The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)
&quot;Cluetrain&quot;, J.P. Barlow&#x27;s Manifesto, and ESR&#x27;s Cathedral &amp; Bazaar were all influential and widely-lauded at the time, but strike me now as various degrees of misguided and&#x2F;or naive.<p>All three documents were <i>highly</i> aspirational, in that they pointed to a vision of the world the authors <i>wanted</i> to see, though the specific mechanisms and implications were less than clear, and over time, many dark and&#x2F;or futile implications have emerged.  &quot;Cluetrain&quot; 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.<p>My sense is that RMS&#x27;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.<p>Though one might argue that JPB&#x27;s Manifesto has given us the EFF.  This hasn&#x27;t <i>guaranteed</i> the freedoms Barlow championed, and it&#x27;s run up against the dark sides of his vision, but it does at least <i>continue the fight</i>, which it seems freedom and democratic ideals <i>always</i> entail.<p>&quot;Cluetrain&quot; though seems far more like mush to me.<p>(I&#x27;d really like to hear from those who disagree with that assessment.)