Resurrecting the Armadillo

Doc Searls — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 20:19:31 +0000

1999 was a crazy year for business on the Internet, and for Linux. It was when Red Hat went public, with a record valuation, and VA Linux followed with a bigger one. Both were cases in point of the dot-com boom, a speculative bubble inflated by huge expectations of what the Internet would mean for business.

In April of that year, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, David Weinberger and I put up a Web site called The Cluetrain Manifesto, attempting to make clear that the Internet was for everybody and everything, and not just for companies looking to exit into wealth on Wall Street.

Our bulls-eye was marketing, which spoke about users in terms that were barely human. "We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers", Cluetrain said. "We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it."

We addressed Cluetrain to "People of Earth", built it around 95 theses (because that worked for Martin Luther) and called it a "manifesto" (because that worked for Karl Marx). The "Cluetrain" name came from an old Silicon Valley put-down: "The clue train stopped there four times a day and they never took delivery."

It was a hit. Volunteers translated it into 13 languages. The Wall Street Journal covered it on the front page of its Marketplace section. Book offers came in. We accepted one and wrote the book version of The Cluetrain Manifesto that summer. It came out in January 2000 and was a business bestseller, even though it could also be read for free on-line at the Cluetrain Web site. It went on to be published in nine languages, and still sells at a nice clip, 15 years later. Same goes for a 10th anniversary edition that came out in 2010.

Today the word cluetrain, which didn't exist before 1999, appears in thousands of books and is tweeted many times per day. One-liners from its list of theses—"Markets are conversations", "Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy"—are quoted endlessly. Not bad for an project that had no promotion, no budget, no conferences, no bumper stickers, no t-shirts and no interest in becoming a business or an institution. It was just a bunch of ideas people could put to use.

The biggest irony of Cluetrain's success is that most books that cite it are marketing books, and most tweets about it seem to be by marketing people. Is marketing better because of it? To some degree, I suppose. But I don't care. Nor do I care that Cluetrain is often credited with having something to do with social media. What I care about is that Cluetrain hasn't yet succeeded at its main mission: to make clear that the Internet is something more than the pipes we get it from, the "content" we find there, and the companies and governments that would have us think they run the thing.

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