Cyberspace, Copyright, Cynicism Cyberspace is an essentially cynical medium, but an illusion-free awareness of the character of the net paradoxically opens up the ethical discussion needed to guide and regulate it.
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN
Conventional wisdom about cynicism is that it is corrosive. It is rude and unworkable, uncomfortable and nihilistic. When I teach, I ask my students to name a popular character that embodies their assumed definition of cynicism. They always cite the character George Costanza from the television comedy Seinfeld.
But the roots of cynicism lie in ancient Greece where Diogenes of Sinope was exiled from Athens for masturbating in the marketplace in the 4th century BCE.
Diogenes was the best-known pupil of Antisthenes, founder of the philosophical current known as the Cynics. The latter had no canon, no schools, no academic lineage, but their teachings have flowed like memes through the cultures of Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Rome. The Cynics held a deep belief in radical freedom and were against sophistry and theory. The idea was to live according to nature, and to avoid being twisted by social convention or cultural power.
When asked which city-state he claimed as his own, Diogenes responded, "I am a citizen of the kosmos", in other words the universe. He used the word kosmopolites. It is from here we get our notion of cosmopolitanism.
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