Question
Why has the empowered employee predicted in the Cluetrain Manifesto not emerged?
Answer
tl;dr version: you can take the individual out of the hierarchy, but you cannot take the hierarchy out of the individual.
To be honest, I never bought into the Cluetrain Manifesto to begin with. It was a nice piece of rhetoric, an edge-culture PR stunt, and a good conversation starter, but I don't consider it a serious sociological model (either descriptive or normative). It ignores too many human realities in its spirit of thinly-disguised gleeful anti-corporate schadenfreude. At best its a motivational speech, not a solid doctrine. Asking why its visions haven't come true is like asking why the visions of hyperspace in 50s Sci-Fi novels never came true. Both skip rather lightly over some pesky old natural laws that we haven't yet found ways to break, Internet or no Internet.
So I am entirely unsurprised that the empowered employee hasn't really emerged. In fact there's a bigger failure than that... the individuals who went all free-agent, nominally living lives that absolutely modeled the CM virtues, have mostly managed to re-organize into free-standing hierarchies outside the corporate world. These hierarchies are all the more powerful because they manage to erect themselves without the scaffolding and structural skeletons of 1.0 organizations. Every mature blogging niche is a hierarchical, ritualized, jargon-filled structure with a mutual-admiration clique at the top, lording it over the plebs at the bottom for example.
What's more, these new hierarchies have emerged in domains (such as blogging) where you don't even have the practical constraints that create normal industrial organization (such as the demands of manufacturing space shuttles), that induce certain hierarchical forms of organization naturally. There are no such obvious and extrinsic reasons why blogging should self-organize into an A-list to D-list hierarchy in every niche. So the drivers must be intrinsic to human nature.
Hierarchies, inner circles, secrecy, insider jargon and coded languages of power are not in the institutions and technologies we build. They are in our very genes, and they will find expression whatever the environment, whether or not the coordination/cooperation/collaboration task at hand requires it a lot or a little.To pretend otherwise is to confuse political ideology with human biology and evolutionary psychology.
I find it ironic that the elements of the manifesto that have to do with the voice of discourses apply perfectly to the manifesto itself. viz:
The CM does not sound human. It sounds like the voice of a doctrinaire hippie god. At the very least it has a "Luke, I am your father" level of gravitas to it. It does not sound open, natural and uncontrived to me. I don't recognize "human" in the CM... more like a scary collectivist Borg.
I do appreciate the honesty of intent behind the CM, and I think the authors/signatories hearts were in the right place when they made the thing up, but "inflated self-important jargon" is a criticism that applies as well to the social media lefties as it does to the old corporate righties. It's just the vocabulary that is different.
In a way the whole CM way of thinking is a bit of a distraction. It's an attempt to view the social dynamics of the 00s and 10s through the lens of the ideological wars of the 60s and 70s. Reading some of the discourses gives me an odd sense of deja vu, as if the 80s, cyberpunk, the rise of Rand 2.0 libertarianism etc. never really happened.
The relationship between the post-technological human (Gen X/Y) and the post-industrial corporate sector (post 80s deregulation and Soviet collapse basically; the shift happened 10 years before the Internet added more dynamics) is vastly more complex than the relationship between the 60s/70s radical and what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex.
Hell, the very idea of calling the thing a "manifesto" reveals the origins of the discourse form here. It's a very industrial-age style declaration of principles and intent. Very waterfall planning.
I've often wanted to write an ironic and dystopian alternative to the CM, but since many actually nice people who work I appreciate seem to navigate by the CM, I don't want to be more of a party pooper/parade rainer than I already am.
To be honest, I never bought into the Cluetrain Manifesto to begin with. It was a nice piece of rhetoric, an edge-culture PR stunt, and a good conversation starter, but I don't consider it a serious sociological model (either descriptive or normative). It ignores too many human realities in its spirit of thinly-disguised gleeful anti-corporate schadenfreude. At best its a motivational speech, not a solid doctrine. Asking why its visions haven't come true is like asking why the visions of hyperspace in 50s Sci-Fi novels never came true. Both skip rather lightly over some pesky old natural laws that we haven't yet found ways to break, Internet or no Internet.
So I am entirely unsurprised that the empowered employee hasn't really emerged. In fact there's a bigger failure than that... the individuals who went all free-agent, nominally living lives that absolutely modeled the CM virtues, have mostly managed to re-organize into free-standing hierarchies outside the corporate world. These hierarchies are all the more powerful because they manage to erect themselves without the scaffolding and structural skeletons of 1.0 organizations. Every mature blogging niche is a hierarchical, ritualized, jargon-filled structure with a mutual-admiration clique at the top, lording it over the plebs at the bottom for example.
What's more, these new hierarchies have emerged in domains (such as blogging) where you don't even have the practical constraints that create normal industrial organization (such as the demands of manufacturing space shuttles), that induce certain hierarchical forms of organization naturally. There are no such obvious and extrinsic reasons why blogging should self-organize into an A-list to D-list hierarchy in every niche. So the drivers must be intrinsic to human nature.
Hierarchies, inner circles, secrecy, insider jargon and coded languages of power are not in the institutions and technologies we build. They are in our very genes, and they will find expression whatever the environment, whether or not the coordination/cooperation/collaboration task at hand requires it a lot or a little.To pretend otherwise is to confuse political ideology with human biology and evolutionary psychology.
I find it ironic that the elements of the manifesto that have to do with the voice of discourses apply perfectly to the manifesto itself. viz:
- Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
- Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
- People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
The CM does not sound human. It sounds like the voice of a doctrinaire hippie god. At the very least it has a "Luke, I am your father" level of gravitas to it. It does not sound open, natural and uncontrived to me. I don't recognize "human" in the CM... more like a scary collectivist Borg.
I do appreciate the honesty of intent behind the CM, and I think the authors/signatories hearts were in the right place when they made the thing up, but "inflated self-important jargon" is a criticism that applies as well to the social media lefties as it does to the old corporate righties. It's just the vocabulary that is different.
In a way the whole CM way of thinking is a bit of a distraction. It's an attempt to view the social dynamics of the 00s and 10s through the lens of the ideological wars of the 60s and 70s. Reading some of the discourses gives me an odd sense of deja vu, as if the 80s, cyberpunk, the rise of Rand 2.0 libertarianism etc. never really happened.
The relationship between the post-technological human (Gen X/Y) and the post-industrial corporate sector (post 80s deregulation and Soviet collapse basically; the shift happened 10 years before the Internet added more dynamics) is vastly more complex than the relationship between the 60s/70s radical and what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex.
Hell, the very idea of calling the thing a "manifesto" reveals the origins of the discourse form here. It's a very industrial-age style declaration of principles and intent. Very waterfall planning.
I've often wanted to write an ironic and dystopian alternative to the CM, but since many actually nice people who work I appreciate seem to navigate by the CM, I don't want to be more of a party pooper/parade rainer than I already am.