New Clues - an update to the Cluetrain Manifesto

Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger released an updated version to the sixteen year old Cluetrain Manifesto. They call it "New Clues" (Dave Winer's Listicle version is here).  Take a moment to read it. The article spells out in understandable, readable detail how and why your future is at stake.

My addition to their conversation is to encourage you to question the culture we are creating with our use of the world wide web. Click-bait words such as: amazing, best, incredible, horrible, and other emotion-laden terms is only a symptom, indicative of the disease but not the cause. Reducing complex ideas to a photo containing only a few words is also only a symptom of a disease.

While at a check out counter in a grocery store, I mentioned to the college kid beside me how the "rags" of 10 years ago, The National Enquirer and similar weeklies, were nearly gone. Their spot, where impulsive purchases are made and which reflect our cultural bias, have been replaced by People, Us, InTouch, Cosmopolitan and Esquire.

Sigh. The aliens are gone. Replaced by photoshopped renditions of people we aspire to be, but of whom most, near all, will never become.

I try to imagine what it was like 10 years ago to be an editor of the National Enquirer going through a grocery store check out. For years you made your bread with articles about the crazy and sometimes nasty things that aliens do on earth. Then you look at the headlines of People, only to see what asinine things celebrities are doing.

"We dream up the most outrageous stuff that an alien could ever be imagined doing, and some dumb ass twenty-something actor comes along and makes our alien look tame? How the hell are we supposed to compete with that?!?!"

How, indeed? How could an alien top what actors, reality "stars" and politicians do - and do without a moments thought, while still being believable? How can a professional writer top the stupid acts of professional celebrity, who arrive laden with fame but without responsibility? How can writers hope to compete with, as philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, ".. composers whose sole function is [to] persuade [us] that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps as entertaining as well. There are great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say."

The age of celebrity worship, and pursuit of similar fame even if only among a select group of our peers, conceals and deflects moral questions about mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperil wars, economic disparities, and political corruption. Our efforts to make life more interesting, varied, exciting, vivid and promising has in the long run, had the opposite effect.

Note: I've been going through posts I wrote but never published, for whatever reason I decided at the time. Usually, I wanted to fact check further, or edit a section that could be made more clear. Decided to scrub that idea, and just hit the publish button. Please consider this as off-the-cuff, unedited remarks.