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.
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"
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.
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.
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Notes:
1. The agriculturalist, not the flute-heavy rock band named for him.
2. See a search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
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.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20210904005401/https://old.reddi...>
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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Notes:
1. See my Hierarchy of Failures in Problem Resolution here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230323113746/https://old.reddi...>, which I've mentioned numerous times on HN: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
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?
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.
See Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism for insight into the emergence of modern advertising, albeit from a perspective of journalistic media, in 1909: <https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>.
Adam Curtis's Century of the Self gives a longer-term perspective on the emergence of public relations, propaganda, and advertising over the 20th century: <https://archive.org/details/the-century-of-the-self-adam-cur...> (video).
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.
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.
In 1989 I was posting to Usenet.
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.
See also the works of Ted Nelson for a similar vibe.
(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:
<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Ted+Nelson%2C%...> (Note that "Project Xanadu" is weighted 7x "Ted Nelson", so that both terms cover roughly the same vertical span
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.)
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.)