More than a decade ago I was working on a book about the impact of data on society. I was obsessed with a maddening and seemingly impossible idea: What if we could track every single piece of data that mattered in the world, and from that data, gain unimaginable insights that would shake us into … Continue reading "The Planet Is Warming, But Our Speech Has Chilled"| John Battelle's Search Blog
I’ve written a lot about AI lately, and I’ll admit, most of it is critical. Plenty of you have asked me why I’m so down on the sector. The crux of it is this: I think we’re …| John Battelle's Search Blog
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 like to emend my conclusion. Tech hasn’t eclipsed finance. It has captured it. Finance has always leveraged technology – at Wired in the … Continue reading "Tech And Society’s Faustian Bargain"| John Battelle's Search Blog
Today brought so many stories worth “notes and observations” that I thought I’d try something new – a flash newsletter of sorts, with commentary on stories that pushed my eyebrows up a bit more than usual. Each of these items is worth a full-fledged long-form piece, but it’s Friday, so let’s be brief: Do You … Continue reading "If You Trust AI, You’re Asleep. (At Least You’re Not “Woke”)"| John Battelle's Search Blog
(This piece is cross-posted from Signal360, where it first appeared) “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” -Ernest Hemingwa…| John Battelle's Search Blog
Every so often I have the chance to catch up with Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill, the founders of NewsGuard. I was an advisor to their company for several years, and we keep in touch, as we share something of an obsession around the decline of journalism and the related erosion of fact-based information … Continue reading "Nearly 30 % of All Bullsh*t Online Is Health Related"| John Battelle's Search Blog
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 Street’s unabashed fandom. In fact, I can only think of one: Cloudflare. And today, the $65 billion public company* announced a … Continue reading "CloudFlare To The AI Industry: Pay Up!"| John Battelle's Search Blog
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…| John Battelle's Search Blog
Bill Gross has been here before. Back when the Internet was young, when the dot-com wave broke across the monied shoals of Wall Street opportunism, Gross built a world-changing company, took it public, then sold it for billions. Google was a fledgling startup with no discernible business model when Gross pioneered a revolutionary approach to … Continue reading "AI Is Breaking The Internet. Can Bill Gross Fix It?"| John Battelle's Search Blog
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 headstones date back two centuries, making Oak Grove a relative newcomer as New England graveyards go. I’ve been visiting this sacred, spectral spot on … Continue reading "The Standard, Part 1 – The End and The Beginning"| John Battelle's Search Blog
(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 –…| John Battelle's Search Blog
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…| John Battelle's Search Blog
Of all the structural problems “Web 2” has brought into the world – and there are too many to list – one of the most vexing is what I call the “meta-services” pr…| John Battelle's Search Blog
This is an edited version of a series of talks I first gave in New York over the past week, outlining my work at Columbia. Many thanks to Reinvent, Pete Leyden, Cap Gemini, Columbia University, Cos…| John Battelle's Search Blog
God, “innovation.” First banalized by undereducated entrepreneurs in the oughts, then ground to pablum by corporate grammarians over the past decade, “innovation” – at…| John Battelle's Search Blog
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 electron…| John Battelle's Search Blog
