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January 03, 2005
HyperCamo
Excellent Reza post on hypercamouflage...brings me back to my (infinitely more mundane, or course...) memories of being 'immersed' in the corporate world; that at that time I actually believed in it (even found myself picking up horrible US biz-slang, circa late 90s - that vomitous linguistic concoction that resulted from the head-on collision of programmers, venture capitalists and californian futurologists ), so I was in some respects 'fully assimilated', and yet somehow, at a certain time, something pulled me back and out of there, and I realised "I" had never wanted to be there; the same with the academic world.
No, It's too easy to suppose that you suddenly came back to your 'real' self, that you finally knew your mind.
How do you know where camouflage ends and where you melt into the place you're going to - what I once called 'Kurtz-Gradient'...Intoxication: becoming the poison. Or simply, becoming.
And it's the only way to learn, get inside something and take it as far as it can go, but the mystery is how something manages to come back, when so many people seem to happily give themselves up to the certainty of permanent intoxication (I'm playacting the superior intellectual, of course: their achievements outstrip mine by any known measure - but still, it seems despite my best efforts to sink, it couldn't be any other way.)
Posted by robin at January 3, 2005 01:09 PM