Yeah, I think I understand what you’re getting at about digital fragmentation. In moving beyond that, I think what we’re hoping for is an analog world, but one that offers us the same control that the digital world did. Hence the “ubiquitous computing” idea, something that reaches everywhere, no boundaries.

But can we do that?

McLuhan was indeed writing before the internet, but he /did/ have the worldwide analogue telephone network, and the beginnings of things like Telstar, as reference points. What I mean is, the full impact of digital technology was perhaps less obvious at the time, and I suspect that we’re actually moving into a /post/-McLuhan world. Digitization is inherently a fragmentary medium, surely. What I’m trying to say is, these discussions have been fascinating and I feel like I’m beginning to get a handle on what IT is that still prevents us from seeing clearly forty years on, and it’s something we do to ourselves…

But I never noticed him mention “electric speed” so I googled it.

Check this out:
“Today it is the instant speed of electric information that, for the first time, permits easy recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of change and development. The entire world, past and present, now reveals itself as a growing plant in an enormously accelerated movie. Electric speed is synonymous with light and with the understanding of causes.”

Light speed consciousness, electric media as way of seeing change in action… He was onto all this stuff WAY before we got to it here. Check these old comments I wrote on Tim’s site. MM’s saying the exact same thing only years before the internet!

Well said…!!

I always got the feeling that McLuhan was getting at ‘electric speed’ as being something qualitatively different from all its predecessors… but I never understood exactly what.

Ever noticed how content is /actually called ‘media’/ in IT circles? To watch a movie you download a ‘media player’. Something messed up about that, imho.

> but then, I got it for a $1.50 from a video store

Well that’s MM right there ;-D

Your McLuhan commentary ties into some thoughts I’ve been having recently about how the mind in general is sort of a lens through which we see things, and how certain flaws or distortions in the lens can cause problems if they’re not accounted for. But the things is, we put those flaws and distortions there in the first place, because they proved helpful at one time or another. Kind of like Ted’s description of how we’re all machines in one big ghost, creating reference points. Or something kind of like these glasses. These flaws and distortions in our mind field are just reference points, which we use to help us do things. It’s only when we forget that they’re self-created that we end up feeling trapped by them.

As for IT, I think it’s what McLuhan was hoping for: a way to extend all our senses at once, more or less, to put our body in different places. In a way, IT and the internet is already a body swapping kind thing. It allows us to move through time and space instantaneously, and perhaps it’s “massaging” us toward a new gut-level understanding of time and space. Quantum physics finally enters the popular-culture-collective-unconscious.

One other thing though, is that when McLuhan pointed out that “the moment a medium can be perceived for what it is, it has already been replaced by something else” this instantly gave us the ability to see our mediums in action, because he gave us a way of talking about them that allows for that.

By him explaining how media work, we can now look for signs of them in action. This either invalidates his statement, or it makes the creation of new media-forms happen faster and faster.

The question is what’s the next media-form? In my opinion, psi-tech or something along those lines. And if I’m right, or even if I’m not and somebody else is, then it shows that we’re able to predict the next form of media and have moved into a sphere beyond McLuhan.

My impression from reading McLuhan is that all this has already happened. All technologies are extensions of human faculties, and /by their very existence/ they change the way we experience the world. The existence of tools makes you approach problems with the assumption that tools exist. So it’s possible for technologies to be good or bad by their very existence, whether or not they’re ever used for anything, just by the way they distort our behaviour. So in essence a good technology allows us to see more clearly; a bad technology obscures.

In this light we must appraise IT. Of what is it an extension? How does it distort perception? McLuhan always comes back to etymology. Personally, then, I suspect all digits are an extension of /fingers/. Stay in touch…

Of course, McLuhan also says that the moment a medium can be perceived for what it is, it has already been replaced by something else ;-D

I recently had a rather hard time hearing a friend explain that just because something seems like a good, helpful idea, it doesn’t matter if it pulls you away from the way things really are. Trying to “solve” all the problems in one area will only mean that a bunch more will crop up. It’s the old many-headed-hydra problem, the only way to stop it is to pull out the root of the problem: the ego.

Everything’s interconnected, and starting off to solve a problem from an unconnected foundation will only cause more problems. We have to move WITH the world.

Some things excite me about technology and other things depress me. I know Buckminster Fuller excited me when I read him and he was a technophile.

I guess what depresses me is trying to use technology to control the weather, have total saftey and security and to cure all disease and live forever. Because I just think that impetus behind that is so delusional it can’t help but wreck things.

I am most excited about elegant types of technology that helps us live in harmony with the Earth and be creative.

The key here is to realize that we’re not, nor have ever been, separate from nature, and that through humans, natures has developed a way to exert conscious control. We’re just a limb of the bioverse, so to speak, and we need to start acting like one.

But as for as being “doomed to failure”, I don’t think anything is doomed to failure. And I don’t think that technology is something that should be combined with the “ego program” of domination that you’re talking about. Technology is just a technique, a tool. The “ego program” problem is a separate thing, and technology can be used to either support the ego delusion or support escape from the ego delusion.

On the other hand though, if the ego is only a delusion, how can it be supported? It’s not even there to be escaped from!

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am not a Luddite and I don’t like being absolute about stuff. I also am interested in people bringing about latent abilities and the potential for using technology to do that.

But the program of dominating everything, like weather patterns, control of all human behavior, cure for every disease and impriosoning yourself in an ego delusion forever is just really repulsive to me and I think without that you wouldn;’t have a lot of the techological stuff. It would take most of the wind out of its sails, IMO.

Robots suck compared to living things. They are really stupid and ugly, compared to the elegance of nature. They are only cool because we made them, because a person made them. The process is cool because you learn a lot, but at the end of the day its crude and primitive and ugly. So, you know how they say “it takes all kinds to make the world go around”? I don’t begrudge people their technology, but its just that if I have to choose what I want to have around, I choose to have more nature. And I can’t because technological society is supplanting nature.

So I am not impressed. Plus the ego is a delusion. Maybe that is too strong a word. But its based on a misperception.

So you have a delusion at the root of all this. And its basically, “Aw shucks, it sucks being an aliented little ego in this big scary world, at any moment I could be snuffed out forever. I know! Maybe I could come to dominate everything in nature and get all cybernetic and then I could be all powerful and live forever!”

So then you get this brutal, crude program. Then at various points along the program, science reproduces things that adepts have been doing for thousands of years, without technology.

How impressed am I supposed to be? The happiest I can be is that it will cause people to think and open themselves up to new possibilities, but can’t this be done without wrecking everything? And really will any finding or expiriment cause people to drop the program?

I think its doomed to failure. All it can do is reproduce what people already have but don’t know about. And it probably can’t reproduce it.

I get the impression that the illusion of ego is still inflating within our culture, and probably still has some course to run, even whilst geo-social circumstances render it more and more unsustainable. All we can do is keep plugging away at trying to persuade others (and ourselves) to give it up.

That whole post, in fact, is a great read on this very subject.

As for Tim, I think what he’s doing is hard, and I’m not sure how much is even on an everyday conscious level (course, ‘conscious’ is not really how shamans work anyway). However, I do know a couple of things:

1) Playfulness is always the best attitude toward something unknown, in that you retain a lot of your power to act, while doing very little to nothing that could be taken as an offense. It is the best way of being respectfully cautious of the unknown.

2) Before something is completely known (if it’s ever possible to have something be completely known), your relationship to it is still in malleable form. It is difficult to have any control over that malleability, but in a very taosit, wu-wei sense, it may be possible to guide it’s flow. Which is hard, cause we flow through time-space at light speed, remember! :)

Anyway, that’s my take on it, and is also, I suppose, what I am trying to do here, in a haphazard kind of way. Problems and enemies can become opportunities and friends, if handled in a skillful way. It depends on your polarization when coming into contact with them.

The danger is having this one big stupid ego stretching all across the whole planet. Totally wired together and interconnected. So then as the natural resources get used up, this will get smaller and smaller until We all experience the last mouth eating the last bite of food. But by then we will all have plastic replacement parts and won’t need to eat.

Here is my take on it, Ian. This is what I really think. I think Tim is a shaman. I think he is plumbing the depths of this thing.I think he has the right attitude of being playful and open. I mean that’s the right attitude to learn about things. A very empathic way. But it makes me sick. It makes me want to vomit. The subject matter, that is.

Maybe its almost like Nietzsche. He entrained himself fully to some aspect of reality and so had all these brilliant insights and then it killed him. He committed fully to something that was unhealthy.

But all I am saying is, things that make you want to vomit are not good for you. It may be a price you are willing to pay, like a sacrifice. But the picture I have is of a sensitive shaman being able to communicate with some little creature. You know how they do? Like talk to ants and find out what the ants are thinking, what the world looks like from their perspective? What their wants and needs are? So take a sensitive shaman like this and have him try to plumb the depths of an enormous machine intelligence. That’s Tim. Its almost like I wonder how far you have to go to hit something solid that will bounce back? Or is it a bottomless pit? Is it like having empathy for a psychopath? What does the psychopath do with your empathy? What can it do besides use it for its own nefarious ends?

This is what makes me uneasy.

I’ve been reading Alan Watts. Have you heard of him? He is great. He was also an archer in addition to being one of the first western writers that introduced Eastern mysticism to the West.

He doesn’t think you can get rid of your ego. Neither that you can, nor that it would be a good idea. But once you figure out what it is, it calms you down.

What I think, is that, there are two polarities with this. Both are good to master. The one polarity of being really grounded inside your body and being the master of it is good. The other polarity of the connection we have with everything and how our minds are non-local and field like is good too.

I think mastering the first polarity is called “mind body integration.” Some artists can’t seem to render anyone that doesn’t look like a self portrait. I think that just means they have a certian degree of mind body integration and a healthy ego. Because they are literally able to construct an accurate model of themselves. I think The idea originally behind Yoga was mind body integration. A lot of it has to do with hygiene. When you become more aware of your body you are better able to take care of it.

I think people need both and I think some need more of one and some need more of the other. For example some people are spacey and tend to dissociate, they are out of touch with their body. In some circles this may be seen as advanced but I don’t think it is. Not if its all you can do is drift away from your body, but never be fully present with it.