Subjects and Objects

Physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle says you can’t know position and momentum with full accuracy at the same instant. That is, if something is moving, you can’t say exactly where it is; and if you know exactly where it is, you can’t say where it’s going or how fast. He also says observation itself has influences.³

So, in a Heisenbergian sense, I know where VRM development has been, where it is now (when I write this), and the direction it is headed. What I can’t know is where it will be when you read this. Heisenberg also said, “The uncertainty relation does not hold for the past.”

Searls’s corollary for the future is that you can know neither position nor momentum, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying to influence both. Or, don’t be the pinball. Be the machine. So, I beg your patience with motions that don’t go according to plan, and your respect for the good intentions of work that will continue in any case, improved by experience and other helpful influences, perhaps including yours.

Our plan in the VRM movement has always been ambitious: to liberate customers, facilitate better relationships between customers and vendors, and invigorate markets as a result. This requires changing a great deal of what business is doing. The flywheels of business as usual are immense, but so are the engines of change. Steady innovation and disruption, about which Clayton Christensen has studied and written a great deal, will accelerate in the networked world.⁴ It will also follow Larry Downes’s law of disruption: Technology changes exponentially, but social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally.⁵

Thanks to the Internet and rapid cycles of technology creation, use, and improvement, we have little choice but to change what we are doing anyway, and to change it again. We’ll calibrate those changes better if customers help us with it. At least that much should be clear by now.

How the Intention Economy comes about (or if it comes at all) is anybody’s guess, but it’s also the calling of a few who will become many. Life is a casino with no house, so go ahead and influence your own bets. Every species is a mistake that works.

The VRM development community is busy making mistakes that result in new species today, and will continue to make them, as fast as they can. So should those of us on the vendor side. There’s nothing but frontier between us. Might as well get started settling it, cultivating the farmland, and building whole new towns and cities.

Parting Thoughts

One day last spring, I went into the Barnes & Noble store near here. Aside from the Coop in Harvard Square, it’s the biggest bookstore around. For a shopping list, I took along a printout of the books in my Amazon shopping cart. The nice woman behind the service counter thanked me for giving the store a shot, at least for this one visit. Then she carefully went down the list of twelve books, finding only one of them in stock. It was Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, which had come out a few days earlier (and which we discussed back in chapter 2). She pointed to one of the tables where new books are featured. I thanked her and turned to go get the book. But she didn’t want to let me go yet.

“I’m afraid most of what we have here just moves through,” she said.

“Like magazines?” I replied.

“Yes, like magazines. Sorry about that.”

I write a column every month for Linux Journal, a magazine that was sold on the rack at Barnes & Noble before becoming all-digital (i.e., no print version) in September 2011. My lead-time up until then was three months, which is typical of monthlies. That means, for example, that the column I wrote for December was due in the first week of September. Now the lead time is two months, because it’s still a magazine. Show me a good print medium, and I’ll show you a latency issue. Even with blogging, which until tweeting was the most current way one could possibly write, one could sense the space between the now of writing and the then of publishing.

So, as I said at the beginning of part III, the biggest challenge in writing this book has been making it both current and durable. If that proves to be the case, it will be because its simple thesis—that a free customer is more valuable than a captive one—endures.

I believe that thesis will be proven, sooner or later, in the marketplace. It’s a good idea, and always has been.

• Can advertising people ever finally cross the Chinese wall between their work and who they are as real people and customers?
• What will be the VRM user interface, or interfaces? What symbols will we use, and what will they mean?
• Will adhesionism be with us for the duration? To prevent that, how should we work to change law as well as practice?
• Will CRM embrace VRM, or fight it? Or, if the answer is both, who and what will do the embracing and the fighting?
• Will exposing MLOTT be enough of a motivator for those currently ignoring it?
• Can we understand the Net as a rising tide of open capacity that lifts all economic boats, or will incumbent business and government powers succeed in limiting its scope to what they alone allow?
• Will fourth parties (or user agents) emerge as a large, new business category?
• Can retailing move past gimmickry and into genuine communication and relationship with customers?
• What should we be researching now, and in the future, about VRM?

Those are just a few of mine. If this book does its job, you should have many more of your own. So, bookmark this chapter and write your questions in the blank space below. Or go to IntentionEconomy.com and post your questions, answers, and other comments there. And, of course, post them in your own places and spaces, whatever they happen to be. Use the hashtag #intentioneconomy.

We have a lot to start talking about.