Doc’s New Yorker Assault, Redux
Yesterday, we reviewed Doc Searls’ absurd run-in with Condé Nast, whose Customer Deflection System established a new high with its byzantine subscription renewal maze.
See, with most subscription systems, FUBAR is the norm. A matter of course. Pro forma. Entrenched. A box outside of which nobody making, managing or working in those systems can think.
This is why, when an alien idea appears, for example from a loyal customer just wanting a single and simple damn price, the response is “Never gonna happen.”
The Extra Time we were Promised
George Gilder, 1996:
In every industrial transformation, businesses prosper by using the defining abundance of their era to alleviate the defining scarcity. Today this challenge implies a commanding moral imperative: to use Internet bandwidth in order to stop wasting the customer’s time.
Stop the callous cost of queues, the insolence of cold calls, the wanton eyeball pokes and splashes of billboards and unwanted ads, the constant drag of lowest-common-denominator entertainments, the lethal tedium of unneeded travel, the plangent buffeting of TV news and political prattle, the endless temporal dissipation in classrooms, waiting rooms, anterooms, traffic jams, toll booths and assembly lines, through the impertinent tyranny of unneeded and afterwards ignored submission of forms, audits, polls, waivers, warnings, legal pettifoggery.
All these affronts once were tolerable in an age when the customer’s time seemed abundant — an available economic externality in an economy of material scarcity. All are intolerable in an age of compounding abundance, pressing down on the span of life as the irreducible scarcity.
Sound familiar? George Gilder was an early Nethead, certain that the inefficiencies of his age would be alleviated by the magic of the Internet and the web as he envisioned it, a kind of “Gildered Age” of efficiency enjoyed today only by people with a staff of personal assistants. He was also a big fan of Supply-side Economics, which similarly failed to deliver, and despised all regulations and, presumably, the Uniform Commercial Code (“UCC”), governing, well, commercial transactions.
Is it time for a Uniform Online Commercial Code?
Now that everybody’s time has become overwhelmed with the plangent buffeting of online news and political prattle, perhaps it’s time to propose standards of commerce to ensure what Gilder argued for, to use Internet bandwidth “in order to stop wasting the customer’s time”.
Customer Commons needs no permission to draft and promulgate a UOCC, a Uniform Online Commercial Code. Like the Uniform Building Code, etc., it’s a crowdsourced set of standards that has been refined since 1942. “the UCC is the longest and most elaborate of the Uniform Acts. The Code has been a long-term, joint project of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) and the American Law Institute (ALI), which began drafting its first version in 1942.” (Wikipedia) No government regulations required, just local jurisdictions deciding to abide by its standards.
Yes, I know, it sounds like another instance of Balkanization of the Net, but how will customers have any voice in the details of how they are mistreated?
If not Customer Commons, who? If not now, when?
