@JoshHochschild @jeff_bilbro 20/ If mediated reality is reaching “peak manipulation,” the counter-movement won’t be peak counter-manipulation. It will be reality's slow revolt: people migrating back to what resists forgery—presence, cost, and covenant, borne not rendered. Not nostalgia: resurrection.
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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:]
Open original document@amicusadastra 1/5 McLuhan makes the “demonic complex” intelligible as _environment_ rather than conspiracy. A company of voices name the deception, but he explains why we barely see it: environments are invisible because we live inside them—so totalizing, they pass for “reality” itself.
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