@RyanHaecker Ryan, I'm an independent without academic privileges, but I did put the first ever web connection into the US Congress. Any chance you could get me a copy of 'The Silicon Bough', if only Section Five? I'd be immensely grateful.
@thedispatch @jeff_bilbro As for Bulgakov’s “victory of good on the path of world-historical tragedy leading to the final separation of light and darkness"? It embraces a harvest of collective consciousness, disclosure and consequence in cyberspace as much as meatspace. We are a unicity, after all.
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick Routledge Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: We Depends Source: Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @riyeff We? Depends who you reckon with. A vast field of study has long been alert to the structure of media ecology (of late, generative AI) changing us even more than its content. Ellul, Ong and McLuhan would, of course, suggest our reconciliation with truth an eschatological matter. t.co/fIqReSZ0kv
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick Routledge quoting Marshall McLuhan; McLuhan card Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: I am an intellectual thug / As much as air and water Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1858558027869417830 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. McLuhan tells us the hook isn’t content but environment. The prophet-artist crafts anti-environments: not 'Christian content' inside Atlas’s world, but changing the weather so Atlas is seen for what he is. Not nicer content—new air to breathe. At Cloud scale, this is Apocalypsis. 1/2 So obvious we cannot see it. Our media, McLuhan noted, 'own' us in strangely concealed, "invincibly persuasive" ways. As such, 'apocalypse' (in its original sense of 'unveiling') makes the visible Real, freeing us from an all-enveloping enchantment. And the Cloud's role here? Ellul, Ong and McLuhan, fundamentally Christian media ecologists all, would suggest our reconciliation with truth an eschatological matter. Tweet: "I am an intellectual thug who has slowly been accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. To deal with the environment directly is my strategy. To have autonomy, we must push past environmental parameters right up into consciousness." ~ Marshall McLuhan Image [graphically remade for easier reading, otherwise unchanged]: As much as air and water, man-made media are environments, the garments worn by each technology. A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence. Any new technology creates a new environment. It is the environment that changes people, not the technology. Environments are not passive wrappings, rather, active processes. For some biological, physiological reason, people never see the environment. Only the content *shows* and yet only the environment is really *active* as a shaping force. The ground-rules, pervasive structure and overall patterns of environments elude easy perception. The new environment is always invisible. If technology creates environments that brain-wash man, art creates anti-environments heightening consciousness. This need to confront environments with a certain antisocial power is manifest in the famous story, The Emperor's New Clothes. Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment. - Marshall McLuhan [Works cited in text and image here:]
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Marshall McLuhan quotation wording variant Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: artists create anti-environments that heighten consciousness Source: Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. @jamespoulos McLuhan was clear on that point: "If technology creates environments that brain-wash man, artists create anti-environments that heighten consciousness." - M. McLuhan, review of 'Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman', 1965.
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