EGO LECTOR

Whether you view him as a crank or a prophet, you have likely seen Marshall McLuhan cited ad nauseam in discussions of media and its effects on the mind. I was particularly taken with this set of quotes:

McLuhan once said to his friend and colleague Tom Langan, while watching television, “Do you really want to know what I think of that thing? If you want to save one shred of Hebrao-Greco-Roman-Medieval-Renaissance-Enlightenment-Modern-Western civilization, you’d better get an ax and smash all the sets.” And he was no more accommodating to the electronic beast in his advice to his son Eric regarding one of Eric’s daughters in a 1976 letter: “Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.

It’s often said that McLuhan was far better at diagnosing the social effects of media and even prophesying its total capture of our attention (see: ‘the global village’) than in proposing solutions to these ills once diagnosed or prophesied. But here is a solution, spelled out in simple language and presented in summary form. (“Smash all the sets.”) ‘But,’ the objection begins to form in the reader’s mind, ‘it’s simply unrealistic to imagine that we would ever smash all the sets and retreat to a pre-mediatized state of existence.’ This is to assume that the word ‘solution’ necessarily entails feasibility. In fact, there are many problems which admit of clear solutions which are deemed, at a very democratic level, beyond the pale of what civilization is willing to countenance. Examples include:

• Gun violence in America: It is beyond question that entirely banning the sale & manufacture of guns, combined with a full recall/confiscation program and draconian punishments for possessing them, would staunch the flow of blood from our society. But this is never seriously proposed in public.
• Nuclear anxiety: As Will Self notes, we live in a horrific double bind in which the institution which is meant to protect us (the government) also possesses the instruments for effacing human life from the planet and occasionally suggests its willingness to employ them. Obviously, the only real solution to this fear would be complete global disarmament. But this is not possible.
• Environmental disaster: This is an interesting case, because in this situation even the solutions for management/mitigation of the crisis to a level of tolerable death, displacement, and disorder have been freely discussed in public for decades, yet in actual practice we collectively continue to do exactly the opposite of what we ought if our stated goal is to avoid catastrophe.

One could likely think of several more examples. But to return to McLuhan: his solution to the problem of civilizational degradation in the age of mass media and excess entertainment is to revert to a pre-televisual world. Certainly he never expected that society would ever follow through on this plan, but it seems to me that it would effectively be the only way to recover the broad civilizational trend which McLuhan delineates.

Debates about the dangers of social media or the internet more broadly often see at least one citation of the old go-to, “People said the same thing about the telegraph/radio/TV, and they were wrong.” But perhaps they were right. There is no way for us to assess whether we are doing better collectively than we would have without decades of mediatization of our entire experience of the world. Consider: a patient with advanced Alzheimer’s is the one person without a clear sense of how much of their mental power has dissipated. Similarly, we cannot really know what course our collective consciousness or our individual brains may have taken in an alternative world in which these technologies never affected us. Someone who used drugs heavily in their teens will never know in middle age whether they did irrevocable damage to their cognitive capacity because there is no real comparison point.

We are adaptable creatures, but I suspect that each generation which complained as it witnessed some new technology warping the experience of life in real time was right to do so. It may be the case that every technological development from the Industrial Revolution onward was a mistake from a purely phenomenological perspective. Trains did distort our experience of time by allowing for such rapid movement and by compelling us to follow standardized “clock time,” an imperative which we are born into but which at one time caused a rupture in human experience. So too did the swift global communication by telegraph inaugurate an age of anxiety: so began the mass addiction to news from everywhere, allowing one to extend their range of worry beyond their community and focus on the problems of the entire world.

I cannot take seriously anyone who argues that television was not a serious problem for the late 20th century mind. The kind of ultra-stimulating and highly engrossing entertainment on display tended over time to shorten our attention spans, to lower our threshold for boredom, and to shape the very nature of the real world. Even in elementary school I recall my teachers talking about the importance of image in the Kennedy/Nixon debates. Those who think that Trump’s presidency would have been impossible without the internet get it wrong: it would have been impossible without the tyranny of the gaudily visual imposed upon us by TV. Much of the internet, after all, owes its instant and addictive appeal to the fact that it’s really just a distillation of the style of television. Video essays are just Andy Rooney at length; videogame streaming is just ESPN for geeks; TikTok is just sketch comedy or music videos in which regular people get to star. And of course, it all runs on the magic juice that kept the TV on, kept the radio broadcasting, and kept the news presses running: advertisement. Not only did TV warp politics into a contest about televisual charisma, it accelerated our addiction to consumer culture. The more we were entertained, the more we would be shown things to desire. So it simply isn’t the case that fears of TV were overblown: our minds work differently, our politics was rendered more superficial, and we were driven to want & demand much more by way of material goods than people were before the sets turned on. (The fact that, in typing that last sentence, I immediately thought of the scene in which Blofeld tells James Bond, “I am the author of all your pain,” [Blofeld here is mass media] is a perfect demonstration of my point: my mind is just saturated with televisual detritus, and even primarily verbalized thoughts about abstract historical trends can suddenly conjure up a neuron-projected clip in my head.)

Even on the internet, is not uncommon to hear or read a certain popular sentiment directed against the internet itself. Not just its current incarnation (insiliconization?), but its very existence. While I myself am prone to wax nostalgic about a simpler time of basic forums, chat rooms, and text-heavy HTML sites, those who wish to return to that earlier state don’t see that its very structure was simply waiting to be commercialized and, in the parlance of our times, sloppified. Barlow’s declaration that governments and global capital were unwelcome on the web was already too late. Something about the medium itself primes our brains for the very kind of exploitation that is ruining them. I’m glad that we live in a post-ironic age, lest the irony of my posting this on the internet be put to me. We should have smashed all the sets, and we should have smashed all the modems too; but now, you’re integrated into the world and culture of the internet whether you’re on it or not because it shapes public opinion and popular psyche, and has in fact become the default source for epistemic and cultural validation. As Frederic Jameson said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, so too is it impossible to imagine a life without the internet. We could probably recover something of civilization if we did; but we won’t.