Firewall My Ass!

So here's what happened. We were going to do a new edition today. Honest. Then RageBoy came bursting in and shoved us off the terminal. He likes the new Pentium II 266 a lot it seems. And he was all excited about this new book, as you'll see below. He got his name in print somewhere other than some 9th-rate website and he was nearly wetting his pants with joy. He even stuck a big ad banner at the top of the EGR homepage, then went to Amazon.com and posted a book review posing as an IS Professional.

Pathetic really.

Still, this particular episode of mania seemed less potentially injurious to the Fabric of Society than yet another extended reminisce about his acid days, so we let him run with it. Without further ado then, and for what it's worth, here's RB blowing his own horn one more time...

Intranets:
What's the Bottom Line?

by Randy J. Hinrichs Published by Prentice Hall and Sun Microsystems Press Available from Amazon.com Books Prentice Hall blurb Sun Microsystems Press blurb (much better) Table of Contents

as of July 4 1998 the entire interview is online at:
http://www.rageboy.com/id4.html

Selected Quotes from the Book...

From the interview with Larry Geisel, CIO at Netscape:

Hinrichs: Who else do you consider visionary in thinking about technology?
Geisel: Chris Locke comes to mind. He is an absolute brilliant visionary trying to push boulders up hills in corporations.

From the interview with Chris Locke, better known to readers of EGR as RageBoy®:

On the Organization...

I'm reminded of an excellent cover story on intranets that Business Week ran a while back -- this was just around the time the buzzwords were emerging into general parlance. Several CIOs were quoted as saying they had so many thousand web pages behind the firewalls. And they were kind of crowing about it. But my take was that this content didn't get created top-down by the IS organization. Instead, these pages sprang up overnight like a crop of magic mushrooms on a rich motherlode of corporate horseshit.

On Corporate Anarchy...

Randy: Well, yes, but how does all this get coordinated? Doesn't this turn into anarchy?
Chris: Yeah, it does, and you start instigating it. It's bizarre. What I've always been really interested in is revolution. A real one, not some bogus "revolutionary" flavor of the month management obsession like "downsizing" where everybody gets screwed but the top dogs. Where do you think the fervor came from to produce that first wild-oats crop of intranets? It surely wasn't from the CIOs who got quoted in Business Week. Look, workers at every level have had it with repressive organizations. Markets have had it with hyperbole-laden corporate rhetoric that's 99 percent hot air. Why not put them both together and kick some serious butt? About time, don't you think?
Randy: And you say you worked for IBM?
Chris: It was a short marriage.

On Cell Block #9...

The companies at highest risk are not wonderful places to be working in -- at any level. Their prospects could be very bright if they'd just decide to stop being prisons with nasty wardens.

And if they choose not to... well, I don't have much pity for them. Companies that are harming themselves out of genuine ignorance can, with a little humility and a lot of hard work, begin to learn and change. I've seen it happen and it's an impressive thing. On the other hand, companies that are harming the people who work for them out of cowardice, greed and willful stupidity richly deserve whatever fate may have in store. Passion is a two-way street, you know. It doesn't always refer to love.

On Gonzo Business Management...

Randy: You've mentioned several cases where things are radically other than they appear, almost as if a new kind of logic is emerging, or needs to.
Chris: Yeah, I call it gonzo business management -- paradox become paradigm. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto, and we might as well get used to it. The opportunity here is to keep your day job but at the same time to indulge your human creativity and self expression. Companies that try to prevent this sort of thing within their firewalls -- as many do -- need to have their collective heads examined.

On Entropy Gradient Reversals...

...you've got to get down to the underbelly of the thing -- way down below the hype and hoopla, there's something very different brewing. It has to do with living, with livelihood, with connection and community. This isn't some smarmy New Age mysticism either. It's tough and gritty and it's just beginning to find its voice, its own direction. This is hard to communicate -- you have to see it for yourself. You have to live in the net for a while.

At the risk of sounding self-serving -- a dirty job but someone's gotta do it -- you could take my own webzine, Entropy Gradient Reversals, as an example. This might be shocking stuff to some corporate denizens, but they'd probably be even more shocked by the subscriber list. It includes some of the best minds in the on-line business.

[A publishing first: p. 375 contains a screen shot of the EGR homepage.]

Related Links

RageBoy as Intranet Pundit (Again)

The 21st Century Intranet by Jennifer Stone Gonzalez 350 pages Book & CD-ROM ed. (Jan 1998) Published by Prentice Hall Computer Books "Work less, play more, dream always."

RageBoy as Member of the Editorial Board, IEEE Internet Computing

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control

NC: An Acronym Revisited

Of course, anyone who isn't willing to pay IEEE for access to their pathetic website can no longer directly reach these articles -- which I wrote for free! I resinged from their editorial board over this, the silly bastards. The links above will work, however, as they point to "pirated" copies of my own work. Go figure.

RageBoy as Intellectual Capitalist

Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations RB appears in the Acknowledgments for various contributions to this important new book from Thomas A. Stewart, a member of the Board of Editors at Fortune magazine. RageBoy's exchanges with Tom over the last five years consisted mostly of various rabid raillery involving Frederick Winslow Taylor's turn-of-the-century notions about "scientific management," and were also the source of the analogy about organizations as nested Russian dolls (page 48). Order it from Amazon.com

RageBoy as RageBoy

something in the way

"Don't give up; dig deeper. Down to the fuck-it sites that never entertained the hope of Buck One." RB wrote this one for Total New York, which sadly, is now pretty much defunct.