Future Finale

Dear Sirs,

After consulting with my Personal Management Team, the Literary Agency of Baxter, Newfoundland, Portland & Pfaff (BNPP - Hollywood), with my French lawyer, Antwan Bensoufflant-Doidefé for ™ and ® (Paris), and with my American Lawyer, Maria Josephina Baxter-Lasko at Flies and Van Heulen for © (Atlanta), I am pleased to inform you that I have been authorized, for the occasion of your anniversary issue, to respond positively to your request for a short view on the issues and matters that fascinate me as we enter the 21^st century. However this is done not without a few legal caveats. My management and legal sponsors have asked me to list these so there is no ambiguity about the nature, limit, and possible legal pursuits attached to this voluntary contribution in response to your amicable and non-binding invitation:

1. Whereas I am acting alone, without prior consultation of the confidential research files of the Thomas International Industries (TII), I am authorized to describe any possible direction to be included and/or explored for future research in the abovementioned fields of human endeavor;
2. Whereas any party rightfully concerned by my revelations would consider that these unlawfully infringed upon the valid rights of the stockholders or other party or parties involved in the necessary value of secrecy of the industrialenterprise,designated hereafter as TII, I would be considered liable for economic prejudice whose amount would be decided by an act of an open court (not Roland Garros);
3. Whereas I should be considered a distinct individual in the formulation of my fascinations and not in aposition to represent any industrial entity existing or to be created hereafter, and my remarks shall not be construed as representing any opinion, explicit or implicit, representative of any formed or to be established industrial, commercial, or otherwise conceived corporation (LLC, TCV, VTT) and, conversely, none of the propositions advanced should be construed as referring directly to events, persons (intuitu personae) or other types of legal entities having a real existence, nor having ever existed, nor, a fortiori, ready to exist, materially or virtually, by means now known to humanity or to be discovered in the future (validity 5 years);

   Finally,

4. Whereas anyone attempting to implement, pursue or otherwise expand covertly or openly the propositions herein expressed would be subject to possible legal pursuits per the legal covenants covering the intellectual and industrial rights of TII or its associates in the US, Mexico and Canada as well as the EC, and whereas these protections of any industrial intellectual products of the categories 9, 16, 42, 43, 75 and 92 in the ®©™ registers have been officially published by the US, Mexico, Canada and European Community Office of Patents and Trademarks on September 18, 1998 (acts # 309-34-567-892), September 21, 1988 (acts # 34-56RD-grU98) and can be consulted on line by any individual or otherwise approved legal representative at http://www.uspto.gov/,

here, therefore, is my uninhibited contribution, free from any legal entanglements beyond those aforementioned.

I. Material Fascination(s)

1. Our New Creative Entangled Web: Uses and Misuses

In one of my supposedly lesser-known articles, "The Sentimental Life of Moby and other Shell Fishes," published in 1994 in International Historic, I used one of my favorite impressive and authoritative words: apotropaic ¹ (another of these words would have been anapé, but that would be another story, probably too open to legal challenge by my stockholders to discuss here).

In 2002, as I worked on Slavic Futurism under a grant from the Prad Sekwasa Foundation, I used the Google™ and Copernic^© search engines to check for the uses of that word floating in the cyber art world. Out of the many occurrences listed, I was not surprised to find my 1994 occurrence. However, from that seminal use, I found that most of the other ones were clearly spin-offs from my original quote—dishonest, unacknowledged reuse of my own work. Seventy-nine occurrences of the word in student papers available in the virtual world not only used the word...