Lady or the Tiger
Acts of cultural terrorism committed daily
Rip out the last page of that Miss Marple mystery. Rip out the last page of Fight Club too. That’s cultural terrorism.
Nike and Motorola invite you as postmodern symbol arrangers to create web pages for their products with corporate-produced images; tell the world how they make their product, tell the world what their product is.
Remember that each sentence is three words short of making a Harry Potter novel into something rich and imaginative. That’s cultural terrorism.
Acts of compassion
I move from one doctor to another, due to the exigencies of the public health system. Each peforms the check up again, driving me to distraction. They ask questions about my prior results and diagnoses. I feel uncomfortable as I answer. I don’t have the technical background to answer knowingly correct. Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t damaged the intended message a la high school whispers. Then damaged my health.
This discontinuity of doctors, this corruption in the information state of my world, threatens me. I am now the hapless “user” driving that implacable god, the “helpdesk”, to distraction. Surely, it could be better than this.
Possibly I am overconfident. Medicine could surely beneath a higher level of abstraction, on which I could move from doctor to doctor with assurance. But this abstracted level may not be any better for me than living close to the metal. Important details can be lost inside the black box.
We move forward in this world by, on the one hand, making our understanding of a thing deeper and deeper, and, on the other hand, by making our necessary understanding of a thing less and less. We gain power by becoming more powerful but also by using better leverage. An example: a community, where each person fulfils one role adequately, is better off than a single person who performs each role superbly. This is our world.
It can be dangerous to forget the details. In a complex, abstracted world, it can be difficult to determine that a corporation covered up Olympic drug cheats. Behind the images, it can be difficult to see the real past or the Aboriginals who remain on the periphery. A transparent world would not help them. Uncovering the black box would only cause confusion that is its own black box. Our tools become our trap.
Even in our profoundly middle class world, when we stay sick, when we bang our heads against tax, we must ask, is this world fair? But it will require enormous power to change this world. And we will not stand for revolution, will not give up what we have got.