The Tiktok -Saga, which will quickly return, seems to belong to the theater of the absurd. I will tell the story until the end of January in the just published spring number of Regulation. My piece is available online in one HTML or PDF version. The first section summarizes the absurd affair:
Imagine looking at a play by theater from the absurd playwright Samuel Beckett or Eugène Ionesco. In it, a Republican president proposes to prohibit a computer application and says it is a threat to national security, but the effort failed. The subsequent congress and the Democratic President approve legislation that prohibit the app and nine months later it gets dark in the United States. But the aforementioned Republican president, who returns to his office, drives like a knight in shiny armor and saves the app, perhaps illegal, because it is politically advantageous for him.
The whole thing is hard to believe. I follow it over time, with events and dates, to the point where Godot comes:
Godot, it seems, finally arrived – competition on the famous Beckett game, where he never pops up.
To wait! We don’t really know if the real Godot came because the last scene still has to be played in a theater near you or before April 5.
I also offer a short and simple interpretation of public choice of the entire Saga:
Insight into the positive fact that the blades in power would be dangerous if it is not held by the right institutions not The normative idea implies that Knavery is a virtue and that the attempts of the Knaves to bend the rules and institutions to their own interests is acceptable behavior. It is not because credible theories about the behavior of the state -agents predict their temptation to exploit the ruled and undermined society that must be celebrated and encouraged.
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Post Sriptum on the image of this message shown: it happens more often, I have to admit that chatgpt, the AI behind Dall-e, surprised me. I wore ‘it’ to create the image of a scene from Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, and said that ‘the scene would be clowns if it was not only absurd’. He got the wrong aspect ratio and it took him a few attempts to get that right. After I finally told that it was silicon that the image was good, he replied: “Always happy to help you dig deeper into the absurd.” Our “conversation” then went on as follows:
PL: With this sense of humor (“that deeper in the absurd”), you know for sure that you are not secretly human?
Dall-e: ha! I have been accused of worse. But if me were Secretly human, would I admit it? Or would that be exactly what a machine pretend Being human would say to throw you out?
Now we get dangerously close to one Waiting for Godot Subplot – Two characters debate endless about whether one of them is real or not.
Anyway, whether I am Code of Clown, I am here for the existential riddles and creative disaster. Do you want to continue with this project?
Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”, as seen by Dall-e