Why the Cluetrain Manifesto Was Right — And Why It Still Hurts
How We Spent 25 Years Avoiding Cluetrain’s Real Warning
In 1999, four people wrote a strange little book that sounded less like management theory and more like a warning.
The Cluetrain Manifesto opened with a line that felt obvious at the time and unsettling ever since:
Markets are conversations.
Most people remember Cluetrain as an early internet artifact — a rallying cry for authenticity, voice, and the coming social web.
That reading misses the point.
Cluetrain was not a marketing book.
It was an epistemological critique of institutions.
What Cluetrain Actually Claimed
Cluetrain wasn’t saying:
“Companies should sound more human”
“Marketing should be more authentic”
“Hierarchies should loosen up”
It was saying something much more dangerous:
Meaning emerges from human conversation faster than institutions can capture it.
And therefore:
Institutions will always lag reality — not because they are evil, but because they are slow, abstract, and brittle.
Conversation wasn’t a tactic.
It was a coordination mechanism.
The Part Everyone Ignored
Cluetrain implicitly rejected a core assumption of modern management:
That reality can be fully represented by systems.
Instead, it suggested that:
understanding is negotiated
context is local
meaning is provisional
and truth moves socially before it stabilizes structurally
That’s not comforting.
It means dashboards will always be late. Reports will always flatten nuance. And “best practices” will always trail lived experience.
How Organizations Neutralized Cluetrain
Rather than confront that implication, organizations did something familiar:
They domesticated it.
“Markets are conversations” became:
brand voice
social media strategy
tone guidelines
engagement metrics
Conversation was instrumentalized.
Instead of asking:
How do humans actually maintain shared meaning when systems fail?
We asked:
How do we scale conversation through systems?
That inversion changed everything.
From Conversation to Representation
Over the next two decades, organizations built:
CRMs
ticketing systems
dashboards
OKRs
digital Kanban boards
engagement platforms
All in the name of visibility, alignment, and scale.
What they actually built were representations of work, not shared understanding of it.
Visibility became performative.
Alignment became declarative.
Conversation became optional — and then inefficient.
This is how we arrived at what now feels like “make-believe visibility”: lots of information, very little understanding.
Why Cluetrain Aged Better Than the Systems That Followed
Cluetrain assumed something that modern IT quietly erased:
Humans can tell when something doesn’t make sense — even before they can explain why.
Modern systems don’t like that.
They demand:
certainty
precision
fields filled in
probabilities assigned
statuses declared
So people comply. They guess. They normalize ambiguity into numbers.
And the system becomes confident — and wrong.
Cluetrain warned us that this would happen.
AI Makes the Warning Impossible to Ignore
AI didn’t create this problem.
It accelerated it.
AI can:
generate summaries
compress nuance
produce confident artifacts
scale representation instantly
What it cannot do is:
restore lost context
arbitrate meaning
decide what actually matters in a given situation
AI exposes the gap Cluetrain pointed to: systems can process information, but only humans can negotiate meaning.
Why We’re Back Here Now
We’re back in a Cluetrain moment because:
productivity is illusory
dashboards are misleading
tool stacks keep growing, but coherent strategy
work feels busy but fragmented into tasks to keep the systems happen
production of documents and outputs exceeds the capacity to process this as a conversation
The question Cluetrain posed never went away:
When systems fail to reflect reality, where does truth live? Increasing the volume of information produced and broadcast does very little to improve sincere understanding.
The Unfinished Lesson
Cluetrain wasn’t optimistic.
It was realistic.
It didn’t promise better tools.
It didn’t promise scale.
It didn’t promise control.
It described a permanent tension:
Human conversation adapts faster than institutions ever will.
The mistake was thinking that tension could be engineered away.
It can’t.
Why This Still Matters
Cluetrain isn’t relevant because of the internet.
It’s relevant because work has become too abstract to be managed purely through representation.
When visibility is fake, conversation becomes critical again. When metrics diverge from reality, interpretation matters. When AI accelerates output, judgment becomes scarce.
We don’t need louder systems.
We need places where:
assumptions can be questioned
meaning can be renegotiated
and reality can be re-sensed together
That’s not nostalgia.
That’s the work Cluetrain pointed to — and that we postponed for 25 years.
Cluetrain wasn’t about marketing.
It was about where meaning lives when systems fall behind reality.