Amanda Chapel brought my attention to a new article on her blog, Strumpette, via Twitter, “amandachapel: Cluetrain Wreck Predicted: Must read. Spread the word.” So, I read Impending Cluetrain Wreck Predicted. Here’s my reply…
This is such a cute argument. It is charming, really. Very freshman year, late-night, philosophical conversation. The great thing about the Cluetrain Manifesto is that it did not have an agenda: it was informational more than instructional.
It described a paradigm shift, it did not, in fact, teach marketers and CEOs how to either engage or defend against this new market, defined my access to direct, decentralized, conversation.
The 95 Theses describe the new order, they don’t teach companies how to leverage that order — just warns them that what they’re doing isn’t working: and it (still) isn’t.
So, a heresy on heretical work? A reformation reformation. Whatever.
Here’s what you all should do: follow Keen’s advice. Do it! I don’t care. What keen is is a guy who never understoed the text anyway. When you don’t understand a bible, when you don’t understand the words and the context and the content, then you attack it.
Firstly, noone asked anyone to “cede control to the blogosphere.” Engagement, outreach, advocacy, and online diplomacy has nothing to do with “ceding” but rather deals almost completely with getting face-to-face.
What a “heretical” “Orwellian” text like this actually is is doublespeak. I can almost guarantee what Keen is so keen to offer us is contradiction, contrarianism, and, ultimately, a desperate and hungry passiona play for the attention of said “chief marketing officer.”
I am sorry, Mr. Keen, but you will just make a fool of yourself. It is like a child trying to refute relativity or an evangelical using the bible to disprove evolution: this book is the equivalent of Intelligent Design: just because some minds cannot fully comprehend the music of the stars doesn’t mean that one must temper to the lowest common denominator.
Okay, after all of that, I am so happy to see that the Cluetrain Manifesto — which has become a book that fewer and fewer of my peers have ever read, to say nothing of never having heard of — is staging a comeback.
The same thing has happened to the Bible has happened to the Cluetrain Manifesto: lots of small minds have distilled it down to very dangerous spirits that makes folks all drunk and sick and full of regret.
It is time to leave behind snake oil salesmen like Andrew Keen and get back to the original text; also, it is essential to be moderately Derridean here and allow the Cluetrain Manifesto and its 95 Theses to remain excellent gospel no matter how human, mortal, and full of sin its writers may or may not be.
In fact, I think we really should all go back and re-read the Cluetrain Manifesto — I am going to open my sweet little first edition. Our understanding of the Cluetrain is now all corrupted into “Tipping Points” and Edelman cockups and blowback and mockeries and feelings of general Agency Hangover…
Like I said, abandon this text — the fewer of you who understand that one cannot broadcast to the Internet, “The Internet is Vastly Hugely Mind-Bogglingly Big,” after all. To paraphrase The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to the Internet.”
Amen.
