Doc Searls Weblog

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” Archimedes is said to have said.

For almost all of the last four years, Donald Trump was one hell of an Archimedes. With the U.S. presidency as his lever and Twitter as his fulcrum, the 45th President leveraged an endless stream of news-making utterances into a massive following and near-absolute domination of news coverage, worldwide. It was an amazing show, the like of which we may never see again.

Big as it was, that show ended on January 8, when Twitter terminated the @RealDonaldTrump account. Almost immediately after that, Trump was “de-platformed” from all these other services as well: PayPal, Reddit, Shopify, Snapchat, Discord, Amazon, Twitch, Facebook, TikTok, Google, Apple, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. That’s a lot of fulcrums to lose.

What makes them fulcrums is their size. All are big, and all are centralized: run by one company. As members, users and customers of these centralized services, we are also at their mercy: no less vulnerable to termination than Trump.

So here is an interesting question: What if Trump had his own fulcrum from the start? For example, say he took one of the many Trump domains he probably owns (or should have bothered to own, long ago), and made it a blog where he said all the same things he tweeted, and that site had the same many dozens of millions of followers today? Would it still be alive?

I’m not sure it would. Because, even though the base protocols of the Internet and the Web are peer-to-peer and end-to-end, all of us are dependent on services above those protocols, and at the mercy of those services’ owners.

That to me is the biggest lesson the de-platforming of Donald Trump has for the rest of us. We can talk “de-centralization” and “distribution” and “democratization” along with peer-to-peer and end-to-end, but we are still at the mercy of giants.

Yes, there are work-arounds. The parler.com website, de-platformed along with Trump, is back up and, according to @VickerySec (Chris Vickery), “routing 100% of its user traffic through servers located within the Russian Federation.” Adds @AdamSculthorpe, “With a DDos-Guard IP, exactly as I predicted the day it went offline. DDoS Guard is the Russian equivalent of CloudFlare, and runs many shady sites. RiTM (Russia in the middle) is one way to think about it.” Encrypted services such as Signal and Telegram also provide ways for people to talk and be social. But those are also platforms, and we are at their mercy too.

I bring all this up as a way of thinking out loud toward the talk I’ll be giving in a few hours (also see here), on the topic “Centralized vs. Decentralized.” Here’s the intro:

Centralised thinking is easy. Control sits on one place, everything comes home, there is a hub, the corporate office is where all the decisions are made and it is a power game.

Decentralised thinking is complex. TCP/IP and HTTP created a fully decentralised fabric for packet communication. No-one is in control. It is beautiful. Web3 decentralised ideology goes much further but we continually run into conflicts. We need to measure, we need to report, we need to justify, we need to find a model and due to regulation and law, there are liabilities.

However, we have to be doing both. We have to centralise some aspects and at the same time decentralise others. Whilst we hang onto an advertising model that provides services for free we have to have a centralised business model. Apple with its new OS is trying to break the tracking model and in doing so could free us from the barter of free, is that the plan which has nothing to do with privacy or are the ultimate control freaks. But the new distributed model means more risks fall on the creators as the aggregators control the channels and access to a model. Is our love for free preventing us from seeing the value in truly distributed or are those who need control creating artefacts that keep us from achieving our dreams? Is distributed even possible with liability laws and a need to justify what we did to add value today?

So here is what I think I’ll say.

First, we need to respect the decentralized nature of humanity. All of us are different, by design. We look, sound, think and feel different, as separate human beings. As I say in How we save the world, “no being is more smart, resourceful or original than a human one. Again, by design. Even identical twins, with identical DNA from a single sperm+egg, can be as different as two primary colors. (Examples: Laverne Cox and M.Lamar. Nicole and Jonas Maines.)”

This simple fact of our distributed souls and talents has had scant respect from the centralized systems of the digital world, which would rather lead than follow us, and rather guess about us than understand us. That’s partly because too many of them have become dependent on surveillance-based personalized advertising (which is awful in ways I’ve detailed in 136 posts, essays and articles compiled here). But it’s mostly because they’re centralized and can’t think or work outside their very old and square boxes.

Second, advertising, subscriptions and donations through the likes of (again, centralized) Patreon aren’t the only possible ways to support a site or a service. Those are industrial age conventions leveraged in the early decades of the digital age. There are other approaches we can implement as well, now that the pendulum is started to swing back from the centralized extreme. For example, the fully decentralized EmanciPay. A bunch of us came up with that one at ProjectVRM way back in 2009. What makes it decentralized is that the choice of what to pay, and how, is up to the customer. (No, it doesn’t have to be scary.) Which brings me to—

Third, we need to start thinking about solving business problems, market problems, technical problems, from our side. Here is how Customer Commons puts it:

There is … no shortage of of business problems that can only be solved from the customer’s side. Here are a few examples :

1. Identity. Logins and passwords are burdensome leftovers from the last millennium. There should be (and already are) better ways to identify ourselves, and to reveal to others only what we need them to know. Working on this challenge is the SSI—Self-Sovereign Identity—movement. The solution here for individuals is tools of their own that scale.
2. Subscriptions. Nearly all subscriptions are pains in the butt. “Deals” can be deceiving, full of conditions and changes that come without warning. New customers often get better deals than loyal customers. And there are no standard ways for customers to keep track of when subscriptions run out, need renewal, or change. The only way this can be normalized is from the customers’ side.
3. Terms and conditions. In the world today, nearly all of these are ones companies proffer; and we have little or no choice about agreeing to them. Worse, in nearly all cases, the record of agreement is on the company’s side. Oh, and since the GDPR came along in Europe and the CCPA in California, entering a website has turned into an ordeal typically requiring “consent” to privacy violations the laws were meant to stop. Or worse, agreeing that a site or a service provider spying on us is a “legitimate interest.”
4. Payments. For demand and supply to be truly balanced, and for customers to operate at full agency in an open marketplace (which the Internet was designed to be), customers should have their own pricing gun: a way to signal—and actually pay willing sellers—as much as they like, however they like, for whatever they like, on their own terms. There is already a design for that, called Emancipay.
5. Internet of Things. What we have so far are the Apple of things, the Amazon of things, the Google of things, the Samsung of things, the Sonos of things, and so on—all silo’d in separate systems we don’t control. Things we own on the Internet should be our things. We should be able to control them, as independent customers, as we do with our computers and mobile devices. (Also, by the way, things don’t need to be intelligent or connected to belong to the Internet of Things. They can be, or have, picos.)
6. Loyalty. All loyalty programs are gimmicks, and coercive. True loyalty is worth far more to companies than the coerced kind, and only customers are in position to truly and fully express it. We should have our own loyalty programs, to which companies are members, rather than the reverse.
7. Privacy. We’ve had privacy tech in the physical world since the inventions of clothing, shelter, locks, doors, shades, shutters, and other ways to limit what others can see or hear—and to signal to others what’s okay and what’s not. Instead, all we have are unenforced promises by others not to watching our naked selves, or to report what they see to others. Or worse, coerced urgings to “accept” spying on us and distributing harvested information about us to parties unknown, with no record of what we’ve agreed to.
8. Customer service. There are no standard ways to call for service yet, or to get it. And there should be.
9. Advertising. Our main problem with advertising today is tracking, which is failing because it doesn’t work. (Some history: ad blocking has been around since 2004, it took off in 2013, when the advertising and publishing industries gave the middle finger to Do Not Track, which was never more than a polite request in one’s browser not to be tracked off a site. By 2015, ad blocking alone was the biggest boycott i world history. And in 2018 and 2019 we got the GDPR and the CCPA, two laws meant to thwart tracking and unwanted data collection, and which likely wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been given that finger.) We can solve that problem from the customer side with intentcasting,. This is where we advertise to the marketplace what we want, without risk that our personal data won’t me misused. (Here is a list of intentcasting providers on the ProjectVRM Development Work list.)

We already have examples of personal solutions working at scale: the Internet, the Web, email and telephony. Each provides single, simple and standards-based ways any of us can scale how we deal with others—across countless companies, organizations and services. And they work for those companies as well.

Other solutions, however, are missing—such as ones that solve the eight problems listed above.

They’re missing for the best of all possible reasons: it’s still early. Digital living is still new—decades old at most. And it’s sure to persist for many decades, centuries or millennia to come.

They’re also missing because businesses typically think all solutions to business problems are ones for them. Thinking about customers solving business problems is outside that box.

But much work is already happening outside that box. And there already exist standards and code for building many customer-side solutions to problems shared with businesses. Yes, there are not yet as many or as good as we need; but there are enough to get started.

A lot of levers there.

For those of you attending this event, I’ll talk with you shortly. For the rest of you, I’ll let you know how it goes.