"Cluetrain Manifesto"

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David Weinberger Interview
by: Bob Blanchard

Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517. Five centuries later, in March 1999, the 95 theses of The Cluetrain Manifesto were posted on the Web. The former launched the Protestant Reformation; the impact of the later has been almost as incendiary.

The Cluetrain website was an immediate phenomena; soon scoring up to 12,000 hits a day from 75 countries. Just seventeen days after it was posted, the Wall Street Journal ran a gushing article titled, Four Web Rebels Try to Make Managers Talk Like Human Beings. The writer,Thomas Petzinger, assessed the Manifesto as "pretentious, strident, and absolutely brilliant."

Actually, the old story about Martin Luther nailing his theses to the chapel door is apocryphal. He simply published them. But the Cluetrain Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com) is real. The idea took shape over the Net, as the Manifesto’s co-authors David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Christopher Locke, and Rick Levine (the four had never met face-to-face in one room) conversed about how the Net is reframing the traditional dynamics of business and communication, and what companies need to learn to survive -- and thrive -- in the new millennium.

We were thinking together things that we were not thinking alone, says Doc Searls. We were of one mind, and as we talked we realized that our ideas were moving pretty far downstream. In the midst of a conversation about what to call the website, Searls mentioned that it was said about one company in Silicon Valley that the cluetrain stopped there four times a day for years and they never took delivery. Within seconds, his co-authors checked to see if the name Cluetrain was taken as a domain name. It wasn't. It took a few more seconds to register the name.

Who are these Cluetrain guys? Rick Levine is co-founder and CTO of Mancala, Inc; before Mancala, he was Web Architect for Sun Microsystems’ Java Software group. Christopher Locke, a writer, publishes Entropy Gradient Reversals from Boulder, Colorado. Doc Searls is the senior editor for Linux Journal and has written on science and technology for OMNI and PC Magazine. David Weinberger is the publisher of JOHO (Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization) and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Several publishers were impressed by the insights posted on the Cluetrain website -- and the eyeball count the website generated -- and solicted book proposals from the authors. The lucky winner, Perseus Books, persuaded the authors to transform their ideas into a best-selling business book. Here are excerpts from a conversation with David Weinberger.

Eyemine : Why did you decide to write the Cluetrain Manifesto?

Weinberger : The four of us were sitting around the Web wondering why the media coverage about the Web had gone so wrong. It was all about dot-coms and Internet gazillionaires. It was all about money and it seemed to us to have nothing to do with why we were on the Web or why, we were guessing, most of the 150,000,000 other people were on the Web.

Eyemine : The Cluetrain Manifesto is relentless in its criticism of both marketing and business-as-usual. Why do you think "business-as-usual" is clueless?

Weinberger :Business continues to delude itself that it's the center of the Universe, and it occupies the center by attempting to maintain tight control over all of its constituents, especially its customers. It desperately tries to sell customers   a pyramidal worldview with itself at the top. Marketing as we know it is fundamentally the broadcast model. The Industrial Revolution led to the realization that if industry was willing to make identical, replaceable products it could do so by using replaceable workers. This drove down costs tremendously and created the modern world. Then, broadcasting enabled industry to discover that it could also have replaceable customers, henceforth known as consumers, because it could take a single message and broadcast it to an undifferentiated mass of people.

In marketing, consumers exist only to swallow what’s being shoved down their throats. Companies try to come up with a single phrase that they can drill into the heads of every consumer -- even though everybody knows that each consumer is an individual with different needs and assumptions. But the Web is radically changing the ground rules of business. Now, the trick is for companies to start behaving more like the vendors in pre-industrial markets, craftsmen who exhibited real interest in what they were selling -- who showed passion about the products that they were building. It's very rare for that to come through marketing and legal filters. Usually, it comes through actual contact with an actual person who has an actual name who cares about the product that he or she is building. To companies, those people are worth their weight in gold.

Eyemine : Since the heart of the Cluetrain Manifesto is your 95 theses, let me read you several and ask you to expand on them. Thesis #1: "Markets are conversations."

Weinberger :Markets are social organizations in which none of the people have met one another, and thus it's not social at all. It's a fictitious term invented by marketers based on the broadcast view that says, If I have a simple enough message, I can broadcast it to an undifferentiated mass of people, and that undifferentiated mass is my market.

The Web is turning this mass of faceless people into a real social organization. We're able to find one another and to talk, to have conversations. These conversations tend to be frank and honest and in our own voice and funny and truthful. This the opposite of the conversation that we get from companies. So if you want to know the truth about a product, you are far better off going onto the Web and finding a group of customers who will tell you the truth, than going to the typical corporate website which is just more marketing smoke that's intended to keep you away from the truth, rather than to invite you in.

Eyemine : That's a good lead-in to Thesis #28: "Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what's really going on inside the company."

Weinberger : Why do we have marketing? It's because companies recognize, first, that the market doesn't want to do what the company wants it to do. So marketing is a hostile act, an act of war waged on your own customers.

That's why the language of marketing is all war-based: marketing campaigns, marketing strategy, marketing tactics, targeted marketing. This is the language of war, and for good reason. You're trying to bend the hostile public to your will.

So what you do is present the glorified image of your company and its products. You do everything you can to prevent people from penetrating that image. It is a defensive wall that’s put up. The secret you're hiding generally is that your company is made up of fallible individuals like every company. It's not a secret at all. But companies are very uncomfortable admitting that.

Eyemine : That leads us to Thesis #89: "We have real power, and we know it. If you don't see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with."

Weinberger : The power shift has been tremendous and amazingly fast. First, market conversations aren't all talk. For example, there was a discussion group for U.S. owners of the Volkswagen Eurovan. Somebody on the list mentioned a problem he was having with a fuel line. A whole bunch of other people chimed in and said they were having the same problem, and the result was that they were able to generate a recall. So here a market conversation turned into a political action committee, and that will happen over and over again.

Second, we see in just about every aspect of corporate life, where the corporation assumed it was the center of the Universe and in control, now the market is taking control. This includes pricing with websites like priceline and even product web design. And the most important thing is that, while companies may resist this shift in power, it's the best thing that could happen to them.

Eyemine : Why?

Weinberger : Companies tend to value power and control over the real pathways to success. But what could be better than to have your customers web design your product? You may not like them setting the price, but they're more likely to establish a fair price than the top-down pricing that companies have assumed. And fair means sustainable.

Eyemine : In the book, you mention a famous axiom of the computer industry -- Metcalfe’s Law: the value of a network increases as the square of the number of the users connected to it -- connections multiply value exponentially. Then you define what you call "The Cluetrain Corollary -- as the network gets larger, it also gets smarter."

Weinberger : Yes. There's a really simple reason why networks get smarter, and also a less simple reason. The simple reason is that networked markets are as smart as the smartest people in them. So as they scale, markets are more likely to include smarter and smarter people. Of course, they also include dumber and dumber people, so you need to be able to tell the difference. The less simple reason is that intelligence generally has to do with the ability to correlate pieces, and the more complex the network is, the smarter it becomes because of that.

Eyemine: In the book, you write that by listening, marketing will relearn how to talk. What do you mean?

Weiberger : If you read almost any piece of marketing literature, from product

brochures to press releases to annual reports, they're written in a stilted, phony language that communicates almost nothing–it is the language of control. In fact, I was just in Beijing where I was reading the China Daily, which is not devoted to free speech. The language of the Chinese government is exactly that of the marketing department in any corporation anywhere in the world. Because totalitarian governments and marketing departments and business as usual are all about control, so they speak the same language.

The language of marketing is designed to minimize risk and to inflate perceived value. It is not the way human beings speak. For example, a guy goes to a barbecue and somebody says, Oh, what do you do? He doesn’t say, I work for the world’s leading supplier of spherical entertainment objects. He says, We make bowling balls. He says, They're really cool, 'cause when you roll 'em , they hum" or whatever. That's human speech. Marketing speech is not human speech. Another example, you could cut up paragraphs in marketing literature of any type, put them in a hat with any set of emails that you get from human beings, and anybody whether they're on the Web or not, could divide them into two groups: the human and the inhuman. So businesses have absolutely forgotten how to talk. We're so inured to this that we think it's actual language. But it's not.

Eyemine : Why were you in Beijing?

Weinberger : I had to go to Hong Kong for business, and I've always wanted to go into China and never gotten close before. It's a three-hour plane ride, so I took advantage. I was a tourist, every website -- the Great Wall, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City, and Tiananmen Square.

Eyemine : Tiananmen Square must have been an awe-inspiring moment.

Weinberger : Only if you have an imagination. They've washed away the blood and the bullet holes. There's the square and then adjacent to it there's an Internet café where I went every day to do my email. A remarkable environment: it was where I felt most at home in all of Beijing. Not that I wanted to feel at home--the whole point of traveling is not to feel at home, but anybody who uses the Internet -- he or she could be dropped into this spot and feel this was a familiar, inviting ambience. Of course, some of that had to do with extrinsic reasons like the attendants spoke English, and there were a bunch of foreigners there, and there’s computers, and I’m getting mail from home, all of which counted. But I think what was most important was the sense that this is the refuge of the Net and we all have some commitment, some involvement, with this new world.

Eyemine : How do you see the digital divide? Is this a real issue or just an

issue hyped up by old media?

Weinberger : It’s a real issue because it’s a reflection of the much more important economic divide. However, the digital divide will be much easier to get over than the economic divide. All it requires is a $500 computer and a telephone line and some education. But the education divide, the economic divide, the racial divide are much more important and much deeper. Of all of these, the digital divide is the easiest to solve and will be solved first and we’ll still be left with all the other important ones.

Eyemine : That’s a fairly optimistic viewpoint and supports the idea that the Web may function as a democratizing force, that it may level the global playing field.

Weinberger : I think there's something to that. But I'm not so optimistic or idealistic as to believe that the Web will cure all ills. But widespread access to the Web certainly will have a democratizing effect. And it offers some economic relief, some economic democracy. I believe the Web restores a sense of power to the individuals who are the nodes being linked. We see this mirrored in the concerns of totalitarian regimes about the spread of the Internet. It’s because the hyperlinked environment of the Web offers people alternative voices. It gives people the sense that they are -- or should be -- more in control of their own destiny. It takes away some of the supposed justification for the power of the elites. If it’s superior knowledge that gives the elites their right to rule, we're discovering that we get better information from one another than we do from our so-called betters. That’s subversive.

Eyemine : What's your perspective on the Nasdaq downturn? A healthy corrective? A major change in the zeitgeist? What does it change, not change?

Weinberger: It's a slap in the face to greed, and to idiocy born of greed. Greed is one of the great flaws of humanity; it makes people stupid. Always has, always will. The downturn should be a step forward in intelligence for the industry.

Eyemine : How should emerging companies be positioning their efforts? What opportunities and risks should new start-ups be aware of?

Weinberger : Almost all small companies work well. Group dynamics are such that people engage with one another in a spirit of enthusiasm, equality, and joy. As they get larger, they feel the need to institute some control, some division of labor. They frequently fall into the old patterns of hierarchy and power. It would be very good to explicitly try to stay away from that.

Eyemine : What excites you right now as far as emerging trends in the computer industry? What do you see on the horizon in the next year or two?

Weinberger : We’re still inventing ways to talk with one another, and that's tremendously exciting. Chat’s been around for awhile. Mailing lists and discussion lists have been around for awhile, but we're seeing new ways of people talking that were never possible before. Some are emerging. Some fail. Some fall under their own weight. Some are just bad ideas, but we're just at the beginning of seeing how to scale conversations, at truly global levels.

Eyemine : In the Cluetrain Manifesto, you ask the question, What is the Web for? Then you proceed to write about a desire that people feel for the Web: a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. What do you mean?

Weinberger : What we’re seeing with the Web is the invention of a new technology with the steepest upside curve since fire -- but unlike other technologies, there isn’t a simple and clear answer to "What is it for?" For example, the printing press was for printing books; the telephone was for talking to people far away. But we don’t know what the Web is for. And we've embraced it with a fervor that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. I'm 50 and I’ve never seen any technology cause so much excitement.

How do we explain this rush to embrace such a mysterious technology? To me, that means that we're expecting something deep from it. So, what type of expectation do we have? I propose that it’s not community, although I think community is close, but too much of what happens on the Web has nothing to do with community. I believe that at its best, what the Web offers is the intimacy of a good conversation. And one of the most important things about conversation, why we want to have them so desperately, is that it’s a chance for us to speak in our own voice again, after feeling that business has forced us to adopt a foreign voice. Our Faustian bargain with business is ending -- in which we gave up much of our individuality in return for the illusion of living in a safe world managed by business-as-usual. We no longer trust business; we’re understanding that our planet is a wildly risk-filled world. And that’s exhilarating; we’re willing to leap into the void. So now on the Web, we talk about subjects we want to talk about, and in the way that we want. That's liberating. Because our voice is not simply sound-waves; it’s who we are in public. The Web is calling forth new types of self, and we’re able to enter this public square and speak in more authentic, more genuine voices. If that’s close to describing some of the sense of liberation that the Web brings, then we're talking in a spiritual vocabulary. We’re talking about the human spirit, and ultimately, I think that’s the right vocabulary for understanding the Web.