Doc Searls's Blog, page 9

Remembering a Good Man

My father, Corporal Allen H. Searls, in Germany near the end of World War II

Pop loved being a soldier. He served in the U.S. Army Coastal Artillery Corps in the 1920s, stationed at Fort Hancock in New Jersey’s Sandy Hook. Here is a photo collection that he shot there during that time. The only dates I know for sure during that time in his life are 1929-1930, when he worked construction as a ‘bridgeman’, rigging cables on what would become the George Washington Bridge. This was after his Coastal Artillery service was completed. Here is a collection of photos he shot while working on the bridge.

For most of World War II, Pop worked in Alaska, mostly on trestle construction for the Alaska Railroad. But he hated being away from the action, so he enlisted again, at age 35 in early 1944, and was given the rank of corporal, with credit for his prior service. He served in the Signal Corps, where his main job was running communication lines along the ground toward enemy lines under cannon fire in advance of the next day’s action. His only injury was damaged hearing from friendly cannon blasts. His last job in Europe after the end of the war was as a telephone operator in Eisenhower’s headquarters in France.

After the war, he was a proud member of the American Legion, and marched in all our 4th of July parades in Maywood, New Jersey, our hometown from the late 1940s until my sister (the Navy veteran) and I grew up.

Pop was much more than a soldier, of course. He was as good a father as a kid could wish for, and a great husband, uncle, son, brother, friend, fisherman, hunter, builder of things, and much else. He passed in 1979, but I still miss him every day.

 

Ecology vs. Egology

Source: Hugh MacLeod

Back in 2008, while working for a startup, Hugh MacLeod and I contrasted the distributed, decentralized, participatory tech development culture of the time with the centralized, top-down kind that had dominated for the prior few decades—and, let’s face it, still does today. Hugh drew the cartoon above to illustrate what we thought was going on at the time, though it wasn’t. The startup is long gone, but the labels are still useful, and the conflict persists.

One angle on that conflict is From Single‑Point Optimisation to Tender Symbiosis, by Indy Johar. My wife pointed me to it yesterday, and I’ve been haunted by it since.

Here is a chunk:

As the medium becomes the message, we find ourselves living inside a civilisation that equates alignment with truth and aggregation with progress. This systemic bias pushes us toward a brittle form of self‑determination: we pursue agency through domination of the variable we can measure, ignoring the variables we cannot. The inevitable result is extraction—of carbon sinks, of cultural memory, of psychological attention—followed by backlash, polarisation, and institutional corrosion.

The tragedy is structural, not moral. When the channel allows only single notes, the symphony dies unheard.

3. A Third Evolution: Machine‑Assisted Deliberation

Large language models and agentic systems arrive as the first tools capable of scaling conversation rather than broadcast. Instead of choosing between headlines, we can invite the corpus of human knowledge into the room as a listening partner—summarising, translating, mapping disagreement, and surfacing neglected vantage points at a pace and granularity no assembly hall can match.

But capability is not destiny. These machines inherit our datasets, our blind spots, our historical harms. Without deliberate governance they will amplify single‑point optimisation—hyper‑targeted persuasion, automated extraction, and a calculus of social control measurable only in engagement metrics. The question, therefore, is not whether we will embed AI into the civic stack, but how we will govern its presence so that it extends, rather than erodes, the commons of complex deliberation.

4. From Capability to Compassionate Form

We do not need smarter hammers; we need gentler hands.

The arrival of generative models gifts us unprecedented capabilities—the power to synthesise, to forecast, to orchestrate complexity at velocity. Yet every new lever of agency deepens the asymmetry between what we can do and what we can truly know. The delta between capacity and comprehension is a fault‑line that can only be crossed through a new behavioural stance: tenderness.

…

6. Re‑Weaving Radical Humanity

Industrial modernity did not merely optimise supply chains; it labourised the self. By accounting for humans as interchangeable productivity units, we internalised the logic of the assembly line: attention sliced into task increments, identity compressed into job description, worth indexed to wage signal. We became the single points our dashboards demanded.

Re‑expanding the human is therefore inseparable from institutional and machine reform. A society capable of complex deliberation must grow citizens who can inhabit multiplicity without fracturing, who can speak from body as well as browser history. This is not a return to some pre‑industrial idyll; it is a forward movement into polyphonic personhood.

Johar’s case for tenderness is also an argument for the nurturant parent model that George Lakoff sees behind progressive political thinking, in contrast to the strict father model he sees behind conservative political thinking. It also comports with the partnership model that Rianne Eisler poses in contrast to the dominator model that has prevailed in human civilized life for dozens of millennia. (For more on both, read Lakoff’s Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think and Eisler’s The Chalise and the Blade.)

He also concludes his case with specific recommendations. Check ’em out and let me know what you think.

Puppet Tree

I guarantee insights and learnings. Great podcast interview with the world's leading authority on the puppets in Star Wars, and author of the book A Galaxy of Things.

But… Japan? A leaked FSB email says Russia had a "maniacal desire for war" and that Ukraine was (or may not have been… unclear) its first choice.

Online Sports Betting is for Losers

A few decades back my teenage son and I approached Las Vegas at night while traveling south on Interstate 15. When the skyline of the city began sparkling into view, the kid said, “Wow. Think of all the money people have made there!” This was a perfect tease for my response: “Dude, everything you see there was paid for by losers.”

The same is true for online sports betting, only more so. How? Soon as you do well, they cut you off. Sources:

Won and done? Sportsbooks banning the smart money. By @DavidPurdum in ESPNSports Betting Companies Weed Out Winners. Gamblers Want to Know Why. By Katherine Sayre in  The Wall Street Journal Sportsbooks seem to be the worst losers of them all. By Phil Mushnick in  The New York Post ‘Very disappointing to me’: Sports betting companies balk at discussing limits on bettors
By Colin A. Young in New England Public MediaIn Episode 5 and Episode 6 of Michael Lewis‘ Against the Rules podcast series on sports gambling, producer Lydia Jean Kott made a bunch of bad bets that won her the favor of sportsbooks (FanDuel and DraftKings), and then found herself cut off after she started winning (as a “mule” for a skilled sports gambler).

Also interesting: While the online sportsbook algorithms are good at spotting gamblers who are smarter than the house, they aren’t so good at spotting and getting help for problem gamblers, which the sportsbook apps are all but (or actually) designed to create—especially out of young people who are quick to rationalize the game of losing money as a form of fun.

In Why Sportsbooks Limit Your Bets (And How to Avoid It), Outlier excuses the practice:

Sportsbooks are businesses, and like any business, their primary goal is to make a profit. When a bettor consistently wins, they are essentially taking money from the sportsbook’s bottom line. To mitigate this risk, sportsbooks implement limits on the accounts of profitable bettors. The aim is to encourage more casual, recreational bettors, who are less likely to have an edge and more likely to contribute to the sportsbook’s revenue.

Translation: They want people who throw their money away.

I could go on, but instead suggest you dig those two episodes of Against the Rules.

Oh, and here’s a bet: a generation or few from now (though hopefully sooner), we’ll look back on sports gambling everywhere the same way we look back today on smoking and drunk driving everywhere.

 

 

 

Filings

Throwing blogs on the fire. I was thinking about posts as files, blogs as outlines, and outlines as directories. In geek-speak, directories look like this: something/something/something/something/file. In URLs, each something is also called a folder, because that's the frame in which putting files somewhere makes sense. Anyway, I have the top level of a directory of sorts in the menu atop this blog (or at least in the full-width view one gets in a browser on a computer). Those are:

News Commons

People vs. Adtech

Personal AI

I think it's fair to say that Cluetrain, a quarter century ago, got the world to start calling every topic worth talking about a "conversation." Whether that's true or not (doesn't matter), those are three conversations worth having. Expect more posts on all of them to come soon.

Remembranes

How the future might come true. I've re-written most of Four Roads to the Intention Economy, because I keep getting encouraging news about the prospects.

It was slow as mud, but worked full time and I loved it. Anyone else remember Ricochet, the wireless ISP that served the Bay Area for the last few years of the prior millennium?

Gnaws

Source: Jimmy Emerson, DVM, on Flickr

And, not to be outdone, Bloomington. Here in Indiana, not far west of Columbus, is a stretch of highway 46 called Gnaw Bone. Says at that link that the origin of the name is “obscure.” By the way, Columbus isn’t the only Indiana location sharing its name with a bigger place elsewhere.

• U.S. Cities: Albany, Atlanta, Austin, Buffalo, Cincinnat, Columbus, Denver, Elizabeth, Nashville, Portland, Topeka.
• Cities outside the U.S.: Berne, Rome, Versailes, Warsaw.
• Countries: Brazil, Morocco, Mexico, Ireland, Panama, Peru, Chile, Chine, Crete, Cuba, Egypt.

So marketing still gets to screw the customer. Tom Fishburne’s latest cartoon shows marketing and customer AI agents trying to outsmart each other. He sources this Bain report, which describes how “the traditional customer discovery funnel” has been upended by customers using AI for “zero click” product discovery methods along their buying “journey.” This means fewer ways for marketers to influence customers along that journey. The solution: “Marketers must adapt by optimizing content for large language models, investing in new performance metrics, and rethinking their digital strategy around a future where the AI agent—not the buyer—is in control.”

The result will more parity across the league. Two predictions. First, while I want the Knicks to win the NBA championship, the Thunder are obviously the best team. Best offense, best defense, deepest bench.  But ya never know. Should be good games ahead. Second, NBA salaries for the best players have now maxed out, and we’ll see teams dumping high-salary players outright, or trading expensive good players for affordable mediocre ones. The Boston Celtics will be Exhibit A for all this. They pushed all their chips to the middle of the table this season, going over the “second apron” and paying penalties for it, while five of their chips turned out to be damaged goods. Brown, Porziņģis, Holiday, and Hauser were all injured or slowed by health problems, and Tatum’s achilles injury leaves him out for most or all of next year (while he’s still getting paid). The Suns, Bucks, and Lakers are also in trouble.

Storm Reportings

While the deadliest Friday tornadoes were south of here in Kentucky, we were hit by some in and around Bloomington, Indiana. Reports: Bloomingtonian, BSqare Bulletin, Herald-Times, WBIW, WTHR, WFIU, MSN, Facebook, WLKY. I'll add more when I get the chance.

Of significance

That's about half off. The Intention Economy hardcover edition is now $12.97 on Amazon.

Huge

Classic HBO. Seems HBO's rebrand as Max is something of a fail. The app re-rebrand is HBO Max.

A good sign. Ever hear of TCF, or the Transparency & Consent Framework? The TCF is how sites and services can obey the letter of the GDPR's law, while screwing its spirt. It does that with those annoying consent notices that interrupt your experience of seemingly every site you visit, recording "your choices" God knows where. Well, says here the Belgian Court of Appeals has called bullshit on TCF, ruling those notices illegal after all. Dr. Johnny Ryan, one of the many complainants, said, "Today's court's decision shows that the consent system used by Google, Amazon, X, Microsoft, deceives hundreds of millions of Europeans. The tech industry has sought to hide its vast data breach behind sham consent popups. Tech companies turned the GDPR into a daily nuisance rather than a shield for people."

Still, I like it. For decades, my wife did a lot of work in Asia, where the English names companies often amused her. So when it came time to name a new small U.S. company, she thought the Asian-sounding "International Huge, Inc." would be good. But it was taken.