A tribute to our friend and leader from Steve Larson, who captures the essence of what it is to experience and be experienced by Chris Locke. So much of Steve’s tribute is so good that I have to put a lot of it right here. (Not everyone knows how he became known as RageBoy…):
Chris gets up and “What the fuck,” he says, not questioning, more like a statement of fact. “I’ve been stuck at IBM for a year with my thumb up my ass and I’m waiting for someone to figure out what the fuck is going on and they’ve got plans I give them all the time and they file them and say “Yeah, Chris, that’s great, then they take me into some fucking egg carton room and tell me what I’ve got to work with, which is nothing, no money no equipment no staff, and then they give me a check and I fucking go home and sit there, where I’ve got better tech stuff anyway than IBM where it took me two solid months to get an internet hookup, and this is what they want me to do, see, they want me to do the internet thinking, and get them into it, but the first fucking thing they tell me is you’ve got no resources and ‘Oh, by the way, don’t talk to anyone about this stuff without clearing it through channels.’ A fucking year. And I sit here and some of what I’m hearing is how to work in the system. Well I say fuck the system — it’s dead it’s stupid it’s non-responsive it’s counter productive it’s fucking socially evil and if we put any more of our goddamn time into propping up these dead- ass morons we deserve what we fucking get.”
The veins are standing out in his neck. “Just fuck ’em and move on. I’m sitting around drawing a fat check off these people and it isn’t enough. I don’t want their money. These are deathly structures with no perceptible pulse except for once in a while you run into somebody lost in the fucking halls and maybe you start to talk about something real and then the guy with the fucking glad-hand comes around and tells you can’t do that, you can’t talk.”
“This is a huge goddamn breakthrough into who knows what and as we sit here IBM is trying to figure out how to put it in a box and make it sit up to beg for airholes and fucking cheese. We’re not going to work in the system because THE SYSTEM DOES NOT WANT US.”
“Go rageboy, go,” Esther Dyson yells out (ed: the moniker would stick). “THEY DO NOT WANT US AND THEY’RE CRIMINALS BY INSTINCT ANYWAY AND IF WE PUT ONE MORE YEAR INTO FUCKING AROUND WITH THESE DEAD FROM THE FUCKING TOP DOWN PIECES OF MANUAL-BOUND SHIT WE’RE GOING TO MISS THE GODDAMN TRAIN!”
There are whistles and cheers in the crowd. People are standing. One guy is on his table. Paper airplanes and erasers are filling the air. “Let me tell you — I’m Program Director for Online Community Development and they’re paying me to do nothing and when I say “Hey, I’m getting paid for doing nothing they say, ‘As long as you understand the situation.’
His rant achieved eloquence, as rants occasionally can. Now, speeding toward home on the unspeakable New Jersey Turnpike, peering red-eyed through the cloud of smoke from the unspeakable Locke’s cigarettes, we’re turning over a lot of information, twisting and bending it, shooting into the twilight and the greasy salmon-smear that twilight can be around Newark, the refineries, the lights hung on the outsides of the buildings, seemingly, just like always.
How can I tell you about that conversation/monologue? Mix up a vat of hard information, coffee dregs, healthy contempt, real world pragmatism, mashed Toxico cigarette butts, visionary eloquence, trailing-off-in-the-haze 60s enthusiasms, pure rage, a sense of mission, Thirteen Ways of Saying Fuck It, a highly-tuned bullshit detector with wires and lights and everything, democratic zeal, arcane rock and roll, a dollop of Howl, a cloud of menthol smoke and a driver with his head in and out of the window, trying to breathe, at ninety or so, bearing down on the Hanging Gardens of Newark.
“We absolutely have to fucking burn the Fortune 500 down to the water-line. This is a moral obligation, this is an absolute fucking obligation.” Chris waving his left hand in the air, the smoke from his cigarette eddying around in search of free air to poison.”
That’s exactly how it was to be in the presence of such genius and passion. Chris’ spirit changed worlds. His ideas busted open doors to new lands. His rage brought down the sky. And his barometer was always right on the mark, even when it wasn’t.