Good news for pomophobes, Julian Baggini has a new game poking fun at certain critical postures in academia: Žižuku. I much prefer this to the postmodernism generator as a satirical tool.

The postmodernism generator is something that follows language rules to produce gibberish. This is funny, so long as you don’t read the sort of material that it purports to send up. I’m not saying that a lot of postmodernism isn’t twaddle, but it’s a recognisably different sort of twaddle. The reason Sokal’s hoax was funny was that it was indistinguishable from some of the straight material in Social Text. Essays from the postmodernism generator aren’t going to pass muster with another journal, even if the references are altered. Comparing the output of the Postmodernism Generator with postmodern scholarship is like comparing a Lorem Ipsum generator to a Latin text. Superficially similar, but not close enough.

What I do think is interesting is that if you loaded it with genuine references, and a bit more thematic connectivity then v2.0 might produce genuine pomo text but that’s another matter.

Žižuku requires a bit more work, but I think it’s a lot funnier because I can foresee this having serious potential. It’s from Baggini’s review of More >