Concerned Netizen

Full-Stack Media Ecology

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Clinton, the author, outside the Media Lab on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cheating at Peekaboo against a Bad-Faith Adversary

March 19, 2024 / / 3 Comments

What follows is a short book detailing the mechanisms by which computers have thwarted our sense of reality and children’s sense of embodiment, with receipts. The narrative centers Terry A. Davis, creator of TempleOS, as self-reporting on the effects of cyberspace on children; cyberspace as designed and implemented in order to sell computers to adults.

Peekaboo! ICQ!

Peekaboo is a game we play with infants in order for them to learn what child psychologist Jean Piaget termed object permanence.

A world composed of permanent objects constitutes not only a spatial universe but also a world obeying the principle of causality in the form of relationships between things, and regulated in time, without continuous annihilations or resurrections. Hence it is a universe both stable and external, relatively distinct from the internal world and one in which the subject places himself

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A pile of books by Sherry Turkle. Her 1995 book Life on the Screen lays on top of the rest.

The Benefit of Hindsight in Turkle’s Life on the Screen

March 19, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I had to make a visit to the doctor’s clinic yesterday, interrupting my writing for this website. In order to not lose much time, I grabbed a book I hadn’t yet opened, but knew would be of benefit to what I was working on: Sherry Turkle’s 1995 book Life on the Screen. I had picked it up in Boston last years while attending the Free Software Foundations annual convention, LibrePlanet 2023. Now, from having read the opening chapters, I get the unfortunate impression that to the author—at least in 1995—, I may as well have been attending a Microsoft Appreciation convention.

Of course, working with the benefit of 29 years hind-sight, I have Dr. Turkle at an extreme disadvantage. I’ve found all of her books to be absolutely invaluable as sociological histories. Further, I will personally attest that her

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A dial-up modem from 1982, the Hayes Smartmodem. A small black box with blinking lights on the front.

Modems and Codecs—The Human-Scale Stack

March 18, 2024 / / 0 Comments

It is not enough to understand computers to understand their proportions and scales. We only know that they are very complex and very fast. But they have been very complex and very fast for about half-a-century now, and it seems culture has all but given up on retaining any sense of scope for computers relative to human experience or meaning. They no longer exist within our subjective universe.

Full-stack media ecology is not just an explanation of what goes on between the top and the bottom of the computer stack; that is, between the high-level, easy-to-use interfaces and the bare metal and silicon. It’s about building the historical context for the development and growth of the stack upward and downwards, as a narrative about our lived environment, culture, and who and what we are as humans. We are embodied beings,

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A scene from the documentary The Social Dilemma, of a teenager being manipulated by digital algorithms.

Nice Average Fellows Who Have Developed a Technique

March 14, 2024 / / 1 Comment

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

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The dust-jacket to Wyndham Lewis' book Doom of Youth.

Competence as Maturity

November 23, 2023 / / 0 Comments

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

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Domicide of the Microworld

April 20, 2023 / / 0 Comments

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

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The long history of metrics before and after cybernetics

April 18, 2023 / / 0 Comments

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

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A thinkpad covered in Free Software Foundation stickers, surrounded by important texts of media ecology.

What “Full Stack” means on this Site

April 13, 2023 / / 0 Comments

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

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Me presenting at FSF
A still image from my soon-to-be-released presentation at the Free Software Foundation's convention last month.

Long Live the Free Software Foundation

April 12, 2023 / / 3 Comments

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

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LOGOS: McLuhan Among the Gnostics Part IV

April 2, 2023 / / 0 Comments

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

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