The Cluetrain Manifesto said this…
…in 1999.
And now, in 2021, it’s still not true—at least not on the Web.
If it was true, California’s CCPA wouldn’t call us mere “consumers” and Europe’s GDPR wouldn’t call us mere “data subjects,” whose privacy is entirely at the grace of corporate “data processors” and “data controllers.” (While the GDPR does say a “natural person” can be either of those, the prevailing assumption says no. Worse, it assumes that what privacies we enjoy on the Web should be valved by choices we make when confronted with “consent” notices that pop up when we first visit a website, and which are recorded somewhere we don’t know and can’t audit or dispute.)
Simply put, we are not free, and our reach does not exceed their grasp. Again, on the Web.
But (this is key), the Web is not the Internet. It’s a haystack of stuff on the Net. It’s a big one, and hugely good in many ways. And maybe we can be really free there eventually. But why not work outside of it? That’s the question.
And that’s what some of us are answering. You might call what we’re doing a blue ocean strategy:
For example, Joyce and I are now in Bloomington, Indiana, embedded as visiting scholars at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop, where we are rolling out a new project called the Byway, for Customer Commons, ProjectVRM’s nonprofit spin-off. We will also be working with local communities of interest here in Bloomington. Stay tuned for more on that.
To find out more about what we’re up to—or just to discuss whatever seems relevant—please come to our first Beyond the Web salon, by Zoom, on Monday at 3pm Eastern time. The full link: https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/264653-ostrom-salon-series-beyond-the-web