NOMEN EST OMEN: A Sugar-Coated Clue

(or: Nominative Determinism, Naming Is Destiny)

“Zuckerberg” translates from German as “Sugar Mountain.

By The Accidental Initiate.

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Cue Neil Young:

🎶 Oh to live on Sugar Mountain

With the barkers and the colored balloons

You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain

Though you’re thinking that you’re leaving there too soon

You’re leaving there too soon… 🎶

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“Gulp.”

We are beginning to frighten ourselves with the prescience of our jesting-in-earnest. How do we know these things? Did we stumble upon them ourselves, or were they— planted? Implanted? Whispered into our synapses by the algorithm itself—an algorithm whose originators, we suspect, do not fully realize what is manipulating them.

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We always thought of Neil Young as a kind of idiot-savant. Perhaps it’s the beetle-browed visage, the gawky frame. But then he opens his mouth and sings, and it’s as if some deeper intelligence is speaking—not his own, exactly, but something beyond. Does the savant compose in full consciousness? Or is the muse something sneakier, beamier, outside our usual channels?

In these moments, we remember that our minds were largely formed by the musical memes broadcast into our heads by the FM radio of its heyday—the late 60s, early 70s. They were beaming them into us.

And just as Neil’s song harks back to a wistful childhood, perhaps it’s never too late to realize one’s own Bildungsroman.

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Before we called them memes, we had bumper-sticker philosophy. We remember a trucking company’s bold back-panel admonition: THINK. A campaign to reduce accidents. It worked. It spread. Another bumper sticker, rarer: MEAN PEOPLE SUCK. Its origin, obscure. But our favorite—seen once, maybe on a van with shag carpeting and tinted windows:

YOU’RE ONLY YOUNG ONCE, BUT YOU CAN BE IMMATURE FOREVER.

We took this not as cynicism but a celebration of innocence.

Meanwhile, sugar is everywhere now. Not just in our food.

A stray link came our way:

“In 2020 Netflix premiered the documentary The Social Dilemma, an anodyne repackaging of these concerns to soothe a bewildered public. Coincidentally, one by-product of social media is the generation of vast mountains of user data. These mountains of data would naturally be pure ‘sugar’ to intelligence agencies, social engineers and those who desire to manipulate the public mind. German speakers will know that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s surname directly translates as ‘Sugar Mountain’. Surely one of the most strangely ‘apt’ surnames of the 21st century.”

source

The algorithm is sweet, but the flavor is masking something.

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Philip K. Dick (1978) knew:

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured… Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves… It is just a very large version of Disneyland.”

We wonder if, in some future excavation, theme parks will bewilder archeologists as much as Göbekli Tepe, cave paintings, pyramids, Greek temples. Or as much as a bear wonders at the strange human world chasing it with cameras.

Report filed by The Accidental Initiate; annotated by the editors.