On the geofences we’re already building

I was just pointed to the Geofencing Manifesto, “created by the audience at the SxSW 2014 workshop entitled ‘The Future Landscape of Geofencing Manifesto’ on Saturday, March 8th, 2014.” Leading the workshop were Jay Wilson (@jwsfl), Jenessa Carder (@expressanything) and Kevin Pound, all with SapientNitro, “a new breed of agency for an always-on world” that is “redefining how stories can be told across brand, digital and commerce.” Additional inks: workshop, guidelines.

I salute their good efforts. Could be they’ll get farther with this than other agencies have. There are also some existing contexts they will need to consider as they press forward with this and similar efforts. So, to help with that,  I’ll run them down:

1. There is work already going on here, by the EFF,  Mozilla, ProjectVRM and others.
2. The Geofencing Manifesto appears to be a marketing document. Meaning, it seems to be a form of outreach from marketing. It also frames the geofencing challenge — correctly — in the context of huge push-back against marketing by its targets.
3. We have some manifestos already, starting with Cluetrain, which laid out the situation pretty well in 1999. It does help that marketing embraced Cluetrain rather enthusiastically, especially the idea that markets are conversations. (That was Cluetrain’s first thesis, expanded a few months later into a whole book chapter.)
4. We are not just “consumers.” As Cluetrain put it, “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.” Persons, people, individuals and customers are all better terms.
5. There have never been mutual and consenting relationships between marketers and the people they call “targets,” and which they seek to “acquire,” “manage,” “control” and “lock in” as if they were slaves or cattle. For example, programs called “loyalty” involve all the words in that last sentence, and are by nature coercive. They are all different from each other as well, requiring the customer to maintain separate “relationships” with every marketing operation, which is a huge inconvenience and an industrial-age affront to the peer-to-peer design of the Net in the first place.
6. Let’s face it: until we build those fences, and get tools of our own for managing real relationships, on our terms, all we’ll get from marketing is more respectful and conversational forms of the same old thing. Meaning it’s our job, not marketing’s.
7. There is nothing in the history of marketing to suggests that it will work cooperatively with “consumers” to come up with something agreeable to both that will lock out all marketing intrusions. This is especially true in the Age of Data, because…
8. Data is to marketing as blood is to Dracula. Telling surveillance-oriented marketing “Let’s work together on what we agree to let you suck from our necks” won’t get us very far in the dark and bat-filled night that the commercial Web has become.
9. The only way to build fences that work is for us to build them ourselves, which is what we’ve been doing with ProjectVRM.
10. Geo is an interesting angle, especially in the mobile world. I like it. Privacy in the physical world tends to be spacial, and matching that in the virtual world seems a good thing. Bonus link: Clothing as a privacy system.

So we invite Jay, Venessa, Kevin and other well-intended marketers to come check out the work already going on here and elsewhere. (A good place to start is at our development work list.) I also suggest they come as individuals and not as marketers. In other words, stand on our side of the fence. Trust me: doing that will make marketing a lot better than anything marketing can do alone, or with the help of cooperating “consumers.” (For more on the customer/consumer distinction, go here, here, here and here.)