IMHO & FWIW, I don’t think we can get much good VRM development done if our default perspective remains downward toward people from within existing systems, or to build new systems that “improve the customer journey” differently for every vendor. (BTW, this is what I believe “____-centric” does. But thats another thread.) I think we can get a lot of good—and original—development done if we look outward (not necessarily upward) from individuals. Tools in the first place are extensions of ourselves. Think of a hammer, a screwdriver, a camera, a typewriter, a paintbrush, glasses, shoes, wallet, bike, keys and pants. All are extensions of ourselves, and we have full agency through each of them. They enlarge our capacities in the world. (Yes, institutions are involved in some cases, but these things start with individuals human bodies and minds.) Early personal tech development, especially with PCs, was around enhancing personal agency. Your word processor, your spreadsheet, your checkbook and accounting software, your tax software, your games, your contact list, your calendar, your drawing programs—were all as much yours as the collection of coins and pens in your pockets or purse. What happened in the early to mid 80s was not just that personal tech came into the world, but the discovery by business that people could do more with their own personal computing tools than companies could alone with their centrally controlled systems, or by controlling what individuals could do with tech. Similar discoveries happened with the Internet in the late ‘90s and smartphones in the late ‘00s. Companies at first fought the independence and personal agency of employees and customers. (Recall “You don’t need the Internet. We have a LAN” and later, “You con’t need an iPhone or an Android. Here’s your corporate Blackberry.”) Then, when it became clear that people could do more with personal tech than companies could (whether those companies were employers or vendors), companies embraced personal agency and the tech that made it possible. We are on a similar cusp today. And the only way we can prove that people can do more with their own data, their own ways of controlling relationships, their own ways of expressing intentions, their own “journeys” and “experiences,” their own terms of engagement, is by providing tools and tool-like services that people can put to use easily. It’s still uphill. The norms we’re dealing with here go back to the industrial revolution and earlier; and defaults were set then and remain embedded deep in our cultures and our brains. Defaults in business models are beyond significant as well. For example, not catering to marketers, which seem to have all the budget, is hard. UI is especially hard. But we have help right now with the GDPR, ePrivacy, the popularity of ad blocking and tracking protection and other shifting winds and tectonic shifts in the market environment. These include the rapid shift upward in consciousness among and toward women in the marketplace. Tech has been grossly remiss on that one, and I sense a flood of good sense starting to rush toward tech from no less than half the world’s population. I’ve been working on pulling together all the development threads going on. Look for something soon on that in the ProjectVRM wiki, along with more geek recruitment at LinuxJournal. Scroll down...
I think the way we beat China’s top-down surveillance-intensive systems, and others like them, is by equipping individuals with tools for independence and engagement (reminder: what #VRM is about) that prove so good, so useful and so productive, that those systems’ gears are stripped. While I do have faith in that, we need the code. Lets make it. Doc
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