The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)
I enjoyed and took plenty from the Cluetrain when I read it in 2004, my final year as an undergrad in Australia. It resonated for me as a kid who loved the web for it&#x27;s freedoms and the disconnect from mainstream commercial interests in the 90s. I could see what lay ahead.<p>It remains on the list of books I still recommend people. Not because it can be applied directly in it&#x27;s entirety today, but rather because it captures a time and a place. I still feel there are still plenty of insights to take away.<p>I&#x27;m also reminded of HSTs closing passage to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:<p>“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . .<p>There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.<p>...<p>And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.&quot;<p>So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”<p>Who know&#x27;s what we&#x27;ll think of influential books of recent years (of the top of my head: the Lean Startup or Rework, which I also love), in 2025.