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An image of The Age of Adverising's opening paragraphs, as originally published.

The Age of Advertising

April 2, 2023 / / 0 Comments
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

March 10, 2023 / / 0 Comments

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

February 27, 2023 / / 0 Comments

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 …

Vivian James, the GamerGate mascot

GamerGate on Default Wisdom

November 8, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been, and will continue to be tied up with some personal family stuff. But in the meantime, my friend Katherine Dee has released a new piece by me, the second in a series trying to dig beneath the surface and open new avenues to talking about and analyzing the flame-war that never died: 2014’s #GamerGate, which many believe permanently altered the terrain of social media and ushered in our perpetual meme-war. All the noise and surface issues, I think, obscure what the really important messages underlying the spectacle. It can’t be said enough: the media themselves were the real message here.

Part One: “Gaming is Leaving Gamers Behind”
Part Two: Gamers vs. Academics…

I’m on Team Human

September 23, 2022 / / 0 Comments

On the tail of Ezra Klein’s NYT mini-McLuhan media-blitz last month, I wrote a piece that got some currency, including the attention of author and Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at SUNY, Douglas Rushkoff.

His book Survival of the Richest has just been released (it’s very good!) and yet somehow, amidst all that hubub, Prof. Rushkoff had the time and inclination to host me for an hour on his Team Human podcast. I’m humbled and gratified to share it here today—thanks, Doug!

Click Here to Listen!…

Tear it Down and Start Over

September 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Seymour Papert and Alan Kay, two foundational giants in the world of personal computer interface design in the ‘70s and ‘80s, appeared before the American congress in 1995. Specifically, they were witnesses testifying to the House Committee on ‘Technology in Education.’

They are both huge critics of the way computer education had been rolled out in schools. As an elementary school student in the ‘90s, and a product of the system they’re critiquing, I find this entire chapter in the story of microcomputers extremely enlightening for reasons of personal understanding. Kay says that dropping a Mac (let’s say) in every classroom is like dropping a piano in every classroom. Imagine that. Every classroom in the school gets their own piano, and then every teacher—none of whom, we can assume, are musicians—are given two-week long “piano” classes in September. And then …

The Helens of Baskerville

September 7, 2022 / / 3 Comments

Good news, everyone! Science has finally, finally delivered us something it’s been long promising: the much-anticipated portal to hell, teeming with summonable demons.

An ugly AI woman with dead-looking children.

It’s about goddamned time!

This is literally the reason for Marshall McLuhan’s beef with Northrop Frye. That later. First, here’s the deal.

These A.I. art generator thingies are trained on millions upon millions of images. Also, they can detect features of those images, including objects within them describable by human language. Roughly speaking, they can “read” what’s “in” a picture, and then reverse the process to generate images based on whatever prompts we “write.”

We can take the whole sum of millions and millions of images—photographs and artworks and whatever else—that these things have synthesized into coherency as some kind of unprecedented summation or unity of culture. Clearly there will be over-representation of lots of things—you know, …

Oh, For the Love of Knowledge!—Default Friend Exclusive

August 17, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Another post I’ve written exclusively for Default Friend‘s excellent Substack.

Last article, I insisted that nearly everyone who popularizes McLuhan mangles him and his message. Why? If you want to think of causality in the sequential terms of linear cause-and-effect, then there are many causes. (Of course, when you read Laws of Media and Media and Formal Cause, you learn that cause-and-effect account for only a fourth of what causality is… but that formality would be a huge digression at this point.)

So, ahem….

🫴Click here to read more over on her Substack!👈…

Misreading Marshall—Default Friend Exclusive

August 9, 2022 / / 0 Comments

My friend Katherine Dee has asked me to write regularly for her Substack blog, and I’m thrilled to accept! She’s been covering the internet history beat for a while now with wonderful research and gathering lots of momentum. Here’s my first piece.

Ezra Klein—founding editor of Vox, contributor to the New York Times, and, where I knew him best, former MSNBC pundit—has made two distinct moves aiming to launch Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) back into the public conversation. I was nine-hundred words into a written analysis of these last night when this little gem of a tweet popped up on my timeline….

🫴Click here to read more on her Substack!👈 …

Some vecuum tubes, also known as "electron valves." The grid inside uses a small current sent through a third wire to adjust the flow of a much stronger one between the first two.

McLuhan’s Synthesis—Part Three

July 16, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I began studying McLuhan heavily in 2017. Since I had no formal education—or even cursory introduction—to many of the subjects and fields he draws upon in his works, I had no sieve for separating his own idiosyncrasies from the mainstreams of thought within and against which he plays.

The larger part of the past five years, beyond reading and absorbing McLuhan’s primary texts has been, then, to also catch up on what everyone else has taught and learned regarding media, literary criticism, and so-called post-modernity.

That’s because reading McLuhan carefully is to read a guy who was always nitpicking whatever larger, impersonal current of thought everyone around him was being swept up in. Before the early ‘50s, he was always fighting to go against the flow.

In an unpublished polemic he wrote against public intellectual Syndey Hook in the …

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