Doc Searls sent this to a bunch of us.  I’ve been reading through his other blogs and I don’t see it - so I thought I’d reprint it here. I’m sure he won’t mind.

As with all stories, all narratives, there is the matter of framing.

For too long we have framed the Net — especially in the press (where I work, along with Aarti) — in terms of What Big Vendors Are Up To. In crass but accurate terms, we like to cover vendor sports.

But another frame has been there since the beginning, and largely ignored. It’s What Individuals Are Up To.

As we put it in The Cluetrain Manifesto <http://cluetrain.com> (way back in early 1999), “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.”

This new Bill of Rights delivers what Cluetrain promised: Power to, and from, the individual. It’s human reach that exceeds corporate grasp.

By ignoring growth in personal power while we’re busy covering vendor sports, we in the media have also missed another story: the compromised and vulnerable nature of the advertising-supported business model. The rise in personal power on the Net inevitably exposes structural as well as financial problems with that model. This exposure is long overdue. I submit that one reason the media have missed it is that we’re funded by advertising too. Even if we’re not influenced by it, we do take it for granted.

The structural problem is this: our customers and our consumers are different populations. This split didn’t matter for most of the last two hundred years. But now it does, thanks to the Net and the Web, where consumers are also producers. The demand side also supplies.

This change is profound. It’s more than a sea change. It’s a whole new world where we’re all a functional distance of zero from each other, where goods that cost nothing can have $billions in leverage.

So it should come as no surprise that this new class of supplier would eventually insist on control — even ownership — of the data goods that bait eyeballs and clicks at social websites. Or anywhere else on the Web.

It’s also important to contemplate the certainty that advertising’s gravy train will slow or stop when less wasteful and speculative ways can be found to bring customers, and not just eyeballs, to companies funding the advertising bubble.

Those ways will be found, but not on the supply side. The freedom we seek and insist upon is native to each of us as individuals. It is not something given to us by suppliers. We have to insist on it ourselves, and assert it in the marketplace. And, in the process, make possible new businesses that help us do that.

We as individuals need to be equipped to express demand, provide supply and form relationships on *our* terms, and not just those of vendors, with their (usually) controlling and one-sided TOS agreements.

There will be a lot of business in helping demand find supply, rather than vice versa. A new economy will grow out of that activity, and it is essential in this new economy that we make clear who owns what, who has rights to what, and what can be done with what.

It helps that the goods in question — ones provided by users to “social” sites such as Facebook — are not sold in the marketplace, but freely given. This helps us avoid the morass in which the recording and movie industries find themselves, where the goods have a dollar value to begin with.

But there is still much hard work ahead as we build out our new world where vendors no longer rule, no matter how big they are. That work starts with recognizing this world as a fact.

I salute the authors and supporters of this Bill for getting the ball rolling. Rock on.

Best,

Doc

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 3:07 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.