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In his lighthearted farcical novel “1984,” George Orwell writes:
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’
Well, the year is now [checks sexy firefighter wall calendar] 2025, and with a little determination anybody can manipulate the truth to suit their own ends. Consider the Trek Y-Foil:
In 2008, I attributed the following quote to writer George Plimpton, of whose work I have not read a single word to this day:
Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else. –George Plimpton
A few years later, the magazine George Plimpton edited, and which remains similarly unread by me, stated the following:
Did you know that a pearl is in fact an oyster’s natural response to irritants? It’s true! Something works its way into the oyster’s shell, it secretes stuff all over it to neutralize it, and the result is a pearl. And of course we can grow cultured pears by sticking an irritant in there ourselves. In a similar fashion, by depositing the small irritant that is my own inanity into the giant oyster shell that is the Internet, an artificial pearl of highly spurious “wisdom” began to form.
Then, twelve more years passed, and I received a letter:
And a bike:
What better way to reinforce faith than with a holy relic?
I then wrote about the bike in a [chokes back laughter] reputable publication:
Coyly noting its provenance:
Like the LeBaron, the Y-Foil 77 was also of highly dubious celebrity provenance, having supposedly once belonged to the late writer and bon vivant George Plimpton.
Now the year is 2025, and behold…truth!
Cultured truth to be sure, but for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the real thing:
This may seem like yet another reason to be wary of AI, but has anything really changed? George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, the Trojan Horse, the Holy Bible…our entire culture is built upon anecdotes coated in mother-of-pearl, so why would we expect that to change in the digital age? Sure, it’s alarming how much of what we accept as “truth” is largely synthetic, and yet it’s also oddly comforting that much of what we’re told is only as real as we allow it to be.
But controlling both past and future isn’t worth anything if you don’t have an agenda, and mine is two-pronged: to inflate the value of George Plimpton’s Y-Foil into the high six figures, and to coin the name “Plimpton Effect” for this sociological phenomenon.
Anyway, enjoy your weekend, and if you need me I’ll be out on George Plimpton’s Y-Foil.
