So much doom and gloom about AI. Lordy: Samuel Marks on X. Ted Gioia on that one and many more. Quoth The Raven Jeffrey Snover And I'm exactly at the expected age: Life expectancy vs. Health costs Not good Nicholas Cage's house has a hole Seems NPR is super-serving its core demographic

I've ordered danah boyd's new book, Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census, from the University of Chicago Press. danah, who is brilliant, teaches at Cornell these days, but will also be on tour. A schedule is at that last link. So is this: […]

Yesterday I was working in my home office when I suddenly remembered that the first IU football game of the season was on. So I went downstairs, turned on the TV, found the Indianapolis station carrying it (we still use an antenna here, 60 miles away), and started watching in time to see what I […]

Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond is a story in Reason, which adds this subhead: “The government also placed Karyann Parkinson on its child abuse and neglect registry, where she will remain for seven years.” The distance to the Pond was half a mile. I turned five […]

Here is some stuff I’ve noticed, thought about, or wrapped up, while ending a summer of travel and work (the order is random):

Canadian universities are poaching American academics who could use a more hospitable work and research environment. Here’s McGill’s brag on its bags, one of which is my good friend Ethan Zuckerman, who will be leaving his beloved job at U.Mass Amherst to take a new and promising position at McGill, in Montréal. He explains, Canada […]

Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. That’s what Reuters says The Information says. The latter is behind an expensive paywall, so I’ll take Reuters’ word for it. In The Price Of Independence Was $5.9 Billion, AI Secret says, 🌍 How this hits reality: Last year, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia at […]

And loved them all Among Money Inc.'s wealthiest college towns, I've lived in numbers 2, 3, 4, 10, 13*, and 20. I've also had good hang times in 5, 9, and 15. Oddly, I've never been to #1, and I grew up in both North and South Jersey. *Same as 2, really.

I remain charged about both Wired has a good review of electric toothbrushes. I've had both the brands that Wired names winners: a Sonicare and an Oral B. The Sonicare was an early model that I bought late in the last millennium. One battery charge lasted for weeks, and it didn't crap out until 2019, when I […]

My life Do some stuffSleep like a dogDo some stuffSleep like a dog Or watch the play from a seat close to a door "Hell is other people."—Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopheasy explains, What makes another person’s gaze so powerful? According to Sartre, we exist in two radically different ways.In our own minds, we are a “Subject.” […]

But I will run out of days Will I ever run out of names for days? Probably not.

Prophesy When MyTerms succeeds, CMP—Consent Management Platforms—will mean Contract Management Platforms. From the Annals of Enshittification Seth Godin on The Amazon Tax: "Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve."

Worth reading A Reddit discussion among and about our local homeless.

I was overheard to have said Exhumed this from a Facebook comment to repost here: About advertising, there have been two state changes in the business. One I unpacked eleven years ago, here: https://dsearls.medium.com/separating-advertisings-wheat… The most quoted line from that one is "Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke […]

I posted what follows more than twenty-six years ago on Searls.com, which now brings up a danger warning because it’s still http and not https. (Yes, I’ll fix it.) It makes interesting reading today for several reasons, one of which is that much of what it (and The Cluetrain Manifesto, which had just come out) […]

How Claude marks AI-generated content is the most self-destructive utterance I’ve ever heard coming out of an AI company. Wow: When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response. Because the […]

No, neither makes sense I had two posts titled Whensday. Now there is one. It is re-headlined Densday. And give gentle advice Trunkline, the least-written of the three WordPress blogs I run and write for, all with the kind assistance of the good folks at Pressable, has a new theme. The old one dated from […]

On my way back to Bloomington from Santa Barbara on Saturday, while I sat in the first row of an Embraer short-haul vectored to Indianapolis but delayed while awaiting its pilot and parked at the far end of the strangely long jetway at O'Hare's Gate C6, everyone in the first few rows of the plane bonded […]

There is a meteor impact crater in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. It’s called Upheaval Dome, because that’s what geologists thought it was before it became clear that it wasn’t. When I visited the place with my teenage kids in the late ’80s, all the placards along the trail explained that the circular canyon was what […]

Well, almost. Tomorrow I fly back to Indiana, where it has been stormy the whole time I've been gone, seems like. In a couple of months, I'll be scanning all the photos I have in dozens of three-ring albums, but keeping the photos themselves, which I want to organize chronologically behind tabbed dividers in boxes […]

I subscribed to the Los Angeles Times early last year when I was writing about the challenges for journalism in covering the wildfires there. That was in my News Commons series, which I think has some brilliant and useful stuff. But it didn't go anywhere, for reasons. So I wasn't sure about renewing. But I […]

Live and re-learn I've been a citizen of California for 41 years, and I learned here long ago that the narrow staircase-like parallel terraces on many ranchland hillsides were caused by cattle grazing on horizontal paths, because ungulates aren't climbers. I have seen cattle on some of these, so the story made sense. But my […]

Less to talk about Anver Kantor in NiemanLab:  We analyzed 6,400 New York Times stories to find out how comments change when you give readers more information. The subhead: "The same stories that produced sharper, more analytic conversation also produced less conversation."

Beyond wet and dry Bruce Li in Hackernoon:  AI’s Water Problem Is Smaller Than You Think Pull-quote:  The data centers rising out of the desert didn't create the water crisis. They did something arguably more useful: they made it legible. A 200-megawatt facility asking a small county for eight million gallons on a summer afternoon […]

Check them out Hackernoon today: Cyber Libertarians: Esther Dyson & The Knowledge Age. Esther is an old friend and one of my favorite people. Front burner for her right now is .agent. Exit signals Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other […]

Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would employ me. Not full-time, anyway. I was too obsessed with the Internet, the Web, and what I saw as the dawn of a new reality: a digital world we would co-occupy with the natural one. So I self-published on the Web, at Searls.com, where […]

On big changes in nowheres becoming somewheres Audacy, by far the most stressed-out owner of too many radio stations, is killing off another big old signal: KXNT/840 in Las Vegas. I dug into that, and wrote about it on Trunkline, my neglected blog about infrastructure that will soon get a big facelift. C****heck them out […]

Book now The next three IIWs. November 3 – 5, 2026IIWXLIII #43 Fall 2026 April 27 – 29, 2027IIWXLIV #44 Spring 2027 October 19 – 21, 2027IIWXLV #45 Fall 2027 Early bird ends in 15 days

We now have an internet of stuff, at the heart of which are the distribution and fulfillment centers that have been replacing farmland and former broadcast transmitter sites near highways and airports everywhere. (The one above straddles I-65 in Whitestown, Indiana, northwest of Indianapolis.) In The Rise of the Stupid Network, David Isenberg (in 1997!) explained […]

On AI wronging and writing I hate AI writing and can spot it in a second. It's not just the piles one-line paragraphs, the contrasty "not that, but this" argument constructions, the excessive use of em dashes. It's a tone that sounds like a million well-put hunks of text published by competent writers of opinion […]