"I hope this doesn't give Trump any ideas" is what I thought when I heard that the president of South Korea had out of the blue declared martial law. You probably thought it too.

I decided it was time to tell the story of how we elected Trump even though we had a 4-year demo, including COVID and an attempted overthrow of the US government.

We knew who he was, and we said give us more of that.

We are out of our minds.

Includes a transcript.

PS: Recorded on Tuesday, published on Thursday.

PPS: It turns out the president of South Korea was actually trying to give Trump an idea.

PPPS: The people of South Korea told the president to go to hell.

Sources Go Direct is the way everything works now. Ad dollars and gotchas are not how you get known. The only way that works is patience over long periods of time so the voters feel comfortable with the candidate. The story keeps repeating.

This is how the political system works now, but the Democrats haven't adjusted to the new reality. It's past time. We need to get going before the transition is complete.

Here's a transcript.

I've been saying this for twenty years -- the Dems shut down their campaign presence on the social web on Election Day, and they come back when they need our money (to give to the huge media companies for ads) and vote, and that's it. We play no role in governing.

Meanwhile the other party, starting when Trump discovered Twitter, was on the air 24-by-7-by-365 every freaking year whether or not there's a presidential election. Their voters are led, ours are left to drift around in the wind, asked to resist with no answer to the question How? We have no leadership.

Now we may be able to get the Harris campaign back on the air on the social web. We found the team that did it. Like the rest of us they lost their way on Election Day which was only two weeks ago, believe it or not. Anyway I wanted to share the good news. There are links on my blog for today.

PS: Here's a transcript.

We start with what didn't work about the election of 2024 as the question du jour, and the answer is basically everything. The Democratic Party is a funnel which tries to funnel what the elites think we need without triggering Jake Tapper or Maggie Haberman or the publisher of the NYT. As the Bidens discovered this is a hopeless cause, so no one liked Joe, and they didn't have a feel for Kamala, and they aren't wrong they're right.

The world changed and it's time for the old Democratic party to be replaced by a completely new version, as happened already with the Repubs. We're going to be much better at what we believe in, as they are much better at what they believe in. Our goals won't change, but we'll have candidates that rise from the people, instead of being filtered and handed down from above.

We're not connecting with people because they're not connecting with the people we give them. These people do know how to run the US government, but they aren't doing it the way we want them to. Change isn't happening fast enough to keep up with the demands of a changed country. I doubt if the Dems would disagree with that. Okay we see how to fix this. I explain in this long ramble, if you're patient enough to listen that long!

The piece that inspired this post.

The net-net is that WordPress is everything that remains of what's useful in the blogging world.

It carries the banner for the format writers need to be able to communicate meaningfully, which I call textcasting.

I wanted to develop a writing tool for WordPress because it needed to start developing in that direction. There should be hundreds of ways to write with WordPress, and it should be able to flow writing through all the social networks. That's the idea. It's doable, now, more so than ever before. And then once we have that working, we can see what's next.

But the writer's web has been reduced to a small fraction of its potential.

I think this may be a time when people will be looking for something new, but there doesn't need to be a cost. You don't have to pick up your whole thing and move somewhere else, we can build on what WP already is.

It's a 37 minute podcast, that also includes a long story about Napster, how revolutionary it was, and how the music industry failed to see the value in having all the music availalbe to everyone in one place. All the applications of music that didn't happen because of their approach.

We're lucky now that it's all in one place, and the software underlying that is open source, and the APIs are clonable. And the social web is just beginning to get it together, and btw Mastodon is sitting there ready for us to play with them. You just have to make the software, work with others and connect the dots.

In 2017 I wrote that Twitter, which had just elected the US president could be bought for $12 billion. (In the podcast I got the number wrong.)

Given that the US budget is over $6 trillion, and the assets of the government are worth much more, this was a bargain.

Not only did VCs not see this, but Elon Musk did. People kept saying he overpaid for it at $44 billion, but I have a hunch he may be able to make them eat their words.

Anyway, the leadership of the Democratic Party should play close attention to what he's doing, and don't dismiss the waste of money, or whatever you see that he's doing wrong. He hires clever people who see their way around corners that you probably don't. He has better tools that you, in many ways. His server capacity is world class. And obvious brainpower and creativity.

I was right in 2017 and right now in 2024. He could make the difference that puts Trump over the topo.

The quote I cited was by Ann Richards at the 1988 DNC. "He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple."

Quick podcast explaining what worked today that blew my mind.

I surprised myself by editing a post that appeared in WordPress and Mastodon at the same time, with no loss of fidelity.

We're pretty damned close to the ideal of textcasting. How about that!

Sorta snuck up on me.

Bing!

Today's podcast has nothing to do with the 30 year milestone, except that it is totally unscripted, stream of consciousness, for 30 minutes, on two topics.

1. The idea of what a programming language is, is about to be completely overturned. The verbs and nouns will, at least at first, be pretty much exactly like we do it now, but the way you specify how they work, how they interact both in the UI and on the backend, will be done more or less as you would document the user interface. The AI system is almost ready to work at that level. With a few more iterations by human designers it should all meet up in a place where the slogging type work I've been doing for 50+ years will be obsolete. We will all become anachronisms. All of us. Get ready for it. And btw I was the biggest skeptic of the idea of a higher level more human way of programming. Scoffed at the idea. Repeatedly. Never say you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

2. The second part is about kitchen-table conversations in families, the bored rantings of our ancestors, passed on lovingly from generation to generation. Should have realized that we did not turn a racial corner with the election of Obama, we all should have gotten prepared for the backlash from children of the slavers and fascists, who were raised alongside us as victims of slavery and fascism were raised to feel persecuted. We all revert to our comfortable roles. The question is can we rise above that and forget for a moment what our ancestors taught us as gospel and take an interest in going beyond that, or do we have to do another loop around the genocide and its consequences, which this time will be far worse than they were in the 1940s because of all the new war and computer tech and the damage done by the post-war growth.

I feel good about this podcast, because it has nothing to do with the milestone. I have an idea of what it feels like to have been blogging for 30 years, but no conclusions to offer that would mean anything to me or anyone else, except perhaps a psychologist.

I've been watching a lot of sports recently and the interviews with star athletes saying the same predictable bullshit after being asked how it felt to do whatever heroic thing they just did. All of TV and news is like that, none of it is news, all of it is predictable bullshit. That is probably why they have so much trouble reporting the truth about Trump and Musk. It doesn't fit into their job description, it's not in anyone's job to tell the truth. And that's the truth.

My fifth podcast release today, the others were all on the Podcast0 feed, which I explain is the flow of two feeds, Morning Coffee Notes and Trade Secrets.

Also the idea of subscription lists you subscribe to, the next level of power in feeds, which should be imho supported broadly by all apps that implement OPML subscription lists, which is a pretty strong standard in the world of feed readers, which of course includes podcast clients.

The users are so powerful when they realize they have the power. In the case of OPML lists, they are very very functionally powerful. That power always faces off with the famous programming priesthood and now is no different. I see the opportunity to get some more power for users, if a few developers are willing to go along.

Thanks for listening! 😀

52 minute podcast.

I want to talk about interop among the products that do more or less what Twitter does, including Twitter.

I think we're doing a replay of the way hypertext developed in the 80s, and then took off when TBL produced a much simpler product with one-way links instead of two. It made developing a website a matter of writing a text file and uploading it to a server. Almost no configuration.

Same kind of experience with Napster, in a minute you had access to all the music of the world. It was super easy to use, that was key to it being a breakthrough. Over and over, it's simplicity that has made new technology take off. That a developer without much training but a big idea can put something together in an afternoon or a weekend.

We need that kind of interface for the same kind of explosion to happen between the twitter-like products.

Also I am using a recorder app from Google that automatically produces a transcript, so here it is.

27-minute podcast.