Dupes of Non-Physical

Electronics As E.S.P. VV-MM-Item 3

The content of writing is speech; but the content of speech is mental dance, non-verbal ESP. CB-MMHP-23

The extremely mobile individual consciousness of the print-oriented man now reverses into the tribal inertia of multi-consciousness. CA-MMWW-6

The new cult of ESP is a natural adjunct to telecommunications. When you put your nervous system outside as a world environment, ESP would seem to be rather "Plurabelle". CA-MMWW-40

MM- Electricity makes possible - and not in the distant future, either - an amplification of human consciousness on a world scale, without any verbalization at all.
Playboy- Are you talking about global telepathy?
MM- Precisely. Already, computers offer the potential of instantaneous translation of any code or language into any other code or language. If a data feedback is possible through the computer, why not a feed-forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a world computer? PL-MMEN-72

The present electric ESP age of multiple interfaces finds no problems in metamorphosis or transubstantiation such as baffled abcede-minded culture of the sixteenth century and after. CO-MM-82

The cavemen of Madison Avenue have begun to get sensitive to the ESP power of names to shape perception and to control energies. CO-MM-276

In the same way, the filling in of the gap between the old biological environment of our bodies and the new electric environment of our extended nervous system automatically evokes the world of ESP and LSD. CO-MM-180

When a man-made environment circumvents the entire planet, moon, and galaxy, there is no alternative to total knowledge programming of all human enterprise. Any form of imbalance proves fatal at electric speeds with the superpowers released by the new technological resources representing the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties. Survival now would seem to depend upon the extension of consciousness itself as an environment. This extension of consciousness has already begun with the computer and has been anticipated in our obsession with ESP and occult awareness. TT-MMBN-14

ESP IS OLD HAT WHEN EFFECTS PRECEDE CAUSES. The patterns of formerly hidden processes now begin to obtrude on every hand. Prescience, prophetic vision, and artistic awareness are no longer needed to establish an understanding of the most secret causes of personal and social processes. Mere electric speed-up makes X-ray awareness natural. Any administrator today is aware of his environment as a universal teaching machine. TT-MMBN-193

If there is, indeed, a terrible nihilism in the photo and a substitution of shadows for substance, then we are surely not the worse for knowing it. The technology of the photo is an extension of our own being and can be withdrawn from circulation like any other technology if we decide that it is virulent. But amputation of such extensions of our physical being calls for as much knowledge and skill as are prerequisite to any other physical amputation. UM-MM-173

It is this fragmentation that enables him (Western man) to ignore cause-and-effect in all interplay of technology and culture. It is quite different in Big Business. There, tribal man is on the alert for stray seeds of change. UM-MM-237

In the future, the only effective media controls must take the thermostatic form of quantitative rationing. Just as we now try to control atom-bomb fallout, so we will one day try to control media fallout. Education will become recognized as civil defense against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defense is the print medium. The educational establishment, founded on print, does not yet admit any other responsiblities. UM-MM-267

For lack of observing so central an aspect of the TV image, the critics of program "content" have talked nonsense about "TV violence". The spokesmen of censorious views are typical semiliterate book-oriented individuals who have no competence in the grammars of newspaper, or radio, or of film, but who look askew and askance at all non-book media. The simplest question about any psychic aspect, even of the book medium, throws these people into a panic of uncertainty. Vehemence of projection of a single isolated attitude they mistake for moral vigilance. Once these censors became aware that in all cases "the medium is the message" or the basic source of effects, they would turn to suppression of media as such, instead of seeking "content" control. Their current assumption that content or programming is the factor that influences outlook and action is derived from the book medium, with its sharp cleavage between form and content. UM-MM-274

The Western way of life attained centuries since by the rigorous separation and specialization of the senses, with the visual sense atop the hierarchy, is not able to withstand the radio and TV waves that wash about the great visual structure of abstract Individual Man. Those who, from political motives, would now add their force to the anti-individual action of our electric technology are puny subliminal automatons aping the patterns of the prevailing electric pressures. A century ago they would, with equal somnambulism, have faced in the opposite direction. German Romantic poets and philosophers had been chanting in tribal chorus for a return to the dark unconscious for over a century before radio and Hitler made such a return difficult to avoid. What is to be thought of people who wish such a return to preliterate ways, when they have no inkling of how the civilized visual way was ever substituted for tribal auditory magic? UM-MM-275

Failure to understand the organic character of electric technology is evident in our continuing concern with the dangers of mechanizing the world. Rather, we are in great danger of wiping out our entire investment in the pre-electric technology of the literate and mechanical kind by means of an indiscriminate use of electrical energy. UM-MM-218

It may be simplest to say at once that the real use of the computer is not to reduce staff or costs, or to speed up or smooth out anything that has been going on. Its true function is to program and orchestrate terrestrial and galactic environments and energies in a harmonious way. For centuries the lack of symmetry and proportion in all these areas has created a sort of universal spastic condition for lack of inter-relation among them. In merely terrestrial terms, programming the environment means, first of all, a kind of console for global thermostats to pattern all sensory life in a way conducive to comfort and happiness. Till now, only the artist has been permitted the opportunity to do this in the most puny fashion. The mass media, so-called, have offered new materials for the artist, but the understanding has been lacking. WP-MMQF-89&90

So the process of renewal can't come from above. It can only take the form of reawakened critical faculties. The untrancing of millions of individuals by millions of individual acts of the will. Psychological decentralization. A merely provisional image of how it might (not how it should) occur could be formed by supposing every mechanical agency of communication in the world to be suspended for six months. No press. No radio. No movies. Just people finding out who lived near them. Forming small communities within big cities. It would be agony. All psychological drugs cut off. No capsulated thoughts or melodies. To say that anything like this could never happen, or that it should never be allowed to happen is a remark worthy of those mesmerized practical men who are efficiently arranging for the obsequies of our world's mind and body alike. If something like this doesn't happen it is quite plain what will happen. PY-MM-159

MM- All these convulsive changes, as I've already noted, carry with them attendant pain, violence and war - the normal stigmata of the identity quest - but the new society is springing so quickly from the ashes of the old that I believe it will be possible to avoid the transitional anarchy many predict. Automation and cybernation can play an essential role in smoothing the transition to the new society.
Playboy- How?
MM- The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. Already, it's technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways.
Playboy- How do you program an entire society- beneficially or otherwise?
MM- There's nothing at all difficult about putting computers in the position where they will be able to conduct carefully orchestrated programing of the sensory life of whole populations. I know it sounds rather science-fictional, but if you understood cybernetics you'd realize we could do it today. The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their over-all needs, creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses. We could program five hours less of TV in Italy to promote the reading of newspapers during an election, or lay on an additional 25 hours of TV in Venezuela to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio the preceding month. By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate, just as we are beginning to learn how to maintain equilibrium among the world's competing economies.
Playboy- How does such environmental programing, however enlightened in intent, differ from Pavlovian brainwashing?
MM- Your question reflects the usual panic of people confronted with unexplored technologies. I'm not saying such panic isn't justified, or that such environmental programing couldn't be brainwashing, or far worse - merely that such reactions are useless and distracting. Though I think the programing of societies could actually be conducted quite constructively and humanistically, I don't want to be in the position of a Hiroshima physicist extolling the potential of nuclear energy in the first days of August 1945. But an understanding of media's effects constitutes a civil defense against media fallout. The alarm of so many people, however, at the prospect of corporate programing's creation of a complete service environment on this planet is rather like fearing that a municipal lighting system will deprive the individual of the right to adjust each light to his own favorite level of intensity. Computer technology can - and doubtless will - program entire environments to fulfill the social needs and sensory preferences of communities and nations. The content of that programing, however, depends on the nature of future societies - but that is in our own hands. PL-MMEN-72&74

Keeping in mind that the user is necessarily the content of any man-made service environment or media, it is noteworthy that, with Sputnik, men put the planet inside its first man-made container. From that time people had an immediate sense of being the "content kings" of the Earth. As the content of the planet they suddenly noticed how poor a job Nature had done in keeping men in line. If "what the public wants" was the first child of the telegraph press, ECOLOGY was the first progeny of Sputnik. When processes moved up to electric speeds, it became obvious that "everything causes everything". For every cause there are many effects, just as every effect has many causes; this becomes apparent to those existing in an electric environment of information. Those existing as the content of a man-made environment never cease adjusting it to their own behavior, just as they adjust their behavior to the environment. "Programming" the environment had this form of slow adjustment earlier. However, for the residents of the "wired planet", or the magnetic city, the programming now begins to assume the character of rapid and extensive change, which we take for granted on radio, movies, and TV. Sputnik and the moon shots brought about, in effect, the institution of a new kind of global theatre, in which all men become actors and there are few spectators. The population of the world is both the cast and content of this new theatre. The repertory of the theatre consists of a perpetual happening, which can include the retrieval or replay of any previous happenings that men choose to experience.
The replaying of past events in "realistic" ways began with the power of print to retrieve the ancient authors and historians. The Elizabethan stage projected scenes and characters of the past as a staple entertainment. Our power to reconstruct the past has grown steadily with media enlargement, till Hollywood made such replays into a major feature of this century. TT-MMBN-145

As the detective reconstructs events, so the artist by retracing the processes of cognition (mimesis) bridges the world of sense and the world of awareness. James Joyce presents this cognitive bridge in monumental and dramatic form in Finnegans Wake: the entire tribal cycle of society now begins again, but awake. ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS CREATES A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE OLD ACCIDENTAL AND THE NEWLY PROGRAMMED EVENTS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE FOR ENRICHMENT THROUGH DIVERSITY. TT-MMBN-11

In this book there is no intent to endorse or condemn what has happened. Our concern is to explore and to reveal the process patterns of current happenings. Since it is no longer safe to wait for the harsh judgement of results, we must discover how to anticipate effects with their causes in order to avoid the "inevitable" by "programming Fate". TT-MMBN-6

The familiar idea of "making the news" now yields to making the world itself. For the best part of a century, we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious. The complementary of this process would seem to be the "natural" program for the period ahead: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness. This procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness radically different from former consciousness. Everybody becomes a voluntary participant in creating diversity without loss of identity. TT-MMBN-297

Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature. TT-MMBN-11

These new forms - television and radio - are new languages. They're huge extensions of ourselves which enable us to participate in one another's lives, much as language does. But these forms lay down their own ground rules; the modes of participation are already built into the technology. There are real, rigid art rules, for each form. The fact that we have many media now enables us to leap across the barriers from one form or one set of rules to another. And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history. He has been the victim, the servo-mechanism of his technologies, his media from the beginning of time, but now because of the sheer multiplicity of them he is beginning to awaken. Because he can't live with them all. PR-MM-366

T. S. Eliot's famous account of "the auditory imagination" has become an ordinary form of awareness; but Finnegans Wake, as a comprehensive study of the psychic and social dynamics of all media, remains to be brought into the waking life of our world. PT-MM-18

During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be "a good thing" is a question that admits of a wide solution. UM-MM-19

It is equally conceivable that the electric extension of the process of collective consciousness, in making consciousness-without-walls, might render language walls obsolescent. Languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses, in varying ratios and wavelengths. An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960's. UM-MM-123

To put the matter abruptly, the advertising industry is a crude attempt to extend the principles of automation to every aspect of society. Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. UM-MM-202

For with the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting. UM-MM-222

Many may think that we are now safely ensconced inside a utopian kingdom like Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme, the fantastic world of do-as-you-like. In fact, we have now to replace nature itself, remaking it as an art form perfectly accommodated to the totality of human needs and aspirations. Such an enterprise requires nothing less than inclusive awareness of human resources and limitations. Man-made nature, fashioned according to life as art, may tax human creativity far beyond anything levied on presatellite man. Having engineered into existence this giant rim spin around all human transactions, we now have to discover the means of adjusting the speed of this spin in order to accommodate the responsive spins of all the components.
As concertmaster, satellite man would have to audition such selections as the Manhattan Project with exquisite prescience of "audience" effects. The "audience" of satellite man includes the "actors" and is not merely human but consists of all the resonances awakened everywhere. Satellite man no longer inhabits visual space, but a resonating acoustic space whose boundaries are nowhere. Today, he is an information hunter in ECO-land. TT-MMBN-294&295

But like Shakespeare and Chesterton, Joyce uses the pun as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through language. And it was years after he had begun the Wake before he saw that the babble of Anna Livia through the nightworld of the collective consciousness united the towers of Babel and of sleep. In sleep "the people is one and they have all one language" but day overcomes and scatters them. IL-MM-46&47

For the electric puts the mythic or collective dimension of human experience fully into the conscious wake-a-day world. Such is the meaning of the title Finnegans Wake. While the old Finn cycles had been tribally entranced in the collective night of the unconscious, the new Finn cycle of totally interdependent man must be lived in the daylight of consciousness. GG-MM-319

Today, when we live in a time of sudden transition from mechanical to electric technology, it is easier to see the character of all previous technologies, we being detached from all of them for the time being. UM-MM-299

Just why we are no longer content to leave our experience in this subliminal state, and why many people have begun to get very conscious about the unconscious, is a question well worth investigation. People are nowadays much concerned to set their houses in order, a process of self-consciousness that has received large impetus from photography. UM-MM-172

Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. UM-MM-56

Since the advent of TV, the exploitation of the unconscious by the advertiser has hit a snag. TV experience favors much more consciousness concerning the unconscious than do the hard-sell forms of presentation in the press, the magazine, movie, or radio. UM-MM-202

All technologies are collective unconscious. All arts, science and philosophy are anti-environmental controls that are ever merging into the environmental and losing their power to create awareness of environment. When arts fail to cope with the environment by being anti-environment then there can be a shift to a rapid succession of innovations as ersatz anti-environments. CB-MMHP-31