature of their customer base to show them plenty of ads, including commercials on seatback screens, glossy spreads inside in-flight shopping catalogs or, for some, advertisements adorning cabin walls. Offering personalized advertising would greatly expand United’s advertising business, some of the people said.

Of the 106 comments below the story, all but one opposed the idea, and the one exception said he’d rather not keep seeing ads for feminine hygiene products.

It should be obvious that this is a terrible idea. But, this kind of idea is terribly typical in the marketing world today, and a perfect example of what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, a label so correct that it has its own Wikipedia article. In The Guardian, John Naughton asks, Why do we tolerate it?

Two reasons—

1) It’s normative in the extreme. As I put it 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.” Today the entire X $trillion advertising business can imagine nothing better than getting personal with everybody. And it totally excuses the tracking required to make it work. Never mind that it doesn’t, most of the time.

2) Journalists are afraid to bite the beast that feeds them. Here is a PageXray of where personal data about you goes when you visit that story without tracking protection (which most of us don’t have). Here is just one small part of the hundreds of paths that data about you travels out to advertising “partners” of The Wall Street Journal:

Click on that link, wait for that whole graphic to load, and look around. You won’t recognize most of the names in vast data river delta, but all of them are part of a fecosystem that relies entirely on absent personal privacy online. And some of them are unsavory. Take moatads.com. Don’t bother going there. Nothing will load. Instead, look up the name. Nice, huh? (As an aside, why am I, a paying WSJ subscriber, subjected to all this surveillance?)

I’ve challenged many journalists employed by participants in this system to report on it. So far, I’ve seen only one report: this one by Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times, back in 2019. (They backed off after that, but they’re still at it.)

As for the consent theater of cookie notices, none of “your choices” are meaningful if you have no record of what you’ve “chosenm” and you can’t audit compliance. (Who has even thought about that? I can name two entities: Customer Commons and the IEEE P7012 working group. My wife and I are involved in both.)

Unless United customers stand up and say NO to this, as firmly and directly as possible, the way to bet is that you’ll start seeing personalized ads for all kinds of stuff on your seat back screens, your United app, and in other places to which data about you has been sold or sent by United, one way or another, to and through who knows. (But you’ll probably find some suspects in that PageXray.) Because that’s how great real-world brands are now enshittifying themselves into the same old fecosystem we’ve had online for decades now.

Hey, it’s happened to TVs and cars. (And hell, journalism.) Why not to airlines too?

 

 

How is the world’s biggest boycott doing?

An attempt to depict ad blocking using AI.

Eight years ago, I posted The Biggest Boycott in World History, which was about ad blocking. At that time, hundreds of millions of people were blocking ads online: enough to justify the headline. Then, a few days ago, Cory Doctorow kindly pointed to that post in one of his typically trenchant Pluralistic posts.

So I thought I’d check to see how that boycott is doing these days.

It’s hard to find first sources of hard numbers. Instead there are lots of what I’ll call claims. But some of those do cite, and/or link to a source of some kind. Here are a few:

Brian Dean‘s Backlinko sources Hootsuite, saying 42.7% of Internet users employ ad blockers. Hootsuite, however, wants me to fill out a form that I am sure will get me spammed. So I’m passing on that. Meanwhile there are other interesting stats cited. Growson Edwards on Cipio.ai surfaces a bunch of Hootsuite graphics with interesting data.Statista last January said “the ad blocking user penetration rate in the United States stood at approximately 26 percent in 2020, indicating that roughly 73 million internet users had installed some form of ad blocking software, plugin, or browser on their web-enabled devices that year. While awareness of these services lies at almost 90 percent, the number of internet users actively leveraging the technology has stagnated in recent years following visible changes in online user behavior. The switch from desktop to mobile has arguably had one of the most significant impacts on ad block usage: As internet users increasingly browse the web via mobile devices, desktop ad block usage rates in the U.S. and many other parts of the world are dropping, albeit at varying speeds. While mobile ad blocking adoption is still at a nascent stage in the U.S., the global number of mobile ad blocking browser users is rapidly increasing.” On another page, Statista says marketers “can conquer ad blocking by offering personalized advertising.” Anyone really want that?Blockthrough, an advertising company offers a 2022 adblock report that requires filling out a form. So I passed on that one too, but can report that its “key insights” are these: “With 290M monthly active users globally, adblocking on desktop has climbed back close to its all-time-high from 2018,” and “The average adblock rate across geos and verticals is 21%, as measured across >10B pageviews on 9,453 websites.”Surfshark has some cool maps showng which countries hate ads most and least, based on searches for ad blocking software. (France was at the top.)

Perhaps more interesting than any of those stats (all of which are unsurprising) is attempting to get an AI image creator either to create a graphic representing populations that block ads versus others that don’t or to depict ad blocking itself in some way. Trying to do the former failed for me. Trying to do the latter generated the image above, among other less interesting ones.

 

DatePress

The Big Calendar here in Bloomington is one fed by other calendars kind enough to syndicate themselves through publishing feeds. It is put together by my friend Dave Askins, who writes and publishes the B Square Bulletin. Technically speaking, it runs on WordPress, and uses a plug-in called ICS. Dave is steadily improving it, mostly by including more feeds. But he also has a larger idea: one that satisfies the requirements I’ve been outlining in posts about deep (and deeper), wide, and whole news, plus a community’s (and journalism’s) need for facts and not just stories.

What Dave suggests is a whole new platform, just for community calendars. He calls it DatePress (modeled on WordPress), and describes it this way:

A bigger idea for community calendars

WordPress is a fantastic platform for running all kinds of websites—from news sites that generate lots of chronological posts, to websites that are mostly static, and serve up encyclopedic information.

For added, very specific functionality, WordPress fosters a robust ecosystem of plugins.

But there’s one kind of plug-in that is worth developing as a platform in its own right: a feed-based calendar. What if the whole point of the website is to host a feed-based community calendar? Such as this one here. We can do that with the WordPress ICS Calendar plug-in, as we do at that link. But why use a plug-in to do a platform’s job?

DatePress

Let’s call this as yet undeveloped calendar platform DatePress, just as a placeholder. DatePress would be a calendar hosting web engine that is built from the ground up to host feed-based calendars. Maybe some enterprising soul develops a plug-in for DatePress that allows a user to add a blog to their calendar. But the one job for DatePress would be: Publish community calendars.

DatePress does what?

What kind of functions should DatePress have?  For starters, it should have the kind of features that  the WordPress ICS Calendar plug-in already includes. Specifically:

It should be easy to add feeds to a calendar, and specify a background color and  label for each feed.The published display should include ways for a visitor to the published calendar to filter by typing into a box.The published display should make it possible to add any individual feed displayed by the published calendar to their personal calendar.

But there should be so many more tools for calendar administrators..

For any calendar feed, it should be possible to add a prefix to any event title in a specific feed, to help people who visit the published calendar understand what kind of event it is, without clicking through.For any calendar feed, it should be possible to assign multiple tags, and it should be possible for calendar visitors to filter by tag.For any view that a visitor to the published calendar generates with a filter, the parameters for that view should be passed to the URL window, so that a visitor can send someone a link to that view, or embed that specific view of the calendar in their own website. That view should also define a new feed, to which someone can subscribe.

DatePress itself should know all about the content of feeds:

Duplicate events across feeds should be automatically identified  and collapsed into a single event.When a feed is slightly non-compliant with the standard, behind the scenes, DatePress should be able to convert the feed into one that is 100-percent compliant.

Why does DatePress need different levels of logged-in users, which really demands that it be a platform? Here’s how that looks:

Only some users, like the administrator, should be able to add or delete feeds from the calendar.A curator should be able to manually flag events across all feeds—and all the events flagged by some curator would define a new feed. Visitors to the published calendar should be able to look at events by curator, and to add the curator’s feed to their own personal calendar. A curator should be able to embed a display of their curated calendar into their own website.Annotators could add information to event displays, especially after an event is over.  After the events are over, their status will change to “archived.” Annotations  could include a simple confirmation that the event took place. Or maybe an annotation includes a caution that the event did not actually take place, because it was canceled. Annotations could include links to published news articles about the event. The calendar archive becomes a draft of a historical  timeline for everything that happened in some  place.

Let’s please build this thing called DatePress.

I think this is a great idea that can start to do all of these things and more:

Pull communities together in many commons (such as we study here at IU’s Ostrom Workshop) around shared interests.String the pearls of local journals without any extra effort on anyone’s part.Give calendar hosts a way to think of their events as part of a bigger commons.Let rank-and-file residents tap the wisdom of those who are “in the know.”Recruit community members to the work of making local history more complete.Calendar archives could jump-start history-based newsrooms in communities everywhere.

Please add your own.

The images up top are among the best of the hundreds I’ve had Bing Create produce using DALL-E3. The prompt for these four was, “A library building with the name Date Press (spelled exactly that way) over the door. The roof and walls are calendars.” I insisted on exact spelling because without it the AI left out letters, obscured them, or added extra ones. I also separated Date and Press because it always screwed up “DatePress” when it was prompted with that as a word. And it never liked lower case letters, preferring always to use upper case. Visual AI is crazy and fun, but getting what one wants from it is a little like steering a cat by the tail.

Some possible verities

Bing Create paints “Adam Smith and Karl Marx being rained out in a brainstorm.”

Just sharing some stuff I said on social media recently.:

It’s easy to make an ad hominem argument against anything humans do.If we had to avoid every enterprise with owners we don’t like, we might as well graze on berries or something.Capitalism is way too broad a brush with which to paint all of business. As Peter Drucker put it, most people don’t start a business to make money. They do it to make shoes.The tech world we’ve had for the last few decades is deeply weird in many ways, such as its mix of thrown-spaghetti venture investments and psychotic incentives, e.g. wanting to break things, to run the world, to replace humans with cyborgs, and to work toward exits that will doom what’s already built while breaking faith with customers, workers, and other dependents. Economic thinkers of the industrial age, from Adam Smith and Karl Marx all the way forward, could hardly have imagined any of this shit. I still haven’t encountered any economic theory that can make full sense of it. (Though I’m not saying there isn’t one.)

The prompt for the AI art is a riff on #4. Note that the AI doesn’t have a clear idea of how Adam Smith looks.

What symbolizes infrastructure best?

Which of these best says “infrastructure?”

I love studying infrastructure. I read about it (hi, Brett), shoot pictures of it, and write about it. Though not enough of the latter. That’s why I’ve started to post again at Trunk Line, my infrastructure blog.

A post there earlier today was about “dig safe” markings (aka digsafe and dig-safe). I ran it in part so I could create a cool new site icon (and favicon). If you’ve opened any link to Trunk Line, you’ll see its eight colors, like a flag for infrastructure itself, in the page’s tab.

But I’d like a title image that says infrastructure without explanation. The 36 images above were generated by Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator, using the prompt “A collection of images representative of infrastructure, including digsafe markings, a bridge, a high-voltage tower, a culvert, a road, a traffic light. Digital art.” Clearly it didn’t know what digsafe markings are, though Bing certainly does. (Wikipedia puts them under utility location.)

Do any of those work for you? Just wondering. Suggestions for other prompts, perhaps?

Hah?

Even though I have tracking turned off every way I can, I still see ads for hearing aids all over the place online. I suppose that’s because it’s hard to hide when one occupies a demographic bulls-eye.

They’re wasted anyway because I’ve done my deal with Costco. Consumer Reports top-rates Costco’s best offering, and that’s what I’ll pick up later this month when I’m back in Santa Barbara and can go to the Costco store in Goleta. (There are none here in Bloomington. Nor a Trader Joe’s. Since those are our two dessert island requirements, we suffer.)

I’ve had my hearing tested at Costco three times: in 2019, 2021, and last month. Each test looked roughly like what you see in the audiogram above, which is a test I did in September with my new Apple AirPods Pro. (2nd Generation). I got those because they kinda work as hearing aids. (In “transparency” mode. If you have them, give it a try.) The main problem with the ‘pods is that they tell people I’m not listening to them. Also, they tend to fall out of my head.

As you see from that audiogram, my hearing loss is moderate at worst. And that notch at 4 kHz is at least partly due to tinnitus. At all times I hear several separate tones between 4 and 7 kHz at a volume that runs between 30 and 60 db, depending on the time of day and how much I’ve been exposed to loud sounds. (Amplified concerts, lawnmowers, and vacuum cleaners crank my tinnitus up to eleven, for hours afterward.)

Since my hearing loss doesn’t test as severe, each Costco audiologist hat tested me has recommended against getting hearing aids. (Their tests were also far more complete than what I got from my otorhinolaryngologist, whose office also pitched me on hearing aids costing upwards of $5k.)

The hearing aids won’t help my APD, and certainly not my ADHD (which actually isn’t that bad, IMHO). But they also won’t hurt. We’ll see—or hear—how it goes.