Empowering consumers in the digital age
Doc Searls on rethinking digital relationships
Ever wondered if you could take the lead in your interactions with businesses instead of just accepting terms? Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and a driving force behind Project VRM, believes it's not just possible but necessary.
In this interview, Doc discusses the concept of vendor relationship management (VRM), challenges posed by contracts of adhesion, and the power dynamics between consumers and corporations. Join us as Doc shares his insights on reshaping digital landscapes to empower individuals and foster genuine customer-business relationships.
Yorba: Let's start out with an introduction of yourself and maybe one sentence about Customer Commons or Project VRM.
Doc: I was an editor of Linux Journal and co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto, a big deal back in the turn of the millennium. That book became a best-seller, was translated into nine languages, and still sells well.
Also, I was a fellow with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard for four years, and I still have a project there called Project VRM. VRM stands for vendor relationship management, the customer side of customer relationship management, a hand for the CRM to shake on the customer side, where the customer could take the lead in the dance, in their dance with the sellers.
That's been very aspirational for a long time, and it did, among other things, help inspire Tim Berners-Lee to create the Solid Project. A theme running through all of this is personal independence and agency. I feel like, ever since the internet showed up, individuals should have far more power than they ever had in the old industrial world, and we're still waiting for that to happen. We have a lot of graces that we could take advantage of. But as long as we are taking, we're always the second party in agreements to websites, for example, where we're always accepting their terms. We don't have power, and we need that power, and so I'm working on that power.
Yorba: Could you talk a bit about a contract of adhesion, and how it affects people today?
Doc: So a contract of adhesion is a kind of standard form contract we sign all the time, especially online. It's basically any contract that disadvantages the second party to an extreme degree by adhesion. It means that you have to adhere to it as the second party, as the user, as the customer or the other party has velcro. And they can remake it anytime they want.
An example is cookie notices that say, “Click the big ACCEPT button to agree to be tracked anyway.” Even though they all think the GDPR is making them do that, it’s not actually required by GDPR. But all, or almost all the websites have this, because they think they need to tell you they're using cookies, which is like a sign used to put on the front of our house, that said, “This house uses molecules. Please press this button to accept its use of molecules.”
Anytime you acquiesce to clicking on or signing any of those contracts, which you know, disadvantage you and advantage the other party – that's a contract of adhesion, a term Friedrich Kessler came up with. A big company says, “You know what? We can't negotiate a contract with everybody. We're gonna have one contract that screws everybody the same way, and you have no choice but to sign it, because we're the industrial power and you're not, you're just an ordinary consumer.”
But we can all have contracts. We can all have power. And in fact, the contracts might be good for you.
When Creative Commons was created by Larry Lessig, Aaron Swartz, and a few other people, we came up with a really simple idea. There’s a list of standard form contracts. We just pick one which is good both for you and for me, and we both keep a copy of it. And if there's ever a dispute, we can go into standard dispute resolution online.
Yorba: What about this idea of consumer sort of protest, where you can vote with your feet, or you can vote with your wallet? For example, Yorba provides privacy grades for terms of service contracts that one agrees to when they sign up for something. Do you think that until we have the system you described, people should be voting with their feet? And leaving services that have terms of services that are F's, D's, and maybe C's. Or do you think this sort of negotiation isn't really useful?
Doc: There are a lot of efforts out there that are trying to do this. Unscrewing subscriptions, for example, is one of the biggest challenges that we have right now and Yorba is on that case.
But, we need lots of efforts that are working on the individual side. I don't want to call us users anymore. I don't want to call us consumers, because those are old-school terms. We're not just using. We're taking the lead in a dance with the websites, and the services of the world.
Right now, there's ill will on the part of every loyalty program is there to trap you. Every subscription program is out there to screw you. That's not very efficient for sellers. The sellers could be gathering friendly information from the people they sell stuff to that doesn't have to be inside Apple silo or Microsoft silo. They don't want to sell you inside those things for their own advantage.
There’re so many better ways we can relate as customers and companies than we have right now. We're still in the old industrial system with the contracts of adhesion and the loyalty programs that are out to screw us. There’re programmatic ways that we could start chipping away at the industrial system that has persisted and inherited ideas that came in the 1940s. We could do better than that. So let's do it.
Yorba: How would you address a namespacing issue, a divide between anarchists, intellectual property purists, and those who seek a flow of communication that works on behalf of individuals? The challenge is that these different systems often don't interact, creating silos that force individuals to manage multiple names and passwords. Do you see any immediate solutions to this problem?
Doc: I was going to say yes and no, but there's also a yes and yes. It just depends on which kind of yes you want. Namespace issues will always exist, whether it's for SKUs or anything we own. For example, CRM mostly stands for customer records management, not customer relationship management—there's no relationship there.
Intellectual property and copyright maximalists are always going to be around, and they're going to defend the old way of doing things. The only practical approach is a real partnership between customers and companies that is both achievable and low-cost.
Take Trader Joe's, for instance. It's one of the most loved companies in the country, and it has no loyalty program, which keeps everything cheap.
Twenty years ago, I met Lee Scott, who ran Walmart. When I asked him what happened to Kmart, he said, “I can give it to you in one word: coupons.” 11% of their overhead was running a coupon program, hooking customers on coupons. This downscaled their customer base to those who needed that currency called the coupon. Printing the coupons weekly costed them, and with 2% margins, it killed them. Lee added, “All we have is everyday low prices.” They never spend more than 1% of their overhead on advertising. That simple strategy made it much easier for customers.
We can run markets so much better when customers are treated as independent variables, not dependent ones. Many namespace issues could be resolved by eliminating the namespaces and getting rid of customer-screwing programs like loyalty programs.
Yorba: What tools do people have today to manage their relationships with businesses and organizations online?
Doc: I think all they have are their phone and browser. And while those scale in the sense that you can use them with many different sites and services, all of them have their own siloed ways of relating to you. So we all carry or at least have on our phones this portfolio of loyalty cards and barcodes and key tags and other credit card size things. And you don't have a way to manage all of those at once. Right now, all the payment rails in the world are braided. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all of these bigs want you to ride on your payment to ride on their rails.
Yorba: And what do you think about a platform like Plaid? Yorba uses Plaid to find recurring payments for our members, and so they can track their subscriptions. Fundamentally, they've created an abstraction layer between the banks and our members. Do you think this sort of solution is liberating, or is it another way to put individuals into a different, more abstract layer of silo?
Doc: You know, all these bigs are going to want to get you into their silo, whatever their silo is. However, I believe none of them is thinking about what happens when you start maximizing real intelligence on the customer side.
Increasing agency and capacity on the individual side is inevitably going to rearrange everything, and whoever gets in front of that, and whatever means they have for getting in front of it, is going to be a good thing. But there are still going to be giants. We need big entities that have lots of scale and lots of money working for their own interests, but the ones that align best with the customer's interests are going to win.
Yorba: One of the things you’ve mentioned a few times in this conversation is the idea of rails, and if there are the bigs that can take advantage of those rails. But then what about the individuals? How can they take advantage of the rails, or help contribute to it, building those rails? Or, even better, small and medium businesses. Do you see opportunities there?
Doc: I'm insistent that structurally, the customer needs those rails. There are three things happening in any marketplace: transaction, conversation and relationship. We wrote about markets and conversations in the 80s, and the marketers didn't understand what it actually meant. It meant that the customer should be in charge of the relationships, and they wanted to be. They wanted the vendor to be in charge, separately, with all their customers and their relationships, and to scale them only for the seller. We need rails for relationships. That's what VRM was about in the first place. We don't have that yet.
Apple wants to be there. Google wants to be there. They're failing right now. Look at the Apple Wallet app and how they want to be the rails for your ID with your state driver's license, or your state license plate. Apple has just a handful of states, not 50 states. The states don't want to be locked into Apple's thing. And the same goes for other cards. That wallet metaphor is not working for them yet, because there's no trust in the giants for that yet. Maybe there will be in the long run. I think Visa and MasterCard have a much better chance than Apple and Google do, because they already have the transaction part of it, and they're busy working that out.
There's, again, there's transaction, conversation and relationship. The conversation is an SMS and an email. That's basically what it is. It's not WeChat or Messenger, or any of those proprietary ones. SMS is going to stay around, even though, basically, the phone companies own it. They worked that out a long time ago. All the phone companies said,”We're all going to do SMS together.” They're essentially separate now, but they do work. They do work through their rails, but we can enlarge conversation, probably on those rails.
But there are no rails for the relationship yet. The transaction people, which are the banks and phone and credit card companies, could work them out.
The rails of loyalty programs are all built for the seller, not for the buyer. But if you can bolt a relationship layer or a relationship pipe onto the payment pipe, that could be big.
Yorba: Still a little adversarial, though.
Doc: Yeah, it is adversarial. This is where the banks and the credit card companies come in. They're not adversarial with you. They're making it easy for you to buy stuff. Oh, and you've got your own independent AI that's busy looking at everything you're doing, and, you're busy sharing your data because you get better advertising. The most stupid and screwed idea out there that's been around for like, 10 years, is that the marketers will say, “We can know you better than you know yourself.” That is wrong, they're absolutely wrong. The bad online guesswork is a multi-trillion-dollar business. All the crappy advertising we're getting based on bad guesses can be totally replaced by our self-knowledge. We'll let you know when we need this or that. And by the way, we're going to make you a better seller, because you have better intelligence which you're getting from us, based on our use and not you guessing about the next thing we're going to buy.
Yorba: We'll use the rails metaphor for our last question. Of course, Yorba is working on top of rails, whether that is an internet specification like OpenID Connect, or the rails enforced by the government, like certain requirements for privacy, deletion of data, the CAN-SPAM Act, etc. So with all these rails in place, the customer-seller relationship doesn't seem to have that same capacity at this moment. Although Plaid is one example of a system that came and kind of inserted itself into the conversation. And so we're slowly trying to build some sort of way to communicate both ways between, the individual and the company. Hopefully, that opens up a dialog between the two, rather than what we have right now, especially with advertising which is extremely adversarial. With that sort of context in mind, was there anything that surprised you in Yorba? Or maybe you have any feedback about the product?
Doc: The main thing I get from Yorba is, you're on our side. And that to me, is the key thing. The dashboard Yorba provides is the dashboard for our life, you know? I mean, that's what it should look like from our side. Ad blocking is the biggest boycott in human history. Billions of people are blocking and tracking. What a message to the marketplace! And it got totally ignored. The sellers could say, “Wait a minute. Why are they blocking that? Can't we do something better here? How can we work together on this and talk to somebody on the other side?” But they never did.
Why can't we have our own shopping cart that we could take from site to site? Every seller wants their own shopping cart for you, which, frankly, is the model that you have in the real world. ... So when I look at Yorba and I see what's on there, I want to import stuff from all the TV people and the radio people and the all of the websites. All your personal data sitting at these big companies is the radon gas for those companies. It's the silent killer. They don't see it, they don't know it, but it's sitting there being a liability for them, that some bad actor comes in and steals.
So when I look at Yorba, I see a potential dashboard for me. You know, I'm very big on UNSC subscriptions. I have a spreadsheet which was a pain to maintain. I have a deal with the Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Sirius XM, The New Yorker, and all the Condé Nast publications. And all of it is right in front of me. And I can see if it's time to renew.
