Liberal Debutante

My last issue of Wired was pretty dissapointing. There was nothing overtly exciting in it…or worth talking about. BUT! This months, has a giant picture of Stephen Colbert on the front of it and he is sawing through an IPod. (See on the left, uploaded from the official Wired website.)

The magazine comes with a pull out titled "Wired: How To: A step-by-step guide to making the most of your digital life". (Follow the link to Wired to find the How To guide in a more complete form.) It has how to make the most of you work, play and life, and is jump started by an introduction called "Be an Expert on Anything" written by Stephen Colbert. Yeah, it’s funny.

(read on for Stephen’s advice on how to be an expert on anything…)

Pick a field that can’t be verified. Try something like
string theory or God’s will: “I speak to God. I’m sorry that you can’t also.”
Security experts are in this category: They have security clearances, we don’t.
We can’t question the expertise of the NSA because we are not in the NSA.

Choose a subject that’s actually secret. Dan Brown invented
a secret subject for The Da Vinci Code,
so new he is forever an expert on this secret subject that no one can challenge.
Anybody who attacks the secret subject is, by definition, part of the cabal.

Get your own entry in an encyclopaedia. In the media age, everybody
was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in
five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem
even smarter.

Use the word zeitgeist as often as possible. Ideally, you
want to find words that sound familiar by people don’t really know their definitions:
zeitgeist, bildungsroman, doppelganger –
better yet, anything Latin. But avoid paradigm.
It’s so 1994. If you say the word paradigm,
everybody knows you’re a poser.

Be sure to use lots of abbreviations and acronyms. Someone
who says the words operations security
may be educated, but the person who uses the military abbreviation Opsec is clearly an expert. If I use the
term Gitmo, that means I’ve actually
been there. If you say “we’re going to Defcon 1,” it means you probably have
the launch codes. Real experts don’t have time for extra syllables.

Speak from the balls, not from the diaphragm. In the expert
game, you’ve got to have sack. That means speaking with confidence. In America you’ve got to steer clear of nuance and ambivalence – and don’t even
contemplate doubt.

Don’t be afraid to make things up. Never fear being exposed as a fraud. Experts make things up all the
time. They’re qualified to.

Don’t limit yourself to current knowledge. If you worry too
much about being up-to-date, you miss out on vast territories of obsolete
knowledge just waiting to be reclaimed. Think of leech-craft and all the lonely
experts in the use of the little creatures, which are now experiencing a
renaissance in health care. 

Get an honorary PhD. They work wonders. I have a doctorate
in fine arts from Knox College in Illinois.
All I did was give a speech, and now everybody has to call me Dr. Colbert.

Make a habit of name-dropping. Say things like “I was
talking to John Hockenberry yesterday for my story in Wired. Have you seen my cover?” I plan to use this issue of Wired to assert that I now know
everything about wires.