Let's begin with a quote from the Introduction: "Because the Internet is so technically efficient, it has also been adopted by companies seeking to become more productive. They too are hungry for knowledge, for the intellectual capital that has become more valuable than bricks and mortar or any tangible asset. What they didn't count on were the other effects of web technology. Hypertext is inherently non-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic. It does not reinforce loyalty and obedience; encourages idle speculation and loose talk. It encourages stories.
These new conversations online - whether on the wild and woolly Internet or on (slightly) more sedate corporate intranets - are generating new ways of looking at problems. They are spawning new perspectives, new tools, and a new kind of intellectual bravery more comfortable with risk than with regulation. The result is not just new things learned but a vastly enhanced ability to learn things. And the pace of this learning is accelerating. In the networked marketplace it is reflected in the joy of play. On company intranets it is reflected in the joy of knowledge. But it's getting difficult to tell the two apart. Employees go home and get online. They bring new attitudes back to work the next day. Enthusiastic surfers get hired and bring strange new views into corporations that, until now, have successfully protected themselves from everything else. The World Wide Web reinforces freedom. The Internet routes around obstacles. The confluence of these conversations is not only inevitable, it has largely already occurred".1
The
Cluetrain Manifesto is one of the concepts that inspired me to start this project late last year. I was already interested in
blogs, mainly as a source for news that I wasn't able to get from the MSM. In the process I discovered that there were blogs and websites for every conceivable interest. I used it as a resource for my own hobbies, information on authors and books that I like to read, research for my work, and so on.
Eventually I started posting
my own blog and began to get ideas about starting a web-based business in order to break free of the shackles of the 9 to 5 world: ties,
Suits, and
Corporate Dictatorships.I am, of course, still working on that part. I first attempted to use the Internet as a sort of soapbox or billboard, and it didn't work the way I expected. Then again, I really didn't know what to expect. After I found
The Cluetrain Manifesto, I understood some of what to expect, and why the billboard idea didn't work. The future of Internet-based business (and soon there will not
be any business without an Internet component) is in
two-way communication, a
conversation: provider to customer, customer to provider.
Business is just a word for buying and selling things. In one way or another, we all rely on this commerce, both to get the things we want or need, and to afford them. We are alternately the workers who create products and services, and the customers who purchase them. There is nothing inherently wrong with this setup. Except when it becomes all of life. Except when life becomes secondary and subordinate. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, business so dominates all other aspects of our existence that it's hard to imagine it was ever otherwise.2
The original
marketplace was a "commerce-zone" set as the central part, the essential heart of every village, town, and city. The larger the population, the greater the variety of goods available. Yet there was always one common "product" in every market, sought out by everyone, everywhere in the world.
Conversation. News. Gossip. Stories.
Human interaction. Call it what you will. This marketplace is where information was exchanged.
Information - frequently more valuable than any commodity or trade good.
Commerce is a natural part of human life, but it has become increasingly unnatural over the intervening centuries, incrementally divorcing itself from the people on whom it most depends, whether workers or customers. While this change is in many ways understandable - huge factories took the place of village shops; the marketplace moved from the center of the town and came to depend on far-flung mercantile trade - the result has been to interpose a vast chasm between buyers and sellers.3
No more conversations. The sales clerks in the retail stores of today's shopping malls have no idea what is happening in the places where the products they sell come from, nor do they know who made them, or why.
Once an intrinsic part of the local community, commerce has evolved to the primary force shaping the community of nations on a global scale. But because of its increasing divorce from the day-to-day concerns of real people, commerce has come to ignore the natural conversation that defines communities as human.4
Globalization and Mass-production - creation of any & every product by a virtually unskilled and possibly even illiterate worker - have silenced the conversation and destroyed the niche worker, the skilled specialist, the cottage industry.
For a very long time industry was based on the scale and scope of the cottage. The Industrial Revolution changed everything about manufacturing, and then about selling, and finally the marketplace itself.
These changes were gradual at first. Even early on, "economies of scope" began to be perceived. General Motors broke Ford's run on the Model T - an impossibly long product cycle by today's standards - by offering cars that were not black, and even came in different styles to suit different tastes and pocketbooks. [...] Consumers began to have a wider range of choice, and they warmed quickly to their new options.5
Suddenly, the consumers began to drive the market, supporting some options, rejecting others. The "scope", or the perceptions, of both producers and consumers changed, and now businesses all over the world were competing with each other.
Competition is healthy, we'd been told from birth, because it breeds greater choice. But now competition was out of control and old-guard notions of brand allegiance evaporated like mist in the rising-sun onslaught for Japan, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Choice and quality ruled the day, and consumer enthusiasm for the resulting array of new product options forever undermined the foundations of yesterday's mass-market economy.6
Now these remarkable (for some, earth-shattering) changes that came to manufacturing and the marketplace have come to the Service Providers and Information Workers. Choices and competition are nearly beyond comprehension.
However, most "e-commerce" plays today look a lot like General Motors circa 1969 - looking for that next lucrative mass market just when markets have shattered into a million mirror-shard constituencies, many asking for something altogether different from the mindless razzle-dazzle of the tube. Marketers still drool at the prospect of the Net replicating the top-down broadcast model wherein glitzy "content" is developed at great cost in remote studios and jammed down a one-way pipe into millions of living rooms. TV with a buy button! Wowee!7
Today's consumer has the power to re-direct the direction of the content, to stop the one-way flow of "content" from the provider. Then they can turn and have a conversation with the entire world, discussing, critiquing, and mocking the content force-fed to them. Similarly, today's worker has the power to communicate with everyone else in the world, without going through the filter of the "official" PR line. In addition, both consumers and workers have access to information that would have been unimaginable only a generation ago.
So, where do this take us? Where does it leave the information worker, the service provider, with this sea-change in the marketplace of ideas?
Knowledge worth having comes from turned-on volitional attention, not from slavishly following someone else's orders. Innovation based on such knowledge is exciting, inflammatory, even "dangerous", because it tends to challenge fixed procedures and inflexible policies. While collaboration has been paid much lip service within corporations, few have attempted it beyond their own boundaries.
[...]
...the future business of businesses that have a future
will be about subtle differences, not wholesale conformity; about diversity, not homogeneity; about breaking rules, not enforcing them; about pushing the envelope, not punching the clock; about invitation, not protection; about doing it first, not doing it "right"; about making it better, not making it perfect; about telling the truth, not spinning bigger lies; about turning people on, not "packaging" them; and perhaps above all, about building convivial communities and knowledge ecologies, not leveraging demographic sectors.8
This is to be the ultimate purpose of this blog and web suite, to join/create a new community, where Internet entrepreneurs and enthusiasts can gather to share ideas, participate in the new revolution in the virtual marketplace. Welcome to the Future. I look forward to building it together.
(All Notes:
The Cluetrain Manifesto)
