Imagine no more cookie notices.

Imagine no more Internet of Nothing But Accounts.

Imagine no more surveillance panopticons.

Imagine no more privacy in the hands of everybody but you.

Imagine no more creepy adtech.

Then thank MyTerms. When the time comes. We start that clock today.

It’s not a new idea. We’ve had it since before The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999). The Buyer Centric Commerce Forum (2004). ProjectVRM (2006). The Intention Economy (2012). Customer Commons (2013). And finally, since IEEE P7012 (2017).

It’s what we got with the Internet and its founding protocols, TCP and IP (1974).

It’s what we got with the Web and with its founding protocol, HTTP (1989).

It’s what we got with dozens of other members of the Internet Protocol Suite, plus other graces, such as RSS, which we can thank every time we hear “and wherever you get your podcasts.”

All of those protocols are end-to-end, i.e. peer-to-peer, by design.

And so is MyTerms, which is the nickname for IEEE P7012 (like Wi-Fi is the nickname for IEEE 802.11.)

As of today, MyTerms has its own website: https://myterms.info.

MyTerms is a standard that the P7012 working group, which I chair, has just completed after eight years in the works. It is due to be published by the IEEE on January 22, 2026.

MyTerms describes how the sites and services of the world agree to your terms, rather than the other way around. It says your agreements with those sites and services are contracts you both agree to, rather than the empty promises that come when you click on cookie notice “choices.” These agreements are ones both sides store in ways that can be audited and disputed, should the need arise.

And the process is made simple, by limiting your chosen agreement to one among the handful kept on a roster kept by a disinterested nonprofit, such as Customer Commons., on the model established by Creative Commons.

Right now there are just five. The default one is SD-BASE, which says “service delivery only.” SD-BASE says what you get from a site or a service si what you expect when you walk into a store in the natural world: just their business, whether it be luggage, lunch, or lingerie. Not to be tracked elsewhere like a marked animal or have information about you sold or shared to other parties—which is the norm we have today in the digital world.

Other variants cover data portability, data use for AI training, data for good, and data for intentcasting.

In the natural world we worked out privacy many millenia ago. We started with the privacy tech we call clothing and shelter. Then we worked out social contracts that were almost entirely tacit, meaning we knew more about them than we could tell, but everyone understood how it worked.

But there is no tacit in the digital world. Everything there needs to be made explicit, with ones and zeroes and written into code. In the absence of explicit agreement about what privacy is, and how it works, we’re stuck with the horrible tacit understanding by business-as-usual that following people without their express invitation or a court order is just fine, and worth $trillions.

With MyTerms we can have $trillions more. Because far more business is possible when customers can have scale, and an abuncance of mutually trusted market intelligence can flow both ways moves between peers in the open marketplace.

At this stage, the collection of workers behind MyTerms is still small. If you’re interested in joining us, write to contact@myterms.info.

On November 21, the Cardano blockchain suffered a major chainsplit after someone created a transaction that exploited an old bug in Cardano node software, causing the chain to split. The person who submitted the transaction fessed up on Twitter, writing, "It started off as a 'let's see if I can reproduce the bad transaction' personal challenge and then I was dumb enough to rely on AI's instructions on how to block all traffic in/out of my Linux server without properly testing it on testnet first, and then watched in horror as the last block time on explorers froze."

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, responded with a tweet boasting about how quickly the chain recovered from the catastrophic split, then accused the person of acting maliciously. "It was absolutely personal", Hoskinson wrote, adding that the person's public version of events was merely him "trying to walk it back because he knows the FBI is already involved". Hoskinson added, "There was a premeditated attack from a disgruntled [single pool operator] who spent months in the Fake Fred discord actively looking at ways to harm the brand and reputation of IOG. He targeted my personal pool and it resulted in disruption of the entire cardano network."

Hoskinson's decision to involve the FBI horrified some onlookers, including one other engineer at the company who publicly quit after the incident. They wrote, "I've fucked up pen testing in a major way once. I've seen my colleagues do the same. I didn't realize there was a risk of getting raided by the authorities because of that + saying mean things on the Internet."

• Tweet thread by Homer J
• Tweet by Charles Hoskinson
• Tweet by Charles Hoskinson

I wish I were making this up: Eighty-six Democrats voted for a Republican-contrived House resolution on Friday decrying “the horrors of socialism.”

The horrors of socialism? Do you mean like Social Security, Medicare, the interstate highway system, and air-traffic control? The digging of the Erie Canal? The free museums that are part of the government’s Smithsonian Institution? Or did they get their panties in wad over land-grant colleges, public libraries, and city fire departments?

The sponsor, María Elvira Salazar, the Republican assistant whip for the House, had the vote on the same day that New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani was meeting with President Trump at the White House. The vote was clearly aimed at embarrassing Mamdani and splitting the Democratic House caucus. So of course, the worst Democrats took the bait.

Eric Michael Garcia, the Washington bureau chief at the United Kingdom’s The Independent and an MSNBC regular, did God’s own work and compiled a list of these losers, which you can see here on Bluesky. Incidentally, Congressman Morgan McGarvey did not embarrass himself and is not on the list.

But you know who is? House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries! And Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar. And Democratic House Whip Katherine Clark. And, sad to say, a favorite of mine, House Democratic Vice Chair Ted Lieu. The only member of Democratic House leadership not on the loser list is Suzan DelBene, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Bunches of committee ranking members also appear on the List of Shame, among them Angie Craig of Agriculture, Brendan Boyle of Budget, and Bennie Johnson of Homeland Security. (A “ranking member” is the most senior member of the minority party on a particular committee, the person most likely to become chair once the Democrats kick the bums out. So a pretty powerful Democrat.) Sadly, leadership in lockstep indicates this was clearly an organized Democratic tactic (a.k.a., stupidity on purpose).

And that brings us to the reason this non-binding resolution is a bigger deal than it seems. When you have the House Democratic leadership openly saying that Americans having what the citizens every other industrialized country in the world take for granted (universal health care; affordable housing, child care, and colleges; living wages; universal pre-kindergarten) is “a horror,” then we need new leadership.

Because with friends like these, Americans don’t need Republicans to make their lives worse and protect the 1% at all costs. These corporate Democrats are happy to take on the task.

--30--

Not sure a hugely topical and well-reported piece in The New York Times needs any amplification from me but….this just in … “the Times has uncovered nearly 50 cases of people having mental health crises during conversations with ChatGPT. Nine were hospitalized; three died”

You should read their report about what went on the inside, at OpenAI.

A big part of the culprit? Maximizing metrics for user engagement.

Lots of internal warnings were ignored.

Here’s Kashmir Hill’s own summary, followed by a gift link to the essay. It’s long but with lots of new insights into how OpenAI rolls — and by extension insights what that might mean for the future of AI safety.

You can read the essay here.

Subscribe now

It’s hard to picture the end-game of renewables’ full takeover of the energy sector—but it will happen. Wind and solar both have their shortcomings, but with the astonishing collapse of battery storage costs over the past decade, intermittency is no longer an issue. Hydro works well in many places, but even where it’s dry, a new generation of geothermal power is coming to provide baseload power and district heating from the Gobi Desert to Antarctica. By the time nuclear fusion arrives, we won’t need it; fusion is fundamentally centralized anyway, and renewables are pushing us to decentralize our grids—to decouple them from big, centralized baseload sources. Fusion will be an awkward partner in this mix.

It’s even harder to imagine what the world will look like when precision fermentation comes into its own. We already have Solein, and precision-fermentation replacements for milk and cheese. Solein in particular, with its promise of providing food anywhere that electricity is available (which is now everywhere, see the above paragraph) points towards a future where a minimum of nutrition can be guaranteed in almost any nation on Earth.

Combine just these two trends—cheap power anywhere, and basic nutrition anywhere—and what does this revolutionary future look like?

The Metabolic Floor

The world already produces enough food for everyone, and climate change is not going to change this. (If even the smallest African village has its own solar-powered Solein plant, drought and ecosystem collapse impacts will be strongly reduced; projections of famine based on climate change assume that our food system will not evolve, but it will and it is.) Right now, true production‑side scarcity still occurs due to droughts, wildfires, and the collapse of fisheries, but it is usually localized (e.g., a failed harvest in a remote valley) and quickly mitigated by international trade—provided that trade routes remain open and purchasing power exists. It’s when those conditions break down that the scarcity becomes effective rather than physical. The current famines in the Middle East and Sudan are instances of the weaponization of food access—not actual scarcity.

Taking our notional African village as an example, we can imagine a near-future system of fully distributed energy and basic nutrition. Imagine how hard it would be to track down and destroy every solar panel and satellite dish in a region thousands of kilometers in extent, and then imagine that each of those panels is powering a small family- or neighbourhood-sized precision fermentation vat. It will be possible, but difficult, to generate famine except when one has complete control over a geographic area, and many regions are simply too large to be policed in this way.

Considering that solar panels and LED lights can last for decades, then as long as communities have access to the additional mix of minerals that go into the feedstock for Solein or comparable photosynthesizing microbes (these additives being the only major source of potential scarcity now) then a community can be physically isolated for years but remain alive, connected to the web and with all the lights on.

What I’m describing here is a form of New Medievalism. Even a couple of years ago I would not have considered it a likely outcome in the near future; but times have changed, and quickly. It has its upsides and downsides, but in either case this is a very different picture of the world our children will have to live in.

Imagine renewables everywhere and inland bioreactors feeding millions, the provision of those two services being a basic subsistence layer of civilization that is automated, boring, and reliable. They are the basis for meeting the fundamental needs of your citizens. Together they form what I’m calling a “metabolic floor”—a stable, low-growth infrastructure that keeps societies lit, fed, hydrated, and warm. Unlike traditional subsistence economies, this floor is industrial, modular, and scalable.

Once a nation crosses the threshold into metabolic self-sufficiency, its vulnerability to global shocks collapses, and its political imagination broadens. But different countries cross this threshold in radically different ways.

Post-Scarcity Does Not Mean Post-Politics

The European Union could become the first major example of what metabolic integration looks like. Under the unexpected pressure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, European states have accelerated their transition to energy independence. Offshore wind grids, cross-border HVDC links, and a coordinated climate policy create a continental metabolic commons. Solein is a Finnish invention, ready to provide the protein component of the metabolic floor if needed. The more self-sufficient the infrastructure becomes, the more viable integration will feel. In this case, metabolic security can encourage political cohesion rather than fragmentation.

Russia represents a very different pathway. Instead of using energy independence to integrate, it’s been doubling down on autarky, nationalism, and territorial aggression. Hydro, nuclear, and domestic gas have given Moscow its own version of a metabolic floor, but one that is used as insulation rather than as a platform for cooperation. The parallel wars in Ukraine and other regions demonstrate that metabolic independence doesn’t pacify states. It frees them to pursue the particular politics they already favored. Europe integrates; Russia isolates and expands.

Uruguay offers a third path—one that is neither imperial nor integrationist. The country is closing rapidly on 100% renewable energy use. It’s agriculturally independent as well. Uruguay might become the prototype of a small, steady-state, quietly prosperous, locally anchored society. Ironically, it (like Canada and Norway) is aggressively pursuing the export of fossil fuels as a cash crop. We can’t expect this to last, as the Carbon Bubble will pop soon and fossil fuels will cease to be a viable export market, likely within twenty years. For Uruguay the next decade gives it an opportunity to cash in on oil while building a sovereign wealth fund (similar to the UAE’s $2 trillion one) that it can use to invest and attract business and commodities it needs.

So metabolic independence can support small democracies and middle powers, and opens the door to prosperity that need not be growth-oriented.

No Single Narrative

Metabolic independence, if it occurs, doesn’t lead to a uniform zero-growth world. Once every region can feed and power itself, the world stops being a single economic game and becomes a mosaic of metabolic regimes—some cooperative, some predatory, some isolationist, some experimental. When we talk about this possible regime, we’re no longer in the business of predicting a future, we are mapping a branching space of possible futures that’s already emerging in front of us.

In other words, we’re not facing Utopia or Dystopia, but both, overlaid, combined and recombined, rebranded and executed differently, in bewildering ways, across a future world both fragmented and tightly integrated by information, trade, and a planetary commons of ecological limits and tipping-points.

This brand of New Medievalism might serve as an amplifier of cultural, historical, and political differences, rather than the stabilizer that Globalism provided. Metabolic independence won’t eliminate geopolitical competition—it will redirect it toward minerals, knowledge, ecological sinks, and symbolic power. Some regions may slip below the metabolic floor due to climate damage or political mismanagement, creating islands of instability in an otherwise self-sufficient world. The result is not global collapse but uneven resilience—an archipelago world where safe and unsafe zones coexist, and where the moral burden of abundance becomes harder to ignore.

We may be entering an era when where the fundamentals of life are locally secured while the higher-order complexities of culture, governance, and identity diversify beyond anything the twentieth century predicted. This is the invitation hidden in the energy transition—a chance to embrace regional plurality without giving up global responsibility.

We’re already charting a clear path in Canada—though the new budget of the Carney government is a curious mix of visionary and arch-conservative, it does point the way towards a more self-sufficient future for my country.

Your task is to imagine what your region’s metabolic future could look like. How might your city, state, or nation contribute to a world defined not by scarcity but by a metabolic floor that supports and encourages diversity and independence?

—K