The Best Paladin in the World
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
I think when most of us started to listen to Bob Dylan we assumed that we were part of some community that shared a certain hipness denied to the rest of society. Maybe so, but it kind of missed the point. The point, if I may be permitted, was that we didn’t know, but we knew that we didn’t know, and were trying to deal with the implication of our ignorance.
One of the unforeseen effect’s of the current information overload is that we’ve lost comfort with not knowing. We tend to be, along with our previous president, “deciders”; after a couple of seconds of examination, we either understand something or we assume that it doesn’t have enough significance to warrant the time and energy to try to figure it out. YouTube is a great example; we’re not really ready to deal with the mystery. Probably the best 
demonstration of our ignorance can be experienced by trying to get a handle on the Ipower social network. It’s hard to know where to start; the AtheneWins channel began October 11, 2007, it’s currently the 13th most subscribed YouTube channel, and the 23rd most viewed. This is particularly impressive when you consider that most of the competition is record companies and media production giants. Still, the real curiosity is the content; start here: Best Paladin of The World pwning nubs on My Heart Will Go On from Celine Dion (ATHENE #1). From there it gets really strange, bringing new definition to phrases like tasteless and sexist. How to get a horny bitch (ATHENE #12). In an apparent effort to leave no group un-offended they rapidly move on to Tom Cruise, Scientology, and most of Asia: Hot Girl & Crazy Gamer on Tom Cruise from scientology (ATHENE #19). Before proceeding any further we need to take a brief detour with Marina Orlova 28-year-old philologist who is HotForWords so that we have a good understanding of “irony”. It turns out that the folks at AtheneWins, which has now branched out into the Ipower channel, Tania Uncensored, etc. are actually a group of Belgium political/net activists. This raises questions like , “Do they know what they’re doing; are they serious, and if so when so; are they a positive force for social change, or simply another example of the degeneration of youth and society; why are several thousand people watching them on a daily basis (on any given day one or more of the Ipower productions finds itself in the top 20 most viewed videos on YouTube), and my personal fave, ‘What is identity?’” Perhaps more to the point, it raises the question- do we/can we have any idea what’s happening on YouTube? Wittgenstein ended the Tractatus with position seven: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Good advice; if we could follow it, we just might learn something.
