Danny O'Brien on the estimable O'Reilly campers:
".. And we'll realise that the real conspiracies, aren't the ones that appear on publically readable Websites, with full names of attendees, detailed documentation of discussions, and endless braindumps of semi-private, clumsy, gushing conversations that nonetheless deserve a wider audience. That people who come across as eager to do good, willing to feed a couple of hundred people on the offchance that some benefit may accrue, who like hearing their friends sing in an off-key, don't mind others knowing that, and who are lucky enough to have smart friends and generous enough to share them, aren't the threat.
It's the real secrets; the real hide-aways; the people who are always either in public mode or in an ultra-ultra-secret combination we can barely guess at who are the dangerous ones. And they're a lot harder to spot from fifty yards, and a damn sight more immune to gentle satire .."
Was there a role model for that silently lucid archtype?
One can say that the term "conspiracy" has been successfully stripped of all meaning by various pots and kettles scratching each others black.
The chameleonesque human capacity for falsehood is neutralized by our age, race and creed-neutral capacity for subconscious distillation of sincerity.
As a famous reporter has said about success on television:
From the epistemological roots of Moses ("these 15 *crash* 10 commandments") to the populist confidence of long division, elders have held social restraint as counterweight to unfettered button pushing by liberated fingers, as new straps of literacy are booted once again.
Still, each generation must address the transclusion of means and ends by the partially literate ("I smile therefore I am"). Thousands of years of agenda joyriding have yet to derail the evolution of literacy or the truth-colocation capacity of semantics.
Economics bequeathed special powers of modulation to the semantic device we have amicably named "price". In the absence of this most populist of social restraints, what have we reaped from our voluminously open cyberlands?
Truth? It rides near, not on, semantics.
Wisdom? Does a menu of 100 diversions eclipse a menu with 2 solutions?
Light. Courtesy of distant stars, publishing only their past. It is fitting that cyberlands arrive at our brainsteps after traversing optical fiber at light speed. The tense of cyberlands is a past of select publishers, but past photons are more numerous than their selection in our cyberlands.
With late light from the past does the future distill its present.
Posted by dotpeople at October 17, 2003 03:32 PM