@FrontPorchRepub “It is, therefore, a simple maxim of communication study that any change in the means of communication will produce a chain of revolutionary consequences at every level of culture and politics.” ~ Marshall McLuhan, 1955. Let's add consciousness to that mix, too, shall we?
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Copy of tweet here: Just gonna brush the dust off this one, too. Marshall McLuhan: “The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.” 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. What if the dark, mercenary genius of algo-supercharged, exploitative media-ecology's claim upon the private soul is ultimately checked only in recognizing its larger, evolutionary role delivering us to a sunburst of revelation overturning the tables of history itself?
@hedgehogreview Barba-Kay, astute. Further: if the polycrisis ceases to confound only when interpreted through a deeper horizon of meaning, maybe technology trends too can only be grasped apocalyptically—that is, as disclosures pointing beyond their literal function toward a hidden significance.
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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick; McLuhan and Martin Gurri quotations; Nick on McLuhan; James Poulos quotation Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1956713734782501364 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. Barba-Kay, astute. Further: if the polycrisis ceases to confound only when interpreted through a deeper horizon of meaning, maybe technology trends too can only be grasped apocalyptically—that is, as disclosures pointing beyond their literal function toward a hidden significance. Bingo. *Choice* excerpt, Nils. Peculiar, isn't it, the evolutionary ontology of a noospheric, algorithmically-supercharged claim upon the private soul, and the planetary harvest of consequence, consciousness and disclosure it radically enhances, remaining, as a rule, unobserved. "World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between civilian and military participation." That's Marshall McCluhan headlining a 2017 Atlantic Council report on the radically enhanced capabilities of AI-driven computational-propaganda for mind manipulation. 3/ Martin Gurri: “That was me at the global media analysis section of CIA...And I was not alone. A group of us were obsessed with the same drama...We all asked the same question: Why? What does information technology have to do with politics?” 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). 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?” 18/ This is not AI becoming conscious—it's a message, a story, a revelation moving through the Cloud with such force it cannot be ignored or algorithmically suppressed. Infrastructure built to fragment and manipulate now carries something that unifies, clarifies and compels.
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