Cluetrain at 20
blogs.harvard.edu
blogs.harvard.edu
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.
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.
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.
In another 10 years computers may be fast enough to make No Code actually viable at scale, which will enable entirely different types of people to start making things for the first time.
And even failing that, we now have muppets teaching 3-year-olds the basics of coding. Not everyone is going to know how to code in 20 years, but the percentage of new high school graduates who can make a webpage might be comparable to the percentage who can read.
The basic reason the tech industry is fucked up is that the FAANG companies have a monopoly on discovery right now. But that's not going to last forever.
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.
My generation's despair was watching them being supplanted by the social media companies who provided platforms with a fraction of the capabilities and none of the user empowerment.
It's never too late to go back to federated architectures.
Conveniently forget about the indigenous population that hates you and can be co-opted by the special ops into the defenses take-down.
And, for talent recruitment purposes, the dear leader invites a known mind-hacker and terrorist pilot into his battlestation office with a view, sends the guards home early (because confidentiality) and offers the temptations that come with a weapon and concerns for friends and family.
Lesson: Malicious leaks in a quest for galactic domination may backfire, as may insider threats if you're not careful.
Need more Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.
Edit addition: Lesson 2, don't double down on failed moonshoots
But I don't know if the Web - or the digital rights movement or Occupy or meme culture or whatever your personal fancy is - will ever be retaken. There's space for an underground now - which is good enough for me. Perhaps better than trying to fit all of mainstream society in. And maybe social networks can stay - as a kind of fly paper.
• 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....
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.
I also still like World of Ends very much: http://www.worldofends.com/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.