i'm just a poe boy

rhapsodizing any which way the wind blows

let’s face it, it’s getting pretty surreal out there. the boundaries of fact and phantasmagoria have become dangerously blurred or perhaps altogether absent.

many of you are doubtless familiar with poe’s law.

“without a clear indicator of the author's intent, every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.”

based on the hilarious firestorm of response to the (parody) graphic below, poe’s status as “proven” appears indisputable as discernment on this topic was near zero.

lesser studied is the manner in which, once one has crossed the event horizon into clown world, today’s parody seems to unerringly augur future reality.

are we seeing fiction engender fact?

thus i present for your consideration:

poe's temporal parallax postulate:

any sufficiently advanced parody cannot be distinguished from next year's davos talking points.

i confess that the exact method of action here remains opaque to me.

are the davosians falling prey to poe and mistaking jokes about them for their own brainstorms?

i don’t know how we’d ever validate this, but it certainly seems like a potential pitfall (pratfall?) for those who have risen to power but possess no concept of how anything works. (gato’s postulate)

mayhap the terrifying final form of this phenomenon is recursive intellectual collapse where not even the writer can tell if they themselves are joking in some sort of “poe singularity?”

imagine where THAT might go.

or perhaps ask if we are already there…

caught in a landslide, no discerning reality!