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]>
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 lobbying 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 absence 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 by 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 educated/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 global 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
