dsearls

War on Peace The front page of today’s Los Angeles Times. I can read it, because I subscribe. I also recommend that everyone subscribe to newspapers, because facts still matter to those troubled entities,…

On stories, and covering war coverage: doc.searls.com/2026/03/01/w...

Because Pricing is Getting Too Personal Surveillance pricing already has its own page in Wikipedia. It also has its own authority: Abbey Stemler, Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics and Weimer Faculty Fellow in Business Law &a…

If you think surveillance pricing (prices just for you, based on surveillance) is bad, you need to dig this: doc.searls.com/2026/02/12/b...

We remain Santa Barbara residents and voters. We just seem to find good work where it's fun (and far less costly) to reside elsewhere. So we're mostly in Bloomington (go Hoosiers!) but in SB as often as we can.

We got 14.5" here, and it will be deeply subfreezing for days, so I'm looking for somebody with a plow to clear our short sideroad so I can get out of here. Below the snow, it's still Indiana, which is okay.

Now the Future Can Start That’s a screen grab of an email we’re sending out for the MyTerms launch in London. Links: To attend online: To attend in person: Be there in a Zoom square. Or in old-fashioned reality…

Big thing going down in London on the 28th. See you there or in a Zoom square: doc.searls.com/2026/01/20/n...

How to Be Old, Lesson 1 A trick for opening a stuck lid. I’ve been young a long time. My chronometer says 78.4685 years, which is long for a human but short for a rock. I know a lot of rocks. It helps to have perspe…

A blog post: doc.searls.com/2026/01/16/h...

MyTerms Reclaiming Your Digital Self YouTube video by MyTerms

Here is a short video that condenses my hour-long talk on MyTerms at Indiana University: www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2B7... Does a pretty good job.

On the Scariest Roller Coaster Ever Built The original Cyclone roller coaster at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, built in 1927. The photo is by my father, Allen H. Searls, who helped build it and turned nineteen that year. I just d…

Had fun writing this one: doc.searls.com/2025/12/30/o...

I am live on WFHB right now: wfhb.org

On extracting yourself from the extractors Here’s the flyer for the next talk in our salon series here at Indiana University: Elettra is one of the most interesting, smart, accomplished, caring, and effective people I know. She is als…

We are an hour and a third from a great talk Elettra Bietti will give here at Indiana University and live on Zoom. It'll be great. Please come. More here (with the Zoom link): doc.searls.com/2025/12/05/o...

MyTerms are Your Terms That’s the case I’ll be making next Tuesday in a talk at Indiana University. The subject is big—maybe the biggest in your online life. That’s because MyTerms is the only way you&#…

I'm giving a talk on Tuesday about a new standard that flips the script on cookie notices, surveillance, and the adtech fecosystem. Its IEEE P7012, better known as #MyTerms. It'll be on Zoom. More at doc.searls.com/2025/11/14/m...

Life after SeatGuru As a devout window-sitter on planes, SeatGuru was a must-have for avoiding misaligned or absent windows on booked flights. But now it’s gone, because its owner, Tripadvisor, failed to keep it…

Why I'd rather book the Death Star than use Tripadvisor for anything again: doc.searls.com/2025/11/14/l...

Look Up! Surf’s up. North. Here is the auroral oval, right now: And here is the K Index, also via NOAA: Remember that the aurora’s curtains of light stand up to 800 miles above their base, about…

Big aurora going on: doc.searls.com/2025/11/11/l...

Who’s your agent? M.G. Siegler says AI is Breaking the Browser's Back. His problem starts with OpenAI's GPT Atlas, which some publishers won't let view their contents on the Web. For example, if you a…

A question, plus another at the end: doc.searls.com/2025/11/06/w...

This is a Test. Or a Taste. Or both. What see ye? I shot the photo above last night on approach to SFO. My window seat was on the left side of the plane. Tell me where this is, what the two most standout features are, and what was hap…

My latest: doc.searls.com/2025/10/20/t...

I've disliked the Dodgers since they divorced New York and married Los Angeles (which I do love, but not for its baseball). But Shohei Ohtani is possibly the greatest baseball player of all time, and he is playing in ours, now. Alas, for the Dodgers.

Is Facebook down? Every other site/service seems to be working, but Facebook is a spinning wheel right now.

Amazon's music on hold is the same as Rackspace's was before it failed in an attack and cost me years of email. Hope that's not a bad sign.

Questions of Law, not Just Politics Go to HUD.gov,  and you’ll get this: Go to USDA.gov, and you’ll get this: Seems to me these violate the Hatch Act, aka “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.” I…

Do partisan statements atop US .gov websites violate the Hatch Act? See doc.searls.com/2025/10/03/q... My idea here is mainly to help reporters follow what's going on by visiting links to every federal branch and agency I could find. See what they're saying during the shutdown.

Privacy is a Contract In the natural world, privacy is a social contract: a tacit agreement that we respect others’ private spaces. We guard those spaces with the privacy tech we call clothing and shelter. We also…

Laws won't get us privacy online. Contract will. I explain why: doc.searls.com/2025/09/11/p...

Remembering R.C. Ward The first thing R.C. Ward taught in our biology class at Guilford College was his eponymous Law: “If it works, it’s good.” He frequently mentioned Ward’s Law by name and req…

A long-belated obituary of sorts, with a bunch of bonus facts: doc.searls.com/2025/09/09/r...

Cartoon: Web's end To support this work and receive my weekly newsletter with background on each cartoon, please consider joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon . Follow me on Bluesky ...

One irony is that I'm pointing to this on a social medium and not putting it on my own Lovable Expert page: www.dailykos.com/stories/2025...

The Case for MyTerms We know more than we can tell. That was how Michael Polanyi distinguished between tacit and explicit knowing. We may know tacitly how we form speech, ride a bike, or sense when to shake hands with …

Want to blow up cookie notices, and overturn the whole surveillance fecosystem? MyTerms is the way. I make the case here: doc.searls.com/2025/08/14/t...

Yes, and I run it. At this point, I'd call it a great start. But we have a loooong way to go.

Personal AI Having personal AI is like having a personal computer. It’s yours. It’s not AIaaS (AI as a Service), which is what we get from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, Meta, an…

Try seeing "mainframe" every time you see "AI." Because giant mainframes are what we're getting AI from, so far. "Personalized" is nice, but you don't drive. You're a passenger in a Waymo. We need truly personal AI. I've been writing about that here: doc.searls.com/personal-ai/

Getting Real With AI. When I read that some conversations with ChatGPT had appeared in Google searches, I did a search for “Doc Searls” ChatGPT and got a long and not-bad but not entirely accurate AI summary…

Just posted this: doc.searls.com/2025/08/02/g...

This post is about how both The Cluetrain Manifesto and The Intention Economy will finally come true. It's what many of us have been working toward since the last millennium: projectvrm.org/2025/07/15/t...

And how about that bug-eyed Jeep Liberty with peeling paint and cataracts in the tall grass on the left?

Hammad Ul Hassan Pratik Joshi had been living in London for six years. A software professional, he’d long dreamed of building a life abroad for his wife and three young children, who stayed back in India. After...

This is among the saddest things I've ever read: www.facebook.com/hammaduh/pos...

Online Sports Betting is for Losers A few decades back my teenage son and I approached Las Vegas at night while traveling south on Interstate 15. When the skyline of the city began sparkling into view, the kid said, “Wow. Think…

I make a bet (more like a wish) at the end of doc.searls.com/2025/05/21/online-sports-betting-is-for-losers/