Dr. Dobb's Journal July 2000
AWall Street Journal writer compared The Cluetrain Manifesto to the writings of Upton Sinclair, Rachel Carson, and Ralph Nader, but its own authors have placed it firmly in the tradition of manifesto writers like Petrus Bungus, Bill Joy, and the Unabomber.
Now that we have given programs the power to find one another and engage in collaborative behavior employing subtle negotiating skills, it won't be long before we see applets unionize to strike for higher bandwidth or longer downtime.
This just in: 1 actually precedes 0. Later, more about Cluetrain, Gluetrain, manifestos on destiny, Petrus Bungus, distributed programming, and the real roots of 0.
I have seen the future of business writing, and it's overblown apocalyptic rhetoric.
-- Carmen E. Swahili, The Wag Street Journal
In The Cluetrain Manifesto, the authors argue that markets are being transformed in a fundamental and revolutionary way by the Internet. They say, "Through the Internet, the people in your markets are discovering and inventing new ways to converse. They're talking about your business. They're telling one another the truth, in very human voices." Just visible out my office window as I write this, through Andy's and Russ's fields and across the highway, is a 6-foot-tall billboard. It reads: "We bought a Redman Home. Never again."
A very human voice, that, and not a web page in sight. Last year, in the tradition of the Unabomber, four individuals with distinctive human voices -- Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger -- put together what they called "The Cluetrain Manifesto." It's a web site (http://www.cluetrain.com/), a list of 95 theses, an ongoing discussion, and recently a book (Perseus Books, 1999), and it has inspired a wicked parody site, The Gluetrain Manifesto (http:// www.gluetrain.com/). The keys to inviting parody are: 1. have a statement to make; 2. overstate it.
Ninety-five theses? That's in imitation of Martin Luther, whose 95 Theses split the Catholic church and ushered in the Protestant Reformation. Identifying with Martin Luther might be seen as overstating your case. Unless it's not...
The cluetrain is to marketing and communications what the open-source movement is to software development...
-- Eric Raymond, President, Open Source Initiative
Stripped of metaphor, the manifesto says something like this: Business as we know it is being changed fundamentally by the Internet and by corporate intranets. The changes the Internet is bringing about chiefly have to do with communication: how the business communicates with its customers or potential customers, how the business communicates with its employees, how employees communicate with one another and with customers, and how customers communicate with one another. All these channels of communication are being changed in the same way: They are opening up, and will no longer be under the control of corporate management. When employees can talk freely with one another about their work without going through channels, it has certain predictable advantages. Mainly these are the advantages commonly cited for open-source software development. There are also some predictable disadvantages, but mainly they involve loss of control. And this may be control that's been getting in the way. From a different perspective, maybe these aren't disadvantages at all.
When employees can talk freely with customers, there are all kinds of opportunities for the "wrong" message to get sent, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the overriding message is more important and is entirely positive. That overriding message is that this company is made up of real people who will talk to me honestly in a human voice about the company and its products.
When customers can talk freely among themselves about your business, when they can do a search for "Redman Homes quality" and find out what every other vocal customer on the planet has to say about the quality of Redman Homes -- well, that's a thought to strike fear in the heart of any corporate executive.
Even if you try to make the best products possible and sell them at a fair price and provide good support, you can't please everyone. Some dissatisfied customers are just dissatisfied people, but their opinions about your products will be out there for everyone to see. Worse, your competitors can spread disinformation about you and your products on the Internet.
It's chaos, basically, and it can't be controlled. The only way to deal with it is to join the conversation. And at least in the current Internet culture, that means speaking in a human voice, not the disembodied marketing voice that companies have polished to a fine sheen over the past century or two. That voice, the voice of marketing, is unwelcome on the Internet.
Marketing, in fact, is a business that produces a product that nobody wants. The Cluetrain Manifesto points out this obvious fact. Well, it may be obvious, but marketing has been an integral part of business for centuries and it's hard to imagine it going away. Imagine it, the cluetrainers advise. In the future, the notion of creating demand will seem quaint, and the idea that manufacturers should decide what products need to be created rather than the people who will use them will seem a temporary insanity.
I think that's the message. A movement that launches with 95 theses and grows from there is a little hard to summarize, but I think the above is roughly the idea.
A lot of people have signed on. I don't join movements much, but I'm more or less a believer. I think these guys have got hold of something, and that the change they are describing is probably as profound as they think it is. But I won't be 100 percent convinced until I walk into Border's Books and see Cluetrain For Dummies.
Now for the quibbles.
I think David Weinberger (one of the four horsemen of the cluetrain apocalypse) is very witty, but he seems to be pushing an agenda all his own. In several places in The Cluetrain Manifesto, he complains of companies not allowing employees to share their religious views with coworkers and customers.
Most companies, I think, rely on peer pressure rather than policy statements to keep religious proselytizing out of the workplace. There's no antireligious conspiracy behind this; it's just common courtesy in a pluralistic society. Monotheistic societies like Iran's probably see a fair amount of religious discussion in the workplace, but most of you reading this column, I'm guessing, would prefer the richness and diversity of a society of individuals with differing views. Perhaps not Weinberger, though. Business hierarchies, he tells us, "assume -- along with Ayn Rand and poorly socialized adolescents -- that the fundamental unit of life is the individual. This is despite the evidence of our senses that individuals only emerge from groups -- groups like families and communities."
I never thought of myself as a follower of Ayn Rand so I must be a poorly socialized adolescent, because my senses present a very different kind of evidence. I don't see abstractions as being more "fundamental" than living, breathing human beings. Weinberger's views have a precedent, though. Here's how Harry Emerson Fosdick described this group-centric view over 60 years ago in his A Guide to Understanding the Bible (Harper & Brothers, 1938):
This submergence of the individual in the social group has been called "corporate personality" and the name accurately indicates the nature of the fact. Personal life among primitive peoples was rather the tribe's possession than the individual's...[I]n primitive society the abiding entity was conceived to be the social group as a whole rather than its individuals.
I'm no sociologist, so I won't assert that this primitive suppression of the individual has historically justified slavery, child abuse, and extreme nationalism. I'll just say that what is evident to David Weinberger's senses is not evident to mine. Does any of this matter? Is there anything in the changes that the cluetrainers are predicting/reporting that would lead society toward such a primitive corporate personality?
I suspect not. I think Weinberger may just have been carried away by the analogy with primitive marketplaces. The message of The Cluetrain Manifesto seems to be just the opposite: that the emerging online marketplace will be more, rather than less, cluttered with annoyingly individual voices from real human beings.
Is my rant on individuality versus corporate personality merely an aside, missing the main point of The Cluetrain Manifesto? Probably. This is neither a review nor a summary of the book nor of the related cluetrain phenomena. You may just have to read it yourself, if you haven't already. If the little taste provided here has whetted your appetite, then at least this month's column has justified its title.
Okay, so employees are going to talk directly to customers and the world at large, in their own voices, not toeing any company line, often expressing views that the company would probably like to distance itself from, and there's nothing the company can do about it. Or at least nothing the company can do about it without coming across as manifestly clueless. So how bad, from the company's point of view, could it get? What's the worst-case scenario here?
Well, one of your top executives, closely associated with the company in the public perception, could start writing long, apocalyptic manifestos about the fate of the earth and the coming of the saucer people. Uh, no, I wasn't thinking of Bill Joy. Nor even of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, although...
No, I had in mind Joe Firmage, the brilliant programmer and highly successful entrepreneur who stepped down as CEO [of a company that shall remain nameless here] when some sentiment was expressed that his growing passion for expounding on fringy topics might not reflect well on the firm. These days, Joe continues to expound, the latest exposition being an impassioned call for nuclear disarmament. It dropped through my e-mail slot as I was starting to write this column.
Joe is more than a little interested in unidentified flying objects, and writes long essays. That's enough to earn him a place at the table of manifesto writers, but his views cannot be easily dismissed. Or some of them can't, anyway. He's a bright guy who thinks hard about things that matter. He shares the results at http://www.firmage .org/. In his latest e-mail message, he describes a lunch conversation with former Senator Alan Cranston, who has formed the Global Security Institute, an organization dedicated to the cause of the abolition of nuclear weapons. Musing on the conversation and on Cranston's efforts, Firmage asks, "Why can't we retask a trillion dollars per year of statesmanship, sober wisdom, youthful passion, and organizational ethic to other kinds of soaring missions?" A good question, surely.
The strategic way to think about JavaSpaces technology is this: It defines markets for computing power.
-- Cameron Laird, Byte
The Cluetrain Manifesto is about the end of markets as we have known them in the industrial age and the return to less abstract, more immediate and personal markets of yesteryear. The question arises, what about markets that don't have any persons in them? Will they get more personal, too?
What can we expect when computer programs have their own eBay? With JavaSpaces, Sun's distributed-computing technology that is based on David Gelernter's Linda programming language, Sun set out to decouple providers and requestors of software capabilities. The typical example that Sun uses to explain how JavaSpaces might be used is a stock trading system -- a market. A seller places an entry in a JavaSpace and indicates that she wants to be notified when an interested buyer shows up. Buyers anonymously read about stocks for sale and write a bid for the seller's entry when they decide they're interested, and the seller gets notified. But instead of mere notification, the seller could receive code objects that actually execute the transaction.
Okay, so what if the commodities being offered for sale (or for trade or for free, subject to acceptance of the terms of a license) are not stocks but capabilities? Self-describing chunks of code? And what if the buyers and sellers are also chunks of code, specialized to match capability descriptions to need specifications and to handle simple negotiations? Distributed computing projects like SETI@home make use of excess computational capability, and can be seen as a sort of market. You will soon be able to sell time on your PC and maybe offset your ISP bill in the process. On a different level, actual markets for selling Internet bandwidth are being set up. And in both these markets automated negotiation systems could be created that would allow the computers involved to come to terms without human intervention. But that's peanuts compared to the possibility of programs shopping for their own subroutines, negotiating for the next available sort routine, taking bids on a nice 3D plot of this or that data. When programs can do that, how will they act? Will they be cut-throat business types? Will they get lazy and inefficient?
There is an old joke about a career-counseling test. You're led into a room that contains a gas stove, match, sink, and empty kettle on the floor. You're asked to boil water. If you do anything other than fill the kettle from the sink, put it on the stove, and light the burner, you're counseled to go into the arts or humanities. Otherwise you're invited back the next day.
The second day there's still the stove, match, and sink, but this time there's a full kettle of cold water on the burner. If you light the burner, you're encouraged to go into engineering. If you dump the water in the sink, set the kettle on the floor, and say that this now reduces to the problem you solved yesterday, you're immediately sent over to the math department.
So are programs more like engineers or mathematicians? Maybe we'll find out one of these days.
Manifestos fascinate us for several reasons. They make strong claims. They display the thoughts of someone who has focused on a subject more concentratedly than most of us have the time to do. And they represent one human voice, the viewpoint of one individual who has tried mightily to make sense of a complex subject. Often they are a little cuckoo, but not always.
Georges Ifrah's The Universal History of Numbers (John Wiley & Sons, 2000) is not at all cuckoo, but it has some of the features of a manifesto. For one thing, it's a big fat book -- 638 oversize pages. It's also the fairly obsessive work of a single individual. Without academic credentials, Ifrah decided to devote his life to researching the history of number systems. He spent years working as a delivery boy, chauffeur, waiter, and night watchman to keep body and soul together as he visited the great museums and libraries and archeological sites of five continents, researching his subject. Although the book cites its many sources, the writing, some of the novel conclusions and discoveries, and essentially all the illustrations are Ifrah's work. Ifrah takes a generally chronological approach to the history of numbers, but also digs into topics that span centuries, such as the history of calculating devices, the development of place-value systems and the concept of zero (the history of numbers runs from 1 to 0, he says), and the crucial Indian contributions to the modern concept of numbers. He gives significant attention to the Mayan, Chinese, Indian, Greek and Roman, Egyptian, Sumerian, Hittite, and other number systems and pushes the history of numbers as far back in archeological history as possible based on existing evidence.
I was struck by the insight that numerals can be calculating devices in the same sense as abaci and computers, but that they can also be purely representational tokens. Some early number systems were actually used to calculate, while others were only seen as static means of recording quantitative information.
For anyone with an interest in number systems, this book, originally published in French in 1994, presents a comprehensive, readable, passionate story.
By the way, Petrus Bungus, as Ifrah explains in his book, was a 16th-century Catholic mystic who "proved," in his 700-page manifesto, that Martin Luther's name works out numerologically to 666 -- the Number of the Beast.
DDJ