Doc Searls's Blog, page 35

A happy 75th anniversary

My parents (that’s them, Eleanor and Allen Searls) were married on 17 August 1946, seventy-five years and two days ago. I would have posted something then, but I was busy—though not too busy to drop something in Facebook, where much of the readership for this blog, plus the writership of others listed in my old blogroll, has drifted in the Age of Social Media. Alas, blogging is less social than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the chatterteriat. But that doesn’t stop me from blogging anyway.

The wedding took place in Minneapolis, for the convenience of Mom’s family of second and third generation Swedish members of the homesteading diaspora, scattered then around Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin. Pop was from New Jersey, and all his immediate kin were there and in New York. After the wedding the couple came east to briefly occupy the home they rented in North Bergen, New Jersey while mostly hanging at Grandma Searls’ house in Fort Lee (where Pop grew up with his two sisters), and then a short drive west of there in Maywood, where Jan and I grew up. I was born less than a year later, and my sister Jan less than two years after that.

In a comment under my Facebook post, Jan writes,

Mom from ND and Pop from NJ met in Alaska in the middle of WWII. He’d already served in the Costal Artillery in the early 30s but after D-Day came home to join up. They courted by mail after the war while he was with SHAEFE (he loved that acronym: Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Forces Europe), and Mom with the Red Cross at a Naval Hospital in Oregon. When he got home, she flew to NJ for 6 days of courtship – at a small shack at the NJ shore with Pop’s entire family! He came to MN the night before the wedding. They fell in love with the dream of having a family and future together, and always said they really fell in love with each other on their honeymoon and were devoted to each other. Mom was 33, Pop was 38, and they’d already lived lives of adventure, full of friends and family. We grew up knowing were blessed to have them as our parents.

I’ve added links. The Shack is still there, by the way.

Alas, Mom passed in ’03 and Pop in ’79. But they were exceptionally fine parents and grandparents. Not all kids are so lucky.

So, a belated toast, in pixels.

Beyond the Web

The Web is a haystack.

This isn’t what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he invented the Web. Nor is it what Jerry Yang and David Filo had in mind when they invented Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web, which later became Yahoo. Jerry and David’s model for the Web was a library, and Yahoo was to be catalog for it. This made sense, given the prevailing conceptual frames for the Web at the time: real estate and publishing. Both are still with us today. We frame the Web as real estate when we speak of “sites” with “locations” in “domains” with “addresses” you can “visit” and “browse” through stuff called “files” and “pages,” which we “author,” “edit,” “post,” “publish,” “syndicate” and store in “folders” within a “directory.” Both frames suggest durability, if not permanence. Again, kind of like a library.

But once we added personal movement (“surf,” “browse”) and a vehicle for it (the browser), the Web became a World Wide Free-for-all. Literally. Anyone could publish, change and remove whatever they pleased, whenever they pleased. The same went for organizations of every kind, all over the world. And everyone with a browser could find their way to and through all of those spaces and places, and enjoy whatever “content” publishers chose to put there. Thus the Web grew into billions of sites, pages, images, databases, videos, and other stuff, with most of it changing constantly.

The result was a heaving haystack of fuck-all.

How big is it? According to WorldWebSize.com, Google currently indexes about 41 billion pages, and Bing about 9 billion. They also peaked together at about 68 billion pages in late 2019. The Web is surely larger than that, but that’s the practical limit because search engines are the practical way to find pieces of straw in that thing.

So that’s one practical limit. There are others, but they’re hard to see when the level of optionality on the Web is almost indescribably vast. But we can see a few limits by asking some questions:

Why do you always have to accept websites’ terms? And why do you have no record of your own of what you accepted, or when‚ or anything?Why do you have no way to proffer your own terms, to which websites can agree?Why did Do Not Track, which was never more than a polite request not to be tracked off a website, get no respect from 99.x% of the world’s websites? And how the hell did Do Not Track turn into the Tracking Preference Expression at the W2C, where the standard never did get fully baked?Why, after Do Not Track failed, did hundreds of millions—or perhaps billions—of people start blocking ads, tracking or both, on the Web, amounting to the biggest boycott in world history? And then why did the advertising world, including nearly all advertisers, their agents, and their dependents in publishing, treat this as a problem rather than a clear and gigantic message from the marketplace?Why are the choices presented to you by websites called your choices, when all those choices are provided by them? And why don’t you give them choices?Why would Apple’s way of making you private on your phone be to “Ask App Not to Track,” rather than “Tell App Not to Track,” or “Prevent App From Tracking You”?Why does the GDPR call people “data subjects” rather than people, or human beings, and then assign the roles “data controller” and “data processor” only to other parties?*Why are nearly all the 200+million results in a search for GDPR+compliance about how companies can obey the letter of the law while violating its spirit by continuing to track people through the giant loophole you see in every cookie notice?Why does the CCPA give you the right to ask to have back personal data others have gathered about you on the Web, rather than forbid its collection in the first place? (Imagine a law that assumes that all farmers’ horses are gone from their barns, but gives those farmers a right to demand horses back from those who took them. It’s kinda like that.)Why, 22 years after The Cluetrain Manifesto said, we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it. —is that statement still not true?Why, 9 years after Harvard Business Review Press published  The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge , has that not happened? (Really, what are you in charge of in the marketplace that isn’t inside companies’ silos and platforms?)

It’s easy to blame the cookie, which Lou Montulli invented in 1994 as a way for sites to remember their visitors by planting reminder files—cookies—in visitors’ browsers. Cookies also gave visitors a way to remember where they were when they last visited. For sites that require logins, cookies take care of that as well.

What matters, however, is not the cookie. It’s what makes the cookie necessary in the first place: the Web’s mainframe-based architecture. It’s called client-server, and is represented graphically like this:

This architecture was born in the era of centralized mainframes, which humans called “users” accessed through “dumb terminals”:

On the Web, as it was in the old mainframe world, we clients—mere users—are as subordinate to servers as are cattle to ranchers or slaves to masters. In the client-server paradigm, our agency—our ability to act with effect in the world—is restricted to what servers allow or provide for us. Our choices are what they provide. We are independent only to the degree that we can also be clients to other servers. In this paradigm, a free market is “your choice of captor.”

Want privacy? You have to ask for it. And, if you go to the trouble of doing that—which you have to do separately with every site and service you encounter (each a mainframe of its own)—your client doesn’t keep a record of what you “agreed” to. The server does. Good luck finding whatever it is the server or its third parties remember about that agreement.

Want to control how your data (or data about you) gets processed by the servers of the world? Good luck with that too. Again, Europe’s GDPR says “natural persons” are just “data subjects,” while “data controllers” and “data processors” are roles reserved for servers.

Want a shopping cart of your own to take from site to site? My wife asked for that in 1995. It’s still barely thinkable in 2021. Want a dashboard for your life where you can gather all your expenses, investments, property records, health information, calendars, contacts, and other personal information? She asked for that too, and we still don’t have it, except to the degree that large server operators (e.g. Google, Apple, Microsoft) give us pieces of it, hosted in their clouds, and rigged to keep you captive to their systems.

That’s why we don’t yet have an Internet of Things (IoT), but rather an Apple of Things, a Google of Things, and an Amazon of Things.

Is it possible to do stuff on the Web that isn’t client-server? Perhaps some techies among us can provide examples, but practically speaking, here’s what matters: If it’s not thinkable by the owners of the servers we depend on, it doesn’t get made.

From our position at the bottom of the Web’s haystack, it’s hard to imagine there might be a world where it’s possible for us to have full agency: to not be just users of clients enslaved to as many servers as we deal with every day.

But that world exists. It’s called the Internet, and it can support a helluva lot more than the Web, with many ways to interact other than those possible in the client-server world alone.

Digital technology as we know it has only been around for a few decades, and the Internet for maybe half that time. Mobile computers that run apps and presume connectivity everywhere have only been with us for a decade or less. And all of those will be with us for many decades, centuries, or millennia to come. We are not going to stop living digital lives, any more than we are going to stop speaking, writing, or using mathematics. Digital technology and the Internet are granted wishes that won’t go back into the genie’s bottle.

So yes, the Web is wonderful, but not boundlessly so. It has limits. Thanks to the client-server architecture that prevails there, full personal agency is not a grace of life on the Web. For the thirty-plus years of the Web’s existence, and for its foreseeable future, we will never have more agency than its servers allow clients and users.

It’s time to think and build outside the haystack. Models for that do exist, and some have been around a long time.

Email, for example. While you can look at your email on the Web, or use a Web-based email service (such as Gmail), email itself is independent of those. My own searls.com email has been at servers in my home, on racks elsewhere, and in a hired cloud. I can move it anywhere I want. You can move yours as well. All the services I hire to host my email are substitutable. That’s just one way we can enjoy full agency on the Internet.

My own work outside the Web is currently happening at Customer Commons, on what we call the Byway. Go there and follow along as we work to toward better answers to the questions above than you’ll get from inside the haystack.

 

Car design trends

On Quora, here’s my answer to What are the worst design trends in modern cars?—updated by our family’s experience with a new Toyota that features even more indicators than the bunch above::::

Based on driving lots of late-model rental cars, here’s a list:

Entertainment systems that are hard to use and dangerous on the road. (Few are good. Most are bad. Some are truly awful.)Making AM and FM listening harder than ever. Some of this is by putting too many functions in too many menus you have to poke at. (While driving, knobs and switches beat buttons for usability. Ask a pilot.) Some of it is by burying antennas in windows, which will never work as well as a whip antenna (preferably the retractable kind that can survive a car wash). But a thumbs-up to cars offering HD Radio, which adds many more stations to FM and far better sound to AM (on the sadly too few stations that feature it).Way too much optionality among features with non-obvious meanings that you control through buttons with whaaa? symbols or half-buried menus that can be as dangerous to navigate while driving as it is to finger-text on one’s cell phone. For example, a loaded 2021 Toyota Camry Hybrid has TSS w/PD, HUD, DRCC, LDA w/SA, LTA, AHB, PCS, RCD, RSA, BSM. RCTA, RCTB, VSC, EV, ECO, plus other stuff that’s a bit more spelled out, such as TRAC, Qi Wireless Charger and Birds Eye View Camera. And those are in addition to the usual indicators: shifter position, odometer, outside temperature, etc. Many of these unclear functions are displayed only or mainly in the “Meters/Multi-Information Display” you view through or over your steering wheel. Since there is no way the display can give you a full view of all these functions in all their possible states, you move around your selections and menus through buttons on the steering wheel that you mash with your left thumb. And that’s just one model of one car. (Which we happen to almost have: ours is a 2020 model.)Poor visibility out the back corners, thanks to extra-wide roof pillars and fake-muscle styling that narrows the shapes of the cars’ aft windows.No place to mount a phone. I mean, why have Apple’s CarPlay and/or Android Auto and not have a place to mount a phone? (Yes, there are aftermarket things with suction cups, but most new cars lack a surface other than the windshield that will hold a cup sucked.)Trunks with plenty of space but too small an opening, so it’s hard to get large or odd-shaped items in there.Low-profile and performance tires, which handle nicely but can ride rough and transmit lots of road noise.Too much black. On the dashboard platform under windshields, black makes sense because you don’t want a light color reflecting off the windshield. But black is used way too much in trim. Worse, black steering wheels parked in the sun can get too hot to hold. And black leather or vinyl seats can fry your ass.Giant grills—especially ones that resemble the mouths of manta rays. (I’m looking at you, Lexus.)

I think comments work here now, so if you have any additions or subtractions, bring ’em on.

Speaking of character

It seems fitting that among old medical records I found this portrait of , my comic persona on radio and in print back in North Carolina, forty-five years ago. The artist is Alex Funk, whose nickname at the time was Czuko (pronounced “Chuck-o”). Alex is an artist, techie and (now literally) old friend of high excellence on all counts.

And, even though I no longer have hair and appear to be in my second trimester, my wife and son just said “Oh yeah, that’s you” when I showed this to them. “Totally in character,” said my wife.

I guess so. As Dave says (and does!), I’m still diggin’.

In the spirit of that, I thought this would be worth sharing with the rest of ya’ll.

 

A storage crisis

The best new phones come with the ability to shoot 108 megapixel photos, record 4K video with stereo sound, and pack the results into a terabyte of onboard storage. But what do you do when that storage fills up?

If you want to keep those files, you’ll need to offload them somewhere. Since your computer probably doesn’t have more than 2Tb of storage, you’ll need an external drive. Or two. Or three. Or more. Over time, a lot more.

Welcome to my world.

Gathered here for a portrait in a corner of my desk in Manhattan are eighteen hard drives, including the 2Tb one in the laptop I’m using now. That one has 359.75Gb available. Most of the others you see are also full, dead, or both. I also have a similar collection of drives in Santa Barbara, though I only use the 10Tb backup I keep there.

Photos occupy most of the data I’ve stored on all those drives. Currently my photo archives are spread between two portable drives and my laptop, and total about 6.5Tb. I also have a 5Tb portable drive for videos, which is back in Santa Barbara awaiting dubs off of tapes. The portable photo drives are among those in the picture above. Earlier today, my laptop gave me this news about the main one, called Black 4Tb WD Photo Drive:

That’s why I’m transferring its contents over to the 10Tb drive called Elements, on the far left. A progress report:

About 5Tb of Elements is occupied by Apple Time Machine backups. After the transfer is done, there won’t be room for more backups. So my project now is figuring out what to do next.

I could get some Network Attached Storage (NAS). I already have used 2012-vintage 18Tb QNAP one in Santa Barbara that I’ve never been able to make work.

So my plan now is to put it all in a cloud.

I hadn’t bothered with that before, because upstream speeds have been highly sphinctered by ISPs for decades. Here in New York, where our ISP is Spectrum, our speeds have long run 100-400 Mbps down, but only 10 Mbps up. However…. I just checked again with Speedtest.net, and got this:

And that’s over wi-fi.

Now I’m encouraged. But before I commit to a supplier, I’d like to hear what others recommend. Currently I’m considering Backblaze, which is top rated here. The cost i $6/month, or less for unlimited sums of data. But I’m open to whatever.

[Later…] Hmm. At that last link it says this:

What We Don’t Like:

Something I should mention is that some users have had bad experiences with Backblaze because of a not-so-apparent feature that maybe should be a lot more obvious: Backblaze doesn’t function as a permanent archive of all of your data, but instead as a mirror.

In other words, if you delete files on your computer, or the drive fails and you’re connected to Backblaze’s website, Backblaze will see that those files are gone and will remove them from your online account, too.

Granted, signing up for the forever version history option would eliminate any issues with this, but it still poses a problem for anyone using one of the limited version history options.

Alas, the forever thing is complicated.

To be clear, I want more than a mirroring of what I have on my laptop and external drives. I want to replace those external drives with cloud storage. Is that possible? Not clear.

Alas, for all of us, this problem remains.

Redux 002: Listen Up

This is a 1999 post on the (pre-blog) website that introduced my handful of readers to The Cluetrain Manifesto, which had just gone up on the Web, and instantly got huge without my help. It was also a dry run for a chapter in the book by the same name, which came out in January, 2000. As best I can recall, I wrote most of it a year earlier, and updated it when Cluetrain was finally published.

Listen Up

By Doc Searls
April 16, 1999 

“All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value! So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!'”
— Howard Beale, in Network, by Paddy Chayevsky

Bob Davis is the CEO of Lycos, Inc., whose growing portfolio of companies (excuse me, portals) now includes Lycos, Hotbot, WhoWhere and Tripod. I’m sure Bob is a great guy. And I’m sure Lycos is a great company. A lot of people seem to like them both. And you have to admire both his ambition and his success. To witness both, read his interview with PC Week, where he predicts that the Lycos Network (the sum of all its portals) will overtake Yahoo as “#1 on the Web.”

Lycos will win, Davis says, because “We have a collection of quality properties that are segmented into best-of-breed categories, and our reach has been catapulting.”

I can speak for Hotbot, which is still my first-choice search engine; but by a shrinking margin. I often test search engines by looking for strings of text buried deep in long documents on my own site. Hotbot always won in the past. But since Lycos bought it, Hotbot has become more of a portal and less of a search tool. Its page is now a baffling mass of ads and links. And its searches find less.

In today’s test, Infoseek won. Last week, Excite won. Both found pages that Hotbot seems to have forgotten.

Why? Bob Davis gives us a good answer.

“We’re a media company,” he says. “We make our money by delivering an audience that people want to pay for.”

Note the two different species here: audience and people. And look at their qualities. One is “delivered.” The other pays. In other words, one is cargo and the other is money.

Well, I don’t care if Lycos’ stock goes to the moon and splits three times along the way. The only #1 on the Web is the same as the only #1 on the phone: the people who use it. And the time will come when people will look at portals not as sources of “satisfying experiences” (another of Davis’ lines) but as useless intermediaries between supply and demand.

 Words of Walt

You there, impotent, loose in the knees,
open your scarfed chops till I blow grit within you.
Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets.
I am not to be denied. I compel.
It is time to explain myself. Let us stand up.
I know I am solid and sound.
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow.

I know that I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself
or be understood.
I see that the elementary laws never apologize.

.
— Walt Whitman, from  Song of Myself

 

“Media company” guys like Davis are still in a seller’s market for wisdom that was BS even when only the TV guys spoke it — back when it literally required the movie “Network.” That market will dry up. Why? Because we’ve been mad as hell for about hundred years, and now we don’t have to take it anymore.

Three reasons.

Humanity. This is what Walt Whitman reminded us about more than a hundred years ago. We are not impotent. Media companies may call us seats and eyeballs and targets, but that’s their problem. They don’t get who we are or what we can — and will — do. And the funny thing is, they don’t get that what makes us powerful is what they think makes them powerful: the Internet. It gives us choices. Millions of them. We don’t have to settle for “channels” any more. Or “portals” that offer views of the sky through their own little windows. Or “sticky” sites that are the moral equivalent of flypaper.Demand. There never was a demand for messages, and now it shows, big time. Because the Internet is a meteor that is smacking the world of business with more force than the rock that offed the dinosaurs, and it is pushing out a tsunami of demand like nothing supply has ever seen. Businesses that welcome the swell are in for some fun surfing. Businesses that don’t are going to drown in it.Obsolescence. Even the media guys are tired of their own B.S. and are finally in the market for clues.

Alvin Toffler had it right in The Third Wave. Industry (The Second Wave) “violently split apart two aspects of our lives that had always been one… production and consumption… In so doing, it drove a giant invisible wedge into our economy, our psyches … it ripped apart the underlying unity of society, creating a way of life filled with economic tension.” Today all of us play producer roles in our professions and consumer roles in our everyday lives. This chart shows the difference (and tension) between these radically different points of view — both of which all of us hold:

Producer viewConsumer viewMetaphorBusiness is shipping (“loading the channel,” “moving products,” “delivering messages”)Business is shopping (“browsing,” “looking,” “bargaining,” “buying”)OrientationBusiness is about moving goods from one to many (producers to consumers)Business is about buying and selling, one to oneMarketsMarkets are shooting ranges: consumers are “targets”Markets are markets: places to shop, buy stuff and talk to peopleRelationshipsPrimary relationshiphs are with customers, which are more often distributors & retailers rather than consumersPrimary relationships are with vendors, and with other customers

 

These are all just clues, which are easily deniable facts. Hence a line once spoken of Apple: “the clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.” But Apple was just an obvious offender. All of marketing itself remains clueless so long as it continues to treat customers as “eyeballs,” “targets,” “seats” and “consumers.”

For the past several months, I have been working with Rick Levine, David Weinberger and Chris Locke on a new railroad for clues: a ClueTrain.

Our goal is to burn down Marketing As Usual. Here is the logic behind the ambition:

Markets are conversations
Conversations are fire
Marketing is arson

The result is here — in what The Wall Street Journal calls “presumptuous, arrogant, and absolutely brilliant.”

Take a ride. If you like it, sign up. Feel free to set fires with it, add a few of your own, or flame the ones you don’t agree with. What matters is the conversation. We want everybody talking about this stuff. If they do, MAU is toast.

Here is my own short form of the Manifesto (inspired by Martin Luther, the long version has 95 Theses). Feel free to commit arson with (or to) any of these points as well.

Ten facts about highly effective markets:Markets are conversations.
None of the other metaphors for markets — bulls, bears, battlefields, arenas, streets or invisible hands — does full justice to the social nature of markets. Real market conversations are social. They happen between human beings. Not between senders and receivers, shooters and targets, advertisers and demographics.The first markets were markets.
They were real places that thrived at the crossroads of cultures. They didn’t need a market model, because they were the model market. More than religion, war or family, markets were real places where communities came together. They weren’t just where sellers did business with buyers. They were the place where everybody got together to hang out, talk, tell stories and learn interesting stuff about each other and the larger world. ‘Markets are more about demand than supply.
The term “market” comes from the latin mercere, which means “to buy.” Even a modern market is called a “shopping center” rather than a “selling center.” Bottom line: every market has more buyers than sellers. And the buyers have the money.Human voices trump robotic ones.
Real voices are honest, open, natural, uncontrived. Every identity that speaks has a voice. We know each other by how we sound. That goes for companies and markets as well as people. When a voice is full of shit, we all know it — whether the voice tells us “your call is important to us” or that a Buick is better than a Mercedes.The real market leaders are people whose minds and hands are worn by the work they do.
And it has been that way ever since our ancestors’ authority was expressed by surnames that labeled their occupations — names like Hunter, Weaver, Fisher and Smith. In modern parlance, the most knowledge and the best expertise is found at the “point of practice:” That’s where most of the work gets done.Markets are made by real people.
Not by surreal abstractions that insult customers by calling them “targets,” “seats,” “audiences,” “demographics” and “eyeballs” — all synonyms for consumers, which Jerry Michalski of Sociate calls “brainless gullets who live only to gulp products and expel cash.”Business is not a conveyor belt that runs from production to consumption.
Our goods are more than “content” that we “package” and “move” by “loading” them into a “channel” and “address” for “delivery.” The business that matters most is about shopping, not shipping. And the people who run it are the customers and the people who talk to them.Mass markets have the same intelligence as germ populations.
Their virtues are appetite and reproduction. They grow by contagion. Which is why nobody wants to admit belonging to one.There is no demand for messages.
To get what this means, imagine what would happen if mute buttons on remote controls delivered “we don’t want to hear this” messages directly back to advertisers.Most advertising is unaccountable.
Or worse, it’s useless. An old advertising saying goes, “I know half my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” But even this is a lie. Nearly all advertising is wasted. Even the most accountable form of advertising — the junk mail we euphemistically call “direct marketing” — counts a 3% response rate as a success. No wonder most of us sort our mail over the trash can. Fairfax Cone, who co-founded Foote Cone & Belding many decades ago, said “Advertising is what you do when you can’t go see somebody. That’s all it is.” With the Net you can go see somebody. More importantly, they can see you. More importantly than that, you can both talk to each other. And make real markets again.

What becomes of journalism when everybody can write or cast?

Formalized journalism is outnumbered.

In the industrialized world (and in much of the world that isn’t), nearly everyone of a double-digit age has a Net-connected mobile device for sharing words they write and scenes they shoot.

While this doesn’t obsolesce professional journalists, it marginalizes and re-contextualizes them. Worse, it exposes the blindness within their formalities. Dave Winer lays this out clearly in They can’t see what they can’t see. An excerpt:

Journalism, academia, government and the corporate world all hire from the same talent pool.

They go to the same universities, get their news from the same sources. Corporate people take government jobs, then go back to the corporations. The people move fluidly in and out of each bucket.

So you get the same story, the reality they believe in, developed over centuries, that is radically different from the reality most other people experience. The story recited daily at CNN, MSNBC, The New Yorker, NYT. The world changes, again and again, and the story they tell is how angry this makes them, and how everyone must snap back.

New technologies can make change possible, like the one we’re using now.

We would never have Trump if it weren’t for Twitter.

Marshall McLuhan, dead since 1980, had something to say about that:

People don’t want to know the cause of anything. They do not want to know why radio caused Hitler and Gandhi alike. They do not want to know that print caused anything whatever.

Also,

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive… that they leave no part of us untouched unaffected, unaltered… Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

What could be more worked-over than our new nature as digital beings? Consider where and what you are reading right now, on your desk, your lap or in your hand. This was barely imaginable when the word “journalism” came into use around 1830.

What are we now? While remaining no less embodied than we ever were, we are incorporeal inhabitants of a digital world, absent of distance and gravity, where the only preposition that fully applies is with. Unless we aren’t. Ephemerality runs deep, and the Web is a whiteboard.

I don’t have an answer to the question in my headline. I tried one out three years ago, in my first, last and only TEDx talk, The story isn’t the whole story. To summarize, we gotta start local.

Because it is essential to be real with each other in the physical world, especially when fully relevant news actually happens. Conspiracy theories and other forms of bullshit will always be everywhere, but it’s harder for them to apply or survive when your building is on fire or your neighborhood is flooding.

Outside of that, I’m starting to think we need a new discipline: one that doesn’t start with the word journal. And decades may pass before we have it.

Dialog with a robot

So I ordered one of these yesterday…

…and got a notice that said,

That was to my building in Manhattan.

I’m on the third floor, so I went down to the front, and saw it wasn’t there. Since the chance that an Amazon package sitting in front of a Manhattan building’s front door will not be stolen is above zero, I wanted to know if I should be worried. So I went to Amazon’s Contact Us page and got this:

Then, after I clicked on the big yellow button, a dialog ensued :

Hi! It’s Amazon’s messaging assistant again.

Amazon eero mesh WiFi system – 2 packIs this what you need help with?

12:49 PM

Yes, that’s it

12:50 PM

Messaging Assistant | Customer Service

Looks like this item was delivered on Tuesday, Jun 22.Could you confirm what went wrong, so I can help?

12:50 PM

Didn’t get it

12:50 PM

Messaging Assistant | Customer Service

Sorry to hear that. Tell me a little more about what happened.

12:50 PM

Package never arrived

12:50 PM

Messaging Assistant | Customer Service

OK, looks like the delivery status may have been updated too soon.The good news is it should arrive soon. Give us until end of day Wednesday, Jun 23.Really appreciate your patience with this. Is there anything else I can help with?

12:50 PM

No, that’s all

12:50 PM

Messaging Assistant | Customer Service

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This kind of thing has happened before; not just with Amazon, and not just here. In fact, it has happened enough times for me to wonder whether there is a method to the madness.

I mean, is “the delivery status may have been updated too soon” an occurrence that’s common for a reason? Also, might that reason be technical, human, neither or both?

To be fair, this is not a big deal. Progress is how the miraculous becomes mundane, and this is a good example of it the mundane miraculous at work. “No sooner said than shipped” is the new norm. So are conversations with robots.

I’d love it if one could give me answers below, but that feature isn’t working right now. So feel free to tweet yours or something. Thanks!

Redux 001: BuzzPhrasing

Since I’m done with fighting in the red ocean of the surveillance-dominated Web, I’ve decided, while busy working in the blue ocean (on what for now we’re calling i-commerce), to bring back, in this blog, some of the hundreds of things I’ve written over the last 30+ years. I’m calling it the Redux series. To qualify, these should still ring true today, or at least provide some history. This early one is still on the Web, here at BuzzPhraser.com. I’ve made only two small edits, regarding dates. (And thanks to Denise Caruso for reminding me that this thing started out on paper, very long ago.)

The original BuzzPhraser was created in 1990, or perhaps earlier, as a spreadsheet, then a HyperCard stack; and it quickly became one of the most-downloaded files on AOL and Compuserve. For years after that it languished, mostly because I didn’t want to re-write the software. But when the Web came along, I knew I had to find a way to re-create it. The means didn’t find that end, however, until Charles Roth grabbed the buzzwords by their serifs and made it happen, using a bit of clever Javascript. Once you start having fun with the new BuzzPhraser, I’m sure you’ll thank him as much as I do.

The story that follows was written for the original BuzzPhraser. I thought it would be fun to publish it unchanged.

—Doc, sometime in the late ’90s

BuzzPhrases are built with TechnoLatin, a non-language that replaces plain English nouns with vague but precise-sounding substitutes.  In TechnoLatin, a disk drive is a “data management solution.”  A network is a “workgroup productivity platform.”  A phone is a “telecommunications device”.

The virtue of TechnoLatin is that it describes just about anything technical.  The vice of TechnoLatin is that it really doesn’t mean anything.  This is because TechnoLatin is comprised of words that are either meaningless or have been reduced to that state by frequent use.  Like the blank tiles in Scrabble, you can put them anywhere, but they have no value.  The real value of TechnoLatin is that it sounds precise while what it says is vague as air.  And as easily inflated.

Thanks to TechnoLatin, today’s technology companies no longer make chips, boards, computers, monitors or printers.  They don’t even make products.  Today everybody makes “solutions” that are described as “interoperable,” “committed,” “architected,” “seamless” or whatever.  While these words sound specific, they describe almost nothing.  But where they fail as description they succeed as camouflage: they conceal meaning, vanish into surroundings and tend to go unnoticed.

Take the most over-used word in TechnoLatin today: solution.  What the hell does “solution” really mean?  Well, if you lift the camouflage, you see it usually means “product.”  Try this: every time you run across “solution” in a technology context, substitute “product.”  Note that the two are completely interchangeable.  The difference is, “product” actually means something, while “solution” does not.  In fact, the popularity of “solution” owes to its lack of specificity.  While it presumably suggests the relief of some “problem,” it really serves only to distance what it labels from the most frightening risk of specificity: the clarity of actual limits.

The fact is, most vendors of technology products don’t like to admit that their creations are limited in any way.  Surely, a new spreadsheet — the labor of many nerd/years — is something more than “just a spreadsheet.”  But what?  Lacking an available noun, it’s easy to build a suitable substitute with TechnoLatin.  Call it an “executive information matrix.”  Or a “productivity enhancement engine.”  In all seriousness, many companies spend months at this exercise.  Or even years.  It’s incredible.

There is also a narcotic appeal to buzzphrasing in TechnoLatin.  It makes the abuser feel as if he or she is really saying something, while in fact the practice only mystifies the listener or reader.  And since buzzphrasing is so popular, it gives the abuser a soothing sense of conformity, like teenagers get when they speak slang.  But, like slang, TechnoLatin feels better than it looks.  In truth, it looks suspicious.  And with good reason.  TechnoLatin often does not mean what it says, because the elaborate buzzphrases it builds are still only approximations.

But who cares? Buzzphrasing is epidemic.  You can’t get away from it.  Everybody does it.  There is one nice thing about Everybody, however: they’re a big market.

So, after studying this disease for many years, I decided, like any self-respecting doctor, to profit from the problem.  And, like any self-respecting Silicon Valley entrepreneur, I decided to do this with a new product for which there was absolutely no proven need, in complete faith that people would buy it.  Such is the nature of marketing in the technology business.

But, lacking the investment capital required to generate demand where none exists, I decided on a more generous approach: to give it away, in hope that even if I failed to halt the epidemic, at least I could get people to talk about it.

With this altruistic but slightly commercial goal in mind, I joined farces with Ray Miller of Turtlelips Services to create a product that would encourage and support the narcotic practice of buzzphrasing.  Being the brilliant programmer he is, Ray hacked it into a stack in less time than it took for me to write this prose.  And now here it is, free as flu, catching on all over the damn place.

What made BuzzPhraser possible as a product is that the practice of buzzphrasing actually has rules.  Like English, TechnoLatin is built around nouns.  It has adjectives to modify those nouns.  And adverbs to modify the adjectives.  It also has a class of nouns that modify other nouns — we call them “adnouns.”  And it has a nice assortment of hyphenated prefixes and suffixes (such as “multi-” and “-driven”) that we call “hyphixes.”

Since the TechnoLatin lexicon is filled with meaningless words in all those categories, the words that comprise TechnoLatin buzzphrases can be assembled in just about any number or order, held together as if by velcro.  These are the rules:

adverbs modify adjectivesadjectives modify adnouns, nouns or each otheradnouns modify nouns or other adnounsnouns are modified by adnouns or adjectivesprefixes modify all adjectivessuffixes qualify all adnouns

Here is a diagram that shows how the rules work:

As with English, there are many exceptions.  But, as with programming, we don’t make any.  So cope with it.

With one adverb, one adjective, two adnouns, a noun and a prefix, you get “backwardly architected hyper-intelligent analysis inference leader.”  With an adjective and two nouns, you get “interactive leverage module.”  Put together buzzphrases of almost any shape and length:

“Breakthrough-capable technology market”“Primarily distinguished optional contingency philosophy control power environment”“Executive inference server”“Evidently complete key business manipulation capacity method”“Incrementally intelligent workgroup process topology vendor”

The amazing thing is that all of these sound, as we say in TechnoLatin, “virtually credible.”  And one nice thing about the computer business is — thanks largely to the brain-softening results of prolonged TechnoLatin abuse — “virtually credible” is exactly what it means in plain English: close enough.

BuzzPhraser makes “close enough” easy to reach by substituting guesswork for thinking.  Just keep hitting the button until the right buzzphrase comes along.  Then use that buzzphrase in faith that at least it sounds like you know what you’re saying.  And hey, in this business, isn’t that virtually credible?

Acknowledgements

Thanks to:

Stewart Alsop II, who published “Random Strings of TechnoLatin” along with the original Generic Description Table in both the Preceedings and Proceedings of Agenda 90; and who would like an e-mail front end that automatically discards any message with too many TechnoLatin words and buzzphrases.

Spencer F. Katt of PC Week, who devoted parts of two consecutive rumor columns to the Table, and posted it on the magazine’s CompuServe bulletin board, from which so many people copied it that I thought there might be something going on here.

Guy Kawasaki, who told me “this needs to be a product.”

Bob LeVitus, who told me “you ought to get this hacked into a stack.”

And Ray Miller, who did it.  Beautifully.

Doc Searls
Palo Alto, California
March 7, 1991

Comparing cameras

On the top left is a photo taken with my trusty old (also much used and abused) Canon 5D Mark III. On the top right is one taken by a borrowed new Sony a7Riii. Below both are cropped close-ups of detail. The scene is in a room illuminated by incandescent track lighting. It is not an art shot, though it does contain photo art by our good friend Marian Crostic, whose Sony a7R she is kindly remanding to my custody tomorrow. (Her main camera is now an a7Riii like the borrowed one I used here.)

Both photos were shot with Canon and Sony’s best 24-105 f4 zoom lenses, at the 105mm end. Both were also set to automatic, meaning the camera chooses all the settings. In both cases the camera chose ISO 3200 at f4. The only difference was shutter speed: 1/125 sec on the Canon and 1/160 sec on the Sony. While 3200 is not the prettiest ISO, I wanted to compare both cameras indoors under less than ideal lighting, because that’s typical of situations where I shoot a lot of people.

One difference between these cameras is the pixel density of the sensor: the Canon’s shot is 5760 x 3840 pixels, while the Sony’s is 7952 x 5304. While that difference accounts for some of the higher detail in the Sony’s shot, it’s clear to me that the Sony lens is simply sharper, as Ken Rockwell kinda promised in this glowing review. (Also, to be fair, the Canon lens has had a lot of use.)

All the images above are screen shots of RAW versions of the photos (.CR2 for the Canon and .ARW for the Sony). Though I don’t have the time or patience to show differences in the .JPG versions of these photos, it’s clear to me that the Canon’s JPGs look less artifacted by compression. The obvious artifacts in the Sony shots have me thinking I may only shoot RAW with the a7R, though I’ll need to test it out first.

The main difference overall, at least in this setting, is in the warmth of the color. There the Canon has a huge advantage. I could say it’s also because the Sony is slightly less exposed (by the higher shutter speed); but I noticed the same difference in test shots I took outdoors as well, under both overcast and sunlit skies, and at ISO 100. The Canon seems warmer, though the Sony has far more detail one can pull out of shadows.

I should add that neither camera got the color of the wall (a creamy white) right in these photos, with the Canon leaning hot and the Sony leaning cool.

Anyway, I just thought I’d share that much before I pick up the a7R, and start using it to shoot stuff in New York, where I’m headed Wednesday night after more than a year away.