Klaatu barada nikto

A blog, wow! So 1990's! Why and what for?

Three reasons: first, the dynamics of Facebook, with its binary like/dislike discourse and time-wasting attractiveness, is no longer merely distasteful. It's truly harmful: narrowing friend communities to hysterical echo chambers, facilitating fake news, creating destructive and expensive feedback loops for small businesses. It's a two-dimensional reality that allows for no quietude (I exist only if I click), no nuance, no reflection or meditation, no evolution of our human-ness.

Donald Sutherland in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

This flat world gains no depth of its own when it unfolds; rather it breaches the borders of its screen/map only to squash and annex the 3-D world. The networked sprawl of media conglomerates, then, is the second reason for starting my own internet island. The net of Facebook, Google, Apple, and other web-based tools captures our identities and reduces them to logarithms whose formula is simply to extract profit for "the corporations," which really means some incredibly wealthy people. The tools have extended from easily-identifiable computers or cell phones into "devices," and the more slippery "devices" now mutate into the astonishingly voracious "Internet of Things" — the logical extension of which is to create of every tangible object a cash register. Real labor and work—measured in physical effort—is cheapened, and the costs of heating, cooling, moving, transmitting, supporting Data are hidden. The results are not unlike the horror of The Matrix or The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Except that there are no machines or aliens trying to occupy civilization. We are colonizing our own planet, minds, and bodies.

"Klaatu barada nikto" — will any sentence save us?

The third reason for Song of Bob (yes, allusions to Whitman and Dylan and Chaucer are in there, as is "sob," a Ray Davies tangent, as well as a slur on myself, a not-so-tough s.o.b. who is really just an Ohio kid with a sainted lineage which I could only dream of emulating)...

...the third reason is good old-fashioned writing time. I'm not a luddite and don't believe in the eradication of digital media. This cyborg world is what we dreamt, and what dreamed us, and while scribbling away in notebooks forever might preserve the writing from a power outage, it also might, like some Borgesian librarian or character from Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, mutter nonsense to himself.

So my first effort is to create an island amidst the digital ocean. The second is to say something valuable, that is, the eternal essay. Stephen Crane put it this way:

(from The Black Riders, 1895):

There was a man with tongue of wood
Who essayed to sing,
And in truth it was lamentable.
But there was one who heard
The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood
And knew what the man
Wished to sing,
And with that the singer was content.

Thanks for listening.