Searls begins his introductory chapter as follows:

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Music of the future? Or not? Doc Searls doesn't think so. According to him, we are heading towards a future in which the customer is finally king. In this coming era, the customer has access to and control over all his data and decides for himself which party may do something with his data. Based on the intentions of the customer, companies must compete with each other to see who best satisfies the needs.


In March 2006, Doc Searls attended the Emerging Technologies conference in San Diego. Searls had agreed to write an article for Linux Journal on the conference theme: “ The Attention Economy” . An economy in which attention is a scarce commodity. An eyeball economy, in which companies compete for the attention of the consumer through advertising. Economist Herbert A. Simon explains this economy as follows:

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

As Searls sat in the audience, however, the following turkey phone data thought crossed his mind: “Why build an economy around attention, when intention is where the money comes from?” This brainwave resulted in an article with the catchy headline “ The Intention Economy ” . It was 6 years before he published a book with the same title in 2012, in which he had elaborated on all his ideas about this concept.

When the customer is king


“[…] Over the coming years, customers will be emancipated from systems built to control them. They will become free and independent actors in the marketplace, equipped to tell vendors what they want, how they want it, where, and when – even how much they'd like to pay – outside of any vendor's system of custom control. Customers will be able to form and break relationships with vendors, on customers' own terms, and not just on the take-it-or-leave it terms that have been pro forma since industry won the industrial revolution.”

Searls' groundbreaking idea is that we are moving towards an economy that is driven by the intentions of consumers. We are moving from a mass industry, dominated by.