I’m going through my backlog of half-written pieces over the past eight years, and have decided to just publicly release works which are worthy, even in their incomplete state.
This review of the documentary The Social Dilemma was written in September of 2020, contemporaneous with the film’s wide release.
The concept—that McLuhan’s unpublished 1948 book was a review of this 2020 documentary—was solid. But I couldn’t execute it at the time. My own thoughts on this now 4-year-old documentary will be given in these pages soon.
Marshall McLuhan’s Unpublished Review of ‘The Social Dilemma’
The Matrix
In the climax to The Social Dilemma (2020), the “avatar booty doll,” or digital twin, of the fictional character Ben is revealed to be only one of countless subjects to algorithmic experimentation and prediction by closed source, corporate software. Ben is the politically-radicalized son in the dramatic sub-plot of the documentary interspersed between the on-camera interviews and testimonials of self-effacing experts and engineers. In this portrayal of a family torn apart by smartphones, we are shown two different sides of Ben: one in the flesh at home and at school, and another as a virtualized hologram in a “The Matrix”-style science-fiction testing chamber, being worked over and manipulated by anthropomorphized algorithms who send him down a conspiratorial rabbit-hole straight into police hand-cuffs.
While this representation of contemporary cyberspace may appear to many viewers as exaggerated for dramatic effect, I’d like to argue instead that it presents a proportioned, realistic, and—if anything—understated analogy for the forces presently constructing the postmodern subject Kenneth Gergen called The Saturated Self in his 1991 book of that title.
In the final analysis, we find technology and life-style operating in a state of symbiotic interdependence. The technology opens opportunities, and as these opportunities are realized, the person becomes increasingly dependent on the technology. The technologies engender a multiplicitous and polymorphic being who thrives on incoherence, and this being grows increasingly enraptured by the means by which this protean capacity is expressed. We enter the age of techno-personal systems. (Gergen 1991, 173)
The historical narrative of “social media” presented in the film itself does not go far enough in contextualizing the depths, proportions, and scope of social construction, engineering, and illusion inherent to the lives of the casual “end-user” of consumer technology epitomized by Ben and his family. From the testimony of film’s interviewees, the machinery they haplessly developed is less than two decades old: it is frightfully new, unprecedented, and stands in stark contrast to the more responsible, bygone age of well-regulated Saturday-morning television cartoons of the 1980s. In response to that contextualization, I’d like to offer a longer historical time-frame by drawing on the perceptions of Canada’s premier media-analyst Marshall McLuhan, made during the dawn of the cybernetic and television age.
More than that, I’d like to do so primarily through the lens of two unpublished McLuhan books, The New American Vortex, and Typhon in America, which (while being many other things besides) are together nothing less than a comprehensive review of the film predating it over 70 years. How’s that for effects preceding their cause?
Magic and the Machine
After a dramatic portrayal of Ben—the soon to be alienated smartphone junkie—being successfully pulled away from a starting a conversation with his high-school crush by the dastardly algorithmic trio of Engagement, Growth, and Advertising (all played by a single actor who was no-doubt cast for his resemblance to both Noah Wyle’s Steve Jobs portrayal and the “I’m a P.C.” character from the Apple advertisements of a decade ago), we are treated to a title card of the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Immediately thereafter, we learn how Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris’ early interests in performing magic tricks informed his gradual perception of the for-profit illusions perpetrated by contemporary internet companies.
This provides the perfect point of comparison between the film’s thesis and the concerns which drove Marshall McLuhan into researching media effects and creating both the Explorations journal and the University of Toronto’s Center for Technology and Communications. I’d like to argue that the wielding of “magic” by artists, marketers, politicians, and propagandists through media images is precisely what McLuhan’s entire popular career was dedicated to unmasking and subverting—albeit by necessarily-indirect means. Doing so, however, will require a long elaboration of the “origin story” of this reluctant (wish somebody else had written it!) hero against media mind-control.
Thankfully, McLuhan’s fascination with magic and occult traditions has been well established (Theall) (Granata). My focus here then will be to establish the development of his approach to emancipation from cybernetic possession by exhuming analyses and probes from the letters, the book reviews, and unpublished writings of the early “moral” McLuhan. From these we can glean precisely the perception of his times to which his particular astuteness of sensibility toward the magic of media is attributable. For reasons which will soon be made clear, these early, largely-obscure and unavailable works of McLuhan offer a much richer peak at the individual behind the public image.
Marshall McLuhan’s 1943 doctoral dissertation for Cambridge University encompassed “two-thousand years of modes of education over the centuries from Cicero to Nashe” (McLuhan 2006, xi). Over this vast stretch of time—from classical antiquity to the Renaissance—the three dimensions of the classical trivium are seen variously unifying in a golden ages of pedagogy and rationality, and then falling apart in vast stretches of imbalance as the logical branch of dialectics vies for domination against the analogical branches of rhetoric and grammer in “ancient quarrel”.
To our minds, accustomed to frequent revolutions and experiments in education, the stability which one encounters in grammer instruction, both in the Graeco-Roman and medieval worlds, is scarcely credible. It immediately arouses a suspicion that poverty of facts must produce the appearance of continuity. Such, however, is not the case, for facts are plentiful. The explanation must rather be sought in the long prevalance of the doctrine of analogy, discussed above, which reigned until Ramistic nominalism and Cartesian mathematics dethroned it decisively. (McLuhan 2006, 31)
Throughout the dissertation McLuhan makes clear the thoroughness of his study of study of mystical topics as broad as Chaldean cosmologies, Neo-Platonism, and alchemy, all in light of his studies of Western pedagogy as expressed in language.
Agrippa, made a doctor in divinity at twenty-three for his lectures on the grammatical theology of Reuchlin, remained a theologian all his life. His fame as an alchemist or magician was well-founded, since his system of occult philosophy is identical with that of Plato, Philo, Augustine, and Bonaventure. His occult philosophy begins with words, and proceeds by the methods of grammatical exegesis, giving the most complete sixteenth-century statement of the traditional views. Thus Agrippa’s magic is a by-product of his theological interests, and his treatise on the subject was directly inspired by Reuchlin’s grammatical studies… The pattern of his life is simply the opposition of a thorough-going grammarian to the pagan Aristotle and of the monkish Schoolmen. (McLuhan 2006, 181)
The relation of this McLuhan’s early acquaintance and understanding of “magic” as applied techniques of exegesis—or Logos—to the matter of social media today may not yet be clear. We must first establish how McLuhan began to bring his well-developed comprehension of the complementary natures of metaphor and syllogism to bear on the contemporary world of letters which were his chosen subject. For the modernists, he had nothing but praise. For instance, in his New American Vortex, he enthusiastically gushes
The new American vortex… needs a focus of erudition of encyclopedic range, the huge technical developmetns of the arts since Mallarmé through Picasso, Joyce, Pound, and Eliot having brought the whole of human tradition into range for the first time in history. Mallarmé was the first artist ever to have brought the purgation of the means and matter of art to the point where the matter of poetry was the poetic act itself. That is also the substance of the work of Joyce, Pound, and Eliot, who have understood Mallaré thoroughly. For the only step after that decisive event was to represent the whole of human experience in the light of that supreme power of the human mind to make and forge, render and interpret, human society. To purge the dialect of the tribe (donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu) to recapture the plenary scope and conditions of human autonomy, to see the creative act in all its analogical relations with politics, history, metaphysics and theology, and to make of art not only matter for universal contemplation but a tool and a discipline for the awakening of heroic fortitude in men, that is the significance of [Joyce’s] Finnegans Wake and [Eliot’s] Four Quartets. (In a different way it is also the key to [Pound’s] The Cantos and [Lewis’] The Art of Being Ruled)
The Carrot and the Stick
As it is remains unpublished, more must be now explained about The New American Vortex. It is a collection of essays written in the mid ‘40s divided into three parts and is likely the closest thing to a non-satiric utopian vision that McLuhan ever laid out. The title essay suggests the blossoming of a new renaissance drawing on home-grown American culture and the intellectual influx of wartime immigration from Europe. Every essay in Vortex is written in a voice familiar to anyone who has read his literary criticism or reviews—McLuhan is even-handed, scholarly, and even apologetic in tone. For example an essay entitled “The Failure of the Chicago School”, McLuhan laments both the school’s introduction of multiple-choice exams within literary studies and its emphasis on dialectical mode of criticism focused on identifying plot elements in a text. In turn McLuhan sensibly describes elements of his own preferred mode of analysis which are lacking, toward triangulating the writer’s sense of relation to both the subject and to the reader. While severe in its judgment, the essay closes with a civil, constructive reasoning for its having been written.
[Professor Adler’s] inability in prose is plain from How To Read A Book where reading is made an exercise in isolating the rationalistic procedures only. Worst of all, it compels a reader to follow bad prose just as far as good prose… Finding in dialectics no available means of unifying the interests and experience of man and society, Professors Adler and McKeen can naturally discover no basis for fusing art and prudence.
And since the College at Chicago, like St. John’s, shows neither awareness nor concern with the need to forge anew a unified sensibility, to restore the close harmony of thought, action, and feeling, it must be judged not as a genuinely contemporary experiment but merely a continuation of that dichotomous Cartesian culture of the Enlightenment… [O]f the new gains for cultural unity and community achieved by a Freud, a Malinowski, a Dawson, a Giedion, or a Corbusier, nothing appears at Chicago or in the great books programs. Chicago persists, along with all the rest, in a naive rationalism which regards a poem, a philosophy, a building, or a political constitution as a Leibnitzian monad without windows. So that only by pre-established harmony, assured by the possession of dialectical skill, can a person and such objects ever be said to have “met.” That is only another way of saying that student and teacher alike are cut off from the nutritional properties of art and civilization. Thus, the dilemma is precisely that of the ordinary man in relation to a commercial job today. Abstract commerce and dialectical education are the outside and inside of the same situation. In a word, Chicago has not really accepted the challenge of our contemporary condition but is, willy-nilly, a helpless reflection of the same. But from the salience which its experiments have conferred on the basic issues much help can be gained towards establishing a college which would not be a carbon copy of the confusions of the great society. Because there are many people at Chicago, as well as many more who are interested in Chicago, who earnestly desires such a new college, this effort to focus the causes of failure was undertaken.”
Against it stands, in stark stylistic contrast, a second book. Typhon in America or Guide to Chaos is divided into four parts, and its typescript was unsuccessfully mailed about to publishers in 1948. While of equal weight and similar subject-matter to Vortex, Typhon could scarcely be any more different. Its pages brim with scathing rebukes of both the explicit and implicit institutions of education comprising the total environment of Modern America. While Vortex had been written for academics and literary-minded readers, Typhon aims for a mass audience with a jocular, provocative prose riddled with slang and derisively-affected accents (In an early analysis of the “Nose for Whiskey” Time ad, he mocks the magazine’s ad-copy’s put-on as reading “Oh, how ah hates mahself. How turrible it is to be always putting mud in the eyes of all the pore deluded admirers of ours.”). McLuhan’s clear aim is the jolting and needling of readers into uncomfortable awareness of society’s many crimes against their own stultified intellects. In contrast with the above quote from Vortex, McLuhan writes in Typhon:
How To Read a Book provides a variety of devices for outlining the contents of any kind of book. But it gives no clue whatever to whether a book is worth reading. You see, in this basic respect Professor Adler is at one with the hapless bosses of American graduate studies. Said professor Adler to a group of prospective Adult Education group leaders: “How do we know a great idea?” (He always asks and answers his own questions, thus keeping the seminar spirit at great intensity). “Great ideas are in great books. There are only about a hundred of them. Ideas like Fate, Free-will, Tragedy, and God. How do we know a great book? We don’t. Not until a hundred years have passed.” No, sir, not until the holy zeitgeist has breathed upon a book for a hundred years dare we look in it for any of the hundred “great ideas”. But, Professor Adler, that is exactly what your damned professors have said all along. How does their incompetence exceed yours?
Professor Adler professes Know-How, just as much as Dewey, Rugg, or Kilpatrick who are behind the Columbia Teachers College. He has mistaken his friends for his enemies. Right know Professor Adler is engaged in applying Know-How to philosophy and literature. Professor Eliot’s Five Feet of Kulchur are being traversed again by Professor Adler—this time with a difference. There is to be a big I.B.M. index. Suppose you want the low-down on one of the hundred great ideas. Let’s say it’s “tragedy”. Turn up tragedy in the index and by gosh you’ll find listed every occurrence of it—at least in the great books selected by Professor Adler. In a jiffy you’ll have a cross-section of “tragedy” through-out the ages. “They laughed when I sat down at the piano.”
For deeper insight into the plight of the earnest Know-How chaps read Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels.
In fact, much of the typescript for Typhon in America is stricken out—quite evidently for being over the top. One section, all excised but for the last sentence, reads:
The only advice to offer youth to-day is this: “Examine closely all the intellectual and social fads which have roused the enthusiasm of your ancestors for the past 300 years. Then have a good loud guffaw at their efforts to banish the autonomous reason from the control of society. Next, write a few thousand books hinging your charge of criminal dereliction of mind and commonsense on the leading philosophers, educators, economists, and other stooges of the zeitgeists of those centuries.”
The average parent to-day should then be detained in a mental-delousing institution until cleansed of the verminous accretions of pseudo-philosophy acquired while lolling around in the Circe-sty of sensate culture. There is absolutely nothing which youth can learn from the adult world to-day except “how to be miserable while destroying our age-old civilized inheritance.”
It is worth going into detail on these matters. I will shortly make the case that McLuhan’s gradual turn away from English literature and criticism—and abrupt vocational commitment to media studies—arose on account of a startling total-reevaluation of his former subject of inquiry: the Romantic, Symbolist, and Modernist artists culminating (in English) in T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. We will examine it as a personal re-triangulation of his stylistic positioning in relation to both them and the “students” of what he would later call the City as Classroom.
Establishing this, the similar positioning of the creators of The Social Dilemma will also become easier to triangulate.
For this reason, it is worth taking the time to appreciate the difference in tone and approach in these two books, because taken together they paint a well-rounded portrait of McLuhan’s private views before this re-evaluation wherein his “private point of view” both positive and negative is expressed in far plainer, unguarded exposition in both high-brow and low-brow form. Shortly after the release of The Mechanical Bride in 1951, his critical assessment of his contemporary culture and educational system was pushed to its extreme, flipping into a public image which was neutral: detached in its “circulating vision,” and unladen by value-judgements or any private point-of-view. Rather than remain content describing this technique as a critic, he adopts it himself as a public performance artist.
For the rest of the essay, we will use quotations from this unguarded, frank private perceptions of the English professor McLuhan to explain and unpack the aphorisms and perceptions disseminated broadly by the later public media scholar. By seeing how very-little has changed, except in proportion and scale, from the post-war period to now, we can acquire our own perception of the magic of technological possession as it has remained consistent from at least then, right up until today’s “Social Dilemma.”
The Machine Then
As we will see, the societal machine McLuhan observed in 1947 shares a startling number of features with those billed as “unprecedented” in The Social Dilemma—at least in his recorded perception.
[Insert TSD’s account of predictablity, etc.]
McLuhan’s astute sense of his time was honed by careful study of political tracts of Percy Wyndham Lewis, written two decades prior. In his England of the 20s, Lewis’ saw recorded and scrutinized with precision the conditions of spiritual and artistic oppression ravaging the minds of the rulers and the ruled alike. To his carefully-trained artistic eye, the solid world of objects which he painted were very clearly succumbing to, and dissolving in, a regressive flux of sensation and intermittent time within the subjectivity of nearly every citizen. The result was an easily ruled populace who, when rushed into early, precocious maturity, failed to ever truly leave adolescence into adulthood. These childish masses, indulging in “art” as mere past-time, hobby, and self-expression, would be a totally unaware of the real art which created their total modern, urban environment. He predicted that any remaining real artists would be those complicit in fulfilling the whims of the commercial classes, the state, and diabolical, blood-thirsty revolutionaries.
Lewis’ books were unread and forgotten. As McLuhan noted in his essay “Wyndham Lewis: Lemuel in Lilliput”, this was largely on account of Lewis’ difficult prose, written for no pre-existing audience and certainly not for general readers. Twenty years later, Typhon in America seized upon the popularity of magazines like Time by emulating their casually, chummy style. In this way, it seems McLuhan sought to import the penetrating, cynical eye of Lewis in a reflexive mode, like a ready-made voice of cringing self-awareness for the mass audiences of the American cultural scene.
He cut straight to the chase. Early in the text, he introduces a promotional pamphlet for the now-ubiquitous Nielsen rating system.
Reporting New Facts about Radio Research
In 1946, Arthur C. Nielsen spoke these words:A.C. Nielsen Company, founded in 1923, provides an example of outstanding success based on long, unswerving and intelligent devotion to a difficult but worthy task. Educated in various brances of engineering and science, and accustomed to dealing with tangible facts, the early leaders of this company were convinced that some means could be found to substitute facts for much of the guess-work then used in guiding corporate marketing operations.
Despite the commercial failure of all methods developed during the first ten years of operation, despite staggering operating losses which twice brought them to the brink of disaster, this group of pioneers perservered— because the great importance of the goal was very clear… Finally… Nielsen Radio Index Service was born…
The Nielsen Audimeter… the graphic recording instrument installed in a radio receiver in a scientifically selected radio home. By recording every twist of the dial, every minute of the day or night, the Audimeter obtains precious radio data not available through any other means.
By now the reader should know that he is reading a very weird tale indeed. The basic assumption underlying this sort of human engineering is that people are just so much raw power to be harnessed to permit the wheels of commerce to turn more swiftly and smoothly and cheaply. The market research engineers are not the dictators of club and fist but the shepherds of utility and comfort. They are nice average fellows who have developed a technique. That’s all. They’ve got Know-how. And their families are just as much the victims of their methods as we are. In fact, they are precisely in the position of the chap who says: “I didn’t know it was loaded.” As we shall see, the school system is working along precisely the same lines in peddling merely verbal and mechanized formulas for _immediate_ use. The kids coming off those assembly lines have been processed for consumption in a time-machine that renders them obsolescent in a few years. Their day is little more than that of a movie star, and they are as little prepared to understand what’s going on around them or what’s happening to them as the horse that’s headed for a can of Grow-Pup.
It used to be complained [i.e. by Lewis] that the processes of industrial society delivered all the intelligence into the hands of anybody. But we are now being delivered into the hands of nobody at all—just machines:
In “a corner of the Nielsen Tabulating Department” all the relaxation of typical American families “is tabulated by an installation of 71 machines. This operation is one of the most complex ever performed by I.B.M. equipment.”
And that includes all the logistics of World War II by means of which it was known in advance just how many pieces of Kleenex and how many glucose tablets any given G.I. would need in the twelfth day of action. You thought you were just sitting at home trying to enjoy the radio but really you were feeding an I.B.M. machine with a lot of inside dope about yourself. And anything you didn’t do or say will be used against you.
This point was reiterated again and again throughout McLuhan’s career, as seen in this line from From Cliché to Archetype (1970):
It is just when people are all engaged on snooping on themselves and one another that they become anaesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anaesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliché, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist. (McLuhan 1970, 12-13)
How widely known is it that McLuhan’s most thorough-going analyses of computerized data-mining, and its effects on individuals, would be made before his self-reinvention as a media analyst? That before becoming best-known for prognosticating on the effects of television, the first electric medium to bear his scrutiny was digital computing employed for demographic research and the social engineering of a predictable consumer class?
This brings us back to The Social Dilemma. Having watched the algorithms slave tirelessly to subvert and capture Ben’s goals and desires from “the other side” of his cell-phone screen, the drama crescendos with this reveal of the full-scope of the vast machine which today ensnares the souls of—presumably—Americans, each of whom are isolated in their own red or blue private cell in the prison of personalized media wrought by “surveillance capitalism.” We can here note the primary innovation between McLuhan’s commercial zeitgeists and the social media: the dimension of centralized control at the level of individual personalization. As McLuhan quips endlessly, the human products of his environment were mass-produced replaceable, interchangeable parts within a machinic society. While centralized media broadly cast its rote prescriptions of techniques for living, doing, and being (“Know How”) and stereotyped personalities for emulation, these were received passively by a public only indirectly surveilled and measured at scale. Social networks, thus, offer closure of an immediate cybernetic feedback circuit between the scales of individual person and international media corporation. In contrast, the now-innocuous Nielsen ratings and Gallup polls which loomed so largely in McLuhan’s perception offered only a latent, generalized current or stream which swept about whole population environmentally, and was programmatically particularized at the individual human-scale only in a fragmentary and local, institutional sense.
Accordingly, unlike the “digital booty doll” or Digital Twin metaphor of the documentary, In New American Vortex and Typhon in America the effects of media content is explained as that of the engineered, romantic zeitgeists (time spirit) which deigns to represent “the Absolute” (i.e. the abstract, secular god-head comprising the totality of the real) for the captive audience who find personal catharsis and thrilling sensation in its proffered hallucination. These cultural dynamics are taken straight from Wyndham Lewis’ The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Western Man (1927), impeccably streamlined after much digestion and refinement of the faculties for their perception by McLuhan.
It happens that the Hegelian-Communist assumptions are much more dynamic than the Anglo-American since Hegel and Marx were very romantic chaps who hitched their egos and their theories to the Absolute. For Hegel and Marx the Absolute unfolds as History through us. It is really us and we are it. So whatever we choose to do about manipulating power and people is necessarily underwritten by the Absolute. Presumably the Absolute is impatient to become bigger and more powerful and efficient and so there are a lot of displaced persons being shunted around in accordance with its one increasing purpose. People aren’t really people, of course. They are just little space-time agglomerations of Absolute energy. Some of these little configurations are obsolete. They don’t registers in accordance with the latest I.B.M. intuitions of the Absolute. So they might as well be liquidated back into the great sea of primal energy to be used again. Better luck next time. Such is the psychology-cum-theology-cum-politics-cum-economics of [Nazi] Germany and [Soviet] Russia. It’s simple. It’s profound. It’s all-inclusive. It’s deeply sentimental and satisfying. And it’s ever so dynamic.
The Digital Twins of social media users—the cybernetic secular souls modelling, predicting and nudging the future decisions and life-courses of a great many individuals—are still accurately considered “little space-time agglomerations.” And yet The Social Dilemma’s chosen science-fiction analogy makes clear that the Absolute has been long-unmasked as the mundane machine it is—magical only in its incomprehensibility. This incomprehensibility owes to its total ubiquity, its inscrutability, its deep and ever-deepening augmentation of both our self-perception and of physical space in which our chemical bodies dwell, and our inability to gain any critical distance from it—the unawareness of any hospitable “anti-environment” to it (as McLuhan would later say).
Yet the effect is the same, when considering social media as intended, not only in the exceptional case as the focus upon Ben’s radicalization makes the audience focus on.
Physical-culture, personality building and nudism can be recommended as highly efficacious means for using up this enormous scrap-heap of irrelevant human qualities and potencies. They are sure-fire Know-How for pulping the human detritus of a technological society and for simplifying the problems of Professor Gallup in predicting to the third decimal point whatever will be done in such a society.
Where physical culture means gym workouts, how far along have we come in relying on these means of “using up” the “surplus flesh” of the digital body?
Intersections of Identity
Quoting an advertisement for a Burt Bacharach album, McLuhan writes in Typhon in America:
The phrase “19 is such a thrilling age” is of a piece with the current tendency to hack the human person into several chronological segments. Special thrills and thoughts and pills, not to mention hormone cream, are not designated for “Those under twenty-five” and a different set for “Those over thirty-five.” In this scheme the facts of life alter sharply depending on one’s precise age. Communication between these age groups is, of course, very difficult. “We live in different worlds,” say the twenty-fives with drastic emphasis to the poor wretches who are five years older.
In only a few sentences McLuhan here-recapitulates the theme girding Wyndham Lewis’ 1927 book Doom of Youth, which is the first to collect and analyze many specimens of newspaper features and advertisements inflaming and capitalizing upon generational differences for the sake of amassing power and profit. In The Art of Being Ruled Lewis generalizes the underlying principle (with disturbing, Machiavellian instrumentality) as follows
The classes that have been parasitic on other classes have always in the past been races… But even if race were abolished by intermixture, it would still be possible, of course, to get your class-factor, and with it your organized war, by way of sex, age, occupational and other categories. ‘The intensity of organization is increased,’ as Mr. [Bertrand] Russell points out, ‘when a man belongs to more organizations.’ The more classes (of which, in their various functions, he is representative) that you can make [a man] become regularly conscious of, the more you can control him, the more of an automaton he becomes. Thus, if a man can be made to feel himself acutely (a) an American; (b) a young American; (c) a middle-west young American; (d) a ‘radical and enlightened’ middle-west young American; (e) a ‘college-educated’ etc., etc.; (f) a ‘college-educated’ dentist who is an etc., etc.; (g) a ‘college-educated’ dentist of such-and-such a school of dentistry, etc., etc.,—the more inflexible each of these links is, the more powerful, naturally, is the chain.
In its particularizing, identity-constructing nature, doesn’t the metricization of identity into uniform categories precisely do the work of differentiating, othering, and ultimately alienating various “bubbles” or “comunities” (as we say today, rather than classes)
And that’s where it ends, mid sentance! To be picked up, no doubt, in some other piece soon to be released here. Off the top of my head, were I to write this today I’d go from Kenneth Gergen into the technoshaminism subcultures of the ’90s (update! added link!) as illustrative of why the “The Matrix” aesthetic framing of the documentary was already well understood over a quarter-century before it came out. 🙂
👍👍😎🍻