Spam - the unwanted tide

The number of unsolicited and unwanted emails transmitted on the Internet exceeds 180 billion per diem. Spam now makes up 90% of the content of email. Curiously, the 10% balance is roughly double the Postmaster's figures for the percentage of personal snail mail. We seem to combine a tolerance for wildly arbitrary commercial assaults with reticence, no matter what form of communication our technology provides.

I am reminded that in 2004, Bill Gates predicted that the distribution of bulk emails spam would be marginalized. Was he not making a serious prediction? Or was he just that wrong?

Clearly, it is "personal life" that is marginalized; persons as such have almost no life. Between being over-run and being bored, or between being a victim of mass media and being one of the spammers, what vitality is left?

Starting Over. Never.

You realize that someone close to you has no respect for you. They have a complete mis-impression of your career, capped with a certainty that you have never worked and are not "good" with money. You are horrified, not only because these allegations are simply false. But by the fact that it is your own failure to have communicated your successes, your steady and energetic work. Thus, it is not your detractor's fault that she believes completely false things, but yours, for having failed to share the details of your life with those around you. And now it is too late. It is too complicated. There is water under the bridge. Huge.

How often is it too late? When is "starting" just completely over?

Without an Absolute...footnote 43: A. Personal attachments, B. Dreams, C. Beauty

The Platonic Particulars are Meaningless. And there is not a Moment to Lose.

People with time--never too much, tirelessly infinite--on their hands are necessarily confronted with the meaninglessness of their lives. Not life in general, but in particular. We draw three solutions from what others have found:

A. PERSONAL ATTACHMENTS. As gentle as starlight, the twinkling of a hot ball at far remove, there is the comfort of personal attachments. We may be born alone, sharing no limbs, no organs, or even undertanding, and yet, there is no one and nothing "complete". Everything is incomplete. Even Unity is undone. So your life has meaning in its exile from the womb, from its being part of that partition, that multiplication off the introduction of sperm and egg, that contact. And contact continues. As gentle as starlight, however great the remove.

B. DREAMS. The meaning is not only in the twinkling massage of starlight. The consciousness goes to sleep and awakens to its Dreams -- and why is this? Why is Dreaming happening? The meaning of life is bundled with the exilic mass, and sits astride the saddle of the corpus colosum, as a headless horseman holding his head, holding in his hands the meaning of his ride. In our sleep, we work out the route of our purposes. In the tidal cycle of sleep and awakening, one draws out the other, which pushes in turn. This is the hall of mirrors bespoken by poets, the reflection of of the push to pull virtual to virtual, sleep/awakening. The meaning is in the rising and falling, in the reflection of the cycle on itself.

C. BEAUTY. And why does the imagination have the ability, the desire, to appreciate moments of beauty, often so fleeting? The Inuit family trapped in the dark privations of winter, minutes from death, will resort to Art - from child-like giggle songs, to story-told scrimshandering. Beauty is a refuge in difficult times. And so the explanation for the phenomenal impulse of wealthy people to pay millions to other wealthy people to acquire mosaics made by slaves (the Greek decorations displayed in the nonpareil Roman ugly Getty Villa) and the stretched and colored canvas of poverty-ridden painters (Van Gogh). How can beauty be bought? And its accumulation is so mandatory for the powerful, not because they can, for they cannot, but because they must, for they are not living without it.