——

The Cluetrain Manifesto is the latest book to stake a claim as the paradigm-shifting tech bible of the moment. At its best, it’s one of those books that would have made a nifty article. At the other end of the scale, it is representative of the worst kind of high-tech hype, and a microcosm of many of the problems we have in the Web business and in user-centered software design.

Throughout the book, the authors promote a utopian vision of the Web and how it will not only solve all our problems (from consumer to social), but radically transform the way business is done. Some of the ideas are good; but most is common knowledge for anyone working the Web, which is the primary audience for the book. Cluetrain really gets into trouble when it starts making sweeping unsubstantiated claims about everything from users to organizations to politics. The style of the writing is often nothing short of hyperbolic, which makes it very difficult to take seriously. In the first chapter, “Internet Apocalpyse,” Christopher Locke writes,

“Just as GM mistook the Hondas and VWs for a passing fad, most corporations today are totally misreading this invasion from Webspace. Their brand will save them. Right. Their advertising budget will save them. Uh-huh. More bandwidth will save them. Sure. Well … something will save them. They’re just not too sure what it is yet. But the clock is now ticking in Internet time. Maybe they should get a clue. And quick.”

If it weren’t in an Internet book, this kind of writing would simply be dismissed as impudent. What does the author offer to corroborate his claims?

“The Internet has radically changed the nature of the marketplace. I believe this. But how do I presume to know it? Certainly not through market-research reports, most of which aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. I know it because the Internet has changed me and the thousands of people I talk to every week. Maybe the best way to explain this is to tell my own story–talk about who I am and how I got here. Am I representative of the online market? The point is that there is no ‘online market’ in some general abstract sense. More than any market that’s ever existed, the Internet is a collection of unique individuals. I’m one of them.”

So, based on his own experience (rather than worthless research), the author tells us The Truth. There is a massive contradiction here, of course. If the market is so fragmented, how can he and his circle of friends presume to know it from personal experience? This kind of received wisdom is found throughout the book. There isn’t even a bibliography: it’s all anecdotal.

The central idea in the book is that in the wired world, markets are conversations rather than one-way “communications” from producer to consumer. This is an exciting enough idea, but there is no evidence offered to suggest that a wider market, beyond early adopters like the authors of Cluetrain, are participating in the conversation. How does a first-time computer user find out about, for instance, rec.autos.vw? There is certainly no pointer there from http://www.vw.com (which is heavily promoted), and Usenet is chaotic enough even for initiates that there is little hope this hypothetical user will become involved in the kind of online community that provides the platform for a lot of ideas in the book. Conversations should be all-inclusive; they seem currently to be the domain of the online elite.

The online community is also supposed to promote “craft” instead of mass production. But craft is an attribute of the local, not the global; the authors again offer no evidence to support their claim.

“Internet time,” which is taken as a given throughout the book, is one of the most problematic concepts in the Web business. The idea is that things are moving seven times as fast as normal in the Internet business as in everyday life. This is a common way for high tech workers to make themselves feel important. And projects suffer for it: better to launch with severely reduced functionality in three weeks than to step back and look at requirements and provide real value for users (most of whom have never heard of “Internet time”). Web sites are software design and development projects, often very large ones. It’s time we started seeing them as such.

In terms of user-centered design, the book is simply a continuation of the software engineering culture that assumes it knows everything necessary about users. In fact, engineers are not typical users–they never really were–and it has been shown repeatedly that the only way to design usable software is to take steps to understand user needs and involve users in the design process. It cannot be bypassed with assumptions or excuses. We are designing the Web for our users, not for ourselves. Cluetrain is almost entirely inward-looking, taking its cue from Silicon Valley high tech culture. Very engineering-centric. (And very American–including revisionist history and a stab at socialized medicine, from authors who probably don’t realize they live in the only industrialized country without universal access to health care.)

In Chapter 5, “The Hyperlinked Organization,” David Weinberger writes, “Education is the transfer of content into the receptacle that is the student.” This hasn’t been an accepted definition of learning for ages, but it seems to be the model that the authors use exclusively in this book. We credulous readers are supposed to sit back and take it all at face value. But that’s just not the way the Web works.

Thomas Pettzinger, Jr. writes in the foreword that “The Cluetrain Manifesto takes on the arrogance of e-commerce.” Unfortunately, it is simply replaced by a different brand of arrogance. The Web is a wonderful place, but to keep it that way we have to remain vigilant. A conversational online market is not a foregone conclusion.