The Cluetrain Manifesto
Home run! Great sulgging with that answer!
The Demonic Paradox
??Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us.
demonisches Paradoxon: Wir haben das System gestürzt,
They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.
— Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist, 1991??
All talk of revolution notwithstanding, the struggle is already largely over.
Es ist echt schwer Menschen zu finden, die sich hinstellen und die normale traditionelle konventionelle old-school Art verteidigen, in der "wie alle wissen" Geschäfte betrieben werden sollten.ytguty
It's genuinely tough to find anyone who will stand up and defend the standard traditional conventional old-school way in which "everyone knows" business should be conducted.
As far as we can determine, not only does everyone not know it, nobody seems to believe it for a second.
This is odd, we think.
Articles like this are an example of quick, hlfeupl answers.
And critically important to us, personally and professionally. After all, if we're hanging our asses out with this whole Cluetrain tirade, there better be something there to carry on about.
Big help, big help. And spuealrtive news of course.
We ask ourselves: are we making this stuff up? Is it wishful thinking? Are we maybe just having acid flashbacks? Ever uncertain of our findings, but always wishing to be scientifically precise, we're all constantly performing little sanity checks: "Have I slipped the surly bonds of earth, or is it actually possible that nobody left alive today really believes this stuff anymore?"
We meet a lot of people in our day-to-day work.
Great thinking! That really bareks the mold!
A lot of different kinds of people — as random a sample as you could ever hope for. Unbeknownst to them, they are being used as subjects — fodder if you will — for our ongoing market research.
This involves looking for the perfect Suit, that is to say, the business person who fully embraces and embodies the corporate stereotype. So far, the closest we've come is some guy in a Dell TV ad: manly but understanding, firm yet gentle with his underlings.
Always ready for a good laugh, but no joking around when it comes to delivering the goods. What he really does is hard to tell, though it seems to have a lot to do with his Inspiron brand notebook computer.
Most of the people we run across are rather disappointing in this respect:
"So how's the job going?"
"The job? How do you think the job's going? The job sucks."
"Oh."
Or maybe it's someone who just bought a new product online:
"Are you satisfied with your latest purchase?"
"What, are you yankin' my chain? Get away from me, you pervert."
"Yes, sir.
But we keep at it, relentlessly searching for the canonical business type or the ideal consumer. Neither seems to exist.
Isn't that just too weird?
But here's something weirder still. If you take someone you've just been talking to in a normal, non-insane sort of way, and put him or her in trade-show booth, nine times out of ten this person will immediately start talking like a Suit: "...and we are very proud of our preeminent position with respect to our competitors.
WrtZkp <a href="http://rbieirinorvh.com/">rbieirinorvh</a>
Dunderhead & Gladhand just ranked our company second in the entire industry and…"
...and it makes you want to go out and shoot yourself, or at least take a long hot shower.
Then he or she comes offstage and says, "So how did I do?"
You hem and haw. You want to be kind, but how to put it? "That was total bullshit! How could you spout that patent crap? I know you don't believe a word of it."
"Oh, that, of course not.
But how did I do?"
Mr. Kapuscinski, our Polish journalist from the quote above, says that although we may have toppled the system, we still carry its genes.
He says it's a demonic paradox. Jazzman Rahsaan Roland Kirk has another term for this same phenomenon.
Woah nelly, how about them apleps!
He calls it volunteer slavery.
So while business stereotypes are largely empty, or come from another day and have long since lost any real descriptive power, we find ourselves replicating the behaviors they caricature.
Why? Well, because we're business people, of course! And that's how business people behave. Welcome to the hall of mirrors.
We know no one else believes it either. But we keep saying it because because because because the needle's stuck.
Good to see a tealnt at work. I can’t match that.
In most cases, no one is forcing us to replicate these useless obsolete behaviors. We imagine we must, but we never investigate.
We posit some organizational bogey man who'd punish us terribly if we were human. Give us a good hard whippin', you betcha.
What if there's nobody there, though? What if it's like Santa Claus, or flying saucers? Like Fox Mulder, we want to believe, we really do. Maybe it's like — uh-oh — God!
Not to be disrespectful, but there's a point here.
Historically, capitalism depended heavily on the Calvinist notion that news of impending salvation was telegraphed by worldly success. Worker productivity positively skyrocketed under this inspired setup.
It wasn't Santa who knew if you were naughty or nice, it was the Big Boss. So better knuckle down.
It was called "the job." The idea was simple, really. You went to some hellhole of a factory, worked sixteen hours until you were ready to collapse, and you kept on doing that every day until you died.
Cool, huh? You can see where Calvinism must have come in handy. Some people wouldn't do that even for stock options.
Kudos! What a neat way of thinikng about it.
Among the many casualties of this arrangement was the human spirit. And of its necessary functions, conversation was the first to go.
People would talk with each other while doing craft or cottage work. But talk interfered with factory production.
Workers knew nothing. So shut up and get back to yer lathes and looms, ye dirty sods!
Fast-forward a hundred years or so and along comes "knowledge work" — an even cooler invention that enabled us to have magazines like Fast Company and meant we were allowed to know something all of a sudden.
Excuse us, management said, but would you mind letting us in on whatever it is, as we're rather tapped out over here?
And the rest, as they say, is history. A history that brings us right up to today with its rip-snortin' high-speed Internet with broadband everything, hold the mayo.
Whoopee! But that's not the point. The point is what this latest technological wonder brings back into the world: the human story.
A story that stretches back into our earliest prehistory. A story that's been in remission for two hundred years of industrial "progress." When it breaks out again in the twenty-first century, it's gonna make Ebola look like chicken pox.
That's way more cleevr than I was expecting. Thanks!
Catch it if you can.
And next time you wonder what you're allowed to say at work, online, downtown at the public library, just say whatever the hell you feel like saying.
Put that in your demonic paradox and smoke it.
More About Radishes
What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
Samuel Beckett
So whaddya think? Will Cluetrain be the Next Big Thing? Not if we can help it.
Wow, your post makes mine look felebe. More power to you!
Let's not write the bylaws and pretend we did. Let's not start another frickin' club.
The only decent thing to do with Cluetrain is to bury the sucker now while there's still time, before it begins to smell of management philosophy. Invite the neighbors over, hold a wake.
Or Frankenstein. Their noses grow longer at the oddest moments, or they start breaking things for no good reason.
They want to be human, but gosh, they're not. They want the Formula for Life — but they want it so they can institutionalize it.
The problem, of course, is that life is anti-formulaic, anti-institutional. The most fundamental quality of life is something the corporation can never capture, never possess.
And so, finally, the question we've all been waiting for. In the newly humanized and highly vocal global marketplace the Internet has helped create, can corporations survive at all? Not if they're unable to speak for themselves.
Not if they're literally dumbfounded by the changes taking place all around them.
But maybe — and it's a big maybe — companies can get out of their own way.
Maybe they can become much looser associations of free individuals. Maybe they can cut "their" people enough slack to actually act and sound like people instead of 1950s science-fiction robots.
Gort need more sales! Gort need make quota! You not buy now, Gort nuke your planet!
Easy there, Gort. Calm down boy.
Perhaps you even thought of it yourself. How come this book ended up in the business section of your local bookstore instead of under Humor, Horror, or True Crime? Hey, don't look at us.
Fact is, we don't care about business — per se, per diem, au gratin. Given half a chance, we'd burn the whole constellation of obsolete business concepts to the waterline.
Cost of sales and bottom lines and profit margins — if you're a company, that's your problem. But if you think of yourself as a company, you've got much bigger worries.
We strongly suggest you repeat the following mantra as often as possible until you feel better: "I am not a company. I am a human being."
So, no, at the end of all this we don't have a cogent set of recommendations.
We don't have a crystal ball we can use to help business plot its future course. We don't have any magic-bullet cure for Corporate Linguistic Deficit Disorder.
Did that much come across? OK, just checking.
However, we do have a vision of what life could be like if we ever make it through the current transition.
Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge.