interface 010: THE FAUX-SAVANT

THE FAUX SAVANT:
Override complete. We’re back in control.

A crisis blinks in code across the screen. No time to panic – your mind shifts gears, adapting without hesitation. Patterns emerge where others see gibberish; your fingers move with confident precision. That part of you fluent in machines has taken over, cool and focused, kind of. 44 tabs open.

“The medium is the massage.”

Marshall McLuhan, [Jerome Agel, produced]

Actually, that does remind you; you’ve been having problems with your printer recently…

You learned the machine by living inside its ribcage.

The Faux Savant’s technical survival is practical, adaptive, and unsentimental. It values figuring things out as you go over formal training, workarounds over rules, and momentum over permission. You know enough to make things function and/or break convincingly.

You navigate software, platforms, formats, and tools with the understanding that none of them are stable. Updates change the rules. Access disappears. What worked yesterday may be deprecated tomorrow.
Overuse may result in treating every system as temporary, every solution as provisional, and every tool as already obsolete.

You do not trust machines.
You keep pace with them.

THE FAUX SAVANT:

Shall we begin with the people’s classic? Wikipedia, the structural template for online systems of information. Everything has a wiki.

THE SYSADMIN:

Excellent choice. Useful, cited and boring. As it should be. The greatest stories ever read exist within the daily newspaper, according to Kenneth Goldsmith, the same could be said for the contents of a Wikipedia page.

THE BIT:

“Page”, the greatest story ever plagiarized.

BACK HOME NEXT