Ah, The Agony and Ecstasy of Reganwald.
Amidst accusations that his concept was lifted from Mr. Daisey, can we expect him to say, "I am not a crook?"
Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous
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Re: Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous
#22Ah, The Agony and Ecstasy of Reganwald. Amidst accusations that his concept was lifted from Mr. Daisey, can we expect him to say, "I am not a crook?"
Mike named specific companies and denied that he was making up his experiences when asked. I can sleep at night about writing that particular piece of fiction and following it up with disclaimers on Twitter, here on HN, and on my blog.
Re: Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous
#23Am I in the minority in thinking this didn't need a clarification?
It was aimed at a technical audience that would likely catch the humor and direct signs of fiction. I do realize that the impact of the story led to its larger audience, but this does not change the original intent.
The ambiguity in story telling (and music, and art, and ..) adds depth. Clarifying it after the fact, with the proverbial lights on removes depth.
Also, comparing Reginald to Mike Daisy non-ironically is very disingenuous. Mike went on national news outlets to pitch his show and highlighted it as fact rather than performance. He was warned that performing on TAL will lead to its scrutiny as a journalistic report and he still went ahead, knowingly misleading the public.
Re: Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous
#24Fake activism hurts real activism. Please label your fiction as such. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amina_Abdallah_Arraf_al_Omari
All stories are metaphorical, even the true ones. And many of the most honest stories I have read have clearly been fictions.
Perhaps it is attempts at truth telling that should display the clearest warning, as it is generally better to start with the assumption that anything within the realm of normal media is written with an agenda and is probably not entirely true.
As to what counts as fake activism, the claims that were made in the story by raganwald are things that are easily verified as fiction by merely scratching the surface.
Where Mike Daisey actively promoted his work through a journalistic media outlet and only revealed the fabrications after an investigation to trace the interpreter he used in china, this is a post on a blog where as soon as the author is asked, "Is this real?", they write a disclaimer explaining that it isn't, but was written to illustrate a point.
Re: Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous
#25Am I in the minority in thinking this didn't need a clarification? It was aimed at a technical audience that would likely catch the humor and direct signs of fiction. I do realize that the impact of the story led to its larger audience, but this does not change the original intent. The ambiguity in story telling (and music, and art, and ..) adds depth. Clarifying it after the fact, with the proverbial lights on remov…
Not in the minority, but here’s the thing. As long as this was primarily in our community, I was comfortable with a wee bit of ambiguity. Hackers and others are perfectly capable of doing a little fact-checking such as looking at my online resume or noticing that I write a lot of stuff like this.
Perhaps one in a hundred or even thousand people reading it might have thought it was real.
But once it escaped our cozy little echo-chamber, it went to a place where many people thought it was real. They aren’t part of a culture that expects parables and satire. They have no familiarity with my existing blow-hardiness on the subject of hiring programmers or privacy. It’s not as reasonable for me to expect that J. Random Facebookfriend will read it and assume it’s a parable.
So, it seemed like the right thing to do to issue a clarification.
tl;dr: An item on the front page of HN doesn’t need a clarification, an item on the front page of Reddit does.
Re: Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous
#26Am I in the minority in thinking this didn't need a clarification? It was aimed at a technical audience that would likely catch the humor and direct signs of fiction. I do realize that the impact of the story led to its larger audience, but this does not change the original intent. The ambiguity in story telling (and music, and art, and ..) adds depth. Clarifying it after the fact, with the proverbial lights on remov…
regardless of who it was aimed at, it ended up on the front page of reddit. and we all know how reddit is about believing stuff, and then how they react when they find out they've been 'lied' to.
i'm sure at least a few people have threatened to kill raganwald's cats by now.
Re: Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous
#27Am I in the minority in thinking this didn't need a clarification? It was aimed at a technical audience that would likely catch the humor and direct signs of fiction. I do realize that the impact of the story led to its larger audience, but this does not change the original intent. The ambiguity in story telling (and music, and art, and ..) adds depth. Clarifying it after the fact, with the proverbial lights on remov…
I totally agree. Some people understood it, who cares? Their lives were not negatively affected by that in any way. Let them misunderstand. The letter would have been much less compelling with a disclaimer on it.
Re: Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous
#28Am I in the minority in thinking this didn't need a clarification? It was aimed at a technical audience that would likely catch the humor and direct signs of fiction. I do realize that the impact of the story led to its larger audience, but this does not change the original intent. The ambiguity in story telling (and music, and art, and ..) adds depth. Clarifying it after the fact, with the proverbial lights on remov…
regardless of who it was aimed at, it ended up on the front page of reddit. and we all know how reddit is about believing stuff, and then how they react when they find out they've been 'lied' to. i'm sure at least a few people have threatened to kill raganwald's cats by now.
Strangely, the amount of anger people feel when their beliefs are revealed to be false is proportional to the leap of faith they had to make to believe them in the first place.
Think of that leap of faith as being personal investment.
Re: Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous
#29Fake activism hurts real activism. Please label your fiction as such. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amina_Abdallah_Arraf_al_Omari
This is why we have stuff like "All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." in a book about starships and aliens in a far-off galaxy. Not everything needs to be labeled for the lowest common denominator.
Re: Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous
#30Team Fizz Buzz is not an unreasonable team name! Or is the norm out there for teams to name themselves to whatever they are working on? Our current teams are named: "Team America 2", "Kill Kenny" and "Etablissemanget" ("The Establishment" in swedish)
You may have something there, I do recall meeting a member of Apple’s System Seven team, and his business card read: Omniscient Thaumaturge, Blue Meanies Group
Not bad! On a similar note Etablissemanget adopted "treating objects like women" as their slogan.