Full-Stack Media Ecology

Year: 2023

Competence as Maturity

Acting the Age

Competent people are mature people. Competent people are surrounded by incompetence, but they understand why everyone around them is so incompetent. Furthermore, they have means of redressing that incompetence, and faith in their process. And so they aren’t so liable to get angry or upset about that incompetence. That is maturity.

Competent people are necessarily paternalistic in many senses. But with eloquence, grace, and faith in the processes which can reproduce more competence, they can be paternalistic without being condescending or judgemental in a non-constructive way..

By “processes which can reproduce more competence,” I am of course referring to the processes of maturation. Paternalism, of course, means being father-like. We can’t fault kids for being kids. But when it comes to incompetent adults, we also can’t be exactly like their fathers, except that we wish maturation for …

Domicide of the Microworld

Pilgrim, Breakout!

In a portrait of the “meaning crisis” by way of exegesis of the zombie film genre, John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic relate the notion of Christian apocalypse to that of the film genre’s zombie apocalypse.

While it is crucial for us to have a grasp on the world, it is also crucial for the world to escape that grasp so that our mapping of reality can be recast and recaptured. The feeling that there is more to reality than what we know of it strengthens its integrity, and its independence from our subjectivity makes it more trustworthy. While it is necessary, as discussed above, to feel that the world is consistently intelligible, it is also necessary to have our sense of the world pulled periodically from underneath us. Insight emerges from the wreckage of this

The long history of metrics before and after cybernetics

My talk on March 19, 2023 at the Free Software Foundation’s annual convention in Boston, MA is now available!

In it, I go from the invention of the double-entry account ledger, through the material make-up of our machines of measurement, up to modern computer-driven economics. We look at punch-cards before computers, early university rigs, up to the IBM System/360, and the invention of UNIX and creation of Free Software. I also explain how people are enveloped by discontinuous layers of material reality, as distinct arenas which shape their being. And then we’ll see, by many historical examples, how to hack through those layers of material reality, to freedom!

You can watch the original upload on the FSF’s own MediaGoblin instance , their Free Software video platform. That site includes a link to my original slides, if you want to see …

What “Full Stack” means on this Site

Yesterday I jumped into a conversation on reddit’s /r/programming sub by writing about my thought on the Open Source/Free Software distinction. It goes to show that I haven’t participated in this side of the tech culture for a long time because I was unprepared for the arguments I encountered, and what I wrote apparently didn’t get to the core of what the crowd apparently thought the argument was. I’m definitely out of touch—my posts are both upvoted and buried into the negatives, so apparently I’m all over the map. The fast pace of arguing online got the better of me, and I actually had a pretty busy day such that I couldn’t really spend the time to address everyone and everything properly.

If you read the sidebar of this blog, you’ll see that I launched this site a few …

Long Live the Free Software Foundation

As close readers of this blog know, I attended the Free Software Foundation’s annual convention, LibrePlanet 2023, last month owing to the generous sponsorship of my readers, friends, and family.

The video of my presentation is not yet out, and so I was waiting for its release to do a write-up here. However, a reddit thread on a blog post by programmer Drew DeVault titled “The Free Software Foundation is dying” has hit a nerve with me. So here’s a counter-thread linking to this blog post. Having only just flown back from Boston, MA, where I encountered a very, very …

LOGOS: McLuhan Among the Gnostics Part IV

Two weekends ago I was given the chance to speak publicly in Boston at The Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet 2023 convention thanks to the wonderful followers of my work here, on Twitter, and my YouTube channel. Since then, I’ve lost all taste for the lonely reading of scripts into my webcam, and so am foregoing a recording of this fourth installment in my series on Logos. I will work diligently to ensure that more actual, real, embodied public speaking opportunites present themselves in the future that I might share here with you. Thanks again to everyone who sponsored my trip!

Part IV: Analysis of The Age of Advertising

The 1953 article Age of Advertising, not available online for public reading before today, apparently, was written at at turning point in McLuhan’s strategy for writing to the public. I …

The Age of Advertising

THE ADS ARE A FORM OF MAGIC WHICH HAVE
COME TO DOMINATE A NEW CIVILIZATION.

MARSHALL McLUHAN
in The Commonweal Volume LVIII, Number 23, September 11, 1953

There is no accident about this. Symbolist poetry and painting were magical in theory and in practice, linking objects which had no logical connection. Modern advertising is a form of magic (“kissing sweet in five seconds”), and it employs all the techniques of symbolist art. It is a kind of Arabian Nights world of Aladdin lamps and genii who spring from bottles to do our bidding. In this world, as in the world of Omar Khayyam, the sorry scheme of things as they are is forever being remolded nearer to the heart’s desire. So powerful is this feature of the huge artificial pictorialized neon-lighted environment created by advertising that people have got into …

LOGOS: McLuhan Among the Gnostics III

Welcome to the third installment of Logos! I’m creating this series to fundraise for my upcoming trip to Boston, to aid the fight for our collective freedom at LibrePlanet 2023. Many thanks go out to Duncan, Leon, Gia, and Dmitriy. With their help, I’ve got a place to stay for the trip. More on that later. Last week, I promised you an installment on Embodiment. Well, 3000 words later, I’m not there yet! You’ll have to forgive my following the flow of how, it seems, the story here must proceed.

Part Three: Prufrock

In the last instalment of LOGOS, we considered Wyndham Lewis’ merger of the Time School with the approach of the Space School. Lewis, like the anthropologists from which so much of his work derived, immersed himself in society without becoming part of it. All the better to …

LOGOS: McLuhan Among the Gnostics I & II

Part I: History of the Logos

Logos against forces of the Occult!

I’m trying to get to Boston mid-March to speak at the Free Software Foundation’s annual conference, LibrePlanet 2023. We must understand, and be in control of our computers, not vice versa. If you’d like to help fund my trip, I’m welcoming contributions at my PayPal account. Or shoot an email to clinton@ this website’s domain name! You’ll be thanked in the next installment of this series, part III!

Framing McLuhan

Last year, I decided making internet videos on McLuhan would be counter-productive. His books and public speeches are like poetry. You can’t summarize them, abstract from them. That kills them dead, results in “theories” or “philosophies” or “concepts” like every other thinker he’s counteracting, undercutting, running circles around. Because you’re reading McLuhan, you’re …

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