6 ms·

Cluetrain at 20

• goodmachine 8y ago
  Oh, to be young again and believe in palpable nonsense like this: "markets are conversations" or "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy" or "we are immune to advertising" etc. Happy days.
  • slantyyz 8y ago
    I was thinking more like "Oh, to be young again and be able to have the memory of a twenty-something me again. Happy days." I saw the headline, and struggled to remember any details of the book, and ended up having to read a summary of it. I only remember reading the book and talking about it with coworkers during the dot-com craze.
    • gumby 8y ago
      Perhaps that's a clue to its actual significance? Perhaps you remember the feeling and perhaps that you had fun buzzy conversations? That would mean those were the important parts, not the actual substance of the essay. Nothing wrong with that. Perhaps you changed a bit as a result, even if you can't remember precisely what spurred the change. Nothing wrong with that either. And I bet there are books you read back then chunks of which you remember (and other parts that are gone). Probably you remember the good parts. I don't think your memory has necessarily gotten any worse -- if anything (given you're in your 40s by inference) it's probably gotten functionally better.
      • PakG1 8y ago
        But I have a benchmark to compare to. Any book that made a significant impact on me, I can remember some key points. Not everything, certainly not many of the details, but at least some key points. Cluetrain Manifesto? I can't remember anything at all. edit: Maybe it's like The World Is Flat? I've heard that people who read the book when it came out thought it was incredible, preposterous, and amazing. But if people read it for the first time today, they're like, "why is this so special?" Perhaps it's difficult to remember what Cluetrain was about because the world became Cluetrain? Except judging from all the comments, I'm guessing a lot of people were disappointed that it didn't. So I don't know.
  • PakG1 8y ago
    It is like one of those movies that did not age well. Sort of like Mighty Ducks and Fight Club.
    • colordrops 8y ago
      Oh I was about to watch Fight Club again, sad to hear that it didn't age well.
      • api 8y ago
        I can't see it as anything now except foreshadowing of the emergence of radical fascist brown shirt gangs into the semi-mainstream.
      • draw_down 8y ago
        I think there are things about it that still work, like the scene where the narrator breaks down how recalls work. And, especially, the meet-cute where the narrator makes the "single-serving friend" joke, and Durden replies "That's very clever. How's that working out for you, being clever?" I think that's one of the best lines in a movie ever.
  • trevyn 8y ago
    What do you believe now?
    • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      I'm not the one you're asking. But what I believe now is this: The Cluetrain approach largely lost. But the Manifesto did in fact represent how a lot of people felt. The complaints about what the net has become are, in essence, because the human approach lost and the impersonal corporations took over.
      • johnm 8y ago
        Indeed. And that's a sad testament about humanity.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • Alex3917 8y ago
    Even if it doesn't always feel like there is as much opportunity as there was 15 years ago on the open web, these are still important and timeless principles. It's still one of the most important books on marketing ever written, and it's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't benefit from reading it.
  • api 8y ago
    All three of those notions failed because nobody yet understood the awesome power of network effects compounded by aspects of digital communication (incompatibility, fragility, performance benefits of hierarchical trees, security concerns) that encourage the formation of gravity wells in networks. There's been a lot of work on non-hierarchical networks but it's still a little too early. Unfortunately the block chain bubble also sucked all the air out of the room by causing decentralization to be connected with financial scams in many laypeople's minds and redirecting everyone's attention toward cryptocurrency me-too projects.
    • BrainInAJar 8y ago
      All of them failed because they're all wrong. Markets aren't conversations, they're power relationships. Hyperlinks reinforce hierarchy (see: what news is surfaced vs. what is hidden,) And nobody is immune to advertising, behavioural science relies on this
      • api 8y ago
        Beware of the defeatism imported by pretending these problems are intractable. Markets are conversations when the participants are relatively equal. Barter and informal commerce in voluntarist/anarchist communities would be somewhat close to a pure example. Power relationships can be thought of as external to markets but markets are certainly influenced by them very heavily. Hyperlinks do create hierarchy but for the network effect reasons I discussed. I also think the hierarchical nature of the DNS system is a culprit. I prefer non-hierarchical cryptographic addressing for this reason, but it has yet to see a mainstream implementation. I agree that nobody is immune to advertising. You're right about that one. I didn't highlight it as different from the others.
  • optimuspaul 8y ago
    I have always felt that "markets are conversations" is why social media became what it is now. Markets are still conversations, we are having them out in the open. I also honestly believe that the ideas in cluetrain were taken to heart and perverted into the landscape we see now. I think that they are still relevant but need to be considered for a new generation of people.
• olivermarks 8y ago
  Doc Searles subsequently wrote a good 2012 book 'The intention Economy' https://www.amazon.com/Intention-Economy-When-Customers-Charge/dp/1422158527 https://www.amazon.com/Intention-Economy-When-Customers-Char... 'Caveat venditor—let the seller beware' 'While marketers look for more ways to get personal with customers, including new tricks with “big data,” customers are about to get personal in their own ways, with their own tools. Soon consumers will be able to: • Control the flow and use of personal data • Build their own loyalty programs • Dictate their own terms of service • Tell whole markets what they want, how they want it, where and when they should be able to get it, and how much it should cost And they will do all of this outside of any one vendor’s silo. ' Another lap of utopian 'what the world could look like' which is a good thing IMO. The reality though is that the few big platform companies 'crushed it' a decade ago and now dominate everything from the stock market to retail, socializing, information flows etc and the earnest pre Web 2.0 philosophers seem naive and simplistic in their 20+ year old vision....
• olivermarks 8y ago
  Doc Searles subsequently wrote a good 2012 book 'The intention Economy' https://www.amazon.com/Intention-Economy-When-Customers-Charge/dp/1422158527 https://www.amazon.com/Intention-Economy-When-Customers-Char... 'Caveat venditor—let the seller beware' 'While marketers look for more ways to get personal with customers, including new tricks with “big data,” customers are about to get personal in their own ways, with their own tools. Soon consumers will be able to: • Control the flow and use of personal data • Build their own loyalty programs • Dictate their own terms of service • Tell whole markets what they want, how they want it, where and when they should be able to get it, and how much it should cost And they will do all of this outside of any one vendor’s silo. ' Another lap of utopian 'what the world could look like' which is a good thing IMO. The reality though is that the few big platform companies literally 'crushed it' a decade ago and now dominate everything from the stock market to retail, socializing, information flows etc and the earnest pre Web 2.0 philosophers seem naive and simplistic in their 20+ year old vision....
  • dsearls 8y ago
    Thanks! The Internet and the Web are miracles on the order of loaves and fish, and demonstrations of how progress is the process by which the miraculous becomes mundane. This is why it's so easy to be mindful of how awful the Net and the Web have become while forgetting how miraculous both remain as well. It's also easy to forget that the Internet as we know it is still new, dating roughly from the explosion of commercial activity that began after the NSFNet, whose "acceptable use policy" prevented commercial data from flowing through its backbone, stood down on 30 April 1995. With tech, what can be done will be done, and that includes the bad as well as the good. Both Cluetrain and The Intention Economy directed attention to the miraculous good that was both already there (in the Cluetrain case) and on the way (in the Intention Economy case). This was not to ignore the bad, but rather to energize hackers toward working on what we need, rather than lamenting what at any moment we seem stuck with. Today I think Cluetrain (1999) was at least thirty years ahead of its time, and The Intention Economy (2012) was around a decade ahead. Both were about what can be done with simple human agency, and about energizing hackers to work on that. If doing that was utopian, naive or simplistic, I plead guilty. I also believe the Web, the Net, email and other graces of open and widely used protocols are utopias we already have, and that should at least be encouraging.
• Mizza 8y ago
  There was a scene of very well-meaning academics and young people in Cambridge around the Free Software/Free Culture movement and the Berkman Center in the early/mid/late 00's. There was a lot of idealism and a belief that digital interconnectedness was going to change the world for good. At the time, it was really fun and inspiring to be a part of. I realize now that the leaders/notables of the movement were, for the most part, morally bankrupt careerists who all went to work in surveillance advertising. The worst are the lawyers but lots of the hackers are just as bad. The academics and activists moved from digital rights issues to identity social justice issues when it became trendy. Nobody gives a fuck about digital rights any more, if they ever did to begin with, and the only people who are left behind are embarrassingly out of touch with the real state of affairs. I no longer think that the internet is a force for good in the world.
  • api 8y ago
    We tend to overestimate the impact of technologies in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. The Internet visionaries overestimated how rapidly the Internet would change the status quo. Instead the status quo came and colonized the Internet. The night is young though, and we have generations coming up right now that don't know what one-way broadcast media even is. The printing press took a long time to totally transform society, but transform it it did. Society changes much more slowly than technology. I personally think we are living through the "Empire Strikes Back" period -- a period where the conventional powers (political think tanks, advertisers, ideological and state propagandists, etc.) have learned to attack the Internet using its own systems (social media, forums, memes, etc.) and the Internet hasn't yet learned how to defend itself. This is probably peaking now with "peak social" and the explosion of hip and effective social media based state and political propaganda. I don't know what "Return of the Jedi" will look like, but I think it's likely coming. Some of the problems that need to be solved are technical but many are just a matter of people learning how to mentally filter BS in the new Internet era.
    • Mizza 8y ago
      I'd like to think that, but I don't. I haven't seen any evidence for any meaningful resistance. I think it's very possible that the internet will just continue to get worse and worse and worse. It's already worse than television ever was. The only real resistance I can think is Tor, but it turns out that the cost of being able to buy psychedelics online is global child rape gangs and a nationwide Fentanyl problem. Not a great trade off, in my opinion. I don't see any technological way out of this mess.
• bitwize 8y ago
  I think that a huge component of the "Culture War" is large media (game, movie, etc.) companies colluding with the press to mitigate the effects of internet word of mouth by discrediting independent internet-based sources that are not part of the "access journalism" payola network and that foster discussion between ordinary consumers. And the surest way to discredit an organization is to accuse it of being a safe harbor for child molesters, serial sexual harassers, racists, Nazis, the "alt-right", etc. The principles of Cluetrain work -- provided that there exist organic online communities where consumer discussion can take place. It makes sense that in order to preserve the status quo, preventing such communities from ever forming or reaching critical mass is a top priority for the BigCos.
  • MockObject 8y ago
    Reminds me of the programmer in his mid-20s who honestly believed that Reddit was entirely dominated by alt-right gamergate incels, because the Big Media told him so. I could not convince him otherwise.