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hello everyone welcome to Harvard Law School welcome specifically to the book launch of this wonderful tome the intention economy from our dear friend doc searls I didn't recognize doc if
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you're having trouble I should point out that he is wearing a tie and so for those of you who know him well he can be tough to pick out against the this this complicated camouflage so welcome and
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welcome to this presentation my name is ethan Zuckerman I direct the Center for civic media over at MIT like doc I am a long long long long time Berkman affiliate and just to welcome you with
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some of the practicalities before we get into contextualizing by which you should read embarrassing doc first of all I should point out that this event is entirely on the record it is being
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recorded for posterity if I know Berkman well and I do it will end up in any number of digital formats on the web on their website possibly streamed for all I know it's going to be written to
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optical discs launched into outer space if you do not wish your likeness to be captured this would be a great time to climb under a table but you should assume that anything you say in this
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room can and will be held against you because this is a book launch and also because you really do want a copy of this lovely book they are for sale in the back of the room at the end of this event which will be approximately 7 15 I
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encourage you to come to the back of the room and transact so that you go away with your own copy of this as befits a social media pioneer like doc we
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strongly encourage you to tweet to blog to otherwise share this event we have more hashtags than you can shake a stick at I've been trying to shake sticks at them I've been failing at the very least
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we seem to be using vrm Berkman intention economy that's my Twitter handle if you need it for some reason mostly to tell me to shut up that's Doc's feel free to to transmit whatever
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you have to say about this so in offering some context for this book I I've been trying to figure out why doc asked me to introduce him and I think the reason is that we have a certain
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complicated kinship he and I which is to say that the Berkman Center which is this remarkable institution brings together sort of deep thinkers about the internet brings in a really wide variety
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of people it tends to bring in lawyers who want to do something that's very practical in the world they tend to bring in scholars who are doing deep thinking about the future of the internet there's a lot of sociologists and sort of social scientists and then
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there are those people that make you say what were they thinking and that happened both with Doc and with me and in fact you know for the years that we've been together at Brooklyn we've gotten very used to sort of answering those questions what what is it that
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bourbon was thinking in bringing people with unusual track records here when I say unusual track records we're talking about an individual that we refer to by a nickname hailing back to his career as a radio DJ this is a gentleman who's
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been a journalist who's been a columnist but who has been a thinker and an instigator about internet issues for a very very long time who's ridden an
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enormous amount both on his tremendous blog but also for linux journal one of the office of really one of the key texts in our space the clue train manifesto but the reason that people
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find themselves at Berkman when they come from this odd writerly think early background that doc hells from is because they have incredibly big ambitions and they're looking for some way to change the world in a really
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fundamental fashion and this is Doc's manifesto to try to find a way to change the world in a very deep and very fundamental fashion what doc is really
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doing here is bringing to the table a set of questions in a set of actors that we too seldom talk about when we talk about the Internet as we know it we tend
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to talk a lot in terms of infrastructure we tend to talk a lot in terms of policy recently we've started talking in discourses about and and rights to access and rights to speech but we rarely talk about the fact
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that at the heart of the net as we know it is really a transactional economy that we all find ourselves part of whether we really like it or not and many of us avoid this subject entirely
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because it seems so complicated it forces you to deal with questions of what's a vendor who's a customer what are the rights of each of them and doc has put himself right squarely in the
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middle of this both trying to find a new vocabulary to talk about these issues and so when you see hashtags like vrm vendor relationship management this is not just because doc is incredibly
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gifted with crafting interesting catchphrases but literally because to understand the way we think about how the economy is going to work in the future we need new tools and new
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vocabulary and really that's what Doc's putting forward here this isn't just a conceptual book in some very real ways this is also a manifesto it's really a
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call to arms and a call to action and because it's not my manifesto I'm going to leave it to this guy to tell you about it but it's also I think a tremendously helpful book for anyone in
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the business community who's trying to figure out how this is all going to work over the next several decades and I think actually the story behind this book helps us sort of come to this doc within the environment of bourbon which
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encourages people to start projects found himself starting project vrm literally a community open collaborative software and conceptual effort to sort
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of build the infrastructure to allow a very different set of relationships between buyers and sellers between customers and providers many of the people involved with project vrm are in fact in this room and when we get to the
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QA which I'll be moderating after Doc's talk I suspect we will probably have questions that go from here and down to this level of figuring out where veeram goes but docs goal was to build a proud
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direct and a movement it wasn't really until someone from Harvard Business press came to him and said you know this would make a killer book that this turned into a book as well so we thank
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Harvard for for providing a space to think this big we think thank the press for really forcing doc to take this incredible line of thought that he's been developing over the last decade put
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it into print and most of all we thank dr. Isles for putting something wonderful and provocative in front of us he's going to run us through some of the ideas behind the book then we get the wonderful treat of arguing with him with
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no further ado your friend and mine doc Searls thank you thanks anything here so all that flattering beginning there I'm
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going to start out by making you uncomfortable because I want to ask a question there actually is not answerable because I have no business hearing the answer the question is what is the most embarrassing thing about you
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the thing you want to are the things you want to conceal that you want to cover up that you want others to know the kind of things you would share only with a degreed professional or a licensed professional or a very very good friend
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which we would describe define a really good friend as some of you actually can keep a secret okay these are the kinds of things we would like to cover up and maybe it's the tattoo we wish you didn't have or a body part or a or some some
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embarrassing thing at our past or that will happen in the future doesn't matter what it is I just want you to keep it in mind as I show you something that will perhaps make us amused at the same time
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as it compounds that whatever discomfort I've started you off with so this is from the onion story tonight Congress today reauthorized funding for facebook the massive online surveillance program run by the CIA
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according to department of homeland security reports facebook has replaced almost every other CIA information gathering program since it was launched in 2004 after years of secretly monitoring the public we were astounded
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so many people would willingly publicize where they live their religious and political views an alphabetized list of all their friends personal email addresses phone numbers hundreds of photos of themselves and even status
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updates about what they were doing moment to moment it is truly a dream come true for the CIA much of the credit belongs to CIA agent Mark Zuckerberg who runs the day-to-day Facebook operation for the agency the decorated agent
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codenamed the Overlord was recently awarded the prestigious middle of intelligence commendation for his work with the Facebook program which he has called quote the single most powerful tool for population control ever created among the biggest successes of the
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Facebook program is operation farmville which the CIA credits with pacifying as many as 85 million people after unemployment rates rose dramatically other features such as the suggested friends window have been instrumental in
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allowing government agents to infiltrate deeper into the friend networks of suspected dissidents for some expert analysis now on the story let's check in with backbones first responders Jason you have written extensively about the
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Facebook program why is it so effective but one of the key reasons is that the CIA has been so thorough in convincing the nation that constantly sharing information about everything that you're doing is somehow desirable instead of deeply unsettling epitopes are saying
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that with the national debt being so high is this really the time do you spending even more money on spy programs well actually the Facebook program saves the CIA money like the maps application where you list every place that you've been whether it's at the state or a
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country or right with the little pins they show where you visiting yes that kind of information would have taken the CIA months of going through hotel receipts and plane tickets to figure it all out the manpower that Facebook saves
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is absolutely absolutely and and the calendar feature even lets the CIA know where you're gonna be in advance so that's right so now if they want to pick you up for questioning all they have to do is see which events you RSVP'd yes to and then send their agents to be waiting for you that's how they got my brother
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so effective but guys with all the focus on the Facebook program is it taking away from some of the other CIA programs like the Twitter initiative the funding for that should be cut entirely right 400 billion tweets and not one useful bit of data was ever
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transmittal issue now is this trend of social network information gathering dangerous I mean just last week the New York Times revealed that al-qaeda has designed for squared to identify popular locations for body I actually Brooke
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that's been discredited as any kind of real threat the people that use that site or people that no one would mind seeing bombed anyway so really the only thing the CIA has to be concerned about people losing interest in facebook and moving on to a new social network site
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like the Chinese site 1b I love you guys I wanna be oh my god yeah so much more fun than Facebook it is great i love that I love that you can earn friend points the more state secrets that you pose yeah I've got a lot of contacts in the State Department you know I think I
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could really rack them up post a lot hey first responders thank you so much as always you know I'm of course a big fan of any social networking site it allows me to interact with my fans without having to see hear or smell them well okay it's from the Department of irony
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of course we have all our hashtags listed up here of course and you know in faith that all of you I was gonna ask how many people here on face we don't even need to bother with that it's pretty much one hundred percent no matter what so here's here's the
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interesting thing and if if you look at the distance between Facebook and what happened before then okay is that privacy is very simple in the material world you know if we go back 18 years
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here nobody had a laptop nobody had a smartphone but we were in a material world which we inhabited for the last 10,000 years with developing a very thorough understanding of what it meant
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to be private privacy started with clothes it basically started with clothes and it started with spaces we create it was there was no doubt about what private was you know so so we could
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debate it a different from one one one culture to another but for the most part we privacy was well understood now we've created this other world this other world hears though this one's been here for ten thousands there's other worlds
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the internet the Internet as we know it is 17 years old it was born with the first graphical browsers from Netscape and from from Microsoft basically the difference between O's early browsers
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only ones who are using now are not large they're pretty much same here's here's the thing that the the world that we have that's virtual has no has no privacy built into it has no rules been into it and that is in
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fact a virtue of it the the Internet is based on protocols a very simple protocol the tcp/ip that says we're going to make the best effort to get data from one point to another point and is going to be very stupid in the middle
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about what happens to that data along the way intentionally surveillance was not built in it might have been if AT&T design it but 18t wouldn't have designed the net because it would have been out
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of their control it has a characteristic as does all open source and all and all free software that nobody owns it everybody can use it and anybody can improve it and so the protocol suite of
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the net has improved over the years there are newer protocols RSS for one for example XMPP for for instant messaging these things come along but but the thing is that it's still it's
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still young 17 years old it's immature it's early the older I get the earlier it seems and I advise you to kind of hold his either the ones that are my age like Tom over here are laughing a lot
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it's but this is this is the world where we haven't built it out yet we've just started to so when we when we hear all the internet knows about you as Facebook knows about you that's not the internet Facebook is a company that has a service
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that sits on the web that sits on the internet the web is just an application on the internet so we have this this this early experimental efforts doesn't matter of Facebook is as big as it is
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it's experimental it wasn't even around seven years ago something else will be around in another seven years and that'll be an experiment to until we get to the point where we can understand privacy and sharing and all these things
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that were well developed over 10,000 years so I want to go over some of the things that are going wrong that as we're experimenting our way through things and then follow that with the right things that we've been working on
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with project vrm here at the Berkman Center and out in the world so anyway we've been stuck in a master slave system since 1995 and the way this looks is this you know we browse and we go to websites
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for the milk of HTML and cookies so you know H we want to get the HTML cookies oh this little bonus bonus things that were created that were created in order to keep track of what's called state
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state is what is the is what you were doing the last time you were there what's in your what's in your shopping cart you know what's what pages you were looking at before it was a convenience
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but because of the design of the net of the web at the point that we adopted this system in 1995 called client-server we had this master-slave relationship or we're always the slave we're always the
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caf we are subordinate we are always dependent we built dependency into the system and dependency is the fundamental problem and we still have that we haven't broken out of it yet because
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what happens with the with the cookies is that we're being followed now and not just by friends because what cookies allow you to do if you are a big company trying to keep track of people is to
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follow them around you don't just get something to keeps track of state you get something that keeps track of people so the wall street journal in in starting in July of 2010 started a
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series called what they know and that's a short version of the URL I advise you to visit it run by a reporter named Julia angwin who deserves a Pulitzer for the the work they've been doing at the
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journal just looking at what they know about us they being these big companies and they surveyed the top 50 sites the only one dot tracking you of course is Wikipedia all the rest of them were one of them was dictionary com and this one
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had 234 tracking files 11 first party first party is them that's the kind of things that just keeping track of what they want to know the rest of our all third parties are all advertising companies and tracking companies and data gathering and harvesting and
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hoovering and reselling companies and some of them are flesh Flash cookies and what are called beacons which are more ways that our cookie like for following you around every commercial site you go to is doing this kind of thing there's a company
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called ghostery that produces this item on the right that's I copied that out of I run ghostery on my on one of my browsers and it will tell you every single site you go to what they're doing
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to follow you around some of this is just getting analytics when you're on the site some of it is actually following you from site to site and reporting back to the third parties and to the site what you've been doing and I
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only got down to tea before I didn't have enough room on my screen to get the whole thing so this in Rebecca McKinnon in her really excellent book the consent of the network talked about what
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happened in Iran in 2009 which is with facebook facebook was this accessory to the revolution until all of a sudden out of nowhere Facebook changed the rules and said oh all your privacy all your friends we're going to tell everybody in the world about this I don't know what
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the particulars were doesn't matter they were horrified the people who were suddenly exposed the dissonance that we had talked about buy-in that onion story so another problem is that we have near
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zero control out of about how personal data is used and this is this is you you would think that you know all this data is going out there you'd have some control but you don't actually there's a
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company called rapleaf rapleaf is the one of the many companies that the Wall Street Journal took on when it when it when it did the what they know series and what rapleaf did effort they got
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like just beat against the wall by the wall street journal there was a long list of probably five or maybe eight stories just in the fall of 2010 they said uncle wait a second we're we're going to be good to you the consumer
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that we've been following around and we're going to let you get into our site and see what we have on you and I thought that's interesting I better look at that because I've been pretty active since 1995 and I've been blogging since
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1999 of that sixteen thousand followers on Twitter you know I'm on foursquare about 50,000 photos on on flickr what do they know about me and an interesting thing is are just a couple of pages all
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these things are wrong I never went to grad school that was not the right zip code was 10 years old my estimated household income was wrong marital status he said I was single I hadn't been for 20 years you know estimated length of residence
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that was wrong and the next page all these things were wrong as well I took them off here because the same reasons they gave you with that opening question I don't want you to know or them either you can your only choice by the way is
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to remove these things you really can't change them they don't give you a way of doing that whatever the reasons are you know that the my point here though is that they don't know much and and and the BS they're throwing around is we can
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know you so intimately you know but they don't they actually don't and so what happens is that in the middle of this retreated like toddlers who can't dress themselves this is my wife's joyce's heading for from yesterday was brilliant
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i thought because that's actually the case a current controversy going on are you familiar with this microsoft thing last week they suddenly said a bunch of nods in the room that in ie10 i think it's going to be they're going to
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default to do not track and if there's a whole bunch of stuff i just is so out of character for microsoft and the rest of it but the important thing is that they came up with this idea of defaulting to do not track and then it just caused all the advertisers to split a gut they go
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to the people who are drafting whatever the guidance is on this I don't remember what the exact body is the important thing though is down at the bottom here I'll have to translate this for you because it's a little obscure but an ordinary user agent that's a browser
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must not send a tracking preference signal without a user's explicit consent what that says is there in control not you and you have to have their permission to put clothes on before you
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leave your bedroom that's how that translates that's what's wrong with the way that they're trying to compromise doing that track but the point is you don't really have control next is big data is turning into big brother so this
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is a story from last week in the in the Washington Post the important part of it is this line down here you know companies and governments are pushing the envelope and the use and reuse of data and ways not originally intended
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the original intent is on the part of the seller the envelope is you the envelope is the clothing that you would like to wear on the net the virtual clothes that you don't have because they don't want you to have
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that's the envelope so I went to tie vm today just to pick up the logo when I was greeted by this this is their their homepage you go to IBM right now you're
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going to see this meet the new executive chief executive customer new term that's who's driving the new science of marketing that you there can see here is that you're actually driving does
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anybody here filled it to driving IBM in any way no because if you look down here there's a little retweet down there because they have to be social all these big companies now have to be social right and to them social is they find
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somebody who's saying something that improves their PR and they put it on their on their page and in this case it's you know take a look at highlights from the smarter commerce global summit which i guess is going on now and I can
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tell you with complete faith there is not a single person representing a customer at the global commerce summit it's all companies talking to other companies listening to the CEOs get up there and talk about big data big data
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is the big topic right now big data is big because Mike I'm sorry because because IBM bought McKinsey and bought whoever else it took in order to promote big data so they can sell more software
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and more big systems and surveil you more and improve marketing more where marketing is doing nothing but following you around like a dog you can't see or a pack of dogs you can't see that's what's going on there and there's a lot of
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money involved over here if you just look on the right 1.5 trillion spent on marketing q communications in 2011 that sounds trying to sell you stuff trying to follow you around there's just you know sixty percent increase in spending
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on marketing analytics that's a bubble that's what a bubble looks like there are their charts I could show you here they all go up to the sky all these guys are looking at the sky is where all the big data goes so as a result of this
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advertising is gone nuts it's gone insane and there's this idea behind advertising as Eric Schmidt's talked about a lot of these guys talking about it that they can know you they can know you perfectly they're following you
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around they have the big data they can do analytics out the wazoo and know you so thoroughly that's the idea right so a year ago eli Pariser this guy here wrote
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a book called the filter bubble what the internet knows about you in there this is one line a bad theory of you because that's what it's based on it's based on an idea that you are data and nothing more they can be tracked and follow it
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around and there is in in in both puppetry and robotics this term called the uncanny valley which is where things get creepy that's the best they can do by the way they can only get creepy they
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can emulate a corpse or a zombie they can't get past that and be fully human so heard a peep over there so I mean this is a from the movie Lars and the real girl you know where she was creepy
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and and she was entirely in it it was about the uncanny valley this is the amusing thing for me these are this is the ads that that facebook gives me right I just I turned off my ad blocking look like five kinds of it on a browser
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but turn it off long enough to see what they're doing it's telling me I need orchard supply because Robert Scoble likes it Robert Scoble is a great guy he's a friend but he can't find enough ways to sell out and he likes everything so he likes orchard supply have been
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there at the bottom he also likes capital one I've got enough credit cards above that fly fishing I haven't done any fishing since I was 15 never went fly-fishing boyfriend wanted seniors you know senior something or other it's
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telling me yeah say two things you're old and you're single you know o for 2 i'm not 65 yet guys back off right that's the first thing you know that the second thing is i'm not single and they
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know that you'd say it's not working you know it's really busted so loyal tea and retail is more crazed than fact so an interesting thing about how many people here have loyalty cards are various kinds are kind of forced it everybody
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yeah of course it's insane it's you know there's no point in having them but they really took off in 1995 when the internet came along and they took off because there was this kind of weird is called zoonosis zoonosis is the process
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by which a virus can travel from one species to another and so the virus that is the CAF cow system where you have to login and register and have a login and a password and all kinds of
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is online the brick and mortar guys took a look at that say that's cool let's do that in a brick and mortar world where we don't need it at all and it made a huge business at it and trust me the big data people are selling a whole lot of stuff around that right because they're
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going to know you from the big data they have about you in retail and we can make countless agreements that art so all of you with a an iphone have the have seen
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this dozens of times right you you have an agreement you have to click yes to an agreement that you never made because you don't really never who actually really agrees to that the important thing about that is that somewhere if
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you actually read through it on page 35 or whatever it is it says we can change these anytime we want you know you have no power here and there's a name for that a guy named Friedrich Kessler he
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was a law professor who wrote a piece in in in 1943 called contracts of adhesion it was for the Columbia Law Review and what he said in that was that there is
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this kind of contract this is at the height of the Industrial Age the Industrial Age peaked in World War two because an industry caused in one world war two if you want to dig into it it kind of comes down to that so and he
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said well you know the problem is that we had this thing called freedom of contract where any two parties could engage each other and do business and make a law unto themselves that's what freedom of contract is about it's a
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fundamental part of civilization especially in a democratic society the ability of anybody to make a contract with anybody else anybody to come to an agreement with anybody else but he said what happened with mass marketing which
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really was born in in the 1930s the word consumer was hardly used before then when mass market was born and aided by by broadcast because broadcasting really
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came of age in the 1930s with with network radio in soap operas and things like that we could use mass marketing to sell mass products that were all the same and we needed contracts that we
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just couldn't do individual contracts with everybody so we invented these contracts of adhesion adhesion means you get held to it and the other party can change whatever they want so and we're stuck and what happened is we go online and
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well we already had this laying there we just use those online we took something that was really went the other way from the one I just described with with with loyalty cards we took we took the brand new online world where we had a virgin
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territory where we could maybe we really could do freedom of contract there and we said not you know what we're just going to make it simple and we're going to do these contracts of adhesion they seem to work in the mass-market world will use them here so what can we do
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about that I've just described like a number of the problems that we have in the online world these were evident in 1999 to myself and there were three other guys that I got together with and
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wrote the clue train manifesto with David Weinberger Chris lock Rick Levine but I wanted to focus on this one one line in the middle it's from Chris lock it's actually not quoted very often and
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I think it's because it's a it's a it's a graphic it's not text but to me it's the most important thing it's what galvanized this is what got us going gave us the sense we could do something with clue train and it's this we are not
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seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp deal with it so an interesting thing there is that that motivated us then and we thought this
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this is what the net is and suddenly our reach exceeds marketers grasp and it wasn't true worse clue train didn't work out that way clue train was a very
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popular book and there was a period of giving google actually in Google Books you go their accounts how many how many books of where a word appears include train now appears a known if over 5,000
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books and increased at a book a day until they got to 5,000 and they stopped counting after that it's it's a very popular word and yet our reach does not exceed that grasp and I felt that you know what writing about this wasn't
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enough we actually had to do something we had to do something more so in 2006 when I got the the fellowship at the Berkman Center and as even said those of
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us in those days we got a project you get to be a fellow you get to start a project and I started project vrm and I didn't choose the term vrm by the way it was chosen by the market you might say people just started talking
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about it that way after a podcast where somebody just used the term and it kind of caught on but it stands for vendor relationship management customer relationship management is this 18 billion dollar business it's the 19
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billion dollar business of IBM and Microsoft and SI p and oracle and other companies like that's selling selling services to big companies to manage their relationships with customers and
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the problem is the customer's not involved in that so we thought well why don't we put tools on the customer side why don't we create tools that make customers both independent and better
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able to engage those two things give them independence and give them ways to engage so here are just some of the some of the things that have happened since fall of two thousand six there now
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dozens of projects there in all those countries and probably more many meetings and conferences as a list and a wiki with hundreds of contributors so it's in terms of activity it's been quite a success and and I want to go
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over some of those successes there's so many things going on I can't go into all of them but in a summary way to start out I'll put it this way with vrm the customer drives or the individual drives
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because it's not just about business it's also about government there are government relationship management projects going on for example but the the cool thing about a car a car is a
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vrm tool a car gives us independence a car gives us a sense of privacy even if we're renting a car those are mike wheels those are that's my steering wheel that's my engine those are my fenders and my bumper you have the sense
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of occupying that car as a private space and also it's a way of relating to commerce you know and infrastructure has grown up around it we drive to the mall they have parking spaces for us you know
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here in Cambridge you get two hours of parking before they find you two minute two seconds after the two hours are up but infrastructure grows around this because we have an instrument of independence that's been around for a
00:33:01
hundred years an interesting thing about the car is that it could not have been invented I the railroad business Facebook is a railroad business Google is the railroad business anybody running a server alone
00:33:15
is in the railroad business they're not in the business of giving you independence we need other entities to give us independence so what would those be so here's some of the things you can
00:33:26
do with vrm you can specify your own terms of service you can define for yourself but loyalty is you can gather examine and control the use of your own data you can intent cast to the market
00:33:39
in an anonymous and secure way you can manage your own relationships with all the vendors and other organizations you deal with and do all of that either on your own or with the help of fourth parties a fourth party is is a third
00:33:53
party that's working for you the idea behind it and it's just a term we came up with in the vrm conversation in order to differentiate third parties that are basically not working for you that are kind of on the other guys side that
00:34:06
honor they accessorized the second party so you go to the you know apple store those are all third parties there are these third parties that are following us around you know they don't have the
00:34:18
best reputation as a term but we wanted to distinguish those things that are are working for us so for example a buyer's agent I see Bill and eliz here somewhere but a buyer's agent in in real estate
00:34:32
working for you that's a fourth party a lawyer is a fourth party this school manufacturers fourth parties because they are advocates they're working for you a doctor is your fourth party
00:34:44
they're working for you they represent you to the other institutions we got a little nodding back and recognize this year so i wanted i want to go into just a few fourth parties are in the vrm
00:34:57
community an interesting things of erm dot CL is in is in Chile trust fabric is in South Africa they're doing very well singhalese in san francisco my XP yoga and the customers voice are all in in
00:35:11
the UK is ego Paul travik right here is in is in Boston and that's not a complete list I want to start and and and use just one of those to illustrate
00:35:24
some of what is going on with VR Emma what can be done with vrm when you have a tool that makes you both independent and engaging and that's this company probe oniy if they're in France but they
00:35:36
also have an office in Palo Alto here's the interesting thing about provo knee it gives you a place to store your personal data it gives you away many ways of interacting with sellers of all
00:35:48
kinds but it doesn't know anything about your data that's the key thing about provo knee gets blind to your data it's encrypted you have a relationship with your data but they don't then and they
00:36:01
have they have ways that you can track for example when you share an email address to somebody if that email address itself is also shared and they have ways of turning on and off your email which also Paul's company here
00:36:14
does as well as you go it gives you this menu bar on the right and by the way I want to point out that I mean this is his slide but he says all via REM is described by doc searls in the picture of the book the term vrm is actually
00:36:26
much more commonly used in Europe than in the u.s. at this point the the hotbed of activity i would say that kind of a heat map of erm would be really hot in
00:36:37
in hottest in the UK and in france so and this is a like i said it's a it's a french company this menu bar runs along the left side of your of your screen you can pop it out and see what your relationships are you could see what the
00:36:51
site's doing you can put in some of those things where the tracking guys are and see what they're doing cut them off if you want but it's basically a framework within which you can start relating in a new and better way with
00:37:04
the vendors the vendors of the world and they have a business model that we're for some of the ad networks and marketers and so forth if they're you know where with your permission entirely in your control they can sell that data
00:37:17
into in the sense that you you can be in the qualified lead business because that's how the sellers look at it or you can cut it all off and at the same time they have a premium service where you pay them and they're accountable to you
00:37:31
and that's that's another another way they work the rest of its a lot of detail I want to go into so all of it all the fourth parties have the capability i would hope to
00:37:41
allow you to set your own terms and preferences and policies which would include things like don't track the outside your site or service giving my data in a usable form i specify white my
00:37:53
data when i say so here's my fourth party who represents me here's my trust network trust network is just a term that came up in the last year there at least two companies doing and working out what a trust network would be which
00:38:05
is we take the social stuff we you know I trust so-and-so as a doctor I trust so and so as a real estate guy I trust so-and-so is a videographer and have enough of those and you can start scaling trust in a way that's external
00:38:19
to any in any of the cows that are out there in the world and there's a how that menu bar would look on the side and it would probably fit somewhere in there you can program the way your cloud that
00:38:32
you can have a cloud you know can interact with other things so for example this this is a graphic and it's not that clear and I should I should explain it a little bit from from a company called kinetics in salt lake
00:38:45
city where you can program how you interact and how the services you use interact with each other outside of any of the cows that are out there in the world so for example but you can use some of their services with their API so
00:38:59
for example mark could say you know Mark header here in the third row I'm going to be in Cambridge I'm open in the evening if doc is there send him a note or if I'm working for somebody fill out
00:39:12
my expense report and inform runkeeper I can I can program all of the if then or else kind of logic that that we would like to be able to do on our own outside
00:39:25
of any single site we don't have to go to Nike to do all of our fitness stuff we don't have to go you know to our sole healthcare provider to do all our health stuff we can keep track of that and we
00:39:37
could program that and the idea is that we have a cloud that is our own and not just the ones outside ourselves generally we're talking about clouds we're talking about something somebody else has is Apple's cloud you
00:39:49
know you leave Apple you lose all the stuff that was in that cloud right get full use of your digital assets this is a completely understandable um graphic
00:40:01
that I only put up there to show that the work is going on a bunch of us are working with Swift which is a very large company that that's a non-profit in Europe that transfers several trillion dollars a day when you have a bank
00:40:14
transfer from a place to another there's a swift is involved in that now they haven't day of the infrastructure for that and the interesting thing about this project is that they're starting
00:40:26
from the assumption that your data also has value like money and if your data is as the World Economic Forum said last year a digital asset that needs to be treated with full respect what would be the infrastructure for transferring some
00:40:39
of that in such a way that if it's not used right you can see it or will support new banking services so for example there's an idea we've had for several years called emancipate
00:40:50
emancipate by which you can escrow the intention to buy something so for example you can say i want to buy a Dodge Ram truck that has the that's white and has a crew cab and has these
00:41:04
wheels and so many horsepower and a roof rack and I've got forty thousand dollars sitting in the back ready to pay for that and you can ask her that intention this is one of the intentions that we talked about so Swift wants Swift wants
00:41:18
to help create these businesses for banks I've talked with a number of banks that want to restore the trust they once had and lost in in the crash deservedly
00:41:30
but they feel like they can you know they're they're never going to go away and you should be able to use them right so maybe they could be fourth parties that could that could help you out this is this is for them and some of us are
00:41:42
working with them project vrm is actually back here we're starting out okay after six years we're still starting it's still at the innovator stage but it's pointing somewhere we
00:41:54
have enough progress now we have enough sense of where this is a go so that I could write a book about it and say what was going to happen over time what is the end state and the end state is what i call the intention
00:42:07
economy and that's an economy that's not based on the guess work that the trillions of dollars that IBM is talking about back here aims at that 1.5 trillion and marketing that for the most part is being wasted on guesswork right
00:42:20
now through a bad theory of you but rather a marketplace where your intentions which might be negative they're prophylactic ones like don't track me to positive ones like I'm looking for this or these are my genuine
00:42:34
relationships these are the real ways that I have loyalty here's some ideas General Motors here's how I'm using your car I spent several hours a couple days ago talking with with a guy who wants to
00:42:46
reform the the local car dealers business so that they are fourth parties working for you advocating what you want in cars to the car manufacturers because
00:43:00
right now they see themselves as just conduits for the car manufacturers or the cars just get pumped through to you but they see they look at social they see these things happening with social and say that's not quite there we're
00:43:13
participating in that but that doesn't get us all the way there there's another state at the end of this where we could turn the tide we know that our customers come to us wanting things that aren't on
00:43:25
the spec sheet they want they see things that they would like that we're not hearing about we would like to advocate them we would like to be a fourth party so so we see the intention economy emerging and looking like this about in
00:43:39
here and now we go to the Q&A and bring ethan back up and i have a little bit more to add at the end of this okay it's fine listen let me play so um
00:43:56
by the way I haven't been answering my email I've been sitting here blocking this just clear my my typing along the side and so having followed this very closely and taking moderators prerogative for the first question
00:44:09
docket it seems to me like many of the people that you're critiquing in this book advertisers businesses that don't really care about what the customer want are working from a very particular
00:44:22
theory of you which is that you don't know what you want right they manufacture your desire and it sounds like the intention economy is fantastic news for businesses that provide
00:44:36
wonderful products and really care what their users one but also sounds like terrible news for businesses that sort of thrive on constructing desire and I'm
00:44:49
sort of wondering you know is is that too naive a reading or are you basically announcing that in the intention economy those guys are dead i I think they have to adapt i mean i think that there's
00:45:01
they're always going to be you know there's always going to be a back-and-forth between between manufacturing desire as it were or you know we that in marketing marketing 101
00:45:12
says you find what the customer wants and you give them that if that was all marketing was we wouldn't have had apple we wouldn't have had Silicon Valley you know so somebody invents an iphone and
00:45:26
we got to have one you know so we events the macbook air we got to have one before that someone invented a fax machine somebody invented a Xerox machine somebody invented Polaroid right those things manufactured desire okay
00:45:38
and there's nothing wrong with that the is but there is something wrong with nothing but that and so there's there's going to be a back and forth on that and there there are companies like like like
00:45:51
IBM that are very clue full about a bunch of things and on the other hand they sort of want to make hay while the Sun shines and while the Sun shines right now Google and Facebook Oh kind of haagen stage and big data looks like a great way to make money and doing data
00:46:03
analytics sounds like a great thing and there's going to be back and forth on that but but i think that there's good the my main point is not not that the other stuff goes away I think there's and logic here okay there there's going
00:46:16
to be marketing as usual and there's going to be a new form of market that willing elicits a new form of marketing that really is about listening and
00:46:27
dialogue there will be a problem and there's a political problem in business and a political problem is it is one that that that my wife Joyce here pointed out early in our marriage when I
00:46:41
was a marketing consultant and I asked why is it that VPS of marketing and sales almost always our salespeople they're not marketing people I was marketing guy to work with marketing people and she said well it's simple
00:46:55
sales is real marketing is and and and when I asked her to unpack that she said well was because sales touches the customer marketing is not allowed to touch the customer politically so
00:47:08
marketing therefore has to be strategic okay it's still going on right marketing still has to be strategic is not touching the customer with social it's starting to touch it more that's what Salesforce is selling us with sugarcrm
00:47:21
is selling that's all the crm guys is selling right now oh now you can touch your customer by watching what they're doing on Twitter and the rest of this and you can jump them and try and sell them whatever it is but there's still
00:47:33
that political problem because the sales side wants to own the customer as it were and there are two problems the customer doesn't want to be owned and the other is that marketing may actually no more than sales it's going to it's
00:47:44
going to be a battle it's going to be a lot of noise going on in the middle of it so there was not a simple answer to that so to provide a slight bit of structure to the amount of noise that's now about to go on in a question and
00:47:56
answer session let me point out a couple of things it would be great if you raise your hands if you have a question when I call on you there are little microphones in front of you if you press on the button that microphone will turn red and
00:48:08
then it will possibly amplify you as you speak into it also just a helpful reminder as this is an academic event sometimes it's important to remind people that questions are interrogative statements they often end with a rise in
00:48:21
vocal tone at the end of them and they provide an opportunity for the person in the front of the stage to respond to them not merely to express your opinions so with that in mind any questions please bunch of them unjust Bob in the
00:48:35
bag Hoover's will get look you first you got the red light hi a lot of what you owe my name is Ben I'm a summer research assistant here at the Berkman Center a
00:48:46
lot of what you seem to talk about in terms of vendor relations management is individuals engaging with these fourth parties right coming together with companies that exist to advocate on
00:48:59
their behalf but are there things the individual can do by themselves without you know interfacing with these fourth parties that is the default state I should say my my preference where I
00:49:14
think we will end up is that we will all have tools that are ours and nobody else's where we can have our own relationships with things and the fourth parties will come into play in the same way as we need lawyers or doctors now
00:49:26
where they have professional capacities that we don't have a loan but the primary state that we're in is fully independent individuals I see Keith nodding in the front row Keith the keith
00:49:38
is an early is with NPR he's an early participant in in in this in vrm in fact one of the original things that we created is called a listen log and it's on the public radio public media player
00:49:51
rather the pic that you can choose public radio stations within and and and it keeps a log of everything that you've listened to so you can use that yourself that's yours is entirely yours nobody else has it you are your own party you
00:50:04
know so you know so the answer is yeah the thing is that most of the commercial activity going on now is in this fourth party area and I think part of what's going to sort out in the course of that
00:50:16
and prove owning is built for that by the way and and so are sure are some of the others which is okay we're just going to do this one thing right and you do the rest the freedom freedom box is perfect when
00:50:29
Freda box is one of the ebon maudlin of law professor columbia major figure in the in the free software movement we've had a bunch of people working on vrm on
00:50:41
the freedom box where you have you know you define your relationship with so-and-so or so and so and so and so so and that's all that's a hardware project um you want a huge I know you you call you know this real better than I do and
00:50:53
I write a headache if they get rowdy up your every second is again cool hi I am I'm a consumer and I'm really really lazy and I would say that a lot of
00:51:07
consumers out there are also really really lazy and so it's easy for me to click on an ad word ad than to go and download some software to protect my ID
00:51:22
what what how is this going to work for lazy consumers who don't want to lift a finger we're going to need inventions that make it easy that's that's it so a couple of interesting learnings we've
00:51:35
had in the last several years when we started out I remember the very first meeting we had in fall of two thousand six at the Berkman Center the project via Rand Paul travik was there and he
00:51:49
said nobody's ever going to do a user install there's a problem you're not gonna do a user install now we have the app market user install out there was it easy to do we need something that's that
00:52:04
easy you know people are willing to do the work when they see ease at the other end of it I remember when when the first pcs came out and I saw quicken for the first time or when I saw Mac and tax for
00:52:18
the first time as like oh my god taxes are going to be easy now I'm eager to do my taxes right there's there are these little crossover points but we need the inventions that mother the necessity right so we don't have them yet that's
00:52:32
the can i append to that yes the facebook like button is really easy and it's a statement of intent except somebody else sends it right yeah and it's Anna's gamed out the wazoo
00:52:44
which is so you know the problem with Facebook isn't just that you know it's huge and all those other things but it's a monoculture you know it's his monoculture so you know people you know weird things happen inside of it mark I
00:52:57
think you were next hi my name is Mark so I can't help but remember when Steve Gilmore and esters stood up and talked about the attention trust and I got really excited about it until Steve Bill
00:53:09
Maher said oh no I'm not leading it it's complete anarchy and I can you can't have a leader which reminds of the Occupy movement so my question to you mr. Searles is will you be the leader of
00:53:22
this movement because my voice is rising at the end to ask you to step up you wrote the book but you can't have all these cats running around an anarchy you
00:53:34
need to be organized because they are really organized right with other folks and they make us look bad because we're all occupy anarchy you know and we need
00:53:48
to be organized bill to fight them well sure Here I am right i mean so I mean it's not somebody else up here talking about this but I don't you know I don't
00:54:02
want to be the only guy I don't see this as an occupy kind of thing actually I see this is a distinction of of project vrm and our aspirations for vrm is that
00:54:15
we see a hole in the market where the individual is which is why we've avoided almost always talking about oh if enough of people get together then we have this
00:54:26
effect we're at because when you have that we sort of diminish the individual and so what I it's like you know I want to invent like you know I want I want to encourage the invention of a ratchet
00:54:38
wrench okay rather than a standard wrench you know the I mean tools that suddenly when you see to see jeez I gotta have that you know that is it because you're afraid to set expectations or what that's what this is there's expectations out the wazoo in
00:54:51
this thing so I have a that's true as just put out I do have an action item at the end I just sort of jump ahead to it so there is an action item and if you want to lead it step up so but but i but I so that hand
00:55:05
was up there too and Bob back here and then Renee and then you okay so go ahead hi thank you thanks for the talk my name is Peter I'm a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon I'm just trying to think through some of the consequences of what you're
00:55:17
advocating and think about maybe unintended consequences so I mean Google and Facebook and companies like this are able to provide relatively free search with massive data centers to the world
00:55:30
because I occasionally click on their ads I being one of the you know privileged few who has money to spend online now if many of us start withholding our data and that data is
00:55:43
what drives their business models obviously they're going to have to innovate right so my question is kind of twofold so first is it worth it for all of us to withhold our data and then
00:55:56
maybe the world loses free search right for those who can't afford to pay for it and there was a second part that was really clever but I forgot it but it ended with a question together great and
00:56:09
was a good profit it's a very good question and people say that's a good question when they don't have the answer he ever notice that but my answer is a too bad but be theirs we are really
00:56:23
exposed right now I mean they're the bubble is enormous and there's the the level of of bad click edge that's
00:56:36
involved in in the wealth that Google creates that buys you all these free service is very high nobody wants to talk about it it's not accountable it's not transparent but it's there okay and as you is there was very more manifestly
00:56:49
with Facebook actually where the click-through rates are in fact much lower and they have not announced they're shown what the plan is to get past that but we're not so dependent on facebook as we are in Google Google's free search is huge gmail is huge you
00:57:03
know how they can afford to maintain that infrastructure I don't know the costs are very buried there these big factory sized boxes out a you know running off of hydropower in Bend Oregon and hickory north carolina where
00:57:15
you can't really see what's going on in there but it's taken a second a lot of electricity off the grid I think there are all kinds of positive and negative unintended consequences that when that system fails because I think it's going
00:57:27
to fail in the long run and I think there's we're hugely exposed with Google right now but already we're seeing negative effects anyhow of Google being a monoculture a few months ago I was
00:57:40
trying to look up something for fixing Joyce's computer it was like as a simple apple thing that was on an apple page I like a safe startup or safe reboot or I forget what it was called it was unlike
00:57:54
page 10 everything in front of it was I mean it was all you know SEO driven commercial stuff the the level that the commercialization of the web is
00:58:06
so high and getting higher that the organic results they call are going farther and farther down it's getting harder and harder to find some of the stuff you're actually looking for to Google's credit there may there they're keeping up with it but it's a problem
00:58:18
the net that we the web that we know now is vastly a commercial space it's like a giant strip mall it's it's the San Fernando Valley on steroids out the wazoo and it's and it's ugly and it's
00:58:31
going to get uglier and at some point something breaks there and I I don't know whether the vrm stuff causes that breakage but I think it's a problem and I think it's you know we'll go through some process with this but I don't know
00:58:44
what it's going to be so did Bob next think what's it I'm just trying to Bob oh you made your letter I'll see if I can affect a simple question of a complex set of issues but I Schumer
00:58:55
advanced package books in the 60s that advertise of local persuaders and hit but yeah that in every drop of water the worst checks would appear in an ad and other other beliefs that they could
00:59:09
somehow finagle the customer and in a sense what you're saying is today's big data is another version of that but is it that but as a desperate need to sort of find money by selling a fantasy like you TV now puts
00:59:23
up banner ads so I try to make simple question your one thing you fight is a monoculture Facebook and things like that which is initially its own right but to what extent sort of is the money
00:59:37
in those this fantasy that that their data gives an advantage or the other ways you see Facebook and monetize you what it was the day and the argument of
00:59:48
that Facebook and Google make is that because they've this data advertising with them is better than other channels they know more about you and that's driving so much of this business do you
01:00:02
think the jig will ever be up and other other ways to make money there'll be lots of other ways to make money I give advanced Packard you think yeah Vance Packard wrote a book in a 60s called a hidden persuaders where he'd show for
01:00:14
example when if you see some bacardi rum and in a bunch of ice cubes that you know there was something evocative about that would persuade you to buy it I'd rather table that and go to the Facebook
01:00:28
versus Google question because it was his interesting conversation I had about a year and a half ago with a guy who worked for one of those many big advertising companies you never hear about because they're at the back end and they buy and sell your data and he
01:00:41
said here's here's an interesting irony Google is jealous of Facebook because Facebook can get more personal in Google can Facebook is jealous of Google because Google can put their ads all over the web and they're actually
01:00:54
surfing on real intent I should point out when you search for something you're expressing intent it's not like it's a bad thing and they were jealous of each other but at the same time as this guy pointed out both of them actually fail
01:01:07
ninety-nine point X percent of the time and that waste is hidden and you don't see where it is but it's it is it is itself a problem that no amount of of
01:01:18
improving that system can cure and so I'm not sure the jig is up we'll always have online advertising just like we will always have brand advertising will always have you know the first half of an ax t fair
01:01:31
is going to be all fashion & liquors and the rest of it and they keep these big nice magazines and business and and to some extent that advertising is desired it is a form of editorial I don't think that changes I think some things are
01:01:44
seriously in danger radio is in danger television as we knew it is in danger we never wanted those ads for the most part there are better ways of finding out what we want but the thing is that there
01:01:56
you know what I hope I get across oh but I sense and what we're trying to cause as well is this tidal shift where it's not all just slosh coming down from a zillion advertisers that's driving everything but at some point it starts
01:02:10
leveling out and the the signaling that goes back upstream is is helpful and not just rebellion I mean this is where I did this kind of addresses marks issue I don't think this is this is an Occupy
01:02:22
we're not we're not trying to come from we're too poor helpless powerless little calves and please treat us better which is what a lot of people where they want to go but rather you know what we're going to get power is you don't have that we don't have now when we get those
01:02:34
you're going to want to talk to us you're going to want to relate to us we're going to find out through dialogue what the real relationship should be like right now I think we had your next
01:02:45
play yeah so um how do you what are your thoughts around people there's a trust issue that people have they people have assumed that their data wouldn't be used in places it's been used so there's your
01:03:00
also answering it a little closer you're answering like a trust problem issue so what are your thoughts about how does this not become another play at the customer and something that has some
01:03:13
substance that people can say I believe in this I trust this is there a community enforcement mechanism are there a variety of mechanisms is there you know we've talked a lot about this but yeah I one I want to hear more in
01:03:27
the community since because I I think one concern is you have people who are there's an on way of this is now the new thing and owe you cookies are going to be it's a technical play but it really
01:03:39
doesn't do much on the other end or here's a great fourth part is going to host my data but when you look at the terms they're not willing to protect you if they screw up what are people what's the community going to do to protect this great work and say look here's the
01:03:52
line you don't cross the slide what are your thoughts around that there I think they're at least three issues there one is we have so few reasons to trust anybody right now out there there's nothing I've shown you today and there's
01:04:05
nothing I've seen so far that says any of the fourth parties we have so far can't be corrupted and be and you know and as you've pointed out and in Renee's my mentor on all things legal by the way she's a former fellow here as well you
01:04:19
know all the most well intended companies out there have really bad terms of service because that's pro forma still we haven't fixed that and we have we have to fix that but we can't fix that as long as there's this power
01:04:33
asymmetry that we've we have to bring the power up on the customer side on the individual side so suddenly we can have decent relations there that's one thing the second thing is we are going to have
01:04:46
I think a community and an organization and I'll go into that in a few minutes as a kind of punch line but the but the but the third is I think there's strength in numbers and by that I mean we are going to lose some of these
01:04:58
fourth parties some of these toolmakers some of the high aspiration says the right thing companies that are in the vrm community now too they'll be selling out I mean it the money is there the money is going to be here here's fifty
01:05:12
million dollars to help us scarf up data and Hoover up more stuff for the big data mills that I were buying from IBM I'm afraid that's probably going to happen to some degree or there there are a number of companies that are sort of
01:05:23
starting with okay we've got a business model where we make money off the sell side then we're going to gradually shift over to the buy side provo knee has one of those okay if if nobody wants to buy in maybe they're not as accountable to
01:05:36
the individual I think a good thing is that in France and my conversations with our French friends including a professors at Thomas Stesha from
01:05:49
from the University into Poitier which is we figured today 205 years the elder of Harvard attended made it clear even more clear that it had already been made
01:06:03
clear to me that there is so little taste for bad behavior on the cellar side in respect to privacy and identity and things like that in France that you don't even bring the subject up and in
01:06:15
fact whole institutions are at risk so here this actually addresses part of your question there are three industries that we've dealt a lot with in the vrm community telcos banks and was the third
01:06:28
one to remember but anyway telcos and banks or to their own and end up in a post office okay that there are these are these are not the most trusted institutions you know that's they're not
01:06:40
and the government in general is not as trust its trusted different ways in different societies but there's there's a Sosa but they're coming to us in part because they do want to reform you know
01:06:52
we have one guy who is very active in coming to our meetings and silver there's now working for JPMorgan Chase right and his job is to kind of erm jpmorgan chase in the long run you know
01:07:05
what can we do to be a non bad bank and but the question is he was already told me he's going to be fighting internal battles from all the way along because security always comes up right only we
01:07:18
can control security so I know the talk that what I was trying to get as that we need to Steve Jobs who could be an because that's not may be easy yeah and that's why Apple products are so good because he was able to draw the
01:07:31
line and say sorry it has to be this way so here here's the problem with the Apple example it was an example only of itself they'll only be one of those they'll never be another Steve Jobs they'll never be another Apple including Apple because Steve Jobs is dead you
01:07:44
know ride to stock well it's good now but it's going to die all these companies going to die but then like Steve did I mean there there's such an anomalous company there so unusual and I don't know if we need you know a you
01:07:58
know a you know a charismatic person here I really don't I think it's I think we need good tools here because you've worked wait Chris Speier has been trying to Chris are sorry Chris I'm looking to the right I don't put your mic i'm chris chris meyer
01:08:11
from minor talent yeah um i think i understand an endpoint which sounds a lot like what Seth code needs to call permission marketing where we trust people enough to give them permission to tell them what we want to know and we
01:08:25
think that that works but you don't believe there's any way to get to there from here oh no I do I think that's part of it that I think that's a very benefit let me get to the question okay okay hundred years ago we had an interesting
01:08:38
technology that created a lot of new value and for the economy of industrial technology but one of the unintended consequences was abuse of laborers and
01:08:50
to the point of shooting at them in Carnegie's case but eventually we figured out labor laws and similarly we had monopoly and we figured out antitrust laws we are sitting I think in a law school and you have not mentioned
01:09:04
any legal or regulatory role in changing the balance of power here so does that is that include it in the brm movement not yet I I'm my position on this is
01:09:20
that we should work the technology out and work to sociology out before we start working out the legal stuff in terms of getting new laws and things like for example I think it's too early to have a Do Not Track law I think
01:09:32
that's that would be a mistake I there was a I was at a meeting once with Michael Powell the former FCC Chairman
01:09:44
where I think what was on the table then was net neutrality but here it is an important point he he said well next you want to go for that but I want to tell you this I've met everybody in Congress thing and tell you to a person there are
01:09:57
two things they don't understand what is technology the other is economics now proceed right so that's what I'm afraid of with this is that is that you know but you consider say we need to do that track law when we can have a technical solution that starts with us being
01:10:11
empowered and I would rather have that happen first so so I don't see that as off the table at all I just don't see it as at the center of the table or the first place to go duck i think you have
01:10:25
room for for one more question and then a call to action such okay carefully okay we've had your let's take two because you've had your hand up a long time and you did too so go ahead is
01:10:40
there one next to you on the other side just here we go okay does that sound good that sounds good that's hi Gilligan talks about some GCC printers and I just had kind of from a sort of practical angle how do you feel the intersection
01:10:56
of vrm and supply chain management is going to occur and I just want to address that because of our interest in 3d printing which now allows for small lots to be produced quickly and things to be turned around and manufactured in
01:11:10
a way that makes vrm of course you have a supply chain like Apple which is huge and takes quite a while to implement so what's your feeling oh so there's a one of the participants in the vrm
01:11:23
conversation is a an authority on on on supply chain night Michael stole our zyk who just came out with a book called logical logistics and he talks about I think what he calls a funicular
01:11:37
relationship if you know a funicular train is once I goes down while the other goes up there's a there's a tight linear relationship between the two if he sees vrm playing an important role giving signals that go back up the
01:11:51
supply chain that help improve the supply chain all the way through that's kind of what the the guy with the with the car dealers is in in Alabama same same kind of thing it's like they're whoops the dealers are whipsawed by the
01:12:04
supply chain even though it's just like one tier where they are now and there are many other kinds of suppliers I think they have many more stages in it but the theory on his part is the more
01:12:15
good information you get at the point of use the better it's going to be for the supply chain especially if goodwill is involved and and having for example just surveys surveys almost always wrong it was asked the wrong questions and the
01:12:28
important question you get is you know this one thing didn't work from one guy who was in a good position to know that you know that wasn't put in there right and after a year of use that connector is not going to work and you better work on that and it goes back up
01:12:40
the supply chain he sees vrm playing a that role in the long run is one part of here I'm doing that so and over here sir george central square um i looked in
01:12:55
your index and i don't see elinor ostrom oh she should she's in the bibliography for sure okay and I'm wondering about how you're going to apply her ideas about sustainable economics and decision
01:13:09
structures through a variety of different mechanisms and groups to what you're talking about because you know she's world expert on commons and what this is right Commons so there I have a
01:13:22
chapter on the commons and one of the one of the things that my good editors here like Jeff over here and others that helped me is is cutting the book data for 120 thousand words to 80,000 words and Elinor Ostrom is one of the ones
01:13:34
ended up on the floor I hate to say but but Lewis hide who's a colleague here is still in there and um that's part of it i think i think we are building a new commons that is going to be like the
01:13:47
ones that lewis describes and that Eleanor describes but I understand him better than her even though both of them had wonderful critiques of garrett hardin and the notion that Commons has to be tragic when in fact it does not
01:14:00
that that and I happen to believe that the net itself which is why the whole central section of the book is devoted to the net as a marketplace as a natural marketplace that the facebooks of the
01:14:12
world and even the googles and the Amazons the world are narrowing down to some degree but it can be much more of a commons than it is right now and I think we can make it a commons by our behaviors and our our participation in
01:14:25
it and I'm an optimist okay so what you're getting with this book is primarily an optimistic thing I've been accused correctly as a as a cyber libertarian I'm not libertarian to us a cyber token sorry Tokyo p.m. sever
01:14:40
utopian yeah we had a in this room or one like it we had a a thing a couple years ago where David Weinberger and I SAT here and the session was called house house hbu Toby of working out for you so far and the
01:14:52
answer and I happen to think it is utopia I mean if you'd said and I point us out in the book in in in nineteen and nineteen eighty-two or you know that you
01:15:04
would have this worldwide network where we are all connected to each other at no cost and a great ease and we can do all of this sharing in real time and that we would obsolete the phone companies and
01:15:16
all kinds of things in the process we think you were nuts we think we might have active gravity cars before we'd have that but we it is a utopia we made a utopia we have to build it out I think so doc you've got us all you'll get all
01:15:29
fired up before we exit through the gift shop we literally do in this I so what is your call to action okay so the call to action is join customer comments so we created and the book talks about
01:15:41
customer comments and we put this thing together as a six it's not a successor organization to to project via around project veeram will persist as the light weight thing it is it's a wiki unit and
01:15:53
at a list and hopefully in the long run will do research there as well but customer Commons where is the idea is that this is what the hundred percent belong to we are all customers and it's
01:16:06
been it will be the place where we can do several things one is crowdfund developments like vrm developments going on here where we can talk with each other and work things out that are not
01:16:18
complaints about what the big bad companies are doing but what constructive things we can do with around law around supply chain around building out the commons around the rest
01:16:29
of these things so so the yeah and is a customer comment storage it so I just put that up there we have customer comments dot org up there so so joint go there join it and you can give it money
01:16:44
too if you like it's too it's still early we're still shaking it down but it is formed join customer Commons by the book have doc sign it applaud doc Searls well done
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