Three little fragments of what my new book looks like as I write it…

(Don’t worry – they won’t tell you anything very spoilerish. Well, I suppose if you’re massively psychic or supremely tuned in to them while actually reading the book and trying really hard to work out what they mean, but… Well.)

I haz tumblr.

I don’t know whether I’ll use it yet. What do other people use it for?

From the pages of harkaway.tumblr.com -

Pootwattle: post-human, post-Turing

Pootwattle writes: “The logic of the culture industry reinvents itself as the internal structure of an anthropocentric history.”

Which is almost certainly true, although at the same time there’s plenty to argue with. The thing is, Pootwattle is a random sentence generator. So does this demonstrate that meaning lies in the mind of the reader/critic, or that academic work is often utterly meaningless?

Even more fun: I could have a dialogue with Pootwattle almost as readily as with a human academic; does this mean he passes the Turing test, or that the mode of academic discourse fails it?

Briefly, two things:

1. the scientists in the UAE/Climategate thing committed the fundamental email sin: they wrote in emails things they would not say on a postcard. Well all do it. We should not. Annoying though it is, we should encrypt, because email has a sense of privacy which is utterly false.

2. encrypt is a boring word. We should broaden the field. There’s already a verb “to occult“; we could add enigmise, arcanify, and hermetograph. Or we could go a bit more classical: Gordianise, Daedalate.

Anyone got any more suggestions? I had vaticise, gnomify, and sphynxert, too, the first two turned out to mean something different and the last one seems somehow like someone with a fetish for chimerae.