Doc Searls's Blog, page 24

Mom’s breakfast

As a cook, my Swedish mother was best known for her Swedish meatballs, an indelicacy now familiar as the reward for completing the big-box retail maze called Ikea. Second-best was the limpa bread (vörtbröd) she baked every Christmas. She once won an award for that one. Maybe twice.

But her most leveraged dish was the breakfast she made for us often when my sister and I were kids: soft-boiled eggs over toast broken into small pieces in a bowl. It’s still my basic breakfast, many decades later.

Mine, above, are different in three small ways:

I cut the toast into small squares with a big kitchen knife. (For Mom the toast was usually white bread, which was the only thing most grocery stores sold, or so it seemed, back in the 1950s. I lean toward Jewish rye, sourdough, ciabatta, anything not sweet.)Mom boiled the eggs for three minutes. I poach mine. That’s a skill I learned from my wife. Much simpler. Put the eggs for a second or two into the boiling water, take them out, and then break them into the same water. (Putting them in first helps keep them intact.) Make sure the water has some salt in it, so the eggs hold their shape. Pull them out with a slotted spoon when the white gets somewhat firm and the yolk is still runny. Lay them on the toast.I season them with a bit of hot sauce: sriracha, Tapatio, Cholula, whatever. That way they look like this before I chow them down—

The hot sauce also makes the coffee taste better for some reason.

Thus endeth the first—and perhaps last and only—recipe post on this blog.

Assassinations Work

On April 4, 1968, when I learned with the rest of the world that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, I immediately thought that the civil rights movement, which King had led, had just been set back by fifty years. I was wrong about that. It ended right then (check that last link). Almost fifty-six years have passed since that assassination, and the cause still has a long way to go: far longer than what MLK and the rest of us had imagined before he was killed.

Also, since MLK was the world’s leading activist for peace and nonviolence, those movements were set back as well. (Have they moved? How much? I don’t have answers. Maybe some of you do.)

I was twenty years old when MLK and RFK were killed, and a junior at Guilford College, a Quaker institution in Greensboro, North Carolina. Greensboro was a hotbed of civil rights activism and strife at the time (and occasionally since). I was an activist of sorts back then as well, both for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. But being an activist, and having moral sympathies of one kind or another, are far less effective in the absence of leadership than they are when leadership is there, and strong.

 Alexei Navalny was one of those leaders. He moved into the past tense today: (1976-2024). His parentheses closed in an Arctic Russian prison. He was only 47 years old. At age 44 he was poisoned—an obvious assassination attempt—and survived, thanks to medical treatment in Germany. He was imprisoned in 2021 after he returned to Russia, and… well, you can read the rest here. Since Navalny was the leading advocate of reform in Russia and opposed Vladimir Putin’s one-man rule of the country, Putin wanted him dead. So now Navalny is gone, and with it much hope of reform.

Not every assassination is motivated by those opposed to a cause. Some assassins are just nuts. John Hinkley Jr. and Mark David Chapman, for example. Hinkley failed to kill Ronald Reagan, and history moved right along. But Chapman succeeded in killing John Lennon, and silence from that grave has persisted ever since.

My point is that assassination works. For causes a leader personifies, the setbacks can be enormous, and in some cases total, or close enough, for a long time.

I hope Alexei Navalny’s causes will still have effects in his absence. Martyrdom in some ways works too. But I expect those effects to take much longer to come about than they would if Navalny were still alive. And I would love to be wrong about that.

Cluetrain at 25

Chris Locke found this on the Web in early 1999, and it became the main image on the Cluetrain Manifesto homepage. We’ve never found its source.

The Cluetrain Manifesto will turn 25 in two months.

I am one of its four authors, and speak here only for myself. The others are David Weinberger, Rick Levine, and Chris Locke. David and Rick may have something to say. Chris, alas, demonstrates the first words in Chapter One of The Cluetrain Manifesto in its book form. Try not to be haunted by Chris’s ghost when you read it.

Cluetrain is a word that did not exist before we made it up in 1999. It is still tweeted almost daily on X (née Twitter), and often on BlueSky and Threads, the Twitter wannabes. And, of course, on Facebook. Searching Google Books no longer says how many results it finds, but the last time I was able to check, the number of books containing the word cluetrain was way past 10,000.

So by now cluetrain belongs in the OED, though nobody is lobbying for that. In fact, none of the authors lobbied for Cluetrain much in the first place. Chris and David wrote about it in their newsletters, and I said some stuff in Linux Journal.  But that was about it. Email was the most social online medium back then, so we did our best with that. We also decided not to make Cluetrain a Thing apart from its website. That meant no t-shirts, bumper stickers, or well-meaning .orgs. We thought what it said should succeed or fail on its own.

Among other things, it succeeded in grabbing the interest of Tom Petzinger, who devoted a column in The Wall Street Journal to the manifesto.* And thus a meme was born. In short order, we were approached with a book proposal, decided a book would be a good way to expand on the website, and had it finished by the end of August. The first edition came out in January 2000—just in time to help burst the dot-com bubble. It also quickly became a bestseller, even though (or perhaps in part because) the whole book was also published for free on the Cluetrain website—and is still there.

You can’t tell from the image of the cover on the right, but that orange was as da-glo as a road cone, and the gray at the bottom was silver. You couldn’t miss seeing it on the displays and shelves of bookstores, which were still thick on the ground back then.

A quarter century after we started working on Cluetrain, I think its story has hardly begun—because most of what it foresaw, or called for, has not come true. Yet.

So I’m going to visit some of Cluetrain’s history and main points in a series of posts here. This is the first one.

*A search for that column on the WSJ.com website brings up nothing: an example of deep news‘ absence. But I do have the text, and may share it with you later.)

If Your Privacy Is in the Hands of Others Alone, You Don’t Have Any

Prompt: “A panopticon in which thousands of companies are spying on one woman alone in the center with nothing around her.” Via Microsoft Bing Image Creator

In Patreon: Blocking platforms from sharing user video data is unconstitutional, Ashley Belanger of Ars Technica reports that Patreon, the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative folk, opposes the nearly absent personal privacy protections provided by a law you probably haven’t heard of until now: the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA. Patreon wants wants a judge to declare that law (which dates from the videotape rental age) unconstitutional because it inconveniences Patreon’s ability to share the personal data of its users with other parties.† Naturally, the EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the ACLU of Northern California, and the ACLU itself are all against Patreon on this and have filed an amicus brief explaining why.

An irony here is that Ars Technica is itself in the surveillance business. A PageXray of that story finds 360 adserver requests, 259 tracking requests, and 131 other requests, which it visualizes with this:

And that’s just one small part of it.

Will anyone grab the third rail of tech media’s participation in the tracking-based advertising business, or visit its responsibility for what was already the biggest boycott in human history way back in 2015? I’ve only see it happen once: when Farhad Manjoo exposed The New York Times‘ (his employer’s) own participation, back in 2019. Here’s a PageXray of tracking via that piece today:

Better, but not ideal.

Five years ago this month, I wrote a column in Linux Journal with the title above. With just a few minor edits, here it is again. Amazing how little things have changed since then—and how much worse they have become. But I do see hope. Read on.

If you think regulations are going to protect your privacy, you’re wrong. In fact, they can make things worse, especially if they start with the assumption that your privacy is provided only by other parties, most of whom are incentivized to violate it.

Exhibit A for how much worse things can get is the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). As soon as the GDPR went into full effect in May 2018, damn near every corporate entity on the Web put up a “cookie notice” requiring acceptance of terms and privacy policies that allow them to continue violating your privacy by harvesting, sharing, auctioning off and otherwise using your data, and data about you.

For websites and services in that harvesting business (a population that rounds to the whole commercial web), these notices provide a one-click way to adhere to the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit.

There’s also big business in the friction that produces. To see how big, look up GDPR compliance on Google. You’ll get 232 million results (give or take a few dozen million).

None of those results are for you, even though you are who the GDPR is supposed to protect. See, to the GDPR, you are a mere “data subject” and not an independent and fully functional participant in the technical, social, and economic ecosystem the Internet supports by design. All privacy protections around your data are the burden of other parties.

Or at least that’s the interpretation that nearly every lawmaker, regulatory bureaucrat, lawyer, and service provider goes by. (One exception is Elizabeth Renieris @hackylawyer. Her collection of postings is required reading on the GDPR and much else.) The same goes for those selling GDPR compliance services, comprising most of those 190 million GDPR compliance search results.

The clients of those services include nearly every website and service on Earth that harvests personal data. These entities have no economic incentive to stop harvesting, sharing, and selling personal data the usual ways, beyond fear that the GDPR might actually be enforced, which so far (with few exceptions), it hasn’t been. (See Without enforcement, the GDPR is a fail.)

Worse, the tools for “managing” your exposure to data harvesters are provided entirely by the websites you visit and the services you engage. The “choices” they provide (if they provide any at all) are between 1) acquiescence to them doing what they please and 2) a maze of menus full of checkboxes and toggle switches “controlling” your exposure to unknown threats from parties you’ve never heard of, with no way to record your choices or monitor effects.

So let’s explore just one site’s presentation, and then get down to what it means and why it matters.

Our example is https://www.mirror.co.uk. If you haven’t clicked on that site already, you’ll see a cookie notice that says,

We use cookies to help our site work, to understand how it is used, and to tailor the adverts presented on our site. By clicking “Accept” below, you agree to us doing so. You can read more in our cookie notice. Or, if you do not agree, you can click Manage below to access other choices.

They don’t mention that “tailor the adverts” really means something like this:

We open your browser to infestation by tracking beacons from countless parties in the online advertising business, plus who-knows-what-else that might be working with those parties (there is no way to tell, and if there was we wouldn’t provide it), so those parties and their “partners” can use those beacons to follow you like a marked animal everywhere you go and report your activities back to a vast marketplace where personal data about you is shared, bought and sold, much of it in real time, supposedly so your eyeballs can be hit with “relevant” or “interest-based” advertising as you travel from site to site and service to service. While we are sure there are bad collateral effects (fraud and malware, for example), we don’t care about those because it’s our business to get paid just just for clicks or “impressions,” whether you’re impressed or not—and the odds that you won’t be impressed average to certain.

Okay, so now click on the “Manage” button.

Up will pop a rectangle where it says “Here you can control cookies, including those for advertising, using the buttons below. Even if you turn off the advertising related cookies, you will still see adverts on our site, because they help us to fund it. However, those adverts will simply be less relevant to to you. You can learn more about cookies in our Cookie Notice on the site.”

Under that text, in the left column, are six “Purposes of data collection”, all defaulted with little check marks to ON (though only five of them show, giving the impression that there are only those five). The right column is called “Our partners”, and it shows the first five of what turn out to be 259 companies, nearly all of which are not brands known to the world or to anybody outside the business (and probably not known widely within the business as well). All are marked ON by that little check mark. Here’s that list, just through the letter A:

1020, Inc. dba Placecast and Ericsson Emodo1plusX AG2KDirect, Inc. (dba iPromote)33Across7Hops.com Inc. (ZergNet)A Million Ads LimitedA.MobAccorp Sp. z o.o.Active Agent AGad6mediaADARA MEDIA UNLIMITEDAdClear GmbHAdello Group AGAdelphic LLCAdform A/SAdikteevADITION technologies AGAdkernel LLCAdloox SAADMAN – Phaistos Networks, S.A.ADman Interactive SLAdMaxim Inc.Admedo Ltdadmetrics GmbHAdmotion SRLAdobe Advertising CloudAdRoll Incadrule mobile GmbHAdSpirit GmbHadsquare GmbHAdssets ABAdTheorent, IncAdTiming Technology Company LimitedADUXadvanced store GmbHADventori SASAdverlineADYOULIKE SAAerserv LLCaffilinetAmobee, Inc.AntVoiceApester LtdAppNexus Inc.ARMIS SASAudiens S.r.l.Avid Media LtdAvocet Systems Limited

If you bother to “manage” any of this, what record do you have of it—or of all the other collections of third parties who you’ve  agreed to follow you around? Remember, there are a different collection of these at every website with third parties that track you, and different UIs, each provided by other third parties.

It might be easier to discover and manage parasites in your belly than cookies in your browser.

Think I exaggerate? The long list of cookies in just one of my browsers (which I had to dig deep to find) starts with this list:

1rx.io247-inc.net2mdn.net33across.com360yield.com3lift.com4finance.com

After several hundred others, my cookie  list ends with:

zencdn.netzoom.uszopim.com

I know what zoom is. The rest are a mystery to me.

To look at just that first one, 1rx.io, I have to dig way down in the basement of the preferences directory (in Chrome it’s chrome://settings/cookies/detail?site=1rx.io), where I find that its locally stored data is this:

_rxuuid

Name
_rxuuid
Content
{"rx_uuid":"RX-2b58f1b1-96a4-4e1d-9de8-3cb1ca4175b0","nxtrdr":false}
Domain
.1rx.io
Path
/
Send for
Any kind of connection
Accessible to script
No (HttpOnly)
Created
Wednesday, December 12, 2018 at 4:48:53 AM
Expires
Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 4:48:53 AM

I’m a somewhat technical guy, and at least half of that stuff means nothing to me.

As for “managing” those,  my only choice on that page is to “Remove All”. Does that mean Remove everything on that page alone or Remove all cookies everywhere? And how can I remember what I’ve had removed?

Obviously, there is no way for anybody to “manage” this, in any meaningful sense of the word.

We also can’t fix it on the sites and services side, no matter how much those sites and services care (which most don’t) about the “customer journey”, the “customer experience” or any of the other bullshit they’re buying from marketers this week.

Even within the CRM (customer relationship management) world, the B2B customers of CRM companies use one cloud and one set of tools to create as many different “experiences” for users and customers as there are companies deploying those tools to manage customer relationships from their side.  There are no corresponding tools on our side. (Though there is work going on. See here.)

So the digital world remains one where we have no common or standard way to scale our privacy and data usage tools, choices or experiences across all sites and services. And that’s what we’ll need if we want real privacy online.

The simple place where we need to start is this: privacy is personal, meaning something we create for ourselves (which in the natural world we do with clothing and shelter, both of which lack equivalents in the digital world).

And we need to be clear that privacy is not a grace of privacy policies and terms of service that differ with every company and over which none of us have true control—especially when there is an entire industry devoted to making those companies untrustworthy, even if they are in full compliance with privacy laws.

Devon Loffreto (who coined the term self-sovereign identity and whose good work we’ll be visiting in an upcoming issue of Linux Journal) puts the issue in simple geek terms: we need root authority over our lives. Hashtag: #OwnRoot.

It is only by owning root that we can crank up agency on the individual’s side. We have a perfect base for that in the standards and protocols that gave us the Internet, the Web, email, and too little else. And we need it here too. Soon.

We (a few colleagues and I) created Customer Commons as a place for terms that individuals can proffer as first parties, just by pointing at them, much as licenses at Creative Commons can be pointed at. Sites and services can agree to those terms, and both can keep records and follow audit trails.

And there are some good signs that this will happen. For example, the IEEE approached Customer Commons last year with the suggestion that we stand up a working group for machine-readable personal privacy terms. It’s called P7012. If you’d like to join, please do.

Unless we #OwnRoot for our own lives online, privacy will remain an empty promise by a legion of violators.

One more thing. We can put the GDPR to our use if we like. That’s because Article 4 of the GDPR defines a data controller as “the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data…” This means each of us can be our own data controller. Most lawyers dealing with the GDPR don’t agree with that. They think the individual data subject will always need a fiduciary or an intermediary of some kind: an agent of the individual, but not an individual with agency. Yet the simple fact is that we should have root authority over our lives online, and that means we should have some degree of control over our data exposures, and how our data, and data about us, is used—much as we do over how we control or moderate our privacy in the physical world. More about all that in upcoming posts.

The original version of this post was published on the Private Internet Access blog. Private Internet Access and Linux Journal are both holdings of London Trust Media. Also check out the Privacy Manifesto at the ProjectVRM wiki. I maintain it and welcome bug fixes. It’s also new, so be gentle.

†This is an example of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” and Wikipedia (at that link) more politely calls “platform decay.” It’s a big trade-away of goodwill by Patreon. Says to me they must be making an enshitload of money in the adtech fecosystem.

Privacy is Social

Looking into the windows of a living room in an Amsterdam houseboat floating on a canal.

Eight years ago I was asked on Quora to answer the question “What is the social justification for privacy?” This was my answer. 

Society is comprised of individuals, thick with practices and customs that respect individual needs. Privacy is one of those. Only people who live naked outdoors without clothing and shelter can do without privacy. The rest of us all have ways of expressing and guarding spaces we call “private” — and that others respect as well.

Private spaces are virtual as well as physical. Society would not exist without well-established norms for expressing and respecting each other’s boundaries. “Good fences make good neighbors,” says Robert Frost.

One would hardly ask to justify the need for privacy before the Internet came along; but it is a question now because the virtual world, like nature in the physical one, doesn’t come with privacy. By nature, we are naked in both. The difference is that we’ve had many millennia to work out privacy in the physical world, and approximately two decades to do the same in the virtual one. That’s not enough time.

In the physical world, we get privacy from clothing and shelter, plus respect for each others’ boundaries, which are established by mutual understandings of what’s private and what’s not. All of these are both complex and subtle. Clothing, for example, customarily covers what we (in English vernacular at least) call our “privates,” but also allows us selectively to expose parts of our bodies, in various ways and degrees, depending on social setting, weather and other conditions. Privacy in our sheltered spaces is also modulated by windows, doors, shutters, locks, blinds, and curtains. How these signal intentions differ by culture and setting, but within each the signals are well understood, and boundaries are respected. Some of these are expressed in law as well as custom. In sum, they comprise civilized life.

Yet life online is not yet civilized. We still lack sufficient means for expressing and guarding private spaces, for putting up boundaries, for signaling intentions to each other, and for signaling back respect for those signals. In the absence of those we also lack sufficient custom and law. Worse, laws created in the physical world do not all comprehend a virtual one in which all of us, everywhere in the world, are by design zero distance apart — and at costs that yearn toward zero as well. This is still very new to human experience.

In the absence of restricting customs and laws it is easy for those with the power to penetrate our private spaces (such as our browsers and email clients) to do so. This is why our private spaces online today are infected with tracking files that report our activities back to others we have never met and don’t know. These practices would never be sanctioned in the physical world, but in the uncivilized virtual world they are easy to rationalize: Hey, it’s easy to do, everybody does it, it’s normative now, transparency is a Good Thing, it helps fund “free” sites and services, nobody is really harmed, and so on.

But it’s not okay. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done, or that it’s the right thing to do. Nor is it right because it is, for now, normative, or because everybody seems to put up with it. The only reason people continue to put up with it is because they have little choice — so far.

Study after study shows that people are highly concerned about their privacy online, and vexed by their limited ability to do anything about its absence. For example —

Pew reports that “93% of adults say that being in control of who can get information about them is important,” that “90% say that controlling what information is collected about them is important,” that 93% “also value having the ability to share confidential matters with another trusted person,” that “88% say it is important that they not have someone watch or listen to them without their permission,” and that 63% “feel it is important to be able to “go around in public without always being identified.”Ipsos, on behalf of TRUSTe, reports that “92% of U.S. Internet users worry about their privacy online,” that “91% of U.S. Internet users say they avoid companies that do not protect their privacy,” “22% don’t trust anyone to protect their online privacy,” that “45% think online privacy is more important than national security,” that 91% “avoid doing business with companies who I do not believe protect my privacy online,” that “77% have moderated their online activity in the last year due to privacy concerns,” and that, in sum, “Consumers want transparency, notice and choice in exchange for trust.” that “A large percentage of individuals employ artful dodges to avoid giving out requested personal information online when they believe at least some of that information is not required.” Specifically, “Only 8.45% of respondents reported that they always accurately disclose personal information that is requested of them. The remaining 91.55% reported that they are less than fully disclosing.”The Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania reports that “a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data—and that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs.” Specifically, “91% disagree (77% of them strongly) that ‘If companies give me a discount, it is a fair exchange for them to collect information about me without my knowing.'” And “71% disagree (53% of them strongly) that ‘It’s fair for an online or physical store to monitor what I’m doing online when I’m there, in exchange for letting me use the store’s wireless internet, or Wi-Fi, without charge.'”

There are both policy and market responses to these findings. On the policy side, Europe has laws protecting personal data that go back to the Data Protection Directive of 1995. Australia has similar laws going back to 1988. On the market side, Apple now has a strong pro-privacy stance, posted Privacy – Apple, taking the form of an open letter to the world from CEO Tim Cook. One excerpt:

“Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t ‘monetize’ the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.”

But we also need tools that serve us as personally as do our own clothes. And we’ll get them. The collection of developers listed here by ProjectVRM are all working on tools that give individuals ways of operating privately in the networked world. The most successful of those today are the ad and tracking blockers listed under Privacy Protection. According to the latest PageFair/Adobe study, the population of persons blocking ads online passed 200 million in June of 2015, with a 42% annual increase in the U.S. and an 82% rate in the U.K. alone.

These tools create and guard private spaces in our online lives by giving us ways to set boundaries and exclude unwanted intrusions. These are primitive systems, so far, but they do work and are sure to evolve. As they do, expect the online world to become as civilized as the offline one — eventually.

For more about all of this, visit my Adblock War Series.

The Biggest Wow in Indiana

No, an AI did not paint this. It’s the West Baden Springs Hotel, which I shot with a camera while gawking at it for the first time.

In the summer of ’22 we were still new to Indiana and in an exploring mood. Out of nowhere one afternoon my wife said, “Let’s go check out French Lick.” She just liked the name of the town, plus the idea of taking a half-day road trip under a sweet blue sky and big puffy clouds. I said “Sure,” because I’m a basketball fan and supposed there would be a Larry Bird museum or something like it in his hometown.

Southern Indiana would be part of Kentucky if the Ohio River didn’t inconvenience that option. It’s hilly, and the natives have Southern accents. They say CEment and INsurance. (You know, like Larry Bird.) About halfway down from Bloomington to French Lick, Google takes the driver off the highway on a twisty hypotenuse through deep woods and lumpy farmland, away from the hard right angle the boring main route would take at the city of Paoli (home of Indiana’s only ski slopes). This short-cut ended where the going got flat and we turned right on a highway called 150. Then, in a short distance, we drove under a serious-looking arch that announced WEST BADEN SPRINGS. It might also have said ALMOST FRENCH LICK, because that’s what Google Maps told us. We were less than a mile away. After the arch, the edge of a town appeared straight ahead, but that scene was totally upstaged by the one on the right.

My wife and I both gasped. I said, “What the fuck is THAT?” My wife said “Wow!”

Suddenly we were … where? Spain? France? Croatia? There, under that perfect sky sat a beautiful giant resort-like structure that was obviously old, grand, nicely maintained, and set among smaller structures just as old and nearly as grand, on a wide expanse of green.

A few hundred feet farther came this entrance on the right:

The only Carlsbads we knew were the town in California and the caverns in Arizona New Mexico. And all we knew about West Baden Springs was what that arch just told us.

Of course, we couldn’t wait to get inside this thing, whatever it was. Here’s what we saw:

“Wow” doesn’t cover it. Nor do the many views of what turns out to have been—and still is—the West Baden Springs Hotel, which I’ve put in this album here. (They’re still fine photos. Check ’em out.)

We’ve been back a bunch of times since then. And to French Lick, home of the French Lick Springs Hotel, which was once a great competitor to the West Baden Springs Hotel, and is almost as grand. just as historic, and a short and fun train ride away. Here’s the West Baden Station.

I’ll be putting up more albums of both places soon. Meanwhile, come visit, ya’ll.

The New News Business

How Microsoft Bing Image Creator illustrates EmanciPay

Back when I was on the board of my regional Red Cross chapter (this one), I learned four lessons about fund raising:

People are glad to pay value for value.People are most willing to pay when they perceive and appreciate the value they get from a product or service.People are also most willing to pay full value when the need or opportunity to pay is immediate, and the amount they pay is up to them.People are willing to pay more when they have a relationship with the other party (seller, service provider, philanthropy, cause, whatever)

It’s worth (value for value) digging down on the fourth point. Here’s what I wrote about it in The Cluetrain Manifesto:

Not long after Cluetrain came out in early 2000, I found myself on a cross-country flight, sitting beside a Nigerian pastor named Sayo Ajiboye. After we began to talk, it became clear to me that Sayo (pronounced “Shaiyo”) was a deeply wise man. Among his accomplishments was translating the highly annotated Thompson Bible into his native Yoruba language: a project that took eight of his thirty-nine years.

I told him that I had been involved in a far more modest book project—The Cluetrain Manifesto—and was traveling the speaking circuit, promoting it. When Sayo asked me what the book was about, I explained how “markets are conversations” was the first of our ninety-five theses, and how we had unpacked it in a chapter by that title. Sayo listened thoughtfully, then came back with the same response I had heard from other readers in what back then was still called the Third World: “Markets are conversations” is a pretty smart thing for well-off guys from the First World to be talking about. But it doesn’t go far enough.

When I asked him why, he told me to imagine we were in a “natural” marketplace—a real one in, say, an African village where one’s “brand” was a matter personal reputation, and where nobody ruled customer choices with a pricing gun. Then he picked up one of those blue airline pillows and told me to imagine it was a garment, such as a coat, and that I was interested in buying it. “What’s the first thing you would say to the seller?” he asked.

“What does it cost?”

“Yes, you would say that,” he replied, meaning that this was typical of a First World shopper for whom price is the primary concern. Then he asked me to imagine that a conversation follows between the seller and me—that the two of us get to know each other a bit and learn from each other. “Now,” he asked, “What happens to the price?”
I said maybe now I’m willing to pay more while the seller is willing to charge less.

“Why?” Sayo asked.

I didn’t have an answer.

“Because you now have a relationship,” he said.

As we continued talking, it became clear to me that everything that happens in a marketplace falls into just three categories: transaction, conversation, and relationship. In our First World business culture, transaction matters most, conversation less, and relationship least. Worse, we conceive and justify everything in transactional terms. Nothing matters more than price and “the bottom line.” By looking at markets through the prism of transaction or even conversation, we miss the importance of relationship. We also don’t see how relationship has a value all its own: one that transcends, even as it improves, the other two.

Consider your relationship with friends and family, Sayo said. The value system there is based on caring and generosity, not on price. Balance and reciprocity may play in a relationship, but are not the basis of it. One does not make deals for love. There are other words for that.

Back in the industrialized world, few of our market relationships run so deep, nor should they. By necessity much of our relating is shallow and temporary. We don’t want to get personal with an ATM machine or even with real bank tellers. Friendly is nice, but in most business situations that’s about as far as we want to go.

But relationship is a broad category: broad enough to contain all forms of relating—the shallow as well as the deep, the temporary as well as the enduring. In the business culture of the industrialized world, Sayo said, we barely understand relationship’s full meaning or potential. And we should. Doing so would be good for business.

So he told me our next assignment was to unpack and study another thesis: Markets are relationships.

That is why, six years later, I started ProjectVRM (the R means Relationship) at the Berkman Klein Center, wrote The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), co-founded Customer Commons in 2013, and am now a visiting scholar with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, thinking out loud about how a news commons might thrive as a market of relationships—starting here in Bloomington, IU’s home town.

In The News Business, I said the three current business models for local news were advertising, subscription, and philanthropy, and promised a fourth. This is it: emancipayments.

We came up I came up with this idea in ProjectVRM in 2009. Here is how the EmanciPay page on the ProjectVRM wiki puts it:

Overview

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

as much as they likehowever they likefor whatever they likeon 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], which have become by 2021 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. (To our knowledge, it is still the first and only way.)

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 party] 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 silo’d systems for engaging and managing customer relations, as well as receipt, acknowledgement and accounting for payments from customers.

Use Case Background

EmanciPay was conceived originally as a way to provide a customers with the means to signal interest and 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 silo’d 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 several 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 an 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; and 4) all methods of intermediating payment choices are either silo’d by the seller or silo’d 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, newsstand, 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 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[edit]

The idea of “micro-payments” for goods on the Net has been around for a long time, and if often brought up as a potential business model for journalism by an article by Walter Isaacson in Time Magazine. What ProjectVRM suggests instead is something we don’t yet have, but very much need: micro-accounting for actual uses. These including reading, listening and watching.

Most of what we now call “content” is 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.

So, as currently planned, EmanciPay would –

Provide a single and easy way that consumers of “content” can become customers of it. In the current system — which isn’t one — every artist, every musical group, every public radio and TV station, has his, her or its 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 artists 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.Provide ways for individuals to look back through their media usage histories, inform themselves about what they have been enjoying, and to 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” — language that 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.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. In fact 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 on the radio,” and “I’ll send SoundExchange a lump sum of all the pennies wish to pay for songs I hear over the course of 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.

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 visited EmanciPay use cases twice in Linux Journal:

An Easy Way to Pay for Journalism, Music and Everything Else We Like (May 2015)An Immodest Proposal for the Music Industry (November 2018)

There are two differences in the world today that should make it easier to code up something like EmanciPay. (A name I am not committed to, by the way. It has always been a placeholder.) One is that smartphones have become extensions of our selves, ready to have apps written for them. The other is AI.

Note that I am not talking here about the kind of centralized AI we get now from Amazon, Microsoft/OpenAI, Adobe and the rest. I’m talking about AI that’s as personal as our own underwear, and gives us what Sam Altman calls “individual empowerment and agency on a scale we’ve never seen before,” and which I made the title of this blog post two months ago.

In my next post I’ll dig deeper into what we need to develop EmanciPay, and how we can use it to scaffold up the kind of markets imagined by The Cluetrain Manifesto, a quarter century ago.

The News Business

How does the news business see itself?

Easy: ask an AI. Or a lot of them.*

That’s what I’ve been doing. Unless otherwise noted, all the following respond to the same three-word prompt: the news business. Here goes…

Microsoft Bing (Full name: Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer), which uses DALL-E 3:

Dream Studio by Stability.ai (which, as you see, required a longer prompt than I used with the others):

Deep Dream Generator:

Adobe Firefly:

Craiyon, again with a longer prompt:

Stable Diffusion:

Finally, a series from DeepAI., each generated in a different style.

First, impressionism:

Surreal graphics:

Renaissance painting:

Abstract painting:

AI art:

What do these say about the news business? Well,

It’s mostly male.It’s mostly about newspapers, somewhat about TV, and idealized both.It used to be big.It doesn’t know what to make of the Internet.It’s obsolete in the extreme.

For most of the prior century, the news business was big. In tech parlance, it scaled. Here in the U.S. and Canada, every town had a newspaper, and in some cases several. Many towns—and all cities—had radio stations. Every name-brand city had a TV station, or two, or more. The great newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek, had millions of subscribers and made lots of money. So did TV network news operations. Newsstands were everywhere.

All of that has collapsed. Some print and broadcast news operations still exist, but most are shells of their former selves, and many put news icing on a cake of partisan talk shows. Exceptions to collapse are the surviving news giants (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal), and resourceful public broadcasters. (Pew Research shows NPR’s audience has long topped 20 million people, though it is slowly declining.)

People today get most of their news through phones, tablets, and laptops. These are packed with apps that maximize optionality. People now hardly listen, watch, or read on schedules set by publishers, stations, or networks. Everyone with a smartphone had a limitless variety of news sources. Or sources within sources such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and old-fashioned social media such as Facebook and X.

According to Pew, the top news sources for young people today are TikTok and social media. In other words, from each other. The threshold of news creation and production is also low. This is why, according to Exploding Topics, there are now over three million podcasts worldwide.

As Scott Galloway put it in a recent Pivot podcast (which I can’t find right now), news is a shitty business—at least if you want to scale up something huge. It’s not even a great small business. But hell, neither is running a restaurant, a nail salon, a clothing shop, or a small farm. But those are real businesses.

As Jeff Jarvis makes clear in The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet (which I highly recommend), we are at the end of one long era and the start of another one.

In these early years of The Internet Age, the most substantive news and news businesses are the local kind. True, not everybody cares about local news. But everybody lives somewhere, and it does matter what goes on where people live. As with running a restaurant, a store, or a farm, reporting local news is a labor of talent and love. It’s what we still call “a living.”

Right now there are three models for the local news business: advertising, subscription, and philanthropy. In my next post, I’ll lay out the case for a fourth one.

*I didn’t try Midjourney, DALL-E 3, or Stable Diffusion because they all require subscriptions, and I don’t feel like paying for those yet. DALL-E 2 yielded blah results.

Choices

Choose wisely.

Comment with wrong captions only.

A Supply Problem

My last four boxes of Trader Joe’s High Fiber Cereal

A while back, my gastroenterologist insisted that I get accustomed to eating high-fiber cereal in the morning. And so I have. It does work.

He recommended Fiber One. I didn’t like it, but I put up with it until I found Trader Joe’s version, which tasted much better. Since Bloomington is more than an hour from a Trader Joe’s in Indianapolis (there are two on the north side, while we are way down to the south), I stock up when we’re up that way.

Or I used to.

In Palm Desert for Thanksgiving, I went to a Trader Joe’s there to find High Fiber Cereal missing from the shelves. When I asked a crew member (they’re called that) if they had any in the back, she came back out with the manager to tell me that High Fiber Cereal had, regrettably, been discontinued.

I did not take it well.

I then told them that I also lament earlier discontinuations of the house-brand Ancient Grains granola and its thick, labneh-like strained Greek yogurt. As I reported in the chapter about Trader Joe’s in The Intention Economy, the company takes customer requests to heart.

I also see here that Fiber One is not getting out to store shelves, thanks to what General Mills calls “supply issues.” Since most of Trader Joe’s branded goods are made by other companies (including, presumably, General Mills), perhaps High Fiber Cereal will be re-continued.

Meanwhile, here’s to a good digestive 2024.