The Bombast Transcripts by Christopher Locke

The Bombast Transcripts is a collection of newsletter reports that Chris Locke wrote from 1996 until 2001, and which sometimes recount and reflect on events earlier in his life. At times it gets autobiographical, but it also reads in part like an account of the changing business environment as the Web went public and commercial, and soared up and fell down. There are many messages there, as the author's view of what was going on changed, and as the world he was observing changed.

If it is autobiography, the emphasis is on auto as in automatic; not life reflected on from a distance in time and neatly packaged. This book reads like an extended parenthesis which never ends. Locke seems to distrust endings, to distrust writing that is too well polished and packaged, and to distrust as well business plans that are too well polished, too finished, too remote from the ever-changing world of customers. He believes that successful businesses need to engage in continuous dialogue with their customers and continuously adjust what they do based on what they learn, and that the Internet provides the best means that man has yet come up with for carrying on open-ended dialogues of that kind.

At his best, Locke reminds me of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, sometimes even Whitman.

• "we are verbal fish awash in an ocean of language, unable to taste its salt" p. 10
• "for the first time I saw what language was: a shared dream of the world from which its dreams seldom ever wake, a virtually seamless emblem representing the accreted memories of a billion years of biological evolution, twenty-five millennia of human culture, and a few dozen centuries of historical wars and wanderings filtered through the personal fantasy of a single lifetime." pp. 10-11
• "I began to see the AI approach to modeling mind as allegorical proof of the power of ambiguity. The attempt to represent the world encounters deep paradox: the representation ultimately points back to its own symbols in a great circle. The language cannot escape itself."

He defines art as "Exploring without knowing. Looking at what's actually there, not what you expect will be. Allowing for the possibility of magic." p. 76

He asks "is it possible to live in a world that is not pre-defined in the kind of philosophic depth you might expect to find articulated, say, on the back panel of a box of Wheaties? A world that is hugely uncertain and whose principles of operation, if any, are largely unknowable? Well, like the man said, when you got nothin, you got nothin to lose. Why not?" (p. 77)

The closest we come to magic or to some higher form of truth is not through some freudian subconscious, but rather through words, through language. "Language, as it transpires, is our only clue to many otherwise occulted truths." p. 32

He defines a dictionary as "fundamental documentation for the mother of all operating systems". p. 58 "It seemed to me that no one really understood what anyone else was saying. It still does.  We are locked up in our heads with our ideas: memories, longings, aspirations, disappointments, dreams. We try to explain. We fail. This disconnect is so dependable it has become our closest bond." p. 58

He puts the Internet into perspective as a way to move words, for people to connect with and communicate with other people. "The Internet is not a new thing, though the pipes are certainly faster now." p. 59 "Imagine this expanded literacy as an ability to use technology to tell a different class of stories than the story we've all been handed. Stories that draw people together around a new cultural campfire and hold their rapt attention there amid the gale-force storm of noise that's blowing down the world outside.

"The spookiness derives from the open-endedness of popular narrative. This is atavistic stuff, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, connected to a collective unconscious predating any scrap of recorded history -- notes form the ultimate underground. And this ancient elemental force has just broken loose in the pipes and wires of the late 20th century. Not only is it loose, it's breeding and seething at the very heart of a civilization based on discontent." p. 140

He also has some beautiful moments of mock BS pomposity, when he deliberately lets words get in the way of meaning (making fun of himself as well as of corporate mediaspeak), such as "'Mediaspace is that concatenation of Weltanschauung, Zeitgeist and communication bandwidth that provides new opportunities for wealth creation at any given historical juncture,' I orate. 'It is the constellation of unbridled desire conjunct with the potential for ultimate fulfillment.'" (p. 189)

For me the funniest sections are the ones dealing with IBM and Lou Gerstner back at the time when he was leaving their employ (around 1996): a mock interview with someone from corporate legal at IBM and an imagined interview with "Lew Firstner".

Don't expect consistency. Don't expect either a beginning or an end -- this book is all middle, as if it started with the beginning of a parenthesis, and the end of the parenthesis never appeared. It's a digression without a main story line -- a delightful digression, in ways reminiscent of Tristram Shandy, where the only overall structure is given by life itself, the author growing older in the process of the writing, in the process of  sometimes getting "a glimpse of something."

Since his life in recent years has been closely connected with the Internet (he was a "pioneer" and a "visionary" in the 1993 to 1996 era when business use of the Web was new), and since the human dynamics of the Internet are what matter most for online business, his very personal account gives a pretty good picture of the impact of the Internet on business. Much of what he says -- particularly his humorous criticism of typical companies that simply didn't "get" it -- rings very true. When the Web took off ordinary people were rapidly adopting new habits new ways of working and interacting; and the old behemoths were paranoid of change.

One of the major benefits Locke provides in this book and in his others (Gonzo Marketing and The Cluetrain Manifesto) is  waking people up, disrupting their expectations, not letting them get complacent. His writing is like a cup of strong coffee...

This waking up has to do with seeing the world from a different perspective, like Tolstoy telling a story from the perspective of a horse -- helping you to see the world unhampered by your usual assumptions, taking a good look at behavior that you have taken for granted; preparatory to moving ahead in a new direction.

Chris Locke in the world of business is a stranger in a strange land, a Gulliver in the land of Lilliput, someone who looks at standard business practice with wide-eyed amazement, questioning what often goes unquestioned, both mocking and milking every sacred cow in sight.

Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer

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