[ga-full] Re: [IFWP] Doubt, change management and DisINTA-mediation by INEG stakeholders: was: There's something dirty in the works

[Mark Measday <measday@josmarian.ch>]

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
Fred-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 apparently UK
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, 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
Léléron 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 Miloseviç, 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. 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 roberto.gaetano@hotmail.com. 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 "kent@songbird.com".  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 owner-list-outgoing@ns1.vrx.net  Sun Jun 18 00:59:05 2000
> > Return-Path: <owner-list-outgoing@ns1.vrx.net>
> > 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 <kent@songbird.com>; 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: list-outgoing@ns1.vrx.net
> > Received: by ns1.vrx.net (Postfix, from userid 1074)
> >        id C721BF100; Sun, 18 Jun 2000 03:58:57 -0400 (EDT)
> > Delivered-To: list@vrx.net
> > Received: from songbird.com (songbird.com [206.14.4.2])
> >        by ns1.vrx.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9C366F045
> >         for <list@ifwp.org>; 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 list@ifwp.org; Sun, 18 Jun 2000 00:58:49 -0700
> > Message-ID: <20000618005848.G26084@songbird.com>
> 
> --
> Kent Crispin                               "Do good, and you'll be
> kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain

--
This message was passed to you via the ga-full@dnso.org list.
Send mail to majordomo@dnso.org to unsubscribe
("unsubscribe ga-full" in the body of the message).
Archives at http://www.dnso.org/archives.html