ProjectVRM

ProjectVRM 2.0

August 18, 2023 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

It took a while, but our website is now on its own. Big thanks go to the Berkman Klein Center for hosting us on its blog server since 2006. Also for continuing to host our mailing list and our wiki. And to all the friends who helped, including those at WordPress and Pressable, who made the transition smooth and complete. Links to every post and page we’ve published at blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/ (our old location) now travel down the same directory paths at projectvrm.org/. There will be no 404s. This is a rare thing for any site that moves from one host to another.

Clearly, this is not the one-year project we imagined in the first place. It may not be a one-generation project. But we will get from the state on the left above to the one on the right. And thanks to Gapingvoid‘s Hugh MacLeod for drawing that illustration in the first place, way back in 2005.

Markets vs. Marketing in the Age of AI

May 15, 2023 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment

Maybe history will defeat itself.

Remember FreePC? It was a thing, briefly, at the end of the last millennium, right before Y2K pooped the biggest excuse for a party in a thousand years. This may help. The idea was to put ads in the corner of your PC’s screen. The market gave it zero stars, and it failed.

And now comes Telly, hawking free TVs with ads in a corner, and a promise to “optimize your ad experience.” As if anybody wants an ad experience other than no advertising at all.

Negative demand for advertising has been well advertised by both ad blocking (the biggest boycott in human history) and ad-free “prestige” TV, (or SVOD, for subscription video on demand). With those we gladly pay—a lot— not to see advertising. (See numbers here.)

But the advertising business (in the mines of which I toiled for too much of my adult life) has always smoked its own exhaust and excels best at getting high with generous funders. (Yeah, some advertising works, but on the whole people still hate it on the receiving end.)

The fun will come when our own personal AI bots, working for our own asses, do battle with the robot Nazgûls of marketing — and win, because we’re on the Demand side of the marketplace, and we’ll do a better job of knowing what we want and don’t want to buy than marketing’s surveillant AI robots can guess at. Supply will survive, of course. But markets will defeat marketing by taking out the middle creep.

The end state will be one Cluetrain forecast in 1999, Linux Journal named in 2006, the VRM community started working on that same year, and The Intention Economy detailed in 2012. The only thing all of them missed was how customer intentions might be helped by personal AI.

Personal. Not personalized.

Markets will become new and better dances between Demand and Supply, simply because Demand will have better ways to take the lead, and not just follow all the time. Simple as that.

A beckon for Beckn

February 14, 2023 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

Want to place a bet on where VRM will finally take off? Try India.

Because India is home to the Beckn protocol: one that enables peer-to-peer e-commerce at scale without the big platforms taking a large cut of the pie just for matchmaking. The possibilities are endless and extreme—especially for customers and small businesses.

Beckn is open source (here on Github), moving into deployment, and expected to grow toward ubiquity on the same slope as Aadhaar, the government ID now held by 1.35 billion people.

To put this into perspective, India has more people than all of Europe (even when you throw in Russia and Turkey), and more than twice the population of North America. Only China has more people, but India is ready to overtake it in just four years.

We will discuss all this and more with Sujith Nair this coming Monday, 20 February, from 2-3:30 PM Eastern Time. He is the CEO & Co-founder of FIDE.org, the nonprofit behind the Beckn protocol, and may have the clearest vision in the world toward an e-commerce future that isn’t contained inside big tech’s walled gardens: ones in which every business and every customer can operate with both independence and minimized friction.

This will kick off the Workshop’s next Beyond the Web salon series . Stay tuned for more in the coming months, but be sure to catch this one. It could hardly matter more for what our project has worked toward since 2006.

It’s both in-person and online, and free. But you need to register. Do that here.

Syndication and the Live Web Economy

January 8, 2023 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

This is from a December 2009 newsletter called Suitwatch, which I wrote for Linux Journal, and was 404’d long ago. (But I kept the original.) I’m re-posting it here because I think syndication may be the most potent power any of us have in the Internet age—and because the really simple kind, RSS, has been with us since before I wrote this piece. (I also think RSS has VRM implications as well, but I’ll leave those for another post.) My only edits here were to remove arcana and anachronisms that are pointless today. This graphic illustrates how entrenched and widespread RSS already is:

Until recently, the verb “syndication” was something big publishers and agencies did. As a kid, I recognized “© King Features Syndicate” was the one unfunny thing about Blondie or Dennis the Menace. All it meant to me was that some kind of Business was going on here.

Now millions of individual writers syndicate their own work, usually through RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Publishers and other large organizations do too. This article is syndicated. So are updates to product manuals, changes to development wikis, updates on SourceForge, and searches of keywords. You name it: if there’s something that updates frequently on the Web, there’s a better chance every minute that the new stuff is syndicated if it isn’t already.

Far as I know, not many sources are making money with it. Lots, however, are making money because of it. The syndicated world may not look like an economy yet. But trust me, it is.

At this early stage in its long future history, syndication is primarily a feature of blogging, which is primarily the product of too many people to count. Blogging is not about large-scale things. It’s about human beings who have no scale other than themselves. Only you can be good at being you, and nobody else is the same as you. Syndication does more to expand individual human potential than anything since the invention of type. Or perhaps ever. The syndicated world economy is the one that grows around unleashed personal powers of expression, productivity, creation, distribution, instruction, influence, leadership, whatever.

In a loose sense, syndication is one side of the conversation. Think about conversation in the best sense of the word: as the way people teach and learn from each other, the way topics start and move along. Syndication makes that happen in huge ways.

The notion that “markets are conversation”, popularized by The Cluetrain Manifesto, was borrowed from this case I used to make for a form of marketing that was far more natural and powerful than the formal kind:

Markets are conversation, and
Conversation is fire. Therefore,
Marketing is arson.

If you want to set fires, start conversations that tend to keep going. Nothing does the latter better than syndication.

There are three reasons why we still don’t hear as much about syndication as we should (and will). First, it’s still new. Second, it didn’t come from The Big Guys. (It came from Dave Winer, father of RSS — Really Simple Syndication.) Third, it points toward a value system not grounded only in exchange — one especially suited for the Net, a deeply ironic worldwide environment where everybody is zero distance apart.

But let’s park the value system until later and talk about next week. That’s when I’ll be in San Francisco for Syndicate. It’s the second in a series of conferences by that name. The first was in New York last Spring.

Since I’m the conference chair (disclosure: it’s a paying gig), and since I’ll be giving both the introductory talk and the closing keynote, Syndication is on the front burner of my mind’s stove.

There are others subjects there as well, some of which will be visited in sessions at the show. RSS, for starters. And tagging—a practice so new it’s not even close to having standards of the sort we find at OASIS, the IETF, and the W3C. Instead, it has emerging standards, like the ones we find at microformats.org.

Like syndication, tagging is a long-tail activity. Something individuals do. Along with blogging and syndication, it helps outline a new branch of the Net we’re starting to call the Live Web — as opposed to the Static Web with “sites” that are “built” and tend not to change.

The World Live Web is the title of my December Linux For Suits column in Linux Journal. In it, I note that the directoryless nature of everything on the Web falls in the Unix file path east of the domain name. Every path to a document (or whatever) is a piece of straw in the static Web’s haystack. Google and Yahoo help us find needles in that haystack, but their amazing success at search also tends to confirm the haystack nature of the Static Web itself.

The Live Web is no less webby than the Static Web. They’re both parts of the same big thing. But the Live Web is new and very different. It cannot be understood in Static Web terms.

In that piece, I also observed that blogs, as continuing projects by human authors, leave chronological trails. These give the Live Web something of a structure: a chronological one that goes /year/month/day/date/post, even if that’s not the way each post’s URL is composed. There is an implicit organizational structure here, and it’s chronological.

Tagging, by which individuals can assign categorical tags of their own to everything from links to bookmarks to photos, has given the Live Web an ad hoc categorical structure as well.

So that’s what we’re starting to see emerge here: chronology and category. Rudimentary, sure, but real. And significant.

But not organized. New practices, and new ideas, are coming along too fast.

What matters, above all, is user-in-charge: a form of personal agency in the connected world. That’s a concept so key to everything else that’s happening on the Web, even on the Static one, that we may need a new word for it.

Or an old one, like independence, liberty, sovereignty, or autonomy. That’s my inner Libertarian, choosing those. If your sensibilities run a bit more to the social side, you may prefer words like actualization or fulfillment. Point is, the Big Boys aren’t in charge anymore. You are. I am. We are.

There’s an economy that will grow around us. I think free software and open-source practices (see various books and essays by Richard M. Stallman and Eric S. Raymond) put tracks in the snow that point in the direction we’re heading, but the phenomenon is bigger than that.

It’s also bigger than Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and IBM and Sun and Red Hat and Apple and the rest of the companies people (especially the media) look to for Leadership. For all the good those companies do in the world, the power shift is underway and is as certain as tomorrow’s dawn. The Big Boys will need to take advantage of it. We’ll need them to, as well.

This power shift is what I’d like to put in front of people’s attention when they come to Syndicate next week, or when they follow the proceedings in blogs and other reports.

Now more than ever, power is personal. Companies large and small will succeed by taking advantage of that fact. And by watching developments that aren’t just coming from The Usual Suspects. Including the Usual Economic Theories.

For example, not everything in an economy is about exchange, or the value chain, or about trade-offs of this for that. Many values come out of effort and care made without expectation of return. Consider your love for your parents, spouses, children, friends, and good work. Consider what you give and still get to keep. Consider debts erased by forgiveness. Consider how knowledge grows without its loss by anyone else.

Sayo Ajiboye, the Nigerian minister who so blew my mind in conversations we had on a plane nearly five years ago (Google them up if you like), taught me that markets are relationships, and not just conversations. Relationships, he said, are not just about exchange. They cannot be reduced to transactions. If you try, you demean the relationships themselves.

Also, in spite of the economic framings of our talk about morality and justice (owing favors, paying for crimes, just desserts), there is a deeper moral system that cannot be understood in terms of exchange. In fact, when you bring up exchange, you miss the whole thing. (Many great teachers have tried in futility to make this point, and I’m probably not doing any better.) Whatever it is, its results are positive. Growth in one place is not matched by shrinking in another. Value in both systems is created. But in the latter one, the purpose is not always, or exclusively, exchange, or profit. At least not from the activity itself. There are because effects at work. And we’re only beginning to understand them, much less practice them in new ways.

Toward that end, some questions…

Where did the Static Web, much less the Live Web, come from? What is it for? What are we doing with it? Whatever the answers, nothing was exchanged for them. (No, not even the record industry, the losses of which owe to their own unwillingness to take advantage of new opportunities opened by the Net.)

Nor was anything exchanged for Linux, which has grown enormously.

As Greg Kroah-Hartman said recently on the Linux-Elitists list,

Remember, Linux is a species, and we aren’t fighting anyone here, we are merely evolving around everyone else, until they aren’t left standing because the whole ecosystem changed without them realizing it.

Yes, we have living ends.

ESC

December 2, 2022 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

VRM Day had an extraordinary outcome this time: a movement to end surveillance capitalism.

The movement began with a talk by Roger McNamee titled Saving us from Big Tech: the Gen Z Solutio n. It was the latest in the Ostrom Workshop‘s Beyond the Web salon series, which on this occasion took place live and in person simultaneously in the Computer History Museum‘s Boole room and on the Web via Owl and Zoom, through the Workshop at Indiana University, where people also participated in a room and virtually. You can see the first hour of the talk here.

The conversation with Roger was super-energized, continued well past the scheduled hour, and onward through breakout sessions on each of the three days that followed at the Museum during IIW, and since then on Signal and Zoom. The conversation informally called itself “Roger and We,” and it vectored toward what it says on the t-shirt design above, drawn on a whiteboard during the third of the IIW sessions: End Surveillance Capitalism or ESC. (Also implying ESCape). One of us at the session created this graphic—

—and used it to create this t-shirt at Zazzle.com:

He’s bought a number of them, so far, because when he wore the first to Thanksgiving dinner, other people there also wanted one. In the spirit of freedom and openness, please feel free to use the same graphic (which, if you drag it off, is quite large ), or something like it, to make one or more of your own. Or run with it any way you please. Movements work that way.

This is where I pause and thank Shoshana Zuboff for making surveillance capitalism a full-sized Thing. Also to Brett Frishcmann and Evan Sellinger for explaining what it does to all of us, personally.

Where this goes is up to the group, which is small, growing, and gathering weekly in virtual space while corresponding asynchronously as well. It’s still small but growing.

To succeed, its fire needs to be so large and hot that profiting by tracking people will fail because neither people nor regulators will put up with it. It is also sobering to know that similar efforts to end surveillance capitalism have faltered in the past (which is still now), in spite of the simple fact that spying on people without their clear invitation (not mere “consent”) or a court order is wrong on its face, regardless of the purposes to which that spying is put.

We talked about lots of other stuff during VRM Day, of course. For example, Don Marti led a session on the W3C’s Private Advertising Technology Community Group, which he encouraged everyone in the room to join. (Please do.)

But the main outcome was ESC.

Now, some background for those not familiar with ProjectVRM.

From its start at the Berkman Klein Center in 2006, ProjectVRM has had (says here) “the immodest ambition of turning business on its head — for its own good, and for everyone else’s as well.” Perhaps ESC will be the thing to do that, after sixteen years of encouraging countless other efforts, some of which are listed here. (There is no easy way to keep up with all of them.)

If you’re interested in joining this cabal, write to me (the email is doc @ my last name dot com). You can also follow along on the ProjectVRM mailing list.

Toward better buy ways

August 23, 2022 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

For sixteen years, ProjectVRM has encouraged the development of tools and services that solve business problems from the customer side. This work is toward testing a theory: that free customers are more valuable—to themselves and to the businesses they engage—than captive ones. That theory can only be tested when tools for doing that are in place.

We already have some of those tools. Our big four in the digital world are the browser, the phone, email, and texting. In the analog offline world, our best model is cash. From The Cash Model of Customer Experience:

Here’s the handy thing about cash: it gives customers scale. It does that by working the same way for everybody, everywhere it’s accepted. It’s also anonymous by nature, meaning it carries no personal identifiers. Recording what happens with it is also optional, because using it doesn’t require an entry in a ledger (as happens with cryptocurrencies). Cash has also been working this way for thousands of years. But we almost never talk about our “experience” with cash, because we don’t need to.

The problem with our four personal digital tools—browser, phone, email and texting—is that they are not fully ours. So our agency is at best compromised. Specifically,

The most popular browsers are also agents of Apple, Google, Microsoft, plus countless thousands of third parties inserting cookies and other tracking instruments into our devices.
Our phones are not just ours. They are corporate tentacles of Apple and Google, lined with countless personal data suction cups from unknown surveillance systems. (For more on this, see Apple vs (or plus) Adtech, Part I and Part II.)
Apple and Google together supply 87% of all email software and services. Apple promises privacy, while Google makes a business out of knowing the contents of your messages, plus every other Google-provided or -involved piece of software reveals to the company about your life. As for how well Apple delivers on its privacy promises, look up apple+compromised+privacy.
The original messaging service for phones, SMS, is owned and run by phone companies. Other major messaging, texting and chat services are run entirely by private companies.
Among common Internet activities, only email and browsing are based on open and simple standards. The main ones are SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 for email, and HTTP/S for browsing. Those share the Internet’s three NEA virtues: Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them, and Anybody can improve them.

This is important: If a product or service mostly works for some company, it’s not yours. You are a user or a consumer. You are not a customer; nor are you operating with full agency in a truly free market. So, while it is obvious that all of us are made more valuable to business, and to ourselves, because we use browsers, phones, email, and messaging, we can’t say that we are free while we do.

But the Internet is still young: dating in its current form—supportive of e-commerce—since 30 April 1995, when the NSFNET (one of the Internet’s backbones) was decommissioned, and its policy forbidding commercial traffic on its pipes no longer stood in the way. The Net will also be with us for dozens or hundreds of decades to come, with its base protocol, TCP/IP, continuing to support freedom for every node on it.

More importantly, there are many business problems best or only solved from the customer side. Here is a list:

Identity. Logins and passwords are burdensome leftovers from the last millennium. There should be (and already are) better ways to identify ourselves by revealing to others only what we need them to know. Working on this challenge is the SSI—Self-Sovereign Identity—movement. (Which also goes by many other names. The latest is Web5.) The solution here for individuals is tools of their own that scale. Note that there is a LOT happening here. One good way keep up with it is in the Identisphere newsletter. You can also participate by attending the twice-yearly Internet Identity Workshop, which has been going strong since 2005.
Subscriptions. Nearly all subscriptions are pains in the butt. “Deals” can be deceiving, full of conditions and changes that come without warning. New customers often get better deals than loyal customers. And there are no standard ways for customers to keep track of when subscriptions run out, need renewal, or change. The only way this can be normalized is from the customers’ side.
Terms and conditions. In the world today, nearly all of these are ones that companies proffer; and we have little or no choice about agreeing to them. Worse, in nearly all cases, the record of agreement is on the company’s side. Oh, and since the GDPR came along in Europe and the CCPA in California, entering a website has turned into an ordeal typically requiring “consent” to privacy violations the laws were meant to stop. Or worse, agreeing that a site or a service provider spying on us is a “legitimate interest.” The solution here is terms individuals can proffer and organizations can agree to. The first of these is #NoStalking, and allows a publisher to do all the advertising they want, so long as it’s not based on tracking people. Think of it as the opposite of an ad blocker. (Customer Commons is also involved in the IEEE’s P7012 Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms.
Payments. For demand and supply to be truly balanced, and for customers to operate at full agency in an open marketplace (which the Internet was designed to support), customers should have their own pricing gun: a way to signal—and actually pay willing sellers—as much as they like, however, they like, for whatever they like, on their own terms. There is already a design for that, called EmanciPay. Its promise for the music industry alone is enormous.
Intentcasting. Advertising is all guesswork, which involves massive waste. But what if customers could safely and securely advertise what they want, and only to qualified and ready sellers? This is called intentcasting, and to some degree, it already exists. Toward this, the Intention Byway is a core focus of Customer Commons. (Also see a list of intentcasting providers on the ProjectVRM Development Work list.)
Shopping. Why can’t you have your own shopping cart—that you can take from store to store? Because we haven’t invented one yet. But we can. And when we do, all sellers are likely to enjoy more sales than they get with the current system of all-silo’d carts.
Internet of Things. We don’t have this yet. Instead, we have the Apple of things, the Amazon of things, the Google of things, the Samsung of things, the Sonos of things, and so on, each silo’d in separate systems we don’t control. Things we own on the Internet should be our things. We should be able to control them, as independent operators, as we do with our computers and mobile devices. (Also, by the way, things don’t need to be intelligent or connected to belong to the Internet for us to control what’s known about them. They can be, or have, picos.)
Loyalty. All loyalty programs are gimmicks, and coercive. True loyalty is worth far more to companies than the coerced kind, and only customers are in a position to truly and fully express it. We should have our own loyalty programs, to which companies are members, rather than the reverse.
Privacy. We’ve had privacy tech in the physical world since the inventions of clothing, shelter, locks, doors, shades, shutters, and other ways to limit what others can see or hear—and to signal to others what’s okay and what’s not. Instead, all we have are unenforced promises by others not to watch our naked selves, or to report what they see to others. Or worse, coerced urgings to “accept” spying on us and distributing harvested information about us to parties unknown, with no record of what we’ve agreed to.
Customer service. There are no standard ways for customers and companies to enjoy relationships, with useful data flowing both ways, and for help to come when it’s needed. Instead, every company does it differently, in its own silo’d system. For more on this, see # 12 below.
Regulatory compliance. Especially around privacy. Because really, all the GDPR and the CCPA want is for companies to stop spying on people. Without any privacy tech on the individual’s side, however, responsibility for everyone’s privacy is entirely a corporate burden. This is unfair to people and companies alike, as well as insane—because it can’t work. (Worse, nearly all B2B “compliance” solutions only solve the felt need by companies to obey the letter of a law while ignoring its spirit. But if people have their own ways to signal their privacy requirements and expectations (as they do with clothing and shelter in the natural world), life gets a lot easier for everybody, because there’s something there to respect. We don’t have that yet online, but it shouldn’t be hard. For more on this, see Privacy is Personal and our own Privacy Manifesto.
Real relationships: ones in which both parties actually care about and help each other, and good market intelligence flows both ways. Marketing by itself can’t do it. All you get is the sound of one hand slapping. (Or, more typically, pleasuring itself with mountains of data and fanciful maths first described in Darrell Huff’s How to Lie With Statistics, written in 1954). Sales departments can’t do it either, because their job is done once the relationship is established. CRM can’t do it without a VRM hand to shake on the customer’s side. From What Makes a Good Customer: “Consider the fact that a customer’s experience with a product or service is far more rich, persistent and informative than is the company’s experience selling those things, or learning about their use only through customer service calls (or even through pre-installed surveillance systems such as those which for years now have been coming in new cars). The curb weight of customer intelligence (knowledge, know-how, experience) with a company’s products and services far outweighs whatever the company can know or guess at. So, what if that intelligence were to be made available by the customer, independently, and in standard ways that work at scale across many or all of the companies the customer deals with?”
Any-to-any/many-to-many business: a market environment where anybody can easily do business with anybody else, mostly free of centralizers or controlling intermediaries (with due respect for inevitable tendencies toward federation). There is some movement in this direction around what’s being called Web3.
Life management platforms. KuppingerCole has been writing and thinking about these since not long after they gave ProjectVRM an award for its work, way back in 2007. These have gone by many labels: personal data clouds, vaults, dashboards, cockpits, lockers, and other ways of characterizing personal control of one’s life where it meets and interacts with the digital world. The personal data that matters in these is the kind that matters in one’s life: health (e.g. HIEofOne), finances, property, subscriptions, contacts, calendar, creative works, and so on, including personal archives for all of it. Social data out in the world also matters, but is not the place to start, because that data is less important than the kinds of personal data listed above—most of which has no business being sold or given away for goodies from marketers. (See We can do better than selling our data.)

All of these, however, are ocean-boiling ideas. In other words, not easy, especially without what the military calls “robust funding.” So our strategies are best aimed toward what are called “blue” rather than “red” (blood filled) oceans. One of those is the Byway (or “buyway”) project by Customer Commons, in Bloomington, Indiana. An excerpt:

There are three parts to the Byway project as it now stands (in July 2022): an online community (Small Town/mastodon), a matcher tool (Intently), and a local e-commerce “buyway.” (For more on that one, download the slide deck presented by Doc and Joyce at The Mill in November 2021. Or download this earlier and shorter one.)

We also see the Byway as complementary to, rather than competitive with, developments with similar and overlapping ambitions, such as SSI, DIDcomm, picos, JLINC, Digital Homesteading / Dazzle and many others.

Joyce and I, both founders and board members of Customer Commons, are heading up to DWeb Camp in a few minutes, and plan to make progress there on Byway development. I’ll report here on progress.

[Later…] DWeb Camp was a great success for us. We are now in planning conversations with developers and others. Stay tuned for more on that.

Toward a lexicon for advertising in both directions

June 9, 2022 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

We need a lexicon for the different ways buyers and sellers express their intentions to each other. Or, one might say, advertise.

On the demand side (⊂) we have what in ProjectVRM we’ve called intentcasting and (earlier) personal RFP. Scott Adams calls it broadcast shopping and John Hagel and David Siegel both (in books by that title) call it pull.

On the sell side (⊃) I can list at least six kinds of advertising alone that desperately need distinctive labels. To pull them apart, these are:

Brand advertising. This kind is aimed at populations. All of it is contextual, meaning placed in media, TV or radio programs, or publications, that appeal broadly or narrowly to a categorized audience. None of it is tracking-based, and none of it is personal. Little of it wants a direct response. It simply means to impress. This is also the form of advertising that burned every brand you can name into your brain. In fact the word brand itself was borrowed from the cattle industry by Procter & Gamble in the 1930s, when it also funded the golden age of radio. Today it is also what sponsors all of sports broadcasting and pays most sports stars their massive salaries.
Search advertising. This is what shows up with search results. There are two very different kinds here:
1. Context-based. Not based on tracking. This is what DuckDuckGo does.
2. Context+tracking based. This is what Google and Bing do.
Tracking-based advertising. I’ve called this adtech. Cory Doctorow calls it ad-tech. Others call it ad tech. Some euphemize it as behavioral, relevant, interest-based, or personalized. Shoshana Zuboff says all of them are based on surveillance, which they are. So many critics speak of it as surveillance-based advertising.
Advertising that’s both contextual and personal—but only in the sense that a highly characterized individual falls within a group, or a collection of overlapping groups, chosen by the advertiser. These are Facebook’s Core, Custom and Look-Alike audiences. Talk to Facebook and they’ll tell you these ads are not meant to be personal, though you should not be surprised to see ads for shoes when you have made clear to Facebook’s trackers (on the site, the apps, and wherever the company’s tentacles reach) that you might be in the market for shoes. Still, since Facebook characterizes every face in its audience in almost countless ways, it’s easy to call this form of advertising tracking-based.
Interactive advertising. Vaguely defined by Wikipedia here, and sometimes called conversational advertising, the purpose is to get an interactive response from people. The expression is not much used today, even though the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is the leading trade association in the tracking-based advertising field and its primary proponent.
Native advertising, also called sponsored content, is advertising made to look like ordinary editorial material.

The list is actually much longer. But the distinction that matters is between advertising that is tracking-based and the advertising that is not. As I put it in Brands need to fire adtech,

Let’s be clear about all the differences between adtech and real advertising. It’s adtech that spies on people and violates their privacy. It’s adtech that’s full of fraud and a vector for malware. It’s adtech that incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism. It’s adtech that gives fake news a business model, because fake news is easier to produce than the real kind, and adtech will pay anybody a bounty for hauling in eyeballs.

Real advertising doesn’t do any of those things, because it’s not personal. It is aimed at populations selected by the media they choose to watch, listen to or read. To reach those people with real ads, you buy space or time on those media. You sponsor those media because those media also have brand value.

With real advertising, you have brands supporting brands.

Brands can’t sponsor media through adtech because adtech isn’t built for that. On the contrary, adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses, because it cares about eyeballs more than media.

Adtech is magic in this literal sense: it’s all about misdirection. You think you’re getting one thing while you’re really getting another. It’s why brands think they’re placing ads in media, while the systems they hire chase eyeballs. Since adtech systems are automated and biased toward finding the cheapest ways to hit sought-after eyeballs with ads, some ads show up on unsavory sites. And, let’s face it, even good eyeballs go to bad places.

This is why the media, the UK government, the brands, and even Google are all shocked. They all think adtech is advertising. Which makes sense: it looks like advertising and gets called advertising. But it is profoundly different in almost every other respect. I explain those differences in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff:

…advertising today is also digital. That fact makes advertising much more data-driven, tracking-based and personal. Nearly all the buzz and science in advertising today flies around the data-driven, tracking-based stuff generally called adtech. This form of digital advertising has turned into a massive industry, driven by an assumption that the best advertising is also the most targeted, the most real-time, the most data-driven, the most personal — and that old-fashioned brand advertising is hopelessly retro.

In terms of actual value to the marketplace, however, the old-fashioned stuff is wheat and the new-fashioned stuff is chaff. In fact, the chaff was only grafted on recently.

See, adtech did not spring from the loins of Madison Avenue. Instead its direct ancestor is what’s called direct response marketing. Before that, it was called direct mail, or junk mail. In metrics, methods and manners, it is little different from its closest relative, spam.

Direct response marketing has always wanted to get personal, has always been data-driven, has never attracted the creative talent for which Madison Avenue has been rightly famous. Look up best ads of all time and you’ll find nothing but wheat. No direct response or adtech postings, mailings or ad placements on phones or websites.

Yes, brand advertising has always been data-driven too, but the data that mattered was how many people were exposed to an ad, not how many clicked on one — or whether you, personally, did anything.

And yes, a lot of brand advertising is annoying. But at least we know it pays for the TV programs we watch and the publications we read. Wheat-producing advertisers are called “sponsors” for a reason.

So how did direct response marketing get to be called advertising ? By looking the same. Online it’s hard to tell the difference between a wheat ad and a chaff one.

Remember the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” (Or the remake by the same name?) Same thing here. Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.

This whole problem wouldn’t exist if the alien replica wasn’t chasing spied-on eyeballs, and if advertisers still sponsored desirable media the old-fashioned way.

Bonus link.

I wrote that in 2017. The GDPR became enforceable in 2018 and the CCPA in 2020. Today more laws and regulations are being instituted to fight tracking-based advertising, yet the whole advertising industry remains drunk on digital, deeply corrupt and delusional, and growing like a Stage IV cancer.

We live digital lives now, and most of the advertising we see and hear is on or through glowing digital rectangles. Most of those are personal as well. So, naturally, most advertising on those media is personal—or wishes it was. Regulations that require “consent” for the tracking that personalization requires do not make the practice less hostile to personal privacy. They just make the whole mess easier to rationalize.

So I’m trying to do two things here.

One is to make clearer the distinctions between real advertising and direct marketing.

The other is to suggest that better signaling from demand to supply, starting with intentcasting, may serve as chemo for the cancer that adtech has become. It will do that by simply making clear to sellers what buyers actually want and don’t want.

Democracy vs. Surveillance

April 4, 2022 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

That’s the choice. We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.

That’s what Shoshana Zuboff says, in The Coup We Are Not Talking About.

What we have now—and have fallen into, largely unawares—is a surveillance society. We do not have democracies of the kind that the U.S. founders would want us to have. We do not even have the democracies we had, flawed as they all were, prior to our digital age. Specifically, Shoshana says, our lives are now governed by

surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.

In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.

Shoshana is the one who introduced surveillance capitalism into the lexicons of economics, social studies, policy, and other fields. Her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, 2019) is an international bestseller now in 23 languages, and essential reading for everyone involved in this fight.

And she will be with us to talk about this coup, and how to fight it, at the Ostrom Workshop’s Beyond the Web Salon one week from today, at 2pm Eastern Time. It’s free and you can get on at that link.

If you’re already fighting this coup (which we’ve been doing, in our own many different ways, in ProjectVRM), or if your own life is affected in any way by the struggle to break free of creepy systems that trash our privacy and nudge us into warring tribes, this is a can’t-miss event. See you there.

The Rise of Robot Retail

March 1, 2022 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

end of personal dealings
From Here Comes the Full Amazonification of Whole Foods, by Cecelia Kang (@CeceliaKang) in The New York Times:

…In less than a minute, I scanned both hands on a kiosk and linked them to my Amazon account. Then I hovered my right palm over the turnstile reader to enter the nation’s most technologically sophisticated grocery store…

Amazon designed my local grocer to be almost completely run by tracking and robotic tools for the first time.

The technology, known as Just Walk Out, consists of hundreds of cameras with a god’s-eye view of customers. Sensors are placed under each apple, carton of oatmeal and boule of multigrain bread. Behind the scenes, deep-learning software analyzes the shopping activity to detect patterns and increase the accuracy of its charges.

The technology is comparable to what’s in driverless cars. It identifies when we lift a product from a shelf, freezer or produce bin; automatically itemizes the goods; and charges us when we leave the store. Anyone with an Amazon account, not just Prime members, can shop this way and skip a cash register since the bill shows up in our Amazon account.

And this is just Amazon. Soon it will be every major vendor of everything, most likely with Amazon as the alpha sphincter among all the chokepoints controlled by robotic intermediaries between first sources and final customers—with all of them customizing your choices, your prices, and whatever else it takes to engineer demand in the marketplace—algorithmically, robotically, and most of all, personally.

Some of us will like it, because it’ll be smooth, easy and relatively cheap. It will also subordinate us utterly to machines. Or perhaps udderly, because we will be calves raised to suckle on the teats of retail’s robot cows.

This system can’t be fixed from within. Nor can it be fixed by regulation, though some of that might help. It can only be obsolesced by customers who bring more to the market’s table than cash, credit, appetites and acquiescence to systematic training.

What more?

Start with information. What do we actually want (including, crucially, to not be bothered by hype or manipulated by surveillance systems)?

Add intelligence. What do we know about products, markets, needs, and how things actually work than roboticized systems can begin to guess at?

Then add values, such as freedom, choice, agency, care for others, and the ability to collectivize in constructive and helpful ways on our own.

Then add tech. But this has to be our tech: customertech that we bring to market as independent, sovereign and capable human beings. Not just as “users” of others’ systems, or consumers (which Jerry Michalski calls “gullets with wallets and eyeballs”) of whatever producers want to feed us.

Time for solutions. Here is a list of fourteen market problems that can only be solved from the customers’ side.

And yes, we do need help from the sellers’ side. But not with promises to make their systems more “customer centric.” (We’ve been flagging that as a fail since 2008.) We need CRM that welcomes VRM. B2C that welcomes Me2B.

And money. Our startups and nonprofits have done an amazing job of keeping the VRM and Me2B embers burning. But they could do a lot more with some gas on those things.

The impossible fix

February 25, 2022 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

choice of captors

Imagine a world in which there are only mainframes, and all individuals have are mainframe terminals. Then imagine that personal rights (e.g. to privacy) are violated in many ways by the mainframes and their operators. Then imagine that these violations have attracted regulations meant to protect the rights of mainframe terminal users—and that those regulations have made things worse for users, because the violations haven’t stopped, and users now have to hurdle “consent” notices, usually by clicking “accept” to the mainframe’s continued privacy violations.

Of course, you don’t need to imagine any of that, because this is the world we are in today. Our browsers and apps are terminals of mainframes operated by the sites and services of the digital world. And no regulations will give us the tools we need to create and sustain our independence and freedom, and to create a better economy than the one we have, in which freedom is “your choice of captor.”

This status quo will persist as long as our work is confined to fixing it. Because it can’t be fixed. By design.

What should our work be? Start here: We need customertech. Simple as that. Then read back through this blog.

Image by Hugh McLeod.