> Marshall McLuhan, who warned us that ‘the medium is the message’. (Technology is not just a tool, embedded within it is a message.)<p>Unless this is an extraordinarily obtuse way of expressing it, that's not what McLuhan wrote. He meant that the medium itself shapes us.<p><pre><code> For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. [...] it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. [...] Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium. It is only today that industries have become aware of the various kinds of business in which they are engaged. [0]
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[0] <a href="https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf</a>
It’s strange to me that this guy keeps popping up when he’s had maybe one actually successful book (_The Burnout Society_) in twenty years. I’ve read _The Disappearance of Rituals_ and _Shanzai_ and found them both “shallow, smoothed and filtered.” There’s not a lot of secondary literature building on his work, just another book of his popped out every couple years.<p>> If I’ve learnt anything from Han it’s that we don’t need perfection, smooth lines and filters, to feel complete. We need the authenticity that comes from the negative, the imperfect, the hidden and the simply beautiful. Instead of falling in love with ourselves, we should be falling in love with others and the world, not to see ourselves in them, not to commodify them, not to achieve friendship or marriage or love, but to appreciate what makes them different and other.<p>This is a perplexing turn to me because _The Disappearance of Rituals_ is, in large part, about how authenticity is The Problem With Society and we’ve all lost our ability to submerge our individuality in ritual-bound communities, each one homogenous in some respect (the ritual itself, at least).
I really enjoyed The Burnout Society, read it about two months ago and plan to read some more.<p>The "positive power" idea that you can do anything always struck me as funny but I didn't have good words to explain it until I ran into his work. Less disciplinarian punishment, more implicit and internally-driven self-punishment for failing to live up to the "can."<p>There is a pretty good relevant episode of the podcast Philosophize This (#179).
Is it just me or does pessimist philosophy just immediately scream "I don't actually base my understanding in reality?"<p>Like I understand that the world is pretty depressing right now, but the underlying assumption here is that our actions/beliefs inherently have a particular (bad) output, and yet there doesn't seem to be much analysis of the mechanics of how our actions/beliefs actually manifest as this output, let alone a proof of how this output is the only possible output in all scenarios (or just the most likely one.) Criticism like this relies on the reader to already agree for the outset, which means it doesn't really have much value.<p>>Starting with love, Byung-Chul Han tells us that today we’re in a crisis of love. This crisis is caused by the growth of narcissism and the separation between us and the other. The world is increasingly appearing, not as something ‘other’ to us, but as an innumerable number of reflections of ourselves.<p>But like... what does any of this actually mean on a mechanical level? These are all buzzwords that don't have any practical meaning.<p>>Why do we today find what is smooth beautiful? Beyond its aesthetic effect, it reflects a general social imperative. It embodies today’s society of positivity. What is smooth does not injure. Nor does it offer any resistance. It is looking for Like. The smooth object deletes it’s Against. Any form of negativity is removed.<p>What mechanism proves that the abstract concept of "positivity" is the problem here rather than, say, political propaganda from a dominant power structure that uses a ton of energy/effort reinforcing these particular beliefs?<p>I just don't find this stuff meaningful