You’re reading this on a machine with an operating system: Linux, Windows, MacOS, iOS, or Android.

But that’s not your OS. It’s your machine’s.

How about one for you, that runs on your machine but is entirely yours? Let’s call it a Personal OS, or a POS.

The POS will have a kernel onto which abilities (not just applications) can be added. An extreme example of how this might work is Neo learning ju jitsu in The Matrix:

That OS amplified Neo’s own intelligence, in his own head. We’re far from that today. But we can at least add abilities to a POS of our own. Those too can give us more agency of many kinds.

To my knowledge, there is only one POS so far. It’s called pAI-OS (Github code), and it’s led by Kwaai.* To my knowledge, pAI-OS is the first and only truly personal operating system. (If others do the same, let me know and I’ll talk those up too.) And it is built to run our own AIs. Let’s call them PAIs, where the A can mean amplified or augmented (sourcing Doug Englebart for the latter).

So, what kind of abilities are we talking about?

Let’s start with something that could hardly be more mundane and important: memory.

In Laws of Media, Marshall McLuhan said (five decades ago) that computing promises “perfect memory—total and exact.” For many millennia, our species has been outboarding memory through speech, the written word, and collecting all of that in libraries and museums. And now, in the digital age that dawned with microcircuits and the Internet, we now occupy a digital world where everybody can publish whatever they want. To peruse that, we made search engines. Those ruled from the late ’90s until approximately yesterday, when AIs took over servicing our interest in answers to questions. Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, and others have moved into a space we might call AI answerware.

Running all that answerware are corporate AIs. Lets call them CAIs. Nothing wrong with CAIs, but also nothing personal, because they are not ours. I explain the difference in Personal vs. Personalized AI. Here’s a graphic from that post showing a bit of what abilities might run on your PAI:

PAIs can extend our own memories by accumulating personal stuff we need to know better, and our ability to meet, access, and use the external abilities of the CAI world. So we’ll have our agents + their agents, working together.

For an example of how that might work, take a look at The most important standard in development today: P7012: Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, which “identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they can be read and agreed to by machines.” After seven years with a working group, it is now in the IEEE editing and approval mill, edging toward becoming a finished standard by next year. It works like this:

Here your agent (a PAI, represented by the ⊂ symbol) proffers your privacy terms (here is one example) to a corporate agent (which might or might not be a CAI, but is still represented with the reciprocal symbol ⊃. (This should be familiar to ProjectVRM veterans as the r-button. We may finally get to use it!)

The ceremony here is the exact reverse of what we have today with the cookie popovers on most website home pages. This can and should be done ⊂ to ⊃. So should signing and recording the agreement, or the choice of the site, should it tell you to screw off. (An agent running on your PAI will record that diss.)

I also bring this up because it will be a key required ability—not just for you and me but for the world, starting with Europe, where the GDPR lists six lawful bases for processing personal data. They begin—

(a) Consent: the individual has given clear consent for you to process their personal data for a specific purpose.
(b) Contract: the processing is necessary for a contract you have with the individual, or because they have asked you to take specific steps before entering into a contract.

By now everyone knows that (a) Consent has failed. It’s an expensive and meaningless dance, with high cognitive (mostly cynical) overhead, and almost no accountability. Now they’re ready for (b) Contract, especially in ceremonies where the individual (not a mere “user”) takes the lead.

I believe there is less limit to what each of us can do with a PAI than there is to what we can do with a laptop or a phone. Because our PAI is our own. It runs on a deeper machine OS, but is not limited by that. Your PAI, running on your POS, may prove to be the first truly personal layer ever put on a machine OS.

*Full disclosure: I am now the Chief Intention Officer there. At this stage, it’s a voluntary position.

On a scale of one to ten, how do you rate the  Customer Experience Management (CEM) business?

I give it a zero.

Have you noticed that every service comes with a bonus survey—one you answer on a phone or fill out on a Web page? And that every one of those surveys is about rating the poor soul you spoke to or chatted with, rather than the company’s own crappy CEM system?

I always say yes to the question “Was your problem resolved?” because I know the human I spoke to will be punished if I say no.  Saying yes to that question complies with Don Marti‘s tweeted advice: “5 stars for everyone always—never betray a human to the machines.”

The main problem with CEM is that it’s all about getting service to scale across populations by faking interest in human contact. You can see it all through McKinsey’s The CEO Guide to Customer Experience. The customer is always on a “journey” through which a company has “touchpoints.”

Oh please.

IU Health, my primary provider of health services, does a good job on the whole, but one downside is the phone survey that follows up seemingly every interaction I have with a doctor or an assistant of some kind. The survey is always from a robot that says it “will only take a few minutes.” I haven’t counted, but I am sure some of those surveys last longer than the interaction I had with the human who provided the service: an annoyingly looooong touchpoint.

I wrote Why Surveys Suck here, way back in 2007. In it, I wrote,  “One way we can gauge the success of VRM is by watching the number of surveys decline.”

Makes me cringe a bit, but I think it’s still true.

The image above was created by Bing Creator and depicts “A hellscape of unhappy people, some on phones and others filling out surveys.”

Prompt: A woman uses personal AI to know, get control of, and put to better use all available data about her property, health, finances, contacts, calendar, subscriptions, shopping, travel, and work. Via Microsoft Copilot Designer, with spelling corrections by the author.

Most AI news is about what the giants (OpenAI/Microsoft, Meta, Google/Apple, Amazon, Adobe, Nvidia) are doing (seven $trillion, anyone?), or what AI is doing for business (all of Forbes’ AI 50). Against all that, personal AI appears to be about where personal computing was in 1974: no longer an oxymoron but discussed more than delivered.

For evidence, look up “personal AI.” All the results will be about business (see here and here) or “assistants” that are just suction cups on the tentacles of giants (Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, Bixby), or wannabes that do the same kind of thing (Lindy, Hound, DataBot).

There may be others, but three exceptions I know are Kin, Personal AI and Pi.

Personal AI is finding its most promoted early uses on the side of business more than the side of customers. Zapier, for example, explains that Personal AI “can be used as a productivity or business tool.”

Kin and Pi are personal assistants that help you with your life by surveilling your activities for your own benefit. I’ve signed up for both, but have only experienced Pit,” or “just vent,” when I ask it to help me with the stuff outlined in (and under) the AI-generated image above, it wants to hook me up with a bunch of siloed platforms that cost money, or to do geeky things (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Python on my own computer. Provisional conclusion: Pi means well, but the tools aren’t there yet. [Later… Looks like it’s going to morph into some kind of B2B thing, or be abandoned outright, now that Inflection AI’s CEO, Mustafa Suleyman is gone to Microsoft. Hmm… will Microsoft do what we’d like in this space?]

Open source approaches are out there: OpenDAN, Khoj, Kwaai , and Llama are four, and I know at least one will be at VRM Day and IIW.

So, since personal AI may finally be what pushes VRM into becoming a Real Thing, we’ll make it the focus of our next VRM Day.

As always, VRM Day will precede IIW in the same location: the Boole Room of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, just off Highway 101 in the heart of Silicon Valley. It’ll be on Monday, 15 April, and start at 9am. There’s a Starbucks across the street and ample parking because the museum is officially closed on Mondays, but the door is open. We lunch outdoors (it’s always clear) at the sports bar on the other corner.

Registration is open now at this Eventbrite link:

https://vrmday2024a.eventbrite.com

You can also just show up, but registering gives us a rough headcount, which is helpful for bringing in the right number of chairs and stuff like that.

See you there!

A customer looks at a market where choice rules and nobody owns anybody. Source: Microsoft Copilot | Designer

I’m in a discussion of business constituencies. On the list (sourced from the writings of Doug Shapiro) are investors, employees, suppliers, customers, and regulators.

The first three are aware of their membership, but the last two? Not so sure.

Since ProjectVRM works for customers, let’s spin the question around. Do customers have a business constituency? If so, businesses are members by the customer’s grace. She can favor, ignore, or more deeply engage with any of those businesses at her pleasure. She does not “belong” to any of them, even though any or all of them may refer to her, or their many other customers, with possessive pronouns.

Take membership (e.g. Costco, Sam’s Club) and loyalty (CVS, Kroger) programs off the table. Membership systems are private markets, and loyalty programs are misnomered. (For more about that, read the “Dysloyalty” chapter of The Intention Economy.)

Let’s look instead at businesses that customers engage as a matter of course: contractors, medical doctors, auto mechanics, retail stores, restaurants, clubs, farmers’ markets, whatever. Some may be on speed dial, but most are not. What matters in all cases is that these businesses are responsible to their customers. “The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers,” Adam Smith writes. “It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.” That’s what it means to be a customer’s constituent.

An early promise of the Internet was supporting that “effectual discipline.” For the most part, that hasn’t happened. The “one clue” in The Cluetrain Manifesto said “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.” Thanks to ubiquitous surveillance and capture by corporate giants and unavoidable platforms, corporate grasp far outreaches customer agency.

That’s one reason ProjectVRM has been working against corporate grasp since 2006, and just as long for customer reach. Our case from the start has been that customer independence and agency are good for business. We just need to prove it.

Prompt: “A public marketplace for digital goods where people pay whatever they please for everything they consume.” Via Microsoft Image Creator

Now that we’ve hit peak subscription, and paywalls are showing up in front of formerly free digital goods (requiring, of course, more subscriptions), perhaps the world is ready for EmanciPay, an idea that has been biding its time on our wiki since 2009.

So, rather than leave it buried there, we’ll surface it here. Dig:::

Overview

Simply put, Emancipay makes it easy for anybody to pay (or offer to pay) —

1. as much as they like
2. however they like
3. for whatever they like
4. on their own terms

— or at least to start with that full set of options, and to work out differences with sellers easily and with minimal friction.

Emancipay turns consumers (aka users) into customers by giving them a pricing gun (something which in the past only sellers used) and their own means to make offers, to pay outright, and to escrow the intention to pay when price and other requirements are met. And to be able to do this at scale across all sellers, much as cash, browsers, credit cards, and email clients do the same. Payments themselves can also be escrowed.

In slightly more technical terms, EmanciPay is a payment framework for customers operating with full agency in the open marketplace, and at scale. It operates on open protocols and standards, so it can be used by any buyer, seller or intermediary.

It was conceived as a way to pay for music, journalism, or what any artist brings into the world. But it can apply to anything. For example, [subscriptions], have become a giant fecosystem in which every seller has separate and non-substitutable scale across all subscribers, while subscribers have zero scale across all sellers, with the highly conditional exceptions of silo’d commercial intermediaries. As [Customer Commons] puts it,

There’s also not much help coming from the subscription management services we have on our side: Truebill, Bobby, Money Dashboard, Mint, Subscript Me, BillTracker Pro, Trim, Subby, Card Due, Sift, SubMan, and Subscript Me. Nor from the subscription management systems offered by Paypal, Amazon, Apple or Google (e.g. with Google Sheets and Google Doc templates). All of them are too narrow, too closed and exclusive, too exposed to the surveillance imperatives of corporate giants, and too vested in the status quo.

That status quo sucks (see here, or just look up “subscription hell”), and it’s way past time to unscrew it.) But how?

The better question is where?

The answer to that is on our side: the customer’s side.

While EmanciPay was first conceived by ProjectVRM as a way to make live payments to nonprofits and to provide a new monetization method for publishers. it also works as a counterpart to sellers’ subscription systems in what Zuora (a supplier of subscription management systems to the publishing industry, including The Guardian and Financial Times) calls the “subscription economy“, which it says “is built on ever-changing relationships with your customers”. Since relationships are two-way by nature, EmanciPay is one way that customers can manage their end, while publisher-side systems such as Zuora’s manage the other.

Emancipay economic case

EmanciPay provides a new form of economic signaling not available to individuals, either on the Net or before the Net became available as a communications medium. EmanciPay will use open standards and be comprised of open-source code. While any commercial fourth parties can use EmanciPay (or its principles, or any parts of it they like), EmanciPay’s open and standard framework will support fourth parties by making them substitutable, much as the open standards of email (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) make email systems substitutable. (Each has what Joe Andrieu calls service endpoint portability.)

EmanciPay is an instrument of customer independence from all of the billion (or so) commercial entities on the Net, each with its own arcane and siloed systems for engaging and managing customer relations, as well as receipt, acknowledgment, and accounting for payments from customers.

Use Case Background

EmanciPay was conceived originally as a way to provide customers with the means to signal interest and the ability to pay for media and creative works (most of which are freely available on the Web, if not always free of charge). Through EmanciPay, demand and supply can relate, converse, and transact business on mutually beneficial terms, rather than only on terms provided by the countless different siloed systems we have today, each serving to hold the customer captive, and causing much inconvenience and friction in the process.

Media goods were chosen for five reasons: 1) because most are available for free, even if they cost money, or are behind paywalls 2) paywalls, which are cookie-based, cannot relate to individuals as anything other than submissive and dependent parties (and each browser a users employs carries a different set of cookies) 3) both media companies and non-profits are constantly looking for new sources of revenue 4) the subscription model, while it creates steady income and other conveniences for sellers, is often a bad deal for customers, and is now so overused (see Subscriptification) that the world is approaching a peak subscription crisis, and unscrewing it can only happen from the customer’s side (because the business is incapable of unscrewing the problem itself 5) all methods of intermediating payment choices are either siloed by the seller or siloed by intermediators, discouraging participation by individuals.

What the marketplace requires are new business and social contracts that ease payment and stigmatize non-payment for creative goods. The friction involved in voluntary payment is still high, even on the Web, where one must go through complex ceremonies even to make simple payments. There is no common and easy way either to keep track of what media (free or otherwise) we use (see Media Logging), to determine what it might be worth, and to pay for it easily and in standard ways — to many different suppliers. (Again, each supplier has its own system for accepting payments.)

EmanciPay differs from other payment models (subscriptions, newsstands, tip jars) by providing customers with the ability to choose what they wish to pay and how they’ll pay it, with minimum friction — and with full choice about what they disclose about themselves.

EmanciPay will also support credit for referrals, requests for service, feedback, and other relationship support mechanisms, all at the control of the user. For example, EmanciPay can provide quick and easy ways for listeners to pay for public radio broadcasts or podcasts, for readers to pay for otherwise “free” papers or blogs, for listeners to pay to hear music and support artists, for users to issue promises of payment for stories or programs — all without requiring the individual to disclose unnecessary private information or to become a “member” — although these options are kept open.

This will scaffold genuine relationships between buyers and sellers in the media marketplace. It will also give deeper meaning to “membership” in non-profits. (Under the current system, “membership” generally means putting one’s name on a pitch list for future contributions, and not much more than that.)

EmanciPay will also connect the sellers’ CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems with customers’ VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) systems, supporting rich and participatory two-way relationships. In fact, EmanciPay will by definition be a VRM system.

Micro-accounting and Macro-distribution

The idea of “micro-payments” for goods on the Net has been around for a long time and is often brought up as a potential business model for journalism. For example in this article by Walter Isaacson in Time Magazine. It hasn’t happened, at least not globally, because it’s too complicated, and in prototype only works inside private silos.

What ProjectVRM suggests instead is something we don’t yet have, but very much need:

1. micro-accounting for actual uses. Think of this simply as “keeping track of” the news, podcasts, newsletters, or music we consume.
2. macro-distribution of payments for accumulated use (that’s no longer “micro”).

Much — maybe most — of the digital goods we consume are both free for the taking and worth more than $zero. How much more? We need to be able to say. In economic terms, demand needs to have a much wider range of signals it can give to supply. And give to each other, to better gauge what we should be willing to pay for free stuff that has real value but not a hard price.

As currently planned, EmanciPay would –

1. Provide a single and easy way for consumers of “content” to become customers of it. In the current system — which isn’t one — every artist, every musical group, and every public radio and TV station has his, her or own way of taking in contributions from those who appreciate the work. This can be arduous and time-consuming for everybody involved. (Imagine trying to pay separately every musical artist you like, for all your enjoyment of each artist’s work.) What EmanciPay proposes, however, is not a replacement for existing systems, but a new system that can supplement existing fund-raising systems — one that can soak up much of today’s MLOTT: Money Left On The Table.
2. Provide ways for individuals to look back through their media usage histories, inform themselves about what they have been enjoying, and determine how much it is worth to them. The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), and later the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), both came up with “rates and terms that would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller.” This almost absurd language first appeared in the 1995 Digital Performance Royalty Act (DPRA) and was tweaked in 1998 by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), under which both the CARP and the CRB operated. The rates they came up with peaked at $.0001 per “performance” (a song or recording), per listener. EmanciPay creates the “willing buyer” that the DPRA thought wouldn’t exist.
3. Stigmatize non-payment for worthwhile media goods. This is where “social” will finally come to be something more than yet another tech buzzmodifier.

All these require micro-accounting, not micro-payments. Micro-accounting can inform ordinary payments that can be made in clever new ways that should satisfy everybody with an interest in seeing artists compensated fairly for their work. An individual listener, for example, can say “I want to pay 1¢ for every song I hear,” and “I’ll send SoundExchange a lump sum of all the pennies wish to pay for songs I have heard over a year, along with an accounting of what artists and songs I’ve listened to” — and leave dispersal of those totaled pennies up to the kind of agency that likes, and can be trusted, to do that kind of thing. That’s the macro-distribution part of the system.

Similar systems can also be put in place for readers of newspapers, blogs, and other journals. What’s important is that the control is in the hands of the individual and that the accounting and dispersal systems work the same way for everybody.

I was listening to the latest Pivot Podcast when Kara Swisher played a clip from Sam Altman‘s keynote at OpenAI’s Developers Day, earlier this week. Spake Sam (at the 35:18 mark),

We believe that AI will be about individual empowerment and agency on a scale we’ve never seen before

Whoa! That’s what we’ve been working toward here at ProjectVRM since 2006.

Shall we call it IEASWNSB? (Pronounced “Eewasnib,” perhaps?) We might have better luck with that than we’ve had with VRM, Me2B, and other initialisms and acronyms.

For fun, I asked Bing Image Create, which uses OpenAI’s DALL-E to produce images, to make art with its boss’s words. It gave me the images above. Here’s the link.

Those are a little too Ayn Randy for me. So I tried just “Empowered individuals,” and got this—

—which is almost the ulta-woke opposite of the first one.

But never mind that. Let’s talk about individual empowerment with AI help. Here’s my personal punch list:

1. Health. Make sense of all my health data. Suck it in from every medical care provider I’ve ever had, and help me make decisions based on it. Also, help me share it on an as-needed basis with my current providers. (On my own terms, about which more below.)
2. Finances. Pull in and help me make sense of my holdings, obligations, recurring payments, incomes, whatever. Match my orders and shipments from Amazon and other retailers with the cryptic entries (always in ALL CAPS) on my credit card bills. I want to run every receipt I collect through a scanner that does OCR for my AI, which will know what receipt is for what, where it goes in the books it helps me keep, and yearly helps me work through my taxes. The list can go on.
3. Property. What have I got? I want to point my phone camera at everything that a good AI can recognize, and make sense of all that too. Know all the books on my shelves by reading their spines. Know my furniture, the stuff in my basement. Help me keep records of my car’s history after I give it the VIN number I photographed under the windshield, and run all the records I’ve kept in the glove box through the same scanner I mentioned above. Whatever. Why not?
4. Correspondence. I have half a million emails here, going back to 1995. (Wish it went back farther.) Lots of texts too, in lots of systems. Help me do a better job of looking back through those than my various clients do. Help me cross-reference those with events I attended and other stuff that may be relevant to some current inquiry.
5. Contacts. Who do I have in my various directories? How many entries are wrong in one way or another? Go through and correct them, AI butler, using whatever clever new algorithm works for that, supplied by corporate entities whose knowledge of me remains as close to zero as I allow.
6. Crumb trail. What did I buy from Amazon (or anybody) and when? Where do Google and Apple know I’ve been and what I’ve been doing? How about my late model car, which at the very least knows lots about my driving, and may even know what I’ve said, to whom, or even if sexual activity was going on? How about my TV, the maker of which gets paid to snitch on what I’ve watched and when—and may even be watching me and others, sitting and staring at it. All that information is far more useful to me than it is to them.
7. Calendar. Tell me where I was on a given day, what I was doing, and who I was with. Knowing all that other personal data (above) will help too.
8. Business relationships. Look into all my subscriptions and help me fight the fuckery behind nearly all of them. Make better sense of all the “loyalty” programs I’m involved with, and help me unfuck those too since most of them are about entrapment rather than real loyalty. (Bonus links here and here.)
9. Other involvements. What associations do I belong to? How deeply am I involved with any or all of them? Can we drop some? Add some? Have some insights into how those are going, or should go?
10. Travel. I have 1.6 million miles with United Airlines alone. Where did I go? When? Why? What did I pay? Are there ways to improve my relationships with airlines and other entities (e.g. car rental agencies, Uber/Lyft, Airbnb, cruise lines)? Are there ways I can help them that don’t require enduring yet another of those annoying surveys that seem to follow every contact with them?
11. Shopping. We’ve been talking about (and working toward) intentcasting since the late aughts, with lots of developers on the case, but not big breakthroughs. But with AI it’s easy to imagine countless possibilities that begin with one’s intent to buy rather than retailers’ intent to sell. Words to wise sellers: A) Make it as easy as possible for customers’ personal and privacy-guarding AI agents to find what you’ve got and know as much about it as possible, and B) Fire every marketer and marketing system that wants in any ways to trap, milk, coerce, and otherwise fuck over customers. Meanwhile, customers should have AI capacities that keep them from getting screwed, to know when the screwing happens, and to help do something about it.
12. My own personal data collection. There have been many of these, by many names, tried over the years. The current leading candidate (IMHO) is Sir Tim Berners-Lee‘s Solid project.

Our lives are packed with too much data for our meat brains alone to fully comprehend and put to use. AI is good for that. So bring it on.

And don’t bet that any of the bigs, including OpenAI, will give you anything on the punch list above*. They’re too big, too centralized, too stuck in a mainframe paradigm. They look for what only they can do for you, rather than what you can do for yourself—or do better with your own damn AI.

Personal AI today is where personal computing was fifty years ago. We don’t yet have the Apple II, the Osborne, the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, much less the IBM  PC or the Macintosh. We just have big companies with big everything and hooks for developers. Coming soon: an app store (also announced in Sam Altman’s keynote).

Real personal AI is a huge greenfield. Going there is also, to switch metaphors, a blue ocean strategy. Wrote about that here.

*Except by pouring all that data into their LLM. Not yours.

And privacy be damned.

See, there is an iron law for every new technology: What can be done will be done. And a corollary that says, —until it’s clear what shouldn’t be done.  Let’s call those Stage One and Stage Two.

With respect to safety from surveillance in our cars, we’re at Stage One.

For Exhibit A, read what Ray Schultz says in Can Radio Time Be Bought With Real-Time Bidding? iHeartMedia is Working On It:

HeartMedia hopes to offer real-time bidding for its 860+ radio stations in 160 markets, enabling media buyers to buy audio ads the way they now buy digital.

“We’re going to have the capabilities to do real-time bidding and programmatic on the broadcast side,” said Rich Bressler, president and COO of iHeart Media, during the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, according to Radio Insider.

Bressler did not offer specifics or a timeline. He added: “If you look at broadcasters in general, whether they’re video or audio, I don’t think anyone else is going to have those capabilities out there.”

“The ability, whenever it comes, would include data-infused buying, programmatic trading and attribution,” the report adds.

The Trade Desk lists iHeart Media as one of its programmatic audio partners.

Audio advertising allows users to integrate their brands into their audiences’ “everyday routines in a distraction-free environment, creating a uniquely personalized ad experience around their interests,” the Trade Desk says.

The Trade Desk “specializes in real-time programmatic marketing automation technologies, products, and services, designed to personalize digital content delivery to users.” Translation: “We’re in the surveillance business.”

Never mind that there is negative demand for surveillance by the surveilled. Push-back has been going on for decades.  Here are 154 pieces I’ve written on the topic since 2008.

One might think radio is ill-suited for surveillance because it’s an offline medium. Peopler listen more to actual radios than to computers or phones. Yes, some listening is online; but  not much, relatively speaking. For example, here is the bottom of the current radio ratings for the San Francisco market:

Those numbers are fractions of one percent of total listening in the country’s most streaming-oriented market.

So how are iHeart and The Trade Desk going to personalize radio ads?  Well, here is a meaningful excerpt from iHeart To Offer Real-Time Bidding For Its Broadcast Ad Inventory, which ran earlier this month at Inside Radio:

The biggest challenge at iHeartMedia isn’t attracting new listeners, it’s doing a better job monetizing the sprawling audience it already has. As part of ongoing efforts to sell advertising the way marketers want to transact, it now plans to bring real-time bidding to its 850 broadcast radio stations, top company management said Thursday.

“We’re going to have the capabilities to do real-time bidding and programmatic on the broadcast side,” President and COO Rich Bressler said during an appearance at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. “If you look at broadcasters in general, whether they’re video or audio, I don’t think anyone else is going to have those capabilities out there.”

Real-time bidding is a subcategory of programmatic media buying in which ads are bought and sold in real time on a per-impression basis in an instant auction. Pittman and Bressler didn’t offer specifics on how this would be accomplished other than to say the company is currently building out the technology as part of a multi-year effort to allow advertisers to buy iHeart inventory the way they buy digital media advertising. That involves data-infused buying and programmatic trading, along with ad targeting and campaign attribution.

Radio’s largest group has also moved away from selling based on rating points to transacting on audience impressions, and migrated from traditional demographics to audiences or cohorts. It now offers advertisers 800 different prepopulated audience segments, ranging from auto intenders to moms that had a baby in the last six months…

Advertisers buy iHeart’s ad inventory “in pieces,” Pittman explained, leaving “holes in between” that go unsold. “Digital-like buying for broadcast radio is the key to filling in those holes,” he added…

…there has been no degradation in the reach of broadcast radio. The degradation has been in a lot of other media, but not radio. And the reason is because what we do is fundamentally more important than it’s ever been: we keep people company.”

Buried in that rah-rah is a plan to spy on people in their cars. Because surveillance systems are built into every new car sold. In Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed By Mozilla — Including Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota — Flunks Privacy Test, Mozilla pulls together a mountain of findings about just how much modern cars spy on their drivers and passengers, and then pass personal information on to many other parties. Here is one relevant screen grab:

As for consent? When you’re using a browser or an app, you’re on the global Internet, where the GDPR, the CCPA, and other privacy laws apply, meaning that websites and apps have to make a show of requiring consent to what you don’t want. But cars have no UI for that. All their computing is behind the dashboard where you can’t see it and can’t control it. So the car makers can go nuts gathering fuck-all, while you’re almost completely in the dark about having your clueless ass sorted into one or more of Bob Pittman’s 800 target categories. Or worse, typified personally as a category of one.

Of course, the car makers won’t cop to any of this. On the contrary, they’ll pretend they are clean as can be. Here is how Mozilla describes the situation:

Many car brands engage in “privacy washing.” Privacy washing is the act of pretending to protect consumers’ privacy while not actually doing so — and many brands are guilty of this. For example, several have signed on to the automotive Consumer Privacy Protection Principles. But these principles are nonbinding and created by the automakers themselves. Further, signatories don’t even follow their own principles, like Data Minimization (i.e. collecting only the data that is needed).

Meaningful consent is nonexistent. Often, “consent” to collect personal data is presumed by simply being a passenger in the car. For example, Subaru states that by being a passenger, you are considered a user — and by being a user, you have consented to their privacy policy. Several car brands also note that it is a driver’s responsibility to tell passengers about the vehicle’s privacy policies.

Autos’ privacy policies and processes are especially bad. Legible privacy policies are uncommon, but they’re exceptionally rare in the automotive industry. Brands like Audi and Tesla feature policies that are confusing, lengthy, and vague. Some brands have more than five different privacy policy documents, an unreasonable number for consumers to engage with; Toyota has 12. Meanwhile, it’s difficult to find a contact with whom to discuss privacy concerns. Indeed, 12 companies representing 20 car brands didn’t even respond to emails from Mozilla researchers.

And, “Nineteen (76%) of the car companies we looked at say they can sell your personal data.”

To iHeart? Why not? They’re in the market.

And, of course, you are not.

Hell, you have access to none of that data. There’s what the dashboard tells you, and that’s it.

As for advice? For now, all I have is this: buy an old car.

A VRM Day at Harvard Law School in 2008

We’ve been in an uphill fight to empower people—customers—in online markets where the prevailing belief is that captive customers are more valuable than free ones. (The value of free customers is well-understood, though not always respected, in offline markets.) And we’ve been in this fight for more than seventeen years.

But now AI is all the craze.

Question: Can AI help VRM? And vice versa?

Think about what would happen if people had their own AI systems, working for them and not for companies whose business is selling you something (e.g. Amazon), pushing advertising at you (e.g. Google), or trapping you in their walled garden (e.g. Apple)? Why not have our own AI, to help us make better sense of our contacts, our calendars, our health, financial, property, travel, and other kinds of data? And then, when the need arises, have our personal AI help us make well-informed decisions about what to buy, how, and where, without being biased by marketers and their bots on the other side?

Those are just a few questions we’ll be visiting two Mondays from now, October 9, at VRM Day in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The time frame will be 9am to 4pm. There is also plenty of parking (the Museum is otherwise closed on Mondays).

We’ll visit other questions that come up, of course. And participants with something to show off are free to do that as well. And some will, especially with IIW happening the following three days, also at the Computer History Museum.

Registering here isn’t necessary, but it helps to have a head count.

See you there!

ProjectVRM has been HQ’d in blog form here since 2007. On Friday that ends.

Our plan is to move it to ProjectVRM.org, a URL that has redirected to the index page at blogs.harvard.edu and needs another way to point.

We’re working on that.

Our host will be WordPress.com. We will need to be on a Business plan there, which is $300/year or $480 for two years.

We can use some help with that. Also with the move.

Meanwhile, thanks to everyone involved, especially the Berkman Klein Center, which has supported us kindly and helpfully through all these years. It’s been a great ride.

Maybe history will defeat itself.

Remember FreePC? It was a thing, briefly, at the end of the last millennium, right before Y2K pooped the biggest excuse for a party in a thousand years. This may help. The idea was to put ads in the corner of your PC’s screen. The market gave it zero stars, and it failed.

And now comes Telly, hawking free TVs with ads in a corner, and a promise to “optimize your ad experience.” As if anybody wants an ad experience other than no advertising at all.

Negative demand for advertising has been well advertised by both ad blocking (the biggest boycott in human history) and ad-free “prestige” TV, (or SVOD, for subscription video on demand). With those we gladly pay—a lot— not to see advertising. (See numbers here.)

But the advertising business (in the mines of which I toiled for too much of my adult life) has always smoked its own exhaust and excels best at getting high with generous funders. (Yeah, some advertising works, but on the whole people still hate it on the receiving end.)

The fun will come when our own personal AI bots, working for our own asses, do battle with the robot Nazgûls of marketing — and win, because we’re on the Demand side of the marketplace, and we’ll do a better job of knowing what we want and don’t want to buy than marketing’s surveillant AI robots can guess at. Supply will survive, of course. But markets will defeat marketing by taking out the middle creep.

The end state will be one Cluetrain forecast in 1999, Linux Journal named in 2006, the VRM community started working on that same year, and The Intention Economy detailed in 2012. The only thing all of them missed was how customer intentions might be helped by personal AI.

Personal.* Not personalized.

Markets will become new and better dances between Demand and Supply, simply because Demand will have better ways to take the lead, and not just follow all the time. Simple as that.

*For more on how this will work, see Individual Empowerment and Agency on a Scale We’ve Never Seen Before.

For sixteen years, ProjectVRM has encouraged the development of tools and services that solve business problems from the customer side. This work is toward testing a theory: that free customers are more valuable—to themselves and to the businesses they engage—than captive ones. That theory can only be tested when tools for doing that are in place.

We already have some of those tools. Our big four in the digital world are the browser, the phone, email, and texting. In the analog offline world, our best model is cash. From The Cash Model of Customer Experience:

Here’s the handy thing about cash: it gives customers scale. It does that by working the same way for everybody, everywhere it’s accepted. It’s also anonymous by nature, meaning it carries no personal identifiers. Recording what happens with it is also optional, because using it doesn’t require an entry in a ledger (as happens with cryptocurrencies). Cash has also been working this way for thousands of years. But we almost never talk about our “experience” with cash, because we don’t need to.

The problem with our four personal digital tools—browser, phone, email and texting—is that they are not fully ours. So our agency is at best compromised. Specifically,

1. The most popular browsers are also agents of Apple, Google, Microsoft, plus countless thousands of third parties inserting cookies and other tracking instruments into our devices.
2. Our phones are not just ours. They are corporate tentacles of Apple and Google, lined with countless personal data suction cups from unknown surveillance systems. (For more on this, see Apple vs (or plus) Adtech, Part I and Part II.)
3. Apple and Google together supply 87% of all email software and services. Apple promises privacy, while Google makes a business out of knowing the contents of your messages, plus every other Google-provided or -involved piece of software reveals to the company about your life. As for how well Apple delivers on its privacy promises, look up apple+compromised+privacy.
4. The original messaging service for phones, SMS, is owned and run by phone companies. Other major messaging, texting and chat services are run entirely by private companies.
5. Among common Internet activities, only email and browsing are based on open and simple standards. The main ones are SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 for email, and HTTP/S for browsing. Those share the Internet’s three NEA virtues: Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them, and Anybody can improve them.

This is important: If a product or service mostly works for some company, it’s not yours. You are a user or a consumer. You are not a customer; nor are you operating with full agency in a truly free market. So, while it is obvious that all of us are made more valuable to business, and to ourselves, because we use browsers, phones, email, and messaging, we can’t say that we are free while we do.

But the Internet is still young: dating in its current form—supportive of e-commerce—since 30 April 1995, when the NSFNET (one of the Internet’s backbones) was decommissioned, and its policy forbidding commercial traffic on its pipes no longer stood in the way. The Net will also be with us for dozens or hundreds of decades to come, with its base protocol, TCP/IP, continuing to support freedom for every node on it.

More importantly, there are many business problems best or only solved from the customer side. Here is a list:

1. Identity. Logins and passwords are burdensome leftovers from the last millennium. There should be (and already are) better ways to identify ourselves by revealing to others only what we need them to know. Working on this challenge is the SSI—Self-Sovereign Identity—movement.  (Which also goes by many other names. The latest is Web5.) The solution here for individuals is tools of their own that scale. Note that there is a LOT happening here. One good way keep up with it is in the Identisphere newsletter.  You can also participate by attending the twice-yearly Internet Identity Workshop, which has been going strong since 2005.
2. Subscriptions. Nearly all subscriptions are pains in the butt. “Deals” can be deceiving, full of conditions and changes that come without warning. New customers often get better deals than loyal customers. And there are no standard ways for customers to keep track of when subscriptions run out, need renewal, or change. The only way this can be normalized is from the customers’ side.
3. Terms and conditions. In the world today, nearly all of these are ones that companies proffer; and we have little or no choice about agreeing to them. Worse, in nearly all cases, the record of agreement is on the company’s side. Oh, and since the GDPR came along in Europe and the CCPA in California, entering a website has turned into an ordeal typically requiring “consent” to privacy violations the laws were meant to stop. Or worse, agreeing that a site or a service provider spying on us is a “legitimate interest.” The solution here is terms individuals can proffer and organizations can agree to. The first of these is #NoStalking, and allows a publisher to do all the advertising they want, so long as it’s not based on tracking people. Think of it as the opposite of an ad blocker. (Customer Commons is also involved in the IEEE’s P7012 Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms.
4. Payments. For demand and supply to be truly balanced, and for customers to operate at full agency in an open marketplace (which the Internet was designed to support), customers should have their own pricing gun: a way to signal—and actually pay willing sellers—as much as they like, however, they like, for whatever they like, on their own terms. There is already a design for that, called EmanciPay. Its promise for the music industry alone is enormous.
5. Intentcasting. Advertising is all guesswork, which involves massive waste. But what if customers could safely and securely advertise what they want, and only to qualified and ready sellers? This is called intentcasting, and to some degree, it already exists. Toward this, the Intention Byway is a core focus of Customer Commons. (Also see a list of intentcasting providers on the ProjectVRM Development Work list.)
6. Shopping. Why can’t you have your own shopping cart—that you can take from store to store? Because we haven’t invented one yet. But we can. And when we do, all sellers are likely to enjoy more sales than they get with the current system of all-silo’d carts.
7. Internet of Things. We don’t have this yet. Instead, we have the Apple of things, the Amazon of things, the Google of things, the Samsung of things, the Sonos of things, and so on, each silo’d in separate systems we don’t control. Things we own on the Internet should be our things. We should be able to control them, as independent operators, as we do with our computers and mobile devices. (Also, by the way, things don’t need to be intelligent or connected to belong to the Internet for us to control what’s known about them. They can be, or have, picos.)
8. Loyalty. All loyalty programs are gimmicks, and coercive. True loyalty is worth far more to companies than the coerced kind, and only customers are in a position to truly and fully express it. We should have our own loyalty programs, to which companies are members, rather than the reverse.
9. Privacy. We’ve had privacy tech in the physical world since the inventions of clothing, shelter, locks, doors, shades, shutters, and other ways to limit what others can see or hear—and to signal to others what’s okay and what’s not. Instead, all we have are unenforced promises by others not to watch our naked selves, or to report what they see to others. Or worse, coerced urgings to “accept” spying on us and distributing harvested information about us to parties unknown, with no record of what we’ve agreed to.
10. Customer service. There are no standard ways for customers and companies to enjoy relationships, with useful data flowing both ways, and for help to come when it’s needed. Instead, every company does it differently, in its own silo’d system. For more on this, see # 12 below.
11. Regulatory compliance. Especially around privacy. Because really, all the GDPR and the CCPA want is for companies to stop spying on people. Without any privacy tech on the individual’s side, however, responsibility for everyone’s privacy is entirely a corporate burden. This is unfair to people and companies alike, as well as insane—because it can’t work. (Worse, nearly all B2B “compliance” solutions only solve the felt need by companies to obey the letter of a law while ignoring its spirit. But if people have their own ways to signal their privacy requirements and expectations (as they do with clothing and shelter in the natural world), life gets a lot easier for everybody, because there’s something there to respect. We don’t have that yet online, but it shouldn’t be hard. For more on this, see Privacy is Personal and our own Privacy Manifesto.
12. Real relationships: ones in which both parties actually care about and help each other, and good market intelligence flows both ways. Marketing by itself can’t do it. All you get is the sound of one hand slapping. (Or, more typically, pleasuring itself with mountains of data and fanciful maths first described in Darrell Huff’s How to Lie With Statistics, written in 1954). Sales departments can’t do it either, because their job is done once the relationship is established. CRM can’t do it without a VRM hand to shake on the customer’s side. From What Makes a Good Customer: “Consider the fact that a customer’s experience with a product or service is far more rich, persistent and informative than is the company’s experience selling those things, or learning about their use only through customer service calls (or even through pre-installed surveillance systems such as those which for years now have been coming in new cars). The curb weight of customer intelligence (knowledge, know-how, experience) with a company’s products and services far outweighs whatever the company can know or guess at. So, what if that intelligence were to be made available by the customer, independently, and in standard ways that work at scale across many or all of the companies the customer deals with?”
13. Any-to-any/many-to-many business: a market environment where anybody can easily do business with anybody else, mostly free of centralizers or controlling intermediaries (with due respect for inevitable tendencies toward federation). There is some movement in this direction around what’s being called Web3.
14. Life management platforms. KuppingerCole has been writing and thinking about these since not long after they gave ProjectVRM an award for its work, way back in 2007. These have gone by many labels: personal data clouds, vaults, dashboards, cockpits, lockers, and other ways of characterizing personal control of one’s life where it meets and interacts with the digital world. The personal data that matters in these is the kind that matters in one’s life: health (e.g. HIEofOne), finances, property, subscriptions, contacts, calendar, creative works, and so on, including personal archives for all of it. Social data out in the world also matters, but is not the place to start, because that data is less important than the kinds of personal data listed above—most of which has no business being sold or given away for goodies from marketers. (See We can do better than selling our data.)

All of these, however, are ocean-boiling ideas. In other words, not easy, especially without what the military calls “robust funding.” So our strategies are best aimed toward what are called “blue” rather than “red” (blood filled) oceans. One of those is the Byway (or “buyway”) project by Customer Commons, in Bloomington, Indiana. An excerpt:

There are three parts to the Byway project as it now stands (in July 2022): an online community (Small Town/mastodon), a matcher tool (Intently), and a local e-commerce “buyway.” (For more on that one, download the slide deck presented by Doc and Joyce at The Mill in November 2021. Or download this earlier and shorter one.)

We also see the Byway as complementary to, rather than competitive with, developments with similar and overlapping ambitions, such as SSI, DIDcomm, picos, JLINC, Digital Homesteading / Dazzle and many others.

Joyce and I, both founders and board members of Customer Commons, are heading up to DWeb Camp in a few minutes, and plan to make progress there on Byway development. I’ll report here on progress.

[Later…] DWeb Camp was a great success for us. We are now in planning conversations with developers and others. Stay tuned for more on that.

We need a lexicon for the different ways buyers and sellers express their intentions to each other. Or, one might say, advertise.

On the demand side (⊂) we have what in ProjectVRM we’ve called intentcasting and (earlier) personal RFP. Scott Adams calls it broadcast shopping and John Hagel and David Siegel both (in books by that title) call it pull.

On the sell side (⊃) I can list at least six kinds of advertising alone that desperately need distinctive labels. To pull them apart, these are:

1. Brand advertising. This kind is aimed at populations. All of it is contextual, meaning placed in media, TV or radio programs, or publications, that appeal broadly or narrowly to a categorized audience. None of it is tracking-based, and none of it is personal. Little of it wants a direct response. It simply means to impress. This is also the form of advertising that burned every brand you can name into your brain. In fact the word brand itself was borrowed from the cattle industry by Procter & Gamble in the 1930s, when it also funded the golden age of radio. Today it is also what sponsors all of sports broadcasting and pays most sports stars their massive salaries.
2. Search advertising. This is what shows up with search results. There are two very different kinds here:
   1. Context-based. Not based on tracking. This is what DuckDuckGo does.
   2. Context+tracking based. This is what Google and Bing do.
3. Tracking-based advertising. I’ve called this adtech. Cory Doctorow calls it ad-tech. Others call it ad tech. Some euphemize it as behavioral, relevant, interest-based, or personalized. Shoshana Zuboff says all of them are based on surveillance, which they are. So many critics speak of it as surveillance-based advertising.
4. Advertising that’s both contextual and personal—but only in the sense that a highly characterized individual falls within a group, or a collection of overlapping groups, chosen by the advertiser. These are Facebook’s Core, Custom and Look-Alike audiences. Talk to Facebook and they’ll tell you these ads are not meant to be personal, though you should not be surprised to see ads for shoes when you have made clear to Facebook’s trackers (on the site, the apps, and wherever the company’s tentacles reach) that you might be in the market for shoes. Still, since Facebook characterizes every face in its audience in almost countless ways, it’s easy to call this form of advertising tracking-based.
5. Interactive advertising. Vaguely defined by Wikipedia here,  and sometimes called conversational advertising,  the purpose is to get an interactive response from people. The expression is not much used today, even though the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is the leading trade association in the tracking-based advertising field and its primary proponent.
6. Native advertising, also called sponsored content, is advertising made to look like ordinary editorial material.

The list is actually much longer. But the distinction that matters is between advertising that is tracking-based and the advertising that is not. As I put it in Brands need to fire adtech,

Let’s be clear about all the differences between adtech and real advertising. It’s adtech that spies on people and violates their privacy. It’s adtech that’s full of fraud and a vector for malware. It’s adtech that incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism. It’s adtech that gives fake news a business model, because fake news is easier to produce than the real kind, and adtech will pay anybody a bounty for hauling in eyeballs.

Real advertising doesn’t do any of those things, because it’s not personal. It is aimed at populations selected by the media they choose to watch, listen to or read. To reach those people with real ads, you buy space or time on those media. You sponsor those media because those media also have brand value.

With real advertising, you have brands supporting brands.

Brands can’t sponsor media through adtech because adtech isn’t built for that. On the contrary, adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses, because it cares about eyeballs more than media.

Adtech is magic in this literal sense: it’s all about misdirection. You think you’re getting one thing while you’re really getting another. It’s why brands think they’re placing ads in media, while the systems they hire chase eyeballs. Since adtech systems are automated and biased toward finding the cheapest ways to hit sought-after eyeballs with ads, some ads show up on unsavory sites. And, let’s face it, even good eyeballs go to bad places.

This is why the media, the UK government, the brands, and even Google are all shocked. They all think adtech is advertising. Which makes sense: it looks like advertising and gets called advertising. But it is profoundly different in almost every other respect. I explain those differences in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff:

…advertising today is also digital. That fact makes advertising much more data-driven, tracking-based and personal. Nearly all the buzz and science in advertising today flies around the data-driven, tracking-based stuff generally called adtech. This form of digital advertising has turned into a massive industry, driven by an assumption that the best advertising is also the most targeted, the most real-time, the most data-driven, the most personal — and that old-fashioned brand advertising is hopelessly retro.

In terms of actual value to the marketplace, however, the old-fashioned stuff is wheat and the new-fashioned stuff is chaff. In fact, the chaff was only grafted on recently.

See, adtech did not spring from the loins of Madison Avenue. Instead its direct ancestor is what’s called direct response marketing. Before that, it was called direct mail, or junk mail. In metrics, methods and manners, it is little different from its closest relative, spam.

Direct response marketing has always wanted to get personal, has always been data-driven, has never attracted the creative talent for which Madison Avenue has been rightly famous. Look up best ads of all time and you’ll find nothing but wheat. No direct response or adtech postings, mailings or ad placements on phones or websites.

Yes, brand advertising has always been data-driven too, but the data that mattered was how many people were exposed to an ad, not how many clicked on one — or whether you, personally, did anything.

And yes, a lot of brand advertising is annoying. But at least we know it pays for the TV programs we watch and the publications we read. Wheat-producing advertisers are called “sponsors” for a reason.

So how did direct response marketing get to be called advertising ? By looking the same. Online it’s hard to tell the difference between a wheat ad and a chaff one.

Remember the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” (Or the remake by the same name?) Same thing here. Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.

This whole problem wouldn’t exist if the alien replica wasn’t chasing spied-on eyeballs, and if advertisers still sponsored desirable media the old-fashioned way.

Bonus link.

I wrote that in 2017. The GDPR became enforceable in 2018 and the CCPA in 2020.  Today more laws and regulations are being instituted to fight tracking-based advertising, yet the whole advertising industry remains drunk on digital, deeply corrupt and delusional, and growing like a Stage IV cancer.

We live digital lives now, and most of the advertising we see and hear is on or through glowing digital rectangles. Most of those are personal as well. So, naturally, most advertising on those media is personal—or wishes it was. Regulations that require “consent” for the tracking that personalization requires do not make the practice less hostile to personal privacy. They just make the whole mess easier to rationalize.

So I’m trying to do two things here.

One is to make clearer the distinctions between real advertising and direct marketing.

The other is to suggest that better signaling from demand to supply, starting with intentcasting, may serve as chemo for the cancer that adtech has become. It will do that by simply making clear to sellers what buyers actually want and don’t want.

That’s the choice. We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.

That’s what Shoshana Zuboff says, in The Coup We Are Not Talking About.

What we have now—and have fallen into, largely unawares—is a surveillance society. We do not have democracies of the kind that the U.S.  founders would want us to have. We do not even have the democracies we had, flawed as they all were, prior to our digital age. Specifically, Shoshana says, our lives are now governed by

surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.

In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.

Shoshana is the one who introduced surveillance capitalism into the lexicons of economics, social studies, policy, and other fields. Her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, 2019) is an international bestseller now in 23 languages, and essential reading for everyone involved in this fight.

And she will be with us to talk about this coup, and how to fight it, at the Ostrom Workshop’s Beyond the Web Salon one week from today, at 2pm Eastern Time. It’s free and you can get on at that link.

If you’re already fighting this coup (which we’ve been doing, in our own many different ways, in ProjectVRM), or if your own life is affected in any way by the struggle to break free of creepy systems that trash our privacy and nudge us into warring tribes, this is a can’t-miss event. See you there.

From Here Comes the Full Amazonification of Whole Foods, by Cecelia Kang (@CeceliaKang) in The New York Times:

…In less than a minute, I scanned both hands on a kiosk and linked them to my Amazon account. Then I hovered my right palm over the turnstile reader to enter the nation’s most technologically sophisticated grocery store…

Amazon designed my local grocer to be almost completely run by tracking and robotic tools for the first time.

The technology, known as Just Walk Out, consists of hundreds of cameras with a god’s-eye view of customers. Sensors are placed under each apple, carton of oatmeal and boule of multigrain bread. Behind the scenes, deep-learning software analyzes the shopping activity to detect patterns and increase the accuracy of its charges.

The technology is comparable to what’s in driverless cars. It identifies when we lift a product from a shelf, freezer or produce bin; automatically itemizes the goods; and charges us when we leave the store. Anyone with an Amazon account, not just Prime members, can shop this way and skip a cash register since the bill shows up in our Amazon account.

And this is just Amazon. Soon it will be every major vendor of everything, most likely with Amazon as the alpha sphincter among all the chokepoints controlled by robotic intermediaries between first sources and final customers—with all of them customizing your choices, your prices, and whatever else it takes to engineer demand in the marketplace—algorithmically, robotically, and most of all, personally.

Some of us will like it, because it’ll be smooth, easy and relatively cheap. It will also subordinate us utterly to machines. Or perhaps udderly, because we will be calves raised to suckle on the teats of retail’s robot cows.

This system can’t be fixed from within. Nor can it be fixed by regulation, though some of that might help. It can only be obsolesced by customers who bring more to the market’s table than cash, credit, appetites and acquiescence to systematic training.

What more?

Start with information. What do we actually want (including, crucially, to not be bothered by hype or manipulated by surveillance systems)?

Add intelligence. What do we know about products, markets, needs, and how things actually work than roboticized systems can begin to guess at?

Then add values, such as freedom, choice, agency, care for others, and the ability to collectivize in constructive and helpful ways on our own.

Then add tech. But this has to be our tech: customertech that we bring to market as independent, sovereign and capable human beings. Not just as “users” of others’ systems, or consumers (which Jerry Michalski calls “gullets with wallets and eyeballs”) of whatever producers want to feed us.

Time for solutions. Here is a list of fourteen market problems that can only be solved from the customers’ side.

And yes, we do need help from the sellers’ side. But not with promises to make their systems more “customer centric.” (We’ve been flagging that as a fail since 2008.) We need CRM that welcomes VRM. B2C that welcomes Me2B.

And money. Our startups and nonprofits have done an amazing job of keeping the VRM and Me2B embers burning. But they could do a lot more with some gas on those things.

Imagine a world in which there are only mainframes, and all individuals have are mainframe terminals. Then imagine that personal rights (e.g. to privacy) are violated in many ways by the mainframes and their operators. Then imagine that these violations have attracted regulations meant to protect the rights of mainframe terminal users—and that those regulations have made things worse for users, because the violations haven’t stopped, and users now have to hurdle “consent” notices, usually by clicking “accept” to the mainframe’s continued privacy violations.

I’ve owned a lot of bad cars in my decades.  But some I’ve loved, at least when they were on the road. One was the 1965 Peugeot 404 wagon whose interior you see above, occupied by family dog Christy, guarding the infant seat next to her. You’ll note that the hood is open, because I was working on it at the time, which was constantly while I owned it.

I shot that photo in early 1974, not long after arriving at our new home in Graham, North Carolina. The trip down from our old home in far northern New Jersey was one of the most arduous I’ve ever taken, with frequent stops to fix whatever went wrong along the way, which was plenty.

Trouble started when a big hunk of rusted floor fell away beneath my feet, so I could see the New Jersey Turnpike whizzing by down there, while worrying that the driver’s seat itself might fall to the moving pavement, and my ass with it.

The floor had rusted because rainwater would gather in the air vents between the far side of the windshield and the dashboard, and suddenly splat down on one’s feet, and the floor, soon as the car began to move.  (The floor was prepared for this with a drainage system of tubes laminated between layers of metal, meant to carry downward whatever water fell on top. Great foresight, I suppose. But less prepared was the metal itself, which was determined to rust.)

Later a can attached to the exhaust manifold blew to pieces so sound and exhaust straight from the engine sounded like a machine gun and could be heard to the horizons in all directions, and echoed into the cabin off the pavement through the new hole in the floor. I am sure that the hearing loss I have now began right then.

I replaced the lost metal with an emptied V8 juice can that I filled with steel wool for percussive exhaust damping, and fastened into place with baling wire that I carried just in case of, well, anything. I also always carried a large toolbox, because you never know. If you owned a cheap used car back in those days, you had to be ready for anything.

The car did have its appeals, some of which were detailed by coincidence a month ago by Raphael Orlove in Jalopnik, calling this very model the best wagon he’s ever driven. His reasons were correct—for a working car. The best feature was a cargo area was so far beyond capacious that I once loaded a large office desk into it with room to spare. It also had double shocks on the rear axle, to help handle the load, plus other arcane graces meant for heavy use, such as a device in the brake fluid line to the rear axle that kept the brakes from locking up when both rear wheels were spinning but off the ground. This, I was told, was for drivers on rough dirt roads in Africa.

While the Peugeot 404 was not as weird in its time as the Citroën DS or 2CV (both of which my friend Julius called “triumphs of French genius over French engineering”), it was still weird as shit in some remarkably impractical ways.

For example, screw-on hubcaps. These meant no tire machine could handle changing a tire, and you had to do the job by hand with tire irons and a sledgehammer. I carried those too. For unknown reasons, Peugeot also also hid spark plugs way down inside the valve cover, and fed them electricity through a spring inside a bakelite sleeve that was easy to break and would malfunction even if they weren’t broken.

I could go on, but all that stuff is beside my point, which is that this car was, while I had it, mine. I could fix it myself, or take it to a mechanic friendly to the car’s oddities. While some design features were odd or crazy, there were no mysteries about how the car worked, or how to fix or replace its parts. More importantly, it contained no means for reporting its behavior or use back to Peugeot, or to anybody.

It’s very different today. That difference is nicely unpacked in A Fight Over the Right to Repair Cars Turns Ugly, by @Aarian Marshall in Wired. At issue are right-to-repair laws, such as the one currently raising a fuss in Massachusetts.

See, all of us and our mechanics had a right to repair our own cars for most of the time since automobiles first hit the road. But cars in recent years have become digital as well as mechanical beings. One good thing about this is that lots of helpful diagnostics can be revealed. One bad thing is that many of those diagnostics are highly proprietary to the carmakers, as the cars themselves become so vertically integrated that only dealers can repair them.

But there is hope. Reports Aarian,

…today anyone can buy a tool that will plug into a car’s port, accessing diagnostic codes that clue them in to what’s wrong. Mechanics are able to purchase tools and subscriptions to manuals that guide them through repairs.

So for years, the right-to-repair movement has held up the automotive industry as the rare place where things were going right. Independent mechanics remain competitive: 70 percent of auto repairs happen at independent shops, according to the US trade association that represents them. Backyard tinkerers abound.

But new vehicles are now computers on wheels, gathering an estimated 25 gigabytes per hour of driving data—the equivalent of five HD movies. Automakers say that lots of this information isn’t useful to them and is discarded. But some—a vehicle’s location, how specific components are operating at a given moment—is anonymized and sent to the manufacturers; sensitive, personally identifying information like vehicle identification numbers are handled, automakers say, according to strict privacy principles.

These days, much of the data is transmitted wirelessly. So independent mechanics and right-to-repair proponents worry that automakers will stop sending vital repair information to the diagnostic ports. That would hamper the independents and lock customers into relationships with dealerships. Independent mechanics fear that automakers could potentially “block what they want” when an independent repairer tries to access a car’s technified guts, Glenn Wilder, the owner of an auto and tire repair shop in Scituate, Massachusetts, told lawmakers in 2020.

The fight could have national implications for not only the automotive industry but any gadget that transmits data to its manufacturer after a customer has paid money and walked away from the sales desk. “I think of it as ‘right to repair 2.0,’” says Kyle Wiens, a longtime right-to-repair advocate and the founder of iFixit, a website that offers tools and repair guides. “The auto world is farther along than the rest of the world is,” Wiens says. Independents “already have access to information and parts. Now they’re talking about data streams. But that doesn’t make the fight any less important.”

As Cory Doctorow put it two days ago in Agricultural right to repair law is a no-brainer, this issue is an extremely broad one that basically puts Big Car and Big Tech on one side and all the world’s gear owners and fixers on the other:

Now, there’s new federal agricultural Right to Repair bill, courtesy of Montana Senator Jon Tester, which will require Big Ag to supply manuals, spare parts and software access codes:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21194562/tester-bill.pdf

The legislation is very similar to the Massachusetts automotive Right to Repair ballot initiative that passed with a huge margin in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

Both initiatives try to break the otherwise indomitable coalition of anti-repair companies, led by Apple, which destroyed dozens of R2R initiatives at the state level in 2018:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#r2r

It’s a bet that there is more solidarity among tinkerers, fixers, makers and users of gadgets than there is among the different industries who depend on repair price-gouging. That is, it’s a bet that drivers will back farmers’ right to repair and vice-versa, but that Big Car won’t defend Big Ag.

The opposing side in the repair wars is on the ropes. Their position is getting harder and harder to maintain with a straight face. It helps that the Biden administration is incredibly hostile to that position:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/07/instrumentalism/#r2r

It’s no coincidence that this legislation dropped the same week as Aaron Perzanowski’s outstanding book “The Right to Repair” — R2R is an idea whose time has come to pass.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/29/planned-obsolescence/#r2r

[The next day…]

Cory just added this in a follow-up newsletter and post:

…remember computers are intrinsically universal. Even if manufacturers don’t cooperate with interop, we can still make new services and products that plug into their existing ones. We can do it with reverse-engineering, scraping, bots – a suite of tactics we call Adversarial Interoperability or Competitive Compatibility (AKA “comcom”):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

These tactics have a long and honorable history, and have been a part of every tech giant’s own growth…

Read all three of those pieces. There is much to be optimistic about, especially once the fighting is mostly done, and companies have proven knowledge that free customers—and truly free markets—are more valuable than captive ones. That has been our position at ProjectVRM from the start. Perhaps, once #R2R and #comcom start paying off, we’ll finally have one of the proofs we’ve wanted all along.

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

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

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

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

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