Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Hacking verbal reality

So this morning I open my email and read this headline--Lulzsecurity and Anonymous are joining forces. These are the names of two hacker groups who may or may not have the noble purpose of highlighting weak cyber security in the political areas on the planet known collectively as "the west."

The headline started me thinking about the topic of this post to American Mysticism. Because here you have labels and with these labels you have the feeling you understand -- more. And yet, how could you really understand what is going on with these groups -- because if you really understood you would be able to stop their incursions into corporate and government computer systems. Wouldn't you? Wouldn't understanding mean being able to code "better" than these folks? And yet, we have just by using labels a sense that we know what is going on here. And that is the nature of verbal reality, the words prevent you from grasping --- your own ignorance. 

Without knowing what you don't know, what you know, what you think you know --- is dubious. 

By the time I was on my second cup, this headline--
"Suspected LulzSec leader arrested." I wonder, does someone thinks aha, we do know something about these hacker groups, or else we would not have caught someone.

Because my choice of news items is as an example, of verbal reality, and how it obscures other reality, and how we do not notice, notice --- where the accent of reality resides.... The hacker story continues, because it is part of the magic show which must go on. The intellectual show continues, it has to, it has to fill up the verbal space so no one notices, how flimsy, how gauzy, the words are, how beside the point, are the words.