
The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) - ohjeez
http://www.cluetrain.com/?platform=hootsuite
======
dwightgunning
I enjoyed and took plenty from the Cluetrain when I read it in 2004, my final
year as an undergrad in Australia. It resonated for me as a kid who loved the
web for it's freedoms and the disconnect from mainstream commercial interests
in the 90s. I could see what lay ahead.

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.

~~~
dsearls
Thanks for bringing Cluetrain up, and for the HST comparison.

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/](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/.](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](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.

------
mathattack
Here are their updates ->
[http://newclues.cluetrain.com/](http://newclues.cluetrain.com/)

------
SiVal
The declaration right in the title that they, the enlightened ones, are
condescending to offer "clues" to the clueless (us, their benighted readers),
and proclamation that their opinion piece is a "manifesto" tells me that the
writers are a little too invested in the campus radical romance of heroic
revolutionaries standing above the peasants preaching their utopian vision for
me to care much about their talk about hyperlinks subverting hierarchy and
such silliness.

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.

~~~
dweinberger
Hi, I'm one of the authors. I can certainly see why you'd take it as
condescending. At the time, it was generally taken in the sense that we meant
it: we were trying to articulate what Web users understood but the media and
most businesses weren't getting.

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.

~~~
gonzo
Hello David,

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.

~~~
dweinberger
Thanks for spreading the ideas, gonzo. Good to meet you now, these many years
later.

------
johan_larson
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?

~~~
marxidad
No. We lost.

~~~
Chlorus
But how could they lose?! Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy! The triumphal tone
throughout indicates there's clearly no stopping the cluetrain; it's obviously
inevitable.

------
cousin_it
> _74\. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it._

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!

~~~
some1else
It may be an overreaching assertion. But do you seriously think that the way
advertising channels lose effectiveness and die out is sustainable? We're
really good at gradually learning to ignore the meaningless noise, that's why
entrenched brands market to kids. I think that an interpretation of that
shorthand could be: that we see through fake authenticity, that we're repulsed
by condescending approaches, that we will work towards keeping top down
advertising out of our conversations, and that we will, as always, eventually
just learn to ignore it. Those things are proven to be true, too.

------
jdrenterprises
The comments identifying the parts that Cluetrain got "wrong" and the ones
stating it "failed" prove only one thing to me...

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.

------
PaulRobinson
I always preferred the Hughtrain manifesto:

[http://gapingvoid.com/blog/2004/06/27/the-
hughtrain/](http://gapingvoid.com/blog/2004/06/27/the-hughtrain/)

------
draw_down
Been a while since I looked at this, I was surprised how silly much of it
seems today. "Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy", "Markets are conversations", The
community of discourse _is_ the market", yuck.

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.

~~~
dweinberger
I'm one of the authors. Yes, much of it seems silly. But the fundamental point
was that the Internet is a social space, and that is still true. At the time,
that was not obvious to most of the media or businesses.

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.

~~~
dwightgunning
Should we be looking to halt or divert that trend of centralisation ? If so,
do you have any thoughts on how?

On my less optimistic days it sure does feel like a lost battle.

~~~
dweinberger
Sure we should be trying to halt it! How? That's tough. We've got economies of
scale and the network effect working against us. But there's a lot going on in
a lot of places trying to address this. I'm no expert, but it's a topic of
great interest at the Berkman Center (where I'm a senior researcher), e.g.
AmberLink.org and Perma.cc. Tim Berners-Lee has the Solid project
([http://www.csail.mit.edu/solid_mastercard_gift](http://www.csail.mit.edu/solid_mastercard_gift)).
BitCoin and especially the BlockChain tech underneath it offer some hope. The
W3C WebID ([https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebID](https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebID))
initiative could help decentralize authentication. There's no shortage of
projects underway. But the forces of centralization are well-entrenched,
powerful, and often offer great user experiences.

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.

------
mbrock
The point about the human voice, in this context here, makes me think of voice
as a part of design, and the function of "copywriting."

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](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.

