"Bringing Down Business as Usual"

“Real authority is based on respect for knowledge.”
Go tell that to my high-school history professor from Texas. Named Kirby. Who hated Californians.




Written as a dialogue between web advocates and oblivious corporations, the cluetrain manfesto (no capitalization necessary) posits that the marketplace is a series of conversations, turning the notion of technological determinism on its head. With tired, redundant analogies, the manifesto lent itself to the view that people just want to talk to each other, and through these interactions can shake up the order of businesses or fix a software glitch or point a loyal Saturn customer to a cheaper oil change. Corporations that can utilize web conversation skills are much more likely to succeed in the new (technological) conversation market.

The internet is awe-inspiring. The web is us, but even we don’t know exactly what it is or what it’s for. We just know it’s cool. And we know it’s highly insubordinate.

It can’t be controlled by businesses, and it cannot become a mass market. “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…The Internet is inherently seditious.”

The internet subverts the hierarchy of corporations as it advances. The “panopticon” view of the internet is reversed, where many can see in but no one is in the center, in control.

If marketing is a one-way conversation, the internet changes the nature of marketing. Scratch that, it destroys marketing and paves the way for new advertisement: the corporation cares. And the corporation can show it cares through customer interaction.

Metcalfe’s Law, an overused but nonetheless vital axiom of CCT studies, states that “the value of a network increases as the square of the number of users connected to it—connections multiply value exponentially.” It paves the way for mass market’s revenge: as more users become connected and start talking (and further, start thinking), they realize that the internet has the power to turn corporations into “replaceable merchants” after being “replaceable consumers” or “replaceable workers” for so long.

Here’s where I have a problem with the manifesto. Though I know manifestos are not, by definition, supposed to be rational or coherent in any way, cluetrain begins to contradict itself and widely known facts.

The authors claim that as markets become larger (markets of scale), choice increases. Well, not in this corporate climate. What about telecommunications companies increasingly monopolizing? What about Microsoft?

The authors also claim businesses are based on individuals, after spending pages upon pages trying to convince us otherwise. If that were the case, then why do companies need to humanize and talk to people in order to succeed? Wouldn’t they already be doing that?

The authors assume we talk to each other. If we’re headed to an “economy of voice,” then why do we feel even less connected to the people at the top or the people sitting next to us on the bus?

I suppose this is what you get when multiple people compose a “revolutionary” book.