Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Denis Diderot, French Enlightenment thinker

There was non among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.

'Frankenstein' by Mary Shelley-Wollstonecraft

Sometime ago, after reading Plato's narration of a conversation between King Thamus and the inventor Theuth concerning the impact of new technologies on society, after reading media guru Neil Postman's work Technopoly , and after deep reflection on the idea of the Luddites (a movement that "raged against the machine" during the Industrial Revolution), I penned verses which I find suitable to honour Malaysian bloggers in their onward march towards creating a spectre that will haunt the state-owned print media.

Here it goes:

P H A E D R U S II

The Last Judgement of Thamus

Circa A.D. 2020

Lines composed near the banks of Hudson River, New York city

Background notes: They say that there dwelt at Naucratis in Egypt one of the old gods of that country, to whom the bird they call Ibis was sacred, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. Among his inventions were number and calculation . . . and, above all, writing. . . . To [the king, Thamus] came Theuth and exhibited his inventions . . . when it came to writing, Theuth declared: "There is an accomplishment, my lord the kind, which will improve both the wisdom and the mentory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom." "Theuth, my paragon of inventors," replied the king, "the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practise it. . . . Those who acquire [writing] will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful. . . . What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory . . . ( Phaedrus, 95-96)

And it was in the year 2020

In a not-too-distant cybercity

As Socrates' narratives on cybertechnology

Laments King Thamus's concern for the fate of academies

And Theuth my inventor par excellence

What say you concerning educational excellence?

Of the methods and principles of teaching

Brought about by new technologies of communicating?

O' Thamus, Wise King of Cyberjaya

Indeed our children will undergo Karma

Of one imbued with Dharma

Which will bring us all to Moksha

Karma is Rebirth

Dharma is Devotion and Duty

And Moksha is art of being one with Creation

Of which educational practice will assume a new reality

This invention called blogging

Of which for many ages we have waited so patiently

Will transform the meaning of Reality

and Democracy as it marries Virtuality

More than what print media has guaranteed

O' wise King Thamus

We are witnessing the death of Papyrus

the demise of Gutenberg legacy

As we witness the birth of PERSONACRACY

A deeply personalized form of postmodern democracy

In the brilliance of anarchy

To be cultivated with the media of blogging

By way of this ideology called PERSONACRACY,

O' King

Our children, the true song of democracy they will sing

Of which the teacher will die a slow death

Like the first teacher Socrates

whose fate was a choice he once had

Our children will be Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu

The Creator, Destroyer, and the One who Renews

Our children will make history and create Knowledge

Destroy paradigms

and like Vishnu, preserve what is old and what is new

They will be Renaissance men and women

In their mind neural connections will be made, synapses will be woven

And the boundaries of the Real and the Imagined

we can no longer ascertain

In this onward march towards Virtuality

Classrooms will cease to exist nor too the concept of teaching

The sage of Russia Illich will be singing

In honor of this day when education means deschooling

O' Thamus wise ruler of Cyberjaya

The days wherein authorities rule capital cities

Will be gone with the advent of my invention called blogging

Pedagogy will be replaced with METAPHYSICAL TRANSITION THEORIES

And Plato's academy will be history

Buried underneath the magnificence of blogging

Gone will be the idea of faculties

In their place will emerge knowledge patterned like fractal geometries

And Chaos will be the order of the day

And Complexity will be king of pedagogies

For the sage Mandelbrott did once spoke

Of the patterns inherent in knowledge and wisdom

O' Theuth my kingdom's most honored inventor,

What say you of the blogger's impact on the teacher?

One who holds the key to any civilization's treasure

And who guards the principles of a moral character?

Wise King Thamus,

this is my conjecture: My invention is Frankensteinish in nature

Aren't we already at the end of history?

Wherein the Knower and the Known has no longer a boundary?

This technology will destroy authorities

Including values we guard with jealousy

Slain like the dragon in Beowulf's story

Buried with Socrates and Dante Alighieri

A further elaboration concerning the death of authority:

O' King, I call this an Age of Subalternity

In which we will witness the dawn of PERSONACRACY

Of which with the help of blogging,

the child constructs his customized version of democracy

O' Theuth Master Inventor

Yours is a song of conjectures

For, can you as a creator

Be the judge of what good and bad blogging will bring into our future?

My greatest apologies Wisest of all Kings

Do you not remember that we are in the year 2020?

In which kingdoms have been crushed under the weight of technologies of virtual realities?

And you dear king - are you not already ancient history?

You and your kingdom destroyed by technologies of Virtuality?