Traditionalists may see the death of old media and the fracturing of style as threats to time-tested systems. Old writers likely want people to read books, dangit, and books written within clear limits of genre, even if those limits have only existed for a few decades. Each medium wins its hawks, and so each medium has mourners to bemoan its inevitable death.  But how much gladder am I to laud the comings of a form, the birth of a new literature, a new system of meaning, one made of transparencies and Japanese music videos…

These musings are really just to say: My friends P. D. and M. R. of What We Know So Far have been presenting for the last year or so a series of simultaneously low-fi/hyper-current lecture-operas about, among other rhizomatic topics, the internet—what it means, where it’s going, and how quickly information in general is mutating in the Twitter era.

The other night at 3rd Ward they presented a series of short… lectures (?) and videos, some of which I’d seen in earlier, less-polished (but always entertaining) rounds of composition. To sum it up quickly and perhaps badly, WWKSF’s work blends the words of Baudrillard and the images of ICanHasCheezburger seamlessly, so that it’s afterward surprising that the great French de-thinkers of the twentieth century weren’t inspired by the internet, but somehow prefigured it, perhaps by doing lots of awesome drugs, or by being really smart, or a mix of columns A and B.

For What We Know So Far’s bold and hilarious efforts to probe just what we know and how we know it, in toto, they receive this week’s Honourable Badge of Merit.

In related news, (i.e., the news of cat memes on the internet), I found a new favorite sentence of the summer, from the New York Times:

No group, from the mostly white soldiers and bureaucrats who corral and abuse the prawns to the Nigerian gangsters who prey upon the aliens and exploit their addiction to cat food, is innocent.

This sentence claims to describe a movie, District 9, which I hadn’t really wanted to see until reading about the Nigerian cat-food gangsters. I wonder now, rereading the sentence from beyond the stars, if the c.-f. gangsters ever heard of Athanasius Kircher’s anti-mellifluous cat piano, and if cats like aliens, or if aliens fall into the same category as other cats, vacuums, mops, twine, roaches, bees, human toes, and floss.