
“Markets are conversations”: that is how the authors of the “Cluetrain Manifesto” put the logic of the market economy in the digital age at a point in time when the new economy – today one might call it Web 1.0 – had reached its climax. The idea was not brand new. As a matter of fact it is part and parcel of the science of political economy that “economic transactions are always based upon relations between human beings”, as Gebhard Kirchgässner formulates it in his book “Homo Oeconomicus”. Or in other words: goods, services and prices are media of a dialogue between supply and demand.