…on the here and now aspects of reality. I mean I think that what's happening now was very presciently anticipated by marshall McLuhan, who felt that the electronic media would return us to an eye oriented culture and that the biases that have shaped the…

…decipherment of the visual surface in the act of reading print in the way that there is reading manuscript. This is what McLuhan is talking about of this linear uniform high speed thing which sets up democracy and modern science and reproducible data and…

…not that different from the chemistry of the psychedelic experience. You change these brain chemicals around and according to McLuhan and other students of communication and media how media how we process language is actually not a biologically determined…

…us and you know there may be different adumbrations of it the machines are already an advanced prosthetic device but you know McLuhan very presciently realized we are entirely shaped by our media. Well this is a media so permeating so inclusive of what we…

…You're sort of advocating this, I'm asking: is it possible? I'm not sure. Well what I was going to say was, you know, McLuhan said it was inevitable, in the sense that he had this notion that he called electronic feudalism and he felt that the…

…and think nothing of it. So I think the mind is very malleable and the imprint of culture very deep. You know McLuhan suggested that the concept of the citizen, the concept of the industrial assembly line were both artifacts of print and would have…

…test you don't give a shit about culture. Should we indeed Terence, boil this down to a no yes? Well I think that Terence's McLuhan Esque theory is more or less correct but it doesn't answer the question. The question is: do we need more or less if I…

…whether. Well do we? Yes I think we do well, as far back as 19 as the mechanical bride, which was 1952, McLuhan was talking about what he called electronic feudalism and said the world will fragment. And it seemed completely unlikely because the United…

…then through printing, has created, has had all kinds of effects on the evolution of the western mind that we, until McLuhan, were totally unaware of. I mean he believes that the linear uniform quality of print creates the intellectual preconditions for the…

…seemed to me that the nearness of these tryptamine hallucinogens to normal metabolites of brain chemistry, and the fragileness that people like McLuhan and Julian Janes have shown to be a part of the way we construct our world. In other words, that it's a…

…the entire human community is enclosed in a light second of travel. So there is. The globalism is real. I mean, when I first read McLuhan, it seemed to me very true, but a thin voice crying in the wilderness. It was hard to see if out of all the…

…part of evolution. His great insight was to see geology, biology, and sociology as a continuous spectrum. And, you know, well, McLuhan talked a lot about Tellhard de Chardin. With McLuhan, you never knew whether he was being entirely serious or just going…

…geology, biology, and sociology as a continuous spectrum. And, you know, well, McLuhan talked a lot about Tellhard de Chardin. With McLuhan, you never knew whether he was being entirely serious or just going for the good line, but he maintained, he said…

…of media on our cultural values, aesthetic canons, even our gender relations and economic arrangements and so forth and so on. You know, McLuhan was very keen, sort of his special area of expertise was print. And he was very keen to. Sort. Of tease apart…

…all, isn't democracy a notion of interchangeable parts, all of equal, the one man, one vote concept? This is an idea which McLuhan felt only made sense inside a print culture. He talked about what he called sensory ratios being subtly shifted by the…

…things, he was pretty spot on. And many any information transforming medium can be treated this way in understanding media. McLuhan talks about the electric light as a form of media. He never wrote about psychedelics, but certainly psychedelics transform the…

…proof created idea extends into all kinds of things. And television and radio also, and the Internet? And I think, no, see, what McLuhan was saying, saying was that he didn't live to see the Internet, but he talked a great deal about television, and he…

…Television is a completely different creature, very physiologically involving. It's hard to see it. You have to look at it. And McLuhan talked a lot when he talked about print. He contrasted it with manuscript culture, which is what culture in the Middle…

…this middle declension in the christos, and then this peculiar and misunderstood promise of the redemption by the Holy Ghost. McLuhan, who's a very interesting figure, as you know, a radical thinker in communications theory and a devout Catholic, believed…

…that we were able to coax into becoming our friend. Well, who knows how much of this sort of thing there is? According to McLuhan, that's the major thing. And the electrification of the body. You know, this is a theme you get as early as Whitman. I…

…for hard facts. Did you want to say something else? Well, would you discuss these? Because they now not function. Yeah. No, McLuhan talked about this. He talked about what he called electronic feudalism, and he said that the rise of electronic media would…

…assumptions of a form of media that nobody really looked at its potential effects before it was put in place. McLuhan saw that this kind of rational, linear, compartmentalized, uniformitarian culture would be completely broken up by electronics. And so it…

…are downloading our culture into a different kind of matrix. These. These things that we think of as machines are, as McLuhan so presciently observed, simply the extensions of ourselves. The distinction is immaterial. You know, we are, as a snail makes a…

…on entirely in the evolution of thoughts, feelings and perceptions. And it seemed to me for a long time, at least since I read McLuhan and assimilated his notion of tools as things which have a feedback into how we see the world. It seemed to me that…

…and all of this stuff is basically rooted in a more psychedelic attitude, a less categorical and constipated and print defined, McLuhan would say, attitude toward social roles and social polity. Yeah, I'm Tom. I teach literature and mythology and I've been…

…was another aspect that was missing from the hippie thing to some degree communal living in the country, which is tribalism, which McLuhan was talking about in the sixties, not from the point of drugs, but electronics. But I think that that was the…

…at one time. After a couple of hours of that, you leave the keyboard and you can practically feel the McLuhan esque reprogramming of your communication based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you've been spending time in. So,…

…Europe, which is no longer a sure thing, you know, because of recent developments, goes against that. I sort of think maybe McLuhan was right and that there is going to be a kind of electronic feudalization where without many more small states will…

…in the world is fragmentation on a vast scale, to be applauded in all cases. This is not a bad thing. This is what McLuhan said would happen. It isn't going to be a world federalist state ruled for Geneva with a spaceport in Antarctica and all that…

…out whether there are visual types and audio types, or whether there are generalized human biases embedded in cultural conventions. You know, McLuhan talked about how at the inventing of printing, there was a shift from the eye culture, as he called it, to…

…out the pieces and then let's assemble them in teams. And this kind of thinking arises out of the bias of a technology. McLuhan talked a lot about technological bias. Isn't this going back to the chinese ideogram where they had 50,000 symbols at one time…

…kind of thing, even had exercises to elicit it. This kind of thinking. I mean, I think that we're. And, you know, and McLuhan is trying to get at this by talking about the effects of technology. It's that we haven't realized just how fluid the mental…

…in the western mind that is very nervous, that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology. McLuhan talked about this. He meant great resistance. And all he was saying was that printhead had created certain kinds of unconscious…

…content problem. I think television itself is toxic. It's not how many murders you witness. It's the actual physical. This is what McLuhan was always trying to say, that people couldn't understand what he meant when he said that the medium was the message.…

…the broadest possible sense. Language is a tool. Social organization is a tool. But this is what we do. We build tools. And McLuhan very wisely observed, these tools are extensions of who we are. They are only distinct from us, in our opinion. But in…

…of super technology, a global information society, so forth and so on. But strangely enough, and you have to go back to McLuhan for this, the sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were…

…Reader's Digest stays subscribed to and the tv stays on, these are all interchangeable parts. This is this nightmarish thing which McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis and others foresaw, the creation of the public. The public has no history, has no future, lives in…

…long time. The LSD taking of the 60s was the same kind of thing and you know I'm very I come out pretty strongly from McLuhan in the idea that as the emphasis, as the ratios of the mix of media in a society changes, the sensory ratios and values of…

…the world. And that happened with the evolution of demotic Greek and even earlier languages, Linear A and B and that kind of stuff. McLuhan talks a lot about this. I mean, we live in a universe so alienated that we can barely conceive of the way back.…

…computer people and all that is very interesting. Recently I had to review Marshall McLuhan's letters. So I read all these letters that McLuhan wrote and one of the things he wrote about was how nervous people got when he tried to discuss the effects of…

…Reader's Digest stays subscribed to and the tv stays on, these are all interchangeable parts. This is this nightmarish thing which McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis and others foresaw, the creation of the public. The public has no history, has no future, lives in…

…seemed to me that the nearness of these tryptamine hallucinogens to normal metabolites of brain chemistry and the fragileness that people like McLuhan and Julian Janes have shown to be a part of the way we construct our world. In other words, that it's a…

…the entire human community is enclosed in a light second of travel. So there is. The globalism is real. I mean, when I first read McLuhan, it seemed to me very true, but a thin voice crying in the wilderness. It was hard to see if, out of all the…

…the perceiving organism in this magical moment called the now, where the past is coordinated for the purpose of navigating the future. McLuhan called it driving with the rearview mirror. And the only thing good about it is it's better than driving with no…

…window, and whoever is dreaming this huge hallucinatory gizmo of a dream, every once in a while the tap of the branch breaks through McLuhan I don't know how many of you recall him from the sixties, but he had, for a very brief period of time, about…

…years, an extraordinary influence on american culture. You couldnt pick up a magazine or turn on the tv without hearing McLuhan. McLuhan. What he said, what he thought, what he predicted. He was consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians, with…

…an extraordinary influence on american culture. You couldnt pick up a magazine or turn on the tv without hearing McLuhan. McLuhan. What he said, what he thought, what he predicted. He was consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians, with Hollywood, so…

…much in the same way that Joyce was a unique personality and spawned very few imitators. And the irony of all this is that McLuhan did his journeyman work before he burst onto the world stage as this mysterious savant of media. He did his work as a…

…book, which I've never readdeveloped, very hard to find, called the mechanical bride. That was his first testing of his ideas. McLuhan is primarily understood as a communication theorist or a philosopher of media, and that's what he talked about. He turned…

…do you see it? You mean from all this media? Well, I'm pretty optimistic about all that, because I'm sort of influenced by McLuhan and the school of communication theory that he came out of. And his notion was that, that these technologies, based on the…

…new age, the fragmentation of epistemology, the cultification and commodification of religion, all of these are cultural effects that McLuhan predicted in the fifties and early sixties in books like the Gutenberg Galaxy, and understanding media, ideally. See,…

…you have a sign for a sound, and then you print it so that it becomes uniform. And this was a point that McLuhan made that a lot of people couldn't immediately grok, was that there was a profound difference between manuscript culture and printed culture…

…it's becoming clearer and clearer that we do not understand the implications of what we're doing with these technologies. I mean, McLuhan always said this. He said, no technology in human history has ever been put in place with even a partial appreciation…

…archetypal imagination of modernity about the kind of communication that is introduced by electricity. Interesting. It's sort of, you know, McLuhan had this idea about the third person of the Trinity. The Holy Ghost was electricity, and the covering of the…

…like a normal primate would if they weren't jacked up on some alkaloid. And so that's very welcome. You know, it was McLuhan who made the point, and it still hasn't been assimilated by enough people, that he said that technologies carry a hidden agenda…

…carry a hidden agenda and shape their user in ways that the user is never conscious of. And the great case that McLuhan made was print, which he said the linear and uniform nature of print created the preconditioned mindset, able to accept democracy, the…

…of the archaic, it was natural magic. In our case, it will be the technological magic of electromagnetic technology, a global tribe. McLuhan was right. I mean, McLuhan is given zilch credit. He understood all of this stuff, all of this by 1965. The people…

…natural magic. In our case, it will be the technological magic of electromagnetic technology, a global tribe. McLuhan was right. I mean, McLuhan is given zilch credit. He understood all of this stuff, all of this by 1965. The people who dismissed him never…

…to create a system where, sitting in an office in Berlin, he could throw a switch and speak to the german people. And this McLuhan talked a lot about this. The notion of the creation of the public. What is the public? It's something that comes out of…

…we actually are. That is not the top down values of the culture that we wear, like clothing. That's who we are. This is what McLuhan said when he said, we wear culture like an overcoat. It's something sold to us. You go out and buy it and you try it…

…the primacy of experience, recapturing the primary importance of yourself, first of all, and then your affinity group, the people around you. McLuhan said that the, this would happen naturally. And from what I see over the past few years, it seems to me…

…and question him about it. And he knew what he had read. And they just were knocked off their chairs by this. McLuhan and Carpenter did studies in the fifties where they showed movies to bushmen and everything was going along fine until somebody walks…

…person to create a system where, sitting in an office in Berlin, he could throw a switch and speak to the german people. And McLuhan talked a lot about this. The notion of the creation of the public. What is the public? It's something that comes out of…

…we actually are. That is not the top down values of the culture that we wear, like clothing. That's who we are. This is what McLuhan said when he said, we wear culture like an overcoat. It's something sold to us. You go out and buy it and you try it…

…the perceiving organism in this magical moment called the now, where the past is coordinated for the purpose of navigating the future. McLuhan called it driving with the rearview mirror. And the only thing good about it is it's better than driving with no…

…us. And as we get closer, the chatter of noise and static being given off of this thing increases exponentially. Because, you know, McLuhan said once, he said, we move into the future like a person driving who uses only the rear view mirror. That's how…

…around the world. But it's also the complete database of the culture is now digitized and online. We are becoming. And McLuhan said this. He said, human beings are the genitals of information technology. They exist only to produce a better model next…

…bandwidth for the intense compression of data that we are trying to put across to each other. It occurs to me from studying McLuhan and other people, that the ratios of the senses, the ratio between the eye and the ear and so forth, this also is…

…have it function? So the tools you have to beware of the tool, of what the tool does to you, as well as this McLuhan, should be looked at more carefully. I think McLuhan was never correctly centered vis a vis the psychedelic phenomena the way he should…

…of the tool, of what the tool does to you, as well as this McLuhan, should be looked at more carefully. I think McLuhan was never correctly centered vis a vis the psychedelic phenomena the way he should have been. People thought he was talking about the…

…just have to run that experimental cable into every city and home on the planet, and then we'll have it. You know, McLuhan had an interesting idea. McLuhan's a weird character because a very advanced thinker, but a convert to Catholicism, so forth and so…

…hookers and the businessmen. And we've got plenty of hookers and plenty of businessmen on the Internet now. It's the content. I'm McLuhan enough to nothing so much be obsessed with the content. It's not what is on the net that's important. It's the net…

…way in which we modern people process information. I don't know how many of you are familiar with Marshall McLuhan, but McLuhan argued that an equally profound transition occurred with the introduction of print. Print is not simply writing that's easy to…

…on the page with that white back. No, we just read. And the difference between looking and reading is very great. McLuhan called it the contrast between a manuscript culture, which is ear oriented, and an eye oriented visual culture. Well, now, what's…

…Well, that's why I called my book, one of my books, the archaic revival. Because, you see, I really think the thing that McLuhan was trying to say was that every medium, be it print, he even treated the electric light as a medium. Every medium has…

…sexuality much earlier than they would have because of the automobile. That wasn't its intent, but that was its effect. Similarly, McLuhan says, you could never have the concept of the citizen if it was not preceded by the invention of movable type,…

…of our communication method to reality itself. My hope is that through holography and virtual reality and hdtv and a deep awareness of McLuhan, that we could create what I would call a biasless media. In other words, it would be a mediaev that would do…

…And, you know, William Butler saw this in the 19th century. Tellard de Chardin reached it in the forties and the fifties. McLuhan expressly articulated this vision in the fifties and the sixties. This is really, you know, as Ahab tells the crew in Moby…

…and political things, they'd been overrun. Then they moved into the countryside, communal living in the country, which is tribalism, which McLuhan was talking about in the sixties, not from the point of drugs but electronics. But I think that that was the…

…control, that perhaps we cannot potentially control the Internet. Well, I don't think we've ever controlled a technology. This is what McLuhan is all about. Or educated us to, you know, be a part of that. Well, like. But every technology carries utterly…

…the extended family, the people would move hundreds and hundreds of miles from the automobile, created the suburb. And, you know, McLuhan on print, he says that the linear, uniform qualities of print created the very possibility of science, of the idea of…

…the precision of stellar movement could be extended down to the oceans and the animal life. That's a post cartesian ideal for sure. McLuhan said that the citizen is a creation of print. The public is the creation. There was no public in the middle ages.…

…of all kinds of objects, that's from print, so forth and so on. Similarly, television had hidden impacts on sensory ratios. McLuhan, strangely, his interpretation of television was that it restored us to a medieval sensory ratio. He said that print was an…

…going on is a process of fragmentation. And that is what is supposed to happen at this cultural stage. I think McLuhan talked about what he called electronic feudalism. Wherever fragmentation is resisted, violence and war and horror will break out. For…

…weaknesses of the world we've inherited are strengths and weaknesses put there by printhead and by the spectrum of effects, which McLuhan called the Gutenberg galaxy. The spectrum of effects spun off from print. And if you're not used to thinking in…

…constellated cultural hallucination for about 500 years, until the advent of various forms of electronic media in the 20th century. McLuhan talked about radio, he talked about television. He didn't really live to see the Internet. The notion that keeps the.…

…done, the chip is manufactured. The actual design of the thing is in the hands of machines. So these machines are, you know, McLuhan once said of human beings, he said, we are the genitals of our technology. We exist only to improve next year's model.…

…see if I can figure his work out a little better with the help of Terrence McKenna, who recorded this talk in August of 1993. McLuhan, I don't know how many of you recall him from the sixties, but he had, for a very brief period of time, about five…

…years, an extraordinary influence on american culture. You couldn't pick up a magazine or turn on the tv without hearing McLuhan. McLuhan. What he said, what he thought, what he predicted. He was consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians, with…

…an extraordinary influence on american culture. You couldn't pick up a magazine or turn on the tv without hearing McLuhan. McLuhan. What he said, what he thought, what he predicted. He was consulting with Madison Avenue, with politicians, with Hollywood, so…

…much in the same way that Joyce was a unique personality and spawned very few imitators. And the irony of all this is that McLuhan did his journeyman work before he burst onto the world stage as this mysterious savant of media. He did his work as a…

…book, which I've never read, it's very hard to find, called the mechanical bride. That was his first testing of his ideas. McLuhan is primarily understood as a communication theorist or a philosopher of media, and that's what he talked about. He turned the…

…are going to have to go back to first principles. And what that means is a return to the authenticity of the body. McLuhan wrote about how media distorts human self images. One of the reasons that I'm involved in virtual reality and electronic media and…

…and so on, are simply dragged along by the shadow and its obsessive relationship to the technologies which it produces. You know, McLuhan is famous for saying, no technology in history has ever been put in place with even a partial understanding of what…

…of the historical dilemma is back into some kind of atavistic tribal arrangement of society. I've called it the archaic revival. McLuhan called it the global village electronic feudalism, so forth and so on. It's been called many different things. But I…

…how the discovery of perspective could have been a breakthrough, since it seems to us, given by, you know, our perceptual apparatus. McLuhan wrote an essay or one of his minor books called through the Vanishing Point. And the point that he was making…

…books called through the Vanishing Point. And the point that he was making there was that the new electronic media, for McLuhan, that didn't even mean virtual reality or the Internet. For him, it meant television, movies, radio, the electric light, so forth…

…I think that's already happening. It's been predicted by people who didn't even have my point of view. For instance, McLuhan predicted something which he called electronic feudalism. And he said the inevitable consequence of electronic media is a fragmentation…

…will arrive at their goals, and this will all be fed together into a civilization that nobody is managing and nobody can imagine. McLuhan was the one who pointed out that we have never been able to anticipate the impact of any technology. We always get…

…the Internet or think of computers as masculine and so forth. They are not at all. It's an incredible feminizing influence. McLuhan understood this very well. He believed that the worldwide rise of electrical networks could be correlated to the descent of…

…people think technology means exploding nuclear power plants and irradiated food and tv. But all technology really means, in the McLuhan sense, is the extensions of man. The extensions of man. And so language is a technology, shamanism is a technology.…

…and all of this stuff is basically rooted in a more psychedelic attitude, a less categorical and constipated and print defined, McLuhan would say, attitude toward social roles and social polity. Well, it's always interesting to me to do these around in the…

…on entirely in the evolution of thoughts, feelings and perceptions. And it seemed to me for a long time, at least since I read McLuhan and assimilated his notion of tools as things which have a feedback into how we see the world. It seemed to me that…

…just that our eyes, our nostrils, our ears, our skin, we break up this incoming flow of data and now we're close to McLuhan country here. I think what this hints at is that print skewed our perceptual, our perceptual apparatus, or our style of parsing…

…into the actual geometry of the circuit is now necessary. So, you know, in a way, this process is happening very slowly. McLuhan, back in the sixties, said, we have become the genitals of our machines exist only to improve next year's model. And, you…

…created in the past, because the past 500 years has been about the exploration of the print created space that McLuhan called public space, the space of rational discourse and academic dialogue and democratic deliberation. That space is being collapsed,…

…it? That's the question. The other evidence. Well, okay, Terrence, you described the World Wide Web a little. You even invoked his name, McLuhan. And I think that you gave a kind of a McLuhan esque version of it. And certainly that is one aspect, that…

…you described the World Wide Web a little. You even invoked his name, McLuhan. And I think that you gave a kind of a McLuhan esque version of it. And certainly that is one aspect, that it is a new medium. It's a medium of communication. It connects…

…for all of us. Yeah. Just in the interests of thoroughness, I read McLuhan's letters a few years ago, and, you know, McLuhan had a very interesting intellectual history. He was a Joyce scholar and eventually a convert to Catholicism. And in one of his…