13 September 2006

Sock Puppet

It is cool today, and rain is coming from the Midwest. There is driving to be done, and a long session in an airless vault to fulfill the annual requirement to be reminded that there is a significant counter-intelligence threat out there.

A person with a sock-puppet on their hand could make it more interesting than it is likely to be.

I think I will keep my mouth shut about my interview with the nice man from the Bureau a few weeks ago. I think I was able to convince him that my intentions were entirely honorable in my relationship with a sovereign Southeast Asian nation, and that the situation was purely tangential to the matter they were investigating.

I'll nod when the briefer tells us that things are not always what they appear to be, and that we should be alert to potential threats.

That covers a lot of territory.

I manage to compartment the threats pretty well. There is the low-level radar we all use when walking around in the city, or driving in our cars. If things do not look right, it could be because they are not. You could walk into something unpleasant or drive at high speed into something catastrophic.

We are not in Baghdad, after all, but some of the same rules for safe living apply,

Just as they do at the office. We have our on-the-job radar, looking for signs and portents in the e-mail, and what is said in the meetings. And of course, who is saying it. There is a time of great tension down at the Bus Station, and rumors that some of us will have to decamp from our offices to accommodate the new corporate leadership.

It is wearing down some of the employees, and I am happy to say that I have adopted the same cheerful attitude I used when the ship was going to sea, and we did not know when, or if, we would be back.

Cheerful idiot, that's me.

That is why I enjoy the relative anonymity and anarchy of the net. It is extraordinary that we have these small windows into the chaos of the wide world in the places we live. I am looking into one now, as are you.

Mostly the parts of our shared digital environment in which we spend time are benign, if you stay in safe electronic neighborhoods and away from the Wild West pages filled with Mal-ware and Trojan programs.

We even have a whole new vocabulary to describe the wonders of this medium that permits us to collaborate, and share our thoughts.

There is blogging, of course, or the act of posting a Web Log. I had always aspired to be a Samuel Pepys, recording a small view of great events for some distant posterity. But there was only one of him, and we are legion. I am resigned to be what I am, a dyspeptic idiot.

There is phishing, or the act of fooling someone into giving up their personal information which is then manipulated into fraud by malign idiots.

My favorite new term is “sock puppet.” The Times of New York brought it to me this morning. It id defined as “a false identity through which a member of an Internet community speaks while pretending not to, like a puppeteer manipulating a hand puppet.”

I take that as an image of something like Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, a fist stuck in front of a camcorder.

I like that a lot. I have heard that there are unscrupulous people out there who do reprehensible things. For example, they assume alternate identities and review their own books on Amazon.com, saying improbably nice things about themselves. They make up scurrilous facts and edit the Wikipedia to their own ends.

They vilify their foes from the safety of their sock-puppets, hiding behind bogus names and IP addresses.

There are those who would say that taking a nom de guerre is a time-honored tactic for self-protection. Certainly, I am no position to be critical on that count. Still, it makes me wonder that at the end of a mostly honorable career, I have scaled the heights to become a blogging sock-puppet.

It is not exactly what I started out to do. But perhaps I can find someone to write a favorable review and make it seem worthwhile.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com


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