@johnrobb 2/ Then again, a culturally-constructed Spectacle passing for substantive reality is hardly news; nor, for that matter, is the dark sorcery of veiled powers commanding us to be fooled by appearances - ravenous wolves disguised as angels of light. There is another way, of course.
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Copy of Tweet: Nils Gilman Technology is too often used as a stealth vector (often by private actors who control the tech) to enact, embody, or constitute quintessentially “political” matters — that is, matters concerning the allocation & legitimation of power & authority. AI puts this pattern on steroids
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Copy of tweet and subtweet: Nick Routledge Nick_routledge “The successor to politics will be propaganda” - Marshall McLuhan. War propaganda, how’s it going? Subtweet: Nick Routledge Nick_routledge ‘Shaping media’, at home and abroad? Militarist strategy 101. But with the digital shift to a single, conjoined, global mediasphere, so militarism aimed at total, moment-to-moment, noospheric domination, heralds a new, supercharged evolutionary threat, at the planetary level.
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Copy of tweet thread, and subtweet: billy moose The conflict in #Ukraine makes clear we are seeing the weaponizing of attention itself. This has long been true. Somehow this time the fact of it is clearer. Nick Routledge Nick_routledge Yup, vast resources of immense, competing, dominative powers of war and profit, actively shaping universal attention span in the pathological image of division and outrage. Media ecology, fixed into furrows of death, applied as a diabolical claim upon the private soul. Nick Routledge Nick_routledge Nick_routledge and 2/ The attention span is, of course, the salient currency of the Web Era. Enough has already been spoken about the economic logic of feeding it outrage. White, which is to say ‘dominative’ religion, but the conjoined twin pillar of the supremacist Spectacle, in this regard.
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Copy of tweet, and quote tweet containing image: Nick Routledge Nick_routledge Worldly, I arrived Stateside 36 yrs. ago, to a distinct impression that represented reality was superseding direct experience as a/the paramount, defining influence shaping the way peeps related. Already, folks' sense of the Real, of significance itself, seemed strangely 'owned'. Quote tweet: Nick Routledge Nick_routledge 1/ Last Days. “News is the last addiction before what?” - Delillo. The Eschatological Event, a classic instance of therapeutic ‘intervention’; a substrative shift in global ‘attention span’. Simply stated, where US media goes, so goes the planetary paradigm. Image: 12/17/2001 Image, front cover of Time magazine 12/17/2001 showing image of the Taliban's Mullah Omar with the all-page headline, 'The Last Days of the Taliban'
@nils_gilman Goes both ways. Long before the Web, planetary Sages anticipated the advent of a cyberspace-actualized dimension of meaningfulness, constituting a 'quintessentially political' surprise positively addressing such base shenanigans at a totalizing, substrative, ontological level.
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Copy of tweet: Nick Routledge 2/ Only when the fat lady sings, and not a moment before, will a bifurcation point, long anticipated as a seismic evolutionary threshold and surge, advance a sunburst of revelation transcending the mystery of history. "Teilhard’s noosphere is alive and well.” – Jean Houston