Corinthian Column
by Andrei CodrescuThe pedestal set on this base is a sense of social election, the feeling that wiring sets one higher than one's unwired fellows. People who wear expensive underwear feel the same. Nobody can see it, but they know it and it is enough to raise their self-esteem and put them on a smug pedestal. From this pedestal rises a slender fluted shaft with fillets, meaning that one's sense of social importance travels upward through the economy, ever-hopeful, thrifty and forward-looking, a work of willful erection fed by the best fillets of the most-kindly animals on this earth hand-fed in their turn with beer and airline peanuts. It is true that the stock market has caused a number of these slender flutes to wilt like sunflowers past their prime, but this is a temporary condition. Greenspan has drugs for it.
The flutes have ornate capitals. These capitals are: New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and Seattle. What makes these capitals ornate is too complex to pack here, suffice it to say that people wired for total communication produce spontaneously all kinds of ornate businesses that stimulate their imagination and reinforce their smugness. The non-ornate provinces, still mired in the ionic or uncertain neo-classical cement, benefit from the ornate capitals, eventually, when broken Corinthians are shipped to them for storage. That's another matter altogether.
The ornate capitals use stylized acanthus leaves and an elaborate cornice, which gets us to the heart of the matter -- which is style, not philosophy. The best electronics are embedded in the acanthus leaves and the cornice, which is to say in hats and hair. If until now you were wondering just what part of Wired Man carries the brunt of the chips, you have my opinion. The future will be full of extraordinary hats and sophisticated big hair, extensions, and the like. The future will be Corinthian, if at all.
