Sometimes the beginning says it all. Starting a manifesto with the invocation “people of Earth” says you’re trying to change the world. Without any modesty but with some urgency.
In short, it was March 26, 1999. Four hundred and eighty-two years after the famous 95 theses that Martin Luther posted on the door of a church to unleash a revolution, 4 American scholars put online a site with 95 theses. What are they protesting against? What are they trying to reform? Our way of seeing the Internet, of considering the impact of the digital revolution. David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Rick Levine e Christopher Locke they are not kids: they are around 50 years old, they observed what was happening and decided to write a manifesto.
They call Cluetrain Manifestoalso inventing the word, cluetrain, the train of clues or new ideas (it turns out that the name came from a top manager of a large American company that describes the bankruptcy of its company saying: “The clue train stopped here four times a day for ten years and we never took a delivery”, that is: we didn’t notice anything and we didn’t catch the opportunities we had before us, losing contact with customers and therefore competition with competitors).
Before the 95 theses, the Manifesto warns: “If this year you have time for even one idea, this is the only one not to be missed. We are not spectators, nor eyes, nor end users, nor consumers. We are human beings and our influence is beyond your grasp, try to understand it ”. From then on, the beginning is dazzling.
there the first 10 theses:
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Markets are conversations.
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Markets are made up of human beingsnot demographic segments.
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Conversations between humans sound human. And they take place with a human voice.
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Whether it provides information, opinions, scenarios, arguments against or amusing digressions, the human voice is essentially open, natural, not contrived.
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People recognize each other as such by the sound of this voice.
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The Internet allows conversations between human beings which were simply impossible in the age of the mass media.
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Hyperlinks subvert the hierarchy.
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Both in interconnected markets and among employees of intraconnected companies, people talk to each other in a new way. Much more effective.
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These conversations on the Net are giving birth new forms of social organization and a new exchange of knowledge.
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As a result, markets are becoming smarter, more informed, more organized. Participating in an online market changes people profoundly.
And here’s the latest:
95. We are waking up and linking. We are watching, but not waiting.
The four authors put the site online on March 26, 1999: Locke and Weinberger manage their newsletters, and Searls and Levine also have mailing lists for posting that text. The impact is immediately enormous. The text is shared and quoted thousands of times; the expression “markets are conversations” (invention by Doc Searls) it becomes a slogan that even today someone in digital marketing conferences repeats not realizing that something has changed in the meantime. The Wall Street Journal talks about it to say that “four rebels of the Web try to make managers speak like human beings”. The Guardian warns: “No excusesit’s time to read those 95 theses “. Salon, an authoritative Silicon Valley site, notes that in those same days a book by Bill Gates was released, and that the manifesto shows that the number one at Microsoft did not really understand the meaning of the Internet: “It is not only the speed that has changed, but the tenor and content of the conversations “. That text becomes a book that climbs the charts and stays at the top for years.
Sixteen years after that March 26, Weinberger and Doc Searls have tried again by publishing a new manifesto, New Clueswhich, however interesting (it begins like this: “We are the Internet, connected. The Internet is not made of cables, of optical fibers, of radio waves, and not even of tubes. The devices we use to connect to the Internet are not the Internet …) it didn’t have the same cultural impact.
The operation made in Italy by Paolo Iabichino with a class of the Holden School of Turin, on the occasion of the twenties: to have the children write a Newtrain Manifesto of 30 theses, one for each year that separates us from 2050. Still very relevant.