We thought the Web was a library. Turns out it’s not. (Image via ChatGPT 4o.)
Before there were search engines, there were directories. The biggest and best-known was Yahoo. On the first graphical browser (Mosaic), it looked like this:
The directory idea made sense, because the Web is laid out like the directory in your computer. There is a “domain” with a “location” or a “site,” containing something after the last / in a path of /something/something/something. Geeks call these directories too, and the string of somethings a path. Directories in computing also follow an outline format: heads, subheads, and subheads of subheads.
While this design is boundlessly flexible, it also suggests durability, if not permanence, because it’s good to find stuff where it rightly goes and to find it in the same place over and over again.
That was what Yahoo assumed in the early days of the Web—as did everyone who bought a domain name. I’ve had searls.com since 1995. Dave Winer (father of outlining and progenitor of much else) has had Scripting.com for even longer (and has a lot more in that domain).
But we don’t own domain names. We rent them. And the World Wide Web isn’t a library. It’s a whiteboard with stuff written on it. Some of that stuff is located on directory paths. A lot more is coughed up by database systems on an as-needed basis.
The Yahoo directory failed. In its place search engines appeared. Search engines don’t catalog the Web like a library might. They index it. That means they send crawlers down the Web’s directory paths, recording everything they see into a searchable index. I explain here how that works and where this went:
The Web is a haystack.
This isn’t what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he invented the Web. Nor is it what Jerry Yang and David Filo had in mind when they invented Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web, which later became Yahoo. Jerry and David’s model for the Web was a library, and Yahoo was to be the first catalog for it. This made sense, given the prevailing conceptual frames for the Web at the time: real estate and publishing.
Both of those are still with us today. We frame the Web as real estate when we speak of “sites” with “locations” in “domains” with “addresses” you can “visit” and “browse”—then shift to publishing when we speak of “files” and “pages,” that we “author,” “edit,” “post,” “publish,” “syndicate” and store in “folders” within a “directory.” Both frames suggest durability if not permanence. Again, kind of like a library.
But once we added personal movement (“surf,” “browse”) and a vehicle for it (the browser), the Web became a World Wide Free-for-all. Literally. Anyone could publish, change and remove whatever they pleased, whenever they pleased. The same went for organizations of every kind, all over the world. And everyone with a browser could find their way to and through all of those spaces and places, and enjoy whatever “content” publishers chose to put there. Thus the Web grew into billions of sites, pages, images, databases, videos, and other stuff, with most of it changing constantly.
The result was a heaving heap of fuck-all.*
Back in 2005, I wrote in Linux Journal about a split between the “static” Web that was like a library (with its “locations,” “sites,” and “domains” you could “visit” and “browse”), and the “live” Web of blogs and posts. Then social media came along, and the live branch of the Web outgrew the static Web’s trunk.
Last week came news that a leak revealed lots of interesting poop about how Google actually ranks search results. Here are two things I don’t need those leaked documents to tell me:
Google favors the present over the past, the current over the archival.
Google no longer indexes, or ranks very old Web pages.
I speak from experience here, because I have some old pages that are on the Web but don’t seem to be indexed, meaning searches don’t find them. I also have Easter eggs on a couple of those pages: words that exist in no language but made those pages easy to find when I did keyword searches for them. Now I get “No results found for _____.” (I won’t reveal the word because I want to keep testing Google.)
Countless publications have also come and gone on the Web without leaving a trace. Upside was a gigantic publication from the Nineties through the dotcom boom. Not a trace of it remains. Far as I know, nothing remains of Fast Company‘s early issues.
By expert acclaim, this is the best antenna for receiving hard-to-get over-the-air (OTA) TV signals
I think I will be the last person in Bloomington to try getting free over-the-air TV from what’s left of all the major networks. But that’s just my style, so roll with me while I explain how I’m hoping to do it, with the antenna above, which I’ll need because here is what the Search Map at RabbitEars.info says we might get here:
We live next door right now, and the top station above, WTIU from Indiana University (our PBS affiliate), comes from a tower you can walk to from here. We can get that signal by using a straightened paper clip for an antenna. (You jam the clip into the center hole of the coaxial connector in the back of the TV.) Even a real indoor antenna connected to the same jack gets nothing else, not even the two stations above with “Fair” signal strength.
But this Televes antenna might do the job because we’re on the slope of a hill that faces the Indianapolis stations that carry CBS (WTTV/4 on 27), ABC (WRTV/6 on 25), NBC (WTHR/13 on 13), and Fox (WRDB/41 on 32)*. These range from 27 to 54 miles away, in roughly the same direction. VHF and UHF signals always gain strength when they hit the faces of hills, similar to how surf builds as it approaches a sand bar or a shore. Also, the Televes DAT BOSS antenna gets great reviews:
I was going to put it in our new attic before the drywall goes up. However, the attic space is low and full of close cross-braces. Worse, the antenna is not small and kinda complicated to fit in a space that’s a web of short 2x4s. Dig:
So it will go on a pole in the backyard and feed a coaxial line that will tunnel through conduit under the yard and inside to the new living room.
But I would like to test it first, preferably with a tuner gizmo I can plug into my laptop. I had one of those for years: the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid TV Tuner stick, which looked like a fat thumb drive,with USB-A at one end and a coax connector for an antenna at the other. It was sold in the ’00s and picked up both analog and digital TV (the Digital Transition was happening then), on every North American channel, and came with good software that ran on Macs and operating systems that have long been abandoned. Far as I can tell there are no replacements that run on current hardware or operating system, other than this one sold in Europe. Far as I can tell, it only works on TV bands over there. But I could be wrong. If anybody knows of a gizmo/softward combo I can use, please tell me. My only other option is to buy or find a cheap TV and try that out. Any advice is welcome. Thanks!
*After the digital transition in 2008, and again with the “repack” after 2016, most TV stations moved onto channels other than their original ones, using less spectrum overall. All the TV channels above 36 were auctioned off, first in 2008 and again in 2018. Most buyers were cellular and other short-range wireless carriers, which have been repurposing the old TV spectrum for 5G and other modern uses. The only station in Indianapolis that didn’t move its channel position was WTHR/13. That one is listed in the chart above as one of the “bad” signals for this location. The Televes antenna is designed specifically for “high band” VHF (channels 7-13) and the remaining UHF (14 to 36) TV channels. It also filters out any 5G signals that the antenna might pick up on what used to be the higher UHF channels. By the way, the old “low band” VHF channels (2 to 6) are still in use in some places, but by very few TV stations. So it’s not worth it for Televes to design an antenna to pick those channels up. Such an antenna would also be a lot bigger and longer because the low-band elements of the antenna would be much longer.
I asked ChatGPT to give me “people eating blogs” and got this after it suggested some details.
Two things worth blogging about that happened this morning.
One was getting down and dirty trying to make DALL-E 3 work. That turned into giving up trying to find DALL-E (in any version) on the open Web and biting the $20/month bullet for a Pro account with ChatGPT, which for some reason maintains its DALL-E 3 Web page while having “Try in ChatGPT︎” on that page link to the ChatGPT home page rather than a DALL-E one. I gather that the free version of DALL-E is now the one you get at Microsoft’s Copilot | Designer, while the direct form of DALL-E is what you get when you prompt ChatGPT (now 4.0 for Pro customers… or so I gather) to give you an image that credits nothing to DALL-E.
The other thing was getting some great help from Dave Winer in putting the new Feedroll category of my Feedland feeds placed on this blog, in a way similar stylistically to old-fashioned blogrolls (such as the one here). You’ll find it in the right column of this blog now. One cool difference from blogrolls is that the feedroll is live. Very cool. I’m gradually expanding it.
Meanwhile, after failing to get ChatGPT or Copilot | Designer to give me the image I needed on another topic (which I’ll visit here later) I prompted them to give me an image that might speak to a feedroll of blogs. ChatGPT gave me the one above, not in response to “people eating blogs” (my first attempt), but instead to “People eating phone, mobile and computer screens of type.” Microsoft | Designer gave me these:
When Parisians got tired of cemeteries during the French Revolution, they conscripted priests to relocate bones of more than six million deceased forebears to empty limestone quarries below the city: a hundred miles of rooms and corridors now called The Catacombes. It was from those quarries that much of the city’s famous structures above—Notre Dame, et. al.—were built in prior centuries, using a volume of extracted rock rivaling that of Egypt’s Great Pyramids. That rock, like the bones of those who extracted it, was once alive. In the shot above, shadows of future fossils (including moi) shoot the dead with their cell phones.
This is a very human thing to want. But before we start following his lead, we might want to ask whether death awaits us there.
Not our deaths. Anything’s. What died there to make life possible for what succeeds it?
From what we can tell so far, the answer is nothing.
To explain why life needs death, answer this: what do plastic, wood, limestone, paint, travertine, marble, asphalt, oil, coal, stalactites, peat, stalagmites, cotton, wool, chert, cement, nearly all food, all gas, and most electric services have in common?
They are all products of death. They are remains of living things or made from them.
Consider this fact: about a quarter of all the world’s sedimentary rock is limestone, dolomite and other carbonates: remains of beings that were once alive. The Dolomites of Italy, the Rock of Gibraltar, the summit of Mt. Everest, all products of death.
Even the iron we mine has a biological source. Here’s how John McPhee explains it in his Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Former World:
Although life had begun in the form of anaerobic bacteria early in the Archean Eon, photosynthetic bacteria did not appear until the middle Archean and were not abundant until the start of the Proterozoic. The bacteria emitted oxygen. The atmosphere changed. The oceans changed. The oceans had been rich in dissolved ferrous iron, in large part put into the seas by extruding lavas of two billion years. Now with the added oxygen the iron became ferric, insoluble, and dense. Precipitating out, it sank to the bottom as ferric sludge, where it joined the lime muds and silica muds and other seafloor sediments to form, worldwide, the banded-iron formations that were destined to become rivets, motorcars and cannons. The is the iron of the Mesabi Range, the Australian iron of the Hammerslee Basin, the iron of Michigan, Wisconsin, Brazil. More than ninety percent of the iron ever mined in the world has come from Precambrian banded-iron formations. Their ages date broadly from twenty-five hundred to two thousand million years before the present. The transition that produced them — from a reducing to an oxidizing atmosphere and the associated radical change in the chemistry of the oceans — would be unique. It would never repeat itself. The earth would not go through that experience twice.
Death produces building and burning materials in an abundance that seems limitless, at least from standpoint of humans in the here and now. But every here and now ends. Realizing that is a vestigial feature of human sensibility.
Take for example, The World Has Plenty of Oil, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal ten years ago. In it, Nansen G. Saleri writes, “As a matter of context, the globe has consumed only one out of a grand total of 12 to 16 trillion barrels underground.” He concludes,
The world is not running out of oil any time soon. A gradual transitioning on the global scale away from a fossil-based energy system may in fact happen during the 21st century. The root causes, however, will most likely have less to do with lack of supplies and far more with superior alternatives. The overused observation that “the Stone Age did not end due to a lack of stones” may in fact find its match.
The solutions to global energy needs require an intelligent integration of environmental, geopolitical and technical perspectives each with its own subsets of complexity. On one of these — the oil supply component — the news is positive. Sufficient liquid crude supplies do exist to sustain production rates at or near 100 million barrels per day almost to the end of this century.
Technology matters. The benefits of scientific advancement observable in the production of better mobile phones, TVs and life-extending pharmaceuticals will not, somehow, bypass the extraction of usable oil resources. To argue otherwise distracts from a focused debate on what the correct energy-policy priorities should be, both for the United States and the world community at large.
In the long view of a planet that can’t replace any of that shit, this is the rationalization of a parasite. That this parasite can move on to consume other irreplaceable substances it calls “resources” does not make its actions any less parasitic.
Or, correctly, saprophytic; since a saprophyte is “an organism which gets its energy from dead and decaying organic matter.”
Moving on to coal, the .8 trillion tons of it in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin now contributes 40% of the fuel used in coal-fired power plants in the U.S. Here’s the biggest coal mine in the basin, called Black Thunder, as it looked to my camera in 2009:
About half the nation’s electricity is produced by coal-fired plants, the largest of which can eat the length of a 1.5-mile long coal train in just 8 hours. In Uncommon Carriers, McPhee says Powder River coal at current rates will last about 200 years.
Then what? Nansen Saleri thinks we’re resourceful enough to get along with other energy sources after we’re done with the irreplaceable kind.
I doubt it.
Wind, tide, and solar are unlikely to fuel aviation, though I suppose fresh biofuel might. Still, at some point, we must take a long view, or join our evolutionary ancestors in the fossil record faster than we might otherwise like.
As I fly in my window seat from place to place, especially on routes that take me over arctic, near-arctic, and formerly arctic locations, I see more and more of what geologists call “the picture”: a four-dimensional portfolio of scenes in current and former worlds. Thus, when I look at the seashores that arc eastward from New York City— Long Island, Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Cape Cod—I see a ridge of half-drowned debris scraped off a continent and deposited at the terminus of an ice cap that began melting back toward the North Pole only 18,000 years ago—a few moments before the geologic present. Back then, the Great Lakes were still in the future, their basins covered by ice that did not depart from the lakes’ northern edges until about 7,000 years ago or 5,000 B.C.
Most of Canada was still under ice while civilization began in the Middle East and the first calendars got carved. Fly over Canada often enough and the lakes appear to be exactly what they are: puddles of a recently melted cap of ice. Same goes for most of the ponds around Boston. Every inland swamp in New England and upstate New York was a pond only a few dozen years ago, and was ice only a dozen or so centuries before that. Go forward a few thousand years and all of today’s ponds will be packed with accumulated humus and haired over by woods or farmland. In the present, we are halfway between those two conditions. Here and now, the last ice age is still ending.
As Canada continues to thaw, one can see human activity spark and spread across barren lands, extracting “resources” from ground made free of permafrost only in the last few years. Doing that is both the economic and the pestilential thing to do.
On the economic side, we spend down the planet’s principal, and fail to invest toward interest that pays off for the planet’s species. That the principal we spend has been in the planet’s vaults for millions or billions of years, and in some cases cannot be replaced, is of little concern to those spending it, which is roughly all of us.
Perhaps the planet looks at our species the same way and cares little that every species is a project that ends. Still, in the meantime, from the planet’s own one-eyed perspective, our species takes far more than it gives, and with little regard for consequences. We may know, as Whitman put it, the amplitude of time. We also tend to assume in time’s fullness all will work out.
But it won’t.
Manhattan schist, the bedrock anchoring New York City’s tallest buildings, is a little over half a billion years old. In about the same amount of time, our aging Sun, growing hotter, will turn off photosynthesis. A few billion years later, the Sun will swell into a red giant with a diameter wider than Earth’s orbit, roasting the remains of our sweet blue planet and scattering its material out into the cosmos, perhaps for eventual recycling by stars and planets not yet formed.
In a much shorter run, many catastrophes will happen. One clearly is what our species is already doing to the planet during what geologists correctly call the Anthropocene. I suppose that’s a good reason for Elon and crew to “save” a few members of our vain little species. But why fuck up Mars before we’re done fucking up Earth, when there’s still some leverage with the death we have at home and that Mars won’t begin to have until stuff dies on it?
I’ve always been both an optimist and a realist. Specifically, I’m an optimist for at least the short run, by which I mean the next few dozen years. But I’m a pessimist for our civilization — and our species. Death is always a winning bet.
But hey, maybe nature knows better what to do with us than we do.
Prompt: “a field of many different kinds of people being harvested by machines and turned into bales of fertilizer.” Via Microsoft CoPilot | Designer.
This post is for the benefit of anyone wondering about, researching, or going into business on the proposition that selling one’s own personal data is a good idea. Here are some of my learnings from having studied this proposition myself for the last twenty years or more.
The business category harvesting the most personal data is adtech (aka ad tech and “programmatic”) advertising, which is the surveillance-based side of the advertising business. It is at the heart of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, and is now most of what advertising has become online. It’s roughly a trillion-dollar business. It is also nothing like advertising of the Mad Men kind. (Credit where due: old-fashioned advertising, aimed at whole populations, gave us nearly all the brand names known to the world). 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.
Adtech pays nothing to people for their data or data about them. Not personally. Google may pay carriers for traffic data harvested from phones, and corporate customers of auctioned personal data may pay publishers for moments in which ads can be placed in front of tracked individuals’ ears or eyeballs. Still, none of that money has ever gone to individuals for any reason, including compensation for the insults and inconveniences the system requires. So there is little if any existing infrastructure on which paying people for personal data can be scaffolded up. Nor are there any policy motivations. In fact,
Regulations have done nothing to slow down the juggernaut of growth in the adtech industry. For Google, Facebook, and other adtech giants, paying huge fines for violations (of the GDPR, the CCPA, the DMA, or whatever) is just the cost of doing business. The GDPR compliance services business is also in the multi-$billion range, and growing fast. In fact,
Regulations have made the experience of using the Web worse for everyone. Thank the GDPR for all the consent notices subtracting value from every website you visit while adding cognitive overhead and other costs to site visitors and operators. In nearly every case, these notices are ways for site operators to obey the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit. And, although all these agreements are contracts, you have no record of what you’ve agreed to. So they are worse than worthless.
Tracking people without their clear and conscious invitation or a court order is wrong on its face. Period. Full stop. That tracking is The Way Things Are Done online does not make it right, any more than driving drunk or smoking in crowded elevators was just fine in the 1950s. When the Digital Age matures, decades from now, we will look back on our current time as one thick with extreme moral compromises that were finally corrected after the downsides became clear and more ethically sound technologies and economies came along. One of those corrections will be increasing personal agency rather than just corporate capacities. In fact,
Increasing personal independence and agency will be good for markets, becausefree customers are more valuable than captive ones. Having ways to gather, keep, and make use of personal data is an essential first step toward that goal. We have made very little progress in that direction so far. (Yes, there are lots of good projects listed here, but there we still a long way to go.)
Businesses being “user-centric” will do nothing to increase customers’ value to themselves and the marketplace. First, as long as we remain mere “users” of others’ systems, we will be in a subordinate and dependent role. While there are lots of things we can do in that role, we will be able to do far more if we are free and independent agents. Because of that,
We need technologies that create and increase personal independence and agency. Personal data stores (aka warehouses, vaults, clouds, life management platforms, lockers, and pods) are one step toward doing that. Many have been around for a long time: ProjectVRM currently lists thirty-three under the Personal Data Stores heading. Some have been there a long time. The problem with all of them is that they are still too focused on what people do as social beings in the Web 2.0 world, rather than on what they can do for themselves, both to become more well-adjusted human beings and more valuable customers in the marketplace. For that,
It will help to have independent personal AIs. These are AI systems that work for us, exclusively. None exist yet. When they do, they will help us manage the personal data that fully matters:
Contacts—records and relationships
Calendars—where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, where, and when
Health records and relationships with providers, going back all the way
Financial records and relationships, including past and present obligations
Property we have and where it is, including all the small stuff
Shopping—what we’ve bought, plan to buy, or might be thinking about,
Subscriptions—what we’re paying for, when they end or renew, what kind of deal we’re locked into, and what better ones might be out there.
Travel—Where we’ve been, what we’ve done, with whom, and when
Personal AIs are today where personal computers were fifty years ago. Nearly all the AI news today is about modern mainframe businesses: giants with massive data centers churning away on ingested data of all kinds. But some of these models are open sourced and can be made available to any of us for our own purposes, such as dealing with the abundance of data in our own lives that is mostly out of control. Some of it has never been digitized. With AI help it could be.
I’m in a time crunch right now. So, if you’re with me this far, read We can do better than selling our data, which I wrote in 2018 and remains as valid as ever. Or dig The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), which Tim Berners Lee says inspired Solid. I’m thinking about following it up. If you’re interested in seeing that happen, let me know.
My favorite version, however, is this one by KPIG’s Fine Swine Orchestra, recorded by Santa Cruz musicians sheltering in place during the pandemic. That’s a screen grab, above.
I am pretty sure I’ve blogged about “Ripple” before, but can’t find evidence of that right now, perhaps because I published it somewhere obscure, or perhaps because we have entered the Enshittocene. Whatever the case, it doesn’t hurt to re-hear a classic.
KPIG, long one of my favorite radio stations, is no longer live streaming for the world, but for subscribers only. (It’s free only for a week.) I know they need the money. But so does Radio Paradise, which has KPIG ancestry, is free, and supported by donations.
Toward normalizing the donations for every worthy thing, see what I wrote here.
On April 4, 1968, when I learned with the rest of the world that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, I immediately thought that the civil rights movement, which King had led, had just been set back by fifty years. I was wrong about that. It ended right then (check that last link). Almost fifty-six years have passed since that assassination, and the cause still has a long way to go: far longer than what MLK and the rest of us had imagined before he was killed.
Also, since MLK was the world’s leading activist for peace and nonviolence, those movements were set back as well. (Have they moved? How much? I don’t have answers. Maybe some of you do.)
I was twenty years old when MLK and RFK were killed, and a junior at Guilford College, a Quaker institution in Greensboro, North Carolina. Greensboro was a hotbed of civil rights activism and strife at the time (and occasionallysince). I was an activist of sorts back then as well, both for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. But being an activist, and having moral sympathies of one kind or another, are far less effective in the absence of leadership than they are when leadership is there, and strong.
Alexei Navalny was one of those leaders. He moved into the past tense today: (1976-2024). His parentheses closed in an Arctic Russian prison. He was only 47 years old. At age 44 he was poisoned—an obvious assassination attempt—and survived, thanks to medical treatment in Germany. He was imprisoned in 2021 after he returned to Russia, and… well, you can read the rest here. Since Navalny was the leading advocate of reform in Russia and opposed Vladimir Putin’s one-man rule of the country, Putin wanted him dead. So now Navalny is gone, and with it much hope of reform.
Not every assassination is motivated by those opposed to a cause. Some assassins are just nuts. John Hinkley Jr. and Mark David Chapman, for example. Hinkley failed to kill Ronald Reagan, and history moved right along. But Chapman succeeded in killing John Lennon, and silence from that grave has persisted ever since.
My point is that assassination works. For causes a leader personifies, the setbacks can be enormous, and in some cases total, or close enough, for a long time.
I hope Alexei Navalny’s causes will still have effects in his absence. Martyrdom in some ways works too. But I expect those effects to take much longer to come about than they would if Navalny were still alive. And I would love to be wrong about that.
Prompt: “A panopticon in which thousands of companies are spying on one woman alone in the center with nothing around her.” Via Microsoft Bing Image Creator
In her latestArs Technica story, Ashley Belanger reports that Patreon, the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative folk, opposes the minimal personal privacy protections provided by a law you probably haven’t heard of until now: the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA. Patreon, she writes, wants a judge to declare that law (which dates from the videotape rental age) unconstitutional because it inconveniences Patreon’s ability to share the personal data of its users with other parties.† Naturally, the EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the ACLU of Northern California, and the ACLU itself all stand opposed to Patreon on this and have filed an amicus brief explaining why.
But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to bring up the inconvenient fact that Ars Technica is also in the surveillance business. A PageXray of Ashley’s story finds this—
But will Ashley, or any reporter, grab the third rail of their employer’s participation in the tracking-based advertising business? Or visit that business’s responsibility for what was already the biggest boycott in human history way back in 2015? The odds are against it. I’ve challenged many reporters to grab that third rail, just like I’m challenging Ashley here. In every case, nothing happened.
I never challenged Farhad Manjoo, but he did come through exposingThe New York Times (his employer’s) own participation in the privacy-opposed tracking-based adtech business, back in 2019. Here’s a PageXray of tracking via that piece today:
If you think regulations are going to protect your privacy, you’re wrong. In fact, they can make things worse, especially if they start with the assumption that your privacy is provided only by other parties, most of whom are incentivized to violate it.
Exhibit A for how much worse things can get is the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). As soon as the GDPR went into full effect in May 2018, damn near every corporate entity on the Web put up a “cookie notice” requiring acceptance of terms and privacy policies that allow them to continue violating your privacy by harvesting, sharing, auctioning off and otherwise using your data, and data about you.
For websites and services in that harvesting business (a population that rounds to the whole commercial web), these notices provide a one-click way to adhere to the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit.
There’s also big business in the friction that it produces. To see how big, look up GDPR+compliance on Google. You’ll get 232 million results (give or take a few dozen million).
None of those results are for you, even though you are who the GDPR is supposed to protect. See, to the GDPR, you are a mere “data subject” and not an independent and fully functional participant in the technical, social, and economic ecosystem the Internet supports by design. All privacy protections around your data are the burden of other parties.
Or at least that’s the interpretation that nearly every lawmaker, regulatory bureaucrat, lawyer, and service provider goes by. (One exception is Elizabeth Renieris@hackylawyer. Her collection of postings is required reading on the GDPR and much else.) The same goes for those selling GDPR compliance services, comprising most of those 190 million GDPR+compliance search results.
The clients of those services include nearly every website and service on Earth that harvests personal data. These entities have no economic incentive to stop harvesting, sharing, and selling personal data the usual ways, beyond fear that the GDPR might actually be enforced, which so far (with fewexceptions), it hasn’t been. (See Without enforcement, the GDPR is a fail.)
Worse, the tools for “managing” your exposure to data harvesters are provided entirely by the websites you visit and the services you engage. The “choices” they provide (if they provide any at all) are between 1) acquiescence to them doing what they please and 2) a maze of menus full of checkboxes and toggle switches “controlling” your exposure to unknown threats from parties you’ve never heard of, with no way to record your choices or monitor effects.
So let’s explore just one site’s presentation, and then get down to what it means and why it matters.
Our example is https://www.mirror.co.uk. If you haven’t clicked on that site already, you’ll see a cookie notice that says,
We use cookies to help our site work, to understand how it is used, and to tailor the adverts presented on our site. By clicking “Accept” below, you agree to us doing so. You can read more in our cookie notice. Or, if you do not agree, you can click Manage below to access other choices.
They don’t mention that “tailor the adverts” really means something like this:
We open your browser to infestation by tracking beacons from countless parties in the online advertising business, plus who-knows-what-else that might be working with those parties (there is no way to tell, and if there was we wouldn’t provide it), so those parties and their “partners” can use those beacons to follow you like a marked animal everywhere you go and report your activities back to a vast marketplace where personal data about you is shared, bought and sold, much of it in real time, supposedly so your eyeballs can be hit with “relevant” or “interest-based” advertising as you travel from site to site and service to service. While we are sure there are bad collateral effects (fraud and malware, for example), we don’t care about those because it’s our business to get paid just for clicks or “impressions,” whether you’re impressed or not—and the odds that you won’t be impressed average to certain.
Okay, so now click on the “Manage” button.
Up will pop a rectangle where it says “Here you can control cookies, including those for advertising, using the buttons below. Even if you turn off the advertising-related cookies, you will still see adverts on our site, because they help us to fund it. However, those adverts will simply be less relevant to you. You can learn more about cookies in our Cookie Notice on the site.”
Under that text, in the left column, are six “Purposes of data collection”, all defaulted with little check marks to ON (though only five of them show, giving the impression that there are only those five). The right column is called “Our partners”, and it shows the first five of what turn out to be 259 companies, nearly all of which are not brands known to the world or to anybody outside the business (and probably not known widely within the business as well). All are marked ON by that little check mark. Here’s that list, just through the letter A:
If you bother to “manage” any of this, what record do you have of it—or of all the other collections of third parties who you’ve agreed to follow you around? Remember, there are a different collection of these at every website with third parties that track you, and different UIs, each provided by other third parties.
It might be easier to discover and manage parasites in your belly than cookies in your browser.
Think I exaggerate? The long list of cookies in just one of my browsers (which I had to dig deep to find) starts with this list:
I know what zoom.us is. The rest are a mystery to me.
To look at just that first one, 1rx.io, I have to dig way down in the basement of the preferences directory (in Chrome it’s chrome://settings/cookies/detail?site=1rx.io), where I find that its locally stored data is this:
_rxuuid
Name
_rxuuid
Content
%7B%22rx_uuid%22%3A%22RX-2b58f1b1-96a4-4e1d-9de8-3cb1ca4175b0%22%2C%22nxtrdr%22%3Afalse%7D
Domain
.1rx.io
Path
/
Send for
Any kind of connection
Accessible to script
No (HttpOnly)
Created
Wednesday, December 12, 2018 at 4:48:53 AM
Expires
Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 4:48:53 AM
I’m a somewhat technical guy, and at least half of that stuff means nothing to me.
As for “managing” those, my only choice on that page is to “Remove All”. Does that mean Remove everything on that page alone or Remove all cookies everywhere? And how can I remember what I’ve had removed?
Obviously, there is no way for anybody to “manage” this, in any meaningful sense of the word.
We also can’t fix it on the sites and services side, no matter how much those sites and services care (which most don’t) about the “customer journey”, the “customer experience” or any of the other bullshit they’re buying from marketers this week.
Even within the CRM (customer relationship management) world, the B2B customers of CRM companies use one cloud and one set of tools to create as many different “experiences” for users and customers as there are companies deploying those tools to manage customer relationships from their side. There are no corresponding tools on our side. (Though there is work going on. See here.)
So the digital world remains one where we have no common or standard way to scale our privacy and data usage tools, choices, or experiences across all sites and services. And that’s what we’ll need if we want real privacy online.
The simple place where we need to start is this: privacy is personal, meaning something we create for ourselves (which in the natural world we do with clothing and shelter, both of which lack equivalents in the digital world).
And we need to be clear that privacy is not a grace of privacy policies and terms of service that differ with every company and over which none of us have true control—especially when there is an entire industry devoted to making those companies untrustworthy, even if they are in full compliance with privacy laws.
Devon Loffreto (who coined the term self-sovereign identity and whose good work we’ll be visiting in an upcoming issue of Linux Journal) puts the issue in simple geek terms: we need root authority over our lives. Hashtag: #OwnRoot.
It is only by owning root that we can crank up agency on the individual’s side. We have a perfect base for that in the standards and protocols that gave us the Internet, the Web, email, and too little else. And we need it here too. Soon.
We (a few colleagues and I) created Customer Commons as a place for terms that individuals can proffer as first parties, just by pointing at them, much as licenses at Creative Commons can be pointed at. Sites and services can agree to those terms, and both can keep records and follow audit trails.
And there are some good signs that this will happen. For example, the IEEE approached Customer Commons last year with the suggestion that we stand up a working group for machine-readable personal privacy terms. It’s called P7012. If you’d like to join, please do.
Unless we #OwnRoot for our own lives online, privacy will remain an empty promise by a legion of violators.
One more thing. We can put the GDPR to our use if we like. That’s because Article 4 of the GDPR defines a data controller as “the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data…” This means each of us can be our own data controller. Most lawyers dealing with the GDPR don’t agree with that. They think the individual data subject will always need a fiduciary or an intermediary of some kind: an agent of the individual, but not an individual with agency. Yet the simple fact is that we should have root authority over our lives online, and that means we should have some degree of control over our data exposures, and how our data, and data about us, is used—much as we do over how we control or moderate our privacy in the physical world. More about all that in upcoming posts.
† This is an example of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” and Wikipedia (at that link) more politely calls “platform decay.” It’s a big trade-away of goodwill by Patreon. Says to me they must be making an enshitload of money in the adtech fecosystem.
Not long after Cluetrain came out in early 2000, I found myself on a cross-country flight, sitting beside a Nigerian pastor named Sayo Ajiboye. After we began to talk, it became clear to me that Sayo (pronounced “Shaiyo”) was a deeply wise man. Among his accomplishments was translating the highly annotated Thompson Bible into his native Yoruba language: a project that took eight of his thirty-nine years.
I told him that I had been involved in a far more modest book project—The Cluetrain Manifesto—and was traveling the speaking circuit, promoting it. When Sayo asked me what the book was about, I explained how “markets are conversations” was the first of our ninety-five theses, and how we had unpacked it in a chapter by that title. Sayo listened thoughtfully, then came back with the same response I had heard from other readers in what back then was still called the Third World: “Markets are conversations” is a pretty smart thing for well-off guys from the First World to be talking about. But it doesn’t go far enough.
When I asked him why, he told me to imagine we were in a “natural” marketplace—a real one in, say, an African village where one’s “brand” was a matter personal reputation, and where nobody ruled customer choices with a pricing gun. Then he picked up one of those blue airline pillows and told me to imagine it was a garment, such as a coat, and that I was interested in buying it. “What’s the first thing you would say to the seller?” he asked.
“What does it cost?”
“Yes, you would say that,” he replied, meaning that this was typical of a First World shopper for whom price is the primary concern. Then he asked me to imagine that a conversation follows between the seller and me—that the two of us get to know each other a bit and learn from each other. “Now,” he asked, “What happens to the price?”
I said maybe now I’m willing to pay more while the seller is willing to charge less.
“Why?” Sayo asked.
I didn’t have an answer.
“Because you now have a relationship,” he said.
As we continued talking, it became clear to me that everything that happens in a marketplace falls into just three categories: transaction, conversation, and relationship. In our First World business culture, transaction matters most, conversation less, and relationship least. Worse, we conceive and justify everything in transactional terms. Nothing matters more than price and “the bottom line.” By looking at markets through the prism of transaction or even conversation, we miss the importance of relationship. We also don’t see how relationship has a value all its own: one that transcends, even as it improves, the other two.
Consider your relationship with friends and family, Sayo said. The value system there is based on caring and generosity, not on price. Balance and reciprocity may play in a relationship, but are not the basis of it. One does not make deals for love. There are other words for that.
Back in the industrialized world, few of our market relationships run so deep, nor should they. By necessity much of our relating is shallow and temporary. We don’t want to get personal with an ATM machine or even with real bank tellers. Friendly is nice, but in most business situations that’s about as far as we want to go.
But relationship is a broad category: broad enough to contain all forms of relating—the shallow as well as the deep, the temporary as well as the enduring. In the business culture of the industrialized world, Sayo said, we barely understand relationship’s full meaning or potential. And we should. Doing so would be good for business.
So he told me our next assignment was to unpack and study another thesis: Markets are relationships.
In The News Business (which precedes this post), I said the three current business models for local news were advertising, subscription, and philanthropy, and promised a fourth. This is it: emancipayments.
We* came up with this idea in 2009. Here is how the EmanciPay page on the ProjectVRM wiki puts it:
Overview
Simply put, Emancipay makes it easy for anybody to pay (or offer to pay) —
as much as they like
however they like
for whatever they like
on their own terms
— or at least to start with that full set of options, and to work out differences with sellers easily and with minimal friction.
Emancipay turns consumers (aka users) into customers by giving them a pricing gun (something which in the past only sellers used) and their own means to make offers, to pay outright, and to escrow the intention to pay when price and other requirements are met. And to be able to do this at scale across all sellers, much as cash, browsers, credit cards and email clients do the same. Payments themselves can also be escrowed.
In slightly more technical terms, EmanciPay is a payment framework for customers operating with full agency in the open marketplace, and at scale. It operates on open protocols and standards, so it can be used by any buyer, seller or intermediary.
It was conceived as a way to pay for music, journalism, or what any artist brings into the world. But it can apply to anything. For example, [subscriptions], which have become by 2021 a giant fecosystem in which every seller has separate and non-substitutable scale across all subscribers, while subscribers have zero scale across all sellers, with the highly conditional exceptions of silo’d commercial intermediaries. As [Customer Commons] puts it,
There’s also not much help coming from the subscription management services we have on our side: Truebill, Bobby, Money Dashboard, Mint, Subscript Me, BillTracker Pro, Trim, Subby, Card Due, Sift, SubMan, and Subscript Me. Nor from the subscription management systems offered by Paypal, Amazon, Apple or Google (e.g. with Google Sheets and Google Doc templates). All of them are too narrow, too closed and exclusive, too exposed to the surveillance imperatives of corporate giants, and too vested in the status quo.
That status quo sucks (see here, or just look up “subscription hell”), and it’s way past time to unscrew it.) But how?
The better question is where?
The answer to that is on our side: the customer’s side.
While EmanciPay was first conceived by ProjectVRM as a way to make live payments to nonprofits and to provide a new monetization method for publishers. it also works as a counterpart to sellers’ subscription systems in what Zuora (a supplier of subscription management systems to the publishing industry, including The Guardian and Financial Times) calls the “subscription economy“, which it says “is built on ever changing relationships with your customers”. Since relationships are two-way by nature, EmanciPay is one way that customers can manage their end, while publisher-side systems such as Zuora’s manage the other.
EmanciPay economic case
EmanciPay provides a new form of economic signaling not available to individuals, either on the Net or before the Net became available as a communications medium. EmanciPay will use open standards and be comprised of open source code. While any commercial [Fourth party] can use EmanciPay (or its principles, or any parts of it they like), EmanciPay’s open and standard framework will support fourth parties by making them substitutable, much as the open standards of email (smtp, pop3, imap) make email systems substitutable. (Each has what Joe Andrieu callsservice endpoint portability.)
EmanciPay is an instrument of customer independence from all of the billion (or so) commercial entities on the Net, each with its own arcane and silo’d systems for engaging and managing customer relations, as well as receipt, acknowledgement and accounting for payments from customers.
Use Case Background
EmanciPay was conceived originally as a way to provide a customers with the means to signal interest and ability to pay for media and creative works (most of which are freely available on the Web, if not always free of charge). Through EmanciPay, demand and supply can relate, converse and transact business on mutually beneficial terms, rather than only on terms provided by the countless different silo’d systems we have today, each serving to hold the customer captive, and causing much inconvenience and friction in the process.
Media goods were chosen for five reasons:
because most are available for free, even if they cost money, or are behind paywalls
paywalls, which are cookie-based, cannot relate to individuals as anything other than submissive and dependent parties (and each browser a users employs carries a different set of cookies)
both media companies and non-profits are constantly looking for new sources of revenue
all methods of intermediating payment choices are either silo’d by the seller or silo’d by intermediators, discouraging participation by individuals.
What the marketplace requires are new business and social contracts that ease payment and stigmatize non-payment for creative goods. The friction involved in voluntary payment is still high, even on the Web, where one must go through complex ceremonies even to make simple payments. There is no common and easy way either to keep track of what media (free or otherwise) we use (see Media Logging), to determine what it might be worth, and to pay for it easily and in standard ways — to many different suppliers. (Again, each supplier has its own system for accepting payments.)
EmanciPay differs from other payment models (subscriptions, newsstand, tip jars) by providing customers with the ability to choose what they wish to pay and how they’ll pay it, with minimum friction — and with full choice about what they disclose about themselves.
EmanciPay will also support credit for referrals, requests for service, feedback and other relationship support mechanisms, all at the control of the user. For example, EmanciPay can provide quick and easy ways for listeners to pay for public radio broadcasts or podcasts, for readers to pay for otherwise “free” papers or blogs, for listeners to pay to hear music and support artists, for users to issue promises of payment for for stories or programs — all without requiring the individual to disclose unnecessary private information, or to become a “member” — although these options are kept open.
This will scaffold genuine relationships between buyers and sellers in the media marketplace. It will also give deeper meaning to “membership” in non-profits. (Under the current system, “membership” generally means putting one’s name on a pitch list for future contributions, and not much more than that.)
EmanciPay will also connect the sellers’ CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems with customers’ VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) systems, supporting rich and participatory two-way relationships. In fact, EmanciPay will by definition be a VRM system.
Micro-accounting and Macro-distribution
The idea of “micro-payments” for goods on the Net has been around for a long time, and is often brought up as a potential business model for journalism. For example in this article by Walter Isaacson in Time Magazine. It hasn’t happened, at least not globally, because it’s too complicated, and in prototype only works inside private silos.
What ProjectVRM suggests instead is something we don’t yet have, but very much need:
micro-accounting for actual uses. Think of this simply as “keeping track of” the news, podcasts, newsletters, or music we consume.
macro-distribution of payments for accumulated use (that’s no longer “micro”).
Much — maybe most — of the digital goods we consume are both free for the taking and worth more than $zero. How much more? We need to be able to say. In economic terms, demand needs to have a much wider range of signals it can give to supply. And give to each other, to better gauge what we should be willing to pay for free stuff that has real value but not a hard price.
As currently planned, EmanciPay would –
Provide a single and easy way for consumers of “content” to become customers of it. In the current system — which isn’t one — every artist, every musical group, and every public radio and TV station has his, her or its own way of taking in contributions from those who appreciate the work. This can be arduous and time-consuming for everybody involved. (Imagine trying to pay separately every musical artist you like, for all your enjoyment of each artist’s work.) What EmanciPay proposes, however, is not a replacement for existing systems, but a new system that can supplement existing fund-raising systems — one that can soak up much of today’s MLOTT: Money Left On The Table.
Provide ways for individuals to look back through their media usage histories, inform themselves about what they have been enjoying, and determine how much it is worth to them. The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), and later the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), both came up with “rates and terms that would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller.” This almost absurd language first appeared in the 1995 Digital Performance Royalty Act (DPRA) and was tweaked in 1998 by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), under which both the CARP and the CRB operated. The rates they came up with peaked at $.0001 per “performance” (a song or recording), per listener. EmanciPay creates the “willing buyer” that the DPRA thought wouldn’t exist.
Stigmatize non-payment for worthwhile media goods. This is where “social” will finally come to be something more than yet another tech buzzmodifier.
All these require micro-accounting, not micro-payments. Micro-accounting can inform ordinary payments that can be made in clever new ways that should satisfy everybody with an interest in seeing artists compensated fairly for their work. An individual listener, for example, can say “I want to pay 1¢ for every song I hear,” and “I’ll send SoundExchange a lump sum of all the pennies wish to pay for songs I have heard over a year, along with an accounting of what artists and songs I’ve listened to” — and leave dispersal of those totaled pennies up to the kind of agency that likes, and can be trusted, to do that kind of thing. That’s the macro-distribution part of the system.
Similar systems can also be put in place for readers of newspapers, blogs, and other journals. What’s important is that the control is in the hands of the individual and that the accounting and dispersal systems work the same way for everybody.
I visited EmanciPay use cases twice in Linux Journal:
There are two differences in the world today that should make it easier to code up something like EmanciPay:
Smartphones and apps on them have become extensions of ourselves.
AI.
For the latter, I am not talking about the kind of centralized AI we get from Amazon, Microsoft/OpenAI, Adobe, and the rest. I’m talking about AI that’s as personal as our own underwear and gives us what Sam Altman calls “individual empowerment and agency on a scale we’ve never seen before.” That quote became the title of the post I wrote at that link. I will unpack it further in an upcoming News Commons post.
But first I’ll dig deeper into what we need to develop EmanciPay, and how we can use it to scaffold up the kind of markets first imagined by The Cluetrain Manifesto, a quarter century ago.
*Big hat tip to Keith Hopper for his thinking and work on this, especially toward ListenLog, which is now fourteen years ahead of its time. And that time will come. Also to Joe Andrieu, whose The User as a Point of Integration (published in 2007) is a founding document in the VRM canon. He reported on progress here in 2017. All hail writers who keep their archives alive on the Web.
Finally, a series from DeepAI., each generated in a different style.
First, impressionism:
Surreal graphics:
Renaissance painting:
Abstract painting:
AI art:
What do these say about the news business? Well,
It’s mostly male.
It’s mostly about newspapers, somewhat about TV, and idealized both.
It used to be big.
It doesn’t know what to make of the Internet.
It’s obsolete in the extreme.
For most of the prior century, the news business was big. In tech parlance, it scaled. Here in the U.S. and Canada, every town had a newspaper, and in some cases several. Many towns—and all cities—had radio stations. Every name-brand city had a TV station, or two, or more. The great newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek, had millions of subscribers and made lots of money. So did TV network news operations. Newsstands were everywhere.
All of that has collapsed. Some print and broadcast news operations still exist, but most are shells of their former selves, and many put news icing on a cake of partisan talk shows. Exceptions to collapse are the surviving news giants (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), and resourceful public broadcasters. (Pew Research shows NPR’s audience has long topped 20 million people, though it is slowly declining.)
People today get most of their news through phones, tablets, and laptops. These are packed with apps that maximize optionality. People now hardly listen, watch, or read on schedules set by publishers, stations, or networks. Everyone with a smartphone had a limitless variety of news sources. Or sources within sources such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and old-fashioned social media such as Facebook and X.
According to Pew, the top news sources for young people today are TikTok and social media. In other words, from each other. The threshold of news creation and production is also low. This is why, according to Exploding Topics, there are now over three million podcasts worldwide.
As Scott Galloway put it in a recent Pivot podcast (which I can’t find right now), news is a shitty business—at least if you want to scale up something huge. It’s not even a great small business. But hell, neither is running a restaurant, a nail salon, a clothing shop, or a small farm. But those are real businesses.
In these early years of The Internet Age, the most substantive news and news businesses are the local kind. True, not everybody cares about local news. But everybody lives somewhere, and it does matter what goes on where people live. Belonging somewhere in the virtual world is optional, but it is mandatory in the physical one. And, as with running a restaurant, a store, or a farm, reporting local news is a labor of talent and love. It’s what we still call “a living.”
Right now there are three models for the local news business: advertising, subscription, and philanthropy. In my next post, the eighth in this series, I’ll lay out the case for a fourth one.
*I didn’t try Midjourney, DALL-E 3, or Stable Diffusion because they all require subscriptions, and I don’t feel like paying for those yet. DALL-E 2 yielded blah results.
A few among the countless photos I’ve shot from United Airlines window seats.
I’ve flown 1,500,242 miles with United Airlines. My wife has flown at least a million more. Both of us currently enjoy Premier status, though we’ve spent much of our time with United at the fancier 1K level. We are also both lifetime United Club members and have been so for thirty-three years.
Unlike many passengers of big airlines, we have no complaints about United. The airline has never lost our luggage or mistreated us in any way, even going back decades, to when we were no-status passengers. On the contrary, we like United—especially some of the little things, such as From the Flight Deck (formerly Channel 9) on some plane entertainment systems, and free live Internet connections (at least for T-Mobile customers, which we are). And we rolled with it when United, like other airlines, changed the way frequent fliers earn privileges.
United Airlines is considering using its passenger information to help brands serve targeted ads to its customers, joining a growing number of companies trying to tap their troves of user data for advertising purposes.
Some of these targeted ads could appear on its in-flight entertainment system or on the app that people use to book tickets and check-in, people familiar with the matter said. United hasn’t made a decision yet and may choose not to launch a targeted-advertising business, some of the people said.
Airlines have long taken advantage of the captive nature of their customer base to show them plenty of ads, including commercials on seatback screens, glossy spreads inside in-flight shopping catalogs or, for some, advertisements adorning cabin walls. Offering personalized advertising would greatly expand United’s advertising business, some of the people said.
Of the 106 comments below the story, all but one opposed the idea, and the one exception said he’d rather not keep seeing ads for feminine hygiene products.
The big question here is whether and how United might share personal data with parties other than itself. Because there are lots of companies that will pay for personal data, and United does have, as Patience says, “an advertising business.”
What exactly is that business? Is it just showing ads to United customers? Or, in the process of now personalizing those ads, is it sharing data about those customers with “partners” in the adtech fecosystem, which has been hostile to personal privacy for decades, as a matter of course?
Just based on this one story (and 99+% of the thumbs-down comments it got), it should be obvious that this is a terrible idea. But, this kind of idea is terribly typical in the marketing world today, and a perfect example of what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, a label so correct that it has its own Wikipedia article. In The Guardian, John Naughton asks, Why do we tolerate it?
Two reasons—
1) It’s normative in the extreme. 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.” Today the entire .X $trillion digital advertising business can imagine nothing better than getting personal with everybody. And it totally excuses the tracking required to make it work. Which it doesn’t, most of the time.that
2) Journalists are afraid to bite the beast that feeds them. Here is a PageXray of where personal data about you goes when you visit that story without tracking protection (which most of us don’t have). Here is just one small part of the hundreds of paths that data about you travels out to advertising “partners” of The Wall Street Journal:
Click on that link, wait for that whole graphic to load, and look around. You won’t recognize most of the names in that vast data river delta, but all of them play parts in a fecosystem that relies entirely on absent personal privacy online. And some of them are extra unsavory. Take moatads.com. Don’t bother going there. Nothing will load. Instead, look up the name. Nice, huh? (As an aside, why am I, a paying WSJ subscriber, subjected to all this surveillance?)
I’ve challenged many journalists employed by participants in this system to report on it. So far, I’ve seen only one report: this one by Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times, back in 2019. (The Times backed off after that, but they’re still at it.)
As for the consent theater of cookie notices, none of “your choices” are meaningful if you have no record of what you’ve “chosen” and you can’t audit compliance. (Who has even thought about that? I can name two entities: Customer Commons and the IEEE P7012 working group. My wife and I are involved in both.)
Unless United customers stand up and say NO to this, as firmly and directly as possible, the way to bet is that you’ll start seeing personalized ads for all kinds of stuff on your seat back screens, your United app, and in other places to which data about you has been sold or sent by United, one way or another, to and through who knows. (But you’ll probably find some suspects in that PageXray.) Because that’s how great real-world brands are now enshittifying themselves into the same old fecosystem we’ve had online for decades now.
Hey, it’s happened to TVs and cars. (And hell, journalism.) Why not to airlines too?
Eight years ago, I called ad blocking The Biggest Boycott in World History, because hundreds of millions of people were blocking ads online. (The headline came from my wife, by the way.) Then, a few days ago, Cory Doctorow kindly pointed to that post in one of his typically trenchant Pluralistic newsletters.
So I thought I’d check to see how the boycott is doing.
It’s hard to find original sources of hard numbers on ad blocking. Instead, there are lots of what I’ll call claims. But some of those claims do cite or link to sources of some kind. Here are four:
Brian Dean‘s BacklinkosourcesHootsuite, saying 42.7% of Internet users employ ad blockers. Hootsuite, however, wants me to fill out a form that I am sure will get me spammed. So I’m passing on that. Meanwhile there are other interesting stats cited. Growson Edwards on Cipio.ai surfaces a bunch of Hootsuite graphics with interesting data.
Statista last January said “the ad blocking user penetration rate in the United States stood at approximately 26 percent in 2020, indicating that roughly 73 million internet users had installed some form of ad blocking software, plugin, or browser on their web-enabled devices that year. While awareness of these services lies at almost 90 percent, the number of internet users actively leveraging the technology has stagnated in recent years following visible changes in online user behavior. The switch from desktop to mobile has arguably had one of the most significant impacts on ad block usage: As internet users increasingly browse the web via mobile devices, desktop ad block usage rates in the U.S. and many other parts of the world are dropping, albeit at varying speeds. While mobile ad blocking adoption is still at a nascent stage in the U.S., the global number of mobile ad blocking browser users is rapidly increasing.” On another page, Statista says marketers “can conquer ad blocking by offering personalized advertising.” Anybody want that? Give me a show of hands. Thought so.
Blockthrough, an advertising company, offers a 2022 adblock report that requires filling out a form. So I passed on that one too, but can report that its “key insights” are these: “With 290M monthly active users globally, adblocking on desktop has climbed back close to its all-time-high from 2018,” and “The average adblock rate across geos and verticals is 21%, as measured across >10B pageviews on 9,453 websites.”
Surfshark has some cool maps showing which countries hate ads most and least, based on searches for ad-blocking software. (France was at the top.)
Perhaps more interesting than any of those stats (all of which are unsurprising) is using AI to generate graphics for a post such as this one. At first, I wanted the system (Bing Creator or whatever it’s called this week) to show two separate populations: one living blissfully in a land without advertising, and one with advertising everywhere. That was a fail. I couldn’t get it not to show advertising on both sides. Then I tried to get it to depict the blocking of ads, for example with a wall. That failed too, because advertising always appeared on the wall. Finally, I got the image above with a prompt asking for people who were happy to have advertising inside a giant bottle. Isn’t it crazy how fast the miraculous becomes annoying?
The Big Calendar here in Bloomington is one fed by other calendars kind enough to syndicate themselves through publishing feeds. It is put together by my friend Dave Askins, who writes and publishes the B Square Bulletin. Technically speaking, it runs on WordPress, and uses a plug-in called ICS. Dave is steadily improving it, mostly by including more feeds. But he also has a larger idea: one that satisfies the requirements I’ve been outlining in posts about deep (and deeper), wide, and whole news, plus a community’s (and journalism’s) need for facts and not just stories.
What Dave suggests is a whole new platform, just for community calendars. He calls it DatePress (modeled on WordPress), and describes it this way:
A bigger idea for community calendars
WordPress is a fantastic platform for running all kinds of websites—from news sites that generate lots of chronological posts, to websites that are mostly static, and serve up encyclopedic information.
For added, very specific functionality, WordPress fosters a robust ecosystem of plugins.
But there’s one kind of plug-in that is worth developing as a platform in its own right: a feed-based calendar. What if the whole point of the website is to host a feed-based community calendar? Such as this one here. We can do that with the WordPress ICS Calendar plug-in, as we do at that link. But why use a plug-in to do a platform’s job?
DatePress
Let’s call this as yet undeveloped calendar platform DatePress, just as a placeholder. DatePress would be a calendar hosting web engine that is built from the ground up to host feed-based calendars. Maybe some enterprising soul develops a plug-in for DatePress that allows a user to add a blog to their calendar. But the one job for DatePress would be: Publish community calendars.
DatePress does what?
What kind of functions should DatePress have? For starters, it should have the kind of features that the WordPress ICS Calendar plug-in already includes. Specifically:
It should be easy to add feeds to a calendar, and specify a background color and label for each feed.
The published display should include ways for a visitor to the published calendar to filter by typing into a box.
The published display should make it possible to add any individual feed displayed by the published calendar to their personal calendar.
But there should be so many more tools for calendar administrators..
For any calendar feed, it should be possible to add a prefix to any event title in a specific feed, to help people who visit the published calendar understand what kind of event it is, without clicking through.
For any calendar feed, it should be possible to assign multiple tags, and it should be possible for calendar visitors to filter by tag.
For any view that a visitor to the published calendar generates with a filter, the parameters for that view should be passed to the URL window, so that a visitor can send someone a link to that view, or embed that specific view of the calendar in their own website. That view should also define a new feed, to which someone can subscribe.
DatePress itself should know all about the content of feeds:
Duplicate events across feeds should be automatically identified and collapsed into a single event.
When a feed is slightly non-compliant with the standard, behind the scenes, DatePress should be able to convert the feed into one that is 100-percent compliant.
Why does DatePress need different levels of logged-in users, which really demands that it be a platform? Here’s how that looks:
Only some users, like the administrator, should be able to add or delete feeds from the calendar.
A curator should be able to manually flag events across all feeds—and all the events flagged by some curator would define a new feed. Visitors to the published calendar should be able to look at events by curator, and to add the curator’s feed to their own personal calendar. A curator should be able to embed a display of their curated calendar into their own website.
Annotators could add information to event displays, especially after an event is over. After the events are over, their status will change to “archived.” Annotations could include a simple confirmation that the event took place. Or maybe an annotation includes a caution that the event did not actually take place, because it was canceled. Annotations could include links to published news articles about the event. The calendar archive becomes a draft of a historical timeline for everything that happened in some place.
Let’s please build this thing called DatePress.
I think this is a great idea that can start to do all of these things and more:
Pull communities together in many commons (such as we study here at IU’s Ostrom Workshop) around shared interests.
String the pearls of local journals without any extra effort on anyone’s part.
Give calendar hosts a way to think of their events as part of a bigger commons.
Let rank-and-file residents tap the wisdom of those who are “in the know.”
Recruit community members to the work of making local history more complete.
Calendar archives could jump-start history-based newsrooms in communities everywhere.
Please add your own.
The images up top are among the best of the hundreds I’ve had Bing Create produce using DALL-E3. The prompt for these four was, “A library building with the name Date Press (spelled exactly that way) over the door. The roof and walls are calendars.” I insisted on exact spelling because without it the AI left out letters, obscured them, or added extra ones. I also separated Date and Press because it always screwed up “DatePress” when it was prompted with that as a word. And it never liked lower case letters, preferring always to use upper case. Visual AI is crazy and fun, but getting what one wants from it is a little like steering a cat by the tail.
Bing Create paints “Adam Smith and Karl Marx being rained out in a brainstorm.”
Just sharing some stuff I said on social media recently.:
It’s easy to make an ad hominem argument against anything humans do.
If we had to avoid every enterprise with owners we don’t like, we might as well graze on berries or something.
Capitalism is way too broad a brush with which to paint all of business. As Peter Drucker put it, most people don’t start a business to make money. They do it to make shoes.
The tech world we’ve had for the last few decades is deeply weird in many ways, such as its mix of thrown-spaghetti venture investments and psychotic incentives, e.g. wanting to break things, to run the world, to replace humans with cyborgs, and to work toward exits that will doom what’s already built while breaking faith with customers, workers, and other dependents. Economic thinkers of the industrial age, from Adam Smith and Karl Marx all the way forward, could hardly have imagined any of this shit. I still haven’t encountered any economic theory that can make full sense of it. (Though I’m not saying there isn’t one.)
The prompt for the AI art is a riff on #4. Note that the AI doesn’t have a clear idea of how Adam Smith looks.
The Tessereact, a structure that allows travel in time through a deep library, from the movie “Interstellar.”
Let’s say you’re a public official. Or an engineer. Or a journalist researching a matter of importance, such as a new reservoir or a zoning change. What do you need?
In a word, facts. This should go without saying, but it bears saying because lots of facts are hard to find. They get lost. They decay. Worse, in their absence you get hearsay. Conjecture. Gossip. Mis and Dis information. Facts can also get distorted or excluded when they don’t fit a story. This is both a feature and a bug of storytelling. I reviewed this problem in Stories vs. Facts.
So how do we keep facts from decaying? How do we make them useful and accurate when future decisions require them?
Two ways.
One is by treating news as history. You do this by flowing news into well0-curated archives that remain accessible for the duration.
The other is to gather and produce facts that don’t make news but might someday—and flow those into curated archives as well.
In both cases, we are talking about facts that decision-makers may need to do their work, whether or not their work produces news.
So let’s start with history.
Timothy Snyder defines history as “what’s possible.” In his Yale lectures on The Making of Modern Ukraine, he also says history is discontinuity. By that, he means we give the most significance to moments of change, to times of transition. Elections. Wars. Disasters. Championships. And we tend to ignore what’s not making news in the meantime. We also tend to ignore the kind of news that just burbles along, not sounding especially historical, but is interesting to readers, watchers, and listeners—and might be relevant again. This is most of what gets reported by the obsessives who still produce local news. But how much of that stuff gets saved? And where?
Here in Bloomington, Indiana, the big industries for more than a century were limestone, furniture, and radio and television manufacture. Specifically,
The limestone industry is still large and likely to stay that way until demand for premium limestone goes away (my guess is a few centuries from now).
The furniture industry came and went in about seven decades, but at its peak Showers Brothers Furniture produced a lion’s share of the affordable furniture sold in the U.S.
In the Forties and Fifties, so many radios and TVs were made here that Bloominngton for a time called itself “the color TV capitol of the world.”
If you haven’t seen Breaking Away yet, please do. Besides being one of the greatest coming-of-age stories ever told, it’s an excellent look at Bloomington’s small-town/big university charms, plus its limestone industry and the people who worked in it, back when the quarries and the cutting plants were still right in town. (They’re still around, but out amidst the farmlands.)
In Showers Brothers Furniture Company: The Shared Fortunes of a Family, a City and a University (Quarry Books, 2012), Carol Krause gives a sense of how huge a business Showers Brothers was at the time:
Shipments averaged seventy rail carloads per month. The sawmill daily cut 25,000 feet of lumber at that time and secured its lumber by purchasing large tracts of land and then logging them. This is undoubtedly part of the reason that so much of the land around Monroe and surrounding counties had been completely clear-cut early by the twentieth century.” (p. 121)
Her source for that was the April 26, 1904 issue of Bloomington Courier, then one of two papers competing to serve a town of about seven thousand people. But countless other bits of history are forever gone. In her notes about sources, Krause writes,
The business records of the Showets company have unfortunately been lost, and only a handful of the annual furniture catalogs survive, despite decades of publication. We no longer have the training materials that the company distributed to its salesme, and we have virtually no remaining business correspondence. As for family papers, we possess only the handwritten memoir of James Showers, the spiritual daybook of his mother, Elizabeth, and a small handful of family photographs. There is also no comprehensive Bomington history that sums up the major events or characters in the company’s history. Owing to the lack of records, this work relies largely upon accounts published in newspapers of the period. this record is fragmentary during the early years and we cannot consider any of it fully accurate or complete, because of the political partiality of the newspaper publishers. Nevertheless, newppaper records are the single largest remaining source of information available about the Showers family and its company, so this book reflects countless hours spent at the microfilm machines at the public library, perusing the headlines of bygone times. (p. xv)
Bloomington is fortunate to have an unusually thick collection of factual resources in the Monroe County library system and history center. Without those, Carol Krause probably wouldn’t have written her book at all. (Alas, she passed in 2014. Here is a Herald-Times obituary.)
The best sources I’ve found for Bloomington’s history as a broadcasting town are Bloomingpedia and Wikipedia. From the former:
In 1940 RCA moved a major manufacturing plant from Camden, NJ to Bloomington. The 1.5 million square foot RCA plant, although originally planned to build radios, was converted to televisions when that technology became viable, and when the first television came off the line on September 6, 1949, “TV Day” was declared in Bloomington. The plant was located on south Rogers Street, and produced more than 65 million televisions over the next 50 years. The factory employed over 8,000 workers at its peak, roughly 2% of the entire Bloomington workforce, and also provided many jobs for industries servicing the plant. Sarkes Tarzian, Inc. was among these. For a while, Bloomington called itself the “Color Television Capital of the World”.
Labor unrest began to swirl in the 1960’s. In 1964 5000 workers walked off the job over the protest of both management and union leaders. After a week, a new contract was approved and the workers returned to the assembly lines; but in October of 1966 the workers stuck again, claiming the company was in violation of the union contract, and several violent scuffles were reported. In 1967 a third, rather disorganized strike also took place.
In 1968, over 2000 people were laid off; mostly the young female workers that were considered to be most skilled at the delicate work of assembling televisions on the line.
RCA was bought by General Electric in 1986, then immediately sold to the French company Thomson SA, and rumors of the plant closing immediately began. On April 1, 1998, the last television rolled off the line and Thomson moved the plant to Juarez, Mexico, where RCA had had a small plant as early as 1968.
The Sarkes Tarzian company was an important manufacturer of radio and television equipment, television tuners, and components. Its FM radio receivers helped to popularize the broadcast medium. Sarkes Tarzian manufactured studio color TV cameras in the mid-1960s.[16] The manufacturing operations were spun off in the 1970s and today the company still exists as a broadcaster, owning several television and radio stations. Gray Television has owned a partial stake in Sarkes Tarzian, Inc., since the early 2000s.
Those are all great sources, but the holes are bigger than the hills.
We also have a new situation on our hands, now that we are completing what Jeff Jarvis calls The Gutenberg Parenthesis: the age of print. How do we best accumulate and curate useful facts in our still-new digital age?
Back in 2001, my son Allen astutely noted that the World Wide Web was splitting between what he called the Static Web and the Live Web. Here is what I wrote about the former in the October 2005 edition of Linux Journal:
There’s a split in the Web. It’s been there from the beginning, like an elm grown from a seed that carried the promise of a trunk that forks twenty feet up toward the sky.
The main trunk is the static Web. We understand and describe the static Web in terms of real estate. It has “sites” with “addresses” and “locations” in “domains” we “develop” with the help of “architects”, “designers” and “builders”. Like homes and office buildings, our sites have “visitors” unless, of course, they are “under construction”.
One layer down, we describe the Net in terms of shipping. “Transport” protocols govern the “routing” of “packets” between end points where unpacked data resides in “storage”. Back when we still spoke of the Net as an “information highway”, we used “information” to label the goods we stored on our hard drives and Web sites. Today “information” has become passé. Instead we call it “content”.
Publishers, broadcasters and educators are now all in the business of “delivering content”. Many Web sites are now organized by “content management systems”.
The word content connotes substance. It’s a material that can be made, shaped, bought, sold, shipped, stored and combined with other material. “Content” is less human than “information” and less technical than “data”, and more handy than either. Like “solution” or the blank tiles in Scrabble, you can use it anywhere, though it adds no other value.
I’ve often written about the problems that arise when we reduce human expression to cargo, but that’s not where I’m going this time. Instead I’m making the simple point that large portions of the Web are either static or conveniently understood in static terms that reduce everything within it to a form that is easily managed, easily searched, easily understood: sites, transport, content.
At the time I thought—we all thought—that the Live Web was blogs. But then social media came along, mostly in the forms of Twitter and Facebook. After Technorati (which I had a hand in creating) began to index the Live Web of RSS feeds, Google also began to index the whole Web in real time, and soon began to supply the world with live information such as traffic densities on maps in apps running on hand-held phones connected to the Internet full time.
As I shared in Deep News., Dave Askins of the B Square Bulletinwould like us to create a “digital file repository”—” a place where anyone—journalists, public officials, and residents of all stripes—can upload digital files, so that others can have access to those files now and until the end of time. It can also serve as a backup for files that the city has made public on its website, but could remove at any time.”
“Removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly. Our teams analyze many data points to determine whether there are pages on CNET that are not currently serving a meaningful audience. This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven by SEO traffic,” said Taylor Canada, CNET’s senior director of marketing and communications. “In an ideal world, we would leave all of our content on our site in perpetuity. Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site.”
This is the exact opposite of deep news. It’s about as shallow as can be.
Not that Google is much deeper. I have a number of pages here that contain a unique word—kind of an Easter egg—that Google used to find if I searched for it. Now Google doesn’t. Why? whatever the reason, it is clear that Google is optimized for now rather than then.
So we need to start creating deep and archival ways that serve meaning across time.
I have a lot more to say about this, but want to get what I have so far up on the blog, where others can help improve the post. Meanwhile a bonus link:
While discussing ChatGPT with my teenage grandkids, I put it to a number of tests. In one I asked it to write a poem that includes all the capital cities in the U.S. Here is its reply:
From sea to shining sea, Across this land so grand, The capitals of every state, Await us to take a stand.
In Montgomery, Alabama, We begin our noble quest, To climb each statehouse staircase, And put our wills to the test.
Through Juneau, Alaska, To Phoenix, Arizona’s heat, The halls of power beckon us, With challenges we must meet.
Little Rock, Arkansas, And Sacramento, too, We march to their state capitals, To learn what they can do.
From Denver, Colorado’s heights, To Connecticut’s Hartford town, We cross this land of liberty, To see our nation’s crown.
Dover, Delaware, And Tallahassee, Florida’s heat, We journey forth to find our place, In every statehouse seat.
Atlanta’s Georgia peach, And Honolulu’s island breeze, We’ll walk the halls of power, To achieve our lofty dreams.
Through Boise, Idaho’s hills, And Springfield’s Illinois pride, We’ll take the steps of governance, With courage as our guide.
Indianapolis, Indiana, And Iowa’s Des Moines, We’ll stand in every capital, To honor each state’s joins.
From Topeka’s Kansas plains, To Kentucky’s Frankfort pride, We’ll learn from every leader, In whom we can confide.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, And Augusta, Maine’s coast, We’ll listen to the wisdom, That each statehouse host.
In Annapolis, Maryland, And Massachusetts’ Boston town, We’ll seek to find our purpose, And rise to wear the crown.
Lansing, Michigan, And St. Paul’s Minnesota pride, We’ll climb each capital’s staircase, And never be denied.
Mississippi’s Jackson town, And Jefferson City’s Missouri call, We’ll cross this land with honor, And never falter or fall.
Helena, Montana’s heights, And Lincoln’s Nebraska plains, We’ll march through every capital, And honor each state’s gains.
Carson City, Nevada, And Concord’s New Hampshire pride, We’ll stand in every statehouse, And let our voices be our guide.
Trenton’s New Jersey call, And Santa Fe’s New Mexico sun, We’ll climb the stairs of governance, And learn from everyone.
Albany’s New York pride, And Raleigh’s North Carolina charm, We’ll honor every state’s glory, And never let it harm.
Bismarck’s North Dakota plains, And Columbus’ Ohio pride, We’ll journey forth to every capital, With honor as our guide.
Oklahoma’s Oklahoma City, And Salem’s Oregon call, We’ll stand in every statehouse, And never let our spirits fall.
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, And Rhode Island’s Providence town, We’ll climb each capital’s staircase, And never let ourselves drown.
South Carolina’s Columbia pride, And South Dakota’s Pierre call, We’ll cross this land with dignity, And never let ourselves stall.
Nashville’s Tennessee music, And Austin’s Texas pride, We’ll stand in every statehouse, And let our voices rise.
Salt Lake City’s Utah heights, And Montpelier’s Vermont pride, We’ll march through every capital, And let our dreams be our guide.
Richmond’s Virginia charm, And Olympia’s Washington crown, We’ll honor every state’s valor, And never let ourselves down.
Charleston’s West Virginia hills, And Madison’s Wisconsin pride, We’ll journey forth to every capital, And never be denied.
Cheyenne’s Wyoming pride, And Washington, D.C.’s White House, We’ll cross this land with honor, And never let ourselves douse.
From sea to shining sea, We’ve walked each statehouse hall, And learned the lessons of governance, That make our nation stand tall.
That’s a question asked on Quora and deleted before I posted my answer. So I’m posting my answer here.
This is like asking if a car radio sounds better than a TV. Because it’s a matter of where, how, when, and what, more than a matter of sound.
There is some overlap in the sense that both SiriusXM and YouTube are fully useful on mobile apps. But you don’t watch your radio in your car or listen to your radio on your TV, even though it’s possible to do both through apps that are native to both the road (through Android Auto and Apple Carplay) and the living room (through Roku, Amazon, Apple, and other TV app platforms).
As for the sound itself, YouTiube lets you select audio quality bitrates up to 256kbps AAC & OPUS. SiriusXM’s default bitrate is also 256kpbs, but over the satellite link bitrates are typically lower—sometimes much lower. But, since SiriusXM does not (to my knowledge, so far) publish their bitrates in a place that’s easy to find, its bitrates are subject to debate. Here is one of those on Reddit.
But, again, it’s a matter of where. when, and what, more than how. If you want to see and hear a piece of music, YouTube provides enormous optionality, with its almost boundless collection of videos. If you want radio-like music programming, SiriusXM offers more—plus sports, talk, news, sports (including play-by-play for all the major ones), and more.
Yet the Internet has more than both put together. That’s why the image above is of Radio Paradise, which is one of the oldest and best Internet music stations. It’s live on the Net and the Web, and it has Best Of collections on YouTube as well.
Bonus link (and a lot of fun): radio.garden. There’s an app for that too.
[Update: 11:20 AM Wednesday 18 January] Well, I woke this morning to hear all the signals from Gibraltar Peak back on the air. I don’t know if the site is on generator power, or if electric power has been restored. This pop-out from a map symbol on Southern California Edison’s Power Outage Awareness Map suggests the latter:
However, I am listening right now to KZSB/1290 AM’s FM signal on 96.9 from Gibraltar Peak, where the show hosts are detailing many road closures, noting that sections of Gibraltar road are “down the hill,” meaning not there anymore, and unlikely to be fixed soon. I think I also heard them say their FM transmitter is on generator power. Far as I know, they are the only station covering local road closures, buildings damaged, farms and orchards damaged, and related topics, in great detail. It’s old-fashioned local radio at its best. Hats off.
Looking at the power requirements up there, only two stations are high-power ones: KDB/93.7’s transmitter pumps 4.9kW into a stack of five antenna bays that yield an ERP (effective radiated power) of 12.5kW, and KDRW(KCRW)/88.7 uses about 5.9kW to produce 12kW ERP through a stack of four antenna bays. Those are on the poles at the right and left ends of this photo, which I shot after the Jesusita Fire in 2009:
All the other stations’ transmitters require less wattage than a microwave oven. Three only put out ten watts. So, given typical modern transmitter efficiencies, I’m guessing the site probably has a 20kW generator, give or take, requiring about 2.5 gallons of propane per hour. So a 500-gallon propane tank (a typical size) will last about 200 hours. Of course, none of that will matter until the next outage, provided electrical service is actually restored now, or soon.
[Update: 3:34 PM Monday 16 January] Two news stories:
Edhat: Gibraltar Road Damage., by Edhat staff, Januraly 11, 2023 12:30 PM. It’s a collection of revealing Gibraltar Road photos that I wish I had seen earlier. Apologies for that. This is the text of the whole story: “A resident of Gibraltar Road shared the below photos from the recent storm damage. A section of the road appears to be washed out with a Tesla trapped under some debris. The Tesla slide is located approximately a quarter mile past the Rattlesnake Canyon trailhead and the washed road is about a mile past the radio tower before reaching the west fork trailhead.” If “mile past” means going uphill toward East Camino Cielo on the ridge, that means travel was (and is) impeded (at the very least) in both directions from the transmitter sites. The photos are dramatic. Please check them out.
“… they’ve helicoptered up a new battery and 600 gallons of diesel fuel to the site’s backup generator, but they haven’t been able to get it to work.” I believe this is for lack of the expected banjo valve. (See below.)
“Southern California Edison, which supplies power to the transmission towers site, first reported an outage for the Gibraltar Road area at 2:34 a.m. Jan. 9, the day of the big storm.” That was Monday. At least some stations would have switched over to generator power then.
“Repair crews haven’t been sent to the site yet, according to the SCE Outage Map, but Franklin said he heard there could be new poles installed this week.” That’s John Franklin, who runs the whole Gibraltar Peak site.
“KCLU (102.3 FM) went off the air on Wednesday and was still off as of Monday.KCLU (102.3 FM) went off the air on Wednesday and was still off as of Monday. KJEE (92.9 FM) went down for several days but came back on the air on Thursday.” Note: it’s not on now—at least not on the radios I’m using.
“Santa Barbara County spokeswoman Kelsey Gerckens Buttitta said there are cell and radio station towers off Gibraltar Road that requires fuel to operate, and Gibraltar Road and East Camino Cielo Road are closed because of slides, debris and slipouts.” Fixing those roads will be very difficult and time-consuming.
The story also lists signals I reported off as of last night. One correction to that: K250BS/97.9, which relays KTMS/990, is on the air. This I presume is because it’s at the KTMS/KTYD site. All the signals from that site (which is up the road from Gibraltar Peak) are still up. I assume that’s either because they are fed electric power separately from Gibraltar Peak, or because they are running on generator power.
[Update: 11:40 AM Monday 16 January] In a private group discussion with broadcast engineers, I am gathering that a stretch of Gibraltar Road close to the Gibraltar Peak site has collapsed. The location is 34°28’05.2″N 119°40’21″W, not far from the road into the transmitter site. This is not the section marked closed by Santa Barbara County on its map here. It is also not an easy fix, because it appears from one photograph I’ve seen (shared on a private group) that the land under the road slid away. It is also not the section where power lines to the site were knocked out. So we’re looking at three separate challenges here:
Restoring electrical service to Gibraltar Peak, and other places served by the same now-broken lines
Repairing Gibraltar Road in at least two places (the one marked on the county map and the one above)
Getting generators fueled and fixed.
On that last issue, I’m told that the site with most of the transmitters can be powered by a generator that awaits what is called a banjo valve. The KDB facility requires propane, and stayed up longer than the others on the peak while its own supply held up.
Gibraltar Peak isn’t the highest landform overlooking Santa Barbara. At 2180 feet, it’s about halfway up the south flank of the Santa Ynez Mountains. But it does provide an excellent vantage for FM stations that want the least obstructed view of the market’s population. That’s why more local signals come from here than from any other site in the region.
Except for now: a time that began with the storm last Tuesday. That’s when power lines feeding the peak were broken by falling rocks that also closed Gibraltar road. Here is a list of signals that have been knocked off the air (and are still off, as of the latest edit, on Sunday, January 15 at 11:15PM):
88.7 KDRW, which has a studio in Santa Barbara, but mostly relays KCRW from Santa Monica
89.5 KSBX, which relays KCBX from San Luis Obispo*
89.9 K210AD, which relays KPCC from Pasadena by way of KJAI from Ojai
102.3 KK272DT, the FM side of KCLU/1340 in Santa Barbara and KCLU/88.3 in Thousand Oaks
KTMS/990AM, KTYD/99.9FM, and K231CR/94.1, which relays KOSJ/1490AM, are still on the air as of Sunday night at 11:15pm. Those are are a short distance farther up Gibraltar Road. (In the other box in the photo above.)
Here is a guide to substitute signals for some of the stations:
KCRW/KDRW can be heard on KCRU/89.1 from Oxnard (actually, Laguna Peak, in Pt. Magu State Park)
KDB can be heard on KDSC/91.1 from Thousand Oaks (actually off Sulphur Mountain Road, south of Ojai)
KCLU can be heard on 1340 AM from Santa Barbara and 88.3 FM from Thousand Oaks
KPCC can be heard on KJAI/89.5 from Ojai (also transmitting from Sulphur Mountai Road)
KSBX/KCBX can be heard on 90.9 from Solvang (actually Broadcast Peak)
KPFK can be heard on its home signal (biggest in the U.S.) from Mount Wilson in Los Angeles at 90.7
KZSB can be heard on 1290 AM from Santa Barbara
KMRO can still be heard on its Camarillo main transmitter on 90.3
The two AM signals (marked green in the top list above) are strong in town and most of the FMs are weak but listenable here and there. And all of them can be heard through their live streams online.
Published stories so far, other than this one:
Gibraltar Peak Towers Out of Commission, in the Santa Barbara Independent. That story says two power poles were knocked out, as reported by John Franklin, who operates the whole transmitter site. (The story also kindly gives me credit for the photo there.)
The Independent says the site is a “relay” one. That’s correct in the sense that most of the stations there are satellites of bigger stations elsewhere. But KCLU is local to Santa Barbara (its anchor AM station is here), and the ratings reflect it. I wrote about those ratings a few years ago, in Where Public Radio Rocks. In that post, I noted that public radio is bigger in Santa Barbara than anywhere else in the country.
The most recent ratings (Spring of 2022), in % shares of total listening, are these:
KDB/93.9, classical music, relaying KUSC/91.1 from Los Angeles: 7.9%
KCLU/102.3 and 1340 in Santa Barbara (studios in Thousand Oaks), public broadcasting: 7.3%
KDRW/88.7 in Santa Barbara (main studio in Santa Monica, as KCRW/89.9): 4.6%
KPCC/89.9, relaying KJAI/89.5 and KPCC/89.3 in Pasadena: 1.3%
KSBX/89.5, relaying KCBX/90.1 from San Luis Obispo: 0.7%
Total: 21.8%.
That means more than a fifth of all radio listening in Santa Barbara is to noncommercial and public radio.
And, of all those stations, only KDB/KUSC and KCLU-AM are on the air right now.
By the way, when I check to see how public broadcasting is doing in other markets, nothing is close. Santa Barbara still kicks ass. I think that’s an interesting story, and I haven’t seen anyone report on it, other than here.
*Turns out KSBX is off the air permanently, after losing a coverage battle with KPBS/89.5 in San Diego. On December 29, they published a story in print and sound titled Why is 89.5 KSBX off the air? The answer is in the atmosphere. They blame tropospheric ducting, which much of the time makes KPBS come in like a local signal. Also, even though KPBS’s transmitter on Soledad Mountain (really more of a hill) above the coast at La Jolla is more than 200 miles away, it does pump out 26,000 watts, while KCBX puts out only 50 watts—and less in some directions. Though the story doesn’t mention it, KJAI, the KPCC relay on 89.5 for Ojai, is audible in Santa Barbara if nothing else is there. So that also didn’t help. By the way, I’m almost certain that the antenna identified as KSBX’s in the story’s photo (which is also one of mine) is actually for KMRO-2. KSBX’s is the one on the left in this photo here.
