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Jon Stokes

@jon_stokes

Verifiable Domains Will Eat The World<br>Way back in the Before Times, before social media and the iPhone — even before the towers fell and the modern security state was stood up in their place — we online types would amuse one another by making fun of PowerPoint presentations. PowerPoint was the Nickelback of office software, and performatively hating on it was part of a culture of office humor that now seems to have gone the way of both offices and humor.<br>Probably the most famous PowerPoint spoof of that era was Peter Norvig’s slide deck rendition of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.<br>Every word of Lincoln’s two-hundred seventy-two word oration fits so precisely with every other word, that despite its elevated register there’s a naturalness and wholeness to it that makes it feel like it could only ever have come into being in exactly this form.<br>Norvig’s PowerPoint (per)version of the speech was unexpected and funny because we have a vague but deep sense that the compelling particulars of that speech’s construction carry a kind of truth that a dry recounting of the same bare facts just can't carry.<br>There’s information, and then there’s truth. The two are clearly related, but somehow not actually identical. And in that gap between “information” and “truth” is a whole family of ancient and modern disciplines with names like “rhetoric” and “aesthetics” and “hermeneutics”.<br>Load-bearing complications<br>I hate to dwell on this “form vs. substance” issue much more, because I think you get the point, but I want to pull one more thread before I turn to the topic of the controversy surrounding Anthropic’s watermarking, and to the AI nerd meta-controversy over the normie controversy surrounding that same issue.<br>A few weeks ago, before the Arday affair and the Hugging Face hack — even before Nolan’s Odyssey was released — we all endured a full Discourse Cycle on the politics of Emily Wilson’s Homer translations.<br>I point your attention back to the much-discussed opening lines of Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey:<br>Tell me about a complicated man.<br>Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost<br>when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,<br>and where he went, and who he met, the pain<br>he suffered in the storms at sea, and how<br>he worked to save his life and bring his men<br>back home.<br>One of the words Wilson’s critics focused on was πολύτροπος (polytropos), which she translated as “complicated.” It has a range of meaning indicated by its constituent parts — "poly" for “many”, and “tropos” for “way” or “turn”. Lattimore’s classic translation renders it “many ways,” which conveys the sense that Odysseus did a lot of wandering around but feels a bit wooden, at least to me.<br>Some years ago when I was a student at Harvard Divinity School, I attended a job talk given by the late Ellen Aitken. Ellen discussed the use of the word polytropos in the opening lines of Epistle to the Hebrews, and made a clever case that the anonymous writer of the letter was deliberately fashioning a connection between Odysseus and Jesus for his ancient readers.<br>Take a look at the letter's opening verses, and see if you can spot it:<br>Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets,<br>but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.<br>He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.<br>What the NRSV’s translators have rendered as “various ways” is the same Greek word that Wilson renders as “complicated.” The biblical passage goes on to reference the earthly sojourn of the kingly Jesus, and how he suffered, and how he saved his people, and how he eventually returned home to his rightful throne.<br>In Ellen’s reading of these two passages alongside one another, she has the writer of Hebrews intentionally setting up an intertextual relationship between the wandering and suffering king Odysseus and the wandering and suffering king Jesus. There’s also a bit of an implied contrast, because, as The Odyssey’s intro points out right after our quote cuts off, Odysseus tried and failed to save his men, whereas Jesus succeeded in saving us all.<br>One can imagine the writer of Hebrews carefully dialing in his word choices — turning the knobs for word selection (polytropos) and word sequence (left a royal home, suffered, saved, returned home) like Rick Rubin at the mixing board, until the figures of Odysseus and the figures of Jesus begin to take focus and then overlap one another in his audience’s minds.<br>Certainly the writer of Hebrews could have used a word other than polytropos in the opening of his letter, but it wouldn't have done the same rhetorical work of juxtaposing Odysseus with Jesus. The word selection was an...