From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Feb 09 2003 - 02:53:31 MST
Addendum to my recent post.
F L A S H:
Dr. Rafal Smigrodzky, of the Neurosciences Service Center,
a specialist in movement disorders and dystonias, reports
on a more medically credible diagnosis of the afflicted
state than was possible for me in my post. I quote the
portions amenable to understanding by the layman:
"[The patient is] presenting the classical neturalistic analysis...
...reactionary... semantic complexity of attenuated posters...
disturbing possibility of back-propagation of net content, or even
retrodiction... an anathema to the classical neturalist."
More to follow.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lee Corbin [mailto:lcorbin@tsoft.com]
> Sent: Sunday, February 09, 2003 1:41 AM
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: Towards Degoogleization (was I am the Google)
>
>
> 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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