Doc Searls interview: 'Amazon even tried to sell me a book I'd written. How stupid can that be?'

Silicon Valley veteran talks about the personal information economy and ad blocking

Big companies, even technology firms, are very bad at handling and using personal data because they are built on a model that arose during the industrial revolution, advocate and author Doc Searls told the audience at the Personal Information Economy 2016 event last week.

"Amazon is supposed to know more about us than we know ourselves, right? But a few weeks ago I bought a Bose Bluetooth speaker on Amazon and afterwards on every commercial website I visited there was an Amazon ad trying to sell me what I just bought. How stupid can that be?

"They even try to sell me books I've written."

One of those books is The Intention Economy. Subtitled ‘When consumers take charge', it is all about inverting the relationship between supply and demand, and putting consumers in charge of their relationships with retailers and advertisers.

"Wouldn't it be better if I can ‘intent-cast' anonymously to the world saying ‘I'm looking for this Bose speaker and I'm willing to pay 90 bucks, who wants to make me an offer?'," Searls asked.

"I think we're right on the cusp of being able to do that now."

The basic idea behind the intention economy is as simple as it is radical. It is a power inversion, or rather a reversion to a more human way of buying and selling in which the buyer exchanges information in return for a good deal rather than being tracked without his or her knowledge or consent.

The structure of large organisations has not changed much since the industrial revolution, argues Searls. The mass production factory model means that to grow companies needed to keep customers captive. This has led to advertising and marketing that "talks of customers as entities that we acquire and control and lock in as if they were animals or slaves."

The main tool for keeping customers captive is the CRM and associated analytics and tracking technology, which enables companies to suck up information about people, including their transactions, online behaviour, interactions and relationships. In 2007 Searls coined the concept of VRM (vendor relationship management), the idea that individuals need to control their own digital identity, selecting which information to share with a vendor in exchange for something back.

It's a theme he's been "going on about" for the best part of two decades, and an idea he visited in The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book he co-authored in 1999 which explored how the nascent internet would change business. The change has been a long time coming, he said, "but now, at last, finally, after all these years we're at the beginning".

Customer intelligence from intelligent customers

Despite all the technology at their disposal to track customers (something people are increasingly suspicious of) big companies like Amazon frequently have a distorted picture of individuals because they are not structured to handle personal data. This is "extraordinarily wasteful", Searls told Computing.

"The party that knows most about the customer is the customer themselves. If you take all the marketing noise out of the relationship and let supply and demand meet on their own terms you have a much richer marketplace that's native to the internet, rather than the industrial model that's native to factories.

"Continuing with the old industrial model, even fattening it with AI is just prolonging the agony of ending an age where one side is entirely in charge."

While it is simple, the new model is hard to imagine because we have lived with the old one so long, he contends.

"The problem with all business coverage is that it's all about business, never about what customers bring to the marketplace besides money, and loyalty that's usually coerced. But customers have immense market intelligence."

Searls illustrated his point with the example of the Apple Store.

"Apple don't need to track you. You walk into an Apple Store with a problem and if it's difficult to solve the assistant writes it down and the intelligence goes back to the company. There's a real connection between the customer and the company. They rely on customer intelligence in ways their competitors don't."

Doc Searls interview: 'Amazon even tried to sell me a book I'd written. How stupid can that be?'

Silicon Valley veteran talks about the personal information economy and ad blocking

Waiting for the new iPhone

As yet, the players in the personal information economy (or VRM, or Me2B, or CMR - someone needs to settle on a stickier term) are nowhere near Apple's size. They are small startups working on personal data stores, APIs, encryption, identity platforms and the like. The market is waiting for one of them to do what Apple did with mobile phones.

"We need the iPhone here, the thing that makes people go ‘I gotta have that'. When one of these companies makes the dashboard, or the personal assistant that you really want then it's going to win. Then we'll see the sea change."

Searls mentioned a number of startups that could make the break, but asked that this be kept off the record as he is involved in a number of different firms.

"I'm like a VC making lots of penny stock bets on as many interesting companies as possible, except I'm not making any money out of it, I just want it to pay off for the rest of the world."

A Faustian bargain

Ad blocking is a subject that Searls has covered quite extensively in his blog. Is this an early example of consumers taking back control?

"At the moment it's pure prophylaxis," he says, before railing against the ad-tech industry.

"You're having something forced on you that you never asked for. A liberty has been taken that's immoral and indefensible. It's subterfuge."

He had little sympathy with publishers who have seen their ad revenues eroded by ad blockers, industry consolidation and a fall in prices.

"Almost all publishers have turned over their entire publishing division to these ad-tech companies. They fired the guys that sold ads directly and turned it over to these guys that are busy placing cookies on your computer."

Searls, who used to be a partner in an ad agency, insists it's not the ads that are the problem, but the tracking.

"I don't use an ad blocker, I use Privacy Badger which blocks trackers, but if the ads are tracking me it will block those too," he said.

"Some publisher needs to step up and say we're not doing this anymore. They've handed their soul over to the wrong people and it's a totally Faustian bargain. The one thing they should do is honour [the browser setting] tracking protection and recognise people who are protecting themselves are the best customers."

"I've been a Wired subscriber for years and spent hundreds of dollar with them but they have no way of knowing I'm a subscriber on their stupid website, and they say ‘you're running an ad blocker', but I'm not. I'm willing to see an ad if you're not tracking me."

What's needed, he says, is an alternative to the monolithic cookie system to allow various levels of opt-in. This needs to extend to other trackers too, such as Wi-Fi beacons used in high street shops.

"If example.com wants to see how it's doing and people don't mind being tracked that's fine. There are certain types of cookies that we might permit if we know what they are. It's like what kind of microbes will you allow in your body. There are ones you want in your mouth and not in your ass and vice versa. I don't want to eat E. coli but I've got to have them at the other end. I need to control that."