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Tuesday, April 3, 2007
What it wasn't 
| | Every so often, a book comes out that changes everything. The Cluetrain Manifesto was such a book. It was a seminal work that articulated a genuine paradigm shift. |
| | Well, mark this down. There's a book coming out in June that again changes everything. Ironically, it describes the Cluetrain Wreck. |
| | Authored by Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen, we were lucky enough to get an advanced copy. It is a hard-hitting and provocative polemic that exposes the grave consequences of today¹s new participatory Web 2.0. It demonstrates definitively how the Web Train is off track and threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement. THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR is a wake-up call!! |
| | For what it's worth, I see few connections between what we wrote and Web 2.0. (Hey, I'm the guy who said Web 2.0 was "what we'll call the current bubble and the next crash". After remarks like that, it's not surprising that, to my knowledge, none of Cluetrain's four authors have spoken at any Web 2.0 events.) |
| | CHAPEL: Your book sounds like a total refutation of the premise and proposal that is the Cluetrain Manifesto. As Cluetrain is accepted as bible, that would make your book heresy! Your thoughts? |
| | KEEN: Yes, my book is in the heretical tradition of modern dystopian writers like Huxley & Orwell as well as contemporary American cultural critics such as Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell and Neil Postman. Cluetrain established a biblical orthodoxy around the four C's: "community", "citizenship", "customer" and, most ludicrously of all, "conversation". What it tries to do is displace the ethical and cultural truths that have traditionally defined our civic life -- and replace them with the feel-good language of public relations. At the ideological heart of Cluetrain is the absurd cult of the amateur with its denial that real "truth" or "expertise" can ever exist. |
| | Good God. Where to begin? |
| | Well, not only did Cluetrain contain no "four C's", but neither the words "citizen" nor "citizenship" appear anywhere in the original website or the book. |
| | While Cluetrain certainly has an ideological heart, it's not "the cult of the amateur", or the cult of anything. |
| | And while I don't yet know which "ethical and cultural truths" Andrew is talking about, I'm damn sure Cluetrain's authors would never hope to replace them with "the feel-good language of public relations". Which we crapped on rather forcefully in this chapter here. |
| | Anyway, I'm sure Andrew's book has lots of interesting stuff in it. I just hope that his sourcework is better than what he shows here in respect to Cluetrain. |
Thoughts du jour
There are responses to this message:Re: What it wasn't, Sean Coon, 4/4/07; 1:34:35 PM Re: Monday, April 3, 2007, Mike Taht, 4/3/07; 7:32:09 PM Re: Monday, April 3, 2007, John Quimby, 4/3/07; 6:19:41 PM
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