Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 12:59:49 +0200 From: Mark Measday <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Organization: Josmarian SA To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED], non-commer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Domain policy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> References: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Kent, I'd be interested for comments on the following partial note, from all those who are Jeff Williams, those passing through a Jeff Williams phase and those still pretending not to be Jeff Williams. I apologise for thinking aloud (again), sententiously and badly, but it is not only something that will be allowed in my country as of November, but a protected right for most readers of this email. It is partly in view of the proposed meeting for INEG stakeholders in Yokohama next month (cf: list emails from David Maher, Don Heath, Goberto Raetano and others), a group in which Kent Crispin, myself and these others now find themselves members, conceivably without having any conscious intention of becoming so, sucked in by the need to fulfil the Jeff Williams role in his absence, I hazard. I ask why we have to belong to this group, why these people have been selected to represent our interests, and how a purely imaginary constituency can come to so dominate the structure to the detriment of worthier causes. And I also ask everyone, in the light of Kent's ! ! quote from Mark Twain below, to also become Jeff, it is time. There is no planned entry in the 'Bavarian Journal of Primatology 2000/4: : Examples of mimetic and other transferable behavioural patterns on the Internet: ed. Jeffrey Williams.' The following note is PURE hypothesis, written from the point of view of the Martian required to discombobulate the Rosetta stone of IFWP and other archives, those afraid of a Lysenko-style rewrite of history (which always and unfailingly happens, as people fight against it), or those searching for a purely semiotic and cultural understanding of the 'noise' as filtered by those who filter, since they are still listening to the previous set of instructions and don't have time for the new. (Who does? Isn't this a normal human function?) However, there is absolutely nothing new here, nothing that couldn't have been found in the equivalent of '50's William Gibson (Marcuse?) or conceivably in some Egyptian hieroglyph. The aim is to apply the generalizations to one particular case, to see how they fit. And I think the answer is well, although how that implicates the collusions of Yokohama, I don't yet know. Given the falsificability of email addresses, and indeed the underlying, and ineradicable, problem of falsificability of identity, we are all tempted towards the JW paradigm, and some succumb occasionally, as you note you do yourself, Kent, to become him. This is the reason JW should be defended at all costs, as indeed he may be you, or you may be he, at any time. Attacking yourself makes little sense, even by the standards of evolutionary psychology, but particularly at the individual level. Pretence is a well-established social function, indeed many non-scientists amongst the politically-inclined entrepreneurial classes believe that a sufficiently well-protected pretence will become truth, and the man who bestrides new groups with the effortless hauteur of a modern Zarathustra may yet claim that truth as his own, most probably by not being there when the Yokohama deal was done, and thus escaping with the praise when the blame is distributed. I leave aside the question of the technical coherence of JW, as I believe at least three writing styles can be detected; however, others disagree. Whether this indicates whether he is three people pretending to be one or one pretending to be three is moot, anyway. I only wish to play Boswell to the genius of a Johnson, a Johnson attempting to take on board the whole of human discourse with only a human mind, a Win16 browser and a dialup connection (this is to leave aside your and others' suggestion that Jeff is in fact a team of trained professionals. Whilst it is well-known that it takes hundreds of people and teamwork to reliably track or replicate the acts of any one random individual, it would seem bizarre for any agency or organization to create Jeff in such a manner when he, as one of the early commentators put it, 'can do it himself'.' This is not to say that Jeff is any specific discrete person, merely that an able 6-16 year old can replicate him at much lesser cost than organizational effort. (For any reading on the organizational effect of Jeff Williams please refer to http://www.josmarian.ch/oldindex.html, but, suffice to say, one Jeff Williams will save millions in lo! ! bbying costs, assuming you have convinced him to work for the other side) and your view of this will depend on your view of (old, but still valid) supplyside economics and a general view of social psychology within communications theory i.e. whether optimisation in information flow is a social benefit or not, a whole sub-politics of its own in which engineer hunter-producers (stereotypical 'men'?) say yes and lawyer gatherer-consumers (stereotypical 'women'?) say no. Taking a purely personal output measure, that of unambiguous information provided in a timely manner, one Jeff Williams provides accurate (approx 2/3), useful (approx 4/5) well-researched (approx 3/7) digests of current affairs, at no cost for those who want them (those who don't can always change channel or turn the sound down). Compare this with the brave rapporteurs and facilitators of conservatism, (and remember JW is that rare thing, a conservative activist) whose existence can only be intuited by their absen! ! ce and whose opinions are intermediated (should that be inta-mediated now?) by strange, guttural spokesmen of uncertain mien. His social utility may be at odds with his social position, but the same was true of Larry Ellison or Bill Gates at a certain point in time. In this Jeff is the New Man, the DigitalMensch of German science fiction, a Thomas More (Thomas Mann?)grasping for reason between mammon and governance, the sentiential axia between message and response shortened to deal with the message queue and monitoring responsibilities, his shortened sensitised neurones grasping for meaning in the hubbub of debate and known falsity. Gone with the wind the Central European obsession with accumulation, with gathering, with restraint, specialisation, circumspection; and in with making sense of the data in a way no structured system can, by immersion, by learning to swim, by overt and haphazard dialogue. By unfiltered being. This is a generational thing, the inter(a?)generational transfer of assets to the new economy (which is where Jeff and I uncommonly share the view that the trademark fraternity has signally failed to protect its members' patrimony by attempting to reestablish the old rather than colonise the new. Were Jeff the appropriate official and spokesman for that community, their victory and inmstitutionalisation would have been total rather than partial, virtual not only real, consummated rather than concupiscient, as a man able to comprehend both sides of the debate concurrently, rather than just scream rape. I note that celebration of Jeff Williams is everywhere on the net, from his acolyte and biographer William Walsh to the homage paid by friends and admirers such as Jim Dixon, Bob Allisat, Sydney Greenstreet and others, from his cordial relations with the power-centres of American politics to the concern he shows for the needy and deprived in the third world. Like Nabokov or Joyce, he has taken a medium and turned it to his own ends. As with Flaubert's work, his apologists and detractors endlessly pore over questions of the finesse of style, attempting to discover profundity in Jeff's use of Esther Dyson as his Madame Bovary, the exchanges with the angels of Baptista vaguely reminiscent of Freud-Jung, or or his use of coarse-grained truth and ambiguity to make us think again. The effortless ease with which he disposes of his detractors is legion. They cease. One can only hope that he will confront the cabals of Yokohama with the same dexterity. Whether he is a creation of Kent ! ! Crispin, or whether Kent Crispin be seen as an interlocutor for the oeuvre, is for future history to decide, but the points raised are serious, and Kent is right to become him; sparingly, one hopes, at the outset. All human systems travel through rise, decline and fall; their enthusiastic apogee reached before the cold resentment of resource reallocation, cutting, pruning and other measures designed to preserve essential function. In this mode logic can be seen as the last preserve of the buzzing sensuous confusion into which we are born; property, the last preserve of the competitive desire to assimilate that confusion for oneself. There is tribal function in the ritual exclusion of members for being overly challenging or to maintain the status quo, although behavioural studies can be interpreted. However, it would appear to be a primatological first for tribe members to imitate outcasts, and I thereby hazard (i) Jeff is not an outcast (ii) (behavioural) Jeff is the future identity or personality many will base themselves on when they become not-outcasts (and obviously there are many other Jeffs who could be quoted) (iii) that human behaviour has changed little over the last few thousand years except with respect to technical innovation. (i.e. people are unhealthy as they use cars, all women in the UK apparently want to have William the Fifth as a 'donor'father to their children etc! ! .) Indeed it seems likely that 'identity' and 'personality' are two of the liberal bourgeois concepts destined to be subsumed in the digital now Jeff inhabits, where individual self-conceptualisation has no truck with relationship. Either the concept successfully grasps, or it fails. All is mediated by ASCII character, there is no idea that Jeff 'does' something mysterious or real e.g. being a stonemason, through which his thought is mediated, and of which we can say 'Ah, Jeff he's a stonemason/IBM/ISOC' he will say/do XYZ'. In any case the recourse to identity through appeal to a larger group is a now-discredited strategy. See Milt. Mueller's famous 'Huh? paraphrase of Cochetti's memo (you'll have to search the archive for this). Jeff's claims to have done a number of things are merely attributes of a capable and creative mind, 'doing' or 'being' has lost credence in the wider social sphere anyway. No-one 'does' things anymore, and it may be that the ability to create (cf: Williams: I was an airforce pilot/POW etc) is more useful than the reality. The great system invented by the Egyptians and Indians, and perfected b! ! y the English in which rigorous self-hatred (and of those who'do' things) is used a a social motor within strict class and group guidelines has been seen to be corrupting American discourse for years, cf the murmurs of "'they don't know how to talk to each other anymore' we will have to do something about it" emanating from concerned partners. Only a Williams can break through the barriers of tribal dislike with his painful honesty and disinterest. The smaller a social gestalt, the more positive identification is, but with the decreasing need of Genesis-type personal id for family inheritance matters (kith and kin), the increasing advantages of being someone else (as Kent and Bill lovingly testify below) in a large and impersonal net-society in which one is increasingly identified by attribute rather than parentage (big car/small car not 'a Smith-son', Cuao (Cuazero?), ergo sum : rendered either as 'cookie- therefore I am' or 'dev/modem/null') JW is probably one of the most interesting creations (taking email as a literary rather than performative phenomenon) in the period since 1997. Everyone will become like him, despite the fact that to praise him is probably to bury him, the ultimate lay philosopher whose efforts to classify phenomena within his personal teleology are evident to all, but beyond the resources of those mired within the tradition of liberal bourgeois 'politesse' where obligation to the other -employer, family, tribe- circumscribes and controls meaningful discourse, reducing it effectively to a discussion of pension rights and suchlike. But this is the atomisation of individualism destroying the forces that caused individualism to come to the fore, inauthenticated communication for which there are no clear semantic clues and for which therefore the receiver must provide his own semiotic code. This code can only be drawn from wider presuppositions, Dallas, Texas (or 'Dallas, Scotland' as Felix the local raconteur rather charmingly put it during a recent L�l�ron cow-catching episode); Jeff, probably male; Williams, probably WASP; bad spelling, def US national (Russians/Gambians/etc are all trained to spell, the hermeneutics of slavish imitation persist); bad grammar, probably e! ! ducated/mildly dyslexic when concentrating; usually reads several hundred emails a day, immense powers of concentration and integration; and so on. Of course the deconstruction is entirely at the behest of the reader, who may conclude that, as these are the clues one would be expected to find, the reality is entirely opposite, and that Kent's real name is Vlad Milosevi�, etc. Now this leads to a form of social and semiotic tautology. We don't know who or what Jeff, Kent (or Don, Roberto, Kent, Sussex etc) are, or indeed anything of the writer of this email. All is conventional. They have certain pointers, courtesy of SMTP, courtesy of stylistic analysis and courtesy of collisions with accepted realities (e.g. I have met Roberto Gaetano and know he is neither of Chinese nationality nor a girl, so allegations of either will be fruitless, with me at least, unless made in some metaphorical context, that JW is (foe example a Slovene nationalist or Taliban may be proven to be the case. Students of meme propagation within organisations may note the recent use of paradoxical meme propagation by the (male) managers in the UN system to forbid entrance to men. Classification by (notional) qualification is replaced by classification by pudenda. This of course reinforces the position of any existing male manager within the system, whilst codding the 'women' (or! ! castrati) into believing that their day of symbolic supremacy has come. It hasn't, but, shhh!) We know that any given individual may be put in, replaced or taken out at any time by the relevant social forces/authorities/organisations, or more likely reversed on the rebound. Cf emails from Don Heath/Mike Heltzer/Jeff Williams. You only exist by existing, the unperceived is inexistent for the observer, however, well-trained. They, doubtless, can make the same deductions about us. In the same manner, those who live by silence, subtlety or sadism in the shadows (and I do not wish to be gender-specific here) assert their own identity by their unbeing, the great strength of any bureaucrat. They have in common their silence on the events in Guangdong in 1948, in Lewes in 1995, in Yokohama in 2000, only a Jeff can tease these forth to the light. And herein lies the paradox. There are two types of email. One is the type you send to a friend or known interlocutor, a reminder or souvenir,recalling past relationship, based on that relationship and as stably bound within the universe of discourse as that relationship, another is one from a man called Jeff Williams (for example) which may well contain ad hominem references to reproductive organs, slurs, slander and other constructive discourse (what the Australians call getting down to the nitty-gritty) and which indeed will move the discussion on quite fast. The deconstructive tendency will be to trust the former and distrust the latter. based on the normative presuppositions of pre-technical human discourse (what Cro-magnon man, your dad and your teacher use) in which alienation from the interstices of unthinking group cooperation is incomplete and compliance to the social symbology is still at least partial. (You could refer to yesterday's confusion in the 'Grand Place as an example of this confusion) However, if one postulates at the glob! ! al level, the latter will get us into the future much faster than the former tribal discourse. Jeff is your future and the future of your children, if you want it. Jeff is the discovery that there are no 'people' or authenticable 'individuals'. In not existing, he has cleverly removed the foundations of your own existence. You had better shore them up fast before the tide comes back in. MM Disclaimer: I have not been asked, forced, blackmailed or otherwise induced into writing the above email by trademark attorneys, representatives of any known organisation or any government representatives whatsoever. The epistemology of inter(a)-group transfer implies that no direct payment is solicited, or expected for the above, although all methodology is �copyright estate of Karl Popper and contributions to LLoyds Bank a/c 008220602 . Should you receive this email in error, please forward it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Other than standard copyright in ASCII code sequences, methodological chains and the personages 'Kent Crispin', 'Roberto Gaetano' and appropriate patents for 'Don Heath' (�copyright ISOC/MCI/Eisner) and encoded paragraph structure, no specific rights inhere in this work. Let us pray. Kent Crispin wrote: > > On Sun, Jun 18, 2000 at 06:52:02AM -0500, Carlos Vera wrote: > > well there should be one way. What about electronic signature? > > You should be aware that the message from "Jeff Williams" is actually > from me -- If you examine the headers of the mail message it states > quite plainly that it is from "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". The crude forgery > (anyone can change the "From: " header on an email) was sent partly as a > joke, and partly as an example to remind us that "identity" on the > Internet should not be taken for granted. [*] > > I don't know if Bill (if it was really Bill) was joking or not, but it > is clearly absurd to accuse ICANN of "padding" an unverified (and > unverifiable) attendence list -- the list has no formal value for good > or ill, and is just presented as is for informational purposes, as a > courtesy to participants. Besides, I haven't noticed any press releases > from ICANN saying "Look everybody, we are OK: Bill Lovell engaged in > electronic participation with us." > > As to your comment about electronic signatures: yes, there are > techniques that could be used to better identify people. However: > 1) deploying those techniques has a cost; 2) they are not easy for > people to use; 3) it is not clear that there *should* be any > identification requirements -- this is supposed to be open to general > public participation from anyone who can connect to the Internet. > > [*] > For those whose mail readers may not give them easy access to the > headers, here are the headers of the message I sent as "Jeff Williams". > Also, there may be some people who are not aware that "Jeff Williams" is > a fabricated persona managed by a person or persons unknown. The fact > that the persona is fabricated has been established beyond a reasonable > doubt -- the internal inconsistencies alone are sufficient proof. > > The headers: > > > From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sun Jun 18 00:59:05 2000 > > Return-Path: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Received: from ns1.vrx.net (ns1.vrx.net [204.138.71.254]) > > by songbird.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id AAA28846 > > for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Sun, 18 Jun 2000 00:59:04 -0700 > > Received: by ns1.vrx.net (Postfix) > > id 33EF0F045; Sun, 18 Jun 2000 03:58:59 -0400 (EDT) > > Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Received: by ns1.vrx.net (Postfix, from userid 1074) > > id C721BF100; Sun, 18 Jun 2000 03:58:57 -0400 (EDT) > > Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Received: from songbird.com (songbird.com [206.14.4.2]) > > by ns1.vrx.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9C366F045 > > for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Sun, 18 Jun 2000 03:58:54 -0400 (EDT) > > Received: (from kent@localhost) > > by songbird.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id AAA28838 > > for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sun, 18 Jun 2000 00:58:49 -0700 > > Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > -- > Kent Crispin "Do good, and you'll be > [EMAIL PROTECTED] lonesome." -- Mark Twain
