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.
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.
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.
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.
I think there are things about it that still work, like the scene where the narrator breaks down how recalls work. And, especially, the meet-cute where the narrator makes the "single-serving friend" joke, and Durden replies "That's very clever. How's that working out for you, being clever?" I think that's one of the best lines in a movie ever.
I'm not the one you're asking. But what I believe now is this: The Cluetrain approach largely lost. But the Manifesto did in fact represent how a lot of people felt. The complaints about what the net has become are, in essence, because the human approach lost and the impersonal corporations took over.
Even if it doesn't always feel like there is as much opportunity as there was 15 years ago on the open web, these are still important and timeless principles. It's still one of the most important books on marketing ever written, and it's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't benefit from reading it.
All three of those notions failed because nobody yet understood the awesome power of network effects compounded by aspects of digital communication (incompatibility, fragility, performance benefits of hierarchical trees, security concerns) that encourage the formation of gravity wells in networks.
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.
All of them failed because they're all wrong. Markets aren't conversations, they're power relationships. Hyperlinks reinforce hierarchy (see: what news is surfaced vs. what is hidden,) And nobody is immune to advertising, behavioural science relies on this
Beware of the defeatism imported by pretending these problems are intractable.
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.
I have always felt that "markets are conversations" is why social media became what it is now. Markets are still conversations, we are having them out in the open. I also honestly believe that the ideas in cluetrain were taken to heart and perverted into the landscape we see now. I think that they are still relevant but need to be considered for a new generation of people.
Doc Searles subsequently wrote a good 2012 book
'The intention Economy'
https://www.amazon.com/Intention-Economy-When-Customers-Char...
'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 '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....
Doc Searles subsequently wrote a good 2012 book
'The intention Economy'
https://www.amazon.com/Intention-Economy-When-Customers-Char...
'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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are still in the Microsoft era of social media; people using the major platforms out of inertia and network lock-in. But there's no reason to believe the next generation of digital natives will have any such inertia, and could easily adopt distributed protocols over centralized walled-garden platforms.
> 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.
The irony is that the technical architectures with which the Internet can defend itself existed in the early 90's already.
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.
Will take this as an exercise to reader. What is the equivalent of leaking the battlestation construction site location and defense system and an appropriately authorized vehicle perfect for a first strike special ops force while having your starfleet and a ground legion lying in wait.
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
Somewhat agree. I've been getting back into blogs and personal websites - some of this is categorized under 'indieweb'. There is a lot of good work being done out there, great conversations going on, strange and wonderful new hobbyists.
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.
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.
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.
32 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 77.0 ms ] threadI 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.
• 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 '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....
• 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 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.
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.