Full-Stack Media Ecology
With agent-assisted console coding apps blowing up in the past half-year (Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, OpenCode, etc.), 70s/80s-style text interfaces are making a comeback among surfers of the latest tech waves. This throwback to the old textual interfaces of yore is extremely interesting. I explained how they work eight years ago when I started my McLuhan-inspired mission to explain the…
Hello everyone! If you are subscribed to LessMad, or follow me on Twitter/X, then you already know that I ve been ambushed by a rowdy and excited crowd of crypto-investors who made a crypto-coin out of my VibeKoder program . I imagine that I m straddling a few very different communities right now. I ve had followers who enjoy my deep studies of McLuhan and histories of computing. I have other…
In the December, 1957 issue of The Canadian Forum , McLuhan penned a piece titled The Subliminal Projection Project, (available to read here ) wherein he intended, with his usual haughty aloofness, to deflate the post-war paranoia around subliminal messaging in ads and propaganda. He belittles the popular fears about hidden messages in media by people who otherwise ignore the vast juggernauts of…
Between The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan wrote a short piece on education which was, as usual, a vehicle for him to demonstrate novel linguistic forms to perturb and unsettle the settled modes of thought of readers. Give this introductory paragraph a quick go, and see if you can parse his meaning: I wonder whether Jerome Bruner, during the writing of his…
In his critical essay James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial , Marshall McLuhan makes reference (on page 38 of Interior Landscape ) to a passage in critic Paul Valéry s book Variety V (1945) . The quoted passage is on the nature of language as used by writers. Valéry calls for a reinvention of literary studies which makes use of ancient wisdom and pedagogy—the classical trivium ; the figures of…
It s here! Part two of my review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation , covering not only the book itself but the predicted monumental policy changes which the book’s release has achieved. Hosted on Katherine Dee’s Default Blog , which is definitely worth your subscription.
Ratios Let’s figure out just what analogy and metaphor meant for Marshall McLuhan. To begin, here’s an early summary of his conception spelled out for Modernist poet Ezra Pound. As Pound’s technique drew a great deal on his study of Mandarin, McLuhan frames his argument in terms familiar to his correspondent: that of the Chinese ideogram . The American mind is not even close to being amenable to…
My recent dive into anthropology has taken its inevitable post-human turn with a book a friend gave me today, purchased from Book Bazaar here in Ottawa. It s a collection of academic papers titled Cyberspace: First Steps , edited by Michael Benedikt and published in 1991. It has inspired me to finally tell you what s turning the frogs friggin gay. And, to be perfectly honest, I m as pissed as Alex…
I ve been writing up a storm over at Less Mad , and I m very proud to say that I ve had a few paid subscribers amid the nearly fifty people who now receive a few emails a week, on average, from yours truly since I started just a few weeks ago. Check there for my latest! This website, Concerned Netizen , has received a major overhaul in the above-linked header pages. So if you re wondering what the…
I ve been doing my thing on this website since June of 2018, and doing it on ConcernedNetizen.com since February 2019. That s nearly six years of blogging! Some deep dives I ve done in the past month into the nature of metamorphosis and transformation have pushed me into some deep introspection. And so, with much deliberation with my friends, I have made a decision to open up a bit more online,…