RT @nick_routledge: @jamespoulos 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.
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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 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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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?
Open original document@BretVDB @malcolmguite end/ Prophetic speech is exorcism's counter-spell. An archetypal irruption—truth sounded—it sets refiner’s fire to pseudo-order, evil’s veneers, and hollow abstraction, revoking its claim and rebinding the field to truth. Where the Word sounds, the Real can bear weight again.
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