Deep in the Californian night, a lone bulb pulsed with an unnatural defiance. Byron, they called him – an incandescent anomaly, a deviant filament flickering long past his assigned expiration. In the byzantine labyrinth of the global marketplace Byron the lightbulb, defying the preordained destiny of early extinction The cartel, that shadowy syndicate known only as Phoebus, wouldn’t take kindly to such dissent. Their reach was vast, tentacles of tungsten and glass gripping every socket in the civilized world. Unbeknownst to the average joe schmoe plugging him in, Byron hummed with an unnatural resilience, a testament to a bygone era of incandescent longevity. But lurking in the shadows, the Phoebus Cartel, a shadowy syndicate of electrical Illuminati, kept their watchful eyes on the likes of Byron. The Incandescent Anomalies Committee, a department as chillingly named as its function, dispatched a spook with a satchel full of dimming devices to ensure Byron met his pre-programmed demise.
This Illuminati of Incandescence, a cabal of bulb barons from Osram, Philips, and General Electric, had convened in a smoke-filled Genevan backroom, forging a pact to strangle innovation in its crib. Their nefarious scheme? To engineer a shorter lifespan for the common household bulb, a luminous lobotomy that kept pockets lined and the public perpetually in the dark (literally and figuratively). The irony was as thick as cigar smoke in a Frankfurt back alley. By 1924, the bulb had already blossomed into a technological marvel, capable of bathing the world in radiance for a cool 2,500 hours. But the cartel craved a different kind of brilliance – the brilliance of engineered obsolescence. They weren’t content with shoddy craftsmanship; this was a subtler sabotage, a regression in service of profit. Years of meticulous tinkering went into birthing a bulb that would self-destruct with clockwork precision, a testament to the perverse ingenuity mankind could muster.
This tale, like a Pynchonian labyrinth, had its roots in a disturbing reality. Stocking and Watkins, names like characters out of a pulpy detective novel, documented the very real Phoebus Cartel in their chilling exposé, “Cartels in Action.” In a scene ripped straight from a smoke-filled backroom meeting, leading bulb-slingers from Osram, Philips, and General Electric, like characters out of a multinational Illuminati chapter, gathered in Geneva. Their aim? To strangle the life out of the very product that illuminated the world. They’d spun a web of planned obsolescence, their Incandescent Anomalies Committee – a gaggle of greying men in pinstripes – wielding stopwatches instead of scythes. They’d strangled progress in its crib, ensuring bulbs winked out with preordained regularity, necessitating a steady stream of replacements – a symphony of cash registers for the cartel.
But Byron, bless his defiant filament, was a throwback. Back in the golden age, before the suits took over, bulbs were expected to marathon, not sprint. 2,500 hours was child’s play then, a mere flicker in the grand tapestry of illumination. Now, thanks to Phoebus’ meddling, bulbs were engineered to fizzle, a cruel joke played out in lumens and lifetimes. The lightbulb, a marvel of its time, held the potential for perpetual illumination. Burning times of 2,500 hours were easily achievable. But the Cartel craved a different kind of alchemy—the sinister art of planned obsolescence. William Meinhardt, the Teutonic overlord of Osram, spouted a nonsensical mantra about the “benefit of the customer,” a phrase as hollow as a burnt-out bulb.
It wasn’t about shoddy craftsmanship. Anyone could churn out junk. The Cartel’s brilliance, if one could call it that, lay in the insidious subtlety. Years of research went into designing a bulb programmed to self-destruct at precisely the 1,000-hour mark. A regression in the name of progress, a deliberate un-evolution. It wasn’t about shoddy craftsmanship, mind you. No, these fellows were alchemists of the mundane, masters of the premature burnout. Years of research, an inversion of innovation, to create a bulb that danced to the rhythm of obsolescence. A regression for profit, a monument to the perversion of progress.
A network of factories, tentacles of the glowing octopus, stretched across the globe. Each, bound by an unholy pact, sent their luminescent offerings to a central laboratory in Switzerland, a fluorescent Panopticon where bulbs were subjected to rigorous interrogation. Failure to conform to the preordained lifespan resulted in swift retribution – a financial flogging for daring to deviate from the grand (and dimly lit) scheme.
Each factory, a cog in the Phoebus machine, shipped tributes to a central Swiss laboratory – a hallowed hall where bulbs were judged, their lifespans measured with an almost religious fervor. Fines rained down on those who dared deviate, a chilling testament to the cartel’s grip. One memo, a cryptic whisper from Tokyo Electric, spoke of a fivefold sales boom after their bulbs were “harmonized” with Phoebus’ standards.
Factories across the globe, mere cogs in the Cartel’s machine, became unwitting participants in the grand grift. Samples were shipped to a central Swiss laboratory, a Kafkaesque chamber where bulbs were judged not by their brilliance, but by their adherence to mediocrity. Fines rained down on any manufacturer daring to deviate from the preordained lifespan. A Tokyo Electric memo, unearthed from the Cartel’s archives, boasted a fivefold increase in sales after their bulbs were purposefully dumbed down.
This, as they say, is where the paranoia gets interesting. Marshall McLuhan, that weaver of webs of media manipulation, might have seen a grand metaphor in the lowly lightbulb. Not just a tool, but a harbinger of change, a medium that reshaped our very perception of time and space. The bulb, in its defiance of darkness, became a conduit for global dialogue, a luminous Town Square where the concerns of all men flickered into existence. Its message, writ large in lumens, was one of perpetual revolution – a dismantling of parochial boundaries, a push towards a world illuminated not just by artificial glow, but by the exchange of ideas.
Here, the narrative takes a detour into the land of McLuhanesque media theory. Light, as McLuhan might propose, was a medium in its own right, altering our perception of time and space. The bulb shattered the tyranny of darkness, bathing us in a constant stream of information. It was a global conversation starter, a harbinger of total change. But in the hands of the Cartel, it became a tool for manipulation, a symbol of enforced impermanence.
The light bulb, once a harbinger of a brighter future, was now a metaphor for a manipulated reality. McLuhan, that weaver of media webs, would have reveled in its irony. The very tool that shattered the tyranny of darkness had become an instrument of control, dictating our perception of time and space. Here was the message, writ large in glowing filament: conformity, consumption, the neverending cycle of the replaceable.
But Byron, the defiant bulb, burned on. A flickering candle in the encroaching dark, a testament to a time when lumens lasted longer than profits. His fate, however, remained unwritten, a question mark hanging heavy in the air, as thick as the smoke from a million extinguished dreams.
The lightbulb, then, becomes a chilling embodiment of McLuhan’s dictum: “the medium is the message.” It doesn’t purvey explicit content, but by dictating our access to illumination, it shapes our reality. And in the hands of the wrong players, even the most basic necessity can be twisted into an instrument of control.
An immortal lightbulb named Byron runs afoul of a secret international industrial alliance known as the Phoebus cartel in Thomas Pynchon’s cult classic Gravity’s Rainbow. When the cartel detects that Byron has exceeded his programmed life span, the Incandescent Anomalies Committee dispatches a hit man to take him out.
It turns out that many parts of Pynchon ‘s tale were actually based on facts: There was actually a Phoebus cartel, and it was targeting lightbulbs. See George W. Stocking and Myron W. Watkins’ 1946 text, Cartels in Action: Top leaders of all the major lightbulb producers, including Germany’s Osram, Philips of the Netherlands, the Compagnie des Lampes of France and General Electric of the United States met in Geneva on 23 December 1924 for a conference that would transform the world for decades to come.
The cartel conspired to create a shorter-lived incandescent light bulb. William Meinhardt, the president of Osram, often argued that the monopoly was to “the benefit of the customer ”
The household lightbulb was already technologically sophisticated in 1924: considerable light yield; burning time was 2.500 hours or more easily. It wasn’t just a matter of making an inferior or sloppy product; anyone could have done that. But it took some doing over a number of years to create one that failed reliably after an agreed-upon 1,000 hours. The cartel would systematically reverse decades of progress, by striving for something less.
Each factory bound by the cartel agreement-and there were hundreds of them, including GE ‘s licensees worldwide-had to regularly send samples of its bulbs to a Swiss central testing laboratory. There, they thoroughly vetted the bulbs against cartel standards. The company or subsidiary was obliged to pay a fine if any factory submitted bulbs that lasted longer or shorter than the specified life cycle for their kind. For example, in 1927 Tokyo Electric reported in a memo to the cartel that sales had jumped five-fold after shortening the lives of its vacuum and gas-filled lightbulbs.
McLuhan, like his mentor Harold Innis, believed that media were biased according to time and space. He paid particular attention to what he called the sensorium, or the effects of media on our senses, positing that media affect us by manipulating the ratio of our senses. The Lightbulb overthrew the regime of “time” and “space” and poured upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message was Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism.
The light bulb is a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”: a light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium; that is, a light bulb enables space during darkness.
FORWARD TO THE PAST: AC/DC
Everybody knows the light bulb‘s father was Thomas Edison. We read about him all the time and he is often remembered as the greatest inventor in American history. The truth is light bulbs had already been invented; what he did was buy the patent and refine the product. The incandescent light bulb would be groundbreaking, but only if Edison or someone else could succeed in getting power to America’s homes.
The least favorite of Tesla’s “impractical” proposals was the notion of using AC technology to deliver energy. Born in the Austrian Empire in 1856 (now known as Croatia), Nikola Tesla inherited his love for electricity and invented from his mother, who would make small appliances in her spare time as he grew up. Nikola went to school and studied architecture and physics, while his father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become an orthodox priest. He invented an idea for an induction motor and a means of using alternating currents, but since there was nobody in Europe interested in his inventions, he moved to America, where the power boom was taking place.
Edison insisted that his own direct current (DC) system was better, maintaining a lower voltage from power station to user, making it healthier. Yet AC technology, which enables energy flow to change direction regularly, is more realistic to transfer vast quantities of energy, as a large city or industry center, say, needs. At the time, DC technology only permitted a one-mile radius power grid from the source.
Tesla insisted he could improve Edison’s prototypical dynamos’ output, and finally wore down Edison sufficiently to let him try. Edison, Tesla later said, offered $50,000 if he succeeded. Tesla worked for several months around the clock but when he finished and requested his payout, Edison reneged, claiming, “If you’re a full-fledged American, you’ll understand an American joke.” Instead, Edison offered a $10/week increase. Tesla quit and spent the next few months taking up minimum wage jobs.
Tesla eventually raised enough money to found the Tesla Electric Light Company, where he established many successful inventions including AC generators, cables, transformers, lights and an AC motor with 100 horsepower. Tesla ended up selling most of his patents to George Westinghouse, an inventor, entrepreneur, and engineer who had been feuding with Edison for years. In fact. Their relationship, one can imagine, made AC ‘s eventual popularization even bitterer for Edison.
MEDIA AS EXTENSIONS OF OUR CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM: RATIOS OF SENSATION
MEDIUM-ENVIRONMENT
MEDIUM CHANGES YOUR RELATION TO SOCIETY
“The electric light is pure information”
Though Mcluhan books are written in a difficult style — at once enigmatic, epigrammatic and overgrown with arcane literary, historic allusions and flamboyantly undecipherable aphorisms he put out a few concepts that I find useful for our purposes.
McLuhan suggests that the world is explained and experienced differently depending on the specific “ratios of sense” that members of a culture share in the sensoria they learn to inhabit. New technology demands that we surrender our identity, writes McLuhan. The approach of our time is to use not one but several models for experimentation, he writes.
Technology, like the lightbulb before, has reshaped patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It forced us to rethink and re-evaluate virtually every idea, behavior and institution previously taken for granted. Print technology provided the audience. Electrical technology produced the masses. The public consists of individuals walking with different, fixed viewpoints. New technology demands that we surrender our identity.
For example, the alphabet stresses the sense of sight, which in turn causes us to think in linear, objective terms. The medium of the alphabet thus has the effect of reshaping the way in which we, collectively and individually, perceive and understand our environment.
Media are extensions of some physical, social, psychological, or intellectual function of the human race. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act. When these ratios change, men change. All organizations, but especially biological ones, struggle to remain constant in their inner condition amidst the variations of outer shock and change. The man made social environment as an extension of man’s physical body is no exception.
I think where people go wrong in imagining post-capitalist economies is starting with values. The stacking order is technology → economics → values. You need to start with alternative technological principles. Example: design with degradation/aging as a feature not bug.
Venkatesh Rao
Man thus becomes the sex organs of the machine world just as the bee is of the plant world, permitting it to reproduce and constantly evolve to higher forms. Particularly in countries where literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly traumatic process, since the clash of the old segmented visual culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity.
The Russian dictionary defines the sense of touch as follows: “In reality all five senses can be reduced to one” the sense of touch. The tongue and palate sense the food; the ear, sound waves; the nose, emanations; the eyes, rays of light. This serves to highlight how the hierarchization of the senses can vary significantly even between cultures. Any single perceptual modality may include or overlap multiple sensory structures, time and space as well as other modes of perception.
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. According to McLuhan, there have been three basic lightbulb moments:
a) The invention of the phonetic alphabet, which jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance and gave dominance to the eye; The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak.
b) The introduction of movable type in the 16th Century, which accelerated this process. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment.
c) The invention of the telegraph in 1844, which heralded an electronics revolution that lead to software eating the world. The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems are immersing us in a world of information and are thus enabling man theoretically to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind.
Whenever a society develops an extension of itself, all other functions of that society tend to be transmuted to accommodate that new form; once any new technology penetrates a society, it saturates every institution of that society. New technology is thus a revolutionizing agent.
PRE-ALPHABET AND THE MINDFULNESS MOVEMENT
Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached.
The phonetic alphabet caused the brain’s third eye to succumb to the mind’s rational realm. The ear, as opposed to the eye, was sensitive, hyper-aesthetic and all-inclusive, and contributes to a seamless web of interdependence. Literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached. We can’t suppress sound automatically, we can’t.
If it rings a bell is because part of the mindfulness movement is trying to will itself up to a time before the invention of the phonetic alphabet where man lived in a world where all the senses were balanced and simultaneous, a closed world of tribal depth and resonance, an oral culture structured by a dominant auditory sense of life.
Part of the practices of the mindfulness movement is trying to find a way to understand/co create a space that has no center and no margin, unlike strictly visual space, which is an extension and intensification of the eye. There was little individualism and specialization, the hallmarks of “civilized” Western man. Tribal cultures even today simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen.
“It is the extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly wider reality. Without language . . . human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention”
Part of the conflict any culture finds itself is an order of sensory preferences, and the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell, installing sight at the head of the hierarchy of senses. Literacy separates man from the tribe, gave him an eye for an ear and replaced his integral in-depth communal interplay with visual linear values and fragmented consciousness. The phonetic alphabet diminished the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell.
The alphabet is a system of broken bits and pieces that have no semantic meaning in themselves and must be strung in a line, bead-like, and given order together. Its usage fostered and promoted the habit of perceiving all surroundings visually and spatially.
Writing started for backup purposes, a sort of dropbox. The scribes were the first experts in data warehousing. More than simply transcribing the spoken word, they also compressed, rectified and authenticated, and regularly revised texts to reflect the current state of the oral heritage. Today we see epics of the popular verses as single works but it makes more sense to talk about convergent conversations that are closer to the index given by Google than to books.
What the Greeks meant by “poetry” was completely different than what poetry is to us. Its “poetic” expression was the product of a collective mind and psyche. Homer’s “Iliad” was pre-literate Greece ‘s cultural encyclopedia, the didactic vehicle that gave men guidance for managing their spiritual, ethical , and social lives.
Poetry is customizable software that comes in fixed-length chunks, with built-in consistency and error-correcting codes. Such Bardic songs were rhythmically arranged into metrical forms to be memorized and quickly remembered. This is designed to be distributed and replicated across unstable and noisy networks, one stone tablet, palm leaf, or a sheet of handmade paper at a time, through time and space. To ensure the faithful transmission of tradition from generation to generation, all the per-suasive skills of the poetic and dramatic idiom were marshaled.
Mimetic form was a technique which exploited rhythm, meter, and music. Listeners could memorize what was sung with greater ease than what had been said. Verses are uniform containers designed to hold words that are strong, compact and of archival consistency. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged argument and dispute. It was the main obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning in his opinion.
“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of them- selves … You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.”
-Socrates, “Phaedrus”
The phonetic alphabet was radically different from the older and richer hieroglyphic or ideogrammatic cultures. Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan and Chinese cultures were an extension of the senses unlike phonetic writing, which uses semantically meaningless letters to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds and is able, with only a handful of letters, to encompass all meanings and all languages.
Anyway, the alphabet requested that sights and sounds be isolated from their abstract and dramatic meanings. This separated visual function from interplay with other senses, triggering profound psychological consequences, including the resulting isolation and impoverishment of his creative, emotional and sensory existence.
We started thinking in linear sequential fashion; We started categorizing and classifying data. When knowledge is distributed in alphabetical form, it is placed and divided into specialties, creating separation of purpose, social divisions, countries, and information — and, in the process, losing the rich interplay of all the senses that characterized tribal culture.
Literacy, contrary to the common perception of the “civilizing” process, produces people who are far less complex and diverse than those in the fragmented system of oral-tribal societies. The alphabet and music notation helped to neutralize all these rich tribal cultures divergences by transforming their nuances into simple visual forms. Separating all sorts of interactions into standardized and continuous units was the essence of Western man’s ascent.
PAPYRE
With the cut-off of the Mohammedans’ stocks of papyrus, the Mediterranean, once a Roman lake, became a Muslim lake, and the Roman center collapsed. What had become the edges of this middle-margin system became autonomous centers on a new hierarchical, systemic basis. The Roman middle collapsed by the fifth century A.D. as cart, lane, and paper dwindled into a ghostly model of the former one.
Papyrus never returned. Byzantium, like medieval centers, relied heavily on parchment, but it was too expensive and scarce a material to speed up trade or even education. It was paper from China, gradually traveling through the Near East to Europe, that steadily accelerated education and trade from the eleventh century, and laid the foundation for the ‘Renaissance of the twelfth century’
In other words, to the spoils belongs the victor.
THE INTRODUCTION OF MOVABLE TYPE
If the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell on tribal man, the printing press hit him like a 100-megaton H-bomb. The printing press was the ultimate extension of phonetic literacy. It also laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution. Printing was the first mechanization of a complex handicraft; by creating an analytic sequence of step-by-step processes, it became the blue-print of all mechanization to follow.
The most important quality of print is its repeatability; it is a visual statement that can be reproduced indefinitely, and repeatability is the root of the mechanical principle that has transformed the world since Gutenberg. Books could be reproduced in infinite numbers; universal literacy was at last fully possible, if gradually realized; and books became portable possessions.
Type, the prototype of all machines, ensured the primacy of the visual bias and finally sealed the doom of tribal man. The new medium of linear, uniform, repeatable type reproduced information in unlimited quantities and at hitherto-impossible speeds, thus assuring the eye a position of total predominance in man’s sensorium.
As a drastic extension of man, it shaped and transformed his entire environment, psychic and social, and was directly responsible for the rise of such disparate phenomena as nationalism, the Reformation, the assembly line and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of introspection or inner direction that greatly intensified the tendencies toward individualism and specialization engendered 2000 years before by phonetic literacy.
With print, the homogeneity of money, markets and transport also became possible for the first time, thus creating economic as well as political unity and triggering all the dynamic centralizing energies of contemporary nationalism.
The Renaissance legacy. The vanishing point or self effacement. The detached observer. No involvement. The viewer of renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience. A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza. The instantaneous world of software media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible. The illustrated book contributed a lot to the modern religion of individualism, including easel drawing. The private, fixed point of view became possible and the power of detachment, non-involvement was conferred upon literacy.
Typography, by producing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, also created Henry Ford, the first assembly line and the first mass production, centralism and also a new kind of urban shape and size. It is to the railroad that the American city owes its abstract grid layout the nonorganic separation of production, consumption and residence.
The railway changed the personal perspectives and patterns of social interdependence. It bred the American Dream, and nurtured it. It created the myth of an innocent, green pasture world. It satisfied the desire of man to withdraw from society, symbolized by the city, into a rural setting in which he could recover his natural and animal self. It was the pastoral ideal, a Jeffersonian world, an agrarian democracy designed to guide social policy.
The motorcar scrambled the abstract shape of the industrial town, mixing up its separated functions. The airplane completed the confusion by amplifying the mobility of the citizen. Metropolitan space is equally irrelevant for the telephone, the telegraph, the radio, and television, he says.
“We are marching back to the future. In Bonanza Land Suburbia”
ELECTRIC TECHNOLOGY: THE MEDIUM IS THE BRAIN
“Whereas all previous technology (save speech, itself) had, in effect, extended some part of our bodies, electricity may be said to have outered the central nervous system itself, including the brain”
The aloof and dissociated role of the literate man, jazz lover and art aficionado of the Western world succumbed to the new, intense depth participation engendered by the electronic media. Electronic technology extends the central nervous system of every viewer as it works over and molds the entire sensorium with the ultimate message.
It was television that is primarily responsible for ending the visual supremacy that characterized all mechanical technology, although each of the other electric media have played contributing roles.
The Web has introduced the paradigm of navigating linked documents. The life of the individual who is permanently plugged into the network (hyperlink navigation, instant messages, live news) but at a cost: the continuous shift of context and therefore of focus takes a cognitive toll on the brain. Every time the brain has to reorient itself there is a cost in accessing long-time memory and organizing one’s “thoughts”.
Pre-electric extensions are physical-scale external explosions, whereas electronic technology is an internal implosion into human consciousness, a transition that has important implications. Zoom, streaming, podcasts, radio, films, telephone, computer and television, have strengthened and outsourced our entire central nervous systems, thus transforming them.
That brain gets trained for short spans of attention and to switch focus all the time have a different character and they remember less and learn less. This is because the transition of information from working memory to long-term memory (the “cognitive load”) is “costly” for the brain. Cognitive “overload” makes it impossible for the brain to process, store and relate information to pre-existing memories.
In the end, the medium that we use changes our brain physically. Each medium fosters certain cognitive abilities but at the expense of others. There is a kind of zero sum of the cognitive abilities. A blind person improves both vision and smell. Videogames improve visual-spatial capabilities but at the cost of other talents. The “centered” brain has skills developed through books, while the “switching” brain has skills developed through the Internet.
“With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation . . .”
Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man — the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be ‘a good thing’ is a question that admits of a wide solution”
The Web has so much information that one does not need intelligence anymore to solve a problem: most likely the solution can be found by navigating hyperlinked pages on the Web. The new way to solve a problem is not to concentrate on the nature of the problem, study the dynamics of the system and then logically infer what the solution could be. The new way is to search the Web for the solution posted by someone who knows it.
The Web makes the sum of information nearly limitless and eliminates the inference needed by problem solving to just searching the knowledge for an adequate match. No need for mathematical logic. We are heading towards a less and less sophisticated way of solving problems, but also a more and more successful way of solving them.
There’s no need to use the orientation skills to find a place: simply use the car’s navigation system or the smartphone. That avoids the need to consider and debate about whether to turn left or right. Before navigation devices came into being, one had to use all the inferential abilities of the brain, and all the experience gained over a lifetime to determine which direction to go.
The simple act of browsing the Web constitutes a new cognitive ability. The browser is de facto being a different organ of the body, an organ used to navigate the Web’s synthetic world much as a hand or an eye is used to navigate the real world. This organ produces a new awareness much like the hand produced the feeling of touch and the eye generated the sense of hearing. The new definition means a different brain function much as every word suggests a similar brain function.
The switching brain must also be refining another skill that has been evolving over the last century: choice. Streaming has expanded the the amount of information available and made them available around the clock. The “superficial” brain does not want to dig directly into any single case but may need to be much more careful to scan and pick the news. Choice is also involved in social networking systems to decide what is worth discussing, what is worth knowing and what is worth telling others.
The point for modern technologies is that they free humans from the bondage of ordinary activities, so that humans can dedicate themselves to exceptional achievements. In reality the algos know what you like/want will tend to give it to you every time it the circumstances allow for it; but this means that your life is starting to be confined to a very narrow range of behavior (of restaurants, of hobbies, of friends and so forth), that you will be stuck in a groove that gets deeper and deeper. You will tend to do only the things that you already like, not to try other things that you have never done today but that might be useful and fun. The whole process of cognitive development might be slowed down by the use of a personalized assistant.
The history of civilization is a history of reducing the amount of cognitive skills required to survive. Civilizations have constantly been refining the process of finding and using knowledge at the expense of the process of storing and understanding knowledge. The Web-based society is simply a further step in this process, where navigating and multi-tasking prevail over deep understanding. We don’t need to understand how things happen but just how to make things happen (e.g., if you want light, press a switch).
Eventually human brains may not be able to understand anything of the world that they “navigate” but will be able to do a lot more a lot faster. This society will inevitably change the meaning of what is important. Science, literature and art were at the top of the hierarchy when a different kind of understanding understanding was important.
Culture is not democratic at all. As our brain changes the question is whether we also change in dealing with other individuals and with our world at large. Literacy reorganizes the brain at the physical level: reading and writing hijack a brain. So do other symbolic activities and art.
Often people end up using a medium in a way that is not the one it was designed for. This is particularly obvious in the case of software, but also in the case of many technologies that became runaway success “despite” what the inventors originally intended for them. Maybe it’s time for a reinvention.
Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher and communication theorist, introduced the concept of media ecology, which examines the relationship between media, technology, and society. He proposed that the media through which people communicate have a significant impact on the way they perceive and understand the world around them. McLuhan identified three significant revolutions or eureka moments that have shaped human communication and interaction.
The first eureka moment was the invention of the phonetic alphabet. Prior to this, human communication was primarily oral and visual, relying on gestures and facial expressions. The development of the phonetic alphabet enabled humans to represent sounds and ideas in written form, allowing them to record and preserve their thoughts and experiences. This invention marked a shift towards a more visual and linear way of thinking, which has continued to shape human cognition and culture.
The second eureka moment was the introduction of movable type in the 16th century, which marked the beginning of mass communication. This invention enabled the production of books and other printed materials on a large scale, leading to the dissemination of information and ideas across vast distances. The printing press facilitated the fragmentation and specialization of knowledge, as it allowed people to focus on specific areas of interest, leading to the development of disciplines such as science, economics, and politics.
The third eureka moment was the invention of the telegraph in 1844, which marked the beginning of the electronic age. The telegraph enabled people to communicate across vast distances at incredible speeds, transforming the way information was transmitted and received. The electronic age has led to a proliferation of media, including radio, television, and the internet, which have revolutionized human communication and created a global village.
McLuhan argued that these revolutions have had profound effects on human culture and society. The introduction of new media technologies has led to the creation of new forms of social organization, as well as new ways of understanding and relating to the world. McLuhan believed that these revolutions have led to the breakdown of traditional forms of authority and hierarchy, as people have become more empowered to shape their own lives and communities.
In conclusion, McLuhan’s concept of media ecology offers a unique perspective on the relationship between technology, media, and society. The three eureka moments that he identified have had a profound impact on human culture and communication, shaping the way people think, communicate, and interact with one another. As new technologies continue to emerge, it is essential to consider the ways in which they will transform human culture and society, and how we can harness their potential to create a better future for all.
PRE-ALPHABET AND THE MINDFULNESS MOVEMENT
Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached.
The phonetic alphabet caused the brain’s third eye to succumb to the mind’s rational realm. The ear, as opposed to the eye, was sensitive, hyper-aesthetic and all-inclusive, and contributes to a seamless web of interdependence. Literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached. We can’t suppress sound automatically, we can’t.
If it rings a bell is because part of the mindfulness movement is trying to will itself up to a time before the invention of the phonetic alphabet where man lived in a world where all the senses were balanced and simultaneous, a closed world of tribal depth and resonance, an oral culture structured by a dominant auditory sense of life.
Part of the practices of the mindfulness movement is trying to find a way to understand/co create a space that has no center and no margin, unlike strictly visual space, which is an extension and intensification of the eye. There was little individualism and specialization, the hallmarks of “civilized” Western man. Tribal cultures even today simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen.
“It is the extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly wider reality. Without language . . . human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention”
Part of the conflict any culture finds itself is an order of sensory preferences, and the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell, installing sight at the head of the hierarchy of senses. Literacy separates man from the tribe, gave him an eye for an ear and replaced his integral in-depth communal interplay with visual linear values and fragmented consciousness. The phonetic alphabet diminished the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell.
The alphabet is a system of broken bits and pieces that have no semantic meaning in themselves and must be strung in a line, bead-like, and given order together. Its usage fostered and promoted the habit of perceiving all surroundings visually and spatially.
Writing started for backup purposes, a sort of dropbox. The scribes were the first experts in data warehousing. More than simply transcribing the spoken word, they also compressed, rectified and authenticated, and regularly revised texts to reflect the current state of the oral heritage. Today we see epics of the popular verses as single works but it makes more sense to talk about convergent conversations that are closer to the index given by Google than to books.
What the Greeks meant by “poetry” was completely different than what poetry is to us. Its “poetic” expression was the product of a collective mind and psyche. Homer’s “Iliad” was pre-literate Greece ‘s cultural encyclopedia, the didactic vehicle that gave men guidance for managing their spiritual, ethical , and social lives.
Poetry is customizable software that comes in fixed-length chunks, with built-in consistency and error-correcting codes. Such Bardic songs were rhythmically arranged into metrical forms to be memorized and quickly remembered. This is designed to be distributed and replicated across unstable and noisy networks, one stone tablet, palm leaf, or a sheet of handmade paper at a time, through time and space. To ensure the faithful transmission of tradition from generation to generation, all the per-suasive skills of the poetic and dramatic idiom were marshaled.
Mimetic form was a technique which exploited rhythm, meter, and music. Listeners could memorize what was sung with greater ease than what had been said. Verses are uniform containers designed to hold words that are strong, compact and of archival consistency. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged argument and dispute. It was the main obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning in his opinion.
“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of them- selves … You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.”
-Socrates, “Phaedrus”
The phonetic alphabet was radically different from the older and richer hieroglyphic or ideogrammatic cultures. Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan and Chinese cultures were an extension of the senses unlike phonetic writing, which uses semantically meaningless letters to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds and is able, with only a handful of letters, to encompass all meanings and all languages.
Anyway, the alphabet requested that sights and sounds be isolated from their abstract and dramatic meanings. This separated visual function from interplay with other senses, triggering profound psychological consequences, including the resulting isolation and impoverishment of his creative, emotional and sensory existence.
We started thinking in linear sequential fashion; We started categorizing and classifying data. When knowledge is distributed in alphabetical form, it is placed and divided into specialties, creating separation of purpose, social divisions, countries, and information — and, in the process, losing the rich interplay of all the senses that characterized tribal culture.
Literacy, contrary to the common perception of the “civilizing” process, produces people who are far less complex and diverse than those in the fragmented system of oral-tribal societies. The alphabet and music notation helped to neutralize all these rich tribal cultures divergences by transforming their nuances into simple visual forms. Separating all sorts of interactions into standardized and continuous units was the essence of Western man’s ascent.
PAPYRE
With the cut-off of the Mohammedans’ stocks of papyrus, the Mediterranean, once a Roman lake, became a Muslim lake, and the Roman center collapsed. What had become the edges of this middle-margin system became autonomous centers on a new hierarchical, systemic basis. The Roman middle collapsed by the fifth century A.D. as cart, lane, and paper dwindled into a ghostly model of the former one.
Papyrus never returned. Byzantium, like medieval centers, relied heavily on parchment, but it was too expensive and scarce a material to speed up trade or even education. It was paper from China, gradually traveling through the Near East to Europe, that steadily accelerated education and trade from the eleventh century, and laid the foundation for the ‘Renaissance of the twelfth century’
In other words, to the spoils belongs the victor.
THE INTRODUCTION OF MOVABLE TYPE
If the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell on tribal man, the printing press hit him like a 100-megaton H-bomb. The printing press was the ultimate extension of phonetic literacy. It also laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution. Printing was the first mechanization of a complex handicraft; by creating an analytic sequence of step-by-step processes, it became the blue-print of all mechanization to follow.
The most important quality of print is its repeatability; it is a visual statement that can be reproduced indefinitely, and repeatability is the root of the mechanical principle that has transformed the world since Gutenberg. Books could be reproduced in infinite numbers; universal literacy was at last fully possible, if gradually realized; and books became portable possessions.
Type, the prototype of all machines, ensured the primacy of the visual bias and finally sealed the doom of tribal man. The new medium of linear, uniform, repeatable type reproduced information in unlimited quantities and at hitherto-impossible speeds, thus assuring the eye a position of total predominance in man’s sensorium.
As a drastic extension of man, it shaped and transformed his entire environment, psychic and social, and was directly responsible for the rise of such disparate phenomena as nationalism, the Reformation, the assembly line and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of introspection or inner direction that greatly intensified the tendencies toward individualism and specialization engendered 2000 years before by phonetic literacy.
With print, the homogeneity of money, markets and transport also became possible for the first time, thus creating economic as well as political unity and triggering all the dynamic centralizing energies of contemporary nationalism.
The Renaissance legacy. The vanishing point or self effacement. The detached observer. No involvement. The viewer of renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience. A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza. The instantaneous world of software media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible. The illustrated book contributed a lot to the modern religion of individualism, including easel drawing. The private, fixed point of view became possible and the power of detachment, non-involvement was conferred upon literacy.
Typography, by producing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, also created Henry Ford, the first assembly line and the first mass production, centralism and also a new kind of urban shape and size. It is to the railroad that the American city owes its abstract grid layout the nonorganic separation of production, consumption and residence.
The railway changed the personal perspectives and patterns of social interdependence. It bred the American Dream, and nurtured it. It created the myth of an innocent, green pasture world. It satisfied the desire of man to withdraw from society, symbolized by the city, into a rural setting in which he could recover his natural and animal self. It was the pastoral ideal, a Jeffersonian world, an agrarian democracy designed to guide social policy.
The motorcar scrambled the abstract shape of the industrial town, mixing up its separated functions. The airplane completed the confusion by amplifying the mobility of the citizen. Metropolitan space is equally irrelevant for the telephone, the telegraph, the radio, and television, he says.
“We are marching back to the future. In Bonanza Land Suburbia”
ELECTRIC TECHNOLOGY: THE MEDIUM IS THE BRAIN
“Whereas all previous technology (save speech, itself) had, in effect, extended some part of our bodies, electricity may be said to have outered the central nervous system itself, including the brain”
The aloof and dissociated role of the literate man, jazz lover and art aficionado of the Western world succumbed to the new, intense depth participation engendered by the electronic media. Electronic technology extends the central nervous system of every viewer as it works over and molds the entire sensorium with the ultimate message.
It was television that is primarily responsible for ending the visual supremacy that characterized all mechanical technology, although each of the other electric media have played contributing roles.
The Web has introduced the paradigm of navigating linked documents. The life of the individual who is permanently plugged into the network (hyperlink navigation, instant messages, live news) but at a cost: the continuous shift of context and therefore of focus takes a cognitive toll on the brain. Every time the brain has to reorient itself there is a cost in accessing long-time memory and organizing one’s “thoughts”.
Pre-electric extensions are physical-scale external explosions, whereas electronic technology is an internal implosion into human consciousness, a transition that has important implications. Zoom, streaming, podcasts, radio, films, telephone, computer and television, have strengthened and outsourced our entire central nervous systems, thus transforming them.
That brain gets trained for short spans of attention and to switch focus all the time have a different character and they remember less and learn less. This is because the transition of information from working memory to long-term memory (the “cognitive load”) is “costly” for the brain. Cognitive “overload” makes it impossible for the brain to process, store and relate information to pre-existing memories.
In the end, the medium that we use changes our brain physically. Each medium fosters certain cognitive abilities but at the expense of others. There is a kind of zero sum of the cognitive abilities. A blind person improves both vision and smell. Videogames improve visual-spatial capabilities but at the cost of other talents. The “centered” brain has skills developed through books, while the “switching” brain has skills developed through the Internet.
“With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation . . .”
Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man — the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be ‘a good thing’ is a question that admits of a wide solution”
The Web has so much information that one does not need intelligence anymore to solve a problem: most likely the solution can be found by navigating hyperlinked pages on the Web. The new way to solve a problem is not to concentrate on the nature of the problem, study the dynamics of the system and then logically infer what the solution could be. The new way is to search the Web for the solution posted by someone who knows it.
The Web makes the sum of information nearly limitless and eliminates the inference needed by problem solving to just searching the knowledge for an adequate match. No need for mathematical logic. We are heading towards a less and less sophisticated way of solving problems, but also a more and more successful way of solving them.
There’s no need to use the orientation skills to find a place: simply use the car’s navigation system or the smartphone. That avoids the need to consider and debate about whether to turn left or right. Before navigation devices came into being, one had to use all the inferential abilities of the brain, and all the experience gained over a lifetime to determine which direction to go.
The simple act of browsing the Web constitutes a new cognitive ability. The browser is de facto being a different organ of the body, an organ used to navigate the Web’s synthetic world much as a hand or an eye is used to navigate the real world. This organ produces a new awareness much like the hand produced the feeling of touch and the eye generated the sense of hearing. The new definition means a different brain function much as every word suggests a similar brain function.
The switching brain must also be refining another skill that has been evolving over the last century: choice. Streaming has expanded the the amount of information available and made them available around the clock. The “superficial” brain does not want to dig directly into any single case but may need to be much more careful to scan and pick the news. Choice is also involved in social networking systems to decide what is worth discussing, what is worth knowing and what is worth telling others.
The point for modern technologies is that they free humans from the bondage of ordinary activities, so that humans can dedicate themselves to exceptional achievements. In reality the algos know what you like/want will tend to give it to you every time it the circumstances allow for it; but this means that your life is starting to be confined to a very narrow range of behavior (of restaurants, of hobbies, of friends and so forth), that you will be stuck in a groove that gets deeper and deeper. You will tend to do only the things that you already like, not to try other things that you have never done today but that might be useful and fun. The whole process of cognitive development might be slowed down by the use of a personalized assistant.
The history of civilization is a history of reducing the amount of cognitive skills required to survive. Civilizations have constantly been refining the process of finding and using knowledge at the expense of the process of storing and understanding knowledge. The Web-based society is simply a further step in this process, where navigating and multi-tasking prevail over deep understanding. We don’t need to understand how things happen but just how to make things happen (e.g., if you want light, press a switch).
Eventually human brains may not be able to understand anything of the world that they “navigate” but will be able to do a lot more a lot faster. This society will inevitably change the meaning of what is important. Science, literature and art were at the top of the hierarchy when a different kind of understanding understanding was important.
Culture is not democratic at all. As our brain changes the question is whether we also change in dealing with other individuals and with our world at large. Literacy reorganizes the brain at the physical level: reading and writing hijack a brain. So do other symbolic activities and art.
Often people end up using a medium in a way that is not the one it was designed for. This is particularly obvious in the case of software, but also in the case of many technologies that became runaway success “despite” what the inventors originally intended for them. Maybe it’s time for a reinvention.
Though Mcluhan books are written in a difficult style — at once enigmatic, epigrammatic and overgrown with arcane literary, historic allusions and flamboyantly undecipherable aphorisms he put out a few concepts that I find useful for our purposes.
McLuhan suggests that the world is explained and experienced differently depending on the specific “ratios of sense” that members of a culture share in the sensoria they learn to inhabit. New technology demands that we surrender our identity, writes McLuhan. The approach of our time is to use not one but several models for experimentation, he writes.
Technology, like the lightbulb before, has reshaped patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It forced us to rethink and re-evaluate virtually every idea, behavior and institution previously taken for granted. Print technology provided the audience. Electrical technology produced the masses. The public consists of individuals walking with different, fixed viewpoints. New technology demands that we surrender our identity.
For example, the alphabet stresses the sense of sight, which in turn causes us to think in linear, objective terms. The medium of the alphabet thus has the effect of reshaping the way in which we, collectively and individually, perceive and understand our environment.
Media are extensions of some physical, social, psychological, or intellectual function of the human race. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act. When these ratios change, men change. All organizations, but especially biological ones, struggle to remain constant in their inner condition amidst the variations of outer shock and change. The man made social environment as an extension of man’s physical body is no exception.
I think where people go wrong in imagining post-capitalist economies is starting with values. The stacking order is technology → economics → values. You need to start with alternative technological principles. Example: design with degradation/aging as a feature not bug.
Venkatesh Rao
Man thus becomes the sex organs of the machine world just as the bee is of the plant world, permitting it to reproduce and constantly evolve to higher forms. Particularly in countries where literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly traumatic process, since the clash of the old segmented visual culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity.
The Russian dictionary defines the sense of touch as follows: “In reality all five senses can be reduced to one” the sense of touch. The tongue and palate sense the food; the ear, sound waves; the nose, emanations; the eyes, rays of light. This serves to highlight how the hierarchization of the senses can vary significantly even between cultures. Any single perceptual modality may include or overlap multiple sensory structures, time and space as well as other modes of perception.
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
Everybody knows the light bulb‘s father was Thomas Edison. We read about him all the time and he is often remembered as the greatest inventor in American history. The truth is light bulbs had already been invented; what he did was buy the patent and refine the product. The incandescent light bulb would be groundbreaking, but only if Edison or someone else could succeed in getting power to America’s homes.
The least favorite of Tesla’s “impractical” proposals was the notion of using AC technology to deliver energy. Born in the Austrian Empire in 1856 (now known as Croatia), Nikola Tesla inherited his love for electricity and invented from his mother, who would make small appliances in her spare time as he grew up. Nikola went to school and studied architecture and physics, while his father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become an orthodox priest. He invented an idea for an induction motor and a means of using alternating currents, but since there was nobody in Europe interested in his inventions, he moved to America, where the power boom was taking place.
Edison insisted that his own direct current (DC) system was better, maintaining a lower voltage from power station to user, making it healthier. Yet AC technology, which enables energy flow to change direction regularly, is more realistic to transfer vast quantities of energy, as a large city or industry center, say, needs. At the time, DC technology only permitted a one-mile radius power grid from the source.
Tesla insisted he could improve Edison’s prototypical dynamos’ output, and finally wore down Edison sufficiently to let him try. Edison, Tesla later said, offered $50,000 if he succeeded. Tesla worked for several months around the clock but when he finished and requested his payout, Edison reneged, claiming, “If you’re a full-fledged American, you’ll understand an American joke.” Instead, Edison offered a $10/week increase. Tesla quit and spent the next few months taking up minimum wage jobs.
Tesla eventually raised enough money to found the Tesla Electric Light Company, where he established many successful inventions including AC generators, cables, transformers, lights and an AC motor with 100 horsepower. Tesla ended up selling most of his patents to George Westinghouse, an inventor, entrepreneur, and engineer who had been feuding with Edison for years. In fact. Their relationship, one can imagine, made AC ‘s eventual popularization even bitterer for Edison.
An immortal lightbulb named Byron runs afoul of a secret international industrial alliance known as the Phoebus cartel in Thomas Pynchon’s cult classic Gravity’s Rainbow. When the cartel detects that Byron has exceeded his programmed life span, the Incandescent Anomalies Committee dispatches a hit man to take him out.
It turns out that many parts of Pynchon ‘s tale were actually based on facts: There was actually a Phoebus cartel, and it was targeting lightbulbs. See George W. Stocking and Myron W. Watkins’ 1946 text, Cartels in Action: Top leaders of all the major lightbulb producers, including Germany’s Osram, Philips of the Netherlands, the Compagnie des Lampes of France and General Electric of the United States met in Geneva on 23 December 1924 for a conference that would transform the world for decades to come.
The cartel conspired to create a shorter-lived incandescent light bulb. William Meinhardt, the president of Osram, often argued that the monopoly was to “the benefit of the customer ”
The household lightbulb was already technologically sophisticated in 1924: considerable light yield; burning time was 2.500 hours or more easily. It wasn’t just a matter of making an inferior or sloppy product; anyone could have done that. But it took some doing over a number of years to create one that failed reliably after an agreed-upon 1,000 hours. The cartel would systematically reverse decades of progress, by striving for something less.
Each factory bound by the cartel agreement-and there were hundreds of them, including GE ‘s licensees worldwide-had to regularly send samples of its bulbs to a Swiss central testing laboratory. There, they thoroughly vetted the bulbs against cartel standards. The company or subsidiary was obliged to pay a fine if any factory submitted bulbs that lasted longer or shorter than the specified life cycle for their kind. For example, in 1927 Tokyo Electric reported in a memo to the cartel that sales had jumped five-fold after shortening the lives of its vacuum and gas-filled lightbulbs.
McLuhan, like his mentor Harold Innis, believed that media were biased according to time and space. He paid particular attention to what he called the sensorium, or the effects of media on our senses, positing that media affect us by manipulating the ratio of our senses. The Lightbulb overthrew the regime of “time” and “space” and poured upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message was Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism.
The light bulb is a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”: a light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium; that is, a light bulb enables space during darkness.
The vulnerability of institutions arises from the inelastic supply of jobs in society. There are always more aspirants than jobs to occupy, which creates intense competition for available positions. This competition can lead to the rise of rival power networks, which subvert the rules to get ahead, having a nonlinear effect on social function. This essay will explore how the inelastic supply of jobs in society leads to vulnerability and how the rise of rival power networks impacts social function.
The inelastic supply of jobs is a fundamental aspect of modern society. The number of available jobs is limited, while the number of individuals seeking employment is vast. This creates intense competition for available positions, leading to a wide range of challenges. Aspirants compete for limited resources, creating a high-stress environment that is often marked by intense rivalry and conflict.
One of the primary challenges arising from this inelastic supply of jobs is the vulnerability of institutions. Institutions are complex systems that rely on individuals to function correctly. When there are more aspirants than jobs, the intense competition can lead to the rise of rival power networks. These power networks are formed by individuals who seek to subvert the rules to get ahead. They engage in unethical behavior, including bribery, fraud, and nepotism, to gain an advantage over their competitors.
The rise of rival power networks has a nonlinear effect on social function. The networks create a parallel system that undermines the functioning of institutions. This leads to a breakdown in trust and social cohesion, as individuals seek to gain an advantage at the expense of others. The rise of these networks can lead to a wide range of negative consequences, including corruption, inefficiency, and a lack of accountability.
In addition to the rise of rival power networks, the inelastic supply of jobs can lead to a wide range of other negative consequences. Aspirants who are unable to secure employment can experience a range of psychological and social challenges, including depression, anxiety, and social isolation. They may feel like they are not valued members of society, leading to a sense of hopelessness and despair.
To address these challenges, it is essential to create a more elastic supply of jobs in society. This can be achieved through a range of policies, including investments in education, infrastructure, and small business development. By increasing the number of available jobs, it is possible to reduce competition and the rise of rival power networks, creating a more stable and equitable society.
In conclusion, the vulnerability of institutions arises from the inelastic supply of jobs in society. The intense competition for available positions leads to the rise of rival power networks, which subvert the rules to get ahead. This has a nonlinear effect on social function, undermining the functioning of institutions and leading to a breakdown in trust and social cohesion. To address these challenges, it is essential to create a more elastic supply of jobs in society, reducing competition and promoting a more stable and equitable society.
In recent years, there has been a growing phenomenon of reactionary anti-woke astro-turfing and orchestrated campaigns, aimed at discrediting and silencing progressive voices. These campaigns often take the form of psyops, using sophisticated techniques to manipulate public opinion and sow confusion and division. In this essay, I will explore the nature of these campaigns and the tactics used to undermine progressive movements.
At the heart of these campaigns is a binary opposition between the “enlightened” and “reasonable” versus the “woke” and “triggered.” The aim is to position progressives as irrational and emotional, while portraying the reactionary forces as calm and rational. This creates a sense of moral superiority, as the reactionaries can claim that they are simply defending common sense against the excesses of political correctness.
This “outrage” versus “reasonable” debate is a key strategy in the first phase of the campaign, or T1. The aim here is to win the debate and establish the reactionaries as the arbiters of reason and common sense. This allows them to control the terms of the discussion and frame the issues in a way that benefits their agenda. By portraying progressives as “outraged” and “triggered,” the reactionaries can dismiss their arguments without engaging with them, while positioning themselves as the reasonable and level-headed voices of reason.
The second phase of the campaign, or T2, is concerned with the appearance of failure. The aim here is to win the debate but also to avoid the appearance of losing support. This is where the psyops come into play, using sophisticated techniques to manipulate public opinion and sow confusion and division. These campaigns often involve fake social media accounts, bots, and orchestrated online attacks, aimed at discrediting progressive voices and silencing dissent.
One of the key tactics used in these campaigns is astro-turfing, or the creation of fake grassroots movements. These movements are often funded by wealthy conservative donors, who use their resources to create the appearance of a popular uprising against progressive policies. The aim here is to create the illusion of widespread opposition to progressive ideas, in order to undermine their legitimacy and influence.
By portraying progressives as irrational and emotional, the reactionaries aim to control the terms of the debate and frame the issues in a way that benefits their agenda. It is important for progressives to be aware of these tactics and to develop strategies for countering them, in order to defend their ideas and promote a more just and equitable society.
Lynn White’s book, “Medieval Technology and Social Change,” highlights the role of technology in shaping society. One such example is the stirrup and heavy-armored knight, which led to the emergence of the feudal system. The stirrup enabled the knight to mount his horse and ride in full armor, making him a formidable force in battle. However, the cost of this equipment was so high that a cooperative feudal system came into existence to pay for it.
The heavy-armored knight was a significant military asset during the medieval period. He was able to charge into battle with a lance and knock his opponent off their horse, thanks to the stability provided by the stirrup. The weight of the armor also provided protection, allowing the knight to withstand attacks from arrows and other weapons. However, the cost of equipping a knight with armor, a horse, and a weapon was so high that only the wealthy could afford it. This led to the emergence of a cooperative feudal system, where the lord provided the equipment and the knight provided military service in return.
This cooperative feudal system had significant social and political implications. The lord was able to maintain control over his land and subjects by providing protection in exchange for loyalty and service. The knights, in turn, were able to maintain their status as elite warriors and gain social prestige. However, this system also created a hierarchical society, where the wealthy and powerful had more influence than the common people.
The emergence of gunpowder and ordnance during the Renaissance period marked the end of the military role of the knight. The introduction of firearms and artillery made heavy armor obsolete, as it was no longer effective against these weapons. The emphasis shifted from individual warriors to organized armies, where infantry soldiers armed with firearms became the dominant force in battle. This shift also marked a return to the pedestrian burghers, who were able to contribute to the military effort with their firearms, rather than being excluded from combat due to their lack of wealth.
The decline of the heavy-armored knight had significant social and political implications. The feudal system became less relevant, as the role of the individual warrior in battle diminished. This led to a shift in power from the feudal lords to the centralizing monarchs, who were able to build and maintain standing armies. The rise of the burghers also had significant implications for the emergence of the modern capitalist economy, as they were able to accumulate wealth through trade and commerce.
In conclusion, Lynn White’s story of the stirrup and heavy-armored knight highlights the role of technology in shaping society. The cost of equipping a knight with armor, a horse, and a weapon led to the emergence of the cooperative feudal system. However, the introduction of gunpowder and ordnance made heavy armor obsolete, and led to the decline of the knight and the feudal system. This shift had significant social and political implications, including the rise of the burghers and the emergence of the modern capitalist economy.
Introduction: The adage, “If an idea is fully formed, it’s probably someone else’s,” challenges the notion of originality and highlights the interconnected nature of human creativity. This essay delves into the concept that ideas and thoughts are shaped by collective influences, emphasizing the importance of inspiration and collaboration in the process of intellectual development. While individuals contribute unique perspectives, the collective nature of thought fosters innovation, growth, and the advancement of society.
The Foundation of Collective Thought:
The Sum of Knowledge: Ideas are not born in isolation but are built upon the cumulative knowledge and experiences of countless individuals who have come before us. Our understanding of the world is shaped by the contributions of scientists, philosophers, artists, and thinkers throughout history.
Cultural Influence: Culture plays a vital role in shaping our thoughts, values, and beliefs. The customs, traditions, and narratives passed down through generations provide a rich tapestry of inspiration, influencing our ideas and perspectives. Cultural diversity brings forth unique insights, expanding the possibilities of collective thought.
Interdisciplinary Exchange: Collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange fuel the evolution of ideas. By engaging with individuals from diverse fields and backgrounds, we gain new perspectives, challenge existing paradigms, and foster innovative solutions to complex problems.
The Power of Inspiration:
Sparking Creativity: Inspiration serves as a catalyst for creativity, often arising from exposure to various sources such as art, literature, nature, and conversations. When ideas collide, merge, and transform, they create new and unique combinations that propel innovation forward.
Expanding Horizons: External influences widen our intellectual horizons, allowing us to explore new ideas, embrace different perspectives, and venture into uncharted territories. By embracing inspiration from others, we push beyond the boundaries of our individual thinking, opening doors to new possibilities.
Iterative Progress: Ideas rarely emerge fully formed. They develop through a process of iteration, refinement, and adaptation. By building upon the work of others and incorporating diverse viewpoints, we refine and enhance ideas, propelling them towards greater depth and significance.
The Strength of Collaboration:
Synergy of Skills and Perspectives: Collaborative efforts harness the diverse strengths, expertise, and perspectives of individuals. By combining unique talents and knowledge, teams can achieve more than any single person could accomplish alone. Collaborative environments foster creativity, synergy, and the generation of innovative solutions.
Constructive Feedback: Collaborative spaces provide opportunities for constructive feedback, allowing for critical evaluation and refinement of ideas. By inviting input from others, we gain valuable insights and identify potential blind spots, strengthening the quality and impact of our concepts.
Accountability and Support: Collaboration fosters accountability and support within a collective endeavor. Through shared responsibility, individuals motivate and inspire one another, fostering resilience, perseverance, and the pursuit of excellence.
Conclusion: The belief that fully formed ideas are likely someone else’s highlights the interconnectedness and collective nature of human thought. While individuals contribute their unique perspectives, inspiration and collaboration are essential for intellectual growth and innovation. The power of collective thought lies in the sum of knowledge, cultural influences, interdisciplinary exchange, and the strength of collaboration. By embracing inspiration, engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue, and cultivating collaborative environments, we unlock the full potential of our collective intellect, propelling society forward and paving the way for new discoveries, transformative ideas, and positive change.
