ARTS & FARCES internet

“The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.”

Get a great big pile of sand and put it on your kitchen table. Notice that when you add more sand the pile begins to collapse around the edges. All it takes is a single grain of sand to start an avalanche. Such is the state of business today: a pile of sand and one more grain is going to make it topple.

Cluetrain is that one grain of sand, and the business avalanche is coming so strong that it will make any Y2K problems seem like a day at the beach.

Screw a bunch of sand. Cluetrain is leading the way for the New Reformation, complete with Ninety-Five Theses. Martin Luther began the Reformation by nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door. Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses opposed the practice of payment to the Church—called indulgences—to absolve one’s sins. The corporation has become the new church and the practice of indulgences is alive and well. Cluetrain has nailed its Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the new church.

When asked by Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms to recant, Luther refused: “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.” I expect as much from Cluetrain: “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings—and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.”

In late March 1999, I interviewed David Weinberger, one of the Cluetrain “ringleaders,” just before Cluetrain went live.

Michael Fraase: What’s a networked market? You seem to be saying that this is coming in the near future. Isn’t it already here?

David Weinberger: I’d say a networked market is a market that has the means to converse with itself. And, yes, it exists but only for a small percentage of the population at this point. What percentage of the U.S. population goes to Usenet to get consumer information?

MF: How do the self-employed, free agents fit into this meta-structure?

DW: Really, really important. Wave of the future. Big impact. Wearing away the thin veneer that is the corporation. All four of us have a lot of experience as self-employed types (and two of us currently are that way, with a third just having Sold Out to take a job in the big city, man—but it’s a job at the leading edge of Linux so I guess I have to grudgingly admit that it’s Officially OK).

MF: How do you see knowledge being exchanged within this new environment?

DW: Is it arrogant to point you to some stuff I’ve written on this?

Knowledge Narratives:
http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-feb5-99.html#narratives

MF: How about social organization? Do you see this as related to chaos theory (and the attendant phase change states, etc.)?

DW: I don’t know how far to push the analogy, but yeah. There’s even an important fractal element to all this—there has to be if we’re talking about devolving autonomy to the “parts.”

MF: Following up, when water is heated to a boil, it’s like one single water element “decides” to change state. That event causes the other water elements to similarly change their states. Extending that to the networked market, what is the analogue of heat (i.e., what causes an individual element to “decide” to change its state)?

DW: Personally, I think the closest analogue is Voice: you hear someone speaking in her own voice, and it can be enormously liberating.

MF: If brand loyalty is dead, why are you still buying the same laundry detergent (or any other commoditized “products”? Are we collectively really that far-gone?

DW: To use someone else’s turn of phrase (and now cliché): The Web is frictionless. Grocery stores aren’t.

MF: In his latest book The Invisible Computer, Don Norman points to the U.S. Navy as a good example of subverting command-and-control successfully within large organizations. On the ships, sailors are expected to question superiors’ orders. Is there anything besides fear that keeps other organizations from subverting command-and-control structures?

DW: Great question. (Well these are all really, really helpful questions. Thanks.) I think this is something a novelist could explore better than a business analyst. Human motivation is a pretty rich swamp. Fear clearly is a huge motivator but not the only on. Sex has to be in there somewhere….

MF: Give me a nutshell procedure for helping a large organization—say IBM or MCI—initiate a conversation in the networked market? (Besides a massive dosing of Bear’s best, I mean.)

DW: We’re posting a list of clues, a to-do list, if you prefer, which has some ideas. But it’s really meant only as a way of starting a conversation. I like the Bear’s best idea, by the way.

MF: Can you talk a little about being immune to advertising?

DW: I personally don’t agree with that one. (Omigod, the first crack in the seamless facade of cluetrain.com!) I’d say that we’re becoming more resistant to advertising and more resentful of demeaning ads. Immunity is a high goal.

MF: Thanks David.

DW: Thanks Michael. The site will have a place where this type of conversation can be initiated and pursued. At the moment, however, the alligators are engaging us in a more urgent form of dialogue. Needless to say, I don’t speak for Cluetrain. In fact, no one does.

Let the games begin….