Rich Text Forever

I’m fairly certain that this is a dumb idea, but I love dumb ideas because they usually go somewhere interesting so I figured I would do my best to explain this one in case you find something worthwhile in it or know someone who might. It’s been driving me a little bit crazy since 2018 or so, and my hope is that by blurting it out it will leave me alone.

I’ll start with a gripe: a lot of marketing sucks to me and the trend of companies always needing to be in touch is insane and annoying. The barrage of requests to buy a product, or review it, or recommend it to a friend, or confirm my next order, or get a coupon for 3 more months of it, ad infinitum is enraging and the open eCommerce web feels fucking feral at this point.

Here’s another gripe: I don’t think most consumer product companies will need a traditional website for much longer, and no one needs an app. One or both used to be important because for the last 20 years or so, all the major players structured the Internet the way a cartel would. Every hit, not just the first one, feels free but is actually costing you dearly, and the resulting dependency mayhem means brands have had to cut through the noise with more noise by building as many storefronts or on-ramps as they can wherever they can. Over that same time period, our personal lives & times became a literal currency for these various “free” platforms and providers, which resulted in an endless competition between them to fill every millisecond of our days with something for us to buy or click on or share. It’s started to feel like Groundhog Day: Black Friday edition and we’re all constantly trapped at the front of the line. Which to me means you don’t really need much of a storefront if your customers never truly leave the store. None of this is new or a revelation, I’m just including it here for some context.

Ok here’s the idea:

I think eCommerce should be made a protocol just like texting was, and that traditional online shopping should happen through messaging. And I don’t mean through a proprietary platform like iMessage or WhatsApp that one of the traditional goons (or a new goon clone) owns and monitors, either. I’ll explain as quickly as I can:

SMS was originally developed to run through spare bandwidth on wireless voice networks, and because there wasn’t much space there, its structure had to be frugal. An SMS standard was developed that provided a rubric for encoding 160-character text messages that any other device with receiver capability could interpret and convert into the original text. This standard resulted in a protocol description unit (PDU) that had all the necessary information for each step of the message’s journey encoded into it. It looked something like this, and made sure your green-tinted howdies and you ups sailed across their enumerated little ocean to the appropriate port(s):

And as wireless tech evolved, the SMS infrastructure did as well:

What I’d like to see done is building the same sort of system for ecommerce but using barcodes (or something similar) and payment tokens in place of an encoded SMS message. You could cut out or reduce a number of different costs for brands on one side, and create a minimalist but feature-savvy experience for shoppers on the other with very minimal exchange of data or information. It could run from warehouse software to this system to individual customer phones with nothing, or nearly nothing, else in between and it could even have payment processing baked in. I’m extremely new to writing software and I’m not intending this to be a filled-out portrait of the system or pretending that I’m getting all of this right. I’ve just been bugged by the idea for awhile that an exchange structure like this could run either completely through SMS or through a private browser-esque experience on the customer’s phones. Sort of like Signal but for shopping, and open-source/decentralized.

I don’t think our time online has to be meaningless and vapid, and I don’t think we have to let folks like Coca-Cola or Samsung spray paint branded dicks on the walls of our psyches just so we can get our favorite shampoo or order some furniture. I also don’t think we should have to give over every piece of our personal information, or most of it, in order to be able to find things we like. We should be able to shop for real products we actually love and find them again easily any time we want to buy them again, without all of this other bullshit. Calm, non-invasive shopping that makes brands more money seems possible to me. I’m not sure that this stuff above is the answer, but if you think it might be, or if you think you have a better idea and want to chat about it, feel free to hit me up.