Re: [projectvrm] slaves and masters

[Don Marti < >]

Adam Smith said it best. 

  "The pride of man makes him love to domineer,
  and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged
  to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever
  the law allows it, and the nature of the work can
  afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer
  the service of slaves to that of freemen."

Marketing would rather earn 90 cents from a locked-in,
tracked customer than a dollar from the free market.
And we probably won't see much improvement until
one of the "feudal" companies fails hard enough at
surveillance marketing that they're willing to try
the alternative, just like didn't get much corporate
open source until Microsoft had clearly beaten the
Unix vendors.

Anyway, more on that, kind of:
  http://zgp.org/~dmarti/business/surveillance-marketing-pays/

Don

begin Doc Searls quotation of Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 11:12:48PM -0400:
> 
> Thanks, Jonathan.
> 
> It helps that Bruce Schneier is not only a pal (to me and others here), but 
> a colleague this year as a Berkman Fellow. There has been much information 
> sharing and collaboration through Berkman around the stuff you're talking 
> about below, including work Bruce is doing toward his next book.
> 
> Doc
> 
> On Apr 12, 2014, at 10:59 PM, Jonathan King 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
> 
> > Sorry for the delayed response!  
> > 
> > You have to love Serendipity.  While catching up on my VRM inbox I 
> > happened to be listening to Copland's 'A Lincoln Portrait.'  The quote 
> > jumped out asking to be shared!
> > 
> > VRM is vital for sustainable free market economies as they become 
> > digital. VRM concepts are equally if not more vital for free 
> > constitutional democracies as the people go digital. The power is with 
> > the people in a constitutional form of government.  Where the people in a 
> > constitutional form of government go, so goes their power and so goes 
> > their rights to protect that power.   As we the people today, in the 
> > blink of a generation, move our lives to the digital realm, so goes our 
> > digital power and so goes our digital rights to protect that digital 
> > power.  The analog power and the analog rights already exist, they just 
> > have not yet clearly emerged in the digital realm.  
> > 
> > Security expert Bruce Schneier characterizing our current paradigm as 
> > feudal with lords (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple...) and vassals. We 
> > pledge our allegiance to the lords of our devices and holders of our 
> > data.  ( https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.html 
> > ).  I hope that with groups like VRM we can skip past feudalism and stay 
> > with free market constitutional democracies.
> > 
> > On Apr 12, 2014, at 11:50 AM, Doc Searls 
> > <
 >
> >  wrote:
> > 
> >> An interesting angle. Hence the subject change.
> >> 
> >> In a meeting yesterday the term "monopsony" came up. Here is the 
> >> Wikipedia article on it. 
> >> 
> >> With a monopoly, one seller controls the market for many buyers.
> >> 
> >> With a monopsony, one buyer controls the market for many sellers.
> >> 
> >> While monopsony customarily refers to the advantage one large buyer 
> >> (e.g. a government) can have over many sellers, I found myself thinking 
> >> that it might also apply to the state we might seek for each of us as 
> >> customers, with VRM.
> >> 
> >> Not saying this is an ideal state; just that it's fodder for thought, 
> >> especially if guided by that Lincoln line.
> >> 
> >> Doc
> >> 
> >> 
> >> On Apr 12, 2014, at 12:03 PM, Jonathan King 
> >> <
 >
> >>  wrote:
> >> 
> >>> As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses 
> >>> my idea of democracy.  ~ Abraham Lincoln
> >>> 
> >>> 
> >>> On Apr 8, 2014, at 10:55 PM, Doc Searls 
> >>> <
 >
> >>>  wrote:
> >>> 
> >>>> I think the tide is turning on this stuff, as more people become aware 
> >>>> of the Faustian natures of the bargains they're making with the 
> >>>> Facebooks of the world. Less investment is going into unwelcome 
> >>>> surveillance and more into privacy protection and related work. Or so 
> >>>> it seems to me at 11:51 on a Tuesday night.
> >>>> 
> >>>> But I should put my bias on the table. To me — and I hope to others 
> >>>> involved in ProjectVRM — our work is toward giving the individual more 
> >>>> agency in the world, including more control over their own exposures. 
> >>>> That goes for the CEOs you'd like to spy on in your scenario, as well 
> >>>> as everybody else.
> >>>> 
> >>>> Doc
> >>>> 
> >>>> 
> >>>> On Apr 8, 2014, at 11:39 PM, Lucas Cioffi 
> >>>> <
 >
> >>>>  wrote:
> >>>> 
> >>>>> Hi All, this one's for the futurists out there...
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> These days, if the average person's geographic location is made 
> >>>>> public, that person usually is the one who made it public using a 
> >>>>> service like Foursquare.
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> In the future, do we expect that to not be the case?  If Facebook 
> >>>>> opened up a facial recognition API, would we expect that most public, 
> >>>>> geographic check-ins would instead be made by third-party apps & 
> >>>>> hardware without consent of the one who gets checked-in?  
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> For example, I'm guessing many people would jump at the chance to get 
> >>>>> free car insurance in exchange for mounting a facial recognition 
> >>>>> scanner to the roof of their car.  The driver gets free insurance, 
> >>>>> and while driving to pick up groceries, he uploads a few hundred 
> >>>>> people's locations to some company's cloud.
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> I could see a bunch of new applications for data like this.  For 
> >>>>> example, if my company is competing with another company, then I 
> >>>>> could pay $100 to use a search engine which could tell me all the 
> >>>>> buildings that the competing CEO has walked into over the past 2 
> >>>>> years and which new clients he/she has been meeting with this week.
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> These questions come to mind: 
> >>>>> How is this good/bad?  Is this inevitable?  Does this change human 
> >>>>> behavior in significant ways?
> >>>>> -- 
> >>>>> Lucas Cioffi
> >>>>> Co-Founder, BarkBest.com
> >>>>> Charlottesville, VA
> >>>>> 917-528-1831
> >>>> 
> >> 
> 

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/