Social Media Pioneers: Doc Searls

I am treating Cluetrain Manifesto‘s publication as a pivotal moment in my book-in-progress, Pioneers of Social Media. Yesterday, I profiled co-author David Weinberger. Today I ask the same  questions to co-author Doc Searls

Doc, is a career journalist and leading thinker in matters related to the internet, open source and social media. He is a passionate and eloquent end-userist. He sees the web as the great equalizer between people and the institutions that try to manipulate them.

He began contributing to Linux Journal when it was started in 1994 and continues to do so today.

From 2006 to 2010 he was a Berkman Fellow alongside Weinberger, during which he launched and led ProjectVRM [Vendor relationship Management] which encourages the development of new tools for people to create and control relationships with companies and other organizations on the internet.

He’s  on a book about VRM, The Intention Economy: What Happens When Customers Get Real Power .

In “The World is Flat,” Thomas L. Friedman calls Doc “one of the most respected technology writers in America.”  He is also among the most tirelessly accessible. Halley Suitt Tucker [l] one of the first women to become prominent in the blogging community tells a story about being with Doc in Paris at the first Les Blog Conference, hosted by Lois LeMeur in 2004.

” On a day off, Doc let me shadow him around town. I was always interested

how he knew so many people — and even then,  as he was just approaching 60  and might find taking it easy for a day in Paris was ideal, he didn’t.  He poured all his energy into meeting with his friends and followers.  He went from cafe to restaurants to hotel lobbys and met up with so many bloggers — new friends and old one — I was truly stunned.”

The following are his answers to my emailed questions.

How did the four Cluetrain authors first get together? Whose idea was it to write the book? What was the process?

Chris Locke [r], David Weinberger and I were annoyed at how poorly the Net and its implications were being understood. There was so much about the Net that was obvious to us — and presumably to at least a few others — but that part was hardly talked about in the media, and was largely ignored by the flood of venture capitalists funding projects that seemed to regard the Net as “TV with a buy button” or worse.

Chris suggested we make our conversation a three-way conference call. By early 1999, our calls became frequent, along with plenty of emails.

Anyway, after the three of us decided to put up a website, Chris suggested we add Rick Levine, who, at the time, worked for Sun Microsystems and was sympathetic with what we were saying, and was more technical than the rest of us. He was the only one of us with a real job.
How did you come up with the title, Cluetrain Manifesto?

‘Cluetrain’ was born of a snark. At some point in our conversations, I recalled a one-liner that was something of a Silicon Valley epitaph: “The clue train stopped there four times a day for 10 years, but they never took delivery.”

Ironically, the guy who told it to me had Apple Computer in mind.

After we got a chuckle, I looked up cluetrain.com, saw it wasn’t taken, bought it on the spot, and, without deliberation, it became our new website. We made it a manifesto because that had worked for Karl Marx, and racked up 95 theses because that had worked for Martin Luther. or so the story goes, anyway.

Chris was also the guy whose fearless attitude both impelled Cluetrain into existence and gave us our collective voice. For example, take the time David, Chris and I were sharing our approaches to prospective consulting clients. At some point I said that my own approach was to lay out what I called my marketing logic:

Markets are conversations and conversation is fire. Therefore, marketing is arson.” Thus, I would say to a prospect, “If you want to set fires, I’m your guy. If you just want to put out press releases, find somebody else.”

So Chris responded with something like, “Okay, so let’s put what we’ve been talking about up on a website, and see if it catches fire.”

So does a little graphic that Chris sent out as an attachment. It said: “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.”

It galvanized us, and became, I believe, the core point of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

In 1998, when you were writing Cluetrain, there was internet commerce and etailing; forums and usenet, but most of the tools we consider to be part of today’s social media did not yet exist. Yet Cluetrain seems to be prescient of them. Did you have any sense or vision of what would unfold over the next decade?

I had a sense that markets would become more conversational, and that more people would speak with their own voices, outside of what David called Fort Business in Chapter 5.

What I didn’t expect was AOL 2.0, which I believe is what we got with Facebook. I also didn’t expect trapping and milking of users in silos to remain normative, which they have, even as those silos have become more ‘social.’

Cluetrain gets a lot of credit for being visionary about social media, and I think that’s true to the extent that there is much more human interaction on the Net than ever before. But there also was plenty to begin with, even in 1999. Email was already old hat then. So was instant messaging. Blogging had just begun. While much good has come of Twitter and Facebook; but if those end up being the highest expressions of Cluetrain‘s aspirations, we have failed, because both are silos and walled gardens.

How does Facebook speak? Just asking.

As we wrote in Cluetrain:

“Learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about listening to customers. They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happy talk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.

However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranet-working employees can converse directly with internet-worked markets.”

To a significant extent this has happened. But there are huge absences here. How many Apple employees dare to blog, for example? And how large is the call center business now?

“Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in,” we said in the book.

I believe that conversation, of the full Cluetrain-compliant sort, won’t happen for real until our reach — as individuals — exceeds corporate grasp. And that hasn’t happened yet. That’s why I started ProjectVRM in 2006, and why I’m working to get code out of the dozens of companies and development projects that are now part of the VRM movement. I want to help finish what Cluetrain started.

And trust me on this: ‘social media’ like Facebook are not part of the solution. They are part of the same old problem, which remains unsolved.

The Cluetrain subtitle is “The end of businesses as usual?” Is it?  How is business different in 2011 from 1998?

No, it’s not. And it won’t be until individuals have their own tools for engaging with companies and other organizations. We’ve made plenty of progress on the social front, but on the individual front we’re still subordinated, still submissive, still dependent.

If you want an example of how absolute power corrupts absolutely, check out Facebook Connect, which is designed to spill personal data every time anybody uses it to sign in to a website. For more about how this works, check out http://isharedwhat.com, which was created by Joe Andrieu, a stalwart member of the VRM development community.
At the heart of Cluetrain was the great image of axe-wielding message-mongers, marketers who were going to get images into people’s brains whether people liked it or not. How has social media impacted the message-mongers? Do you think they have simply adapted their old tricks to new channels and are continuing to shovel out the same sort of crap as always?

Not exactly.

The source for the axe metaphor was Alvin Toffler, who wrote that the rise of industry drove an “invisible wedge” between production and consumption.

As we wrote in Chapter 4, Markets are Conversations:

“As production was ramped up to unheard-of rates, the clay pot of craftwork was broken into shards of repetitive tasks that maximized efficiency by minimizing difference: interchangeable workers creating interchangeable products.

In the market, consumption also needed to be ramped up — not just to absorb the increased production of goods, but also to promote people’s willingness to buy the one-size-fits-all products that rolled off mass-production lines.

And management wasted little time noticing the parallels in efficiencies they could achieve all along the production-consumption chain. If products and workers were interchangeable, then interchangeable consumers began to look pretty good too.”

The goal was simple. Customers had to be convinced to desire the same thing, the same Model-T in any color, so long as it’s black. And if workers could be better organized through the repetitive nature of their tasks, so customers were more easily defined by the collective nature of their tastes. Just as management developed a new organizational model to enhance economies of scale in production, it developed the techniques of mass marketing to do the same for consumption.

So the customers who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market were transformed into consumers.  In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.” Power swung so decisively to the supply side that “market” became a verb: something you do to customers.

Then later we wrote:

“Every one of us knows that marketers are out to get us, and we all struggle to escape their snares. We channel-surf through commercials; we open our mail over the recycling bin, struggling to discern the junk mail without having to open the envelope; we resent the adhesion of commercial messages to everything from sports uniforms to escalator risers.

We know that the real purpose of marketing is to insinuate the message into our consciousness, to put an axe in our heads without our noticing. Like it or not, they will teach us to sing the jingle and recite the slogan. If the axe finds its mark we toe the line, buy the message, buy the product, and don’t talk back. For the axe of marketing is also meant to silence us, to make conversation in the market as unnecessary as the ox cart.”

How is business in 2011 any different from the way business was in 1998?

It’s all far more connected. The internet is an absolute necessity now for doing business in a serious way. The Net is also undermining all the major media and forcing them to adapt to the Net’s presence and utility in the world.

We’re seeing television and radio reform themselves before our eyes and ears, and normalizing to the Net. It’s the same with newspapers and magazines. None of these media will go away, but eventually all of them will be based primarily on the Net and secondarily on their legacy platforms.

The Net also exposes how much old media and old businesses, are locked by regulation, custom and contract into their legacy platforms.

For example, if you want to watch live coverage of what’s happening in the world today on streaming video over your iPhone, iPad or Android-based hand-held — or even on your laptop — you have only one choice: Aljazeera. CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, NTT and BBC are all limited to clips rather than streams, thanks to restrictive agreements with distributors (cable, in the U.S. cases), or national regulation (in the case of the BBC, which won’t allow streaming to non-UK IP addresses).

We can only sort these problems out by normalizing to the Net. That was, in essence, what we said we expected with Cluetrain, but it will take time for it all to sort out.
Cluetrain’s “self-evident truth” was that markets are conversations. This, to me, is exactly what has happened. Today, millions of people engage in billions of conversations online everyday. Geography has become less relevant. Information is shared, not cloistered. So my question is quite simple: How has the web-based marketplace changed the world?

What happens when Facebook goes away, which it will. What happens to the conversational record?

I managed to half-trash my own email record from 1995-2001, but I still have the files, and they are recoverable. I have everything since then as well. I have nothing from my postings and e-mailings on AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy, and I don’t expect to have much to pull out of Facebook unless their API generously permits it–maybe it does, I don’t know–I just know it’s a silo. Every blog post I have ever made is still up on the Web. Can I say the same for every tweet?

Too much of what we call ‘social’ today is, for all the good it does, a chocolate-covered spider. We remain at the mercy of corporate entities whose first loyalty — their economic one — is to advertisers.

In this respect, they are no different than commercial broadcasters have been for 90 years. There is no direct accountability to individual users, because those users are not customers. They are the eyeballs being sold to advertisers.

This is the Faustian bargain that even well-intended companies had before the

Web came along, and it’s the same bargain made by Google, Facebook and Twitter today—and also by its users.

So, how has the web-based marketplace changed the world?

Well, as I said, it has made us all a lot more connected. But we have a long way to go.

I remain no less Utopian than I ever was. I do believe there is an end state in which we can all assume what Bob Frankston calls ambient connectivity and that connectivity will be far less restricted than it is today (by speech-limiting countries, onerous mobile data plans and so on). But I don’t think “social media” as we know them today are radically new and different things– or even an especially good thing. In fact, I think they have lulled us into thinking that giant companies absorbing the Web into their walled gardens are Good Things, or at least good enough.

And I think that is a huge mistake.

Looking back over the last decade, what about social media has surprised, delighted and disappointed you?

I’ve been pleased, if not surprised and delighted, by the many connections I’ve made with old friends and half-lost relatives, and the way many people who would not otherwise use the Net have come to depend on it for mostly good and helpful things, such as planning reunions and sparking fresh and interesting conversations.

I have been disappointed that we have come to repeat the mistakes of the past, especially in the creation of giant walled gardens for users, and our unimaginative dependence on advertising as the business model of first resort.

And I have been especially annoyed at the degree to which the online advertising industry has come to believe that it is possible to target individuals with perfect messages at perfect times, because the advertising system will have perfect knowledge of what individuals want and will do next. This is delusional bullshit of the highest order, and it will fail.

How do you hope the world will remember Cluetrain Manifesto?

As a helpful website and book.

What is your vision for the next 5, 10 or 50 years related to social media?

I predict a social media crash by 2015, brought on by increased personal independence, autonomy, and ability to express preferences, policies and demand for goods and services, outside of any one platform, or any one company’s silo or walled garden.

I believe these changes will reduce or eliminate the need for much of the advertising that clutters the world today — and, in the process, it will crash the business models of social media as we know them today. Unless, of course, they adapt, which I believe they can. In other words, if markets really are conversations, we won’t need so much guesswork by advertisers. Free customers will prove more valuable than captive ones. And make no mistake: Facebook users are captives today.

It helps to remember that we were plenty social before social media came along, and we’ll be just as social long after social media becomes old hat.

Additional comments?

I wish I could be more positive about that phrase. But I do believe it has been corrupted, and that social media as we know them today have veered far from the vector of progress that Cluetrain projected in 1999.