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When thinking about what SSI means for enterprises and providers of services to enterprises, it's easy to forget that SSI is about each of our sovereign selves. This means SSI should give us each a clear sense of independence, agency, and obvious freedom from the old centralized Identity Provider Relying Party model, and the federated one that followed from it. But we aren't there yet. What will it take to get us there—for our sovereign selves, and not just for hot new SSI businesses?
When thinking about what SSI means for enterprises and providers of services to enterprises, it's easy to forget that SSI is about each of our sovereign selves. This means SSI should give us each a clear sense of independence, agency, and obvious freedom from the old centralized Identity Provider Relying Party model, and the federated one that followed from it. But we aren't there yet. What will it take to get us there—for our sovereign selves, and not just for hot new SSI businesses?
Person who puts their shoes on in the morning that drives their car. That operates a wallet.
These are, these are things you can only do as an individual. And, and that need that individual needs to have a, a, a high leverage role in, in the, in the digital world. So our comedians actually had something to say about this over 2200 years ago, he said, give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it. And I shall move the world. That was an abstract concept for him. And by the way, the Greeks had already figured out the world is round.
That didn't come along later, they knew, but even if they knew the world was round, it was just a, it was an intellectual challenge to, to think of having a lever long enough to move the world. But he didn't have the internet. We have the internet now and unbelieving a world right now by being present with you in slice time. And at it remotely, you might notice if you could see behind me, it's still dark outside here. I'm in California, nine, nine hours behind you there. But in real time in real presence here, this is, this is a new thing.
And we have this fulcrum and we have the whole world to work with it. Isn't just the lever. It's the fulcrum. It's the world itself. It's one that gives us leverage both as individuals and organizations, 99 point X percent of our conversations in places like this is about what the organizations could do, but what can it do for us? And it's gonna, one is gonna be with us for millennia to come. We're not gonna stop being digital. If we're civilized at all, and it's still new that it's only decades old and we'll have it for a very long time.
So this guy, Marsha McLean famously, he didn't say this exactly. It's, he's often quoted as saying it, but that was his point. We shape our tools and our, our tools shape us. And another thing he did say, and the cover of a book even was that every new medium works us over completely. Our tool shape us. If I grab a pen, that pen is now part of me, I can write, I can't put ink on my fingers and write, I have a pen to do that. It extends me in a similar way. All of our tools, all of our media shape us. And so what does this do? He died in 1980.
Well, before he could imagine what this would do. He did know computers were around however, and he knew satellites were around. He said it would turn the world into a global village. He said that in 1960, he said that that, that computers would give us perfect memory. He said that in the seventies. So he was right about some of that stuff, but how does the world shape us? How does the internet shape us? How do our tools shape us?
Now, this is how inhabitants of the digital world were shaped on a New York subway. In 2019. We live much of our time in New York city. We have an apartment there, take the subway almost every day. And at least as of 2019, before the pandemic showed up, I could take my phone. And when everybody else in a subway car was preoccupied on their rectangle, I would do what I call rectangle. Bingo. I would take my phone and scan across all of it and get a panel of the whole subway car, not seeing me scanning them, cuz everybody's preoccupied by their phone. That was 2019.
We were back after we were exiled during the pandemic to California where I am now. But when we got back to New York, it was a different scene on the subway. Everybody's wearing masks. The masks changed us. And my point with this is that every technology does change us and it changes us fast about half the people in those cases, we were we're occupied with their phones and I couldn't do rectangle bingo because it was too hard to see. Obviously it was, you know, they didn't have the same habit.
It wasn't as interesting a fact, you know, but so this, these kind of things change and it's important that they change. So here in this moment of time is what the media and regulators think the internet looks like. And it's most of us here.
In fact, Jackson just spoke about it, not like this, but like this it's a collection of, of, of platforms. We call these the platforms. This one is Fang. One of the many, five letter acronyms or initialisms Facebook, apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. In this case, there are many others. Those are some of the big ones.
And we, and the regulators, you know, the GDPR in Europe, the CCB and California, they wanna regulate these guys. And they wanna RA regulate wannabees here because those are the ones that are, that are taking advantage of our privacy, trying to give it to us on their terms and in their ways. But what it misses is that the Internet's underneath all those things. That internet is actually what gives us leverage. And the internet is far bigger than all those platforms.
In fact, the term platforms applied to these is a new thing. We weren't a platform used to be well, you know, my apple had a platform and Google had a platform and you know, and, and the, the windows platform and the Linux platform, and I worked for Linux journal for 26 years and, and a platform then was an operating system.
Well, now it's these companies, but the internet is underneath there. And that gives us leverage. So how can sovereign cells use the internet as a lever on business? That's really the thing, the question that was raised by SSI, when development started on it a few years ago, and you see, there are two worlds at once here, the physical world and the digital world and the platforms are in there and we can use them for leverage as well. So I wanna look at just five of those. These are in the CRM business. These are B2B businesses. CRMs only been around since the eighties.
CRM is a, is a B2B business. It's not one that we get as individuals, Oracle, when it was still had, Sebel see, they bought Sebel. They started it Sebel started. It Salesforce's biggest in it.
Right, right now SAP's one of the more established ones Microsoft has. Most, the most customers, Adobe got into it in a big way. When they bought Marketo kind of a hot newer, newer company. These are how many customers they have. These are B2B customers. These are corporate customers. And what they add up to are 826,000 corporate customers with 826,000 different ways to relate to customers held captive in as many silos, not in these silos. I don't have a relationship with Salesforce.
You and I don't have relationship as, as individuals with any of these companies, we have relationships with the companies that are, that use these companies, right? So what all of them sell and their customers buy are ways to do this, to have leverage, to have leverage across many, many customers at once. This is as old as the industrial age it's been with us for a long time. There's nothing wrong with it, but what they, but it's not. It's incomplete in the, in the internet age. And this is in the physical world. It started here.
And the language that we use to deal with customers on the corporate side are these, these are marketing terms, but you hear it all the time. Each of us are targets that companies acquire control, own manage and lock in. I heard Jackson talk about lock in, in the, in the last talk. And that's considered a desirable thing by the people operating the platforms about the people operating these companies. We wanna own, these customers wanna equip, but this is the language of ranching and of, and of slavery, frankly.
And it's not what we want, you know, but the result is this 826,000 different identifiers in different databases, different name spaces, and no one way for customers to change all of them in one move, different ways to consent, to terms and policies. And that's been much worse since the GDPR came along and we have it with every web website now, different ways to subscribe different shopping carts, different loyalty systems, all coercive and close is not our loyalty.
It's their way of managing us different logins and passwords and ways to update, update them different ways to get customer and tech support, different ways to provide helpful input and feedback, different ways to not get information into your records, Amazon, the credit card companies, at least here in the us go out of their way to make it very hard for you to know exactly what you paid for. What they'll tell you, what was shipped when and stuff like that.
The credit card companies in all upper case will tell you, you know, this much was spent with Amazon, but not what it was so different ways to not get information put in your records, different ways to be targeted, acquired, controlled, managed, and locked in. And that's just for the 826,000 corporate customers of five CRM companies. It's far more compound and far worse than that. And it's become worse than a digital age. What we want, what customers want and what self sovereignty will provide. When we finally get, it looks like this.
You and I, as customers, as individuals have leverage across all of business for the good of business, cuz it makes things simpler for them. And we can do that on the internet before the internet couldn't do it with the internet we can. So these are some business problems that can only be solved from the customer side. And this is a critical thing. There exist. Doesn't matter how good a company is, how big one is. They can't do it. All identity is one of them. There is not gonna be one company providing all of identity.
Can't be, we should have control of our own identity. We should have control of the way that we present all of Kim. Cameron's seven laws, minimum disclosure for a constrained purpose, user control and consent. All of that stuff can only be done from our side consent. I just talked about that. We should have, they should all consent to us. As we walk around in the world, everybody consents to the fact that I don't want my privacy invaded. For what reason? I have privacy technology called clothing. I'm not sitting here naked.
This is a signal to the world that you don't plant a tracking beacon inside my shirt. You know, we do this in the physical world. We don't have it in the digital one yet we could, but we can only solve it from the customer side logs and passwords. I mentioned logs and passwords are partly solved by password managers, but they themselves are an issue that can be solved in better ways. Loyalty is another one. Tech supports another one big one shopping with personal records. How do your receipts flow into your own personal records?
How can you, how can you better manage those and pull together ones from your, your health and your fitness and your financial and all the rest of it in ways, where could you run your own algorithms on that you should be able to, but you need your records together. How can you do that? There's a different shopping cart for every, every, every site.
So, and subscriptions. And I wanna actually unpack subscriptions, cuz subscriptions are really hot right now. Every company, every blogger now wants to be on subs stack and wants you to subscribe to them. This is a new form of income for journalists. Everybody wants this subscription and there's no one way for us to manage all of them. When does this expire? What was the original deal? None of that can be done. So we live in subscription hell right now. And I wanna unpack this because it it's one of the things we can solve.
Many companies, what recurring payments from customers, preferably renewing automatically with price increases. There are BDB businesses selling as many ways to do subscriptions. As there are companies doing them, just like it is with, with CRM. All those ways are designed to manipulate and trap customers because subscribers aren't involved in designing those systems and all these approaches wanna make your consumption rely on the old industrial model, which is they produce and you consume as mindlessly as possible, right? That's what they all want. What subscription heaven. We should have.
One. Everybody has a record of all their recurring expenses in a standardized easily read and useful form. There are standardized ways to request, offer except and terminate subscriptions. Everybody has an app of their own, not in a big company. Silo. Why should only, you have apps in a company, silo should have your own apps on your own laptop on your own phones. We had those before we had phones. Remember that it was your app. You got it in a box and you put it on your computer with a disc. It was yours, right?
Don't have that now, but you shouldn't have apps of your own with algorithms, your algorithms for making smart decisions about subscriptions and other expenses. Companies will benefit from this by simply offering better products and services. And by eliminating the moral and operational overhead required to manipulate customers constantly there's trouble. There there's work in that. Why should they have to go through that work? The same benefit supply to shopping loyalty permissions and every other business activity held back by industrial age habits and norms.
So to sum that up SSI, developers and businesses have a choice to make. On the one hand you can make SSI or whatever you end up calling it. We've always wanted to call it something else. I think it's just fine. Just another way for companies to do the same old things and leave many business problems, many big business problems, unsolved.
And again, I think most of what we're gonna be talking about here at this conference is doing this. We're solving business problems, businesses, helping other businesses solve business problems. We need that. It's a good thing, but it's, can't be the only thing. The other choice is to stand with our sovereign cells and use SSI to start solving problems that can only be solved by human beings, working at full agency. So here's what we're doing at customer commons.
Customer commons is a nonprofit that Joyce and I and, and friends started spun out of project VRM project VRM is a project we've had since 2006 at the Berkman client center at Harvard university. There's an active mailing list of over 600 people. There are many, many developers that have been involved in this from the start KuppingerCole to their enormous credit, gave us an award in year two of that in 2008 for the work we were doing on that.
Well, we have a spinoff. It's called customer comments. It's a nonprofit worldwide, but it's based in the us and we're doing some stuff. We're actually working on this. Giving people and organizations pass for signaling interests and intentions to each other. I wrote a book about this called the intention economy, how, and as subtitle, how customers take charge that was in 2012, we wanna make it happen now. So we're taking it on ourselves and that's called the buy way. It's based on open standards. We've already started working on it. We have some code. That's how we're symbolizing it.
Little graphic. I came up with using PowerPoint, giving you a new computing tool for sending and receiving those signals. This is your tool. It's not apples is that Google's, it's not anybody's it's your tool.
You know, that run your apps on your personal data and we're calling it the Tron. It's your, your server, your vehicle on the buy way for, and on your own platform. It can run your own algorithms, which is like your own algorithms, your personal algorithms, you know, so you can push up together.
Your, again, your, your health, your financial, your property data, Phil Wiley's here. Talk to Phil about Picos Pico's everything, all the books I'm looking at here, everything I own all of the, the, the, all the tape recorder that's broken behind here, that they can all have their own Picos they're all property I have. If I have records of these things that this house burns down, that has insurance implications, all of those things can be pushed together in a way that I can run algorithms on them.
That tell me when I should replace this, or what's the guarantee on that, or what should I be buying now? And here's the intent on these by the way, are emojis. That's an emoji for a castle.
You know, a, a person's home should be their castle. Your Tron should be your castle. And we're running trials and research with Indiana university in Bloomington, Indiana in the us, in case you wanna know where that is, there's a map. It's one of those flyover states that when you're going from New York to California or vice versa that you see below a relatively flat one, but it's the, the, the biggest university within that state. It's a really fantastic place.
There's a, there's an organization there called the Ostrom workshop, founded on the Nobel prize, winning work of LR. Ostrom on governing the commons and Joyce and I are both visiting scholars there. We're doing research and we're gonna run trials over the next, the next year. And we love help with that. We love if you're interested in helping reach out to Docker Joyce sols.com, that's our email address. And that's the story. Thanks a lot.
