Category Archives: Online Trends

Gemini vs. ChatGPT: Will Either Become Our New Habit?

Two tall skyscrapers with digital data patterns glowing on their surfaces at dusk in a cityscape

Back 20 years ago when I spoke about search, I used to talk a lot about the “Google Habit.”  In the remarkably short time from its debut to the early 2000s, Google had become our defacto search choice. In fact, it was so dominant, we didn’t even consider its competitors. We didn’t think at all…we just Googled. That is how a habit works. We do things without thinking about them.

Fast forward 20 years. Google still dominates the information retrieval space. When we talk about worldwide search, Google delivers the results on 9 out of every 10 searches launched. It’s monolithic presence in the online landscape hasn’t really changed. But the way we navigate that landscape is beginning to. For the first time in a long time, Google has a real competitor when it comes to the way we look for our answers.

Another favorite topic of mine, following hard on the heels of the “Googe Habit,” was talking about the “usefulness of search.” I argued that while Google did a good job of retrieving information, it feel well short of the goal of making that information immediately useful to us. Today, with agentic A.I., the tantalizing promise of usefulness has finally arrived. The question is, what tools will we use to mine that usefulness?

The battle seems to be between Google’s Gemini, deeply embedded in the entire Google ecosystem, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a standalone app. Anthropic’s Claude is currently focused on the enterprise AI market.

Back two decades ago, I envisioned search gradually disappearing “under the hood” of various apps that made our lives easier. The act of actually retrieving information would be one step removed from us. What we would interact with would be a distillation of that information, formed into something we could use to do the things we wanted to do. What I didn’t anticipate was the emergence of the Large Language Model that currently powers ChatGPT and other AI models.

But as it currently stands, the act of retrieving information that we can use and the act of processing huge reams of text to predict useful responses are quickly converging. For an ever-increasing number of queries (currently about 50%) Google’s Gemini AI answers are now predominately displayed in the prime real estate of the search results page, straddling the very top of the “Golden Triangle.”  And ChatGPT is increasingly asked to retrieve specific information as users interact with its chatbot. Both Google and OpenAI realize that the future lies in a hybrid of the two.

The battle now is for either Google or OpenAI to dominate the various user interfaces in our personal technologies. And in this regard, it will be hard to beat Google. This January, Google and Apple inked a deal that would make Gemini the foundational AI platform for a future version of Siri. It’s already embedded in all Android devices. OpenAI’s early mover advantage over Google in terms of consumer AI usage is rapidly disappearing, with the two currently running almost neck and neck (36.6% for ChatGPT vs 27.4% for Gemini, according to a recent Emarketer forecast).

Brian X. Chen, lead consumer technology writer for the New York Times, indicated in a recent article that Emarketer’s numbers could be understating the competitiveness of OpenAI’s rival.  Google said at their recent Google I/O conference that in one year, the number of people using the Gemini chatbot more than doubled to 900 million. That puts it in a dead heat with ChatGPT and, if current growth rates continue, moving well past it in the next year.

Chen points out another massive advantage for Google’s Gemini over OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While OpenAI’s numbers are not public, they likely lost between $8 and $9 billion last year. Even the most optimistic forecasts don’t put OpenAI in a profitable position til 2029.

Google, thanks to its dominance in the online ad space, made a profit of $112 billion in 2025 on revenue of $386 billion. It will be relatively easy for Google to fold Gemini into that vast advertising supported ecosystem, moving to a cash positive position almost immediately. Because of the enormous development costs of AI, it’s hard to argue with the logic that player with the deepest pockets will be the ultimate winner.

Asking Advice for a Friend

Diverse group of people sitting on wooden chairs in a circle in a room with wooden floors

I have a question for you, “Do you ask people for advice as often as you used to?”

It’s an important question, because the ability to exchange information is one of the most human of capabilities. It was that, probably more than any other factor, that sparked “The Great Leap” 50,000 years ago. Suddenly humans became more than slightly advanced primates and we started creating art, building advanced tools, forging long distance trade alliances and practicing religion. It was this cognitive revolution that started us on the path that led to where we are today.

Most anthropologists agree that while there could have been many factors that lead to the “Great Leap”, the most likely candidate was our ability – through the creation of symbolic language – to communicate abstract ideas and transfer complex skills. All the things that make us human came from this new ability to talk to each other: we could manage living in large groups, we could transfer knowledge from one person to the other, and – more importantly – we could pass information and skills from one generation to the next, ensuring our knowledge didn’t die with us.

So, yes, it’s important to ask if we still ask other people for advice. Because if we don’t, are we losing the ability to be human?

Now, I have a confession to make. All the stuff I just told you about the Great Leap came from A.I. I had the tiniest kernel of an idea and rather than share it with someone else, I typed the question into ChatGPT. I did reword its answer in my own words, but the above 3 paragraphs aren’t my ideas, nor do they come from any other human that I talked to. They were distilled from an algorithm. And here we have two intrinsically human strategies battling each other: the need to communicate, and the instinct to forage efficiently.

We humans are born communicators, but we are also natural foragers. We have an internal effort vs reward calculator that drives us down the most efficient path to get what we’re looking for. One of the dusty old UX concepts I used to drag around with me on the speaking circuit was Pirolli and Card’s Information Foraging Theory, which was formulated in 1999 at Xerox’s PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center, where I happened to have a wonderful visit with Peter Pirolli).

The theory may be long-in-the-tooth, but it’s still the single most elegant theory I’ve ever found to explain human behavior online. Simply put, we will expend the least amount of energy required to gain the information we’re looking for. That basic human tendency takes on new implications in our world of A.I.

If we’re looking for information, we will take the shortest path that will get us there. If the shortest path is asking ChatGPT, or, increasingly, using Gemini’s AI Mode in Google, then that’s what we’ll do.

So, I was just being human when I asked AI about the Great Leap. It took me 5 seconds to structure my query and 2 seconds later, I had my answer, impeccably reasoned and laid out in structured language. It did – in 7 seconds – what it would have taken at least a few hours to do the old way, by searching through words written by another human.

And heaven forbid asking another living, breathing human. That would have taken days, at least.

But if we stop asking each other for advice or information, we also have to ask ourselves, “what are we giving up?”  In our previous quest for information, we had to exercise two critical regions of our brain, our language centers (commonly called Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area), used to communicate with other humans, and the prefrontal cortex, where we synthesize information into a viable framework for action. If we were looking for the two areas of the brain that make us distinctly human, these would be two excellent candidates.

If we start using A.I. not just to gather information, but also to structure it into pre-made “thoughts”, we will inevitably use these areas of our brain less. And one of the features of our brain is that it automatically housecleans the least used parts of itself. It’s called synaptic pruning. Through it, the brain continually rewires itself to be best adapted to the tasks it does all the time.

If we stop doing the things that are instinctively human, like sharing knowledge, will our brain start trimming the very parts that make us human?

I’m asking for a friend.

Tucker Carlson, the Transactionalist Journalist

Man wearing a red 'Make America Great Again' cap in a library setting

Tucker Carlson is the proverbial worm in the midst of a turn. He – apparently – has now decided the approval for the Donald Trump he has been paying off-and-on support to for the past 10 years is – off again. A few weeks ago, he said this about his past lip service to Trump and the MAGA Movement, “It’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”

But is he? Or is this just another pivot from a journalist that has more switchbacks in his past than an Olympic slalom skier?

There are those that are applauding Carlson for what seems to be an ethical epiphany, reasoning that it’s never too late to see the light and are quick to forgive him his past sins.

I say, “Not so fast.”

Tucker Carlson is a transactional journalist. Whatever comes out of his mouth is what he feels will immediately do him the most good. It’s not that he didn’t fully recognize Trump for what he was. He has, multiple times in the past. And he has gone on the record saying so. But then he would willingly swallow those reservations to be a MAGA team player and publicly support a figure about whom he privately said in a text, “I hate him passionately.”

This most recent turn likely comes from being released from the far-right editorial restraints of Fox News and now seeking an audience through his own podcast. This recent gnashing of teeth and clutching of pearls can simply be chalked up to just another pivot in search of an audience.

And, perhaps, this is one pivot too far. David A. Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said this about Carlson and other prominent right-wing mouthpieces who have recently looked at Trump askance, “These pundits deserve no amnesty. Their second thoughts are wise, but to have erred so badly, when so many other commentators and journalists saw the truth, disqualifies them from being taken seriously on politics again.”

The casualty from all this transactionalism is trust. And it is just that – trust – that has been hardwired into us as the fundamental yardstick by which we judge all our own transactions. Yes, the real world is a place of pragmatic transactions, but when you strip trust and fairness from those transactions, you lose the very bearings you need to move from transaction to transaction with any sense of direction.

In Game Theory, there is a thought experiment called the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is transactionalism boiled down to its essence. Together with your partner, you can choose to either cooperate for mutual benefit or betray them for individual gain. If you only play one round of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and you go first, the best option is to betray your partner. But if you play multiple rounds, the winning strategy is something called “Tit for Tat.”

Although the name doesn’t imply it, this is a strategy that embeds trust and co-operation. You start from that foundation and only move to retaliate if you’re betrayed by your partner. The “Tit for Tat” strategy self-corrects over time, consistently moving you back to your base of trust.

It’s this long-term ethical direction that is sacrificed by transactionalists like Tucker Carlson. It’s unfortunate that this ethical rot has crept into journalism, but a far more worrying concern is the fact that the U.S. – and much of the rest of the world – has now embraced transactionalism stripped of trust as their default position. This is true of the current administration, the billionaires who have eschewed their own personal ethics to support it, and every level of government, business and society propping up this transactional regime.

Increasingly in today’s world, there is no trust. There are only decisions made solely to secure immediate gains and exchanges built to amass profit and power. It is transactionalism run amok. And – as any good Game Theorist will tell you – the only possible outcome from that is mass betrayal.

No One Was Laughing this April Fool’s Day

Men in fedoras at typewriters in a vintage newsroom with fish in unusual places.

Last Wednesday was April Fool’s Day. But I hardly saw any April Fool’s pranks. When I realized that, I thought to myself, “This is a sign of the times.”

April Fool’s probably started in 1582, when much of Europe switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which moved New Year’s from April 1st to January 1st. Those that still clung to the old calendar were called April Fools.

An alternative theory comes from Spring festivals that celebrated jokes, chaos and role reversals, like the Roman Hilaria or the medieval European “Feast of Fools.”

But April Fool’s really hit its peak when Mass Media joined in the fun. It was the BBC in Britain that got the ball rolling in 1957, with their famous “Spaghetti Tree Harvest” news documentary. Thousands jammed the BBC switchboards asking how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. The April Fool’s News Story became a BBC tradition.

Other media outlets followed in the BBC’s footsteps. In 1977, that stiff-lipped stalwart of British journalism, The Guardian, published a travel supplement for “San Serriffe” – a tropical nation made up of two main islands, Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. The leader, General Pica, had a palace in the capital city of Bodoni. Anyone with some graphic design experience would soon realize the entire 7-page special supplement was full of typography puns, but it seems the British weren’t exactly that “type” – U.K. travel agencies received several calls wanting to book trips there.

Brands thought elaborate pranks would show how hip and relevant they were and jumped on the April Fool’s bandwagon in the 1980’s and 90’s. Taco Bell “bought” the Liberty Bell in 1996 and renamed it the Taco Liberty Bell. In 1998, Burger King introduced the Left-Handed Whopper. Even Big Tech joined the party with that wacky sense of humor computer engineers are known for. In 2013 Google introduced Google Nose, a search engine of smells. It included “Wet Dog” and had a Street Sense feature.

Ironically, Google also introduced Gmail on April 1st, in 2004, blurring the line between prank and product launch. No one believed you could get a free email account with 1 GB of storage. Competitors offered 2 to 4 megabytes.

Let’s fast forward to April 1, 2026. On that day – last Wednesday – crickets. There was no ha-ha to be found. And I thought, “What a sad state the world is in when we can’t even poke fun at ourselves.”

Maybe it’s because “Fake News” is now a real thing, 365 days a year, not just on April First.

Also, if you’re going to play a prank now, it’s probably going to be on social media. And how the hell can you compete with the wall-to-wall misinformation madness that fills everyone’s feed, every single day of the year.

But then I realized that attitudes towards April Fools have followed an arc directly related to how we get our information through media.

From the 1950s to the 90s, information was scarce and mass media outlets were the gate keepers. Trust was implied in the relationship, and it was that trust that was slyly mocked at on April the First. The April Fool’s prank hearkened back to the Medieval tradition of role reversal on Feast of Fools Day, when traditional hierarchies were inverted. This meant that – for one day – even the sober British media could play the fools. It was all done in a “wink wink” kind of way.

Then, in the late 90s and early 2000s, information became abundant. Those playing a prank expected to be fact checked. It was a way to drive viral traffic to online sources of information, which is why brands started to jump aboard with their own April Fool’s Pranks.

But now, in the age of misinformation and A.I. slop, every day is April Fool’s Day. Information (and misinformation) isn’t just abundant, it’s a pollutant. It’s everywhere and it’s often intentionally toxic. The very thing we used to smile about is a force that’s shattering our society.

It’s hard to laugh at that.

Meta’s Social Media Battle Plan

My fellow Media Insider Maarten Albarda called it the “The Big Tobacco Moment for Social Media” in his post last week. Then, just yesterday, Steve Rosenbaum added that the K.G.M v. Meta Platforms case “signals a shift that cuts directly through the core defense platforms have relied on for decades.”

It was a seismic decision, and I’m pretty sure the various conference rooms of 1 Meta Way, Menlo Park, California have the doors closed as a bunch of sweaty lawyers and Meta staff are rolling out the whiteboards (or the Meta Quest virtual reality equivalent) and rolling up their sleeves to assess the potential damage and draw up a battle plan. Let’s take a moment to speculate about what they may be talking about.

In at least one of those conference rooms, Meta’s legal team is assessing one line of defence, which I’ll call Project “Hail Mary,” tapping into the current pop culture Zeitgeist. This involves an appeal to the $6 million decision. It’s not this case that’s worrying them. It’s the thousands waiting in the queue for the legal precedent to be set. The Meta Legal Team will be spending much of their foreseeable future in a courtroom. Even they know that chances for a successful appeal are slim. 

The second line of defence is to quantify the impact of this on Meta’s bottom line if the appeal is not successful. So let’s unpack that, because it deals with the elephant in the room, touched on in both Steve and Maarten’s post: Is this the beginning of a slippery slope that will lead to the dismantling of algorithmic ad targeting and the demise of the endless scroll for everyone, or just legal minors? 

If we follow the lead of Australia, the first country to implement a ban on social media, it will just be minors – those under 16. The legislation was passed late last year and the ban officially took place on December 10, 2025. 

There are several countries around the world looking at implementing a similar ban, including Canada. Most are watching to see how Australia implements and polices its ban, as there are several thorny issues at play here. The countries seriously looking at it tend to share a similar legislative sentiment with Australia when it comes to consumer rights and privacy concerns. 

The U.S., under the current administration, is the least likely to implement federal restrictions on social media. Still, that is not keeping several states from introducing their own legislation. What the K.M.G. v. Meta decision does do is move the debate from the arena of federally controlled media to that of state controlled online safety, privacy and mental health concerns. All will be watching the pending suits, which will likely fill up dockets in U.S. courts for the next few years at least. 

Given the international aspect of this, it’s instructive to look at how Meta’s revenues breakdown by region. 

The biggest share, 39%, is the U.S. and Canada, but 94% of that comes from the U.S. We’re a Meta rounding error up here.

The Asia-Pacific is the second biggest regional market – with 26.8% of global revenues. While the user numbers are huge, the revenue per user is much smaller than in North America. Several countries in this market are considering some type of age-based restriction on social media usage – largely driven by the academic concerns of parents and educators in China, Japan and Korea.

Next is Europe, with 23.2% of Meta’s revenue pie. If there is any jurisdiction likely to follow Australia’s lead, it’s the E.U., who have consistently shown leadership in implementing privacy protection legislation.

Finally, there is the rest of the world, which collectively accounts for about 11% of Meta revenues. When you consider this includes all of Africa, all South America and whatever else is left, you can appreciate that attitudes towards legislation will be all over the map, both literally and figuratively.

Still, let’s say that a significant chunk of Meta’s revenue – say about 30 to 40% – comes from regions likely to pass legislation similar to Australia’s. Still, that undoubtedly will be only directed at minors younger than 16, which today makes up less than 10% of Meta’s user base (between Instagram and Facebook). All those young people have gone to TikTok (where it makes up 25% of their user base). 

So, what Meta’s financial planners are probably talking about is the fact that – even in a worst legal case scenario – we’re talking about 3 to 4% of their total user base that may be legislatively restricted in some form or another. If you’re in triage mode, that’s not severe enough to consider major surgery or amputation. Probably a band-aid will do the trick. 

The Most Canadian of Social Networks

It may be the most polite social network in the world. It’s Hey.Cafe – a Facebook alternative built by Canadians for Canadians.

I first heard about Hey.Cafe through a reel on Facebook (oh, the irony) from Tod Maffin, a former CBC radio host, author and podcaster. Prompted by the not so veiled threats coming from south of the border, Tod’s been on a “buy Canadian” campaign for several months now and that has recently extended to Canadian alternatives for the big social media platforms. It was Tod that suggested to every Canadian listening (currently about 10,000,000 a week, according to Tod’s website) that we check out Hey.Cafe.

So, I did. It turned out that Anthony Lee, the creator of Hey.Cafe, lives about an hour down the highway from me, here in the heart of beautiful British Columbia. So I reached out and we had a chat – a nice, polite Canadian chat. Because that’s how we do things up here.

The first thing I learned, which was a surprise, is that Hey.Cafe is not new. In fact, it’s been around since 2001. That means there was a version of Hey.Cafe before there was ever a Facebook (which started in 2004). In addition to running a tech support company out of Penticton, BC, Anthony has been developing alternatives to the major social media platforms for the better part of 3 decades now, “Whenever I thought, ‘Oh, I think I have an idea,’ I’d make some changes, that kind of stuff. But it definitely wasn’t a sit down and work on it all day thing, unless I had some time free that I was just like, ‘Yeah, I’ll spend this week working on stuff.’”

Then I asked the obvious question, “Why now? Why is Hey.Cafe suddenly gaining attention?”

There is the “buy Canadian” thing, of course. But Anthony said it’s more than just Canadians being fed up with an American president and his bluster. We’re also fed up with social media founders that have their noses firmly pressed up against said President’s posterior simply because it’s good for business.

And let’s not even get into the simmering cesspool every major social media platform has become, driven by an ad-obsessed business model that monetizes eyeballs at the expense of ethics. Lee concurred, “It’s all about algorithm for them. They don’t care if it’s someone you follow or not. If, if it looks like it’s gonna make some attention, whether it be good or bad, they’re gonna push it in the feed.”

So, are Canadian’s kicking Hey.Cafes tires like a rink-side Zamboni? Yes, finally. Thanks to the plug from Tod Maffin, users shot up from about 5,000 to over 40,000 in two weeks. And it’s still growing. Because it’s still a side of the desk project, Anthony had to cap new accounts at 250 an hour.

Now, those numbers are infinitesimal compared to any of the major platforms, but they do signal a willingness by Canadians to try something not tied to business practices we don’t agree with. At the same time, it does bring up the elephant in the room for anyone going up against Facebook or any of the big platforms – the curse of Metcalfe’s Law. Metcalfe’s Law – named after Ethernet pioneer Robert Metcalfe – says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. Having a telephone isn’t much use if no one else has one. For networks, bigger = better. And Facebook is currently 75,000 times bigger than Hey.Cafe.

Given that, does Hey.Cafe stand a chance? I hope so. I supported it with a one-year subscription because I would love to see Anthony Lee’s side project survive and – hopefully – succeed. I did go on and post a few things. I even started a new “café” – Hey.Cafe’s version of a Facebook Group. So far, nothing much has happened there, but we’ll politely wait and see. Again, that’s how we do things up here.

What I did find, however, is a community that seems genuinely, politely happy to be there. And not all of them are Canadian. This was a post from a nurse newly arrived from the U.S.: “Newly landed nurse practitioner from Oregon via Boston (long story). Love the concept of no ads and AI. Now to find some other communities, Bernese Mountain Dogs and skiing!”

I did ask Anthony, given the audience MediaPost (where this post also runs) reaches, if there’s any message he’d like to pass on. For media buyers especially, he offered this, “Whether it be HeyCafe, Bluesky, Mastodon, (consider) using more services that aren’t the big three players. Use more stuff that puts you in the spotlight of communities that are all over the place.”

While Anthony would love for Hey.Cafe to be economically sustainable, maybe the take-away here is not so much about financial success. Maybe these are Canadians signalling a change in our attitude. It’s as if we’ve been in an abusive relationship with Facebook for years but have put up with it because it’s been too hard to leave. But, at some point in abusive relationships, there comes a red line which, when crossed, you begin planning your exit. It doesn’t happen immediately. It may not happen at all, but there is a significant mental shift that happens where you become aware of how toxic the relationship really is and you start planning a life free from that toxicity.

For 40,000 Canadians and wannabe Canadians – at least – that switch may have happened.

How Seniors Get Sucked into Falling for Bad Information

It happened to me last Thursday. I was tired, I was jet lagged and I was feeling like garbage. My defenses were down. So, before I realized it, I was spinning down a social media sewer spiral. My thumb took over, doom scrolling through post after post offering very biased commentary on the current state of the world, each reinforcing just how awful things are. Little was offered in the way of factual back up, and I didn’t bother looking for it. My mood plummeted. I alternated between paranoia, outrage and depression. An hour flew by as my brain was hijacked by a feckless feed.

And I know better. I really do. Up in my prefrontal cortex, I knew I was being sucked into a vicious vortex of AI slop and troll baiting. Each time I scrolled down, I would tell myself, “Okay, this is the last one. After this, put the phone down.” And each time, my thumb would ignore me.

This is not news to any of us. Every one of you reading this knows about the addictive nature of social media. And you also know the pernicious impacts of AI generated content spoon fed to us by an algorithm whose sole purpose is to hog tie our own willpower and keep our eyes locked on the screen. I also suspect that you, like I, think because we know all this, we have built up at least some immunity to the siren call of social media.

But I’m here to tell you that social media has gotten really, really good at being really, really awful for us. I didn’t notice it so much when I was on my game, busy doing other things and directing my attention with a fully functional executive brain. But the minute my guard slipped, the minute my cognitive capacity shifted down into a lower gear, I was sucked into the misinformational sh*thole that is social media.

Being a guy that likes to ask why, I did exactly that when the jet lag finally dissipated. Why did I, a person who should know better, fall into the crappy content trap?  “Maybe,” I said to myself reluctantly, “it’s a generational thing.” Maybe brains of a certain age are more susceptible to being cognitively hijacked and led astray.

A recent study from the University of Utah does lend some credence to that theory. Researchers found that adults older than 60 were more likely to share misinformation online than younger people. This was true for information about health, but a prior study showed an even higher tendency to swallow bad information when it came to politics.

Lead researcher Ben Lyons set out to find why those of us north of 60 are more likely to be led astray by online misinformation. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t have anything to do with our brains slowing down or lower information literacy rates. It appears that older people can sniff out bullshit just as well as younger people. But it turns out that if that information, no matter how dubious it is, matches our own beliefs and world view, we’ll happily share it even if it doesn’t pass the smell test.

Lyons called this congeniality bias. I’ve talked before about the sensemaking cycle. In it, new information is matched to our existing belief schema. It it’s a match, we usually accept it without a lot of qualification. If it isn’t, we can choose to reject it or we can reframe our beliefs based on the new information. The second option is a lot more work and, it seems, the older we get the less likely we are to do this heavy lifting. As we age, we get more fully locked into who we are and what we believe. We’ve spent a lot of years building our beliefs and so we’re reluctant to stray from them.

Of course, like all things human, this tendency is not a given nor universally applied. Some older people are naturally more skeptical, and some are more inflexible in their beliefs. Not surprisingly, Lyons found those that leaned right in their political affiliations tend to be more belief-bound.

But, as I discovered this past Thursday, these information filtering tendencies are dependent on our moods and cognitive capacity. I am a naturally skeptical person and like to think I’m usually pretty picky about my information sources. But this is true only when I’m on my game. The minute my brain down-shifted, I began accepting dubious information at face value simply because I happened to agree with it. I didn’t bother checking to make sure it was true.

It sounded true, and that was all that mattered.

Happy 25th Birthday, Wikipedia!

Wikipedia is perhaps the last remaining vestige of the Internet we thought we’d build, two and a half decades ago. It was born of the same stuff that fueled open-source software and freeware, open access to knowledge and a democratization of data. This was part of the Internet that was supposed to make the world a fairer and more knowledgeable place, narrowing the gap between the haves and have nots. It was an “information superhighway” that would connect the global village and, according to the McGraw-Hill Computer Desktop Encyclopedia of 2001, “help all citizens regardless of their income level.”

We know better now. But despite the Internet’s hard pivot towards capitalism, Wikipedia is still around. It just celebrated its 25th birthday a few weeks ago. According to Wikipedia itself, there are 18 edits to its content every second from Wikipedians from all over the world. There are versions in over 300 different languages, and all of this receives 10,000 page views every second. There are over 7 million articles in the English version, and 500 new articles are added per day. In the last 25 years, almost 12 million users have edited the English Wikipedia at least once.

This was not what Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger envisioned in 2001, when they started Wikipedia. It was just supposed to be a collaborative sandbox that would allow for editing and drafting of articles which would then be included in their other project, Nupedia. Nupedia was more centrally controlled and structured. This side project used the wiki platform developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994. Wiki is Hawaiian for “quick” and Cunningham thought it had a little more panache than just calling his platform something like “Quickweb.”

The concept behind wikis is all about creating and empowering collaborative communities, opening the platform up to anyone who wanted to contribute. Wales and Sanger believed this would be a perfect way to quickly draft new entries at scale, but they still envisioned themselves and a team of editors as the gatekeepers who would control what would show up in Nupedia. But the pace of contribution soon outstripped the ability of Nupedia’s editorial team to keep up. The decision was made completely open the doors to contribution and make Wikipedia the end destination.

This completely open concept was a preview of what was to come. It may have been the one of the first times we saw what would become a common theme: a web-based platform unleashing the potential of a latent market by connecting an open community of suppliers (in this case, editors and contributors) and an audience of consumers at scale. It would be repeated by Uber, AirBnB and others.

The difference with Wikipedia was that – in this case – no one was making any money. The information was free. As a comparison, the competitor, the online version of Encyclopedia Brittanica, charged a yearly subscription of $50.

This upset of the information market didn’t go down well with everyone. This was especially true for academics and researchers. Students were warned not to use Wikipedia as a source. It was roundly criticized for its open nature and lack of peer review. To this day, much of the academic community still looks down its nose at Wikipedia, even though at least one academic study has shown that Wikipedia’s accuracy is on a par with the Encyclopedia Britannica and far outstrips it terms of the number of entries and the sheer breadth of content. This ongoing hostility towards Wikipedia is unfortunate, because the very same audience that sneers at it could be its most valuable contributors, especially in their own areas of expertise.

Of course, part of this lingering resentment could come in part due to the glacially-slow resistance to change from academic publishers, many of whom are still clinging to exorbitant subscription models. These publishers are resisting to the bitter end writer and iconoclast Stewart Brand’s feeling that “information wants to be free.”

Despite all this, Wikipedia has not only survived but thrived. It is still very much a part of the online information ecosystem, 25 years after its birth. And yes, it might be an anachronistic and naïve throwback to a more idealistic time, but it has proven at least one maxim of the open-source community. Eric. S. Raymond, in his seminal and prescient essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, called this maxim Linus’s Law, named after Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel. The law states, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”  

Or, to paraphrase, “Given enough eyeballs, most Wikipedia entries are mostly accurate.”

What Authoritarianism Gets Wrong

Like the rest of the world, my attention and intentions got hijacked over the weekend by what is happening in Minneapolis. I did not intend to write this post, but I feel I must.

What is happening right now is – plain and simple – authoritarianism. Some – like Jonathon Rausch in the Atlantic –  have used the word Fascism. Whatever label you put on it, it has the same flawed logic behind it – the belief that might makes right. It’s the same calculus of cruelty and coercion that the school yard bully uses: I’m bigger than you so do what I want you to do.

Here’s the problem with that formula. Resolve, resistance and resiliency aren’t things that can be consistently quantified. They are not static. The bewildering thing about humans when we’re faced with a crisis is this: the harder you push, the harder we’ll push back.

This is the reality of the red line. We accept adversity only up to a certain point. Past that point, individual concerns give way to that of the greater good. We join together into a coalition, dismantling the smaller walls that used to separate us to unite and fight a greater enemy that threatens us all. Rather than being beaten down by adversity, it raises us up.

We have always done this. Journalist Sebastian Junger documents one example in his excellent book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. During the London Blitz, Hitler believed he could bomb Londoners into submission. For 56 days he tried, dropping over 12,000 tonnes of bombs on the city, sure that it would break the will of Londoners. On one day alone, in September 1940, over 700 tones of high explosives and 86,000 incendiaries fell, killing 1,436 people. But the resolve of Londoners never wavered. In fact, it grew with adversity. They kept calm and carried on.

I’ve seen it firsthand in my own community. Our city, Kelowna, B.C., has been threatened with wildfires a number of times. In 2003, our city of 150,000 lost over 200 homes in one night and one third of the city was evacuated.

I have never seen this city come together like it did then. Neighbours helped neighbours. Those of us who weren’t evacuated opened our homes to those that were. In many cases, spare bedrooms and pull-out couches were occupied by total strangers. Crisis centers were swamped with offers of food, clothing, blankets and volunteer assistance.

This is how we’re wired. We band together in times of trouble. We are tribal creatures. As Junger found in his research, psychological health actually seems to improve in times of crisis. He cites a 1961 paper by American sociologist Charles Fritz, which opens with this sentence, “Who do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?” Junger writes, “Fritz’s theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a ‘community of sufferers’ that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others.”

Humans evolved to join together to overcome obstacles. Our modern world doesn’t often ask that of us. But right now, in Minneapolis, that’s exactly what’s happening as thousands of ordinary people are coordinating protection patrols to document authoritarianism. They are using the encrypted Signal platform to communicate and direct observers to emerging trouble areas. They have established their own protocols of behaviour. It is, in the words of Robert F. Worth, again writing in the Atlantic, “a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest.”

At least two Minnesotans have paid as much as they mortally can, with their own lives.

This is the wrench that humans throw into the crushing cogs of authoritarian behaviour: the more you crack down on us, the stronger we will become as we join together to push back against you.

Of all the places on Earth, Americans should know this.  I can think of one more example of this that is particularly relevant. It happened 250 years ago, when American colonists joined together to protest against the authority of the British Crown.

We shouldn’t forget that.

Home Movies: The Medium of Memories

Media is a word that is used a lot, especially in my past industry of advertising, but we may not stop to think about the origin of the word itself. Media is the plural of medium, and in our particular context, medium is defined as “the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses.”

When defined this way, media are powerful stuff. Let me give you a personal example.

At a recent family gathering a few cousins were talking about old 8 mm home movies. Some of you know what I’m talking about. You might even have some yourself, stuck somewhere in your attic or basement. They came in yellow-orange boxes from Kodak and might have “Kodachrome II” on the front. In my case, I had some which I salvaged from my mom during her transfer to her care facility. Two of my cousins similarly took custody of their films from their respective mothers. I packed what I could of these in my suitcase and gingerly transported them home, after trying to explain what they were to a curious TSA official and why they couldn’t go through an X-Ray scanner.

When I got them home, I transferred them to digital. Then, starting December 1st, I have been sharing small snippets of the resulting videos with the rest of my family, one a day in a type of home movie Advent Calendar.

Most of these home movies were shot between the mid 1950’s and mid 1960’s; capturing picnics, weekends at the family cottage north of Toronto, weddings, birthdays, going away parties, Christmases and other assorted occasions. I’ll soon tell you what this sharing of one particular medium has meant to my family and I, but first I want to give you a little background on 8 mm home movies, because I think it helps to understand why they were such an important medium.

The 8 mm format was introduced by Kodak in 1932. It was actually a 16mm format that had to be flipped and run through the camera twice. In processing, the film would be split and spliced together to create a 50 ft reel, capturing about 3 to 4 minutes.

Kodak hoped to extend the ability to make movies to the home market, but between the Great Depression and World War II, the format didn’t gain real traction until the post-war consumerism boom. Then, thanks to smaller cameras that were easier to use and improved picture quality, 8 mm movie cameras became more common place and started showing up at family gatherings, weddings, honeymoons, vacations and other notable events.

It would have been in the mid 1950’s that my mother’s family bought their first cameras. My grandfather and grandmother, a few great uncles and my mom and dad all became amateur movie makers. Suddenly, many family events became multi-camera shoots.

It was the results of this movie making boom in my family that I recently started digging through, rounding up those little yellow boxes, delicately threading the fragile film into a digital scanning system and letting grainy and poorly lit moving pictures transport me back to a time I had only heard stories about before.

Let me tell you what that meant to my family and myself. I never met my maternal grandfather (or my paternal one either, but that’s another story for another time). He passed away two weeks after I was born. I also never knew my father. He tragically died when I was just one year old. These were two man I desperately wanted to know, but never had the chance. I only knew them through still photos and stories passed on from older family members.

But suddenly, there they were; moving, laughing and living. My grandfather teasing my grandmother mercilessly and then sitting back in his easy chair with a big smile on his face as he watched his family around him. My father at his and my mom’s wedding, holding a huge cigar in one hand while he picked confetti out of his hair with the other. “My God!,” I thought, “he stands just like me!”

This medium, long forgotten as it sat in dusty boxes, brought my grandfather and father back to life for me. It colored in the outline sketches I had of who they were. For my family, these movies reconnected us to our younger selves, brought loved ones back, introduced the younger members to their direct ancestors and – for myself and others – shed new light on figures in our past that had been shrouded in the shadows of time.

Because of this project, two things became clear to me. First of all, if you have also inherited old media filled with family memories, find the time to transfer them into a medium that allows them to be shared and preserved for the future in some type of transferable format. The act of archiving brings up images of bespectacled staff peering over dusty tomes and pulling forgotten boxes from the top shelf. But it is simply the act of imbuing the past with a type of permanence so it always remains accessible.

Secondly, recognize the importance of any type of medium that captures the moments of our lives. Rick Prelinger, an archivist in California, has compiled a collection of over 30,000 home movies. He published a list of 22 reasons why home movies are important. For me, number 21 resonated most deeply: “showing and reusing (these movies) today invests audiences with the feeling that their own lives are also worth recording.”

I’m sure my dad or granddad had no idea of their own impending mortality when they were captured on these movies. They weren’t planning on being memorialized. They didn’t realize the importance of the moment – or the medium.

But today, these movies are one of the all-too-rare things we have to remember who they were. For me, it was this medium that erased the time and distance between my senses, here at the end of 2025, and that day in June, 1957 – the day my parents got married.

Thank Heavens someone was there with a camera.