Sometime before 11, after the coals had cooled and the police helicopters descended into the L.A. basin to begin trolling in earnest, the party considered a number of after-dinner entertainments. The debate quickly split into two factions: venturesome cosmopolitan nature-lovers advocating a steep hike into the hills for a dance with coyotes (while gingerly sidestepping other semi-feral, leather-clad scrub dwellers exercising more urban libidos) and dipsomaniacal couch-dwellers listing sharply in favor of a downhill expedition to the Tiki Bar of the moment.

Parallel Dimension Girl introduced a surreal alternative: “Or,” she bleated, conspiratorially twirling her wine glass, “Or, we could get doughnuts.“

I thought this was just a little weird. And not just because I’d just polished off a cornucopia of delicious, low fat, au courant forage, either. I love high-octane confections as much — no, a lot more, actually — than the next person. But doughnuts just never appear on my gastronomic radar. Doughnuts, I think: official pastry of the hopeless. Sometimes garishly embalmed in atrocities of colored sugar. Most often seen in the company of bad drip coffee. Definitive emblem of bungling law enforcement.

On the other hand, Parallel Dimension Girl is something of a legend for her unerring cool-hunting and Zeitgeist-homing powers. Over the decade I’d known her, she had been on the very leading edge — and had occasionally been the wildly inventive perpetrator — of a number of bona fide pop culture phenomena. If she was saying doughnuts, well, doughnuts.

There are times when the epic conceals itself behind a mundane account: Captain Ahab goes fishing; Madame Bovary shops for a matching handbag; Whitley Strieber is surprised by unexpected guests. And we were just going out for doughnuts.

We piled like teenagers into PDG’s sport-ute, and drove. I was still a little shaky on the whole concept, wondering what to expect: retro chic, perhaps; a charmingly lurid little shack staffed by beehived waitresses from a bygone era, propped up defiantly in the center of some forgotten patch of asphalt. Maybe there would be a drive-up window, I thought hopefully. Maybe we wouldn’t even have to get out of the car.

What we encountered was more like a major social upheaval, the effects of which could be felt well in advance of arrival; the left-hand turn lane on Van Nuys Boulevard was packed solid for two blocks. We were approaching, we would later learn, a kind of low-intensity doughnut riot. PDG’s instincts were on target — there was, in California, a new hysteria afoot. Doughnut hysteria. And the madness had a name; and the name was Krispy Kreme.

I was, of course, to be informed later that there was nothing particularly new about Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Apparently, Krispy Kreme has for decades been part of the hidden, good-ol’-boy culinary arcana of the deep South, along with other institutions like Waffle House and Piggly Wiggly. The only thing really new about these fat-fried, sugar-glazed cyclopses was their sudden debut in trendier urban climes.

But the appearance of the Krispy Kreme star in the firmament of Southern California fast food was being greeted as the Second Coming. Certainly the police had recognized it as some kind of apocalyptic event; this newly opened Krispy Kreme franchise was causing a traffic jam of near-biblical proportions. No bungling here; the patrolmen stood in the streets like grim blue prophets signifying with ominous, staccato arm movements. Blazing flares and phalanxes of orange cones created a strangely festive, end-of-the-world atmosphere.

We parked blocks away and approached on foot, through streets congested by stalled cars and throngs of doughnut-eaters munching dreamily down the middle of ordinarily perilous intersections that had become parking lots. I was agog; I feared the popular predictions might belatedly be upon us, that the third millennium would precipitate all manner of mass insanity.

My mind raced. What could possibly account for this doughnut-based mania? Some kind of junk food Revelation, one in which the entire population of Southern California suddenly repents of whole grains, tofu and raw vegetables at exactly the same moment? Or millennial fatigue, all of us finally tired of the elaborate, 50-year lifestyle experiment of the “California Experience?” Had the mythology of the Golden State just become too cumbersome to maintain, and had the green and white Krispy Kreme banners come to finally call our macrobiotic bluff? Was it all a high-cholesterol renunciation of our regional cultural pride, a dim and intuited confession that Californians were, after all, normal, and ordinary, with the same lumpy hopes and unholy doughnut desires as their brothers and sisters in less fashionable quarters of the nation?

We took our place in line, which stretched around the shop and into the parking lot. The atmosphere was oddly, unexpectedly convivial. People huddled cheerfully in the darkness, sharing intimacies with absolute strangers, as people will when pressed together by extraordinary events. Soon we, too, found ourselves chatting with fellow travelers on this inexplicable high-calorie hajj: How we had heard about Krispy Kreme; how otherwise thinking people could come to be found so far from home, at midnight on a Saturday, standing in the cold and waiting for doughnuts; what we might order if we ever got inside.

Some of my fellow pilgrims anticipated the flavors of their salvation: chocolate with sprinkles; powdered sugar; old fashioned. PDG demonstrated her gnosis of the subtleties of devotion: “Oh, no, you guys — you only want to get the glazed, yeast doughnuts, the ones they make fresh all night long.” She gave them a look of expert conviction. “The ones that go straight out of the oil, through the syrup and into your mouth,” she testified, acting it out with hula hands. The rest were dumbfounded, but convinced. PDG has that effect on people.

This sparked a discussion of the completely automated doughnut assembly line at every Krispy Kreme shop, displayed prominently behind a wall of glass. “It’s true!” one believer gushed. “You can see them made! All the way from batter to glaze — never take your eyes off ‘em.” Part of the experience, we learned, would be our slow progress past the mechanism as the line approached the cash register. This piqued my curiosity, and clarified the moment somewhat. Here, at least, was some small thing to be genuinely excited about: Doughnut ontogeny.

Another hour in line, and I knew it was true about the doughnut machine. There was something implausibly satisfying about peering through the glass at the languid, inexorable progress of legions of doughnuts in their journey from extrusion to maturity. It was hypnotic; the intricate workings of the device induced fanciful reveries of metaphor. Soon I found myself attributing profound symbolic significance to this pastry passion play, as if I were witnessing the mysteries of some obscure, deep-fried Tibetan bardo:

Life begins

We fall, barely formed

from shifting, shapeless primordial batter

onto the conveyor of life

Up and down we travel in the rising chamber

gathering strength as the yeast-force builds within us

We descend into a tribulation of boiling oil

We begin to develop our doughy potential

Midway we are flipped, realizing our duality

(and ensuring an evenly distributed, delicious outer crust)

Those uninverted ones will fail to attain doughnut nature

and be cast into the void

We emerge into the world through a curtain of sugar syrup

Some will go on heroic journeys

Some will never leave the shop

All, in the end, are devoured by gigantic, hungry beasts

The final product does nothing to betray my creation fantasy. There is something vaguely fetal about Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts. They are warm, spongy, implausibly light. They nestle together in the box like a litter of kittens.

I begin to understand. This excursion was never about doughnuts; we have come to the temple, where the mysteries of creation have been laid bare. Doughnut fate, finally, is the same as ours: We will be placed in a box, there will be a final reckoning, a bell will ring and we will be shoved across the counter into the unknown.

Make mine glazed, please. Fresh ones.

I had no good idea how this might actually come to pass. But reading Simson Garfinkel’s new book, it’s starting to become clear: The combination of free markets and ubiquitous information technology imposes its own kind of tyranny, the end results being often as scary as a KGB nightmare.

“Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century” is a dense treatise on electronic identification and surveillance technology, as well as a guide to the workings of the modern consumer tracking complex. Garfinkel, a technology writer who runs an ISP on Martha’s Vineyard, outlines the laws and policies that make these mechanisms possible and explains the commercial appetites that motivate the relentless corporate mining of the mountains of consumer data.

The picture is more than a little hair-raising. Take, for instance, the hazards of corporate credit-tracking databases: In the tangled web of electronic repositories that chronicle your personal credit history, a single mistake or false report can be propagated to multiple agencies, ensuring that you’ll never be approved for a credit card or a mortgage. Worse, errors can never be expunged, but only mitigated with supplemental reports. Of course, the burden of proof is on the individual. Equifax, Inc. may have made the mistake, but the consumer suffers the consequences, which can last for years.

Then there are the hidden perils of those ubiquitous enticements to give up a few shreds of your identity to the commercial data sphere. Think that supermarket discount card was a bargain? Tell it to the man who slipped and injured himself while shopping, then sued the store. His corporate grocers used his consumer profile against him, courtesy of the discount card. A history of large liquor purchases undermined the credibility of the customer’s claim.

Then there are the databases tracking your medical history: Garfinkel reports that 35 percent of Fortune 500 companies acknowledge that they have drawn on personal health records to make employment decisions. Think you’re in line for a big promotion? Not with your record of psychiatric treatment, or that one-time abnormal T-cell count after a nasty virus. For HMOs, controlling costs also means the permanent suspension of patient confidentiality; the ramifications of this are nightmarish. Suddenly insurance companies, marketers and mass-mailers have access to the most intimate details of your flesh and blood.

The deeper Garfinkel digs, the more ghoulish the picture becomes: Near the bottom of the pit, there’s the Medical Information Bureau, a widely used clearinghouse of patient data for medical insurers, which cloaks itself as would any sinister covert agency: unlisted phone numbers, a profile so low as to approach invisibility, concentric layers of codes and obfuscation in reporting procedures. And though its data remains invisible to consumers, its effects do not; with the wrong codes affixed to your name in the MIB data cores, you’ll never get health insurance again. And you may never know why.

Corporate databases also greatly increase the individual’s vulnerability to fraud, identity theft and a host of other criminal abuses. I was surprised to read, for instance, that United Parcel Service stores customers’ digitized signatures as proof of delivery. UPS will fax you a receiver’s signature if you supply them with a package tracking number. It appears to be relatively easy for someone to arrange for UPS to deliver a facsimile of my signature.

Garfinkel makes the infuriating revelation that much of the most promising technology that could decrease consumer jeopardy isn’t implemented because of the marginal costs to corporations; profits are more important than individual welfare, apparently. Indeed, this inversion of corporate over individual rights emerges as the dominant theme of “Database Nation.”

Certainly, Garfinkel finds corporate disdain for consumer privacy rights is right out in the open. Most incensing is the attitude of a mass-mailing maven, the kind of marketer who upholsters your mailbox daily with unwanted catalogs: “There is no such thing as ‘junk mail’ — only junk people.” In other words, corporation |ber alles.

Starting to sound a little like tyranny?

Of course, resistance doesn’t seem to be coming from the technology sector — the Internet’s masters of the universe are too busy pawing through your e-commerce cookies and profiling your Web surfing to take much notice. The onslaught of corporate privacy abuses has been resisted by only a few: whistleblowers like Garfinkel, underground groups like the Cypherpunks and — in a most un-Orwellian turn — by the federal government, which has passed legislation to slow the invasion.

There are a few problems with “Database Nation.” At times Garfinkel seems to wander outside the implicit charter of the book. For instance, his extended taxonomy of surveillance techniques veers away from credibility and dangerously close to “X-Files” territory with accounts of thought-tapping and remote viewing experiments. At other times he seems to want to write a completely different book on spy technology, more appropriate for, say, Jane’s Defense Weekly.

Garfinkel also has an annoying habit of creating shocking anecdotes of privacy abuse out of whole cloth, not telling the reader until afterward these horror stories only represent possible portraits of the future. He opens one chapter with an account of his e-mail correspondence with a person who turns out to be a program sucking data about his shopping habits and movie preferences — then reveals that the scenario is make-believe. This sensationalist technique is more suited to National Enquirer than anything else, and serves to subtly undermine his audience’s trust.

Overall, though, “Database Nation” is well worth the read. In the face of escalating corporate incursions onto our fundamental liberties, popular opposition is in alarmingly short supply; those determined to galvanize public indignation are performing a valuable service, and deserve to be heard.

In “Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho,” journalist Jon Katz shoulders the prickly mantle of geek bard/apologist and attempts to explain this newest subculture to the rest of the world.

His main conceit is tried-and-true: “Geeks” is essentially a Horatio Alger-style tale of self-improvement and upward mobility: two working-class, socially backward but technically inclined lads leverage the power of the Internet to grab the bottom rung of the infotech employment ladder and climb to higher socioeconomic ground.

At the same time, “Geeks” is an attempt to diagram the somewhat elusive essence of geekness. This is a daunting, but not impossible task; though the soul of geek is slippery to the touch, there is almost certainly a canon of core values somewhere in the restless heart of everygeek, which Katz struggles to capture.

But the book’s dual ambitions — to be at once a tender story of coming-of-age in the Age of Internet, and a general dissertation on geek culture — seem to work against each other. Katz’s attempt to explain in broad terms the geek “movement” is hindered by his primary narrative obligation, the more specific and intimate saga of his two subjects.

In arranging his investigation as he has, Katz finds himself a victim of induction; inferring the great truths of the geek nation from a sample size of two may not have been the best plan of attack. Katz’s anecdotal angle of analysis is less convincing than if it were pure ethnography. This is unfortunate; he seems eminently qualified to do one or the other.

It’s easy to see how it happened. “Geeks” began as an article for Rolling Stone, a pop-journalism foray into this latest mutation of youth culture. Journalist Katz made the trip to Caldwell, Idaho, to investigate the story of his two geek subjects, Jesse Dailey and Eric Twilegar, having made their electronic acquaintance on the Internet. “Geeks” appears to be an extension of that magazine piece, wrapped in more general peregrinations on geek life.

A good deal of the padding derives from the author’s lengthy campaign writing pieces for that rough-and-tumble, free-fire zone of geek culture, Slashdot. Many of Katz’s broader assertions on geek nature derive from the tsunamis of electronic responses to his postings on that Web site.

Somewhere in that ocean of e-mail, though, Katz seems to have gotten oversaturated by his subject. Clearly, the jacket copy of the book suggests a loss of objectivity with its definition of geek: “A member of the new cultural elite, a pop-culture-loving, techno-centered Community of Social Discontents.” Overly proud, perhaps, but defensible. But then it continues: “Most geeks rose above a suffocatingly unimaginative educational system, where they were surrounded by obnoxious social values and hostile peers, to build the freest and most inventive culture on the planet: The Internet and World Wide Web. Now running the systems that run the world.”

This characterization tests the limits of credibility, as well as the boundaries of reasonable self-congratulation. Last time I checked, the principal architects of the Web and Internet were not a pack of picked-on, maladjusted high school anarchists. Some of them were startlingly well-socialized, even — gasp — government employees, or tenured physicists.

Indeed, a more general difficulty with this book is that Katz’s lines around geekdom seemed to be drawn far too broadly. Geekness and geek alienation, Katz seems to suggest, are at the heart of the recent rash of high school shootings across the country. This just doesn’t have the ring of truth; it’s an awfully long way from the Columbine death squad to the keyboard of Tim Berners-Lee. Trying to connect the two is an egregious overreach, and intensifies the persistent misgivings one has about this book — namely, that geekness itself may be a concept so broad and spongy as to be useless.

The raving self esteem of the geek is one of the more interesting facets of the recent bloom of geek culture: Though the geek may be shunned — or at least held at arm’s length — by mainstream society, the geek’s technical inclinations present a lucrative overlap with the current appetites of the job market. Katz tells us what most of us already knew: the Internet has created rich employment opportunities for certain kinds of narrow, youthful obsessives; what was once mere callowness is now a career skill.

In a society where money is truth, this has created irresistible opportunities for the predictable geek refrains of, “we’re smarter than everybody else,” and “we told you so.” Much of the momentum of this “geek ascension” — as Katz dubs it — rides on the current human resource vogue for info-tech types. This has created more than a small degree of contemporary geek mania; whereas the computer nerds of yesteryear were manageably insecure, today’s geeks are flush with a healthy sense of entitlement, and seem quite pleased to throw their weight around when the occasion presents.

Despite the hyperbole and conflicting motives, I’m inclined to applaud Katz’s effort in “Geeks.” In attempting to shine a light on geek culture, he’s taken on a difficult task, particularly in consideration of the petulant resistance of his subjects to classification or characterization of any kind. After watching from the sidelines the merciless online thrashings — when not outright abuse — rained upon him by his Slashdot audience, I often wondered why he lingered so long in the line of fire. Slashdot, with its uncontrolled content and participants’ poor impulse control, remains Internet culture’s answer to “Lord of the Flies.” Clearly, I thought, Katz offered more than this audience deserved. If, in “Geeks,” he hasn’t managed to completely encircle his topic, at least he deserves a medal for valor. And “Geeks” is, for all its warts, several degrees more insightful and entertaining than many of the simpering techie odes being written these days.

But there is one flaw in the book I can’t overlook: the author’s astounding oversight of the real story of “Geeks.” The tale suggested by the book’s subtitle — and the story Katz insists he’s telling — is of two teenage no-hopers who absorb the geek credo, meet the Net, and make a better life: Internet as a new meritocracy and conduit to opportunity.

I just don’t buy it. The book I read had a completely different story, one in which the teens’ principle access to opportunity is not the Net, but Katz, who catalyzes most all Jesse’s and Eric’s good fortune: By making them aware of life — and job opportunities — outside rural Idaho; by making minor celebrities of them in Rolling Stone; by arranging for a small loan to cover housing costs; by encouraging them to cultivate relationships with — drum roll — significant others; by coaching one of them through his application to an elite university, even personally pleading the youngster’s case to the dean.

Katz is cheerleader, parent and mentor, and has some marvelous things to show for it: an engaging story of salvaged potential, and the personal satisfaction of doing something nice for someone else (even if he did get a book deal out of it). But by putting himself so prominently within the frame of the picture, Katz has introduced a kind of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty effect: his influence makes it impossible to take a true measure of his subject.

Although his own object lesson is laid upon the pages as bluntly as could possibly be, Katz seems blithely unaware throughout the book. Leveraging his position and connections as a notable journalist on his subjects’ behalf, he unwittingly demonstrates the very kind of social capital that makes the world go ’round, and that geeks in general lack — and that they’re unlikely to accumulate in Internet chat rooms, news groups and MUDs.

Which, for a less geekly reader, is unforgivably frustrating. Ultimately, “Geeks” is not a story about the Internet or computers or techies. It is a story about personal bonds, optimism, access to opportunity and the courage to dream — with a little help from a mentor. How many other geeks must there be, languishing in sad, disadvantaged little burgs with no Katz to come to town and pull them up? Will their techie tinkerings and an ISDN lines alone be sufficient to lead them to $50,000-a-year IT jobs, too? Despite the techno-optimistic spin of “Geeks,” the book’s unintentional subtext seems to argue firmly against it: Compassion and goodwill cannot be automated, and must be delivered in the flesh.

Pisces (Feb 19-March 20)

Happy birthday, Pisces! Something sure smells fishy. Could it be a whiff of your decaying self-esteem? While maturity may count for something in some professions, it’s just more bad news in your business. For you it just means desperately keeping up with all those new young whippersnappers with their Java Serverlets, Python scripts and XML. In fact, all this rapid technology drift contributes mightily to psychic buffer overflow on the 8th, when massively parallel emergencies cause a number of unforeseen ripple effects — including your own personal core meltdown. Cosmic Interrupt: Beware self-reference; this horoscope is a lie.

Aries (March 21-April 19)

Rapid staff-up leads to plummeting productivity as clue-to-meat ratio approaches zero. Mythical man-month? You wish. If only you could recompile the entire team with a #INCLUDE <clue.h>. Promising new hire’s nose elongates visibly as you discover his risumi contains more compressed air than previously supposed. He only wanted to make a good impression. Now you do, too — in his backside. Cosmic Interrupt: Your planet stubs its toe passing through the eighth house  Ow!

Taurus (April 20-May 20)

You spend mega-nights on giga-heroic coding binge, only to find that you’ve reinvented the wheel. Repetitive stress injuries follow from whacking your head against the keyboard for hours. We all hope you learn something from this unfortunate episode in your career. But you probably won’t. Cosmic Interrupt: “People who think truly random numbers can be generated algorithmically are, of course, in a state of sin.” — Von Neumann

Gemini (May 21-June 20)

What a rocket ride you had last year! You were a Net.god — or at least a minor digital deity, anyway. But now that some of the air has been let out of your high-flying dot-com, maybe it’s time to allocate blame and sabotage a few careers. After all, why should the MBAs have all the fun? Cosmic Interrupt: Lube that squeaky wheel — nobody’s paying any attention right now. Concentrate on issues within your sphere of control.

Cancer (June 21-July 22)

Information concerning your future encroaches on your attention during working hours, courtesy of pesky Instant Messenger. You log on and respond (like, way against your better judgment? Hellooo!) only to experience unfortunate emotional phase-change — from solid to superheated plasmid. This techie-snit persists until the next full moon precipitates a “brief unemployment event” that lasts long enough for you to do your stack of aging laundry. Not to worry; the Next Big Thing is stalking you. Cosmic Interrupt: Inexplicable!

Leo (July 23-Aug 22)

Your project manager glibly delivers oblique product requirements that give you a queasy feeling — as if they were the product of a game of “telephone” between nonengineers. Is that a patronizing smile on your face, or are you biting your tongue to keep from screaming? No matter — your objectives were always 180 degrees out of phase with management’s, anyway; you will skip lunch and write a business plan. By next week, you’ll have venture funding and you’ll be kissing your current start-up goodbye. It was time to leave, anyway — you’ve been there almost four months. Cosmic Interrupt: Gambling may be a regressive tax on people who don’t understand statistics — but even dice are better than indecision when you’re standing in the headlights.

Virgo (Aug 23-Sept 22)

Satanic Saturn forces you into a struggle between Visual Basic and what you know is right. Don’t be shaken; the path of righteousness is narrow, and assailed on all sides by pernicious DLLs. Look for an earthshaking return on a technical skill you nearly threw away years ago. Cosmic interrupt: A picture of a double latti will not wake you up in the morning. But a picture of Bill Gates naked sure will.

Libra (Sept 23-Oct 22)

Relentless commercial disappointments drive you deep into the heart of open-source territory, where you find comfort in the arms of Linus. Bathing in pure source, you wonder dreamily why you ever signed anybody’s NDA in the first place. Harsh economic realities may eventually intrude, but that shouldn’t stop you from having a good time right now. Savor the experience while you can; it’s still springtime in Net-land. Cosmic Interrupt: Trying to get noticed by management? Turn heads by rolling out your raving narcissism.

Scorpio (Oct 23-Nov 21)

Nagging Taurus coerces you into performing some thankless nontechnical task — like cleaning up the conference room after the Friday pizza bash. When his powers slip on the 28th — thanks to a completely unforeseen reorganization — you attack his position, sending him ass-over-teakettle down the org chart. You don’t experience a micron of regret, of course. Why would you? He’s an MBA, for god’s sake. Cosmic Interrupt: Infinite perversity and genius are often indistinguishable.

Sagitarius (Nov 22-Dec 21)

An attempt to install new paramour is thwarted by previous girlfriend/boyfriend application. Remember: Concurrent, preemptive multitasking may not be such a great idea for romantic system architectures — and can result in catastrophic hardware failure. Aries puts your technical prowess to the test on the 11th, when she inadvertently overwrites mission-critical company database with “hamster dance” mirror site. Cosmic Interrupt: Psychic triple-A! Third-eye sidewinders have already been launched! Eject!

Capricorn (Dec 22-Jan 19)

Human resource issues paramount; your elderly and obsolete CFO is about to blow a vacuum tube or two. No hope of retrofit or upgrade, either; his contacts are too corroded. Be proactive by beginning executive search immediately. Meanwhile, engineering manpower crunch demands that you pioneer innovative new tech recruiting techniques. You set up shop as a day care center for precocious adolescents with hard-coding skills. Cosmic Interrupt: In a world of infinite connections, serendipity is clichi.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Circus comes to town! Your extraordinary efforts to monitor, benchmark and baseline your position on the raggedy edge of complexity has caused all sorts of quantum hell to bust loose. Newtonian mechanics receive a thorough shredding by Schroedinger’s ferocious kitty. But all is not lost; bad pointer arithmetic leads to unlikely discoveries. Hysterically minded Gemini goes postal on the 25th, leaving development team in shambles. Cosmic Interrupt: New opportunity comes with hidden strings — and a booby-trap.

The essential thesis of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” is that the Internet has turned the tables on the forces of mass industrialization. No longer is the cycle of production and consumption a corporate monologue; ubiquitous networking has enabled under-served masses and powerless workers to organize, energize, assert their own voices and thereby push back on their corporate oppressors. As consumers and workers become ever-more internetworked, interoperable and interdependent, both become smarter and more powerful — perhaps more powerful than the corporations that serve and employ them. Corporate control is an inevitable casualty as intellectual capital becomes more important than material capital.

Pretty bracing assertions, to be sure — but what else to expect from a treatise that touts itself as “The End of Business as Usual”? Whether or not “Cluetrain” lives up to this promise (or threat), the authors do seem to grasp the essential elements of revolutionary style; no self-respecting manifesto should leave the house without a few critical accessories, and this manic tract seems to have most of them. There is the obligatory declaration of obsolescence: Just as Karl Marx declared the world no longer had any use for capitalism, “Cluetrain” announces the end of Taylorism and Fordism, the very cornerstones of the industrial age. There is the ever-popular prognostication of doom: Companies that don’t recognize and embrace the new reality — by metaphorically jumping on the eponymous “clue train” — will be left squashed on the tracks. There is evangelical righteousness by the truckload. In fact, the book begins by declaring a Digital Reformation with its own version of Martin Luther’s 95 theses — a clever device that has been circulating in open-source circles for some time now.

The theses, first posted to the Net last year, open with the declaration: “1. Markets are conversations. 2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors. 3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.” The manifesto continues like a finger-waving lesson book for clueless corporations and concludes with an implicit threat of extinction for firms that refuse to get it. “95. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.”

Of course, the authors of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” are hardly the first to argue that the Internet is putting individuals back in charge. Any number of recent books have served corporate America with official notification that the post-industrial era begins now, and the news is — for the captains of industry, anyway — mostly bad. “The Cluetrain Manifesto” adds to the gloom-fest its own litany of the many corporate organs rendered vestigial: marketing, advertising and “business communications” at large (consumers are now too well-informed to accept breezy P.R. babble at face value anymore); management (peer-to-peer connections subvert hierarchy); and control (you just can’t push customers or employees around like you used to, darn it — access to information has made ‘em ornery).

“The Cluetrain Manifesto” is unique, however, in its refreshingly humanist orientation. Whereas many books attempt to analyze Internet phenomena in economic or cybernetic terms, the authors of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” take an unabashedly narrative approach: The balance of power, the authors declare, has been tipped by, of all improbable things, storytelling; the Internet, with its mailing lists, newsgroups, chat rooms, e-mail and otherwise one-to-one conduits, has enabled us to relentlessly minstrel to each other, restoring the voice of the individual in the marketplace.

Not only do these conversations allow us to pool our knowledge and organize efforts against the body corporate, but they have a satisfying, authentic, sincere quality to them — in contrast to the hollow, flat, inhuman tone of the bureaucratic voice, which grows more intolerable with each day, now that we are continually reminded of the difference. Any company hoping to hang on to its customer base, “The Cluetrain Manifesto” insists, had better learn the New Sincerity.

This argument by itself is enough to redeem “Cluetrain”; in a debate where the Internet economy is traditionally explicated in terms of “value chains” and “vertical integration,” this is a delightfully orthogonal point of view. Classicists and anthropologists have long declared storytelling the main event in human culture, but seldom has it been advanced as an issue of such immediate economic urgency.

But the most striking feature of this book is its sheer exuberance. This isn’t so much a scholarly, constructed, fussed-over opus as much as a collection of related broadsides colluding in a rollicking, tag-team pummel-fest of the (until recently) powers-that-be — or a giddy, extended riff on the end of an ice age.

Perhaps the spirited tone derives from the book’s genesis online. The authors have had a year to hone their clue train act on the Web and this book is probably the distillation of months of e-mail conversation and reader feedback. Besides, each of these guys enjoys a reputation as not only a technology sage, but an online gadfly and iconoclast.

One side-effect of this loosely collaborative approach is a certain amount of rhetorical overlap; the four authors are clearly of one mind, and none can resist recapitulating the same message with his own particular spin. This would be much more of a problem if it weren’t for the redeeming circumstance that much of the book reads like stand-up comedy. Much of the message of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” is in the smirk wedged firmly between the lines — we don’t mind the variations on theme, as long as the authors keep us laughing. This style — the wisecracking, attention-deficient, stream-of-consciousness nonlinear rant — has something of a venerable history in computerdom; Ted Nelson vigorously pioneered the form decades ago in “Computer Lib/Dream Machines,” and the technique is still as potent as ever, especially when the object is to whack the audience upside the head with a clue-by-four.

There is more than just gonzo attitude here to compel the skeptical reader. One of the most compelling passages features an annotated exchange on a Usenet newsgroup in which a number of Saturn customers triangulate on the inconsistent service policies of Saturn-affiliated car dealerships. It’s a powerful example of how an internetworked customer base can bring a corporate organization to heel, and more than sufficient to ground the airy abstraction of the “Internet-empowered consumer.”

In “The Great Transformation,” economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi asserted that prior to the 19th century, markets were coeval with, and embedded in, society. Markets did not exist entirely for their own sake, or even for profit’s; they were simply one manifestation of social discourse. The signal trait of the industrial revolution, he contended, was the de-coupling of society and the market, much to the detriment of the former, notably in the form of alienation of labor and the depletion of community resources.

In that light, one interpretation of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” is that the trend identified by Polanyi is beginning to reverse — as the Internet insinuates its chatty, communitarian (dare we say “old-fashioned”) values into the industrial conversation, corporations are going to have to re-couple with society at large. In more concrete terms, they will have to begin acting less like faceless profit-robots and more like good neighbors — on pain of death.

That would be a change for the better; let’s hope “The Cluetrain Manifesto” — with all its grandiloquence — isn’t too far off the mark.