— John Dvorak’s takedown of the The Cluetrain Manifesto for PC Magazine brings tears to my eyes:
A site to visit is www.cluetrain.com. There you can read a chapter from the book where we learn bromides such as “life is too short” or read cute mumbo jumbo such as “knowledge worth having comes from turned-on volitional attention, not from slavishly following someone else’s orders.” I rolled my eyes so much that my vision is now 20/20 from the exercise. More interesting on the site is the massive list of well-wishers, ding-dongs, and so-called signatories to the so-called Manifesto itself. I’m sure many of them petition for the legalization of marijuana too. Throw a dart at this list and you’ll find one dot-com failure after another.
The only thing to take issue with, other than it’s not biting enough, is John’s conflation of the Cluetrain group with bloggers in general, which is kind of understandable since many ‘Trainers blog, after a fashion, but basically they’re giving us a bad name.
Well, it’s time for me to go subvert hierarchy with hyperlinks, just to stay busy until the Revolution comes.
Just looked through it (the 95 theses). Looks like the usual Slashdot Socialism. Not a fully accurate term, but rolls nicely off the tongue.
Most of the Cluetrain stuff, and Doc Searls’s comments (for example) seem to me to be just ways of saying: “I don’t understand economics and economic terms. I’ll just change the words so that they sound friendlier.”
It’s annoying and stupid. The first one says “Markets are conversations.” Is this supposed to be revolutionary? All markets are conversations, to an economist. Markets are ways of communicating and expressing preferences. Doc complains that he wants to be “not a consumer, but a customer.” Does it matter? Economic rules still apply, no matter what jargon you use.
The meaningless statements and ignorance displayed are just frustrating. There’s nothing there.