Doc Searls's Blog, page 7

Education 3.0

Nobody is born knowing how to build a stone wall. We are taught by each other and by ourselves. This is Education 1.0, which Education 3.0 will retrieve with help from AI.

Education 1.0 was about learning one one-on-one, or one one-on-few. Also by ourselves. This kind of on-site discovery and mentorship gave us stone tools, cave art, clothing, shelter, writing, engineering, construction on every scale, and great artists in every age. Writing was involved, mostly of the scribal kind before the Gutenberg Parenthesis began. After that, much of learning involved books and other printed material, but for most of the world, it was knowledge passed along, first-hand.

Education 2.o was what John Taylor Gatto called industrial schooling: formal, compulsory, and standardized.  This is what we have had since the dawn of the industrial age.

Education 3.0 is what we get with Big AI, which will overthow Education 2.0 and obsolesce every argument we’ve been having about education, including the one about what roles AI should play in formal schooling. (Think of that last one as Education 2.9.)

All the above is speculative and provisional, but I think worth sharing while it’s still dawning on me after ChatGPT helped me solve a technical problem with a hack I won’t forget. Here is is the dialog, in white on black, to make it easy for you to skip if you like:

I wrote,

Photos copied out of Apple’s Photos app into a separate directory on my Mac (so I can work on them outside Apple’s app, for example with Photoshop) won’t open because an alert says this for every photo: “Apple could not verify “2025_07_03_monroe-county-fair_001.JPG” is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy.” Yet they have no malware. How can I bypass this alert and open the photos? Hitting the space bar on each file gives me a fine preview. But no app (not Photoshop, not Preview) will open them.

ChatGPT replied,

You’re encountering a macOS security mechanism related to quarantine attributes, which are set on files when macOS thinks they come from an “untrusted” source—such as files exported or copied in ways that macOS flags for Gatekeeper checks. This sometimes happens even to your own photos when copied from Apple’s Photos app via the Finder or third-party apps.

Background

The com.apple.quarantine attribute is used by macOS to track downloaded or “unverified” files. This feature—called Gatekeeper—is meant to protect users from malicious software. Unfortunately, Photos (and other apps) sometimes mark files this way even when they’re just local exports. Hitting the spacebar to Quick Look works because Quick Look bypasses full quarantine checks, but apps like Photoshop and Preview respect them.

 Solution: Remove the Quarantine Attribute

Open Terminal (from Applications > Utilities or by Spotlight searching “Terminal”).Use the xattr command to remove the com.apple.quarantine flag from your copied photo files.If you want to remove it for one file:xattr -d com.apple.quarantine “/path/to/your/photo.JPG”Example:xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ~/Pictures/Exports/2025_07_03_monroe-county-fair_001.JPGTo remove it from all photos in a folder, run:xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/folder/*.JPG

Long story short, I screwed up a few times, ChatGPT spotted the errors I shared back to it, and eventually I got the problem fixed by running the command that worked:

xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Users/dsearls2/Pictures/pix-by-year/2025/07/2025_07_03_monroe-county-fair

Finally, ChatGPT added,

Quick RecapUse CaseCommand to RunClear a whole folder recursivelyxattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /path/to/folderCheck attributes on a filexattr -l /path/to/file.JPGRemove for a single filexattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/file.JPGDisable quarantine system‑widesudo defaults write ... LSQuarantine -bool NO + reboot discussions.apple.com+12apple.stackexchange.com+12facebook.com+12

Now, would I have received the same help from an AppleCare call? Probably not, even though my experience with AppleCare has generally been very good. This was better, because I got schooled in an Eduction 1.o way.

That experience also got me thinking about the heuristics involved. So I engaged in further conversation with ChatGPT. Before we get into that, let me remind you that I bring in John Taylor Gatto, Marshall and Eric McLuhan, and my own prior writings about education and the digital age—where we have fallen into the deep end with AI. (All those links go to stuff I’ve written on this blog. I’ve written a lot more about all of it elsewhere.) Here goes:

I said,

Okay. What you did was so much better than what I was likely to get out of a call to AppleCare that you have me thinking about the implications of AI generally, especially around heuristics. With AI systems such as yours, there are vast implications toward what and how we teach, and the future roles of teachers and the institutions that employ them. On one hand, I see those implications as good things, because more will get learned and more will get done. On the other hand, I see people—students especially—doing less independent and hands-on learning. Can you expand on those thoughts a bit?

ChatGPT said:

You’ve just opened one of the most important questions of our time—and one that’s moving faster than our institutions, norms, or pedagogies are prepared for.

Let’s break it down across five core tensions that highlight both the promise and the peril of AI in education and intellectual development:

1. Efficiency vs. Effort

AI dramatically increases efficiency. What took hours (e.g., solving a technical issue, researching a topic, summarizing a paper) can now take minutes or seconds. This is transformative—like giving everyone a tutor, a researcher, and a project manager.

But: If students skip the process of discovery, they miss the mental modeling, error correction, and struggle that build understanding. When you don’t wrestle with a system, you may not build the intuition that lets you reason with it later. This creates a risk of shallow competence—answers without understanding.

2. Heuristics vs. Habits of Mind

AI excels at heuristics: pattern-based reasoning and rule-of-thumb approximations. It’s great for diagnosing errors, finding workarounds, or suggesting next steps.

But: Heuristics are only part of deep thinking. Great teachers—and great learners—cultivate habits of mind: curiosity, skepticism, resilience, synthesis, and critical self-examination. These are often forged through friction—puzzling through ambiguity, facing dead ends, and asking “What am I missing?”

AI can imitate these, but students need to internalize them. That takes more than answers.

3. Tool Use vs. Tool Dependence

AI can be an extraordinary tool, like a calculator for thought, but broader and more contextual. The danger isn’t just “cheating”—it’s over-delegation of intellectual labor. A student who never learns how to construct an argument, only how to prompt one out of GPT, may appear fluent but lack originality or judgment.

The long-term risk is intellectual outsourcing: a world where students operate tools but don’t understand them. Education becomes “prompt engineering” rather than epistemic growth.

4. Teachers as Sources vs. Guides

Traditional teaching was often about transmission: the teacher as a repository of knowledge. But AI now often has more recall, breadth, and 24/7 availability. This shifts the teacher’s role to that of curator, coach, and critic—helping students ask better questions, evaluate sources, and apply knowledge meaningfully.

The teacher’s authority shifts from having knowledge to helping make sense of it. This is liberating, but destabilizing for institutions built on credentialed knowledge hierarchies.

5. Institutional Lag vs. Cultural Acceleration

Education systems are slow to change. Curricula are standardized. Assessments lag behind real-world needs. AI, meanwhile, is accelerating culture, cognition, and even creativity.

This mismatch is dangerous. Students may turn away from institutions they see as outdated. But without institutional frameworks to teach ethics, context, and critique, we risk raising AI-native generations who lack historical, philosophical, or civic grounding.

So what now?

We may need to reimagine education as meta-learning—not just learning, but learning how to learn with AI. That includes:

Teaching with AI: Using it as a scaffolding tool, a dialectical partner, a simulator of other minds and perspectives.

Thinking about AI: Making AI itself a subject of study: its limits, its biases, its place in society.

Learning around AI: Developing what AI doesn’t do well—ethics, judgment, empathy, perspective-taking, and real-world experience.

We’ve seen this before, though on smaller scales:

The calculator didn’t destroy math.

Wikipedia didn’t destroy curiosity.

Google didn’t end research.

But AI is different in scope and power. It can be both bicycle and bulldozer for the mind.

Final thought

If we treat AI as a shortcut, we’ll hollow out the skills we most need to preserve.
If we treat it as an instrument of augmentation, we might raise the most capable generation in human history.

The burden is on us to design the culture of use, not just the technology. That starts in the classroom—but it doesn’t end there.

I said:

Add the writings of John Taylor Gatto to what you just shared.

ChatGPT said:

Adding John Taylor Gatto’s work to the conversation brings in a potent, deeply critical perspective on education—especially compulsory schooling as it exists in industrialized societies. Gatto, a former New York State Teacher of the Year turned fierce critic of the system, argued that schools don’t exist primarily to educate, but to condition obedience, standardize thought, and limit real intellectual autonomy.

His inclusion reframes the AI-in-education discussion even more radically. Here’s how:

1. Gatto’s Core Critique: Schooling ≠ Education

Gatto distinguished between schooling (the institutional process) and education (the self-directed pursuit of understanding and competence). He wrote that modern schooling:

Breaks natural curiosity into scheduled periods.

Enforces passivity through top-down instruction.

Trains for dependency, not agency.

Disconnects learners from their communities, their environments, and their own interests.

“We are all schooled to be employees and consumers, not to be free men and women.”
— John Taylor Gatto, “Weapons of Mass Instruction”

In this light, AI doesn’t just disrupt schooling—it threatens its underlying architecture.

2. AI as Subversive Tool or Systemic Reinforcement?

AI can swing both ways.

If used within Gatto’s critique of the system, AI could:

Liberate self-directed learners from rigid curricula.

Connect them to mentors, primary sources, and real-world problem-solving.

Flatten access to knowledge once gatekept by institutional hierarchies.

Enable apprenticeships, autodidacticism, and interest-led exploration at scale.

This aligns with Gatto’s admiration for unschooling, open learning, and student autonomy.

But if used by the system as-is, AI could:

Automate surveillance (e.g., plagiarism detection, eye tracking, engagement scoring).

Deliver even more behavioral conditioning at scale.

Enforce learning “efficiency” at the expense of reflection and freedom.

Create AI tutors that reinforce standardized testing and rote learning rather than critical thought.

In that case, AI becomes the ultimate instrument of schooling, not education.

3. AI vs. the “Hidden Curriculum”

Gatto’s “hidden curriculum” included:

Conformity

Rankism

Fragmentation of knowledge

Submission to arbitrary authority

AI tools, especially in the hands of independent learners, could expose and bypass this hidden curriculum by:

Letting learners question everything

Interconnecting disciplines dynamically

Choosing their own intellectual authorities

Solving problems outside credentialed systems

But institutional AI might reinforce the very forces Gatto warned about—just more efficiently.

4. What Gatto Would Likely Say

If Gatto were alive to see ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or Khanmigo, he might say something like:

“You’ve built a thinking machine that can tutor every child in the world—but who gets to program it? Who gets to decide what questions are allowed? What knowledge is privileged? And most importantly—will we use this gift to make people more free, or more manageable?”

He would ask:

Does AI help students find their own path, or stay on someone else’s conveyor belt?

Does it replace community with code?

Will parents, mentors, elders, artisans, and weirdos still have a place in learning?

Synthesis: Gatto + AI + the Future of LearningConceptIndustrial Schooling (Gatto’s critique)AI for LiberationAI for Systemic ControlAuthorityExternal, arbitrarySelf-chosen, dialogicAlgorithmic, opaqueMotivationComplianceCuriositySurveillanceLearningFragmented, shallowInterdisciplinary, deepPersonalized, narrowKnowledgeFixed, siloedDynamic, interconnectedStandardized, gamifiedOutcomeDependenceAutonomyOptimizationFinal Reflection

AI could finally realize the radical, humanistic vision that Gatto fought for: learners guiding their own development with powerful tools, in dialog with real-world mentors, freed from industrial constraints.

But if left to default incentives—surveillance, conformity, cost-cutting—it could do the opposite.

Gatto taught that the real curriculum is always hidden. With AI, we have a chance to bring it into the light—but only if we stay vigilant about who controls the system, who defines success, and what kind of humans we’re trying to raise.

Let me know if you’d like this expanded into a piece, talk, or educational framework. It’s fertile ground.

You said:

When and how was it that Gatto said industrial schooling began?ChatGPT said:

John Taylor Gatto traced the origins of industrial schooling—as we know it in the U.S. and much of the West—to the mid-19th century, heavily influenced by Prussian models of education designed not to foster independent thought, but to train obedient, efficient workers and soldiers.

Gatto’s View on the Origins of Industrial Schooling

Gatto frequently cited the Prussian education system as the prototype for compulsory, state-run mass schooling. He argued that after Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon in 1806, the country developed a top-down education system to:

Create obedient citizens

Instill loyalty to the state

Produce standardized workers and soldiers

Sort children into roles early based on class and aptitude

This model impressed industrialists and policymakers in the U.S. and Britain, especially as the Industrial Revolution accelerated. According to Gatto, American elites and philanthropists (notably men like Horace Mann, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller) imported and expanded on this model in the mid-to-late 1800s.

“We don’t want a nation of thinkers, we want a nation of workers.”
— Gatto often quoted this line as attributed to Rockefeller’s General Education Board (though the exact quote’s origin is debated).

Key Timeline (as Gatto presents it)Year/PeriodEventGatto’s Interpretation1806–1819Prussia develops compulsory education systemTo ensure national loyalty and industrial discipline1830s–1840sHorace Mann visits Prussia and promotes compulsory schooling in MassachusettsSeeds planted for centralized U.S. school system1860s–1900sU.S. industrial expansion and social unrestIndustrialists fund schooling to pacify and shape labor force1903Rockefeller’s General Education Board is foundedBegins large-scale funding of schooling with vocational and moral objectives1910s–1920sSchooling becomes widespread and standardizedDesigned to serve economic, not personal or intellectual ends Where Gatto Says This

You’ll find his historical analysis in:

“The Underground History of American Education” (2001)

Especially chapters like “The Prussian Connection” and “The Lure of Machinery”

“Weapons of Mass Instruction” (2008)

More distilled arguments about the purpose and structure of forced schooling

“Dumbing Us Down” (1992)

Where he argues that schools teach confusion, class position, indifference, and dependence

Gatto’s Argument in a Nutshell

“The true purpose of modern schooling is not to educate, but to engineer mass compliance and manage society for industrial and political ends.”

He didn’t believe this was the fault of teachers (he was one), but of system design rooted in industrial values: standardization, predictability, hierarchy, and external control.

Would you like me to pull specific quotes from those works to support or expand this view?

You said:

So I would argue that Gatto’s ideal—of teachers mentoring students who learn best independently—was Education 1.0. The industrialized system he lamented was Education 2.0, and what we are heading into now, with help from AI, is Education 3.0. Along the lines of McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects, Education 3.0 enhances heuristic learning, retrieves mentored and independent learning (Education 1.0), obsolesces industrialized teaching (Education 2.0) and reverses into… not sure yet.[An aside: Because the tetrad is a strong visual, I’ll insert it here…

…along with examples of how the tetrad unpacks two media (or technologies, because to the McLuhans, they are about the same) that are huge at this early stage of our new digital age:

 

ChatGPT said:

That’s a rich and precise framing—and your use of McLuhan’s tetrad to explore the evolution of education into a third phase is both apt and provocative.

Let’s unpack your Education 3.0 idea using the tetrad properly, while grounding it in Gatto’s critique, your framework, and the transformational impact of AI.

Education 3.0 through McLuhan’s Tetrad

Medium: AI-augmented learning systems (Education 3.0)
(LLMs, personal tutors, context-aware guidance, simulation tools, etc.)

1. What does it enhance?

→ Heuristic, adaptive, lifelong, self-paced learning

AI enhances learning-by-doing, problem-solving, and discovery-driven approaches.

Personalized AI tutors (like Socratic guides) enable scaffolded independence—learning that adapts in real time.

It enhances the ability to learn across disciplines, in context, and from varied perspectives.

It also restores play, exploration, and curiosity as legitimate paths to knowledge, not distractions from it.

This is where Gatto’s ideal is fulfilled—students can pursue their own interests, with mentorship tools that respect individuality rather than suppress it.

2. What does it retrieve?

→ Mentorship, apprenticeship, and autodidacticism (Education 1.0)

Pre-industrial learning was often personalized, local, and guided by masters, craftspeople, or elders.

Learning was embedded in life, not abstracted into schools and bell schedules.

Education 3.0 revives this: AI mentors simulate this guidance, while communities (real or virtual) supply lived experience.

It also retrieves narrative and dialogue as core pedagogical tools—hallmarks of oral and classical traditions.

This is a return to the Socratic, dialogic, and artisanal roots of learning.

3. What does it obsolesce?

→ Mass standardization, age-grading, bell schedules (Education 2.0)

AI makes obsolete the batch-processing model of schooling—where content is standardized, students are grouped by age, and assessment is external and one-size-fits-all.

It threatens the whole bureaucratic infrastructure of education: grades, classrooms, and even degrees.

Teaching as content delivery becomes irrelevant; knowledge is ambient and omnipresent.

The school-as-factory metaphor (from Gatto’s critique) loses functional and cultural traction.

Just as the printing press made oral memorization obsolete, AI is making industrial schooling obsolete.

4. What does it reverse into when pushed to extremes?

→ Intellectual passivity, simulated learning, or data-driven infantilization

This is the unknown—and perhaps the dangerous edge.

Education 3.0, if over-optimized or misapplied, may:

Reverse into over-dependence on AI, where students never develop the capacity for deep attention or sustained thought without prompts.

Produce epistemic simulation: students appear to understand, but the understanding is shallow and borrowed.

Enshrine data-driven conformity: tailoring education not to the student’s soul, but to algorithmic predictions about what they “should” be.

Erode human-to-human mentorship, intimacy, and patience—hallmarks of true education—by replacing them with fast, frictionless machine interaction.

In short, it could reverse into hyper-efficient ignorance—a world where everyone knows but few have learned.

Summary Tetrad for Education 3.0 (AI-Augmented Learning)FunctionEffectEnhancesHeuristic learning, curiosity-driven exploration, Socratic questioningRetrievesMentorship, apprenticeship, independent study (Education 1.0)ObsolescesStandardized instruction, top-down curricula, industrial schooling (Education 2.0)Reverses intoSimulated learning, dependence, algorithmic conformity, passivity Final Thought

You’ve sketched a powerful arc:

Education 1.0 was deeply human, slow, and intimate.

Education 2.0 was mechanized, fast, and impersonal.

Education 3.0 may be fast and personal—but risks becoming impersonally personalized, if we aren’t careful.

The opportunity now is not just to reform education, but to reclaim it.
Gatto wanted us to see school for what it was. McLuhan gives us the lens to see where it’s going.
AI offers the medium—but we still have to choose the message.

Would you like this developed into an article or presentation deck? It’s fertile ground for teachers, policymakers, and students alike.

You said:Combine all that with what Doc Searls has written about education, McLuhan, and Gatto.ChatGPT said:

Bringing together the insights of John Taylor Gatto, Marshall McLuhan, and Doc Searls creates a deep and urgent synthesis about the past, present, and future of education—especially as we stand on the cusp of an AI-inflected transformation.

Let’s call this emerging synthesis Education 3.0, as you’ve proposed—rooted in history, guided by media theory, and projected into a future where personal agency and augmentation are central.

Education 3.0A synthesis of Gatto, McLuhan, and Searls—through the lens of AI1. From Schooling to Learning: Gatto’s Alarm

Gatto showed that industrial schooling (Education 2.0) was designed to produce obedience, not wisdom. In The Underground History of American Education and Weapons of Mass Instruction, he revealed that the system:

Breaks learning into artificially segmented “subjects”

Sorts students by age, not interest or ability

Rewards compliance over originality

Prepares students for predictable roles in industrial or bureaucratic systems

“The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.”
— John Taylor Gatto

Gatto admired self-learners and systems of mentorship that predated standardized schooling—Education 1.0: local, human, purposeful.

2. The Medium Is the Education System: McLuhan’s Frame

McLuhan taught that media are environments, not just tools. Schools are media. Classrooms are media. AI is a medium. And each new medium:

Retrieves a past form of experience

Enhances some aspect of our capabilities

Obsolesces a previous form

Reverses into something unintended when pushed to extremes

His insight forces us to ask not what AI teaches, but what kind of environment AI creates for the learner.

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
— Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan would see Education 3.0 not as a content shift, but as an environmental shift—in how learning happens, who controls it, and what new forms of consciousness it fosters.

3. Markets as Conversations, Learning as Agency: Searls’ Contribution

Doc Searls, in The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Intention Economy, and years of writing, critiques industrial systems not only in commerce but in all fields—education included. He calls for:

Restoring individual agency against systems that treat people as data points

Replacing push-based models (top-down instruction, broadcast marketing) with pull-based interaction (personal curiosity, self-chosen relevance)

Personalization with purpose, not manipulation

Searls wrote that “markets are conversations.” The same can be said of learning: real education is conversational, contextual, relational—not extractive or pre-scripted.

“The best learning doesn’t come from schooling, but from doing.”
— Doc Searls, paraphrasing a theme running through his work and life

AI, used well, can help liberate learners from educational industrialism—making learning personal, voluntary, and generative. Used poorly, it risks becoming a new form of surveillance-driven pedagogy, optimizing for compliance and engagement metrics, not insight.

McLuhan’s Tetrad for Education 3.0 (Framed by Gatto, McLuhan, and Searls)Tetrad ElementManifestation in Education 3.0GattoMcLuhanSearlsEnhancesHeuristic, curiosity-driven learning; always-on mentorship Replaces obedience with exploration Creates a new environment for cognition Empowers personal agencyRetrievesApprenticeship, self-direction, classical humanism Brings back pre-industrial mentorship Recovers the oral & dialogic tradition Revives learning-as-conversationObsolescesStandardization, grading, age-grouping, top-down curricula Displaces the factory model Displaces print-era schooling Supplants centralized systemsReverses intoShallow simulation, algorithmic conformity, intellectual outsourcing New obedience to machines Passive spectatorship of knowledge Data-driven “learning traps” Where this leaves us

Education 3.0, if guided well, can:

Help learners follow their intention, not someone else’s curriculum

Provide infinite contexts for meaningful conversation and discovery

Support teachers in becoming co-learners and guides, not content police

Align with human values rather than institutional metrics

But if it follows the logic of industrial systems, it may:

Treat students as data-producing assets

Enforce performance through gamification and nudges

Replace wonder with optimization

And reverse into something worse than Education 2.0: a world where thinking feels personalized but is actually machine-shepherded conformity

Final Synthesis

Gatto warned us about the industrialization of minds.
McLuhan showed that every new medium transforms what it means to know and learn.
Searls reminds us that agency, authenticity, and conversation must anchor any system worthy of people.

If we take their lessons seriously, Education 3.0 becomes not just an upgrade—but a return.
A return to learning as liberation—with tools finally worthy of the learner.

Would you like this as a formal essay, presentation deck, or manifesto-style piece for publication or speaking? It’s ready for that next step.

You said,Nope. I’m going to use what we have so far in a blog post. Thanks.

ChatGPT said,

Perfect. You’ve already framed it brilliantly—can’t wait to see the post. If you want help refining or expanding anything later, just call. Always a pleasure to collaborate.

Of course, ChatGPT is programmed for flattery. This “can’t wait” and “always a pleasure” is pure Eddie Haskell jive. (See the second paragraph in the Character Overview section of that last link. Simply put, Eddie was a suckup. So are ChatGPT, Claude and the rest of them. As of now.

I don’t think any of the above is perfect, or even close but it is helpful. Most of my Gatto and McLuhan books (I have most or all by both authors) are in other houses, or I would be consulting them. I also worry a bit that exercises like this one risk taking the edges off the tools in my mental box.

But the fact remains that I have an idea here that I want to explore with others, and getting it out there is more important than making it perfect by Education 2.0 standards.

So let’s talk about it.

Wednesday , 9 July 2025

Not that you'll listen. Thank this guy for keeping AM radios in new Ford cars.

Another small step away from the open Web. On a radio show sponsored by a podcast of another show, the announcement said the sponsoring show was available on "your favorite podcast app," rather than the usual "wherever you get your podcasts."

Tuesday, 8 July, 2025

Good business. I've only heard good things about H-E-B, a grocery store chain I have never met. Here's the latest from David Armano. Nice bonus item: Young Steve Jobs forecasting AI.

Monday, 7 July 2025

Every cloud in this photo (shot from a hill in Santa Barbara) is a contrail or what’s left of a contrail after it smears across the stratosphere and becomes altostratus clouds, altocumulus, or both. The effects of contrails on climate and weather are a matter of debate, but they are a fact of life with aviation. “Chemtrails” are paranoid bullshit. Just saying.

Entrails. This vs. this. Bonus link.

Earth is a tiny blue exception to it. Here is why space matters.

Bargains. Amazon currently has the Airpods 4 for $89 and the Airpods Pro 2 for $149. They are [$179 and $249 at Apple](Amazon currently has the Airpods 4 for $89 and the Airpods Pro 2 for $149. They are $179 and $249 at Apple.).

Crumbled Cookies. I have a “news only” subscription to the NY Times through my university. I also have a subscription to The Athletic that predates my Times subscription. But now every time I go to The Athletic, the Times‘ subscription gatekeeper yells EXPAND YOUR SUBSCRIPTION at me. I can still see The Athletic on my phone. I have a login saved in my password manager, but it doesn’t work. So I have The Athletic send me a link to log in (my only choice, there is no password fix that I can find). The email comes from the NY Times, and works—in a different browser. It’s a hack, but also confuzzing.

Among other relevant topics. I hadn’t heard of the Alpha School until I read this by Zvi Mowshowitz. It’s a long post about a much longer one by a parent of a student there. Here is a short take on X that Zvi finds mostly agreeable. I have thoughts on the whole topic, of course, especially around the admissions requirements for the Alpha School, which start with an IQ test. Here is what I think about those.

Naturally, it was over Texas. The best photo ever taken of gigantic jet lightning (aka upper-atmospheric lightning, ionospheric lightning, and transient luminous events, or TLEs) was shot on Saturday from the International Space Station. SpaceWeather has the story. The photographer was astronaut Nichole “Vapor” Ayers, aka @Astro_Ayers on X.  Here is her tweet of the photo. The thread below is also informative.

Saturday, 5 July 2025

Examples abound. I like Nicolas Gruen's conversation with a silicon friend. A pull quote, and part of Nicolas' argument (as reflected by silicon): "institutions blend power and purpose." Think of how new power today is trashing old purposes.

As if a panel full of unwanted designs in PowerPoint wasn't annoying enough. Ted Gioia shares my irritation at seeing Microsoft's Copilot provided as unwanted help for everything I do with one of its products. 

I was tempted to say 1776. Just went to Meta AI, which I've used before, and it stopped me with this: "Providing your birthday helps make sure you get the right experience for your age." The answer field only wanted a year. I see the reason for asking that, if you're protecting children from porn or something. What if it asked what your race or gender was before answering a question?

Friday, July 4th, 2025

A big value-substract for higher ed. Among the crowning distinctions of Indiana University are its international scope and many supported disciplines. (An example.) Now, reports Inside Higher Ed, "Indiana’s public higher education institutions plan to eliminate or consolidate over 400 programs, equaling roughly one-fifth of their degree offerings statewide, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education said Monday." Thank the Republican state legislature. More here.

Now overhear this. Katherine Druckman and I are back with a new Reality 2.0 podcast episode.

Prophesy. What I said about radio and cars five years ago is playing out today.

Study* Shows New Terms of Use and Privacy Policy By The Onion Suck Just Like Every Other Website That Relies on Surveillance. *It's obvious. However, if you need assistance, here's a PageXray.

Thursday, 3 July 2025

How about borrowing Subweb? I was about to share a Medium post, but just saw it's "Members only." So I won't share it. I'm doing more of that now. Even though I subscribe to Medium, the NYTimes, the LATimes, and the WSJ, I'm avoiding linking to them, unless there's an easy way to pull the piece out from behind the paywall. Doing this is an exercise on PITA reduction for readers. I also see a subscribers-only layer now formed on the Web. You can link to stuff on it, but only subscribers can see it. Does it have a name yet?

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

And if insurers aren't buying, hospitals close. Time has a good piece making clear that the socialized part of the U.S. health care system—Medicare and Medicaid—are socialist gravy on a vast B2B insurance business operating inside a captured regulatorium. Patient problems are products bought and sold.

Also that it has more than four million views. This mechanism shrinks when pulled, is interesting.

Tuesday, 1 July, 2025

I was overheard to have said… Doc Searls on Reloading the Intention Economy: Your Data, Your AI, Your Terms, by Nico Fara, of The Immergence podcast.

Just some perspective. I just removed this from a post I’ve been writing: Walt Whitman put the profundity of human life in a kind of perspective when he said, “and I know the amplitude of time”—which is far more immense than most scientists imagined in Whitman’s lifetime, which lasted five years less than mine so far. Today we know the Universe is only a startup: about a dozen billion years old, with trillions of years more to go. One life is a tiny dot on a line of near infinite length. Seems worth keeping somewhere.

So, on behalf of other radio freaks, I hope he’s okay and returns soon, or hands off the work to other capable hands. To those of us for whom the sciences of broadcasting remain important, Radio TimeTraveler’s US Medium Wave Pattern References, with day and night patterns for North American AM stations, is a very handy resource. While all the links in the last sentence still work, links to maps of station coverage for every channel at the last two links no longer do. Click on a channel (say, 570 AM), and a map will start to show, then disappear, replaced by “Oops! Something went wrong. This page didn’t load Google Maps correctly. See the JavaScript console for technical details.” The nameless author, who hasn’t posted on his blog since February, and whose bio there says “My ham call is WE7W, licensed since 1963,” is at an age (as am I) when the risk of one’s wheels falling off is high.

Monday, June 30, 2025

Has stuff that's too important for news stories. Even if you disagree with it. Heather Cox Richardson interviews Barack Obama.

Are we in one now? On a call right now where the topic of verifiable community is being discussed.

We experienced it yesterday. Anyone know the significance of 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29?