An environment programmed for irrationality

If culture is an operating system, the environment is a CPU

Marshall McLuhan

By

James Pew

(This post originally appeared on The Turn.)

If we went back a little, to the decade when electricity became a common utility of the developed world, it is unlikely the people then would predict anything like the postmodern turn into identity politics. More likely, assuming they are not the cynical type, they might imagine an evolution of liberalism where incremental improvement over a long arch of time leads to greater strides in human rights, advances in health and sciences, and more peace and prosperity generally throughout society. Is it a stretch to imagine that someone living at the onset of the electrical grid, might have felt some love for his homeland and the people in it?  And that maybe he might believe in the promise and potential of the liberal society that electrified his brave new environment?

To put myself in this hypothetical guy's shoes, I can’t imagine envisioning a future where political radicals (on either side of the spectrum) would be permitted the platform they enjoy today. If there was to be a parliamentary system with multiple parties, I would not imagine the greater public being so divided along the party lines as to view each other as less than human. That would seem at odds with liberalism, and not like progress at all.

It was 1752 when Benjamin Franklin demonstrated the electric current with his famous kite in the storm experiment. But it wasn’t until 1831 when Michael Faraday invented the electric dynamo - a generator capable of providing and sustaining electrical current - that applied electric technology became feasible¹.  Progress continued slowly, in 1896 the first alternating current line connecting Niagara Falls to Buffalo, New York was developed. And by the end of 1914, 43 American states had regulatory commissions overseeing electric utilities². In Ontario, Canada 59,000 customers had been connected to the province's power grid by 1914.³

What happened in the years that followed? What were the attitudes of North American people in the 1920s? Were there any hints of identity politics or postmodern irrationality back then? 

Often called the roaring twenties, and even though the following decade was plunged into a devastating depression, they are known as being full of energy, spirit, ambition and promise. The question I wish for the reader to ponder -  is it reasonable to assume that, in 1920s Canada, the decade after the first World War, when William Lyon Mackenzie King was prime minister (a liberal concerned with social welfare) that some Canadians may have had optimistic feelings about the future of Canada? 

In my piece If Culture Is An Operating System, Ours Is Postmodernism (substack.com) I use the operating system as an analogy for the prevailing culture. As time goes on, the culture evolves, the operating system goes through many updates. But there are also issues with viruses, malware and incompatible software. Some cultural operating systems have advanced virus protection and other forms of software that extend functionality.

To build on the analogy somewhat, if the operating system is the culture, then the computer is the environment. An operating system has to run on something, in this case that something is the environment where society expresses its culture. Since I steal all my best ideas from Harold  Innis and Marshall McLuhan, for the remainder of this piece environment will refer to the McLuhian conception, media environment.

But before I give McLuhan’s definition of media and media environment, there is another device he used to employ quite a bit that I am somewhat attempting to do with this piece. Let me explain. He used to say things like - if television was the dominant medium, Hitler would not have been accepted by the German public. Or, that Picasso would not have invented cubism if it were not for the electric circuit. These are the types of observations (cryptic though they may seem, they do have a logic) that come from viewing the world through the lens of media ecology. 

The assertion I’m making in this piece is that you cannot have postmodern identity politics without a modern electric/digital environment. And that wokeism would not have happened during the industrial age; it is a unique consequence of the global digital electric surround.

To argue this effectively I need to offer a few definitions of terms as used by McLuhan, and a brief summary of a few relevant aspects of his media theory (which later became the discipline of media ecology).

Definitions:

Media - the plural for medium. It is any artifact (hardware or software) that comes out of the human imagination. Hardware media are - eye glasses, automobiles, computers, tooth brushes, Life Jackets, etc. Software media are - liberalism, Marxism, Christianity, democracy, the buddy system, the phonetic alphabet, critical theory, postmodernism, digital applications, etc.

The Media Environment - Is the man made technological surround. Where the built environment, the technological environment, and the knowledge, religious and ideological environment, overlap and compress into a mesh of human action. I say action because all of this requires the human act of, as McLuhan would put it, “utterance” or “outering” of something from within.

I will go into more details in future pieces of what I think is one of the most exciting parts of McLuhan’s theories; that when new forms of media appear, fundamental changes occur in both the environment, and the people in it. When these mechanisms are understood, they reveal a predictive quality.

““We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.” — John Culkin (1967)

Media Theory

McLuhan, in discussing media (which he often defined simply as “the extensions of man”), described an overlapping of forms that often occur between disparate sectors and seemingly unrelated domains of human affairs. For instance, the similarity in form of the assembly line (with its mono-directional linear sequence of processes consisting of single-function stages) to print media (the dominant communications medium during the age of the assembly line). The text found in industrial age print media (books, journals, newspapers, etc.) is made up mostly of collections of symbolically displayed characters (phonetic alphabet) arranged into “stages” (words) that are processed by the reader one-at-a-time in a single direction linear sequence, in a way, reading text very much evokes the action of an assembly line. This can be restated as - you cannot have the assembly line without preceding conditions set by the predominance of print media.

When print media was demoted to a background player, and replaced generally by electronic media (telegraph, radio, TV), the ordering of the assembly line took on a new form of electronic automation. Instead of a linear sequence of mechanical one-at-a-time functions, an automated electronic production environment has the appearance of an all-at-onceness demonstrated in the simultaneous non-linear multi-processes indicative of the electronic circuit. As confusing as that may seem, what McLuhan is saying is that the essence of dominant forms of media seem to have an influence on the ordering and design of subsequent innovations (ideas and inventions) even though the relational link may not always be obvious. 

The Shift In Regime Of Accumulation

My essay, Postcolonial Theory and Indigenous Traditional Knowledge: Linking Postmodern Identity Politics with Transitional Shifts in Canada’s Political Economy and Media Landscape, contains a discussion of regimes of accumulation (a term from political economy referring to socio-economic paradigms of reproduction). The modes of production (the dominant methods for the organization and management of production), and their counterpart modes of regulation (the habits/behaviors that organize people around the modes of production), experienced a transition to a post-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation concurrent with the postmodern turn. 

Changes in the dominant forms of communications media and the effect these transitions have on reordering the culture, the modes of production and their corresponding modes of regulation have an enormous impact on society, including the psychology and social concerns of people. The industrial age was ordered by the Fordist regime of accumulation. This is reflective of the enlightenment rationality common when print was the dominant medium. When electronic media replaced print media as the dominant communications form, the updated environment, of integrated circuitry and automated electronic manufacturing, was incommensurate with the Fordist managerial system, whereas the succeeding regime of flexible accumulation with its fluid unstructured modes of regulation is consistent with the electric age rejection of enlightenment rationality indicative of the postmodern turn. Postmodernism itself can be described as flexible electric thinking.

From David Harvey’s 1989 book The Condition Of Postmodernity - “The relatively stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism has given way to all the ferment, instability, and fleeting qualities of a postmodernist aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification of cultural forms.” 

In the same way that postmodernism requires the electronic surround, it also requires flexible modes of production and regulation. For the analogy to work within the framework of McLuhan’s media theory, It must be assumed that the environment, or computer, on which the cultural operating system is installed, requires compatible hardware/software. And that the conditions of the environment (computer) are inexorably connected to the conditions of the culture (operating system).

In my essay, Paratactic Juxtapositions: A Theoretical Framework For Understanding The Complex (substack.com) I developed a simple framework for sense-making. Postmodernism is the complex thing this framework was developed for, and intended to help make sense of.

A paratactic juxtaposition is simply a collection of statements without connectives, where each fragment contributes to the meaning of a larger concept. The semicolon is the sole syntactic structure employed in the method. Here is the example provided in the essay mentioned of the framework applied to postmodernism (this is by no means exhaustive):

A ruling tendency is indeterminate and immanent (indetermanence); Favors subjectivity over objectivity; Late-capitalism is a founding condition; Requires modes of regulation consistent with the post-Fordist/Keynesian regime of flexible accumulation; Is bolstered by a deregulated and decentralized culture that emphasizes creativity and innovation; Requires the convergence of cultures and political economies brought about by globalization; Requires the “time & space compression” aspect of instantaneous communications and of increased efficiency in global transport networks; Is bolstered by the inter-connected communications environment of the social web (internet communications); Requires a general psychological shift to emotional irrationality consistent with an environment dominated by electronic/digital communications media (unlike the rationality and detachment of “typographic man” - where print is the dominant medium); Material and historical frameworks of analysis are replaced with relativist methods; “Cultures” are favored over the achievements of “civilizations”; Despondency and nihilism are defining elements; polylectic and polylogic pervade; Involves speculation necessarily; Disconfirms familiar forms; Favours collectivism over individualism; Arises from left-wing academic circles;

More work needs to be done to add to this particular paratactical juxtaposition. And I have some ideas on how to develop the framework. Something like postmodernism is so complex and hard to pin down with a singular definition that a more expansive approach is called for. Even the framework itself needs to be developed further to accommodate the complexity. 

One idea I have to improve it is to create subheadings followed by the clumps of semicolon separated statements. Postmodernism should include several subheadings - ie. Education, Art, Economics, Public Policy, Technology, etc. Each one would have under it, many paratactically juxtaposed statements describing postmodernism's effect on, and connection to, the topic of the corresponding subheading. Another improvement would be the inclusion of footnotes for each statement for further exploration.

All of this is meant to prime the reader for what is to come on The Turn. I plan to explore the mechanisms causing these societal disruptions, transitions and turns from as many angles as my brain can handle. For now, I feel this can best be achieved through various theoretical frameworks found in disciplines like political economy and media ecology. Since there are many complex processes and mechanisms involved, It is not necessary to understand absolutely everything that is being discussed. Absolute understanding may not be possible. But some understanding is, and I believe enough can be attained for a utility to be derived from the effort. I believe the sense-making and predictive capacity of humans is improved with intelligent use of political economy and media ecology along with various other enlightenment methods of understanding. If we can predict it, we can change it.

In the next McLuhan/media ecology oriented piece I will go into more depth regarding the comparison of what McLuhan called “typographic industrial age man” with modern man of the “electric age.” For now, I’ll give the reader a small preview of what these comparisons look like - Industrial man is private and logical, while electric man is social and emotional. The next essay will explain this and offer an extended list of these characteristic comparisons between ourselves and our mechanically minded predecessors, while tracing key aspects of the course of development the media environment went through, shaping who we are today.

Lastly, you may have noticed this piece did not mention the famous McLuhan quote - “the medium is the message.” Never-the-less that is exactly what this piece was about. It will all be expanded on in small chunks so as to make things as clear as possible. The reader will see why Hitler would have most likely failed under Television, a medium that is not friendly to fired up intense angry people. Television was called a “cool” medium by McLuhan. He meant that successful TV characters have a calm and cool everyman type of charisma, whereas a medium like radio is very successful the more intense or “hot” it is. 

Hitler’s persona worked on radio, it affected people (for the worse), it got under their skin, filled them with tribal rage, and brought out collective hate. This does not happen on TV, the medium of the sitcom, but many genocides (like the Rawanda genocide of the 1990s) are largely driven by the use of radio. The medium is the message, because the medium is what ultimately makes the message work. McLuhan makes an important distinction between the content and the medium. The content (what Hitler actually said) was not the compelling part, it was how the content (message) was delivered that made it stick. The medium delivers the message in a way that causes its effects, the message by itself, has no such power.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, The Most Important Anti-Woke Books

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1. Who Discovered Electricity? - Universe Today

2. Power Grid History – ITC Home (itc-holdings.com)

3. A History Of Canadian Economy by Norrie, Owram & Emery 2008, pp. 247