The Breakfast Table

Are You a Pervert or a Detective?

Dear Joel,

Didn’t catch Bill Joy’s piece in Wired. (I don’t read Wired, or the Industry Standard, or any of those. My theory is that my head will explode if I add any more magazines to my reading life.) But I really loved The Matrix. I don’t worry very much about whether machines will dominate us and turn us into batteries. I only worry about whether Michael Saylor will figure out a way to dominate us and turn us into batteries. I am totally fascinated by Saylor, and not only because he recently did us all the favor of losing more than $6 billion in a day. He might be an entire new life form. Out of curiosity, I went downtown a few weeks ago to watch the breakfast at which he announced his plan to found a $100 million online university. (It was at that awful Reagan International Trade Center, which was surely designed by machines.) The plan has a few little kinks, such as his determination not to pay any of the professors and so on, but boy does he know how to sell. Think Dennis Quaid on amphetamines, but talking faster. His speech moved seamlessly from a sort of populist choler (he had to join the reserves in order to get a scholarship to MIT, he reminded the crowd; “we are ignorant, and we don’t deserve to be ignorant”) to a completely sinister peroration about how if you could educate online all the people in India who make $5 a year, you could put them to work writing code for you and pay them $50 a year instead. And he didn’t even seem to know he was talking self-interest as well as world betterment, because apparently these distinctions have been rendered inoperative. There is no spoon.

I meant to ask you earlier what you thought of this morning’s Post front-pager about the “cyber-Mom” who spends as much as 18 hours a day on the Internet trolling for pedophiles and then luring them ever deeper into yucky conversation with her various undercover (and underage) identities before turning them in to the police. I don’t have any problem with people reporting child pornography and pedophilia they come across online; I even like the notion, as explained in the piece, of net vigilantes as a form of new-age neighborhood watch. But this woman seemed so invested in the fictional 14-year-olds she becomes, even using details from her own daughters’ lives to help their verisimilitude. (“When her daughters, ages 11 and 14, make the honor roll, her characters do, too.”) She’s been responsible for several arrests, but something about the story gave me the utter creeps.

Are you all sloshing champagne on each other down at 1150 15th Street? (I should make it clear to our readers that whereas we’re both technically Post columnists, I’m the kind of columnist that works at home in its bathrobe, whereas you’re the kind that puts on grown-up clothes and goes to the office.) I just heard that the Post won at least two Pulitzers–Kate Boo for investigation and the peerless Henry Allen for criticism. Almost equally thrilling from the Post’s point of view (though none of the supervising adults would ever admit to feeling this): The New York Times won zero Pulitzers. This is actually unfair. Jason DeParle, who was a finalist, certainly deserves one for his work on welfare reform. Anyway, I’m sure wild celebration prevails down there, and if you’re crying inside, Joel, I won’t tell anyone.

Best,
Marjorie