Ideas
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Toward an ethics of influence
This event is now in the past and can be seen in its entirety here. Stop now and go to TimeWellSpent.io, where @TristanHarris, the guy on the left above, has produced and gathered much wisdom about a subject most of us think little about and all of us cannot value more: our time. Both of us… Continue reading
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The Giant Zero
The world of distance Fort Lee is the New Jersey town where my father grew up. It’s at the west end of the George Washington Bridge, which he also helped build. At the other end is Manhattan. Even though Fort Lee and Manhattan are only a mile apart, it has always been a toll call… Continue reading
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Moron the IQ myth (pun intended)
On Quora an anonymous somebody asked, My IQ is 131. Can I get into MIT? Yeah, it’s easy to call that a dumb question. But it’s the kind of question you get from somebody trapped in a caste system that cries out for a larger perspective, such as this one: Anyway, here’s my answer: You… Continue reading
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What everything isn’t
We know shit. I mean, in respect to the Everything that surrounds us, and the culture in which we are pickled from start to finish, what we know rounds to nothing and is, with the provisional exception of the subjects and people we study and love, incomplete and therefore somewhere between questionable and wrong. But… Continue reading
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What should we call the selling of our digital body parts?
In a provocative OuiShareFest talk titled You Are the Product, Aral Balkan says this: I think we are at the point where we have to ask ourselves the very uncomfortable question: What do we call the business of selling everything else about you, that makes you who you are, apart from your physical body? And why, if this… Continue reading
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What’s the best way customer love can help a brand?
In “Cool Influencers With Big Followings Get Picky About Their Endorsements,” Sydney Ember of the NY Times writes, The more brands that use influencers for marketing campaigns on social platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, the less impact each influencer has. At the same time, many influencers, who once jumped at the opportunity to endorse… Continue reading
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We can all make TV. Now what?
Look where Meerkat and Periscope point. I mean, historically. They vector toward a future where anybody anywhere can send live video out to the glowing rectangles of the world. If you’ve looked at the output of either, several things become clear about their inevitable evolutionary path: Mobile phone/data systems will get their gears stripped, in both… Continue reading
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The most important event, ever
IIW XX, the 20th Internet Identity Workshop, comes at a critical inflection point in the history of VRM: Vendor Relationship Management, the only business movement working toward giving you both independence from the silos and walled gardens of the world; and better means for engaging with every business in the world — your way, rather… Continue reading
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Maybe wallets can’t be apps
Danese Cooper (@DivaDanese) asks via tweet, Wallet App (and 1-button pay) as “compelling demo” apparently works equally well 4 BitCoin as 4 PayPal. @dsearls opinion? #BitcoinSummit Sounds cool, but I don’t know which wallet app she’s talking about. There are many. In my opinion, however, they all come up short because they aren’t really wallets.… Continue reading
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Is perfectly personalized advertising perfectly creepy?
The uncanny valley is where you find likenesses of live humans that are just real enough to be creepy. On a graph it looks like this: So I was thinking about how this looks for advertising that wants to get perfectly personal. You know: advertising that comes from systems that know you better than you… Continue reading
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Why EULAs suck for the Internet of Things
I’ve been asked how EULAs — End User License Agreements — might affect the Internet of Things, now becoming better known as the IoT. Good question. The topic is hot: Development, however, is another story. There we are headed straight into a log-jam that Phil Windley calls the Compuserve of Things. In the 80’s and early ’90s, Compuserve was… Continue reading
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It’s Indie Time
Aral Balkan is doing a bang-up job getting Indie rolling as an adjectival meme. He’s doing it with his Indie Phone, Indie Tech Manifesto and a talk titled Free is a Lie. To put the Indie movement in context, it helps to realize that it’s been on the tech road at least since 1964, when Paul Baran, one of the Internet’s… Continue reading
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Earth to Mozilla: Come back home
In her blog post explaining the Brendan Eich resignation, Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, writes, “We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves.” In Mozilla is Human, Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Foundation, adds, “What we also need to do is start a process… Continue reading
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Escaping the Black Holes of Centralization
Turkey shut down Twitter today. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced, “We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” (Hurriyet Daily News) He also said Turkey will “rip out the roots” of Twitter. (Washington Post) Those roots are… Continue reading
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Searls Glasses vs. Google Glass
For many years I’ve wanted glasses that would help me observe and record what I see and hear in the world — but in a polite way that would respect the privacy of others. Since nobody has made anything like that (that I know of) I decided to publish my idea. I immodestly call it… Continue reading
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Into the dark
The power will be out for a while. That’s what the guys in the hard hats tell me, down where they’re working, at the intersection where our dead-end street is born. Many trucks are gathered there, with bright night-work lights illuminating whatever went wrong with the day’s power pole replacement job. The notices they left… Continue reading
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Seeing Deeply
Cities aren’t simple, especially mature ones. They are deep and complicated places that require equally deep attention to appreciate fully. That’s what I get from Stephen Lewis‘ insights about the particulars of present and past urban scenes and characters in Sofia, New York, Istanbul and other cities he knows well. His latest post, titled The Women’s… Continue reading
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The American Way of Privacy
My sister Jan — student of history, Navy vet and a Wise One — sent me an email a couple days ago that I thought would make a good guest post. She said yes to that suggestion and here it is… Is the new born-in-connectivity generation going to re-define privacy? They may try —… Continue reading
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A good word for a good cause
@BlakeHunskicer has a kickstarter project, Fleeing the War at Home: An interactive documentary introducing the crisis in Syria through the personal histories and dreams of Syrian refugees, with a few days and a few thousand dollars left to go. Blake is one of the graduate students I got to know this last year as a visiting… Continue reading