 Hello and welcome everyone. This is Active Inference guest stream 69.1 on February 6th, 2024. Really looking forward to this session and conversation with Andrew McLuhan. We will be hearing about Marshall McLuhan and Project 69. So it's an incredibly auspicious numerological coincidence. And I look forward to hearing about what you're gonna share right now, Andrew. So thank you very much to you. Thank you. Yeah, well, I noticed that the stream was 69.1 or whatever. So I thought, well, I guess I know what I'm going to talk about. You know, actually numbers numerology is important in McLuhan work. Maybe not in the full blown mystical sense of it, although that too sometimes. But the number 69 comes up a few times in a very vanilla kind of way. Well, Marshall loved the number three for a few reasons. The Trivium was a pet subject of his grammar rhetoric dialectic. There was his PhD work on the Trivium, for example. Also the Holy Trinity, you know, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. And the McLuhan's lived in Toronto for the longest time at number three, which would park, which seemed auspicious to them, I'm sure. You know, 69.3 is a root of 69, of course. Marshall McLuhan was 69 years old when he died, amazingly enough. He wasn't that old, according, you know, people tend to live longer than that. I often wonder if he'd lived five more years, you know, even five more years, where would his work have taken him? What direction? I think about this a lot when people say, well, what would Marshall McLuhan say about this? Or if Marshall McLuhan was here today, what would he say? And even on my own, when I'm, you know, when I have a topic I'm thinking about researching or writing, I ask myself, you know, what would Marshall say about this? And the answer is, we have no way of knowing because he only died at the age. He wasn't 70 years old when he died. He could have had a lot more time to develop his work. At the time of his death, he'd already developed his work a lot further than what most people know about, you know, his whole work with the laws of media with my father. If he'd had another five or 10 years, how much further would he develop that work? And what would he say about today with that in mind? You know, if he'd lived another decade, he would have actually seen the early internet. He died in 1980. I think about these things, but, you know, number 69 brings to mind to me Project 69, which was a grant awarded by the NAEB, the National Association of Educational Broadcasters from Washington, DC, to Marshall McLuhan in order to undergo a study in understanding new media. This was in 1958. Marshall received this important grant, foundational grant for him. The first major grant he received with his friend, Ted Carpenter, was in the early 1950s from the Ford Foundation. And that started off a culture and communication seminar. They undertook, which was an early interdisciplinary study of communication, which turned into for Marshall and others, the birth of media studies, not simply communication studies, the enlarging of this category from simple communication to media, to all human innovation and its effects. The second very important grant was this NAEB grant, which gave Marshall the resources to undergo serious study of technology and media. And the results of his studies for the next two years, 58 to 60, would really underpin and inform the rest of his work for the next two decades almost. This is when Marshall came up with this formulation, the medium is the message among other things. It's when Marshall received this grant, which was for essentially to create a high school curriculum for understanding media. Marshall said about doing that, and he delivered it in what's called the report on the project in understanding new media, which he delivered to the NAEB in 1960. This report didn't really go anywhere within the NAEB. It didn't become the United States or Canada's high school curriculum for understanding media, although it would be amazing if it had. It kind of fell flat. I think, like a lot of McClones work, people didn't know what to do with it, right? Laws of media, which maybe we'll talk about as well, was an outgrowth of this whole process. And again, people didn't know what to do with. In fact, nobody would publish it up until my father managed to convince somebody in 1988, eight years after Marshall died. But what Marshall did was he took this report, and he spent the next four years, 1960 to 1964, revising it, chopping it down, taking it apart, putting it back together, rewriting and rewriting, basically condensing it down into poetry. And it was published in 1964 as understanding media, the extensions of man. So this was Marshall taking, and it's fascinating to look at the report that he delivered in 1960, because stylistically, it's so much different. He would almost think it's completely different material, but it's not. It's the book through McGraw Hill is basically just another version, as if you were to make a film from a book, this is making a book from a report in many senses. And so in making a popular book from the report, he did some interesting things. For one thing, there's a narrative structure at work in the book, understanding media. It opens up with, after 3,000 years of print dominance essentially, you know, it's a shock to find it that the medium is the message. The book is essentially rests on top of the story of the change between eras from the alphabet mechanistic era to the electric era, which we're currently still writing out. I feel like to me, I put it like this, if the alphabet, the ultimate extension of the alphabet was the technique of fragmentation, coming to a peak with the industrial age in the late 19th, early 20th century. Perhaps right now, we are at a similar extension of the technique of electricity with digitization and AI. It feels like an apt comparison. And it would be interesting to rewrite this narrative, rewrite this book of tools and information on the top of that narrative, rather than the switch from mechanistic to electrical, but from electrical to digitized to AI, which I think is more of a transition in outgrowth than a straight up flip of eras. But, you know, the one enduring interest of Marshall was in, as he said, understanding the processes in which we are involved. He was, this was his preoccupation with media and structure and form over content, meaning, which again, is an interesting tension in paradox because he was an English teacher and he was very, very interested in content. He loved content, you know, he loved poetry. That was his thing, poetry and literature, his specialty. Media studies was a side hustle that he kind of fell into and kind of overtook everything else. But his interests in both subjects were the same. He was interested in structure and effect. That was his interest in poetry and literature, which grew out of his work at Cambridge University, studying under people like Levis, F.R. Levis and I.A. Richards, who founded Practical Criticism. You know, McLuhan work is essentially Practical Criticism applied to technology and culture over simply literature and poetry. So this was McLuhan's enduring interest, structure and effect, the effect of structure and form rather than simply meaning and effect of content. You know, that's more toward media literacy and propaganda studies, which again, are important, but they're, and they're related, obviously, but they're separate categories. You know, our interests tend to be more toward structure and form rather than content, which isn't to say, again, that content is meaningless or ineffective, because obviously it is. But, you know, the main point of understanding media is that the main effects in reshaping people individually and people culturally and societally comes less from the content or uses to which technologies are put and more from the structure of the technologies itself as they reshape us and reshape our environment, which then reshape us again and again. So that's my opening gambit, I guess. Awesome. What a gambit. For those who are watching live, let's grab some questions, use a live stream, mediatic affordance. There's just many places to jump in. Where would you like to start? Well, for one thing, I wanna know what's happening with the pyramid triangle set up behind you there. Good question. I use a lot of tetrahedra to symbolize bucky-folder synergetics and the different first principle, the different starting point in synergetics, as opposed to kind of the water we swim in today is rather than starting with a three-dimensional X, Y, Z, cube, starting with a tetrahedron. Four events, the minimum enclosed system kind of comes up again in active inference with the four-fold particular partition. And so it just reminds me that space is not necessarily cubic and that even our space and time projection is heavily in feedback with the angles that we see. So I look forward, I see a 90-degree angle and I can imagine space is cubic, but then I can look back and see that it doesn't have to be that way. Okay, can you back up a second and talk a little bit more about active inference and the four-fold what now? Yes, so to the four-foldness of active inference, one of the key developments of active inference, though it's in the tradition of cybernetics and ecological psychology, is heavily resting upon a particular partition. And so it's a little bit of a pun because it's that specific particular way to partition agents from the environment. And then also what it individuates is called the particle. And so the first cleaving is the environment from the agent. So the external states from the particle and then the particle itself, there's a three-foldness, which is the incoming sensory information, the internal cognitive states, and then the outgoing action dependencies. And so the incoming sensory states and outgoing action states, that defines like the blanket or the interface. So the particle sometimes is described as the interface plus the internals or to zoom in on the blanket or the interface, there's the incoming aspect of the interface, the sense, and then there's the outgoing dependencies on the blanket, which is the action. And then everything that happens behind the black box, that's the cognitive internal states. Okay, that's interesting. It's not unrelated to something I've been working on for quite a while, which is a McLuhan model of communication or of media, which does not exist, really. When you look up models of communication, McLuhan isn't in the conversation, which is interesting. And I felt that was a significant gap. And that's led me to, I've been toying with this for a year or so anyway. What against, for example, the Shannon Weaver model of communication, where you have the source and then the message to be shipped somewhere and then received. The McLuhan model is a bit deeper than that. Marshall says that Shannon Weaver is a model of transportation, moving information from one place to another. And his is a model of transformation or what happens along the way. And at the end, how we are changed. Again, effect, right? So how, I've got it over there on a board and I look at this Weaver model and think how to include McLuhan's ideas, notions about technology and its effects into a model, what does a transformation model look like graphically? And it's a little bit related to what you were talking about with particular partition. But the main area of focus is on the senses. So the impact of information or data or stimulus, stimuli on our senses because the way you hear people talk about it, it's as if these senses are static things and they're not or they're passive things and they're not. The data, the information is, color is received but the way it's received has everything to do with the nature of the senses receiving it. And the senses don't simply, it's not like a straw, right? That you suck liquid through because it's very much transformed and we are transformed reciprocally, right? There's a reciprocal thing that happens. The other thing which needs to be taken into account is that when we talk about the senses, when we think about the senses, we need to think about them individually but we also need to think about them collectively because our senses, our bodily senses, our interior senses, they all exist in a balance, in a ratio among themselves. We speak of the sensorium as one thing and that again is not a static thing, it's a dynamic thing. To change, to affect one sense is to affect all the senses by either numbing them or activating and when you alter a sense, you alter all the other senses because you alter the relationship among them. If you go, well, if you even close your eyes, when you're trying to hear something really closely, you close your eyes and kind of point your ear toward it, right? Because you wanna cut off the visual faculty which is dominating things and you wanna focus all your energy toward that sense. When people go blind, they almost universally talk about how their other senses perk up. That's because your senses react and they pick up the slack and they change you. Fundamentally, mechanically as to who you are but also how you identify, how you see yourselves, how others see you, right? For example, if I were a blind person, your background there would have no significance for me or for you, right? Like you would probably be sitting in front of blank walls. Maybe white, maybe not, who knows, who cares, right? They have zero meaning. But that little assembly behind you is a reflection and an impactful and necessary reflection of your identity. You know, I went through a house fire when I was a teenager and it was an awful thing but just to get everything I owned burned up in it including all my clothing. And you don't realize how much of our identity especially as a kid is wrapped up in your wardrobe, right? I had to go out shopping. I went to the local Walmart and bought a couple outfits of things and I'm wearing it and I don't feel like me. I'm somebody else. You know, little changes like this have big effects on an individual level, right? So when you mess with your senses, when you rearrange their balance you change who you are individually. You put those individuals together and you have a society, a culture, you know? It changes in your senses affect you individually and affect you culturally. This is very much the underpinning of McLuhan work where the medium is the message is because it's not the content that messes with your senses. The content is the delivery mechanism paradoxically for the changes introduced by the medium, you know? And it's in this sense that the content isn't relevant. It doesn't really matter so much if we're talking about this or if we're talking about beehives or tetrahedrons or whatever else, you know? The content is just what's keeping us occupied while these forces are in action and shaping us. So, you know, as it says in understanding media I love how Marshall paraphrases so many different people in that book. But T.S. Eliot, he paraphrased when he said that content is the juicy piece of meat used by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. And that's what he's talking about, you know? The content is what keeps us busy and unaware while this rearrangement is happening quite between beneath our notice, you know? As he said, also everybody experiences far more than they understand. Amazing. I'll make a few points and then ask some questions from live chat. So, sense also has a broad scope in active inference because sense is just used to cover all inbound dependencies. So that could include sensory, sense is changing within a lifetime, differential accessibility, or just different ways of modeling inputs of system. So, sense is super broad on the incoming sense making side. Action is all outgoing dependencies, all the kinds of behaviors that emit from a system. So that's why the theory of the interface and conditioning on the interface and the boundary or the blanket, that that's such a key move that allows the conditioning upon particularity. And then also like given that kind of multimodal sense, technology, objects come in bundles, the smell and the mass and the look and the sound, they do all co-occur in the product and in the material reality of media. And then even if that weren't the case, like somehow bizarrely, attention would still have its own dynamics. So, so much of the brunt of the receipts of information, rather than falling into this payload, content, deliverable, packet, envelope, like it's kind of this naive, like, well, the meaning is right there on the pages, right there in the book. And then it's like being like, well, yes, once you've zeroed out the fact that it's a letter, you can abstract the information and talk about it, maybe in a more general or de-materialized or however it's seen, but the primacy, which is so glaring is our sensory perception and active perception with the isocade, the blind spot, the low resolution vision in the periphery, these features that belie the generative nature of our experience period. And we know that there's frequencies that we don't pick up like radio, and then radio appears and all of a sudden that changes our sensory environment. So this is a very fun exercise to see how many of these concordances, which were observed and intuited and worked after in the McLuhan tradition, how many of these, because they're grounded in like qualitative and prima facie aspects of experience, their applicability is like higher than a computer science paper from 1975, which isn't to say that it wasn't super informative for moving the field forward to 1976, but then like the shelf life dropped and the older things that took longer in terms of the change to understand, they start to like punch way above their weight and also it's cool to connect all the dots in conversation. Yeah, I mean, a large part of the reason why Marshall McLuhan's work remains vital and important in our time is because he examines media as a category and talks about media in general and not simply different media in particular. If all his work was just studying television, then obviously I wouldn't have much to say about today. But this book, Understanding Media, for example, is if you look at it, it's two parts. Part one is seven chapters and part two is 26 chapters coming again to new numbers in numerology and not accidental. Marshall favored the Trivium, but we have what classical education was modeled on the seven liberal arts. So that's the Trivium of writing, sorry, of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. And it's the quadrivium of astronomy, math, music, and I always forget one of them anyway. I consider, I think about part one of Understanding Media as McLuhan's seven liberal arts, seven liberal arts of media because what it is is each of those chapters is a different perspective, a different way of looking at any technology, any human innovation, not just communications media, but if you look at part two, the chapters go from speech to clothing to housing to cars to television. It's human innovation, it's not just communication, it's technology, it's anything that we do to increase the abilities we're born with, essentially. And that's what Marshall is studying. So each of those first seven chapters, and you'll get a lot from the book if you look at it this way, each of those chapters is one perspective or method or way of looking at technologies. Part two is taking these seven principles from part one and applying them on particular technologies and putting that in action. That's why this book is so great and it's perennial and never green because it's a guidebook, not simply situated in technology up to 1964, but useful today. It's wild that I've read the book several times, I've led two groups of students through it from cover to cover word by word in a process that's 36, two or three hour classes. And every time I lead people through that book, it's as if the book was written today to talk about what's happening today because it was, it's wild. Awesome. And a side plot is Bucky Fuller and Marshall knowing each other and Bucky saying that he was 50 years on time and what was 50 years ago from now, all these very fun topics. I'm gonna ask some questions in the live chat and we'll just continue and see where it goes. Okay. Sure. Upcycle Club writes, so cool. I have a question for Andrew. Can you share any interesting anecdotes or stories about your grandfather and his work that may not be widely known? I mean, like what, you have to be a little more specific. That's a... Okay. We'll get a follow up from Upcycle Club. Next question. The intuitive artist writes, how is context, contextuality, recontextualization understood within the model? Yeah. So that's a great question. Contextuality. It's tricky talking about media and looking at McLuhan in media. You know, it's a very good question to ask, well, what does he mean by media? Or what is it a medium? It's tricky because, you know, like a lot of human, a lot of English, the English language and other languages, a single word can have several meanings, right? The word medium is no different because medium can be used to talk about an instrument, like a specific medium, like the pen, or it can be used as a, right? It can be used as a word to talk about, like a growing medium, a culture, an environment. And it's interesting to me that understanding media comes, keep in mind, again, that understanding media is published in 1964, but the source material was written in 1958 to 1960 and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten until it was published in 64. But as that art comes along, one of the very, very important pieces in the McLuhan Canon is a work published in, at the end of 1965 are written. It's dated November, 1965, called The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment. This is a very, very important piece, and a lot of it has to do with the senses. It says, we have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle this sensory thresholds in the name of haphazard information. I love this line. This is one of my favorite lines. We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle the sensory ratios in the name of haphazard innovation. He's talking about inventors in technology companies, people who create these new tools, who essentially are creating devices which juggle our sensory thresholds, the tolerances of our senses, the individual quality of each sense, where they peak, how much they're used, the ratio among them, that every new technology when it is used essentially affects those senses, re-jiggles, re-wires, remodels them, affects them individually and collectively and creates at the end a particular balance of the senses. The new technologies that come along juggle these sensory thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation. So like we design a technology to be able to make phone calls as we're out and about or listen to music on the go or whatever other objective or aim we have. But the effect is always much different than the objective, right? The side effects always end up adding up to more than the main effects or the intended effects. The intended effects are one thing, the actual effects are another. And so he calls it haphazard innovation because we don't actually plan for most of what the effects are. However, I think, you know, I'm drifting a little bit away from the context question, but not really. Marshall's object sometimes expressed in this term media ecology was to take more control over these effects because he said, you know, there's absolutely no inevitability as long as there's a willingness to comprehend the situation, to pay attention. The thing is, you know, the environments, any environment is a very dynamic, active, large, complicated place. And as I said before, everybody experiences so much more than they understand. There's so much, I mean, in your own body, there's so much happening right now that's quite beneath your level of awareness. Your breathing, the blood flowing through your body, oxygenization, you know, the hair follicles, whatever you might have left at this point growing, your senses dulling or, you know, growing sharper. All these things are happening quite underneath your notice if you think about your body as an environment, but think about a larger environment which only gets more complex, you know. But we don't generally think about the larger environment or ecosystem when we design things. We tend to have a very, very narrow focus. Although it was Marshall's contention that we didn't need to be, you know, there doesn't need to be any ignorance in these matters once we understand that there's anything that we're not paying attention to, right? So his idea of taking control of technology had a lot to do with a kind of environmentalism and environmental activism more than, you know, the silly stuff that happens in Congress and whatever else where they argue about censorship and people's rights and all this stuff, which, well, anyway, that's another subject, isn't it? Well, just one short comment on that and then I'll ask a question from the live chat. Media, if we say something like mainstream media, it's kind of like, oh yeah, it's a newspaper or it's the internet or the TV, but it's this kind of whatever it is. Whereas in the art world, media or in the scientific laboratory culture, media is the growth medium. And so it's the medium of creation and that allies it essentially only entirely with ecological psychology. And it's more of a secondary connection or a secondary use that it's applied to what we call the media in terms of communications, apparatuses by multiple names. Yeah, you know, I mentioned anti-environment and that's, it's not a term that you hear. You can, Marshall McLuhan was essentially, as he defined it, an anti-environmentalist, although I never heard him use it quite that way. An anti-environment is essentially any device or situation that helps you apprehend an environment. Okay, so it's like putting dye in the water in order to follow the flow of a stream or underground current, right? That's an anti-environment. Marshall categorized artists as anti-environments because they're people or the court jester who's there to point out things that people are missing as uncomfortable as they might be. And it's generally uncomfortable. This is actually, people don't generally think about it this way, but Marshall McLuhan had an object. He had an intent, a mission that he was undertaking and that that intention was to wake people up to the things happening around them in the name of haphazard innovation, to understand that technology, the content level, the understanding, the meaning level is just the very, very tip of the iceberg in terms of what we do when we mediate. Yes, yet another sense of media to mediate and intermediate. All right, I'll read a comment and then a question from the chat. So Dean writes, sensory attenuation, so the suppressing of attention would seem to play an important role in an effects-based approach to understanding media. And here's a question from Chris Bennett who wrote, how does the move to AR, VR, compared to the move from printed media to radio? That's a good question. You know, this term AR, augmented reality makes me laugh a little bit because any technology augments reality. To alter our perception is to alter our reality for all intents and purposes. But the move, say it again, the move from print to radio and the move. The current move implied to AR, VR, big if compared to the move from printed media to radio. Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting. Another one of the tools from understanding media, the second chapter, which confuses a lot of people is media hot and cool, hot and cool media. And these are relative terms, you know, they think about the temperature of the water, is it hot, is it cold? They're relative terms, right, compared to one another. What's hot compared to one thing might be cold compared to another thing, right, very relative terms. But the way Marshall used them for examining, if not understanding media or technology is, again, it comes down to the senses. And it's a bit of another equation which runs a little bit like this, that the more information, the quality of the information that is how rich it is in intensity coming at you or complete or incomplete has a proportionate response from you. So if you're given a lot of information, like in a photograph, for example, a photograph is very rich visually, very full of information, a high definition, it doesn't require a lot from you to make sense, so to speak, right, to get something from it. A cartoon, in contrast, is very low in definition, very low in information compared to a photograph, for example. In a cartoon, you have usually a very simple representation of something and a narrative sequence that there's a lot happening between frames that you kind of fill in. It requires a lot from you in order to make something of it to complete. This is what Marshall is talking about when he talks about participation. Oftentimes it's not so much active participation, but sensory participation, like in film, right? In film, traditional film that is, what you have actually is a sequence of still images that speed up enough in order to trick the eye into seeing movement, in sequential movement, in natural flowing movement, which actually isn't there. It's a rapid sequence of still images. You're involved to a very deep extent in keeping up this illusion and making sense of the thing, making it work, versus video, which has a completely different character. So one way to look at the nature of any given technology is to analyze it in terms of its definition and the image or information proffered to know what kind of effect it has in return. And it's the demand that it makes and what that means in return. So from print to radio, while you're dealing with very different sensory spaces for one thing, the print which involves the eye and occupies the eye and radio, which involves is very much lower in information, obviously lower in visual information. It keeps your mind busy making pictures and stuff in a different way than the visual does. AR and VR are very, very rich. If hot is high definition, these are very, very hot things. They don't leave much for you to do, but sit and stare, right? It's interesting the reactions people are having to Apple Vision Pro. It's almost a religious experience. It's so rich. It's interesting to me that the way that screens operate with the light coming through, one of our first technologies using the light through principle were stained glass windows, as if we almost intuitively understood how deeply religious in effect and experience it has. Yes. Well, the curiosity, what's on the other side of the blanket, what's on the other side of the veil, what's on the other side of the interface, like it's kind of the unknowable, but that's where the mind imagines. And then to return to your earlier point about like the impact of information, so there's the syntax of data just in a digital setting. It's like, is it a 1080p video? Is it 4K? Is it 8K? Is it 360 video? So all these kind of brandings and resolution differences. That's definitely part of the experience. And then there's the semantics and there might be a super high resolution photo with one object. There might be a low resolution photo of many objects. And then it comes up through the recipient dependent unpacking all the way on through like narrative consequences. So there could be a high resolution photo and someone could flip through vacation photos very rapidly and take in a gigabyte of data. And then some pixels of a stick figure could be very shocking for them and have this total influence. And so that's part of the multifaceted challenge of talking about like information and communication and media understanding that it is kind of all last miles. And yet the challenge and the task is to make those kinds of timeless artifacts that are of pragmatic and epistemic value in future moments. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting to me that generative AI is typically used to make quote unquote photorealistic images experiences because not just still images but now video and stuff as well. Whereas there seems to be a parallel, this 8-bit, 16-bit, you know, GIF, CryptoPunk, CryptoStuff is at the complete opposite end of that spectrum because that's very, very, very low definition. I've yet to see anybody using mid-journey or whatever else to produce low definition experiences. They seem to be geared toward very, very high definition experiences that I don't know what it means. It's just an interesting observation to me. Yeah, one interesting part with the writing and with the images is partially through training and so on on people's approval. It generates hyper salient or hypernormative types of content relative to what it's trained upon. Of course, this is a topic we can go into but it's just always so overblown and intense like a movie poster but always taken to the nth degree rather than the kind of looking like it's from the 1990s like very normal photorealism that has still more of a real flavor than the hypernormal and all of these kinds of things. Okay, Upcycle Club is back with specification. I will try to make my question more explicit. Smiley face, do you have a story to share about your grandfather's interest in the Fisher-Spasky chess match and how he related it to his media theory? If you could summarize that if you know about it, that would be fine. I don't. You know, I have very few first-person anecdotes to share about Marshall because I was a baby when he died. I was, you know, two years old. I was born in the summer of 78 and he died in the winter of 80. So, you know, I was not quite two years old but sorry, I was two and a half years old. The interesting thing to me is it's really wild to see pictures of him holding me as a kid. I was just starting to talk, you know, I was making noises and he had had a major stroke the previous year, the fall of 1979 and he couldn't talk. He could only just kind of babble and make noises and I was, I've been told that we had great conversations with each other that nobody outside of us could understand. Whether we understood each other or simply enjoyed each other, I don't know. I wish I could remember maybe there's some kind of regressive hypnotherapy that could surface some things, I don't know. I don't think I need to go there. I think I can enjoy the knowledge that it happened and you know, that we were able to enjoy each other's presence like that. You know, when people know about that time of his life, that he lived the last 18 or so months of his life unable to communicate in the manner in which he was accustomed. And listen, the manner to which he was accustomed was he had such an active mind and he worked it out in dialogue mostly orally, you know, speaking to himself to others, to whoever happened to be around whether they wanted to hear it or not. To have that suddenly cut off a lot of people talk about the irony or the tragedy that this guy could no longer do that. And I think certainly at first it would have been a shock and horrible to only be able to make yourself understood through gestures and very basic things like that to not be able to express the thoughts that you're having maybe not to be able to have the thoughts that you're used to having much less write them down or speak them. Certainly a kind of torture at times. However, I think there's a lot of relief in there too that not being able to provide that function not being able to do that frees you from having to do it. I see pictures from that time a visit that he made to Ted Carpenter on Long Island playing around in the ocean with Ted Carpenter and the biggest smile on his face the biggest smiles. You've never seen somebody so happy. There's a freedom there a great freedom and when robbed or relieved depending on how you want to look at it of the ability and the necessity to communicate deeply if you want to get any enjoyment out of life you have to find it where you can and I like to think that myself, my sisters there was a cousin or two around at that point I know where I find my pleasures I have two young kids and a wife and our relationship just being with each other is so fulfilling and I think for the first time maybe in his life certainly in a long time he was able to enjoy the simpler things communing with his family communing with his God I would imagine a lot of prayer and that kind of experience would happen in those circumstances sometimes our biggest challenges are our biggest opportunities thank you for sharing that that was very special and you said he was robbed or relieved essentially at this partial removal from the oral discourse community of which he wrote and spoke so much about and to have the crossover point on the rising sun and the setting sun in the language and that and then even how much do those special events need to be dissected or what does dissection do when the media ecosystem rolls forward and doesn't dissect the fermentation of the past but thank you and Upcycle Club says thank you as well you're welcome Upcycle Club where would you like to take it or what's a question or a thought or I can read something else from the live chat yeah go ahead what's the live chat okay Richard writes McLuhan called the age of movable type as fragmented and the electronic age as global but it seems the situation is the opposite a small number of books were common to all literates but electronic media is targeted to each consumer differently Mojo writes good to view them in the light of Markov blankets and how they maintain themselves through perturbations and social movements and this is something that like we've explored a lot in active inference and the social sciences is well what does a formalism do for the social and how do we approach and tackle and address the social in all of its complexities and what does going into that forest formalism or toolkit do is the formalism or the toolkit in account oh yeah the social group no worries just generative model and then what dusted off and walk away so how do we see the formalism as the beginning of an investigation in inquiry rather than how it's sometimes positioned in like a disciplinary or learning environment that the framework of the abstraction is the terminus of the inquiry and bend the attention back to addressing specific systems I've never, I'm not familiar with was Markov blanket yes it's a topic in active it's on a base graph when there's some variables that insulate other variables so like earlier talking about the senses the incoming dependencies and the action as the outgoing dependencies another exactly equivalent way to say that is the external states only influence the internal states through sense and the internal states only influence the external states through action another way to say that is no telepathy no telekinesis just at a first pass but there's an interface that is insulating the cognitive states and the affective in the bodily is insulated off from just coarsely let's just say the video studio and what they're broadcasting it's moving through a medium and then there's the semantic unpacking and if something was shown but you weren't paying attention to it then it was as good as not there versus if something was seen that wasn't there in the mind of the broadcaster that's kind of a non sequitur because that's what is happening yeah interesting of course again there's that quote that we experience far much more than we understand you don't have to understand anything about effects to register and be affected by things others I wondered when Barry would show up this cat honestly I was giving a guest lecture last night for an NYU class and this cat is literally sitting back here going meow meow meow meow the whole time I'm like trying to gather my thoughts and this cat is like heckling me well played Barry damn yeah again you know environments and anti environments but there's this funny exchange it's on the internet of course on YouTube Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan and W.H. Auden on a panel together debating television discussing debating television and one of my favorite lines from that is you know Auden is a playwright guy he's very anti-television and he's like you know a television I wouldn't dream of having a television Marshall says well you merely suffer the consequences without enjoying any of the benefits and a point there is that you don't need to have a television you don't need to watch television to be affected by the television as a medium as you know something which is running our society same with smartphones you might not have a smartphone but you live in a society that runs on the smartphone so it's interesting what Marshall is saying here because he's almost saying well you know you might as well have it and get some benefits some use some enjoyment of the thing if you're going to be affected by it anyway right but he's being kind of tongue-in-cheek about that but still the point remains and you know it's the nature of an environment is that there's little escape we have only the crudest ways of maintaining an environment a technological environment one way is to do what some Amish or Hutterite communities do which is they impose technology hard technological limits you know it's like they basically freeze technology at the level to which because it's interesting they they understand even if it's unconsciously that to introduce these different technologies would destroy their culture they're not wrong they're quite right about it and the only thing we can do at this point is to protect our environment from it right walling off a community it's you know the crudest it's crude but effective you know a much more sophisticated way to do it would be well what is it about this technology that would interrupt what we value from our community and then to design the technology accordingly like but that requires a really really deep understanding of the instrument and again it really comes down to sensory things because you know generally cultures protectionist cultures like this are trying to protect specific parts of their culture and that's a very very difficult things to do in the face of change isn't it Barry but it is you know it may be it may be crude but effective it's one thing you know I live I've got two kids as I mentioned they're six and eight years old and well they're just about to turn sorry eight and ten years old which is crazy but sorry seven and nine how old are my kids again geez time what is time but it's very it's very difficult to be a parent today especially when you understand as I do how important technology is in shaping who your kids are becoming as people as wild I see and again parenting I think is the toughest gig do you have any kids Daniel not yet okay parenting is a toughest gig and I have so much respect from other parents because it's difficult and you know I don't want to judge anybody and tell people that they're doing it right or wrong it's the context situations are different but you know I see I also know too much you know I understand what happens cognitively and sensorally when you're exposed to different technologies I know that the society the person brought up around literature in the environment of literature versus the person brought up in an environment absence of literature and rich in technology like screens televisions smartphones etc are tend to produce very different results your brain your senses are wired in particular pathways that set you up for life which isn't to say they don't change because they do you know our senses our brains these things are plastic they're elastic to a certain extent but they're set up in the first couple of years of life so you know Marshall at one point is it an understanding media is out loud about people developing the habits of literacy after being raised on television and wondering if this isn't not a great way to go around it if the process should be perhaps reversed the difficulty is the barrier to entry you know so I see a kid in a baby carriage isn't old enough to walk on their own without falling over and the parent hands them a smart phone or a tablet and iPad whatever and the kid pokes at it and is off to the races can do a lot of things versus drop this into a kid's lap in the baby carriage and what's it going to do it's going to eat it that's about all it can do is chew on it years and years and years in order to open this into to make this these pages these letters whatever do anything for you you know not even any any pictures unless the kids a fan of you know concrete poetry or something at the age of one or two it's not going to get very far it's so you know these things versus each other it's obvious which one is going to win right this is and this sets up the kid in a certain way versus versus this but I get it parenting is a tough gig and God I just want some peace and quiet sometimes myself you know and it's easy to give a kid a device and they keep themselves happy for hours and hours and hours in fact the average American citizen at 8 and 18 now consumes eight and a half hours of non of screen time every day for non educational purposes is the statistic so this doesn't count the screen time for school or for educational purposes and that right there tells you so much about the lack of understanding on the part of government agencies because they make a distinction between educational and educational as if it's a distinction that makes a difference when it comes down to the sensory neurological psychological sensory cultural identity effects of technologies these things do not occur on the level of opinions concepts or content at all and every time we get a new statistic that says something like that it shows how little our understanding has come and how far we have to go if we're ever going to make any headway and take any control over our technological lives and the direction of culture which is an easy thing to say from the side of the screen thank you that's very powerful and it just makes me think about how the the payload content the meaning is inside of the envelope perspective leads to these ideological distinctions and lines and shifting in the sand and all this but that's kind of like an adult literary discussion like well here's a quote where this word was used this way but while that debate was happening or discussion or whatever the baseball diamond in the sports field have been transformed with screens such that basically no matter where in a downtown area or like even in restaurants or on train even things that when I was younger were not seen so where's the discussion around that and part of it is hindered by just like you described like that kind of affordance at hand and the kind of low activation energy so the concept that it's a personal choice would be understood in terms of personal choice and constraint too and just how that whole semantics discussion like is on a separate concept of media than what is happening moment to moment for like 8.5 or 18.5 hours per day with complete permanent consequences on everything yeah it's wild understanding as I do these things I try to spend as little time on the screen as I can but it's still a lot of time whenever I'm able to I read something off the page rather than the screen I've got you know 6,000 books here for example and my ideal is to try and balance right like spend as much time reading as I do on screens and it's impossible it's a daily battle that I'm losing big time you know emails and correspondences and things like this and I'd rather have this conversation in person but this is the reality of things and you know what this reality of things also means I can do a lot that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do because I'm talking to you here from a 19th century barn in rural southern Ontario from here because of my internet access I'm able to lead courses on understanding media that have 20, 30 students from around the world joining me for a couple hours a week for 36 weeks simply because of this fact, this circumstance, this medium this environment of services and disservices and for all the disservices it makes things possible that would otherwise not be because if I were to hold this class here I don't think I'd get a student you know I don't think I'd get a single person come certainly not enough to make it make sense and this is why I think about it I think about it like like New York City, New York City is my ideal because you know anything is possible there with 8 million people at your doorstep essentially you can open up a small shop that caters to Buckminster Fuller dome building kits and probably make a living out of 8 million people a community can coalesce that can assemble, can find each other, can exist and support the internet brings 8 billion people potentially to my barn it means I can connect in the same way that New York City can and try to make a modest living out of what I do so as much as that's the thing that makes technology work is the affordance is the things that makes possible and we just have to deal with the fallout and with the things that it makes impossible the things that it one environment sustains certain things and not others we talk a big game about the senses and media ecology and being more intentional about design but it is essentially theoretical because I'm not building hardware or software or anything else although I am talking to people who are and that's why I'm trying to reach people who are designing the technologies that are going to be creating the environments of tomorrow this I think our greatest area of opportunity and it's actually why I remain very hopeful because again mixed blessings but it's never been easier the barriers keep dropping away the technological change happens so quickly now because such powerful tools are at our fingertips even 30 years ago you didn't have the access to supercomputers shared time and stuff relatively affordable things access to information, computing power building things now is easier for younger people to do this is where I think there's hope because it's easier for younger people to follow their dreams and their ideals younger people want to do I think everybody, a lot of people want to do the right thing but it's easier for younger people to actually do the right thing because they have less to lose here I am approaching middle age or whatever, I have kids I have a mortgage, bills to pay I got to do what I got to do but a teenager people in their young 20s and startups developing technologies, they don't have a house they don't have kids, they have fewer responsibilities fewer fears, they can follow their hearts and their dreams and now with the access to tools and services and computing power and things and financing particularly they don't have to take they don't have to make hard decisions that other people used to have to do they don't have to take money from one place there's another place to take money from funding and this gives me hope because as I said I think they're more likely because they're in a better position maybe to make harder choices that are maybe easier for them sorry that's a very fuzzy and convoluted way of trying to express what I'm trying to express but I hope it comes through thank you well as we sort of land the plane where and how are you going to continue your work and also I would love to hear a little bit about the consequences or implications for education and for online for example technical online education and all these different things like that yeah I mean I'm going to keep on keeping on pretty much I've got you know what I'm trying to do here is preserve the work and the way of work that my grandfather started back in the 40s and 50s that my father jumped in and kept going from the 60s through the 80s and 90s in early thousands and I've been left with a lot of stuff in physical form and a lot of begun projects and half finished things so my role which I take on with absolute delight is to preserve that and make it available for today and tomorrow how I do that I'm still figuring out you know I'm independent you know the McLuhan Institute is essentially me it's not a registered business I'm not affiliated with any business or other institution I don't get any government or private funding really I've got a Patreon page go ahead and join that if you want I've got a sub-stack which you can subscribe to the McLuhan newsletter I sell stuff through my bookshop and what not and basically the money that I make teaching giving speeches consulting I pour back into here ideally I would spend less time doing the exterior stuff and more time in here doing the work that I think is more valuable and important but means to an end and it is what it is right now the future you know I don't think people for a long time I don't think people have gone to school to really get an education to learn important things going to school has more been about you know because that's why universities were begun is centralized knowledge to make it available for people but as many people have pointed out there's more information available outside the university than in it at this point and that's been true for a century or more so going to school is more about socialization networking status credentials that kind of thing when people want to learn things that they're passionate about they go generally I'm speaking very broadly they have many other different ways to do it I've been very fortunate to be able to offer classes courses and stuff for like I said people from around the world students to retired professors to professionals across industries and I think that is increasingly the future is this self directed learning it's interesting that it's happening it facilitated more and more from businesses people are encouraged to continue learning to build their skill set to follow their interests to develop and grow because change happens so fast you want people that are growing not specialists and kind of dead people we all need to keep growing and expanding because this environment and the things within it keep growing and expanding to stand still to die essentially so I'm going to keep on doing that following my own nose and interests doing my best to translate and interpret and make available bridging generations as I can and I'm really glad to have all you along with me and together for this ride amazing I resonate with a lot of that so thank you for the work and to our colleague who introduced us and to the live chat for many great topics and questions and let's stay in touch and maybe 69.2 and then you know there I say 69.3 when the time is right awesome good to talk to you take care everybody thank you Andrew peace