The brilliance that is the Cringely gonzo-snark complex is, of course, 99.99 percent me. But once in a while the editors at InfoWorld cease sponging up beer and instead find useful/disturbing material to fuel these award-winning essays. This time, one of them came across either serious crazy or the most brilliant being of our generation while looking for Bluetooth-enabled urinal cakes on Craigslist.
You might remember the Internet splash back in May regarding a near-luminary calling himself Cloud Starchaser, aka (or not) Einstein MacGyver. This character founded a new religion, The Church of the Zuckerberg, based on the premise that Mark Zuckerberg is God, which may explain nothing or everything, depending on how much Oxycontin you’ve ingested. For all you budding Web comic book artists, gird your loins – Mr. Starchaser is looking for a few good and either hugely open minded or intellectually numb graphics geeks.
First, apologies for not commenting on the Church of the Zuckerberg back in May. Clearly, it was an oversight of biblical proportions – perhaps literally.
A Zuckerberg shall lead us
Mr. MacGyver-Starchaser has detailed the particulars of his religion in a typically lengthy, rambling, and in no way psychotic manifesto, which he is qualified to write because “he’s a sweet-a$$ prophet chosen by God Himself.” Translation: Zuck ate too many gummy bears one night and accidentally sent over a few pages from his diary, “The Wonders of Me and My Own Sweet Me-ness, by Me (A Me Book).”
But while his brain may live in Narnia, I submit that at least on the surface, Einstein MacGyver/Cloud Starchaser’s heart is in the right place, or at least its vicinity. Basically, he feels that now or in the near future, humanity will consist of endlessly warring nations that have the ability to wipe out every living being on earth. Based on Edward Snowden’s findings and the troubling confessions of Travis Kalanick’s wet nurse, he’s probably right.
To outline his solution, MacGyver-Starchaser points to John Lennon, who recommended we come together as “one tribe” to avoid disaster. MacGyver-Starchaser believes Facebook is the ticket to get us there, which isn’t too insane as long as you can gloss over its relentless invasion of privacy. Where old EinCloud went wrong was in believing it takes 98 pages to explain this. He could have kept it to the paragraph above and concluded with my absolute favorite bloc of the whole shebang (edited and commented for the language-sensitive):
Now dump [sic] people are a real @#$%ing problem right now because while it’s good that Zuck came into this world and created Facebook as the tool that could be used to unite the world as one global nation which is necessary for the survival of the entire human race there are just a #$%@load of #$%&ing dumb, dumb people who think this is a bad idea when it’s actually a good idea and many of these dumb people will oppose the idea because of their just basic dumb nature.
Now that’s writing! If I drink, smoke, and snort whatever chemicals the Cloudster is apparently consuming by the bucket and subsequently decide to found the Church of Cringely, I’m plagiarizing that passage verbatim.
The newest testament
Unfortunately, MacStarchaser dulls his impact when he decides to explain the grittier details of his church:
- Jared Kushner, publisher of the New York Observer, and his wife Ivanka Trump being appointed the future King and Queen of Israel, otherwise known as the Divine Monarchy, which somehow also means Donald Trump and his hair will get elected as President of the United States.
- The ancient Greco-Roman pantheon actually exists and, in fact, founded Judaism, which means Yahweh is Zeus/Zuckerberg and Abraham didn’t pick up on the accent.
- All 12 Olympians have also manifested in human form: Justin Massler as Apollo, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth as Poseidon, Sheryl Sandberg as Athena, and Tucker Max as Dionysus. There are more, most of them hailing from the same high school as Zuck, Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H. As it happens, I live only a few hundred miles away, thus I must rate at least a prophet in Zuck’s church or, even more fun, a heretic.
Unfortunately, I struggled to get even a third of the way through Cloudy's “second proof,” despite a heroic intake of scotch. If any reader manages to do enough crystal to finish the tome, please let me know how it ends and why, if he’s God, Zuck so often behaves like such a slime waffle.
Lucky for us, the sheer length of his epic inspired Mac’s latest Craigslisting. He sensibly realized that the dissertation might be a smidge long and infused with too much genius, rendering it incomprehensible to us lower-echelon pinheads. He’s decided to turn his brainchild into a series of short and humorous comic book-style vignettes for our little minds to digest in pieces and thus come to know Zuck’s true illumination. That’s where you, the budding Web comic book artist, come in.
Before you reject this idea like a bad organ transplant, think about it a minute. Sure, MacG-S probably dances nightly to imaginary banjo music, but it’s a paycheck, and this economy isn’t exactly Web comic book artist-friendly. Plus, he has no idea of the going rate for Web illustrators, so negotiations should be a breeze – unless he wants to pay you in Zuck blessings. In that case, you should hit him with pepper spray and sprint for the door, damned if you do and damned if you don't.