The Cluetrain Manifesto

Sort of neat how that works out. So the bottom line is: you can play in the Internet headspace as well as anyone.

There are just three conditions: 1) you have to let your people play for you, since there's really nobody else at home; 2) you have to play, not something more serious and goal-oriented; and 3) related to the previous, you have to have at least some tenuous notion of what "headspace" might mean.

It's not in the dictionary. But you can ask around.

Get the general hang of the thing. If you figure it out, we'll think you're cool and consume mass quantities of all your wonderful products.

See how easy life can be when you loosen up a little?

You laugh, we laugh with you.

Either way, we live.

2 - The Longing (David Weinberger)

What Is the Web For?

We know telephones are for talking with people, televisions are for watching programs, and highways are for driving.

So what’s the Web for?

We don’t know. Yet we put it on magazine covers, found businesses stoking it, spend billions on an infrastructure for it.

We want it to be important with a desperation that can frighten us when we look at it coldly.

Who is this we? It’s not just the webheads and full-time aficionados.

It’s the management teams who don’t understand it but sense an opportunity. It’s the uncles and aunts who pepper you with questions about all this Web stuff.

It’s the seven-year-old who takes it for granted that when she speaks the entire world can choose to hear her. Our culture’s pulse is pounding with the Web.

This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates that something is missing in our lives.

What is missing is the sound of the human voice.

The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice.

Being Managed

The longing for the Web occurs in the midst of a profoundly managed age.

We believe, in fact, that to be a business is to be managed.

A business manages its resources, including its finances, physical plant, and people in basically the same way: quantifiable factors are determined, predicted, processed, assessed.

But our management view extends far beyond business. We manage our households, our children, our wildlife, our ecological environment.

And that which is unmanaged strikes us as bad: weeds, riots, cancer.

The idea that we can manage our world is uniquely twentieth-century and chiefly American.

And there are tremendous advantages to believing one lives in a managed world:

• Risk avoidance. Nothing unexpected happens if you’re managing your world.

• Smoothness. Everything works in a managed environment simply because broken things are an embarrassment.

• Fairness. In earlier times, life was unfair.

Now you’re guaranteed your three-score and ten and if something "goes wrong," the managed system will compensate you, even if you have to sue the bastards.

• Discretionary attention.

If you were out in the wild, your attention would be drawn to every creaking twig and night howl. But now that the risks have been mitigated, things work right, and you can manage your time so you have not just leisure time but also discretionary attention: you can decide what interests you.

Why, you can even have hobbies.

Of course, none of these benefits are delivered perfectly.

There are still risks, there are still injustices, there are still "outages." But these are exceptions. And when they occur, we feel cheated, as if our contract has been violated.

It wasn’t always thus. For millennia, we assumed that being in control was the exception and living in a wildly risk-filled world was the norm:

??"As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.

They kill us for their sport."
King Lear??

Today these awful words sound like one of those quaint, primitive ideas we’ve outgrown.

The belief in the managed environment is a denial of the brute "facticity" of our lives.

The truth is that businesses cannot be managed. They can be run, but they exist in a world that is so far beyond the control of the executives and the shareholders that "managing" a business is a form of magical belief that gets punctured the first time a competitor drastically lowers prices, a large trading partner’s economy falters, a key supplier’s factory burns down, your lead developer gets a better offer, your CFO becomes felonious, or an angry consumer wins an unfair lawsuit.

As flies to wanton boys are companies to their markets. They pull off a company’s wings for sport.

How to Hate Your Job

A managed environment requires behavior from us that we accept as inevitable although, of course, it is really mandatory only because it is mandated.

We call it "professionalism."

Professionalism goes far beyond acting according to a canon of ethics. Professionals dress like other professionals (one eccentricity per person is permitted — a garish tie, perhaps, or a funky necklace), decorate their cubicles with nothing more disturbing than a Dilbert (formerly Far Side) cartoon, sit up straight at committee meetings, tell carefully calibrated jokes, don’t undermine the authority of (that is, show they’re smarter than) their superiors, make idle chatter only about a narrow range of "safe" topics, don’t swear, don’t mention God, make absolutely no reference to being sexual (exceptions made for male executives after the hot new hire has left the room), and successfully "manage" their home life so that it never intrudes unexpectedly into their business life.

Most of us don’t mind doing this. In fact, we actually sort of enjoy it.

It’s like playing grownup. And having extremist political banners hung in cubicles or having to listen to someone talk about his spiritual commitments or sex life would simply be distracting.

Disturbing, actually.

And yet...

we feel resentment. Find someone who likes being managed, who feels fully at home in his or her professional self.

Our longing for the Web is rooted in the deep resentment we feel towards being managed.

However much we long for the Web is how much we hate our job.

Our Voice

Just about all the concessions we make to work in a well-run, non- disturbing, secure, predictably successful, managed environment have to do with giving up our voice.