[HN Gopher] The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)
___________________________________________________________________
The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)
Author : KingOfCoders
Score : 64 points
Date : 2023-07-03 11:14 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cluetrain.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cluetrain.com)
| ryandrake wrote:
| The "power of conversations among people" espoused by the
| Cluetrain Manifesto never really panned out, thanks to companies
| poisoning the well by absolutely cramming it full with spam, SEO,
| Social Media Marketing, astroturf, fake reviews, soon ChatGPT,
| and by Social Media companies filling it with outrage and
| battles. Genuine conversations now pretty much happen within
| small filter bubbles. Most of what you see on the broad, open
| Internet is either Marketing, "Influencing," or outrage. We've
| left the Cluetrain and ended up in the Dark Forest Internet[1].
|
| 1: https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-
| int...
| tiffanyg wrote:
| Very true. Sadly, while "companies" play a very large role,
| ultimately, it's people.
|
| The dynamics are, I think, somewhat interesting. The essential
| pattern appears like "theme and variations", woven endlessly
| through human history that I'm familiar with.
|
| It has been possible, in brief periods, to imagine that perhaps
| _we_ had moved past some of it ... grown a bit, on the whole.
| But, it 's really difficult to imagine we might ever reach a
| sort of "Star Trek: First Contact" ... "economic regime"*.
|
| Circumstances continually evolve and even relatively subtle
| changes in policies and principles and such, at scale, can make
| a big difference. One key problem is simply that the cohesion
| and principled behavior and all of that, borne out of
| challenging times** and the desire to make things better for
| ones offspring, so easily leads to less purposeful more
| entitled people who can even end up resentful at what previous
| generations accomplished, the philosophies they espouse, the
| plaudits that they have engendered... and purposefully wish to
| go against that grain.
|
| But, to get a bit away from this unintentionally increasingly
| high-falutin' "jibber jabber" - the phases of commercial
| internet development adhere to fairly typical (modern) human
| patterns.
|
| First: optimism and practically "free money" ... an initial
| gold rush, real attempts at building real value ultimately
| drowning out the charlatans and general gold rush "carnival".
| Second: a sort of plateau, "professionalization", coalescence,
| big companies consolidating and buying up (additional)
| innovators, etc. Third: the land in terms of current resources
| mostly staked out, various little (and mostly legitimate
| "fish") utilizing the big products and services to provide
| smaller products and services ... a sort of completion of an
| "ecosystem". Fourth: increasing trouble making additional
| money, creating real distinct new value, economic cycle getting
| past peak, probably inflation issues, etc. ... plus, crime and
| illegitimate activity more and more present ... tools and
| opportunities for charlatans, more and more ... Even
| established big companies having issues with their models,
| etc... The "only real hope" is the next big innovation...
|
| This comment is overly long, and yet, hardly adequately covers
| the shallowest surface of the topic. But, eh, best I can do
| this moment.
|
| It's unfortunate to watch these kinds of cycles, and easy to
| have hope that "this time it'll be (more) different". But, no
| matter how quickly technology changes, humans seem more stuck
| when it comes to "evolution" (even accounting for changes in
| communications, education, etc.). And, really, ultimately, some
| people realized even 1000s of years ago that almost all of this
| is a kind of futile "chasing the dragon".
|
| * https://youtu.be/PV4Oze9JEU0?t=2m28s
|
| ** E.g.,https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8763215/
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Is that just a factor of time plus the tendency for
| gamification of <identified positive thing>?
|
| KPIs become meaningless over an amount of time depending on how
| well thought out they are.
|
| All things need to evolve to outrun the corruption of what they
| used to be. Feels like this is a universal truth.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| This is why we can't have nice things.
| bilsbie wrote:
| An elegant sentiment from a more civilized age.
| bilsbie wrote:
| This could be an amazing opportunity though. It's what everyone
| wants.
| mistermann wrote:
| Totally agree (well, _most_ people), but as I recall there
| was some language in the TikTok bill subjecting any
| onlinecommunity over X people being subject to "monitoring"
| by the government.
|
| This advice should maybe be heeded:
|
| https://youtu.be/WP-lrftLQaQ
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| api wrote:
| "All open systems without a built in economic system are
| destroyed by spam. No exceptions."
|
| This is a problem cryptocurrency could have tackled, but it
| never really did because scamming and gambling are so much more
| profitable than solving real problems.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| So.. by that logic we can conclude it didn't have a built-in
| economic system?
|
| No, I think think the conclusion is that spam will destroy
| all open systems.
| larata_media wrote:
| [flagged]
| heisenbit wrote:
| Corporation have capital and can shoulder risk. To the degree
| that medium to long term insights have value their access to
| capital ads value.
| superq wrote:
| "capital ads value"
| shove wrote:
| Oldie but goodie
| santoshalper wrote:
| Two things stand out:
|
| 1. I really miss the days when I was optimistic about the
| internet. Though to be clear, 1999 was not peak internet optimism
| and this was more of a reaction to us already seeing signs of
| corporate takeover.
|
| 2. If we're being real, a lot of this is seriously pretentious
| bullshit.
| jrm4 wrote:
| But you NEED the stuff we call "pretentious bullshit" to be a
| useful "Overton Window" endpoint. This is precisely why I'm so
| pro e.g. Richard Stallman/GPL et al. Not because I actually do
| all that shit, but because I recognize how useful an absolute
| weirdo at that endpoint is.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Without those at each far end, the centre would be shifted
| closer to the other.
|
| An incomplete theory of mine is around problems of using
| behavioural patterns to identify potential criminals. Not all
| deviant behaviour is criminal, but identifying deviance and
| somehow cutting it off or minimising it, just means that the
| next inner level of the bell curve of that deviancy becomes
| the next target.
|
| Eg. Everyone who's killed an animal larger than a mouse put
| on a watch list for sociopathy. Ok, so once that's done, we
| need yet another level to score some cheap political points.
| Ok, how about kids who have amputated their siblings dolls,
| yeah, they're fucking nutters...
|
| It's an incomplete theory because it fails the slippery slope
| logical fallacy, potentially fatally.
|
| But behaviour patterns are already used to predict where
| crime will occur based on where it has previously occurred.
| This feels like an ever tightening loop that acts to
| increasingly justify itself whilst trapped in an echo chamber
| of our very own unintentional design.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I have no idea what you are even trying to say here because
| the underlying idea is so far from mine. Also -- uh, black
| enslaver? hope I'm reading that wrong
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| You're only the second person who's read it as that.
| Black and Silver.
|
| I considered deleting the comment altogether as it did
| ramble.
| santoshalper wrote:
| I'd need to think about that more, but I upvoted your idea
| because it is interesting and potentially useful.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I don't like the assumptions I'm making here, but I still think
| it's worth saying to you and anyone who agrees with "the
| internet isn't what it used to be":
|
| Don't let your idea of the internet be what your habits are
| limiting you to experiencing.
|
| Create something that's your flavour of weird or interesting
| and put it out there. Link to it when conversation strays
| somewhere that it may be appropriate. Search for weirdness in
| the flood of what has come be to normal.
|
| It's like music. I listen to a local, community, subscription
| funded radio station because they don't play what most radio
| stations are paid to play. They play what the weirdly artistic
| hosts like, and they play predominantly local country
| (Australia) and local state (South Australia) music. There's a
| whole lotta bad music out there, and I've heard more than my
| fair share, but my word, there are diamonds in the rough. You
| just have to keep sifting.
|
| Most people don't have the motivation or energy. Most people
| are ... "Happy", I guess... listening to the same old
| manufactured bullshit on insanity inducing high rotation. Fuck
| man, music is life and most people choose to be zombies.
|
| I don't browse the weird web, but I know it's there if I looked
| hard enough. I seemingly am more "affected" by music than the
| average person, and so I do have the motivation and will to
| endure the sift. It's not for everyone. In fact, it seems to be
| for quite the small percentage.
| prepend wrote:
| I feel like 1999 was peak internet optimism. The crash happened
| in April 2000, so 99/ winter 2000 was the peak.
|
| After that everything was crashing and then consolidating into
| Amazon, google, eBay, and then Apple.
| jmacd wrote:
| The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined were
| major influences on my young brain. I'm glad I, for some reason,
| decided to read them.
|
| Over the years I had several chances to meet Doc Searls and David
| Weinberger and it was a case of it being a good idea to meet your
| heroes. They were just very nice to an eager young kid.
| Mizza wrote:
| Personally, I can't believe I ever fell for this bullshit, but
| it is nice to remember the optimistic feelings I had during
| that era. Now, I am a cynic, and that I ever thought "markets
| are conversations" was a profound idea and not the Ritalin
| ramblings of the most annoying guy in the world fills me with
| self-cringe.
| itomato wrote:
| But now they seem to be. That's about all they are. It's so
| transactional that the transaction mode has become the
| relationship, platform and product all-in-one.
|
| Right down to Credit Cards and Car Insurance.
| Mizza wrote:
| I guess my objection - besides the tedious style - isn't
| that it's incorrect, but that it's _bad_.
|
| I find it deeply unnerving when corporations act like
| people. I don't want to have a "conversation" with a
| company if it means they've used surveillance to stalk and
| harass me across the internet so they can build a data
| profile of me and my habits. I don't want my life
| controlled by ruthless monopolies with happy human faces.
|
| The result is not corporations that are more human, it's
| people that are less human. There is a straight line from
| Cluetrain to OnlyFans fleshmarkets. It worked, and it
| sucks.
| prepend wrote:
| > I don't want to have a "conversation" with a company if
| it means they've used surveillance to stalk and harass me
| across the internet so they can build a data profile of
| me and my habits.
|
| I feel similarly. I don't want my grocery store or
| restaurant to understand me. I just want to buy a gallon
| of milk and don't want to discuss my day with them. And I
| don't want my order called out to my name. Just give me a
| number and I'll listen for it.
|
| I think the idea is that relationships make me spend more
| money. But I don't want to spend more money on groceries.
| I want to spend as little as possible.
|
| Also in this category is companies that want to wish me
| happy birthday or happy pride month or anything else
| related to what I want from them. I don't need my water
| company to wish me happy new year, just provide water
| efficiently.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| A major credit card company (whose cards are usually
| green) used to bug me with surveys asking what else they
| could do to make me happier. My answer: Get more
| merchants to accept your card.
|
| How about cash back? No, cash back means I paid too much
| in the first place.
|
| How about free movie tickets once a year? Won't make me
| use my card more.
|
| How about free access to airport lounges (as long as you
| pay an extra $500 a year)? No.
|
| Then what can we do?
|
| Improve.
|
| Your card's.
|
| Acceptance.
|
| Hmmm. How about a free credit checkup?
|
| Aaaand this is why I no longer respond to surveys:
| There's often one blindingly obvious thing a company can
| do to improve customer satisfaction, and coincidentally
| it's usually the thing the company least wants to do. So
| survey responses that tell them "Do the obvious thing"
| just get ignored.
| parasubvert wrote:
| So, don't give the corporations you don't like your data?
| Many people DO want to have these conversations and are
| okay with surveillance of a sort if they get something of
| perceived value in return. OTOH, there are plenty of ways
| to avoid surveillance via ad blocking and onion routers
| (which is now shipping on all Apple devices).
|
| I'm also not sure why you think people are less human in
| all of this is, or why OnlyFans is "bad". Commercial porn
| has existed for 50 years, and like the music industry,
| has had its economics upended because of Mindgeek (or
| Reddit, or ...) giving most porn away in exchange for
| surveillance rather than money. OnlyFans brings the 70's
| NYC Times Square peepshow back to the mainstream.
|
| The cluetrain manifesto and that crowd all saw this
| coming over a decade before the mobile smart phone put
| this into hyperdrive; to me it's not "bad" it's just
| "different from the 90s".
| mpweiher wrote:
| Related: The Gluetrain Manifesto:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20041022054701/http://gluetrain....
| nologic01 wrote:
| What a complete fail...
|
| Subtitle: _The end of business as usual_.
|
| At least they got that right: Today Apple hit the 3 trillion
| valuation mark.
|
| The very concept that the economy is a decentralized something is
| up for discussion.
| parasubvert wrote:
| Not a fail - a raging success of a manifesto that was largely
| ignored by the old guard and the results were, predictably,
| winner take all for those that saw it coming.
|
| And by now the conversations have been corrupted because the
| old guard did eventually catch on and flooded the channels with
| shit.
|
| That said, what does the valuation of a company have to do with
| its participation in an economy? The only implication to me is
| that some corporations are so valuable that there's no way they
| can be taken over by a hostile entity. Revenue is a more
| important indicator. Apple is big at $400 billion, but there
| are lots of other big companies.
| paulorlando wrote:
| Back in 2011 I looked at how many of the URLs in the book had
| survived. For a Dotcom era book, I think they held up pretty
| well. Anyone want to update the list?
| https://startupsunplugged.com/startup-communities/random-fac...
|
| Cluetrain.com: y. Haveanotherbeer.com: n (fake). (bought by
| Google) deja.com: n; liveperson.com: y. (with diff name)
| chrisworth.com: y. Boy-are-we-clueless.com: n. Dunkindonuts.com:
| y. Dunkindonutssucks.com: n. Ford.com: y. Wdc.com: y.
| Whitehouse.com: n. Whitehouse.gov: y. Thesphere.net: n.
| mancala.com: ?. panix.com: y. (not updated) rageboy.com: y.
| cratermoon wrote:
| https://zombo.com/
| parasubvert wrote:
| I find it fascinating that some comments think this was wrong.
| Yes it was pretentious and arrogant. But it wasn't wrong.
|
| It was right: too right, and was winner take all for those who
| figured it out (Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google, many
| others), before spam invaded and made the conversations much
| harder.
|
| The web architecture , technology , and protocols are still the
| decentralized underpinning of the internet, but people have
| forgotten why they're there. It's almost an archeological dig for
| the new generation. It's a foundation ready for decentralization
| but tech folks were frustrated when people CHOOSE to live in
| large cluster silos, socially (eg. meta, tiktok, Twitter etc) .
| But in most other domains with network effects, this clustering
| isn't entirely surprising. Network effects is often a euphemism
| for "winner take all". Same confusion as to why AOL was so
| popular for so long. But the web moves on.
|
| Ask yourself: how did TikTok take off? Or how do new sites come
| about and grow (as is happening with Bluesky, Mastodon and
| others? How many businesses do I transact eCommerce with
| directly? If we truly had a big bad hierarchical dystopia , it
| wouldn't happen.
|
| It requires _hard work_ to get noticed, but the hyperlink (and
| HTTP /MIME/HTML/JS) is still the foundation of all of our
| interop. which is why Elon shutting off Twitter unauthenticated
| hyperlinking this weekend is the biggest signal he wants to tank
| the site: no more network effects for you!
|
| What's interesting to me is that technical folks never quite
| "got" the web, the way the mailing list archives from the 90s
| understood the web. It was built, deliberately. People now assume
| it's a utility that was always there. They've not experienced
| true silos (CompuServe Vs AOL Vs GEnie, anyone?). But still, the
| evolution stalled. RSS Feeds were the closest we got to an
| evolution , though ActivityPub is finally showing promise 15
| years after AtomPub belly flopped. People have to build
| compelling software to make users want a more decentralized
| experience, and that's hard to fund when your investors usually
| want winner take all network effects.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| You hit the nail on the head. For all of our Eternal September
| jokes, before then it was a morass of networks that didn't talk
| to one another at all. But now it's time to fix the damage of
| centralization. We all got lazy, myself included, and today's
| mess is the result.
|
| I still need to sit down and give one of the fediverse systems
| a shot. I sat on the sidelines as RedFaceTwitTok ate the world
| (and have never had an account on any of them). So, for me, the
| loss of Twitter and nerfing of Reddit are not _quite_ as big a
| deal as it is for someone who has invested years into a
| presence there only to get banned or have the site go under.
|
| If I'm going to do $SOCIAL_MEDIA, you better bet I want to be
| able to jump ship (or, if necessary, self-host).
| walrus01 wrote:
| > Yes it was pretentious and arrogant
|
| a lot of things in the VC bubble dotcom 1.0 boom were
| pretentious and arrogant
|
| a lot of things today still are pretentious and arrogant
|
| nothing has changed
| majormajor wrote:
| 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.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Well, if you narrow enough the scope of the analysis a lot of
| things can be "right".
|
| My brilliant manifesto talks about cars, with round wheels, on
| paved streets, taking people places - it will be a wonderful
| democratization of travel. Come buy a car.
|
| I forgot to manifest that the road is severely inclined and the
| cars lack breaks.
|
| > The web architecture , technology , and protocols are still
| the decentralized underpinning of the internet
|
| The web is whatever Chrome and Safari say it is [1].
|
| Its not winner-takes-all on some level playing field. Its a
| winner-takes ALL, _including_ the playing field.
|
| [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
| npsimons wrote:
| > winner take all for those who figured it out (Amazon, Meta,
| Apple, Microsoft, Google, many others)
|
| What's really funny to me is the following quote from
| "Cluetrain Manifesto" that sticks out in stark opposition to
| the above:
|
| > We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers, we
| are human beings. And our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with
| it.
| mojomark wrote:
| [flagged]
| api wrote:
| (7) is completely wrong. Hyperlinks do not subvert hierarchy due
| to network effects combined with the fact that the lookup system,
| DNS, is hierarchical.
|
| Nobody uses hyperlinks anymore except to link into social media
| silos or "up" to media sources. The web as an actual web died and
| nobody noticed.
|
| It's pretty thoroughly dead now. Creating your own home page or
| even a hosted blog is now a weird niche activity.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I'd hold the phone on that one, literally today? I think
| there's not a bad chance _right now_ that social media somewhat
| collapses and people significantly return to more things like
| that; a possible happy medium with -- ideally federated
| services, but if not, even just like 20 or so twitters and
| reddits instead of two?
| api wrote:
| If the fediverse ever gets big enough to be a juicy marketing
| target or able to sway elections then the same bad actors
| that destroyed e-mail, Usenet, the open web, and social media
| will come for it.
| parasubvert wrote:
| This is far too cynical. Firstly, DNS is mostly irrelevant to
| hyperlinks, it's been a long time since everyone fought over
| getting "the right .com name". With a proliferation of TLDs, is
| this is really even a big deal?
|
| The web is still there as the foundation and glue. It's not
| dead, it's used all the time for eCommerce, support,
| documentation, research, forums, and most importantly for
| universal interoperability across whatever "silos" are out
| there. URI, HTTP, MIME, HTML, and JavaScript are literally the
| glue that holds even the silos together, or allows our myriad
| devices to interoperate with them.
|
| How else did TikTok take off? Hyperlinks! There's no central
| hierarchy , the network effects of the web won out.
|
| I think the issue people have is they confuse network effects
| with even distribution. But that's never been the case: think
| of the countryside Vs cities. Network effects often lead to
| huge clusters. Even peek web circa 2012 had Google Reader as
| the ultimate blog aggregation experience.
|
| All the architecture and tech of the web is sitting there ready
| to be used. It's up to software creators to make decentralized
| software people actually want to use.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'd argue that creating your own homepage or a hosted blog were
| _always_ a niche activity.
|
| Though at one time, so was posting any online content
| whatsoever, and the first small niche was a much larger share
| of the second small niche.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Two significant past discussions:
|
| The Cluetrain Manifesto (2022)| 42 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395587>
|
| The Cluetrain Manifesto (2016) | 31 comments
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220242>
| [deleted]
| wffurr wrote:
| [flagged]
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Dr Bronner's did it better. http://all-one-
| typography.com/Dr_Bronners-label-Peppermint-3...
| thom wrote:
| A spiritual successor to the Cluetrain was Hugh McLeod's
| Hughtrain:
|
| https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-hughtrain-mki...
|
| If you read it in the most cynical possible way, it actually came
| to fruition in a way the Cluetrain didn't.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| Why is thesis #83 a spam link for boner pills?
|
| It used to be "We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously
| as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.". Now it's
| "Research in the field of medicine. Now it is easy to buy viagra
| online for men."
| netbioserror wrote:
| There are some really good points here that are soured by an
| almost high-school-socialist level of rhetoric. Probably would've
| been better written as a continuous essay or treatise instead of
| a list. I'm sure, 24 years later, the authors would acknowledge
| that. But they can probably say the same in not so many words:
|
| The Internet has enabled customers and employees to be far more
| informed and aware than ever before; companies trying to
| depersonalize and reduce will die, while those trying to
| personalize and communicate can win the loyalty of both.
|
| I doubt publicly traded companies are even capable of this, and
| with the money printer constantly spinning, I'm sadly unsure they
| need to be.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| on the one hand, denounce meme-level political analysis
| ("Socialism"); then in the next breath, declare that the money-
| printer is on, favoring Big Corp, and helplessly observe that
| they will not and maybe cannot, do 6th grade level social
| citizenship. OK!
| netbioserror wrote:
| >social citizenship
|
| Good god man, grow some self-awareness.
| superq wrote:
| This is a great comment for its unintentional humor.
| skyechurch wrote:
| >Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives,
| dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is
| typically open, natural, uncontrived.
|
| At the present moment the human voice online is none of these
| things, as the market pressures which led to the hated 80s
| corporate speak are now felt by everyone - the risk one might
| "lose subscriber" or that one could be "cancelled". If you want a
| real human conversation now you have to use the abandonware IRL
| protocol.
| gbxyz wrote:
| mods, I suggest adding (1999) to the post title.
| [deleted]
| polynomial wrote:
| Wait, so the fundamental principle of the Cluetrain Manifesto is
| that "Markets are conversations" and we've just invented the
| greatest (in some sense of the word) conversational (literally:
| chat) technology or all time? (or at least in in our relatively
| short history)
|
| Can't even imagine what Rageboy would have had to say about all
| this.
| superq wrote:
| read that way, pretty soon Alexa will order things you don't
| need. (so, no change except for who's placing the order)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "Cluetrain", J.P. Barlow's Manifesto, and ESR's Cathedral &
| Bazaar were all influential and widely-lauded at the time, but
| strike me now as various degrees of misguided and/or naive.
|
| All three documents were _highly_ aspirational, in that they
| pointed to a vision of the world the authors _wanted_ to see,
| though the specific mechanisms and implications were less than
| clear, and over time, many dark and /or futile implications have
| emerged. "Cluetrain" specifically is a bunch of fuzzy-but-
| attractive-sounding aphorisms though with little in the way of
| specific mechnisms for bringing them about, or even an
| understanding of how media landscapes tend to be utterly
| dominated by centralised, powerful, institutional (corporate,
| governmental, religious, ideological) interests --- all the more
| ironic as the authors themselves came from this space.
|
| My sense is that RMS's GNU Manifesto is an exception to this
| tendency to failure: it painted a clear hazard, a specific
| mechanism (copyleft), and a goal, all of which seem to have
| largely stood the test of the intervening decades, and has
| produced actual useful tangible results.
|
| Though one might argue that JPB's Manifesto has given us the EFF.
| This hasn't _guaranteed_ the freedoms Barlow championed, and it
| 's run up against the dark sides of his vision, but it does at
| least _continue the fight_ , which it seems freedom and
| democratic ideals _always_ entail.
|
| "Cluetrain" though seems far more like mush to me.
|
| (I'd really like to hear from those who disagree with that
| assessment.)
| colordrops wrote:
| I found the name "cluetrain" itself a pretentious turnoff when
| I first heard of it, and didn't bother reading it for a while.
| After reading it I didn't feel like I gained anything of value.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| > were all influential and widely-lauded at the time, but
| strike me now as various degrees of misguided and/or naive.
|
| See also the works of Ted Nelson for a similar vibe.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| * * *
| cratermoon wrote:
| > "Cluetrain" though seems far more like mush to me.
|
| Even after all these years, I have no real idea what Cluetrain
| is about, other than "consumers now have an internet full of
| information about products and services, companies will have to
| change how they market and sell stuff"
| hedgehog wrote:
| That, and the idea that ordinary individuals have much closer
| reach to a corporate marketing department than before. It all
| seems sort of boring and obvious now but remember in the 90s
| online shopping was mostly the digital equivalent to mail-
| order catalogs, marketing was very one-way through major
| media channels, etc, and stuff like the ideas in Cluetrain
| were very far from mainstream at the time.
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