Pictures Unpack 20,669 Words

That’s a small sample of some great work by the artist R. Siskoryak, who (Wikipedia tells us), usually “specializes in making comic adaptations of literature classics”, but has now graphically adapted the complete text of what Joe Coscarelli (@JoeCoscarelli) of The New York Times (in Artist Helps iTunes’ User Agreement Go Down Easy), calls “the complete text of Apple’s mind-numbing corporate boilerplate” one must agree to before using iTunes.

The adaptation has its own Tumblr site, where it says, “@rsikoryak is on tour to promote the new color edition of Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel, out now from @drawnandquarterly.” Hence the image above. His  well-illustrated bio there is fun too. You can also read the original Tumblr version from the beginning here.

He’ll be appearing (and, presumably speaking and showing) at the Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway, 10003, with Kenneth Goldsmith, at 7pm this evening (Thursday, March 9). He’s already been in Baltimore. Next up:

• Pittsburgh, PA, Friday, March 17, 2017 – 6:00pm, ToonSeum with Copacetic Comics. 945 Liberty Ave, 15222
• Cincinnati, OH, Tuesday, March 21, 2017 – 7:00pm, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 2692 Madison Ave., 45208 with Carol Tyler
• New York, NY, Friday, March 24, 2017 – 4:00pm, Spring Symposium, Cardozo Law Journal, moderated by Brett Frischmann
• Rochester, NY, Wednesday, April 12, 2017 – 4:00pm, Rochester Institute of Technology, Bamboo Room in the Student Alumni Union, 1 Lomb Memorial Dr, 14623
• Toronto, ON, Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Friday, May 12, 2017 – 9:00am to Sunday, May 14, 2017 – 5:00pm, Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge

Meanwhile, here are a few things we’ve been doing (both through ProjectVRM and CustomerCommons, which is working with the Consent & Information Sharing Working Group at Kantara) on terms and conditions you, the individual formerly known as “the user” (as if you’re on drugs) can assert as the first party. In other words, ways companies such as Apple can click “agree” to what you bring to the level table between you both. Four reasons they would do that:

1. We have the Internet now. It’s a flat place. We don’t need to drag industrial age defaults that give companies scale across many customers, but don’t give individuals scale across many companies.
2. Ours can have scale too. This is what Cluetrain promised in 1999 when it said we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it. Sure, companies haven’t heard of customer boilerplate before; but they do like consistency, simplicity, predictability, standardization and saving money and time. Customers’ scalable terms will bring them all.
3. Our terms can be as friendly online as they are off. First example: #NoStalking, which can save the asses of publishers and advertisers, and maybe save journalism too.
4. GDPR compliance. No need to worry about Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation and its scary penalties when agreeing to friendly GDPR-compliant terms proffered by individuals obviates the whole thing.

Bonus links:

• EmanciTerm (An early brand-like name we came up with for a term an individual might assert. The two below are examples.)
• #NoStalking, which we explain in How customers can debug business with one line of code (19 April 2016 here, and in Medium), and in Why #NoStalking is a good deal for publishers (11 May 2016  here, and in Medium).  Here is the current draft of the term itself.
• #Intentcasting, which we have visited in many posts here. Here is the current draft for some intentcasting terms.

We will also be visiting all of these—on both the first and second party sides—at VRM Day, and then at the 24th Internet Identity Workshop, which happen together the first week of May at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

“Disruption” isn’t the whole VRM story

The vast oeuvre of Marshall McLuhan contains a wonderful approach to understanding media called the tetrad (i.e. foursome) of media effects.  You can apply it to anything, from stone tools to robots. McLuhan unpacks it with four questions:

1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?

I suggest that VRM—

1. Enhances CRM
2. Obsoletes marketing guesswork, especially adtech
3. Retrieves conversation
4. Reverses or flips into the bazaar

Note that many answers are possible. That’s why McLuhan poses the tetrad as questions. Very clever and useful.

I bring this up for three reasons:

1. The tetrad is also helpful for understanding every topic that starts with “disruption.” Because a new medium (or technology) does much more than just disrupt or obsolete an old one—yet not so much more that it can’t be understood inside a framework.
2. The idea from the start with VRM has never been to disrupt or obsolete CRM, but rather to give it a hand to shake—and a way customers can pull it out of the morass of market-makers (especially adtech) that waste its time, talents and energies.
3. After ten years of ProjectVRM, we still don’t have a single standardized base VRM medium (e.g. a protocol), even though we have by now hundreds of developers we call VRM in one way or another. Think of this missing medium as a single way, or set of ways, that VRM demand can interact with CRM supply, and give every customer scale across all the companies they deal with. We’ve needed that from the start. But perhaps, with this handy pedagogical tool, we can look thorugh one framework toward both the causes and effects of what we want to make happen.

I expect this framework to be useful at VRM Day (May 1 at the Computer History Museum) and at IIW on the three days that follow there.

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