Here is some video I shot of John Perry Barlow speaking about the internet back in Nov 2006:

http://streamingmarv.wordpress.com/2006/11/14/john-perry-barlow/

The “we” I’m talking about is institutions — mostly big business — that treat individuals like cattle that can be owned and branded and kept captive.

As I wrote here, we see evidence of this in 10,000-word “terms of service” from phone companies that basically say they can cut us off at any time and for any reason they like. We see it in call centers that do everything they can to keep us dependent while not providing more than the most minimal service. We hear it from venture capitalists who ask entrepreneurs “what’s your lock-in” for customers, as if locking customers up is naturally a good thing.

Many of us, when we go to work, do our best to “capture” customers — and then go home and resent it when we’re treated like captives by the companies on which we have no choice but to be dependent.

The “stretch” I wrote about is the difficulty all of us have in seeing past this contradiction. It’s the difficulty that companies have in valuing customers’ independence.

A few months ago I was talking to a high-up guy at a major retailer who said they love their customers and do everything they can to own them. I asked him if he knew another word for “owning” a human being. He said, “Oh shit, it’s slavery!” And then he said that in fact the company’s whole CRM — customer relationship management — system was not about relationship at all, but about maintaining customer dependence, on the company’s own terms.

Back farther than that I talked to a marketing VP at a major car rental agency. He told me that he couldn’t imagine any form of customer input other than what the company’s narrow system would allow. “We have consumers, not customers” was his message.

By “independently empowered individual”, I meant somebody who isn’t a slave to the existing system.

What we’re working on at ProjectVRM is providing individuals with tools that make them both independent from companies and better able to engage with companies — on the individual’s own terms, and not just those that companies provide.

We (that is, ProjectVRM) don’t have a better way of saying that yet. It isn’t easy. But it needs to be done. If you want to help, please do.

Also, just because ProjectVRM happens to be headquartered at a center at Harvard doesn’t make it ivy-covered. The only person active in ProjectVRM who happens to be at Harvard is me, and I’m just a fellow there. The university graciously provides me with interns and geeks and a server for our wiki and our blogs and stuff like that. But in the long run we need ProjectVRM to be independent as well.

And we need all the help we can get.

I had to read that first ‘graph a couple of times.

From where I sit in the Sonoran desert, it looks fairly insulting to those of us who live outside the ivy-covered walls.

Please identify this “we” who thinks so little of their fellow human beings.

I wish that, when most of us in the webbed world speak about “content,” we actually mean “the substance of cognition,” or just, well, substance. I remember many years ago working with an especially generic VP — a guy who looked the part, but had nothing of substance to offer. About him one of his workers said, “He has no content.”

Alas, when online marketers today (as Deb points out) talk about “user generated content,” they’re usually talking about something which, for the economic purposes of the medium, is little other than advertising bait.