The Cluetrain Manifesto

OK. Because you’ve been so patient and read so bloody much, we’ll let you in on the Secret of Our Success.

Just follow the twelve easy steps below and you’re sure to be on your way to fame and fortune in the exciting new world of Webusiness. (Caution: It is vital that you follow these steps precisely in the order given.

Otherwise, we are not responsible for the mutant hellspawn you may inadvertently call forth from the realm of the undead.)

?? The Cluetrain Hit-One-Outta-the-Park Twelve-Step
Program for Internet Business Success

1. Relax
2. Have a sense of humor
3. Find your voice and use it
4. Tell the truth
5. Don’t panic
6. Enjoy yourself
7. Be brave
8. Be curious
9. Play more
10. Dream always
11. Listen up
12. Rap on ??

Do these things and you just can’t miss.

Of course, there’s as much distance between this advice and the decisions you make every day as there is between "Go forth and multiply" and "100 Ways to Pick Up Hot Chicks and Radical Dudes." Still, we yearn for easy advice.

It’s so hard to give up the old wish for stimulus-response marketing and management. Hard to go back to the days of the "talking cure" when psychotherapy meant years of slogging through memories and dreams instead of a slap on the back, and instructions to "nurture the inner child" and eat two bran muffins every day.

Hard to forget the televised version of Anna Karenina that goes from start to finish in two hours (the train comes to a screeching halt just in time) and reopen the musty volume and soak into every snow-flecked page.

Look, we’d love to derive twelve happy instructions from the wash of ideas swirling around us. Really.

We could market those puppies like Tang in a sauna. Seminars, workbooks, T-shirts, coffee mugs...

But it doesn’t work that way. This is an existential moment.

It’s characterized by uncertainty, the dissolving of the normal ways of settling uncertainties, the evaporation of the memory of what certainty was once like. In times like this, we all have an impulse to find something stable and cling to it, but then we’d miss the moment entirely.

There isn’t a list of things you can do to work the whirlwind. The desire to have such a list betrays the moment.

There may not be twelve or five or twenty things you can do, but there are ten thousand. The trick is, you have to figure out what they are.

They have to come from you. They have to be your words, your moves, your authentic voice.

The Web got built by people who chose to build it. The lesson is: don’t wait for someone to show you how.

Learn from your spontaneous mistakes, not from safe prescriptions and cautiously analyzed procedures. Don’t try to keep people from going wrong by repeating the mantra of how to get it right.

Getting it right isn’t enough any more. There’s no invention in it.

There’s no voice.

Maybe we’d have more luck with the Cluetrain List of Don’ts than with a List of Dos.

The first ninety-four items would be things like: don’t snoop on your employees, don’t build knowledge management systems and corporate portals that are nothing but funnels for the same old propaganda.

Don’t hire people who claim to be experts at increasing morale. And right at the bottom of the list, number ninety-five, would be the most important one: don’t rely on lists, self-styled "gurus," or business books.

Scary, isn’t it? Good. You ought to be scared.

That’s a realistic reaction. You want comfort? Invent your own.

Exhilaration and joy are also in order. But face the facts: the tracks end at the edge of the jungle.

7 - Post-Apocalypso (Christopher Locke)

??We will strive to listen in new ways — to the voices of quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices, and the voices that have despaired of being heard.\\ Richard M.

Nixon, first inaugural address, 1969??

Irony is perhaps the most common mode of Internet communications. The Net didn't create the mentality, but it did come along just in time to give it new expression.

Nixon speaking about unheard voices of the heart from the height of the 1960s is a prime example of why most people have despaired of ever being heard at all. And of why they've stopped listening for answers from above — from Big Government, Big Business, Big Education, Big Media, Big Religion.

With few exceptions, the interlocking agendas of these monolithic powers have become utterly divorced from the constituencies they were originally conceived to serve, their interests as remote from our daily lives as the court of King George was to the American colonies in 1776.

And you know what happened then.

So are we calling for a revolution? What would be the point? The only revolution that matters is already well underway.

And by the way, since it's not being covered by CNN and Fox, we're winning.

You say you didn't notice anything out of the ordinary? Nor were you supposed to.

Invisibility and ignorance are powerful weapons.

Ignorance is not a value you often hear extolled.

Let's make up for lost time. Here's how it works; it's pretty simple.

When you ignore people long enough, they begin to feel invisible. Because your important concerns do not concern them, they begin to figure it's a two-way street.

They begin to ignore you back. Pretty soon they're thinking Al Gore is some hockey player from Winnipeg, and Warren Buffet…isn't he the guy who does late-nite infomercials for cut-rate country western CDs? Three easy payments and it's yours? Yeah, but who really cares.

Ignorance is power. A maxim often heard online is that the Internet routes around obstacles, meaning it ignores them.

In its early phase, the Net ignored business; Internet audiences simply weren't interested. And the feeling was mutual.

Business ignored the Net for a long time, not seeing it as what it thought a media market should look like, which is to say television. This mutual ignorance served as the incubator for a global revolution that today threatens the foundations of business-as-usual.

Before any Old Order of Things can be given the final heave-ho coup de grâce, it's necessary to create a parallel infrastructure controlled by people acting in cooperation for their own benefit and mutual support.