…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…

…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…

…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…

…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…

…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…

…its components. You see because it is a coincidencia appositorum it does maintain within itself the character of contradiction. You know marshall McLuhan said a pun is a sphere of meaning whose center is nowhere and whose edge is everywhere. Well this is a…

…wouldn't be saying this these kinds of things. 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…

…bandwidth for the intense compression of data that we are trying to put across to each other. And 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 not…

…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…

…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 we…

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

…the phonetic alphabet through the abuse that print has laid on to our thinking. You all probably know the ideas of marshall McLuhan who felt that the linear quality of print created such notions as the citizen, the industrial assembly line the theory of…

…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…

…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 the…

…after all isn't democracy a notion of interchangeable parts all of 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…

…to things he was pretty spot on and 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…

…this creative idea extends into all kinds of things, and television and radio also and the internet and I didn't no see what McLuhan was saying was that he didn't live to see the internet but he talked a great deal about television and he felt that…

…Television is a completely different creature. It's 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…

…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…

…to imagine how the discovery of perspective could have been a breakthrough since it seems to us given by our perceptual apparatus. McLuhan wrote an essay or one of his minor books called through the vanishing point. The point that he was making there was…

…minor books called through the vanishing point. 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…

…tree explode into a fractal and you change the chocolate mousse into an orange sherbet and you're doing suddenly you see it's a McLuhan said it marshall McLuhan said it the medium is the message but it's not the medium is the message the medium of…

…and you change the chocolate mousse into an orange sherbet and you're doing suddenly you see it's a McLuhan said it marshall McLuhan said it the medium is the message but it's not the medium is the message the medium of optical, neurological brain…

…wouldn't be saying this these kinds of things. 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…

…civilization's accomplishments and horrifying myopia to its own destructiveness is all a product of print of the shift in what McLuhan called sensory ratios that occurred when Medieval Manuscript using civilization went over to a form of media that allowed…

…about tonight because I think the situation is changing. It's changing in unexpected or unpredictable ways unless you think in McLuhan Esque or postmodern deconstructionist metaphors of some sort. In other words it's not obvious on the surface the drug…

…image based, involving kind of media, and he made the point that film and TV were completely different forms of media. Unfortunately, McLuhan Didn't live to see the internet or virtual reality. I think that if you take McLuhan Seriously and you have your…

…different forms of media. Unfortunately, McLuhan Didn't live to see the internet or virtual reality. I think that if you take McLuhan Seriously and you have your finger on technological know how then with the body of McLuhan's thought behind you the obvious…

…other and possibly part in company in terms of day to day stuff like Bosnia and Sarajevo and all that. What McLuhan said would happen is happening. He said the consequences of electronic civilization would be fragmentation. The nation state is a fiction…

…our mind and collective culture that we're building under the inspiration and aegis of that older dimension. Yes, what happened to McLuhan? Oh I'll do it now. I was thinking about this last week. I consider myself a mcluhanite. Mcluhan's great insight was…

…is accessible to you when you look at other people who abuse states of mind. And the last thing I want to say about McLuhan because it's the last thing I've thought in the privacy of my own mind is: people are always saying: why did McLuhan fade so…

…McLuhan because it's the last thing I've thought in the privacy of my own mind is: people are always saying: why did McLuhan fade so quickly? It was thought to be this incredible breakthrough in the understanding of culture and media and what the hell…

…profound and can be taken further, because what is really happening, as I see it in the culture wars now is that McLuhan predicted a great clash between the television based culture and the print based culture, but in a sense the compression of historical…

…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 Jaynes have shown to be a part of the way we construct our world in other words that it's a…

…you know the entire human community is enclosed in a light second of travel. So 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 trends…

…the machines that we inherit from the age of the internal combustion engine the age of the jet engine. You know, marshall McLuhan said we navigate our way into the future like someone driving who uses only the rearview mirror to tell them where they're…

…weaknesses of the world we've inherited are strengths and weaknesses put there by print 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 mcluhanist…

…that are already tried and true. In that sense then all governments are incredibly anti progressive forces. Again the image from McLuhan of someone driving into the future using only the rear view mirror. So the electronic media and the psychedelics work…

…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.…

…writing and then through printing, 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…

…feel that historically it's been positive. I just wanted to put mtv and game boy in a kind of historical perspective m McLuhan spoke about when we graft on a new technology we go through this period of numbness where we basically are totally bewildered…

…that confronts us, and there may be different adumbrations of it. The machines are already an advanced prosthetic device. But McLuhan very presciently realized we are entirely shaped by our media. Well, this is a media so permeating, so inclusive of…

…goes public and the differences between people then decline toward being insignificant. It's a kind of final confirmation of the McLuhan Apotheosis, and I think visible language is coming. Life in the imagination is to be the life of creativity carried…

…their impact on human culture and that's really what interests me is how drugs affect culture. After I went through Jung and McLuhan and iliad, my next port of call was McLuhan and I absorbed very deeply the notion that media structure civilizations in…

…interests me is how drugs affect culture. After I went through Jung and McLuhan and iliad, my next port of call was McLuhan and I absorbed very deeply the notion that media structure civilizations in ways that the and manuscript and electronic culture. He…

…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 these technologies based on the phonetic…

…the new age, the fragmentation of epistemology, the cultification and commodification of religion, all of these are cultural effects that McLuhan predicted in the 50s and early 60s in books like the Gutenberg Galaxy and understanding media ideally see there's…

…you have a sign for a sound and then you print it so that it becomes uniform and this was the 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…

…village had a vcr and what were they watching? They were watching pornographies from hong Kong. Who cares? As marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. The medium determines reality and I see psychedelic drugs as technologies. They're simply different…

…the republican party create, fabricate their reality. Last Christmas 700 000 kids could put their hand through and fight. That's all right. McLuhan said it. The meaning is the message and if kids can do that and play ninja games through the screen, we're…

…integrity of all other life forms on this planet. Thank you, I wish I had some of that stuff. Well I was surprised to hear McLuhan invoke so many times today and I will do it again. Mcluhan had an idea of what he called the global village, and the…

…understand. You see we have collective decision making apparatus and hence we don't make mistakes. So I think that to return to McLuhan for a moment, what's happening is, as gates said in his poem the center does not hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon…

…because 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,…

…broadening as we speak. The whole world is being brought into the domain of electricity, and you may not know it but marshall McLuhan thought that this was the descent of the holy ghost. As a convert to catholicism he sort of went the opposite direction…

…It's this ideal which we are educated into in an educational system created and based on the values of print. That's right. So McLuhan said as long ago as 1965 that what we were on the brink of was what he called a global village. Electronic tribalism…

…because of computers, our boundaries are dissolving. We are entering into the post print, electronic, feudal, pre apocalyptic mode that McLuhan anticipated and we each one of us has the challenge of redesigning ourselves to slip more smoothly through the time…

…poverty. They don't have cars because the per capita income in china is about 250 us dollars a year. Well I think marshall McLuhan pointed out that any technology put in place is extremely difficult to dislodge and that is our problem. We went for the…

…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 a radical thinker in communications theory and a devout Catholic, believed that the…

…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 this is a theme you get as early as Whitman. I sing the body…

…test you don't give a shit about culture. Do we need Terrence to boil this down to a no, yes? Well I think that Terrence'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…

…driven components of an organometallic, self perpetuating matrix that is on the epigenetic level, redesigning itself all the time. It was McLuhan who said human beings have become the genitals of machines. We exist only to improve next year's model, and that…

…like a normal primate would but 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…

…magic in our case it will be the technological magic of electromagnetic technology. You know a global tribe. Mcluhan was right I mean McLuhan is given zilch credit. He understood all of this stuff he said all of this by 1965. The people who dismissed him…

…real change the way we relate to language by moving language more and more away from the acoustical and toward the image that McLuhan said all this 25 years ago. It's just taken this long for the REST of us to understand what he meant. Terence, We've…

…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…

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

…insight was to see geology, biology and sociology as a continuous spectrum. And McLuhan talked a lot about Teilhard 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…

…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…

…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,…

…is 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 it…

…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 human…

…systems is this: well let's say we don't need. If the world wide web were a medium only in the sense of marshall McLuhan, then it's not too important because we already have telepathy but maybe it's more and one kind of information that it's got is…

…made this possible for all of us. Yes just in the interest of thoroughness I read McLuhan's Letters a few years ago and McLuhan had a very interesting intellectual history he was a Joyce Scholar and eventually a convert to catholicism and in one of his…

…sort of advocating this. Well 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 consequence…

…the 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…

…game, showing us what is happening. The kind of analysis of media and cultural artifacts that has been possible since 1950 McLuhan and so forth and so on was literally those thoughts were unthinkable before that because the reign of print created linearity…

…like a drug in that it dissolves these boundaries that are so very carefully constructed and maintained by cultural values. So McLuhan said no technology in history was ever put in place with even a partial appreciation of its consequences. Technologies can…

…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 rearview mirror. That's how we…

…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 fact…

…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 in…

…a content problem I think television itself is toxic. It's not how many murders you witness it's the actual. 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…

…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 Jaynes have shown to be a part of the way we construct our world in other words that it's a…

…you know the entire human community is enclosed in a light second of travel. So 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 trends…

…and we have 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…

…who could fully explicate. And yet because that mathematics exists we think that this is all very humdrum. You know it took marshall McLuhan to say that the age of electricity was nothing less than the descent of the holy ghost onto this planet. I mean…

…it. I mean think about I mean I don't think you could discover consciousness if you didn't perturb it because as marshall McLuhan said whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn't a fish. Well we are fish swimming in consciousness and yet we know it's…

…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 our perceptual apparatus or our style of parsing perceptual data toward…

…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…

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

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

…the collective future has become for us a focus of major anxiety. We need to know where we're going. You know marshall McLuhan said the way we run our societies is like driving an automobile using only the rear view mirror. Well in shamanically guided…

…in the 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…

…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…

…quickly. No 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 a…

…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,…

…citizen has arisen in the wake of the invention of printing and printing. A number of ideas spun off from printing that McLuhan was the only person to really correctly identify what they were and what their effects were. One is the idea of interchangeable…

…traded in cultural illusions for hard, hard facts. Did you want to say anything else? Well would you discuss the? Well, McLuhan talked about this he talked about what he called electronic feudalism and he said that the rise of electronic media would…

…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…

…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 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. I teach literature and mythology and I've been experimenting with my…

…the phonetic alphabet through the abuse that print has laid on to our thinking. You all probably know the ideas of marshall McLuhan who felt that the linear quality of print created such notions as the citizen, the industrial assembly line, the theory of…

…it we can dissolve it and not only we can, we cannot not do this. So then the goal becomes and this is where McLuhan is important to try and raise into consciousness the process that we are undergoing, before it is a Fita Compli, before we are in…

…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 from 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…

…great stress on this kind of thing even had exercises to elicit this kind of thinking. I mean, I think that we're 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…

…which we can 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 he invented it and sold it is what I mean or educated us to you know be a part of…

…destroy the extended family, that people would move hundreds and hundreds of miles. 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…

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

…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…

…a birth. It can go with ease because we help it from this side or it can be traumatic because we resist and as McLuhan said, insist on driving the automobile of history using only the rear view mirror. That's no way to proceed. We need to wake up,…

…your answer is on the surface waiting to be heard. Goebbels was the first person to create a system where sitting in an 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…

…free love, eastern wisdom and back to nature. Terence's Audience were mostly younger, genuine inhabitants of the global village predicted by McLuhan and rapidly morphing into reality. They had grown up bathed in the cool glow of television and far from being…

…and you can perturb it. I mean I don't think you could discover consciousness if you didn't perturb it because as marshall McLuhan said, whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn't a fish. Well we are fish swimming in consciousness, and yet we know it's…

…that's really what me is how drugs affect culture. After I went through Jung and iliad, my next port of call was McLuhan and I absorbed very deeply the notion that media structure civilizations in ways that the civilizations are never aware of and Jung…

…very much. Okay the first one. If you were in jail 20 years ago and you had to choose between Finnegan's wake and McLuhan books or any drug. Which would you choose? How about today? Has something happened in 20 years that should make these different…