 Hello, everyone. Welcome to Harvard Law School. Welcome specifically to the book launch of this wonderful tome, The Intention Economy from our dear friend, Doc Searles. I didn't recognize Doc. If you're having trouble, I should point out that he is wearing a tie. And so for those of you who know him well, he can be tough to pick out against this complicated camouflage. So welcome and welcome to this presentation. My name's Ethan Zuckerman. I direct the Center for Civic Media over at MIT. Like Doc, I am a long, long, long, long time Berkman affiliate. And just to welcome you with some of the practicalities before we get into contextualizing by which you should read Embarrassing Doc. First of all, I should point out that this event is entirely on the record. It is being recorded for posterity if I know Berkman well, and I do. It will end up in any number of digital formats on the web, on their website, possibly streamed. For all I know, it's going to be written to optical disk, launched into outer space. If you do not wish your likeness to be captured, this would be a great time to climb under a table. But you should assume that anything you say in this room can and will be held against you. Because this is a book launch, and also because you really do want a copy of this lovely book, they are for sale in the back of the room at the end of this event, which will be approximately 7.15. I encourage you to come to the back of the room and transact so that you go away with your own copy of this. As befits a social media pioneer like Doc, we strongly encourage you to tweet, to blog, to otherwise share this event. We have more hashtags than you can shake a stick at. I've been trying to shake sticks at them. I've been failing. At the very least, we seem to be using VRM, Berkman, Intention Economy. That's my Twitter handle if you need it for some reason, mostly to tell me to shut up. That's Doc's. Feel free to transmit whatever you have to say about this. So in offering some context for this book, I've been trying to figure out why Doc asked me to introduce him. And I think the reason is that we have a certain complicated kinship, he and I, which is to say that the Berkman Center, which is this remarkable institution, brings together deep thinkers about the internet, brings in a really wide variety of people. It tends to bring in lawyers who want to do something that's very practical in the world. They tend to bring in scholars who are doing deep thinking about the future of the internet. There's a lot of sociologists and social scientists. And then there are those people that make you say, what were they thinking? And that happened both with Doc and with me. And in fact, for the years that we've been together at Berkman, we've gotten very used to answering those questions. What is it that Berkman was thinking in bringing people with unusual track records here? When I say unusual track records, we're talking about an individual that we refer to by a nickname hailing back to his career as a radio DJ. This is a gentleman who's been a journalist, who's been a columnist, but who has been a thinker and an instigator about internet issues for a very, very long time, who's written an enormous amount, both on his tremendous blog, but also for Linux Journal, one of the authors is really one of the key texts in our space, the Clutrain Manifesto. But the reason that people find themselves at Berkman when they come from this odd, writerly, thinkerly background that Doc hails from is because they have incredibly big ambitions and they're looking for some way to change the world in a really fundamental fashion. And this is Doc's manifesto to try to find a way to change the world in a very deep and very fundamental fashion. What Doc is really doing here is bringing to the table a set of questions and a set of actors that we too seldom talk about when we talk about the internet as we know it. We tend to talk a lot in terms of infrastructure. We tend to talk a lot in terms of policy. Recently we've started talking in discourses about rights and rights to access and rights to speech, but we rarely talk about the fact that at the heart of the net as we know it is really a transactional economy that we all find ourselves part of whether we really like it or not. And many of us avoid this subject entirely because it seems so complicated. It forces you to deal with questions of what's a vendor? Who's a customer? What are the rights of each of them? And Doc has put himself right squarely in the middle of this, both trying to find a new vocabulary to talk about these issues. And so when you see hashtags like VRM, vendor relationship management, this is not just because Doc is incredibly gifted with crafting interesting catchphrases, but literally because to understand the way we think about how the economy is going to work in the future, we need new tools and new vocabulary. And really that's what Doc's putting forward here. This isn't just a conceptual book in some very real ways. This is also a manifesto. It's really a call to arms and a call to action. And because it's not my manifesto, I'm gonna leave it to this guy to tell you about it. But it's also, I think, a tremendously helpful book for anyone in the business community who's trying to figure out how this is all going to work over the next several decades. And I think actually the story behind this book helps us sort of come to this. Doc, within the environment of Berkman, which encourages people to start projects, found himself starting Project VRM. Literally a community, open, collaborative software and conceptual effort to sort of build the infrastructure to allow a very different set of relationships between buyers and sellers, between customers and providers. Many of the people involved with Project VRM are in fact in this room. And when we get to the Q and A, which I'll be moderating after Doc's talk, I suspect we will probably have questions that go from here and down to this level of figuring out where VRM goes. But Doc's goal was to build a project and a movement. It wasn't really until someone from Harvard Business Press came to him and said, you know, this would make a killer book that this turned into a book as well. So we thank Harvard for providing a space to think this big. We thank the press for really forcing Doc to take this incredible line of thought that he's been developing over the last decade, put it into print. And most of all, we thank Doc Searles for putting something wonderful and provocative in front of us. He's gonna run us through some of the ideas behind the book. Then we get the wonderful treat of arguing with him. With no further ado, your friend in mind, Doc Searles. Thank you. Thanks, Ethan. So all that flattering beginning there, I'm gonna start out by making you uncomfortable. Because I wanna ask a question that actually is not answerable because I have no business hearing the answer. The question is, what is the most embarrassing thing about you? The thing you want to, or the things you want to conceal that you wanna cover up, that you want others to know, the kind of things you would share only with a degree professional or a licensed professional, or a very, very good friend, which we would describe to find a really good friend that some of you actually can keep a secret. Okay, these are the kinds of things we would like to cover up. And maybe it's the tattoo we wish you didn't have or a body part or some embarrassing thing in our past or that will happen in the future. Doesn't matter what it is, I just want you to keep it in mind. As I show you something that will perhaps make us amused at the same time as compounds that whatever discomfort I've started you off with. So this is from The Onion. Story tonight. Congress today reauthorized funding for Facebook, a massive online surveillance program run by the CIA. According to Department of Homeland Security reports, Facebook has replaced almost every other CIA information gathering program since it was launched in 2004. After years of secretly monitoring the public, we were astounded so many people would willingly publicize where they live, their religious and political views, an alphabetized list of all their friends, personal email addresses, phone numbers, hundreds of photos of themselves, and even status updates about what they were doing moment to moment. It is truly a dream come true for the CIA. Much of the credit belongs to CIA agent Mark Zuckerberg, who runs the day-to-day Facebook operation for the agency. The decorated agent code named the Overlord was recently awarded the prestigious Medal of Intelligence Commendation for his work with the Facebook program, which he has called, quote, the single most powerful tool for population control ever created. Among the biggest successes of the Facebook program is Operation Farmville, which the CIA credits with pacifying as many as 85 million people after unemployment rates rose dramatically. Other features, such as the suggested friends window, have been instrumental in allowing government agents to infiltrate deeper into the friend networks of suspected dissidents. For some expert analysis now on the story, let's check in with the fact zone's first responders. Jason, you have written extensively about the Facebook program. Why is it so effective? Well, one of the key reasons is that the CIA has been so thorough in convincing the nation that constantly sharing information about everything that you're doing is somehow desirable instead of deeply unsettling. You know, the critics are saying that with the national debt being so high, is this really the time to be spending even more money on spy programs? Well, actually, the Facebook program saves the CIA money. That's right. Like the maps application where you list every place that you've been, whether it's at the state or a country or... Oh, right, with the little pins. They show where you've visited. Yeah, I like that. Yes, that kind of information would have taken the CIA months of going through hotel receipts and plane tickets to figure it all out. The manpower that Facebook saves is huge. Absolutely, absolutely. And the calendar feature even lets the CIA know where you're going to be in advance. Right, so now if they want to pick you up for questioning, all they have to do is see which events you RSVP'd yes to and then send their agents to be waiting for you. That's how they got my brother. That's right. So effective. But guys, with all the focus on the Facebook program, is it taking away from some of the other CIA programs like the Twitter initiative? Yeah, the funding for that should be cut entirely. Right, 400 billion tweets and not one useful bit of data was ever transmitted. That's true. Is this trend of social network information gathering dangerous? I mean, just last week, The New York Times revealed that Al Qaeda has designed four square to identify popular locations for bombing. Actually, Brooke, that's been discredited as any kind of real threat. The people that use that site are people that no one would mind seeing bombed anyway. Really, the only thing the CIA has to be concerned about is people losing interest in Facebook and moving on to a new social network site. Like the Chinese site WANBI. I love that. Are you guys on WANBI? Oh my God, it's so much more fun than Facebook. It is great. I love that one. The more that you can earn friend points, the more state secrets that you post. I've got a lot of contacts in the State Department. I think I could really rack them up. But you post them up. I could. All right, first responders. Thank you so much as always. I'm, of course, a big fan of any social networking site. It allows me to interact with my fans without having to see, hear, or smell them. Okay, and from the Department of irony, of course, we have all our hashtags listed up here, of course. In faith that all of you, I was going to ask how many people are on Facebook. We don't even need to bother with that. It's pretty much 100%. No matter what. So here's the interesting thing. And if you look at the distance between Facebook and what happened before then, okay, is that privacy is very simple in the material world. You know, if we go back 18 years here, nobody had a laptop. Nobody had a smartphone. But we were in a material world, which we inhabited for the last 10,000 years, with developing a very thorough understanding of what it meant to be private. Privacy started with clothes. It basically started with clothes and it started with spaces. We create, there was no doubt about what private was. You know, so that we could debate it a different from one culture to another. But for the most part, privacy was well understood. Now we've created this other world, this other world, this one's been here for 10,000 years, this other world's the internet. The internet, as we know it, is 17 years old. It was born with the first graphical browsers from Netscape and from Microsoft. Basically, the difference between those early browsers and the ones we're using now are not large. They're pretty much the same. Here's the thing, that the world that we have that's virtual has no privacy built into it, has no rules built into it, and that is, in fact, a virtue of it. The internet is based on protocols. A very simple protocol, the TCPIP, that says we're gonna make the best effort to get data from one point to another point and it's gonna be very stupid in the middle about what happens to the data along the way. Intentionally, surveillance was not built in. It might have been if AT&T designed it, but AT&T wouldn't have designed the net because it would have been out of their control. It has a characteristic, as does all open source and all free software, that nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it. And so, the protocol suite of the net has improved over the years. There are newer protocols, RSS for one, for example. XMPP for instant messaging. These things come along, but the thing is that it's still young, 17 years old. It's immature. It's early. The older I get, the earlier it seems. And I advise you to kind of hold this. The ones that are my age like Tom over here are laughing a lot. But this is the world that we haven't built it out yet. We've just started to. So, when we hear, oh, the internet knows about you, if Facebook knows about you, that's not the internet. Facebook is a company that has a service that sits on the web that sits on the internet. The web is just an application on the internet. So, we have this early experimental efforts. It doesn't matter if Facebook is as big as it is. It's experimental. It wasn't even around seven years ago. Something else will be around in another seven years. And that'll be an experiment too until we get to the point where we can understand privacy and sharing and all these things that were well-developed over 10,000 years. So, I wanna go over some of the things that are going wrong, that as we're experimenting our way through things, and then follow that with the right things that we've been working on with Project VRM here at the Berkman Center and out in the world. So, anyway, we've been stuck in a master slave system since 1995. And the way this looks is this. We browse and we go to websites for the milk of HTML and cookies. So, we wanna get the HTML. Cookies are just little bonus things that were created in order to keep track of what's called state. State is what you were doing the last time you were there. What's in your shopping cart? What pages you were looking at before? It was a convenience. But because of the design of the web at the point that we adopted this system in 1995 called Client Server, we had this master slave relationship where we're always the slave. We're always the calf. We are subordinate. We are always dependent. We built dependency into this system. And dependency is the fundamental problem. And we still have that. We haven't broken out of it yet. Because what happens with the cookies is that we're being followed now and not just by friends. Because what cookies allow you to do, if you are a big company, trying to keep track of people, is to follow them around. You don't just get something that keeps track of state. You get something that keeps track of people. So the Wall Street Journal in starting in July of 2010 started a series called What They Know. And that's a short version of the URL. I advise you to visit it. Run by a reporter named Julia Angwin who deserves a Pulitzer for the work they've been doing at the Journal. Just looking at what they know about us, they being these big companies. And they surveyed the top 50 sites. The only one not tracking you, of course, is Wikipedia. All the rest of them were. One of them was dictionary.com. And this one had 234 tracking files. 11, first party. First party is them. That's the kind of things that just keeping track of what they want to know. The rest of them are all third parties. They're all advertising companies and tracking companies and data gathering and harvesting and hoovering and reselling companies. And some of them are flash cookies and what are called beacons, which are more ways that are cookie-like for following you around. Every commercial site you go to is doing this kind of thing. There's a company called Ghostery that produces this item on the right. That's a, I copied that out of, I run Ghostery on one of my browsers and it will tell you every single site you go to what they're doing to follow you around. Some of this is just getting analytics when you're on the site. Some of it is actually following you from site to site and reporting back to the third parties and to the site what you've been doing. And I only got down to tea before I didn't have enough room on my screen to get the whole thing. So this, in Rebecca McKinnon in her really excellent book, The Consent of the Network, talked about what happened in Iran in 2009, which is with Facebook. Facebook was this accessory to the revolution until all of a sudden out of nowhere, Facebook changed the rules and said, oh, all your privacy, all your friends, we're gonna tell everybody in the world about this. I don't know what the particulars were. Doesn't matter. They were horrified. The people who were suddenly exposed. The dissonance that we heard talked about in that onion story. So another problem is that we have near zero control about how personal data is used. And this is, you would think that all this data is going out there. You'd have some control, but you don't actually. There's a company called Wraplief. Wraplief is one of the many companies that the Wall Street Journal took on when it did the What They Know series. And what Wraplief did after they got, like just beat against the wall by the Wall Street Journal, there was a long list of probably five or maybe eight stories just in the fall of 2010. They said, uncle, wait a second. We're gonna be good to you, the consumer that we've been following around. And we're gonna let you get into our site and see what we have on you. And I thought, that's interesting. I better look at that because I've been pretty active since 1995. And I've been blogging since 1999 of that 16,000 followers on Twitter. I'm on Foursquare, I've had 50,000 photos on Flickr, What Do They Know About Me? And an interesting thing, these are just a couple of pages. All these things are wrong. I never went to grad school. That was not the right zip code. It was 10 years old. My estimated household income was wrong. Marital status, they said I was single. I hadn't been for 20 years. Estimated length of residence, that was wrong. And the next page, all these things were wrong as well. I took them off here because for the same reasons I gave you with that opening question, I don't want you to know, or them, either. Your only choice, by the way, is to remove these things. You really can't change them. They don't give you a way of doing that. Whatever the reasons are. My point here, though, is that they don't know much. And the BS they're throwing around is we can know you so intimately. They don't, they actually don't. And so what happens is that in the middle of this we're treated like toddlers who can't dress themselves. This is my wife's Joyce's metaphor from yesterday. It was brilliant, I thought. Because that's actually the case. A current controversy going on. Are you familiar with this Microsoft thing? Last week they suddenly said a bunch of nods in the room. In IE 10 I think it's gonna be they're going to default to do not track. And there's a whole bunch of stuff. I just saw out of character for Microsoft and the rest of it. But the important thing is that they came up with this idea of defaulting to do not track and then it just caused all the advertisers to split a gut. They go to the people who are drafting whatever the guidance is on this. I don't remember what the exact body is. The important thing though is down at the bottom here I'll have to translate this for you because it's a little obscure. But an ordinary user agent, that's a browser must not send a tracking preference signal without a user's explicit consent. What that says is they're in control, not you. And you have to have their permission to put clothes on before you leave your bedroom. That's how that translates. That's what's wrong with the way that they're trying to compromise doing that track. But the point is you don't really have control. Next is big data is turning into big brother. So this is a story from last week in the Washington Post. The important part of it is this line down here. Companies and governments are pushing the envelope in the use and reuse of data in ways not originally intended. The original intent is on the part of the seller. The envelope is you. The envelope is the clothing that you would like to wear on the net. The virtual clothing you don't have because they don't want you to have any. That's the envelope. So I went to IBM today just to pick up the logo. When I was greeted by this, this is their homepage. You go to IBM right now, you're gonna see this. Meet the new executive, chief executive customer, new term. That's who's driving the new science of marketing. That you, their conceit here is that you're actually driving. Does anybody here feel that they're driving IBM in any way? No, because if you look down here, there's a little retweet down there because they have to be social. All these big companies now have to be social, right? And to them, social is they find somebody who's saying something that improves their PR and they put it on their page. And in this case it's, take a look at highlights from the Smarter Commerce Global Summit, which I guess is going on now. And I can tell you with complete faith there is not a single person representing a customer at the Global Commerce Summit. It's all companies, talking to other companies, listening to the CEOs get up there and talk about big data. Big data is the big topic right now. Big data is big because, I'm sorry, because IBM bought McKinsey and bought whoever else it took in order to promote big data so they can sell more software and more big systems and surveil you more and improve marketing more where marketing is doing nothing but following you around like a dog you can't see or a pack of dogs you can't see. That's what's going on there. And there's a lot of money involved over here if you just look on the right, 1.5 trillion spent on marketing communications in 2011. That's on trying to sell you stuff, trying to follow you around. There's just 60% increase in spending on marketing analytics. That's a bubble. That's what a bubble looks like. There are other charts I could show you here. They all go up to the sky. All these guys are looking at the sky as where all the big data goes. So as a result of this, advertising has gone nuts. It's gone insane. And there's this idea behind advertising. There's Eric Schmitz talked about it. A lot of these guys talk about it that they can know you. They can know you perfectly. They're following you around. They have the big data. They can do analytics out the wazoo and know you so thoroughly. That's the idea, right? So a year ago, Eli Pariser, this guy here, wrote a book called The Filter Bubble, what the internet knows about you. In there, this is one line, a bad theory of you. Because that's what it's based on. It's based on an idea that you are data and nothing more that can be tracked and followed around. And there is in both puppetry and robotics, this term called the uncanny valley, which is where things get creepy. That's the best they can do, by the way. They can only get creepy. They can emulate a corpse or a zombie. They can't get past that and be fully human. So I heard a beep over there. So this is from the movie Lars and the Real Girl, where she was creepy and she was entirely in it. It was about the uncanny valley. This is the amusing thing for me. This is the ads that Facebook gives me, right? I turned off my ad blocking, like five kinds of it on a browser, but turned it off long enough to see what they're doing. It's telling me I need orchard supply because Robert Scoble likes it. Robert Scoble's a great guy. He's a friend, but he can't find enough ways to sell out and he likes everything. So he likes orchard supply. I've been there at the bottom. He also likes Capital One. I've got enough credit cards above that, fly fishing. I haven't done any fishing since I was 15. Never went fly fishing. Boyfriend wanted seniors, seniors something or other. It's telling me, yeah, I say two things. You're old and you're single. Oh, for two, I'm not 65 yet, guys. Back off, right? That's the first thing. The second thing is I'm not single and they know that. It's not working. It's really busted. So loyalty in retail is more crazed in fact. So an interesting thing about how many people here have loyalty cards of various kinds. They're kind of forced to, everybody, yeah, of course. It's insane. There's no point in having them, but they really took off in 1995 when the internet came along. And they took off because there was this kind of weird, it's called zoonosis. Zoonosis is the process by which a virus can travel from one species to another. And so the virus that is the calf cow system where you have to log in and register and have a login and a password and all kinds of inconveniences online, the brick and mortar guys took a look at that and say, that's cool, let's do that in the brick and mortar world where we don't need it at all. And they made a huge business out of it and trust me, the big data people are selling a whole lot of stuff around that, right? Because they're gonna know you from the big data they have about you in retail. And we can make countless agreements that aren't. So all of you with an iPhone have seen this dozens of times, right? You have an agreement, you have to click yes to an agreement that you never made because you never, who actually really agrees to that? The important thing about that is that somewhere if you actually read through it on page 35 or whatever it is, it says, we can change these anytime we want. You have no power here. And there's a name for that, a guy named Friedrich Kessler. He was a law professor who wrote a piece in 1943 called Contracts of Adhesion. It was for the Columbia Law Review. And what he said in that was that there is this kind of contract, this was at the height of the industrial age. The industrial age peaked in World War II because an industry caused in one World War II if you wanna dig into it, it kinda comes down to that. So, and he said, well, you know, the problem is that we had this thing called Freedom of Contract or any two parties could engage each other and do business and make a law unto themselves. That's what Freedom of Contract is about. It's a fundamental part of civilization, especially in a democratic society, the ability of anybody to make a contract with anybody else, anybody to come to an agreement with anybody else. But he said, what happened with mass marketing, which really was born in the 1930s, the word consumer was hardly used before then, when mass market was born and aided by broadcast, because broadcasting really came of age in the 1930s with network radio and soap operas and things like that. We could use mass marketing to sell mass products that were all the same, and we needed contracts that we just couldn't do individual contracts with everybody, so we invented these contracts of adhesion. Adhesion means you get held to it and the other party can change whatever they want. So, and we're stuck, and what happened is we go online and, well, we already had this laying there, we just used those online. We took something that was really, went the other way from the one I just described with loyalty cards. We took the brand new online world where we had a virgin territory where we could, maybe we really could do freedom of contract there, and we said, not, you know what, we're just gonna make it simple and we're gonna do these contracts of adhesion. They seem to work in the mass market world, we'll use them here. So, what can we do about that? I've just described a number of the problems that we have in the online world. These were evident in 1999 to myself, and there were three other guys that I got together with and wrote the Clutrain Manifesto with David Warnberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine. But I wanted to focus on this one line in the middle. It's from Chris Locke. It's actually not quoted very often, and I think it's because it's a graphic, it's not text, but to me it's the most important thing. It's what galvanizes, it's what got us going, gave us the sense we could do something with Clutrain, and it's this, we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it. So an interesting thing there is that that motivated us then, and we thought, this is what the net is, and suddenly our reach exceeds marketer's grasp, and it wasn't true. Worse, Clutrain didn't work out that way. Clutrain was a very popular book. And there was a period up to, Google, actually in Google books you go there, it counts how many books a word appears in. Clutrain now appears in over 5,000 books, and it increased that a book a day until they got to 5,000 and they stopped counting after that. It's a very popular word, and yet our reach does not exceed that grasp. And I felt that, you know what, writing about this wasn't enough. We actually had to do something. We had to do something more. So in 2006, when I got the fellowship at the Berkman Center, and as Ethan said, those of us in those days, you get to be a fellow, you get to start a project. And I started Project VRM. And I didn't choose the term VRM by the way. It was chosen by the market, you might say. People just started talking about it that way after a podcast where somebody just used the term and it kind of caught on. But it stands for vendor relationship management. Customer relationship management is this $18 billion business. It's the $18 billion business of IBM and Microsoft and SAP and Oracle and other companies like that selling services to big companies to manage their relationships with customers. And the problem is the customer's not involved in that. So we thought, well, why don't we put tools on the customer side? Why don't we create tools that make customers both independent and better able to engage? Those two things, give them independence and give them ways to engage. So here are just some of the things that have happened since fall of 2006. There are now dozens of projects. There are in all those countries and probably more. Many meetings and conferences. There's a list and a wiki with hundreds of contributors. So in terms of activity, it's been quite a success. And I want to go over some of those successes. There's so many things going on. I can't go into all of them. But in a summary way to start out, I'll put it this way. With VRM, the customer drives or the individual drives, because it's not just about business. It's also about government. There are government relationship management projects going on, for example. But the cool thing about a car, a car is a VRM tool. A car gives us independence. A car gives us a sense of privacy. Even if we're renting a car, those are my wheels. That's my steering wheel. That's my engine. Those are my fenders and my bumper. You have the sense of occupying that car as a private space. And also, it's a way of relating to commerce. And infrastructure has grown up around it. We drive to them all. They have parking spaces for us. Here in Cambridge, you get two hours of parking before they find you two seconds after the two hours are up. But infrastructure grows around this because we have an instrument of independence. It's been around for 100 years. An interesting thing about the car is that it could not have been invented by the railroad business. Facebook is the railroad business. Google is the railroad business. Anybody running a server alone is in the railroad business. They're not in the business of giving you independence. We need other entities to give us independence. So what would those be? So here's some of the things you can do. With VRM, you can specify your own terms of service. You can define for yourself what loyalty is. You can gather, examine, and control the use of your own data. You can intent cast to the market in an anonymous and secure way. You can manage your own relationships with all the vendors and other organizations you deal with and do all of that either on your own or with the help of fourth parties. A fourth party is a third party that's working for you. The idea behind it, and it's just a term we came up with in the VRM conversation. In order to differentiate third parties that are basically not working for you, that are kind of on the other guy's side, that they accessorize the second party. So you go to the Apple store, those are all third parties. They're these third parties that are following us around. They don't have the best reputation as a term, but we wanted to distinguish those things that are working for us. So for example, a buyer's agent, I see Bill Wendell is here somewhere, but a buyer's agent in real estate working for you, that's a fourth party. A lawyer is a fourth party. This school manufactures fourth parties because they are advocates. They're working for you. A doctor is your fourth party. They're working for you. They represent you to the other institutions. We got a little nodding back and forth. Not so sure. So I want to go into just what a few fourth parties are in the VRM community. An interesting thing though, VRM.cl is in Chile. Trust Fabric is in South Africa. They're doing very well. Singly's in San Francisco. Mydex, Pioca, and the customer's voice are all in the UK, Azego. Paul Trevithic right here is in Boston. And that's not a complete list. I want to start and use just one of those to illustrate some of what is going on with VRM and what can be done with VRM. When you have a tool that makes you both independent and engaging. And that's this company, Provoni. They're in France, but they also have an office in Palo Alto. Here's the interesting thing about Provoni. It gives you a place to store your personal data. It gives you many ways of interacting with sellers of all kinds. But it doesn't know anything about your data. That's the key thing about Provoni. It's blind to your data. It's encrypted. You have a relationship with your data, but they don't. And they have ways that you can track, for example, when you share an email address with somebody if that email address itself is also shared. And you have ways of turning on and off your email, which also Paul's company here does as well, Azego. It gives you this menu bar on the right. And by the way, I want to point out that, I mean, this is his slide, but he says, all VRM is described by Dr. Searles in the picture of the book. The term VRM is actually much more commonly used in Europe than in the US at this point. The hot bed of activity, I would say, the kind of the heat map of VRM would be really hot in, hottest in the UK and in France. So, and this is a, like I said, it's a French company. This menu bar runs along the left side of your screen. You can pop it out and see what your relationships are. You can see what the site's doing. You can put in some of those things where the tracking guys are in, see what they're doing, cut them off if you want. But it's basically a framework within which you can start relating in a new and better way with the vendors of the world. And they have a business model that, where for some of the ad networks and marketers and so forth, if they're, you know, with your permission entirely and your control, they can sell that data in the sense that you can be in the qualified lead business, because that's how the sellers look at it, or you can cut it all off. And at the same time, they have a premium service where you pay them and they're accountable to you. And that's another way they work. The rest of it's a lot of detail I wanna go into. So, all of the, all the fourth parties have the capability I would hope to allow you to set your own terms and preferences and policies, which would include things like, don't track me outside your site or service. Give me my data in a usable form. I specify, wipe my data when I say so. Here's my fourth party who represents me. Here's my trust network. Trust network is just a term that came up in the last year. There are at least two companies doing and working out what a trust network would be, which is, we take the social stuff. We, you know, I trust so-and-so as a doctor. I trust so-and-so as a real estate guy. I trust so-and-so as a videographer. And have enough of those and you can start scaling trust in a way that's external to any, any of the cows that are out there in the world. And there's how that menu bar would look on the side and it would probably fit somewhere in there. You can program the way your cloud, that you can have a cloud, you know, can interact with other things. So for example, this is a graphic and it's not that clear and I should, I should explain it a little bit from, from a company called Kinetics in Salt Lake City, where you can program how you interact and how the services you use interact with each other outside of any of the cows that are out there in the world. So for example, but you can use some of their services with their API. So for example, Mark could say, you know, Mark Hader here in the third row, I'm gonna be in Cambridge. I'm open in the evening. If Doc is there, send him a note. Or if I'm working for somebody, fill out my expense report and inform RunKeeper. I can program all of the if, then, or else kind of logic that we would like to be able to do on our own outside of any single site. We don't have to go to Nike to do all of our fitness stuff. We don't have to go, you know, to our sole healthcare provider to do all our health stuff. We can keep track of that and we can program that and the idea is that we have a cloud that is our own and not just the ones outside ourselves. Generally we're talking about clouds. We're talking about something somebody else has. It's Apple's cloud, you know. You leave Apple, you lose all the stuff that was in that cloud, right? Get full use of your digital assets. This is a completely ununderstandable graphic that I only put up there to show that the work is going on a bunch of us are working with Swift, which is a very large company that's a nonprofit in Europe that transfers several trillion dollars a day when you have a bank transfer from a place to another. There's a Swift is involved in that. Now, they have the infrastructure for that. And the interesting thing about this project is that they're starting from the assumption that your data also has value like money. And if your data is, as the World Economic Forum said last year, a digital asset that needs to be treated with full respect, what would be the infrastructure for transferring some of that in such a way that if it's not used right, you can see it? Or we'll support new banking services. So for example, there's an idea we've had for several years called emancipate. Emancipate is a means by which you can escrow the intention to buy something. So for example, you can say, I want to buy a Dodge Ram truck that's white and has a crew cab and has these wheels and so many horsepower and a roof rack and I've got $40,000 sitting in the bank ready to pay for that. And you can escrow that intention. This is one of the intentions that we talk about. So Swift wants to help create these businesses for banks. I've talked with a number of banks that want to restore the trust they once had and lost in the crash deservedly. But they feel like they can, they're never gonna go away and you should be able to use them, right? So maybe they could be fourth parties that could help you out. This is for them and some of us are working with them. Project VRM is actually back here. We're starting out. After 60 years we're still starting. It's still at the innovator stage. But it's pointing somewhere. We have enough progress now. We have enough sense of where this is going so that I could write a book about it and say what was gonna happen over time. What is the end state? And the end state is what I call the intention economy and that's an economy that's not based on the guesswork that the trillions of dollars that IBM's talking about back here aims at, the 1.5 trillion in marketing that for the most part is being wasted on guesswork right now through a bad theory of view but rather a marketplace where your intentions which might be negative or prophylactic ones like don't track me to positive ones like I'm looking for this or these are my genuine relationships. These are the real ways that I have loyalty. Here's some ideas, General Motors, here's how I'm using your car. I spent several hours a couple days ago talking with a guy who wants to reform the local car dealers business so that they are fourth parties working for you advocating what you want in cars to the car manufacturers because right now they see themselves as just conduits for the car manufacturers or the cars just get pumped through to you but they look at social, they see these things happening with social and say that's not quite there, we're participating in that but that doesn't get us all the way there. There's another state at the end of this where we can turn the tide. We know that our customers come to us wanting things that aren't on the spec sheet. They want, they see things that they would like that we're not hearing about. We would like to advocate them. We would like to be a fourth party. So we see the intention of economy emerging and looking like this about in here and now we go to the Q&A and bring Ethan back up and I have a little more to add at the end of this. Okay, that's fine. Listen. Another play. So by the way, I haven't been answering my email. I've been sitting here blocking this just to make it clear on my typing along the side and so having followed this very closely and taking moderate interest prerogative for the first question. Doc, it seems to me like many of the people that you're critiquing in this book, advertisers, businesses that don't really care about what the customer want are working from a very particular theory of you which is that you don't know what you want. They manufacture your desire and it sounds like the intention economy is fantastic news for businesses that provide wonderful products and really care what their users want but it also sounds like terrible news for businesses that thrive on constructing desire and I'm wondering, is that too naive a reading or are you basically announcing that in the intention economy, those guys are dead? I think they have to adapt. I mean, I think that there's always gonna be there's always gonna be a back and forth between manufacturing desires that were or in marketing, marketing 101 says, you find what the customer wants and you give them that. If that was all marketing was, we wouldn't have had Apple. We wouldn't have had Silicon Valley. So somebody invents an iPhone and we gotta have one. Somebody invents the MacBook Air, we gotta have one. Before that, somebody invented a fax machine. Somebody invented a Xerox machine. Somebody invented Polaroid, right? Those things manufactured desire, okay? And there's nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with nothing but that and so there's gonna be a back and forth on that and there are companies like IBM that are very clueful about a bunch of things and on the other hand, they sort of wanna make hey, while the sun shines and while the sun shines right now, Google and Facebook are kinda hogging the stage and big data looks like a great way to make money and doing data analytics sounds like a great thing and there's gonna be a back and forth on that but I think that there's, my main point is not that the other stuff goes away. I think there's and logic here, okay? There's going to be marketing as usual and there's gonna be a new form of market that will elicit a new form of marketing that really is about listening and dialogue. There will be a problem and there's a political problem in business and the political problem is one that my wife Joyce here pointed out early in our marriage when I was a marketing consultant and I asked why is it that VPs of marketing and sales almost always are sales people? They're not marketing people. I was a marketing guy and I worked with marketing people and she said, well, it's simple, sales is real and marketing is bullshit. And when I asked her to unpack that, she said, well, it's because sales touches the customer. Marketing is not allowed to touch the customer politically. So marketing therefore has to be strategic, okay? It's still going on, right? Marketing still has to be strategic. It's not touching the customer. With social, it's starting to touch it more. That's what sales force is selling. That's what Sugar-CRM is selling. That's what all the CRM guys are selling right now. Oh, now you can touch your customer by watching what they're doing on Twitter and the rest of this and you can jump them trying to sell them whatever it is. But there's still that political problem because the sales side wants to own the customer, as it were, and there are two problems. The customer doesn't wanna be owned and the other is that marketing may actually know more than sales. It's gonna be a battle. It's gonna be a lot of noise going on in the middle of it. So there was not a simple answer to that. So to provide a slight bit of structure to the amount of noise that's now about to go on in a question and answer session, let me point out a couple of things. It'd be great if you raise your hands if you have a question. When I call on you, there are little microphones in front of you. If you press on the button, that microphone will turn red and then it will possibly amplify you as you speak into it. Also just a helpful reminder as this is an academic event, sometimes it's important to remind people that questions are interrogative statements. They often end with a rise in vocal tone at the end of them and they provide an opportunity for the person in the front of the stage to respond to them, not merely to express your opinions. So with that in mind, any questions? Please. Yeah, just a bunch of them. I'll just bob in the back of the verse. We'll get you first. You got the red light. Hi. A lot of what you, oh, my name's Ben. I'm a summer research assistant here at the Berkman Center. A lot of what you seem to talk about in terms of vendor relations management is individuals engaging with these fourth parties, right? Coming together with companies that exist to advocate on their behalf. But are there things the individual can do by themselves without, you know, interfacing with these fourth parties? That is the default state, I should say. My preference where I think we will end up is that we will all have tools that are ours and nobody else's. Where we can have our own relationships with things and the fourth parties will come into play in the same way as we need lawyers or doctors now where they have professional capacities that we don't have alone. But the primary state that we're in is fully independent individuals. I see Keith nodding in the front row. Keith is in early, he's with NPR. He's an early participant in VRM. In fact, one of the original things that we created is called a listen log and it's on the public radio, public media player rather, that you can choose public radio stations with and it keeps a log of everything that you've listened to so you can use that yourself. That's yours, it's entirely yours. Nobody else has it. You are your own party, you know. So, you know, so the answer is yeah. The thing is that most of the commercial activity going on now is in this fourth party area and I think part of what's gonna sort out in the course of that, and Proveni is built for that by the way and so I'm sure are some of the others which is okay, we're just gonna do this one thing, right? And you do the rest. The Freedom Box is a perfect one. Freedom Box is one of the, Evan Mowlin of a law professor at Columbia, major figure in the free software movement. We've had a bunch of people working on VRM on the Freedom Box where you have, you know, you define your relationship with so and so and so and so and so and so. So, and that's a hardware project. You wanna keep track? You call, you know this room better than I do and go right ahead. Okay. If they get rowdy I'll just throw them out. But you were actually second, is that game? Cool. Hi there, I'm a consumer and I'm really, really lazy and I would say that a lot of consumers out there are also really, really lazy. And so, it's easier for me to click on an ad word, ad, than to go and download some software to protect my ID. What, how is this gonna work for lazy consumers who don't want to lift a finger? We're gonna need inventions that make it easy. That's it. So, a couple of interesting learnings we've had in the last several years. When we started out, I remember the very first meeting we had in fall of 2006 at the Berkman Center, the project of VRM, Paul Trivithic was there and he said, nobody's ever gonna do a user install. There's a problem. You're not gonna do a user install. Now we have the app market. User install out the wazoo. Easy to do. We need something that's that easy. People are willing to do the work when they see ease at the other end of it. I remember when the first PCs came out and I saw Quicken for the first time or when I saw Macintax for the first time I was like, oh my God, taxes are gonna be easy now. I'm eager to do my taxes. There are these little crossover points but we need the inventions that mother the necessity. So, we don't have them yet. That's it. Can I append to that? Yes. The Facebook like button is really easy and it's a statement of intent except somebody else owns it. Right, yeah, and it's gamed out the wazoo which is so, the problem with Facebook isn't just that it's huge and all those other things but it's a monoculture. It's this monoculture so people, weird things happen inside of it. Mark, I think you were next. Hi, my name's Mark. So I can't help but remember when Steve Gilmore and Esther stood up and talked about the attention trust and I got really excited about it until Steve Gilmore said, oh no, I'm not leading it. It's complete anarchy and you can't have a leader which reminds you of the Occupy movement. So my question to you, Mr. Searles, is will you be the leader of this movement because my voice is rising at the end to ask you to step up. You wrote the book but you can't have all these cats running around in anarchy. You need to be organized because they are really organized, right? The other folks and they make us look bad because we're all Occupy anarchy and we need to be organized to be able to fight them. Well, sure. Here I am, right? I mean, is that somebody else up here talking about this? But I don't wanna be the only guy. I don't see this as an Occupy kind of thing actually. I see this as a distinction of project VRM and of aspirations for VRM is that we see a hole in the market where the individual is which is why we've avoided almost always talking about oh, if enough people get together then we have this effect. We'd rather, because when you have that we sort of diminish the individual. And so what I, it's like, I wanna invent, I wanna encourage the invention of a ratchet wrench rather than a standard wrench. I mean, tools that suddenly when you see them, say, geez, I gotta have that. Is it because you're afraid to set expectations or metrics? Well, that's what this is. There's expectations out of the wazoo in this thing. So I have, that's true. As Drew has put it out, I do have an action item at the end. I just don't wanna jump ahead to it. So there is an action item. And if you wanna lead it, step up. So that hand was up there too. And Bob back here and then Renee and then you. Okay, so go ahead. Hi, thank you. Thanks for the talk. My name is Peter. I'm a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon. I'm just trying to think through some of the consequences of what you're advocating and think about maybe unintended consequences. So, I mean, Google and Facebook and companies like this are able to provide relatively free search with massive data centers to the world because I occasionally click on their ads. I being one of the privileged few who has money to spend online. Now, if many of us start withholding our data and that data is what drives their business models, obviously they're gonna have to innovate, right? So my question is kind of twofold. So first, is it worth it for all of us to withhold our data and then maybe the world loses free search, right? For those who can't afford to pay for it. And there was a second part that was really clever but I forgot it. But it ended with a question which was great and was a good provocation. It's a very good question. And people say that's a good question when they don't have the answer. Have you ever noticed that? But my answer is A, too bad. But B, we are really exposed right now. I mean, the bubble is enormous and there's the level of bad clickage that's involved in the wealth that Google creates that buys you all these free services is very high. Nobody wants to talk about it. It's not accountable, it's not transparent, but it's there, okay? And it's there very more manifestly with Facebook, actually, where the click-through rates are in fact much lower and they have not announced or shown what the plan is to get past that. But we're not so dependent on Facebook as we are on Google. Google's free search is huge, Gmail is huge, how they can afford to maintain that infrastructure, I don't know. The costs are very buried. They're these big factory-sized boxes out of running off of hydro power in Bend, Oregon and Hickory, North Carolina where you can't really see what's going on in there, but it's sucking a lot of electricity off the grid. I think there are all kinds of positive and negative unintended consequences of when that system fails because I think it's going to fail in the long run. And I think we're hugely exposed with Google right now. But already we're seeing negative effects, anyhow, of Google being a monoculture. A few months ago, I was trying to look up something for fixing Joyce's computer. It was like, it's a simple Apple thing that was on an Apple page on like a safe startup or safe reboot or I forget what it was called. It was on like page 10. Everything in front of it was bullshit. I mean, it was all SEO-driven, commercial stuff. The commercialization of the web is so high and getting higher that the organic results, they call it, are going farther and farther down. It's getting harder and harder to find some of the stuff you're actually looking for. To Google's credit, they're keeping up with it, but it's a problem. The web that we know now is vastly a commercial space. It's like a giant strip mall. It's the San Fernando Valley on steroids out the Wazoo. And it's ugly and it's gonna get uglier and at some point, something breaks there. And I don't know whether the VRM stuff causes that breakage, but I think it's a problem. And I think it's, you know, we'll go through some process with this, but I don't know what it's gonna be. So to Bob next, I think. What's that? I'm just trying to maintain your list here. I'll see if I can extract a simple question of a complex set of issues. But I assume you read the Vance Packard's books in the 60s, that advertise of long- The hidden persuaders. The hidden persuaders, yes. That in every drop of water, the worst sex would appear in an ad. And other beliefs that they could somehow have finagled the customer. And in a sense what you're saying is today's big data is another version of that. But is a desperate need to sort of find money by selling that fantasy, like ETV now puts up banner ads. So try to make a simple question. One thing you find is a monoculture Facebook and things like that, which is an issue in its own right. But to what extent sort of is the money in those this fantasy that their data gives them an advantage or the other ways you see Facebook monetize you? What, in other words. Who's the they? The argument that Facebook and Google make is that because they have this data, advertising with them is better than other channels. They know more about you and that's driving so much of this business. Do you think the jig will ever be up and are there other ways to make money? There'll be lots of other ways to make money. But given Vince Packard, do you think the jig will not be up? Yeah, Vince Packard wrote a book in the 60s called Hidden Persuaders where he'd show, for example, when if you see some Bacardi rum in a bunch of ice cubes that, you know, there was something evocative about that that would persuade you to buy it. I'd rather table that and go to the Facebook versus Google question because it was this interesting conversation I had about a year and a half ago with a guy who worked for one of those many big advertising companies you never hear about because they were at the back end and they buy and sell your data. And he said, here's an interesting irony. Google is jealous of Facebook because Facebook can get more personal than Google can. Facebook is jealous of Google because Google can put their ads all over the web and they're actually surfing on real intent. I should point out, when you search for something you're expressing intent, it's not like it's a bad thing. And they were jealous of each other, but at the same time, as this guy pointed out, both of them actually fail 99.x% of the time and that waste is hidden and you don't see where it is, but it is itself a problem that no amount of improving that system can cure. And so I'm not sure that the jig is up. We'll always have online advertising just like we'll always have brand advertising. We'll always have the first half of Vanity Fair is gonna be all fashion and liquors and the rest of it and they keep these big nice magazines and business and to some extent that advertising is desired as a form of editorial. I don't think that changes. I think some things are seriously in danger. Radio is in danger, television as we knew it is in danger. We never wanted those ads for the most part. There are better ways of finding out what we want. But the thing is that there, you know, what I hope I get across and what I sense and what we're trying to cause as well is this title shift where it's not all just slosh coming down from a zillion advertisers that's driving everything, but at some point it starts leveling out and the signaling that goes back upstream is helpful and not just rebellion. I mean, this is where it kind of addresses Mark's issue. I don't think this is, this is an Occupy. We're not trying to come from we're the poor, helpless, powerless little calves and please treat us better, which is what a lot of people where they wanna go, but rather, you know what, we're gonna get powers you don't have that we don't have now. When we get those, you're gonna wanna talk to us. You're gonna wanna relate to us. We're gonna find out through dialogue what the real relationship should be like. Renee, I think we had you next. Renee? Hi. So, how do you, what are your thoughts around people, there's a trust issue that people have. They, people have assumed that their data wouldn't be used in places it's been used, so there's, you're also answering a trust. You're a little closer than I do. You're answering like a trust problem issue. So, what are your thoughts about how does this not become another play at the customer? And something that has some substance that people can say, I believe in this, I trust this, is there a community enforcement mechanism? Are there a variety of mechanisms? Is there, you know, we've talked a lot about this, but I wanna hear more in the community sense because I think one concern is you have people who are, there's an ennui of this is now the new thing and oh, your cookies are gonna be protected and it's a technical play, but it really doesn't do much on the other end or here's a great fourth party that's gonna host my data, but when you look at the terms, they're not willing to protect you if they screw up. What are people, what's the community gonna do to protect this great work and say, look, here's the line, you don't cross this line. What are your thoughts around that? There, I think there are at least three issues there. One is we have so few reasons to trust anybody right now out there. There's nothing I've shown you today and there's nothing I've seen so far that says any of the fourth parties we have so far can't be corrupted and be and as you've pointed out, and Renee's my mentor on all things legal by the way, she's a former fellow here as well. All the most well-intended companies out there have really bad terms of service because that's pro forma still. We haven't fixed that and we have to fix that but we can't fix that as long as there's this power asymmetry that we've, we have to bring the power up on the customer side, on the individual side so suddenly we can have decent relations there. That's one thing. The second thing is we are going to have, I think, a community and an organization and I'll go into that in a few minutes as a kind of punchline but the third is I think there's strength in numbers and by that I mean we are gonna lose some of these fourth parties, some of these tool makers, some of the high aspiration says the right thing. Companies that are in the VRM community now they'll be selling out. I mean the money's there. The money's gonna be, here's $50 million to help us scarf up data and hoover up more stuff for the big data mills that I were buying from IBM. I'm afraid that's probably gonna happen to some degree or there are a number of companies that are sort of starting with, okay we've got a business model where we make money off the sales side then we're gonna gradually shift over to the buy side. Proveni has one of those. Okay, if nobody wants to buy in maybe they're not as accountable to the individual. I think a good thing is that in France and my conversations with our French friends including Professor Thomas Stencher from the University de Poitiers which is we figured today 205 years the elder of Harvard. It made it clear, even more clear that it had already been made clear to me that there is so little taste for bad behavior on the seller side in respect to privacy and identity and things like that in France that you don't even bring the subject up and in fact whole institutions are at risk. So here this actually addresses part of your question. There are three industries that we've dealt a lot with in the VRM community. Telcos, banks and what's the third one? I'll try to remember. But anyway Telcos and banks are too, and the post office. These are not the most trusted institutions. That's, they're not. And the government in general is not as trusted. It's trusted in different ways and different societies. But there's, but they're coming to us in part because they do want to reform. We have one guy who is very active in coming to our meetings and so forth. He's now working for JP Morgan Chase, right? And his job is to kind of VRM JP Morgan Chase in the long run. What can we do to be a non-bad bank? And, but the question is here he's already told me he's gonna be fighting internal battles from all the way along because security always comes up, right? Only we can control security. So I know. But Doc, what I was trying to get at is that we need a Steve Jobs who could be an asshole because it's not gonna be easy. And that's why Apple products are so good because he was able to draw the line and say, sorry it has to be this way. So here's the problem with the Apple example. It was an example only of itself. There'll only be one of those. There'll never be another Steve Jobs. There'll never be another Apple, including Apple because Steve Jobs is dead. Ride the stock, well, it's good now, but it's gonna die. All these companies are gonna die. But, like Steve did, I mean, they're such an anomalous company. They're so unusual. And I don't know if we need a charismatic, person here, I really don't. I think we need good tools back here because you've had your hand up for a while. Wait, Chris Meier has been trying to get her box. Oh, Chris, I'm sorry, Chris. I'm looking to the right. And put your mic on Chris. Chris Meier from Minor Talent. I think I understand an end point which sounds a lot like what Seth Godin used to call permission marketing where we trust people enough to give them permission to tell them what we want to know and we think that that works. But you don't believe there's any way to get to there from here. Oh, no, I do. I think that's part of it. I think that's a very benefit. Let me get to the question. Okay. Okay, 100 years ago we had an interesting technology that created a lot of new value for the economy of industrial technology. But one of the unintended consequences was abuse of laborers. And to the point of shooting at them in Carnegie's case. But eventually we figured out labor laws. And similarly we had monopoly and we figured out antitrust laws. We were sitting I think in a law school and you have not mentioned any legal or regulatory role in changing the balance of power here. So is that included in the BRM movement? Not yet. My position on this is that we should work the technology out and work the sociology out before we start working out the legal stuff in terms of getting new laws and things. Like for example, I think it's too early to have a do not track law. I think that would be a mistake. I was in a meeting once with Michael Powell, the former FCC chairman, where I think what was on the table then was net neutrality. But here is an important point. He said, well, next you wanna go for that. But I wanna tell you this. I've met everybody in Congress. I'm gonna tell you to a person there are two things they don't understand. One is technology, the other is economics. Now proceed, right? So that's what I'm afraid of with this is that a bunch of constituents say we need to do not track law when we can have a technical solution that starts with us being empowered. And I would rather have that happen first. So I don't see that as off the table at all. I just don't see it as at the center of the table or the first place to go. Doc, I think you have room for one more question and then a call to action. So choose carefully. Okay, well you've had your, let's take two because you've had your hand up a long time and you did too, so go ahead. Is there one next to you on the other side? Just, here we go. Okay. Does that sound good? That sounds good. Yes, it does. Hi, I'm John Charles from GCC printers. And I just had kind of from a sort of practical angle. How do you feel the intersection of VRM and supply chain management is going to occur? And I just want to address that because of our interest in 3D printing, which now allows for a small lots to be produced quickly and things to be turned around and manufactured in a way that makes VRM. Of course, you have a supply chain like Apple, which is huge and takes quite a while to implement. So what's your feeling on this? So there's, one of the participants in the VRM conversation is an authority on supply chain named Michael Stolarzik who just came out with a book called Logical Logistics and he talks about, I think what he calls, a funicular relationship. If you know a funicular train, as one side goes down while the other goes up, there's a tight linear relationship between the two. He sees VRM playing an important role, giving signals that go back up the supply chain that help improve the supply chain all the way through. That's kind of what the guy with the car dealers is in Alabama, same kind of thing. It's like, the dealers are whipsawed by the supply chain even though it's just like one tier where they are now and there are many other kinds of suppliers. I think they have many more stages in it, but the theory on his part is the more good information you get at the point of use, the better it's going to be for the supply chain, especially if good will is involved. And having, for example, just surveys. Surveys are almost always wrong. They always ask the wrong questions. And the important question you get is this one thing didn't work and you got it from one guy who was in a good position to know that that wasn't put in there right and after a year of use, that connector's not gonna work and you better work on that and it goes back up the supply chain. He sees VRM playing that role in the long run. There's one part of VRM doing that. So, and over here, sir. George from Central Square. I looked in your index and I don't see Eleanor Ostrom. Oh, she's in the bibliography for sure. Okay, and I'm wondering about how you're going to apply her ideas about sustainable economics and decision structures through a variety of different mechanisms and groups to what you're talking about because she's world expert on commons and what this is, the commons. So, I have a chapter on the commons and one of the things that my good editors here, like Jeff over here and others that helped me is cutting the book down from 120,000 words to 80,000 words and Eleanor Ostrom is one of the ones that ended up on the floor, I hate to say, but Louis Hyde, who's a colleague here, is still in there and that's part of it. I think we are building a new commons that is going to be like the ones that Louis describes and that Eleanor describes but I understand him better than her, even though both of them had wonderful critiques of Garrett Hardin and the notion that commons has to be tragic when in fact it does not. And I happen to believe that the net itself, which is why the whole central section of the book is devoted to the net as a marketplace, as a natural marketplace that the Facebooks of the world and even the Googles and the Amazons of the world are narrowing down to some degree but it can be much more of a commons than it is right now and I think we can make it a commons by our behaviors and our participation in it. And I'm an optimist, okay, so what you're getting with this book is primarily an optimistic thing. I've been accused correctly as a cyber libertarian, I'm not libertarian, a cyber utopian. Cyber utopian. Cyber utopian, yeah. We had in this room where one like it, we had a thing a couple of years ago David Weinberger and I sat here and the session was called how's the utopia working out for you so far? And the answer, and I happen to think it is utopia. I mean, if you'd said, and I point this out in the book, in 1982 or that you would have this worldwide network where we are all connected to each other at no cost and at great ease and we can do all of this sharing in real time and that we would obsolete the phone companies and all kinds of things in the process we'd think you were nuts. We think we might have out to your gravity cars before we'd have that, but it is a utopia. We made a utopia, we have to build it out, I think. So, Doc, you've got us all fired up before we exit through the gift shop which we literally do in this case. Right, sorry, sorry. What is your call to action? Okay, so the call to action is join customer comments. So we created and the book talks about customer comments and we put this thing together. It's not a successor organization to Project VRM. Project VRM will persist as the lightweight thing it is. It's a wiki and a list and hopefully in the long run we'll do research there as well. But customer comments is the idea is that this is what the 100% belong to. We are all customers and it'll be the place where we can do several things. One is crowd fund developments like VRM developments going on here where we can talk with each other and work things out that are not complaints about what the big bad companies are doing but what constructive things we can do with around law, around supply chain, around building out the comments around the rest of these things. Yeah, and it's at customercomments.org. So I just put that up there. We have customercomments.org up there. So go there, join it, and you can give it money too if you like. It's still early, we're still shaking it down but it is formed. Join customer comments, buy the book, have Doc sign it, applaud Doc Searles. Thank you, well done.