Eight Sleep adds ‘outage mode’ to smart beds after AWS problems left them frozen Eight Sleep became No Sleep

Modern problems. www.theverge.com/news/804289/...

No Kings had more than 3.5% of the Dukes County population today. Biggest one yet here.

So, what are you doing to hedge the bet? battellemedia.com/archives/202...

No, everything is fine, FINE.

John Battelle's Search Blog Tech And Society’s Faustian Bargain Capture. I led my predictions for 2025 with the dog-bites-man observation that technology has eclipsed finance as the most powerful industry in the world. More than six months into the year, I’d li…

battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog CloudFlare To The AI Industry: Pay Up! There are precious few companies in the tech world that are willing to stick their necks out and “do the right thing,” and even fewer who both operate at Internet scale and enjoy Wall S…

On what Cloudflare announced today: Tollbooths for AI crawlers: battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly” Fourth in a series. Previous installments:  The Standard, Part 1  Get Wired – The Launch One Fateful Phone Call: How I Ended Up At Wired  Wednesday, July 9th, 1997. I left Wired for the secon…

A continuation battellemedia.com/archives/202...

Shout out to @thebenedictevans.bsky.social for this gem:

John Battelle's Search Blog AI Is Breaking The Internet. Can Bill Gross Fix It? 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 pu…

History rhymes battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog The Standard, Part 1 – The End and The Beginning Note: Third in a series. First post, second post. The Oak Grove cemetery in Tisbury, Massachusetts encompasses roughly ten acres of rolling woodlands and narrow dirt roads. Its 1,800 or so headston…

On the beginning, and the end, of The Industry Standard (1997-2001). battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog Get Wired: The Launch (1992-93) (continuation of a previous post) If you ever have a hit on your hands, my advice is to take notes. Living in the whirlwind of blinding success is a little like experiencing your own wedding &#8211…

A continuation... battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog One Fateful Phone Call: How I Ended Up At Wired Living at the cutting edge of technology in the early ’90s required either a magical token forged of copper and silver, or the capacity to memorize a ridiculously long string of numbers. Eith…

A story about how the band got together to make Wired battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog The Trouble With Bees 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, “Comm…

Have we given up on government and public good? battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog Headless Marketing Yesterday I wrote a piece about the AI-driven “white collar recession,” which felt to me like a bunch of bullshit marketing. This morning as I perused my morning paper I came across thi…

Chaser
battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog A “White Collar Recession”? It Won’t Be AI’s Fault. BULLSHIT! That’s what I found myself yelling at a recent board meeting, unimpeded by my usual filters of propriety or self-restraint. But I couldn’t help myself. The board was debating …

Shot and chaser - On shitty AI marketing and "the white collar recession"
Shot: battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog Is AI the “Big Bang” or Merely a “Turning Point”? Much Depends on the Answer According to scholar Carlota Perez, one of tech’s most revered theorists, society regularly goes through technology-driven “revolutions.” These structural cycles can take fifty ye…

AI may be the struck match, but the Internet is the fire itself. And we’d be wise to not outsource the power of that fire to a cadre of evangelists bent on convincing us that they alone can save us from the flames.
battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog How Google Can Win the Future [Second in a series, first post here] This past week, Wall Street caught up with the rest of us and realized that Google has lost its monopoly grip on search. The trigger wasn’t Google losing…

Imagine what would change in the world if Google gave the world the keys to its search engine. battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog Free the Database of Intentions: Could Google Thrive If It Gives Away Its Data? Over the past 25 or so years, I’ve argued that Google has built a massive database of intentions – the aggregate result of every search ever entered, every page of results ever tendered…

Google should embrace the future, not fight with it.
battellemedia.com/archives/202...

Thinking about devastating cuts to NSF: US gov-funded science has been the engine upon which most of the tech wealth was generated. But the oligarchs (currently hoarding much of that $) think it’s their own brilliance & not the accident of standing close to the scientific engine that made them rich.

John Battelle's Search Blog Wait, What’s This DOC Thing You’re Doing?! An old friend asked me what I was up to the other day, and despite two years having passed since I started getting that question (here’s my first post on the subject), I realized I’ve not made much…

An update for pals and colleagues battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog How On Earth Will OpenAI Hit $129 Billion in Four Years?! I’ve been traveling for the past week, and ignoring the news as best as one can while on the road. But when The Information posted this doozy of a story – OpenAI Forecasts Revenue Toppi…

IDK. DYK? battellemedia.com/archives/202...

The US Has Spent Over $500,000 on Hyper-Targeted YouTube Ads to Discourage Irregular Migration A WIRED investigation reveals that the US Department of Homeland Security has deployed at least 30 YouTube ads since April 1 to threaten irregular migrants with deportation and a ban on reentry.

Nice to see Google has already gotten a return on its investment in our sitting President. Wonder if they're also buying memecoins. www.wired.com/story/dhs-yo...

History is laughing at us.

John Battelle's Search Blog Who Owns Your AI Identity? (Hint: Not You) As generative AI reaches a fever pitch of investment, product releases, and hype, most of us have ignored a profound flaw as we march relentlessly toward The Next Big Thing. Our most dominant AI pr…

Not really sure I want my identity, AI or otherwise, owned by a tech company. battellemedia.com/archives/202...

John Battelle's Search Blog Should AI Write Our Fiction? I’m going to try to write something difficult. I don’t know if I’m going to pull it off, but that’s kind of the point. This is how writers improve: We tackle something we&#8…

A response to an essay about AI fiction that got under my skin. battellemedia.com/archives/202...

WTAF

Announcing the Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)- Google Developers Blog Explore A2A, Google's new open protocol empowering developers to build interoperable AI solutions.

A2A: agent to agent interoperability protocol, new from Google

it seems that MCP provides the tool usage, where A2A provides the inter-agent connectivity & discovery

developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new...

One hopes for a silver lining but gets a lead coffin

I just realized that I really don't give a fuck about what's happening on the internet at any given time. Looking back a day or a week or a month, then I can figure out what matters.

Tech C.E.O.s Spent Millions Courting Trump. It Has Yet to Pay Off. With inauguration donations and Mar-a-Lago visits, leaders of the biggest tech companies sought favor with the president in an attempt to steer regulation and tariffs, to little avail.

Yeah no shit NYT. Tech C.E.O.s Spent Millions Courting Trump. It Has Yet to Pay Off. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/t...