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If I'm understanding you correctly there seem to be two main points in here: 1) "It worked much better at first but now spam has invaded and it doesn't work as

If I'm understanding you correctly there seem to be two main points in here: 1) "It worked much better at first but now spam has invaded and it doesn't work as well" and also 2) "It's still working enough because new things like TikTok are emerging from things other than some top-down mandate" My response to the first is pretty short, like: if it didn't still work once big corporations and political actors, etc, noticed it, then it wasn't actually significantly different, just a new venue that was temporarily less crowded. And so the "new guard" is just the innovators in the Clayton Christensen sense who were able to win new markets with fairly traditional methods but without some new profound disintermediated relationship with their customers. But the second one... to me this is really where it's much more "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" and actually inherently a flawed, naive position. People were never entirely at either extreme of "sheeple controlled by big corporations" or malcontent sarcastic "haha brands are dum and embarrassing themselves." New things emerged in non-top-down ways pre-internet too. But overall, before-and-after, big corporations that "win" then still usually get stuck in the same patterns that stuff like 66-95 predicts will go away: they have to please their investors, they have to please the media. The hold of the money people hasn't been broken by the internet.

parasubvert 3y ago
Flawed, Naïve, but mostly right ideas are how the world makes progress. On the first point: it does still work - all the big corporations and political actors noticed it worked and it profoundly changed the way politics and consumer engagement was conducted. Cluetrain doesn't negate Clayton Christensen but good luck building a scalable consumer business without a strategy to get close with your customers (usually via online/social media). That said, a great counterintuitive old school success here was Apple with opening up its retail stores as the conversation channel for its customers, which makes sense given the nature of its products. Spam etc. gums the online channels up but "markets are conversations" is still the dominant paradigm of how marketing is crafted. It wasn't this way in 1999. On the second: 66-95 doesn't pretend any of that stuff goes away? Like the manifesto isn't about big companies dying... it's about the game of marketing is changing, and opening up an opportunity for a new generation of what are now enormous companies. The two points on investors are that "if you ignore your customers (ie. us, the market), your investors aren't going to be happy". Ignoring customers was a lot easier in the 90s. The main naive thing of this section is about workers ability to influence corporate policy, but even there we've seen a lot of movement vs 1999. I had a third point: the web architecture kind of stopped evolving circa 2010 as the next generation never quite figured out what made it special, as the technical and protocol foundation for all these changes in marketing and communication we've seen in the world. I see HN and tech circles filled with cynics that believe the world is just going to be dominated by the same mega corps for a century, and that the solution is regulation and government utilities taking over certain services. This to me is nonsense. There is huge opportunity for a new generation of titans, in the places people aren't looking.

parasubvert 3y ago

Flawed, Naïve, but mostly right ideas are how the world makes progress. On the first point: it does still work - all the big corporations and political actors noticed it worked and it profoundly changed the way politics and consumer engagement was conducted. Cluetrain doesn't negate Clayton Christensen but good luck building a scalable consumer business without a strategy to get close with your customers (usually via online/social media). That said, a great counterintuitive old school success here was Apple with opening up its retail stores as the conversation channel for its customers, which makes sense given the nature of its products. Spam etc. gums the online channels up but "markets are conversations" is still the dominant paradigm of how marketing is crafted. It wasn't this way in 1999. On the second: 66-95 doesn't pretend any of that stuff goes away? Like the manifesto isn't about big companies dying... it's about the game of marketing is changing, and opening up an opportunity for a new generation of what are now enormous companies. The two points on investors are that "if you ignore your customers (ie. us, the market), your investors aren't going to be happy". Ignoring customers was a lot easier in the 90s. The main naive thing of this section is about workers ability to influence corporate policy, but even there we've seen a lot of movement vs 1999. I had a third point: the web architecture kind of stopped evolving circa 2010 as the next generation never quite figured out what made it special, as the technical and protocol foundation for all these changes in marketing and communication we've seen in the world. I see HN and tech circles filled with cynics that believe the world is just going to be dominated by the same mega corps for a century, and that the solution is regulation and government utilities taking over certain services. This to me is nonsense. There is huge opportunity for a new generation of titans, in the places people aren't looking.