In chapter 1, the narrator tells a story to "get you in the mood" for the Poignant Guide. "Here's something poignant to get you started." It's a story about a dog who he found and adopted, named Bigelow, only to lose him right away.
In chapter 5, the narrator reveals that he is a Preeventualist. Preeventualism seems like a fairly new philosophical doctrine, asserting that the nature of all predictive thought is optimistic -- even dystopian futures are "optimistically" predicted to come true. Therefore preeventualists just "focus... on the understanding that hope will always prevail in any sort of thought". I'd never heard of preeventualism before, but it made sense that someone on the cutting edge of Internet programming would also be on the cutting edge of philosophical discourse. And it was cutting edge -- no wikipedia articles, no podcasts, nothing. Just one page of actual information on the preeventualist homepage, and that shout-out in the Poignant Guide.
But it's a pretty compelling philosophy on the face of it, and they have a preeventualist youth group responsible for maintaining the web page (which is probably why it went down with such frequency). You can see other examples of preeventualist thought if you know what you're looking for: Anathem is pretty preeventualist, and if you start to think seriously about Long-Now style timescales I bet you'll become somewhat preeventualist yourself. (You'll start to mix up words like "molding" and "embroidery".) And of course there's always Ashley Raymond's blog, which sadly doesn't get updated at all. In fact, there's only the one entry, in which Ashley Raymond talks about his time with his dog, whom he called Biggles, whose "accusatory gaze often hinted at how wrong my pronounciation must have been".
Wait. Biggles? Bigelow?
So I did a whois on preeventualist.net, and sure enough, it was registered to _why the Lucky Stiff. Conclusion: the dude FABRICATED AN ENTIRE PHILOSOPHY FOR A THROWAWAY JOKE IN HIS STUPID BOOK. And it wouldn't be so stunning except that I BECAME a preeventualist in the time between discovering the philosophy and discovering that it was "fake" (if such a thing can be said of an idea).
To me it seems like a digital suicide :(
And, since one of the suspected reasons for why he chose to disappear as he did was "people prying into his real-life non-_why identity", it's probably best if we leave it at that.
Interesting timing... I'm just working on the new site for Hackety Hack right now...
His disappearance definitely wasn't a very considerate thing to do, but at least we still have most of his amazing work.
This page is full of links to awesomeness.
http://img.skitch.com/20091219-b386ifyqq1uqrfa2nu4qpd75du.pn...
