Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Masturbatory Montage

For just one of the many reasons why Annalee Newitz should be your personal hero, as most certainly she is mine, consider that she has the good sense to open her essays with sentences like this one: "In the 'we're not sure we're part of the United States' Bay Area, we like to enjoy a little masturbation with our free speech."

This week's Techsploitation is a meandering and somewhat langorous production, as befits its topic, and no sooner has it commented that "[n]ot only can masturbation in a public venue be erotic free speech, but it's also educational. It dispels myths, demonstrating that healthy sexuality includes solo acts as well as coupley ones" -- we have moved on moments later to, "My theory is that the new battle over Internet obscenity will be fought over community standards." All very enjoyable and worthwhile. Reading it, my mind listed back to an item in last week's Onion--

"Masturbatory Prose Style Fails To Reach Climax
NEW YORK—Writer Terrence Hendrie's debut novel I, Me, Eye, with its lengthy sentences and elaborate footnotes, failed to result in a climax, sources reported Monday. "Hendrie really works himself into a frenzy, massaging his love for obscure vocabulary," bookstore owner Robert Silvers said of the 385-page novel, which opens, "Adam, his serpentine ponytail flapping freely in the wintertide dithers, frostbitten grapewine bouche pursed around a smoldering Camel, hands gripping a Dachshund-eared copy of Hesse's Damien, which he recalled borrowing from his Cambridge roommate Geoffrey—young Geoffrey, how Adam chided him for his nostalgie de la boue." "Then, after 385 pages, the wanking-off ends abruptly, leaving the reader unsatisfied." Silvers added that the book's attempts at humor were too dry."

-- A News in Briefs snippet that might provide an apt narration for the (to me) erotic only for a moment but then soon thereafter eerily not-at-all erotic but instead anxiety-provoking animations I found [via Fleshbot] at a site called "The Tireless Hand" --

All of which, in turn, sends the free-associational machineries of my mind to the dangerously meta ground of contemplating the activity of blogging more generally. Certainly, some of us rightly enjoy a little masturbation with our free speech. And sometimes, they are one and the same. Tissue?

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