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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick quoting McLuhan; Nick on media; Nick quoting Heim; Nick on apocalypse; Pete Berkman/McLuhan quotation Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1897364645280874517 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. Tweet:  and McLuhan saw it as crucial to push past an experiential 'environment' invisibly dictating the limits of our questions, positing technology and consciousness merging, in effect, in a Cloud-enabled apocalypse transcending such limits to birth 'a new form of revelation' (Panikkar). "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 1/2 It's all One Media Picture, of course, along with a Unitive Ecology defined, of late, by a radically-accelerated harvest of consequence, consciousness and disclosure characterizing a Media Event of epochal proportions as one planetary paradigm crashes and another replaces it. end/ And the 'machina' of the 'deus ex' or, as Ellul might define it, 'the messianic technique' obviating a totalizing existential apostasy? ‘Hypertext,’ noted Michael Heim in 'The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality’ (1995), 'refers to the existence of a hidden, unnoticed dimension.’ 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? Pete Berkman: "When the environment is invisible, the path of least resistance is determined by the medium itself. Our plans plan us. In order to recover human agency over technique, the invisible environment has to be made visible. “Apocalypse,” McLuhan says, “is our salvation.” Subtweet: Many sides: one disease. J. Poulos: “Who has the fullness of soul in them, and the authority this vitality confers, to triumph over the computed and computing world in its worldliness, to redeem it and turn it back toward service to the given life of the world and we the living?