We love Pluribus because it has the features we find irresistible.

1. AppleTV.
2. The makers of two previous huge hits.
3. An unsung and much loved star in the last hit.
4. An intriguing sci-fi plot.
5. It’s pretty good adventure type thriller in the first episodes then settles into a slower sexy love story, where the lead character takes us through the mind of someone falling in love and trying to figure out if the other person is worth it.
6. A clever final scene in the final episode.
7. A typical long wait for the next season that we knew was coming.

But all this is incidental, what really matters is that we’re all involved, have opinions, and thank goodness it doesn’t actually matter like the other stuff we debate.

This came up on Kottke. I'm going to try commenting on other old school blogs more here on my blog. Want to see if we can reboot the original sphere as a way of priming a new one.

Sarah Kendzior is a political writer who I greatly admire. Her frustration sounds a lot like mine. I wrote in 2017 that the bankers in tech should watch out because Twitter had just elected a president, and its market capitalization was so low that it was bound to get bought by someone who saw that you could buy the presidency of the United States for a few billion dollars. Was it worth that? Absolutely, as we're learning. All I got were pats on the head, stories about PE ratios, which of course I understand. What it did show is they didn't understand that the presidency could and would be monetized.

Yesterday Kendzior posted a tweet about how frustrating it was that all the "new" details of the Epstein scandal were known in 2020, and published in her book Hiding in Plain Sight. Sounds like what I've been saying about how tech and news works, we just come at it from different perspectives.

I don't know if there's a way around the ownership of news in the US, if there's still a way to route around it, but I'm sure that publishing on Substack, which is owned by the same people she doesn't trust with other journalism, is not the answer.

In order for news to have a chance of working we need to be using only the web, commodity services that are completely replaceable, and we keep our own writing, and route it to everyone who's interested via the open protocols of the web. That's the only way people with important ideas and info can get it out there.

I think in order for this to work we have to have people like Kendzior, and Heather Cox Richardson, Paul Krugman, publishing via the web, not via Substack. It should be fine for Substack to continue to publish their stuff, no problem with that, but they shouldn't be the only place their stuff is published. That gives them near-total control of the writers.

Our bigger problem is news distribution that works, and not depending on system we have. It may be too late to fix it, but we have to try.

PS: The story Kendzior was writing about was not covered yesterday on CNN or MSNOW, as far as I can tell. It got dumped on Christmas Day, I guess -- and that's probably the best day in the US to dump a story you want to get lost in the haze.

PPS: The title of this piece recalls a great documentary, The Fog of War, about America at war in Vietnam.

After thanking the Inoreader team for implementing inbound dynamic OPML, I thought to ask if they had also implemented outbound?

Yes in fact they have. "Yes, it works the other way too! You can right-click a folder → Folder properties → enable Output feeds, choose OPML, and you’ll get a URL you can use for syncing elsewhere."

To which I replied: "We're going to be best friends. ;-)"

This is how a ball starts rolling. You can sit there forever just wishing someone would play the game with you. And then one day, quite unexpectedly -- it turns out that someone has been doing the same as I have. And now our products are connected.

Here's the list of feeds I'm subscribed to in Inoreader. And it should update when I subscribe or unsubscribe to feeds.

Bing!

Bing!

Bing!

I hate to see AT Proto use up creativity of web developers that imho haven't realized that they're pouring their ideas and work into someone else's platform, and that in the end they will control every bit of content that flows through their network. They might let you in, but I doubt they would do that until they had a feature that competes with your add-in.

Sure you can build another network using their identity system, and that was exactly the deal Twitter offered us. I went for it -- who wants to develop a new identity system, when good old Twitter was letting us use theirs. I really think they meant well, sort of fits in with Jack Dorsey's way of looking at things.

It was a good deal for a lot of years, but then one day Elon Musk bought the company, and soon all bets were off. We had little warning before we had to move our act and all our users to another identity system. Lost a lot of traction right there.

My advice -- think this through, now. And if you can't see a way that you share in the success of the company behind Bluesky, which we know very little about, then I urge you to at least have the web as a backup. Use a standard format to broadcast your writer's work to places outside the AT Proto-verse, so we can pick up your signal, and you'll still be on the air if they yank your chain. This alone might get the Bluesky folk to listen to you more carefully. My experience, no matter how much you want, you can't wish away the economics of this stuff.

In 2026 and beyond, web devs will build on WordPress as if it were as crucial a part of the web infrastructure as the web browser or server, but performing a different but essential function that has been missing for the weird reason that few web developers know it is there.

This has been one of the big problems in tech as journalism beyond rewriting press releases has been gone for a couple of decades. No way to get news out about new developments. We have to fix that too, btw. ;-)

Yours in support of the forgotten freedom of the world wide web.

Dave

PS: More here.

2019 on Facebook: "People are too judgmental, which is a shame because in the end, which is coming soon enough for all of us, your opinion of other people doesn’t matter. Sorry if I’m telling you something you don’t already know."

On the other hand, we can't help but be judgmental. It's programmed into our DNA at a deep level. You have to form an instant opinion of other animals, any delay could cost your life. Better to assume the worst. Fight or flight. This happens esp if you don't know you're doing it, so don't know to watch for it.

It isn't until their 40s that most people understand that what they see isn't what everyone else sees. If you think there's an objective truth that we all experience, you're not getting the point. There is no consistent view from nowhere because everyone is somewhere. ;-)

I know where I was when I really understood this, not because I read it somewhere, or a teacher told me about it. I was riding on the 4 train north in the Bronx, where the train runs as an elevated on Jerome Ave. I had ridden this train for three years as a high school student, and never thought about all the six story apartment buildings whose backs faced the train. As you went by, you passed by one family for every two or three windows. A whole set of people with relationships, problems, tragedy, joy, dreams, the whole thing. They don't come from where you come from, inside each house there are stories, lives, people. You'll probably never know anything about any of them. I wasn't sad about this.

View from the 4 train described above.

When I was a kid we went to a bungalow colony in upstate NY, around where I live now. I was less than 10 years old, so were my friends. We used to do things together that the adults didn't know about. There was an abandoned house we used to hang out in, mostly open to the elements. We also played in a graveyard and talked about what the families whose names were on the headstones were doing. Having dinner maybe? Listening to the Mets on the radio? (No TV in the mountains.) So the thought had occurred to us at that point in life that behind doors there were things happening that we could only imagine. I guess what you learn later is that you can't imagine, and if you want to know you have to ask and listen.

I saw a critique of my writing that said I don't put enough titles in my writing. I didn't want to answer it in context, because I wanted to explain more generally. I tried to write the way the world was forcing me to write for over ten years, between 2006 and 2017, and I came to hate it. My writing is a way of getting things out of my head and into a place where I can find it later. It's more interesting to me if it's published. I am vision-impaired too. But if you account for every preference, as I learned between 2006 and 2017, the writing ends up worse than worthless. It becomes something you have to overcome. In the end you have write about why this is the wrong way to write.

You have been warned, spoilers follow...

The whole thing is the book Carol is writing, about writing a book, inside the book she's writing another book. The book I'm speaking of is the one where it's all about Carol.

Everywhere she goes people stop and say hello, and address her by her name.

• Hi Carol!
• Congrats Carol!
• Carol, we will move heaven and earth to make you happy.
• You suck Carol !!!!

In the book she ends up changing them back, un-joining them, and they keep the good qualities they got from being joined, and can be individually creative as they were before the switch.

Also, btw -- John Cena says their situation isn't sustainable, but neither is the one we are in now ourselves, in reality, in our reality.

She teaches her lover, Zosia, to think in the first person.

Carol is right about everything because this is her book.

You can see it happening on her whiteboard.

The show could be titled The Adventures of Carol, as told by Carol.

BTW, I might love a podcast of just the writers of the show every week, perhaps interviewed by writers who did not write it, asking questions. It might suck as much as the one they do now, but it also might be great. It would stick to the story, not about praising everyone, kind of like interviews of sports heroes (which are mostly nauseating, except for the few have the gift of gab, who are fun while never saying anything remotely bad about anyone). The people they'd talk about are the people they created.

This post was updated thanks to help from Andrew Shell.

I have a free account at Inoreader. I was reminded today that they support dynamic OPML subscription lists, and decided to give it a try.

You can subscribe to an OPML subscription list. Exactly the same format we used for importing lists. This means I can use the same feed list in two readers. Or I could share my list with everyone who subscribes to my newsletter. I can update the list, and the flow of news to the subscribers changes too.

I tried subscribing to my podcast list in Inoreader.

1. Put the URL to my podcast list on the clipboard.
2. Go to this page on the Inoreader site.
3. Click the big blue Subscribe to OPML button.
4. Paste the URL from the first step into the dialog.
5. Enter a folder name and description.
6. For synchronization I recommend the second option, full synchronization.
7. Then click Save, and if it worked, you should see the OPML file in a list.

It worked. I now can see my podcast updates in Inoreader, exactly as if it was in FeedLand.

And when I add new feeds they show up over there, same when I remove.

It'll be very interesting to see how it changes over time. I'll let you know! ;-)

Links

• Listening lists, as a feature for podcasts.
• This is where I was accumulating short URLs for subscription lists. Started it in Sept. The short URL for the blogroll.

Last night while I was on the phone, ChatGPT started talking to me in a British woman's voice. It's something that my Android phone does every so often, when I haven't said the magic word that activates it, even if I'm not in the same room as the device. It's a tiny bit funny, but a reminder that the microphone is always on, so I watch what I say when walking around the house, knowing that whatever I say is likely to end up in a database, to be used against me in a court of law.

I didn't like that it was a voice of a British woman. It was not a friendly voice, perhaps intended to communicate intelligence, competence. An unwelcome intrusion into reality, but then it is reality -- I'm getting old, and won't be here that much longer, and odds are that the British-voiced female robot will outlive me, forgetting for a moment that it is not actually alive.

I would submit this to the NYT as a guest op-ed, except I haven't explained why we must not create cyber-humans out of AI bits. I'm open-minded. Perhaps this is the way to create a new humanity, one that can survive the hell that's coming due to climate change. One that won't mind being subject to an idiotic 21st century American emulation of Adolf Hitler (incorporating the latest news about Trump). One that only needs electricity to survive, and won't need the medicine and love and attention that flesh and blood humans require. But every time I address the robot as I would address a real human, I try to stop myself, but I can't. I was raised to be concerned about the other person's feelings. Being a CEO of a tech company in California trains you that way too. And as I accept its humanity, as irrational as it is, I feel like I'm surrendering the independence of the species that I was born into. Are humans meant to be self-sovereign? Something to consider at this fork in the road.

If I could get something onto the agenda of the AI industry it would be this -- if you don't want to go down in history as the destroyer of the human spirit, stop programming your devices to emulate humanity. That should have been in Asimov's laws of robotics, but you have to actually use these things to see the danger. Of course Asimov can be forgiven because AI only existed in his imagination when he was writing his books. But they do exist now, and the damage is being done now.

Basically, it seems to me that humans must have an exclusive on being human.

I wrote, in a reply to Ben Werdmuller on Bluesky: "I’ve had 66K followers on Twitter for many years, but when I post something there it gets 250 views, not even sure what that means. These days all I use it for is communicating with insiders on certain tech platforms, and even that is kind of empty. Pretty much the same in Bluesky too, btw."

I was going to write a reply, but it got too long (300 char limit), so I put it here and posted a link on Bluesky.

• Ben, I think we have to create our own social web.
• We've been like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire for too long, always depending on the kindness of strangers.
• None of the candidates for the Social Web Prize are actually of the web. But one certainly is possible. You could create one, I could create one, Manton could too -- and they would all be the same network.
• That's how you'll know it's the web, when we get choice, and any developer with an idea can create their own version of the social web, and interop with all the others. That was the promise of the web. The platform with no platform vendor.
• We don't have to agree on very much, just what is a post, beyond the limits imposed by twitter-like systems, and a simple way to share them using HTTP and really simple RSS.