My dear Cowgirl in the Sand --
I never stopped to consider the size of my mini's horse d'oeuvres; they're small, sometimes pungent, sometimes not depending on what's been ingested. I never stopped to calculate the amount of poop, but a rough estimate is that two minis poop equals a full-sized horse. Two for the price of one, would everything be that cost-effective.
Sometimes it's difficult for me to come up with the precise metaphor to describe what you and I are talking about, entropical or not. One thing that is abundantly clear is that it's all about man trying to master the Impenetrable and the Unknowable with systems which seem to work "for the time being" but are replaced by other systems in the end. In truth though, it's all something to occupy our time on our way to the graveyard. Not to put too fine a point upon it, but it comes down to seeking solace to the question "Why?" when "Why Not?" is the obvious rejoinder and this fable:
The Alchemist and the Perfect System
Once upon a time in Cambridge Mass. there lived an Aspiring Alchemist who was obsessed with developing the Perfect System. Like his fellows, he too wanted to make his mark as a brilliant technocrat, a developer of systems which would make him rich if not immortal. The only thing he lacked to be an official high priest of science was the ritual initiation and dissertation required before he could don the ceremonial robes of Science.
However, he declined as a matter of principle to perform as bidden, knowing that his system was above their laws, and far too complicated to boot. Thus while his colleagues passed out of school and into the real world performing the alchemical duties of transmuting ideas into micro processors, he remained in Cambridge un-credentialed and unemployed.
For years, he labored in solitude and penury spending thousands of dollars he couldn't afford on exotic tomes with small print. Flirting with blindness and myopia, he minutely inspected the theoretical underside of molecules since the path to the perfect system was proving to be quite elusive. Just as he was about to get the Whole Perspective (a final draft of his diss.) another piece of the endless puzzle disclosed itself in another obscure journal which forced him to re-think and re-draft yet again. Eventually his research lead him into the occult side of the discipline looking for clues.
At first the examining board had been sympathetic, remembering fondly their own youthful exuberance and how ephemeral knowledge could be and allowed him generous exemptions. As the years wore on though, their interest waned despite the Alchemists periodic research updates. Time passed, the original members of his committee died off or retired. His yearly updates grew more complex and abstruse, and although nobody understood what he talking about, they continued to grant him to string him along. By now, his thesis topic had long since transcended the realm of alchemy to myth among his colleagues in his department.
An embittered middle-aged man, his living conditions had degenerated to the point where he sleeping on a mattress in the middle of an abandoned warehouse full of learned tomes and computer read-outs, some of the countless introductions he'd written. Over the years his system had boiled itself down into series of highly complex hyper number equations which he was sure contained all mankind spiritual and philosophical knowledge.
It was late one evening or early morning, the Aspiring Alchemist sensed he was close, real close this time. Keying furiously on his keyboard with his math-co processors straining to the max, he resolutely factored in his final magical equations and a nanosecond later, the CRT screen faded to black. Almost immediately a small point of light appeared like a mandala which rapidly grew into a series of equations and symbols which scrolled rapidly downward as the Alchemist, eyes transfixed on the miracle, felt a stabbing pain in his side.
Abruptly the scrolling stopped. Able to at last catch his breath, he read the message which emerged:
"THE ONLY PERFECT SYSTEM IS BEYOND...SORRY"
Then he died.
MORAL: "What a man's work comes to! So he plans it,
performs it, perfects it, makes amends and then---
sic transit."
(Robert Browning, "Old Pictures in Florence")
I don't know whether this answers THE QUESTION, or whether it makes me or you feel any better, but as Uncle Franz so eloquently put it,"What the fuck?". Mini poop is a life process which when properly and lovingly composted leads to flowers. At the moment, it doesn't appear that what is being produced by the Internet in terms of real time will be anything as valuable and life-affirming as flowers unless the operators figure out how to enrich the compost of that blank empty electronic space with something other than self-advertisements, laundry lists, pleas for help, animated by snappy graphics. As you say, there "are alternatives to mass idiocy, even though sometimes the aggregate seems rather idiotic", but I just don't suffer fools gladly, I've enough foolishness of my own I'm trying to deal with.
Is this philosotopher spinning his wheels? I dunno, I'm just trying to keep as current as possible in my way. After all when I upgrade I wait until the Christmas after sale for the deals. I just think though that the Internet continually is offering all of us "deals" which really aren't that much, and only serves to hook us further and further into their windowbox and estrange us from our own.
As for the minis, they're smaller but speaking aggregately, they produce the same amount of poop, it's just easier to handle. Is that progress or what?
David
Howdy Dr. Maimonides --
Your fable about the alchemist/scientist, and his attempt to master the Impenetrable for the time being, coincided neatly (perhaps there *are* no coincidences after all) with a letter I wrote to a guy in Santa Cruz recently. You'd probably like him: he isn't on the internet 'grid' -- he corresponds solely by snail mail, and initially he wrote to me asking about Uncle Franz and religion. I have been trying to straighten him out, with varying degrees of success. Here's what I wrote him recently:
[snip] I tend to agree with Carl Sagan in one area, anyway, which is that science as a concept is neither understood nor appreciated in the good old USA. Or to paraphrase Will Rogers, "It's not what the people don't know that's the problem -- it's the things they know that ain't so." I don't disagree that there are limits to our ability to comprehend the vastness of the universe, but that's no reason to shrug and do what was common until fairly recently, even in science -- assume that anything we can't understand too well is the province of God. In his discussion of the no-boundary hypothesis Stephen Hawking observed, "The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws...So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?" I have a suspicion that for a lot of people, there's a high level of discomfort when they contemplate something this indefinite. To put it in simple terms: The age-old truism is that God created us in His image; but if we have gradually come to recognize that God is only a human construct, then where the fuck do we come from, and who are we? The unpopularity of scientific method, I think, is based in that discomfort. When it comes right down to it, most people would prefer to believe that we are the crown of creation and the element around which the universe revolves, rather than risk finding out otherwise. The sort of abstract thinking that is necessary to be empirical is, unfortunately, beyond many people. [end snip]
And hence our immersion in trivialities -- better to waste Time than to confront it in its vastness. If you can stand another quote, Edward Carpenter, a proponent of the Craftsman ethic ("plain living and high thinking", which is a philosophy I think both you and I adhere to, each in our way) said this around the turn of the century: "No doubt immense simplifications of our daily life are possible; but this does not seem to be a matter which has been much studied...For beside the smoke pall which covers our towns, we raise in each household such a dust of trivialities that our attention is fairly absorbed, and if this screen subsides for a moment we are sure to have the daily paper up before our eyes so that if a chariot of fire were sent to fetch us, ten to one we should not see it."
The only thing that has changed since 1906, really, is the scope of our technology. Substitute "the World Wide Web" for "the daily paper" in the above quote, and you'll see that nothing is different but the millennium.
Carpenter was, of course, protesting against the massive industrialization of his day; the Arts and Crafts movement, after all, was largely made up of upper-class reformers and theoretical neo-Luddites, many of whom were, ironically, wealthy industrialists. These people could *afford* to retreat to their country estates and engage in "plain living and high thinking" with the hefty price tag that went with the Stickley furniture and Grueby tiles meanwhile cheerfully oblivious to the fact that they were the root cause of the very conditions that caused them such a philosophical bellyache! Yep, the poor Arts and Crafties, despite the aesthetic loveliness of their vision, got steamrollered over in the end, because they had no concrete answers to the Realpolitik, sociopolitical aspects of technology.
I think we should pick up their beautiful, cordovan-and-gold-leaf-covered book and learn a lesson from it. We mustn't let technology overwhelm us to the point where we become techno-Luddites. Rather, we are in a position, simply because we're writers who have thought a great deal about these issues, to provide (hopefully) intelligent observations on the issue of electronic communication. I personally feel that the Internet unless or until it is seized by governmental tentacles, and restrictions of one type or another are imposed has immense potential to make information available to anyone who wants it. Such an invaluable resource needs our constant vigilance to keep it open and free to all. We in essence lost our radio and television mediums to corporate barons and the all-pervasive 'censorship' of the bottom line we must not let this happen with the Internet. Rather than be dismayed by the enormity of the task, or throw in the towel entirely and refuse to "play God" to the Golem we have created, we have to be able to grin, however weakly, at the increasing entropy out there, and start flailing away with our buckets and shovels.
That reminds me -- time to start scrubbing all the birdcages!
Your neo-utopian
N.
