
Cluetrain at 20 - wallflower
http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2019/03/26/cluetrain20/
======
Mizza
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
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
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.

~~~
njharman
> It's already worse than television ever was.

You have a myopic view of the internet. I don't use any social media. Unless
you consider hn or Reddit that. And I run ad blocker. I spend most of my
entertainment, educational, and social interaction budget on the internet. The
internet is ducking amazing. I could never publish on tv. I could never
consume what normal people published, unfiltered by FCC /network
execs/advertisers.

The internet is not social media. Social media is "the masses", the
mainstream. And regardless of platform those always suck, banal, lowest common
denominator, and manipulated for profit or power.

Checkout of the mainstream, not the internet.

------
olivermarks
Doc Searles subsequently wrote a good 2012 book 'The intention Economy'
[https://www.amazon.com/Intention-Economy-When-Customers-
Char...](https://www.amazon.com/Intention-Economy-When-Customers-
Charge/dp/1422158527) '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
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.

~~~
hypertexthero
The Cluetrain Manifesto was a great inspiration to me. Thank you for your work
on it.

I also still like World of Ends very much:
[http://www.worldofends.com/](http://www.worldofends.com/)

------
goodmachine
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
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
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
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.

------
bitwize
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
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.

