Julian Assange And Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian scholar, born in 1911, died 1980, author of the books The Mechanical Bride, Gutenberg Galaxy, and Understanding Media among others. He is the author also of the statement "the medium is the message," and the phrase "global village." In fact another of his books is titled The Medium is the Massage, its idea being that media are extensions of our senses, whose use condition our nervous systems differently from each other. In other words, a television watcher will be have different, but no less real strengths than readers. McLuhan claimed that electronic media condition people in this culture to behave more like pre-literate villagers than like our great grandparents.


Julian Assange is an Australian-born activist and journalist, the editor of Wikileaks, the publisher of government and corporate files submitted by whistleblowers. Assange is currently in England battling extradition to Sweden to face charges of multiple sexual assaults. He asserts that he is resisting extradition because Sweden would be more likely than the UK to extradite him in turn to the United 
States. PayPal and various credit cards have stopped handling donations to Wikileaks, Wikileak apps are verbotten on the iPhone, and Wikileaks' Swiss bank has frozen its accounts. My take on it is that Wikileaks is the first of a phenomenon -- along with Stuxnet, improvised explosive devices, and extraordinary rendition, part of war as the planet now wages it -- and that whatever happens to it, the idea of an internet platform for whistleblowers to publish documents from the vaults of transgressing governments and companies is established and will co-evolve with efforts to defend against it.



There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That's why there are so many missing feedback loops -- and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses and unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen or go around them and make it happen anyway.

                                  Donella Meadows, "Places to Intervene in a System"

In 1986, the US government required that every factory releasing hazardous air pollutants report these emissions publicly. Suddenly everyone could find out what was coming out of the smokestacks in town. There was no law against these emissions, no fines,no determination of "safe" levels, just information. But by 1990 emissions dropped by 40 percent. One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent just to "get off that list."

                                  Donella Meadows, "Places to Intervene in a System"

Missing feedback is a common cause of system malfunction. Adding or rerouting information can be a powerful intervention, usually easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical structure.

                                  Donella Meadows, "Places to Intervene in a System"

Real total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric informational media -- under cold conditions, and constantly.

                                  Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

A new form of politics is emerging and in ways we haven't yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything.

                                  Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.

                                   Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

                                   Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

(Wikileaks defends itself against litigation)  by using every trick in the book that multinational companies use to route money through tax havens, Instead we route information.

                                   Julian Assange

Jill From Tuesday Night

I'm getting more confidant, and minding clumsinesses like the hands in the bottom study less. The humanoid smudge is a fifteen-minute blind contour, using the same pen as the other drawing on the page.

Discovered with Patrica at Drawing Group that we both have spent time following the instructions of Kimon Niccolaides' The Natural Way to Draw, she more than I, and with a student of Niccolaides, and at the Art Students' League.

I rediscovered Marshall McLuhan a few weeks ago, and thinking about media as environments and massages has been really juicy. It's been a no-brainer (snicker) to sort of map McLuhan onto more recent brain research: f'rinstance, Germans got volunteers to learn to juggle, and found that they started making new brain tissue. We're tripping across similar info frequently these days. So that's how the massage works. Anything you do is a skill, including understanding a television commercial.

Now I need to map that onto ecology, limits to growth, sexual liberty, etc., etcetera being Teilhard's and Soleri's notion that we will take conscious, somatic control of evolution.

Sidearms At Wounded Knee

Stony says art shouldn’t tell you things; a work of art should invite you to consider something.

The Balinese have a saying, sayeth McLuhan: We have no art; we do everything as well as we can. Lovelock says life optimizes conditions for life, and he shows how life on Earth affects various planetary material cycles. I train my own nervous system, and I train my environment the way I think will optimize conditions for human growth.

Artistic Observation, Representation, And Narrative

Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) is the presumed inventor of scientific perspective, around 1425. Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) invented (European) movable type around 1450.

Marshall McLuhan connected print technology and perspective in art. He seems to have believed that perspective derives from print, but their order of appearance -- a generation apart -- would have them merely coincidental, or deriving from third source. McLuhan wrote:

The Renaissance Legacy.

The Vanishing Point=Self Effacement.
The Detached Observer.
No Involvement!

The viewer of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience. A piazza for everything, and everything in its piazza.

The instantaneous world of electric  informational media  involves all of us, all at once. No detachment of frame is possible.

The first example is a modern child's drawing, taken from Betty Edward's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The drawing tells us what the artist thinks we need to know: People have a cap of hair, eyelashes, pairs of arms and legs; clothes have edges, and houses have doors and windows; smoke comes out of chimneys; there is a man in the moon. There's a narrative, given the unusual circumstance of a child's being outdoors alone at night, or of the moon's being visible by day (not an unusual event, but something a seven year-old might have only just noticed). Things are sized hierarchically. (This drawing is by an unusual child, or an adult, given the signature, written in confident, non-standard cursive.)

The second example is an etching by Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer. Durer, using scientific perspective, is illustrating a gadget for drawing objects in a cold-blooded way. McLuhan would have said the picture also illustrated his point.

The third example is a portrait of Ambrose Vollard by Pablo Picasso, done in 1910. The artist and his subject would have known electric lights, telegraphs, telephones, phonograph records, and cinema, but not radio. The artist has deconstructed Vollard's image, and put it back together, in a cloud of impressions, forming something new. We get to share various moments of perception, recalled or invented by Picasso.

The fourth example is a page from Saul Steinberg's The Passport, published in 1954.  This may be one drawing, or it may be two, fortuitously combined for the book. In any case, we have a narrative, as we did with the child's drawing: These are men sleeping on a night flight, not noticing as their airplane passes over a desert town.

Aphorisms

There's freedom of the press if you own one.

                                                                                Somebody

Teilhard said that we were gonna take conscious and somatic control of evolution; he didn't say it would be this tough.

                                                                                Me

The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. You must talk to the media, not to the programmer. To talk to the programmer is like complaining to the hot dog vendor at a ball park about how badly your favorite team is playing.

                                                                               Marshall McLuhan