A customer looks at a market where choice rules and nobody owns anybody. Source: Microsoft Copilot | Designer

I’m in a discussion of business constituencies. On the list (sourced from the writings of Doug Shapiro) are investors, employees, suppliers, customers, and regulators.

The first three are aware of their membership, but the last two? Not so sure.

Since ProjectVRM works for customers, let’s spin the question around. Do customers have a business constituency? If so, businesses are members by the customer’s grace. She can favor, ignore, or more deeply engage with any of those businesses at her pleasure. She does not “belong” to any of them, even though any or all of them may refer to her, or their many other customers, with possessive pronouns.

Take membership (e.g. Costco, Sam’s Club) and loyalty (CVS, Kroger) programs off the table. Membership systems are private markets, and loyalty programs are misnomered. (For more about that, read the “Dysloyalty” chapter of The Intention Economy.)

Let’s look instead at businesses that customers engage as a matter of course: contractors, medical doctors, auto mechanics, retail stores, restaurants, clubs, farmers’ markets, whatever. Some may be on speed dial, but most are not. What matters in all cases is that these businesses are responsible to their customers. “The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers,” Adam Smith writes. “It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.” That’s what it means to be a customer’s constituent.

An early promise of the Internet was supporting that “effectual discipline.” For the most part, that hasn’t happened. The “one clue” in The Cluetrain Manifesto 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.” Thanks to ubiquitous surveillance and capture by corporate giants and unavoidable platforms, corporate grasp far outreaches customer agency.

That’s one reason ProjectVRM has been working against corporate grasp since 2006, and just as long for customer reach. Our case from the start has been that customer independence and agency are good for business. We just need to prove it.

Maybe history will defeat itself.

Remember FreePC? It was a thing, briefly, at the end of the last millennium, right before Y2K pooped the biggest excuse for a party in a thousand years. This may help. The idea was to put ads in the corner of your PC’s screen. The market gave it zero stars, and it failed.

And now comes Telly, hawking free TVs with ads in a corner, and a promise to “optimize your ad experience.” As if anybody wants an ad experience other than no advertising at all.

Negative demand for advertising has been well advertised by both ad blocking (the biggest boycott in human history) and ad-free “prestige” TV, (or SVOD, for subscription video on demand). With those we gladly pay—a lot— not to see advertising. (See numbers here.)

But the advertising business (in the mines of which I toiled for too much of my adult life) has always smoked its own exhaust and excels best at getting high with generous funders. (Yeah, some advertising works, but on the whole people still hate it on the receiving end.)

The fun will come when our own personal AI bots, working for our own asses, do battle with the robot Nazgûls of marketing — and win, because we’re on the Demand side of the marketplace, and we’ll do a better job of knowing what we want and don’t want to buy than marketing’s surveillant AI robots can guess at. Supply will survive, of course. But markets will defeat marketing by taking out the middle creep.

The end state will be one Cluetrain forecast in 1999, Linux Journal named in 2006, the VRM community started working on that same year, and The Intention Economy detailed in 2012. The only thing all of them missed was how customer intentions might be helped by personal AI.

Personal.* Not personalized.

Markets will become new and better dances between Demand and Supply, simply because Demand will have better ways to take the lead, and not just follow all the time. Simple as that.

*For more on how this will work, see Individual Empowerment and Agency on a Scale We’ve Never Seen Before.