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.

The Cluetrain Manifesto is a book about very big things--things like life, love, voice, craft and humanity--disguised as a book about business. Indeed, among other noteworthy pleasures, it offers the corporate world a heads-up on the fact of its imminent extinction.

Books like this occasionally come along after periods of protracted bureaucratic expansion, with its retinue of forced mannerisms, mincing hypocrites and pandemic artificiality. One thinks of Rousseau, writing in the language of the heart to a world that had forgotten it had one.

Or, think of Diogenes, the laughing scourge of Athens. You may recall, he's the fellow who went around with a lamp in broad daylight, looking for an honest man. We're also in his debt for this anecdote:

Diogenes was in the marketplace one day, and saw a band of Corinthian youths walking by--perfumed, dressed in the latest florid fashion, preening and simpering with false laughter. "Affectation!" said Diogenes. A little while later, a troop of young Spartans came along. They looked grim, as though they'd just come from the battlefield--in rags, smeared with dirt and blood. "More affectation!" said Diogenes.

The era of bureaucratic affectation addressed by The Cluetrain Manifesto (CM) is the recent 200 years of Industrial Revolution, with its concomitant pathology of mass production, mass marketing, and mass media.

The authors--Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger--found themselves having a very real conversation on and about the Internet. What they shared was a growing conviction that the phenomenon they were looking at was unlike anything that had come along since sliced bread.

Spawned in the Pentagon, the Net had taken off on its own, hammered out in code and hardware and endless conversations by thousands of people around the globe with no connection other than their shared passion for this new thing. In those days, there was no commercial Web, the Net was slow, purely text based, and unheralded by any media. These folks had no profit motive. Rather, they found it exciting to have the ability to converse with anyone in the world, on any subject, at any time they chose--human connection on demand.

What the Cluetrain authors also noticed was that this "grass roots" spreading of the Net occurred right under the sizeable corporate noses of big business and big government. AT&T, Microsoft, Time Warner, Intel and every other giant corporation, who collectively spend billions on market research and R&D, never saw it coming. As Christopher Locke puts it in Chapter 1:

The attraction was in people talking, however slowly. Never in history had so many had the chance to know what so many others were thinking on such a wide range of subjects. Slowly at first, a new kind of conversation was beginning to emerge, but it would achieve global reach with astonishing speed.

How could thousands of people be so right while the haughty institutions that strut around pretending to offer "solutions" to all of our problems were so wrong? And how did a network as complex and encompassing as the Internet get built without any centralized intelligence, any five-year plan, any campaign to win consumer acceptance?

It is through pondering these events that the Cluetrain authors arrive at insights that mega-conglomerate businesses will ignore at their peril. Here's Locke:

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.

Now the Net is the greatest thing to happen to the largest economy on earth since, well, sliced bread.

Like Diogenes, however, CM's authors are unmoved. Here's Locke:

...most "e-commerce" plays today look a lot like General Motors circa 1969 -looking for that next lucrative mass market just when markets have shattered into a million mirror-shard constituencies...

When Cluetrain's 95 theses first appeared on the Web a year ago), the only image that accompanied it was a picture of armadillo roadkill which, instead of receiving proper burial, received two yellow road stripes across its crushed back.

The implication was that this is what the uncontrollable Net does to lumbering corporations without a clue. So get one.

Curiouser and curiouser

But a clue to what?

The book offers no roadmap to corporations seeking to avoid the armadillo's fate. Faithful to its own negative insight, it avoids the glib prescription, the technical fix.

Instead it offers valuable insights into a host of related elements of the puzzle of the Net. In Chapter 5, David Weinberger examines how stripped down bits of data, while representing the world as seen through computers, entirely forfeit the rich texture of reality. "We have statistics but no understanding," he says.

With conviction not so oddly reminiscent of Martin Luther, whose 95 theses nailed to the cathedral doors are echoed in the manifesto, Weinberger finds the human voice to be the real clue to new forms of organization that can thrive in the new connected economy--"hyperlinked" organizations that take on the shape of the collective understanding of the people who are busy crafting whatever is being made.

In a hyperlinked organization, voice plays the old role of the org chart, telling you whom you should work with. The fact that Mary is the Under-VP of Expectation Deflations for the western semi-region tells you nothing. That Mary is wicked smart, totally frank, and a trip to work with tells you everything.

Thus do the formal bonds dissolve, replaced by the sound of the human spirit.

Tweedledum and dumber

If this is one aspect of CM's Looking-Glass world, another is the belly-laugh fun it has with the language of hierarchy and organized idiocy in corporate America.

Here's Searls on some of the hi-tech blather we've all grown fond of:

Equally vague and common are platform, open, environment, and support when used as a verb. A veterinarian using TechnoLatin might say that a dog serves as a platform for sniffing, is an open environment for fleas, and that it supports barking.

At times the Manifesto's grasp of the speed and power of the decentralized Web produces a strobe effect, capturing corporate monoliths in the very act of becoming historical curiosities. Weinberger:

Consider this: From the other side of the gulf opened by the Web, virtually all of the structures that management identifies as being the business itself seem to be the bizarre artifacts of earlier times, like wearing a powdered wig and codpiece to the company picnic.

As Wall Street Journal columnist Tom Petzinger suggests in his forward to the book, this is what used to be called "a seminal work"--one that seeks a new way of looking at the world, not so much through systematic argument as through powerful, fragmentary insights that blow holes through the systems of belief in which we are imprisoned.

And while CM has a very good time at the expense of the codpieces, it's never far from deflating any thoughts the reader might have of replacing the Ozymandias it's just knocked down with substitute idols, such as the Manifesto itself.

The CM would violate its own basic insight to pretend to offer remedial methods. What it sees at times seems so fundamental that any pretense that this is just a business book pretty much falls away: Business is being transformed, but not by technology. The Web is simply liberating an atavistic human desire, the longing for connection through talk….We've been waiting for the Web to happen all along.

The fact that this plot shapes a 21st century work on commerce and technology suggests we have moved beyond "business books" into the far richer realm of allegory.

Whether the corporate denizens to whom the book is speaking will hear its voice is an open question. For the wider audience this book will surely attract, the question is whether, on the threshold of the Looking-Glass world, we can ever in good faith return to business as usual.

Copyright © 2000 Tom Matrullo All Rights Reserved