This culture shift will never stop doing my head in. https://twitter.com/thelindsayellis/status/1273343527011799041

In terms of history of ideas, there is a through line which relates directly to the origins of how marketing and platforms became embedded and inseparable from people’s creative output.

The “selling out”/“keep it real” did come from a genuine place, but was always full of contradictions/irony (good example of this is Tool in 1997 admonishing their fans to “send more money / fuck you buddy”).

But the beginning of the end was in 1999 when the ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’ was first posted.

https://www.cluetrain.com/ 

At first, this was seen in terms of companies marketing to consumers—the intersection of markets and the internet.

The term Web 2.0 was also coined in 1999 though it didn’t catch on until 2004 or 2005.

At the time, the big picture intellectual view of the internet was mostly arguments about the ‘semantic web’—very few people bothered to critically analyse the emerging tech/market consensus.

The legacy music industry at this time was just emerging from a protracted battle against Napster and others, completely unaware and unprepared for the emerging technological/cultural shift that was already underway.

Web 2.0 coined a new vocabulary for software design and popularised ideas of “an architecture of participation”, “user generated content”, “collective intelligence”, “crowdsourcing”.

As VC dollars flowed and platforms scaled, consolidated and monopolised, a new vocabulary emerged: “personal branding”, “microcelebrity”, “klout”, “status updates”, “lifestreaming”.

Alice Marwick’s ethnographic study of the emergence of the Silicon Valley status culture—between the dot com bubble and the rise of the App Store—is one of the best records of this time period.

It’s extraordinary that so many people overlooked this phenomena for a whole decade, then flung themselves into it en masse just when the bad signs were starting to appear.