Hi all!
I know that was an annoyingly positivistic greeting for something that is supposed to be as grim/somber/darkly humorous as an ILP post, however, as the great John Popper once sang, but anyway…
My first ever appearance on ILP was, IM(NS)HO, a “whopper”: First Metaphysics, by Dennis Kane (geocities.ws/dkane75/phil.html. I guess I wrote that essay just a little after that first post of mine.
My first interaction with Zootrop went, as can be seen, about as well that first interactions can possibly go. Back in those days (roughly 11.5 years ago, as of March 2017), you could very much say that me and him were pretty much the same dude (he is a mere 7 months my senior). Besides some very superficial coincidences (such as periods of extended homelessness), however, our life paths could not have diverged much more radically than they have.
We both needed to become successful left-wing radicals (revolutionaries?) in order to be able to find a place for ourselves in this wide, weird, wonderful world of ours. We both, in other words, needed to be able to “change the world”, because deep down inside each one of us, the idea of allowing the world to change us, was utterly and completely unthinkable.
Now, we all know the fate that has befallen Zootrop. Starting with an ego as big as Olympus Mons as an early 30-something, yadda yadda yadda, he is where he is today as an early 40-something.
Now, who am I?
I am, plain and simply, “the peace guy”. In this world, truth is not any longer the received wisdom of Encyclopedia XYZ, but rather, the first page of a Google search query. In many ways, that first page of results (google.com/search?q=the+peace+guy) is my true form of identification. After all, driver’s licences and even social security cards can be – given enough patient craftmanship – faked, but an entire life’s work as chronicled by Google (the foremost authority on world-scale applied A.I.) over the span of more than a decade is not quite such an easy thing to make up.
I am claiming to be the “real world Zootrop” in the sense that I have been able to – in living reality – accomplish the first step (I can rightly claim that at least one step has been accomplished; I might have actually accomplished more steps) in order to be able to build the kind of post-neo-liberal world order that the detrop-era “Zootsie” would have whole-heartedly agreed with as a fairly agreeable (or at least somewhat bearable) system of human affairs.
To make it abundantly clear, I am not here simply to raise the spectre of a beloved member of the sacred ILP fraternity in order to elevate my own status. I am here to accomplish something much, much more profound. I am here to get something that we may call a “post-technological” (or maybe: post-post-modern?) philosophical tradition actually started in the USA, and perhaps in the wider world of the the “civilized Western democracies”.
This is only the first post in what I hope will become a very lively and welcoming thread.