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The Almighty Buck Books Media Book Reviews

The Bombast Transcripts 64

Posted by timothy from the loud-and-louder dept.
Steve McLaughlin writes: "When Chris Locke isn't writing business blockbusters like The Cluetrain Manifesto and Gonzo Marketing ,his alter ego Rageboy is churning out issues of the webzine Entropy Gradient Reversals. The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of RageBoy is a collection of EGR's best and worst musings since it first hit the Web in 1996." (Steve's review continues below.)
The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of RageBoy
author Christopher Locke
pages 288
publisher Perseus Publishing
rating 8
reviewer Steve MacLaughlin
ISBN 0738206334
summary Subversive provocateur of the business world's version of "No more Mr. Nice Guy," packaged for your convenience.

While some writers are just starting to publish on the Web, Chris Locke is already offering readers a second helping of EGR in print form. This is just the sort of brain twisting high jinks that's made Locke infamous in the business and technology world.

The Bombast Transcripts reads like a recipe for some exotic elixir: One part prose, one part poetry, a splash of marketing genius, a double-shot of volatility, and some freshly squeezed satire. But be warned. You have to take the book in a bit at a time to avoid overdosing on Locke's unorthodox style. Over and over again Locke reminds readers that "I do not Question Authority, I piss on it at every opportunity."

In one chapter Locke recounts his nightmare conversation with the Under Assistant Counsel to the Executive Vice President for Legal Affairs at the 666 Corporation. In another he proclaims that "the greatest invention of the 20th Century is not the microchip, not extra-orbital flight, not bio-engineering" but instead "rock and roll." And who could forget chapter titles like "DiChirico Fends Off the Spectral Bats of Andalusia" and "Moe Ron Hubbard on Diuretics"?

This is not to say that The Bombast Transcripts is just 288 pages of random thoughts and hallucinogenic ramblings. Locke has also sprinkled in some of the most insightful ideas and commentary about business, technology, and the media. He lends his advice to companies that still don't understand how to communicate on the Web: "Congratulations on that new corporate homepage! You sound like a sexless droid with a badly damaged Personality Module." And who could forget the passage that reads: "I think many of us would prefer that those who don't 'get it' ... would either a) do so quickly, or b) get the hell out of the way."

I'm sure a lot of people will wonder why on Earth they should pay for something that they can already get for free on the Web. (That's what people used to say about cable television.) First off, think of The Bombast Transcripts as your portable guilty pleasure. It contains some of the best EGR moments, and you can literally open it up to any chapter and then let the mind games begin. Second, EGR subscribers have been getting something for nothing for years now. Now's the time to leave some change in the give-a-penny, take-a-penny dish. Just think of it as doing your part for the cause.

The Bombast Transcripts takes readers inside the sausage factory that is Chris Locke's mind. Please, no flash photography. You see how some of the ideas from both The Cluetrain Manifesto and Gonzo Marketing first sprang to life. It's not always a pretty sight, but the end result makes it all well worth it. I highly recommend ordering a healthy serving of The Bombast Transcripts, even if you've had a taste of it before.

You can purchase The Bombast Transcripts from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.
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The Bombast Transcripts More

The Bombast Transcripts

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  • Sorry (Score:2, Funny)

    by cscx ( 541332 )
    I only read JonKatz book reviews. Then again, if I read them all, it would be the year 2025 before I got done...

  • Cluetrain Manifesto....hmmmmm (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Friday March 08, 2002 @10:11AM (#3130168)
    Cluetrain Manifesto ... hmmm ... wasn't that the book that described everyone who didn't immediately dump all their current business practices and processes in favor of a net-centric, dotcom model as a "clueless idiot"? Yep, that was good advice. I'll rush right out and buy that guy's next book.

    sPh

    • I know... dotcomms were just like the USSR... good concept, bad implementation.
    • Funny, that's not how I read it. All the dot commage fluff was about venture capitalists and greedballs uniting. Cluetrain is about a shift in cultural attitudes.
    • Er, not my take on it. It was a dollop of common-sense wrapped in trendy packaging. The reason it spread is because at the time common-sense was in short supply. It tried to shake corporations out of the "build it and they will come" attitude, that with the speed information spreads on the net they can't get away with brochureware as a smokescreen because no-one will know any better. If you read it [cluetrain.com] you'll find a lot of it still applicable today. In fact, most of it is not about "current business practices and processes", it's about having decent customer service.

      Phillip.
      • Er, not my take on it. It was a dollop of common-sense wrapped in trendy packaging.
        On the one hand, I was being a bit harsh to make a point. I was once forced to sit through 3 days of "7 Habits" training at a megacorp, and out of sheer boredom I read the book backwards and forwards several times. What I found was that the guy actually contained had a few useful observations about how to deal with difficult situations and time management - wrapped up in hundreds of pages of pompous blather.

        I did read Cluetrain and felt pretty much the same way: several very cogent observations, wrapped up in hundreds of pages of pomposity. Here's an example:

        The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking respect for centralized authority, whether that "authority" is the neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the corporate annual report.


        And Internet technology has also threaded its way deep into the heart of Corporate Empire, where once upon a time, lockstep loyalty to the chairman's latest attempt at insight was no further away than the mimeograph machine. One memo from Mr. Big and everyone believed (or so Mr. Big liked to think).

        No more. The same kind of seditious deconstruction that's being practiced on the Web today, just for the hell of it, is also seeping onto the company intranet. How many satires are floating around there, one wonders: of the latest hyperinflated restructuring plan, of the over-sincere cultural-sensitivity training sessions Human Resources made mandatory last week, of all the gibberish that passes for "management" -- or has passed up until now.
        Pretty funny in work that claims to be skewering conventional wisdom, eh?

        sPh

    • No, it wasn't. Cluetrain was an attempt to educate the command and control types who run 'marketing' at big companies that markets are information systems, and the net makes them so efficient that they will never be able to get away with their current techniques based on hiding information and controlling 'the message'.

      It is written in a way to get to those people, so anyone geeky enough to grok Hayek and Smith already can't see what the fuss is about.

      Remember all those left-wing student politicans whose existential post-modernism got on your tits so much in college? They all went into marketing, believing themselves to be Lenin's vanguard elite to lead the masses, and secretly hate themselves for selling out. Cluetrain is a way for them to get over it and do somethign useful instead.
    • No. You confound the time it came out with the message of the book.

      As I read it, which by the way you can too [gonzomarkets.com] (so don't just take my word for it), the major point of the book is that the net is allowed all of us to communicate (again), so companies had better stop treating us like isolated, incommunicado sheep, lest we literally laugh them out of business. (Or just badmouth them, give bad reviews, tell the truth about the service records, etc. "Laughing" is just an evocative examples.)

      Not only does it not really have anything to do with the DotCom bust, it rather clearly warned people not to do what the DotComs did... and indeed, what Slashdot seems well on its way to doing. The biggst DotCom failure was to aggregate eyeballs, and never even think for a moment about relating to people.

      The DotCom bust proves the book out, it does not invalidate it.

      Now, I've politely corrected you up to this point, so as to inform the other readers, but for pete's sake, check your facts before posting such antynomous information! You couldn't hardly be more wrong if you tried!
  • Check out the first chapter of the ClueTrain Manifesto here [cluetrain.org]. Interesting reading, especially his thinking processes about publishing online. I'm a devoted subscriber of his newsletter - tends to shake me out of my thinking most of the time.
  • I'm in total agreement with John Dvorak [pcmag.com] about this ridiculous BS.
    • Youch! Here's a quick quote from the Dvorak piece [pcmag.com]:

      The giveaway that cult thinking is present in any environment is how responses are given from possible cult members to probable nonbelievers. If you disagree, then you "don't get it." Werner Erhard of EST (the über-cult of the 1970's) used to use this phrase over and over. Tell Erhard that something makes no sense. "You don't get it." Tell him that something is self-contradictory. "You don't get it." Tell him that something is just plain stupid. "You don't get it." This is the level of debate you can expect when cult thinking is present. But, of course, "I don't get it."
      That's gotta hurt...

      sPh

      • Here's a quick quote from the Dvorak piece ...

        Thanks!! I remembered reading the Dvorak column earlier this week, and I was just on my way out to find it so I could post a link.

        Somebody mod the parent up, please.
      • The giveaway of pre-judged closed-mind thinking is someone who calls something he didn't try to understand nonsense and just plain stupid, is told he doesn't get it, and says that means the one telling him he doesn't get it is cult-thinking.

        Calling things stupid nonsense is the level of debate you can expect when closed-mindedness is presest.

        • The giveaway of pre-judged closed-mind thinking is someone who calls something he didn't try to understand nonsense and just plain stupid, is told he doesn't get it
          Sure. But as Martin Gardner used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. 99.999% of all who claim to be revolutionaries turn out in the end to have been crackpots. If you explain your great new idea to me, and after careful consideration I say, "sorry, I don't agree", is it then automatically true that I "don't get it"? Or is it possible that you have nothing to give?

          sPh

          • You're right, of course. But I guess I just don't believe that Dvorak tried all that hard. He doesn't really give an indication that he did, in my mind. In which case, my statement applies.
    • I'm immediately suspicious of anyone who uses the word 'claptrap'. It ranks right up there with 'piffle' and 'balderdash'...

      on point, Dvorak himself is not exactly a middle of the road kind of guy, how many times has he berated folks for not thinking like he does? (That's a rhetorical question, for those keeping score)...

  • Rageboy: Corporate Bran (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ngr8 ( 504185 ) on Friday March 08, 2002 @10:16AM (#3130193) Journal
    One of the good effects of Chris Locke's work is that it speaks (or spews) high amounts of reality in the midst of hyperbolic screed.

    Locke has done much to reduce the use of the royal "we" in communicating to consumers, and the need to wake up and smell the coffee when looking at who, in fact, the poor customer is and what, in the hell, the customer might want to know or need from corporate messaging and communications.

    Dissonance has its place; Locke writes with neon crayons in the hope that some suit will notice, push beyond the gonzo, and get thinking about what the hell is going on with messages and market positioning. Just pleasing the CEO or the uber director of marketing don't mean squat; its like gagamaggot webpages that look great on the LAN demo and then blow chunks at 28.8. Follow Locke long enough (and it can be tiring) and you'll find archetypes and templates for unhosing that which is hosed.

    So, thank you RageBoy and EGR. The review is rather suck up, but I have already compensated for that by snatching up five copies of Cluetrain Manifesto (another Locke reality sandwich) for a buck a piece at a bookstore that was going out of business. Voice of the consumer.

    So, grab some Locke and a Guiness, read it along with Kotler's Marketing Management, HBR, and Letters To Penthouse. But do anything other than spew out soul free websites and describe your venture as "WankNuts, the *leading* yadda yadda." What's it mean to the customer?
  • the only author i've ever seen that can blatantly steal the style of hunter s thompson and get away with it. drivel drivel drivel.

    i mean, cluetrain was interesting until the whole communist mind control thing, and gonzo wasn't so bad except for the middle and start and end, but c'mon.

  • review of The Cluetrain Manifesto (Score:3, Informative)

    by danny ( 2658 ) on Friday March 08, 2002 @10:29AM (#3130251) Homepage
    My my review of The Cluetrain Manifesto [dannyreviews.com] might be of interest.

    Danny.

  • Everything men from Mars ever needed to know, they learned while making chicken soup in kindergarten.

  • Anyone actually read Cluetrain Manifesto? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by maxpublic ( 450413 ) on Friday March 08, 2002 @11:35AM (#3130591) Homepage
    Anyone actually read this book? It's vague, overgeneralized bullshit littered with yuppie feel-good terms from start to finish. Wildly popular with the folks who don't want to deal with dry, boring economic facts - why bother when you can get excited over hype?

    Of course, we know just how much of a clue the author had. Derive what little advice you can from the book amidst all that clever misdirection and non-speak and then compare that to what happened during the dot-bomb....

    Max

  • review style (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Axeon ( 562612 )
    And who could forget the passage that reads: "I think many of us would prefer that those who don't 'get it' ... would either a) do so quickly, or b) get the hell out of the way."

    I could. It's very cliched. I'm not acquainted with this blog but that's precisely why I bring this up; without anything else to go on, I read this review and think, if this is his best material I don't want to read the book. Which is why I think the reviewer should make a conscientious effort to select the strongest quotes for the uninitiated, because they take it as representative and will conclude it's not worth reading if it isn't very good.

  • I got my bombast right here. [slashdot.org]

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