This book review reprinted from the Ethical Culture Review of Books (http://www.ethicalculture.org/review). Single copies may be printed for personal use; for any other purpose, contact reviews@aeu.org for permission.
The Cluetrain Manifesto
Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger
Perseus Books, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
190 pages. $23.00
ISBN 0-7382-0244-4
The Cluetrain Manifesto, which purports to be about improving business practices by using the World Wide Web, is selling briskly in business circles. Its writers have impeccable credentials: Levine, Locke, Searls, and Weinberger have founded technological companies, created important software, worked in advertising, and written for publications ranging from Forbes and The New York Times to PC Magazine and Wired. The book is, however, in fact less a manual for corporations and more a polemic on how the Web can liberate human creativity from the chains of business culture.
The "Cluetrain" of the title refers to an image of business executives who don't have a clue to what the new technologies mean while the future roars past them like the Twentieth Century Limited. Hierarchical organizations with elaborate flow charts showing information and control moving from top to bottom are not only outmoded, say the authors, but dead in the water.
The Cluetrain writers are partial to phrases like "dead in the water" and "gonzo." Their writing style is jokey, energetic, playful, intentionally outrageous, and occasionally sophomoric. But their voices keep the argument moving -— and make a case in point for their claim that one of the Web's chief virtues is the high value it places on the individual human speaker. While I'm not sure that the ideas in this book needed to be showcased in a twenty-three dollar hardback volume, I am very glad that they are available.
The essential points are as follows: hierarchal organizations (corporations but by extension other bureaucracies as well) are being reformed as multi-dimensional sharing among equals who speak in their true human voices, worker to worker, at enormous speed. People are ignoring organization charts, sales meetings, and their superannuated managers. They are communicating directly with each other through email, Internet bulletin boards and discussion groups, and instant messages— all the many web-based modes of communication. They are at once creating connections among human beings and solutions to practical problems. They are doing all this cooperatively, communally, and without bosses.
In the end, The Cluetrain Manifesto is not really about business at all, but about tools that give us new ways of thinking together, making decisions, and creating new institutions. The writers offer a vague but thrilling vision of a world run from the bottom up: a technological near-anarchy with lots of room for having fun— a world Emma Goldman might have viewed favorably. There is an off-hand, casual suggestion that businesses who get on the Cluetrain will ride it to financial glory, but the writers don't really spend much time on profit making. They seem much more interested in the accumulating capital of human wisdom and democratic consensus building.
Are the Cluetrain boys, as some of their detractors insist, really just resurrected anarchists and Yippies? Is there any solid basis to their idea that the Web can liberate us, and that this liberation has already begun from within the corporations? I don't know the answer to those questions, but for those of us yearning for a world order better than the present one, the book is tremendously stimulating, and gives some small hope from which to take heart.
Meredith Sue Willis's latest book is a new edition of Personal Fiction Writing: A Guide to Writing from Real Life for Teachers, Students, and Writers(Teachers & Writers, 2000).
The Cluetrain Manifesto
Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger
Perseus Books, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
190 pages. $23.00
ISBN 0-7382-0244-4
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