#16

The pride we take in what we think we know is catastrophic. Knowledge has a well-deserved reputation for its many utilities as well as for its psychic pleasures and rigors, but it cannot shield you from ignorance, which is always vaster and stronger than knowledge. No person in one lifetime can accumulate enough knowledge to outweigh their own ignorance, speaking proportionally.

Power, maybe, but paper power. Sometimes literally.

Speaking practically, everything you think you know about a person doesn't add up to jack shit in the face of what you couldn't possibly know, including your own trueborn mother or child. I don't feel like I need to offer a lot of support for this statement, but maybe I find people more complex than most like to admit they are. I understand the flair and the paycheck that go with seeking out the good old lowest common denominator.

Hackable human beings! At the mercy of the corpostate! I guess if you didn't grow up with a million stories like this to hand, falling onto your head in their tottering heaps at the used bookstore, this is an alien notion with one of those payloads which inspires that revulsion which precludes clear thinking.

Frankly, it is a transparent shell game these terrormongers are constantly playing. I mean, look. People can't be both smarter, better-informed, and more literate than they've ever been and laughably psychically malleable at the same time. Unless maybe these things are complementary, and sort of play off each other, maybe as trends? I dunno. Parallel evolution. Sympathetic parasitism. Are you feeling my spitballs? That's what this is. Trickster vs. Lawgiver. Man vs. Self , but also that one Escher drawing of the hands drawing each other--generative Ouroboros, in a backdrop of boundless stagnation which gives way eventually to the fertility which will degenerate, die, stagnate, and so forth unto infinity. Get this: the drawing and the backdrop both represent people fucking each other, in two totally different ways. Spitballin'.

That our field of action which goes unpunished can be limited by forces we have absolutely no way to influence bespeaks a situation where negative freedom is compromised, quantifiable, and reduced even to zero. Our freedom to act and think in ways that lead to punishment and even destruction, in futility, for nothing, for ideas that may not matter and cannot be proven, for a stupid and shitty thing like love, for whatever, really--that we are always, always free to do, which is positive freedom and should not exist but does.

That we can be hacked implied that we were first programmed, which is already delicious, but even better, it suggests that as programs which can hack one another, we are programs which can build firewalls to protect themselves and other programs. In a hack or be hacked world, defenses and advantages always spring up, must always spring up. Vacuums yawn as titans fall, and the young lions rush onto the killing grounds, to find who will rise above the rest. The metaphors, you see, just keep on coming.

It's a complex universe, folks. There is no need to listen to assholes trying to sell it as a solved game. I suspect one good way to get hacked is to go around trying to win a bunch of arguments. It's all just fractals, in a sense.

By way of saying: it's all a very stylish way of showing, as always, that nothing is new and things are the exact same as they have ever been. Fresh coat of paint and a new angle; people buy the car all over again, perhaps for even more money than the last time around.


--JL