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A Brief against Ralphing on Markets
One of the least understood intentions of The Cluetrain Manifesto was that we reconstruct our understanding of markets, starting with the literal meaning they held for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution defeated craft and gave us amnesia about what markets fundamentally were — and still are. I can think of six different meanings for the word "market," all of which are both industrial in nature and have little or nothing in common with the original, literal meaning of the word:
All these abstractions were created in service of an industrial economy, which is one dominated by Supply. While we have always spoken of supply and demand as balanced "forces," the plain truth was that in the Industrial Age the supply side has been almost entirely in charge. Yes, it was accountable to demand. Yes, the best companies were wise to be responsive (and responsible) to demand. And yes, demand got a lot of goodies out of supply. But supply was in charge. Consider just this one telling piece of evidence: the price tag was only invented in the late 1800s, by John Wanamaker, who also invented the department store. We may have motored out of the Information Age, but the conceptual flywheels of Industrial Consciousness continue to spin inside our minds, and our culture. The ironic result is that we try to understand the Information Age in terms that have limited relevance and are often misleading. We even mistake information for a manufactured good. One of the best conversations I had in the last year was one Tim O'Reilly in which we talked about the deeper meanings of information. It's a noun, we realized, derived from the verb to inform, which was in turn derived from the verb to form. What we call "information," we agreed, was not some kind of data, but the changes we cause by adding to what other people know. If you inform me, I now know something I didn't know before. More than that, I am changed by the process. Information is how we commodify the positive intellectual changes we cause to each other. As such, information is far more profound and human than any physical commodity. One line sticks in my mind from that conversation: we are authors of each other. This is profoundly different (and far more meaningful) than "we deliver information" to each other. Perhaps the most pernicious legacy of the Industrial Age is that we still think and talk in shipping terms. This becomes obvious when we look at how much we love to embody business in the preposition "to," which we abbreviate to the homonymic number in B2B, B2C and P2P. We reconcieve everything we make as "content" that we "address" for "delivery" to (or 2) somebody else. Christine Boehlke put it right: we do business with each other, not to each other. In the Industrial Age, much of business really was shipping. It was was a from-to affair. Goods had to move a long way from a few producers to millions of consumers. It's still that way. In many respects it will always be that way The value chain is not an obsolete concept. The difference now is that markets are getting networked, fast. As a result, they are much more like conversations and less like targets, demographics, categories and drop zones. Okay, not everywhere, and not for everybody. But that's where the world is going, very fast. I guess I thought all this was starting to get obvious by the time I shared my problems with Ralph Nader in the current issue of Linux Journal. Since the issue hit the streets, I've had a lot of what we might kindly call "push back" on the matter. Here are some excerpts of one letter (which will be a letter to the editor in January, I believe) Maybe its the fact that it is two weeks before the US election and Doc Searls has decided that he ought to slam Ralph Nader. The only candidate who has actually dedicated himself to helping out people. Not just rich people, nor poor people. Not just consumers or soccer moms. He especiall has never aimed his consumer advocacy only towards the 26.2% of Americans who are actually on the net (according to 1998 statistics from the Consumer Department). Searls places Nader with the likes of Karl Marx simply because he believes that people should have enough room on airlines and safe automobiles, claiming that Nader does no more than to malignantly attack our benevolent corporations. ... What I don't understand is, how do consumers, or as Searls would say, customers, go make airplanes safe for themselves. How do people confront an industry that is controlled by two major entities (Boeing and Airbus)? How do consumers in this new age insure that their SUV's don't roll over. How do they produce safer automobiles for themselves? ... I have always taken in interest in Doc Searls work, but I would not expect to see an editorial that trivializes the problems that exist between Corporations and their customers in today's economy in a publication like Linux Journal -- and not from Searls. I'm flattered by the reader's otherwise warm regard for my writing. As for regulation, I think we're just not going to agree. Although I think of myself as a lily-livered Libertarian, I do think we need some regulation, and even regard the rule of law as a necessity of civilization (though not too much law). I just don't think we need more than a fraction of what Ralph proposes. And frankly, I don't think anybody who uses "corporatist" as an epithet (even to characterize a candidate so deserving of the label as Bush the Younger) is interested in having a conversation about business that doesn't involve demonizing somebody. Another letter came today: Found it quite a coincidence that this article came to my attention a day or two right after I read your latest (11/2000) Linux Journal "Linux For Suits" column... thought you might be interested... It's a piece by Thomas Frank in The Nation, which is one of the most thinky magazines still left on The Left. I suspect Frank (and this reader) would categorize my postion as an example of what Frank calls "market populism:" While once "people thought" there were ways to order human affairs other than through the free market, Friedman insisted, those choices now no longer existed. "I don't think there will be an alternative ideology this time around," he wrote in August 1998. "There are none." It is this intellectual unanimity about the nature and the purpose of economies, as much as the technological advances of recent years, that we refer to when we talk so triumphantly about the "New Economy." It is this nearly airtight consensus--this assurance that no matter what happens or who wins in November, a strong labor movement and an interventionist government will not be returning--that has made possible the unprecedented upward transfer of wealth that we saw in the Clinton years, that has permitted the bull market without end, and that has made the world so safe for billionaires. This is not to say that in the nineties Americans simply decided they wanted nothing so much as to toil for peanuts on an assembly line somewhere, that they loved plutocracy and that robber barons rocked after all. On the contrary: At the center of the "New Economy" consensus was a vision of economic democracy as extreme and as militant-sounding as anything to emanate from the CIO in the thirties. From Deadheads to Nobel-laureate economists, from paleoconservatives to New Democrats, American leaders in the nineties came to believe that markets were a popular system, a far more democratic form of organization than (democratically elected) governments. This is the central premise of what I call "market populism": that in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets are mediums of consent. With their mechanisms of supply and demand, poll and focus group, superstore and Internet, markets manage to express the popular will more articulately and meaningfully than do mere elections. By their very nature markets confer democratic legitimacy, markets bring down the pompous and the snooty, markets look out for the interests of the little guy, markets give us what we want. I believe this "intellectual unanimity" is actually industrial in nature, and all the New Economy did was temporarily substantiate it with financial rewards. Indeed the rewards were extreme in many cases (some of which have now proven temporary). Frank's descriptions of markets as media is a highly industrial conceptualization — one that assumes supply is in command, and that the only legitimate response to that fact is to oppose it (which is what Ralph seems to be all about). I oppose it too. But so do networked markets. That was my point in the editorial. In Cluetrain, however, we did not describe networked markets just as countervailing "forces" of some kind — something to balance the vast incumbent power of Industry. Rather, we saw markets as something forgotten and far more fundamental. From in Chapter 4: The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets or arenas. Not demographics, eyeballs or seats. Most of all, not consumers. The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates. They were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers met, looked each other in the eye and connected. The first markets were places where people came to buy what others had to sell, to exchange — and to talk. The first markets were filled with talk. Some of it was about goods and products. Some was news, opinion and gossip. Little of it mattered to everyone; all of it engaged someone. Often there were conversations about the work of hands: "Feel this knife. See how it fits your palm." "The cotton in this shirt, where did it come from?" "Taste this apple. We won't have them next week. If you like it you should take some today." Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don't let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence. Market leaders were men and women whose hands were worn by the work they did. Their work was their life, and their brands were the names by which they were known: Miller, Weaver, Hunter, Skinner, Farmer, Brewer, Fisher, Shoemaker, Smith. For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. The buyers had as much to say as the sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising or the shading of public relations. These were the kinds of conversations people have been having since they started to talk: They were social, based on intersecting interests. Open to many resolutions. Essentially unpredictable. Spoken from the center of the self."Markets were conversations" doesn't mean "markets were noisy." It means markets were places where people met and talked about work. Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So are markets. Does this mean we don't need Ralph and other "consumer advocates" any more? No. Does it mean we should have faith that new market conversations will all be good and healthy for everybody? No. Does it mean that we should ignore industries (such as oil) where supply looks like it will control demand for the duration, and leave them free of regulation? No. It just means that we need to pay more attention to some of the truly old — and still unconscious — thinking that we're dragging into a truly new age. By the way, my intellectual (and hey, moral) mentor is George Lakoff, the great linguist, author and professor at UC-Berkeley who is involved in a Liberal think tank called The Frameworks Institute, which produces such procative thinking as Susan Nall Bales' Reframing Community Messages through Myths and Metaphors. Dig it. And while you're doing that, ponder this possibility: markets can nurture. (Background: Lakoff places nurturance at the conceptual and familial heart of Liberalism.)
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