The least quoted and most important "clue" in The Cluetrain Manifesto is the "one clue" listed above the "95 theses." Written by the very sadly late Chris Locke, it says,"we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it."
Sadly, that has not yet been proven true. Their grasp far exceeds our reach. But that doesn't mean it always will. Our Digital Age is three decades old at most and will last dozens or thousands of decades more. So it's early.
I think it's because we were never human here. Meaning we were never embodied.
Walk into a store or a house in the natural world, and people there know you're human, because you're embodied. We aren't online.
Here we are "users," "clients," "visitors," "the audience," "eyeballs" "data subjects" (GDPR) or "consumers" (CCPA). Entities embodied as servers are lords of their castles on the Web. We're just serfs, with no more rights or abilities than each of those grants separately.
The best we become instantiated (though only by implication human) is when we get "accounts" with server operators. Yet, with every account we add, we lose a little more of the agency that arises from autonomy and independence. We have measures of both those graces in the natural world, where we are embodied. But we don't here. And, as others in this thread point out, it is extremely easy to take boundless advantage of our structural vulnerabilities. And to normalize that in the extreme as well.
Of course the wizards among us can spin up personal servers, "own" (actually, rent) personal domains, and stuff like that; but the old client-server model is stacked against the world's muggles and only a bit less so against the wizards, since wizards also need their accounts with the networked world's alpha operators.
The best way to solve this, IMHO, is by developing business and technical solutions that can only come from our side, the human side. I list fourteen of those here https://customercommons.org/solutions/ .
I've updated that piece several times to clarify things, so you might check it again.
What it's a call for is hacking our way to publishing norms that don't involve tracking. And that's what we're starting to do at Linux Journal, where I'm editor-in-chief.
For the first time anywhere, we'll be agreeing to readers' terms, rather than the reverse. In legal terms, the reader will be the first party and Linux Journal will be the second party. I explain how we're approaching this in "Help Us Cure Online Publishing of Its Addiction to Personal Data": http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/help-us-cure-online-publ...
The barn we’re raising is for all of publishing, but we’re short-handed. So, if you're interested in helping, let me know (doc at linuxjournal dot com). Or show up on 2 April at the Computer History Museum: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/vrm-day-2018a-tickets-438706894... . Thanks!
The least quoted and most important "clue" in The Cluetrain Manifesto is the "one clue" listed above the "95 theses." Written by the very sadly late Chris Locke, it says,"we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it."
Sadly, that has not yet been proven true. Their grasp far exceeds our reach. But that doesn't mean it always will. Our Digital Age is three decades old at most and will last dozens or thousands of decades more. So it's early.