Doc Searls Weblog

I have accumulated a ridiculous sum of open tabs and closed ones collected in OneTab pages. Here’s a selection from just the latest collection, for your reading pleasure.

Stuff I’ve said

• Giving silos their due, in Linux Journal. Phil Windley responds with Decentralization is hard, maybe too hard.
• Part I of an interview by Simon Carroll in Medium on The Internet of Me (#IoM).
• The Adblock War Series, now with its own page and 41 entries long.

Science

• The chips are down for Moore’s Law, by @MitchWaldrop in Nature. Bonus link: The quantum source of space-time, by Ron Cowen in Nature. But he was right long enough.
• Gravitational Waves at Last, by Sean Carroll. “What I want to do here is to make sure, in case there was any danger, that nobody loses sight of the extraordinary magnitude of what has been accomplished here.” Watch the video there too.
• DIY autostereograms. Fun.
• Acoustic Space by Light through McLuhan. Pull-thought: “The concept of ‘efficient causality’ (i.e. the singular ’cause’ that produces the ‘effect’) only makes sense to the eye.” I can see that. Also, Living in an Acoustic World, by Marshall McLuhan.

Tech, especially Internet

• The Internet is a Global Public Resource, by Mark Surman in The Mozilla Blog. “We’re working to bolster the open Internet movement and take it mainstream.”
• It’s not cyberspace any more, by danah boyd in Medium. Pushback against John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “We all imagined that the Internet would be the great equalizer, but it hasn’t panned out that way… There is a power shift underway and much of the tech sector is ill-equipped to understand its own actions and practices as part of the elite, the powerful. Worse, a collection of unicorns who see themselves as underdogs in a world where instability and inequality are rampant fail to realize that they have a moral responsibility. They fight as though they are insurgents while they operate as though they are kings.”
• The Open Web and its Enemies, by Bill Thompson in Medium. “…we can use the tools of Web science to design and build a better and more resilient Web — but that we must move quickly or there will be nothing left to save.”
• Beyond Mobile: Life After Smartphones ToC, by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble in Medium. “We spotlight four game-changing product categories that will come into play in 2016 and change the world as we know it over the next decade–faster in any case. They are: Augmented and Virtual Reality, Robots, Digital Genies and Autonomous Cars.”
• When your heroes disappoint you. The disappointing hero in this case is Wolfgang Puck.
• From platforms to protocols, by John Light. Important. Example: “Within the past decade or so, many open protocols have been invented that can be used to assemble platforms that can replace the corporate Death Stars.”
• Ida — a Community Empowerment Platform, which “seeks to leverage technology to create new political and economic space for communities.”
• The economics of the Internet, by the World Bank. Not bad as far as it goes, which is transactions. But the Net is about more than transactions. So is economics.
• Scoble goes apeshit over Magic Leap. “I can’t talk about what I saw… is absolutely the biggest product introduction demo, the most interesting product demo, that I’ve ever had in my life.”
• The Waze Effect: AI and the Public Commons, by John Battelle in Medium. “Should we just throw up our hands and “trust the tech?” No.

Politics

• American Democracy is Doomed, by Matthew Yglasias in Vox. “The story here, like so much in American politics, is race.”
• Strategy Trumps Confusion, by Mark D. Stahlman and Jeffery A. Martineau in The Thinker. Makes good sense of the election so far. Good set-up for the next one…
• This is what a Donald Trump Presidency Would Actually Look Like, by Gwynn Guilford in Quartz. In a word, bad. In a worse word, possible.
• Dear Bernie Sanders: Don’t follow in Obama’s footsteps on campaign finance reform, by Larry Lessig in The Washington Post. “…like Obama before him, Sanders has failed to make central the one change that could make his revolution credible: changing the way congressional campaigns are funded.” On the other head, The Super PAC minuet, by George Will. “…understand the wisdom of choosing what the Constitution, properly construed, actually requires: unregulated politics.”
• Podcasting: Legacy media’s new platform, or its antidote? by Lorraine Young in Fold. “For podcasting, there is no more remarkable finding than this: if you are a daily listener of podcasts, you listen to more podcast audio than any other form of audio.”
• American politics just changed, media and money in crisis by Dave Winer. “I predicted that money would not be the determining factor in politics, people laughed, said it’ll never happen. Now we’re there. Neither of the leading candidates have taken contributions from the established sources of political money.”

The People vs/+ Marketing and Advertising

• 60% of all Mobile Banner Ad Clicks are Accidents. Wasting 60% of the $18 billion expected to be spent on mobile advertising this year. Not to mention (the business never does) the wasted time, energy and bandwidth costs to human beings, most of which would rather not have ads on their phones at all.
• Buy More Pointless Stuff, says street-art-edited adverts at the Ealing tube stop.
• Non-Marketing, by Andrew McLuhan in Medium, explains a bit about that last point above: “Fashion magazines and Superbowl Sunday aside, no one wants to see the ads. But in spaces like Snapchat, the users don’t just dislike ads and marketing, they really, really, dislike it. They resent it.”
• MyData: A Nordic Model for human-centered personal data management and processing. “The core idea is that individuals should be in control of their own data. The MyData approach aims at strengthening digital human rights while opening new opportunities for businesses to develop innovative personal data based services built on mutual trust.” A long manifesto at the heart of what might become a movement or part of one. Bonus link: MyData 2016. In Helsinki, August 31-September 1. I’ll be there.
• Wired Is Launching an Ad-Free Website to Appease Ad Blockers. “‘Wired plans to charge $3.99 for four weeks of ad-free access to its website. In many places where ads appear, the site will simply feature more articles,’ said Mark McClusky, the magazine’s head of product and business development. The portion of his readership that uses ad blockers are likely to be receptive to a discussion about their  responsibility to support the businesses they rely on for  information online… There are legitimate reasons that people use ad blockers, according to McClusky, like a desire to speed up web browsing or not wanting to be tracked online. But Wired has bills to pay. “’I think people are ready to have that conversation in a straightforward way,’” McClusky added.  But there is no conversation. If there were, it would look like this.
• Samsung wants customers not to discuss personal information in front of smart TVs, in The Week. Headline says it all.
• Smart, Connected Devices Open More Doors To Personal Networks, by Chuck Martin in MediaPost‘s IoT Daily. My response: “The only ‘transformative consumer experience’ that matters is one of personal independence and control of one’s own data and one’s own stuff. Approximately 0% of the jive around the Internet of Things today is about that, however. Mostly it’s about surveillance and marketing guesswork further intruding themselves into our lives, on vectors of connected stuff controlled by remote corporate and government intelligence agencies with zero interest in our privacy and absolute interest in spying on us. On our side there is no market demand for that. Until we get the true Internet of Things — http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/true-internet-things — we’ll just have more delusional BS.” Chuck’s gracious response: “Agree. Doc, that will have to be part of the “value” exchange. Great piece at the link, thanks for sharing. Still a ways to go to reach The Internet of Everything.”
• Facebook and the new colonialism, by Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic.
• India Doesn’t Need Facebook’s Free Mobile Internet Access. It Needs Nationwide Broadband, by Hasit Shah in Slate. “India has a can-do mentality that enables it to keep functioning and thriving, despite disparaging remarks from places like Silicon Valley. It’s not dissimilar to the spirit that has made the Internet itself a realm of possibility. Splendidly, the 2015 TRAI report ends with a quote from Machiavelli: “The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.” India paid attention, Facebook did not.”
• Is Adblock good for consumers? — asked in Quora. I just added an answer.
• Samsung rolled out ad blocking on Android, Google said no, and then said “Yeah, okay.“

Humanities, culture or something

• I never went looking for a mentor, by Ethan Zuckerman. Good one. Bonus link #1: Why is Verizon letting rural broadband decay? Because they can, and they don’t care. Bonus link #2: Heroin and hope. “…in our corner of New England, we’re starting to see a sane, rational, humane approach by law enforcement to drug addiction.”
• Passages: Put a fork in me, media. I’m done, by Terry Heaton. The good doctor leaves the dying patient who long since stopped listening. No point in staying.
• The Christian Science Monitor has a new project to provide more positive takes on global news, by Laura Hazard Owen in NiemanLab. “an antidote approach to news.”
• Sleeping on subways and elsewhere, by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. Also there: In search of forty winks, by Patricia Marx.
• The Funniest And Most Melodic History Of Japan You Will Ever Watch. By Bill Wurtz.
• The Fallen of WW II. By Neil Halloran. Fucking amazing data visualizations. And history lesssons.
• What Paul Graham is missing about inequality, by Tim O’Reilly in Medium.
• Photoblogger, because it’s all interesting.
• What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foudation set out to conquer inequality, by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker.

Fintech

• The state of P2P lending. By Sonny Singh in TechCrunch

Oldies but Goodies

• Steven Levy interviews Jeff Bezos in Wired. From November 2011.
• Our Town, by Jill Lapore, in The New Yorker in 2007. About two famous failures: John Smith and Jamestown.
• Organization and Markets, by Herbert A. Simon. Not sure how old, but it’s old.