The Cluetrain Manifesto

Your code is so brain-damaged it won't even compile. Read a book, moron."

Today, we tend to think of "flaming" as a handful of people vociferously insulting each other online.

A certain sense of finesse has largely been lost. In the olden days, a good flame war could go on for weeks or months, with hot invective flying around like rhetorical shrapnel.

It was high art, high entertainment. Though tempers flared hot and professional bridges were sometimes irreparably burned, ultimately it was a game — a participatory sport in which the audience awarded points for felicitous disparagements, particularly well-worded putdowns, inspired squelches.

It was not a game, however, for the meek of heart. These engagements could be fierce.

Even trying to separate the contestants could bring down a hail of sharp-tongued derision. Theories were floated and defended with extreme energy and enthusiasm, if not always with logical rigor.

Opinions tended to run high on any given topic. Say you'd posted about your dog.

And, look, you got a response! "Jim, you are a complete idiot. Your dog is so brain-damaged it won't even hunt..."

If you'd happened to see the first version of the comment to Jim, you might grin at the second.

If not, your mileage might vary. But the point is not to extol flame wars, as amusing as some could be.

Instead, it is to suggest a particular set of values that began to emerge in what linguists might call a well-bounded speech community. On the Net, you said what you meant and had better be ready to explain your position and how you'd arrived at it.

Mouthing platitudes guaranteed that you would be challenged. Nothing was accepted at face value, or taken for granted.

Everything was subject to question, revision, re-implementation, parody — whether it was an algorithm, a political philosophy or, God help you, an advertisement.

While the outcome of these debates did not invariably constitute wisdom for the ages, the process by which they took place was honing a razor-sharp sense of collective potential.

The conversation was not only engaging, interesting, exciting — it was effective. Tools and techniques emerged with a speed that broke all precedents.

As would soon become obvious, the Net was a powerful multiplier for intellectual capital. Waiting for Joe Six-Pack

A few years ago, you could make an interesting distinction between people who thought there was something special about the Internet and those who saw it as no big deal.

Now of course, everybody sees it as a big deal, mostly because of those weirdball IPOs and the overnight billionaires they've spawned. But I think the distinction is still valid.

Most companies with Net-dot-dollar-signs in their eyes today are still missing the "something special" dimension.

Yahoo has already made it, financially speaking, but forms a good example nonetheless.

Despite the funky hacker roots of the initial directory Yang and Filo built, Yahoo now describes itself as a "global media company," thus claiming a closer spiritual kinship with Disney and Murdoch than with the culture that originally put it on the map.

To this mindset, the Net is just an extension of preceding mass media, primarily television. The rhetoric it uses is freighted with the same crypto-religious marketing jargon that characterized broadcast: brand, market share, eyeballs, demographics.

And guess what? It works. If nobody was getting rich off this stuff, you wouldn't hear about it.

It's the fast new companies that are reaping these monetary rewards. But guess what again.

They're reaping them from an even faster market — one that, for the most part, has only discovered the Internet in the last year or so. The people who make up this new market naturally bring a lot of baggage from their previous experience of mass media.

To someone who just got an AOL account last Christmas, I suppose a Web page looks like a v-e-r-y s-l-o-w TV show.

But this is where the something-special effect comes in.

It is assumed in some quarters that if you missed the early days of Usenet and didn't use Lynx from a Unix command line, you missed the Magic of Internet Culture.

I don't think so.

Sure those were very different days and there was a certain fervor — almost a fever — that was hard to mistake for sitcom fandom.

But I think the Internet still has a radicalizing effect today, despite all the banner ads and promotional hype and you-may-already-be-a-winner sweepstakes.

The something special is what the Manifesto calls voice.

Imagine for a moment: millions of people sitting in their shuttered homes at night, bathed in that ghostly blue television aura. They're passive, yeah, but more than that: they're isolated from each other.

Now imagine another magic wire strung from house to house, hooking all these poor bastards up. They're still watching the same old crap.

Then, during the touching love scene, some joker lobs an off-color aside — and everybody hears it. Whoa! What was that? People are rolling on the floor laughing.

And it begins to happen so often, it gets abbreviated: ROTFL. The audience is suddenly connected to itself.

What was once The Show, the hypnotic focus and tee-vee advertising carrier wave, becomes in the context of the Internet a sort of reverse new-media McGuffin — an excuse to get together rather than an excuse not to.

Think of Joel and the 'bots on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The point is not to watch the film, but to outdo each other making fun of it.

And for such radically realigned purposes, some bloated corporate Web site can serve as a target every bit as well as Godzilla, King of the Monsters. As the remake trailer put it: size does matter.

So here comes Joe Six-Pack onto AOL. What does he know about netliness? Nothing.

Zilch. He has no cultural context whatsoever.

But soon, very soon, what he hears is something he never heard in TV Land: people cracking up.

"That ain't no laugh track neither," Joe is thinking and goes looking for the source of this strange, new, rather seductive sound.

So here's a little story problem for ya, class. If the Internet has 50 million people on it, and they're not all as dumb as they look, but the corporations trying to make a fast buck off their asses are as dumb as they look, how long before Joe is laughing as hard as everyone else?

The correct answer of course: not long at all.

And as soon as he starts laughing, he's not Joe Six-Pack anymore. He's no longer part of some passive couch-potato target demographic.

Because the Net connects people to each other, and impassions and empowers through those connections, the media dream of the Web as another acquiescent mass-consumer market is a figment and a fantasy.