Matthew T Grant

John Galt says to Dagny Taggart, “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”

So what does it mean that Rand uses a fictional character to express her philosophy (Galt’s epic and exhausting speech) as well as a fictional narrative depicting a fictional reality in order to illustrate it?

Either we are not meant to take the ideas at the center of this novel seriously, seeing them instead as a parody on par with her caricature of job-killing liberal democracy, or we are meant to take them seriously and, as it turns out, certain truths can only be spoken by faking reality.

While I am perfectly comfortable with this notion, it is anathema to “objectivism.” The world of A=A is for all intents and purposes devoid of irony.

Irony requires a subject as well as an object, and the process of speaking ironically and understanding, or not, something ironically spoken, can best—not to say “only”— be understood dialectically.

Having rejected the dialectic, however, Rand forces us to take her work at face value (like a coin of pure gold).

And thus effaces it.

I received an email from a fellow named Igor. I assumed it was your garden variety, botnet-generated spam. It did, however, include a link to a Youtube video and, feeling secure that the Russians or Estonians or Ukrainians or whoever hadn’t jacked Youtube (yet!), I clicked on it. This is what I saw:

If you go ahead and watch the vid on the Youtubes, you’ll discover that there are multiple versions of it including parodies! Furthermore, the video and parodies are discussed at length on Know Your Meme. Why did they care? Because the video had some viral legs, in part thanks to this description which accompanied the original video post:

There is a video on Youtube named Mereana mordegard glesgorv. If you search this, you will find nothing. The few times you find something, all you will see is a 20 second video of a man staring intently at you, expressionless, then grinning for the last 2 seconds. The background is undefined. This is only part of the actual video.

The full video lasts 2 minutes, and was removed by Youtube after 153 people who viewed the video gouged out their eyes and mailed them to Youtube’s main office in San Bruno. Said people had also committed suicide in various ways. It is not yet known how they managed to mail their eyes after gouging them out. And the cryptic inscription they carve on their forearms has not yet been deciphered.

Youtube will periodically put up the first 20 seconds of the video to quell suspicions, so that people will not go look for the real thing and upload it. The video itself was only viewed by one Youtube staff member, who started screaming after 45 seconds. This man is under constant sedatives and is apparently unable to recall what he saw. The other people who were in the same room as him while he viewed it and turned off the video for him say that all they could hear was a high pitched drilling sound. None of them dared look at the screen.

The person who uploaded the video was never found, the IP address being non-existant. And the man on the video has never been identified.

Igor (if that is his real name) wrote in his message: “Tell you know this person? Simply it would be desirable to put an end in this history once and for all.”

The super strange part? I actually do know the guy in the video! How did Igor know? HOW DID HE KNOW!?!?!

More importantly, should I be afraid?

What got me thinking about this was a story about black tar heroin in the LA Times back in February. The sub-headline read, “Sugar cane farmers from a tiny Mexican county use savvy marketing and low prices to push black-tar heroin in the United States.”

The specifically savvy marketing in this case involved putting a premium on customer service (being willing to deliver even relatively small amounts), customer satisfaction (they called to check on quality), customer referral programs (discounts if you bring in new customers), etc.

Oddly enough, just prior to learning of this underground marketing success story I had written about the marketing techniques of the botnet masters. And then, soon thereafter, I heard an episode of OnPoint focused on Bernie Madoff and one of the guests, Frank Casey said, “We understood the ‘game’ of exclusivity and we understood that was his marketing concept.”

In other words, I’ve come to realize that no matter how much people malign marketing, they cannot deny its critical role in every kind of business success. The reality of the value marketing brings to any enterprise, far from being difficult to demonstrate, is in fact undeniable.

As proof of this contention, I submit the fact that “marketing” is a recognizable function in the dark allies and backrooms of underground economies, where many conventions of the above-ground economy – signage, agencies of record, HR- are eschewed in the name of fugitive efficiency.

Interestingly enough, and more as an aside, Frank Casey also points out that, in addition to his marketing concept, Madoff’s scheme relied on a sales (or at least a business development) function. As Casey puts it, “There was always somebody in the middle that was willing to make money feeding victims into the monster.”

Ouch!

Image Courtesy of indfusion.

There are many reasons why my academic career didn’t pan out, but among them is undoubtedly the fact that I didn’t publish very much. For example, I never turned my dissertation on the Baader-Meinhof Gang into a book (though part of my research did end up in an obscure, Canadian journal called, Border/Lines).

When I did publish, it was essays like this one on the politics of gangsta rap.

Now, of course, I “publish” pretty much every day!

Life is so strange.

Reading two NYT articles today reminded me of how much fun with similes writers over there can have.

First, in “The Great Unalignment,” writer Matt Bai says that, in the aftermath of Scott Brown’s Senate victory here in Masschusetts, Democratic talk of “a great liberal realignment seems as retro as Friendster.”

While I don’t exactly consider Friendster retro – it’s hardly Pong – I’ve always said, “Retro is the new cutting edge.”

Second, in a review of Charles Pellegrino’s The Last Train from Hiroshima, Dwight Garner writes, “Mr. Pellegrino follows his survivors as they trudge through wastelands that make ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy read like ‘Goodnight, Moon.'”

Of course, that just got me thinking about how well “The Road” would go over as a bedtime story: “Goodnight corpse. Goodnight air. Goodnight cannibals everywhere.”

I launched the incredibly successful Twitternet phenomenon, #onewordwednesday, in May 2009, at least by my reckoning.

The fact that on every subsequent Wednesday (and sometimes earlier) the hashtag has seen action, and not just due to my own fervid zealotry, I consider one of the few real achievements of my adult life.

Nevertheless, I fear that I have been lax to the point of wishi-washiness on what constitutes proper observance of #onewordwednesday. Among other things, my wavering spirit has led some to attempt a #onewordwednesday takeover, albeit it in the interest of your eternal salvation.

Today, however, I’m drawing a line in the sand and stating clearly and definitively, that true, devout observance of #onewordwednesday calls for limiting all Tweets that day to ONE WORD.

“But Matthew T. Grant, what about retweets or the sharing of links?”

Gosh darn it! OK. Fine. As Buffy Saint-Marie once sang, “I was an oak, now I’m a willow, now I can bend.”

• You may retweet other contributions to the #onewordwednesday experience until the 140 character limit has been achieved.
• You may also share links if and only if the Tweet consists of nothing more than one word and a shortened URL.

Look, I’m not asking that everyone across the Twitterverse adhere to this standard of observance. I simply want to provide those interested in truth, purity, and righteousness a guiding light and a clear sign that they may better find their way on the path to (#)one(wordwednesday)ness.

Peace.

The fact that I was grooving on Andrew Hill, coupled with the fact that I decided to check out  his Andrew!!! (literally, I got the cd at the library) because I saw that John Gilmore, longtime collaborator of Sun Ra, played on it, makes me a “jazzhole.”

Likewise, the fact that I would say, “Everyone knows Point of Departure cuz Dolphy was on it, but I prefer the stuff Hill did with Sam Rivers,” makes me a “jazzhole.”

Nevertheless, if digging the esoteric masters of the art is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Image Courtesy of Max Sparber.

I was once in an alt-rockin’ trio called “Spanking Machine.”  The fellow who played bass, Kurt, was the son of a brain surgeon. My father, it just so happened, was an orthopedic surgeon.

One day, Kurt said that we should form a band with this other dude, Dave, whose dad was a cardiac surgeon.

“We could,” he suggested, “call ourselves, ‘Sons of Surgeons.'”

It only recently occurred to me that our fathers regularly cut people with surgical blades. My father sawed and drilled bones while replacing joints with hi-tech titanium replicas.

Kurt’s father sutured brains.

I’m sure that our conscious or unconscious awareness of the work our fathers did had no influence whatsoever on our life choices.

Image Courtesy of daveparker.

I’m off to MarketingProfs’ Digital Mixer in Chicago this morning and I’m practically giddy.

Look, I’m a people person and if there is one thing that conferences like this have, it’s people. The bonus is that in this case, I’ve actually met some of them before and am very much looking forward to reconnecting with Paul Chaney, Amber Naslund, Beth Harte, Jason Baer, Mack Collier, as well as all the great folks from MarketingProfs proper.

The super-bonus is that there’s gonna be folks there whom I haven’t yet met but, having met them, will find my life utterly transformed and the world full of bright, ever-expanding horizons. Or at least I’ll get their business card.

I must admit, however, that, aside from meeting people, “deepening relationships,” and “participating in the conversation,” I have another goal in attending the MarketingProfs Digital Mixer: atonement.

You see, at a MarketingProfs event last June, I moderated a panel on content strategy. At the beginning of the session, I asked people to put away their laptops and refrain from Tweeting unless prior to doing so they could honestly and earnestly say to themselves, “The world must know!” It was not surprising that, for doing so, I was called, by Greg Verdino among other people, a “douche.”

I don’t know if the mustache I’m growing will really help me live down my reputation as “douchey,” but, heck, I’m gonna do my darnedest to make up for this egregious social media faux pas and show everybody that I’ve drunk the Kool Aid, that I’ve gotten with the program, and that I can play well with others.

And much like my conscious decision to grow a mustache, in spite of its many perils, that last sentence was written in the complete absence of any inner sense of irony or sarcasm. See ya there!

Chaos is our mother.

∞

The entire history of the universe unwinds in the transition of diverse high energy states into a single low energy state. When the universal stuff has achieved a uniform temperature, it will be completely and chaotically disordered. When the energy gradient has disappeared entirely, there will be no identifiable things. “No thing-ness” awaits the universe at and as its end.

∞

The amount of time we spend consciously dwelling on the Earth is vanishingly brief compared to the time it will take for all the energy generated (released?) at the time of the Big Bang to dissipate entropically and, for all intents and purposes, vanish. For this reason, I say that we always find ourselves in the middle of time.

∞

“You can’t miss what you can’t measure.” For something to exist the way that things exist, you must be able to measure it. Does it make sense to speak of a thing that does not exist?

∞

If the existence of something cannot be proven logically or demonstrated scientifically it is irrational to insist that it exists. In other words, it may exist, but only irrationally.

∞

Dynamic referentiality. Our language does not refer to some central lexicon to be used or understood. Instead, it refers to the multidimensional history of its own usage. Read the rest of this entry »