A few years back, I was asked, by my boss, to send him by a certain date two truths about myself, and one lie. I had no idea what was going on. Nobody at anyplace I had ever worked, had ever asked me to tell them anything about myself that wasn’t directly related to whether or not I could do the work.
So I thought of three deep truths that were on my mind. I knew one of them was supposed to be a lie, but on the other hand, how would they know which was the lie? They might assume all were true. One, I remember, was, “I’m older now than my mother was when she died, and that affects me every day.”
My boss came to my desk and asked me to come with him to a room, where he told me that he was supposed to pass these things on to one of his higherups for some sort of “fun” activity, and he couldn’t pass along what I’d given him. “You ride your bike to work, don’t you? Tell them you ride your bike!”
So I sent him a new list, and the first thing on it was “Sometimes I ride my bike to work”.
I understand now that nobody at work still really wanted to know anything about me. They just wanted some information about a fictional me that they could fit into their exercise. Fun facts vs real facts.
Mark Zuckerberg released, last week, his metaverse avatar pasted in front of badly rendered images of Paris’ Eiffel Tower and Barcelona’s La Sagrada Familia, celebrating the expansion of Horizon Worlds to France and Spain.
What a perfect vision of the future. Horizon Worlds’ avatars have no lower bodies; they are literally sexless, genderless hand puppets. You stick your hand into one of them, raise it above your head so the audience can see it, then do your performance while you stay hidden behind a curtain.
This is the future, according to Facebook: where your avatar becomes a more real representation of you, than you yourself. After your body dies, you could perhaps live on, with an AI hand stuck up your backside instead of your human hand.
I write, but I’m not a writer. I play several instruments, but I am not an instrumentalist, or a musician. I’ve developed games, but am not a game developer. I blog, but I am not a blogger. But, one thing I know for sure – I am a fool.
American satirist Kurt Vonnegut Jr is perhaps my most favorite author. In his book “Player Piano”, the ruler of some desert country comes to the USA and looks at all our fabulous automation and has the opportunity to chat with a new supercomputer, and the only question he wanted to ask was, “What are people for?”
Vonnegut comes back to that question again and again in his work. In “The Sirens of Titan”, Malachi Constant, once the richest man on Earth, has his free will taken from him (on Mars, read the book), and after having been broken down to nothing, and still possessing nothing, finds himself arriving back on Earth. There are crowds gathered all around; it’s a festival, and everyone there has come to see him, to hear him say the words they know he will say.
People rush him and dress him in a fool’s costume, because only a fool can speak the truth. They then carry him off to a stage they’d set up, and hand him a microphone, and he can’t think of anything to say. The crowd is silent. Then he speaks. “I was the victim of a series of accidents,” he says, “as are we all.”
The crowd goes wild. Malachi can see now that there are dolls of him in his fool costume hanging from trees, people wearing T-shirts with his words on them.
So that’s who I am – a fool with her hand stuck up the rear of a hand puppet who doesn’t really resemble me, but who is, in many ways, more real than I am. But in reality, I just stumbled my way through life, and somehow I ended up here.
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TL;DR: I ride my bike to work sometimes.