Category: internet

Who Should Govern Us, Apple or…The Government?

One of these things is not like the other.

I’m traveling today – consider this brief post a placeholder of sorts. I’ve long railed against the privatization of public space, and the hidden regulation inherent in the submission of our collective personal data to the black boxes of Big Tech. With that in mind, I’m watching this story, about Apple’s refusal to roll out its new Siri AI service in Europe. Despite its characterization as a “spat,” there are far larger issues at play.

At the heart of the matter is a fundamental disagreement about who has agency over personal data that is created on our phones and other digital devices. Apple insists it should have control over how that data is leveraged by AI agents, and that the EU’s regulatory framework, known as the Digital Markets Act, hinders Apple’s ability to protect its customers’ privacy. The EU believes the job of protecting consumers privacy – and our rights regarding how our data is exploited – is a matter best handled by the public through collective government.

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I’m Sorry, LinkedIn!

I’m sorry, LinkedIn!

Earlier this week, as a major storm took aim at the little island where I live, I saw a story in which Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, defended his company’s energy use by comparing it to how much energy humans use to do similar tasks.

“…it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” he argued, when asked about AI’s insatiable – and destructive – appetite for energy. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.”

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Two Approaches to Saving The Web. Only One Works.

Image Gareth Glaser https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/appeal-open-internet-gareth-glaser-kwnbe/

The open web – free content written by actual humans about things actual humans care about – has been in decline for more than a decade. I’ve had a front row seat throughout – first at Federated Media, which was built 20 years ago to support independent publishers, then on the Board of Sovrn, which continued Federated’s work on the programmatic/data side of the publishing business. I’ve also taught and practiced journalism for the past few decades, and started and advised countless ventures that depend on traditional media revenue streams.

In short, I know it ain’t pretty out there for advertising-supported publishing. Social media dug the grave, and now the nail gun of generative AI seems to be merrily fastening the lid over the open web’s pine box coffin.

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Algorithms and Capitalism: Cleaning Up The Waze Parade

Where are we all going?!

Do you feel it? A simmering discontent with the state of capitalism in American life? I certainly do. My kids engage with social media only if they have to – never because they wish to. They believe their feeds are  manipulated by corporate interests, and they are distrustful of anyone who believes otherwise. My wife is convinced that anything she buys online – particularly the bigger ticket items like flights or hotels – is priced based on what algorithms calculate she can afford to pay – not what might be fair or offered to others. Parents in my friend group are terrified that their kids are using ChatGPT as a confidante and therapist whose motivations are unfathomable. The stock market keeps pushing ever upwards, but my colleagues are increasingly convinced a crash is around the corner.

Something just feels….off. The complex socio-economic system that we’re all a part of seems rigged. And we feel powerless to do anything about it.

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OpenAI: Code Red? More Like Code Green!

 

After writing about how OpenAI might just be the AOL of the post AI Internet, I couldn’t resist commenting on The Information’s scoop this morning about OpenAI hitting the big red panic button. It’s now a Valley ritual to call an official emergency whenever you’ve made massive management mistakes that almost kill your company. Remember Sundar’s code red back when ChatGPT launched? Seems Sam Altman is now returning the favor. He’s worried Google’s Gemini is about to lap ChatGPT, and has told his staff to drop everything and focus entirely on improving OpenAI’s core product.

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Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL?

As is his want, last week Fred Wilson wrote a provocative post I’ve been thinking about for the past few days. Titled “Netscape and Microsoft Redux?“, Fred notes the parallels between the browser wars of the late 1990s and the present-day battle for dominance in the consumer AI market. And he asks a prescient question: What new, world-defining product might we be missing by focusing on AI chatbots?

In the early days of the Web, everyone thought the most important new product to emerge from the Internet was the browser. Netscape, a startup with just a few months of operating history, defined the market for those browsers in 1994, then dominated it for several years thereafter. But by the late 1990s, the lumbering incumbent Microsoft had stolen Netscape’s lead by leveraging distribution and pricing advantages inherent to its massive Windows monopoly.

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Wired’s Backbone Stiffens

Wired’s current issue

We didn’t have much money when we launched Wired back in January of 1993, but we needed to get the word out somehow. We couldn’t spend our way into brand recognition, so we orchestrated a guerilla campaign: The week Wired hit newsstands, day-glo posters with just two words were plastered on construction sites, vacant wall space, and buses all over San Francisco, New York, and a few other tech-heavy cities. “GET WIRED!” the ads  proclaimed. Never mind that no one knew what Wired was. The point was to get people’s attention, and judging from the newsstand sales, it worked.

(If you want part of the history of that period, read my piece “Get Wired,” which I published earlier this year.)

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Nearly 30 % of All Bullsh*t Online Is Health Related

 

Every so often I have the chance to catch up with Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill, the founders of NewsGuard. I was an advisor to their company for several years, and we keep in touch, as we share something of an obsession around the decline of journalism and the related erosion of fact-based information online. Both Crovitz and Brill have long and storied careers in “traditional” media – Brill started American Lawyer and CourtTV and authored countless pieces of long form reporting, and Crovitz was the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

NewsGuard launched as something of a bullshit detector during the ascendence of social media eight years ago. The company’s first product created “reliability ratings” of news and information-based websites. Not surprisingly, the company immediately became a target of the far right media ecosystem, and remains one today.

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AI Is Breaking The Internet. Can Bill Gross Fix It?

Bill Gross, ocean boiler.

Bill Gross has been here before. 

Back when the Internet was young, when the dot-com wave broke across the monied shoals of Wall Street opportunism, Gross built a world-changing company, took it public, then sold it for billions. 

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The Trouble With Bees

This is not a honey bee.

There’s this throwaway conceit in the current season of Black Mirror that keeps tugging at me, and it’s Friday, so I thought I’d think out loud about it.

In Episode 1, “Common People,” the protagonist, a school teacher, is lecturing her young pupils about pollination. She casually explains how robotic bees have taken over for their organic ancestors, buzzing from flower to flower and, one presumes, keeping the world’s agricultural ecosystem from crashing. The exchange is meant to contextualize the episode as happening sometime in the near future – most of us know that the bee population is crashing, and the concept of autonomous insect drones doesn’t feel that far off. It’s also an elegant reference consistent with one of tech’s most fundamental beliefs – don’t worry, kids, technology can and will save us from ourselves!

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