When I lived in California in late 2000 I read probably the best book on modern communications ever written: The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. The authors actually teased the book on the web in their 95 Theses in 1999, so we all knew what was coming would be equally outrageous. Couldn’t wait.
Back then I worked in Cupertino, and many times I’d take breaks and walk across the street from the office to get some coffee and flip through the pages. I loved it. It represented a radical departure in marketing and communications at the time because seemed obviously influenced by developers in the rapidly growing Free and Open Source Software movement (FOSS). I was already familiar with most of the topics in Cluetrain because I worked at Sun Microsystems and mixed with FOSS engineers every day. Still, it was cool to see the concepts applied to marketing where these ideas were totally unknown.
Cluetrain made bold predictions about markets becoming conversations, about authentic voice displacing canned corporate messaging, and about employees and customers breaking free from rigid command and control structures. We read it widely at Sun, especially those of us managing FOSS projects. Back then Sun was opening millions of lines of code, so the book gave us useful language as we built projects and engaged development communities. It also came in handy for dealing with the media, which was my primary job at the time. Cluetrain also fit Sun’s culture perfectly because the place seemed at times more like a frat house than a corporation.
The Prediction: Markets Are Conversations
The Cluetrain Manifesto’s central argument was clear. Mass media had interrupted human conversation and turned people into passive consumers and markets into targets. Even within Sun’s generally open culture, there were still power centers in marketing and product development talking in terms of “targeting” the media, developers, and customers. That positioning drove me nuts because the engineers never spoke that way. Cluetrain argued that the Internet would reverse that old paradigm because people could now talk directly to each other about products, communities, and companies across traditionally closed corporate firewalls.
The authors based their conclusions on their own observations. They showed how customers were gathering in online forums to compare notes, share experiences, and help each other get things done. Engineers at companies could openly explain their software to peers in the community and to potential customers without a corporate communications department in between. Companies that tried to control these conversations through legal threats or PR spin got mocked online, often without realizing it, so it fell to people like me to explain what was happening to teams internally. That was a painful process, I can assure you. The pushback from the more conservative teams was significant. But I never had to justify the book’s ideas to developers because in the FOSS community open communication was just considered normal.
But Cluetrain wasn’t simply calling for friendlier or more open marketing process. It was challenging the idea that companies should attempt to control the conversation about them. That was a wasted opportunity in the Cluetrain paradigm. The people building the products always knew more than the marketing department, and the customers using those products often knew things the company itself didn’t. The Internet let those conversations thrive at a scale that had never existed before, and it didn’t require everyone to agree to the latest message. In fact, disagreement was generally part of the value. People could challenge companies publicly and develop their own understanding of a product without waiting for the officially approved marketing campaign.
What Actually Happened
The first part of the prediction proved accurate. Conversations exploded online. Developer interactions thrived. Customer and developer reviews became crucial to purchasing decisions. Social media finally gave employees and customers a public voice, and many companies encouraged this change. For example, Sun and Microsoft were among the first large software companies to build blogging platforms for employees to talk with outside communities. Development engineers usually led the way, and within a few years Sun had more than two thousand employees blogging and talking to whoever they needed to talk to in order to get their jobs done. That openness was a real relief from the constraints of corporate life, and for a while the old, one-way broadcast model lost some of its grip. We used to call that old broadcast strategy “megaphone marketing” at Sun, but we were now in a many-to-many world. It was cool.
But the manifesto underestimated how quickly new gatekeepers would emerge, and how differently they would operate. The authors understood the Internet would break down old barriers between companies and their audiences, but they couldn’t have anticipated that the new communication systems would themselves become enormous businesses with their own tools and economic incentives.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms created spaces for open conversation, but they also monetized it. Attention became a product. Personal data became even more valuable than before. Algorithms became necessary to sort through the volume, but those same algorithms also began deciding which conversations got seen. A thoughtful explanation doesn’t necessarily earn more attention than an outrageous claim, and content that produces a strong emotional reaction can be worth much more to a platform than content that’s simply accurate or understated. And we all began to see this in our social feeds. A casual peek at a colleague’s screen would reveal that their online conversations showed an entirely different world based on their preferences that were amplified by the platform’s algorithms.
Bots and fake accounts made it worse and the line between an authentic participant and a manufactured one grew harder to see. And a well funded campaign could manufacture the appearance of agreement without any real support behind it. But developers could always see this. Most early FOSS projects ran on Mailman lists, so those discussions among engineers largely escaped the corporate swamp for years. Over time, though, as more engineers drifted onto social media, they were pulled into the mess too. The Internet didn’t eliminate gatekeepers. It built new ones with far more precision than the old media ever had. Also, whereas the old media tended to be centralized, the new one was atomized and embedded everywhere.
The Transformation of Corporate Communication
Companies adapted to these open changes quickly. They hired social media managers and community managers, built brand accounts, and encouraged employees to act as ambassadors. The language of Cluetrain worked its way into corporate communications and marketing meetings, which made it feel like the old model was changing. But something got lost along the way.
The manifesto called for people to speak from a genuine passion and their firsthand knowledge from working within an open community. However, what companies built instead was a new form of managed authenticity. Posts were getting written by communications teams and checked by legal before going out. Influencers were paid to look organic. Employees were encouraged to speak publicly while at the same time getting detailed guidance on exactly what they could and couldn’t say. Some companies appeared to be part of the conversation while also working to keep as much of the control as possible.
But other companies were more genuine about it. They admitted mistakes and let employees talk freely and participate in the communities. At Sun we aired plenty of our dirty laundry in public blogs, and the community noticed that and appreciated it. Several Microsoft bloggers did the same. But those were exceptions rather than the rule, and over time most companies learned to fold blogs and social media into the same communications machine they’d always run. Once authenticity became something a company could measure and manage, it turned into just another item in the corporate toolkit. It was wild to see people in marketing meetings starting to borrow the language engineers had used for years, at least on a surface level.
The Complexity of Authentic Voice
The manifesto also underestimated how hard an authentic voice is to maintain inside an large organization. It’s easy to say employees should speak honestly. It’s harder when those employees have managers, legal departments, and reasonable worries about what happens if they say the wrong thing publicly. People are complicated. They carry competing loyalties, worry about their careers, get tired, make mistakes, and sometimes just disagree with the company they work for.
Also, authentic doesn’t automatically mean good, either. A customer’s honest opinion can be unreasonable. An employee’s honest take can rest on a bias they don’t even recognize. A developer can be technically brilliant and still be a troll. FOSS communities learned this a long time ago, which is why so many projects eventually had to write and enforce conduct policies. Openness alone was never enough, especially when systems scale.
The manifesto also didn’t foresee how authenticity itself would become a commodity. Brands hire consultants to develop an authentic voice. Corporations spend real money trying to appear genuine, and influencers get paid to look like ordinary people making ordinary recommendations. As a result, people learned to perform realness the way they once performed professionalism, and once everyone is trying to appear authentic, authenticity just becomes another style of engagement. This is just a normal process of how organizations full of complicated people operate. It’s to be expected.
What the Manifesto Got Right, and What It Missed
Despite these blind spots, Cluetrain identified something real about how business would change. Markets did become more transparent, and information asymmetries did shrink. Customers and development communities gained real leverage over corporations. Microsoft’s own path from calling Linux a cancer to actively engaging open source projects is a good example. Companies that ignored what customers were saying suffered brand damage faster than they would have in the old broadcast era. And the hyperlinked organization the authors described turned out to be real to a certain degree. Work became more distributed. Information stopped moving strictly through the hierarchy. A developer could talk directly with a customer, and an employee could find the person who knew how to solve a problem without asking permission to cross multiple layers of management. Some managers didn’t love this, of course, but they couldn’t really stop it. Many even saw Cluetrain as an opportunity for career advancement and skill development.
What the authors missed, though, was that they underestimated how well old power would simply adapt. They believed the Internet would make hierarchy less important, and in some ways it did, but hierarchy didn’t disappear. It mostly moved online. They also underestimated scale. Small communities can sustain honest conversation because people get to know each other quickly. They learn who is helpful, who is selling, and who has a real history in the project. That doesn’t necessarily hold once a platform reaches millions or billions of people, though. Context breaks down, algorithms fill the gap by deciding which participants and messages get seen, and gaming becomes easier.
They didn’t foresee algorithmic curation either. The Internet made more information available, but that didn’t mean people would actually see more of it. Two people can use the same platform and end up with entirely different views of what’s happening because the platform is showing each of them a different slice of reality. And they didn’t anticipate how concentrated the new gatekeepers would become. All these years later handful of companies now provide the infrastructure most online conversation runs through. They set the rules, run the algorithms, and collect the data. The promise of decentralized conversation gave way to a new kind of centralized control.
The AI Complication
Then we got artificial intelligence, which is where Cluetrain gets interesting again. The authors believed people could tell the difference between corporate language and the way real people actually talk. That held up fine in 1999. It’s much harder to claim today, though.
AI can write a customer review, draft a social post, answer a support question, or generate an image that looks real. And it can do all of this while maintaining a consistent personality for years. Now, fake reviews and manufactured enthusiasm existed long before AI. What’s changed most recently is how cheap, easy, and fast it is to produce content at scale, and that undercuts one of the manifesto’s core assumptions. If authentic voice is what matters, but we can’t reliably tell which voices are authentic, what happens to the conversation? We used to be able to easily spot corporate messaging, but it’s getting harder and harder to spot AI messaging as those systems become pervasive.
It gets more interesting once you stop thinking about individual fake messages and start thinking about participants themselves. An AI system can answer questions, defend a company, criticize a competitor, and take part in a developer community to the point where people start developing relationships with it. But human reputation develops through repeated interactions where you have something at stake and have to live with what you said. But now an AI agent can simulate the pattern of that outcome without having any of the human substance behind it. Its apparent expertise actually came from a model trained on other people’s work, and its apparent reputation really belongs to whoever operates it either at the LLM or the harness level. That’s a bigger challenge to Cluetrain than simply noting that AI can write marketing copy.
Automation Is Not AI
There’s a distinction worth making here because it sometimes gets lost in many discussions about AI. Automation has been removing humans from transactions for decades. A vending machine does it. An ATM does it. A self checkout does it. None of those systems need AI at all.
I was reminded of this recently while clothes shopping in Tokyo. I expected a clerk to check each item, scan or key in the price, and fold everything neatly for me That’s usually how it goes here. This is Japan, after all. Direct human service matters. A lot. Instead, I dumped a tangled pile of ten items into a bin, and the system identified everything immediately, listed everything on a screen, and let me pay with a quick tap of my card (I love the security on that last part). No human involved anywhere in the process, and no bar codes for me to scan myself. It just worked. What matters here is that this kind of checkout doesn’t need AI to be impressive. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) can identify a pile of products without anyone scanning them one by one, which is what makes the example useful beyond AI specifically. Automation has been removing people from physical transactions for a long time. We’re all used to it now even though we may not like it. This may help explain why people are so sensitive about AI because AI now extends that same trend but into our conversations. Now an AI agent can replace the conversation itself.
Where Cluetrain Still Works
I still see the original Cluetrain principles working in the FOSS projects I’m part of, though. A developer asks a question on a mailing list, and other developers respond with real knowledge and no filter. They argue, share code, make mistakes, correct each other, and build things together because there’s context and an expectation of openness and credibility. People develop reputations in these spaces. You learn who has expertise, who tends to cause trouble, and who is genuinely trying to help. That history and experience over time gives the conversation weight that a comment in a text box on a website can’t create on its own.
I’d revise one part of the usual argument here, though. It’s not quite right to say Cluetrain works at human scale and fails at platform scale, since some gigantic communities function well and some tiny ones are dysfunctional. What actually matters is context, reputation, shared purpose, and accountability. A local bookstore can have those things. So can a software consultancy, a FOSS project, or a single team inside a much larger company. But Cluetrain breaks down once a conversation gets so large and impersonal that participants lose the ability to build context and reputation, while at the same time the platform itself gains more say over what everyone sees.
What We Need Now
The Internet did change business, and authentic conversations did become more important. But the story didn’t unfold as cleanly as Cluetrain predicted. Markets became conversations, sure, but many of those conversations are now mediated by platforms with their own economic incentives. Our content is now run through algorithms built to hold our attention, and our conversations are increasingly populated by AI that can imitate humans well enough to fool most people who aren’t looking closely.
That raises real questions. Does it matter whether the voice answering you is human as long as it gives you what you need? Many times it doesn’t matter. And that’s fine. But in most cases, people tend to seek human interactions. The real question is how markets will function at scale if we really can’t tell who, or what, we’re talking to. We don’t know the answers yet since all of this is still emerging. Some companies are being transparent about their use of AI and are disclosing when people are talking to a bot. Some companies are now saying that AI is just a tool to augment humans rather than a replacement for humans. Others, however, will remain less transparent about their use of AI simply because the incentive to cut human involvement is massive. Those companies seem intent on pushing the narrative that AI will just replace people in the future.
I don’t think AI will destroy human conversation or replace people entirely. Markets are changing, that’s true, and many people will be displaced, but that’s been happening forever. Nevertheless, People will keep seeking relationships, expertise, and direct contact with other people. That’s just an innate human characteristic. And the more artificial our digital environments become, the more valuable genuine interactions will get. That may be part of why live conferences still draw big crowds. When you’re standing in a room talking to someone, you don’t have to wonder if an algorithm or someone bot produced the experience. It’s just real.
That’s what Cluetrain ultimately got right. Markets are conversations because markets are made of people. The Internet made those conversations possible at a scale no one could have imagined in 1999, but it also built new gatekeepers, new incentives, and new questions about who or what we’re actually talking to. I still talk about Cluetrain at developer conferences, even though almost nobody in the room has heard of it anymore. The book may be mostly forgotten, but the basic idea holds. We should still want knowledgeable people talking directly with customers and developers talking directly with their peers. And we should still want communities where reputation gets earned through real contribution rather than assigned by algorithms that can be gamed.
