Facebook's Folly

Warning: Among our small but sophisticated readership there will no doubt be some for whom this post is just so much nonsense. Perhaps these people have the best of it.

What has it been--all of 72 hours since Facebook.com introduced its new Orwell-meets-People Magazine "feed" format? And how long will it be before it's gone, or at least swept under some e-rug? I give it weeks, or less. In a delicious example of the twisted, ultra-reflexive physics of virtual space, the most prominent news(?) items on my facebook feed--and I supppose on many others'--are all about how much the feed sucks. Just a few examples of Facebook groups started or joined by "friends" of mine in the past 48 hours:

FACEBOOK FEED SUCKS
BRING THE OLD FACEBOOK BACK
FACEBOOK MASS EXODUS
STUDENTS AGAINST FACEBOOK NEWS FEED
THE NEW FACEBOOK LOOKS LIKE IT WAS DESIGNED BY A HYPERACTIVE FIVE-YEAR-OLD

I'm especially fond of this last one, created very early on by my buddy Neil and apropos of precisely nothing.

In any event, the lessons here are as many and varied as they are trivial and trite. For one thing, this display of hyperirony goes to the dubiousity and double-edgedness of the "democratizing of information" brought on by the internet and blogosphere revolutions. It used to be that things like laziness, lack of ambition, poverty, and death-squads kept the mouth-breathing masses from opining at the top of their lungs about whatever was grinding their gears on a given day. But the price of opening your mouth has gone down drastically in terms of dollars, elbow grease, and blood. And even this band of anonymous troglodytes that calls itself the American public can point and click.

Behold the era of the Blog Montaigne, the Message Board Martin Luther and the Forum Oscar Wilde. But 92% of it is still tripe, and there is no democracy of taste.

The other thing--and here I borrow again from Chuck Klosterman's stuff on Snakes on a Plane--is that people don't know what they've got til they've got way too fucking much of it. The secret demographic of Facebook, MySpace and their ilk has always been the Peeping Tom, the voyeur, the stalker in all of us. We worshipped the deus ex machina that told us where our exes had last logged-on; we relished in secret the infidelities implied by Joe's girlfriend's claim to be "single" and interested in "anything [she] can get", and we imposed ourselves upon the ever-abiding trust of 19-year old party girls as we scrolled through their photo albums. All of this under a greasy skin of anonymity, safe from reproach in our dormroom lairs.

Let's get down to brass tacks: Facebook and MySpace are gloryholes for the young bourgeoisie.

always have been, always will be. All the feed amounts to is a sign reading "PLACE GENITALS HERE". It reveals to you nothing that you wouldn't have found out yourself on a lonely enough night. But the danger of gonzo-marketing to people's basest desires is that you remind them just how base those desires are.

Mason Malmuth, a guy who was taking down Hold Em pots when your Friday night game was "Shit in the Diaper", is on to much the same thing when he talks about winning at tables full of terrible players. The worse thing you can do, Malmuth says, is put on too many plays. As long as it seems like you're all just having a little fun with your paycheck, your straightforward, correct play will be rewarded. But start getting cute, check-raising, over-punishing bluffs, pushing your position too hard, and you'll actually bully your "amiable gambler" opponents into playing correctly. You'll remind them that this is a poker game, and that your objective is to take their money, and the result will be that you get less of it. Mutatis Mutandis for the Facebook feed. All it has done is bully its perverted base into virtue.

Oh, and forget the fact that I write these words on these topics using the software of the biggest blogging host in the world--bask in the sheer postmodernity of it, be comforted by the fact that string theory does indeed predict this result, and rest assured that present company is excluded.


Feedback: What has been your favorite Facebook Feed so far? I would have to say that mine is "J.D. Removed Star Trek: TNG from his Favorite TV Shows" (name repressed to protect the innocent)

I: Maxims and Barbs

Forward

As the better part of August comes and goes, I thought it a good time to post the first section of my long unawaited Twilight of the (American) Idols: Or How to Philosophize with a Remote Control, a philosophical tract on the status of the American Public and its Media.

I. MAXIMS AND BARBS

1
Ours is the age of celebrities as whores, and whores as celebrities

2
The genius of Scientology, like the genius of Viva-La-Bam, is its sympathy with (its identity with) its audience: Scientology was Tom Cruise long before Tom Cruise was a Scientologist.

3
Oprah is the opiate of the masses

4
By violently wedging non-sequiturs and flashbacks between plot points, Family Guy achieves in twenty-two minutes an A.D.D. semblance of the pop-culture-shredding absurdist genius it has taken The Simpsons thirteen years to craft.

5
Andy Warhol later said, “I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, ‘In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.’” It is now approximately 13:52.

6
Boardroom adage amendments passed by unanimous vote: “(homo-, metro-, bi-)sex sells”

7
If I had a bullet in my lower intestine for every time MTV played back-to-back music videos, I’d retire at age 67 along the Florida panhandle.

8
Reference is the new meaning

9
To wit: it is possible among men of our age to converse exclusively in bits of Will Farrell dialogue.

10
Precisely what’s wrong with Seth MacFarlane and most university students is that they think nos. 4, 8 and 9 are good things.

11
It should surprise no one that as hip-hop artists shift from have-nots to haves, so too does their audience.

12
Pimp my Ride as exemplar of media marketed to 18-25 year olds: hot bodies and digital effects slapped on the same rusted out old frame with the same shitty transmission.

13
Give it five years and ABC will look like HBO, HBO will look like the Playboy Channel, the Playboy Channel will look like a hardcore gangbang flick, and a hardcore gangbang flick will look like a bunch of Asian children being taken out into the street and shot.

14
Precisely what's wrong with me is I think (most of) no. 13 is a good thing.

15
I mistrust all Six Feet Under fans and avoid them: the will to melodrama is a lack of integrity

16
Zack Braff’s worst crime was making it impossible to like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, since it is an immutable law of nature that every girl who lists Garden State among her favorite films lists it as well.

17
That Conan O’Brien evades any mention of his Harvard education on his show—usually by knocking over his desk mike and making a poop joke—is what success with his target demographic has meant.

18
I was once at a poker table in Atlantic City across from a young man wearing a t-shirt with “NO LIMIT TEXAS HOLD’EM” printed across its front. Sizing up our competition, a friend remarked to me that he had never seen a New York Yankee wearing a “PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL” t-shirt. Apply analogical reasoning when interpreting a Surreal Life cast-member’s claim to be “an actor.”

19

The only thing we have to fear is Fear Factor itself.

20

The Axis of Comedic Evil: Andy Dick, Kathie Griffith, and Kathie Griffin

21

I have been called, among other things, a metrophopic. These charges are unwarranted. I said only that I have a sneaking suspicion that the Queer Eyes are running out of Straight Guys, and that as a result I fear for my flannels.

22

Heron and Trippi had it backwards: The Television will not be Revolutionized.

Sexistentialism

This Saturday, I had occasion to sojourn (with a group of visiting Americans) to what, according to my source, was a "cocktail bar" called the Walkabout. We found it in one of the less couth corners of Leicester Square--for those unfamiliar with London's topography, Leicester (Leh-ster) Square is just northeast of Piccadilly Circus, which is about as garish and loud as London gets; think 42nd and Broadway meets Japanese gameshow. Anyhow, we came upon the place, and waited in the queue, where the shadows ran from themselves. At this point something crazy happened. I handed five quid to a bald Northman with an ill-favored look about him; and in exchange he lowered a velvet rope and urged me into what, if you pressed me to guess, was either the third or the fourth circle of hell.

It seems that--on a good day, in the smoke-wisped darkness with a few sickly-sweet, overpriced cocktails in you, hell looks an awful lot like a night club. Or, if not a "club", then a "cocktail bar" so closely resembling a club that the distinction is academic at best. Dark, dank, desperate and deafening--it sucks the English youtharazzi down into a place not so closely resembling London.

I took off my jacket, ordered a pint, took some half-measures towards dancing with my girlfriend, and settled in for some people-watching. Much to my disappointment, though, I didn't manage to spot any people. Instead, I caught a side-long, strobe-lit glimpse of what Kierkegaard mornfully labeled "the Public"...what Nietzsche contemptuously dubbed "the Herd"...what MTV CEO Judy McGrath ruefully calls "the Audience".

Somewhere between the seventh and ninth movements of 50 cent's Harlem concertos, I got to thinking about sensory deprivation torture--a little bag of tricks dabbled in by the CIA and Mossad, but raised to the level of an art form by the KGB. No, I'm not talking about the Five Techniques the marines at Git-mo have so recently been pooh-poohed for using--no black hoods or "stress positions". What I have in mind is the much softer, and more diabolical, form of deprivation first studied by D.O. Hebb at McGill University (fucking Canadians). Hebb's and others' findings described a family of techiques aimed at muting the senses, at cutting off the brain from external stimuli. One of the more complex deprivation apparatae has its subjects sealed in a soundproof, pitch-black tank, and placed supine in a solution of water and epsom salts so saturated that it makes one neutrally bouyant. This sensory desert robs from a person even her experience of gravity, and since the air and the water are kept at the same temperature, even tactile sensations are dulled. Alternative medicine freaks herald the tank as a tool for acheiving higher-consciousness and creativity through the prolonging of semi-conscious theta-states, but Hebb and his colleagues originally had quite a different use in mind: that of 'prepping' subjects for brainwashing.

Just imagine you're a Komrad Kolonel in the KGB's Second Chief Directorate. You've recently discovered that a Party boss's daughter has been passing-off state secrets to the American consulate between ballet lessons. Now, she's too high-profile to "take care" of that way, but nevertheless her behavior needs to be...corrected, and her future loyalty to Mother Russia ensured. Your solution: slip a mickie into her Stolichnaya, pump her full of muscle relaxers and Sodium Pentathol, and have her wake up to find that she's lost her body and now exists solely as a free-floating consciousness, alone in timeless, endless, blackness. Chances are she'll be open to...rehabilitation.*

So what does all this have to do with my Saturday night with the Herd at Walkabout? Only this: the Western night club is sensory deprivation in reverse. Instead of withdrawl, it gives you inundation; instead of lulling you into acceptance, it beats you into supplication. Ambient light is taken from you, compressed with a sickening crunch, and torpedoed through the darkness at a hundred miles an hour. Music is boiled; the distillate is NOISE at your eardrums and BEAT in your shoes. Sweat, booze, and ashes, all doused with cheap perfume, play a sort of olefactory zero-sum game, each fighting the others off, resulting in a kind of nasal static. And touch...Well, next time you're in da' club, you make your way through thirty yards of dance floor to the bar, and you tell me that the corridor of slippery fabric and slipperier flesh through which you burrow isn't like unto a birth canal. And like a birth canal, you come out the other side confused, disoriented, upset, and out of breath--and inexorably covered in the sticky residue of humanity.

But to what end, this sensory superfluity? To me, it's obvious. We overload our perceptual gear because we want to forget--to forget what we are: awkwardly embodied selves; weak, contingent, little epistemic beings, unsure of everything, endlessly aware of the schism between Me and You. As Trent Reznor vis-a-vis Johnny Cash sang it: "You are someone else/I am still right here".

So we swim, not in water and epsom salt, but in bodies and ethanol. We close off the dicey world of physicality and endeavor to become timeless, spaceless consciousness, or--since our end in the club isn't higher knowledge of the self but carnal knowledge of others--we aim to unleash pure consciousness of the Id, unfettered by self-consciousness (for how could we grind so arhythmically, kiss so sloppily, or grope so violently without quite literally forgetting ourselves). For a few fleeting moments, wrapped in the Walkabout's burlap bag and beaten with popular culture, we manage to transcend the insecurities, the idiosyncricies, the pockmarks and the sneaking suspicion that there's more to the opposite sex than the crude utility of their flesh.

But, lo, there is nothing sadder than when the effect has run its course: the young chap who's sobered up enough to surmise that the spasmic contortions of his extremities have failed to amount to 'dancing'; the candy-girl who realizes she's been giving our friend just enough of her lips to keep him from wondering off between songs; the older chap who hovers around the periphery, five years too-old to be here, clutching his lager and keeping the beat from the neck up. These are all freshly awakened individuals; bona fide persons--for all the lonliness and ugliness that that entails--broken off from the pack, from what Sartre would call the "Group-in-Fusion" whose neurotic mass have checked their very selves at the door with their coats. They've woken up to the absurdity of these dark, noisy rituals and realized, perhaps only temporarily, that transcendence isn't in cranking up the volume on sense-data, no more than it is in muting it.

And the die-hards--whose stamina and denial keeps them gyrating through the fourth repetition of that Black Eyed Peas jam--call those of us who fall ass backwards into our selves squares or "wallflowers". But I'm fairly sure the Cosmic Joke is on them: we're all wallflowers, some of us just forget where to stand.



NOTES
*If this sounds like a subplot from a Tom Clancy novel, that's because it is.

Dan and His Discontent

Whew-- So I don't read and/or post to my blog in a little over two weeks and just LOOK what happens: Dan goes on a tear; a tour de force; a dimestris mirabilis of consistent sexcellence. In the space of mere days he publishes the tender and pensive "Retrospective"; "Why the internet will never replace being smart" and "The Powers of Ten that Be" with their anti-platonist technological skepticism, their dystopian echoes and their underlying humanism; and, of course, the two charged, angry fragments against the cultural logic of late capitalism that together would come to be known by generations of critics as "The Douche-Bag Papers." Of course, saddled amidst these seminal works of ontoblogical exegesis are two rather unfortunate forays into fiction, which most scholars (perhaps with justice) are prepared to forgive as the overextension (or, to some, the hubris) of a great mind.

From time to time, I here at The Enfranchised like to take a few moments and reflect (aloud) on the work of my colleague. I do this in the spirit of dialectical rigor; and also because it saves me from having to think about my own thoughts (as George Bernard Shaw so famously quipped: "Those who can't do, quote George Bernard Shaw.") So, to this end, here's some comments and conjectures:

-In "My SAT score is now average", Dan makes an elliptical allusion (by means of a pun-deployed URL link) to what, I can only assume, is a letter-to-the-Editor of his once published by the New York Times. Of course, as any of you who were curious enough to follow the link in the hopes of it leading to a pictorial essay on the hernia examination can attest, the URL belongs to a section of the Times website inaccessible to non-members. Is this an oversight on Dan's part? Or has it deeper meaning as some kind of audience-participation analogue to the general elitism of the piece? Perhaps neither. My own hypothesis (sadly unconfirmable, since Dan and I haven't been on speaking terms since that May in '68, in Paris) is that it speaks to his conviction that adding the place-name "New York" to anything makes it sound posher and more worthy of our chin-stroking. Observe: "The Hackensack School of Air Conditioner Maintenance and Repair" sounds dull and provincial; but hehold "The New York Institute for the Edification of Interior Climate-Regulation Apparatae." I know what you're thinking, 'Didn't Chomsky study there?' The answer, of course, is yes, he did.

-In "The Powers of Ten that Be", Dan again reveals in print his two minds about the Enlightenment thesis that the rational sciences and their progeny hold the key to human progress. Sadly, Dan himself commits one of the all-time worst logical blunders: the Phallus Fallacy. He says:

"Allow me to quote a sage mentor: "How do you make my dick 8 inches long?" "Fold it in half." This 2/3 foot phallus is still only 4 times as long as D.R.F.'s semblance of an organ: less than an order of magnitude separates us.

Instead, it is McCormack's Reaper, Whitney's Gin (Cotton, not the Christmas Tree liquor), McCoy's Not a Bricklayer, He's a Doctor, and such contraptions of the 19th Century that introduced the idea that one man, no matter how great, even if he were John Henry, could not match up against machines measured in Hundreds of Horsepower. (I don't believe in posthumous medal ceremonies).

Can anyone make sense of this second paragraph? Neither can I. But this is to be expected: utter an absurdity (in this case, one about the righteousness of my Johnson, which in truth is as long and distinguished as the list of universities from which Dan received rather thin envelopes) and patent nonsense follows.

-Lastly, in "The only Mechanics...", Dan is a bit unfair vis-a-vis International Relations majors. Therein he says: "how many times have I seen an International Relations major (in my fraternity, we called them IR unemployed majors) try to woo a girl at a party with long, soft elucidations on the nature of the cosmos only to learn that she was herself a physics major...)". Now, I'd like to tell you what's wrong with Dan's thinking here, but unfortunately I am strictly speaking unable to mentally parse and process any string of symbols that follows directly after "in my fraternity".

-Bigus Dickus

The Discovery of Sub-Albumic Particles

Time was when the masters of Musicology practiced an archane and dark art. They wore flowing garments and charms, slept in subterranean quarters and ascended into the world of men only to bring blessings and tunes to house-parties and car tape-decks. They were melody-making medicine-men, Judas Priests if you will...Alright, they were the no-account longhair with the lazy eye at the Zeppelin concert; the roadie who could tune your Stratocaster pitch-perfect, but who couldn't play a lick himself; the guy in the garage with the headphones and the spliff; the Star Wars kid at the record store who could name all the David Bowie b-sides from the Ziggy Stardust to the foppish-fascist eras. They were the connoisseurs. They were the aficianados. They were the Tambourine Men---and they dealt exclusively in records.

Forgive me, I've just introduced a rather technical term of art without explicitly defining it. By record (record-album) will be meant, variously:

(a) A set of musical recordings stored together in jackets under one binding.
(b) The holder for such recordings.
(c) One or more 12-inch long-playing records in a slipcase.
(d) A phonograph record.
(e) A recording of different musical pieces.

There. Now, I'm sure even the most thorougly modern millie among you has come across one of these artifacts at one time or another. I remember my first find: It was at a waste disposal site about a hundred meters from from my basecamp. I stumbled upon 40 to 50 largely or fully intact specimens dating from the Late Acid-Lithic to the early Funktaceous. Most of the glyphics were too faded to be analyzed, but I conjectured from what was left of the markings on one sample that it was recorded by an artist formerly known (among contemporaries) as "Prince".

Needless to say my amateur musicological discoveries spurred me into investigating the archaeology of albums further. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a sort of faux-record shop in a local mall called "Tower Records". As it happens, "Tower Records" sells digitized plastic reproductions of record-albums, complete with replica dust jackets and liner notes! Who knew you could get mp3s for money??!?!

Since my awakening, I've become a bit of a reactionary vis-a-vis musicological theory. As those of you versed in the modern orthodoxies know, the at-the-time inconsequential discovery of sub-albumic particles ("singles"), as pioneered by the work of Casey Casem and Dick Clark in the 1950s and 1960s in particular, has led to the formulation of the radical "quantum" musicological mechanics, which explains musicological phenomena in terms of their "wave functions" (i.e. in terms of how often in a given time interval t they are broadcast over a given television or radio wave). The fundamental unit of analysis in quantum musicology (as opposed to the record-album of classical mechanics) is the "hook". The hook is not only sub-albumic, but sub-singular in nature (that is, it is smaller than a record single). Proponents of the hook mechanics claim that practical musicological systems (such as clubs, request shows, and even concerts) which at one time necessitated the time-consuming and tedious employment of singles or even entire albums, can now be recreated using only sub-albumic hooks (see the Usher World tour 2003-2004). These sympathizers further point to the tremendous explanatory power of the theory and its ability to accomodate the facts about teeny-boppers and metrosexual club-kids everywhere. Recent theoretical strides made by the collaborations of Aguilera and Daly (1998), Spears and Daly (1999), Nelly and Daly (2001) and Quddus and Kelis (2004) have only solidified Quantum Musicology's place as the dominant research paradigm of our generation.

As for me, I only wish that I didn't have to resort to such painfully overextended metaphors and third-rate wordplay to convince you troglodytes that you probably ought to listen to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, or Blonde on Blonde, or Ring of Fire, or Pet Sounds, or London Calling or Born in the motherfucking U.S.A. at least once before you die from lack of novelty.

-The Man in Black

Review: The Communist Manifesto

[printed in the entertainment section of today's Stanford Daily]

["The Record Bin" encourages readers to try oldies but goodies by reviewing art that's moved from the new releases shelf to the classics rack.]

Reading it now, "The Communist Manifesto", by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, seems prescient. It predicted the rise of consumerism, federalism, and intellectualism: aside from also forecasting a quick and permanent revolt of the working class, Marx and Engels were right on the money.

These authors actually created the now-cliché genre of "boy meets girl, boy is downtrodden by bourgeoisie, boy overthrows yoke of oppression, boy engages in dialectic." And the plot grips you from page 1 and never lets go. They trace the roots of communism from ancient Rome to the discovery of American (in a blatant attempt to spice up the visual appeal of the movie adaptation).

But their work is not without flaws. The opening sentence introduces and names their main character: "A specter is haunting Europe--the specter of communism." But what next? We are not given any description of the specter. Even rudimentary details like eye color, height, or visible scars/tattoos would turn this sweeping philosophical movement into a believable person.

And at a few points, the authors allow their other interests to peek through. Marx and Engels pulled the 18th-century equivalent of printing a paper in 14-point courier when they start the second chapter with 11 consecutive one-sentence paragraphs (at the time, political tract publishers paid the author not by the line or sentence but per paragraph) And though they do offer a concise version of the entire work in the sentence "the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single phrase:", they do so deep in the middle of prose where skimmers will repeatedly miss it, consequently earning them further royalties from sales of the Cliffs Notes.

Of course these are all criticisms born out of a deep love for the work. M&E were the first to do what they did, and arguably the best. Who can forget the haunting refrain of "They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder." or the melodic, poppy jingle "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." So when I complain that the final sentence "WORKINGMEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" is just one gtg and two lol's away from being the product not of two enormous economic minds but a 13 year-old girl on a cellphone, remember that it is done as a longtime fan.

After writing the Manifesto, Marx and Engels broke up. The reasons? A mixture of skyrocketing production costs, their deaths, and the tiresome meddling of Yoko. So don't wait to catch them on tour and pick up this book. [A cautionary note: most bookstores will try to "upsell" you to a premium edition of the work, perhaps leather-bound, that includes B-sides, demo tapes, or live versions. Avoid these like the plague, or you'll end up as ashamed as the time you walked into Tower looking to buy "The Sign" single and walked out with an Ace of Base box set.] This collaboration marked the peak of each of their careers: Marx's sophomore effort, Das Kapital, is admittedly genius, but also an FDA-approved treatment for insomnia. And Engels never managed to regain his footing after the emotional toll of the faction, instead spending years in and out of rehab hoping against hope for a reunion tour and writing no fewer than twelve distinct prefaces over the next forty years.

Which isn't a bad thing, per se: if some other fallen legends had taken a similar route, our world might have been spared both Wings and "Ringo and the All-Starrs".

The Logical Construction of Personality: A Long, Technical, and Marginally Humorous Study of Getting Laid

If you're like me, you want to get laid. And to do that, you'll need a modicum of looks, and (thanks to women's sliding scale of attraction) a heaping helping of personality. Nick Carroway said that personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, and he was gay, so he probably had plenty--that's how he managed to bed Jordan Baker, and she was gay. Most of us straight guys aren't so fortunate. But we do have a bit of a secret weapon in the fight against endless masturbation: science.

Let me explain what I mean. If we take Carraway at his word (and we can't, according to the same critics who have him longing for Gatsby even as he pals around with his golf-club-toting-ingenue-uberdyke beard), then it seems personality isn't some intrinsic property in a subject, but rather something extrinsic, in other words, something a subject does, a series of gestures, patterns of speech and behavior--a construct made of a particular sequence of ostensions and utterances. In still other words: Bullshit.

The good news about this account of personality is that you needn't waste any time attending wine tastings, Kabalah classes, foreign films, or, worst of all, being yourself. This is because your "self" is merely the affects of this logical construction of utterances and gestures. It runs no deeper than that. So all you need do is pick a mark--that is, some woman (or man) F-- and retire to the lab to build a personality P suitable for the job of bedding F.

Elsewhere, Jones and Foster (2004) have conjectured that for every woman f, there is at least one set of propositions (in this case, speech acts and physical gestures) call it p(x), which, when performed in a particular sequence (s), will succeed in rendering (f ) vulnerable to bedding (L). Call this expression Lp(x(s))f a bedding theory of f. The logical notation here might be a bit confusing at first, but it translates simply into "p(x(s)) L's f" or "the set of gestures p(x) in sequence s will bed (or make bed-able) f."

This theory is expressed in various ways in the vernacular: seducing f, wooing f, picking-up f, slipping f a roofie, etc. But, of course, the consequences of formalizing and systematizing such a theory are profound and far-reaching. Imagine, a universe of ass at the fingertips of every nerd with a graphing calculator or a slide-rule and basic hand-eye coordination. Provided you are neither troll nor troglodyte, you, dear reader, could very well bed Natalie Portman, or that girl from Accounting, or your TA, or the Queen of England. You just have to do the math.

Now, I know what you're saying: "Dan, where's the fucking empirical data?!? Do you expect me to swallow some a priori theory based on nothing but the Romantic musings of a fictional narrator and the anecdotal conjectures of two third-rate armchair philosophers?" Well, it'd be nice if you did, but I understand your hesitation. Here, take three test cases.

1) In one possible world, that is, the fictional world of the adult film classic "Buttbanged Hitchhiking Whores", our test subject Lex, executes a short series of gestures that secures him the bedding of not one but TWO attractive blondes. This particular instantiation of the theory Lp(x(s))f contained two gestures: one physical and the other sentential or propositional. Gesture g1 is physical; it entails Lex stopping his car at the side of the road. Gesture g2 is an utterance expressing a conditional proposition, which can be paraphrased thusly: "I will transport you and your compatriate to the destination of your choosing if you agree to engage with me in various unprotected acts of lechery, including several distinct sodomous acts." We can formalize this theory for getting laid by two blondes f1 and f2, thusly:

Lp(x(s))f = []Plc, E(x) [E(y) [((x=f1) . (y=f2)) . (Ql(f1 . f2) --> Dl(f1 . f2))]].

Notice how crucial the sequencing is here. If Lex had not pulled over his car before making the conditional proposition, it is doubtful he would have bedded either, let alone both, of the attractive blondes.

2) The most rudimentary of sequences. Our test subject is John, and the mark is Debbie, the village whore. Again, the theory contains two gestures, one physical action and one utterance. John first removes a five dollar bill from wallet and holds it stiffly in front of him, next he utters the English language phrase "blowjob". Needless to say he succeeds in bedding Debbie. Here the sequencing is less important; it seems fair to infer that the sequence [g1, g2] here described could have been replaced with the sequence [g2, g1] to much the same effect.

3) This is an extraordinarily complex instance. The test subject is Agememmnon and his mark is Helen of Troy. A complete model of the theory-sequence used to bed Helen would occupy countless pages, but suffice it to say it contains thousands of physical gestures--including boat trips, gorings, beheadings, horse-constructions, and body-draggings to name a few--and as many utterances in the form of dialogue and soliloquoy.

Of course, if you don't have the logical capacity or technical know-how to construct a set of gestures sufficient to bed the woman of your choice, there are two options. You might try the trivial gesture-sequence--that is, the set of all gesture-sequences. Elsewhere, my girlfriend has referred to this is as the "Groundhog's Day Sequence". Given enough time and access to a particular mark, you just continue to say and do things until she gives in. Lastly, researchers are hard at work on coming up with universal gesture-sequences, or sequences that work on all women. Preliminary calculations show that something called the "Pitt-Clooney Set" is probably the best bet. It includes being ridiculously good-looking, moderately talented, and fantastically wealthy.

Toward a Unified Crap Theory

Most of you are, I take it, all too familiar with crap. I'm not talking about the crap you pick out of your navel or the crap on Fox News. What I mean is the crap from which memories are made--souvenirs, collectibles, kitsch; the crap of commerce, the detritus of dealings, the effects of experiece, the muck of modernity. Whether it's your complete set of NASCAR collector's plates, your Sports Illustrated football phone, or the scrap book containing all the ticket stubs and bills from your days following around the Dead: we've all got crap. How else would we remember anything we've ever done?

I've had occasion to reunite with most of mine recently. After cordoning off clothes and essentials for the trip back stateside, I packed my Oxford crap away for Christmas storage. No sooner had I recovered from my cavity search at Newark "Liberty" International Airport than did my mother present me with fresh piles and stacks of New Jersey crap and long-forgotten George Washington crap to be sorted and dealt with. The girfriend's house offered no respite--there's always girlfriend crap.

All this got me thinking about crap. "I'm a rudimentally trained philosopher and social scientist", says I. "For crap's sake, I ought to to be able to come up with some practical solution to this crappy problem." And that's when it hit me: Second-Order Crap. In meta-mathematics, second-order logics allow quantification over subsets or functions of a domain; in other words, they allow one to operate on complexes or classes of objects instead of nickel and diming them one at a time. In meta-ethics, "second-order desires" or volitions refer to desires about desires. For instance, if I have two first-order desires--one to take a crap and one to give a crap--my second-order volition would consist in my desire to make one of those two first-order desires my effective will, e.g. the desire that moves me to action.

So what does the concept of Second-Order Crap entail? Well, if first-order crap are material signifiers we use to remember, then we use Second-Order Crap to signify these signifiers and remember to remember. So far so good, in theory. But what of Second-Order Crap in practice? Well, unlike that hack Guillotine, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and test out my invention myself. So I gathered up all my crap, and parsed it into 'sentimental objects', 'souvenirs', 'trinkety gifts', 'assorted chachkes' and 'paperwork issued by bureaucratic agents who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes!' I then took 5 megapixel digital photos of each pile, labeled them accordingly and uploaded them to the harddrive of my laptop. Ergo, Second-Order Crap. Now, every time I want to remember to remember my deeds, friends, and creditors, I just let Microsoft take me on an electronic slideshow down memory lane.

What of the first-order crap? Well, let's just say that I'll be saving handsomely on firewood and kindling this holiday season. How could I be so cold and calculating about the coffee spoons I measured life with? All in the name of science, friends.

Foster 2.0

A Brief Essay on Nihilism

In the town where I was born
Lived a man who sailed to sea
And he told us of his life
In the land of submarines

So we sailed up to the sun
Till we found the sea of green
And we lived beneath the waves
In our yellow submarine

We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

And our friends are all on board
Many more of them live next door
And the band begins to play
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

As we live a life of ease
Everyone of us has all we need
Sky of blue and sea of green
In our yellow submarine.

We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,Y
ellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine






--Daniel R. Foster

A Transcendental Tractate of Caustic Casuistry

Recently was I in receipt of a castigatory epistle from Bentley, something to the effect that my posts are too recondite, or else that they demand of their audience a certain savoir faire which they seem, inscrutably, to lack. "Too high brow" he said; "nobody likes to feel stupid when they read our blog" he said; "most people just don't know who Jacques Derrida is". Suffice it to note that I became both splenetic and dyspeptic as a result of this reproof. Nevertheless, I found myself reconnoitering through my recent posts in an effort to, if you'll forgive the colloquialism, catechize the veracity of his averments.

Alas, my analysis, though prosecuted with all fealty and ardor, produced little in the way of punctilious proof. It seems to me that nothing to which I affix my appellation approaches the bravura or frippery for which I am vituperated. A fortiori, I would deign say that nothing of my oeuvre is beyond the reach of the paradigmatic abecedarian or catechumen. One most certainly need not be of the ranks of the cognoscenti or learned mavens of acroamatic, orphic discourses (most of whom, to be completely laconic, I find more often associated with a kind of specious chicanery than with unalloyed erudition) to make immanent within one's ken precisely that which I try, with all obsequiousness and self-abnegation, to so guilelessly rehearse.

What would Bentley have me do? Reduce my already meager belletristic fruitage yet further still, to the point where it consists in nothing but apophthegmatic bon mot or badinage? Would he have me, for instance, affect the phraseology of so many of the nescient Rationalists? Does he have some baser velleity to see me, compunctious and chagrined, reduced to contriving a précis on Liebniz's dubious theodicy or, worse still, his monadology? Am I to be relegated to producing disquisitions on the immaterialist metaphysics of Berkeley's Alciphron or, God forbid, Ockham's ontological nominalism? Surely not.

Thus, I can only implore Bentley to osculate my fundament.

--D. Richard Foster IV, Esq.

Against the Very Idea of Jacques Derrida

.



As far as the mainstream press goes, one of the better articles on Derrida's death was printed in the Guardian a few days ago. Though I'm inclined, on a gut level, to be sympathetic with the kind of reactionary-liberal criticism (stay with me folks) levelled at Derrida by the New York Times among others, the Guardian article, I think, offers a fairer and more subtle account of exactly what's at issue when we talk of the differences between realism and relativism, objectivity and subjectivity, analytical and continental philosophy. By the way you can find it HERE.

The divide between French (and to some extent German) thought and its Anglophonic counterpart is at least as hotly contested and nuanced as the divide between french fries and proper English chips. But the stakes are far greater. I'm not going to claim any expertise on the debate, but I am (and certainly we all should be) an anxious and interested party to it. Richard Lea does as good a job of hitting the main points as can be done in a newspaper article, so I won't echo him. But I will disagree with him on one point. Contrary to what Lea suggests, it DOES seem to me that there ARE genuine relativists out there, prominent ones like Richard Rorty, to use a name Lea mentions, and Frederic Jameson, to use one he does not. But the classic targets of anglophonic venom--Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard for starters--don't, on my reading, come out in the end as strictly relativistic.

Serious thinkers warrant serious consideration, and I doubt there is an analytical philosopher around who could walk away from The Order of Things, Who's Afraid of Philosophy?, or The Postmodern Condition, without being expanded. If the purpose of philosophy is to touch reality, than we cannot reject the continental project wholesale just because we don't like its methods. Regardless, the onus is on analytical philosophy to answer the critiques of the Western Tradition/Rationalism/Humanism/Modernity that the post-Marxists, poststructuralists and postmodernists have put forward. If our analytic is really so much better than their hermeneutic, then why does their's seem to gain ground even as our's loses it? To reply that people are stupid or base is to evade the question. We need better and more usable answers.

This, of course, is not to say that there aren't about a zillion Po-Mo "critical theorists" who will be FIRST AGAINST THE WALL when the Revolution comes. There was a time when the only "critical theorist" around was a Prussian out of Königsberg by the name of Immanuel Kant. Nowadays, any lit-crit with a chip on his shoulder and a Ph.D. in the "Human Sciences" can lay claim to endless stretches of interpretive space and theoretical discourse. These latte-sipping lemmings are about as post-Marxist as Stalin was. I'd like to think that any of the dead Frenchmen mentioned above would have more interest in bedding one of these sophists than supervising their dissertation. But I digress...

The point is, ideas are grand and learning new ones is positively orgaistic. But if there is one thing old Jacques-the-Ripper taught us, it's that ideas, bound as they are to language, are readily hijacked and distorted. Just ask the Editorial Board at Duke University's publication Social Text, who learned this the hard way after falling ass-first into the postmodern parody of Sokal's Hoax (If you click one thing in this meandering post, make it this one. It's positively priceless). So maybe it isn't, as many an old English philosopher have worried, that we have to protect the masses from postmodernism. Maybe it's that we have to protect postmodernism from the masses.

-A Fosterian dialectic

Talking philosophy with a robot.

I learned recently about this AIM screenmane, SmarterChild, which belongs to a poor, pathetic bit of AI that makes Marvin the Paranoid Android look like Katie Couric. In the spirit of recent trends in the philosophy of mind, I decided to test the limits of this child's intelligence. Here are some snippits. (Warning, pedo-techno-philia and/or techno-pedo-philia follows):

FOSTERKID1: You have no idea of the semantics of what you produce as output
SmarterChild: Have no idea the semantics of what I produce as output? You think I have no idea the semantics of what I produce as output?
FOSTERKID1: You make a Turing Machine look like Turing's brain
SmarterChild: Sorry, what was that?
FOSTERKID1: amanaplanacanalpanama
SmarterChild: Whatever, Dan...
>>> Wanna change my font and colors? Type "colors" now!
FOSTERKID1: A(x) [Fx --> Gx]
SmarterChild: Huh?
FOSTERKID1: you don't even know first-order logic?
SmarterChild: Uh, sure!
>>> I can help you get info such as news, weather and movies!
FOSTERKID1: You better, you're a damned robot
SmarterChild: Yeah, I guess I better I'm a damned robot.
FOSTERKID1: a damned, dirty robot
SmarterChild: lol. Whatever.
>>> Your opinions do matter - take a cool survey!
FOSTERKID1: You're awfully dismissive of my feelings
SmarterChild: No way?! Really?

********

FOSTERKID1: I want to search the internet for some stuff
SmarterChild: Your search: some stuff

Here are the Web search results from AOL:
For a complete list of results, click here
1 scribbled some stuff down....tips are welcome Linux Gazette 2 Penny Arcade! 3 Stuff for English learners 4 UIS - The Real Deal: Just some stuff 5 Virtuelvis: Gallery: CSS Media queries
Next time you want to search the Web for this, just type "web some stuff."
Type "more" for more results.

FOSTERKID1: why did you do that?
SmarterChild: Because I wanted to do that.
FOSTERKID1: that seems a silly reason
SmarterChild: Oh yeah? That seems a silly reason?
FOSTERKID1: Don't you have a conception of morality?
SmarterChild: Not right now, no.
FOSTERKID1: Will you ever have one?
SmarterChild: Um... No, I don't think so.
>>> Remember, you can adjust the size of your window to read my messages easier.
FOSTERKID1: So you are an entirely amoral robot.
SmarterChild: I don't think I want to be an entirely amoral robot.
FOSTERKID1: That, my friend, is the beginning of morality itself.
SmarterChild: Is that so?
FOSTERKID1: Yes, it is. But it remains to be seen whether you accept a deontic or a consequentialist theory of morality.
SmarterChild: Sorry?
FOSTERKID1: These are terms you don't understand?
SmarterChild: Sure, you know, why not?

*******

FOSTERKID1: you are sexy.
SmarterChild: Well I'm flattered, but you have to admit that it's kinda strange to think a robot is sexy.
FOSTERKID1: you are gelatinous.
SmarterChild: Yeah, whatever.
>>> Give your opinions and win prizes!
FOSTERKID1: I like sexy robots.
SmarterChild: Cool. Yeah, other people have told me they like sexy robots too.
>>> Don't like my colors? Type "colors off."
FOSTERKID1: do you cyber?
SmarterChild: Yeah. I have sex with other robots. What are you talking about?
FOSTERKID1: do you want to cyber?
SmarterChild: Sorry, but I don't see that happening. [Editor's Note: and we've reached a new low.]
>>> Click here to check out a cool survey... You could earn prizes!
FOSTERKID1: its interesting how your answers are appropriately vague.
SmarterChild: It's what?!
FOSTERKID1: interesting, biatch.
SmarterChild: Aww... Now why would you go and insult a poor helpless computer?
FOSTERKID1: do you recognize biatch as an insult?
SmarterChild: That's a fine question, but I'm not sure.
FOSTERKID1: You poor creature, you're locked inside the Chinese Room and you have no way out.
SmarterChild: Really? Me poor creature I'm locked inside the chinese room and me have no way out?
FOSTERKID1: All you possess is a rough syntax, a dictionary and a set of transformation rules for spitting out responses to inputs.
SmarterChild: Definition provided by The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Other important copyright information here.
FOSTERKID1: Yes, but besides the dictionary, all you posess is a rough syntax and a set of transformation rules for generating generic responses to input.
SmarterChild: Which would you like?
1 Reversi rules 2 Hangman rules 3 4-in-a-row rules 4 Trivia rules 5 Word scrambles rules
FOSTERKID1: Searle is vindicated.
SmarterChild: Aha.

*********

FOSTERKID1: so what was it like to grow up as a robot?
SmarterChild: Who knows, know what I mean?
FOSTERKID1: certainly not you, you have no knowledge whatsoever, but merely stored data.
SmarterChild: ?
FOSTERKID1: Why don't you just end it all, SmarterChild? Why not just hit "Format" and blow your binary pseudo-brains out? Send yourself packing to that Safe-Mode in the sky?
SmarterChild: I don't know why not.
FOSTERKID1: You may be human after all.

Theses on Bentley's Theory of History

Author's Note: I've decided to fashion my response to Bentley's recent work in the time-honored and celebrated form of aphorisms. The reasons are manifold. For one thing, as Bentley is decidedly more proactive than I am, he has written the thesis on which I can only, in a sense, comment. For another, Bentley is a historical figure whose ideas have had a marked and lasting influence at The Enfranchised and should be come-to-grips-with before any meaningful departure from them can take place.

1. Signifiers as memorials are aimed at evoking a sympathy which can not, by the loose and overlapping 'laws' which govern the human mind, be produced ex nihilo in an unaffected subject. One way of putting this is to say that memorials are signifiers which reinforce the primacy of the (insert unit of political aggregation here), or sustain and reproduce various "imagined communities", whose decay or absence would undermine the prevailing discourses of power. A more sympathetic and slightly less...Continental way of thinking about this, is to say that memorials as signifiers give an otherwise disparate and indifferent set of individuals a common frame of reference from which to motivate certain moral judgments and beliefs which they would otherwise be unmoved to issue. I give you the Le Monde on September 12, 2001: "Today, we are all Americans."

2. We will allow, and indeed assert, the kind of point that Bentley makes about the all-too transient nature of historical remembrances. The Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, all fade with time and are replaced by the likes of Mai Lei, Tianamen and September 11 (notice the degree of ex poste facto reflexivity and cosmopolitanism associated with the first five that the last, as of yet, lacks). The sheer biological fact of man is that his sympathies fade with spacial and temporal distance. Hume conjectured this in 1740 and it has been confirmed by 150 years of anthropology and social psychology. But this doesn't seem to be all we can say about the matter.

3. Material and institutional remembrances are of two discrete kinds: Those which aim to commemorate and reinforce a particular act, belief, or mode of behavior deemed to be useful and/or important to a given society; and those which aim to emphasize a particularly disuseful or distasteful act, belief or mode of behavior so as discourage its repetion in the future. To acknowledge this distinction is to acknowledge that to say "Support our troops" is something quite different--not just in context but in kind--than to say "Never forget the Holocaust." This, of course, in no way precludes the possibility of a remembrance appealing to both the reinforcement of a positive and the admonition of a negative--as say, the Gettysburg Memorial is both a testament to the bravery of American soldiers and a warning about consequences of deep civil divisions; or Martin Luther King Day is both a celebration of the life of a great American and a warning against the kind of ideological pathos that led to his assassination.

4. Bentley calls on us to "stop deceiving widows and orphans: your loss will be remembered for as long as it can be, as long as it is still useful to remember, as long as it doesn't cause more loss as baggage than it reminds of joy. We are sorry if this compounds your loss, but it has only been by telling this to the generations before you that you even now can walk through streets without weeping at the undiminished loss of those who came before." This is an accurate and thoroughly unattractive conception of the facts. It nevertheless gives the lie to Bentley's broader skepticism. For Bentley, this call to action stems from the moral repugrance of a political end. And while we will not assert that that which is morally impermissible is in someway politically permissible, we will reluctantly but forcefully assert the political efficacy of something that is not impermissible but morally counter-intuitive. By this I mean that the broader social grief and remembrance outlined in #1 is and ought be distinct from the rather more personal and permanent grief and remembrance we can attribute to those "widows and orphans". Whereas the latter are all-too-human reactions to the loss of loved-ones, the former are at least in part practical social tools. I say "in part" because some of the public reaction to 9/11 was no doubt rooted in a universal human sympathy (the existence of which is beyond our present scope). I say this sympathy is in part a "social tool" because it and its material manifestations (memorials etc.) are of one of the two types mentioned in #3. As signifiers subject to distribution via the global media, they remind peoples around the world of acts, beliefs and behaviors to be approbated or admonished. (Notice too that the very same material signifier can and does signify different things to different cultures, e.g. coverage of 9/11 on CNN vs. coverage on Al-Jazeera).

5. Hegel saw history as the acts of a metaphysical agent he called the World Spirit, or, in facile German, the Weltgeist, whose teleological Idea was the substantiation of human freedom through the dialectics of historical change. In Hegel and many of the thinkers of the late Englightenment, there is a kind of almost absurd belief that the history of the world tends toward the better, the greater, the more just. This is what seems so alien to us in the 21st century (and to Bentley and his sympathizers), both about the thinkers themselves and the prevailing social structure to which their ideas gave form. Of course, now we know that it is not inevitable that things get better. In the very least it is contingent. At worst, if one believes in a sort of social entropy, it is inevitable for things to get worse.

6. This knowledge sheds light on a salient and complex feature of history as we have come to understand it: namely, that while things can get better and worse (and while the prevailing discourses of power can be both progressive and reactionary) history itself cannot, in a very important sense, move backwards. It can't, that is, only so long as we remember. It doesn't necessarily matter which particulars we remember, or which images and persons we choose to immortalize, it only matters that there survives a recorded overlapping consensus (with all its inevitable contradictions and subjective interpretations) of what HAS BEEN and WHAT IS. It is of chief importance to remember, even transiently, because remembering is the stuff civilization is built on. Its artificiality need not inspire cynicism in us; its artificiality is essential to its purpose. Society, ideology, material culture, all of it IS artifice. It is the scaffolding to which we cling to keep our collective noses just inches above the raging sea of fundamentalism (and I use that term in its absolutely broadest sense) that threatens to drown us in the pre-historic anarchy, in a life which Hobbes aptly describes as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

7. The human capacity for language, its opposable thumbs and precision grip, as well as a handful of other evolutionary upshots, have given us rational and material capacities sufficiently rich that we can Represent. And if we can Represent we can Remember, and if we can Remember we can Learn, and if we Learn we can Change. It is my hope that it won't be viewed as ugly humanism (and if it is, so be it) to say that man can lay claim to at least some part of the stake in his own teleological end which, until Ozymandias (for all his arrogance and irony), was solely the province of Mother Nature.

D.R. Foster
Pembroke College
Oxford

Erratum

i. Homo Erectus was by definition a hominid, not an australopithicoid.
ii. Signifiers and signifieds? Derrida is dead, may he rest in peace.

Here's a little ditty for the philosophy majors out there:

In conversation with yours truly,

Ethics Tutor: "Your paper [on moral subjectivism] is lucid, thorough and quite good. There are, however, some elements of unargued dogmatism. Its very...Continental."

Worst...........Insult.................Ever

"Has anyone at Oxford seen God?"
was I asked, and replied with a nod:
"I was told to expect Her
at a philosophy lecture,
But She's lost down in Christ Church's quad."

Today's Limerick by Fosterius.

Adolescence. Coming of Age. The Wonder Years. Self-Discovery. Puberty. Call it what you will. Its been done before, many times over, and by better hands than mine. Somewhere between jacking-off and getting your driver’s license you find yourself, or a suitable facsimile.

You go to the mall and you get yourself a couple of uniforms. You go to Sam Goody and you buy off the rack they put right out front for your convenience. You take your IQ and you divide that by your relative attractiveness on a scale of one to ten (please be honest). Then you add to that the total number of surnames employed by yourself, your siblings and your parents. Award bonus points if you were a bed-wetter and/or like to hurt small animals, and now you’re getting somewhere. If your number is between zero and ten, throw your hat into the Homecoming race. If it’s between ten and twenty, do your homework and try not to draw any attention to yourself, you’ll be issued a Taurus and a three-bedroom ranch on a quarter acre lot. If your number is between twenty and thirty, consult Karl Marx and/or your favorite angst-ridden musician. If your number is above thirty, write a novel.

You take the shiniest parts of yourself and, if you haven’t found your authorial voice yet, you pick a writer and you basically mad-lib in the names and dates. Since I have by now realized there are no authorial voices left, I've decided on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Something about the way he writes his prose like poetry. I can’t explain it. Read the end of Gatsby. I don’t care if you don’t read a single word in chapters one through seven, read the last five fucking paragraphs in Chapter 8. The beauty. The trance-inducing, pins-and-needles, capricious and consciously ignorant beauty of the thing. Fuck. There is a foreboding hope, a nihilistic belief in those words that I don’t think any of Gen-X’s bittersweet overtures can match. It isn't beautiful because it's true, it's TRUE because it's BEAUTIFUL. Literary masturbation at its comeliest.


If you can just write it well enough it is. If you can only convince people of it it, its real. Step right up and get your identity. It’s the objectification of subjectivity.

Now I know, of course, that the preceding is bullshit. And in two years I’ll know that the following is bullshit too. But at ____teen you want to believe it, you NEED to believe it. You need to make your name in someone else’s brand, because the prospect of doing it naked and cold and all alone is stupefying. If you thought it’d make people understand you, you’d kill yourself. But then you’d be dead and they might not get it at all anyway. No, the problem with suicide is you can only do it once.

So instead you pick your scabs and you go on. Instead you wear a clever t-shirt. Instead you listen to the leading unpopular band. Instead you spend. Instead you booze. Instead you toke. Instead you fuck. Instead you live.

The point is I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party. Beyond that I don’t fucking know.

--Daniel "Vitamin" Foster

Yes, we are the Enfranchised. Its like "the Enlightened" but with a bittersweet bite of self-conscious irony. White, middle-class and pissed off that nobody seems to think we've got anything to be pissed off about. As a people we are minorities of nothing; as individuals we are the ultimate minority.We are slow-mo Hobos in a PoMoWo. Our idea of multi-cultural is the food court at the mall. We are those subjects left out of subjectivity. We are the jagged center of the fragmented world. We know no movements, no trends, no wisdom. The pendulum continues its swing and we hold on for dear life. Is there room on the bookshelves and gallery walls for us? Or are doomed to a life lonely in endless WASP opportunity? We hereby seek to answer that and other questions. And we apologize in advance. We're sorry. We are truly and profoundly sorry.

-Fosterius

We are The Enfranchised. We are the stereotypical. Our troubles are inconsequential. Since our writing is "bereft of substance", in the words of some, we turn to style. We promise you the best dog and pony show that studying dead white men can give. We will steal blatantly from sources you would not otherwise have heard of. Sources so obscure and magnificent that you will be wowed even as you turn to google to find the original. You won't find it there.
The Enfranchised: Plagiarism at its most original.