We are in the midst of a primordial redefining of flow that will remove the barriers to the nexus itself. Who are we? Where on the great quest will we be recreated? Our conversations with other storytellers have led to a blossoming of ultra-dynamic consciousness.Yep, it is one of those word generator thingies. This one produces a full article of New-Age bullshit at the click of a mouse. Rather like the Alan Sokal hoax, it is indistinguishable from the real thing and just as meaningless. How long will it be before one of these appears on an inspirational quote website?
There is a serious point to all this fun. The generator's creator writes,
Sometimes, there is a better way to pull your head out of the clouds and the charlatans’ hands out of your pockets. All it takes is a sneaking suspicion that this doctrine you’ve come to defend, fund and worship is, all things considered, perhaps a bit silly. Ridicule can be more persuasive than reason when it’s done right.Not just effective, but funny.
2 comments:
My supervisor was briefly keen for me to read some Derrida. I remember reading out parts of the first chapter of Of Grammatology to my girlfriend on a train once, as comedy. You really couldn't distinguish it from a parody or automatically generated version of itself.
I went back to my supervisor and told him, more delicately than this, that it was the biggest load of tripe I've ever come across and the Derrida-shaped hole in my dissertation would have to stay there.
This kind of 'inspirational' gobbledygook was the best thing about BBC TV's comedy 'W1A'. But actually, it isn't funny. This is what millions have to suffer in silence – if they want to keep their job, be it as a policeman or a lecturer, salesperson or social worker (they might actually like this sort of muck, come to think …) It skilfully fills up space and time and alters nothing. It avoids truth. It hides inconvenient plain fact in a mulch of deception.
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