In the late eighteenth century, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham imagined a little nightmare he called a "panopticon" — a prison in which the inmates could be seen at all times, but couldn't see their jailers. A few hundred years later, mass media inverted this scenario. The imprisoning TV eye now sees nothing, yet we all watch it for clues to our cultural identity. But what would happen if each of these isolated prison cells were somehow wired to all the rest so the inmates could observe their overseers? Not only see them, but also speculate about their motives, and compare notes on their behavior and intentions? It's already happened. That's what the Internet does. Suddenly the overseer is like an insect mounted on a pin for all to view.

While corporations are still only marginally aware of what's being said about them online, all but the totally out-of-it are uncomfortably aware these conversations are taking place, and that the control they had in the days of broadcast has evaporated. We're not just watching the ads these days, we're publicly deconstructing them. In this context, intranets look like salvation to many companies, their protective firewalls a form of corporate encryption designed to insulate against a scary new kind of market: unpredictable, unmanageable, unwilling to be manipulated.

At one point the Cluetrain Manifesto says: "Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall. De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you."

De-cloaking even more: I wrote that last bit. Personally. The Internet has radically changed the nature of the marketplace. I believe this. But how do I presume to know it? Certainly not through market-research reports, most of which aren't worth the paper they're written on. I know it because the Internet has changed me and the thousands of people I talk to every week. Maybe the best way to explain this is to tell my own story — talk about who I am and how I got here. Am I representative of the online market? The point is that there is no "online market" in some general abstract sense. More than any market that's ever existed, the Internet is a collection of unique individuals. I'm one of them.

I bought my first computer in 1981. It had a 300-baud modem that I used to connect to The Source, the first commercial online service. For those who may not know, baud is a technical term meaning "extremely slow." Nonetheless, I used this machine to talk to people I'd never met. We'd hook up and say things like: "Hey, who are you? What's happening over there? And by the way, where is over there?" The personal computer seemed to me the all-purpose machine. You could draw with it, write on it, save thoughts and recall them later, recombine them — you could even make music. I was a carpenter and a cabinetmaker and into tools in a big way. Here was a machine that communicated with others of its type, and behind each one was another person, another mind jamming, improvising, conveying ideas, feelings, and experiences I'd never before had a way to tap into. I'd never encountered a tool this powerful.

Through a weird combination of fortuitous accidents, I ended up in Tokyo several years later working in an artificial intelligence project for the Japanese government. What the project needed — and what I had to offer — was a fairly good grasp of the English language. What I lacked was any formal training in computer science. Nothing had prepared me for the stratospheric high-tech world I suddenly found myself immersed in. I knew next to nothing about machine intelligence, but I was fascinated by its core concept of "knowledge engineering." The challenge was to model how people understand things, represent ideas, and communicate them to others. In this case, the "other" was a computer. I could relate to the enormity of the problem. I was groping around in the dark myself, struggling with new concepts, and learning as I went. I was flying by the seat of my pants.

One day, I met with a researcher in a coffee shop. Language was a problem, but he spoke more English than I did Japanese. I had just been to the bookstore and was lugging a stack of books on highly advanced computer-science topics. It was all Greek to me, but I figured something might rub off. Suddenly the guy asks me, "Who gives you permission to read those books?"

I was stunned. Bowled over. Did his puzzlement reflect some sort of cultural difference? I didn't think so. It struck me that this fellow was just being more honest and direct than an American might be. He was articulating what many people in today's world seem to assume: that official authorization is required to learn new things. I thought about this deeply, and I'm thinking about it still.

Who gives us permission to explore our world? The question implies that the world in fact belongs to someone else. Who gives us permission to communicate what we've experienced, what we believe, what we've discovered of that world for ourselves? The question betokens a history of voice suppressed, of whole cultures that have come to believe only power is sanctioned to speak. Because the ability to speak does involve power. It entails ownership and the control conferred by ownership. As the saying has it: "Money talks, bullshit walks."

Right then and there, in that chance encounter in some random Tokyo coffee shop, I gave myself blanket permission: to be curious, to learn, to speak, to write. But it's a long road from permission to practice, and there's plenty of negative reinforcement in between. Freedom of expression may be called out loftily in the U.S. Constitution, but even after two centuries of democracy, it's still a far cry from second nature.

Communication is a powerful tool. And like any other powerful tool, it has been pressed into the service of business-as-usual. A few years after my stint in Japan, I ended up back in the United States, hired by an AI software outfit to be their director of corporate communications. Cool, I thought. That sounded important. I had no idea what it meant. Only later did I discover I'd become their PR guy. Bummer.

I was pretty naive back then, but I quickly figured out that public relations was perceived by the press — the people I was supposed to be talking to — as little more than thinly disguised hucksterism. I tried playing the high-tech huckster role precisely once and came away from the experience feeling dirty, phony. I couldn't bring myself to do it again, which was a big problem. It was my job. And I needed the money. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.

The "key messages" of any AI software company back then involved head-bangingly abstruse concepts like "heuristics," "backward chaining," and "nonmonotonic logic." Very deep. And very boring. I barely understood this jargon myself. How was I supposed to get on the phone with some total stranger and enthuse about The Product? The truth was, I didn't give a damn about the product. What I cared about was knowledge, how people acquired and used it, how organizations suddenly seemed to need a lot more of it, and why. What I cared about was how technology applied — or didn't — to the world of business and the actual people who worked there.

So instead of pitching the product, I started talking to journalists about stuff like that. I figured I'd just pretend to be working until I got fired for goofing off. But something amazing happened. As soon as I stopped strategizing how to "get ink" for the company that was paying my salary, as soon as I stopped seeing journalists as a source of free advertising for my employer, I started having genuine conversations with genuinely interesting people.

I'd call up editors and reporters without a thought in my head — no agenda, no objective — and we'd talk. We talked about manufacturing and how it evolved, about shop rats and managers, command and control. We talked about language and literature, about literacy. We talked about software too of course — what it could and couldn't do. We talked about the foibles of the industry itself, laughed about empty buzzwords and pompous posturing, swapped war stories about trade shows and writing on deadline. We talked about our own work. But these conversations weren't work. They were interesting and engaging. They were exciting. They were fun. I couldn't wait to get back to work on Monday morning.

Then something even more amazing happened. The company started "getting ink." Lots of it. And not in the lowly trade rags it had been used to, but in places like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and Business Week. One day the CEO called the VP of Marketing into my office.

"What has Chris been doing for you lately?" the CEO asked him.

"I'm glad you brought that up," said the marketing veep. "In the whole time he's been here, he hasn't done a single thing I've asked him to."

"Well..." said the CEO looking down at his shoes — here it comes, I thought, this is what it feels like to get sacked — "whatever it is he's doing, leave him alone. From now on, he reports to me."

That's how I discovered PR doesn't work and that markets are conversations.

That's also how I started ghostwriting for the CEO. One afternoon I was banging out an article, and I wrote a paragraph that stopped me cold. It stopped me because something new and very different had just showed up on the screen: my own voice. It's hard to explain, but the paragraph I'd just written resonated with something that had been sleeping all my life, something potent, something deep. I realized I could say things I cared about, and I could say them in a way no one else could. I stopped ghosting and started writing my own stuff.

But it was hard to write the sort of thing that gave me that same feeling. Where could I publish it? I would try to sneak some of myself into the articles I wrote for journals and magazines, but I usually had to disguise what I really wanted to say.

In 1995, I ended up in IBM's Internet division. A ranking PR guy from corporate headquarters ran into me one day and said he'd heard I had a lot of contacts in the financial press. He suggested we get together for lunch and talk about it. I took this as a good sign, maybe an opening to do what I liked best. But when we met several weeks later he said something like, "All those journalists you know? Never talk to them again."

He said I should refer all such conversations to him instead. That way, he said, the company's messaging would be consistent. Or words to that effect. But I knew they wouldn't be real conversations — they would be "key message" pitches, and I wasn't about to subject people I knew and liked to that sort of targeting. I kept my contacts to myself.

I was devastated. It was bad enough that I'd been explicitly forbidden to speak with journalists, many of whom had become good friends, but where was I going to write? If I published anything, I'd get busted for not asking permission — there was that word again — and if I wrote sleazy PR for IBM, I'd have to kill myself to blot out the karmic stain.

And then it came to me: I could write on the World Wide Web! At that juncture, IBM's Internet division was so clueless I figured most of the top brass had only vaguely heard of it. One senior guy thought Yahoo was a kind of browser — no lie — and this was after the Yahoo IPO had made headlines in every major newspaper worldwide. Oh well, at least their PR was consistent.

I liked this idea. A lot. I'd be invisible on the Web, outside the control of any company. I'd be free at last to speak in my own voice without begging anyone's permission. I decided to create a Web-cum-e-mail newsletter. I wanted a catchy title, so I called it Entropy Gradient Reversals, EGR for short. In the beginning, I thought it would be a perfect vehicle to deliver my profound pundit-grade insights about the Internet and show everyone how smart I was. That didn't last long. I ended the very first issue like this:

[_] From time to time we offer to share our list of subscribers with door-to-door aromatherapy salespersons and ritual ax-murderers. If you would prefer that your data not be used in this way, please check the box.

Whoa! What a response that brought! Everyone was laughing. People subscribed in droves. I was ecstatic. I wondered whether IBM would have given me permission to publish such material. Probably not — on the off-chance of offending the aromatherapy and ritual ax-murderer market segments.

I started wondering what other sorts of noncorporate things I could write. What if I broke all the rules? You know, the unwritten rules everyone learns by telepathy at birth: be pleasant, be brief, don't speak down to your reader, don't use big words, don't use obscenity, don't make yourself the center of attention. First and foremost, do that all-important market research. Find out what your audience wants to hear about. Ask their permission.

Wait a second...hadn't I been through all this? I had, and I'd had enough. I decided to go against the grain with a vengeance. I told readers they were clueless hosers. I interviewed an imaginary horse — at exhausting length. I used vocabulary so obscure that people needed unabridged dictionaries to figure out what I was saying. I developed an alter-ego named RageBoy., a seriously maladjusted mental case and towering egomaniac with an advanced case of Tourette's syndrome. And my readers loved it.

Well...the ones who stayed loved it. Many went screaming for the nearest exit. RageBoy at full throttle is not everyone's cup of tea, to be sure. But the ones who stayed are an interesting lot. Some are programmers, teachers, artists, writers, full-time parents. Others have titles like Director of Public Relations, VP Marketing, Chief Information Officer, CEO. And the companies they come from read like the Fortune 500 list. The readership is not, as you might suspect, drawn from some dangerously misanthropic idiot fringe. The audience is regular people, mostly business people. And as the THX ads say: the audience is listening.

Forget my gonzo experimentation with RageBoy. That's just one microscopic example of what's happening online. The real point is that the Internet has made it possible for genuine human voices to be heard again, however different they may be from the cautious, insipid pabulum of mainstream broadcast media. Why has the Internet grown so rapidly? Why did it catch so many businesses off guard? The audience is listening because people are attracted to precisely the difference the Net provides: the sound of human beings talking with one another as human beings — the sound of a million conversations whose primary purpose, for once, is not to sell us something.

How do these conversations get started? How do people with common interests find each other? How does anyone find anything online? The simple answer is the theme of this book: word gets around. And on the Net, word gets around fast.

For every entry in the encyclopedia, there is now a Web site. For any idea you can imagine — and some you can't — there are thousands of articles and images electronically swirling around the globe. But that's not the real story. That's not the big news. The word that's going around, the word that's finally getting out, is something much larger, far more fundamental. The word that's passing like a spark from keyboard to screen, from heart to mind, is the permission we're giving ourselves and each other: to be human and to speak as humans.

Consciously or not, millions of us are using the Internet to pass along this unconditional permission to millions of others. When enough people do that, something viral happens. It's not hypothetical, it's happening — when we say what we think, when we feel what we say, when we listen for the music of authentic presence. We are constantly searching each other out, linking, talking, shaking things up. Consciously or not, by the very nature of the permission we give each other, we are working to bring down business-as-usual.

News of this ever-spreading word is what you're reading here. And it's a little schizophrenic, I have to admit. In one sense, the news is good. It's great! It's the joyous noise of people reveling in a newfound freedom, laughing, jeering, cheering, irrepressible.

From another perspective, the news is not good at all. Everybody's miserable. Everybody's had about enough. People are sick to death of being valued only as potential buyers, as monetary grist for some modern-day satanic mill. They're sick of working for organizations that treat them as if they didn't exist, then attempt to sell them the very stuff they themselves produced. Why is a medium that holds such promise — to connect, to inspire, to awaken, to enlist, to change — being used by companies as a conduit for the kind of tired lies that have characterized fifty years of television? Business has made a ventriloquist's trick of the humanity we take for granted. The sham is ludicrous. The corporation pretends to speak, but its voice is that of a third-rate actor in a fourth-rate play, uttering lines no one believes in a manner no one respects.

Oh well. That's OK. We'll get by. We've got each other.

I have to laugh as I write that. The Internet audience is a strange crew, to be sure. But we're not talking about some Woodstock lovefest here. We don't all need to drop acid and get naked. We don't need to pledge our undying troth to each other, or to the Revolution, or to the bloody Cluetrain Manifesto for that matter. And neither does business.

All we need to do is what most of us who've discovered this medium are already doing: using it to connect with each other, not as representatives of corporations or market segments, but simply as who we are.

From hopelessly romantic meditations on favorite cats, to screeds so funny you'll blow coffee out your nose, to collective code for alternative operating systems: we're all expressing ourselves in a new way online — a way that was never possible before, never before permitted. And make no mistake, speech once freed is a powerful drug. Get used to it; it ain't going back in the box. What does this mean for electronic commerce? Take a wild guess. We're not those neatly predictable consumers business remembers from yesterday. We got a taste of something else, and we like it. We'll make it ourselves, and defend it with a ferocity that might surprise most businesses. If you're a business, believe us: it's a surprise you'd just as soon skip. We're in the market for lots of things, but the market we see ourselves in is more like that ancient marketplace. Tell us some good stories and capture our interest. Don't talk to us as if you've forgotten how to speak. Don't make us feel small. Remind us to be larger. Get a little of that human touch.

people of earth . . .

"Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you."

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

To find anything that isn't overtly complicit with the Great Technology Sitcom, you have to dig down to the underbelly of the Web. You have to get past the sites with commercial pretensions that are slicing and dicing you, counting the legs and dividing by four, bringing in the sheep. You are being incorporated into their demographic surveys. And, predictably, the lowest common denominator is getting all the juice. You are being packaged for advertisers by some of the hippest hucksters on the planet.

Dig deeper. Down to the sites that never entertained the hope of Buck One. They owe nobody anything. Not advertisers, not VC producers, not you. Put your ear to those tracks and listen to what's coming like a freight train. What you'll hear is the sound of passion unhinged, people who have had it up to here with white-bread culture, hooking up to form the biggest goddam garage band the world has ever seen.

What are these underbelly sites about? What's a rock concert about? How about creation, exploring a visceral and shared collective memory we've been brainwashed into believing never existed?

Conspiracy theory, my ass. Schools and teachers, the motor vehicle bureau, the IRS, the military, the line at the bank, the television set, the newspapers at the checkout stand, the news on your radio, the billboards along the highway, and now a hundred thousand cold-comfort Web sites. All are tuned to your brain at the deepest level and you have lined up for the coolest, latest-model implant. The carrier wave has been tuned at huge cost to deliver a single message: you are not free, you desire nothing but the products we produce, you have no world but the world we give you.

If you're OK with this, then eat it up. There's a bulimic's dream-feast of killer kontent on the way. But if it already makes you want to puke, get angry. Write it, code it, paint it, play it — rattle the cage however you can. Stay hungry. Stay free. And believe it: win, lose, or draw, we're here to stay. Armed only with imagination, we're gonna rip the fucking lid off.

There's your market.