We live in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch defined by the influence of one species over everything else, including the planet itself. That species is ours, and we are a pestilential one, altering, consuming, and wasting everything we can.
Specifically, our civilizations have advanced on the planet like a cancer, parasitically metabolizing materials we call “resources” (without their permission) as if their sums were not finite. Oil and coal will be gone in a few hundred years. Uranium, titanium, tungsten, helium, lithium and other members of the periodic table may be gone far sooner, thanks to our boundless appetites. And yes, we can raise crops of corn and other plants to make fuel for cars and jets, but only at the many costs of monoculture on the biodiversity required for sustaining every form of life.
I bring all this up because we’ll be talking about it on Monday at this month’s Ostrom Workshop salon at Indiana University and live on the Web. Our speaker will be Vinay Gupta (@leashless), inventor of the Hexayurt refugee shelter, founder and CEO of Mattereum, a progenitor of Ethereum, and source of wisdom on all that and much else. The title of his talk is the headline above. His case is that we have to get our per-person environmental consumption down by about 10x. Or else.
It helps that there are people and regions in the world providing living examples of how that is done. Vinay is deeply familiar with those and will share what he knows in ways that help us co-think and work to save the planet’s butt, along with our own.
The salon is at 2 PM Eastern time. It is also free, but you need to register first, here.
If this follows the pattern of our prior salons—all with the theme Beyond the Web—the presentation and discussion will be lively, informative, and productive. See you there.
What happened, Rackspace says, was “the result of a ransomware incident.” Damaged, lost or destroyed is its Hosted Exchange business. On that cloud platform, companies and individuals around the world run their email and much else.
It’s quite a saga.
The first report from Rackspace came at 11:49pm Pacific (where I am) on Thursday, posted on its Incidents page:
We are investigating an issue that is affecting our Hosted Exchange environments. More details will be posted as they become available.
Updates got more wordy as the outage continued. About a day later, a long posting said,
We proactively powered down and disconnected the Hosted Exchange environment while we triaged to understand the extent and the severity of the impact. After further analysis, we have determined that this is a security incident.
They also offered a lifeline of sorts:
At no cost to you, we will be providing access to Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 until further notice. At no cost to you, we will be providing access to Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 until further notice. To activate, please use the below link for instructions on how to set up your account and users.
For reasons not worth going into, this was useless to me. But I’m also just one guy, and almost all of Rackspace’s customers are businesses with more to lose.
Getting help from Rackspace quickly became difficult or impossible, while details about the situation were minimal, until this morning (6 December), when they said it was a ransomware incident. Which countless tweets had been suggesting from the start.
Here is what Rackspace said it was doing about it:
Alongside our internal security team, we have engaged a leading cyber defense firm to investigate. Our investigation is still in its early stages, and it is too early to say what, if any, data was affected. If we determine sensitive information was affected, we will notify customers as appropriate.
No FBI? CIA? NSA? DHS? Police? My guess is that at least two of those have been notified because it would make sense for them to be involved. But I’m sure abundant caution on Rackspace’s part is the reason we’re not hearing about any of that.
As for notifying customers, good luck. In a posting two days ago, Rackspace said,
For those who are finding the process challenging and are awaiting support, we ask for your patience as we increase staff to help every customer. Since our last update, we have mobilized roughly 1000 support Rackers to reduce wait times and address ticket queues. We will continue to accelerate and deploy even more resources to further help customers.
Yesterday morning I chose the “we’ll call you back asap” option at the Rackspace support number, after calling them fruitlessly before that. Since then, crickets. Meanwhile, I’ve been working almost non-stop on moving my email hosting to Hover, which answers the phone quickly and is always helpful.
Of course, I haven’t been able to export anything from Rackspace, and I have growing doubts that I ever will. If the failure is total, many details of my life in the digital world will be lost forever.
One bit of good fortune is that my wife and sister, who both also have searls.com email addresses, were on Rackspace’s basic non-Exchange email service. Since that was still working today, we could export their mail archive from Rackspace as .mbox files, and start new accounts for them on Hover. (Ironically, I moved to Rackspace’s Exchange service because I punched through the basic service’s 25Gb limit on storage, and they sold me on the Exchange service’s better security.)
Ramsomware is bad shit. If you’re Rackspace or one of its customers, there is plenty to fear.
But the larger story here isn’t about Rackspace or its customers. It’s about the cloud business, which is beyond massive.
I’ve been looking for examples of cloud failures that are bigger than this one. Here’s a list from five years ago. Here is one from July of this year. Here is one from August. Most list disruptions lasting hours. This one has been going on for five days with no end in sight.
So let’s imagine that Rackspace and its customers are stuck in that crater, and it just keeps burning. For years. What are the lessons from that?
[Later, on 10 December…] This report by Kevin Beaumont on the Rackspace catastrophe (which continues) is long on technical and administrative details that nobody else seems to be reporting, and is damning to Microsoft as well.
That was Bill Swindaman on the last day I saw him: June 2nd of this year, at a gathering of friends from the best community I’ve ever known: a real one, of friends living in a place. The place was called Oxbow, and it was a collection of mismatched houses on a short dirt road that skirted a pond off Mt. Sinai Road, north of Chapel Hill, in North Carolina. I lived or hung out there, and with friends who called themselves Oxbovines, from 1974 until I moved to Silicon Valley in 1985. After that, we got together once a year at a beach house until the early ’90s. One thing that kept me coming back was a letter Bill wrote called “Where the hell is Searls?”
Since then we’ve all stayed good friends and in touch. And sometimes rogue planets in our little solar system, such as I, would come through town and we’d get together. That’s what happened in June. It was great to see everybody, but there was bummage in the house, because we all knew Bill had ALS: an awful and fatal disease, diagnosed six months earlier. It was a disease that had claimed David Hodskins, my business partner and a friend for nearly as long, just three months earlier. (I remember David, and some of our business adventures, here.)
At Oxbow, Bill and I would often play one-on-one basketball (he was bigger and better), and shoot the shit about everything. I remember one story he told about his dad, a family doctor in Toledo, Ohio. When his car caught fire on the road for no obvious reason, Doctor Swindaman calmly pulled over to the side, got out, lit a cigarette, and calmly watched the thing burn down. Bill too was known for his calm and love of irony. On one of his long cross-country trips alone, Bill sent me a postcard from Tijuana. All he wrote was “Where the liquor flowed, and the dice were hot.” (Those less elderly that Bill and I might not know the reference.)
As I recall, Bill went to Wittenberg College and got his masters in (I thought it was urban planning, but have heard it was something else) at UNC Chapel Hill. After that, he had a series of jobs that he used to accumulate savings for funding long trips. His last job, as I recall, was working for UNC doing something or other that doesn’t matter as much as the other vocation he took up in recent decades: nature photography. You can see his work at BillSwindamanPhotography.com. Here he is, on the job:
I recognize so many places when I look through his photographs—Death Valley, Comb Ridge, Monument Valley, Arches, Canyonlands—less because I’ve been there than because I’ve shot them from commercial flights zooming by overhead. I envied Bill’s ability to get out and explore these places, while I was too committed to other things. I also respected the quality of Bill’s work. It was, and remains, primo.
We did talk for a while about his maybe coming up to New York, from which we could go out to tidelands and photograph wildlife and other outdoor scenes. I lacked gear and skills to equal Bill’s, but it would have been fun. Alas, as John Lennon said, life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.
When I saw Bill in June, I asked if he was still in shape to keep shooting. He said no, and that he had already sold off all his gear. Yet he was still in good humor, considering the obvious fact that he was done with pretty much everything other than persisting at being his good self.
This morning came an email I hadn’t expected this soon. It was from Jackie Strouble, the wild dear with whom he hooked up back in our Oxbow days. With her permission, I’ll later add here what she wrote. Meantime I hope she doesn’t mind my sharing the photo above, which came with her letter.
And I just hope Bill’s memory for us Oxbovines will be a blessing to the rest of the world.
So far the experience of using Twitter under Musk is pretty much unchanged. Same goes for Facebook.
Yes, there is a lot of hand-wringing, and the stock market hates Meta (the corporate parent to which Facebook gave birth); but so far the experience of using both is pretty much unchanged.
This is aside from the fact that the two services are run by feudal overlords with crazy obsessions and not much feel for roads they both pave and ride.
As for Meta (and its Reality Labs division), virtual and augmented realities (VR and AR) via headgear are today where “Ginger” was before she became the Segway: promising a vast horizontal market that won’t materialize because its utilities are too narrow.
VR/AR will, like the Segway, will find some niche uses. For Segway, it was warehouses, cops, and tourism. For VR/AR headgear it will be gaming, medicine, and hookups in meta-space. The porn possibilities are beyond immense.
As for business, both Twitter and Facebook will continue to be hit by a decline in personalized advertising and possibly a return to the old-fashioned non-tracking-based kind, which the industry has mostly forgotten how to do. But it will press on.
Not much discussed, but a real possibility is that advertising overall will at least partially collapse. This has been coming for a long time. (I’ve been predicting it at least since 2008.) First, there is near-zero (and widespread negative) demand for advertising on the receiving end. Second, Apple is doing a good job of working for its customers by providing ways to turn off or thwart the tracking that aims most ads online. And Apple, while not a monopoly, is pretty damn huge.
It may also help to remember that trees don’t grow to the sky. There is a life cycle for companies just as there is for living things.
I wrote this more than a quarter century ago when Linux Journal was the only publication that would have me, and I posted unsold essays and wannabe columns at searls.com. These postings accumulated in this subdirectory for several years before Dave Winer got me to blog for real, starting here.
Interesting how much has changed since I wrote this, and how much hasn’t. Everything I said about metaphor applies no less than ever, even as all the warring parties mentioned have died or moved on to other activities, if not battles. (Note that there was no Google at this time, and the search engines mentioned exist only as fossils in posts such as this one.)
Perhaps most interesting is the paragraph about MARKETS ARE CONVERSATIONS. While that one-liner had no effect at the time, it became a genie that would not return to its bottle after Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine and I put it in The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999. In fact, I had been saying “markets are conversations” to no effect at least since the 1980s. Now “join the conversation” is bullshit almost everywhere it’s uttered, but you can’t stop hearing it. Strange how that goes.
MAKE MONEY, NOT WAR TIME TO MOVE PAST THE WAR METAPHORS OF THE INDUSTRIAL AGE
By Doc Searls
19 March 1997
“War isn’t an instinct. It’s an invention.”
“The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.”
“Conversation is the socializing instrument par excellence.”
-José Ortega y Gasset
Patton lives
In the movie “Patton,” the general says, “Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.” In a moment of self-admonition, he adds, “God help me, I love it so.”
And so do we. For proof, all we have to do is pick up a trade magazine. Or better yet, fire up a search engine.
Altavista says more than one million documents on the Web contain the words Microsoft, Netscape, and war. Hotbot lists hundreds of documents titled “Microsoft vs. Netscape,” and twice as many titled “Netscape vs. Microsoft.”
It’s hard to find an article about the two companies that does not cast them as opponents battling over “turf,” “territory,” “sectors” and other geographies.
It’s also hard to start a conversation without using the same metaphorical premise. Intranet Design Magazine recently hosted a thread titled “Who’s winning?? Netscape vs. Microsoft.” Dave Shafer starts the thread with “Wondering what your informed opinion is on who is winning the internet war and what affects this will have on inter/intranet development.” The first respondent says, “sorry, i’m from a french country,” and “I’m searching for economical informations about the war between Microsoft and Netscape for the control of the WEB industrie.” Just as telling is a post by a guy named Michael, who says “Personaly I have both on my PC.”
So do I. Hey, I’ve got 80 megs of RAM and a 2 gig hard drive, so why not? I also have five ISPs, four word processors, three drawing programs, and two presentation packages. I own competing products from Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Adobe, Yamaha, Sony, Panasonic, Aiwa, Subaru, Fisher Price and the University of Chicago — to name just a few I can see from where I sit. I don’t sense that buying and using any of these is a territorial act, a victory for one company, or a defeat for another.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t have those perceptions when we write and talk about companies and the markets where they compete. Clearly, we do, because we understand business — as we understand just about everything — in metaphorical terms. As it happens, our understanding of companies and markets is largely structured by the metaphors BUSINESS IS WAR and MARKETS ARE BATTLEFIELDS.
By those metaphors we share an understanding that companies fight battles over market territories that they attack, defend, dominate, yield or abandon. Their battlefields contain beachheads, bunkers, foxholes, sectors, streams, hills, mountains, swamps, streams, rivers, landslides, quagmires, mud, passages, roadblocks, and high ground. In fact, the metaphor BUSINESS IS WAR is such a functional conceptual system that it unconsciously pumps out clichés like a machine. And since sports is a sublimated and formalized kind of war, the distances between sports and war metaphors in business are so small that the vocabularies mix without clashing.
Here, I’ll pick up the nearest Business Week… it’s the January 13 issue. Let’s look at the High Technology section that starts on page 104. The topic is Software and the headline reads, “Battle stations! This industry is up for grabs as never before…” Here’s the first paragraph, with war and sports references capitalized: “Software was once an orderly affair in which a few PLAYERS called most of the shots. The industry had almost gotten used to letting Microsoft Corp. set the agenda in personal computing. But as the Internet ballooned into a $1 billion software business in 1996, HUGE NEW TERRITORIES came up for grabs. Microsoft enters the new year in a STRONG POSITION TO REASSERT CONTROL. But it will have to FIGHT OFF Netscape, IBM, Oracle and dozens of startups that are DESPERATELY STAKING OUT TURF on the Net. ‘Everyone is RACING TO FIND MARKET SPACE and get established…’”
Is this a good thing? Does it matter? The vocabularies of war and sports may be the most commonly used sources of metaphors, for everything from academic essays to fashion stories. Everybody knows war involves death and destruction, yet we experience little if any of that in the ordinary conduct of business, or even of violent activities such as sports.
So why should we concern ourselves with war metaphors, when we all know we don’t take them literally?
Two reasons. First, we do take them literally. Maybe we don’t kill each other, but the sentiments are there, and they do have influences. Second, war rarely yields positive sums, except for one side or another. The economy the Internet induces is an explosion of positive sums that accrue to many if not all participants. Doesn’t it deserve a more accurate metaphor?
“Answer true or false,” Firesign Theater says. “Dogs flew spaceships. The Aztecs invented the vacation… If you answered ‘false’ to any of these questions, then everything you know is wrong.”
This is the feeling you begin to get when you read George Lakoff, the foremost authority on the matter of metaphor. Lakoff is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at UC-Berkeley, the author of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things and Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t. He is also co-author of Metaphors We Live By and More than Cool Reason. All are published by the University of Chicago Press.
Maybe that’s why they didn’t give us the real story in school. It would have been like pulling the pins out of a bunch of little hand grenades.
If Lakoff is right, the most important class you ignored in school was English — not because you need to know all those rules you forgot or books you never read, but because there’s something else behind everything you know (or think you know) and talk about. That something is a metaphor. (And if you think otherwise, you’re wrong.)
In English class — usually when the subject was poetry — they told us that meaning often arises out of comparison, and that three comparative devices are metaphor, simile, and analogy. Each compares one thing to another thing that is similar in some way:
Metaphors say one thing is another thing, such as “time is money,” “a computer screen is a desktop,” or (my favorite Burt Lancaster line) “your mind is a cookie of arsenic.”
Similes say one thing is like another thing, such as “gone like snow on the water” or “dumb as a bucket of rocks.”
Analogies suggest partial similarities between unalike things, as with “licorice is the liver of candy.”
But metaphor is the device that matters, because, as Lakoff says, “We may not always know it, but we think in metaphor.” And, more to the point, “Metaphors can kill.” Maybe that’s why they didn’t give us the real story in school. It would have been like pulling the pins out of a bunch of little hand grenades.
But now we’re adults, and you’d think we should know how safely to arm and operate a language device. But it’s not easy. Cognitive science is relatively new and only beginning to make sense of the metaphorical structures that give shape and meaning to our world. Some of these metaphors are obvious but many others are hidden. In fact, some are hidden so well that even a guru like Lakoff can overlook them for years.
Lakoff’s latest book, “Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know and Liberals Don’t,” was inspired by his realization that the reason he didn’t know what many conservatives were talking about was that, as a Liberal, he didn’t comprehend conservative metaphors. Dan Quayle’s applause lines went right past him.
After much investigation, Lakoff found that central to the conservative worldview was a metaphor of the state as a strict father and that the “family values” conservatives espouse are those of a strict father’s household: self-reliance, rewards and punishments, responsibility, respect for authority — and finally, independence. Conservatives under Ronald Reagan began to understand the deep connection between family and politics, while Liberals remained clueless about their own family metaphor — the “nurturant parent” model. Under Reagan, Lakoff says, conservatives drove the language of strict father morality into the media and the body politic. It won hearts and minds, and it won elections.
So metaphors matter, big time. They structure our perceptions, the way we make sense of the world, and the language we use to talk about things that happen in the world. They are also far more literal than poetry class would lead us to believe. Take the metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR —
“It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attach kis decisions and defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies… Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war.” (From Metaphors We Live By)
In our culture argument is understood and structured by the war metaphor. But in other cultures it is not. Lakoff invites us to imagine a culture where argument is viewed as dance, participants as performers and the goal to create an aesthetically pleasing performance.
Right now we understand that “Netscape is losing ground in the browser battle,” because we see the browser business a territory over which Netscape and Microsoft are fighting a war. In fact, we are so deeply committed to this metaphor that the vocabularies of business and war reporting are nearly indistinguishable.
Yet the Internet “battlefield” didn’t exist a decade ago, and the software battlefield didn’t exist a decade before that. These territories were created out of nothingness. Countless achievements have been made on them. Victories have been won over absent or equally victorious opponents.
In fact, Netscape and Microsoft are creating whole new markets together, and both succeed mostly at nobody’s expense. Netscape’s success also owes much to the robust nature of the Windows NT Server platform.
The war stories we’re telling about the Internet are turning into epic lies.
At the same time Microsoft has moved forward in browsers, directory services, languages, object models and other product categories — mostly because it’s chasing Netscape in each of them.
Growing markets are positive-sum creations, while wars are zero-sum at best. But BUSINESS IS WAR is an massive metaphorical machine that works so well that business war stories almost write themselves. This wouldn’t be a problem if business was the same now as it was twenty or fifty years ago. But business is changing fast, especially where the Internet is involved. The old war metaphor just isn’t doing the job.
Throughout the Industrial Age, both BUSINESS IS WAR and MARKETS ARE BATTLEFIELDS made good structure, because most industries and markets were grounded in physical reality. Railroads, shipping, construction, automobiles, apparel and retail were all located in physical reality. Even the phone system was easily understood in terms of phones, wires and switches. And every industrial market contained finite labor pools, capital, real estate, opportunities and natural resources. Business really was war, and markets really were battlefields.
But the Internet is hardly physical and most of its businesses have few physical limitations. The Web doesn’t look, feel or behave like anything in the analog world, even though we are eager to describe it as a “highway” or as a kind of “space.” Internet-related businesses appear and grow at phenomenal rates. The year 1995 saw more than $100 billion in new wealth created by the Internet, most of it invested in companies that were new to the world, or close to it. Now new markets emerge almost every day, while existing markets fragment, divide and expand faster than any media can track them.
For these reasons, describing Internet business in physical terms is like standing at the Dawn of Life and describing new species in terms of geology. But that’s what we’re doing, and every day the facts of business and technology life drift farther away from the metaphors we employ to support them. We arrive at pure myth, and the old metaphors stand out like bones from a dry corpse.
Of course myths are often full of truth. Fr. Seán Olaoire says “there are some truths so profound only a story can tell them.” But the war stories we’re telling about the Internet are turning into epic lies.
Describing Internet business in physical terms is like standing at the Dawn of Life and describing new species in terms of geology.
What can we do about it?
First, there’s nothing we can do to break the war metaphor machine. It’s just too damn big and old and good at what it does. But we can introduce some new metaphors that make equally good story-telling machines, and tell more accurately what’s going on in this new business world.
One possibility is MARKETS ARE CONVERSATIONS. These days we often hear conversations used as synonyms for markets. We hear about “the privacy conversation” or “the network conversation.” We “talk up” a subject and say it has a lot of “street cred.” This may not be much, but it does accurately structure an understanding of what business is and how markets work in the world we are creating with the Internet.
Another is the CONDUIT metaphor. Lakoff credits Michael Reddy with discovering hidden in our discussions of language the implication of conduit structure:
Your thinking comes through loud and clear.
It’s hard to put my ideas into words
You can’t stuff ideas into a sentence
His words carry little meaning
The Net facilitates communication, and our language about communication implies contuits through which what we say is conveyed. The language of push media suggests the Net is less a centerless network — a Web — than a set of channels through which stuff is sent. Note the preposition. I suggest that we might look more closely at how much the conduit metaphor is implicit in what we say about push, channels and related subjects. There’s something to it, I think.
My problem with both CONDUIT and CHANNEL is that they don’t clearly imply positive sums, and don’t suggest the living nature of the Net. Businesses have always been like living beings, but in the Net environment they enjoy unprecedented fecundity. What’s a good metaphor for that? A jungle?
Whatever, it’s clearly not just a battlefield, regardless of the hostilities involved. It’s time to lay down our arms and and start building new conceptual machines. George Lakoff will speak at PC Forum next week. I hope he helps impart some mass to one or more new metaphorical flywheels. Because we need to start telling sane and accurate stories about our businesses and our markets.
If we don’t, we’ll go on shooting at each other for no good reason.
Links
Here are a few links into the worlds of metaphor and cognitive science. Some of this stuff is dense and heavy; but hey, it’s not an easy subject. Just an important one..
The Conceptual Metaphor Home Page, UC-Berkeley’s massive list of metaphor names, source domains and target domains. Oddly, neither business nor markets can be found on any of the three lists. Let’s get them in there.
Let’s say you want to improve the Wikipedia page for Clayton Indiana with an aerial photograph. Feel free to use the one above. That’s why I shot it, posted it, and licensed it permissively. It’s also why I put a helpful caption under it, and some call-outs in mouse-overs.
It’s also why I did the same with Danville, Indiana:
Also Brownsville, Indiana, featuring the Brickyard VORTAC station (a navigational beacon used by aircraft):
Eagle Creek Park, the largest in Indianapolis, and its Reservoir:
The district of Indianapolis charmlessly called Park 100:
The White River, winding through Indianapolis:
Where the White River joins and the Wabash, which divides Southern Indiana from Southern Illinois (which is on the far side here, along with Mt. Carmel):
Among other places.
These were shot on the second leg of a United flight from Seattle to Indianapolis by way of Houston. I do this kind of thing on every flight I take. Partly it’s because I’m obsessed with geography, geology, weather, culture, industry, infrastructure, and other natural things. And partly it’s to provide a useful service.
I don’t do it for the art, though sometimes art happens. For example, with this shot of salt ponds at the south end of San Francisco Bay:
Airplane windows are not optically ideal for photography. On the contrary, they tend to be scratched, smudged, distorted, dirty, and worse. Most of the photos above were shot through a window that got frosty and gray at altitude and didn’t clear until we were close to landing. The air was also hazy. For cutting through that I can credit the dehaze slider in Adobe Photoshop 2021. I can also thank Photoshop for pulling out color and doing other things that make bad photos useful, if not good in the artsy sense. They fit my purpose, which is other people’s purposes.
In addition to Adobe, I also want to tip my hat toward Sony, for making the outstanding a7iv mirrorless camera and the 24-105mm f/4 FE G OSS lens I used on this flight. Also Flickr, which makes it easy to upload, organize, caption, tag, and annotate boundless quantities of full- (and other-) size photos—and to give them Creative Commons licenses. I’ve been using Flickr since it started in 2005, and remain a happy customer with two accounts: my main one, and another focused on infrastructure.
While they are no longer in a position to care, I also want to thank the makers of iView MediaPro, Microsoft Expressions and PhaseOne MediaPro for providing the best workflow software in the world, at least for me. Alas, all are now abandonware, and I don’t expect any of them to work on a 64-bit operating system, which is why, for photographic purposes, I’m still sitting on MacOS Mojave 10.14.6.
I’m hoping that I can find some kind of substitute when I get a new laptop, which will inevitably come with an OS that won’t run the oldware I depend on. But I’ll save that challenge for a future post.
In July 2008, when I posted the photo above on this blog, some readers thought Santa Barbara Mission was on fire. It didn’t matter that I explained in that post how I got the shot, or that news reports made clear that the Gap Fire was miles away. The photo was a good one, but it also collapsed three dimensions into just two. Hence the confusion. If you didn’t know better, it looked like the building was on fire. The photo removed distance.
So does the Internet, at least when we are there. Let’s look at what there means.
Pre-digital media were limited by distance, and to a high degree defined by it. Radio and television signals degrade across distances from transmitters, and are limited as well by buildings, terrain, weather, and (on some frequency bands), ionospheric conditions. Even a good radio won’t get an absent signal. Nor will a good TV. Worse, if you live more than a few dozen miles from a TV station’s transmitter, you need a good antenna mounted on your roof, a chimney, or a tall pole. For signals coming from different locations, you need a rotator as well. Even on cable, there is still a distinction between local channels and cable-only ones. You pay more to get “bundles” of the latter, so there is a distance in cost between local and distant channel sources. If you get your TV by satellite, your there needs to be in the satellite’s coverage footprint.
But with the Internet, here and there are the same. Distance is gone, on purpose. Its design presumes that all physical and wireless connections are one, no matter who owns them or how they get paid to move chunks of Internet data. It is a world of ends meant to show nothing of its middles, which are countless paths the ends ignore. (Let’s also ignore, for the moment, that some countries and providers censor or filter the Internet, in some cases blocking access from the physical locations their systems detect. Those all essentially violate the Internet’s simple assumption of openness and connectivity for everybody and everything at every end.)
For people on the Internet, distance is collapsed to the height and width of a window. There is also no gravity because space implies three dimensions and your screen has only two, and the picture is always upright. When persons in Scotland and Australia talk, neither is upside down to the other. But they are present with each other and that’s what matters. (This may change in the metaverse, whatever that becomes, but will likely require headgear not everyone will wear. And it will still happen over the Internet.)
Digital life, almost all of which now happens on the Internet, is new to human experience, and our means of coping are limited. For example, by language. And I don’t mean different ones. I mean all of them, because they are made for making sense of a three-dimensional physical world, which the Internet is not.
Take prepositions. English, like most languages, has a few dozen prepositions, most of which describe placement in three-dimensional space. Over, around, under, through, beside, within, off, on, over, aboard… all presume three dimensions. That’s also where our bodies are, and it is through our bodies that we make sense of the world. We say good is light and bad is dark because we are diurnal hunters and gatherers, with eyes optimized for daylight. We say good is up and bad is down because we walk and run upright. We “grasp” or “hold on” to an idea because we have opposable thumbs on hands built to grab. We say birth is “arrival,” death is “departure” and careers are “paths,” because we experience life as travel.
But there are no prepositions yet that do justice to the Internet’s absence of distance. Of course, we say we are “on” the Internet like we say we are “on” the phone. And it works well enough, as does saying we are on” fire or drugs. We just frame our understanding of the Internet in metaphorical terms that require a preposition, and “on” makes the most sense. But can we do better than that? Not sure.
Have you noticed that how we present ourselves in the digital world also differs from how we do the same in the physical one? On social media, for example, we perform roles, as if on a stage. We talk to an audience straight through a kind of fourth wall, like an actor, a lecturer, a comedian, musician, or politician. My point here is that the arts and methods of performing in the physical world are old, familiar, and reliant on physical surroundings. How we behave with others in our offices, our bedrooms, our kitchens, our clubs, and our cars are all well-practiced and understood. In social media, the sense of setting is much different and more limited.
In the physical world, much of our knowledge (as the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyifirst taught) is tacit rather than explicit, yet digital technology is entirely explicit: ones and zeroes, packets and pixels. We do have tacit knowledge of the digital world, but the on/off present/absent two-dimensionality of that world is still new to us and lacks much of what makes life in the three-dimensional natural world so rich and subtle.
Marshall McLuhan says all media, all technologies, extend us. When we drive a car we wear it like a carapace or a suit of armor. We also speak of it in the first person possessive: my engine, my fenders, my wheels, much as we would say my fingers and my hair. There is distance here too, and it involves performance. A person who would never yell at another person standing in line at a theater might do exactly that at another car. This kind of distance is gone, or very different, in the digital world.
In a way we are naked in the digital world, and vulnerable. By that I mean we lack the rudimentary privacy technologies we call clothing and shelter, which protect our private parts and spaces from observation and intrusion while also signaling the forms of observation and contact that we permit or welcome. The absence of this kind of privacy tech is why it is so easy for websites and apps to fill our browsers with cookies and other ways to track us and report our activities back to dozens, hundreds or thousands of unknown parties. In this early stage of life on the Internet, what’s called privacy is just the “choices” sites and services give us, none of which are recorded where we can easily find, audit, or dispute them.
Can we get new forms of personal tech that truly extend and project our agency in the digital world? I think so, but it’s a question so completely good that we don’t yet have an answer.
It’s one thing to move off centralized online spaces run by corporate giants, and another to settle the decentralized frontiers where we create new communities. As those communities get organized, forms of governance emerge. Or are deliberately chosen. Either way, the subject could hardly matter more, if those communities wish to persist and thrive.
P7012 is being developed by a working group of the IEEE. Founded in 1963, the IEEE is the largest association of technical professionals in the world and is serious in the extreme.
This standard will guide the way the companies of the world agree to your terms. Not how you agree to theirs. We have the latter “system” right now and it is failing utterly, massively, and universally. Let me explain.
First, company privacy policies aren’t worth the pixels they’re printed on. They can change on a whim, and there is nothing binding about them anyway.
Second, the system of “agreements” we have today do nothing more than put fig leaves over the hard-ons companies have for information about you: information you give up when you agree to a consent notice.
Consent notices are those banners or pop-overs that site owners use to halt your experience and shake down consent to violations of your privacy. There’s usually a big button that says ACCEPT, and some smaller print with a link going to “settings.” Those urge you to switch on or off the “necessary,” “functional,” “performance,” and “targeting” or “marketing” cookies that the site would like to jam into your browser.
Regardless of what you “choose,” there are no simple or easy ways to discover or dispute violations of your “agreement” to anything. Worse, you have to do this with nearly every freaking website you encounter, universalizing the meaninglessness of the whole thing.
But what if sites and services agreed to your terms, soon as you show up?
We have that in the natural world, where it is impolite in the extreme to look under the personal privacy protections called clothing. Or to penetrate other personal privacy protections, such as shelter, doors, shades, and locks. Or to plant tracking beacons on people to follow them like marked animals. There are social contracts forbidding all of those. We expect that contract to be respected, and for the most part it is.
But we have no such social contracts on the Net. In fact, we have the opposite: a feeding frenzy on private information about us, made possible by our powerlessness to stop it, plus boundless corporate rationalization.
While we wait for that, we can use the same kind of tool that companies are using: a simple contract. Sign here. Electronically. That’s what P7012 will standardize.
There is nothing in the architecture of the Net or the Web to prevent a company from agreeing to personal terms.
In fact, at its base—in the protocol called TCP/IP—the Internet is a peer-to-peer system. It does not consign us to subordinate status as mere “users,” “consumers,” “eyeballs,” or whatever else marketers like to call us.
To perform as full peers in today’s online world, we need easy ways for company machines to agree to the same kind of personal terms we express informally in the natural world. That’s what P7012 will make possible.
I’m in that working group, and we’ve been at it for more than two years. We expect to have it done in the next few months. If you want to know more about it, or to help, talk to me.
And start thinking about what kind of standard-form and simple terms a person might proffer: ones that are agreeable to everyone. Because we will need them. And when we get them, surveillance capitalism can finally be replaced by a much larger and friendlier economy: one based on actual customer intentions rather than manipulations based on guesswork and horrible manners.
One candidate is #NoStalking, aka P2B1beta. #NoStalking was developed with help from the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School and the Berkman Klein Center, and says “Just give me ads not based on tracking me.” In other words, it does permit advertising and welcomes sites and services making money that way. (This is how the advertising business worked for many decades before it started driving drunk on personal data.)
Constructive and friendly agreements such as #NoStalking will help businesses withdraw from their addiction to tracking, and make it easier for businesses to hear what people actually want.
Hollywood Park Racetrack is gone. In its place is SoFi Stadium, the 77,000-seat home of Los Angeles’ two pro football teams and much else, including the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater. There’s also more to come in the surrounding vastness of Hollywood Park, named after the racetrack. Wikipedia says the park—
The picture above (via this Martin Turnbull story) is an aerial view of the racetrack in 1938, shortly after it opened. Note the parking lot: immense and almost completely filled with cars. Perhaps this was the day Seabiscuit won his inaugural Gold Cup. Whether or not, few alive today remember when only baseball was more popular than horse racing in the U.S.
What interests me about this change is that I’ve enjoyed a bird’s-eye view of it, while approaching Los Angeles International Airport on commercial passenger planes. I’ve also photographed that change over the course of seventeen years, through those same windows. Between 2005 and 2022, I shot many dozens of photos of the racetrack site (along with the adjacent Hollywood Park Casino) from its last working days as a racetrack to the completion of SoFi Stadium (with the casino’s relocation to a corner of what had been the Racetrack’s parking lot).
In this album on Flickr are 91 photos of that change. Here I tell the story on one page. We’ll start in January 2005:
At this time the racetrack was long past its prime but still functioning along with the casino. (Look closely and you’ll see the word CASINO in red on the roof of the nearest grandstand. The casino itself is the gray building to its left.) In the distance, you can see the skyline of the West Wilshire region and the Hollywood Hills, topped by the HOLLYWOOD sign. (Hollywood Park is actually in Inglewood.)
This same year, Churchill Downs Incorporated sold the track to the Bay Meadows Land Company, owned by Stockbridge Capital Group, for $260 million in cash. This was good for the private capital business, but doom for the track. Bay Meadows, an equally famous racetrack just south of San Francisco, was also doomed.
This shot was taken seven months later, this time looking south:
Note the fountains in the ponds and the pavilion for members and special guests. Also, notice the separate grandstand for the Casino. The cars in the lots are almost certainly extras for LAX’s car rental companies, leasing unused parking spaces. But you can still see in the racetrack what (it says here) was “once described as too beautiful for words.”
The next photo is from April 2007:
Everything still appears operative. You can even see horses practicing on the dirt track. Also note The Forum across the street on the north side. Now the Kia Forum, its roof at various times also bore Great Western and Chase brand images. It was built in 1966 and is still going strong. During its prime, the Lakers in their Showtime era played there. (The team moved downtown to Staples Center in 1999.)
Next is this view, three months later in July 2007, looking south from the north side:
Note the stables between the racetrack and the practice track on the left. Also, note how the inner track, which had turned from dark brown to blue in prior photos, is now a light brown. It will later be green as well.
(Studying this a bit, I’ve learned that good horse race tracks are very deep flat-topped trenches filled with layers of special dirt that require constant grooming, much of which is devoted to making sure the surface is to some degree wet. In arid Los Angeles, this is a steep requirement. For more on how this works, this Wired story will help.)
Two months later, in September 2007, this view looking north takes in most of the Hollywood Park property, plus The Forum, Inglewood Cemetery, Baldwin Hills (beyond the cemetery and to the left or west):
The Hollywood Hills, with its white sign, is below the clouds, in the top middle, and the downtown Los Angeles skyline is in the top right.
Here on the Hollywood Park property, the casino will be rebuilt on the near edge of the property, along South Stadium Drive.
Here, a few months later, in February 2008, the inner track is once again blue:
This time take note of the empty areas of the parking lot, and how some regions are partitioned off. Ahead we’ll see these spaces variously occupied.
A few seconds after the shot above, I took this shot of the casino and club grounds:
The next shot comes a year and a half later, in September 2009:
Here the inner track has returned to green grass. In the far corner of the parking lot, across from The Forum, a partitioned section has activity involving at least six tents, plus other structures.
Almost three years passed before I got another view, in May 2102, this time looking south from the north side:
Here we get a nice view of the stables and the practice track. On the far side of both is a shopping center anchored by Home Depot and Target. (The white roofs are left and right.) Look in the coming shots at how those will change. Also, note the keystone-shaped fencing inside the practice track.
Here is the same scene one month later, in June 2012:
The keystone shape in the practice track is oddly green now, watered while the rest of the ground inside the track is not. A few seconds later I shot this:
Here the main change is the black-on-orange Belfair logo on the roof of the main grandstand. The paint job is new, but in fact, the racetrack became the Betfair Hollywood Park back in March, of this year.
In December begins California’s short rainy season, which we see here in my last view of the racetrack in 2012:
It’s a bit hard to see that the main track is the outer one in dark brown. We also see that the inner track, which had been blue and then green, is now brown: dirt instead of grass. This is my last view before the racetrack got its death sentence. Wikipedia:
On May 9, 2013 in a letter to employees, Hollywood Park president F. Jack Liebau announced that the track would be closing at the end of their fall racing season in 2013. In the letter, Liebau stated that the 260 acres on which the track sits “now simply has a higher and better use”, and that “in the absence of a favorable change in racing’s business model, the ultimate development of the Hollywood property was inevitable”. It was expected that the track would be demolished and replaced by housing units, park land and an entertainment complex, while the casino would be renovated.
My next pass over the property was on June 16, 2013:
The racetrack here is still verdant and irrigated, as you can see from the sprays onto the inner track, which is grass again. The last race here would come six months later, and demolition would begin shortly after that.
One year later, in June 2014, we can see the practice track and the stables absent of any use or care, condemned:
Farther west we see the casino is still operative, with cars in the parking lot:
Racing is done, but some of the ponds are still filled.
Three months later, in September 2014, demolition has begun:
Half the stables are gone, and the whole racetrack area has been bulldozed flat. Two things to note here. First is the row of red trees on the slope at the near end of the track. I believe these are red maples, which turn color in Fall even this far away from their native range. They were a nice touch. Second is the pond at the far end of the track. This is where they will start to dig a vast bowl—a crater—that will become the playing field inside the new SoFi Stadium.
Two months later, in November 2014, all the stables are completely gone, and there is a road across a dirt pile that bridges the old outer track:
This shot looks northeast toward the downtown Los Angeles skyline, and you can see the Hollywood sign on the dark ridge at the left edge of the frame, below a bit of the plane’s wing. The blur at the bottom, across the parking lot, is from the plane’s engine exhaust. (One reason I prefer my windows forward of the wing.)
This next shot is another two months later, in January 2015:
The casino is still happening, but the grandstand is ready for demolition and the racetrack area is getting prepared for SoFi.
One month after that, in February 2015, we see how winter rains have turned some untouched areas green:
Only two of the red trees remain (or so it appears), and the grandstands are still there, along with an operative casino.
This next shot is eight months later, in October, 2015:
The next shot is almost a year later, in September, 2016:
It was a gloomy and overcast day, but you can see the biggest changes starting to take shape. The new casino and its parking garage are all but done, digging of the crater that will become the SoFi stadium has started, and landscaping is also starting to take shape, with hills of dirt in the middle of what had been the racetrack.
Ten months later, in July 2017, the SoFi crater is dug, structural pieces are starting to stand up, the new casino is operating and the old casino is gone:
Here is a close-up of work in and around the SoFi crater, shot a few seconds earlier:
The cranes in the pale gray area stand where a pond will go in. It will be called Rivers Lake.
This shot a few seconds later shows the whole west end of what will become the Hollywood Park complex:
The area in the foreground will become a retail center. The buildings on the left (west) side of the site are temporary ones for the construction project. On the right is the one completed permanent structure: the casino and its parking garage. Buildings on the left or west edge are temporary ones for the construction project.
Three months later, in January 2018, I flew over the site at night and got this one good shot (at 1/40th of a second moving at 200+mph):
Now they’re working day and night raising the SoFi structure in the crater. I share this to show how fast this work is going. You can see progress in this photo taken one month later, in February 2018, again at night:
More than a year went by before I passed over again. That was in August 2019. Here is my first shot on that pass:
Here you SoFi’s superstructure is mostly framed up, and some of the seating is put in place. Here is a wider view shot two seconds later, after I zoomed out a bit:
In both photos you see the word FORUM on The Forum’s roof. (It had previously said “Great Western” and “Chase.” It is now the Kia Forum.) You can also see the two ponds in full shape. The left one will be called Rivers Lake. The right one will pour into it over a waterfall. Cranes on the left stand in the outline of what will become an eight-story office building.
Three months later, in November 2019, the outside surfaces of the stadium are about halfway up:
We also see Rivers Lake lined, with its gray slopes and white bottom.
After this the Covid pandemic hit. I didn’t travel by air (or much at all) for almost two years, and most sporting events were canceled or delayed. So the next time I passed over the site in a position to shoot it was April 2022, when SoFi Stadium was fully operational, and the area around it mostly complete:
Here we see the shopping center in the foreground, now with the Target store showing its logo to the sky. The old practice track and stables have been replaced by parking. A few seconds later I zoomed in on the completed stadium:
We see Rivers Lake, the office building, and its parking structure are also done, as are the parking lots around the stadium. You can also see “SoFi Stadium” in raised lettering on the roof.
And that completes the series, for now.
There are a total of thirty-one photos above. All the links in the photos above will take you to a larger collection. Those in turn are a fraction among the hundreds I shot of the site. And those hundreds are among many thousands I’ve shot of ground and sky from passenger planes. So far I’ve posted over 42,000 photos tagged aerial or windowseat in my two Flickr accounts:
Hundreds of those photos have also found their ways into Wikipedia, because I license nearly all my photos online to encourage cost-free re-use. So, when people with an interest in a topic search for usable pictures they’d like to see in Wikipedia, they often find some of mine and park them at Wikimedia Commons, which is Wikipedia’s library of available images. Of the hundreds you’ll find there in a search for “aerial” plus my name, one is the top photo in the Wikipedia article on Hollywood Park Racetrack. I didn’t put it there or in Wikimedia Commons. Randos did.
My purpose in putting up this post is to encourage documentation of many things: infrastructure changes, geological formations, and any other subject that tends to get overlooked. In other words, to be useful.
A friend yesterday said, “as soon as something becomes infrastructure, it becomes uninteresting.” But not unimportant. That’s one reason I hope readers will amplify or correct what I’ve written here. Blogging is good for that.
For the curious, the cameras I used (which Flickr will tell you if you go there), were:
I’m not a big spender, and photography is a sideline for me, so I tend to buy used gear and rent the good stuff. On that list, the only items I bought new were the Nikon Coolpix and the two 24-105 zooms. The Canon 5D cameras were workhorses, and so was the 24-105 f4L Canon zoom. The Sony a7R was an outgrown but loved gift from a friend, a fine art photographer who had moved on to newer (and also loved) Sony gear. Experience with that camera (which has since died) led me this June to buy a new Sony a7iv, which is a marvel. Though it has a few fewer pixels than the a7R, it still has 33 million of them, which is enough for most purposes. Like the a7R, it’s mirrorless, so what you see in the viewfinder or the display on the back is what you get. It also has a fully articulated rear display, which is great for shooting out the plane windows I can’t put my face in (and there are many of those). It’s like a periscope. So expect to see more and better shots from planes soon.
And, again, give me corrections and improvements on anything I’ve posted here.
In one of his typically trenchant posts, titled Attentive, Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) compares human attention to oil, meaning an extractive commodity:
We used to refer to an information economy. But economies are defined by scarcity, not abundance (scarcity = value), and in an age of information abundance, what’s scarce? A: Attention. The scale of the world’s largest companies, the wealth of its richest people, and the power of governments are all rooted in the extraction, monetization, and custody of attention.
I have no argument with where Scott goes in the post. He’s right about all of it. My problem is with framing it inside the ad-supported platform and services industry. Outside of that industry is actual human attention, which is not a commodity at all.
There is nothing extractive in what I’m writing now, nor in your reading of it. Even the ads you see and hear in the world are not extractive. They are many things for sure: informative, distracting, annoying, interrupting, and more. But you do not experience some kind of fungible good being withdrawn from your life, even if that’s how the ad business thinks about it.
My point here is that reducing humans to beings who are only attentive—and passively so—is radically dehumanizing, and it is important to call that out. It’s the same reductionism we get with the word “consumers,” which Jerry Michalski calls “gullets with wallets and eyeballs”: creatures with infinite appetites for everything, constantly swimming upstream through a sea of “content.” (That’s another word that insults the infinite variety of goods it represents.)
None of us want our attention extracted, processed, monetized, captured, managed, controlled, held in custody, locked in, or subjected to any of the other verb forms that the advertising world uses without cringing. That the “attention economy” produces $trillions does not mean we want to be part of it, that we like it, or that we wish for it to persist, even though we participate in it.
Like the economies of slavery, farming, and ranching, the advertising economy relies on mute, passive, and choice-less participation by the sources of the commodities it sells. Scott is right when he says “You’d never say (much of) this shit to people in person.” Because shit it is.
Scott’s focus, however, is on what the big companies do, not on what people can do on their own, as free and independent participants in networked whatever—or as human beings who don’t need platforms to be social.
At this point in history it is almost impossible to think outside of platformed living. But the Internet is still as free and open as gravity, and does not require platforms to operate. And it’s still young: at most only decades old. In how we experience it today, with ubiquitous connectivity everywhere there’s a cellular data connection, it’s a few years old, tops.
The biggest part of that economy extracts personal data as a first step toward grabbing personal attention. That is the actual extractive part of the business. Tracking follows it. Extracting data and tracking people for ad purposes is the work of what we call adtech. (And it is very different from old-fashioned brand advertising, which does want attention, but doesn’t track or target you personally. I explain the difference in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff.)
In How the Personal Data Extraction Industry Ends, which I wrote in August 2017, I documented how adtech had grown in just a few years, and how I expected it would end when Europe’s GDPR became enforceable starting the next May.
As we now know, GDPR enforcement has done nothing to stop what has become a far more massive, and still growing, economy. At most, the GDPR and California’s CCPA have merely inconvenienced that economy, while also creating a second economy in compliance, one feature of which is the value-subtract of websites worsened by insincere and misleading consent notices.
So, what can we do?
The simple and difficult answer is to start making tools for individuals, and services leveraging those tools. These are tools empowering individuals with better ways to engage the world’s organizations, especially businesses. You’ll find a list of fourteen different kinds of such tools and services here. Build some of those and we’ll have an intention economy that will do far more for business than what it’s getting now from the attention economy, regardless of how much money that economy is making today.
And yes, all those links are on the Web. What’s not on the Web—yet—are all the things listed here. These are things the Internet can support, because, as a World of Ends (defined and maintained by TCP/IP), it is far deeper and broader than the Web alone, no matter what version number we append to the Web.
The salon will open with an interview of yours truly by Dr. Angie Raymond, Program Director of Data Management and Information Governance at the Ostrom Workshop, and Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics in the Kelley School of Business (among too much else to list here), and quickly move forward into a discussion. Our purpose is to introduce and talk about these ideas:
That free customers are more valuable—to themselves, to businesses, and to the marketplace—than captive ones.
That the Internet’s original promises of personal empowerment, peer-to-peer communication, free and open markets, and other utopian ideals, can actually happen without surveillance, algorithmic nudging, and capture by giants, all of which have all become norms in these early years of our digital world.
That, since the admittedly utopian ambitions behind 1 and 2 require boiling oceans, it’s a good idea to try first proving them locally, in one community, guided by Ostrom’s principles for governing a commons. Which we are doing with a new project called the Byway.
A New Way, Byway, and Byway FAQ. All are at Customer Commons and are works in progress. The main thing is that we are now starting work toward actual code doing real stuff. It’s exciting, and we’d love to have your help.
One morning a couple months ago, while I was staying at a friend’s house near Los Angeles, I was surprised to find the Los Angeles Times still being delivered there. The paper was smaller and thinner than it used to be, with minimized news, remarkably little sports, and only two ads in the whole paper. One was for Laemmle Theaters. The other was for a law firm. No inserts from grocery stores. No pitches for tires in the sports section, for clothing in the culture section, for insurance in the business section, or for events in the local section. I don’t even recall if those sections still existed, because the paper itself had been so drastically minimized
Economically speaking, a newspaper has just two markets: advertisers and readers. The photo above says what one advertiser thinks: that ads in print are a waste—and so is what they’re printed on, including the LA Times. The reader whose house I stayed in has since canceled her subscription. She also isn’t subscribing to the online edition. She also subscribes to no forms of advertising, although she can hardly avoid ads online, or anywhere outside her home.
Many years ago, Esther Dyson said the challenge for business isn’t to add value but to subtract waste. So I’m wondering how much time, money, and effort Pavillions is wasting by sending ads to people—even to those who scan that QR code.
Peter Drucker said “the purpose of a business is to create a customer.” So, consider the difference between a customer created by good products and services and one created by coupons and “our weekly ad in your web browser.”
A good example of the former is Trader Joe’s., which has no loyalty program, no stuff “on sale,” no human-free checkout, almost no advertising—and none of the personal kind. Instead, Trader Joe’s creates customers with good products, good service, good prices, and helpful human beings. It never games customers with what Doug Rauch, retired president of Trader Joe’s, calls “gimmicks.”*
I actually like Pavillions. But only two things make me a Pavillioins customer. One is their location (slightly closer than Trader Joe’s), and the other is that they carry bread from LaBrea Bakery.
While I would never sign up for a weekly ad from Pavillions, I do acknowledge that lots of people love coupons and hunting for discounts.
But how much of that work is actually waste as well, with high cognitive and operational overhead for both sellers and buyers? How many CVS customers like scanning their loyalty card or punching in their phone number when they check out of the store—or actually using any of the many discounts printed on the store’s famous four-foot-long receipts? (Especially since many of those discounts are for stuff the customer just bought? Does CVS, which is a good chain with locations everywhere, actually need those gimmicks?)
Marketers selling services to companies like Pavillions and CVS will tell you, with lots of supporting stats, that coupons and personalized (aka “relevant” and “interest-based”) ads and promos do much to improve business. But what if a business is better to begin with, so customers come there for that reason, rather than because they’re being gamed with gimmicks?
Will the difference ever become fully obvious? I hope so, but I don’t know.
One thing I do know is that there is less and less left of old-fashioned brand advertising: the kind that supported newspapers in the first place. That kind of advertising was never personal (that was the job of “direct response marketing”). It was meant instead for populations of possible customers and carried messages about the worth of a brand.
This is the kind of advertising we still see on old-school TV, radio and billboards. Sometimes also in vertical magazines. (Fashion, for example.) But not much anymore in newspapers.
Why this change? Well, as I put it in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.”
That was seven years ago. A difference now is that it’s clearer than ever that digital tech and the Internet are radically changing every business, every institution, and every person who depends on it. Everywhere you drive in Los Angeles today, there are For Lease signs on office buildings. The same is true everywhere now graced with what Bob Frankston calls “ambient connectivity.” It’s a bit much to say nobody is going back to the office, but it’s obvious that you need damn good reasons for going there.
Meanwhile, I’m haunted by knowing a lot of real value is being subtracted as waste. (I did a TEDx talk on this topic, four years ago.) And that we’re not going back.
*I tell more of the Trader Joe’s story, with help from Doug, in The Intention Economy.
That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten links to other sections of today’s report. It’s pretty freaking amazing — and amazingly freaky when you dig down to the business assumptions behind it. Here is the rest of the list (sans one that goes to a link-proof Flash thing):
Personal Details Exposed Via Biggest U.S. Websites The largest U.S. websites are installing new and intrusive consumer-tracking technologies on the computers of people visiting their sites—in some cases, more than 100 tracking tools at a time.
The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.
It gets worse:
In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.The data on Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s film-watching habits, for instance, is being offered to advertisers on BlueKai Inc., one of the new data exchanges. “It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.” The Journal examined the 50 most popular U.S. websites, which account for about 40% of the Web pages viewed by Americans. (The Journal also tested its own site, WSJ.com.) It then analyzed the tracking files and programs these sites downloaded onto a test computer. As a group, the top 50 sites placed 3,180 tracking files in total on the Journal’s test computer. Nearly a third of these were innocuous, deployed to remember the password to a favorite site or tally most-popular articles. But over two-thirds—2,224—were installed by 131 companies, many of which are in the business of tracking Web users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold.
Here’s what’s delusional about all this: There is no demand for tracking by individual customers. All the demand comes from advertisers — or from companies selling to advertisers. For now.
Here is the difference between an advertiser and an ordinary company just trying to sell stuff to customers: nothing. If a better way to sell stuff comes along — especially if customers like it better than this crap the Journal is reporting on — advertising is in trouble.
In fact, I had been calling the tracking-based advertising business (now branded adtech or ad-tech) a bubble for some time. For example, in Why online advertising sucks, and is a bubble (31 October 2008) and After the advertising bubble bursts (23 March 2009). But I didn’t expect my own small voice to have much effect. But this was different. What They Know was written by a crack team of writers, researchers, and data visualizers. It was led by Julia Angwin and truly Pulitzer-grade stuff. It was so well done, so deep, and so sharp, that I posted a follow-up report three months later, called The Data Bubble II. In that one, I wrote,
That same series is now nine stories long, not counting the introduction and a long list of related pieces. Here’s the current list:
Personal Details Exposed Via Biggest U.S. Websites The largest U.S. websites are installing new and intrusive consumer-tracking technologies on the computers of people visiting their sites—in some cases, more than 100 tracking tools at a time.
Two things I especially like about all this. First, Julia Angwin and her team are doing a terrific job of old-fashioned investigative journalism here. Kudos for that. Second, the whole series stands on the side of readers. The second person voice (you, your) is directed to individual persons—the same persons who do not sit at the tables of decision-makers in this crazy new hyper-personalized advertising business.
To measure the delta of change in that business, start with John Battelle‘s Conversational Marketing series (post 1, post 2, post 3) from early 2007, and then his post Identity and the Independent Web, from last week. In the former he writes about how the need for companies to converse directly with customers and prospects is both inevitable and transformative. He even kindly links to The Cluetrain Manifesto (behind the phrase “brands are conversations”).
It was obvious to me that this fine work would blow the adtech bubble to a fine mist. It was just a matter of when.
Alas, the answer to that last one was no. By 2016, Julia and her team had long since disbanded, and the original links to the What They Know series began to fail. I don’t have exact dates for which failed when, but I do know that the trusty master link, wjs.com/wtk, began to 404 at some point. Fortunately, Julia has kept much of it alive at https://juliaangwin.com/category/portfolio/wall-street-journal/what-they-know/. Still, by the late Teens it was clear that even the best journalism wasn’t going to be enough—especially since the major publications had become adtech junkies. Worse, covering their own publications’ involvement in surveillance capitalism had become an untouchable topic for journalists. (One notable exception is Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times, whose coverage of the paper’s own tracking was followed by a cutback in the practice.)
While I believe that most new laws for tech mostly protect yesterday from last Thursday, I share with many a hope for regulatory relief. I was especially jazzed about Europe’s GDPR, as you can read in GDPR will pop the adtech bubble (12 May 2018) and Our time has come (16 May 2018 in ProjectVRM).
But I was wrong then too. Because adtech isn’t a bubble. It’s a death star in service of an evil empire that destroys privacy through every function it funds in the digital world.
That’s why I expect the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (H.R. 8152), even if it passes through both houses of Congress at full strength, to do jack shit. Or worse, to make our experience of life in the digital world even more complicated, by requiring us to opt-out, rather than opt-in (yep, it’s in the law—as a right, no less), to tracking-based advertising everywhere. And we know how well that’s been going. (Read this whole post by Tom Fishburne, the Marketoonist, for a picture of how less than zero progress has been made, and how venial and absurd “consent” gauntlets on websites have become.) Do a search for https://www.google.com/search?q=gdpr+compliance to see how large the GDPR “compliance” business has become. Nearly all your 200+ million results will be for services selling obedience to the letter of the GDPR while death-star laser beams blow its spirit into spinning shards. Then expect that business to grow once the ADPPA is in place.
There is only thing that will save us from adtech’s death star.
That’s tech of our own. Our tech. Personal tech.
We did it in the physical world with the personal privacy tech we call clothing, shelter, locks, doors, shades, and shutters. We’ve barely started to make the equivalents for the digital world. But the digital world is only a few decades old. It will be around for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of decades to come. And adtech is still just a teenager. We can, must, and will do better.
All we need is the tech. Big Tech won’t do it for us. Nor will Big Gov.
The economics will actually help, because there are many business problems in the digital world that can only be solved from the customers’ side, with better signaling from demand to supply than adtech-based guesswork can ever provide. Customer Commons lists fourteen of those solutions, here. Privacy is just one of them.
A visitor to aerial photos on my Flickr site asked me where one should sit on a passenger plane to shoot pictures like mine. This post expands on what I wrote back to him.
Here’s the main thing: you want a window seat on the side of the plane shaded from the Sun, and away from the wing. Sun on plane windows highlights all the flaws, scratches, and dirt that are typical features of airplane windows. It’s also best to have a clear view of the ground. In front of the wing is also better than behind, because jet engine exhaust at low altitudes distorts the air, causing blur in a photo. (At high altitudes this problem tends to go away.) So, if you are traveling north in the morning, you want a seat on the left side of the plane (where the seat is usually called A). And the reverse if you’re flying south.
Here in North America, when flying west I like to be on the right side, and when flying east I like to be on the left, because the whole continent is far enough north of the Equator for the Sun, at least in the middle hours of the day, to be in the south. (There are exceptions, however, such as early and late in the day in times of year close to the Summer Solstice, when the Sun rises and sets far north of straight east and west.) This photo, of massive snows atop mountains in Canada’s arctic Baffin Island, was shot on a flight from London to Denver, with the sun on the left side of the plane. I was on the right:
As for choosing seats, the variety of variables is extreme. That’s because almost every airline flies different kinds of planes, and even those that fly only one kind of plane may fly many different seat layouts. For example, there are thirteen different variants of the 737 model, across four generations. And, even within one model of plane, there may be three or four different seat layouts, even within one airline. For example, United flies fifteen different widebody jets: four 767s, six 777s, and four 787s, each with a different seat layout. It also flies nineteen narrowbody jets, five regional jets, and seven turboprops, all with different seat layouts as well.
So I always go to SeatGuru.com for a better look at the seat layout for a plane than what United (or any airline) will tell me on their seat selection page when I book a flight online. On the website, you enter the flight number and the date, and SeatGuru will give you the seat layout, with a rating or review for every seat.
This is critical because some planes’ window seats are missing a window, or have a window that is “misaligned,” meaning it faces the side of a seat back, a bulkhead, or some other obstruction. See here:
Some planes have other challenges, such as the electrically dimmable windows on Boeing 787 “Dreamliners.” I wrote about the challenges of those here.
Now, if you find yourself with a seat that’s over the wing and facing the Sun, good photography is still possible, as you see in this shot of this sunset at altitude:
One big advantage of life in our Digital Age is that none of the airlines, far as I know, will hassle you for shooting photos out windows with your phone. That’s because, while in the old days some airlines forbid photography on planes, shooting photos with phones, constantly, is now normative in the extreme, everywhere. (It’s still bad form to shoot airline personnel in planes, though, and you will get hassled for that.)
So, if you’re photographically inclined, have fun.
I used to tell Craig Burton there was no proof that he could be killed, because he came so close, so many times. But now we have it. Cancer got him, a week ago today. He was sixty-seven.
So here’s a bit of back-story on how Craig and I became great friends.
In late 1987, my ad agency, Hodskins Simone & Searls, pulled together a collection of client companies for the purpose of creating what we called a “connectivity consortium.” The idea was to evangelize universal networking—something the world did not yet have—and to do it together.
The time seemed right. Enterprises everywhere were filling up with personal computers, each doing far more than mainframe terminals ever did. This explosion of personal productivity created a massive demand for local area networks, aka LANs, on which workers could share files, print documents, and start to put their companies on a digital footing. IBM, Microsoft, and a raft of other companies were big in the LAN space, but one upstart company—Novell—was creaming all of them. It did that by embracing PCs, Macs, makers of hardware accessories such as Ethernet cards, plus many different kinds of network wiring and communications protocols.
Our agency was still new in Silicon Valley, and our clients were relatively small. To give our consortium some heft, we needed a leader in the LAN space. So I did the audacious thing, and called on Novell at Comdex, which was then the biggest trade show in tech. My target was Judith Clarke, whose marketing smarts were already legendary. For example, while all the biggest companies competed to out-spend each other with giant booths on the show floor, Judith had Novell rent space on the ground floor of the Las Vegas Hilton, turning that space into a sales office for the company, a storefront on the thickest path for foot traffic at the show.
So I cold-called on Judith at that office. Though she was protected from all but potential Novell customers, I cajoled a meeting, and Judith said yes. Novell was in.
The first meeting of our connectivity consortium was in a classroom space at Novell’s Silicon Valley office. One by one, each of my agency’s client companies spoke about what they were bringing to our collective table, while a large unidentified dude sat in the back of the room, leaning forward, looking like a walrus watching fish. After listening patiently to what everyone said, the big dude walked up to the blackboard in front and chalked out diagrams and descriptions of how everything everyone was talking about could actually work together. He also added a piece nobody had brought up yet: TCP/IP, the base protocol for the Internet. That one wasn’t represented by a company, mostly because it wasn’t invented for commercial purposes. But, the big guy said, TCP/IP was the protocol that would, in the long run, make everything work together.
I was of the same mind, so quickly the dude and I got into a deep conversation during which it was clear to me that I was being both well-schooled about networking, yet respected for what little new information I brought to the conversation. After a while, Judith leaned in to tell us that this dude was Craig Burton, and that it was Craig’s strategic vision that was busy guiding Novell to its roaring success.
Right after that meeting, Craig called me just to talk, because he liked how the two of us could play “mind jazz” together, co-thinking about the future of a digital world that was still being born. Which we didn’t stop doing for the next thirty-four years.
So much happened in that time. Craig and Judith† had an affair, got exiled from Novell, married each other and built The Burton Group with another Novell alum, Jamie Lewis. It was through The Burton Group that I met and became good friends with Kim Cameron, who also passed too early, in November of last year. Both were also instrumental in helping start the Internet Identity Workshop, along with too many other things to mention. (Here are photos from the first meeting of what was then the “Identity Gang.”)
If you search for Craig’s name and mine together, you’ll find more than a thousand results. I’ll list a few of them later, and unpack their significance. But instead for now, I’ll share what I sent for somebody to use at the service for Craig today in Salt Lake City:
In a more just and sensible world, news of Craig Burton’s death would have made the front page of the Deseret News, plus the obituary pages of major papers elsewhere—and a trending topic for days in social media.*
If technology had a Hall of Fame, Craig would belong in it. And maybe some day, that will happen.
Because Craig was one of the most important figures in the history of the networked world where nearly all of us live today. Without Craig’s original ideas, and guiding strategic hand, Novell would not have grown from a small hardware company into the most significant networking company prior to the rise of the Internet itself. Nor would The Burton Group have helped shape the networking business as well, through the dawn of the Internet Age.
In those times and since, Craig’s thinking has often been so deep and far-reaching that I am sure it will be blowing minds for decades to come. Take, for example, what Craig said to me in a 2000 interview for Linux Journal. (Remember that this was when the Internet was still new, and most homes were connected by dial-up modems.)
I see the Net as a world we might see as a bubble. A sphere. It’s growing larger and larger, and yet inside, every point in that sphere is visible to every other one. That’s the architecture of a sphere. Nothing stands between any two points. That’s its virtue: it’s empty in the middle. The distance between any two points is functionally zero, and not just because they can see each other, but because nothing interferes with operation between any two points. There’s a word I like for what’s going on here: terraform. It’s the verb for creating a world. That’s what we’re making here: a new world.
I could say so much more about Craig’s original thinking and his substantial contributions to developments in our world. But I also need to give credit where due to the biggest reason Craig’s heroism remains mostly unsung, and that’s Craig himself. The man was his own worst enemy: a fact he admitted often, and with abiding regret for how his mistakes hurt others, and not just himself.
But I also consider it a matter of answered prayer that, after decades of struggling with alcohol addiction, Craig not only sobered up, but stayed that way, married his high school sweetheart and returned to the faith into which he was born.
Now it is up to people like me—Craig’s good friends still in the business—to make sure Craig’s insights and ideas live on.
For decades, all TV signals were “over the air,” and free to be watched by anyone with a TV and an antenna. Then these things happened:
Community Antenna TeleVision, aka CATV, gave us most or all of our free over-the-air channels, plus many more—for a monthly subscription fee. They delivered this service, literally, through a cable connection—one that looked like the old one that went to an outside antenna, but instead went back to the cable company’s local headquarters.
Then premium TV (aka “pay,” “prestige” and “subscription” TV), along with one’s cable channel selection. This started with HBO and Showtime. It cost additional subscription fees but was inside your cable channel selection and your monthly cable bill.
Then came streaming services, (aka Video on Demand, or VoD) showed up over the Internet, and then through media players you could hook up to your tv through an input (usually HDMI) aside from the one from your cable box, and your cable service—even if your Internet service was provided by the cable company. This is why the cable industry called all of these services “over the top,” or OTT. The main brands here were Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Google Chromecast, and Roku. Being delivered over the Internet rather than lumped in with all those cable channels, higher resolutions were possible. At best most cable services are “HD,” which was fine a decade ago, but is now quite retro. Want to watch TV in 4K, HDR, and all that? Subscribe through your smart OTT media intermediary.
And now media players are baked into TVs. Go to Best Buy, Costco, Sam’s Club, Amazon, or Walmart, and you’ll see promos for “smart” Google, Fire (Amazon), Roku, webOS, and Tizen TVs—rather than just Sony, LG, Samsung, and other brands. Relatively cheap brands, such as Vizio, TCL, and Hisense, are essentially branded media players with secondary brand names on the bezel.
Economically speaking, all that built-in smartness is about two things. One is facilitating subscriptions, and the other is spying on you for the advertising business. But let’s table the latter and focus just on subscriptions, because that’s the way the service world is going.
More and more formerly free stuff on the Net is available only behind paywalls. Newspapers and magazines have been playing this game for some time. But, now that Substack is the new blogging, many writers there are paywalling their stuff as well. Remember SlideShare? Now it’s “Read free for 60 days.”
Podcasting is drifting in that direction too. SiriusXM and Spotify together paid over a half $billion to put a large mess of popular podcasts into subscription-based complete (SiriusXM) or partial (Spotify) paywall systems, pushing podcasting toward the place where premium TV has already sat for years—even though lots of popular podcasts are still paid for by advertising.
I could add a lot of data here, but I’m about to leave on a road trip. So I’ll leave it up to you. Look at what you’re spending now on subscriptions, and how that collection of expenses is going up. Also, take a look at how much of what was free on the Net and the Web is moving to a paid subscription model. The trend is not small, and I don’t see it stopping soon.
I’ve been blogging since 1999, first at weblog.searls.com, and since 2007 here. I also plan to continue blogging here* for the rest of my life. But it’s clear now that newsletters are where it’s at, so I’m going to start one of those.
The first question is, What do I call it?
The easy thing, and perhaps the most sensible, is Doc Searls Newsletter, or Doc Searls’ Newsletter, in keeping with the name of this blog. In branding circles, they call this line extension.
Another possibility is Spotted Hawk. This is inspired by Walt Whitman, who wrote,
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me,
he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed.
I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
In the same spirit I might call the newsletter Barbaric Yawp. But ya kinda gotta know the reference, which even English majors mostly don’t. Meanwhile, Spotted Hawk reads well, even if the meaning is a bit obscure. Hell, the Redskins or the Indians could have renamed themselves the Spotted Hawks.
Yet barbaric yawping isn’t my style, even if I am untamed and sometimes untranslatable.
Any other suggestions?
As a relevant but unrelated matter, I also have to decide how to produce it. The easy choice is to use Substack, which all but owns the newsletter platform space right now. But Substack newsletters default to tracking readers, and I don’t want that. I also hate paragraph-long substitutes for linked URLs, and tracking cruft appended to the ends of legible URLs. (When sharing links from newsletters, always strip that stuff off. Pro tip: the cruft usually starts with a question mark.) I’m tempted by Revue, entirely because Julia Angwin and her team at The Markupwent through a similar exercise in 2019 and chose Revue for their newsletter. I’m already playing with that one. Other recommendations are welcome. Same goes for managing the mailing list if I don’t use a platform. Mailman perhaps?
*One reason I keep this blog up is that Harvard hosts it, and Harvard has been around since 1636. I also appreciate deeply its steady support of what I do here and at ProjectVRM, which also manifests as a blog, at the Berkman Klein Center.
Marcus Smart. Photo by Eric Drost, via Wikimedia Commons.
Back in 2016, I correctly predicted that the Cleveland Cavaliers would win the NBA finals, beating the heavily favored Golden State Warriors, which had won a record 73 games in the regular season. In 2021, I incorrectly predicted that the Kansas City Chiefs would beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I based both predictions on a theory: the best story would win. And maybe Tom Brady proved that anyway: a relative geezer who was by all measures the GOAT, proved that label.
So now I’m predicting that the Boston Celtics will win the championship because they will win because they have the better story.
Unless Steph Curry proves that he’s the GSOAT: Greatest Shooter Of All Time. Which he might. He sure looked like it in Game Four. That’s a great story too.
But I like the Celtics’ story better. Here we have a team of relative kids who were average at best by the middle of the season, but then, under their rookie coach, became a defensive juggernaut, racking up the best record through the remainder of the season, then blowing through three playoffs to get to the Finals. In Round One, they swept Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and the Brooklyn Nets, who were pre-season favorites to win the Eastern Conference. In Round Two, they beat Giannis Antentokuompo and the Milwaukee Bucks, who were defending champs, in six games. In Round Three, they won the conference championship by beating the Miami Heat, another great defensive team, and the one with the best record in the conference, in seven games. Now the Celtics are tied, 2-2, with the Western Conference champs, the Golden State Warriors, with Steph Curry playing his best, looking all but unbeatable, on a team playing defense that’s pretty much the equal of Boston’s.
Three games left, two at Golden State.
But I like the Celtics in this. They seem to have no problem winning on the road, and I think they want it more. And maybe even better.
May the best story win.
[Later…] Well, c’est le jeu. The Celtics lost the next two games, and the Warriors took the series.
After it was over, lots of great stories were told about the Warriors: the team peaked at the right time, they were brilliantly coached (especially on how to solve the Celtics), Steph moved up in all-time player rankings (maybe even into the top ten), Wiggins finally looked like the #1 draft choice he was years ago, the Dynasty is back. Long list, and it goes on. But the Celtics still had some fine stories of their own, especially around how they transformed from a mediocre team at mid-season to a proven title contender that came just two games away from winning it all. Not bad.
Chemistry is a good metaphor for how teams work—especially when times get tough, such as in the playoffs happening in the NBA right now.
Think about it. Every element has a melting point: a temperature above which solid turns liquid. Basketball teams do too, only that temperature changes from game to game, opponent to opponent, and situation to situation. Every team is a collection of its own human compounds of many elements: physical skills and talents, conditioning, experience, communication skills, emotional and mental states, beliefs, and much else.
Sometimes one team comes in pre-melted, with no chance of winning. Bad teams start with a low melting point, arriving in liquid form and spilling all over the floor under heat and pressure from better teams.
Sometimes both teams might as well be throwing water balloons at the hoop.
Sometimes both teams are great, neither melts, and you get an overtime outcome that’s whatever the score said when the time finally ran out. Still, one loser and one winner. After all, every game has a loser, and half the league loses every round. Whole conferences and leagues average .500. That’s their melting point: half solid, half liquid.
Yesterday we saw two meltdowns, neither of which was expected and one of which was a complete surprise.
First, the Milwaukee Bucks melted under the defensive and scoring pressures of the Boston Celtics. There was nothing shameful about it, though. The Celtics just ran away with the game. It happens. Still, you could see the moment the melting started. It was near the end of the first half. The Celtics’ offense sucked, yet they were still close. Then they made a drive to lead going into halftime. After that, it became increasingly and obviously futile to expect the Bucks to rally, especially when it was clear that Giannis Antetokounmpo, the best player in the world, was clearly less solid than usual. The team melted around him while the Celtics rained down threes.
To be fair, the Celtics also melted three times in the series, most dramatically at the end of game five, on their home floor. But Marcus Smart, who was humiliated by a block and a steal in the closing seconds of a game the Celtics had led almost all the way, didn’t melt. In the next two games, he was more solid than ever. So was the team. And they won—this round, at least. Against the Miami Heat? We’ll see.
Right after that game, the Phoenix Suns, by far the best team in the league through the regular season, didn’t so much play the Dallas Mavericks as submit to them. Utterly.
In chemical terms, the Suns showed up in liquid form and turned straight into gas. As Arizona Sportsput it, “We just witnessed one of the greatest collapses in the history of the NBA.” No shit. Epic. Nobody on the team will ever live this one down. It’s on their permanent record. Straight A’s through the season, then a big red F.
Talk about losses: a mountain of bets on the Suns also turned to vapor yesterday.
So, what happened? I say chemistry.
Maybe it was nothing more than Luka Dončić catching fire and vaporizing the whole Suns team. Whatever, it was awful to watch, especially for Suns fans. Hell, they melted too. Booing your team when it needs your support couldn’t have helped, understandable though it was.
Applying the basketball-as-chemistry theory, I expect the Celtics to go all the way. They may melt a bit in a game or few, but they’re more hardened than the Heat, which comes from having defeated two teams—the Atlanta Hawks and the Philadelphia 76ers—with relatively low melting points. And I think both the Mavs and the Warriors have lower melting points than either the Celtics or the Heat.
But we’ll see.
Through the final two rounds, look at each game as a chemistry experiment. See how well the theory works.
Specifically, our civilizations have advanced on the planet like a cancer, parasitically metabolizing materials we call “resources” (without their permission) as if their sums were not finite. Oil and coal will be gone in a few hundred years. Uranium, titanium, tungsten, helium, lithium and other members of the periodic table may be gone far sooner, thanks to our boundless appetites. And yes, we can raise crops of corn and other plants to make fuel for cars and jets, but only at the many costs of monoculture on the biodiversity required for sustaining every form of life.
I bring all this up because we’ll be talking about it on Monday at this month’s Ostrom Workshop salon at Indiana University and live on the Web. Our speaker will be Vinay Gupta (@leashless), inventor of the Hexayurt refugee shelter, founder and CEO of Mattereum, a progenitor of Ethereum, and source of wisdom on all that and much else. The title of his talk is the headline above. His case is that we have to get our per-person environmental consumption down by about 10x. Or else.
“War isn’t an instinct. It’s an invention.”
Altavista says more than one million documents on the Web contain the words Microsoft, Netscape, and war. Hotbot lists hundreds of documents titled “Microsoft vs. Netscape,” and twice as many titled “Netscape vs. Microsoft.”
It’s hard to find an article about the two companies that does not cast them as opponents battling over “turf,” “territory,” “sectors” and other geographies.
I’ve been blogging since 1999, first at 
