Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Radical Transparency? I’d Settle for Moderate Translucency.

06.17.2025 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

“It’s bullshit,” George Carlin used to say, “and it’s bad for you.”

Corporate communicators work in bullshit. And when they run out of bullshit to work in, they make more.

“Bullshit is the glue that binds us as a nation,” Carlin continued, “Where would we be without our safe, familiar American bullshit?”

I’ve been watching and writing about corporate communication for a living for 33 years. For all the technological, tactical and occasionally philosophical progress it’s made since then, corporate communication is every bit as bullshitty. Back then, my boss Larry Ragan taught his writers to make fun of executives who were always pairing “challenges and opportunities,” describing corporate things as “world class,” claiming the coal miners and oil-rig workers who toiled and sometimes died for them were their “greatest asset,” synergizing, strategizing, prioritizing and emphasizing thrilling new ideas like, The only constant is change. “Brother,” one of Larry’s columnists once delighted him by writing, “can ya paradigm?”

To his corporate communication conferences in those early 1990s, Larry invited William Lutz, editor of a newsletter called The Quarterly Review of Doublespeak, to urge communicators to stop calling layoffs “downsizing” and “rightsizing” and to stop defending people-murdering industrial disasters by saying, “Mistakes were made.” Lutz worked as a consultant for companies and the U.S. government to promote the virtues and utility of “plain language,” as he called it.

More than three decades later, Lutz is still alive—he’s now 84—but plain language is dead.

The only difference between then and now is that now we don’t even call it bullshit. We just lean in to our robust low-hanging fruit.

I won’t waste your time with any more than one term that most corporate communication people use at least once a week, and the rest of us pretend to accept, at least that often.

This one is as malevolently persistent pre-ripped jeans and like them, it’s bullshit right on its face.

It’s: transparent. 

No corporate executive, no management team, no institutional governance structure of any kind has ever been anything close to “transparent,” let alone “radically transparent,” as some of them claim to be. (When your window-washer does a super good job, do you describe your windows as “radically transparent”?)

Even the best-intentioned people who lead institutions do a lot of things behind closed doors: They decide who to hire and who to fire and why, who to pay how much and why. They decide which customers deserve special treatment and why, which board members should be heeded and why, which journalist should be called back and why. Because they must. Otherwise—if every internal communique had to include a cc a New York Times reporter and Robby Starbuck—they’d be nibbled to death by ants: thousands of employees, investors, customers, community members, government regulators and random yahoos, each with their own interest, point of view and eccentric opinion. 

No. Decisions are quietly, carefully come to and they’re announced with an explanation exactly as detailed and plausible-sounding as the well-intentioned leaders can muster, with an authentic-looking face.

It’s like that, and that’s the way it is—and the way it always was. You know it and I know it and we always have.

Yet we write about transparency and we read about transparency every day, knowing it’s bullshit, and knowing it’s bad for us. 

“Children,” to give Carlin the last word, “should be taught to question everything they read, everything they hear.” Instead, parents “stroke the kid and the kid strokes them and we all stroke each other and they grow up all fucked up and they come to shows like this.”

Just like us.

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Friday Happy Hour Photo: 1957

06.13.2025 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

Before AI, there was The Power Mower of the Future: “It had its own electric generating system for operating running lights, a radio telephone, air conditioning and even a cooling system to provide a chilled drink on a hot day. It was also supposed to be multi-purposed. You could mow the lawn, weed, feed, seed, spray for insects, plow snow and haul equipment. It could even be used as a golf cart.”

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Tech Maw: Back in the Belly of the Beast (Boy, Does It Look Familiar in Here)

06.11.2025 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

First posted here in May 2023. Newly relevant, as my company yesterday unveiled a new webinar, AI for Speechwriting & Executive Communication. What took us two years? Read on. —DM

***

I wasn’t always terrified of technology. 

Were you?

When I was five, I was the first kid in the neighborhood trusted to run a Lionel electric train by myself. 

Later, I was a star Centipede player at Fred the Framer’s, a Hudson, Ohio picture-frame shop that doubled as a video game arcade. (Old Fred knew which way the wind was blowing.) And I had an Atari 5200!

In college in the late 80s, I used electric typewriters to write my papers. Mine was an electric Smith-Corona and it had a feature that would let you erase whole lines of type if you made a mistake. I didn’t know how it worked, exactly—how did it remember what I’d just typed, so it covered that precise letter in white?—but I wasn’t afraid of it. I don’t need to know everything. (You know what Chicago Bears’ defensive lineman Refrigerator Perry said about the thermos, right? “It keeps hot stuff hot and cold stuff cold. How does it know?”)

The first time I wrote on a computer was at a publishing company where I went to work in the early 1990s—my first job out of college. They had these primitive Macs, whose plastic had yellowed with age to roughly the color of nicotine-stained fingers. But they were pretty good for writing, and they were reliable. Now and then they broke down—you’d turn it on and the little Mac smiley-face would have x’s instead of eyes—and you’d just unplug the thing, and lug it a few blocks to a repair shop, where it would be fixed. Inconvenient, yes. Again, though: No terror involved.

Soon I bought a Mac of my own and installed a graphic design program called PageMaker, which let me lay out my own monthly print newsletter, called The Murray Meaning. That wasn’t the act of a technophobe, and I remember feeling none of the gnawing dread, unpacking my first one or two Macs, that I feel even while downloading an app, today.

What turned me tech-truculent?

It was the fucking Information Superhighway, which was the first term we heard for the Internet. 

What on earth was this? The publisher sent its editors down to the University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana—where the World Wide Web (WWW) had actually been invented—to check it out. We drove four hours to see the Internet. But we got mind-murdering drunk at the motel the first night, and comprehended very little of what we saw the next day, as the computer nerds lectured us on the technical aspects of the Web—networks connected with networks, and ones and zeroes flying in formation, something about the Pentagon—and then gave us an hour to explore the Web on our own. I remember spending a lot of time gaping at the website of the Seattle Mariners—the first baseball team that had one.

Soon, we all had email addresses like 1003745@compuserve.com. And instead of thinking about communication and politics and human beings and love, I was trying to figure out what in tarnation was a TCP/IP, let alone how to configure the motherfucker. Remember this soul-searing sound?

Meanwhile, the early adopters of this technology—people in the communication business, who treated it as if it was changing the very natural laws of this work—and writers at Wired and Fast Company magazine, who kept talking about a “new economy” that was somehow untethered to the banalities of supply and demand and the old-school drudgery of food and shelter and physics itself—these people were making a young writer very nervous about his future. 

Because I did not care about all this Internet bullshit. If this tech talk, which sounded to me like small talk, was going to dominate the next 10 or 20 years of public discourse—and if mastering the technology was going to be the only way to keep up with that conversation—I wasn’t going to make it very long. 

I was 26, and I was worried I was about to be made obsolete. And that, I think, is when I started to associate technology with anxiety. As my own publisher put it, on printed brochures to sell workshops on Internet communication: “Don’t be left behind!”

***

Almost 30 years after the Internet changed everything, it’s well to ask: Did anyone who wanted to keep up, get “left behind”?

I didn’t, I guess.

I’ve been writing online constantly since the early aughts. I also learned how to make videos, and I started posting them on YouTube around 2008. Check out the situation at 9:25 in this 2009 video, for instance.

I’ve used those tools, and social media, to talk about communication and politics and human beings and love. I reckon I’ll use these new tools for that, too.

But only to the extent that I must. 

This tech stuff is such a bother. My dad went from having a secretary who took dictation and typed perfect letters, to taking computer courses in order to keep a writing career going, in his early 60s. I admired that, and wonder if I have that level of commitment to learning how to operate ChatGPT.

I remember Dad, dying of cancer at 85, watching a TV commercial and asking me with a bewildered look on his face, “What is GoDaddy?” And my answering to our mutual relief, “It doesn’t matter, Dad. You don’t need to know.”

But you and me? In this world of everyone for themselves and let the robots take the hindmost, I’m afraid we still need to know.

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