A KIND READER, noting my recent obsessions with the changing, increasingly hype-ridden language of business journalism and P.R., advised me to check out Cluetrain, a site which talks about just that–among many other “revolution in business” topics.

The site includes the full text of something called “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” a Martin Luther-esque set of “95 Theses.” It also offers samples from a book the manifesto’s four co-authors are selling.

The book adds details to the manifesto’s arguments that the Net is bringing about “The End of Business As Usual”–not just because of online retail but also because “people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”

On the surface, the manifesto writers are proclaiming the imminent decline and fall of corporate gobbledygook and meaningless bureaucratic procedure, in favor of human-scale conversation and systems that make sense.

Dig one level down from that, though, and the “Theses” read like the worst Wired-style bombast. Meet the new hype, same as the old hype.

Like Wired, the manifesto-ists claim their “revolution” is an inevitable, linear, historic course; and that when they call for corporations to change their ways, they’re just helpfully advising these corporations to accept the inevitable or fade into the dustbin-O-history.

(Typical excerpt: “There’s a new conversation between and among your market and your workers. It’s making them smarter and it’s enabling them to discover their human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”)

But dig one level beneath that, and you could ascertain at least the faint beginnings of a post-hype order.

Not an inevitable post-hype order, but at least a possible one.

Certainly, a hype-reduced business universe would be welcomed by most people, with the possible exception of those who work at generating the hype (capitalism’s equivalent of the USSR’s old “ministers of ideology”).

Instead of buzzwords like “business-to-business solution paradigms” and “the dynamic realignment of restructured global opportunities,” the folks who sell and buy stuff would have to, or even want to, explain exactly what they’re really doing. If they know.

But, as can be seen in Chechnya and the Balkans, a brutal regime that drops its old ideological excuses doesn’t necessarily become less brutal.

And the regime of Global Business, shorn of Dilbert-esque B.S., would still be the regime of Global Business.

It would still seek profit and/or organizational growth to the neglect of other goals or values. It would stil, to a large extent, view the environment as raw materials, employees as machine tools, and human beings as target markets. It would still do everything it could to merge, consolidate, downsize costs, move industrial work to low-wage countries, and remove any governmental or other impediments to its ambitions.

It would simply do these things honestly and directly.

At least with the old buzzwords, companies admitted they had to disguise some of their ambitions and behaviors under convoluted excuses.

TOMORROW: Even in L.A., they complain about losing their civic identity.

IN OTHER NEWS: The Kingdome implosion, held the week after the spring equinox (the old pagan new year) was everything Carl Smool’s Fire Ceremony, a sort of neo-pagan new year’s ritual (rescheduled to the previous Sunday), had been created for.

It was a huge, populist moment–a dramatic goodbye to the past, a shared big spectacle in the present, and a greeting and/or dreading to the future.

(Indeed, several TV and radio commentators made comments to the effect that this was the millennium celebration Seattle didn’t get in January.)

I was at the Dome’s opening party in ’76. The show wasn’t much, but the feeling was warm and electric. Amid the marching bands and ethnic dance troupes and politicians’ speeches was the sense of civic triumph, of having become a gosh-darn Big League city in our own modest, thrifty way, via a big building best appreciated by structural engineers.

But now, the Brave New Seattle has no room for a homely yet functional multi-purpose room. So, a millennial Destruct-O-Rama brought one more community gathering experience.

And it was damned cool. That dome blowed up real good!

(Dome-TV marathon moment (KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison): “Look; there’s an armored personnel carrier. I feel like we’re back at WTO.”)

ELSEWHERE:

• Another utterly-cute vehicle we’ll probably never see in the U.S., the Phoenix….