Stephen Downes

There's some interesting thinking happening in this article, though I fear it may be based on a fatal flaw. In ordinary commerce - that is, the day-to-day encounters between people in the real world - a lot of our intentions and expectations are tacit. Clothing, for example, can signal in a non-explicit way how we want to be treated by other people. But no such mechanism exists in the digital space, and so service providers are (according to this story) forced to resort to deep surveillance in order to understand what you want. This, writes Searls, creates the case for an intention-based internet "where the demand side of the marketplace can better signal its wants, needs, and ability to engage in mutually beneficial ways." More on this idea here. The problem, in my view, is that this depends on our being able to make explicit knowledge about ourselves that is generally tacit. We probably can't do this effectively.