Seven years ago, approximately ten years after it was first published, David Weinberger reflected on The Cluetrain Manifesto, and what in retrospect he thought it got wrong. Weinberger wrote:
First, the moderately obnoxious tone of the book was appropriate in 1999, but now it's sometimes odd. It reads as if being on the Web were an act of rebellion. Ten years later, the Web is the mainstream.I have no doubt that Weinberger's ten-years-later reflections on "The Web-as-rebellion" are influenced by the hindsight of seeing how the web developed, how its outsider status transformed into being mainstream. This wasn't the projected development that he'd hoped for. But I think it's also fair to say that beyond the discomfort of waking up one morning and discovering that you've become "the establishment", Weinberger's reflections are the inevitable result of simply growing up.
The Web-as-rebellion is also central to my essay "The Longing," a chapter in the original book. It says that how much you love the Web is how much you hate your job. As time passes, that idea gets increasingly irrelevant, but I think there's still a little truth in it. Being on the Web isn't sticking it to The Man, but much of the Net culture in fact pushes back against mass culture. LOLcats appropriates the very worst of mass culture — the "Hang in there, baby" cat posters — and twists it wryly, absurdly, and collectively. The common use of clip art in Net culture mocks mass business culture. And Auto-Tune the News mocks modern mass culture on several fronts at once, hilariously.
Nevertheless, the strident, self-righteous tone of the original version now sounds a bit, well, quaint.