Doc Searls Weblog

So I just got this email from Pandora:

This is an #AAF: an Automated Assumption Fail. I love music, and Pandora; but what Pandora’s telling me here doesn’t square with my experience of using it. I mean, what is “that Lorde song”? Who are are the Royals? Maybe I do like them, but I don’t recognize them at the moment.

The reason these are mysteries to me is that I’m not the only person using my Pandora account. Listening to my Pandora songs happens on many devices in many places. And, while I’m the one doing most (but not all) of the listening on my many browsers, computers and hand-held devices, in our house I’m just one listener among many indulging our Sonos system. Those others include  house guests at our parties and other gatherings, plus our teenage son. I would love to show you the wackily eclectic list of “my” Pandora channels, but I can’t, because I’m in Spain, where Pandora is blocked. When I go to Pandora.com, I get redirected to http://www.pandora.com/restricted, where (for me, at the moment) it says this:

Enter your email address and we will let you know when Pandora is available in your country:

I should pause here to say that I love what Tim has done with Pandora. I’ve been a fan and a follower of Pandora since its beginning, and I enjoyed the privilege of introducing Tim when he spoke at a Berkman Center gathering a few years back. I also believe there are a great many things Pandora is doing right, or it wouldn’t be so successful. (And it is a huge success.)

But one thing it’s doing wrong here, or at least poorly, is assuming two things here that are not the case. One is that I’m at home in Spain, when in fact I’m a traveling American. The other is that those 130 thumbs were all mine.In fact I don’t do the thumbs-up/down thing very much, usually because Pandora assumes that I don’t like the tune in question — when in fact I usually don’t want to hear that very tune at that very time. Also, I don’t like being told that I won’t hear that tune again for another month, or whatever it is that Pandora says… I’m not in a position to check right now.)

I also assume that there is a lot of #AAF in the absurd and counterproductive licensing restraints Tim talks about in his letter to blocked visitors. Really, it’s crazy that I can listen to all the music on SiriusXM, Apple’s iTunes, websites and countless mobile apps — including TuneIn, AOL, Public Radio Player, Stitcher, rdio, iheartradio, and Wunderadio — while Pandora is blocked. Why would Spain pick on Pandora and not the rest of them? Just because it’s popular? I dunno.

And, speaking of #AAF, when I go to Google to do research, its robot brain assumes I’m Spanish, even when I’m logged in to Google as my 100% American self. When I check less fancy and presumptuous search engines, such as DuckDuckGo and StartPage, I still have to do too much digging, because the engines assume I’m searching for something other than the question of why Spain blocks Pandora. So I’ll leave it up to the rest of you (or the fullness of time) to complete that work.

Let’s be clear: #AAF is not the fault of Pandora, Google or any other outfit needing to scale its dealings with many different people. It’s the fault of the industrial model that has been defaulted ever since industry won the Industrial Revolution and mass manufacture and marketing was required for scale.

It is also unavoidable in an all-silo marketplace, which is what the Web, with its calf-cow architecture, has become. In this architecture, every outfit maintains its own relationship silo, each of which bears the full burden of dealing with thousands or millions of different human beings in scalable templated ways. This problem cannot be solved by #YAS — Yet Another Silo — of any kind.

The only cure for #AAF is independent personal control of relationships. This is what #VRM — Vendor Relationship Management — is about. Maybe somebody here (or some combination there) is working on it. Whether they are or not, it’s inevitable, for three reasons:

1. We are all different, even if we are easily templated by others. This absolute individuation is a base-level human condition.
2. We live in a fully networked world, in which each of us is our own node.
3. The only way we can truly relate, as complete and independent human beings, with full agency, is from our own silos, within which reside the means to relate directly with every other entity we engage. Think about it: our bodies are silos.

That #3 point is the development challenge for the 21st century. The tech sector has been working since 1995 on empowering the vendor side of the marketplace, helping companies, sites and services get their own scale, every one of them with its own silo — together compounding inconvenience won the personal side. Thus every “solution” on the vendor side complicates the problem.

This is a problem that can only be addressed on the individual side. Personal computing and networking create the base conditions for solving the problem, but we need more. We need universal engagement tools for individuals. That category is a $0 trillion greenfield that’s wide open and ready for exploiting, right now.

Look at it this way. We got personal computing in the 80s, personal networking in the 90s, and both together in hand-held form in the ’00s. Now it’s time for personal clouds. (And if not that, something like it.)

Remember: personal computing was an oxymoron before it took off in the ’80s. Networking was entirely an organizational grace before the Internet came along. Likewise with clouds. Right now almost the entire cloud conversation is corporate: B2B. So is the “big data” conversation. Today’s prevailing jive about both are sure signs that they’ll become just as personal as computing and networking.

When clouds do become personal, they will also be private. By that I mean we will control our own private places, spaces, relationships and interactivity in the networked world. (Those will also be programmable, e.g. with KRL.) Once we have personal clouds, based on standards that work for all of us, we will be able to relate in our own ways with everybody and everything else.

Imagine, for example, being able to actually know a company, and have them know you. That way, when you show up as yourself (and there can be no doubt it’s you), you won’t need logins and passwords. (Remember, those are record-keeping namespace burdens on the organizational side today, and huge pains in the ass for those organizations — as well as for you and me.)

Think about being able to change your address or surname for every entity you relate with, in one move. This is only possible if you are a free and autonomous actor in the world, operating with full agency, and not just as a separate administrated entity in hundreds of different organizations’ databases. Your identity (and your ability to identify yourselves and to interact with others) will be sovereign in the sense of having independent authority. (Yes, you will always also be social. But not just as an administrated identity within corporate silos such as Facebook’s and Twitter’s.)

I believe it’s exactly in this direction that Fred Wilson was headed in his talk at Le Web (which I visited a few days ago), and where Bruce Schneier, Eben Moglen (separately and together) and other freedom-lovers are also headed as well.

It is toward that long vector that I bring up #AAF as a problem. Meanwhile, let’s not burden the Pandoras and Googles of the world with solving it. They can’t. We can only solve it for ourselves — and then, as a consequence, for them.

Finally, thanks to @TimWestergren and @Pandora for providing modest evidence of a problem for all of us — and a path toward solving it.