IFiredABroadside™

Following on from RoncoSprayOnUsability™.

If you read the excellent link to that TM, you will discover Eric “The S doesn’t stand for anything” Raymond being ripped to pieces. But one of the more interesting features of this is his total and utter self-confidence.

Rather than admit that he is a technological incompetent, using tools that are barely advanced beyond the stone age and failing to accomplish the simplest of modern computing tasks (attaching a printer to the network), he revels in the attention he’s getting.

...the dominant theme, too, was a bit of a surprise. Not the hundreds of iterations of “Tell it, brother!”, nor the handful of people who excoriated me as an arrogant twerp; those are both normal features of the response when I fire a broadside…

It’s a shining example of the Loon mentality.

Did I accomplish something useful today? Well, no, but…

Have I solved a knotty little problem and thereby helped my fellow users? Well, no, but…

Did I honestly consider the basic issues involved? Well, no, but …

Did I recommend a useful alternative that solves the problem? Well, no, but …

Am I the most important person in the Universe? Do people across the Intertubez bow down and acknowledge my superiority? Do Venezuelan Beauty Queens involuntarily slide off their seat in self-generated ecstasy when they read my pearls of wisdom? Well, yes. Apart from the Venezuelan Beauty Queens thing.

This “payment through community brownie points thing?” It’s what the Loon world is all about.

Except that, in its idealistic foundation (I’m old enough to remember the early O’Reilly years and so on), it was a promise that people like ESR would do great things and build and create and distribute. In return for which, they would get community brownie points.

Turns out that what actually happens is, “I fired a broadside.”

That’s where you get the brownie points. Not for an actual achievement. Just for mouthing off. And like everything else on the Internet, there’s a long tail, and at the other end to Raymond there are pitiful little failed trolls who do precisely the same thing as he does (which is nothing) and are happy to get a single response saying “Tell it, brother!”

If you fire a broadside and it doesn’t hit anything, then basically you are not going to have that Trafalgar moment any time soon. The Imperial Spanish Fleet (M$) is still there.

And it will always be there, unless you shut your stupid mouth and stop talking and start doing.