The Tangent - The Wiki Man lyrics

i) Prologue ii) The Wiki Man All of our answers are here prepared in real time In cities of servers and disks across the globe In whatever format is the fashion In whatever language is the mode And all of our memories jump from the Ether At the click of a mouse or a tap on the screen A Gig in New York or some kids' wedding All jostling around the grander scheme But if I dared to question All the congestion Of infomedial chatter in my home I'd be nothing! Out of a novel from the fifties Comes this mad nightmare, our "Childhood's End" It gives me all that I have but leaves me half empty With a full gla** of 2000 electronic "friends" But if I lived without it, do not doubt it I'd be cutting off my nose to spite my screen And I'd be Nothing, no Nothing! Have I become the Wiki Man? If I lived without it, just think about it I'm living a dream in the Ether not much more I am nothing! - Just a hopeful has been Nothing! - An aging prog queen Getting his kicjs while he still can Nothing! - Am I just lines of data? Nothing! - Or in reserve for later? Have I become the Wiki Man? iii) Competition Watershed iv) Edit You Out So take some music or take a play Some poetry you didn't write or a quote you didn't say And write biographies of people you don't know YOUR matter-of-opinion is the main point of the show In these strange days But today I had a brief talk to a man I did not know From a place I've ever heard in a language I forgot Written in Cyrullic, so couldn't see the words Yet with a click I understood him Though his voice, I never heard In these strange days But YOU, you can edit that out... ... of this story But YOU, you can edit me out Yes YOU, really you, can edit me out Leave the house a hero and come home as a scourge They can edit up your profile with a simple flaming urge Level your ambition with Laetotes and bile You're open to opinion and they'll never close the file In these strange days Everyone's a journalist (that's when they're not a star) And those who aint celebrities like to diss the ones that are The writing's on the Facebook walls, it's a spattered on the blogs On a billion whirling hard disks, those modern squealing cogs Of these strange days So now we're all encyclopedia correspondents We're all record companies We're all world famous rock bands And we're running the biggest car boot sale In the history of The Universe v) Car Boot Sale vi) Wiki Man Reprise