Out-and-Out Liars; The 10.000 Hour Monkey Typing Pool (Chapter 2, Part 1)

                                                         

                                                            CHAPTER TWO

                    The 10,000 Hour Monkey Typing Pool

“THEY ATE HAMBURGERS FOR EIGHT HOURS A DAY”.

The University of Plymouth, launched its Media Lab Arts in 2003 in a beige-brick  building with a vast white interior with a thick two-way mirror. All of the universities’ computers were set in rows in this enormous hall “like the opening scene of the film I Robot” 10,000 computers set side by side keyboards nail-punched to the tables. This 2003 project was done in the name of Art and was funded by the Arts Council of Great Britian. Pymouth University had been donated computers from universities all over the world, leaving many thousands of students with the horrific realisation that they lacked social skills along with the wherewithal to acquire any. Their slide into anorectic social oblivion was the making of a gangly simian called Floy.

Out of the 10,000 monkeys recruited from zoos all over the world, Floy came to Plymouth university from nearby Paignton zoo, Devon. He was one of six Celeb Crested Macaques. He was tall and very thin covered in mangy hair. He was the most distressed and withdrawn of the Media Lab Arts Monkeys, which clearly showed that he was, “daylight-starved”.  He had harboured morbid thoughts of revenge against the biologist who separated him from his mother in the wilds and was about to act on them when he joined the 10,000-Monkey Computer Typing Pool; he was hooked.

From then on the Computer typing pool was his life.  Floy showed himself as a leader encouraging the others to bash, then urinate and deficate on the keyboards. A week after forced enrolment at Plymouth University, gradually, the hard-ware was becoming ever deeper buried. An infestations of flies, made it particularly difficult for the observers to see, one of them wrote,’ the stench was so astounding, that many of them were shouting, ”Jesus, get me out of here!”.

Working in collaboration with municipal refuse and sewage teams, the hard-ware began, slowly. to re-emerge from the general filth, and Floy, along with the others took to the task of  the experiment which was writing the Complete Works of Shakespeare.  The mainframe was programmed to recognise sentences or sequences of random promise; Floy’s version was very good, so great was it that is has laid the foundation for late twentieth century and twenty-first century existence, permutations with which millions of peoples all over the world find themselves obsessively preoccupied.. Floy produced fifty-five thousand pages consisting solely of ‘0’s and ‘1’s. Putting on a Burburry mac which had become his new modish dress code, Floy is not the same monkey we remember years ago. Were you aware of who exactly randomly accessed much that is written that is making us all go soft? Floy.

After gradually going Berzerk, Floy was confined to Silly-Home Valley for the Insane where he became firmly obsessed with sun screen, and remained in a critical sulk while the computer revolution played itself out. There he set himself the futile task of writing to his mother in Java, and his father. Among those who work inside The Silly-Home Valley for the Insane Floy is spoken of with as much bemused Schadenfreude  as ABBA’s Agnetha. He is often called the Glora Swansong of Humanity.

The story of Floy’s genius and morose decline has been recounted a millions times over, the moral of the tale is always the same; in this world you are judged purely on how much you are worth. The computer age was broadcast on TV networks to disgruntled old boys whose operations were being paid for by the state because of lack of money and family connections. It was open season for all participants in this new field whose souls would now be judged not on talent but accomplishment. It was a universe in which, the best monkey won and Floy was obviously one of the best.

It would be easy to swallow the event just recounted as entirely without falsehood, had we not just read the long-drawn-out chapter on Gay soccer players. Their rise was supposed to hinge on talent and accomplishment too. But it wasn’t. it was the tall tale of how out-and-out liars were able to afford loft apartments and status second homes though a mendacious brew of lack of visibility, public gullibility and taking utter advantage.

Is it possible that we will ever go back or even be able to operate in the ‘real world’ again? Let’s all find out why Floy’s special story presents such a disturbing pattern.