dsearls
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.
In it E. Ann Hollier and Tim Ambler make a strong case for what has been known from the start about branding: that mass media do it best, without performing at the personal levewl. One corollary for their case might be, "Not everything you value can be measured, and not everything you can measure has value."
Because digital advertising can be both targeted and measured, the whole advertising business decided that ads perform only when they are targeted and measured. But that's not advertising, really. That's direct marketing, which -- as I say in that post -- is descended from junk mail and a cousin of spam.
It's no accident that the $trillion or more spent on adtech hasn't produced a single brand known to the world.
The unanswered question is the one raised in The Problem With Targeting (https://www.dotcoma.it/2015/06/22/the-problem-with-targeting...), and pretty much everything Don Marti and Bof Hoffman (look them up) have been writing as well: is it possible for online advertising to brand products the way offline print and broadcast media could, and still do?
I suspect the answer is no. But my mind is open on the matter.
When we wrote Cluetrain, I am sure we felt the same "sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world” as did HST in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (We certainly wrote Cluetrain with the same high degree of hyperbole.) And I know the tech counterculture of the late ‘90s is as gone today as the ‘60s were when HST wrote Fear and Loathing.
The main difference is what we were hyperbolic about: the Internet: a hacker invention that put everything and everybody in the world a functional distance apart of zero, or close enough, at costs that veered in the same direction. It was clear that this genie would not go back in the bottle of business-as-usual, but it was hard making sense of it. So we tried.
It's still hard. That's why last year David Weinberger and I wrote an addendum to Cluetrain called New Clues: http://newclues.cluetrain.com/ . It's no less hyperbolic than the original, but at least it's more current. (FWIW, I also visit the zero-distance thing here: https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2016/02/03/the-giant-zero-2/.)
Over the years lots of people have credited Cluetrain with influencing them, including countless marketers who totally misunderstood or ignored what we meant by “Markets are conversations,” “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy” and "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” Thousands of books now mention the word “cluetrain” as well — a word that didn’t exist before 1999, and still gets tweeted at least daily. Does either fact do any good? I think so, but we might need to wait another couple generations to know.
To me the most troubling error in Cluetrain is not any of its 95 numbered clues but in the one that comes above all of them and rarely gets quoted, perhaps because it’s a .gif and not copy-able text. It says, “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.”
It’s a great line, and I believe it will come true in the fullness of time and tech. But in fact our reach did not exceed corporate grasp then, and still doesn’t today. In the 17 years that have passed since we wrote Cluetrain, much of the Internet's commons has been enclosed in the walled gardens of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google and the rest. Closed silos have also proved far more attractive to both hackers and users than many of us would like. (For more on that, see http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/giving-silos-their-due .)
But the geology of the Net hasn't changed. TCP/IP is still there. So is the absence of distance it creates in our midst, and the sense of possibility it opens up. Without that sense, none of us, nor our our many forms of conversation-based cooperation, would be here.
What really matters is that there is work to do. That’s it.