The Cluetrain Manifesto

The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking respect for centralized authority, whether that "authority" is the neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the corporate annual report.

And Internet technology has also threaded its way deep into the heart of Corporate Empire, where once upon a time, lockstep loyalty to the chairman's latest attempt at insight was no further away than the mimeograph machine.

One memo from Mr. Big and everyone believed (or so Mr.

Big liked to think).

No more.

The same kind of seditious deconstruction that's being practiced on the Web today, just for the hell of it, is also seeping onto the company intranet. How many satires are floating around there, one wonders: of the latest hyperinflated restructuring plan, of the over-sincere cultural-sensitivity training sessions Human Resources made mandatory last week, of all the gibberish that passes for "management" — or has passed up until now.

Step back a frame or two. Zoom out.

Isn't that weird? Workers and markets are speaking the same language! And they're both speaking it in the same shoot-from-the-hip, unedited, devil-take-the-hindmost style.

This conversation may be irreverent of eternal verities, but it's not all jokes. Whether in the marketplace or at work, people do have genuine, serious concerns.

And we have something else as well: knowledge. Not the sort of boring, abstract knowledge that "Knowledge Management" wants to manage.

No. The real thing.

We have knowledge of what we do and how we do it — our craft — and it drives our voices; it's what we most like to talk about.

But this whole gamut of conversation, from infinite jest to point-specific expertise: who needs it?

Companies need it.

Without it they can't innovate, build consensus, or go to market. Markets need it.

Without it they don't know what works and what doesn't; don't know why they should give a damn. Cultures need it.

Without play and knowledge in equal measure, they begin to die. People get gloomy, anxious, and depressed.

Eventually, the guns come out.

There are two new conversations going on today, both vibrant and exciting; both mediated by Internet technologies but having little to do with technology otherwise.

Unfortunately, there's also a metaphorical firewall separating these conversations, and that wall is the traditional, conservative, fearful corporation.

So what is to be done? Easy: Burn down business-as-usual.

Bulldoze it. Cordon off the area.

Set up barricades. Cripple the tanks.

Topple the statues of heroes too long dead into the street.

Sound familiar? You bet it does.

And the message has been the same all along, from Paris in '68 to the Berlin Wall, from Warsaw to Tiananmen Square: Let the kids rock and roll!

So open the windows and turn up the volume.

If the noise gets loud enough, maybe even CNN will cover. From Ancient Markets to Global Networks

This may seem rabidly antibusiness.

It's not. Business is just a word for buying and selling things.

In one way or another, we all rely on this commerce, both to get the things we want or need, and to afford them. We are alternately the workers who create products and services, and the customers who purchase them.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this setup. Except when it becomes all of life.

Except when life becomes secondary and subordinate. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, business so dominates all other aspects of our existence that it's hard to imagine it was ever otherwise.

But it was. Imagine it.

Storylines

A few thousand years ago there was a marketplace. Never mind where.

Traders returned from far seas with spices, silks, and precious, magical stones. Caravans arrived across burning deserts bringing dates and figs, snakes, parrots, monkeys, strange music, stranger tales.

The marketplace was the heart of the city, the kernel, the hub, the omphalos. Like past and future, it stood at the crossroads.

People woke early and went there for coffee and vegetables, eggs and wine, for pots and carpets, rings and necklaces, for toys and sweets, for love, for rope, for soap, for wagons and carts, for bleating goats and evil-tempered camels.

They went there to look and listen and to marvel, to buy and be amused. But mostly they went to meet each other.

And to talk.

In the market, language grew.

Became bolder, more sophisticated. Leaped and sparked from mind to mind.

Incited by curiosity and rapt attention, it took astounding risks that none had ever dared to contemplate, built whole civilizations from the ground up.

Markets are conversations.

Trade routes pave the storylines. Across the millennia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand.

So what went wrong? From the perspective of corporations, many of which by the twentieth century had become bigger and far more powerful than ancient city-states, nothing went wrong.

But things did change.

Commerce is a natural part of human life, but it has become increasingly unnatural over the intervening centuries, incrementally divorcing itself from the people on whom it most depends, whether workers or customers.

While this change is in many ways understandable — huge factories took the place of village shops; the marketplace moved from the center of the town and came to depend on far-flung mercantile trade — the result has been to interpose a vast chasm between buyers and sellers.

By our own lifetimes, mass production and mass media had totally transformed this relationship, which came to be characterized by alienation and mystery. Exactly what relationship did producers and markets have to each other anymore? In attempting to answer this blind-man's-bluff question, market research became a billion-dollar industry.

Once an intrinsic part of the local community, commerce has evolved to become the primary force shaping the community of nations on a global scale. But because of its increasing divorce from the day-to-day concerns of real people, commerce has come to ignore the natural conversation that defines communities as human.

The slow pace of this historic change has made it seem unsurprising to many that people are now valued primarily for their capacity to consume, as targets for product pitches, as demographic abstractions.