From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Feb 09 2003 - 02:41:29 MST
Friends, it is perfectly clear that finally we have a new
pathology on our hands, though not the first of the Age of
the Web.
It is obvious that a certain party suffers from Googleization,
and sorely needs to be de-Googleized.
I quote
> There are no words to convey the feeling of omnipotence this generates.
The symptoms clearly exhibited by the patient are alas all too
familiar to the students of certain pathologies of bygone eras.
> Nothing matters except that I have Google.
This is quite sad.
> I am the racial memory of the human species and no isolate can compete
> against that. I am the Web. I am the groupmind. Resistance is futile
> for we are Eliezer of Google.
Analysis of these latter remarks would be superfluous.
But we do have yet one further noteworthy aspect of the pathology,
namely as witnessed in dialog between the patient (who will be
referred to as EY), and a frustrated critic, one Michael Butler
of California. The critic challenged the patient to glean the
identity of the particular finger the critic was holding up
(pertaining to a crude gesture whose actual meaning we may
pass over as irrelevant). Replied the patient:
"I assert that you were holding up your left pinky finger. As this post
will appear on the Extropian BBS and be indexed by Google..., [and] this
clearly demonstrates that the information can in principle be googled..."
showing that in the mind of the patient EY the *assertion* itself
has become reality.
As Orwell predicted, he who controls the present controls the
present, or something like that. Anyway, as Google controls
knowledge, we see EY falling under the same mind-domination
that Winston Smith so valiantly but so hopelessly resisted.
If Google says that there are five fingers, then there are
five fingers.
This should be a lesson to us all. As Erich Fromm wrote
"This means us too".
But so long as we continue to have strength to resist, we must
not only for ourselves preserve our memes from the centralized
control of Google, but also as a moral duty begin the research
necessary to treat patients such as EY. I thus propose the
initiation of a new world-wide effort, the Degoogleization of
the Afflicted, and hopefully President George Bush will prompt
the U.S. Congress to meet the needs of this new challenge with
the alacrity it has recently shown towards the AIDS crisis.
Lee
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