By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Artifacture via MidJourney
Vicky Boykis writes my favourite nerdcore newsletter. She is a computer programmer originally from Russia and has young children with all the challenges those identifiers entail. I found her on Twitter, which is why Twitter is a good thing.
Her latest issue talks about search in ways I simply had not heard before, as much as I try to keep up.
o Google is out, hopelessly commercialized and filled with Reddit links. (It is? Really? Maybe because I hardly go on Reddit I don't see that much but I agree that it is commercialized, and my other critique [which she doesn't have] -- it turns up Wikipedia results, reinforcing the awfulness of Wikipedia.) But I thought nerds liked Google so this comes as a surprise. Google issued its first-even dividend (!) today, imagine, so no wonder nerds, who lean left or at least libertarian anti-stagnant-corporation, are now banging on Google.
o She doesn't mention Bing. I go on Bing merely because it gives you points you can eventually collect to get $5 over a long period of time. Every day I do a bunch of those silly things to make extra cash.
o I'm not surprised she mentions Duck Duck Go, that's the favourite nerd one because of "privacy" -- something I don't care about.
o Then Vicki mentions a search engine run I had never heard of called Marginalia.nu run out of a guy's living room in the Netherlands -- not the Yiddish or Russian "So, nu!" I guess. I had never heard of it so I looked up "Tajikistan" which I often use as a test ("Turkmenistan" is good, too.) It had a lot of interesting and useful sites which didn't have the "half of terrorists come from Tajikistan" meme which the NYT was flogging the other day which of course is likely true at this point (see the Moscow Crocus attack in which some 140 were killed and hundreds injured).
Then I tried "Second Life". And this is where it went off the reservation in weird ways, that at least make you think -- which was her purpose.
Normally, I wouldn't click on a link from a LaRouche disciple (!) but the headline was intriguing, in a sort of Augustian way:
The British Empire's Sex Toys:
Second Life and Virtual Worlds
St. Augustine -- whom he does not credit for his views, being a cultist -- had this to say in Book III about the theater in his Confessions:
Stage-plays also carried me away, full of images of my miseries, and of fuel to my fire. Why is it, that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would no means suffer? yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them, this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness? for a man is the more affected with these actions, the less free he is from such affections.
(BTW, this take is damn weird re: City of God, I took an entire course on St. Augustine in 4th year and I don't recall this bit being emphasized.)
And the LaRouche guy says this:
Amongst the many different virtual fantasy worlds that exist, there are two underlying fallacies governing them all. The first: All who are a part of this Orwellian world, have no true sense of human creativity. The second fallacy rests on the first assumption, that since real creativity can not exist or be fostered, the mere arrogance that this entropic system will continue without the intervention by the real physical world, makes one have to laugh and ask: Do you think your computer lives outside the universe?
I guess I'm bewildered why the creating of the virtual doesn't count as human creativity. Because even going beyond TV and movies, which no doubt this fellow also denounces, as St. Augustine likely would, there is simply the novel. Or for that matter, the Bible. Everybody who comes after the real events of the Bible, aren't they conjuring up a virtual world? Isn't heaven a virtual world?
The point here is not to endorse but to think why it isn't true -- or if parts of it may be true. Log off, log off!!!
I agree with St. Augustine that virtuality can create ultimately false emotions untethered to real things that matter (drama, griefing, virtual relationships) and you need to go outside and hug trees.
So I do. Go outside I mean. I don't hug trees as a rule as they are scratchy.
That's why this particular artifacture "in the style of Maxfield Parrish" works for me because this guy is clinging without hugging...
The good of SL usually offset this need to hug trees, and that good is, indeed, about real human creativity made possible precisely because it is virtual.
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