The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)
Blast from the past. My first experiences of the web were in the mid-late 1990s, and I remember this being so cool at the time. Reading it today makes me sad in so many ways.<p>&gt; Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.<p>Instagram does not strike me as &quot;open, natural, uncontrived&quot;. Nor does any other social media. Does that mean our de facto modes of interpersonal communication online are no longer authentically human? Probably. How the hell did we get here from there?<p>&gt; Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.<p>Hyperlinks have been used to create hierarchy. It&#x27;s the point of PageRank. SEO and backlinks are the currency of half the digital economy now. There are hundreds of thousands of people on Earth employed to worry about _nothing else_ for 40+ hours a week.<p>&gt; Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.<p>Does anybody believe this is completely true in any organisation anywhere on earth today?<p>&gt; Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.<p>The market has rewarded companies getting in the way of everything. Personally owned and hosted blogs were replaced by social media companies, digital marketers prioritised making Google&#x27;s crawlers happy over making human beings happy, public mailing lists outside of open source projects are basically dead because now we need to have our conversations on corporate owned web properties - from LinkedIn to Quora, Stack Exchange to this very site we engage with each other via, today.<p>Some are better than others. I don&#x27;t think any of them are better than what we once had, other than search has become the starting point of any enquiry, and they often facilitate search better than what they replaced.<p>&gt; We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.<p>The defining technology sector of the last 20 years - when we look back it in 100 years - must be considered adtech. The market had the conversation, and most people decided they&#x27;d click &quot;Accept&quot; on those banners and wave it all away. The majority of online humanity is not just not immune to advertising, we&#x27;re happy to be spied on to facilitate it just so long as we don&#x27;t have to pay for content, thanks.<p>In some ways companies did adjust to this siren call, but they did it through the safe silos of social media accounts and advertising. Individual brands (celebrities you like), now may have teams of people curating &quot;natural&quot; conversations, while marketing departments and companies have realised that they need to have &quot;conversations&quot; to support their traditional models.<p>I truly believe it is the efforts of these people, teams and organisations that resist personal ownership of the web: the return to the personal website as the de facto presence online. They can&#x27;t have a conversation with you like that. They have no way to inject themselves into the experience of you reading somebody&#x27;s blog the same way they do if you&#x27;re reading their Facebook or Twitter comments.<p>So, what now?<p>This has been a deeply depressing comment to right. The web was wonderful. The internet was so full of promise. This journey back to the early days which I remember with so much fondness has now reminded me: we lost. It&#x27;s over. I don&#x27;t know how we&#x27;ll ever get it back.