killer meme watch

Apple’s internal security team may be scary – and especially the name (Worldwide Loyalty Team). But they are as nothing, in terms of creepiness, to this Microsoft web page, which provides the criteria against which MS employees are assessed for their use of humour and the targets they are given to improve. You will not be able to unread this.

In fact, it’s the kind of thing for which the only valid response is to pretend to take it seriously. Why not print out a copy and carry it around? Score your friends against this fine 4×4 matrix chart!

Via this comment, it turns out that the program is based on the ideas of a 70s cult leader who fell out with the Scientologists in a dispute about intellectual property – how very Microsoft of him – and who reconverted his organisation into the management consulting industry. (I’ve often thought a terrorist group should try that one some day.)

The Wikipedia article on the dispute is very funny – two blind men fighting over a comb doesn’t really do justice to the full absurdity of it, as two cult/hucksters duel over the rights to the kind of ideas that shouldn’t be treated so much as property as like toxic waste, or one of those weird codicils that occasionally force some poor swing-voter to fork out for a new church roof. If they were sane, they’d be fighting to get rid of this stuff; but then they wouldn’t be there.

But the really interesting thing is that Werner Erhard’s ideas have already killed one of the great computer-development groups, Doug Engelbart’s Augment Lab at SRI, which dissolved into a stew of project failure and ego wars under their influence. Here’s the money quote, from What the Dormouse Said:

A woman who Bob Albrecht, the People’s Computer Company guru, had been involved with went through the training and came back transformed into a very un-Zen-like creature. She no longer believed that everything was interconnected, but rather had decided that she wanted it all for herself and would do anything to get it.

There’s a key cultural inflection point right there. And I bet Linus Torvalds doesn’t make sure to check that

Do I ever encourage a near party atmosphere because of my comfort with using humor?

always returns False, or worry about finding his personal brand.