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It has been the most pressing question floating around in my soup for nearly twenty years. Just saying that, I need to point out to you that this is excruciatingly humiliating to me. Do I punch through this plastic wrap separating me from the libraries full of best sellers that say just precisely what I have to say? Or do I put all my effort into making a safe remove from the conflagration that I might be able to teach the survivors? Can I even live long enough for either? Without the wherewithal, how do I do either?
So my piles of signposts for people like me, the gorgeous traces of the masters of Endurance, begin to accumulate dust instead of the marvelous fragrances of precious tomes that underpin real enlightening beings. The one part of my personal mandate upon which I really do expend almost all my effort, is the one demanding I be capable of giving it to you in your lingo.
I found Joe Rogan. I have, so far, expended well over four hundred hours with him, with the sole objective of understanding your lingo well enough to use it. And I'm not talking about the coarseness he embraces so wholeheartedly, even as it is a monster relief to me that he doesn't pussyfoot around with the immortally idiotic disingenuousness inhering the determination not to swear.
I remind you: Lenny Bruce died that we might cuss blue streaks and still be taken seriously. I remind you: I grew up in one of the most prestigious lawfirms in California, in the country, in the world, and my genius logger, 86, at the very extremity of indignation, could not hold a candle to the epithets that flew in that office. My prissy little insistence on ladylike speech died by the time I was twenty-three. So it isn't the colorful speech on that podcast that terrifies me so much.
I listened to this last night, knowing it was going to make me mad... but I didn't even know how mad going in, which, I'm not bragging, is getting pretty rare. Joe has been waxing sanctimonious about our future as transhumans for months, seeming to be completely unaware that this is imprinting quanta of young people to see this as a powerful and desirable thing, seeming to be completely unaware of what that would mean for individual humans and, you moron, the masses of us. Still, I wasn't prepared to take it in blended with the inputs from one of the leading lights of fascist progressivism on the system of pipes. Maybe the worst of it was to hear them agreeing that the psychopaths hadn't counted on the power of the internet for the common man.
People were saying that shit around the advent of television, you boobs. Are you too thick to notice that every site with respectable traffic is a veritable mine field of propagandist content? That the mighty social media already keep whole agencies busy arresting people who boast of their criminal activity and who speak too clearly about the evil running our country? That at least half of the crucial documentation for really important stuff just completely evaporates off the cyberface of Earth? That clicktivism is as effective as watching a sitcom?
What is the beauty of it? That I could go to Catherine's site and find out Eartha Kitt said, "I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.” That we can find others who we want to relate with... even though we well might never be able to touch them in meatspace. That it is a medium for people like me finding out how to use the lingo. That learning junkies can drop into the time-space continuum and forget to cook dinner for a couple weeks or the rest of our lives.
But, anyone using this medium has to be able to discern what is real information and what is crap. Siri. You ask her a question on your iPhone. She answers you with something she got off Wikipedia or Yelp or some university website. She answers you with frequently seriously flawed, if not utterly bogus, information. Siri will tell you, actually, what any sufficiently powerful person wants you to be able to find out... and that usually has nothing to do with the truth, unless you count the part about the truth being we have to be pumped full of shit to keep the psychopaths in control.
I've been teetering on this stupid razor's edge too long. I might need to jump.
