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All major ideas that change the world are flawed and naïve. What matters is if they're "good enough" for the times and circumstances. Cluetrain is about marke

All major ideas that change the world are flawed and naïve. What matters is if they're "good enough" for the times and circumstances. Cluetrain is about marketing. Think about how politics and consumer marketing is done today compared to 1999. It's not about whether we like it or whether it's good, largely the old school approach to marketing died, and we now have the mess of a massive, messy "markets are conversations" in its place. The point wasn't that large companies or interests are going away, it's that there was an opportunity for a new guard to emerge because the rules of the game were changing. And this happened! What the manifesto didn't consider is, what happens if we are right?

dredmorbius 3y ago
My argument here is clearly that several of these examples were not "good enough". I'm less convinced that the marketing world's fundamentally changed in the ways you describe. I will admit that it has been strongly perturbed, but ultimately the same patterns which "Cluetrain" raged against have largely re-emerged. As they have over the history of modern advertising dating to the mid-19th century. See Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism for insight into the emergence of modern advertising, albeit from a perspective of journalistic media, in 1909: <https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/n7/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>. Adam Curtis's Century of the Self gives a longer-term perspective on the emergence of public relations, propaganda, and advertising over the 20th century: <https://archive.org/details/the-century-of-the-self-adam-curtis https://archive.org/details/the-century-of-the-self-adam-cur...> (video). One major theme in advertising since the 19th century has been "authenticity": immediacy and direct relation between advertiser and customer. "Cluetrain" was really only yet another instance of this IMO.

dredmorbius 3y ago

My argument here is clearly that several of these examples were not "good enough". I'm less convinced that the marketing world's fundamentally changed in the ways you describe. I will admit that it has been strongly perturbed, but ultimately the same patterns which "Cluetrain" raged against have largely re-emerged. As they have over the history of modern advertising dating to the mid-19th century. See Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism for insight into the emergence of modern advertising, albeit from a perspective of journalistic media, in 1909: <https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/n7/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>. Adam Curtis's Century of the Self gives a longer-term perspective on the emergence of public relations, propaganda, and advertising over the 20th century: <https://archive.org/details/the-century-of-the-self-adam-curtis https://archive.org/details/the-century-of-the-self-adam-cur...> (video). One major theme in advertising since the 19th century has been "authenticity": immediacy and direct relation between advertiser and customer. "Cluetrain" was really only yet another instance of this IMO.