On May 23, 2014, at 1:33 AM, William Dyson <
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John GREAT STUFF…Wow!!! I have been working on developing technology to bring about the decentralized internet for over 20 years. Recently pre IIW I and a team of developers have had some major breakthroughs that will being into reality many of the ideas that you mentioned.
We actually have working code so it is beyond theory
All Thanks To You
William
Thanks, William(s), John, Devon and everybody working in support of, and leveraging, the distributed/decentralized Net.
More below... Something is wrong. In products like material goods, computers and data lead to much greater customization. But in the etherial area of legal rights, it's still contracts of adhesion, one size fits all. Why are products customized when computers make that possible, but legal contracts not?
The main answer is that legal departments sell nothing and work to protect everything. They also have norms going back to the dawn of industry, and these are very hard to change from the inside. I took a fresh look by asking what do I personally want from VRM -- and how could marketers benefit? Most fundamentally, the infrastructure needs a more flexible way to share authority among different parties.
The term "infrastructure" is key here. It's what we're working to invent. Some approaches that been vetted are here:
And there are many more. To start with the most basic: I just moved, and have a lot of postal addresses to update. I would rather have a server (or for most people, a service) under my control, that could BE my public personal identity and address -- or let me change a physical mailing address in one place, and set the permission for giving it out (e.g. to anyone -- or to a list of named correspondents only). Using my personal identity server or service would be voluntary, but there would be an incentive to do so, since my contact information would always be the most current possible.
If I wanted to keep my physical address confidential, I could do that too, and my service would forward postal and electronic correspondence. Of course the sovereign government can grab anything; but a violent ex or a criminal gang hopefully could not get one's physical address.
I'm hoping some VRM developers can step in here and say what they're working on that does this, or something like it. Another handy service of a personal identity would be a way to follow what your associates or others are doing in social media or otherwise online, all in one place. Of course you could only follow information that you already had authority to receive, such as status updates by your Facebook friends. This service would show you engagement opportunities that you already had, as they happened, without having to search for them frequently in various different places. (An existing service like Nimble might be integrated into one's personal identity.)
It could be a service, or it could be a sovereign native capability — something of one's own. Working on the above as part of a community empowerment platform…..We have the basic architecture finished and will be rolling parts of the service out shortly.
Looking forward to it. On Sharing Authority
Could I have multiple such identities? Yes. However, there would be various "badges" (certifications) given by different certifying organizations (including the government) to certify that an identity met its requirements. It would be my option whether to apply for and display any particular certification -- but the certifications themselves would be owned by and under the control of the organizations issuing them. The government would undoubtedly issue a certification that required uniqueness and accuracy in identifying a particular person to the government (like the "real ID" philosophy) -- and any party could use that certification to help decide whether or not to send certain correspondence to that identity.
And back to change of address, it would be handy to change your contact information in one place and have that take care of all government business, from tax authorities etc. (as well as non-government entities that chose to use it.) This infrastructure makes that possible.
Again, there is work going on toward exactly that. In fact change-of-address was isolated back in 2007 as a paradigmatic case of something we would all like VRM tools and services to do — and as one that would have economic benefits for both customers and companies. Again, some companies here are downstream with that work.
As for the contrast between how identity works in the offline world and how dysfunctional it is in the online world, here is a subchapter of an early draft of The Intention Economy. Some of this appeared in the final version, but most of it didn't. I share it because what Michael Ventura (quoted at length and later cut) said thirty years ago stuck with me, and is a big reason why I've remained involved in fixing identity problems online:
In The Filter Bubble:
What the Internet is Hiding from You (2011), Eli Pariser writes, “You have one identity,” Facebook
founder Mark Zuckerber told journalist David Kirkpatrick for his book The Facebook Effect. “the days of having
a different image for your work friends or coworkers and for the other people
you may know are probably coing to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities
for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” [i]
Later Zuckerberg discounted the remark as “just a sentence I
said;” but to Facebook the only you
that matters is the one they know.
Not the one you are.
In Shadow Dancing in
the USA (1985), Michael Ventura writes what he calls “a poetic description
of subselves in a stepfamily.” He begins by asking, “… will we, or will we not,
discover all that a man and a woman can be?”[ii]
You want “social?” Ventura gives you social: … living in this small
apartment, there are, to begin with, three entirely different sets of twos:
Michael and Jan, Jan and Brendan, Brendan and Michael. Each set, by itself, is
very different from the other, and each is different from Jan-Brendan-Michael
together. But go further: Brendan-Jan-Michael
having just gotten up ‘for breakfast is a very different body politic, with
different varying tensions, depending on whether it’s a school day or not, from
Brendan-Jan-Michael driving home from seeing, say, El Norte, which is different
still from driving home from Ghostbusters, and all of them are different from
Brendan-Jan-Michael going to examine a possible school for Brendan. The Brendan
who gets up at midnight needing to talk to Michael is quite different from the
Brendan who, on another night, needs suddenly to talk to Jan, and both are
vastly different from the Brendan who often keeps his own counsel. The Michael
writing at three in the afternoon or three in the morning, isolated in a room
with three desks and two typewriters, is very different from the Michael,
exasperated, figuring the bills with Jan, choosing whom not to pay; and he in
turn is very different from the half-crazed, shy drunk wondering just who is
this "raw-boned Okie girl" moving to Sam Taylor’s fast blues one
sweltering night in the Venice of L.A. at the old Taurus Tavern. The Jan making
the decision to face her own need to write, so determined and so tentative at
once, is very different from the strength-in-tenderness of the Jan who is
sensual, or the sure-footed abandon of Jan dancing, or the screeching of the
Jan who’s had it up to here. I can only be reasonably sure of several of
these people – the several isolate Michaels, eight or fifteen of them, whom
"I" pass from, day to day, night to night, dawn to almost dawn, and
who at any moment in this much-too-small apartment might encounter a Jan or a
Brendan whom I’ve never seen before, or whom I’ve conjectured about and can
sometimes describe but am hard-pressed to know.
So in this apartment
where some might see three people living a comparatively quiet life, I see a
huge encampment on a firelit hillside, a tribal encampment of selves who must
always be unknowable, a mystery to any brief Michael, Jan, or Brendan who
happens to be trying to figure it out at any particular moment. His narrative continues until he arrives at his main purpose
behind all this: …there may be no more
important project of our time than displacing the … fiction of monopersonality.
This fiction is the notion that each person has a central and unified
"I" which determines his or her acts. "I" have been writing
this to say that I don't think people experience life that way. I do think they
experience language that way, and hence are doomed to speak about life in
structures contrary to their experience. But what happens now, almost thirty years later, when our
experience is one of Facebook chatter and Google searches, when online life and
language (“poking,” “friending” and so on) soak up time formerly spent around
tables, in bars or in cars, and our environment is “personalized” through guesswork by companies whose robotic filtering systems
constantly customize everything to satisfy a supposedly singular you? In the closing sentences of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (2010),
Nicholas Carr writes, In the world of 2001,
people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be
a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on
computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence
that flattens into artificial intelligence. [iii] Even if our own intelligence is not yet artificialized,
what’s feeding it surely is. Pariser sums up the absurdity of it all in a subchapter
titled, “A Bad Theory of You.” After explaining Google’s and Facebook’s very
different approaches to personalized “experience” filtration, and the
assumptions behind both, he concludes, “Both are pretty poor representations of
who we are, in part because there is no one set of data that describes who we
are.” He says both companies have dumped us into what animators and robotics
engineers call the uncanny valley:
“the place where something is lifelike but not convincingly alive, and it gives
people the creeps.”
I don’t know about you (nor should I, being a mere writer
and not a Google or a Facebook), but I find hope in that. How long can shit
this crazy last?
[i] Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is
Hiding from You. (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011), 109-110.
[iii] Nicholas G. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to
our Brains. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 222.
Ads and Marketing
So the owner of an identity might say, "No ads at all here" -- and enforce it by bouncing all messages from any organization not certified (by some organization in the certifying business) to be ad-free. A company that gets itself certified and then violates the terms could lose its certification and have its future messages bounced, creating an incentive to behave.
This seems like a good place to bring in TOS;DR: < http://tosdr.org/> So what's in it for marketers? Well, if I as end user could control the ads, even to the extent of shutting them all off, I personally and I believe many others would like to get some targeted ads, which could be tens or hundreds of times more likely to generate a sale than poorly targeted ads today.
The problem is making a distinction between the two, which generally doesn't happen. The marketing business on the whole hates Do Not Track and the ad/tracking blockers, and refuses to see the popularity of those as an _expression_ of demand, much less as a business opportunity.
The main problem is that most of marketing, and CRM, is focused on sales, not service, and hardly at all on relationship. It's not a coincidence that the hottest CRM company is called Salesforce. Not Serviceforce. (Though they make gestures in that direction.)
Many of us have talked to, or are involved with, CRM systems, call centers, and the service/support parts of companies that would like to have better relationships with customers, and that understand the high costs and lost opportunities that arise from bad service (and bad or unwanted advertising). Those parts of companies, while meaningful internally, and in some cases looking with hope toward VRM developments that will improve their work, are also fighting the selling-at-all-costs imperative, and systems around it, which are normative and powerful in the extreme. For example, I like seeing Amazon's book etc. recommendations based on what I bought in the past; I do buy books recommended, and whether I buy them or not the recommendations help me keep up with what's going on re my interests. So I'd be happy to let Amazon in.
Three things here.
First, Amazon recommendations are good because they have a closed system that is theirs alone and they run entirely. Their heuristics around you and what you buy are rich with detail and mechanisms for trust. Their service system is also remarkably good. (Ever tried to call them? Their people are quite helpful.) They really do put the customer first. But...
Amazon is a silo. You are inside Amazon's CRM system. It is not inside your VRM system, whatever it turns out to be. Nor is it interested. But...
Since Amazon is so good at what it does, every other company wants to replicate Amazon's grade of success inside their own silo. So, while the free market offers lots of choices, it's still "your choice of captor." And for companies I might not know, I would be happy to fill out and maintain an advertising profile showing what ads I wanted -- e.g. cheap flights to San Francisco in certain date ranges -- or local tickets to any of a few dozen performers -- or other artists like them artistically (Pandora style), and/or like them in appealing to a similar audience (Amazon style).
As long as agency is on their side and not yours, it will be the same system we have now. (FWIW, I've grown very tired of Pandora's algorithm, and would love to personalize it in a variety of ways that I cannot. Nearly all agency is theirs, not mine.) And a nice way to keep advertisers from abusing this system and sending too many not-well-targeted ads would be to let the owner of the personal identity charge whatever amount to receive an ad at that identity. This would also share some of the revenue from big data back with the person whose data it is. For example, I might charge 10 cents an ad, maybe 25 cents -- or maybe a percentage of the advertised price, such as 0.05% of the price of a big-ticket item like a car. Markets would develop, in that someone charging too much would get no ads and no revenue. And someone who asked for lots of ads just to get the revenue would stop getting ads, after being able to get less and less for them as the ads directed there were not profitable.
Some conflict is inherent and cannot be made to go away. I see lots of fights over the certifications, what they should certify and whether someone had met the terms or not. Markets will happen here, too -- since except for the sovereign government's certification, the rest are given by private organizations and not locked in by law. If a certification is too strict or not strict enough, then persons on at least one end of the relationships won't use it, and will drift to others that do a better job. Or the commerce that the certification was supposed to regulate (and thereby facilitate) won' take place.
Is this approach to VRM worth developing?
John S. James
I know a number of companies working on something like this. Maybe they'd like to step forward and talk about it.
Doc Legal is the most difficult one. In The Intention Economy I devoted two chapters (and then some) to the challenge, and probably spent more time on that one issue than on any other.
The story is that freedom of contract is a base principle of civilized life. But, for the last century and a half, so is mass manufacture, distribution and retailing, which require coercive "contracts of adhesion" for scale: to deal in one way with many "end" users or customers.
It might be that we will never move on from this state, which Friedrich Kessler described at canonical length in his 1943 paper, "Contracts of Adhesion: Some Thoughts on Freedom of Contract." Kessler lamented loss of freedoms brought on by adhesive (i.e. standard-form coercive) contracts, and could hardly imagine a future industrial condition where old-fashioned — and preferable — freedom of contract would again prevail.
But then the Internet happened, and we can imagine something better. Here is what I imagined (for some point in the future) on page 9 of the book:
It’s Your Law
These terms, which respect ancient freedom of contract values, are standard ones chosen by you from a list at Customer Commons (Customer Commons.org), which was organized in 2011 and grew out of ProjectVRM at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, with help from the Information Sharing Workgroup. By now, Customer Commons has compiled many choices of standard terms for individuals and organizations—all described in ways that can easily be compared and matched up automatically. As with Creative Commons (on which Customer Commons was modeled), computers, lawyers, and ordinary people can easily read the terms. This is an end state. It will take years before we have this. In the meantime we need to scaffold up other things that will accomplish some, if not all, of what we would like in the ideal world.
But we do need to work in that direction. I think it is a mistake to settle for the status quo.
IMHO.
Doc OK so for me
1. "individual" works better than customer (a point Iain has been making for years).
2. the fourth principle "must be able to assert their own terms of engagement" needs testing a bit. If we leave every user to try to set their own terms then the big corps will always win as they do now. But if VRM means standard individual-friendly agreements so companies can deal in bulk with individuals on terms that suit the individual then we have progress. ("if we're not together, we're nowt" - Rochdate pioneers as per my VRM day t-shirt) Would something like "must be able to engage on terms accepted by the community as suiting the individual" cover it? William
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John S. James
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