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Comment by jmacd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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".

> 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.

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.

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