Category: Business (Page 1 of 3)

Shooting for the World

April 7, 2026 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment

There is no organisation on Earth with a more audacious purpose than this one:

From Customer Commons’ current index page.

This isn’t shooting for the Moon. It’s shooting for the whole world of business.

What Customer Commons wants to restore isn’t just what was lost when the Internet got real. (For example, privacy.) Customer Commons also wants to restore personal agency that was lost when Industry won the Industrial Revolution. That’s when jobs replaced work, labour replaced teams, and customers became consumers.

That last shift, Jerry Michalski explains, was from human beings to “gullets with wallets and eyeballs.” After that shift, freedom of contract in marketplaces was enjoyed only by businesses. Not by gullets.

Customer Commons was created to change that. It was spun out of ProjectVRM as a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2013, shortly after Harvard Business Review Press published The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. That book specifically gave Customer Commons the job of doing for personal privacy terms what Creative Commons did for personal copyright. And to do it by making privacy a contract between customers and businesses, rather than a “consent” to whatever the hell businesses wanted to shove down our gullets. (For example, with interruptive cookie “choices” that really aren’t and leave no audit trail.)

Work on that began in 2017, when the IEEE approached Customer Commons with an offer to host development of a standard for machine-readable personal privacy terms. That standard, officially called IEEE 7012-2025, and nicknamed MyTerms, was published this past January, concluding nine years of work.

Now what?

MyTerms is a great start toward completing Customer Commons’ audacious mission. Here are some goals we will achieve when that mission is accomplished:

VRM will be a business category, welcomed and engaged by CRM and CX functions on the sell sides of markets.
We will have proof that free customers are worth more than captive ones—to companies they engage, to whole markets, and to themselves. This was ProjectVRM’s original mission in 2006.
The intention economy will materialize when voluntary signaling from customers to companies outperforms and obsolesces surveillance as the primary means for companies to obtain data about customers.

MyTerms is required for all three, because a contract is the only way for companies to commit to respecting personal privacy, and MyTerms is the standard for doing that.

So the first challenge is to make Customer Commons viable as the first mover in establishing MyTerms in the world.

The second challenge is to make Customer Commons substantial enough to lead work toward all three of the challenges listed above. Customer Commons won’t be the only entity working on those. In the U.S., Consumer Reports has already stepped forward as a natural ally. MyData Global is partnering with Customer Commons in standing up the MyTerms Alliance, which is HQ’d in Europe. There are many other potential partners, such as Mozilla and the EFF.

There is development work on MyTerms already. You can learn more about those at VRM Day, IIW, and AIW, which run M-F through the last week of this month (April 27 to May 1) at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

Here are other ideas that have been floated in the past for Customer Commons:

Customers Union. Being for customers what the AARP is for retired people. Only bigger, because it would include everybody who is a customer of anything. This isn’t far from Consumers Union, which begat Consumer Reports, and is now its advocacy group.
CustomerCon. A trade show with company booths run by customers, to which companies are invited as guests. Key feature: no complaining. Guest companies are treated only to positive and constructive ideas. HT to Tim Hwang for helping come up with that one.
Omie. A tablet with apps free of Google and Apple. HT to Iain Henderson.
The ByWay, a new path for local e-commerce.
The Free Customer Award. This would be given to companies that value free customers and do nothing to entrap them. The canonical example described in The Intention Economy is Trader Joe’s. But there are others. In-N-Out Burger, for example.

I share those only to give you an idea of how big and influential Customer Commons might be, and how it’s possible to have fun making a new and better economy happen.

We’re not at Square One. Customer Commons is an extant nonprofit, has an energetic board, and a huge accomplishment by getting MyTerms finished. What it needs now is to build out a working organisation. How can we do that?

Let’s look at how Creative Commons got rolling in 2002 and kept moving after that. Here is what I’ve found in diggings so far—

The History of Creative Commons in Wired (December 2011) says, “An hour after the court’s decision was announced, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation presented Creative Commons with $1,000,000 to launch the movement.” The case was Eldred v. Ashcroft.
In 2008, there was a successful funding challenge from Hewlett: “The 5×5 challenge, issued in honor of Creative Commons’ fifth birthday, called for the organization to find five funders to each promise five years of support at $500,000 per year. In addition to the Hewlett Foundation, Creative Commons received pledges of $500,000 in yearly support for five years from Omidyar Network, as well as from an anonymous European trust. Google has pledged $300,000 in support renewable for five years, while Mozilla and Red Hat have each pledged to contribute $100,000 annually for five years. The final block of support comes from the board of Creative Commons, which has promised to personally raise or contribute $500,000 to the organization annually for five years.”(Source: Creative Commons Newsletter No.5, February 2008)
A Creative Commons announcement in April 2008 said, “We’re thrilled about a major new grant of $4 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, consisting of $2.5 million to provide general support to Creative Commons over five years, as well as $1.5 million to support ccLearn.”
A MacArthur grant search reports a total of $3,225,000 provided between 2002 and 2022:
- $750,000 in 2005 to support general operations for three years
- $500,000 in 2007 to support Science Commons for two years
- $700,000 in2008 to support general operations and an endowment campaign for three years
- $25,000 in 2015 to provide travel and other support for attendees of the Creative Commons Global Summit in South Korea, for two months. The meeting was also funded in part by the Institute for Museu m and Library Services and th e Gates Foundation, and by the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism ($25,000), Mozilla ($10,000), and the Wikimedia Foundation ($10,000).
- $50,000 in 2022 to support dedicated programming on open journalism issues at the 2023 Global Summit, “which is an annual event that brings together educators, artists, technologists, legal experts, and activists to promote the power of open licensing and global access.”

So, by inference, the phases were roughly this:

Launch (2001–2002) $1M of initial funding
Early build-out (2002–2004) +$1–3M with additional foundation support
Continuous operations (2005 onward) at ~$1–3M/year

That gives us an idea of what we need to raise. (Given inflation, multiply those numbers by 1.5x.)

I’ll tell you more when I find out more. Meanwhile, watch this space. Better yet, jump in and help out.

Four Roads to The Intention Economy

May 16, 2025 / Doc Searls / 6 Comments

Thirteen years after The Intention Economy was published by Harvard Business Review Press, there are now four clear paths toward making it come true.

IEEE P7012, aka MyTerms. This will make individuals first parties in their agreements with companies, completely flipping the status quo that has been with us since industry won the Industrial Revolution and manifests today in those insincere and annoying cookie notices that interrupt your experience every time you visit a new website or open a new app. MyTerms makes each of us first parties in agreements with sites and services, and in full charge of personal privacy online.
The First Person Project, or FPP (website pending). With help on the buy side from Customer Commons and on the sell side by Ayra, we can finally replace “show your ID” with verifiable credentials presented on an as-needed basis by independent and self-sovereign individuals operating inside their own webs of trust.
Visa Intelligent Commerce, which will make intentcasting happen in a big way. It will also elevate the roles of Inrupt and the open-source Solid Project.
Personal AI. This is AI that is as much yours as your shoes, your bike, and your PC. Personal, not personalized.

To explain how these will work together, start here:

Not long after The Intention Economy came out in May, 2012, Robert Thomson, Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal, wanted the book’s opening chapter to serve as the cover essay for the Marketplace section of an upcoming issue. Harvard Business Review Press didn’t like that idea, so I wrote an original piece based on one idea in the book: that shoppers will soon be able to tell the market what they’re looking for, in safe, secure and anonymous ways—a kind of advertising in reverse that the book called “personal RFPs” and has since come to be called “intentcasting.” This became The Customer as a God: The image above was the whole cover of the Marketplace section on Monday, July 23, 2012. The essay opened with these prophetic words: “It’s a Saturday morning in 2022…”

It is now a Friday morning in 2025, and that godly future for customers is still not here. Yes, we have more market power than in 2012, but we are digital serfs whose powers are limited to those granted by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other feudal overlords. This system is a free market only to the degree that you can choose your captor. This has led to—

The IONBA (Internet Of Notning But Accounts) is based on a premise: that the best customers are captive ones. In this relic of the industrial age, customers are captive to every entity that requires logins and passwords. Customers also have no ways of their own to globally control what data is collected about them, or how. Or to limit how that data is used. This is why our digital lives are infected by privacy-killing data-collection viruses living inside our computers, phones, TVs, and cars.

If you didn’t know about those last two, dig:

Consumer Reports says “All smart TVs—from Samsung, LG, you name it—collect personal data.” They also come with lame “privacy” controls, typically buried deep in a settings menu. (Good luck exhuming them. The ones in our TCL and Samsung TVs have all but disappeared.)
Mozilla calls new cars “the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy.” There is also nothing you can do to stop your car from reporting on everything your car does—and everything you do, including sexual ativity—to the carmaker, insurance companies, law enforcement, and who knows who else. This data goes out through your car’s cell phone, misleadingly called a telematics control unit. The antenna is hidden in the shark fin on your car’s roof or in an outside mirror.

Businesses are also starting to lose faith in surveillance, for at least eight reasons:

People hate it.
They also fight it. By 2015 ad blocking and tracking protection were the biggest boycott in world history.
It tarnishes brands.
Ad fraud is a gigantic problem, and built into the system.
It commits Chrysoogocide (killing golden geese, most notably publishers). Bonus link.
Regulatory pressure against it is getting bigger all the time.
Advertisers are finally remembering that brands are made by ads aimed at populations, while personalized ads are just digital junk mail.
Customers are using AI tools for guidance toward a final purchase, bypassing marketing schemes to bias purchasing decisions along the way. For more on that, see Tom Fishburne’s cartoon, and Bain’s report about it.

So our four roads to The Intention Economy start with the final failings of the systems built to prevent it. Now let’s look at those roads.

1—IEEE P7012 “MyTerms”

MyTerms, the most important standard in development today, will be a keystone service of Customer Commons, the nonprofit spinoff of ProjectVRM. It will do for contract what Creative Commons did for copyright: give individuals a new form of control. With MyTerms, agreements between customers and companies will be far more genuine mutual, and open to new forms of innovation not based on the kind of corporate control that typifies the IONBA. For example, it can open Visa Intelligent Commerce to conversations and relationships that go far past transaction. Take for example Market intelligence that flows both ways. While this has been thinkable for a decade or more (that last link is from 2016), it’s far more do-able when customers and companies have real relationships based on equal power and mutual interests. These are best framed up on agreements that start on the customer’s side, and give customers scale across all the companies with which they have genuine relationships.

2—First Person Project (FPP)

To me, FPP begins with the vision “Big Davy” Sallis came up with while he was working for VISA Europe in 2012, and read the The Intention Economy. At the time, he wanted Visa to make VRM a real category, but assumed that would take too long. So he decided to create a VRM startup called Qredo. Joyce and I consulted Qredo until Davy died (far too young) in 2015. Qredo went into a different business, but a draft I created for Qredo’s original website survives, and it outlines much of what the FPP will make possible. That effort is led by Drummond Reed, another friend and collaborator of Davy’s and a participant in ProjectVRM from the start. Drummond says the FPP is inspired by Why We Need First Person Technologies on the Net, a post published here in 2014. That post begins,

We need first person technologies for the same reason we need first person voices: because there are some things only a person can say and do.

Only a person can use the pronouns “I,” “me,” “my” and “mine.” Likewise, only a person can use tools such as screwdrivers, eyeglasses and pencils. Those things are all first person technologies. They were invented for individual persons to use.

We use first person technologies the same unique ways we use our voices.

Among other things, the First Person Project will fix how identity works on the Internet. With FPI—First Person Identity—interactions with relying parties (the ones wanting “your ID”) don’t need your drivers license, passport, birth certificate, credit card, or account information. You just give them what’s required, on an as-needed basis, in the form of verifiable credentials. The credentials you provide can verify that you are a citizen of a country, licensed to drive, have a ticket to a game, or whatever. In other words, they do what Kim Cameron outlined in his Laws of Identity: disclose minimum information for constrained uses (Law 2) to justifiable parties (Law 3) under your control and consent (Law 1). The credential you present is called a DID: a Decentralized Identifier. No account is required.

Trust in FPI also expands from individual to community. Here is how Phil Windley explains it in Establishing First Person Digital Trust:

When Alice and Bob met at IIW, they didn’t rely on a platform to create their connection. They didn’t upload keys to a server or wait for some central authority to vouch for them. They exchanged DIDs, authenticated each other directly, and established a secure, private communication channel.

That moment wasn’t just a technical handshake—it was a statement of first-person identity. Alice told Bob, “This is who I am, on my terms.” Bob responded in kind. And when they each issued a verifiable relationship credential, they gave that relationship form: a mutual, portable, cryptographically signed artifact of trust. This is the essence of first-person identity—not something granted by an institution, but something expressed and constructed in the context of relationships. It’s identity as narrative, not authority; as connection, not classification.

And because these credentials are issued peer-to-peer, scoped to real interactions, and managed by personal agents, they resist commodification and exploitation. They are not profile pages or social graphs owned by a company to be monetized. They are artifacts of human connection, held and controlled by the people who made them. In this world, Alice and Bob aren’t just users—they’re participants.

This also expands outward into community, and webs of trust. You get personal agency plus community agency.

The FPP covers a lot more ground than identity alone, but that’s where it starts. Also, Customer Commons is a funding source for the FPP, and I’m involved there as well.

3—Visa Intelligent Commerce

The press release is Find and Buy with AI: Visa Unveils New Era of Commerce. Less blah is Enabling AI agents to buy securely and seamlessly. Here’s the opening copy.

Imagine a future where an AI agent can shop and buy for you. AI commerce — commerce powered by an AI agent — is going to transform the way consumers around the world shop.

Introducing Visa Intelligent Commerce, an initiative that will empower AI agents to deliver personalized and secure shopping experiences for consumers – at scale.

From browsing and selection to purchase and post-purchase management, this program will equip AI agents to seamlessly manage key phases of the shopping process.

Visa CEO Ryan McInerney says a lot more in a 1:22 talk at Visa Product Drop 2025. The most relevant part starts about 26 minutes in, with a demo starting at about 31:30. Please watch it. Much of what you see there owes to Inrupt and Solid, which Sir Tim Berners-Lee says were inspired by The Intention Economy. For more about where Inrupt and Solid fit in Visa Intelligent Commerce, see Standards for Agentic Commerce: Visa’s Bold Move and What It Means: Visa’s investment in safe Intelligent Commerce points to a future of standards-forward personal AI, by John Bruce, Inrupt’s CEO. John briefed Joyce and me over Zoom the other day. Very encouraging, with lots to develop on and talk about.

Derailing the Customer Journey

January 2, 2025 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

This came in the mail today:

Everything they list is something I don’t want to do. I’d rather just accumulate the miles. But I can’t, unless I choose one of the annoyances above, or book a flight in the next three months.

So my customer journey with American is now derailed.

There should be better ways for customers and companies to have journeys together.

Hmm… Does United have one?

Here’s a picture of my customer journey with United Airlines, as of today:

I’m also a lifetime member of the United Club, thanks to my wife’s wise decision in 1990 to get us both in on that short-lived deal.

Premier Platinum privileges include up to three checked bags, default seating in Economy Plus (more legroom than in the rest of Economy), Premium lines at the ticket counter and Security, and boarding in Group One. There are more privileged castes, but this one is a serious tie-breaker against other airlines. Also, in all our decades of flying with United, we have no bad stories to tell, and plenty of good ones.

But now we’re mostly based in Bloomington, Indiana, so Indianapolis (IND) is our main airport. (And it’s terrific. We recommend it highly.) It is also not a hub for any of the airlines. The airline with the most flights connecting to IND is American, and we’ve used them. I joined their frequent flier program, got their app, and started racking up miles with them too.

So here is one idea, for every airline: having respect for one’s established status with other airlines means something. Because that status (or those stati) are credentials: They say something about me as a potential passenger. It would be nice also if what I carry, as an independent customer, is a set of verifiable preferences—such as that I always prefer a window seat, never tow a rolling bag on board (I only have a backpack), and am willing to change seats so a family can sit together. Little things that might matter.

I bring all this up because fixing “loyalty” programs shouldn’t be left up only to the sellers of the world. They’ll all do their fixes differently, and they’ll remain deaf to good input that can only come from independent customers with helpful tools of their own.

Developing those solutions to the loyalty problem is one of our callings at ProjectVRM. I also know some that are in the works. Stay tuned. 🙂

On Intentcasting

August 28, 2024 / Doc Searls / 4 Comments

The cover page of the Weekend Review section of The Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2012

On July 9, 2012, not long after The Intention Economy came out, I got word from Gary Rosen of The Wall Street Journal that the paper’s publisher, Robert Thomson, loved the book and wanted “an excerpt/adaptation” from the book for the cover story of the WSJ’s Weekend Review section. The image above is the whole cover of that section, which appeared later that month.

In the article I described a new way to shop:

An “intentcast” goes out to the marketplace, revealing only what’s required to attract offers. No personal information is revealed, except to vendors with whom you already have a trusted relationship.

I also said that this form of shopping—

…can be made possible only by the full empowerment of individuals—that is, by making them both independent of controlling organizations and better able to engage with them. Work toward these goals is going on today, inside a new field called VRM, for vendor relationship management. VRM works on the demand side of the marketplace: for you, the customer, rather than for sellers and third parties on the supply side.

The scenario I described was set ten years out: in 2022, a future now two years in the past. In the meantime, many approaches to intentcasting have come and gone. The ones that have stayed are Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, Instacart, TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, and a few others. (Thumbtack participated in the early days of ProjectVRM.) We include them in our list of intentcasting services because they model at least some of what we’d like intentcasting to be. What they don’t model is the full empowerment of individuals as independent actors: ones whose intentions can scale across whole markets and many sellers:

Scale gives the customer single ways to deal with many companies. For example, she should be able to change her address or last name with every company she deals with in one move—or to send an intention-to-buy “intentcast” to a whole market.

Should we call the sum of it “i-commerce“? Just a thought.

Back to the Wall Street Journal article. It is clear to me now that The Customer as a God would have been a much better title for my book than The Intention Economy, which needs explaining and sounds too much like The Attention Economy, which was the title of the book that came out ten years earlier. (I’ve met people who have read that one and thought it was mine—or worse, called my book “The Attention Economy” and sent readers to the wrong one.)

Of course, calling customers gods is hyperbole: exaggeration for effect. VRM has always been about customers coming to companies as equals. The “revolution in personal empowerment” in the subhead of “The Customer as a God” is about equality, not supremacy. For more on that, see the eleven posts before this one that mention the R-button:

That symbol (or pair of symbols) is about two parties who attract each other (like two magnets) and engage as equals. It’s a symbol that only makes full sense in open markets where free customers prove more valuable than captive ones. Not markets where customers are mere “targets” to “acquire,” “capture,” “manage,” “control” or “lock in” as if they were slaves or cattle.

The stage of Internet growth called Web 2.0 was all about those forms of capture, control, and coerced dependency. We’re still in it. (What’s being called Web3 is, while “decentralized” (note: not distributed), it is also based on tokens and blockchain. ) Investment in customer independence rounds to nil.

And that’s probably the biggest reason intentcasting as we imagined it in the first place has not taken off. It is very hard, inside industrial-age business norms (which we still have) to see customers as equals, or as human beings who should be equipped to lead in the dance between buyers and sellers, or demand and supply, in truly open marketplaces. It’s still easier to see us as mere consumers (which Jerry Michalski calls “gullets with wallets and eyeballs”).

So, where is there hope?

How about AI? It’s at the late end of its craze stage, but still here to stay, and hot as ever:

Can AI provide the “revolution in personal empowerment” we’ve been looking for here since 2006? Can it prove our thesis—that free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves and to the marketplace?

Only if it’s personal.

If it is, then the market is a greenfield.

Some of us here are working at putting AI on both sides of intentcasting ceremonies. If you have, or know about, one or more of those approaches (or any intentcasting approaches), please share what you know, or what you’re got, in the comments below. And come to VRM Day on October 28. I’ll be putting up the invite for that shortly.

The Personal AI Greenfield

June 11, 2024 / Doc Searls / 11 Comments

What forms of pAI—personal AI—are Apple, Mozilla, Google, Meta, Microsoft and the rest not doing?

Let’s look at those first two because they’re at the top of the news LIFO buffer.

Apple Intelligence (“coming in beta this fall*“), announced yesterday, will help you with writing and creating images while giving you less lame answers from Siri. (Which they should re-name. Siri is Apple’s Clippy.) It “can draw on larger server-based models, running on Apple silicon, to handle more complex requests for you while protecting your privacy.” The “larger models” will be white-labeled ChatGPT, plus Apple’s own small language models (SLMs).

Mozilla, which got $400+ million a year from Google (for search in the Firefox browser) starting in 2020, announce on June 3 that they will be Building open, private AI with the Mozilla Builders Accelerator. Jive:

This program is designed to empower independent AI and machine learning engineers with the resources and support they need to thrive. It aims to cultivate a more innovative AI ecosystem, and it’s one of Mozilla’s key initiatives to make AI meaningfully impactful — alongside efforts like Mozilla.ai, the Responsible AI Challenge and the Rise25 Awards.

The Mozilla Builders Accelerator’s inaugural theme is local AI, which involves running AI models and applications directly on personal devices like laptops, smartphones, or edge devices rather than depending on cloud-based services…

We chose Local AI as the theme for the Accelerator’s first cohort because it aligns with our core values of privacy, user empowerment, and open source innovation. This method offers several benefits including:

Privacy: Data stays on the local device, minimizing exposure to potential breaches and misuse.

Agency: Users have greater control over their AI tools and data.

Cost-effectiveness: Reduces reliance on expensive cloud infrastructure, lowering costs for developers and users.

Reliability: Local processing ensures continuous operation even without internet connectivity.

Looks to me like both of these are Big AI writ small. It’s “local,” not personal. It’s made to serve your needs with what BigAI offers through APIs. It is still essentially AIaaS (AI as a Service), rather than truly personal AI (pAI): personalized more than personal.

That’s also what I see when I read between the lines at Mozilla’s AI job openings. Take platform engineer. This person will (among other things), “assist in managing and orchestrating workloads across multiple cloud providers.” That’s fine. I’m sure true pAIs will do that too. But most of pAI will be more personal than that. It will deal with the mundanities of your everyday life. Not with coughing up answers that can only come from AIaaSes.

The problem with personalizing AI giant offerings is that they are large language models (LLM) trained on everything that can be crawled on the Internet, plus who knows what else. Not on your truly personal stuff. This is why “prompt engineering” worthy of the noun is ” not for anybody:

Prompt engineering is crucial for deploying LLMs but is poorly understood mathematically. We formalize LLM systems as a class of discrete stochastic dynamical systems to explore prompt engineering through the lens of control theory. We investigate the reachable set of output token sequences $R_y(\mathbf x_0)$ for which there exists a control input sequence $\mathbf u$ for each $\mathbf y \in R_y(\mathbf x_0)$ that steers the LLM to output $\mathbf y$ from initial state sequence $\mathbf x_0$. We offer analytic analysis on the limitations on the controllability of self-attention in terms of reachable set, where we prove an upper bound on the reachable set of outputs $R_y(\mathbf x_0)$ as a function of the singular values of the parameter matrices. We present complementary empirical analysis on the controllability of a panel of LLMs, including Falcon-7b, Llama-7b, and Falcon-40b. Our results demonstrate a lower bound on the reachable set of outputs $R_y(\mathbf x_0)$ w.r.t. initial state sequences $\mathbf x_0$ sampled from the Wikitext dataset. We find that the correct next Wikitext token following sequence $\mathbf x_0$ is reachable over 97% of the time with prompts of $k\leq 10$ tokens. We also establish that the top 75 most likely next tokens, as estimated by the LLM itself, are reachable at least 85% of the time with prompts of $k\leq 10$ tokens. Intriguingly, short prompt sequences can dramatically alter the likelihood of specific outputs, even making the least likely tokens become the most likely ones. This control-centric analysis of LLMs demonstrates the significant and poorly understood role of input sequences in steering output probabilities, offering a foundational perspective for enhancing language model system capabilities.

But all that stuff applies mostly when we’re prompting a big LLM system.

What about using AI in our own lives, where the data that matters most are in our calendars, contacts, financial and health records, our travels, our correspondence (email, chat, whatever)? And how about all the location data we might get from our cars, phone apps, and phone companies? These should be much easier for a pAI to gather, examine, and help us do useful things. Caring about much less data also means a pAI will be less likely to give wrong (hallucinated) answers.

Today the mental frame almost everybody uses for AI is the Big kind, ingesting everything they can get their crawlers on, and munching all of it in giant compute farms. Those systems are great for lots of stuff, but they still don’t deal with personal data listed in the last paragraph.

Not yet, anyway.

Look at it this way. For each of us, there are three data pools:

The entire Net, which is what gets crawled by all the giant LLM operators, plus whatever else they can get their claws on.
One’s personal life, some of which is digitized in useful form (contacts, calendar, mail, stuff in folders inside PCs and attached drives).
Personal data that is in the hands of giants, but is rightfully ours. These include our driving record and driving practices (,recorded by our late model cars and snitched to insurance companies and others), our location data (kept and shared by car and phone carriers to the likes of Google and the feds), our TV viewing habits, (gathered by Google, Amazon, Roku, Apple, etc.).

The pAI greenfield is with the last two.

Tell us who is working on what there, preferably with open source, and not sitting on walled garden silicon.

[Later… ] Since readers told me I had small language models (SLMs) wrong in one of the paragraphs above, and I’m not sure I had them right, I rewrote them out of the piece. I invite readers to post comments to further correct and expand on the subject of pAIs and what they can do.

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.

Salon with Robin Chase

February 4, 2022 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

Robin Chase, co-founder and original CEO of Zipcar and author of Peers Inc: How People and Platforms are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism, will speak at the Ostrom Workshop s Beyond the Web Salon Series at Indiana University at 2:00 PM Eastern this coming Monday, February 7, 2022. The event link is here, where you’ll also find the Zoom link.

The full theme of the salon series is Beyond the Web: Making a platform-free online marketplace for goods, ideas and everything else, about which you can read more here.

Robin’s work with transportation and peer production has been VRooMy from the start, and especially consistent with our work with the Ostrom Workshop on the Intention Byway in Bloomington, Indiana.

Upcoming speakers in the Salon Series (mark your calendars) are Ethan Zuckerman and Shoshana Zuboff. Both are BKC veterans and, like Robin, devoted to moving beyond status quos that vex us all. Ethan will be with us on March 7 and Shoshana on April 11. Days and times for both are Mondays at 2:00 PM Eastern. Details at those links.<

These events are all participatory, informative, challenging and fun. Please join us.

Beyond the Web

October 22, 2021 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

The Cluetrain Manifesto said this…

not

…in 1999.

And now, in 2021, it’s still not true—at least not on the Web.

If it was true, California’s CCPA wouldn’t call us mere “consumers” and Europe’s GDPR wouldn’t call us mere “data subjects,” whose privacy is entirely at the grace of corporate “data processors” and “data controllers.” (While the GDPR does say a “natural person” can be either of those, the prevailing assumption says no. Worse, it assumes that what privacies we enjoy on the Web should be valved by choices we make when confronted with “consent” notices that pop up when we first visit a website, and which are recorded somewhere we don’t know and can’t audit or dispute.)

Simply put, we are not free, and our reach does not exceed their grasp. Again, on the Web.

But (this is key), the Web is not the Internet. It’s a haystack of stuff on the Net. It’s a big one, and hugely good in many ways. And maybe we can be really free there eventually. But why not work outside of it? That’s the question.

And that’s what some of us are answering. You might call what we’re doing a blue ocean strategy:

For example, Joyce and I are now in Bloomington, Indiana, embedded as visiting scholars at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop, where we are rolling out a new project called the Byway, for Customer Commons, ProjectVRM’s nonprofit spin-off. We will also be working with local communities of interest here in Bloomington. Stay tuned for more on that.

To find out more about what we’re up to—or just to discuss whatever seems relevant—please come to our first Beyond the Web salon, by Zoom, on Monday at 3pm Eastern time. The full link: https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/264653-ostrom-salon-series-beyond-the-web

How the Web sucks

September 11, 2021 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

This spectrum of emojis is a map of the Web’s main occupants (the middle three) and outliers (the two on the flanks). It provides a way of examining who is involved, where regulation fits, and where money gets invested and made. Yes, it’s overly broad, but I think it’s helpful in understanding where things went wrong and why. So let’s start.

Wizards are tech experts who likely run their own servers and keep private by isolating themselves and communicating with crypto. They enjoy the highest degrees of privacy possible on and around the Web, and their approach to evangelizing their methods is to say “do as I do” (which most of us, being Muggles, don’t). Relatively speaking, not much money gets made by or invested in Wizards, but much money gets made because of Wizards’ inventions. Those inventions include the Internet, the Web, free and open source software, and much more. Without Wizards, little of what we enjoy in the digital world today would be possible. However, it’s hard to migrate their methods into the muggle population.

‍Muggles are the non-Wizards who surf the Web and live much of their digital lives there, using Web-based services on mobile apps and browsers on computers. Most of the money flowing into the webbed economy comes from Muggles. Still, there is little investment in providing Muggles with tools for operating or engaging independently and at scale across the websites and services of the world. Browsers and email clients are about it, and the most popular of those (Chrome, Safari, Edge) are by the grace of corporate giants. Almost everything Muggles do on the Web and mobile devices is on apps and tools that are what the trade calls silos or walled gardens: private spaces run by the websites and services of the world.

Sites. This category also includes clouds and the machinery of e-commerce. These are at the heart of the Web: a client-server (aka calf-cow) top-down, master-slave environment where servers rule and clients obey. It is in this category that most of the money on the Web (and e-commerce in general) gets made, and into which most investment money flows. It is also here that nearly all development n the connected world today happens.

Ad-tech, aka adtech, is the home of surveillance capitalism, which relies on advertisers and their agents knowing all that can be known about every Muggle. This business also relies on absent Muggle agency, and uses that absence as an excuse for abusing the privilege of committing privacy violations that would be rude or criminal in the natural world. Also involved in this systematic compromise are adtech’s dependents in the websites and Web services of the world, which are typically employed by adtech to inject tracking beacons in Muggles’ browsers and apps. It is to the overlap between adtech and sites that all privacy regulation is addressed. This is why, the GDPR sees Muggles as mere “data subjects,” and assigns responsibility for Muggle’s privacy to websites and services the regulation calls “data controllers” and “data processors.” The regulation barely imagines that Muggles could perform either of those roles, even though personal computing was invented so every person can do both. (By the way, the adtech business and many of its dependents in publishing like to say the Web is free because advertising pays for it. But the Web is as free by nature as are air and sunlight. And most of the money Google makes, for example, comes from plain old search advertising, which can get along fine without tracking. There is also nothing about advertising itself that requires tracking.)

Crime happens on the Web, but its center of gravity is outside, on the dark web. This is home to botnets, illegal porn, terrorist activity, ransom attacks, cyber espionage, and so on. There is a lot of overlap between crime and adtech, however, given the moral compromises required for adtech to function, plus the countless ways that bots, malware and other types of fraud are endemic to the adtech business. (Of course, to be an expert criminal on the dark web requires a high degree of wizardry. So I one could arrange these categories in a circle, with an overlap between wizards and criminals.)

I offer this set of distinctions for several reasons. One is to invite conversation about how we have failed the Web and the Web has failed us—the Muggles of the world—even though we enjoy apparently infinite goodness from the Web and handy services there. Another is to explain why ProjectVRM has been more aspirational than productive in the fifteen years it has been working toward empowering people on the commercial Net. (Though there has been ample productivity.) But mostly it is to explain why I believe we will be far more productive if we start working outside the Web itself. This is why our spinoff, Customer Commons, is pushing forward with the Byway toward i-commerce. Check it out.

Finally, I owe the idea for this visualization to Iain Henderson, who has been with ProjectVRM since before it started. (His other current involvements are with JLINC and Customer Commons.) Hope it proves useful.

QR codes are becoming fishhooks

July 28, 2021 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

We’ve been very bullish on QR codes here, because they’re an excellent way for customers and vendors to shake hands, to start doing business, and to form constructive relationships.

Alas, they have become bait for tracking by marketers. In QR Codes Are Here to Stay. So Is the Tracking They Allow, Erin Woo (@erinkwoo) of the NY Times explains how:

Restaurants have adopted them en masse, retailers including CVS and Foot Locker have added them to checkout registers, and marketers have splashed them all over retail packaging, direct mail, billboards and TV advertisements.

But the spread of the codes has also let businesses integrate more tools for tracking, targeting and analytics, raising red flags for privacy experts. That’s because QR codes can store digital information such as when, where and how often a scan occurs. They can also open an app or a website that then tracks people’s personal information or requires them to input it.

As a result, QR codes have allowed some restaurants to build a database of their customers’ order histories and contact information. At retail chains, people may soon be confronted by personalized offers and incentives marketed within QR code payment systems.

“People don’t understand that when you use a QR code, it inserts the entire apparatus of online tracking between you and your meal,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Suddenly your offline activity of sitting down for a meal has become part of the online advertising empire.”

So that’s one more thing to fix in our apps and browsers. But how?

Obviously, we can try to avoid QR codes; but there are a growing number of places where that’s not possible.

Providing ways to opt out is a giant non-starter, as we’ve learned at great pain on the Web. (Do you have any record at all of the separate privacy settings you’ve made at all the sites and services where those choices have been provided? Of course not.)

We need at least two things here, and fast.

One is some way, in our phones or browsers, to prevent QR code scanning on phones from turning into tracking. Are you listening, Apple and Google? Plus everybody else in the QR code business?

The other is regulation. And I hate to say that, because too many regulations protect yesterday from last Thursday, and distort markets in ways seen and unseen for decades to come. But this is a case where we really need it.

[Two days later…]

There has been much follow-up to this piece. If you’re interested in that, start with this clip rom Wednesday;s FLOSS Weekly podcast, where Jonathan Bennett (@JP_Bennett) provides some excellent answers to questions raised here and elsewhere.

On Twitter, @QRcodeART has some good follow-up under an @TWiT tweet pointing to that clip. In that thread I stand accused of “pure babbling,” to which I plead guilty (providing, as I do, an example of how, as Garrison Keillor once put it, “English is the preacher’s language because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say”).

The main point in the thread is that QR codes are essentially “innocent.” Also, “#Bluetooth is much worse! Creative names, unique IDs (!) and such and usually open and “seeable” for everybody. Similar to your #Wifi searching always for a #WLan in the perimeter. Unique funny names and identifiable MAC addresses. Think about that !”

Good advice. Clearly, there are concerns for all the tech we use, especially the networked kind. If we fail to take precautions such as those Jonathan recommends, we’re likely being tracked in ways we wouldn’t welcome if we knew about it. Returning to the metaphor, everything you carry, scan or click on can be a fishhook. And, to the hookers, you’re just a fish.