Thanks for bringing Cluetrain up, and for the HST comparison. When we wrote Cluetrain, I am sure we felt the same "sense of knowing that you were there and ali

Thanks for bringing Cluetrain up, and for the HST comparison. When we wrote Cluetrain, I am sure we felt the same "sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world” as did HST in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (We certainly wrote Cluetrain with the same high degree of hyperbole.) And I know the tech counterculture of the late ‘90s is as gone today as the ‘60s were when HST wrote Fear and Loathing. The main difference is what we were hyperbolic about: the Internet: a hacker invention that put everything and everybody in the world a functional distance apart of zero, or close enough, at costs that veered in the same direction. It was clear that this genie would not go back in the bottle of business-as-usual, but it was hard making sense of it. So we tried. It's still hard. That's why last year David Weinberger and I wrote an addendum to Cluetrain called New Clues: http://newclues.cluetrain.com/ http://newclues.cluetrain.com/ . It's no less hyperbolic than the original, but at least it's more current. (FWIW, I also visit the zero-distance thing here: https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2016/02/03/the-giant-zero-2/. https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2016/02/03/the-giant-zero-2/.) Over the years lots of people have credited Cluetrain with influencing them, including countless marketers who totally misunderstood or ignored what we meant by “Markets are conversations,” “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy” and "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” Thousands of books now mention the word “cluetrain” as well — a word that didn’t exist before 1999, and still gets tweeted at least daily. Does either fact do any good? I think so, but we might need to wait another couple generations to know. To me the most troubling error in Cluetrain is not any of its 95 numbered clues but in the one that comes above all of them and rarely gets quoted, perhaps because it’s a .gif and not copy-able text. It says, “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.” It’s a great line, and I believe it will come true in the fullness of time and tech. But in fact our reach did not exceed corporate grasp then, and still doesn’t today. In the 17 years that have passed since we wrote Cluetrain, much of the Internet's commons has been enclosed in the walled gardens of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google and the rest. Closed silos have also proved far more attractive to both hackers and users than many of us would like. (For more on that, see http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/giving-silos-their-due http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/giving-silos-their-due .) But the geology of the Net hasn't changed. TCP/IP is still there. So is the absence of distance it creates in our midst, and the sense of possibility it opens up. Without that sense, none of us, nor our our many forms of conversation-based cooperation, would be here. What really matters is that there is work to do. That’s it.