Thread by @jamespoulos

I see the problem of changing eras of communications technology has at last penetrated The Discourse today. If you care for some special clarity on the politics of twitter and radio, read on

We start with oral. (Quiet, you.) The alphabet makes mere content out of its new psychological and social context—think of Plato’s REPUBLIC, or Aristotle’s teachings on formal cause (important) written down.

Plato gives us the city in speech, philosophy as the queen of the means of understanding causes, what makes people and regimes tick.

Aristotle gives us biology: not an emphasis on nature as will or power—the mastery of material cause—but on formative cause, shaping surrounds.

Idea being that you can’t understand who and how we are without grasping the contexts within which our perceptions and sensibilities are formed, contexts which can themselves arise from things we construct...

We shape our tools, as a wise person later said, and our tools then shape us. Our technologies formally cause the perceptual environs in which we live and process life.

Technological constructivism, not technological determinism.

So. The alphabet gives us instead of the oral age the scribal age—think especially of the New Testament, but even moreso of the monasteries, where diligent workers in remote hardened sites perpetually recorded all knowledge. Scribal tech formal cause of premodern medieval order.

Whoops, Gutenberg gives us the printing press. Total revolution in communications technology unleashes total formative change in our perceptions and sensibilities, in our psycho-social surround. Modern world is born.

And so we go on in the print era until the electric age begins, starting with the telegraph. Did Lincoln, America’s first electric age president, therefore have to refound our regime, which had been founded under print conditions? Interesting question!

Electric technologies advanced with intoxicating and formative speed: from telegraph to radio (“wireless”) to television to wireless television to, yes, social media. Each having profound shaping effects on how we perceive and order our personal and shared lives.

Electric didn’t simply destroy print, in the same way print didn’t nuke scribal and scribal didn’t obliterate oral. In fact each obsolescence the previous by making it into mere content within the new context.

So Plato wrote about what Socrates said, the printing press mass produced the Bible, radio meant you could hear the news report read aloud, and television let you see what you were hearing. Compounding, telescoping content in ever newer and different contexts.

Well, what world did radio shape for us? A dictate-orial one, one full of ideological print content (manifestos and pamphlets) in a new context of leaders commanding the masses through oral and aural power. Obviously with cataclysmic results. And an emphasis on the occult!

The Great (Radio) War ends and elites begin wondering what the hell happened. Research into the formative effects of radio is conducted. TV arrives. Hey, a different medium forming us differently! Instead of dictatorial command, a hypnotic visual trip induced by illusions! Peace?

All you need is love! Drop out, tune in! Enlightenment is found through the intel inside us all! Hallucinations are good, human imagination will save us. Aquarian universalism, creativity for all, maybe God is dead but Goddess lives! Psychosocial forms shaped by televisual tech.

Except that’s not quite what happened. Apocalypse now. Manson. Symbionese Liberation Army. From World War to War of the Worlds, West and East. Serial killers, KGB acid, “groovy to be insane.” Whoops. Elites failed to predict it.

But hey, look, a new medium, digital! Docile nerds connecting everyone in harmony around one whole planet! Everyone will become an audience member and a television program! Or channel! Or broadcast station! TV will be purified and reflected by democratizing it. Utopia! Right?

Mmm, no. Digital is really all about what life was in medieval times: diligent workers in hardened sites perpetually recording all knowledge, and all human perception, attitude, and order being re-architected around that formative tech. TV becomes mere content in this surround.

So you have millions of people, and a whole class of elites, pushing TV tech to its full limit of democracy and imagination-worship: a terminal insanity of outrage, takes, news, opinions, fakery, fantasy, and the appetite for violence that spins out of them all... except...

All this redlining madness is unfolding in a context WHEREIN IT IS ALL DISENCHANTED AND ALL BEING OBSOLESCED. Doesn’t matter how extreme your fantasies or how big your platform—even the biggest voices and most powerful “stars” are suddenly fragile, disposable, even irrelevant.

People don’t like this. People don’t like being told no. They might begrudgingly accept that the Era of Bono is over, but people formed under TV conditions do not want to hear that the Era of You is over.

While kids growing up in digital conditions already KNOW that era is over.

They know everything on screens is either good for a laugh or good for nothing. They know fame is for clowns and failures. They know vomiting content into the void is high risk, negative payoff, and low status. They know there’s no point.

Those raging on social media don’t.

But people are catching on, more every day. Those who get the new rules are gaining status & power at a rapid rate: even, or especially, if they’re “disappearing” from “the public square.” Those who rant as if electric life is still “real” are losing it, and ranting all the more.

Regardless of “ideology,” as we well know. On “both” (all) sides, more TV landers are rushing toward the most extreme possible fantasy frameworks, from eco-Nazi to gnostic Maoist, in the mistaken hope that these will be hardened enough targets to survive digital disenchantment.

These people rage especially hard against the last holdovers of print authority, ie the dead tree press. And the press elites freak away at what they think are still the same old electric age enemies hungry to usurp them. Nope: both obsolescing at speed in the digital surround.

Now, I wrote a book about a terminal scribal sociologist’s print-era effort to see into the human architecture of the electric age. The thesis of this book is that Americans are constitutively anxious and restless, but possess durable resources to avoid spiraling into madness.

This was a great book I stand by and all, but my exhortation to get a grip together, deal with our lot, and avoid meltdowns wound up—released on Inauguration Day—totally out of sync with the unfolding reality, where the shock of digital made everyone double down on delusion.

I resolved, despite or maybe because of massive burnout and the horror of possibly having run out of relevant things to say—this being my job and all—to shut down as much pontification as possible until I could figure out what was going on. That meant getting digital.

This thread is the abstract of the “Digital 101” I acquired. In some senses YMMV but, really, if you don’t get formal cause and the laws of media, events will unfold faster than you can make sense of them. If you’re in politics this should scare some motivation into you. End! //