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"Progress is the process by which the miraculous becomes mundane.” says Doc Searls, the next guest on our popular podcast series - Frontier Talk. In this episode, Raj Hegde sits down with one of the most prolific technology thinkers of our generation to understand the problems of the identity status quo and to determine the boundary conditions required to usher in a new era in identity - one that gives individuals independence and better ways to engage with businesses.
"Progress is the process by which the miraculous becomes mundane.” says Doc Searls, the next guest on our popular podcast series - Frontier Talk. In this episode, Raj Hegde sits down with one of the most prolific technology thinkers of our generation to understand the problems of the identity status quo and to determine the boundary conditions required to usher in a new era in identity - one that gives individuals independence and better ways to engage with businesses.
We need identity for everything we own. Right.
You know, and you know, the microphone I'm using, I think I own it, but it was actually loaned to me by somebody, you know, that I podcast for who owns that? How do I know?
Well, I should be able to scan a QR code on it or the barcode that came with it. And, and we can know, you know, that and these things are, are, are, you know, can only be fixed from the individual side. It cannot be fixed by yet. Another isolated locked down way that every different company can do it a different way. That's the problem we need to overcome. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Frontier Talk. The world's first podcast on decentralized identity. I'm Raj Hegde. And in this podcast, we explore the intersection of identity people and technology.
As you can see, I'm beaming with excitement today because my guest on the pod is someone I've been wanting to speak with for a long time. He is an identity institution in his own, right, and wears multiple hats, being a radio veteran and advertising guru. And more importantly, one of the most prolific technology writers of our generation.
He is at alumna's fellow of the distinguished Berkman center for internet and society at Harvard university and has coauthored two best-selling books, the "Cluetrain Manifesto" and the "Intention economy", which I highly recommend you read to share his take on how to build the future of identity. Doc Searls, the co-founder and board member of customer comments.
Doc, it's great to have you on board. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Frontier Talk. The world's first podcast on decentralized identity. I'm Raj Hegde. And in this podcast, we explore the intersection of identity people and technology. As you can see, I'm beaming with excitement today because my guest on the pod is someone I've been wanting to speak with for a long time. He is an identity institution in his own, right, and wears multiple hats, being a radio veteran and advertising guru. And more importantly, one of the most prolific technology writers of our generation.
He is at alumna's fellow of the distinguished Berkman center for internet and society at Harvard university and has coauthored two best-selling books, the "Cluetrain Manifesto" and the "Intention economy", which I highly recommend you read to share his take on how to build the future of identity. Doc Searls, the co-founder and board member of customer comments.
Doc, it's great to have you on board. Thank you. I'm flattered. It's fun to be here. I'd like to start this conversation off by getting your thoughts on the state of identity. As we know it today, what are the problems of the status quo? It's interesting.
I mean, it's certainly, what's the state of civilization today. You know, it's not going to be the same later and it's been the same all along in other ways. On the one hand, if you told me 20 years ago that I'd still be caring about this 20 years from now and looking forward to decentralized identity, when I thought it was the only possible solution way back when, and, but I'm actually quite encouraged right now. I see an enormous amount of activity going on around SSI, which stands stood originally for self sovereign identity.
It's not, I know a lot of people, especially in Europe seem to have a problem with the word sovereign. It has a number of older meanings that has some political meanings today. But I think in the sense that every individual should be in charge of how they, how they identify themselves in a, in a minimal way for as needed purposes. I think that's been an ideal all along that we don't, you know, what we call ourselves in the purposes for which we do. We in the physical world, we solve this a long time ago.
You know, I mean our parents or our tribes or whatever gave us a name. We may, we may, we may use it. Some cases may not. And if we're standing in line at the store and if your name is Michael, and it says a common name, you may call yourself, you know, Clive instead.
And, and that that'll do, and we haven't replicated that online at all. It's like, it's very similar to privacy. We have not worked that out either. And they're probably tied in some ways I think, but the, the goal has always been for all of us to have individual agency, I think, and not just to always solve these problems from the corporate side. And that's still a challenge. So that's sort of the state as An antidote to this problem. You talk about this concept called VRM window relationship management in your book, the intention economy.
Could you perhaps talk us through project VRM and how does decentralized identity fit into the goals of the project? Yeah, The, the project is what I started at the Berkman Klein center at, at Harvard in 2006, it was a one-year project legal projects. There were one year projects is now going into its 15th year or as approaching starting. That is losing count at this point. It's a bit like identity. That way. The original idea was that VRM stood for vendor. Relationship management is actually not a name that we gave it.
It's one that appeared on a podcast of a guy named Mike
We want scale on our side, we want scale so we can change our last name or our email address or a phone number or any number of other things. One time for every company we deal with, we should have one shopping cart we could take from site to site. Those are ideals that we came up with way back when we still have not realized them, which is why it's now in its 16th year or whatever it is.
So, but we have hundreds of people on the list and we're working on it. Awesome. And as you might know, today, there is a deepest function in the way institutions manage our data. What do you think are some of the top priorities for anyone looking to build decentralized identity solutions? I think it's working for the individual. I think it's the only answer. I think that we're none of the approaches that are hot right now, including and especially SSI. None of them are focusing highly enough. I think I'm giving us each of us, the tools that we need.
We, we should be able to present verifiable credentials to whoever needs them on an as needed and minimally disclosing basis where we can trust what happens at the other end in, in design SSI does that. But I have not yet seen what I call the invention that mother's necessity.
You know, I mean the first time you saw an iPhone or an Android, you, you said I have to have that. There were some you saw apps for coming from the store.
You said, I have to have that farther back. You said you saw a copier.
You saw, you know, an inkjet printer before that a laser printer I had to have that we need that for us OSI. We need that for identity, or we're just going to be stuck with the administrative identities we've had all along. Right. And to add to that point, Dr. Hardy barons, the former head of blockchain at diamond mobility sat on this podcast. That identity is a means and not an end. I'm curious to learn your thoughts on, should the development scope be focused on a specific use case or, or human agency? What's your take? I think the weighted, the way to look at it is that we need scale.
The kind of agency we need is scale for us. If, if Daimler Benz has all the best technology in the world for managing all the identities that are the identifiers or the, the namespaces and customer records, they have that doesn't help a bit of for any of us.
You know, I, I, I want all of us to be able to, again, you know, be able to let you know, let the company know. Yeah, I have one of your cars.
Yes, I have this, you know, here's a credit report. Here's some other thing, but I should be able to do the same with all the companies.
And again, I should be able to change my records with all of them at one time at one time. And I actually, haven't seen very much in SSI that even begins to think about that. But I think we have to think about scale for us. I think it's essential for people on the enterprise side to think, to take off their enterprise hat and think of themselves as individuals.
Again, how do we, how do we, as individuals bene benefit from something that works at scale for all companies and on the corporate side, they have to stop thinking that our re our, our namespace, our records of our customers, especially for marketing purposes are sacrosanct. And we can't share anything with anybody else for many years have dealt with that with Federation on the identity, in for identity purposes. But the corporations, I mean, I said this in like 2001, you know, corporations sharing personal data with other companies is, you know, is having safe sex in a way.
It's not really, it's not really helping the customer, you know, we need, we need scale for us. And it's just essential that companies, you know, people working a company is think of that, think of themselves first, but just, how can I get what I need out of this, Right. That serves as the perfect segue to my next question. Now that we focused on the what and why I think it's time to shift the focus on the who individuals, as, you know, have a contextual understanding of identity and agency, my perception of identity for instance, might be entirely different to yours.
And so my question to you is who ought to be building decentralized identity solutions, and more importantly, is there a need for a multidisciplinary system thinking approach to overcome any bias associated with a dominating context? Well, I think that obviously something needs to be done on both the corporate and the personal side. So the two work together and, and that multiple companies are working on the same thing.
I think, for example, that the Linux foundation does an amazing job of getting together. Everybody that's working on distributed cloud for 5g, you know, that's, that's one of the things they're working on. They're doing the same thing with blockchain, with the Hyperledger project. I think it wouldn't hurt here to have an entity of some kind that comes in and says, what do what? Or what's the same thing that all you guys are doing? What are you doing? That's low level and common enough that we can make this thing work. And it probably some of that's already happening to the sovereign foundation.
For example, that my wife has been involved with has, is one of those institutions, I think. But to me, that's the multidisciplinary side of it. The two disciplines that matter really are the, or the individual and the company. How do we work for the, for both of those at the same time? And on the company side, it has to be, what do all of us have to do in common that, you know, that will be base level?
You know, it's kind of like what happened with the browser way back when it was like everybody, you know, before the internet came along and before the web came along, you know, we had separate online services and they were all different and, you know, but the internet made it possible for every company to look at HTTP requests coming in and saying, oh, I can send out a file. They can look at that in a browser in many ways that you started by mentioning the customer's own perception of identity. I think it's actually very simple.
Everybody thinks is our identity is cards that the companies give them, they have these in their wallets, you know? And in some cases it's like, you know, there, there are, are government ones, driver's licenses, passports in India. They have OD har, there are lots of those, but still it's still a card is still something I present. And now they're beginning to think, well, you know what, I can also do something with a QR code that somebody shows me and my phone is, is acting as my ancient or my proxy.
But in many cases, I think it's not clear to people that a QR code is for anything other than getting your menu or something like that, you know, or registering something. But I think there are a lot of opportunities there to pry people away from the understanding of an identity as something they only get from a company like this, or from a government is my government ID or something. But rather, you know, I just need to say I'm over 18 so I can get into this movie or I can drink, or I can vote, or I can register for this, or I belong to this club.
And if that's all you need to know, you know, loyalty programs can be improved enormously. If somebody has a collection of verifiable credentials that say, you know, I'm a member of CVS, I'm a member of Walgreens. I'm a member of, of Tesco. I'm a member of, you know, of Aldi or whatever the company is, where that's all they need to know. They don't need to know, you know, where you live. They don't need to know all this other stuff. And this is good for these companies as well, because they're not carrying records that could become stale or obsolete.
As soon as the customer changes anything or they get sold or they get attacked. You know, it, it reduces the, our exposure in the marketplace. I'm not sure how clear that is to companies yet. It's probably getting clearer, but there are mutual benefits involved here with minimum disclosure, for, you know, for verifiable purposes. Let's shift gears now and talk about the internet. Overloads speed to scale is a critical factor in consumer internet companies. And as a result, product managers in the valley tend to build products on the assumption that the users are a lazy and B not very smart.
My question to you is can a high brow decentralized identity tech stack reverse this trend Kind of the UI just wants to be used? I mean, I think, and I don't know what that UI would be. I think obviously it has to be accessible through your phone. I think phones have become extensions of people. Marshall McLuhan says that all new technologies are extensions of our, our bodily cells, our bicycle, as an extension of our feet.
You know, our glasses are extensions of our eyes that when you're driving a car, you feel like your body is in that car. It's an embodied thing. Our phones are like that.
Now I, when I ride a ride in the subways in New York now, and it's rare that I don't see everybody looking at their phone or plugged into their phone and listening to something, these things have become as much a part of us as our clothes. So I think for now, at this moment in history, it has to work with your, with your personal devices at your portable personal devices.
But, but the, the, the UI has be so obvious and necessary that it's on the front page. It's not something you look up on your phone and you haven't page two, three or four of, of your, of your apps. It has to be on the front page of your apps. What is that?
You know, and nobody's invented that yet. And we need that invented. And why should large companies be incentivized to do so? What is the business value of decentralized identity? I think there's enormous business value in it because it, again, it's because you've reduced exposure. You're putting the customer, you're putting the individual in charge of, of data that you need to know, you know, did they get married and changed their last name? Did they change their address?
You know, I've read that the, the Royal mail in the UK loses like a billion pounds a year because people change their addresses and they don't know about it. Right. But if a person is able to change their address, one time for everybody they deal with and then have a simple way to, to make themselves known, you know, for what Kim Cameron, formerly of Microsoft called a constrained purpose, right? Minimum disclosure for constraint purposes, justifiable parties. These were his laws of identity written 2004, but they're, they apply today, especially.
And I think actually only SSI can make that happen. But the, the business incentive is that there's less exposure. There's less loss as less friction in the marketplace.
I mean, certainly there's friction in your, in your, in your life when you carry multiple keys in your pocket and many cards in your wallet. And, and if your wallet gets stolen or whatever, I mean, that's an even worse situation. I think we're, we're moving toward the times when pretty much everything that you need to present on a verifiable basis in the world is going to be on your mobile device and that you should be able to survive its loss or theft.
And, and I think, you know, apple and Google are working on that pretty hard. And I think that they're making some progress with that, but for all the apps that run on that, I think that identity is a monstrously, huge opportunity, but companies can't get there. If they're busy thinking how only they can win, because it has to be a win for everybody. Like the internet was a win for everybody that the, you know, SMS, all these things were, were wins for everybody. They needed to think about what's the win for everybody, right?
Machine learning and AI enables mobile just like the browser unlock the true potential of the internet, or at least beyond that way, according to you, what needs to be done to make decentralized identity a reality? I think we need our own ML and our own AI. I think of the only AI we have is what Google or apple or anybody else gives to us. We're lost in the long run.
I think, I think we need something we don't have right now, which is a really good collection of our own data. Everything on our calendar, everything on our contacts, all of our belongings, all of our belongings, you know, we buy something, we get a receipt for that. That should be normalized in some way. Every receipt I get should be in a format where I can possess that. And I know I just bought this focus, right? I'm talking to you through, right. I have a receipt from that company that looks unlike every other receipt. I can't really scan it. I can't really make full sense of it.
Amazon does a really good job of telling me when things were shipped and what was shipped, but not what I paid for exactly. You know, my credit card company doesn't want its competitors to scrape, you know, the, the text, if they send me a PDF or something, this is all very broken. I think the, you know, and, and, and it can be fixed if we realize the customer, the individual needs to be in charge of this data and they can make better decisions. So if I have an AI, that's looking at all, I'm looking at my bookshelves over here. What are all the books that I own?
I should have a library of those. I should be able to scan the ISB and number on the back of every book, have a record of those. And I know I'm not going to buy it twice, you know, or I can get rid of these. I can put these on the market. I use all kinds of things I could do with those. I can ensure my belongings, you know, and, and, and you know, where this, where this goes to identity is we need identity for everything we own. Right.
You know, and you know, the microphone I'm using, I think I own it, but it was actually loaned to me by somebody, you know, that I podcast for who owns that? How do I know?
Well, I should be able to scan a QR code on it, or the barcode that came with it. And, and we can know, you know, that, and these things are, are, are, you know, can only be fixed from the individual side. They can not be fixed by yet. Another isolated locked down way that every different company can do it a different way. That's the problem we need to overcome them. Right. And to add to that, you've blogged about this concept called Pikos. If I'm not wrong, coined by Pecos Doesn't matter, or there's no Orthodox Prudencio Right, right. Yeah. It's a term coined by, by Phil Windley.
Yeah. Could you elaborate more on this concept? Yeah. Persistent compute object. And the idea is that as you know, as I just said, every EV that everything you own, or you can identify can have it and its own unique identifier, but it's not just an identifier. It should be a programmable instance on the internet. It should have its own node, its own little cloud that's programmable and, and, and be fully useful. So for example, with, with this focus, right, that I just got this for people to know what to focus, right.
Is this the company that makes the device that I'm talking through right now is very useful for podcasts and, and their leading company in this. And they just gave me this very difficult thing to go through that delayed our conversation today because they bought it and it's still not working quite right. And I have to go through a bunch of videos and other crap on there, on our website. I don't know if I have another focus, right thing. I'm already registered with that. How do I recover that? I'm not sure I remember it.
That should be in a database of mine, but I should be able to give this thing either. It comes with a Pico, a persistent compute object of its own, or I create one for it. And through that one, I can communicate back to the company, everything I've done with it.
Like, hi guys, I just went through your difficult registration process. I could have, that could have been much shorter. Here are some improvements to it.
Or, you know, it'd be really good if the, if the XLR connection on this was on the back and not in the front, because I'm dealing with too many cables coming out of the front of this thing. Or if I had a second connection in the back, there are lots of ways I can think of as a customer to improve this product. All the products that we own.
And in en masse, the customer base knows more about every product a company produces than, than the company itself does the, the, the curb weight of intelligence about every product that, that, that you can get is much higher on the customer side than it is on the corporate side. And it'd be, it'd be great if we had our own way to, on our, that standardized on our part to communicate, not only to remember everything that we own or that we've rented, and by the way, every subscription that we have, we're moving into a subscription economy here right now.
You know, all of us here in the U S you know, not all of us, do we have a subscription to Hulu and Roku and apple and Amazon and all these other ones all at the same time, when do they come do, how do they trick us into just staying on after the cheap thing at first, why am I paying so much to this guy? There should be Pecos for all of those as well, where I have a way of remembering when this thing comes due.
And when I'm going to charge me more downstream and also killing that whole system, that's a, that's a, that's a screw the customer system that is very common in marketing and has been common in marketing from way back in the physical age, before we had the internet. And it's lingered in, it's a Relic of the industrial age that we can fix.
Now, if we actually own our things and own and can process the data that we have about everything in our lives. And every company is busy thinking of ways to improve their lives as companies, but not about how to improve our lives as customers across all the companies we deal with. Picos are one way of doing that exercise and other way of doing that. But I think we've got a long way to go. The pandemic has brought about significant changes, not just on an individual level, but also on a business level. Has the pandemic accelerated the development of decentralized identity initiatives?
What's your take? It has to the degree that we have become decentralized as workers, many of us are working at home now.
And, and I know from talking to our son who who's 24 and works in staffing for that matter. That's his, that's his profession that in his generation now it's considered bad form for a company to require people to come into work.
You know, apple had a revolt with it. I mean, you never hear about that from apple, you know, but people don't want to come into their beautiful, new building as much as they used to because they'd rather work at home. They're working under computers. What do you, it's nice to be around other people. And it's nice to get free food and stuff like that. If you're a wealthy company like an apple or a Google or whatever, but if you're working in a non-private cubicle in a hive, in a company that's not as attractive as it used to be.
I think so we're becoming decentralized to begin with, hi, I think this cannot help, but have an effect on what goes on with identity. What has done specifically? I don't know. I think I'm sure that it has changed what programming is done with thinking out loud as being done, what planning is being done at different companies on the work that they're doing. But I think it'll also be probably years or decades before we see the full effect of what the pandemic has done.
I think for some things that has moved things forward 10 years or more for other, for other things, it's, it's made no difference at all. So it kind of depends To add to that. How fast is decentralized identity going to be adopted in a way that it radically changes the way individuals manage their data?
I, I think it'll, I think it'll be all of the above. I've. I think that ideally it will be involved. I think it'll hugely take off when two things happen, one is we have a wallet or something equivalent to it, through which we can present verifiable credentials on an as needed basis, as a matter of course, without thinking about it. And we no longer carry around cards or even a wallet. I think that that's one change that will happen and that'll be huge.
But I think another one is when everything that we own or rent or subscribe to has an identity that we, or identifiers that we can manage, that we know that we have these things. We know we have all these subscriptions. We know we own all these books. We know we own these appliances. We know where, you know, when we got them, what we paid for them, what rent we're paying when it's due. And that's integrated with our contacts and calendars.
And, and so, you know, there's a standard way that if a company changes its name, it gets what by somebody else, everybody finds out, but not through their CRM system, but because there's a Pico that, that the company knows and the customer knows. And through that, Pico's back channel as it were, that data gets changed on the customers, on the customer zone database.
You know, so we have an, we have namespaces for everything in our lives and we can perform AI and ML and all that on that stuff. And I see very little thought going into that so far, Right. I think now is a good time to address the interoperability issue. Today. We are seeing a large number of entities, particularly in Europe, be it governments, enterprise, and startups coming together in a cooperative manner to build decentralized identity solutions for a wide range of industries.
My question to you is how can such entities in a sense come together to build an interoperable standard that enables and facilitates a wide range of use cases across the public and private sector? I think the main thing is that competitors need to recognize that there are low level functions that they all share and they need to share in order for the whole market to grow. And that that might involve creating a consortium.
It might involve simply cooperation, non get hub between developers and may have involved going to the I Tripoli or the ITF or some other, or the W3C or any one of the standards organizations and, and creating a standard there. But the, the main thing is that it's, it's essential for every company operating in this space to understand that, unless that, unless you have something that's held in common at the, at, at, at a base level, I won't even call it a low level at a base level where everybody gets along because they all, you know, it's helpful.
You know, we're, we're all in, we're in the web right now talking, and, and, you know, that's an HTTP sitting on top of, of H TCP IP. Neither one of those things makes money.
You know, TCP IP doesn't make any money and because it doesn't make any money, everybody makes money using it so, or can make money if they choose to. And I think that's, that's sometimes called because effects, meaning you make money because of it, rather than with it. And I think that's the key thing for companies developing in this space that they realized that there are some things they'll make money because of rather than width and, and that's, and it's, it's just essential to agree on what that stuff is.
I'm curious to know what is the next AWS operation that dark souls is most actively wrestling with at the moment, It's a completely new thing operating outside on the internet, but outside of the web, outside of big platforms, outside of everything else called the intention by way, a developer step forward, who, who read my book, the intention economy and said, I have some code that, can you do that?
And so, and that's code that will give all of us agency to express our intentions in the marketplace outside of the usual channels, and basically building a new infrastructure at a, at a base level for, for that will improve the degree to which demand can inform supply. This may involve identity. It may not. It probably won't at first, it's just addressing in the same way as the email is not about identity. It's about addresses.
You know, your, your email address, you know, can be a list of numbers at, at IP address. You know, it could be anything in a similar way. This is addressing as well. We're dealing with it at a fairly low level, but there are three places, at least in the world that have expressed an interest in that. And for that reason at one of them in Bloomington Indiana here in the U S my wife, Joyce and I are going to actually go there for the next, for the next, the next academic year, and work on that with friends at Indiana university.
So, so we're, we're going to be working on the ground on this thing. So that's what got most of my attention right now. That's fascinating dog, good luck on this initiative. I started Frontier Talk with the motive to accelerate my rate of learning with Frontier Talk. I get to sit with whoever I want and explore impactful stuff happening at the edges. You've been a prolific blogger for over two decades now. And I'm curious to know what keeps you motivated. What's your reason on that?
You know, I'd love to learn from your expertise To me. What, what keeps me going is the work.
It's not, it's not what I write. I, my work was writing for most of my life actually, and all of the long time that I was involved in marketing and broadcasting and other things like that involved other kinds of work.
But, but right now, I just want to see tools and services come into the world that help individuals in the companies and the organizations that serve them work better together. And, and I have some influence on that.
And, but the influence I have right now is actually on for the first time, really is on code rather than the writing that I do. And it's on activism.
It's on, on working with the community, saying here's some code, here's some tools use these things and let's see how it goes. That's a new thing for me, actually, I've helped with that in a promotional way, in the past for other parties, but not on my own. So that's a new thing as for what's happening in journalism in general, which includes blogging and includes social media and everything else. That is way up in the air right now.
I mean, everybody could be a journalist now, and everybody with a phone can perform journalistic functions. This is utterly changed the way everything's being done. I also think social media is temporary. I think it's a, it's a hack, which is one reasonably I'm kind of against governments jumping in and saying, let's break up Facebook, let's break up Google, because these are all these companies or projects have been around tech for long enough that I realized that every company you can name in the tech world is just a project or a collection of projects.
IBM wrote, ruled the world for many years and at and T here in the U S and the PTs in Europe and elsewhere in the world ruled Telephany for a long time. And those are all out the window. They're all doing different things now, it's, there's no, the assumption that anybody is in charge at the moment is I think illusory and temporary, but tech moves too fast.
And also, and I think was an important thing for everybody is that this is early we've. We've had the internet, as we know it now only since 1995, that's when the commercial web showed up and we kind of standardized on browsers and websites, and that's like 25, 26 years. That's not much time at all. We're going to be digital for the rest of time. I think as a species, we're going to be digital as well as analog, as well as physical beings. And we have a long way to go and many, many changes to go through and so on. And I'm very optimistic about most of them.
I, there are things you could be pessimistic about, but I'm tend to be an optimist because optimists get more done. So, All right. And could you perhaps elaborate on how the internet realize the dreams of early techies By coming into existence?
I, I, I saw the internet coming in the eighties and envied the ability of people in universities and large companies and in government to be able to use this TCP IP thing and the things you could do on it, which is a time where I know finger and gopher and, you know, IRC and stuff like that. And it wasn't really until the mid nineties that I was able to get on, get my own domain name and the rest of it.
But to me, I mean, if you look at a movie like that's about the future that said in the past, so like 2001 is a good example, but a better one is blade runner of a blade. Runner starts out with the Annette on the title page that says Los Angeles, November, 2019. Right. And it's a future with flying cars and all four old colonies and human replicants, but they still have payphones and old-fashioned looking computers. Right.
And, but if you went back to then and said, and oh, by the way, it only one of the 19 companies that got product placements in that I was a pioneering movie for product placement. And in, in, in movies, only one of them, I think it's IBM, maybe it's 18 and T still exists at least in name, but there are there, there tape companies and other Atari and others that are long gone. And that's a lesson.
But if you back to then, if you went back to 1981, and whenever it was that that movie was filmed and said, you know, there's going to be a future where everybody in the world at no cost is zero distance apart and can look at each other and talk to each other on little rectangles that they carry around in their pockets, or that they put on their desks. It would be a miracle on the order of loaves and fish.
I mean, it, it was unthinkable at the time and the internet made it thinkable, but it didn't happen. You know, it was thought up in the seventies and eighties, but it really didn't happen until the mid nineties in a serious way. And it really didn't become portable until, until smartphones with app stores came along in 2008.
So, and that's only 13 years ago. That's not very long ago at all. I I'm just, I'm, I'm sort of blown away by how much the internet became exactly what I wanted it to be. I'm disappointed that, you know, I, co-wrote a book called Luke the Cluetrain manifesto in 1999, came out in 2000. That was regarded as probably the alpha Sabri utopian book.
And, and it was cyber utopian because we, the, the opening clue in it said, we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp and deal with it. That was a little graphic set around by Chris Locke, one of our authors to the others of us, and that motivated us to get going. But that is not yet true. Our hours.
Our, we are still seats. We are still eyeballs. We're still end-users and we're still consumers. And our reach does not exceed the grasp of the companies that want to spy on us. And frankly, I think having governments come along with the GDPR and the CCPA and other things have actually made things worse by ramping up the inconvenience of using the net with consent notices and other crap like that, that have really slowed down work there and created a gigantic cottage industry. And in circumventing those very rules to continue doing surveillance as if surveillance does us any good at all.
And it doesn't for the most part, it does not. The notion that we're getting perfect advertising is ludicrous and expensive and wrong.
And, but I also think it's temporary. I think it's taking a while before companies, as well as the people who set up their ad blocking and tracking, blocking, and the browser makers like apple and Firefox is saying, stop it, stop it already. Brave is another one where people don't want this crap, but let's do something better, but I don't think we're going to do it with browsers. So I'm very optimistic about moving past the internet that the internet we see today to one that we imagined in the tooth, in, in the nineties, I still want that internet.
And, but I'm glad for the one that we have. I just want the next one that we're not getting yet. Do you see any similarities between the early days of the internet and the state of blockchain as we know it today? Yeah.
It's yeah, there are similarities. There are similarities in the sense that it's, there are fad like qualities to it that are going to prove useful in the, that mask. What can be done usefully in the long run?
I mean, a blockchain is a distributed database. That's basically all it is. And you can do more with it than that, but that's basically what it is. It's a distributed database. That's a nice idea. It's going to be good. There's gonna be a lot of good things we do with it. I love the enthusiasm that went into it.
I think the monstrous amount of money that could be made with cryptocurrency is a red herring or the way wish that on day two, when I saw blockchain was, I mean, Bitcoin was there that I didn't put a hundred bucks at a Bitcoin, but you wouldn't be talking to me now I'd be in an island somewhere, perhaps, but, but that's, but again, that's a red herring. I think that it's not representative of what the basic idea is.
An interesting case for me is that when QR codes, which were invented by an, a company for Toyota for tracking car parts in, I don't know, the eighties maybe, or the nineties, along with barcodes, you know, but QR code is especially people in the tech world ridiculed to calling it robot barf and stuff like that. We couldn't get along without them now. And it took what 10 years, 12 years before QR codes became fully useful. And I think we're in a similar position now with, with, with blockchain, we've, we've gone through the fed period. We're going to figure out what what's good with it.
And we saw with SSI, SSI doesn't have to use blockchains, but a lot of the thinking about as I went into blockchains at first, but you know, Kerry, K E R I is one that an approach that society that does not use blockchains, there are others. I think we'll have to go through a lot of fun before it becomes mundane and then fully annoying.
So that's, that's the next step? Fascinating insights there, doc, right? It's now time for frontier fire.
Well, the, the best part of the podcast. Yeah, but I put my guests on the spot and ask a series of rapid fire questions to them.
So doc, I ready for the challenge. Go for it. Awesome. Let's get started. What's your mantra in life. Be useful. Just be useful. Leave the world better than I found it. That's sort of, that's the big one, but be useful. What's a book you would recommend to our audience laws of media by Eric and Mahershala glue and as Marshall McLuhan and his son, Eric, What's your take on NFTs, non fungible tokens. Are they oriented or here to stay? I think they're both. They're overrated in here to stay Interesting answer. The EU is not software centric.
Traditionally, do you see Europe being the hotspot for decentralized identity I'd already is I, so, so my wife was involved with the sovereign foundation and lots of decentralized identity stuff. Most of her conversations are with Europe, so it was Europe and Utah in the U S strategy. So go figure that out. A person who inspires you and why, Oh boy, my wife, more than anybody else. She inspires me on a constant basis and she's a partner and pretty much everything I do. There's an entity called doc and Joyce and, and that's, and people know that I come as a couple actually.
And, and they're learning that, that at least half of what I get credit for this comes from her. So, yeah. And finally, what's your advice to anyone listening to this podcast? I don't give up on any, on any aspirations and listen to everybody. It's I learned yesterday that the guy who was one the most in the TV program here in the us called jeopardy is basically a quiz show, but you have to be very knowledgeable in order to succeed at that show. And he said, I listened to everybody without a filter.
He, he, if somebody says something that's important enough for them to say, he wants to listen, he doesn't listen for the purpose of dismissing or looking for a time to interrupt. And I think that's critically important.
It's very, it's very typical of people to think, to be in conversations where they're really looking for a chance to say what they're thinking rather than hearing what the other person's saying. Why's what's that dog. And on that note, I like to thank you for your time and hope that this conversation has given a lot of food for thought to our audience. I am sure that your work will go a long way in dismantling barriers that accelerate the development of a future identity ecosystem. Hopefully giving individuals more independence and a better means to engage but society.
Thanks, doc. My pleasure. This has been great. That was Doc Searls, Doc will be delivering a keynote at the European identity and cloud conference EIC. So be sure to get your tickets. Why are they link in the description box below? I hope you enjoyed this incredibly insightful conversation and I personally would love to hear your feedback. It will be awesome. If you could share this with anyone who might benefit from this information until next time, I hope to see you again on this incredibly fascinating journey to redefine the eye in identity, stay safe, stay informed. Cheers.
