John Battelle's Search Blog Thoughts on the intersection of tech, business, and society.

Wrestling With The Gray Lady

The other day my wife and I heard a report on our local public radio station that mentioned the Biden Administration’s American Climate Corps (ACC) initiative, a new program seeking to recruit 20,000 young people into jobs on the front line of the climate crisis. Modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-Era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the program is a signature element of Biden’s response to what anyone with a pulse knows is the most pressing issue of our day: we’re destroying the planet through misguided economic incentives.

But despite the fact that the ACC was launched with much fanfare last Fall, my wife and I had never heard of it. We have three young adult children whose future feels in doubt because of climate change, and they’d never heard of it either – not a good sign for a program that hopes to recruit tens of thousands of people just like them. All five of us feel like we’re reasonably well informed. I mean, we read The New York Times, don’t we?

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Will GenAI Kill The Web?

The Atlantic is out with a delicious piece of doomerism: It’s The End of the Web As We Know It. Were it not for the authors, Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier, I’d have passed right on by, because well-respected publications have been proclaiming the death of the Web for more than a decade. By and large they’ve been proven directionally right, but it’s taking a lot longer than most predicted. Much like the Earth’s coral reefs, the Web has been dying off in waves. In their piece, Donath and Schneier argue that generative AI augurs the Web’s final stage of life. The coup de GPT, if you will.

Donath and Schneier are more thoughtful than your average trend-spotting feature writers. Donath, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, is the kind of digital polymath I’ve admired for years, but who’s been relatively quiet of late. No longer. And Schneier, a security expert, writes smart stuff about nearly everything I care about as it relates to the Internet. It’s fair to say I’ll read just about anything he writes.

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Mine, Mine, All Mine

The original MusicPlasma interface. Author’s musical preferences not included…

No Longer Mine

When I write, I like to listen to music. Most of my first book was written to a series of CDs I purchased from Amazon and ripped to my Mac – early turn of the century electronica, for the most part – Prodigy, Moby, Fat Boy Slim and the like. But as I write these words, I’m listening to an unfamiliar playlist on Spotify called “Brain Food” – and while the general vibe is close to what I want, something is missing.

This got me thinking about my music collection – or, more accurately, the fact that I no longer have a music collection. I once considered myself pretty connected to a certain part of the scene – I’d buy 10 or 15 albums a month, and I’d spend hours each day consuming and considering new music, usually while working or writing. Digital technologies were actually pretty useful in this pursuit – when Spotify launched in 2008, I used it to curate playlists of the music I had purchased – it’s hard to believe, but back then, you could organize Spotify around your collection, tracks that lived on your computer, tracks that, for all intents and purposes, you owned. Spotify was like having a magic digital assistant that made my ownership that much more powerful.

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Do We Even Have The Spine To Sacrifice, Just A Little Bit?

Old people are always complaining about how things were harder when they were young. Walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways, that whole thing. So forgive me as I embark on what initially might feel like that old man trope, but stay with me. I’m trying to make a larger point, and I have to start with a few stories of how things were in the Before Times.

So. Back when I was a kid, Big Things That Were Not Entirely In Our Control would happen. Presidents and Governors would get on the (usually black-and-white) TV, imploring us – all of us, mind you, every single citizen of these United States – to do something that would help alleviate the situation. The actions we were asked to take weren’t particularly terrifying – it’s not like we were getting called up to war (though the last-ever draft, for Vietnam, was still fresh in everyone’s mind.)

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No. TV Advertising Is Not Going to Become “Performance Driven”

Remember the “year of mobile”? That was the five-year period from roughly 2007 to 2012, when industry pundits annually declared that everything was about to change because of the smart phone. Mobile eventually did come to dominate the marketing landscape, but the shift took far longer than anyone expected.

I’m starting to think we’re in a similar cycle with streaming – only the transition from cable to digital television has taken far longer, and has been far, far messier. I recall editing the February, 1994 cover story for Wired, in which we asked – thirty years ago! – if advertising as we knew it was finally dead. We opened that piece with a futuristic scenario in which advertising had changed completely:

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Larry Lessig – Why Can’t We Regulate the Internet Like We Regulate Real Space?

I’ve known Larry Lessig for more than 25 years, and throughout that time, I’ve looked to him for wisdom – and a bit of pique – when it comes to understanding the complex interplay of law, technology, and the future of the Internet. Lessig is currently the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. He also taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He is the author of more than half a dozen books, most of which have deeply impacted my own thinking and writing.

As part of an ongoing speaker series “The Internet We Deserve,” a collaboration with Northeastern’s Burnes Center For Social Change, I had a chance to sit down with Lessig and conduct a wide-ranging discussion covering his views on the impact of money in government’s role as a regulator of last resort. Lessig is particularly concerned about today’s AI-driven information environment, which he says has polluted public discourse and threatens our ability to conduct democratic processes like elections. Below is a transcript of our conversation, which, caveat emptor, is an edited version of AI-assisted output. The video can be found here, and embedded at the bottom of this article.

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Vint Cerf: Maybe We Need an Internet Driver’s License

Vint Cerf is one of the most recognizable figures in the pantheon of Internet stardom – and as he enters his ninth decade of a remarkable life, one of its most accomplished. I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Cerf last month as part of the “Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI” lecture series hosted by the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. The conversation also served as the kick-off to my own Burnes Center lecture series, “The Internet We Deserve” where I’ll talk with notable business, policy, technology and academic leaders central to the creation of the Internet as we know it today (last week I spoke with Larry Lessig).

Universally recognized as one of “the fathers of the Internet,” Cerf’s many awards include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Cerf received his PhD from UCLA, where he worked in the famous lab that built the first nodes of what later became known as the Internet. He has worked at IBM, DARPA, MCI, JPL, and is now Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. Cerf has chaired, formed, and participated in countless working groups, governing bodies, and scientific, technological, and academic organizations.

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Google’s On The Field Now. Is It Being Too Cautious?

As hype escalated around the debut of ChatGPT more than a year ago, I predicted that OpenAI and Microsoft would rapidly develop consumer subscription service models for their nascent businesses. Later that year I wrote a piece speculating that Google would inevitably follow suit. If Google was smart, and careful, it had a chance to become “the world’s largest subscription service.” From that piece:

Google can’t afford to fall behind as its closest competitors throw massive resources at AI-driven products and services. But beyond keeping up, Google finds itself in an even higher-stakes transition: Its core business, search, may be shifting into an entirely new consumer model that threatens the very foundation of the company’s cash flow spigot: Advertising.

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The Messenger Deserved Its Demise. Its Staff? Not So Much

I predicted the death of Jimmy Finkelstein’s The Messenger as soon as I read about its impending launch back in March of last year. At the time I had just soft-landed The Recount and was licking three decades of wounds related to launching, running, selling and shuttering digital media startups. And lo! Here was a guy claiming he was going to solve all of digital media’s woes with…what exactly? “Polyperspectivity”?! (No, really, that’s what they called their approach to news coverage.) And a business model ripped from the pages of Business Insider, circa 2012? I was already shaking my head, but then I read this:

“Richard Beckman, a former president of The Hill and Condé Nast who will be The Messenger’s president, said in an interview that the company planned to generate more than $100 million in revenue next year, primarily through advertising and events, with profitability expected that year.”

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The Question Google Won’t Answer

Reading Ben Thompson’s coverage of Google’s earnings call this week, one thing jumps out, and simply can’t be ignored: Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked a simple question, and, as Thompson points out, Pichai dodged it completely. A Merril analyst asked this question:

“Just wondering if you see any changes in query volumes, positive or negative, since you’ve seen the year evolve and more Search innovative experiences.”

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