Messages from the Future
In our unevenly distributed future, we are living in an 'acoustic world', without language, divided by the unseen politics of denial. This is just the beginning. But this too shall pass.
In M2D #2, I used the popular idiom — “getting the memo” — to think about the sociology of ignorance. I also drew a distinction between the “Old Memo” and the “New Memo” to acknowledge the rising frequency of revisions and fragmentations in the consensus about the state of our world.
As a citizen of our Tower of Babel, I do my best to keep up with the high-frequency epistemic perestroika (HFEP), but this time, instead of sequentially responding to these memos as they come, I'd like to provide summaries of the most important memos currently passing through my relevance filters.
I’ll introduce the new memos here, then share some footnotes over the next week, before I retreat back into my cave to observe the hyperdimensional perestroika.
Message #1: We are living in an acoustic world.
Marshall McLuhan delivered this message from the future in 1974, the year I was born. This lecture still provides a fitting description of the media ecology I inhabit at the age of 48.
I've resisted this message heroically, but the transition from the visual to acoustic world jolted me out of my denials and distortions. I felt the first jolt circa 2013. At the time, I didn’t have the vocabulary to translate the dawning realization into language. I turned to Understanding Media, but felt unprepared to metabolize the message of this seminal text.
About a decade later now, the message resonates as a self-evident truth: For natives of the continuous, connected, homogeneous and static visual world, the acoustic world of simultaneous information feels like an exile. Like water lilies planted in desert sand, visual-world natives believe that they are dying, and that only a transplantation can save them.
Through the Looking Glass
McLuhan compares the shift from the eye to the ear to the adventure that began when Alice stepped through the looking glass. This adventure is punctuated by transitions from:
Writing to orality.
Image to sound.
Private identity to collective identity.
Monotheism to polytheism.
Structure to fluidity.
The masculine to the feminine.
Specialism to generalism.
Agriculture to hunting and gathering.
Unidirectionality to multi-directionality.
Goal-seeking to role-playing.
Transparency to secrecy.
The Left Brain to the Right Brain.
Living in the past and the future to living in the present moment.
No doubt, the transition is jarring, destabilizing. However, I'd like to offer a hypothesis to every water lily rutted in the story of its exile into desert sand. The hypothesis is that the transition from the visual to the acoustic world isn't the beginning of our exile, but rather its end, marking our return to the culture that had first cast us into consciousness.
As Marshall McLuhan put it: “The unconscious is a store of everything at once. When you begin to move information electrically, you begin to create a subconscious outside. Until recently, the conscious was our environment; now the subconscious has become the environment.”
I may develop this message further, but it's good to pause to consider the hypothesis that the world isn't ending, just getting infinitely more interesting.
#2: We no longer need to imagine life without language.
Countless authors, especially in the 20th century, have issued warnings about the susceptibility of language to the toxic influences of technology and culture. We grew accustomed to speaking and writing with horror about the future these prophets helped us imagine, but the future is already here.
In case you'd like a second opinion, I refer you to L.M. Sacasas at The Convivial Society. In Language Under Digital Conditions: Power and Action, he writes: “…something of consequence is happening to ordinary language, the lifeblood of human thought and action, under digital conditions.” Anticipating the emotional resonance of his observations, Sacasas reframes them as open-ended questions:
What are the conditions under which language can properly function as the ground of meaning, communication, and action?
To what degree do these conditions obtain in digitally mediated environments?
Individual answers will naturally vary. I expressed part of my response to this predicament in The Future of Trust in the Post-Reality World: When Meaning Defies Paradox. But mere defiance and perseverance in the face of absurdity seem insufficient when we consider that, as Sacasas puts it:
…having built our political structures on the assumption that human experience and human society can be ordered by human language and speech, we may now be suffering through the discovery that the world we have built is no longer responsive to either.
#3: Denial vs. Post-Denial: The New Political Divide
To me and to people I regard as like-minded, it seems self-evident that we inhabit a broken world. By that, I don't mean what Nancy Pelosi once memorably acknowledged: “the system is imperfect”. I liken “the system” to a decomposing carcass. This belief is no longer part of a fringe phenomenon; in fact, it points to the new political divide: Denial vs. Post-Denial.
Alana Newhouse describes this political divide in Brokenism. She uses the label of “status quoists” for people doubling-down on denial and “brokenists” for the post-denial enthusiasts acknowledging the brokenness of their world. Newhouse argues:
“The real debate today isn’t between the left and right. It’s between those invested in our current institutions, and those who want to build anew.”
The argument merits more than agreement or disagreement or an avowed identification with either status quoists or brokenists. I think of arguments like this as corrections for corrupted cartographies that still reify misleading distinctions such as the red-vs-blue ideological battle line.
#4: Word is decoupling from number, and the world of words is shrinking.
From the Convivial Society comments on Language Under Digital Conditions, I gleaned another message from the future, expressed by Hannah Arendt:
The ‘truths’ of the modern scientific worldview, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought.
#5: The “Global Village” is violent.
