“On Vicarious Causation”

That essay was written three years ago. I’m not sure why people are focusing on that rather than on Prince of Networks, which is freshly published and even avalable free of charge as a PDF file.

The biggest surprise for me in recent months in the blogosphere is the rush some people are in to criticize work that they haven’t even read. In the most flagrant example, there was Bryan K. criticizing me for plagiarizing Hegel’s critique of the thing-in-itself, even though I defend the thing-in-itself! He then blamed the mistake on Steven Shaviro’s supposed poor grammar (forgetting that polemical outbursts ought to be based on personal acquaintance with the primary materials, not dependent on the grammatical skill of other commentators).

It’s a good rule of thumb in this business that you should have some idea what you’re talking about before you start pointing fingers and accusing people of being “fools,” “idiots,” etc. Especially when you’re fresh out of undergraduate education and don’t yet have a single publication of your own under your belt. One of the unfortunate aspects of this new medium is the way it allows behavior that would receive swift and severe social punishment if attempted in more traditional settings.