A belated note of gratitude to Chris Locke
Eight or nine years ago, I was a big fan of MecklerWeb for a brief shining moment. It had lucidity. Wit. Openness. It was offering access to thinking and writing and information without turning all of the above into Chunks o' CONTENT. Then one day it went deadfish belly-up stupid.
Until reading Jack Schofield's piece in The Guardian today, I did not know that the editorial sense behind MecklerWeb - before its precipitous dementia - belonged to Christopher Locke.
I've been reading Locke for years. I first became aware of him as an individual at his next gig, at MCI. He was amusing, and open, even inviting contributions from the likes of folks like me. At that time, back in 1995 or so, I was working as a journalist, but it was the genial editorial attitude of Locke more than anything else that suggested possibilities of bottom-up modalities of relationship and expression (i.e. gonzo in embryo) as a hope-giving alternative to the absence of vision that abounded elsewhere.
Without realizing it, I had "followed" Locke from MeckerWeb to MCI, then lost sight of him when he went to IBM, only to come upon his EGR site one day while searching for something a little off the beaten path, like the notion of dialogic heteroglossia in Bakhtin/Medvedev.
The point is, I probably would have thought of the Web as just another delivery system for warmed-over and half-baked received ideas had it not been for the counter-possibility being demonstrated by somebody at MecklerWeb and MCI. And I didn't know until reading Schofield's piece that "somebody" was Chris Locke.
One can idly wonder what sort of Web presence Meckler might have had today had it not chosen to excise human intelligence from his publishing venture. (I had forgotten MecklerMedia even existed until Schofield mentioned it.) But it and MCI and others were simply doing what corporate media appears destined to do: pursue the chimaera of broadcast through the trackless wastes of cyberspace, at great expense.
This provokes a personal note: When I signed on as editor of Comcast's Florida Online City Guides several years ago, I did not know, until I'd attended my first corporate meeting in Philadelphia, that I was part of CONTENT. I had thought I was part of something Net-like - a venture of discovery, ordering and sharing the features of a community in collaboration with the real people in it.
In fact, CONTENT as a corporate label means: "Whatever it is that you put in the void next to the ads in order that your customer, the advertiser, will give you money."
My 2.5 years at Comcast enabled me to see at first hand the paradigmatic reverse thrust Schofield ascribes to Meckler. We had a "Content Team" that took its job seriously. Brainstormed. Came up with lots of innovative and audience-attracting stuff. Then we noticed that Corporate simply BRACKETS CONTENT. I do not mean that it ignores it, though this is certainly often the case. I mean, it is constitutively incapable of recognizing a value inhering in CONTENT, since its sole means of accounting for and tracking value is mechanical and monetary. This is functional nihilism, and it is built into the fabric of corporate culture from the ground up.
The corporate view of CONTENT is similar to its view of landscaping the customers' parking lot - a nonrecoverable expense, an unavoidable cost of doing business. It simply imagines no other way to account for it. So business is never "about" Content, regardless of how much it protests it is. Content is to be eyed warily, produced expeditiously (and on the cheap), and used for sales purposes or ignored while business is "done" elsewhere. As Mr. Locke once noted, "the business of business is business." You can always buy new plants from Wal-Mart when the old ones die.
My little Comcast story, naturally, is far more involved than this brief mention can suggest. (Imagine intrigue worthy of the Sforza.) But the outline is pretty similar to the story Schofield tells about Chris Locke. The same story Locke has been both living and reflecting on for years, in The Cluetrain Manifesto, Gonzo Marketing and the Bombast Transcripts. It may be hyperbolic to suggest that Locke could have saved the Manipulators of Content millions of dollars, but I'm not in a position to judge, nor do I know anyone who is. I do think it's about time I said to him, personally and with all due respect, "thanks."
10:48:09 AM 
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