johan_larson9 years ago
That text is now more than 15 years old. In those 15 years, has it actually made a damn bit of difference? To anything? Anywhere?
I mean, it's cool and all. But is it more than that?
I mean, it's cool and all. But is it more than that?
This is why Slack and tools like hubot work (see rules 46 through 49 as well).
Ooh, a factual assertion. And proven to be false, too.
The rest of the manifesto is just as silly. Open your company's internal discussions to the public, which has become smarter due to the rise of social media? Hahaha!
That doesn't mean it's all wrong. There are some good comments in TCM. It's just that I find collections of simpler articles combining charts of data over time with admitted speculations about what it might mean and, if so, what the implications could be, to be far more useful and, yes, "enlightening" than any "manifesto" I've ever seen.
Remember that in 1999, the Web wasn't as mainstream, and many users felt that being on the Web was a special experience. There was an "us vs. them" feeling, where the "us" were people enthusiastic about the Web and excited about how it was (we thought) transforming our lives, our culture, and our institutions. So the clues were absolutely not for our readers who, we assumed, were part of the Web "us," but for the media and businesses who weren't on the Web or weren't part of the Web culture, and who yet were attempting to impose their understanding upon it.
Now the Web has become such an accepted part of everyone's lives in our culture that it doesn't feel nearly as much like Us vs. Them. I think that explains why the Manifesto now reads as condescending, whereas at the time it was taken (at least by the readers who liked it) as an articulation of what they already felt.
We've never met, but I know Doc and Chris.
I bought around 20 copies of TCM for friends and co-workers. Some got it, some didn't.
It remains on the list of books I still recommend people. Not because it can be applied directly in it's entirety today, but rather because it captures a time and a place. I still feel there are still plenty of insights to take away.
I'm also reminded of HSTs closing passage to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.
...
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave."
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Who know's what we'll think of influential books of recent years (of the top of my head: the Lean Startup or Rework, which I also love), in 2025.
When we wrote Cluetrain, I am sure we felt the same "sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world” as did HST in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (We certainly wrote Cluetrain with the same high degree of hyperbole.) And I know the tech counterculture of the late ‘90s is as gone today as the ‘60s were when HST wrote Fear and Loathing.
The main difference is what we were hyperbolic about: the Internet: a hacker invention that put everything and everybody in the world a functional distance apart of zero, or close enough, at costs that veered in the same direction. It was clear that this genie would not go back in the bottle of business-as-usual, but it was hard making sense of it. So we tried.
It's still hard. That's why last year David Weinberger and I wrote an addendum to Cluetrain called New Clues: http://newclues.cluetrain.com/ . It's no less hyperbolic than the original, but at least it's more current. (FWIW, I also visit the zero-distance thing here: https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2016/02/03/the-giant-zero-2/.)
Over the years lots of people have credited Cluetrain with influencing them, including countless marketers who totally misunderstood or ignored what we meant by “Markets are conversations,” “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy” and "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” Thousands of books now mention the word “cluetrain” as well — a word that didn’t exist before 1999, and still gets tweeted at least daily. Does either fact do any good? I think so, but we might need to wait another couple generations to know.
To me the most troubling error in Cluetrain is not any of its 95 numbered clues but in the one that comes above all of them and rarely gets quoted, perhaps because it’s a .gif and not copy-able text. It says, “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.”
It’s a great line, and I believe it will come true in the fullness of time and tech. But in fact our reach did not exceed corporate grasp then, and still doesn’t today. In the 17 years that have passed since we wrote Cluetrain, much of the Internet's commons has been enclosed in the walled gardens of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google and the rest. Closed silos have also proved far more attractive to both hackers and users than many of us would like. (For more on that, see http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/giving-silos-their-due .)
But the geology of the Net hasn't changed. TCP/IP is still there. So is the absence of distance it creates in our midst, and the sense of possibility it opens up. Without that sense, none of us, nor our our many forms of conversation-based cooperation, would be here.
What really matters is that there is work to do. That’s it.
I think of the typical landing pages for most SaaS-type offerings. I might be particularly jaded, but I'm also the target audience for a lot of them: I'm a professional developer who buys such subscriptions, and I'm also a small business founder.
Nearly all of the marketing aimed at me in these roles fails to convince me, and causes despair and distrust in exactly the way that this manifesto seems to outline—so just from this anecdotal subjective feeling, I have a hunch that if you're trying to market to people likely to read Hacker News, this text is valuable.
Like, when you decide to decorate your site footer with the text "MADE WITH ︎LOVE IN SAN FRANCISCO", you're replacing your human voice with a robotic cliché, and the same effect emanates from most of the marketing copy I see.
Also, when you offer a service that you expect me to rely on for my business, and you fail to communicate in an open and clear way about what your company is up to, I agree exactly with the manifesto.
For a recent example, people have been wanting some kind of threaded response system in Slack. The company Slack has said over and over again that they're "working on it" for over a year. They're not willing to reveal anything more than this vague indication that it's somewhere in their pile of post-its. Here's the Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/578575540594020353
The enthusiastic "We hear you!" and the pseudo-friendly emojis, over and over again like a refrain... If Slack were an open source project, this style of communication would be ridiculous. It's condescending. (Though in the same way that Slack's general presentation is condescending, so +1 for consistency.)
So these points from the manifesto are very relevant:
> However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.
> This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.
> Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false — and often is.
What if Slack's external communication could give this following type of message, instead, for example?
> "Hey. I'm a product manager at Slack. I see lots of people want this feature. I see why: conversations can often become cluttered when topics intersect. Of course, we want Slack to be as useful as possible. So, can we decide on a minimal implementation that we could implement fairly quickly, and still give plenty of value? For example, do you think nested threading is necessary, or is one level enough? I mean, we have the team / channel hierarchy, and we see value in limiting the nesting complexity. I asked @designerperson to produce a mockup of the possible interface, and she should have them done within a few days. But just so you all know, we're working hard on [these 5 features] and this comes after those in priority. You can look at our public Trello board to get some insight into how we're coming along."
To me, that kind of message would be almost a pivotal event in corporate history, and the Cluetrain Manifesto explains why.
TCM didn't fail, we did. All of the Cluetrain Manifesto could have been "right," and might have "succeeded" if we hadn't let the centralized and antiquated powers that be have their way.
TCM wasn't meant to be a solution, it was meant to point out (very early on) something we all know...
When a truly groundbreaking idea like the Internet comes along, there will always be power structures and people who want to turn it into a tool to further centralize and increase their power.
So, we failed. The book did its job, or we wouldn't be discussing how "wrong" it is today.
Ironically, this is really a rant about the tone of marketing (which has since changed btw), but the tone of this is rather cringe-worthy.
Tech columnist John C Dvorak wrote a very entertaining review of the The Cluetrain Manifesto. Here it is from from 2002:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,43161,00.asp
Do people follow hyperlinks to find things? No, they "Google it." Everyone puts free data on the Internet and Google monetizes it by providing a single entry point.
In addition, markets are far far far more conversational than they were before the Net.
But, yes, in 1999 we did not predict the degree of recentralization and corruption that would occur.
On my less optimistic days it sure does feel like a lost battle.
I share your less than optimistic fears. But one of the hopeful things about the Net is that large centralized players can co-exist with decentralized sites and services. The long tail does not get the attention that the short head does (by its very nature), but there will always (?) be lots of creative work and lots of meaningful connections being made there.
The old systems where decentralized and used defined protocols by necessity.
This because you needed software at either end that understood each other over said protocol.
With higher bandwidth, more reliable connections, and the web, the protocols have become fluid, as one end is downloaded and updated each time someone types a url into a web browser.
In a sense we are back at the leased terminal era, only with prettier graphics.
I no longer fire up a usenet client, i go to reddit.com.
I no longer fire up a IRC client, i go to slack.com.