Should we worry about Robin Sage? :: The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It
futureoftheinternet.org
Jonathan Zittrain is great at examining many of the flaws of the internet and what’s going on with the folks who live in those verges and gaps. This is one of those articles that crosses bounds making it hard to categorize: technology? Law? Blogosphere? Culture? all of the above?
In 1996, a physicist named Alan Sokol published an article in Social Text, a cultural studies journal. It was called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” and as the name suggests, it’s pretty impenetrable. You can check it out here. Soon after it came out, he published an article in the now-defunct Lingua Franca, saying that the first article had been a hoax. He said he did it to see if the journal “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”
I remember feeling pretty sympathetic to the Social Text editors at the time — which was before I was immersed in legal academia, where most of the law reviews are run by students and don’t perform what other fields would recognize as formal peer review. Publishing an article doesn’t mean that the journal editors agree with everything it says, and no doubt the Social Text editors had little experience dealing with physics. Sure, they could have sent it to other physicists, but in the meantime they probably welcomed what looked like a rare attempt by someone from the hard sciences to communicate with an otherwise-alien audience, even if the person was deemed an apostate by his colleagues. Moreover, being of the postmodern deconstructionist bent, they gleaned a lot from the text — no doubt more than what its insincere author had put in. (As Wiki says they put it: “its status as parody does not alter, substantially, our interest in the piece, itself, as a symptomatic document.”)