Waking Up from Adhesion

You’ve had trouble sleeping lately. Your husband says you’re snoring less, but you wake up tired, even after a long night in bed. When you look for help on the Web, you find Zeo, a company that sells a sleep-monitoring gizmo you wear like a headband.³ It watches your brain waves, respiration, and other activity (such as your husband’s snoring and your dog barking) while you sleep at night. When you dock it in the morning, it produces detailed data that you can use any way you want.

On the menu bar of your browser are two buttons that look like magnets facing each other: ⊂ ⊃. These are called “r-buttons.” The “r” stands for “relationship.” Yours is on the left and the site’s is on the right. You notice that Zeo’s r-button is a solid color, while yours is gray. The solid color on Zeo’s side is a signal that says, “We are open to dealing with you on your terms and not just ours.” This doesn’t mean it accepts your terms, but rather that it is open to them.

This is a huge change from the old commercial Web, where most sites had lopsided terms of service that gave you no choice but to take them or leave them. In law, these are called “contracts of adhesion,” because they hold the submissive party (that’s you) to terms the dominant party (that’s them) is free to change at will. These contracts became pro forma on the Web at the dawn of e-commerce (1995) and didn’t change until corresponding mechanisms showed up on the users’ side. But now we have mechanisms. For example, your terms might say,

• You may only collect data I permit you to collect.
• Any data you collect—for me, from me, or about me—is mine as well as yours, and will be made available to me in ways I specify (and here they are).
• You can combine my data with other data and share it, provided it is not PII (personally identifiable information).
• If we cease our relationship, you can keep my data but not associate any PII with that data.
• If we enter a paid relationship for services, you will spare me advertising and promotion for products or services other than yours. You will also not follow my behavior for the purposes of promotion or advertising. Nor will your affiliates or partners.
• You will put nothing on my computer or browser other than what we need for our own relationship. That includes cookies. (And here are the specific kinds of cookies I allow.)

It’s Your Law

These terms, which respect ancient freedom of contract values, are standard ones chosen by you from a list at Customer Commons (CustomerCommons.org), which was organized in 2011 and grew out of ProjectVRM at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, with help from the Information Sharing Workgroup.⁴ By now, Customer Commons has compiled many choices of standard terms for individuals and organizations—all described in ways that can easily be compared and matched up automatically. As with Creative Commons (on which Customer Commons was modeled), computers, lawyers, and ordinary people can easily read the terms.

It Takes Four

Later, after kicking a few more tires, you get your Zeo sleep-monitoring gizmo and improve your sleep with the help of coaching provided on its Web site and from other users of the same service. When you go to the Zeo site now, you see both r-buttons are solid. Clicking on either opens links to details for each side of the relationship you now have with Zeo. Details on your side are filled out from your personal data store (PDS), either directly or by the fourth party you’ve hired to help manage your many relationships.

Fourth parties are distinguished from second and third parties by working as agents for first parties: customers like you. Their business is helping you manage relationships, and they carry out your intentions in the marketplace. Fourth parties belong to a larger class of what blogger and software developer Joe Andrieu in 2009 called user-driven services.⁵ The first example of a VRM-based fourth party was Mydex, a community interest company in London.⁶ Early fourth parties in the United States were Azigo, Personal.com, Connect.me, and Singly. In the years since these companies began their pioneering work, fourth parties have turned into a very large category. Many old-line business categories, such as banking and brokerage, are now considered fourth-party services, for the simple reason that they work primarily for individual customers.

New Rules

Your new Zeo joins an assortment of other devices and apps that produce data on your health and lifestyle. Those include your Withings bathroom scale, Fitbit, Digifit, and RunKeeper gear and mobile apps, the Nest thermostat in your home, the exercise machines at the gym, and GPS chips in your smartphone and other devices. The companies that make all this stuff have open APIs, or application programming interfaces. In simple terms, APIs provide ways for programs to communicate with each other. On the old Static Web (where the sites were in charge, and you always had to agree to those icky contracts of adhesion), APIs simply produced data, such as maps or stock charts, for use on Web sites and in apps of various kinds. On today’s Live Web, APIs have become interactive or evented and are simply resources, but fully interactive ones. Nearly all companies, stores, apps, devices, and services—including government agencies and nonprofits—now have interactive APIs. You do too. Anything ready to engage with anything else through digital data streams now has an interactive API.

Think of APIs as exposed competencies, for which engagement is an open choice. In this way, they are a lot like any store, but with the entire inventory exposure-ready (at the store’s selective discretion), along with location data and means for shipping and accepting payment. In fact, this kind of thing has been normal for e-commerce from the start.

In your case, you have rules written in KRL (Kinetic Rules Language) to connect multiple APIs and sources of data, such as all the gizmos and apps you use. You easily arrange cause-effect relationships between them, saying what data can be pulled from where, how data might be combined and put to use, and what rights might accompany data that’s shared with other parties.

Your professional life is also thick with rules, but they’re yours and not just ones others make for you. For example, you can make connections between your travel services, your preferred airlines, car rental agencies, and hotels, so that much of the selecting, booking, and back-end paperwork is handled automatically and accountably, your trip runs smoothly, and at the end a report in the right format is submitted automatically to your company’s systems.

Demand Finds Supply

Among other things, fixing your sleep problems will be good for helping you manage your family of six. Right now, you’re on a family trip, having just arrived in San Diego for a wedding and a couple of extra days off. For reasons unknown, the airline has lost your twin toddlers’ stroller. While the airline might find the stroller eventually, you need one now. So, rather than searching through countless commercial offerings on the Web—which was your only choice back in the Static Web days, you get on your smartphone and issue a personal RFP—a notice of intent to purchase a stroller for twins in the next two hours.

In technical terms, your personal RFP is an event that triggers rules that are written in KRL and executed by a rules engine that’s under your control, in this case, at your fourth party (though it could be anywhere). The rules are ones you or your fourth party write. They say what kinds of information can be released, to whom, and under what conditions. They also say what other information might be brought in to help move things along, such as banking and credit information, general or specific locations, time frames, and other data that can be released securely, at the right time, on a need-to-know basis, and auditable later.

All the retailers in your current area are also on the Live Web and ready to receive notice of intents to buy (what used to be called “leads”) from potential customers. Your fourth party sends out your RFP to qualified sellers, and in a few minutes, you have serious responses from stores with strollers to offer. After a couple of conversations with stores that have the most attractive offers, you decide that a place about two miles from the airport has the stroller you want. You tell them you’ll pick it up after you get your rental car. The store’s systems and yours both record the same intention in their respective databases. The same shows up in your smartphone’s calendar, along with directions to the store on your phone’s map.

The car you’re getting is a minivan that seats six. That’s what you requested in the personal RFP you sent out to car rental agencies a month ago, when you planned the trip. In years past, you had little control over what kind of vehicle you might get. Shopping around required going from one agency’s Web site to another or hoping that a travel site might help find what you wanted. In most cases, however, renting was a cross between a crapshoot and a bait-and-switch scheme. The agency would half-promise a certain car “or similar,” and “similar” would turn out to be a less desirable alternative. In this case, you said you wanted to rent a Toyota Sienna with a bike rack, but would be willing to take a Honda Odyssey. Since you are a member of Budget’s Fastbreak, Avis’s Wizard, and Hertz #1 Club programs, your system matched up with their systems first, and the company with the best offer got your business. Your fourth party also got a piece of the action.

Strolling

After picking up the van and the new stroller, you decide to drop by the nearest Peet’s Coffee & Tea for a couple of cappuccinos before heading to the hotel. Using an AR (augmented reality) application from Layar on your smartphone, you can see (literally) a Peet’s along the way. So you reserve the cappuccinos through your smartphone.

Since your phone knows your location (though it isn’t telling anybody other than your fourth party), it will notify Peet’s two minutes before you arrive, so the barista can start making your drinks. After you arrive and pick up the cappuccinos at the counter, you pay through your digital wallet. Peet’s was a pioneer on the Live Web when it started working with Google’s Wallet app and service back in 2011. That early work resulted in open source code and infrastructural modeling now used by all wallet apps.

Real Loyalty

You’ve been loyal to Peet’s for years. Both you and Peet’s know that, because you’ve let it know. Peet’s is among the vendors you care about and with which you have a relationship. In some cases, you initiated those relationships. In other cases, those relationships migrated from those vendors’ own loyalty programs. In the old days, loyalty programs were run entirely by vendors. Each was different, and all knew only as much about you as their systems were built to comprehend. Then, as the Live Web came along, customers developed their own ways of expressing loyalty, which included solid, reliable, and secure information about themselves and their other relationships in the marketplace. Vendor loyalty programs then adapted and coevolved with customer systems, following customers’ leads.

Before customers took the initiative, Peet’s didn’t have a loyalty program; nor did it see a need for one, since its customers were clearly loyal in any case. The same was true for Trader Joe’s, your favorite grocery store. It was a matter of pride for Trader Joe’s that it had no loyalty program, no discount cards, and no coupons. Like Peet’s, it earned loyalty by avoiding gimmicks and being its own unique kind of store.

You were one of many customers who reached out to both companies, just to let them know how loyal you were, right down to the sums you had spent at their retail outlets over a recent period of time. You could do this because you had VRM tools ready to engage with retailers’ CRM systems.

In the old world, where nearly every store had a different loyalty program, you carried an extra wallet in your purse, just to organize the cards of stores where you shopped frequently. You also carried a number of plastic tags on your key ring, each for a different store, each with its own bar code. Once VRM and CRM systems connected on the Live Web, the need to carry many cards ended, and loyalty programs on the vendors’ side were improved by new standards, protocols, and code (as well as data) originating on the customers’ side.

Real Relationships

After the social network crash of 2013, when it became clear that neither friendship nor sociability were adequately defined or managed through proprietary and contained systems (no matter how large they might be), individuals began to assert their independence and to zero-base their social networking using their own tools and asserting their own policies regarding engagement.

Customers now manage relationships in their own ways, using standardized tools that embrace the complexities of relationship—including needs for privacy (and, in some cases, anonymity). Thus, loyalty to vendors now has genuine meaning and goes as deep as either party cares to go. In some (perhaps most) cases, this isn’t very deep, while in others, it can get quite involved.

For example, you’ve let your new favorite airline, Virgin America, know that you had already racked up many miles with Delta, plus more on United and American. In response to your notification and those of other customers, Virgin America adjusted its loyalty program to include personal communications with interested frequent flyers of all airlines. This helped Virgin America improve its own service while offering attractive perks to all frequent flyers.

Personal Pricing Gun

Your hotel is La Jolla Shores, which you chose based on a variety of considerations. One, of course, was price. You named a fair price, and the hotel agreed to it. This isn’t new, since prices for many things (including travel accommodations and big-ticket items like houses and cars) have always been somewhat flexible, and services such as Hotwire and Priceline modeled customer-set price offerings long ago.

What’s different today is that you have a standard tool for communicating what you are willing to pay, along with your preferences, policies, and whatever else you might choose to share. This tool, called EmanciPay, is most useful for product or service categories where prices are already flexible or have prices that have been absent or set by the customer from the start.

EmanciPay also supports ascribenation, which expresses your interest in how your payment might be distributed to each party that contributes value to what you pay for.⁷ So, for example, you have an EmanciPay button on the screen of your smartphone, which also works as a radio in your rental car. So, when you hear a jazz program you like on KSDS in San Diego and decide to throw $2 to the station for a job well done—your ascribenation—the station also learns that you’d like some of that money to go to the program source and not just the station. You can make this as simple or as complex as you like.

Empathic Supply and Demand

All up and down the world’s supply chains, connections have become what Michael Stolarczyk, author of Logical Logistics, in the 2000s began calling “empathic” and not just mechanical. Today, the supply chain and the demand chain have become funicular, constantly pulling on each other at every level, but through teamwork, which requires a “feel” as well as a strong mechanical connection to what others are doing.

Beyond Guesswork

Advertising still pays for much of what you see, hear, and read, but the trade-offs have evolved. In the old world, advertising was mostly an annoyance you put up with in order to watch a TV show, listen to a radio program, or read a newspaper or a magazine. Even on the Web, where Google, Facebook, and others built elaborate systems to improve their guesswork about what you might want, truly interesting and relevant ads were rare.

A few years back, as VRM and CRM systems pulled together, with better signaling between them, the reduced need for old-style vendor-driven guesswork caused a crash in what came to be called the advertising bubble. Sites and services that depended totally on advertising had a hard time adjusting to a marketplace where free customers were more valuable to sellers than captive ones. But some of the same companies that made big money in the old advertising game adjusted by becoming fourth parties, taking advantage of opportunities in helping customers buy and not just helping vendors sell. These included some of the biggest players, including Google and Microsoft.

Finding

Ever since 1995, when the Web went commercial, search has been the primary means by which users looked for what they wanted among billions of Web sites. Providing this service was very resource-intensive for search engine companies, but they made so much money on advertising that they were able to provide many other services, all for free. By 2012, it became clear that the business model of search was overcoming its original mission, which was simply to help people find stuff. The ratio of commercial to noncommercial sites became so lopsided that for countless keyword combinations, the only noncommercial result to appear in the first page of countless search results was Wikipedia. All the other sites were selling something—or so it seemed. Search engine guesswork about what people wanted to find had been optimized entirely for advertisers, not for users, whether or not they were being customers at the moment.

This changed when the advertising bubble popped. It would have popped in any case, but the introduction of new user-driven search models helped hasten history. Starting with Andrieu’s SwitchBook, new search systems (not just “engines”) began to appear. These new systems gave users control of input, output, storage, and management of their own search history and results. A user could easily, for example, view and construct “search maps” for topics, separating the vacation stuff from the sports stuff and the work-related stuff. Thus, users began to manage search with the same level of control and intentionality as they managed their calendars and wallets.

So the searching you do now on your San Diego trip is remembered in your personal data store and shared with other parties on your own terms, with lots of control over how you organize and interpret queries and results.

Individuals also play the role of sources in searches. So, for example, you can ask a question requiring an expert answer and get it quickly—and even pay for it, if it is worthwhile, using EmanciPay. In your own case, you want to know if it’s true that some wallabies have escaped from the San Diego Zoo and are running wild (because one of your kids says she heard something to that effect). After a quick Web search brings up nothing, you tweet the question and get a good answer from a local who works at the zoo. It’s only a rumor, the guy says. You thank him, tweet what you just learned, and use EmanciPay to donate a couple dollars to the zoo.

Your tweeting also does not have to involve Twitter, as it did in the early days, when one company owned and defined tweeting. Thanks to work by Dave Winer (creator of RSS—Really Simple Syndication) and others, tweeting is now as free, open, and as far outside any company’s control as e-mail has been from the start.

Everyware

A decade or so back, Bob Frankston, who coinvented spreadsheet software, began forecasting what he called “ambient connectivity.” That is, Internet connectivity you just assume is available. This hasn’t happened yet, but there is progress. For example, few reputable hotels still charge for Internet access (a business roughly equivalent to pay toilets), and none force you to endure a welcome page on your Web browser. Instead your laptops, tablets, and other mobile devices move seamlessly between cellular, wi-fi, and wired connections. This is why you usually don’t bother seeing how you are connected, most of the time. Nor do your husband and kids.

Still, there are costs involved, and you are in a position to monitor those. You are also in a position to name your preferred connection providers when there is a choice to be made.

For example, since you’ll be shooting a lot of photographs and video footage at the wedding and on the beach and you store those over the Live Web “in the cloud,” you have a preference for maximized upstream speeds when there is a choice of connection paths and you express a willingness to pay a bit more for that privilege.

At this point in history, Internet service providers are still mostly a combination of what used to be phone and cable TV companies. The difference now is that their offerings are much more à la carte and responsive to customer demand. Since one common demand is that providers not shackle customers to complicated plans and adhesive contracts, those have gone by the wayside. Those same companies now compete to provide the best possible connections and services, and earn customer loyalty in the process. The company that pioneered this shift was Ting, which began to offer “a mobile service that makes sense” back in 2012.

So, while the primary provider of connectivity at your house is Verizon FiOS and you continue to express a preference for Verizon over other connectivity providers when you are on the road (because you have a genuine relationship with Verizon and appreciate its high level of personal service), you are not locked into using Verizon connections alone when you travel. You are also not subject to the punitive roaming fees for traveling outside Verizon’s service areas. If additional costs come up, services inform you directly or through third or fourth parties.

As a result of ambient connectivity, the sum of business supported by the Internet has gone up rapidly over the past several years, and economic prosperity has also been the result. That’s because, in the old system, business could grow only as much as phone and cable companies (and their captive regulators) allowed. In the new system, Internet-based business opportunities are as wide and unrestricted as the Net itself.