Now, when XKCD updated yesterday, as they always do on a Monday, you may well have gone onto their site to view the updated comic, or had it pop up in your feed-reader. Personally, I found yesterday’s quite amusing, and permitted myself a brief chuckle.
If you didn’t fully comprehend the implications of the joke, however, fear not! For xkcdexplained is the site for you. These guys dissect each comic in great detail as it comes out. (For an example of today’s, see below.) And if even that is overly confusing for you, there is, of course xkcdexplainedexplained.tumblr.com (though this updates more sporadically).
A group of men gather, angry about the contents of a book. “Heresy” is the complaint offered, which implies they find the comment religiously objectionable. They decide to burn the book in protest, but realize that in order to get their desired bonfire they need more copies. Comedically, they opt to burn several less-expensive copies loaded onto an ebook reader. The “punch” of this comic—that is to say, its ultimate joke—is that the men involved foolishly burned an electronic device and died from chemical inhalation.
To the uninitiated reader, it may seem shocking that this work ends with people dying. In order to understand why the Author considers this funny, one must understand the subculture and doctrine called the “Hacker Ethos,” a militant version of libertarian-ism and darwinism that believes in absolute survival of the fittest, where “fittest” is defined by who can amass the most knowledge. Unlike other academic subcultures, the “Hacker Ethos” makes almost no differentiation between useful knowledge (such as chemistry, engineering, or computer programming) and useless trivia (such as jokes, correlations to movie plot lines, or correct english spelling of foreign words). In this philosophy, only memorization and recall are of value and the accumulation of knowledge (and its subsequent display) supersede all other drives.
It is easy to see why people who voluntarily destroy or avoid knowledge would be at the absolute lowest position of this social hierarchy. Much like slaves, any and all misfortune that happens to them in this pursuit is considered richly deserved and even funny. This effect is magnified even more than the casual observer might expect; the story will be retold over and over as the crown jewel of the nerd king’s arsenal of trivia.
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I post what I like and I like what I post. I am a law student, which kills my spare time, but I somehow manage to find time to bake and to knit and to see people. Occasionally. I could pencil you in in about 4 months, perhaps? FYI, I dislike closing paragraphs in html tags. For more about me, try the About Me page
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