Self-referencing

The onion has a pretty neat article about Apple's latest new and revolutionary offering:

At a highly anticipated media event Tuesday at San Francisco's Moscone Center, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced a new Apple product he said would "revolutionize" the process of unveiling new products throughout the world.

About the new product (called iLaunch), Jobs said that it "will be able to make announcements from this, or any other stage, making human participation in generating consumer awareness almost entirely unnecessary." But what he concluded with really took the audience by storm

As his presentation wound down, Jobs said there was "one more thing" he wanted to mention: the iLaunch automatically saves a significant, salient product feature for the end of a presentation, to surprise and delight audiences.

"Do you want to know what the surprise of this unveiling is?" said Jobs to the eagerly nodding crowd. "The iLaunch itself generated this entire presentation, as well as this very surprise."

If you found the whole thing weird and hilarious, its because it is. Self-referencing can make things complicated as well as interesting. And when I showed the article to my brother (who is a fan of The Onion), he was immediately reminded of Godel, Escher and Bach, and had this to say

The Onion is entering "Godel, Escher, Bach" self-referential territory... i guess they could also have added that iLaunch also automatically generates news reports in satirical journals that closely mimic actual news reports, and in fact, that particular report was itself generated by iLaunch...

For the first time the "i" really means "I", as in "I launch myself" as opposed to "iLaunch launches iLaunch".

If all this sounds confusing, it is indeed that way (ask Bernard Wooley).