[Unthinking Majority]

I heard the Playstation 7 will add to global warming.

I heard the Playstation 8 will solve global warming.

[Unthinking Majority]

Heard Playstation 8 will also cause massive global cooling though. PlayStation 9 will fix that though.

I heard there's a new pill coming to market that will permanently cure all depression and anxiety. But side effects including headaches, constipation, small erections, hairy tongue, jaundice, uncontrollable yawning, pedophilia, necrophilia, and violent blinking.

[ckaihatsu]

I heard the Playstation 8 will solve global warming.

I heard your *mom* wants a Playstation 8, for sex.

Heard Playstation 8 will also cause massive global cooling though. PlayStation 9 will fix that though.

I heard there's a new pill coming to market that will permanently cure all depression and anxiety. But side effects including headaches, constipation, small erections, hairy tongue, jaundice, uncontrollable yawning, pedophilia, necrophilia, and violent blinking.

Those side effects would be an *improvement* for me....

[Unthinking Majority]

I heard your *mom* wants a Playstation 8, for sex.

Well that was unexpected

[Unthinking Majority]

*

[QatzelOk]

I heard there's a new pill coming to market that will permanently cure all depression and anxiety. But side effects including headaches, constipation, small erections, hairy tongue, jaundice, uncontrollable yawning, pedophilia, necrophilia, and violent blinking.

Wow. Companies don't usually know or list all the side effects of their profit-making products. This is because there's just so much money to make off of them.

We will kill ourselves for a profit.

"Profit" is part of the "amazing people with superior standards" technology that was a by-product of text technology.

...there's also the political take that all technical-type advisors to the bosses are essentially playing a *political* role since there's technology already existing that could make life modern and easy for *everyone*, but which would usurp the capitalist-markets game and thus threaten the bourgeois power-base in society.

This idea that technologies can be "harnassed" to "make life better" is an illusion.

Along with Marshal Mcluhan's "extensions and amputations" limit to any benefits (you have to amputatet something for every tech)... there's also his idea of "the medium is the message."

This is very important for understanding that tech "progress" is a chimera.

What "medium is the message" means is that... humans don't mold technology - technology molds them. While people think that they will be able to "harnass" technologies in ways that will make their lives smarter, what actually happens is that human routines are transmogrified by each tech.

Farming meant that humans had to stay in one place and carry water on their heads for hours and hours. Irrigation meant that most humans would spend their lives building and maintaining canals and aqueducts. Sewing machine technology chained millions of textile workers to their desks. Car technology lead to the destruction of millions of acres of often ecologically sensitive land. Internet is leading to anti-social and obese people with very few social skills or empathy.

Marshal Mcluhan would say that this is what will happen with every technology. Rather than doing what we want with them, they will do "what they want" with us.

Perhaps COVID-19 is a way to get us all to spend more time making money for various Silicon Valley firms.

[Sivad]

Farming meant that humans had to stay in one place and carry water on their heads for hours and hours. Irrigation meant that most humans would spend their lives building and maintaining canals and aqueducts. Sewing machine technology chained millions of textile workers to their desks. Car technology lead to the destruction of millions of acres of often ecologically sensitive land. Internet is leading to anti-social and obese people with very few social skills or empathy.

Not one bit of any of that had anything to do with the technology, it was all due to the brural savagery of human nature. You're barking up the wrong tree, my friend.

[QatzelOk]

Not one bit of any of that had anything to do with the technology, it was all due to the brural savagery of human nature. You're barking up the wrong tree, my friend.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

You don't change technology, technology changes you.

In the above quote, you are saying that humans are bad, so they can't use technology "properly."

Who exactly CAN use technology properly if we can't? Technologies are ostensibly designed for use by humans.

The Medium is the message also means that *it doesn't matter what you think you are going to do with a new tech.*
The new tech itself will determine what you do and how you live. If you must die for new tech, that is what will happen. If you have to sit in a box for your entire life because that is what the tech demands, that is what you will be forced to do.

I really didn't want to spend my childhood in an isolated bungalow watching TV. But that's what car companies and the propaganda industry forced me to do. It's what they did to my life - to my childhood. That was the "message" of TV and cars. My parents and I in no way shaped either of these technologies. They shaped us.

This is NOT my opinion, it's the opinion of Marshal Mcluhan.

[Unthinking Majority]

I really didn't want to spend my childhood in an isolated bungalow watching TV. But that's what car companies and the propaganda industry forced me to do. It's what they did to my life - to my childhood. That was the "message" of TV and cars. My parents and I in no way shaped either of these technologies. They shaped us.

Geez, somebody forced your parents to buy a TV and then forced you to turn it on?

I have a friend that grew up and their parents didn't allow them to watch TV. They read books. They did amazingly in school. Technology influences us, some of is it more difficult to avoid than others. But free will is a thing. Also, using technology is different than abusing it. You can spend 7 hours a day watch TV or 1 hour. Free will.

All you do is see the negative in everything, but none of the positive. Both exists. You're an extreme pessimist and cynic. Medical technology has prevented tens or hundreds of millions of infant moralities, EVIL WAAAAAAAAAA. You must be fun at parties.

[QatzelOk]

All you do is see the negative in everything, but none of the positive.

I already mentionned "extensions and amutations" by Marshal Mcluhan, which includes both the positives and negatives. If you would read and research some of the things that were already written, you would advance a bit more in "the argument" instead of just regurgitating your "opinion" over and over.

Free will.

What is the solution to free will? What technology can finally eradicate this menace to oligarchical power?

How can the elite force people to chose the way the elite wants them to?

This is a question that elites have been asking their technicians for centuries, but you don't seem to realize this. Maybe you could have a chat with Edward Bernays.

[Unthinking Majority]

I already mentionned "extensions and amutations" by Marshal Mcluhan, which includes both the positives and negatives.

No, you say the extensions are amputations. And it's all bad.

What is the solution to free will? What technology can finally eradicate this menace to oligarchical power?

Oligarchs don't need to eradicate free will. Free will makes people want to buy stuff. All they wish to do is manipulate it. To offer the things that cause the release of neurochemicals in the brain that latch onto neurotransmitters that make people feel good.

You can put an ad on TV, but people still choose to buy it or not buy it.

Further, the government didn't put a gun to the head of plantation owners and make them buy slaves and have them work the fields to harvest sugar and cotton. The plantation owners wanted to do it, very much so. The plantation owners did put guns to the heads of slaves. But you and I aren't slaves. You can stop looking at your device right now.

How can the elite force people to chose the way the elite wants them to?

The cure for this is simple: think.

This is a question that elites have been asking their technicians for centuries, but you don't seem to realize this. Maybe you could have a chat with Edward Bernays.

The cure for this is simple: think.

[ckaihatsu]

...there's also the political take that all technical-type advisors to the bosses are essentially playing a *political* role since there's technology already existing that could make life modern and easy for *everyone*, but which would usurp the capitalist-markets game and thus threaten the bourgeois power-base in society.

This idea that technologies can be "harnassed" to "make life better" is an illusion.

This sounds like fucking Buddhist-level cynicism. You've now colonized it to the technology sphere. Congrats.

Remember, hypocrite, that you're using the Internet *right now*. Has it *ensnared* you, like The Matrix, or are you comfortably drinking tea and jerking off your dog while you're typing this?

Along with Marshal Mcluhan's "extensions and amputations" limit to any benefits (you have to amputatet something for every tech)... there's also his idea of "the medium is the message."

This is very important for understanding that tech "progress" is a chimera.

What "medium is the message" means is that... humans don't mold technology - technology molds them. While people think that they will be able to "harnass" technologies in ways that will make their lives smarter, what actually happens is that human routines are transmogrified by each tech.

Farming meant that humans had to stay in one place and carry water on their heads for hours and hours. Irrigation meant that most humans would spend their lives building and maintaining canals and aqueducts. Sewing machine technology chained millions of textile workers to their desks. Car technology lead to the destruction of millions of acres of often ecologically sensitive land. Internet is leading to anti-social and obese people with very few social skills or empathy.

Marshal Mcluhan would say that this is what will happen with every technology. Rather than doing what we want with them, they will do "what they want" with us.

Perhaps COVID-19 is a way to get us all to spend more time making money for various Silicon Valley firms.

You're simply demonizing the *technology itself* for the intentional societal manipulations of the capitalist bourgeois ruling class. You're letting the ruling class off-the-hook by *displacing* blame onto the tools. Do you blame 'hammer-technology' every time you hit your thumb with a hammer?

The new tech itself will determine what you do and how you live. If you must die for new tech, that is what will happen. If you have to sit in a box for your entire life because that is what the tech demands, that is what you will be forced to do.

Technological determinist, dark-side.


---

Free will.

What is the solution to free will? What technology can finally eradicate this menace to oligarchical power?

The tech elites have their 'AI singularity' mythos / teleology (of machines no longer needing humanity), to displace the *class*-based narrative of *humanity* superseding its dependence on the *ruling elite* / capitalism.

[Unthinking Majority]

Wow. Companies don't usually know or list all the side effects of their profit-making products. This is because there's just so much money to make off of them.

We will kill ourselves for a profit.

Side effects also include an average life expectancy in the West of ~80 years old, due mainly to profit and technology. But you don't mention those side effects for some reason.

The average life expectancy in poor countries has also skyrocketed over the last 50-100 years, due almost entirely to the profit motive and technology. People enjoy buying technology that make them live longer.

Subsistence farming is awesome, said Pol Pot.

[RhetoricThug]

I’ve been expounding an updated interpretation of McLuhan for a few years now. Here’s a bit... Retrieved for our guests.

@QatzelOk


viewtopic.php?f=9&t=174834

The rate of change of the velocity of an object in the noosphere directly affects the structure of society. McLuhan departs from the media theory of Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats", or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme. The medium we call capitalism is an organizational concept that resides in the mind and bleeds through reality. All media produce field effects, which ripple throughout our milieu.

I know you're a linear or sequential thinker because you've been culturally trained to think in such a way (after-all, it's a quantitative and qualitative function of the communication process or language as it's encoded and decoded), hence why you focus on "stages" rather than the vortex or matrices of change. This way of modeling the rate of change of any concept is completely outdated. The evolutionary extensions of a medium or in this case capitalism, are present in its inception. Alfred Wallace said: Modification of form is admitted to be a matter of time. Socialism, Communism, etc; are extensions of capitalism. Ideas and physical tools are the same thing, but one has been given a material form in reality. And just like ideas, physical tools contain evolutionary extensions. The telegraph and the smartphone are contained in the same conceptual framework. It wasn't a groundbreaking notion to suggest that capitalism leads to socialism or communism. Marx understood Aristotelian thought (Four Causes) and Hegel, and he applied dialectics to the interplay of a material and efficient cause.

The vector and mechanism of acceleration is technology.

Changes in the environment (ground) automatically reshape or influence the people (figures). This is a field effect.

The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the "grammar and syntax" of the "language" of media.

1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?

Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. For example, radio amplifies news and music via sound.

Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the prominence of print and the visual.

Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.

Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.

/break

@ckaihatsu McLuhan was called a technological determinist by his critics and contemporaries. But look where we are today.

@Unthinking Majority I recommend “Unbridled Progress” for more commentary.

viewtopic.php?f=45&t=179197

[QatzelOk]

This sounds like fucking Buddhist-level cynicism.

I don't think the Buddhists call themselves "cynical," but they do certainly try to eradicate false ideas.

You're simply demonizing the *technology itself* for the intentional societal manipulations of the capitalist bourgeois ruling class. You're letting the ruling class off-the-hook by *displacing* blame onto the tools. Do you blame 'hammer-technology' every time you hit your thumb with a hammer?

I believe that the "need" for most technologies is a result of social hierarchy, and not human "needs."

Likewise, it is the elites who have their knees on the necks of science. "Produce what we ask you for, or struggle to breathe" is the reality for all living under the 1%, including the researchers. So this means lots of that humanity gets mostly knee-pressure-on-neck-friendly technology. And always will.

You accuse me of letting the elite off scott-free, but it is YOU who is trying to defend all their techno-poisons by using a shell-game of words and ideas that you hope can provide a masquarade that looks like "the truth."

The tech elites have their 'AI singularity' mythos / teleology (of machines no longer needing humanity), to displace the *class*-based narrative of *humanity* superseding its dependence on the *ruling elite* / capitalism.

This might "displace" the class-based narrative of humanity in their screen-watching little heads, but not in the physical reality in which they operate their little machines. They are playing sim-life and pushing out sim-opinions. The fakery will kill them in ways that it hasn't already done.

McLuhan departs from the media theory of Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium "overheats", or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.

I would say that the "use of" videogames and smartphones has reached an "extreme" moment. Does this mean that COVID-19's "play outside, get some sun, take care of your health" is an *opposing form* of the extremely unhealthy youth inactivity (during many development phases of youth) and insular screen-watching of the last 20 years?

The cure for this is simple: think.

That you think the cure for this is "simple" means you have more thinking to do.

[late]

I’ve been expounding an updated interpretation of McLuhan for a few years now. Here’s a bit... Retrieved for our guests.

Huh.

I've been watching this thread, looking for a way to disrupt it. It's just bickering now. But I don't think it's going to come close enough to me POV to make it possible.

I'm a big fan of McLuhan, I read a couple of his books when they were still on the bestseller lists.

Sometimes when you push an idea too far, you've simply gone too far. I think maybe a little of that is happening here.

If you follow the progression, telegraph, radio, tv, internet, social media, they just seem to me to get hotter with each step.

My big concern is that the structures of printed media support civilisation, ranging from science to academic discipline, to having editors as gatekeepers, are getting obliterated by the metaphorical nuclear blast that is social media.

It would be nice to wrong.

[QatzelOk]

My big concern is that the structures of printed media support civilisation, ranging from science to academic discipline, to having editors as gatekeepers, are getting obliterated by the metaphorical nuclear blast that is social media

Yes, and that narrative structure (or print media) has determined the way that history has unfolded for the last few millenia, with great leaders making sure that they do linear things that imitate the turning of pages, and the unfolding of chapters.

Also, that the public got used to believing "what is written" meant that the elite could "write down" things like **Scientific Racism** theory, and then the book-believers would "bring this theory to life" much to their profit.

So rather than living a natural life, since literacy, mankind has been living a book, while all the other animals and plants seem to be turing into paper now. Pulp and paper.

It would be nice to wrong.

If literary structure is the place from which you judge right and wrong, I can see why you would want this.

The technology of literacy lead to a very unhealthy linear conception of history, and because of this, it has indirectly lead to many dead species. Perhaps our species is next - stay tuned! (what a page-turner!)

[ckaihatsu]

@ckaihatsu McLuhan was called a technological determinist by his critics and contemporaries. But look where we are today.

You're not being clear -- you're not expressing a full description by just saying 'look where we are today'.

McLuhan was a *hack* because by emphasizing the *medium*, which is really just the *conduit*, we're expected to just ignore *content*, which many do, unfortunately.


Generalizations-Characterizations

Spoiler: show

I'm not interested in philosophizing, so I won't be continuing over at the 'Unbridled Progress' thread.

[ckaihatsu]

I don't think the Buddhists call themselves "cynical," but they do certainly try to eradicate false ideas.

I'm not a fan of religion to begin with, and then Buddhism says 'the world is illusion', which I find to be quite *cynical*. It's *idealism*, philosophically, which *all* religions are.

And, lately there's Buddhist *chauvinism* against the Rohingya Muslims, which I like even *less*.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide


---

You're simply demonizing the *technology itself* for the intentional societal manipulations of the capitalist bourgeois ruling class. You're letting the ruling class off-the-hook by *displacing* blame onto the tools. Do you blame 'hammer-technology' every time you hit your thumb with a hammer?

I believe that the "need" for most technologies is a result of social hierarchy, and not human "needs."

Likewise, it is the elites who have their knees on the necks of science. "Produce what we ask you for, or struggle to breathe" is the reality for all living under the 1%, including the researchers. So this means lots of that humanity gets mostly knee-pressure-on-neck-friendly technology. And always will.

You accuse me of letting the elite off scott-free, but it is YOU who is trying to defend all their techno-poisons by using a shell-game of words and ideas that you hope can provide a masquarade that looks like "the truth."

What's the 'shell game' that I'm 'playing' -- ?

I'm only defending the technologies that are actually *beneficial* to people, like the aforementioned municipal sewer systems, and many others. You're too glass-half-empty regarding technology.

I *don't* defend the techno-elites and their hegmonic control over the *course* of technology -- you have a valid critique of *ruling class*-determined technologies, but then you overstep to dismiss *all* technology.

This might "displace" the class-based narrative of humanity in their screen-watching little heads, but not in the physical reality in which they operate their little machines. They are playing sim-life and pushing out sim-opinions. The fakery will kill them in ways that it hasn't already done.

*Or*, more people will be / are more-*informed*, and even *empowered*, due to technologies like the Internet. Now your anti-tech line has seeped over into a cynicism about *people*, in general.

I would say that the "use of" videogames and smartphones has reached an "extreme" moment. Does this mean that COVID-19's "play outside, get some sun, take care of your health" is an *opposing form* of the extremely unhealthy youth inactivity (during many development phases of youth) and insular screen-watching of the last 20 years?

Lifestyle moralism.

[ckaihatsu]

.