Colin Campbell, Copywriter

colin@colin.org      408-370-6521

Sunday, 8-2-2025

August 5, 2025 No Comments

     Lots of TV news coverage of the Richter 3.0 earthquake that struck New York City yesterday.  In California we literally do not notice a Richter 3 earthquake even if we’re at ground zero.

     “Coverage.” In the old days we were all looking at the same three TV networks from coast to coast. Everybody saw LAUGH-IN.

     Today there are hundreds of cable TV channels and millions of online podcasts. Newspapers are a fading memory. The Santa Barbara City Council is deliberating on a law banning newspaper vending boxes on the sidewalks. Some magazine and newspaper names survive online but most have failed to monetize their properties. The more subscribers they attract, the more money Google makes.

     I looked at a Substack page of gripes from writers who gain a flock of subscribers after publishing a particularly good piece, and then most of the subscribers fail to renew. Why can’t there be a one-time payment method so a visitor could pay one dollar to read this particular article. Too expensive for Substack to administer.

     The web is still hobbled by the lack of a micropayment system.

     Yeah, the web is really still in its infancy. I launched colin.org thirty years ago, Xmas 1995. I thought I had about 3,500 pages but Pro-Sitemap’s indexing shows I have more than 10,000 items indexed now. It’s counting the photos as well as the html files.

     Why use a copywriter for a website.

     The societal changes caused by the internet were presaged by similar upheavals caused by telegraph and railroad connections across the continent 150 years ago. Mark Twain could no longer make a living by writing for magazines and newspapers–as soon as one article was published, it was pirated, telegraphed around the world to be printed and not a penny coming back to him. That’s why he devoted his energies to the Chautauqua circuit where audiences would pay to hear him speak.

     Copywriters came into being in this era by accurately describing a product in Chicago that could be shipped by rail to a farmer in Nebraska. Gaudy false promises might bring a few sales and no repeat business. The Sears catalog was scrupulously accurate and its 500 pages of cheap pulp paper were useful in the outhouse.

     So all I’m aspiring to is to create the best text you can wipe your ass with.

In the beginning was the word

June 26, 2025 No Comments

     In the beginning was the word. My father was a typographer in the ad game and he was always at his drawing board creating words from the time I was born.  

     My theory is that I copied his enthusiasm for his task from my earliest days. I was reading everything by the time I was four. My Christmas present when I was 6 was a miniature printing press with a font of all-cap rubber letters.

      What is a copywriter. Inside the ad game, it was an exalted title. The apex creator of the ad. Today it means the guy who writes the captions. The copywriter is no longer a part of the design process. The Design Committee will let you know when the design is finalized, and then we’ll be ready for text.  

     I was a writer for print, mostly, in my early career, but then the Macintosh computer came along and I dived into it head first and within a few years I was in Silicon Valley making more money as a Mac graphics guy than as a copywriter. I did so many courtroom presentations, for instance. I thought it would be my new career.  

     Then I told my placement agency I wanted copywriting work, and started contracting for the Internet Shopping Network in 1999. Then I wrote thousands and thousands of product descriptions for Walmart.com in the 2000s.

     I wrote a lot of stuff in Santa Barbara. In Silicon Valley they were more interested in my graphics and web skills. Now that I’m semi-retired, I’m offering my copywriting services in Santa Barbara again.

     What I like to do is to absorb myself into my new client’s information, where I discover that everything I knew about the client’s niche is outmoded.

The AI Invasion

June 3, 2025 No Comments

     Everywhere I look I see AI invading. The Turing Test has long since been sent to the old folks’ home–AI can write stuff well enough to persuade you a human did it. Fool me once, fool me forever. There’s no going back. 

     I look at VentureBeat.com several times a week–it’s been around for twenty years or so covering the latest events in tech industries and there are no longer articles about chip fabs and other aspects of tech. Every single article is about AI. New AI apps are touted every day. The foundations are being ripped out of niche industries and this doesn’t make it into the TV news channels.

     But, who cares about the news? CBS News is on this first Sunday of June is devoted to nostalgia–an interview with an elderly novelist whose books were made into movies thirty and forty years ago. ABC News: THIS WEEK With George Stephanopoulos, the network’s Sunday news-panel show, with a list of charges against Trump, what a terrible mess he’s making, plus ethics violations up the wazoo. The sidebar mentions Ukraine destroying 40 warplanes on the ground at Russian military bases but that stays visible for five seconds and then we’re shown a much longer description of the availability of a new and even better Covid-19 vaccine, while the main screen continues with more revulsion about Trump. Sky News has an old black guy sitting at a table with an old white guy tsking about Israel continuing to fight instead of surrendering and allowing Hamas to slit their throats. I’m sure AI bots could disparage the Jews just as easily and persuasively.

     Anyway. AI is here to stay. Next week the Apple Developer’s Conference will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the iPhone, a landmark event in human history. Last year Apple announced that macOS Sequoia would introduce Apple AI which would have massive effects on computer usage, but the introduction has been perpetually delayed. The industry consensus is that Apple is ten years behind in the integration of AI into Siri, compared to other virtual assistants such as Alexa.

     We’re still in the early dawn of AI development. I’ve seen several articles saying AI has run its course, we’ll be forever hobbled by the inherent inadequacies of Artificial Intelligence.

     What they mean is the limitations of the transformer algorithms. I expect that some newer AI technology will be a supernova event–maybe hardware, maybe software. Who knows whether human culture will survive the blast.

     People will survive but civilization might not.

Memorial Sunday

May 27, 2025 No Comments

     Moscow and Kiev swapped massive drone raids again overnight. Israel continues to methodically plod through Gaza eliminating Hamas operatives. Drug cartels have been methodically assassinating mayors and mayor candidates throughout Mexico. And so the main story on ABC News continues to be the trial of rapper Diddy Combs. Oops, now ABC News has switched to its shopping channel feature, here’s a fabulous home vacuum cleaner for only $199, Ulta Beauty cosmetics for only $9.99, wait, act now for 50% off, Cuisinart grill accessory set $24.99…

     It’s hard to find out what is going on here in Santa Barbara. Online news is carried by The Independent, which also publishes a free print version every Thursday, and NoozHawk, online only. They are both good little Chamber of Commerce shills, outspokenly woke, full of clickbait. Somebody got run over on the freeway, was it anybody you knew? All details withheld until family is notified, sorry. Splashy coverage of a new restaurant opening in a space that has seen five restaurants fail in the last dozen years. No mention of the previous tenants.

     I see lots of commenters and bloggers around the web saying that the USA as we knew it is dead, our culture is dead, the US empire has peaked and is now into rapid decay. Europe celebrated the 80th anniversary of the end of World War 2 this month, and now the last vestiges of the post-war era can be set aside and forgotten. NATO will now dwindle away.

     Maybe. It’s the Boomers who are now on the downward slope. Generation X is in charge and is appalled at what the Boomers have bequeathed. I suppose Millennials are equally ready to shove aside all that old crap.

     Europe has been flooded by millions of Muslim “refugees” who are disdainful of whatever particular culture they invade. The European Union is a fascist dictatorship that overrules democratic elections such as in Romania and France recently. Vote correctly or the EU will invalidate the election. Europeans are not allowed to vote for the leader of the EU; the elites appoint the leader.

     Well, it’s all going to fall apart now if Uncle Sam stops paying for everything. Go ahead with the stupid Ukraine war, if you want, on your own dime.

     It’s impossible to find out the facts about China. China withholds data, for one thing, and the mainstream media’s coverage is propaganda. The other day I saw an article about a new computer operating system developed in China that operates much faster and better than Windows and Macintosh and Linux. Is it true, or is it Chinese propaganda?

     The world today has upended every truism that the Boomers grew up with. We’re sitting shell-shocked on the sidelines waiting for our own funeral. The only thing we know for sure is that whatever truisms the Millennials grew up with will eventually be upended, too.

     I don’t know what the new truisms will be. New technology will impose some of the new truisms but there is so much new technology right now… it is impossible to predict which of them will turn out to be pivotal. There weren’t many headlines introducing transistors in 1947, and transistor radios didn’t enter public consciousness for another ten years after that.

     Today transistors have overwhelmed everything else. Everybody says the day of the transistor is over because Moore’s Law has reached its limit–we can’t get much smaller because we’re already down to the size of atoms.

     This has been the received knowledge for ten or twenty years but somehow the transistors keep getting smaller. Maybe something else besides transistors will take over, or perhaps a new operating system paradigm will use transistors in an epic new way.

     Human intelligence is based on a different technology, a wet mess of biological complication. My hunch is that quantum effects are important in consciousness and transistors are not in the ballpark yet as far as quantum computation.

     Lots and lots of people are working on quantum computation. Big-name tech outfits are always announcing breakthroughs in quantum computing but nothing has blossomed the way the transformer paradigm has expanded AI into the mainstream.

     Recently I saw a report of a lab creating a device that generates pairs of entangled photons on demand. Maybe that will lead to something. I forget if it was under cryogenic conditions…most of the quantum technology operates only in a bath of liquid helium.

     Biology uses quantum effects at room temperature, such as chlorophyll converting sunlight into sugar. The original manna from heaven. Mainstream science deprecates this. Cryogenic projects can get funded.

     So it’s going to be some crazy loner who creates the next breakthrough, as usual.

     Wait a minute, who was the loner who invented ChatGPT? Google AI tells me it was a Google team that invented the transformer model in 2017. Eight people listed: Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin.

     Never heard of any of them.

     It was Jakob Uszkoreit’s idea, and Noam Shazeer and Niki Parmar figured out how to make it work. WIRED’s article about it is behind a paywall. It’s a Google product and all the information I’m looking at is presented by Google. So who knows what the real story is.    

     Something else is going to erupt and change everything. That’s been the norm since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The Cabal is satisfied with the way things are and will suppress innovation as much as possible.

     I’m still looking at e-catworld.com every day, the “cold fusion” site. According to commenters and articles, several cold fusion products are about to enter the marketplace.

     It would change everything if cold fusion turned out to actually work.

     Well, it does work: muon-catalyzed cold fusion is a scientific fact. The only problem is that muons cost a dollar apiece and you need a billion of them to power a flashlight for two minutes.

         All kinds of headlines around the country say that gasoline prices for the Memorial Day weekend are the lowest in decades. Not around here: this week the price at Fuel Depot plunged from $4.43 to $4.41 per gallon. California enjoys all kinds of extra gas taxes thanks to Governor Gav.

     This month saw the 65th anniversary of the invention of the laser. Who knew it would turn out to be so important. I remember when it was announced: there was an article in Science News magazine. It was called an optical maser at first. Microwave Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation, except it’s light instead of microwaves.

Easter

April 22, 2025 No Comments

     Easter Sunday. I do not believe that a man can rise from the dead.

     Well, what do I believe?

     Easter is a relic of a pagan rite of spring in which an exalted one is sacrificed to the gods to ensure the onset of summer. We’ll freeze to death unless we do it.

     Today we have better theories of how the universe works. But there’s still a lot we don’t know. The continuing theme of The Establishment is that everything is now known and settled. There is nothing new left to be discovered. The low-hanging fruit has all been picked. The famous example is Lord Kelvin’s statement in 1897: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement”

     There was no room in the theories for x-rays, radio, atomic energy, superconductivity, or quantum physics.

     The more precisely we measure, the more complexity we find. Atoms were the absolute minimum–the word is from Greek “atomos.” The prefix “a-” means “not” and the word “tomos” means “cut.” Uncuttable.

     But then it turned out that you could cut an atom into parts. Atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Okay, finally that was settled. But then it was discovered that protons and neutrons are made of quarks. And not just one quark, there are six different quarks.

     So, is it quarks all the way down? Or could quarks be cut, too?

     The modern world has the same smug assurance that nothing new will ever be discovered except for refinements of existing theory and practice. Anything that would overturn existing theory must not be investigated–thus the shunning of cold fusion researchers.

     The future is going to be different. The Establishment cannot let that happen. The Establishment built the Large Hadron Collider for $13 billion and it has discovered nothing new, so now the Establishment wants $25 billion to make a new collider four times as big.

Instructions to Forgive

March 31, 2025 No Comments

Instructions to forgive
A poem by Cesar Verrier

First, remember. It is a painful task.

Be gentle with yourself.

Write down your recollections.

You can’t forgive what you refuse to remember.

Start your excursion into memory

before you were so cruelly treated.

Recapture what your life was like then

and what you were like, too.

Reconstruct whatever relationship existed between you

and that person before rage blurred your vision.

Once you have retrieved the happier past,

let yourself relive the injury in all its painful detail.

Then review the consequences.

Take careful inventory of the losses

you may not have named before.

Unleash your gift of insight:

try to understand why things happened as they did.

Probe the personalities involved, yourself included.

You may discover that you yourself contributed

to the course of events.

Don’t fall into the trap of making excuses for yourself.

Be willing to try to forgive yourself as well.

Don’t feel obliged to make excuses

for the person who hurt you, either.

Just try to the best of your ability to understand

what was happening inside the offender.

Do you really want to forgive?

Something in the human heart loves dark feelings.

Something in the human heart wants justice.

Some things don’t, in decent human terms, deserve forgiveness.

Forgiving is not something you do for someone else.

Forgiving is something you do for yourself.

You need to forgive

so that you can move forward with life.

Forgiveness is your ticket to freedom.

Let go the bitter feeling you have nursed

like a hungry child so long.

Try praying for your enemy.

One day you may find yourself really wishing well

to the person who hurt you,

or suddenly realize

that you haven’t thought of the old injury for weeks.

Then you will know you have reached the journey’s end.

Forgiving can be a long road indeed,

but at its end lies freedom

to leave behind that heavy burden.

 

 

Instrucciones para perdonar

 

Primero, recordá. Es una tarea dolorosa.

Sé gentil con vos mismo.

Escribí tus recuerdos.

No podés perdonar lo que rechazás recordar.

Empezá tu excursión a la memoria

antes de que fueras tratado tal cruelmente.

Reviví cómo era tu vida entonces

y cómo eras vos, también.

Reconstruí la relación que existía entre vos

y aquella persona antes de que la furia nuble tu visión.

Una vez que hayas recobrado el pasado feliz,

permitite revivir la herida con todos sus detalles dolorosos.

Después revisá las consecuencias.

Hacé un cuidadoso inventario de las pérdidas

que no hayas nombrado antes.

Desatá el don de la intuición:

tratá de entender por qué las cosas ocurrieron como lo hicieron.

Verificá las personalidades involucradas, con vos incluido.

Podés descubrir que vos mismo contribuiste

al curso de los sucesos.

No caigas en la trampa de hacer excusas por vos mismo.

Sé capaz de tratar de perdonarte a vos mismo también.

No te sientas obligado a hacer excusas

por la persona que te hirió, tampoco.   

Simplemente tratá de entender lo mejor que puedas

qué pasaba dentro de quien te ofendió.

¿Realmente querés perdonar?

Algo en el corazón humano ama los sentimientos oscuros.

Algo en el corazón humano anhela justicia.

Algunas cosas no merecen, en términos humanos decentes, perdón.

Perdonar no es algo que vos hacés por otro.

Perdonar es algo que hacés por vos mismo.

Necesitás perdonar

para que vos puedas moverte hacia adelante en la vida.

Perdonar es tu ticket hacia la libertad.

Dejá ir el sentimiento amargo que alimentaste

como un niño hambriento por tanto tiempo.

Tratá de rezar por tu enemigo.

Un día podés encontrarte realmente deseando lo mejor

para la persona que te hirió,

o darte cuenta repentinamente

que no pensaste en la vieja herida por semanas.

Entonces sabrás que tu viaje ha llegado a su fin.

Perdonar puede ser un largo camino en efecto,

pero al final se encuentra la libertad

de dejar atrás esa pesada carga.