Chapter 1
When Customers Take Control: The Dawn of a New Economic Era
What if the tables were turned and you, the customer, had the power to declare exactly what you wanted to buy, at what price, and under what terms-with businesses competing to meet your needs? This revolutionary vision forms the heart of Doc Searls' groundbreaking book "The Intention Economy." As a founding author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" (one of Time Magazine's top 10 business books of 2000), Searls has spent decades analyzing how the internet transforms commerce. What began as a 2006 insight at Harvard's Berkman Center has evolved into a movement challenging our fundamental understanding of markets. With tech luminaries like Tim O'Reilly and business leaders across industries embracing its principles, the book's vision of customer liberation has influenced everything from data privacy regulations to the design of modern customer experience platforms. In a world where we've become accustomed to being tracked, targeted and manipulated as consumers, Searls dares to imagine something radically different: truly free customers in truly free markets.
Chapter 2
From Attention to Intention: A Fundamental Market Shift
For decades, we've lived in what's called the Attention Economy-a marketplace where sellers work relentlessly to capture and control buyers. Companies invest billions in advertising, marketing, and customer relationship management systems designed to find, target, and acquire customers. The entire commercial web has been built around this model: capturing our attention, tracking our movements, and attempting to predict our behavior through increasingly sophisticated surveillance systems.
But what if we've been building our economy on the wrong foundation? What if attention isn't the most valuable resource in the marketplace?
The Intention Economy proposes something revolutionary: that customer intention-what we actually want and plan to buy-is far more valuable than our attention. In this emerging economy, customers will no longer be passive targets of marketing campaigns but active participants who declare their intentions to the market. Instead of sellers hunting buyers, buyers will notify sellers of their intent to purchase, with vendors competing to meet their needs.
This isn't just theoretical. Projects like VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) are already developing tools that will allow customers to manage relationships with vendors on their own terms. These tools will enable customers to store and control their own data, express their buying intentions directly to the market, set their own terms of engagement, and maintain independence while engaging more productively with vendors.
The core thesis is simple yet profound: free customers are more valuable than captive ones, and free markets require free customers. When customers can express their actual intentions rather than having companies guess at them through surveillance and data mining, the entire marketplace becomes more efficient. Vendors can respond to real demand rather than estimated demand, eliminating wasted resources on unwanted products and ineffective marketing.
This shift represents the demand-side revolution the internet has been building toward. While e-commerce transformed the supply side of business, giving companies new ways to reach customers, the Intention Economy represents the coming transformation of the demand side-giving customers new powers to drive the market on their terms.
Chapter 3
The Advertising Bubble: Guesswork at Scale
The advertising industry exists fundamentally as a form of guesswork-companies trying to predict what might capture our attention and persuade us to buy. This industry has grown to staggering proportions, with global advertising spending projected to exceed half a trillion dollars annually. Yet these enormous numbers measure tolerance more than effectiveness.
Television exemplifies this dynamic. In America, hour-long TV dramas contain just 42 minutes of content with 18 minutes of advertising-a 30% ad load that appears to be the upper limit of human tolerance. Online platforms initially showed restraint, with services like Hulu selling just two minutes of ads per half-hour. However, as comScore research suggested, the industry believed it had "erred" by running too few ads online.
This advertising model faces two existential threats. First, demographics: younger viewers increasingly watch content on devices other than traditional televisions, with the majority of 18-24 year-olds already watching primarily on internet-connected devices. Second, choice: technologies like DVRs allow viewers to skip commercials entirely, with research showing 85% of DVR users skip at least three-quarters of all ads.
As content migrates to internet delivery, the advertising industry confronts a fundamental challenge: television was built to make viewers watch ads, while the internet is built to let users do whatever they want. Industry experts like Terry Heaton and Bob Garfield have been sounding alarms, with Garfield declaring we've entered the "post-advertising age" and describing the current situation as "apocalypse now" for the industry.
Despite these warnings, online advertising persists through increasingly invasive tracking and targeting. The Wall Street Journal's investigative series "What They Know" revealed the explosive growth of online surveillance, with major websites installing hundreds of tracking devices on visitors' computers. Companies like BlueKai trade data on over 200 million internet users, while firms like x+1 combine browsing data with personal records to build detailed profiles. "We never don't know anything about someone," boasted their CEO.
Yet despite this surveillance, the results remain disappointing. Clickthrough rates are dismal-even ads "above the fold" (visible without scrolling) achieve less than 1% engagement. From advertising's perspective, this waste is acceptable because advertising has always been guesswork. Online, the waste is simply relocated from physical media to server farms and pixels.
The fundamental problem is that tracking and "personalizing"-advertising's current frontier-test the limits of consumer tolerance while abandoning one of advertising's few noble virtues: respect for privacy. Companies like Reedge and Rocket Fuel share a common assumption: that user intent is something they must decipher rather than something users might express directly. The distance between what tracking does and what users actually want is so extreme that backlash is inevitable.
Chapter 4
The Client-Server Trap: Your Choice of Captor
The Internet and the World Wide Web are distinct entities. While the Internet connects disparate networks through protocols that put every end at equal distance, the Web is just one application running on it. Tim Berners-Lee intended the Web as "a universal linked information system" for finding important information, not the vast commercial space it has become.
The fundamental problem lies in the Web's client-server design, which might better be called "calf-cow." Servers (cows) feed clients (calves) milk mixed with tracking cookies. This submissive-dominant relationship puts servers in control of defining relationships and maintaining all the details, while we're stuck managing countless separate identities across the billion commercial sites on the Web.
Before personal computing, enterprises struggled with proliferating namespaces-different software systems using different identifiers for the same employees. On today's Web, this problem has shifted to consumers. While each seller has one customer-facing system, we must track hundreds of different logins and passwords across the commercial web's billions of sites.
Though workarounds exist-browsers that auto-complete forms, password managers, and "single sign-on" services from Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Yahoo-they create their own problems. Facebook Connect, for example, presumptuously positions your Facebook identity as "your online identity" and creates unintended data spillage. Even if you only want to use it as a login shortcut, it shares your activities with friends and doesn't allow selective sharing of different data with different sites.
The deeper issue is control. As Kim Cameron notes, your "natural identity" gets no respect online, with every website branding you as its own. Federation between companies is merely "large companies having safe sex with customer data."
The problem worsens when you maintain multiple accounts with one service. Managing separate accounts for personal and professional use requires constantly logging in and out or using different browsers. On mobile devices, this becomes so cumbersome many users don't bother.
The business world sees this captive customer model as desirable. Media outlets cover "vendor sports" where customers are prizes, and business writers casually refer to companies "controlling customers." In this dairy farm marketplace, captive customers are valued more than free ones-to the detriment of both worlds.
Chapter 5
Lopsided Relationships: The End of One-Sided Contracts
Our marketplace has forgotten what freedom of contract means. We've become accustomed to one-sided "agreements" that nail down the submissive party while allowing the dominant party freedom to change terms at will.
These "contracts of adhesion" are legally binding agreements where one party has all bargaining power. Google's terms exemplify this imbalance with clauses stating that merely using their services constitutes acceptance of terms, and that Google can change terms anytime. This means companies like Apple can change 55-page Terms of Use documents regularly while customers must either accept or abandon the service.
For nearly all websites and services, privacy policies are mere ass-coverage for companies and PR for users. They're filled with contradictions, like Linden Lab's policy that "requires" new entities to follow old policies while allowing personal information to be used "contrary" to policy with prior notice.
As competitive capitalism moved toward monopoly, contracts lost their foundation in "genuineness and reality of consent." The industrial revolution created a conundrum where mass-everything required standardized legal mechanisms, abandoning contract's core principles to accommodate companies with thousands or millions of customers.
While some adhesion contracts can be deemed unconscionable in court, the commercial Web got a major validation through ProCD v. Zeidenberg in 1995, where Judge Easterbrook ruled shrinkwrap licenses enforceable unless objectionable on general contract grounds, paving the way for e-commerce as we know it.
These contracts remain unchallenged as long as only one side writes the agreements, they must cover all possibilities, and the other side can only agree or walk away-nearly impossible in our networked world.
The context-less nature of mass markets perfectly matches the context-less Web, explaining why boilerplate contracts look similar regardless of company size. Yet networked markets, though massive in geometry, still involve millions of distinct individuals connecting end-to-end. Nothing prevents individuals from acquiring tools to assert their own terms as equals with sellers-tools currently in development that will transform how we engage with businesses online.
Chapter 6
The Networked Marketplace: A New Economic Infrastructure
The Internet has become so mundane we barely recognize its revolutionary impact. Despite this progress, two major roadblocks remain: no agreed-upon understanding of what the Internet actually is, and the resistance of legacy telecommunications companies to evolve beyond their traditional business models.
When searching "The Internet is" online, results range from "terrible" to "a copy machine" to "made of cats," revealing our fragmented understanding of this unprecedented system. The Internet isn't a thing but a protocol-based agreement (TCP/IP) designed simply to move data packets between endpoints with "best effort." Unlike businesses, it has no purpose beyond connectivity and no business model-which paradoxically enables it to support trillions of dollars in commercial activity that wouldn't otherwise exist.
The Internet's future is a battleground between "any" (protocols that enable unlimited possibilities) and "only" (governments and businesses seeking to restrict access and control). Net-heads frame the Internet as a virtual space with neutrality and generativity that should be maximized, while bell-heads see it as private property owners can manage as they please.
The economy has its own virtual Internet of protocols connecting buyers and sellers, explaining why business and the Internet work so well together. The Net's capacity expands with every protocol added, following the "end-to-end principle" that places intelligence at the network's edges rather than with intermediaries. David Isenberg's 1997 paper "The Rise of the Stupid Network" argued against AT&T's belief that networks need all-knowing companies in the middle, showing how entrepreneurs without telecom assumptions created profitable, widely-available data services like Amazon and eBay.
David Weinberger describes the Web as a new world without geography, boundaries, or common sense. Craig Burton envisions the Internet as a hollow sphere where every point is visible to every other with "functionally zero" distance between them. This zero-distance enables global reach and worldwide publishing without intermediary fees.
Internet protocols like RSS embody "NEA" principles: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, Anybody can improve it. The success of Ethernet over IBM's token ring demonstrates the difference between making money "with" a technology versus "because" it's free-creating new markets that benefit everyone.
The Net's "because effects" (positive externalities) create incalculable value, improving as connectivity costs approach zero. While Big Government and Big Business will resist, the Net's evolution is toward ambient connectivity that will resemble "everything, together."
Chapter 7
The Live Web: From Static Pages to Real-Time Engagement
The Live Web transcends static websites by enabling real-time engagement. While early search engines indexed the Web every few days, they couldn't show what was happening in real time. Blogs with RSS feeds became the first widespread Live Web species, followed by Twitter and Facebook, which demonstrated the Web's live nature dramatically during events like earthquakes. However, these platforms are merely prototypes of what's to come-as temporary as AOL and CompuServe were for the Static Web.
To understand the Live Web's future, we must look to cities rather than companies or natural environments. With Earth's population surpassing seven billion and over half living in cities (82% in the US), cities demonstrate remarkable resilience compared to businesses. Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West discovered that cities scale superlinearly while plants, animals and companies scale sublinearly. This means cities need less energy to keep growing as they expand, while companies require more.
Companies follow a sigmoidal growth pattern-they hockey-stick up, bend over, and eventually die. Even with innovation and renewal, companies face increasing costs of bigness that eventually become unsustainable unless they divide into smaller pieces. Cities, however, persist as networks of many living things, providing increasing returns with scale: higher wages, more creative people, and more patents per capita.
Cities thrive because they're networks that combine living systems with others of related kinds, creating economies of scale with increasing returns. The Internet effectively gives all connected civilization the online benefits of living in a city-making it humanity's largest city. Cities are inherently generative, fostering invention, innovation, and adaptation. They embody commons properties, naturally grow around marketplaces and commerce connections, and are fundamentally collections of customers-ideally customers with full agency.
While "agency" commonly refers to organizations acting on others' behalf, its deeper meaning involves acting for oneself. In the Intention Economy, liberated customers enjoy full personal agency and employ agents who respect their granted powers. Today's marketplace severely limits customer agency. For example, as a frequent flyer with extensive aviation knowledge and predictable preferences, my self-actualization as a passenger is reduced to a mileage status within United's system. Other airlines can't know what they're missing because their data is confined to their own CRM systems or purchased from data mills that don't represent my actual agency.
True progress requires agency belonging to customers, not companies. While business literature abounds with self-actualization guidance for companies and employees, almost nothing exists about customer self-actualization. Being customers is only part-time work for most people, yet we bring more to markets than fits into any seller's systems.
Chapter 8
VRM: Tools for Customer Independence
VRM began as a development project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 2006, aiming to encourage tools that empower individuals outside any corporate framework. While related to digital identity work, VRM focuses on customer empowerment that affects the whole of business. By 2011, the ProjectVRM wiki listed dozens of development projects, companies and organizations working to make customers both independent of vendors and better able to engage with them on customers' own terms.
VRM aims to: provide personal tools for managing relationships with organizations; make individuals the collection centers for their own data; enable selective data sharing; give individuals control over how their data is used; allow individuals to assert their own terms of service; provide means for expressing demand in the open market; base relationship tools on open standards and APIs; and make relationships work both ways, adapting existing CRM systems to interact with customer-side tools.
VRM tools are personal (used by individuals), make users independent, help customers express intent, facilitate engagement, assist with relationship management, and are substitutable (preventing lock-in). While everyday items like mobile phones and cars fulfill some of these criteria, they're not perfectly aligned with VRM principles due to carrier lock-ins and walled gardens.
Several Internet-native applications already qualify as VRM tools and serve as models for new development. Email protocols (SMTP, POP, IMAP) exemplify NEA principles-Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them, Anybody can improve them. Unlike the closed proprietary mail platforms that preceded them, these protocols give users freedom to choose any server or client. Open source platforms like WordPress and Drupal, along with Dave Winer's OPML outliner and RSS, give individuals publishing powers once reserved for giant companies without locking users into any single platform.
Among major browsers, only Mozilla's Firefox fully stands on the individual's side, described as "the only browser that has your back." The problem is that browsers have become shopping carts rather than personal vehicles that give us true independence online. We need tools that function more like cars-substitutable goods that let us bring our personal data with us wherever we go.
In business transactions, parties are numbered ordinally: first, second, and third. First and second parties have legal agreements, while third parties have interests but no legal rights unless recognized as beneficiaries. As customers employ more tools for dealing with vendors, a new category-fourth parties-is emerging to help demand drive supply. These are entities whose interests align with customers or who act as agents for customers.
Fourth parties are characterized by substitutability, service portability, data portability, independence, and accountability. Examples include mail filtering services, userscripts, virtual assistants, buyer's agents in real estate, and professionals like doctors and lawyers.
Chapter 9
The Dance: A New Relationship Between Customers and Vendors
The Intention Economy creates a marketplace where vendors and customers lead and follow each other in a mutual dance of value exchange. The relationship begins with the author's personal experience with Trader Joe's, where his wife's shopping preferences influenced their housing choice-demonstrating how customer intentions drive market relationships. Trader Joe's succeeds by acting as a "purchasing agent for the customer" rather than manipulating them. With $8 billion in sales and merchandise selling at $1,750 per square foot (double Whole Foods'), Trader Joe's demonstrates how serving customer intentions creates business success without traditional marketing gimmicks.
The word "consumer" originated in the 15th century meaning "one who squanders," evolving by 1776 to be the economic counterpart of "producer," and by the mid-20th century to mean members of mass markets-"gullets with wallets and eyeballs." While consumers have power only in groups, customers are distinct individuals requiring respect for their uniqueness. This fundamental difference explains why Trader Joe's and some other retailers avoid the term "consumer" entirely.
The respect customers want goes beyond courtesy to understanding that each brings unique knowledge, beliefs and intentions that can't be duplicated by "big data" constructions. Simply getting attention as consumers won't suffice anymore, regardless of how "personalized" the experience.
In value chains, "vendor" refers to upstream suppliers while "customer" refers to downstream buyers. Retailers like Target call customers "guests," avoiding the term "consumer" which denotes collectivity rather than individuality. However, business language often betrays underlying attitudes, as when a Target executive admitted "We do everything we can to own the customer"-essentially describing slavery.
Ellen Ruppel Shell argues in "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture" that America's "fixation on all things cheap led us astray" and that "sometimes what looks like a bargain is really just a bad loan." Discounting acts as an addictive drug for businesses, exemplified by Groupon's meteoric rise and subsequent valuation issues. Companies hooked on coupons lose clear sense of their products' intrinsic value.
During the dot-com crash, many companies confused their two markets: one for goods/services and one for themselves as investments. This symptom of "financialization"-where financial services dominate economic, cultural and political roles-creates corporate psychosis, detaching businesses from reality. Peter Drucker noted that securities analysts misunderstand business because "they believe money is real" while "companies make shoes."
The original markets were places filled with conversation, where buyers and sellers connected personally through genuine human exchange. As quoted from The Cluetrain Manifesto: "Markets were conversations"-places "where people met to see and talk about each other's work." Today's retail environment features too many companies with megaphones shouting dance moves at customers. Instead, businesses should put down the megaphone and shop alongside customers-sometimes leading, sometimes following.
For the economy to work, vendors and customers need to respect and learn from each other as equals, not with one side dominating. Companies must engage customers as partners, not as "slaves or suckling calves." When businesses truly relate with customers, they discover dance moves impossible when running the show alone.
Chapter 10
The Future of Intention: Where We Go From Here
The Internet functions as a World Wide City and a World Wide Commons-a vast new marketplace where connected companies now operate. Its value grows with each person, device and type of work connected to it, supporting and embracing abundance and difference.
Ed McCabe, an advertising copywriting legend, rejected rules as they "rule out the possibility of brilliant exceptions." Humanity thrives on exceptions-our DNA creates incalculable variety among individuals. John Taylor Gatto discovered that genius is common in children until industrial-age systems confine, segregate, and surveil them. Similarly, customers have been categorized and normalized at great cost-ignoring that we're all sovereign sources of intelligence, not mere "resources."
This human difference explains why cities thrive while large companies often don't. Cities embrace abundant differences in businesses, arts, faiths, and people-each with their own intentions. This diversity is the ultimate hedge against disruption and the primary source of innovation.
Commerce involves both rational and emotional dimensions with moral implications. Most formal moralities follow bookkeeping models-scales of justice, paying for crimes, repaying debts. But there's also a morality of generosity: giving without expectation of exchange, like the love we give family members. Lewis Hyde categorizes these as logos (reason and market economy) and eros (attraction and involvement that binds together).
Life is movement guided by intention. As customers, we don't merely consume-we use, enjoy, invest, share, care, and talk. We want the companies we patronize to survive. Intent is the operative force bringing marketplaces to life, moving money, goods, intelligence, and economic growth.
The industrial age obsession with capturing attention arose when reaching people was difficult and expensive. Today, we can connect easily, make our intentions known personally, and sustain genuine relationships. The Attention Economy will persist, but the Intention Economy will grow "because that's where the money is. And the love, too."
For businesses embracing the Intention Economy, Searls offers these recommendations: Turn your company inside out by exposing core competencies through live APIs; follow and adopt tools from the VRM community; restrain legal departments from creating onerous customer agreements; support a free and open Internet; try personal data stores; embrace freedom, open source, open standards and open markets; look for VRM+CRM integration opportunities; think beyond the Static Web to the Live Web; and stop collecting customer data without permission while making personal data available to customers.
While ProjectVRM will persist as a community, Customer Commons is emerging as an organization for customers in the Intention Economy. Founded on three principles-"We are a community of customers," "We are funded only by customers," and "We serve the interests and aspirations of customers"-Customer Commons will, like Creative Commons, be where simple terms of engagement are compiled and made available for everyone. Beyond that, it's up to every customer who wants to make truly free markets happen.
