Marshall McLuhan

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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

But in fact, alongside Innis, McLuhan drew on an eclectic mix of thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and McLuhan’s good friends Wyndham Lewis and the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter. For insights into McLuhan’s intellectual biography, see Marchand, Marshall McLuhan; Gordon, Marshall McLuhan; Theall, Virtual Marshall McLuhan; Stamps, Unthinking Modernity; Horrocks, Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality. 22. Theall, Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 30. 23. McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 252, 31; McLuhan, Understanding Media, 3. 24. At several points in his writing, McLuhan described this electronic nervous system in explicitly cybernetic terms. “By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms,” he wrote in Understanding Media.

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According to Stern, the show was designed to lead viewers from “overload to spiritual meditation.”19 In the final moments, the audience was to experience the mystical unity that ostensibly bound together USCO’s members. Comprehensive Designers: Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller By the mid-1960s, USCO’s performances marked the cutting edge of countercultural art. USCO had built multimedia backdrops for talks by Timothy Leary (whose Millbrook, New York, mansion received regular visits from USCO members) and Marshall McLuhan. In 1966 they supplied multimedia designs for Murray the K’s World—a huge discotheque created within an abandoned airplane hangar—that appeared on the cover of Life magazine.

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For this wing of the counterculture, the technological and intellectual output of American research culture held enormous appeal. Although they rejected the military-industrial complex as a whole, as well as the political process that brought it into being, hippies from Manhattan to HaightAshbury read Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan. Introduction [ 5 ] Through their writings, young Americans encountered a cybernetic vision of the world, one in which material reality could be imagined as an information system. To a generation that had grown up in a world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many thought they could see the possibility of global harmony.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

“We don’t educate people as others wished”: Max Chafkin, “Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather of Free Online Education, Changes Course,” Fast Company, accessed December 2, 2013, http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb. “school was an invention of the printing press”: Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 10. Marshall McLuhan argues that whenever we amplify: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (Berkeley, Calif.: Ginkgo Press, 2003), 63–70. “Welcome to a world through glass”: “What It Does—Google Glass,” accessed September 5, 2013, http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/. “the brightness and glory of the Emerald City”: Baum, Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 88.

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In fact, the only significant change: Michelle Rotermann, “Sexual Behaviour and Condom Use of 15- to 24-Year-Olds in 2003 and 2009/2010,” Statistics Canada, Health Reports 23, no. 1 (March 2012), accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2012001/article/11632-eng.htm. “The knight departing for new adventures”: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1953), 658. Mobile users check their PlentyofFish: Markus Frind, interview with author, July 31, 2013. Marshall McLuhan, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, writes about the garden of senses: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 21. PlentyofFish is especially solicitous: Markus Frind, interview with author, July 31, 2013. Chapter 9: How to Absent Oneself Ah, where have they gone”: Milan Kundera, Slowness, trans.

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• • • • • We may never comprehend just what was subsumed beneath the influence of Gutenberg’s machine because the change was so total that it even became the screen through which we view the world. The gains the press yielded are mammoth and essential to our lives. But we forget: Every revolution in communication technology—from papyrus to the printing press to Twitter—is as much an opportunity to be drawn away from something as it is to be drawn toward something. Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media that “a new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace.” The successful new medium actively subjugates the older ones. It “never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.” So the dismantling of magazine and newspaper offices, the vast fields of lost writers and editors now blogging and bitching from cafés around the world, are not just employment casualties; they’re a symptom of a more profound wreckage.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

♦ “THE OTHER EMINENT CATHOLIC-ELECTRONIC PROPHET”: Frank Kermode, “Free Fall,” New York Review of Books 10, no. 5 (14 March 1968). ♦ “HORSES AS AUTOMOBILES WITHOUT WHEELS”: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 12. ♦ “LANGUAGE IN FACT BEARS THE SAME RELATIONSHIP”: Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking, 1971), 100. ♦ “FOR THIS INVENTION WILL PRODUCE FORGETFULNESS”: Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Fairfield, Iowa: First World Library, 2008), 275a. ♦ “TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF MANUSCRIPT CULTURE”: Marshall McLuhan, “Culture Without Literacy,” in Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., Essential McLuhan (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 305. ♦ “THIS MIRACULOUS REBOUNDING OF THE VOICE”: Pliny the Elder, The Historie of the World, vol. 2, trans.

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Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England, 1066-1307 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 202. ♦ “OH! ALL YE WHO SHALL HAVE HEARD”: Ibid. ♦ “I CANNOT HELP FEELING”: Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 275d. ♦ “WE ARE IN OUR CENTURY ‘WINDING THE TAPE BACKWARD’ ”: Marshall McLuhan, “Media and Cultural Change,” in Essential McLuhan, 92. ♦ “THE LARGER THE NUMBER OF SENSES INVOLVED”: Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan, 3. ♦ “ACOUSTIC SPACE IS ORGANIC”: Playboy interview, March 1969, in Essential McLuhan, 240. ♦ “MEN LIVED UPON GROSS EXPERIENCE”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall, and Civill, (1651; repr., London: George Routledge and Sons, 1886), 299

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EPILOGUE ♦ “IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT MEANING”: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 119. ♦ “WE ARE TODAY AS FAR INTO THE ELECTRIC AGE”: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 1. ♦ “TODAY … WE HAVE EXTENDED OUR CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEMS”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 3. ♦ “WHAT WHISPERS ARE THESE”: Walt Whitman, “Years of the Modern,” Leaves of Grass (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1919), 272. ♦ THEOLOGIANS BEGAN SPEAKING OF A SHARED MIND: For example, “Two beings, or two millions—any number thus placed ‘in communication’—all possess one mind.”

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Jeff Riggenbach Ph.

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, classic study, disinformation, global village, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Lewis Mumford, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the medium is the message

He accurately foresaw that the young would inherit a frantically all-consuming media culture of glitz, gossip, and greed.” —Camille Paglia “A brillant, powerful and important book. This is an indictment that Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World “He starts where Marshall McLuhan left off, constructing his arguments with the resources of a scholar and the wit of a raconteur.” —The Christian Science Monitor “This comes along at exactly the right moment.... We must confront the challenge of his prophetic vision.” —Jonathan Kozol ABOUT THE AUTHORS For the last third of the twentieth century, Neil Postman was one of America’s foremost social critics and education and communications theorists, and his ideas and accessibility won him an international following.

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This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television. If all of this sounds suspiciously like Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, the medium is the message, I will not disavow the association (although it is fashionable to do so among respectable scholars who, were it not for McLuhan, would today be mute). I met McLuhan thirty years ago when I was a graduate student and he an unknown English professor. I believed then, as I believe now, that he spoke in the tradition of Orwell and Huxley—that is, as a prophesier, and I have remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

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In particular, I want to conclude by making three points that may serve as a defense against certain counterarguments that careful readers may have already formed. The first is that at no point do I care to claim that changes in media bring about changes in the structure of people’s minds or changes in their cognitive capacities. There are some who make this claim, or come close to it (for example, Jerome Bruner, Jack Goody, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Julian Jaynes, and Eric Havelock). 7 I am inclined to think they are right, but my argument does not require it. Therefore, I will not burden myself with arguing the possibility, for example, that oral people are less developed intellectually, in some Piagetian sense, than writing people, or that “television” people are less developed intellectually than either.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

But even as these professionals were inventing the means to exploit obsolescence, a number of articulate American critics began to see this manipulation of the public as the very epitome of what was wrong with our culture and its economic system. The former journalist Vance Packard raised the issue powerfully in his debut book, The Hidden Persuaders, in 1957, which revealed how advertisers relied on motivational research to manipulate potential buyers. Others, including Norman Cousins, John Kenneth Galbraith, Marshall McLuhan, Archibald MacLeish, and Victor Papanek, would follow Packard’s lead in pointing out how the media create artificia needs within vulnerable consumers.The sheer volume of print Americans have devoted to this topic since 1927 demonstrates that obsolescence has become a touchstone of the American consciousness.

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Weeks before Germany capitulated, the United Nations Conference had convened in San Francisco, to enormous international interest and enthusiasm. Around the world, there was renewed determination to create an international forum stronger and more effective than the League of Nations had been between the wars. Decades before Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “global village,” Cousins clearly understood the planetary implications of the previous years of confli t: “The world has at last become a geographic unit, if we measure geographic units not according to absolute size, but according to access and proximity. All peoples are members of this related group . . .

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American planes and bombs, science and technology, kept the nation and the world safe, and at the same time provided a constantly increasing level of comfort to more and more Americans. The launch of Sputnik in October 1957, at a moment of economic recession, was a propaganda coup of the highest order for the Soviets. It challenged head-on two of the most basic premises of American ideology: technological superiority and the economic prosperity it supposedly fostered. As Marshall McLuhan would later observe, “The firs sputnik . . . was a witty taunting of the capitalist world by means of a new kind of technological image or icon.”16 The fact that the United States’own Vanguard satellite exploded on the launch pad two months later only deepened America’s moment of self-doubt and readied the country for a period of genuine self-criticism.

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 7. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic, July 2008, 56–63. 8. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965); Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 2008). 9. Jamais Cascio, “Get Smart,” Atlantic, July 2009, 94–100. 10. Lester Ward, Dynamic Sociology (New York: D.

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Andrew Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: PublicAffairs, 1999), 6–7. Also see Gladys Ganley, Unglued Empire: The Soviet Experience with Communications Technologies (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996). 11. Richard Oliver, What Is Transparency? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 27. 12. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 2008); Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Elizabeth L.

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Exhausted by trying to rebuild the classical Greek agora, we have set about trying to build a better coffeehouse.52 It’s no surprise, then, that as soon as the Internet entered public consciousness in the 1990s, cultural and communication theorists started asking whether it would enable the generation of a “global public sphere,” or, in the words of Yochai Benkler, a “networked public sphere.”53 Influenced perhaps too much by Marshall McLuhan’s model of a global village, scholars, journalists, and activists drove Habermasian terms into mainstream discussions of Internet policy and its political potential.54 Alas, the public sphere is not the best model to idealize when we think globally and dream democratically. Habermas’s public sphere is as temporally and geographically specific as Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” and has been similarly misapplied to disparate experiences that don’t correspond to the specific historical situation examined by the original work.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

In spite of being toolmakers of our digital future, Michael and Xochi Birch aren’t prescient. And the truth about the Battery—whether or not it has had a chance to get its jeans on—is that the well-meaning but deluded Birches have unintentionally created one of the least diverse and most exclusive places on earth. The twentieth-century media guru Marshall McLuhan, who, in contrast with the Birches, was distinguished by his prescience, famously said that the “medium is the message.” But on Battery Street in downtown San Francisco, it’s the building that is the message. Rather than an unclub, the Battery is an untruth. It offers a deeply troubling message about the gaping inequalities and injustices of our new networked society.

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Take, for example, the issue of network privacy, the most persistently corrosive aspect of the “big data” world that the Internet is inventing. If San Francisco is “dystopia by the Bay,” then the Internet is rapidly becoming dystopia on the network. “We are fans of the village pub where everyone knows everyone,” Michael Birch says. But our networked society—envisioned by Marshall McLuhan as a “global village” in which we return to the oral tradition of the preliterate age—has already become that claustrophobic village pub, a frighteningly transparent community where there are no longer either secrets or anonymity. Everyone, from the National Security Agency to Silicon Valley data companies, does indeed seem to know everything about us already.

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In an “Internet of Everything” shadowed by the constant surveillance of an increasingly intelligent network—in a future of smart cars, smart clothing, smart cities, and smart intelligence networks—I’m afraid that the Battery members may be the only people who will be able to afford to escape living in a brightly lit village where nothing is ever hidden or forgotten and where, as data expert Julia Angwin argues, online privacy is already becoming a “luxury good.”23 Winston Churchill was right. We do indeed shape our buildings and thereafter they have the power to shape us. Marshall McLuhan put it slightly differently, but with even more relevance to our networked age. Riffing off Churchill’s 1944 speech, the Canadian media visionary said that “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”24 McLuhan died in 1980, nine years before a young English physicist named Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

“I am your disciple”: RBF, “McLuhan, Marshall,” in SD, 10229. Fuller drank copiously: Wigley, Buckminster Fuller Inc., 284. “the glorious Bucky”: From the Library of Buckminster Fuller, 80. industry of the future: Marshall McLuhan to RBF, August 11, 1963, and RBF to McLuhan, August 25, 1963, B122-F6. “technology as creator”: McLuhan to RBF, September 17, 1964, in Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), 309. “a necessity”: Ibid. “McLuhan has never”: RBF, “McLuhan, Marshall,” in SD, 10229. “the message only”: RBF, “Revolution in Wombland,” in Earth, Inc., 103.

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He had trouble following the discussions—he had begun to suffer from the partial deafness that would plague him for the rest of his life, despite a series of hearing aids—and was more comfortable lecturing into the night, but he was still treated as a celebrity. The guests included the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, the British economist Barbara Ward, and an exceptional figure who connected with Fuller on the first day. Hearing someone call his name, Fuller turned to see Marshall McLuhan, who was brandishing Nine Chains and No More Secondhand God. “I am your disciple,” McLuhan reportedly said. “I’ve joined your conspiracy.” They quickly hit it off. Both stood out on the dance floor, and McLuhan, who recalled that Fuller drank copiously, inscribed a copy of his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy to “the glorious Bucky who provides us all with a foretaste of the extension of consciousness that is near in this Electric Age.”

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If they would just understand that the earth is really a sphere with a limited amount of surface, resources, and everything else, then they would behave better. After realizing that no image of the entire earth had ever been released by NASA, Brand distributed buttons printed with a simple question: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” He sent them to public intellectuals, including Marshall McLuhan, and the only one to reply was Fuller, who pointed out that it was possible only to see half the earth at once. Brand was encouraged. He was planning an education fair for the Portola Institute, a nonprofit founded by Dick Raymond that consulted on computer and music classes for high schools, and he invited Fuller to attend what he described as an event on “powerful tools technology.”

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

September 20, 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518906/why-medicine-will-be-more-like-walmart/. 3. E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, The Second Machine Age (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014), p. 96. 4. “Essay: The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy, March 1969, accessed August 12, 2014, Next Nature, http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/. 5. “The Package” (Seinfeld), in Wikipedia, accessed August 12, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Package_(Seinfeld). 6. D. L. Frosch et al., “Authoritarian Physicians and Patients’ Fear of Being Labeled ‘Difficult’ Among Key Obstacles to Shared Decision Making,” Health Affairs 31, no. 5 (2012): 1030–1038. 7.

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—ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON AND ANDREW MCAFEE, The Second Machine Age3 “Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped by print technology, but the modern age is the age of the electric media . . . electronic media constitutes a break boundary between fragmented Gutenberg man and integral man.” —MARSHALL MCLUHAN, 19664 Way back in 1996, the Seinfeld TV show told the story of the “difficult” patient.5 Elaine Benes, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, developed a skin rash, but doctors kept refusing to see her. The problem was that her doctor had called her “difficult” after an appointment four years earlier, when she had not wanted to change into a gown to get a mole examined.

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No longer was reading only for the elite, such as the high priests. By making books and all forms of printed materials available to ordinary people, the world was democratized in an unprecedented fashion. Knowledge was disseminated widely like never before. Movable type enabled the culture to change far more than at any other time in human history. Marshall McLuhan, “the metaphysician of media,” was asked in 1969 about Gutenberg and why he thought practically every aspect of modern life is a direct consequence of the printing press.4 He said that, first, the mechanization of book printing was the blueprint of all mechanization to follow. Typography became the first uniformly repeatable commodity, and led to Henry Ford, the first assembly line, and the first mass production.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

But as memory shifts from the individual mind to the machine’s shared database, what happens to that unique “cohesion” that gives rise to personal knowledge, selfhood’s core? THE MEDIUM IS McLUHAN July 18, 2011 ONE OF MY FAVORITE YouTube videos is a clip from a 1968 Canadian TV show featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both icons of the sixties, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. “The planet is no longer nature,” he announces, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.”

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“The planet is no longer nature,” he announces, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.” Watching McLuhan (who would have turned one hundred this week), you can’t quite decide whether he was a genius or just had a screw loose. Both impressions, it turns out, are justified. As the novelist Douglas Coupland argued in his recent biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, McLuhan’s mind was probably situated at the mild end of the autism spectrum. He also suffered from a couple of major cerebral traumas. In 1960, he had a stroke so severe that he was given his last rites. In 1967, just a few months before the Mailer debate, surgeons removed a tumor the size of a small apple from the base of his brain.

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Speaking to college students in 1956, Robert Frost said, “I am always pleased when I see someone making motions like this—like a metronome. Seeing the music measured. Measure always reassures me. Measure in love, in government, measure in selfishness, measure in unselfishness.” Measure in measurement, too, would seem advisable. SMARTPHONES ARE HOT October 21, 2014 THE LIGHTBULB, MARSHALL MCLUHAN wrote, is an example of a medium without content. Walk into a dark room and hit the light switch, and the bulb generates a new environment even though the bulb transmits no information. The idea of a medium without content is hard to grasp. It doesn’t make sense in the context of our assumptions about media.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

That’s why it’s useful—particularly in a rapidly changing media environment—to look at corporations as if they were forms of media: programs, written by people at a particular moment in history in order to accomplish specific goals. Once we have a handle on the corporate program, we’ll have a much easier time understanding what happened when we plugged it into the digital economy, as well as what to do about it. Marshall McLuhan, the godfather of media theory, liked to evaluate any medium or technology by asking four related questions about it.1 The “tetrad,” as he called it—really an updated version of Aristotle’s four “causes”—went like this: What does the medium enhance or amplify? What does the medium make obsolete?

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Or in today’s parlance, while the founders of Amazon and Uber should be allowed to keep the money they make, they shouldn’t be able to develop platform monopolies that disconnect workers from the resources they need to do their jobs or from earning an ownership stake in the platform itself. The ability to create and exchange value must remain distributed and available—a free market. Early twentieth-century English writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton—and, later, a young Marshall McLuhan—saw in distributism a definitive answer to the failures of both capitalism and state socialism.6, 7, 8 They looked to that same brief moment in the late Middle Ages we’ve been exploring, when the market was in ascendance and former peasants were making and trading things, as the best example of the ideal economic system.

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Matt Bruenig, “This One Weird Trick Actually Cuts Child Poverty in Half,” demos.org, July 21, 2014. 64. Dylan Matthews, “A Guaranteed Income for Every American Would Eliminate Poverty—And It Wouldn’t Destroy the Economy,” vox.com, July 23, 2014. 65. Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). Chapter Two: The Growth Trap 1. Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). 2. For the best historical explanation of the negative effect of chartered commerce and corporatism on the marketplace, see Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). 3.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

His second wife was Ann London, whose father managed a luxury hotel in San Francisco, and as young socialites they regularly appeared in Herb Caen’s gossip columns in the Chronicle. San Francisco was a breath of fresh air for Stern, who had completely struck out in New York, where the art community ignored him. He had been reading an early manuscript of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, which he had borrowed from the poet M. C. Richards, who had gotten it from the composer John Cage. The notion that it was the medium rather than the content that defined society fascinated him, and he was intent on moving away from his poetry of words to create collages of dynamic objects, images, light, and sound.

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The shape of that epoch was still unexplored: “We will see what has been entered with the publication of the first hazy image from the moon of our Earth—glowing disk, mandala of unity, inescapably ourself,” Brand wrote. Where did this come from? Most likely it was a mixture of what he had learned from his time in Oregon on the Warm Springs Reservation, reading Marshall McLuhan—and quite possibly the draft text of an inauguration speech that would be given by President Johnson in January of 1965. Brand had read an early copy in Udall’s office, and he had underlined this passage: Think of our world as it looks from that rocket that is heading toward Mars. It is like a child’s globe, hanging in space, the continent stuck to its side like colored maps.

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Udall, with the prompting and assistance of Sharon Francis, had sent letters recommending that the Sierra Club consider publishing Brand’s Indian book, arguing that the Indians had a great deal to teach whites about conservation. * * * Brand had made a particularly good connection to the Native American Church in meeting Hola Tso, a church vice president, who invited him to participate in an all-night ritual. “There is not really so much irony . . . in my contemplating Marshall McLuhan’s super-up-to-date Understanding Media in a windblown ponderosa forest several hours before participating in an Indian peyote meeting,” Brand wrote. “Indians munch peyote, sing, and listen more attentively to the voice that print culture’s din has made nearly inaudible.” The Native American Church ceremony was more devout than anything he had ever encountered.

1968: The Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, feminist movement, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, land reform, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

With new tools such as communication satellites and inexpensive erasable videotape, television was making everyone very aware of what everyone else was doing, and it was thrilling because for the first time in human experience the important, distant events of the day were immediate. It will never be new again. “Global village” is a sixties term invented by Marshall McLuhan. The shrinking of the globe will never be so shocking in the same way that we will never again feel the thrill of the first moon shots or the first broadcasts from outer space. We now live in a world in which we await a new breakthrough every day. If another 1968 generation is ever produced, its movements will all have Web sites, carefully monitored by law enforcement, while they are e-mailing one another for updates.

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Suddenly a Prague student who had never seen the rest of the world, bearded and in Texasski jeans too stiff and too blue, felt part of a liberating world youth movement. CHAPTER 3 A DREAD UNFURLING OF THE BUSHY EYEBROW Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND QUENTIN FIORE, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967 LIKE AN UNNOTICED TREE falling in the forest, if there is a march or a sit-in and it is not covered by the press, did it happen? From Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis to Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, there was wide disagreement on tactics within the civil rights movement, but they all agreed that an event needed to attract the news media.

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It is a rare politician who can get away with answers like that, but in 1968, with the rest of the world turned so earnest, Canadians were laughing. Trudeau, with his lack of political experience, would say that the voters had put him up to running as a kind of joke. And now they “are stuck with me.” Fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan described Trudeau’s face as a “corporate tribal mask.” “Nobody can penetrate it,” McLuhan said. “He has no personal point of view on anything.” On social issues, however, his position was clear. Despite a reputation for womanizing, he took strong stands on women’s issues, including liberalizing abortion laws, and he was also an outspoken advocate of rights for homosexuals.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

We lived within and for and through the present day—allowing the reality of its known unknown into our everyday lives the same way we integrated the rituals and patterns of gathering food or mourning the dead into the story we told each other, the ongoing story that made sense of how the tribe lived and survived. In this way, “people,” theorized Marshall McLuhan, “were drawn together into a tribal mesh” and partook of “the collective unconscious.” Before past and future abstraction, McLuhan saw us as “audio-tactile,” living “in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine.”5 By “audio-tactile” he meant that people understood what was happening around them by feel and sense, rather than by some arbitrary divide of days into years, months, weeks, minutes, and seconds.

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The Times, notably, highlighted “the transmission of thought, the vital impulse of matter” as the telegraph’s great achievement, as if the telegraph had somehow erased the alphabet and tapped directly into the simultaneity of the thought process.22 Now we are no more than a hundred and twenty years from the time Marshall McLuhan would write of a new global consciousness; the “village” he envisioned would be a triumphant return to the unified audio-tactile consciousness of the tribal prehistoric, only without the blinders, without the limits, without the obsfucation of magic. “Today,” enthused the great 1960s philosopher, “we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.

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But for many of us, even those of us actively involved in pursuing future and transferring more and more of life into captured information, in some hidden part of the brain, a plate is still a circle and death is still the known unknown to be feared and placated. The old modes linger. We have not yet, and may never, end our longstanding relationship to the magic that once overshadowed almost everything in human life. The process is slow and confusing. “Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer,” remarked Marshall McLuhan in 1967. We look at what Ariel Garten is selling and wonder: Is it magic or information? Is it story or science? (It is both and neither.) The time of the permanent future is not the triumph of knowledge over magic, of logic over feeling. It is the triumph of information. Magic—the narrative of the perpetual unknown—lingers in the crannies of our consciousness.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Maria Araujo and Daniel Davila, ‘Machine learning improves oil and gas monitoring’, www.talkingiotinenergy.com, 9 June 2017. 18 Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (Penguin Books, 2016). O’Neil also has an excellent blog at www.mathbabe.org detailing similar instances. Chapter 2: The Global Village 1 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962). 2 Eric Norden, ‘The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan’, Playboy, March 1969. 3 James Madison, ‘Federalist No. 10 – The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection’, 23 November 1787. 4 Thomas Hawk, ‘How to unleash the wisdom of crowds’, www.theconversation.com, 9 February 2016. 5 See especially the following authors: Zeynep Tufekci, Eli Pariser and Evgeny Morozov.

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Political leaders are evolving to the new medium of information – hence the rise of populists who promise emotional, immediate and total answers. But warring tribes of anchorless, confused citizens is a precursor to totalitarianism. BACK IN THE 1960S, celebrity academic and cryptic cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted that the coming age of electronic communications would lead to the breakdown of established structures and identities. The consequence, he asserted, would be a return to a more tribal society. He famously called this seamless web of information ‘the global village’.1 People at the time celebrated this idea.

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

I do not wish to render the past narrowly in terms of or service to the present any more than I would deny that present “adventures” with technology—as Jacques Derrida puts it—promote “a sort of future anterior,” enriching our sense of the past.25 In what follows I have aimed to open the question of digital text—or to allow readers to open that question—in what I hope are original and productive ways, inspired in part by the work of Matthew Kirschenbaum, Richard Harper, and David Levy, among numerous others.26 Readers may find in the end that this book hops toward digital media and then refuses to land there, or at least refuses to plant a proper flag on arrival. Chapter 4 concerns a digital format for documents—the portable document format or pdf file—but it is a peculiarly backward-­looking format, characterized by what Marshall McLuhan might have called an acute rearview-­mirror-­ism.27 (“Warning: Objects in mirror . . .”) A second, related argument advanced here is that the broad categories that have become proper to the history of communication and that increasingly have a bearing on popular discourse are insufficient and perhaps even hazardous to our thinking.28 I refer in particular to the concept of “print culture,” and one aim of what follows is to discourage its use.

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Demand XEROGRAPHERS OF THE MIND 91 was high everywhere: when Baker Library installed its Xerox 914 in 1964, it made 25,000 copies in the first three months, “twice as many as had been expected.”26 America’s great circulating libraries had long promoted the secular “devotions of self-­realization that embody freedom in liberal democracy,”27 in the form of selecting, borrowing, and reading books, and now those devotions were being joined by the practice of xerographically excerpting books. Anyone can “make his own book,” Marshall McLuhan pronounced, and make it out of other books.28 Copying—as few scholars have admitted publicly—would become a surrogate for reading, displacing knowledge: you can read something and have it in mind, or you can Xerox something and have it at hand.29 Ultimately Ellsberg had copies or partial copies of the history squirreled away with different friends.

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Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2008); Richard H. R. Harper, Inside the imf: An Ethnography of Documents, Technology, and Organisational Action (San Diego, CA: Academic, 1998); Levy, Scrolling Forward. The rearview mirror is a figure from Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam, 1967). “Objects in the mirror . . .” is a more recent catchphrase. The argument is advanced as well, incidentally, to correct myself for using such categories in the past. Michael Winship first disparaged “print culture” to me, and I remain grateful that, on reflection, I have accepted his irritation as my own.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Control the “.” and you control access.”13 Since the root servers are at the top, they have ultimate control over the existence (but not necessarily the content) of each lesser branch. Without the foundational support of the root servers, all lesser branches of the DNS network become unusable. Such a reality should shatter our image of the Internet as a vast, uncontrollable meshwork. Any networked relation will have multiple, nested protocols. To steal an insight from Marshall McLuhan, the content of every new protocol is always another protocol. Take, for example, a typical transaction on the World Wide Web. A Web page containing text and graphics (themselves protocological artifacts) is marked up in the HTML protocol. The protocol known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) encapsulates this HTML object and allows it to be served by an Internet host.

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The provocative but tantalizingly thin Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World from architect Branden Hookway, looks at how cybernetic bodies permeate twentieth-century life. Other important theorists from the field of computer and media studies who have influenced me include Vannevar Bush, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, and Alan Turing. I am also inspired by Lovink’s new school of media theory known as Net criticism. This loose international grouping of critics and practitioners has grown up with the Internet and includes the pioneering work of Hakim Bey Introduction 18 and Critical Art Ensemble, as well as newer material from Timothy Druckrey, Marina Gržinić, Lev Manovich, Sadie Plant, and many others.

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Wiener also writes that the “control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback” (p. 24). 83. Wiener, Cybernetics, p. 26. 84. Many others have followed in Wiener’s footsteps. In 1960 J. C. R. Licklider, an early theorist and researcher of computer networks, wrote about what he called the “man-machine symbiosis.” Marshall McLuhan also claimed that technology itself is nothing but an extension of man’s nervous system. Computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart considered technology to be simply an augmentation of the human faculties. For relevant texts by Licklider and Engelbart, see Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New York: Norton, 2001).

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

Consider an experiment conducted by MadV: Some of my writing appeared previously in “Clive Thompson on How YouTube Changes the Way We Think,” Wired, October 2011, accessed March 23, 2013, www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-01/st_thompson. We’re in the transitional moment: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, critical ed. (1964; Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), 19–20; Eric Norden, “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy, March 1969, reprinted in Next Nature, December 24, 2009, accessed March 23, 2013, www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/. “You can describe in words how to swing a golf club”: Clive Thompson, “The Know-It-All Machine,” Lingua Franca, September 2001, accessed March 23, 2013, linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/print/0109/cover.html.

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Neither prediction was quite right, of course, yet neither was quite wrong. The one thing that both apocalyptics and utopians understand and agree upon is that every new technology pushes us toward new forms of behavior while nudging us away from older, familiar ones. Harold Innis—the lesser-known but arguably more interesting intellectual midwife of Marshall McLuhan—called this the bias of a new tool. Living with new technologies means understanding how they bias everyday life. What are the central biases of today’s digital tools? There are many, but I see three big ones that have a huge impact on our cognition. First, they allow for prodigious external memory: smartphones, hard drives, cameras, and sensors routinely record more information than any tool before them.

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To see where things are headed, it would be best to pay attention to these seemingly trivial or even crude amateur experiments, because it’s often in the realm of the amateur where the truly new is possible; amateurs are exempt from the commercial pressures that have locked professional TV, film, and industrial video into its narrow palette of genres and shots. Mind you, it’s also true that today’s amateurs probably aren’t experimenting aggressively enough. Most are still trying to mimic the language of traditional video, producing material that apes the form and content of TV and movies. We’re in the transitional moment that, as Marshall McLuhan points out, occurs at the beginning of every new medium. At first, we have no idea what to do with it—so we tend to repeat the style of the last major media. When printing first made it possible to mass-produce novels, authors tended to recycle the older tropes of letter writing, mock-heroic poetry, and nonfiction.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

One level above that, an aggregator of those aggregators (Kayak, Orbitz) can show you which aggregator is doing this the best. Don’t focus on the content, experts like O’Reilly insisted, but the platform on which everyone posts the content. And if there are already a bunch of platforms, become the platform of platforms. “The medium is the message” became the business mantra for The Mindset, while Marshall McLuhan himself earned a posthumous place on the Wired masthead as the magazine’s “patron saint.” According to Peter Thiel, any new business idea should be 10x better than what’s already out there—literally, an order of magnitude better. Borrowing from his former Stanford philosophy teacher, René Girard, Thiel believes that “competition is for losers .”

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And just in time. We are living in the midst of a myriad of feedback loops, making it tough to figure out who is doing what to whom. We are the parents of our technologies, but we are also its users and respondents. As John Culkin, one of the fathers of media theory, explained in an article about Marshall McLuhan, “We become what we behold . We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” While that’s easy to see with straightforward technologies, such as automobiles which shaped suburban living, it’s a little trickier with cybernetic ones. Each cycle is another feedback loop in which both we and our machines change, iterate, and adjust.

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Chapter 12: Cybernetic Karma 159   cybernetics : Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: Wiley, 1948). 160   “a kind of vaccination” : Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns (Charmouth, UK: Triarchy Press, 2016), 198–99. 161   butterfly flapping : Edward Lorenz, speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC, December 29, 1972, transcribed in Edward Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). 162   “anyone may publish” : Ken Jordan and Randall J. Packer, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). 162   “We become what we behold” : J. M. Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan,” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967, 51–53, 71–72. 164   I wrote my dissertation : Douglas Rushkoff, “Monopoly Moneys,” PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2012. 164   the more frequently retail traders transacted : Dalbar, Inc., “Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior 2011” (Boston: Dalbar, Inc., 2011). 165   The stock shot upwards : Eric Lam and Lu Wang, “Steely Meme-Stock Short Sellers Stare Down $4.5 Billion Loss,” Bloomberg , June 3, 2021, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2021 -06 -03 /defiant -meme -stock -short -sellers -stare -down -4 -5 -billion -loss. 166   A platform like TikTok : Shelly Banjo and Shawn Wen, “A Push-Up Contest on TikTok Exposed a Great Cyber-Espionage Threat,” Bloomberg , May 13, 2021, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2021 -05 -13 /how -tiktok -works -and -does -it -share -data -with -china. 167   “They all know the algorithms” : Taylor Lorenz, Kellen Browning, and Sheera Frenkel, “TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally,” New York Times , June 21, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /06 /21 /style /tiktok -trump -rally -tulsa .html. 167   formed a union : Zoe Schiffer, “Exclusive: Google Workers across the Globe Announce International Union Alliance to Hold Alphabet Accountable,” Verge , January 25, 2021, https:// www .theverge .com /2021 /1 /25 /22243138 /google -union -alphabet -workers -europe -announce -global -alliance. 167   “sometimes the boss is the best organizer” : Kate Conger, “Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism,” New York Times , January 4, 2021, https:// www .nytimes .com /2021 /01 /04 /technology /google -employees -union .html. 169   an open letter about the frightening potential : Wikimedia, “Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence,” https:// en .wikipedia .org /wiki /Open _Letter _on _Artificial _Intelligence, accessed August 10, 2021. 170   “Things are getting … currently doing” : Cat Clifford, “Billionaire Tech Titan Mark Cuban on AI: ‘It Scares the S— Out of Me,’ ” CNBC , July 25, 2017, https:// www .cnbc .com /2017 /07 /25 /mark -cuban -on -ai -it -scares -me .html. 170   “Is the country going to turn” : Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich,” New Yorker , January 22, 2017, https:// www .newyorker .com /magazine /2017 /01 /30 /doomsday -prep -for -the -super -rich. 170   Employees protested : Peter Kafka, “Google Wants out of the Creepy Military Robot Business,” Vox , March 17, 2016, https:// www .vox .com /2016 /3 /17 /11587060 /google -wants -out -of -the -creepy -military -robot -business. 170   four thousand Googlers : Kate Conger, “Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract,” Gizmodo , May 14, 2018, https:// gizmodo .com /google -employees -resign -in -protest -against -pentagon -con -1825729300. 171   “the one who becomes the leader” : Associated Press, “Putin: Leader in Artificial Intelligence Will Rule World,” CNBC , September 4, 2017, https:// www .cnbc .com /2017 /09 /04 /putin -leader -in -artificial -intelligence -will -rule -world .html. 171   “I think the danger of AI” : Elon Musk Answers Your Questions!

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

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< Douglas Rushkoff > they call me cyberboy Originally published in Time Digital (1996). DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is the author of best-selling books on media and society, including Media Virus!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (1994) and Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say (1999), winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for Best Media Book. He made the PBS Frontline documentaries Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and Digital Nation. He teaches at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and in Graduate Media Studies at The New School. His website is http://rushkoff.com. NOT SO LONG AGO, I could freak people out by talking about cyberculture.

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It has broken down the doors of perception. Now, we’re adopting split focus as a cognitive booster rocket, the upgrade we need to survive in our multilayered new spaces. How else can we cope with an era of unprecedented simultaneity, a place we’ve hurtled into without any “way of getting our bearings,” as Marshall McLuhan noted in 1967.8 Multitasking is the answer, the sword in the stone. Why not do two (or more) things per moment when before you would have done one? “It’s a multitasking world out there. Your news should be the same. CNN Pipeline—multiple simultaneous news streams straight to your desktop.” I am watching this ad on a huge screen at the Detroit airport one May evening after my flight home is canceled.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

If some of these sentiments sound familiar, it is because they have echoed in dozens of Apple commercials over the years. In a way, this was a theory of radical individualism and self-reliance—a forerunner of Silicon Valley libertarianism. But Brand had studied the works of such thinkers as Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, and Marshall McLuhan. All of his intellectual heroes wrote about the importance of looking at systems and networks. This was where the notion of the Whole Earth came in. Brand wanted his readers to think ecologically, to see how everything relates to everything else, to understand their place in the web of life.

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Brand could express this sentiment only in gusts of rhetoric that would never survive rigorous analysis, except for the force with which they were exhaled: “Ever since there were two organisms, life has been a matter of coevolution, life growing ever more richly on life. . . . We can ask what kinds of dependency we prefer, but that’s our only choice.” However eloquently expressed, such thoughts weren’t entirely original. Brand borrowed heavily from others, especially Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian academic turned pop icon. Unlike his stuffy colleagues, McLuhan engaged with the culture as it was lived in the sixties—not the work of modernist novelists and action painters, but television, radio, and movies. He was lithe and gnomic, a strangely appealing fixture on TV talk shows, not to mention a perfectly deadpan actor in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.

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“Those magnificent men with their flying machines”: Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972. “When computers become available to everybody”: Brand, “Spacewar.” injected an important new phrase into the lexicon: Stewart Brand, II Cybernetic Frontiers (Random House, 1974). “Ever since there were two organisms”: Turner, 121. “Today, after more than a century”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (McGraw-Hill, 1964), 3. “desert of classified data”: Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., Essential McLuhan (Basic Books, 1995), 92. “Today computers hold out the promise”: McLuhan, 80. “Life will be happier for the on-line individual”: Isaacson, 261. “Hope in life comes from the interconnections”: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (HarperCollins, 1999), 209.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Thinking about changing modes of communication as environments has a long pedigree, and a uniquely Canadian connection to boot. Many Canadians may not be aware of our country’s important legacy around the study of communications technologies associated with the Toronto School of Communications, and in particular with University of Toronto alumni Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. (This family of theorizing is also known as “media ecology,” and adherents of it have formed a large professional network called the Media Ecology Association.) Innis and McLuhan both drew attention in their different ways to the material qualities of different modes of communication and how these material qualities affect the nature and quality of communications.

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According to one survey study, for some journalists “Twitter has become so normalized that tweets were deemed equally newsworthy as headlines appearing to be from the AP wire.”160 Then there are the physical characteristics of digital interactions that affect the nature of discourse, a topic in which Marshall McLuhan would be right at home. Hidden behind screens with relative anonymity, lacking the physical and other cues that come from face-to-face interaction, users are less inhibited online than off. Their utterances are more likely to be emotionally charged and stripped of the usual decorum that comes from speaking in front of intended recipients.

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Virtual, ethereal, weightless, clean, futuristic: these and other terms like them are what first come to mind for most people when they think of digital technologies. But the reality is far different. As long as I’ve studied information and communications technologies, I’ve been fascinated by its often overlooked but vast and inescapable physical infrastructure. No doubt my fascination is thanks to the influence of media ecologists like Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, whose contributions to the field were distinguished by their appreciation of communications technologies’ material qualities. I’ve studied undersea fibre optic cables, toured landing stations off the east coast of Africa, and descended into the depths of a mountain-encased data centre that once served as a nuclear fallout shelter in Stockholm, Sweden.

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

No one ought to have the nerve to pontificate on our present worries without reading it." R. Buckminster Fuller: "Cogent ... brilliant ... I hope vast numbers will read Toffler's book." Betty Friedan: "Brilliant and true ... Should be read by anyone with the responsibility of leading or participating in movements for change in America today." Marshall McLuhan: "FUTURE SHOCK ... is 'where it's at.'" Robert Rimmer, author of The Harrad Experiment: "A magnificent job ... Must reading." John Diebold: "For those who want to understand the social and psychological implications of the technological revolution, this is an incomparable book." WALL STREET JOURNAL: "Explosive ...

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Attractive male and female "guides," similarly nude under their veils, offer each guest a stereophonic headset, a see-through mask, and, from time to time, balloons, kaleidoscopes, tambourines, plastic pillows, mirrors, pieces of crystal, marshmallows, slides and slide projectors. Folk and rock music, interspersed with snatches of television commercials, street noises and a lecture by or about Marshall McLuhan fill the ears. As the music grows more excited, guests and guides begin to dance on the platforms and the carpeted white walkways that connect them. Bubbles drift down from machines in the ceiling. Hostesses float through, spraying a variety of fragrances into the air. Lights change color and random images wrap themselves around the walls, guests and guides.

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Thus, anyone who has attempted to buy a car lately, as I have, soon finds that the task of learning about the various brands, lines, models and options (even within a fixed price range) requires days of shopping and reading. In short, the auto industry may soon reach the point at which its technology can economically produce more diversity than the consumer needs or wants. Yet we are only beginning the march toward destandardization of our material culture. Marshall McLuhan has noted that "Even today, most United States automobiles are, in a sense, custom-produced. Figuring all possible combinations of styles, options and colors available on a certain new family sports car, for example, a computer expert came up with 25,000,000 different versions of it for a buyer ...

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

CHAPTER THREE HISTORY The First Wave WHEN THE FEDERAL AUTHORITIES CAME down hard on Timothy Leary in the mid-1960s, hitting him with a thirty-year sentence for attempting to bring a small amount of marijuana over the border at Laredo, Texas, in 1966,* the embattled former psychology professor turned to Marshall McLuhan for some advice. The country was in the throes of a moral panic about LSD, inspired in no small part by Leary’s own promotion of psychedelic drugs as a means of personal and cultural transformation and by his recommendation to America’s youth that they “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Dated and goofy as those words sound to our ears, there was a moment when they were treated as a credible threat to the social order, an invitation to America’s children not only to take mind-altering drugs but to reject the path laid out for them by their parents and their government—including the path taking young men to Vietnam.

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Dated and goofy as those words sound to our ears, there was a moment when they were treated as a credible threat to the social order, an invitation to America’s children not only to take mind-altering drugs but to reject the path laid out for them by their parents and their government—including the path taking young men to Vietnam. Also in 1966, Leary was called before a committee of the U.S. Senate to defend his notorious slogan, which he gamely if not very persuasively attempted to do. In the midst of the national storm raging around him—a storm, it should be said, he quite enjoyed—Leary met with Marshall McLuhan over lunch at the Plaza hotel in New York, the LSD guru betting that the media guru might have some tips on how best to handle the public and the press. “Dreary Senate hearing and courtrooms are not the platforms for your message, Tim,” McLuhan advised, in a conversation that Leary recounts in Flashbacks, one of his many autobiographies.

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The ex-professor, who for the occasion had traded in his Brooks Brothers for white robes and love beads (and flowers in his graying hair), implored the throng of tripping “hippies”—the term popularized that year by the local newspaper columnist Herb Caen—to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” The slogan—which he at first said he had thought up in the shower but years later claimed was “given to him” by Marshall McLuhan—would cling to Leary for the rest of his life, earning him the contempt of parents and politicians the world over. But Leary’s story only gets weirder, and sadder. Soon after his departure from Cambridge, the government, alarmed at his growing influence on the country’s youth, launched a campaign of harassment that culminated in the 1966 bust in Laredo; he was driving his family to Mexico on vacation, when a border search of his car turned up a small quantity of marijuana.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

And to my community of family and friends, who fill my bubble with intelligence, humor, and love. INTRODUCTION A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. —Marshall McLuhan, media theorist Few people noticed the post that appeared on Google’s corporate blog on December 4, 2009. It didn’t beg for attention—no sweeping pronouncements, no Silicon Valley hype, just a few paragraphs of text sandwiched between a weekly roundup of top search terms and an update about Google’s finance software.

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This book wouldn’t be the same—and wouldn’t be much—without a large team of (sometimes unwitting) collaborators. What follows is my best attempt to credit those who contributed directly. But there’s an even larger number whose scholarship or writing or philosophy gave structure to my thoughts or forced me to think in a new way: Larry Lessig, Neil Postman, Cass Sunstein, Marshall McLuhan, Marvin Minsky, and Michael Schudson come to mind as a start. What’s good in this book owes a lot to this broad cadre of thinkers. The errors, of course, are all mine. The Filter Bubble began as a sketched fragment of text jotted down in the first days of 2010. Elyse Cheney, my literary agent, gave me the confidence to see it as a book.

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The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. NOTES Introduction 1 “A squirrel dying”: David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 296. 1 “thereafter our tools shape us”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). 1 “Personalized search for everyone”: Google Blog, Dec. 4, 2009, accessed Dec. 19, 2010, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html. 2 Google would use fifty-seven signals: Author interview with confidential source. 6 Wall Street Journal study: Julia Angwin, “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets,” Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2010, accessed Dec. 19, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703940904575395073512989404.html. 6 “Yahoo”: Although the official trademark is Yahoo!

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

As the historian of writing Barry Powell argues . . . Barry B. Powell, Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization, Wiley-Blackwell: Malden, MA, 2012, p. 12. 4. The ease of associative linking with hypertext . . . Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2011, p. 455. 5. It shows us how much our inherited standards of punctuation . . . Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2011, p. 455. 6. ‘The more I read,’ Frederick Douglass wrote in 1845 . . . Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Literary Classics of the United States: New York, 1994, p. 42. 7.

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A couple of ordinary sentences can be of enormous economic value, as demonstrated by Snapchat’s loss of $1.3 billion stock value after a single tweet by Kylie Jenner. It shows us how much our inherited standards of punctuation, rubrication and letterform are a legacy of the early modern reinvention of the book as, in Marshall McLuhan’s words, the ‘first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly line, and the first mass-production’.5 It also upsets centred hierarchies of writing, where all texts ultimately refer to and are legitimized by a single, sacred text such as a bible or constitution. On a distributed network of writing, there is no single centre.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Harold Innis, Political Economy in the Modern State (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1946), Empire and Communications (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), and The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). 11. See Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., Essential McLuhan (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, intro. Lewis H. Lapham); Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967); and Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1962). Another classic in this tradition is Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: Quill, 1978).

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In the mid-twentieth century, he wrote long studies on the importance of communication in shaping the course of human history.10 Innis argued that modes of communication and communication technologies were of central importance in understanding human development and that they had profound intrinsic biases. Marshall McLuhan was an acolyte of Innis, though this Canadian English professor altered Innis’s arguments. McLuhan is best known for his notion that the “medium is the message,” that the nature of media content derives from the structure and technology of the medium. The dominant media technology defines a society, he said, changing the very way we think and the way that human societies operate.11 His work was very influential on innumerable thinkers, including Neil Postman, who argued that television had an innate bias toward superficiality.12 “Every intellectual technology,” as Nicholas Carr puts it, “embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.”

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

How can we account for the diversity of logics and practices promoted by digital tools without having to resort to explanations that revolve around terms like “the Net”? “The Net” is a term that should appear on the last—not first!—page of our books about digital technologies; it cannot explain itself. Like Marshall McLuhan before him, Carr wants to score, rank, and compare different media and come up with some kind of quasi-scientific pecking order for them (McLuhan went as far as to calculate sense ratios for each medium that he “studied”). This very medium-centric approach overlooks the diversity of actual practices enabled by each medium.

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Much like with rational-choice theory, what many fellow scholars believe to be rather problematic scholarship is presented as universally admired and entirely uncontroversial. To use Eisenstein as our guide to “the Internet” is to commit to a very particular way of thinking about digital matters. Drawing heavily on the work of Marshall McLuhan, Eisenstein argues that the importance of printing in triggering all the subsequent social transformations had not yet been sufficiently credited (hence she dubbed it the “Unacknowledged Revolution”). But while trying to do justice to the role of the printing press in history, Eisenstein embraces a rather limiting view of print media, overemphasizing what she believes to be the inherent qualities of this technology: fixity (i.e., its ability to preserve texts that might otherwise get lost or badly damaged), ease of dissemination, and the tendency toward standardization.

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The authors’ key insight is that the new electronic systems that mediate access to such forms—from online databases to search engines—are anything but the unproblematic and highly predictable purveyors of information that we often take them to be. These platforms actually transform and modify the information they carry; it’s one of the few cases in which Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that the medium is the message is actually worth heeding, at least partially, for it forces us to confront the information infrastructure that gets us the information we want. There is a certain shallow attitude toward such infrastructure—an attitude that French philosopher Bruno Latour calls “double click”—that treats communication and the production of knowledge as relatively uncomplicated and frictionless affairs that could happen without mediators like databases and search engines.

The Unicorn's Secret by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

The living room was perfect for holding court—it was two steps lower than the rest of the apartment, and had window seats on the big bay windows overlooking Thirty-fifth Street; typically one would find people spread out on a bunch of cushions spread in an oval, with Ira sitting on the window seat, at the oval’s crown, expounding on consciousness, Marshall McLuhan, or LSD. (“Ira was almost a medium in the way that when a television is on, everybody in the room will pay attention to it,” recalls one Einhorn friend.) There was also a spacious kitchen, a huge bathroom—its substantial tub pleased Ira, who took at least one bath a day—and a hallway that led to two bedrooms.

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In the sixties, Jim Sorrels was a psychologist working in a Palo Alto mental health clinic who saw how Ira Einhorn’s verbal presentation drew maximum impact in that intense era. “Usual social convention has people sitting at slightly oblique angles to each other,” says Sorrels. “With Ira, most likely, he would take a position seated directly in front of you in a lotus posture. And the eyes would just lock in, and it didn’t matter whether you were talking about Marshall McLuhan or your own life, but the contact, the engagement, was complete. You almost never made small talk with Ira. He came with the parentheses: This man is not made for small talk.” Author William Irwin Thompson agrees with that assessment, though not with the same enthusiasm as Sorrels. He met Einhorn at a seminar at Esalen, and was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the Unicorn.

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But when registration started, 750 students clamored to get in and new courses had to be opened on the spot. Ira Einhorn quickly became, according to an article by Ralph Keyes in The Nation, “the new hero in today’s Free University.” Keyes saw Einhorn as a long-haired, bearded, education crusader with a daffodil behind one ear. His first course was called “The World of Marshall McLuhan,” but the three-page syllabus covered the full range of his interests; Bob Brand referred to it as “Introduction to Hippiedom.” Keyes wrote that “Einhorn’s courses are easily the most popular in the Free University. His teaching tools range from candles and incense to rock ’n roll and free-word association.… [His ‘McLuhan’ course] actually rose in participation from 60 to 75, more people attending the last class than the room would hold.”

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Its central thesis is that the instructions encoded in the software that effectively run the Internet shape and constrain what is communicated just as laws and regulations do. Although Lessig did not emphasize it, that thesis is part of a larger tradition of theorizing about communications technology associated most prominently with Canadian academics Marshall McLuhan (“the medium is the message”) and Harold Innis (“the bias of communications”). According to this tradition, communications technologies are rarely neutral and their material properties – the wires, cables, machines themselves, and so forth – have direct societal impacts. Think about this for a moment.

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Born as an experimental research network in universities, what used to be called the “Internet” has mushroomed, more by accident than design, to become the information and communications operating system for planet Earth. A mixed common-pool resource that cuts across political jurisdictions and the public and private sectors, cyberspace has become, as Marshall McLuhan foresaw, “our central nervous system in a global embrace.” This unprecedented global network produces a remarkable stream of innovations and social goods. Deep wells of knowledge, translated into multiple languages, are now instantly accessible to people around the world. H.G. Wells’s description of a world encyclopaedia, written less than eighty years ago, is no longer the stuff of science fiction.

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He was also the principal author of the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man (1940), which was later superseded by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. H.G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901). 2 “our central nervous system in a global embrace”: The quotation is from Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, page 3: “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” 3 “Internet Freedom in a Suitcase”: The phrase refers to the so-called Internet-in-a-suitcase project that was developed by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, and funded by the U.S.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

I can date my own serious exposure to it to 1966, when the composer John Cage invited me and four or five other young arts people to join him for a series of dinners—an ongoing seminar about media, communications, art, music, and philosophy that focused on Cage’s interest in the ideas of Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Marshall McLuhan, all of whom had currency in the New York art circles in which I was then moving. In particular, Cage had picked up on McLuhan’s idea that by inventing electronic technologies we had externalized our central nervous system—that is, our minds—and that we now had to presume that “there’s only one mind, the one we all share.”

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While Lois and the team did the heavy lifting on the final mechanicals for WEC, Stewart and I sat together in a corner for two days, reading, underlining, and annotating the same paperback copy of Cybernetics that Cage had handed to me the year before, and debating Wiener’s ideas. Inspired by this set of ideas, I began to develop a theme, a mantra of sorts, that has informed my endeavors since: “new technologies = new perceptions.” Inspired by communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, architect-designer Buckminster Fuller, futurist John McHale, and cultural anthropologists Edward T. “Ned” Hall and Edmund Carpenter, I started reading avidly in the fields of information theory, cybernetics, and systems theory. McLuhan suggested I read biologist J. Z. Young’s Doubt and Certainty in Science, in which he said that we create tools and we mold ourselves through our use of them.

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The event was consistent with HUO’s mission of bringing together art and science: “The curator is no longer understood simply as the person who fills a space with objects,” he says, “but also as the person who brings different cultural spheres into contact, invents new display features, and makes junctions that allow unexpected encounters and results.” In the introduction to the second edition of his book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan noted the ability of art to “anticipate future social and technological developments.” Art is “an early alarm system,” pointing us to new developments in times ahead and allowing us “to prepare to cope with them. . . . Art as a radar environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training.”

Possiplex by Ted Nelson

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Computer Lib, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Murray Gell-Mann, nonsequential writing, pattern recognition, post-work, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vannevar Bush, Zimmermann PGP

We stayed up late and played audio episodes from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” When I said I wanted to smash the educational system, Marvin said, ‘You can’t eliminate the schools, what else is going to keep them out of the churches? What would Marshall McLuhan have said? ca. spring 1979 It's now a standard rhetorical question posed to students: "What would Marshall McLuhan have thought about hypertext?" Only I (and Ron Baecker) know. I had followed Marshall McLuhan since 1957, when I first heard about him from my professor Zellig Harris, when I took a reading course with him at the University of Pennsylvania. Harris had recommended McLuhan's magazine Explorations, which I read at the U.Pa library and found very inspiring.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

When there is a direct communication with the senses, on the other hand, the difference becomes a lot clearer. Like a fluorescent lightbulb, which will perceptibly flicker at 60 hertz along with the alternating current of the house, digital technologies are almost perceptibly on/off. They create an environment, regardless of the content they are expressing. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by “the medium is the message.” A lightbulb creates an environment, even though it has no content. Even without a slide or movie through which to project an image onto the wall, the light itself creates an environment where things can happen that otherwise wouldn’t. It is an environment of light.

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By the time the story is posted to the Web, stocks are actually lower, and the agencies are hard at work searching for a housing report or consumer index that may explain the new trend, making the news services appear to be chasing their own tails. This doesn’t mean pattern recognition is futile. It only shows how easy it is to draw connections where there are none, or where the linkage is tenuous at best. Even Marshall McLuhan realized that a world characterized by electronic media would be fraught with chaos and best navigated through pattern recognition. This is not limited to the way we watch media but is experienced in the way we watch and make choices in areas such as business, society, and war. Rapid churn on the business landscape has become the new status quo, as giants like Kodak fall and upstarts like Facebook become more valuable than oil companies.

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But this approach is still a carryover from the days of broadcast media and easy, top-down control of communications. Back in the era of television and other electronic communications technologies, a “global media” meant satellite television capable of broadcasting video of the Olympics across the globe. This was the electronically mediated world Marshall McLuhan described as the “global village”; he was satirizing the hippy values so many thought would emerge from a world brought together by their TV sets, and in his way warning us about the impact of globalism, global markets, and global superpowers on our lives and cultures. With the rise of digital media, however, we see the possibility for a reversal of this trend.

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

Then instead of populating them with his own art, he made his life’s work the struggle to give us as much freedom of structure as he could, so we can express, interconnect and begin to capture better the ways we experience thought in our minds. Or at least that was, I think, the vision before other people’s ideas and interests pointed the Internet’s evolution in the directions it took. PS: Marshall McLuhan, who, to the best of my knowledge, wasn’t familiar with Artaud’s theories, had this to say regarding computers in his 1964 book Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man:Our very word “grasp” or “apprehension” points to the process of getting at one thing through another, of handling and sensing many facets at a time through more than one sense at a time.

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Ted Nelson: A Critical (and Critically Incomplete) Bibliography Henry Lowood1 (1)Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA, USA Henry Lowood Email: lowood@stanford.edu 16.1 Introduction Devoting time to serious bibliographical matters as a tribute to Ted Nelson may seem like a quaintly out-of-tune and bookish, if not totally misguided project. It is easy to pigeon-hole Ted’s work as belonging to a generation of adventurous and creative writers and editors active during the 1960s who began to find that traditional print media constrained the expression of their ideas. Marshall McLuhan and the Whole Earth Catalog come to mind. Indeed, Literary Machines opens with the declaration that it is “a hypertext, or nonsequential piece of writing.” Each reader of this book has confronted the difficulties imposed by non-linear writing on the linear medium of print. And yet, there is no way around the fact that most of Ted’s work has been published on paper.

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The digital media environment expresses itself in the physical environment Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 40. National governments were declared extinct John Perry Barlow, “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” Wired, February 8, 1996. We are not advancing toward some new, totally inclusive global society, but retreating back to nativism Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Even 9/11 was a simultaneously experienced, global event Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains,” Le Monde, September 12, 2001. At the height of the television media era, an American president Ronald Reagan, “Tear Down This Wall!”

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Online task systems pay people pennies per task to do things that computers can’t yet do Eric Limer, “My Brief and Curious Life as a Mechanical Turk,” Gizmodo, October 28, 2014. 55. We shape our technologies at the moment of conception, but from that point forward they shape us John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan,” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967. they make decisions just as racist and prejudicial as the humans whose decisions they were fed Ellora Thadaney Israni, “When an Algorithm Helps Send You to Prison,” New York Times, October 26, 2017. But the criteria and processes they use are deemed too commercially sensitive to be revealed Ian Sample, “AI Watchdog Needed to Regulate Automated Decision-Making, Say Experts,” Guardian, January 27, 2017.

Collaborative Futures by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv

4chan, AGPL, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative economy, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Debian, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, informal economy, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lolcat, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, Network effects, optical character recognition, packet switching, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, stealth mode startup, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one—instant steal! As new technologies come into play, people become less and less convinced of the importance of self expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.“ —Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the MESSAGE This book was wri en in a collaborative Book Sprint by six core authors over a five-day period in January 2010. The six starting authors each come from different perspectives, as are the contributors who were adding to this living body of text. Six months later a new group of collaborators convened in New York City, while several of the first group also contributed simultaneously from NYC, Berlin and San Francisco.

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And it is this thought, this form-of-life, that, abandoning naked life to ‘Man’ and to the ‘Citizen,’ who c lothe it temporarily and represent it with their ‘rights,’ must bec ome the guiding c onc ept and the unitary c enter of the c oming politic s.” —Giorgio Agamben, Mea ns without End: Notes on Politics. [University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London: 2000] 25 What this book is… To begin looking at those futures, we look back to others who have looked into the future. Marshall McLuhan’s quote above, from “The Medium is the MESSAGE” give us our first clue about all of these assumptions we are making. We are talking about media, we are talking about freedom, we are talking about technologies, and we are talking about culture. McLuhan’s prophetic u erance, several decades before the photocopier fueled the punk cut-up design aesthetic, or the profusion of home-brew zines, is still unmet.

Player One by Douglas Coupland

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, call centre, double helix, Marshall McLuhan, neurotypical, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), uranium enrichment, Y2K

Zeises DOUGLAS COUPLAND Douglas Coupland is the international bestselling author of Generation X, and eleven other novels, including The Gum Thief, Hey Nostradamus!, All Families Are Psychotic, and Generation A, which was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His nonfiction books include Marshall McLuhan, Polaroids from the Dead, Terry: The Life of Terry Fox, and Souvenir of Canada. His books have been translated into thirty-five languages and published around the world. He is also a visual artist and sculptor, furniture designer and screenwriter. He lives in Vancouver, B.C. ALSO BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND Fiction Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture Shampoo Planet Life After God Microserfs Girlfriend in a Coma Miss Wyoming All Families Are Psychotic Hey Nostradamus!

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ALSO BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND Fiction Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture Shampoo Planet Life After God Microserfs Girlfriend in a Coma Miss Wyoming All Families Are Psychotic Hey Nostradamus! Eleanor Rigby JPod The Gum Thief Generation A Nonfiction Polaroids from the Dead City of Glass Souvenir of Canada Souvenir of Canada 2 Terry Marshall McLuhan

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

In most of the developed world, it is likely that you would not be able to get a professional job today without a LinkedIn profile or an online network you can leverage. Marshall McLuhan is credited with a great quote that aptly describes the world that the generation born post-PC and -Internet find themselves in today: “I don’t know who discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish…” Marshall McLuhan, 1966 speech Let’s think about this generation born into a world of technology. A generation that has such a different worldview of technology that Jordan Greenhall24 calls them the “Omega” generation—the last generation. Applying the Marshall McLuhan attribution, these kids who were born after 2000 don’t see technology around them as new; to them, it is just like air or water.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

It’s a dream come true for our insatiable human appetite: rivers of uninterrupted betterment. At the heart of this new regime of constant flux is ever tinier specks of computation. We are currently entering the third phase of computing, the Flows. The initial age of computing borrowed from the industrial age. As Marshall McLuhan observed, the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces. The first commercial computers employed the metaphor of the office. Our screens had a “desktop” and “folders” and “files.” They were hierarchically ordered, like much of the industrial age that the computer was overthrowing.

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Priced at $25,000: Angelo Young, “Industrial Robots Could Be 16% Less Costly to Employ Than People by 2025,” International Business Times, February 11, 2015. all but seven minutes of a typical flight: John Markoff, “Planes Without Pilots,” New York Times, April 6, 2015. 3: FLOWING steady flow of household replenishables: “List of Online Grocers,” Wikipedia, accessed August 18, 2015. new medium imitates the medium it replaces: Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). top ten music videos: “List of Most Viewed YouTube Videos,” Wikipedia, accessed August 18, 2015. about $2.26 per download: “Did Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ Honesty Box Actually Damage the Music Industry?,” NME, October 15, 2012. create a chorus from it: Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, “Lux Aurumque,” March 21, 2010.

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has $3 billion in circulation: “Bitcoin Network,” Bitcoin Charts, accessed June 24, 2015. 100,000 vendors accepting the coins: Wouter Vonk, “Bitcoin and BitPay in 2014,” BitPay blog, February 4, 2015. Six times an hour: Colin Dean, “How Many Bitcoin Are Mined Per Day?,” Bitcoin Stack Exchange, March 28, 2013. Knowledge-Based Trust: Hal Hodson, “Google Wants to Rank Websites Based on Facts Not Links,” New Scientist, February 28, 2015. tools are extensions of our selves: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). down only 14 minutes in 2014: Brandon Butler, “Which Cloud Providers Had the Best Uptime Last Year?,” Network World, January 12, 2015. app onto their phones called FireChat: Noam Cohen, “Hong Kong Protests Propel FireChat Phone-to-Phone App,” New York Times, October 5, 2014. 6: SHARING “new modern-day sort of communists”: Michael Kanellos, “Gates Taking a Seat in Your Den,” CNET, January 5, 2005.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Nellie Bowles, “A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley,” The New York Times, October 26, 2018. 26. Author interview with Harris, 2017. 27. Rana Foroohar, “The Coming Corporate Crackdown,” Time, June 3, 2013. 28. Wikipedia, s.v. “Marshall McLuhan,” last modified May 9, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Marshall_McLuhan. 29. Bianca Bosker, “The Binge Breaker,” The Atlantic, November 2016. 30. Author interviews with Harris, 2017, 2018. 31. Kevin Webb, “The FTC Will Investigate Whether a Multibillion-Dollar Business Model Is Getting Kids Hooked on Gambling Through Video Games,” Business Insider, November 28, 2018. 32.

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If the enduring image representing the industrial revolution was that clanging, smoke-belching locomotive roaring over the countryside, the information age is represented by the sleek, slender iPhone, probably the loveliest mass market product ever made. But wait: It’s not only beautiful; it also does all this great stuff. Has anything ever felt quite so good in the hand, offered so much to the eye, and so enlivened the passions and quickened the mind? Canadian communications theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan once observed that every new wave of technology contains all the previous waves within it,28 and so the smartphone is the telephone, the camera, the movie, the phonograph, the radio, and so much more, all in one. And all of it thanks to computer chips that forever pack more and more power into less and less space—and now, with quantum computing, will operate on hyperdrive.

From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture by Theodore Roszak

Buckminster Fuller, germ theory of disease, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, Murray Bookchin, Norbert Wiener, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

They had heard lights; they to tilt the music; they had seen the colored had sampled the dope. Nothing did more the counterculture toward a naive technophilia than this seductive trio of delights. If the high tech of the western world could offer so great a spiritual treasure, then Here, Fuller, liac the I why not more? suspect, is the reason why Buckminster Marshall McLuhan, and the other technophi- Utopians struck such a responsive chord countercultural prepared prepared an it in Acid and rock had young. audience among for their message, and an especially persuasive way that un- dercut the cerebral levels. For the psychedelics are a powerful, even a shattering experience.

In the Flow by Boris Groys

illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Julian Assange, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, WikiLeaks

As Nietzsche wrote in his famous ‘God is dead’ passage, we have lost the spectator of our souls, and because of that, the soul itself. After Nietzsche and during the whole epoch of mechanical reproduction, we heard a lot about this demise of subjectivity. We heard from Heidegger that die Sprache spricht (‘the language speaks’), rather than the individual who is using the language. We have heard from Marshall McLuhan that the message of the medium undermines, subverts and shifts every individual message transmitted through this medium. Later, Derridian deconstruction and Deleuzian machines of desire rid us of our last illusions concerning the possibility of stabilizing an individual message. Mastery over communication is revealed by modern media theory as a subjective illusion.

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And there are some indications that it can be successful in the long run: The Internet and other contemporary means of communication offer – at least potentially – the possibility of avoiding censorship and exclusion and making everyone’s particular message universally accessible. However, we are all well aware today of the fate to which any subjective message, particular viewpoint, or individual idea is necessarily subject once it is brought into circulation through the media of communication. We know already from Marshall McLuhan that the message of the medium undermines, subverts and shifts every individual message using this medium. We know from Heidegger that die Sprache spricht – the language says more than the individual using the language. These formulations undermine the subjectivity of the speaker, of the sender of the message, even if the hermeneutical subjectivity of the listener, reader, receiver of the information seems to be left relatively intact.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Khartoum Gordon, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, profit motive, sealed-bid auction

After lunch they do ballet exercises to Beatles records, and after that they sit around on the bare floor beneath a photomural of Cypress Point and discuss their reading: Gandhi on Nonviolence, Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank’s Breaking the Thought Barrier, Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, Huxley’s Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. On the fifth day, they meet as usual but spend the afternoon in total silence, which involves not only not talking but also not reading, not writing, and not smoking. Even on discussion days, this silence is invoked for regular twenty-minute or hour intervals, a regimen described by one student as “invaluable for clearing your mind of personal hangups” and by Miss Baez as “just about the most important thing about the school.”

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Until a couple of years ago Chet Helms never did much besides hitchhiking, but now he runs the Avalon Ballroom and flies over the Pole to check out the London scene and says things like “Just for the sake of clarity I’d like to categorize the aspects of primitive religion as I see it.” Right now he is talking about Marshall McLuhan and how the printed word is finished, out, over. “The East Village Other is one of the few papers in America whose books are in the black,” he says. “I know that from reading Barron’s!” A new group is supposed to play in the Panhandle today but they are having trouble with the amplifier and I sit in the sun listening to a couple of little girls, maybe seventeen years old.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson

Columbine, complexity theory, corporate governance, delayed gratification, edge city, Flynn Effect, game design, Golden age of television, Marshall McLuhan, pattern recognition, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, sexual politics, SimCity, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, the market place

Today's popular culture may not be showing us the righteous path. But it is making us smarter. PART ONE * * The student of media s o o n co mes to exp ect the new m edia o f any period whateve r to b e cla ssed as pseudo by those who acqu ired the patte rns of ea rlie r media, whateve r they may happen to be. -MARSHALL McLuHAN GAMES You CAN ' T GET much more conventional than the con­ ventional wisdom that kids today would be better off spend­ ing more time reading books, and less time zoning out in front of their video games. The latest edition of Dr. Spock­ "revised and fully expanded for a new century" as the cover reports-has this to say of video games : "The best that can be said of them is that they may help promote eye-hand co­ ordination in children .

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The Wall Street Journal, November 13, 1998. page 12 "The entertainment industry has pushed ": Parents Tele­ vision Council . (The passage was found in the past at the Coun­ cil's website, http://www.parentstv.orgl.) page 1 2 "The television sitcom is emblematic": Suzanne Fields, "Janet and a Shameless Culture," The Washington Times, Febru­ ary 2, 2004. page 15 "The student of media soon comes to expect": Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1 994) , p. 199. page 17 "The best that can be said of them " : Benj amin Spock and Steven J. Parker, D r. Spock 5 Baby and Child Care (New York: Pocket Books, 1 998) , p. 625 . page 18 " People who read for pleasure " : Andrew Solomon, "The Closing of the American Book," The New York Times, July 10, 2004.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

In those far-off days, however, the reason for knocking out an enemy’s IT infrastructure was so that you could send in your tank columns or paratroopers. There were cyber aspects to war, but that was it. Now we are in a cyberwar and, in Ferguson’s terms, it is a war between networks (Ferguson 2017).39 The Canadian father of media theory, Marshall McLuhan, saw this coming just as he saw everything else coming. Way back in 1970, when the same Cold War that I fought in was well under way, he observed that ‘World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation’. If you think this sounds overly dramatic, you are wrong.

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We took the means for deferred payments (the settlement of debts) and turned them into stores of value that could be traded. These, in turn, became a medium of exchange: asset claims moved from memory to clay tablets to coins. Today, we are no longer in the clan village of the ancient past or the urban anonymity of the recent past. We are in Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’, where the digitization of the world allows us to be connected to everyone, everywhere and all the time. Instead of memory, we have social media, mobile phones and shared ledgers. This is why Weatherford has predicted the intermediary of money will soon no longer be needed: we no longer need to remember.

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost

Colossal Cave Adventure, Fairchild Semiconductor, functional programming, game design, Google Earth, higher-order functions, Ian Bogost, Ivan Sutherland, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software studies, Steve Wozniak

The screen image is not drawn all at once, but in individual scan lines, each of which is created as the electron gun slews from side to side across the screen. After each line, the beam is turned off and the gun resets its position at the start of the next line. It continues this process for as many scan lines as the TV image requires. Then it turns off again and resets to its initial position at the start of the screen. As Marshall McLuhan mused, “The scanning finger of the TV screen is at once the transcending of mechanism and a throwback to the world of the scribe.”2 Modern computer systems offer a facility for transcending the TV’s electronic finger. They have a frame buffer, a space in memory to which the programmer can write graphics information for one entire screen draw.

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Original site offline, see http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.dailyradar.com/features/showbiz_ feature_page_84_1.html. Loftus, Geoffrey R., and Elizabeth F. Loftus. Mind at Play: The Psychology of Video Games. New York: Basic Books, 1983. McLuhan, Marshall. “Printing and Social Change.” Vol. 1 of Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Corte Madera, Calif.: Gingko Press, 2005. Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Montfort, Nick. “An Atari VCS Curriculum.” Grand Text Auto, 6 July 2004. http:// grandtextauto.org/2004/06/06/an-atari-vcs-curriculum/.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Thomas Friedman, Longitudes and Attitudes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 3; “Globalization: The Super Story,” https://genius.com/Thomas-friedman-globalization-the-super-story-annotated. 4. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Thousand Oaks, California, 1992), 8. 5. The phrase is attributed to Marshall McLuhan, reflecting in 1968 on the proliferation of electronic media. “Today electronics and automation make mandatory,” he wrote, “that everybody adjust to the vast global environment as if it were his little home town.” Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York, 1968), 12. 6. William Graham Sumner, The Forgotten Man and Other Essays (New Haven, Connecticut, 1879 [rpt. 1919]), 215. 7.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

All of this preceded Ivan’s work, but none of it involved synthesizing an interactive alternate world of unlimited variations that compensated for head motion (to create the illusion that it was stationary, outside of the person), so for me, Ivan built the first headset that counts as a VR device. Ivan’s work was hidden in plain sight. He didn’t have the flamboyance of a Marshall McLuhan, but he probably had more influence on the future of media than anyone else working in the 1960s. You had to read past the surface, since he presented his work with deceptively dry affect. I love recalling the first passes of computer science because then you can see how the whole of computation is an act of invention.

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Similarly, it used to take a lot of people to spy on a lot of people, as was the case with the monumental Stasi spying and manipulation empire in the East German state. But it has become possible for small numbers of people to spy on everyone else, and also to block most others from doing the same, since digital networks aren’t as equitable as advertised. 7.   In honor of Marshall McLuhan, a celebrity intellectual who thrived in the 1960s. He pioneered the study of media. 8.   William Bricken, onetime principal scientist at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Lab, the VR lab started by Tom Furness and birthplace of the first virtual Seattle, has undertaken an exploration of postsymbolic approaches to mathematics.

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Joy, Bill juggling Kalman filter Kapor, Mitch karate Kay, Alan Kelly, Kevin Kemp, Jack Khan, Ali Akbar Kickstarter Kim, David Kim, Scott Kinect Kinect Hacks King, Stephen kitchen design Klein Bottle Knitting Factory Knuth, Don Kollin, Joel Kotik, Gordy Krueger, Myron Kuiper Belt Kurzweil, Ray Kyoto Prize LaBerge, Stephen Langer, Susanne language translation Lanier, Ellery (father) death of death of Lilly and dome and mysticism and PhD studies and science writing and teaching career and Lanier, first wife divorce from Lanier, Lena Lanier, Lilibell (daughter,) Lanier, Lilly (mother) death of laser procedure on retina lasers Lasko, Ann latency Lawnmower Man, The (film) Learning Company Leary, Timothy Lectiones Mathematicae LEEP Lennon, John Lennon, Sean Leonard, Brett Levitt, David Levy, Steven libertarians licensing light pen lightweight optics limerence links, one- vs. two-way Linn, Roger LISP Lissajous patterns “Little Albert” experiment lobster avatar Los Alamos Los Angeles LSD Lucas, George lucid dreaming Lumière brothers Macedonians machine learning “Machine Stops, The” (Forster) machine vision Macintosh computers operating system MacIntyre, Blair Macromedia Macromind magazine stands magic magical thinking magicians magic window magnetic fields malware Manchurian Candidate, The (film) Mandala mapping marijuana markets Mars Marxism mass media Mateevitsi, Victor mathematics video games and Mathews, Max Matrix films Matsushita Mattel MAX design tool MAX visual programming tool McDowall, Ian McFerrin, Bobby McGreevy, Mike McGrew, Dale McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan ramp McMillen, Keith MDMA (Ecstasy) measurement medicine. See also surgical simulation mega-octopus Mekas brothers memory memory palaces Menke, Joseph Menlo Park Metropolis magazine Mexican-Americans Mexico Michael (gorilla) MicroCosm project micro- or nanopayments Microsoft Microsoft Research Faculty Summit Midas, King military contracts mind control Minecraft Minority Report (film) Minsky, Margaret Minsky, Marvin MIT Media Lab Mitchelson, Marvin mixed reality term coined mobile phones, cheap Möbius-Orwellian tech talk modeless computation modes molecules Molici, Dave Mondo 2000 magazine monitors Monk, Thelonius Montessori school Monty Python Moog, Bob Moog synthesizer Moondust (computer game) Moore’s Law Moravec, Hans Morley, Ruth Morrow, Charlie Mortgage-backed securities motion capture suits motion parallax motion sensing motor cortex mouse, computer MSNBC Mu, Queen multiperson experiences multiperson organizationas multitouch designs multiview display Muppets music royalties and musical instruments musicians music technology music videos Musk, Elon mystery mysticism MythBusters Mythical Man-Month, The (Brooks) Naimark, Michael Naked Lunch (Burroughs?)

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Each dollar spent may generate bonus points toward a prize or air miles. Cards related to an entity like a university, return a percentage of the spending on the card to the affinity group. In developing countries, a credit card is frequently a sought after symbol of Western modernity, signifying sophistication and progress. Consumers agreed with Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist: “Money is a poor man’s credit card.” Nobody wanted to be poor. Credit cards are now even objets d’art. Specialists in numismatics (the study of money) and exonumia (the study of money-like objects) collect old paper merchant cards, metal tokens once used as merchant credit cards and early credit cards made of celluloid plastic, fiber, and paper.

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When asked what happened to his fortune, the soccer star George Best responded: “I spent 90 percent of my money on women, drink and fast cars. The rest I wasted!” Slowly, the world awoke to the realization that it had wasted a staggering amount of wealth that did not exist in the first place. 6. Money Honey The scholar Marshall McLuhan elliptically noted that “the medium is the message.” The medium is newspapers, books, television, and increasingly the Internet. The message now was money. Banker Walter Wriston anticipated it: “Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.”1 Once, newspapers gave more space to sport than financial news.

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Individual lives and business activities are increasingly molded by money. Banks and financiers have become dominant forces in the world. The interplay of the real world and its endless monetary reflection now drives economies and cities. News about money is everywhere and deeply embedded in popular culture. It is a fragile construction that echoes Marshall McLuhan: “All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” In 1999, with the American economy in the grip of a speculative mania, Wired, the magazine that exemplified the dot.com era, envisioned ultra prosperity. By 2020, average household income in the United States would triple to $150,000, and families would be served by their very own household chefs.24 The Dow would be at least 50,000, probably on its way to 100,000.

Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security by Daniel J. Solove

Albert Einstein, cloud computing, Columbine, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, invention of the telephone, Marshall McLuhan, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, security theater, the medium is the message, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, urban planning

A Google search You’ll be redirected to your search results, at a URL something like this: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=best+hospital+ for+treatment+of+pancreatic+cancer&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq= &gs_rfai=&fp=59568d73ba32e248 If you look closely, you’ll see your search terms in the URL. All searches you enter will produce URLs with your search terms. URLs seem to be much more revealing than mere location information. They capture the substance of how a person is searching the Internet. In many circumstances, to adapt media scholar Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim, the envelope is the content.11 160 The Patriot Act and Privacy? Envelope or Content? Before the Patriot Act, the question as to whether IP addresses and URLs were envelope or content information was unresolved. The U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t looked at the question under the Fourth Amendment.

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Rev. 1417, 1453–55 (2009). But for a defense of the distinction, see Orin S. Kerr, A User’s Guide to the Stored Communications Act and a Legislator’s Guide to Amending It, 72 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1208, 1229 n.142 (2004). 11. I am referring to McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 7 (1964). 12. 18 U.S.C. § 3127(3) (amended 2001). 13. 18 U.S.C. § 3127(3), amended by USA PATRIOT Act, Pub. L. No. 107-56, § 216(c) (2001). 14. Kerr, Patriot Act, supra, at 638. 15. 18 U.S.C. § 3127(3). 16. USA PATRIOT Act § 215 (codified at 50 U.S.C. §1861(a)(1)). 17.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

These days, if you want to have a profile in modern politics, you have to be online. Corporate affairs are now largely managed over digital networks, and some corporations have their own proprietary networks. Now, new innovations in fashion and design diffuse over Instagram and Pinterest. Political power has often shifted along with technical innovation. Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan taught us that it wasn’t just new weapons that shifted political power centers.10 New media and communication created great opportunities for cultural dominance, turning the limited rule of particular political leaders into decades of social control by generations of ruling elites. Major concentrations in the control of public infrastructure have a label in political history—we call them empires.

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James Ball, “Meet the Seven People Who Hold the Keys to Worldwide Internet Security,” Guardian, February 28, 2014, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/28/seven-people-keys-worldwide-internet-security-web; “Internet Society,” accessed June 16, 2014, http://www.internetsociety.org/; “ICANN,” accessed June 16, 2014, https://www.icann.org/. 10. Harold Adams Innis, Empire and Communications (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 11. “Twitter Saves Lives in Mexico,” Americas Quarterly, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/2576. 12. “Bloqueos,” Google Maps, accessed June 16, 2014, https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth. Whether or not one believes this as literal truth, the Internet is perhaps “un-dispersing” humanity’s languages by reconstituting them under one virtual roof at Wikipedia. Marshall McLuhan once noted this aspect, saying, “Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the ‘Tower of Babel’ by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation.”48 Most Wikipedia stories in the press tend to cover the English edition, but choose almost any other language and the story gets even more interesting and the effects more profound.

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Wikipedia has come so far that inclusion implies societal validation of a concept. 44. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/ 2003-November/008153.html. 45. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_war. Notes_233 46. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Three_revert _rule _enforcement. 47. Gdansk, from Wikipedia, 19 September 2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php ?title=Gda%C5%84sk& oldid=158792453. Chapter 6. WIKIPEDIA GOES INTERNATIONAL 48. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, the MIT Press (October 20, 1994). 49. http://osdir.com/ml/science.linguistics.wikipedia.international/2002-02/msg00018 .html. 50. http://osdir.com/ml/science.linguistics.wikipedia.international/2002-02/msg00037 .html. 51. http://osdir.com/ml/science.linguistics.wikipedia.international/2002-02/msg00038 .html . 52. http://www.ojr.org/japan/internet/1061505583.php . 53. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaDE .htm. 54. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions/Sighted_versions. 55. http://toolserver.org/~aka/cgi -bin/reviewcnt.cgi?

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency by Ian Demartino

3D printing, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, buy low sell high, capital controls, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forensic accounting, global village, GnuPG, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, initial coin offering, Jacob Appelbaum, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, printed gun, QR code, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, Skype, smart contracts, Steven Levy, the medium is the message, underbanked, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

The following year, both Amazon and eBay were launched, and the rest is history. And yet, people were theorizing about the logistics of the Internet economy well before any of those events took place. While it could be argued that these questions can be traced to Nikola Tesla’s discussion of global wireless “central nervous centers,” it is ultimately Marshall McLuhan who should be credited. In his 1964 book Understanding Media, McLuhan described an interconnected and interactive form of media that sounds shockingly similar to the Internet and, one might argue, virtual reality. Earlier, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, he had coined the term “global village,” which is still used to describe the Internet today.

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See also: Coinbase, Bitcoin Exchanges] Cryptocurrency 2.0 Projects: Bit/BlackHalo, 66 Counterparty, 273, 300 Distributed Automated Corporations (DACs), 69, 324 Factom, 302 iNation, 323 Maidsafe, 302 Mastercoin (see Omni) Omni, 274, 301 OpenBazaar, 67 Storj, 71 Tether, 302 D Dark Web, 95 David Zimbeck, 310 Deep Web, 95 Digital money pioneers: David Chaum, 25 Douglas Jackson, 28 Hal Finney, 36 Nick Szabo, 30 Wei Dai, 33 Dorian Nakamoto, 37 Dread Pirate Roberts, 103 E-G GAW Miners, 148 H Halsey Minor, 239 Homero Joshua Garza, 148 I Investment and Lending Services: BTCJam, 65, 228 Bitcoinwisdom, 211 Uphold, 69, 238 J Jeb McCaleb, 119 Josh Garza; See: Homero Joshua Garza K Kevin Kelly, 11 Key Generation Software: Bit32.org, 19 L Local Wallets: Armory, 22 Bitcoin Core, 22 Lighthouse, 46 M Mark Karpeles, 119 Markus Bot, 127 Marshall McLuhan, 8 Microtransactions, 262 Mining software: CGminer, 190 BFGMiner, 190 Mt. Gox, 118 N Nathan Wosnack, 179 Nick Sullivan, 266 O Online payment systems: PayPal, 28, 173 M-Pesa, 259 P Patrick Byrne, 236 Phil Vadala, 159 Pool Mining, 189 Pre-Bitcoin Digital Currencies: bit gold, 33 Digicash, 25 E-gold, 28 Linden Dollars, 174 Pre-mine, 198 Privacy Tools: TailsOS, 90 Pretty Good Privacy, 9, 10 Private Key, 4 ProTip, 266 Proof of stake, 220 Proof of work, 23, 31 Public Key, 4 Public-Key Encryption, 11 R Remittance, 247 Ross Ulbricht, 103 S Silk Road, The, 95 Shaun Bridges, 106 Stuart Fraser, 157 Solo Mining, 189 T-Z Trading Indicators: Fibonacci Retracements, 214 Moving Average, 213 Moving Average Convergence Difference, 213 On-Balance Volume, 214 Relative Strength Index, 214 Web Wallets: Coinbase, 17 Circle, 17 Coinkite, 19 BitGo, 19 BitGold, 241 (see also: Precursors) Blockchain.info, 80 Rebit.ph, 255 Willy Bot, 127 Zen Miner, 148

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

Newspapers, for example, appear to be freighted with news that they carry out to readers. But, as we suggested in chapter 1, news is not some naturally occurring object that journalists pick up and stick on paper. It is made and shaped by journalists in the context of the medium and the audience. There's no need to go as far as Marshall McLuhan's claim that the "medium is the message" to see that the medium is not an indifferent carrier here. 17 The newspaper, then, is rather like the librarynot simply a collection of news, but a selection and a reflection. And the selection process doesn't just "gather news," but weaves and shapes, developing stories in accordance with available space and Page 186 priorities.

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Indeed, one of the essential distinctions between a performance and a document is that the latter can be revisited. In the excitement and immediacy of the 'Net's fluidity, it's easy to miss the social significance of this aspect of fixity. Harold Innis, an early communication theorist (and an important influence on Marshall McLuhan) suggested that communications technologies tend to favor one of two contrasting characteristics: "time binding" or "space binding."54 Some, that is, tend to immutability (preserving communications across time); others to mobility (delivering communications across ever greater spaces). Society's attention generally follows the latest shift in technology.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Like its predecessors, Third Wave society, which was only beginning to come clear in the 1970s and 80s, engendered its own unique framework. The issue wasn’t just that new technologies like the fax machine were driving the information age, or that changes in the way we interacted were laying the foundation for what Marshall McLuhan had termed, contemporaneously, a “global village.”10 The Tofflers argued that certain distinctions that defined Second Wave society—between home and work, between consumer and producer, between mass production and specific customization—were being breached. Elements of life that simply looked like aberrations from the norm in Second Wave society, such as life in the suburbs, a broad aversion to naked bigotry, “no fault” divorces, longer lifespans—the list could go on—actually represented constituent parts of the Third Wave.

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Bowling Alone, like The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart before it, was steeped in academic literature about the fragile state of American community. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, on the other hand, was designed to explain the transformation of the global economy in the aftermath of the Cold War. Friedman’s argument was grounded in a long history of social and economic scholarship. As far back as the 1970s, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan had predicted that geographic distances would be closed by new electronic media. The kinds of bonds once limited to local communities, the Canadian had argued, would eventually be shared across a much broader landscape.2 The advances described in The Lexus and the Olive Tree make clear that McLuhan got a lot of the story right.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

In the West, those revolutions had triggered a debate about whether Facebook and Twitter had spawned them.7 But regardless of where the academics came down on the question, clearly the internet, and social media specifically, had been a critical factor in igniting long-standing grievances, breaking down people’s fears, enhancing their courage, and fast-tracking protests that might otherwise have taken months and years to organize. The result had been the downfall of dictatorships. The medium that carries the message shapes and defines the message itself, I told the students, invoking the media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s seminal work, “The Medium Is the Message.”8 Social media’s instantaneous nature had accelerated the speed at which the revolutions had taken place. Authoritarian governments couldn’t keep up or control the messaging because those protest movements were modeled on the networks of the web: loose, nonhierarchical, leaderless.

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., William Saletan, “Springtime for Twitter: Is the Internet Driving the Revolutions of the Arab Spring?,” Slate, July 18, 2011, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/07/springtime_for_twitter.html; and D. Hill, “Op-Ed: The Arab Spring Is Not the Facebook Revolution,” Ottawa Citizen, November 16, 2011. 8.Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” 1964, https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf. 9.Suw Charman Anderson, “The Role of Dopamine in Social Media,” ComputerWeekly.Com, November 26, 2009. 10.Jack Fuller, What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism (London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 46. 11.Suzanne Choney, “Facebook Use Can Lower Grades by 20%, Study Says,” NBC News, September 7, 2010, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39038581. 12.This rolled out in the United States to select users in August 2015.

Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin by Jesse Berger

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, carbon footprint, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, diversification, diversified portfolio, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, liquidity trap, litecoin, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Satoshi Nakamoto, the medium is the message, Vitalik Buterin

The dubious track record of some of its shamefully departed intermediaries should motivate all users to make every effort to understand the cumbersome nature of private keys. Like anything worthwhile, locking down your personal Bitcoin bank requires some resolve, but this low hurdle is the only appreciable factor limiting anyone’s pursuit and enjoyment of genuine monetary autonomy. 11.5.1 Dark Mode: Tools of the Trade “The medium is the message.” Marshal McLuhan, Pioneer of Media Theory At its brightest peaks, Bitcoin opens gateways that foster growth and progress, but in its shadowy valleys, it burrows tunnels that tolerate crime and indecency. A prime example of just such a hazard is darknet markets, which are anonymous, Internet-based black markets that sell or broker transactions for drugs, weapons, stolen credit cards, forged documents, and other illicit products.

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, citizen journalism, cloud computing, digital map, East Village, financial innovation, Firefox, Future Shock, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the printing press, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, mirror neurons, peer-to-peer, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, WikiLeaks

For more up-to-date information, see http://rushkoff.com/program. About the Author Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff has written a dozen best-selling books on media and society, including Cyberia, Media Virus, Coercion (winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award), Get Back in the Box, and Life Inc. He has made the PBS “Frontline” documentaries Digital Nation, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. A columnist for The Daily Beast and Arthur Magazine, his articles have been regularly published in The New York Times and Discover, among many other publications.

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

“This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theater, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior.” These words were written by Shannon’s former employer Warren Weaver. Weaver’s essay presented information theory as a humanistic discipline—perhaps misleadingly so. Strongly influenced by Shannon, media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term “information age” in Understanding Media (1964). Oracular as some of his pronouncements were, McLuhan spoke loud and clear with that concise coinage. It captured the way the electronic media (still analog in the 1960s) were changing the world. It implied, more presciently than McLuhan could have known, that Claude Shannon was a prime mover in that revolution.

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Other theorists such as Norbert Wiener and Peter Elias took up this theme. It was time, Elias acidly wrote, to stop publishing papers with titles like “Information Theory, Photosynthesis, and Religion.” To Shannon, Wiener, and Elias, the question of information theory’s relevance was more narrowly defined than it was for Marshall McLuhan. Does information theory have deep relevance to any field outside of communications? The answer, it appeared, is yes. That is what a physicist named John Kelly described, in a paper he titled “Information Theory and Gambling.” John Kelly, Jr. IN 1894 THE CITY FATHERS of Corsicana, Texas, were drilling a new well.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

Beyond that, there are numerous brilliant thinkers, researchers, and inventors who would never contemplate writing a book. They, too, now have the opportunity to become one of the world’s teachers. Their efforts, conveyed vividly from their own mouths, will bring knowledge, understanding, passion, and inspiration to millions. When Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message,” he meant, among other things, that every new medium spawns its own unexpected units of communication. In addition to the Web page, the blog, and the tweet, we are witnessing the rise of riveting online talks, long enough to inform and explain, short enough for mass impact.

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I send out manuscripts and mail, buy things, listen to music, read books, hunt up information and news. The Internet is a great stew of opinion and facts. It is an encyclopedic marvel that has transformed my world. It has also undoubtedly transformed the way I think. But if we humans are the sex organs of our technologies, reproducing them, expanding their domains and functionality—as Marshall McLuhan said—then perhaps I should turn the question upside down. Because of my reliance on the Internet, the number of hours each day I spend in its electronic embrace, have I begun to think like the Internet? Do I have an Internet mind that has been transformed by my proximity to this network of networks?

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The early twentieth century produced many such myths and leaders across Europe; and in The Revolt of the Masses (1930), José Ortega y Gasset voiced a paternalist liberal’s complaint against the arrival of ‘raving, frenetic, exorbitant politics that claims to replace all knowledge’. It is now the fate of many more countries to suffer the avalanches of bitter know-nothingism, or myths, that the Spanish philosopher feared. Marshalling large armies of trolls and twitter bots against various ‘enemies’ of the people, the contemporary demagogues seem as aware as Marshall McLuhan that digital communications help create and consolidate new mythologies of unity and community. Yet the despotisms of our age of individualism are soft rather than hard – democratic rather than totalitarian – and they emerge as much from below as from the strongmen on top. Today’s raving, frenetic, exorbitant politics – an extravagantly rhetorical idealism about nation, race and culture – is often the product of people unconnected to political parties or movements.

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Early in the twentieth century, communications technology was still confined to the telegraph, the telephone and the cinema; but Max Weber warned that, combined with the pressure of work and opaque political and economic forces, it would push modern individuals away from public life and into a ‘subjectivist culture’ – or what he called ‘sterile excitation’. In 1969, Marshall McLuhan claimed that the era of literacy had ended with the advent of radio and television; their multi-sensory experience in a ‘global village’ had returned humankind to tribal structures of feeling and ‘we begin again to live a myth’. Today’s colossal exodus of human lives into cyberspace is even more dramatically transforming old notions of time, space, knowledge, values, identities and social relations.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

And, as we’ll see in later chapters, an increasing amount of the actual writing may be done by machines, not people. It’s not as if we’ll never again read long textual documents written by a single person, but they may someday become as rare as handmade sweaters are today. WHAT WILL ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT MACHINES LOOK LIKE? (HINT: NOTHING) As philosopher Marshall McLuhan noted, we often first understand new technologies by comparing them to old ones.10 For instance, the first cars were called horseless carriages, and that’s what they looked like, too. They were designed like traditional carriages, with running boards and all, just without any horses in front.

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UIST 2011: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. New York: ACM Press, http:doi.acm.org/10.1145/2047196.2047202. © 2011 Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Reprinted by permission. 9. Simple English Wikipedia, accessed October 21, 2017, https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. 10. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 11. James H. Hines, Thomas W. Malone, Paulo Gonçalves, George Herman, John Quimby, Mary Murphy-Hoye, James Rice, James Patten, and Hiroshi Ishii, “Construction by Replacement: A New Approach to Simulation Modeling,” System Dynamics Review 27, no. 1 (July 28, 2010): 64–90, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sdr.437/abstract, doi:10.1002/sdr.437. 12.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Why was there no Soviet Internet? Over the next eight years, the question drew me to archives and interviews in Moscow and Kiev. After spending a year exhausting the available leads, literature, and FOIA requests available from New York, I traveled to begin archival work in Moscow, although initially this proved a dead end. Marshall McLuhan once quipped that the first thing a visitor needs to know about Russia is that there are no phonebooks.2 His point is that a foreigner in Russia needs to have contacts already in place. (Or as the Finns say: in Finland, everything works and nothing can be arranged. In Russia, nothing works but everything can be arranged.)

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Initially a companion program for developing the optimization and economic management software behind the OGAS (All-State Automated System) Project. Notes Prologue 1. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 392 n. 318. 2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 3. Slava Gerovitch, “InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network,” History and Technology 24 (4) (December 2008): 335–350. 4. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed.

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, feminist movement, full employment, Future Shock, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, impulse control, Induced demand, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Marshall McLuhan, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, means of production, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, road to serfdom, scientific management, Scientific racism, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, yellow journalism

., in deliberate disregard of the conventional sense of time), Kurt Vonnegut make;, a passing observation that illustrates the eclecticism with which the modern sensitivity approaches the culture of the past. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time." The fragmentizing impact of the mass media according to Marshall McLuhan, makes all civilizations contemporary with our own. " , " " It is interesting to compare these cheerful expressions of the contemporary sensibility with the contention of two Marxist critics ofliteraturc William Phillips , and Philip Rahv, that the critical sense is necessarily rooted in the historical sense the sense of continuity.

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Nixon, Six Crises (New York: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 251, 277, , 353-58; Bruce Mazlish, In Search cf Nixon (New York: Basic Books, 1972), _ 81 pp. 72-73. Watergate J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (New York: 91 title essay, pp. 86-111. Kurt Vonnegut }t., Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969), , pp. 19-76; Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951), p. 3; William Phillips and Philip Rahv "Some Aspects of Lit, " erary Criticism, Science and Society 1 (1937): 213; Litowitz and Newman Borderline Personality and the Theatre of the Absurd p. 275. Viking, 1976), especially p. 297, for Nixon's talk with Haldeman, 20 March " 1973. 82 , , , " , 91 new left street theater Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973)

Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, bitcoin, Burning Man, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, index card, jimmy wales, junk bonds, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, nuclear paranoia, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, young professional

It also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and create and enhance new and unexpected ones. Some of the stories in this compendium come from the novel Generation A (2007), and I really scared myself when I was writing them. They flowed directly from spending two years deeply immersed in the writings of Marshall McLuhan, and they explore how language, literacy and numeracy feed the technologies we make, and then how those technologies feed back into language. In the novel these stories were integrated into the larger narrative and made a certain sense, but I think the stories work far better extracted from it.

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Soon I’d adopted all of the present-day viewing tendencies most of us share: binge viewing, laptop viewing, torrenting, series addictions, digital video recording, Netflix and guilty-pleasure viewing (Come Dine with Me Canada—I can’t get enough of that show). But also, amid these shifts, it’s been interesting to watch the evolution of TV as a new art form. Marshall McLuhan predicted this. When a new technology obsolesces an old one, it frees the newly obsolete medium to become an art form. Enter The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire and all the shows that are basically movies that run for fifty hours and act as a paradise for talented actors. Perhaps this shift to long-format TV has generated the biggest change in creative culture in the past decades.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

Atomic energy; Velcro; search engines … they all would have been invented one way or another. The next society-changing technology is currently hurtling at us like a meteor, and there’s zilch we can do to stop it. This notion that humans exist only to propagate ever-newer technologies, that we are merely what Marshall McLuhan called “the sex organs of technology,” is called technological determinism. Depressing. Or is technological determinism nonsense? Maybe we can control what we invent and when we invent it. Since 1925, Bell Labs has generated seven Nobel prizes and changed the course of humanity with stunning regularity.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

Brown’s view was that “government may not always be the first to know about important new ideas, but it should not be the last.” Thus every few weeks I got to spend a day hosting the likes of organizational guru Peter Drucker, futurist Herman Kahn, farmer-poet Wendell Berry, and media celebrator Marshall McLuhan. In 1977, two years after Asilomar, the California legislature was threatening to regulate recombinant DNA research in the state, so James Watson, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA and director of the renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, came to visit. Watson had been an early supporter of the moratorium on recombinant DNA research and had helped to organize Asilomar.

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There is harm to undo in this place. Earth as a whole is the most ambitious and necessary restoration project of all. Live-linked footnotes for this chapter, along with updates, additions, and illustrations, may be found online at www.sbnotes.com. • 9 • Planet Craft After Sputnik, there is no nature, only art. —Marshall McLuhan Whether it’s called managing the commons, natural-infrastructure maintenance, tending the wild, niche construction, ecosystem engineering, mega-gardening, or intentional Gaia, humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role. Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on ozone depletion, coined a word that has resonated.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

As the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, noted in a speech in August 2009 in the city of Wuxi, “Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth.” The Smart City Operating System Those skilled in war are able to subdue the enemy’s army without battle. They capture his cities without assaulting them and overthrow the state without protracted operations. SUN TZU In 1964, Marshall McLuhan presciently predicted that by “means of electric media … all previous technologies … including cities …[would] be translated into information systems.” It might have taken fifty years, but his forecast was spot-on. The Internet of Things has the full potential to transform cities into living, breathing ecosystems of ambient intelligence and connected sensors, vastly improving the quality of life for their inhabitants.

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The challenges we face are significant and mounting. It’s not just about hacked bank accounts or stolen private photographs. Nor is it merely about maintaining control and privacy over the multitude of devices in our lives. It is about safeguarding our technological future and understanding what’s coming next. As Marshall McLuhan reminds us, “It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.” The hacks of tomorrow will affect our cars, GPS systems, implantable medical devices, televisions, elevators, smart meters, baby monitors, assembly lines, and personal-care bots.

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Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, A “Kill Chain” Analysis of the 2013 Target Data Breach, Majority Staff Report for Chairman Rockefeller, March 26, 2014. 73 Once there, attackers installed: Kim Zetter, “The Malware That Duped Target Has Been Found,” Wired, Jan. 16, 2014. 74 Worse, it was possible: Sean Gallagher, “Vulnerabilities Give Hackers Ability to Open Prison Cells from Afar,” Ars Technica, Nov. 7, 2011; Shaun Waterman, “Prisons Bureau Alerted to Hacking into Lockups,” Washington Times, Nov. 6, 2011. 75 In mid-2013: Kim Zetter, “Prison Computer ‘Glitch’ Blamed for Opening Cell Doors in Maximum-Security Wing,” Wired, Aug. 16, 2013. 76 While the chamber had successfully: Siobhan Gorman, “China Hackers Hit U.S. Chamber,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 21, 2011. 77 As the Chinese premier: Goodman, “Power of Moore’s Law in a World of Geotechnology.” 78 “means of electric media”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 2001), rev. ed. 79 “Fitbit for the city”: Elizabeth Dwoskin, “They’re Tracking When You Turn Off the Lights,” Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2014. 80 Better sensors in our streetlights: “Outdoor Lighting,” Echelon, https:/​/​www.​echelon.​com/​applications/​street-​lighting/. 81 Using a wireless traffic-detection system: Mark Prigg, “New York’s Traffic Lights HACKED,” Mail Online, April 30, 2014. 82 If smart meters: Erica Naone, “Hacking the Smart Grid,” MIT Technology Review, Aug. 2, 2010. 83 A hacker using the same exploit: Reuters, “ ‘Smart’ Technology Could Make Utilities More Vulnerable to Hackers,” Raw Story, July 16, 2014.

The Rough Guide to Toronto by Helen Lovekin, Phil Lee

airport security, British Empire, car-free, glass ceiling, global village, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, place-making, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Over the ensuing decades the university was browbeaten by theological colleges that considered a secular university to be immoral, but by the turn of the twentieth century the University of Toronto had made a name for itself, ultimately becoming one of North America’s most prestigious educational institutions. It was here that insulin was discovered in 1921, and here that Marshall McLuhan, who taught at the university, wrote his seminal The Medium is the Massage. 77 UPTOWN TORON TO | 78  University of Toronto The Soldiers’ Tower King’s College Circle Hart House Circle leads into the much larger King’s College Circle, where an assortment of university buildings flanks a large field.

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And I was walking through these places, beside the traffic circle at Yonge and Bloor, down the proposed Federal Avenue to Union Station. Lyle was right. These were real places. They could have existed. I mean, the Bloor Street viaduct and this building here are just a hint of what could have been done here. In 1965 Stan Bevington and Wayne Clifford took over a back-lane carriage house space where Marshall McLuhan had lectured and founded Coach House Press, which became the incubator for all that was new and adventurous in Canadian literature. In addition to publishing the early works of Atwood and Ondaatje, whose In the Skin of a Lion is perhaps the definitive Toronto novel – Coach House began a tradition of giving talented new writers their first break: Paul Quarrington, Susan Swan and anthologist Alberto Manguel are just three examples.

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age by Michael Wolff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Carl Icahn, commoditize, creative destruction, digital divide, disintermediation, Golden age of television, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, telemarketer, the medium is the message, vertical integration, zero-sum game

The devices themselves mean that digital media executives become as reliant—or more reliant—on writers, actors, directors, and producers as on programmers. 13 MORE BOXES “Digital convergence” turns out not so much to be about bringing computing to your television but about bringing more television to your television. Accept that the medium is the message (in Douglas Coupland’s succinct explanation of Marshall McLuhan’s still opaque aphorism—more than half a century later still opaque: “The ostensible content of all electronic media is insignificant; it is the medium itself that has the greater impact on the environment, a fact bolstered by the now medically undeniable fact that the technologies we use every day begin, after a while, to alter the way our brains work, and hence the way we experience the world”), but what is the medium?

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

So more production meant more jobs. The control systems she foresaw were different. Her machines didn’t even have human-machine interfaces; “cybernated machines don’t even have control panels,” she said, munching on a handmade ham sandwich. “Cybernated machines run themselves, and people are superfluous.”69 Even Marshall McLuhan was smitten by cybernation. The widely popular media theorist is best known for the idea of a “global village,” of the world contracted into a small place by electrical information links. In November 1964, at the height of his fame, McLuhan presented a paper in Washington, DC, at a symposium on the social impact of cybernetics sponsored by three of the city’s largest universities.

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., “Negros-Whites Together,” New York Amsterdam News, August 15, 1964, 18. 67.James Boggs, “The Negro and Cybernation,” in Hilton, Evolving Society, 172. 68.Hannah Arendt, “On the Human Condition,” in Hilton, Evolving Society, 219. 69.“Cyberculture and Girls,” New Yorker, July 4, 1964, 21–22. 70.Marshall McLuhan, “Cybernation and Culture,” in The Social Impact of Cybernetics, ed. Charles R. Dechert (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 98–99. 71.John Diebold, “Goals to Match Our Means,” in Dechert, Social Impact of Cybernetics, 4. 72.Curtis Gerald, Computers and the Art of Computation (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1972), 319. 73.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The movement was spearheaded by right-wing blogs and various groups on social networking sites (many of them featuring extremely graphic posters—or “political Molotov cocktails,” as Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times described them—suggesting Muslims are threatening Switzerland, including one that showed minarets rising from the Swiss flag like missiles), and even peace-loving Swiss voters could not resist succumbing to the populist networked discourse. Never underestimate the power of Twitter and Photoshop in the hands of people mobilized by prejudice. While Internet enthusiasts like to quote the optimistic global village reductionism of Marshall McLuhan, whom Wired magazine has chosen as its patron saint, few of them have much use for McLuhan’s darker reductionism, like this gem from 1964: “That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to radio and the public-address system.” As usual, McLuhan was overstating the case, but we certainly do not want to discover that our overly optimistic rhetoric about the freedom to connect has deprived us of the ability to fix the inevitable negative consequences that such freedom produces.

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“While each communication technology does have its own individual properties, especially regarding which of the human senses it privileges and which ones it ignores,” writes Susan Douglas, a scholar of communications at the University of Michigan, “the economic and political system in which the device is embedded almost always trumps technological possibilities and imperatives.” And yet this rarely prevents an army of technology experts from claiming that they have cracked that logic and understood what radio, television, or the Internet is all about; the social forces surrounding it are thus deemed mostly irrelevant and can be easily disregarded. Marshall McLuhan, the first pop philosopher, believed that television had a logic: Unlike print, it urges viewers to fill in the gaps in what it is they’re seeing, stimulates more senses, and, overall, nudges us closer to the original tribal condition (a new equilibrium that McLuhan clearly favored). The problem is that while McLuhan was chasing the inner logic of television, he might have missed how it could be appropriated by corporate America and produce social effects much more obvious (and uglier) than changes in some obscure sense-ratios that McLuhan so meticulously calculated for each medium.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 12 THE GREAT REFUSAL In the spring of 1966, a forty-six-year-old former Harvard instructor named Timothy Leary, wearing a jacket, a tie, and a distant look, strode up the red-carpeted steps of the Plaza Hotel on New York’s Fifth Avenue and into the Oak Room for lunch. Waiting for him was a man Leary knew only by reputation: another academic, Marshall McLuhan, almost a decade older, graying a bit, but not yet wearing the mustache that would become his signature in the 1970s. To their respective followings both men sitting in the ornate oak-paneled restaurant were “gurus,” a word just come into currency in the West. McLuhan was a scholar of the media from the University of Toronto who’d become famous thanks to his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which was full of intriguing pronouncements somehow both bold and enigmatic at once (example: “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium”).

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Whether Apple was truly serving its users and business model and only incidentally exploiting Google’s Achilles’ heel is a matter of debate. But there is no doubt that the sentiment of revolt against the shabbiness of the mobile web was coming from an even deeper and broader place. Writing in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan described the media as “technological extensions of man”; in the 2010s it had become more obvious than ever that technologies like the smartphone are not merely extensions but technological prosthetics, enhancements of our own capacities, which, by virtue of being constantly attached to us or present on our bodies, become a part of us.

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge

fear of failure, ghettoisation, global village, light touch regulation, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the medium is the message, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

Robertson and Redmond O’Connell have had promising results using brain exercises to treat attention deficit disorder, and if that can be done, we have reason to hope that mere traits can be treated as well. Most people think that the dangers created by the media are a result of content. But Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian who founded media studies in the 1950s and predicted the Internet twenty years before it was invented, was the first to intuit that the media change our brains irrespective of content, and he famously said, “The medium is the message.” McLuhan was arguing that each medium reorganizes our mind and brain in its own unique way and that the consequences of these reorganizations are far more significant than the effects of the content or “message.”

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Casanova and M. Ptito, eds., Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 134. San Diego, CA: Elsevier Science, 427–45. •Someone…memorizing Homer’s Iliad, might blindfold himself to recruit operators: Such manipulation of senses and the brain is not so uncommon. The anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, who worked with Marshall McLuhan (discussed in appendix 1), observed that “every culture has a sensory profile, and native cultures, for example, to maximize sound will minimize sight. So the dancer is often blinded, deliberately. Or, you may find, they will deliberately turn sound into a textile thing, so they will plug their ears when they sing.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Keller’s aversion to social media is common among media’s old guard, who believe it has eroded standards of ethics and behavior. Outlets like The Atlantic regularly run pieces such as “Is Google making us stupid?” or “Is Facebook making us lonely?” (According to researchers, it is not.) “The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously said. In the digital age, condemning the medium is often shorthand for condemning not only the message but the messenger—and her right to speak. Twitter, which is extremely popular among young African Americans, functions as a public gathering space for marginalized groups to rally under common causes—one of which is countering cruel and inaccurate portrayals of them found in mainstream media.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

To understand the full impact of the empathic surge brought on by monotheism and the world’s axial movements, we need to understand how script cognition differs from oral cognition. Both forms of communication allow human beings to tell their story, but the narratives they tell have the unmistakable mark of the communication media being used. That’s because modes of communication help create the very consciousness that they also manage. As the late Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed, “The medium is the message.” Oral consciousness relies on hearing, while script consciousness relies on sight. This difference alone accounts for the profound change in human consciousness that distinguishes a written culture from an oral one. Hearing is the most internalizing of the senses.

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The electrical metaphors would outlive the Romantic era and provide a bridge between that period and the Age of Psychological Consciousness that rode alongside the Second Industrial Revolution for most of the twentieth century. Nathaniel Hawthorne foresaw the late-twentieth century idea of the world as a global brain and central nervous system—the Age of Psychological Consciousness—popularized by Marshall McLuhan and the communications theorists of the Internet generation. He asked himself:Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!

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Respondents also said they empathized with her strength to persevere, remake her life, and transcend her situation. Princess Diana’s death and funeral brought 40 percent of the human race together at a single moment to grieve, empathize, and share their feelings with one another.10 To paraphrase the late Canadian philosopher of communications Marshall McLuhan, the global electronic embrace has “outed” the central nervous system of billions of human beings and transformed the world into a global village—at least partially and for brief moments of time. The ability to extend individual empathy across national cultures, continents, oceans, and other traditional divides is enormous, with profound implications for the humanization of the human race.

Game Over Press Start to Continue by David Sheff, Andy Eddy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, air freight, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, game design, HyperCard, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, pattern recognition, profit motive, revision control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

[They] … are extensions of social man and of the body politic.… As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image.… The games of a people reveal a great deal about them. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Most people think video games are kids’ stuff, and it is true that in “Super Mario Bros. 3,” mushrooms give super strength, enemies have names such as Morton Koopa, Jr., and a pudgy, suspendered hero jumps on the heads of Little Goombas. Yet behind “Super Mario Bros. 3,” a video game played on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), is a business that is very grown-up indeed.

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It was a misguided criticism, however; MIT was not researching the effects of video games, but of new fields such as “constructivism,” based on the Piagetian thesis that knowledge is built by the learner, not supplied by the teacher. It may well be that Nintendo games of the future will apply this principle—build knowledge by creating—and still be as much fun as the current generation of games. Marshall McLuhan once said that anyone who tries to make a distinction between entertainment and education doesn’t know the first thing about either. There is no reason why Nintendo’s popularity with kids cannot be exploited for higher ends. In a New York Times piece on education, Morgan Newman, cofounder of a multimedia publishing company, AND Communications, was quoted as saying, “We think that quite probably what’s going on with the crisis in education out there is that kids are often just bored.

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

None of this should be very surprising given Barth’s interest in literary experimentalism of all sorts, not to mention the foundational conceit in his Cold War fable Giles Goat-Boy (1966) that the manuscript of the novel had been compiled from reels of mainframe computer storage tape—certainly one of the earliest instances of a computer having any kind of voice or role in serious fiction outside of science fiction. No less notable is the story of Hugh Kenner himself, Barth’s interlocutor in the dialogue above. Kenner was a critic of the first rank, a distinguished scholar who studied under Marshall McLuhan and then devoted a career to Ezra Pound and other major figures of British and American literary modernism. He also, however, maintained a longtime interest in computer-generated poetry, wrote columns and reviews for Byte magazine, and in 1984 published a user’s guide to the Heath/Zenith Z-100 computer, a competitor to the IBM PC noted at the time for its color graphics.

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Acland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 329–343. 2. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, ed. Nicholas Frankel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 51. 3. The claim about James’s dependence on the sound of the typewriter originates with his amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, has been repeated by Marshall McLuhan, and is confirmed by his biographer Leon Edel. See Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim, 100–101. 4. Michael R. Williams, “A Preview of Things to Come: Some Remarks on the First Generation of Computers,” in The First Computers: History and Architecture, ed. Raúl Rojas and Ulf Hashagen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 3. 5.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

Lynn, “The Big Tech Extortion Racket: How Google, Amazon, and Facebook Control Our Lives,” Harper’s Magazine, September, 2020. https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/the-big-tech-extortion-racket/ Stefano Mancuso, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior, New York: Atria Books, 2017. Robert McFarlane, “The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web,” The New Yorker, August 7, 2016. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 [1964]. Luigi F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.,” in Richard Taylor (ed.), Scientific Memoirs, selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies, London: Richard and John Taylor, 1843.

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates by John Logie

1960s counterculture, Berlin Wall, book scanning, cuban missile crisis, dual-use technology, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, Isaac Newton, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, pre–internet, publication bias, Richard Stallman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, search inside the book, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog

Pa r l orPr e s s wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion Pa r l orPr e s s wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om When a new technology strikes a society, the most natural reaction is to clutch at the immediately preceding period for familiar and comforting images. . . . What is called progress and advanced thinking is nearly always of the rear-view mirror variety. —Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage Pa r l orPr e s s wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om 1 Introduction The Cat Is Out of the Bag In the Spring of 2000 I was completing a shopping trip to Costco, a “warehouse club” located in a Minneapolis suburb, when I got an unexpected lesson in the burgeoning popularity of Napster, the peerto-peer file-transfer program developed by Shawn Fanning in 1998.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

But if it’s like this now imagine what it could be like when communication gets even faster thanks to predictive technologies, voice-to-machine interfaces and implanted communication devices. This is an accelerated, metallic, automated and extrovert future full of digital interruptions. A world of sensory overload totally lacking in the kind of stillness and quiet necessary to understand not only ideas, but ourselves. “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Marshall McLuhan, Canadian educator and philosopher No doubt we’ll get better at quickly filtering and processing information. Our thinking will become fast, fluid and flexible, but what would be lost as a result? It could be that the cost we’ll pay for such easy connectivity and communication will include a loss of rigorous, focused and reflective thinking.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

Coming home after work to play videogames provides that escape for millions of workers every day. For a moment, each is no longer a worker, but free to explore new worlds outside the drudgery of capitalism. Videogames provide a space of experimentation, of discovery, but also recovery from capitalist work. In a way, Marshall McLuhan makes a similar claim, arguing that “art and games enable us to stand aside from the material pressure of routine and convention, observing and questioning. Games as popular art forms offer to all an immediate means of participation in the full life of a society, such as no single role of job can offer to any man.”22 It is clear that games have historically played important social roles.

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

For her, the hurt of no response follows from what she calls the “formality” of instant messenging. In her circle, instant messages are sent in the evening, when one is working on homework on a laptop or desktop. This presumed social and technical setting compels a certain gravitas. Mandy’s case rests on an argument in the spirit of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message: if you are at your computer, the medium is formal, and so is the message. If you are running around, shopping, or having a coffee, and you swipe a few keys on your phone to send a text, the medium is informal, and so is the message, no matter how much you may have edited the content.

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Hal Niedzviecki, “Facebook in a Crowd,” New York Times, October 24, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26lives-t.html (accessed July 27, 2010). 23 From Winston Churchill’s remarks to the English Architectural Association in 1924, available at the International Centre for Facilities website at www.icf-cebe.com/quotes/quotes.html (accessed August 10, 2010). Churchill’s comment is, of course, very similar to the spirit of Marshall McLuhan. See, for example, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). CHAPTER 1: NEAREST NEIGHBORS 1 Weizenbaum had written the program a decade earlier. See Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA—a Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine,” Communications of the ACM, vol. 9, no. 1 (January 1966): 36-45. 2 See Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San Francisco: W.

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life by Robert Wright

agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, Asian financial crisis, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Easter island, fault tolerance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Marshall McLuhan, Multics, Norbert Wiener, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, social web, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, your tax dollars at work, zero-sum game

And Teilhard de Chardin, in particular, stressed a comparable tendency in human history: the evolution, over the millennia, of ever more vast and complex social structures. His extrapolations from this trend were prescient. Writing at the middle of this century, he dwelt on telecommunications, and the globalization it abets, before these subjects were all the rage. (Marshall McLuhan, coiner of “global village,” had read Teilhard.) With his concept of the “noosphere,” the “thinking envelope of the Earth,” Teilhard even anticipated in a vague way the Internet—more than a decade before the invention of the microchip. Can the trends rightly noted by Bergson and Teilhard—basic tendencies in biological evolution and in the technological and social evolution of the human species—be explained in scientific, physical terms?

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By the end of the nineteenth century, there were magazines such as Popular Science—rough equivalents of the Discovery Channel. This parallel between media is often lost in the course of cosmic media theorizing. The emphasis, instead, is placed on the supposedly determinative differences among media. Marshall McLuhan, for example, said that “the medium is the message”—that different media have different intrinsic, culture-shaping properties. Thus the phonetic alphabet was said to be a “hot” medium (though ideographic script, oddly, was “cool”), and TV was said to be “cool” (though movies were “hot”). What did McLuhan mean by “cool” and “hot”?

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A. O. Scott

barriers to entry, citizen journalism, conceptual framework, death of newspapers, disinformation, Evgeny Morozov, hive mind, Jacob Silverman, Joan Didion, Marshall McLuhan, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sexual politics, sharing economy, social web, subscription business, TED Talk, the scientific method

The consumer economy is profoundly unequal, raising barriers to entry on the basis of income and access rather than pedigree. And the story of human progress, of opening minds and increasingly cosmopolitan pleasures, is also a tale of loss, of standardization and homogenization. The modern world, accelerating toward the horizon of globalization—toward the media-saturated, wired-together village prophesied by Marshall McLuhan and others in the 1960s—reverses the biblical story of Babel. The world, according to this myth, was once divided into distinct, local cultural enclaves, each with its own integrity. People lived in possession of what T. S. Eliot, one of the great twentieth-century voices of backward-looking wishful thinking, called a unified sensibility.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

The earliest image of a monk with glasses, 1342 What changed all of that, of course, was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the 1440s. You could fill a small library with the amount of historical scholarship that has been published documenting the impact of the printing press, the creation of what Marshall McLuhan famously called “the Gutenberg galaxy.” Literacy rates rose dramatically; subversive scientific and religious theories routed around the official channels of orthodox belief; popular amusements like the novel and printed pornography became commonplace. But Gutenberg’s great breakthrough had another, less celebrated effect: it made a massive number of people aware for the first time that they were farsighted.

Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America by Sam Roberts

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, City Beautiful movement, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, New Urbanism, the High Line, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, Y2K

THE DEPOT YOU DIDN’T NEED A CLAIRVOYANT to predict the burgeoning value of New York Central stock, but that didn’t stop Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennie C. Claflin. Both sisters claimed the ability to see visions of future events, a distinct advantage for a Wall Street broker (and one that gave a whole new dimension to Marshall McLuhan’s maxim about the medium being the message). One investor later testified that when she asked his advice about stock purchases, Vanderbilt himself replied, “Why don’t you do as I do, and consult the spirits?” Woodhull and Claflin (whom Vanderbilt proposed to marry) apparently found their inspiration, instead, from a less evanescent source, one with a proven track record.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

It does not matter if it is delivered over the air, via cable, or with the aid of a dish; played back from tape, digital video disc (DVD), or a digital video recorder’s (DVR) hard drive; watched on a plasma screen, an ancient console, or in the car (a particularly terrifying development for those of us who drive the freeways). Television is always the same: to watch it is to track an electronic download in real time—a narrativized progress bar with a laugh track.3 Marshall McLuhan was half right: the medium is the message, but the messages also define the medium. And what of the computer? The challenge it has mounted to television over the past decade has little to do with one machine being replaced by another—in the manner of 78s being supplanted by LPs, vinyl records by 8-tracks and cassette tapes, and compact discs (CDs) by MP3s; or videotape recorders by laser discs to be followed in turn by DVDs, video on demand, and DVRs.

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, business continuity plan, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, disinformation, hypertext link, invention of writing, inventory management, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, new economy, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, union organizing

It allies propaganda with illusion, the new universal rules of our show-business world. It makes it possible to favor the object over the subject, the container over the thing contained, form over content, and medium over message. We are reminded of the warnings issued by the Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan and the often perspicacious denunciations of the French situationist Guy Debord. The last and not least important paradox is that whereas the mastery and use of PowerPoint are now widespread and unavoidable, according to all the experts, the program is often ridiculed. Does everyone privately sense the perversity of a tool that stimulates the mind while simultaneously constraining it, that requires us to create, commands us to invent?

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, augmented reality, business process, Charles Babbage, defense in depth, demand response, demographic transition, facts on the ground, game design, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, James Dyson, knowledge worker, late capitalism, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, new economy, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, profit motive, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, value engineering

One of the most attractive prospects of an ambient informatics is that information itself becomes freely available, at any place and any time. We can almost literally pull facts right out of the air, as and when needed, performing feats of knowledge and recall that people of any other era would rightly have regarded as prodigious. But we're also likely to trade away some things we already know how to do. As Marshall McLuhan taught us, in his 1964 Understanding Media, "every extension is [also] an amputation." By this he meant that when we rely on technical systems to ameliorate the burdens of everyday life, we invariably allow our organic faculties to atrophy to a corresponding degree. The faculty in question begins to erode, in a kind of willed surrender.

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

Could an interface be designed so that ordinary people could use it? This was an unconventional question in those days, when it was rarely assumed that ordinary people would ever have reason to belly up to a computer keyboard. But Kay already was pondering ideas like people relating to a computer intimately. He found himself reading Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media and pondering its seminal koan, "The medium is the message." Then he had his flash of enlightenment, "a shock that reverberates even now," he wrote over twenty years later in The Art of Human-Computer Interaction: The computer is a medium! I had always thought of it as a tool, perhaps a vehicle-a much weaker conception.

In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

However, literate societies continue to preserve, within their 176 KNOWLEDGE AND COMPUTER-MEDIATED WORK various subcultures, patterns of thought and feeling that bear the mark- ings of oral culture. A brief comparison of oral and written culture provides a vantage point from which to regard the transformation in the quality of knowledge engendered by computer-mediated work. The work of Milman Parry and his son Adam Parry, as well as the work of Eric Havelock, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong, has been a source of powerful new insights into the fundamental characteristics that distinguish oral culture from the orientation toward the written word that thoroughly imbues literate societies. I In his re- cent work, Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong reviews several features of what he calls the "psychodynamics of orality," which help illuminate the action contexts I have described.

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Chapter Five Mastering the Electronic Text 1. Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Eric Havelock, The Greek Concept of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale 442 Notes University Press, 1967); id., Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); id., Orality and Literacy (London and New York: Methuen, 1982). 2.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Cities are created not in units of distance but in units of time. They are born or explode into suddenly frictionless pockets, and we find ever more clever patterns, forms, and purposes with which to fill them. Hawley circumscribed the sixty-minute travel radius of daily life several decades before Marchetti coined his constant, and he even preempted Marshall McLuhan, who in Understanding Media practically plagiarized him. “The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society,” McLuhan wrote, “but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.”

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Other works by University of North Carolina professors during Kasarda’s time as a Ph.D. student include Gerhard Lenski’s Human Societies and Power and Privilege, and Hubert M. Blalock’s Causal Inferences in Nonexperimental Research. The interview with Amos Hawley was conducted at his home in March 2008. He died August 31, 2009. Marshall McLuhan’s quote is taken from the first chapter of Understanding Media. The Ed Glaeser reference is to the working paper “Did the Death of Distance Hurt Detroit and Help New York?” by Edward L. Glaeser and Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto. Jane Jacobs’s recollection of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre is taken from Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator