VRM and the potential of the Net
Fascinating discussion over dinner last night with Drummond Reed, Bill Washburn and my colleagues Iain Henderson and William Heath from our personal data venture Mydex (www.Mydex.org).
We had just flown in to San Francisco for the VRM meeting, so were jet lagged and hardly sparkling. But Bill made the comment that the real potential of the internet was not being realised because of a pervading lack of trust. This is interesting because previously, trust-issues have not created barriers to our ability to realise the full potential of new technologies.
Metallurgy, steam power and electricity transformed the world in many ways, but the general rule of thumb was, in good old entrepeneurial capitalist style, ‘do anything you like with it, so long as you don’t break the law.
Computing technologies started out much the same, transferring that ‘do what you can!’ motto from matter and energy to information. So, in the industrial age we did lots of fantastic new stuff with matter and energy, and then we had an information age where we started doing lots of fantastic new stuff with information. With the internet however, this no holds-barred approach to information creates problems – because I don’t necessarily want you to start doing fantastic new stuff with my information if it’s fantastic for you and awful for me.
The power of trust
When the key issue is no longer just the technology, but the relationships surrounding that technology, you have a different type of problem. You need a parallel set of innovations in ‘social technologies’ – new ways of bringing people together to create new and better outcomes.
Perhaps the last time we had a problem of a similar scale was with the growth of trade. The more trade you do, the clumsier and more constraining barter becomes. You need something to oil the wheels. The ‘obvious’ answer is money, but for many years it was not an obvious answer at all.
Money requires a huge leap of faith. You give somebody something of real value, and in return, they give you a worthless token. The only way you can then retrieve the value you have given away is by persuading someone else to part with something of real value in exchange for your worthless token.
It’s absolutely crazy, once you stop to think about it. But as long as people fail to make this gesture of trust, the prevailing lack of trust acted as a brake on the economic potential of the trading system. And to build the trust that was necessary, a whole set of new rules, institutions, practices, safeguards, social rituals and relationships, norms and expectations, divisions of labour and so on had to be developed.
As Drummond pointed out, one of these institutions is banking, which is an entire global industry built on ‘meta-trust’. First, you make a leap of trust in accepting money in exchange for real value. T hen you make a second leap of trust by giving it to somebody else to look after! With no real recourse if they decide not to give it back! Craziness piled on top of craziness. So, once again, we had to develop a whole new set of rules, regulations, practices, institutions etc to deal with this trust problem – and we’re still struggling with how to do it, as the credit crunch shows.
Bill’s point was that we’re now facing the same sort of problem with the sharing of personal information on the Net.
The old assumptions about ‘if you can, do anything you like with it within the law’ may work brilliantly with new inventions like electrical machinery. But it creates a nightmare of mistrust and lost economic potential when it comes to personal information. And that’s basically what’s happened with the last 50 years of centralised corporate data gathering: the underlying assumption in the corporate world was ‘if we can gather information about you, the customer, it’s ours to what we like with’. Just imagine if banks said that to us in relation to our money!
The next leap
That’s what Mydex in particular, and VRM more generally is about. It’s about creating the new ‘social technologies’ of trust to allow personal information to be shared the way we share money. If all the right conditions are there – if it’s a mutually acceptable exchange in conditions of mutual trust – we hand over money to somebody else without a thought – and by doing so we contribute our little bit to the larger public good of economic activity. We help unleash its potential. But if those conditions are not present, then our immediate attitude is ‘No Way!’. And the economy’s potential is constrained.
So what are the right conditions – the rules, institutions, practices, safeguards, social rituals and relationships, norms and expectations, divisions of labour – necessary to unleash the potential of personal information sharing in a networked world?
That’s a huge question which we need to tackle as a society. But our bet is that one necessary building block is to create the distinction with personal information that banks did with money.
You hand your money over to a bank for safekeeping. But that does not mean the bank can do anything it likes with it. You may give the bank permission to do some things with it, such as lend it out to other people. But if so, they have to pay you interest for it. You share in the benefit of sharing its value.
Personal data banks like Mydex create the same distinction. You use the personal data store to keep your information in a safe place that’s also easy to access. Mydex also allows this information to be shared, but only in ways that you choose, agree to, and get some benefit from.
Personal data stores are certainly not the whole solution to the dilemma Bill raised. But I’m pretty sure they’re a part of it.
Alan Mitchell
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