(off-topic) GoldWorldNet - Musings of winged ecstasy on top of a car radiator.
Josh Wright, GoldWorldNet Moderator
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WINGED ECSTASY, THE DAILY RECKONING, OUZILLY, FRANCE
FRIDAY, 25 AUGUST 2000
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In Today's Daily Reckoning:
More mysteries.....
WINGED ECSTASY
On the drive from Ouzilly to Mortemart.....
... few sounds are heard in this part of the world.
Mortemart is an ancient town.....
... that once belonged to a friend of de la Rochefoucauld's.
... looks at though it might have sheltered Caesar's legions
and a menacing swan in the moat around the chateau.....
Still, it has a restaurant that makes the pleasant drive
even more worthwhile.
... caught out attention was the arrival of a
Rolls Royce bearing license tags from Monaco.
Hmmm... you are almost as likely to take a vacation
on a Russian submarine in the Baring Sea as see a
Rolls Royce in Mortemart. The French tax wealth
- so people hide it.....
... the younger woman looked very trashy
- with a pair of platform shoes, shiny pants
and a face that would not have been out of place
on the Rue St. Denis.
I have been thinking about how the Internet
changes the world.
"You are schizophrenic about the Internet,"
complained Michel, philosopher and auto buff,
"on the one hand you say it is nothing at all
and that the dot.coms will crash...and on the other,
you say it is completely changing the world.
It cannot be both."
But it does seem to be both. Like life itself,
each day is completely new...and much like the day before.
... Nietszche made the distinction between the knowledge
you have that is direct, personal, and immediate
- the things you know indirectly, abstractly and remotely.
The Internet extends the division of labor
- by allowing further and further specialization.
This little hamlet where we had dinner, for example,
used to be almost completely self-sufficient.....
... now, even the local farmers buy their lamb
from New Zealand, their clothes come from Malaysia,
and their roof tiles come from Spain or Italy.
Not only are they dependent on the division of labor
- they have also lost the knowledge of isolation.
... when we wanted to fire up our bread ovens
- just to see how they worked - we had to get
an 80-year-old man from the nearby town to show us how.
Younger people just don't know.
As the division of labor expands, knowledge also expands
- but it also gets spliced and diced into ever finer pieces
and spread all over the world.....
... while information is cheap...knowledge is dear.
It takes time to learn how to do anything.
It can take a lifetime to master a trade
- even a trade that is as rudimentary and analog
as woodworking or gardening.
And the Internet has done nothing to expand the supply of time.
In fact, au contraire, it has made time more dear.
... information may be an expensive luxury,
for it may turn our attention from what is important
to what is unimportant.".....
The Internet is full of unimportant information
- distractions, time wasters, and urgent messages
that mean nothing.
How do we know where - among the dirty pictures
and stock touts - to find what we really need?
And as the division of labor and knowledge fragments,
people become further and further removed from real knowledge of.....
Most of what we think we know is second hand, inferred,
abstract, remote guesswork.
Information is no longer what we want.
We can get as much as we could ever want - for free.
But it is an expensive luxury.
Instead, what we really want is to know what is important
and what is not.
This is not information.
Nor even knowledge.
It is not digital.
It is analog.
It is judgment. Wisdom. Style. Grace.
A Rolls Royce is a not so much a.....
The distinctive radiator, Michel pointed out to me,
is modeled after a Greek temple - rational, classical...digital.
But on top of the radiator sits a statue of winged ecstasy,
Dionysian, irrational, kitschy and completely analog.
... "Why don't you drive it?" I asked him.....
... P.S. Enjoy the weekend.
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