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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Corporations who don't want to see their car unhitched from the New Economy had better give up on "business as usual," argues "The Cluetrain Manifesto."
Feb 1, 2000 | The word "manifesto" is a little like the boy who cried wolf; it's hard to know when to take it seriously. To be certain, its appearance in a book's title always foretells some kind of trouble. Most of the time it's just an early warning of extended bombast. Less frequently it indicates the presence of some profound or earth-rocking ideology. In the confounding case of "The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual," it's probably both.
The essential thesis of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" is that the Internet has turned the tables on the forces of mass industrialization. No longer is the cycle of production and consumption a corporate monologue; ubiquitous networking has enabled under-served masses and powerless workers to organize, energize, assert their own voices and thereby push back on their corporate oppressors. As consumers and workers become ever-more internetworked, interoperable and interdependent, both become smarter and more powerful -- perhaps more powerful than the corporations that serve and employ them. Corporate control is an inevitable casualty as intellectual capital becomes more important than material capital.
Pretty bracing assertions, to be sure -- but what else to expect from a treatise that touts itself as "The End of Business as Usual"? Whether or not "Cluetrain" lives up to this promise (or threat), the authors do seem to grasp the essential elements of revolutionary style; no self-respecting manifesto should leave the house without a few critical accessories, and this manic tract seems to have most of them. There is the obligatory declaration of obsolescence: Just as Karl Marx declared the world no longer had any use for capitalism, "Cluetrain" announces the end of Taylorism and Fordism, the very cornerstones of the industrial age. There is the ever-popular prognostication of doom: Companies that don't recognize and embrace the new reality -- by metaphorically jumping on the eponymous "clue train" -- will be left squashed on the tracks. There is evangelical righteousness by the truckload. In fact, the book begins by declaring a Digital Reformation with its own version of Martin Luther's 95 theses -- a clever device that has been circulating in open-source circles for some time now.
The theses, first posted to the Net last year, open with the declaration: "1. Markets are conversations. 2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors. 3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice." The manifesto continues like a finger-waving lesson book for clueless corporations and concludes with an implicit threat of extinction for firms that refuse to get it. "95. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting."
Of course, the authors of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" are hardly the first to argue that the Internet is putting individuals back in charge. Any number of recent books have served corporate America with official notification that the post-industrial era begins now, and the news is -- for the captains of industry, anyway -- mostly bad. "The Cluetrain Manifesto" adds to the gloom-fest its own litany of the many corporate organs rendered vestigial: marketing, advertising and "business communications" at large (consumers are now too well-informed to accept breezy P.R. babble at face value anymore); management (peer-to-peer connections subvert hierarchy); and control (you just can't push customers or employees around like you used to, darn it -- access to information has made 'em ornery).
