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Introduction to the ‘Acoustic World’
In this post, I compiled twenty-two links to my latest readings on media ecology. Not sure when or if I’ll write anything further about twenty-one of these sources, but tune in tomorrow for my annotations of the oldest source on this list: Marshall McLuhan’s 1974 introduction to the “acoustic world”. In the meantime, you can listen to the full lecture here.
Links
In The Disservices of the Alphabet: Environmental Withdrawal, Andrey Mir argues that: “The social trauma of the alphabet involved the dissolution of society based on tribal unity and kinship. Now, digital orality reverses the media effects of the alphabet and retrieves some features of tribal orality.”
In The Fifth Wave: Andrey Mir Takes on World History, Martin Gurri reviews his friend Andrey Mir's ‘Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror’ and earlier books. Gurri argues that Mir's books redeem our age from the spirit of fractured frivolity evident from a glance at the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.
In The Internet Wants to Be Fragmented, Noah Smith argues that throwing the whole world into a single room doesn't work. That's probably why, as he points out: “15 years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.”
In Everyone You Know Is Dead, Stefan Webb explores an idea that may shock some and cause others to yawn. He writes that he’s “addressing something deeper than the NPC phenomenon. I am talking about the lifelessness in people’s eyes, an apathy in all realms of public life.”
In Large Language Models Are Uncanny, Henry Farrell argues that, like capitalism, LLMs are haunted: voids that seem to speak. He writes: “Some people go beyond dislike - they actually find that LLM-art makes them uneasy, to the point of mild horror or nausea. I would guess (maybe incorrectly) that many of those who react in this way find it uncanny for the same reasons that others or the same people are disturbed by the messages conveyed through a ouija board.”
In McLuhan on AI, William Kuhns annotates McLuhan's AI-related ‘probes’. Here’s one that relates to the ‘Big Flip’ discussed in my post scheduled for tomorrow: “When the globe becomes a single electronic computer, with all its languages and cultures recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant and impossible, no matter how precious.”
In Mir McLuhanism, Arnold Kling reviews Andrey Mir's ‘Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror’. Kling begins the review by challenging the notion that Sesame Street ever taught children to read. Instead, he argues, it taught them to watch television.
In Agonistic Mentality of Oral Culture, Andrey Mir provides an introduction to the ‘global village’ in which “everyone seeks affirmation from others on a scale unheard of in human history”. In the agonistic culture described by Walter Ong, this desire is seldom simply satisfied; instead, it is parried.
At the Novitate conference, a panel discussion explores the intersection of Girard and McLuhan and considers the idea of “many mimeses”.
In The Stuff of (a Well-lived) Life, L.M. Sacasas reviews Apple’s now-infamous ‘Crush’ ad. After reading a couple of similar reviews of the ad, I chose not to watch it, probably for the same reason I often choose not to watch moving images of graphic violence.
In Empires of Modern Passivity, Ron Horning wrestles with the question: in the Society of the Spectacle, what's so special about Tik Tok?
In Cringe Philosophy, Hans-Georg Moeller elucidates the experience and evolving conceptions of embarrassment-by-proxy — or fremdschamen, in German. He defines ‘cringe’ as a mode of embarassment under conditions of profilicity. To set the context for this definition, he also draws distinctions between guilt and shame that refreshingly depart from the cliches endlessly regurgitated in pop psychology.
In Are We Human? Then Let's Be Dancers, Alex Dobrenko proposes an antidote to AI, which I also discussed in FUQ #3.
In Understanding Hyperstition: A Brief Warning, SEELE argues that our civilization has invented an apocalypse-making machine, which we can survive by understanding the “script-ure” it’s running on.
In The Shrinking of Media Eras, Andrey Mir offers an update on the ‘Singularity Countdown’. He argues that “Historical periods have a distinctive temporal characteristic in their progression: each following historical period was shorter than the previous one. History accelerated because the change of media forced it.”
In Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost, Andy Williams raises a Frequently Unasked Question (FUQ): How do we navigate the use of AI while preserving knowledge and skills?
In Narcissistic Depressive Technoscience, Thomas Fuchs asks why modern man yearns to be replaced, fantasizes of being the one to do it, and how we can stay human instead.
In Artificial Creativity, Douglas Rushkoff examines how AI is teaching us to distinguish between humans, art, and industry. He argues that AI will commoditize every industry in which it is deployed, and that AI isn't just taking our jobs but also down-skilling our labor.
In Subscription Solicited as Donation, Andrey Mir examines a new cause of media bias: the desires of the audience.
In The Age of the Sovereign Creator, Hamish MacKenzie looks at Substack's horizon of possibility beyond aggregation. There’s a lot to say, both encouraging and cautionary, about Substack's long-term viability as an alternative to ad-polluted media, but I still can't think of a better place to say it than Substack. I explained the main reason in Start a Substack: A 'channeled' message for readers seeking shelter in the wilderness of the kleptocratic attention economy.
In The Rise of the LinkedIn Right, Dave Greene explains what's wrong with LinkedIn.