 And this is the OGM call for Thursday, March 9th, 2023. Well, I like that, the Pudim Spiel Cam. Oh, I didn't change my phone. What was the game for Pudim? Well, we did a play in our synagogue, and this PC was used as the Pudim Spiel Cam, so everybody can see it. All right, let me rename myself. That's cute. All right. How are you doing? Eric, how are you doing? I just haven't seen you in a while. I was just missing you a couple nights ago, so I should write Eric, and then I fell off to sleep, so I didn't get actually to write that email. Yeah, I'm all for Clint. Oh. We had so much stuff going on with work and synagogue and life, and yeah, but I'm managing. Awesome. Love that. Hey, Pete. Hey, Doug. Hey, Gil. Hey, Gil's bathroom note-taker. So today is a topic day. We can talk topics. And I was just talking with Michael about the potential proposed topic of 40 terabytes in a mule, which really was meant to be about data sovereignty and self-sovereign identity and self-sovereign data and stuff like that, where the project, as I just named it, was more about helping populations who don't often have a lot of access, get access and sovereignty and some governance over their own data. And we don't need to go there, but I'm just curious if anybody showed up for the call expecting to talk about that and interested in it, and if not, to hear about other sorts of topics as well. And Michael, if you wanted to elaborate on what I just said in any way, that would be welcome as well. Yeah, I was just saying to Jerry that I mean, I think you put it well that 40 terabytes in a mule coinage is something that does have to do with the digital divide and things that go on between the halves of this country and the haves and have nots everywhere else. And it feels a little bit weird to be talking about it in a room full of these faces. But the idea of data sovereignty that is its own thing and talking about control and totally game for that. I was just sort of pulling back on that phrase, the 40 terabytes in a mule as our umbrella. And thanks, Michael, for talking about that. Makes total sense to me and happy to discuss even that angle on it as well. Gil just asked in the chat about what is the self sovereignty thing. I'm going to take a very amateur swing at it and anybody else who wants to jump in please do. But basically, usually, our data online is held by corporations or governments in their centralized databases. And they collect up a whole bunch of info on us. And we don't really know what it is they have inside those databases. And we have some but not a lot of rights to see and correct that data, which we almost never, as far as I'm concerned, do. Self sovereignty says, hey, that's all asked backwards. We should own our own data and release it only as necessary for various and sundry events that happen online. And this is about online identity. But it could also be about when you show your ID at the door to get into a nightclub to prove that you're old enough, your age verification. And the one example that I've heard over and over again that I really like is when you show your ID to the bouncer at the door of a nightclub, they can see your address, a whole bunch of statistics and data about you that they don't need to know. And maybe they are a little frightening looking or whatever else. What if all you had was a system that guaranteed that you are you and that you are, in fact, old enough? Yes, no, just green light, red light, old enough to cross into this thresholded space because you qualify. And that none of your other information was revealed and you could protect that. And so that's, I think, a very compelling use case for self-sovereign ID. But then anybody who's creating content or worried about the future of the web and all that has a whole bunch of other very good reasons for self-sovereign data cap keeping. And Pete just put a piece from Wikipedia page of self-sovereign identity in the chat. And Pete, if you want to elaborate a little bit or anybody else also, go ahead. Yeah, sure. And I think Michael might have been talking about data in general and not just identity. The idea of self-sovereignty is that I own the data about me instead of you own the data about me. I have a weird one. There's kind of a modern musician who's very good, Viena Tang. She's got a song called The Hymn of Axiom. Axiom is one of the companies that holds a lot of data about you. And so it's kind of a rye take on an ode to the love that Axiom has for you, that they know everything about you even more than you know. And isn't that a wonderful thing? So I'll put a link in the chat. Thank you very much. Stacey. Yeah. So I had been thinking about this from another perspective as well. So I usually analogize, well, I don't usually, but if I were to analogize Facebook as like our government, because like I know all of you through either Facebook, Zoom, Mattermost, like that's how we're connected. I really feel like I want transparency the same way I would want in government. So I want to know who has seen my posts? Who, you know, where is it going out to? I think that would empower me as a consumer. And I would like to hear some conversations about that because I'm wondering if it could lead to another business model, one that would be fair. So just to paraphrase and see if I'm getting you right, Stacey, if I were to publish a post on a blog and 5,000 people were to go read it, I would have no idea who read it because the post on the blog is basically this inner thing that is waiting to be read. And nobody's busy collecting up, well, the web server might be collecting up some info, but I'm not getting any info back about really what's going on. Now there are Google Analytics and other sorts of engines that will try to do that mostly for advertising and so forth. But in general, I don't know when somebody's interested in my stuff or touching it or reading it or whatever else. And you're looking for that information? Yes, but specifically for Facebook because I think Facebook is very different because a great majority of people on Facebook are more like citizens. They're not there. I mean, there are a lot of people that I didn't realize that are there to make money and to exploit the other half of the people there. But for the average people on Facebook, they're just there, it's the town square. And so I feel that that would help them to not be exploited. Wait, I thought Twitter was the town square. Oh no, anyway, Michael? Yeah, I was gonna say the illusion of these town squares is that they are open space when in fact, they are private space belonging to somebody else whose private space we have been lured into. And Facebook's shopping mall is a private space they own with its own laws and everything that you produce there that is nominally you stays there. And I mean, you can get a copy of some of it. And that the notion that I think the thing I brought up last week that I think connected to you, Jerry, about talking about later was the what if of if all the things that any of these outside players, Axiom, Facebook, Google, our doctors, every bit of the data that exists on us was transferred to us. And the business competition was basically giving us the best tools to parse and use our own information. And Stacey, you might want something that was very, that had great UI around you, like seeing who you were interacting with. And that's important to you as a way that you share some of your data and you're willing to share X data with Y data and the audience in return for that. They know when they're looking at that, that that's the exchange they're making but that you're the one granting the licenses from this position of strength that is everything I have about me is me and doesn't belong to anybody else. It also seems to me like it's a little bit stronger of a nonpartisan legal framework to go after, to say, all we're saying is that the individual right of owning your digital self is something that's worth fighting for and accomplishes a lot and also gets at the freedom of reach versus freedom of speech stuff where like if I'm posting something, sure, you can have free speech. I mean, you can in your digital space say whatever you want, but your ability to share it with other people is governed by their desire to see it and it's not in anybody else's interest to billboard it the way it is for Facebook and Twitter and you will to derive attention from the billboarding now. So it just sits there. And if anybody when they step in wants to take a pause as a little think rest between what we say, please do because I'm realizing I'm back at my reflexive. Next, next, next. Thanks, Jay, thanks, Michael. I'm not sure Michael and I haven't talked about this really, but there's a lot of data that Facebook knows about you, but something and we know a lot about that from inventions in the news and social media and things like that. If you're not paying for the service here, maybe you're the product. If you dig into audience segmentation and consumer segmentation and I put a link to kind of a random database marketing company so if you want to advertise something, you can go to a company like Esri and say I would like to advertise to African American payday loan responders or I'd like to advertise to ethnic second city strugglers. Those are names of lists that they collect people into, right? So there are a number of companies like Esri or Axiom who know a lot about me and a lot about each of you down to the kinds of neighbors that you have, the kind of money that you spend, the kind of products that you buy, the your belief systems, all of that stuff. That's something that, well, you can kind of imagine in the olden days it was a database of customers and I want to mail everybody in zip code 89431. But now it's down to, I want a couple of blocks where this is the way they think, this is what they buy, this is what they want to do. And I want to sell something to them or I want to convince them to vote for somebody or I want to convince them to get a little bit more active about this topic that I'm interested in in their city or whatever, right? So if you think about that self-sovereignty, it's a little bit like in the feudal days or the days when we had slavery. It's like somebody said, hey, I own you. I own your productivity on this land and I get to decide what you grow. I get to decide what you give to me. I get to decide where you live, kind of who you hang out with because I own you, right? And slavery was the same thing, right? You get turned into an asset that somebody else owns and then they make decisions about their asset because legally they've got the right to make those kinds of decisions. So very similarly, we're in that situation now and I'm trying to make a metaphor or something like that, trying to connect what Michael is saying. It's an oddity that we've ended up in a situation where somebody else owns things that they know about me to manipulate me or to move me in different ways. They own that, it's their asset and yet it's a significant part of me, right? It's like who I am. So that self-sovereignty, the idea of it is that doesn't sound right, you know? We figured that out for my physical body, you know, a hundred, 200 years ago. Apparently we haven't figured that out for the other things that I ought to own but that right now in our society, capitalism thinks it's perfectly wonderful that companies know a lot about me and can make decisions about my life without my consent, without my participation, without my even knowing that they're doing it. So that's kind of the, in a nutshell, that's maybe a way to think of it. It's feudalism, it's slavery. It's not physical slavery but it is slavery of a kind of my psyche. And something that if I described it in that way to people from a couple of hundred years ago, they would say, huh, I didn't know it got that far. I didn't know you guys would let that happen. You know, an abolitionist from a hundred years ago would be shocked. It's like, so we fought the good fight and we at least won their physical freedom but people are still locked up in chains, it's insane. And I feel really uncomfortable using some of the language there. I don't mean to equate physical slavery with kind of psychic slavery, it's not the same thing but there's a significant similarity to it as well. So thanks. Thanks Pete. I wanted to put a couple of things in the conversation. A friend of the network, Doc Searles has a project called Customer Commons where he was trying to sort of flip this whole equation. He has VRM vendor relationship management which is like how us, how citizens can manage their vendors instead of VRM which is called Customer Relationship Management which I usually reframe as consumer relationship management. And an old trope of mine is when you hear about a customer centric corporation what that usually means is they have you centered in the crosshairs of an elaborate and expensive device designed to shake your brain and shake more money out of your wallet because they're interested in customer lifetime value which is value to them not to you. It's all really about them, it's never about you. So Doc has been trying to flip this equation around to give a sovereignty with some traction not a ton of traction but the idea that we might make requests into the Commons that says I need to buy a new washer dryer and then vendors would show up and bid on your offer in some sense and compete for your attention and he has not succeeded in flipping that market. And then in a fit of peak sometime many years ago I bought WeDon'tStock.org and I was like could we get companies to just sign a pledge? It's a very dark pledge but it needs better framing and naming but could we get companies to basically say hey we will not stock you and partly I have a whole riff about how trust is less expensive than control and basically the technology of tracking you and manipulating you is really expensive. There are a whole series of vendors to get clean data to place the ads to there's all these sort of markets upon markets and worse that whole process involves a series of breaches of trust. I'm busy dumpster diving your data so that I can manipulate that data and then put things in front of you that you don't even know you're gonna respond to because you tend to respond to orange ads more than green ads. I know that but you don't know that et cetera, et cetera make it up as you go. And I'm not sure what to do with that or where to go but it seems like a lot of our conversations and a lot of our sufferings seems to be because the flavor of capitalism that we're under does these things to us and isn't very respectful of us as humans and isn't very respectful of the earth and what it touches and efforts to use regulations to create that respect are met with oh no you're over regulating us you can't do that. And so we wind up in this impasse in this kind of a bit of a downward spiral even as capitalism creates many, many small cheap objects of luxury because that's what it's good at. It manages to make abundance apparent abundance of things while depleting a lot of the rest of us. Ooh, that turned in a much more of a rant on capitalism than I expected. Mr. Friend. But a good one, Dr. Mikulski. I'm not gonna rant on capitalism at the moment. I'll save that for another time. I offer a confession and a question. So I've been on both sides of this precision marketing database marketing CRM game. As a manipulated object and as somebody using data to reach people in my mind for their benefit bringing them things that they care about not bullshit that I don't care about but there's that argument. The question is this, is this, is what we're dreaming about here gonna be achieved only through regulation or through customer advocacy for one of the better word or through commercial initiative. I mean, Apple has, for example, been staking out a relatively strong position on privacy in relation to the rest of the Fang boys. And whether it's perfect, not a separate question but there's some benefit there and there's certainly some position they've taken there. Is there an opportunity for some company or group of companies to move into the market with the kind of self-sovereignty sensitive stuff we're talking about and kick ass? Or is it just relegated to the fringe in relation to the juggernaut? Crap that we live in. And you would think, I mean, the advocates of capitalism will tell you that it's sort of self-regulating. And when people ask for things then suppliers need to supply them. And you would think that that dynamic would help us achieve what you just described but it ain't somehow happening. But capitalism as we have it now is subsidized from top to bottom. Nobody pays the real costs of what they do. If they did, the market would be more self-regulating. But between explicit transfer payments and unmonetized externalities, these folks get a free ride. They privatize profits and socialize impacts and that's at the root of the capitalist game at the moment. So that's not what I'm talking about. But so regulation forces companies to pay more of the real costs. So, and that's important. And consumer preference thing, we will do this. Well, Gavin Newsom just this week told Walgreens, California's not doing business with you anymore. Because Walgreens is knuckling under the 21 states that are banning abortion medication. Which are passing laws that say the store cannot sell those products in those states. Their job strip would be the law, right? Yeah, yeah. And for whatever reason, California said, okay, if you want to go along with those laws we got other ones that say we're not doing business with you. Because we favor healthcare access to all people. So there's that. But then, is there a commercial initiative that a tech company, a database company, a marketing, I don't know who that could break this open and move into Blue Ocean and create something new that would out-compete the axioms and the SREs and so forth. I don't know. That's just the speculation that comes to my mind listening to this. That's it for the moment. Thanks, Gil. I've got a thought in my brain label, is capitalism possible when everyone and everything is treated fairly? Which is a good thought exercise. Because in my experience everywhere, like somebody needs to be squeezed or broken along the way in order for products to make it to market, I think. But well, it's a great question. And we're not gonna try to answer it now but I think it's a great question. And the notion, it's certainly the myth of capitalism of is fair, uncoerced exchange, exchange of value to relative mutual benefit. The Bible said a long time ago, do not put a stumbling block before the blind. Meaning don't manipulate people. Don't take advantage of someone's disadvantage or infirmity in any way. Do stuff that's fair between you. And there can still be markets that are fair. Whether there can be capitalist markets that are fair is a different question. Thank you. And before we're gonna, Michael, like what on earth capitalism actually is is as complicated a question as what democracy is and a couple other of these terms that we sort of throw around a lot and don't often agree on in different ways. And that's a very interesting conversation that's probably requires a couple of bottles of wine to go into and it's a little early for that here. I'm in. Michael. I was just posting something in the chat which relates to what Gil was just saying. And I think Gil is super right that there's sort of a yes and around the attractiveness of a commercial effort, the need for legislation and grass roots movements to do things differently on an individual basis, which is sadly kind of a privilege to have the alternatives to free and supported access to information. But I think there's this thing, I was gonna say this in response to Jerry bringing up Doc Searles. So Doc and Joyce and Aaron who is in the fellowship of the link, I think. And Zuckershaw from Washington Post Security and some other people who might sort of vaguely overlap were out of the Internet Identity Workshop a couple of months back, kind of came together. Roger McNamee was there and we got into just a big and sendier conversation about surveillance capitalism which Roger loves to rail against loudly and theatrically but like what do you do about it? And we had a little session and I was at the whiteboard and somebody was saying, well, it's in surveillance capitalism and when I put those initials together and drew a square oval around it, we realized it was the escape key. And so under the logo of the escape key and maybe more than the very specific and surveillance capitalism, we're trying to not start another organization but just aggregate and promote the organizations, individuals, events, podcasts, books, stuff that educates people about the subject, about the idea that their digital selves are not under their control. And Adrian Gropper who I don't know if any of you know here who's also a part of this group has been really vocal about redefining what people are calling privacy as digital human rights. And I think that's, it's very powerful. There's actually a nice podcast where Doc and I'll see if I can find it. Pete, you're always quicker at these things. On Reality 2.0, which is Doc's podcast with Catherine Druckmann, they had Adrian on a couple of months ago, maybe more. And he was talking about his medical project. He's a MB by training. And the idea that people should have access to their medical records and Dominion over how they're shared and just framing it as a digital human right. Thanks, Jared. So yeah, I feel like there's a movement here that needs to, like some of the stuff, some of us who are in the metaproject group or have been, have talked about how like we need to not be another organization over, but a active, broad follower under the things that are doing that need to be recognized together as a movement and to see this movement for digital human rights, like the environmental movement, the women's movement, the civil rights movement. And then point to all the people who are part of it that aren't gonna be under one umbrella, but that people should realize, relate to each other and we can support and support products that lead to those principles and feel. Thanks, Michael. Pete. Thanks, Michael. I really liked Gil's questions. You know, is there, maybe is there a market force that would make it such that you would decide to strip mine people less and be a market leader because of that? I literally can't imagine it because in a capitalist system, it doesn't seem like it'll work, but I think that's a lack of imagination rather than a lack of possibility. I wanted to note real quick, when I watch Apple being a good citizen about privacy, personal privacy, it's really striking to me. It feels to me, I don't think they're doing it for market position, even though it does differentiate them in a good way. I'm not sure that people are savvy enough to really think about it and care enough about it. And it does an interesting thing where Apple can now tell the truth about some of their privacy stuff, and it sounds good and it's actually true, which is amazing. It's amazing when marketing is actually true. But I feel like what happened there is the business, and I don't know if this is the CEO or the board or upper management or some investors. I feel like they actually made a moral decision. They said, enough is enough. We don't need to store all of that private information and be able to give it to lose it, to actually just have somebody rip it off or give it to government officials or whatever. We just don't need that. And it feels like they made a moral decision which wasn't a profit directed decision. And I think that's an interesting, I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what it feels like to me. At the same time, they are what I consider horrible landlords, horrible rent seeking landlords, with their 30% tax on basically everything that runs through any of their hardware. It's insane. I don't, like that as a moral stance is reprehensible, I think. And I appreciate that they have the marketplace, they built the marketplace and they should get something for it. But 30% of everything that runs through their app store, it's insane. I like mind-blowingly insane. And now they're wealthier than God and I don't think that's a good outcome. I think that's a moral failure. So it's really interesting for me to hold that company in two places. Outstanding is maybe the wrong way to put it, differentiated, actually taking moral stance which doesn't seem like money-grubbing to me. And then this, you know, it's totally money-grubbing kind of like mill that they can't let go of, you know, that's their cash cow. I wanted to say that, but then I wanted to say something different. A different take on this instead of thinking of market forces and stuff like that and maybe back to Gil's regulatory solutions, a way, a thing that has happened. And I only realized this because of AI art. Some of us were talking about AI art in another call and of the many things that AI synthetic image generation does, it does a lot of cool things and we don't talk about all the cool things. One of the weird things that it does is you can say, give me a realistic photographic representation of a scene in the style of Simon Stallard or something like that. You know, you can say an artist's name and it's a, you know, and in the back of its brain, it knows a bunch of different living artist's names and dead artist's names and it goes, huh, if I think about it, this is the way that person looks or, you know, this person or these two people together, I'll sweeten the image generation to make it look in the style of. And that's, this was one of the big hullabaloo is about synthetic image generation. To me, it's actually a small topic. It's not the most interesting part of synthetic image generation, but I wanna get into that now. If you think about it, what happened, and actually I think that AI company is the people who make synthetic image generators, they're trying to back away from that. It's like, okay, that was a cool feature. It was a cool feature in the lab. It gets misused in the real world. They're trying to back out of that. So they're coming up with ways that you can, you know, if you're an artist, you can opt out of us trolling all of your data or they can at least put a blacklist against names or they can just make a hard cut and say, living artists, you can't copy the style of dead artists you can or whatever, they'll work it out. But the interesting thing there, that issue exploded upon the scene because all of a sudden it was fungible, that the style of an artist was fungible. So up until that point, if an artist drew something and they had a copyright, they could say, my, I own the represent, you know, through the copyright laws over the past couple hundred years, I own this representation. So if I'm Marth Rothko and I've made a painting, the way that painting looks is my property, not just the painting itself, not the one copy, but the whole way it looks, like if somebody takes a photograph of it, I still own the way it looks in a photograph. And that was kind of good enough, you know, for a hundred years ago or something like that. Tech moves to 2023 and, oh, crap. You mean, you know, I've built an over, I've built about a work, a set of work over my 30 or 40 years as being an artist and I have a recognizable style and I make my market on that. I make money off of my style. You mean that you just built a robot that can make another image in my style in five seconds. What, you know, what the hell? And then it can make another one, another one, another one. And all of a sudden the market for Mark Rothko, whatever is flooded, you know, with cheap copies made by an AI that looked like Mark Rothko, good enough for, you know, good enough for most people. So what happened there was, or the capitalist way to think of this and in the capitalist society or the way to think of this is you, maybe what we want to do is make the style of your art an asset, you know, an asset that you can own. So not just the look of each painting I've made, but the whole style of that. If that were an asset, then I could go to court and say these people are stealing my asset. Right now we're in limbo where, you know, we ended up in this word space where technology makes it so that it's a fungible thing that you can separate from, you know, in the olden days, you'd have to have a full blown artist copy the style of Mark Rothko. That artist would know better than to copy the style of it. They would say, no, I'm not gonna do that. That's not cool. I wouldn't want people copying my style. I'm not gonna copy his style. That changed with AIR. So if you think of that as an asset, then all of a sudden you can get it back into our legal system and, you know, say Mark Rothko should own his style, not just each individual representation. You know, everything's hunky dory. The synthetic image generators have to pay like a tape tax or something like that. Every time they generate an image, .001 cents goes to a fund that funds, or whatever, you know, or you license it, or you can just prevent people from using your style. So now, having taken too long on that, I apologize, what if our metadata, data about us, wasn't something that people just stripped a mind off of us and then owned separately? That's the way it is right now. They stripped mine your, you know, everything about you and they own that since they've collected that data, they've collated it and they put it together, they own it, it's an asset, asset separate from you. And, you know, the way we got here, the path that we got here, it makes total sense because we have the copyright law that says, if you collect a bunch of stuff that's novel in us, you can own it as an asset. And so that's what they're taking advantage of, the fact that that kind of data about you can be asset-tized and turned into something that they can own and that you can't, that they can keep it secret from you, whatever, right? So maybe a solution is to say that data about me, metadata about me is an asset and that I own it, not whoever compiled it. I don't know what that would do. It might make it so that you could lease your asset. You know, maybe I would say, yeah, the data about me, I'll be happy to lease it to, you know, whoever wants it for $1,000 a year, whatever, you know, maybe there would end up being a market for it and that would kind of cure things. Some people would say, well, I need 10,000 for my data. Some people would say, well, I need 100. Maybe that would kind of sort into the right thing. The different thing that might happen, which is the thing that I would prefer is maybe we don't need to collect that much information about other people and hold it in a concentrated form like that. Maybe we need a kind of social societal, maybe we need a kind of societal amnesia. We just don't need to collect that information about other people. And so that would be kind of like, I can buy some land and own some land and somebody can't like come and squat on it because I own the land. Maybe stuff about me should be that, you know, it's my property. If you're collecting a bunch of data about me, you need to give it to me because it's mine and you can't do stuff with it, right? So I think that reminds me like it's an odd thing to think of like we used to, you know, in this future I'm imagining where you just don't collect information about people. It's like, well, we used to do that. It was so cool. Why didn't, why did we stop, you know? This reminds me of moving off Twitter onto the Fediverse onto Mastodon. There's a whole bunch of stuff that just doesn't work anymore, right? Like global search over the whole Twitter versus is weird. And you have this, like, you have this reflex in Twitter and Twitter you were trying to get more and more and more followers so that you would have more reach over more people. On the Fediverse, it doesn't work that way. You have to actually engage with people to get them to follow you. So on Mastodon, you end up, I've ended up with dozens or a few hundred people who I engage with a lot more, where on Twitter I had a few thousand people who I didn't know at all. So to some people that feels like a loss, that federation and lack of ability to reach, you know, a hundred million people, it feels like a loss. But, you know, maybe it's not, maybe our society just needs to learn to leave people alone and to be in smaller communities and not have the reach of everything everywhere. And maybe that's the, and I can imagine that feature. Maybe that's a thing that needs to happen. Thanks. I love how this conversation is causing us to think about many different things and go really deep and broad, which is lovely. And I'm about to commit that as a big sin because I took notes in the chat of about 10 things I wanna put in very quickly. In retail, it's assumed that the retail store is gonna mark your product up by 50% because they have to pay the rent, they have a storefront, they attract traffic, they pay their employees, whatever else it is. But sometimes that 50% is egregious and sometimes that 50% is just like, that's the way we get products to market. Apple is verifying products. They have a huge audience that sweeps by your little app in the app store. I don't know that 30% is criminal, but I'm not sure. I'm like, I'm totally on the fence about that, Pete. So when you're, and also making it a blanket policy for everything which they don't violate, which gives them some way to say, we never violate this, you can't do that and eliminates the court of arbitration for, oh, this one's only worth 5% or whatever, is a strategy, I guess. So I'm very torn about the issue because in retail you just expect that a lot of it's gonna go away. The estates of dead artists are horrible usually. And there's a reason there's not a lot of Picasso art in the world in lots of places is that his estate will hunt it down and put lawyers on it and get rid of it because they don't want Picasso's art value to be disseminated, diluted in that sense. So they're busy protecting it. Protecting styles is really interesting and then somehow a lot of the stuff just becomes our patrimony. I think of Guernica as cultural patrimony not as an artist's owned work. And when it's cultural patrimony, it's a different thing. It's passed into the public commons, the public sphere in a way that should be reusable and reusable in different ways. Protecting all of our data per what Michael was saying is really hard. So if somebody takes a picture down a sidewalk in New York and I happen to be on the sidewalk, do I have a right to keep my face out of that picture? And how do we police that? If I sing in a chorus or in a church and somebody records that, my voice is audible in the chorus and I could detect it maybe even. Do I have a right to have it excluded from that? I don't know. I think that's really, really hard. In my brain, I have a thought about how companies have patented or trademarked different colors. So Cadbury's Purple is Pantone 2685C, and I don't know if it's trademarks or patents all the time. Coca-Cola Red, Ferrari Red, McDonald's Red and Yellow, Tiffany Blue, T-Mobile's Pink, UPS is Brown. These are all trademarked and you are not allowed to use those colors. And I don't know to what extent you're not allowed to use them. Could you use them on your website, likely? Don't know where the prohibition boundary is, but I find the trademarking of colors to be like crazy. Like, wait, you have just cut that color out of the world's use. Like, nobody can use that. And then I just recently discovered a YouTube shorts guy named Luxury. I added the YouTube link for him. He does these brilliant shorts about pop music, rock music. He knows where all the skeletons are buried about who copied what riff and who's song and who sued whom and who lost what and who's paying what for what. It's just like, I watched a couple of his shorts and I was like, holy crap, this has been going on. Music lawyers have been very busy for a very long time doing all this kind of interesting stuff. And then finally, the brain has released the new web client, which is more all singing, all dancing is faster and more elegant. I put a link to my notes from this call at the end of my little diatribe post on the chat. If you follow that, you'll see all the notes that I'm taking right now. And then there's a little eye icon on the top. And if you click on the eye icon, it flips between the brain's funny blue PlexView and just a flat land web frames view kind of with the same links on the page. Hopefully in an attempt to make it easier for people to navigate the brain, don't know feedback welcome, but this is sort of a new frontier that I'm eager to explore with the brain folks. And Eric had a screen show he wanted to do, but you haven't raised your hand to step into the queue. So do you wanna do that right now before I go to Michael? Well, if people wanna take a short pause and I could do it. I think I just put enough things in the room that it would be a good to have a little amuse-bouche. Okay, can people see my Macintosh? Yeah. It's Marchintosh. It's March, so yeah, good recognition. So I'm showing you hypercard because this month is Marchintosh. Could you still see the screen as I move it around? No, I'm seeing your mouse move, but I'm not seeing the screen move around. Okay, but you see mini VMac and you see Marchintosh 2023. Good, okay. So this is a hypercard stack that I created for Marchintosh, which is a cute little celebration for vintage computer enthusiasts. And the theme I decided was to look at Star Trek Picard season three, where they're bringing the whole cast from 30 years ago back together. And what would I want to put in this hypercard stack? Well, I wanted to use Ted Nelson's idea of ZZ structures and to help explain ideas like going Pawsword and Negward. So like if the first episode's linked to the next, the episode two, which is linked to episode three, then if I want to go from three to two, I'm going Negward. If I go two to three, I'm going Pawsword. So now let's go into one of these episodes. Now, the things that interest me are music and props and others, but there's also the concept of having a ring. So like if you wanted to go from part one to part two to part three, you could create a ring like that. And then when I had episode four, I'll insert it at the end of the ring. So that's one concept in Ted Nelson's structure. And he has dimensions. So like let's look at the dimension of music, okay? So here is the first song in episode one. I don't want to set the world on fire. So there's information about that. I may be interested in exploring. I may have other dimensions for the composer who performed it, the lyrics, whatever I want. But let's see the next song. Now it seems that our love affair is through. So the same dimensions could be linked to that song. It's really user navigation. And that's a third song in that episode. Eric, just a pause for a second. So you folded the work you're doing on ZZ, on Zippered Lists, which is Ted Nelson's work. Right. And inside of Hypercard, which is running in an emulator here. Right. That's really cool. Keep going, Sean. Okay, so now I'm interested in props. So one of the props we see in the first episode is Beverly Crusher's Corkaroli Five Award. Well, unless you have a whole understanding of the history of how she got that award. Here you could go to the dimension called the Next Generation Episode and you know it's the episode called Allegiance. And then you could get more information on that episode and maybe even link to a video if you have access to that. So let's see the other props. So Captain's Log, Star Date 43996.2. Does anybody remember what happened on that date? I, you know, I have imperfect recall of Star Date. That's from the best of both worlds, part one when Captain Picard was assimilated by the Borg. Well, yeah. And then Picard's Recycling Flute. You would think, you would think we should all remember that date. Yeah, of course, you know. And when did he get a Recycling Flute? Well, that was the episode, The Inner Light. I think it's the end of season six, but I could, but it's showing you the flexibility that you would have with dimensional navigation. And the other thing I'm experimenting with is like, say I could I have a QR code pop up on the emulator or on a Mac and you could scan it with your phone and get a link. So I'm experimenting in hypercard. Could I generate my own QR code? And then for fun, like. I don't know that your screen share is giving us audio. So I don't think I heard what you just played. Okay, fine. When you start, in Zoom, when you start screen share, you have to add audio. Yeah, that's fine. It's hypercard music. So I wrote a script in hypercard to play that music. Awesome. Yeah, okay. But you got the idea. So here is a 30 year old technology running in 2023 and being used for something. So I'm just showing you the creativity that can emerge from going back in time and bringing it forward. And it's amazing what they're doing with Star Trek, taking 30 year old characters and giving them new life. Eric, that was like very fast and mind blowing. Yep. And super cool. Second, Paul Roney, a French entrepreneur that is a founder of Cosmic and I are rebooting the Tools for Thinking podcast as HyperTalk is the name we're giving it because a few people in the world understand that HyperTalk was the programming ramming landings of hypercard. But other people might think, oh, this is like conversations about hyper stuff. Let's join. And we're trying to motivate people to come in and be hosts of strings of episodes, like four or six episodes and basically propose those and host them. And if you felt like doing that around what you just done and shown that would be like extremely on point and like right in because you're hybridizing too important of these historical visions of what the computer might do. Hypercard and zigzag. Yeah. And just another thing I want to mention, I'm also looking at high time, H-Y-T-I-M-E. It's an international standard for hyper media and a topic maps, which Jack Park has written books about. And one of our network friends, Steve Newcomb was one of the developers of High Time. Oh, cool. Oh yeah, I've seen that name. So yeah, I'm trying to bring some of the old back in because we had some great ideas in the 90s. Thank you so much. That was like the best show and tell in a very long time. Really appreciated, Eric. Okay, thank you guys and gals. Any comments, thoughts, questions before I go to Michael about what Eric just showed? Michael, watch the video over and then you can dream up questions. Excellent. There are a couple of offers of old Macs, stacks of old Macs in the chat. Cool. I, in fact, have two old Macs. Yeah. Yeah, people are rescuing them. There's a whole community of vintage computer enthusiasts bringing these old machines back to life. And I should figure out when they next come to Portland and bring all my old gear along to donate into the community. Because I opened up my time capsule box and have five palm pilots, a partridge in a pear tree. I have a kit. Maybe I'll bring it and show it next time. I don't have it handy right now, but... There is a Pacific Northwest chapter. Should we just ship all this stuff to you in UPS Brown truck? Sure. But there are people who fill their basements with all this stuff, yeah. Actually send them in Tiffany blue boxes in an UPS Brown truck. In Tiffany blue box, I'm putting on an Apple 30% markup. Yeah, just save it until somebody wants it, okay? Thanks, Eric. Michael, over to you. Okay. Thank you so much. Well, I was really curious as we were talking, I think this was back when Pete was talking and it sort of came up in what you were saying, Jerry, about, and some stuff that Doug said in the chat. The drawing, the limitations and the recognition on, you know, Jerry used the example of you singing in a chorus or walking on the street and being in a space where you were recorded and what are your rights in that situation? And I feel like there's a lot in thinking in physical space and thinking about your expectations of privacy when you're in private, in semi-public, you know, in a group, in a semi-public group where some of the people in it are anonymous to you on the street that, you know, carry over perfectly well to your digital data and, you know, and then there's another piece that perhaps supersedes that that goes to the style slash color question and also the current case in front of the Supreme Court where photographer Lynn Goldsmith's portrait of Prince was used by Andy Warhol in a piece of art. And she, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the case, actually there's a pretty good piece in the times this past Sunday where a few called when art imitates art and I'll grab it after the, thank you, Pete. So fast. But the gist of it is, and there's an aspect of it that I think has not been sufficiently covered, the gist of it is that, you know, so much art involves, you know, taking existing stuff and manipulating it and, you know, going back to the suit cams and the Brilla Box in Warhol's case and Duchamp, you know, putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. And I think there's a difference in that case that kind of maps to the degree to which one license or licenses for different kinds of use their external facing style, color, whatever IP where you have to ask the question, is somebody paying homage and or parodying or playing on the ubiquity and familiarity of something because it's been out in the world and been really familiar the way Warhol was when he was doing the Brilla Box or the Campbell's suit cam or are you exploiting an individual's efforts and likeness in your case, Jerry, or, you know, just something that is of them where the viewer does not know who that person is, who Lynn Goldsmith is in this case, but only looks at the work and thinks Andy Warhol did a really nice portrait of Prince or, you know, if your face, Jerry, were used in some, you know, if it were commercially exploited without your identification. Like if there were a meme says, obey Jerry with my face on it, I'd be totally into that. That'd be really cool. And would Shepard Ferry be doing that from somebody's copyrighted photo of you as he did? I prefer the Banksy image of me. Okay, Shepard Ferry got sued by the, by AP because their photograph of Obama was the one he used for the whole poster. It's interesting. Also another interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, the idea that this goes to the AI exploitation of artists, if your work is being assimilated into the Borg and used instead of commissioning you and you didn't authorize that to my mind, not cool. But, you know, if you put it out into a space where you have a, an expectation, an expectation that, that it will be used and you're okay with that. That's, that's your choice. I don't know. I'm just really interested to hear people's points of view on this because I think it's, it's hard to wrangle, but I think it's kind of wrangleable. If we, if we start from the place where all that is you is yours and then you like release it in ways and go out into the world in ways that you can't. I think it's a good way to work through some of the dilemmas that what you just said presents, like if you step out onto the. Yeah, exactly. And if you step out onto the sidewalk, you have an expectation that you're going to be seen by other people and your image might be captured. And that should kind of fold into the world in ways that sometimes, yeah, you are going to get seen. You are going to get heard. But you have some control. I particularly like the phrase expectations of privacy. I think it's a good way to work through some of the dilemmas that are going to fold its way in, for example. Gil. Yeah. On the other hand, there was just a case where police were surveilling someone's neighbor around possible drug charges and they requested. His ring video. Which he gladly gave. And then they requested all of his ring videos from the, all the cameras he had inside his house. Whoa. And they subpoenaed ring and ring turned it over. And there was not an exact expectation of being in the public realm. So, but I digress to Michael's point, I think there's really difficult challenges here because, you know, I suppose to the thing that said, you know, rip off or parody or homage. There's a long tradition in the arts and in music of being inspired and influenced by other people's work. It used to be respected. It used to be honored, appreciated, welcomed people would acknowledge it. Sometimes or sometimes not. But you hear it through, you know, you hear it through the blues tradition. You hear it in Mozart. And somewhere along the line, maybe when we get everything commoditized and acid ties to securitize that it becomes a problem. You know, some, some, something is lost about honor and respect and something is gained about this is mine. But like you say, Jerry, you know, Guernica is public realm at this point, but the estate probably doesn't think so. Well, anything before 1923 has fallen out of copyright. And that number is now in motion, I think because they're not renewing the copyright term as far as we know to extend it. And I want to do a tiny vocabulary thing that I learned not that far ago. The difference between commodified versus commoditized. So commoditization is when you make things really, really cheaply and abundant. And the thing becomes a commodity. So sliced bread is a commodity. You know, et cetera, et cetera. Commodification is when you take something that formerly used to be, and I don't know that this is the strict definition, but formerly used to be in the commons, and you then slice it up, pack it up and sell it off. You basically turn something that used to be abundant and just a given into a thing that has a price on it. So you basically put, attach a price to something that didn't always have a price. So if I were selling oxygen by the bottle or something like that is commodification and it's different. And back in the enclosure movement days, part of what happened was the commodification of things like labor and so forth. Yeah, thanks Pete. Well, just to try to just bump into Stacy before you go, just to say that what we're talking about here is about the commodification. We're talking about another kind of enclosure. Yes. And I haven't heard that word in the conversation, but it pervades everything we've been talking about. I'm going to put a boundary around your stuff and call it mine. Exactly. And the thing I have in my brain is commodification is about unsalable things becoming the saleable. Stacy, and feel free to take a pause before you jump in if you want to feel like we've been hustling through the conversation, but it's been exciting. Yeah, I just want to note because I'm all, you know, with chat GPT, I'm always, since it's just developing, I'm always looking through the lens of the values and the ethics. And I just want to point out that in what I posted in the chat, which was Barry's prompt, he fed them an article that I wrote. It an article that I wrote. It credits me in the article. And I kind of like that. You know, it mentions me twice. I think that's in the right direction. So as long as the robots cite us, if we get attribution, it's okay that they eat our culture. Well, in a way it was, it was actually, I looked at it's actually protecting my rights because you couldn't go back and see exactly where it was generated. Yeah. Well, if it had one of the problems here is that as these LLMs are busy inventing new things, they don't properly cite where they got all the chunks that were being remixed into the currently revised version because it's practically impossible. But if they, but if they could, that would be maybe really interesting because then a bunch of filaments would go back to the originators of all the pieces that are remixed and that would be a good thing. I also don't think this has any memory. Yeah. From what I understand it has no memory, but I'm just. What's happening is that these engines are being fed lots of content, which they're not taking snapshots out. They're not summarizing. They're merely washing these things over their memory as they shape up a memory that can represent the essence of what was in all of them, but not the actual stuff that was in them. Gil, is your hand up still from before. No. So you're back in the queue. Okay, good. Michael. I was just going to mention in relation to what Gil was saying. I mean, the, the, the sticky stuff about influence. I don't really think is that sticky. If you're saying, like, it's one thing for. Somebody's. Tune to sound, you know, Beatles or Motown ish or Beethoven and E, you know, and another thing to literally take a piece of their music and, and use it, which is sampling. And we have, you know, we have protocols now for that so that you can do it and it's, you know, pretty freely, freely, freely licensed and somewhere along that continuum of, of, you know, stylistic influence and attribution with allowance for parody and homage. Because when I think about, like, you know, Quernica or the Mona Lisa, if, if Lingold Smith's photo of Prince was as well known as they are, and Warhol played on it. No problem. You know, she's, she's, you know, she's made something iconic and therefore it can be influential and played with. But as an unknown person who's, you know, like, like music being sampled, it's being used to further the artwork of somebody else without attribution or, or compensation. That's something different. So, yeah. Thanks, Michael. I want, I would love to have this conversation with a chat GPT driven agent that thinks it's, it's Cory Doctorow present. Because I'm unclear that Cory's got the time to spend like 90 minutes with us on a call, even though several of us know him. But, but he knows, he runs so deep on these topics and is so passionate that I would love to hear what he thinks about, about this conversation. And then, Pete, thank you for posting about the culture of copying in Japan. And which reminds me that long ago I heard about reggae culture in Jamaica, where the dub side of a single, you basically issue a single. Remember records vinyl, you'd issue a single which would be your reggae tune, but the dub side would be the backside of the single with no, no lyrics intentionally so that people would sample your tune and included in their tune, and that being picked up and sampled in that way was a, was a, an honor was like that this is, this is how the culture actually runs. I love that that, that sort of vein of who did what where and I guess, roofily, I will add that the commercialization of art, the commodification of art caused there to be a lot of money pouring through the system that unfortunately often pours only toward the people that have very high volumes and become stars. So, you know, in music, for example, the top very small percent make a lot of money. There's a thin layer above that, that make a good lifestyle out of it. There's a whole bunch of people making music for love of music and not getting anywhere and many of whom would love to be in those upper tiers, but the upper tiers don't reach down very far. But the presence of that much money is what causes a lot of the mess that we're talking about here is that, hey, wait a minute, my little sample got used in a song that went viral, I want my slice of that revenue stream, which is not an unreasonable request. It's just that this is art used to be about ritual and culture and the sacred or whatever else and then we commodified it, which is one of my beefs with modern culture in some sense. We sort of lost the sense of the sacred and instead of Jeff Coons by doing large sculptures of balloon animals can make a gigantic living and I'm like, seriously? And Grateful Dead has a famously wonderful approach to IP. Go ahead, Gil. And I'll just note that one of the upsides of the whole world that we're decrying here is there are a lot of people earning good livings on YouTube and Patreon and things like that. Doing the work they love, Kevin Kelly's 1,000 fans. I've been following a guitarist named Josh Turner, who's a brilliant, multi-talented guy who's been doing video since he was like 14, and I've watched him go from 10,000 followers to 600,000 followers. And he's on his own. He's no record label. He's got, you know, he's got a real going concern doing good stuff. So that becomes possible now. It's like it was possible before then went away and now it's possible again. Michael. Gil, do you think that that is only possible through an attention seeking advertising supported model though? I would just. Absolutely not. Yeah. I mean, I think that we've gotten into the situation where we're not seeing the means because, you know, YouTube owns a venue. And, and, you know, Facebook owns a venue and Twitter owns a venue. Maul, whatever it is, that's become what people see as the alternative. But were there a way to disintermediate the relationship between artists and, and patron or. You know, what one of the models that, that. Some of us have been talking about is how do you, and this gets back to Doc Searle's a little bit. How do you make advertising on demand? So you see what you want in support of, you know, whether that that sort of like gets you credits. You know, you know, you know, that support artists directly and it isn't that artists, you know, artists have to. Do the stuff that pleases a small audience a lot or a large audience, a little, or, you know, whatever it is that there are, lends itself to. But they're not saying, oh, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. So I've got to grab the attention of these people. So YouTube will give me a fraction, which I don't. I think YouTube might take more than 30%. I'm not sure of the, the ad income that they have. Artists. So, you know, I'm. Yes, it sort of made some things possible, but the commercial web, the ad supported web, the ad people are not saying that. So it's a huge amount of stuff. Of certain kinds of stuff. Tremendously advantaged over. You know, other kinds of stuff. Michael. You're a collector of magazines and a carer for art and other sorts of things, just generally, how do you feel about this stuff? do? For you? What does collecting do for me? What does art do for you? How does collecting play a role in that for you, like just broad context of these issues? Well, that's a really broad question. I'm trying to get us out of the nuts and bolts of some of the details and up to just like, how do you feel? There's collectors satisfaction and curation, which is something I mean, thinking about it and sort of terms of the digital framework that that I was sketching, like, I'm doing something in my digital house, where I'm collecting a bunch of stuff. It my curation of it is mines. A lot of the stuff is somebody else's. Some of it I have a right to share with others. Some of it I don't. But I would love to be able to share my curation, share things that that whether I own them or have created them or co-created them, you know, to be able to share them in permissioned ways so that people who looked for that stuff could find that stuff. And in some cases, and this gets into some other. What's up? Gil, you're muted. I apologize. The ability to share both with attribution and without attribution to say like, I have this thing. It's really cool. I want people in the world to see it. I don't actually want them to know that I'm the one who has it at this address. It's just a thing that somebody else might put into their digital collection. And they would think is cool. And maybe I'll find out more about it by releasing it into the world and seeing where else it shows up. And so like that sort of permeable boundary to collection. I mean, I think there are so many wonderful collections that are, you know, I've talked to my wife about this who has a beautiful collection of vintage clothing that comes out, you know, every now and then for a very small audience, you know, one thing gets seen. And she doesn't necessarily want the world to know exactly what's in her closet. But at the same time, like making images of this stuff and putting it out there so that other people can see it and share it would be a beautiful thing. Is she on Pinterest with it or Instagram? No, she's not. She's really not into that stuff. We are very different creatures. And the idea that, I mean, you know, stuff like rent the runway exists. But, you know, that kind of thing could also be peer to peer in a much more Airbnb tour away. And then besides the actual like, I'm going to rent you this dress, because you would like to wear it for this occasion. There would be, you know, just people collecting things of all sorts, you know, for their wishless aesthetic joys. But as soon as they rip them off and put out their own stuff, then there would be, hopefully, some recourse. There's also an interesting TEDx talk about the sort of lack of IP overprotection in the fashion business. I will find it and post it. It's very interesting. It's about how partly because the fashion industry moves so quickly. But there's sort of lots of knocking off in fashion. Just my cloud of curiosity, what period is your wife's favorite period for fashion? Like what's the window she loves to look through? Well, both in my kind of, this is one of our commonalities, in my like collection of stuff in her aesthetic and fashion. It's sort of 50s, 60s, 70s. I should have known about that. I would have sent her my mom's wardrobe and my mom passed away. That gets into a whole nother subject for a whole nother time. Exactly. People are involved in, which is artifacts and where they go and how they're, you know, recorded and appreciated. Love that. Thanks, Michael. Let's take a breath and then we've got 10 minutes left in our normal time together. So let's just go quiet for a second and let all these things bubble in simmer. You're muted, Gil. I think he's talking locally on the beach on Mars that he apparently is standing on. Thanks, everybody. Anything anyone would like to put into the room for our last little stretch here? On the comment about the difference between Apple's Vig and YouTube's Vig, I've never understood the economics of YouTube. For me, delivering videos worldwide, as if I was faster than Comcast can generate the image on TV for a channel I just switched to, and that's their fricking business and we're paying them a whole bunch of money to do that. I've never understood how YouTube pulls it off. And I upload every week three calls at least that are 60 to 90 minutes long or free. I pay them nothing. We don't get enough traffic to monetize and I don't really want ads on our things. So there's no monetization of what we do, but we are able to get global distribution for anybody who types in OGM or some of the topics that are, and they magically for free generate a transcript for these things in addition to the Zoom transcript that I'm uploading to our chest and all that. That's magic as far as I'm concerned. I can't believe that that happens for free in our lifetimes. I remember the time when I started making some videos thinking, oh gosh, where am I going to host these so that I can make them accessible to other humans, and then that problem just dissolved. And they're monetizing at the other end, which I'm perfectly fine with, but we're not getting any benefit from it, which is okay by me because damn. Well, but you just described the benefit that we're getting is that we're getting this global access for free paid for by them making a shit ton of money off of other stuff. You and your friends, because while they may not be showing ads on your videos, they are getting people who wouldn't otherwise come to the platform to come to the platform to see your videos and then be distracted by the column over on the on the right that tempts them with music they know they like blah, blah, blah. And they're building a better digital twin of you who come to see the recording of this video. It's they're definitely monetizing this action, not just giving you something for free for the action. Anyway, just kind of just like Facebook, you know, Facebook when you post stuff on Facebook, okay, there are no ads on it, but they're, they're deriving a lot of monetary benefit from the attention you draw, you are, you are bringing them. My eyeballs for their product. I get a ton of ads on Facebook. I just meant not on your individual posts. More and more suggested content from Facebook. So I really cranked up in the last few weeks. Literally, by the way, using a blocker, using a blocker, using a blocker on your, on your web browsers. And Gil, are you seeing lots of video suggested video content? I'm seeing, I'm seeing ads, suggested ads, suggested video, and a bunch of stuff that's actually really nice. It's like, it's like, you know, music and, and cinema related photos and essays about interesting people. They somehow figured out that I want to see that and actually I kind of do, but I'm kind of alienated that they are feeding me stuff and it's like, you know, filling up my feed, not as bad as LinkedIn where a significant part of my messaging feed is now pitches. Yeah, same here. My LinkedIn feed is like, I'm going to help you get more LinkedIn followers. How probably by doing this to other people, but it's like, you know, it used to be a few and now it's, it's like 60% some days. I have to ignore the feed mostly and then just go find messages and other sorts of stuff that's happening on LinkedIn. That works. Okay. But the feed is like, I mean, in my, in my messages, and ignore that. Then I, then I miss actual messages from actual humans I need to be in communication with. Good point. I'm getting some solicitations and messages, but not a ton. Speaking of these, these platforms, I just want to circle back to the very original notion of, of the individual controlling the data flow in and out. And there's a paradigm that in the, in the collaborative technology alliance, we're talking about this a lot right now and, and how to create it. But the idea that, that if you control your, your data inflow and your data outflow, your UX of that might be what you want it to be. And that your, you know, it's really weird, Gil, that you're talking a lot to Gil today or something like that, because you have such an interesting stuff to say. But that your interest inserts itself. That's not why you went to Facebook, but that's where it comes in. And for you, the user to be able to set up, okay, this is my, you know, bold film space and stuff that comes in by a Facebook via, you know, Twitter via my subscribing to this RSS feed by my interest in this YouTube channel or this artist, that all comes in here. And when I want to look at that, that's what I look at in my own interface. And then all my stuff with regard to Pete, whether it's, you know, Pete posted something on LinkedIn or Pete sent me a text or Pete sent me an email or somebody mentioned Pete in an article. I want to look at my Pete feed. And it's not saying that you can't govern this in all kinds of different ways that you mix. But the whole, the fact that we have so little control of our attention that we have to go around to all these distracting places to see what we want to see from them. And then we get stuff that we don't want to see from them. It's kind of insane. No wonder we're, you know, info overloaded. Welcome to the 2020s. Life in modernity. Mr. Homer, I think you probably have to bounce in a couple of minutes and you might have a poem, but you might also want to comment on what's being said, your choice. I'm sorry to have had to drop out, you know, I saw somebody write a post earlier in the chat about the right to repair movement. This was the culprit. This is a third party USB-C cable. And as I like to say, everything is made of shit these days. They last for about a year, a year and a half. And then, you know, my chargers were working, my computer's working, and I had to go find another cable in the house somewhere. And so apologize for having to leave. But that's one of the things that really bugs me, because the fact that I can buy three of these, one 10 foot and two six foot in length, for $12 on Amazon, when you think about the manufacturing and the shipping and everything else that went into that, there is an enormous amount of subsidies that are hidden. Uh-oh. And Ken's computer just froze because it was hearing him grouse about technology. And it's like, nope, nope, I'm cutting you off. No. No poem for us. And that totally sucks, because he was probably going to switch to a poem next. And it's a form of meta poetry. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's sort of poetic. I'm sorry. Is there another call in a half an hour? Not on my schedule. I think there's a CTA call in a little bit. There's a CTA check-in. Okay, just make sure. Ken's back. I'm back. I'm back. How many hours a week do people spend on Zoom calls? Too many. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, you could run a poem. That was your poem, huh? I do have a poem. And I want to dedicate it to David Weinberger. It's called The Trouble with Reading, almost by William Stafford. When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone. And the meaning has to go and find an author again. But when we read, it's just print, deciphering, like frost on a window. We learn the meaning, but we lose what the frost is. And all that world pressed so desperately behind. So sometime, let's discover how the ink feels, to be clutching all that eternity onto page after page. But maybe it's better not to know. Ignorance, that wide country, rewards you just to accept it. You ponder, it holds you, and you have become a rich darkness. Want to hear it again? Yes, please. Give it a little bit of quiet first. The Trouble with Reading. When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone. And the meaning has to go and find an author again. But when we read, it's just print, deciphering, like frost on a window. We learn the meaning, but lose what the frost is. And all that world pressed so desperately behind. So sometime, let's discover how the ink feels, to be clutching all that eternity onto page after page. But maybe it's better not to know. Ignorance, that wide country, rewards you just to accept it. You ponder, it holds you, and you have become a rich darkness. Wishing you all a great week. Thank you so much, Ken. And thank you all. It was lovely. Stop. Bye-bye. Bye.