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| Friday, June 29, 2001 |
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Rage on 
| | A friend the other day said this about another friend, my Cluetrain co-author and co-destroyer-of-corporate-worlds, Christopher Locke: "He's not a nice guy." |
| | Well, maybe so; but only in the same sense that Robert Reich expains "the basketball player Shaquille O'Neal and I have an average height of six-foot-one." The difference: Reich & O'Neil are regretably two different people, while Chris Locke and his alter id, RageBoy® are fortunately just one. |
| | The latest Locke & 'Boy co-interference pattern issues from this transmission, which contains what remains of an abortive effort by one or both to enlist the Harvard Business Review in a message delivery mission. The message comes down to this: |
| | For the good of us all, please go fuck yourselves. |
| | He (or they, whatever) explain: |
| | The gulf between personal and corporate communications has become a yawning abyss. Despite the huge costs and lost opportunities this obvious truth entails, the situation shows little sign of improvement. Some chasms you can cross. Some you can't. Not and remain as you are in the process. In the past several decades, business has shown great courage and enthusiasm for reinventing itself. But the current challenge is for business to deconstruct itself. Consciously. Voluntarily. Some chasms are deeper and more terrifying than business likes to admit. |
Flaprolling
| | Followed some inbound traffic back to Photodude. What a great blog. I especially love the artful arrangement of quotes on the right. |
| | Also nice to see the graphical wing of the blog movement flap. |
Boogie On/Off
| | Companies are funny — its almost like a switch gets flipped when they sit down to write descriptions about themselves. The switch reads: "have soul/lose soul." So, they flip to the "lose soul" side and begin to spew endless platitudes that mean nothing. |
Why geeks can't chant
| | ...one also has to wonder who on fucking earth thinks such marketing copy is worthwhile? Like, you see it all over the place, so someone thinks it has value... But who? Has anyone ever said to you, while pointing at such prose, "Now this--this is good writing!" When did such blathering begin? What perpetuates it? It's such a total mystery. |
| | One answer comes to us from the BuzzPhraser site. I wrote it in 1992. Here's the part that still applies, nine years later: |
| | BuzzPhrases are built with TechnoLatin, a non-language that replaces plain English nouns with vague but precise-sounding substitutes. In TechnoLatin, a disk drive is a "data management solution." A network is a "workgroup productivity platform." A phone is a "telecommunications device". |
| | The virtue of TechnoLatin is that it describes just about anything technical. The vice of TechnoLatin is that it really doesn't mean anything. This is because TechnoLatin is comprised of words that are either meaningless or have been reduced to that state by frequent use. Like the blank tiles in Scrabble, you can put them anywhere, but they have no value. The real value of TechnoLatin is that it sounds precise while what it says is vague as air. And as easily inflated. |
| | Thanks to TechnoLatin, today's technology companies no longer make chips, boards, computers, monitors or printers. They don't even make products. Today everybody makes "solutions" that are described as "interoperable," "committed," "architected," "seamless" or whatever. While these words sound specific, they describe almost nothing. But where they fail as description they succeed as camouflage: they conceal meaning, vanish into surroundings and tend to go unnoticed. |
| | Take the most over-used word in TechnoLatin today: solution. What the hell does "solution" really mean? Well, if you lift the camouflage, you see it usually means "product." Try this: every time you run across "solution" in a technology context, substitute "product." Note that the two are completely interchangeable. The difference is, "product" actually means something, while "solution" does not. In fact, the popularity of "solution" owes to its lack of specificity. While it presumably suggests the relief of some "problem," it really serves only to distance what it labels from the most frightening risk of specificity: the clarity of actual limits. |
| | The fact is, most vendors of technology products don't like to admit that their creations are limited in any way. Surely, a new spreadsheet — the labor of many nerd/years — is something more than "just a spreadsheet." But what? Lacking an available noun, it's easy to build a suitable substitute with TechnoLatin. Call it an "executive information matrix." Or a "productivity enhancement engine." In all seriousness, many companies spend months at this exercise. Or even years. It's incredible. |
| | There is also a narcotic appeal to buzzphrasing in TechnoLatin. It makes the abuser feel as if he or she is really saying something, while in fact the practice only mystifies the listener or reader. And since buzzphrasing is so popular, it gives the abuser a soothing sense of conformity, like teenagers get when they speak slang. But, like slang, TechnoLatin feels better than it looks. In truth, it looks suspicious. And with good reason. TechnoLatin often does not mean what it says, because the elaborate buzzphrases it builds are still only approximations. |
| | But who cares? Buzzphrasing is epidemic. You can't get away from it. Everybody does it. There is one nice thing about Everybody, however: they're a big market. |
| | From the FWIW Dept: KnowNow's opening paragraph rates a top score on the Jargonator. |
Shed some dark
| | Here's your assignment. Get up early tomorrow, while it's still dark. Look for the brightest star in the morning sky. That's Venus. Then look for the smudge of white above and to the right of that. This is Linear 32, a comet that's come to play us a visit. Read more about it here and here. |
Home Small Home
| | Tomorrow we move the contents of our old new house into our old new house. To unpack that a bit, our old house was a beautiful square foot contemporary that we almost completely rebuilt in 1998 — while our new house is a charming but kinda run-down former summer shack that's had a series or ramshackle additions and modifications. The main difference is size. The place we left was 3700 square feet with lots of storage. The place we're moving to is 1900 square feet without much storage at all. There's half a garage, two sheds and a few tiny closets. No attic. No basement. The people moving out packed everything they had in half a 48' moving trailer. Our 48' trailer is arriving tomorrow packed to the gills. |
| | It's gonna be interesting. |
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