The messay idea arose from the astonishing number of footnotes listed after "financial capital."
Obviously, asserting that one place is the world's "financial capital" involves a lot of bias, but can bias really be undone by a cluster of footnotes that no one will read?
The point was to take the objective, bland, authoritative minimalism of wikipedia and make a mess out of it.
Why?
To restore a sense of chaos to wikipedia's arbitrary and actually very messy system of semantic authority (Why hyperlinks bleed across several words? Why certain assertions require footnotes while others don't? How does one know which should have footnotes and when it's okay to omit them?).
In keeping true to the essay form and to the original idea, the messay grew organically to be about translation, journalism, objectivity, and propaganda – i.e. the influence of intermediaries between us and the information from which we build a world.
I recognize that it's both crazy and messy. That's kind of the point.