if you hear me in the silence
then am I real.
if you see me in the darkness
then am I music
to your music.
if your heart is empty
yet fills with joy
then are your colors
my colors.
-christopher locke
Hold on a second.
[Quick shake of the head.]
Doesn’t this guy write about business? What’s this poetry doing here?
“The solution is poetry.” That and other fundamental truths according to Locke and RageBoy—Locke’s cantankerous alter ego—are just waiting to slap you around the room as you read the team’s latest: The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of RageBoy.
It’s safe. You can throw away that little postage-paid merchandise-return sticker from Amazon. Put the box in the trash. You may quite confidently expense this book through your place of employment. As a bonus, the book will give you the secret for appeasing the finance jockey who will undoubtedly email you upon receiving your expense report, asking what a Bombast is and who authorized its purchase.
But I digress.
Truth be told, Bombast is more than a business book. And you should know that before you agree to read it.
From “Eden to E-Commerce,” Bombast is the world in RageBoy time, a world designed to destroy everything you thought was so, and then lift you up with the possibilities. It is a journey that crosses every border, deconstructs every widely held notion, teaches as much about what it means to be human as it does about what it means to do business in a connected world.
For RageBoy, nothing is off limits:
touch, madness, the Internet, work, love,
corporations, angst, mores, TCP/IP, music,
artificial intelligence, joy, ROI, dreams, lies,
HTML, 5-GL, change, excrement, rejection,
karma, chaos, fear, creation, paradise, belief,
disbelief, disestablishmentarianism, Elvis,
people, geese, broadband, patterns, walls,
space, fiction, portals, brand, astrology,
guilt, coffee, poverty, philosophy, tear gas,
eclipse, email, addiction, science, passion,
communism, capitalism, aboriginal darkness,
oriental light, power, magic, sin, politics,
pictogram, wanting, sex, P2P,
getting it, and getting lit.
This, my friends, is some serious shit.
I could take you through this browser-free read of Locke’s famed ezine, Entropy Gradient Reversals, step by step. But I won’t, because Bombast is best read without a guide.
So if I’ve intrigued you, good. If not, let me touch on my favorite part of the book and linger here a moment longer. At its core, Bombast has one simple and profound construct, one that RageBoy delivered in a passionate diatribe at a keynote address before 2000 people in Copenhagen:
“What is happening on the net is that people are falling in love with the world all over again.”
Holy cripe.
Did you get that? Worth repeating:
“What is happening on the net is that people are falling in love with the world all over again.”
You see, in the end, it’s not about the net at all. It's about what’s happening because of the net.
As RageBoy tells the good crowd in Copenhagen, we have been here before, with cave paintings, with bone axes, with mythologies and arts. All of these, so distracting in their own right, only tools--tools that help us fall in love with our world—again and again without end.
And that, in a few words, is the beauty of all of this.
Without end.
Tune in, turn on, stay tuned…
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