"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.)
It’s true that it is not pointing to a clear hazard, a mechanism and a goal.
But it is a handbook to what happened over the next 20 years.
Think carefully about how some challenger businesses went into established markets, and how successful they were because they followed these ideas.
Southwest airlines. Robinhood. Airbnb.
Think about how they talk to customers vs the old guard. Think about how YouTube adverts typically work vs TV adverts.
Then think about some recent conflict between people and “corporate”: Twitter, Reddit, GameStop.
Reread the manifesto with these examples in mind.
You might say “so what? It just seems kind of obvious”, but it’s hard to remember, in 1999 this was radical - some people said nonsense - thinking.
If you were starting a new consumer business, you’d need a marketing agency and an ad agency and you’d have to buy full pages or TV spots to get going and it was ruinous.
What cluetrain predicted is all that was going to get way, way, way easier.
And here we are. Search and social ads you can target in minutes, YouTube ads you can film on your phone, and social media accounts where you can have conversations human to human.
Go look at the Netflix social media strategy and tell me is that more cluetrain, or more the old school?
It might not have the specificity you want, but it still somehow ended up being completely accurate and useful to those who could take action with it.
> "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"
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.
Did your cable company talk to you in 1999 the way Netflix does on Twitter today? Does your hotel loyalty program talk to you the way Airbnb does? Does United talk to you the way Southwest does? Do they all treat you in the same way as a customer?
If so, yeah, you’re right. This was a waste of time.
If not, the reason for that difference is likely to be found in cluetrain.
It seems obvious now, but it absolutely wasn’t in 1999.
My own sense of it is mostly that Cluetrain is attempting to describe and justify a new modality of relationships based on networks which are both many-to-many and bidirectional.
Ultimately ... this seems to me to reflect either a misunderstanding of how networks work, or a severe underappreciation of the feedback-at-scale problem.
The most notable coverage of the latter is James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State.
The "mass" models of manufacturing, merchandising, and media are all based on the agricultural notion of broad-casting (that is, literally, scattering seed over tilled ground) not only in the sowing sense, but in the harvesting sense. A farmer of staple crops doesn't have individual relationships with each plant, but tends to entire fields or orchards, and utilises maximally efficient methods of collecting in the crop as well.
In broadcast media, the harvest mechanism is advertising. It's interesting to note that even as broadcast media was developing, agriculture had been adopting more precise modes of planting and cultivating, with Jethro Tull's[1] seed drill being the archetype. Ad-tech's targeted advertising bears some relationship to this. For manufacturing, a key factor was the sales channel, itself often through large chain stores (Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, Woolworths, A&P Markets, Safeway, Macy's, etc., in the US), which handled the interface with individual shoppers. Both manufacturers and merchandisers themselves relied heavily on advertising for branding. Interactions with customers were largely limited to sales, returns, and for some classes of goods, service (also frequently independently provisioned, though often through licensed or registered agents).
Cluetrain seemed to think somehow that there would be vast improvements in scale, capacity, and quality of direct communications between manufacturers, merchants, and service operators, on the one hand, and their customers on the other. In practice ... that doesn't seem to work, and one of the notable characteristics of Internet monopolies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, ...) is "that there's no way to reach anyone". The same information-technology lever which permits a small team of a few tens to thousands to serve millions to billions ... becomes a vast liability when those billions are upset or dissatisfied over something.
I've been having something of a back-and-forth with dang over HN's occasional role in this as customer-support-of-last-resort. My feeling is that this is a useful service and in fact something of an obligation given YC's role in creating the problem. Dang's argued that it goes against the fundamental ethos of HN in stimulating intellectual curiosity, largely on account of repetitive repetitious repetitiveness.[2] I can see that, in part. On the other hand, the underlying problem itself is definitely a hard one, and has evaded satisfactory resolution for decades. (Or longer.)
I've been mulling how these tensions might possibly be mediated in some way.
________________________________
Notes:
1. The agriculturalist, not the flute-heavy rock band named for him.
> My own sense of it is mostly that Cluetrain is attempting to describe and justify a new modality of relationships based on networks which are both many-to-many and bidirectional.
Sort of like Twitter and forums in the days when you could comment on what the company was saying and the replies got the same distribution as the PR.
There are too many things we can no longer have because they will be overwhelmed by spam.
Damned good point and one I'd utterly omitted in my prior comment. Yes, of course, feedback channels also get overwhelmed by actors with ulterior and/or malicious motives. See recent HN discussions on fake reviews and Yelp abuse. Or even encouraging fraudulent credit card transactions with competing merchants.
A friend coined what I call "Woozle's Epistemic Paradox", paraphrasing slightly:
"As epistemic systems become used more widely or by influential groups, there is substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place."
The general notion isn't original to her, though that formulation circa 2017 was my first encounter with it.
My takeaway from Cluetrain was not that there would be actual humans communicating. Point 3: "Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice." Key word being sound, here. Many of the rest of the points discuss how to sound human, but not necessarily how to be human.
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.
The name has pejorative roots, in describing a situation in which useful information repeatedly arrives at an institution and yet is just as repeatedly ignored. "The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery."
The imputed message being that if you have to be prodded to accept delivery, or even to understand what the cluetrain is ... the imputation is not a positive one.
(The long history of words introduced to soften the blow of older terms for low intellect and/or knowledge themselves becoming pejorative is ... instructive.)
> 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
You say that as if there is no space for such documents in the world. There clearly are, and setting out aspirations as a way of inspiring people is not a Bad Thing.
Of course there's a place for documents which attempt to make the world a better place. I'm not arguing against the genre, I'm arguing against ineffective application of the genre.
If I can try to make clearer what I find dissatisfying about the set of documents I mention:
- They rely very strongly on vague concepts and warm sentiments without being specific as to either problems, goals, or solutions.[1]
- There's little by way of empirical support for the models or methods suggested. There's a lot of ought and not much is.
- Overreliance on an appeal to emotion or sentiment.
- Their track record at achieving what vague goals they have specified is ... slim.
Again, the contrast I suggest is the GNU Manifesto which, quite arguably, singlehandedly overturned the entire software industry.
I'll also note that "Cluetrain" and JPB's "Manifesto" both strongly reflect the personalities of their authors. I've met Doc and John, and in person they're well-intentioned charismatic people. But in providing a foundation for a technologically-grounded cultural and political movement ... less effective than they could have been.
All major ideas that change the world are flawed and naïve. What matters is if they're "good enough" for the times and circumstances.
Cluetrain is about marketing. Think about how politics and consumer marketing is done today compared to 1999. It's not about whether we like it or whether it's good, largely the old school approach to marketing died, and we now have the mess of a massive, messy "markets are conversations" in its place. The point wasn't that large companies or interests are going away, it's that there was an opportunity for a new guard to emerge because the rules of the game were changing. And this happened!
What the manifesto didn't consider is, what happens if we are right?
My argument here is clearly that several of these examples were not "good enough".
I'm less convinced that the marketing world's fundamentally changed in the ways you describe. I will admit that it has been strongly perturbed, but ultimately the same patterns which "Cluetrain" raged against have largely re-emerged. As they have over the history of modern advertising dating to the mid-19th century.
One major theme in advertising since the 19th century has been "authenticity": immediacy and direct relation between advertiser and customer. "Cluetrain" was really only yet another instance of this IMO.
> "Cluetrain" though seems far more like mush to me.
The fact that you don’t see the irony of posting this comment on a web forum sponsored by a startup accelerator shows that it’s probably by far the most influential of the three.
Over the interval between the two, I'd posted to email lists and online web forums.
The hosting entities have changed: academic institutions, college students, traditional / trade publications, venture capital. The fundamental discussion modality really hasn't.
There are members of HN whom I know from several of those prior instances, even.
I'm not sure Nelson's work was influential and widely lauded at the time. It seems to have grown in significance since. I'd only started hearing of it substantially in ... let's call it the past two decades or so.
(I'm on the Diaspora* instance managed by the man who'd headed up Xanadu/Australia, which may have something to do with that.)
I suspect if I'd been paying closer attention to the Whole Earth / WELL crowd that might stretch back to the 1980s, and I believe Nelson's work featured there.
Google's Ngram Viewer seems to place peak Project Xanadu about 1990, so my own awarerness may not be the best guide:
That said ... I think Nelson's vision is more concrete than, say, "Cluetrain", though as describing a technical project, realisation of that vision has been ... mixed. (Project Xanadu does actually exist, though it's little used.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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."
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].
This version of the story implies that the outcome is a bad thing people have been tricked into doing.
As far as I can tell from TikTok people want to be part of a brand experience, they want to show their friends they live a luxury lifestyle, and they want to earn promotional goods by being influencers.
There may be some sinister manipulation by marketing experts, but maybe also people just love Texas Roadhouse rolls and love being a part of a bigger movement when they get their pint of butter.
Is there anything wrong with that? It's fun to do your version of the thing that everyone's doing!
I think the separate trend towards hiding your authentic self in a small group direct message or a Discord or Slack instance isn't so bad ... It's not too far off from where we were on IRC in the before times.
“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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Flawed, Naïve, but mostly right ideas are how the world makes progress.
On the first point: it does still work - all the big corporations and political actors noticed it worked and it profoundly changed the way politics and consumer engagement was conducted. Cluetrain doesn't negate Clayton Christensen but good luck building a scalable consumer business without a strategy to get close with your customers (usually via online/social media). That said, a great counterintuitive old school success here was Apple with opening up its retail stores as the conversation channel for its customers, which makes sense given the nature of its products. Spam etc. gums the online channels up but "markets are conversations" is still the dominant paradigm of how marketing is crafted. It wasn't this way in 1999.
On the second: 66-95 doesn't pretend any of that stuff goes away? Like the manifesto isn't about big companies dying... it's about the game of marketing is changing, and opening up an opportunity for a new generation of what are now enormous companies. The two points on investors are that "if you ignore your customers (ie. us, the market), your investors aren't going to be happy". Ignoring customers was a lot easier in the 90s.
The main naive thing of this section is about workers ability to influence corporate policy, but even there we've seen a lot of movement vs 1999.
I had a third point: the web architecture kind of stopped evolving circa 2010 as the next generation never quite figured out what made it special, as the technical and protocol foundation for all these changes in marketing and communication we've seen in the world. I see HN and tech circles filled with cynics that believe the world is just going to be dominated by the same mega corps for a century, and that the solution is regulation and government utilities taking over certain services. This to me is nonsense. There is huge opportunity for a new generation of titans, in the places people aren't looking.
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).
The manifesto's main flaw (besides its prose / arrogance) is it was talking to the old guard, it didn't consider "what if we are right, and the new guard now rules the medium of the conversations?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Haha, fair. Either way -- I def meant "Overton Window" not in the precise political sense, but as a metaphor you could use in software. As in, "Proprietary Software, no sharing ever like Microsoft used to be (and kinda still is)" on one end, and "Stallman and the GPLv3" at the other.
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.
>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.
(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.
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?
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.
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.
I would prefer people did hyperlinks through URI, and we accepted some centrality to access a URI -> URL mapper. I say "some" centrality because the mapping function is a public good, and will probably have to be done by a number of big entities either through sharding, or some distribution of a centrally managed/maintained core. Analogous to the risk in the DNS, but the DNS is also a public good.
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.
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!
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.)