The Net’s Super-power is Connection Without Permission.

https://newclues.cluetrain.com/ is an updated list from two of the authors of the original 95 theses in the 1999 Cluetrain Manifesto. https://www.cluetrain.com/

New Clues contains 121 statements. These have been refined here to 80. These are the ones that resonate with me as an educator.

 Their original numbering is preserved for easier reference.

That the internet continues to transform reading and learning is undeniable. The rate of change in societies is also only accelerated by technology but it is people who ultimately make change and who must value an open internet.

In an age where both governments and multi national corporations seek to redefine what privacy means, an open internet cannot be assumed and must be guarded and protected. And that’s why these statements are valuable for all now and in the future. Aspirational? No. Idealistic? Perhaps.  Realistic? Yes. 

 The Internet is us, connected

1. We hold the Internet in common and as unowned.
2. From us and from what we have built on it does the Internet derive all its value.??

1. The Net is of us, by us, and for us.??
2. The Internet is ours.??

 The Internet is nothing and has no purpose

1. The Internet is not a thing any more than gravity is a thing. Both pull us together. ?
2. The Internet is no-thing at all. At its base the Internet is a set of agreements, which the geeky among us (long may their names be hallowed) call “protocols,” but which we might, in the temper of the day, call “commandments.” ?
3. The first among these is: Thy network shall move all packets closer to their destinations without favor or delay based on origin, source, content, or intent. ?
4. Thus does this First Commandment lay open the Internet to every idea, application, business, quest, vice, and whatever. ?

5. There has not been a tool with such a general purpose since language. ?

6. This means the Internet is not for anything in particular. Not for social networking, not for documents, not for advertising, not for business, not for education, not for porn, not for anything. It is specifically designed for everything. ?

The Net is not content

1. There is great content on the Internet. But holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.

The Net is not a medium

1. The Net is not a medium any more than a conversation is a medium. ?
2. On the Net, we are the medium. We are the ones who move messages. We do so every time we post or retweet, send a link in an email, or post it on a social network. ?
3. Every time we move a message through the Net, it carries a little bit of ourselves with it. ?
4. We only move a message through this “medium” if it matters to us in one of the infinite ways that humans care about something. ?
5. Caring — mattering — is the motive force of the Internet. ?

The Web is a Wide World

1. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee used the Net to create a gift he gave freely to us all: the World Wide Web. Thank you. ?

2. Tim created the Web by providing protocols (there’s that word again!) that say how to write a page that can link to any other page without needing anyone’s permission. ?

3. Unlike the real world, every thing and every connection on the Web was created by some one of us expressing an interest and an assumption about how those small pieces go together. ?
4. The Web remakes the world in our collective, emergent image. ?

But oh how we have strayed, sisters and brothers...

How did we let conversation get weaponized, anyway?

1. It’s important to notice and cherish the talk, the friendship, the thousand acts of sympathy, kindness, and joy we encounter on the Internet. ?
2. And yet we hear the words “fag” and “nigger” far more on the Net than off. ?
3. Demonization of ‘them’ — people with looks, languages, opinions, memberships and other groupings we don’t understand, like, or tolerate — is worse than ever on the Internet. ?
4. Women in Saudi Arabia can’t drive? Meanwhile, half of uscan’t speak on the Net without looking over our shoulders ?
5. Hatred is present on the Net because it’s present in the world, but the Net makes it easier to express and to hear. ?
6. We can say this much: Hatred didn’t call the Net into being, but it’s holding the Net — and us — back. ?
7. Let’s at least acknowledge that the Net has values implicit in it. Human values. ?
8. No one owns that place. Everybody can use it. Anyone can improve it. ?

44.  That’s what an open Internet is. Wars have been fought for less. ?

"We agree about everything. I find you fascinating!"

1. On the Internet, the distance between tribes starts at zero.
2. Being welcoming: There’s a value the Net needs to learn from the best of our real world cultures. ?

Marketing still makes it harder to talk.

1. We were right the first time: Markets are conversations. ?
2. A conversation isn’t your business tugging at our sleeve to shill a product we don’t want to hear about. ?
3. If we want to know the truth about your products, we’ll find out from one another. ?
4. We understand that these conversations are incredibly valuable to you. Too bad. They’re ours. ?
5. You’re welcome to join our conversation, but only if you tell us who you work for, and if you can speak for yourself and as yourself. ?
6. Every time you call us “consumers” we feel like cows looking up the word “meat.” ?
7. Quit fracking our lives to extract data that’s none of your business and that your machines misinterpret. ?
8. Ads that sound human but come from your marketing department’s irritable bowels, stain the fabric of the Web. ?
9. Personal is human. Personalized isn’t. ?
10. The more machines sound human, the more they slide down into the uncanny valleywhere everything is a creepshow. ?
11. Also: Please stop dressing up ads as news in the hope we’ll miss the little disclaimer hanging off their underwear. ?
12. When you place a “native ad,” you’re eroding not just your own trustworthiness, but the trustworthiness of this entire new way of being with one another. ?
13. And, by the way, how about calling “native ads” by any of their real names: “product placement,” “advertorial,” or “fake news”? ?

The Gitmo of the Net.

1. We all love our shiny apps, even when they’re sealed as tight as a Moon base. But put all the closed apps in the world together and you have a pile of apps. ?
2. Put all the Web pages together and you have a new world. ?

3. Web pages are about connecting. Apps are about control. ?

4. In the Kingdom of Apps, we are users, not makers. ?
5. Every new page makes the Web bigger. Every new link makes the Web richer. ?

Gravity's great until it sucks us all into a black hole.

1. If Facebook is your experience of the Net, then you’ve strapped on goggles from a company with a fiduciary responsibility to keep you from ever taking the goggles off. ?
2. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple are all in the goggles business. The biggest truth their goggles obscure: These companies want to hold us the way black holes hold light. ?

Privacy in an age of spies

1. Ok, government, you win. You’ve got our data. Now, what can we do to make sure you use it against Them and not against Us? In fact, can you tell the difference? ?
2. A trade isn’t fair trade if we don’t know what we’re giving up. Do you hear that, Security for Privacy trade-off? ?
3. With a probability approaching absolute certainty, we are going to be sorry we didn’t do more to keep data out of the hands of our governments and corporate overlords. ?
4. Privacy in an age of weasels
5. Q: How long do you think it took for pre-Web culture to figure out where to draw the lines? A: How old is culture? ?
6. The Web is barely out of its teens. We are at the beginning, not the end, of the privacy story. ?
7. We can only figure out what it means to be private once we figure out what it means to be social. And we’ve barely begun to re-invent that. ?
8. Hackers got us into this and hackers will have to get us out. ?

To build and to plant

Kumbiyah sounds surprisingly good in an echo chamber 

1. The Internet is astounding. The Web is awesome. You are beautiful. Connect us all and we are more crazily amazing than Jennifer Lawrence. These are simple facts. ?
2. So let’s not minimize what the Net has done in the past twenty years: ?
3. There’s so much more music in the world. ?

4. Politicians now have to explain their positions far beyond the one-page “position papers” they used to mimeograph. ?

5. Anything you don’t understand you can find an explanation for. And a discussion about. And an argument over. Is it not clear how awesome that is? ?
6. You want to listen in on a college-level course about something you’re interested in? Googleyour topic. Take your pick. For free. ?

A pocket full of homilies

1. We should be supporting the artists and creators who bring us delight or ease our burdens. ?
2. We have a culture that defaults to sharing and laws that default to copyright. Copyright has its place, but when in doubt, open it up ?
3. If the conversations at your site are going badly, it’s your fault. ?
4. Support the businesses that truly “get” the Web. You’ll recognize them not just because they sound like us, but because they’re on our side. ?
5. Sure, apps offer a nice experience. But the Web is about links that constantly reach out, connecting us without end. For lives and ideas, completion is death. Choose life. ?
6. Anger is a license to be stupid. The Internet’s streets are already crowded with licensed drivers. ?
7. Live the values you want the Internet to promote. ?
8. If you’ve been talking for a while, shut up. (We will very soon.) ?

Being together: the cause of and solution to every problem 

1. If we have focused on the role of the People of the Net — you and us — in the Internet’s fall from grace, that’s because we still have the faith we came in with. ?
2. We, the People of the Net, cannot fathom how much we can do together because we are far from finished inventing how to be together. ?
3. The Internet has liberated an ancient force — the gravity drawing us together. ?
4. The gravity of connection is love. ?
5. Long live the open Internet. ?