Tuesday, March 05, 2002

Cluetrain as Economics for lefties?

Dave says Andrew Orlowski's comments make him nervous. Here's the reply I sent to Andrew (I'll post his very resonable reply to me if he says its ok).

Your article made some good points, but I'd disagree with the main thrust.

Cluetrain is showy and flash, but it contains a very important point (admittedly one that Adam Smith and Hayek have made before) that markets are emergent self-organising information systems, and as such far more efficient than anything designed top down. It made this point in a way that would appeal to Marketing types, and make them rethink their ex cathedra approach.

In my experience, the people at college who went into marketing were exactly those pomo left-leaning college politicians (the right winger tends more towards investment banking) so you can look on the revolutionary rhetoric as playing to the audience.

You are too kind to Dvorak, who just posted a load of Blimpish 'what are these young people doing now' stuff, trolling for pageviews, and projecting his bizarre group sex fantasies onto the cluetrain readers. He does this from time to time - I remember him implying that only a poofter would buy a 'girly' coloured iBook a couple of years back. All Locke did was parody this back to him, in slightly stronger terms. He engaged in the debate exactly on Dvorak's level.

A critique of cluetrain via parody that actually manages to land some punches is at http://www.gluetrain.com, and has been for a couple of years.

The thing I find sad is that this puerile man has distracted the blogging community from what is going on this week in Congress, where Movie moguls are lobbying tame legislator to pass a bill outlawing all general purpose computers.

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