SBF from Girard to Dawkins to Xanadu

This started out as a short note to a colleague. But, like Topsy, it jes grew and grew. "So," says I to myself, "I've got a blog post here." And so I dropped it into Blogger and continued on. Then I observed, "You know, WLB, this could go somewhere. We're not ready to go live with it." So I decided to take if off-line so I could work on it for my next 3 Quarks Daily article. Meanwhile, I can leave this here, just as it was when I decided to take if off line. Note that I hadn't quite made it to Dawkins. But I'm headed there.

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Sam Bankman-Fried liked being know a “SBF.” Why? Well, it’s kind of cool on it’s own terms. But I wonder it there might not be a mimetic desire there. After all, there IS an enormously wealthy and well know man who is know by his three initials, two of which are shared by SBF. I’m talking about MBS of course.

And there’s that luxurious Bahamian compound. Kinda of like Xanadu. As you know, Xanadu was the name of Charle Foster Kane’s mansion in “Citizen Kane.” DJT (aka 45) has said that that’s his favorite film. Back in the mid-70s a group of developers made plans to build a hotel in Las Vegas to be called Xanadu. The project fell through, but not before considerable architectural had been done, preliminary plans, renderings, models, etc. And it seems the DJT knew about this and was influenced by it in his Atlantic City Casino, which had a night club called Xanadu. All of this is online.

I discovered this some time ago when, on a whim, I did a web search on “Xanadu.” Why?  Because I have a long-term interest in Colerdige’s “Kubla Khan.” Much to my surprise, that search turned up millions of hits. Why? Of course, Coleridge’s poem is well known, about as well known as poems can be. I reached the OED for uses of the name, and found a few. I also searched the archives of the NYTimes and found, for example, mention of a Xanadu yacht in the 1930. It became clear, however, that it was Citizen Kane that put that name on the map. Another big hit came in the late 60s and on when Ted Nelson started his hypertext effort, Project Xanadu. That was quite influential in the tech world.

The result of this is that, while Xanadu appears all over the place, two clusters seemed to emerge. I called one the sybaritic cluster, which is about wealth and luxury. We can trace that to Citizen Kane. And there’s a cybernetic cluster, which we can trace to Nelson, who in turn was influenced by Coleridge’s poem. Xanadu was the (somewhat anglicized) from Shangdu, the real Kubla Khan’s summer capital. STC – Coleridge sometimes like to go by his initials – found out about that while reading a 17th century travel book written by Samuel Purchas. 

We’ve strayed rather far from SBF. But as you know, there’s lots of speculation about the use of performance-enhancing drugs at his Bahamian Xanadu. And Coleridge has told us that he was...

 

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And, no, there's no man from Porlock lurking in the bushes of this draft text. Nor had I consumed any drugs in the writing.