Asynchronous Simultaneity

vs synchronic instantaneity

Preamble

Okay, let's kick this thing off. So this is the April lecture in the Fundamental Problems and Core Concepts here at Theory Underground. What's up, everybody?

A couple of days ago, I tried to do this lecture with nobody present, and it felt too weird. I still really appreciate to have people present. And so we've got Sam, Spencer, and Ann here. The goal was to do this specifically with the programming crew at TU. I did not extend the invitation to the people who are on the payroll, who are full-time students right now, because this is finals week. And at the end of the day, they're in it for a very basic set of tasks, as opposed to the TU programming crew, which is currently in its gestial form. It's like baby, baby crew…

Asynchronous Simultaneity

I don't want to make people feel like they have to be here, which is a great sort of segue into the theme here, which is when to really be a part of a community. Like when should you feel the need to show up? And should you ever when it's something like what we're doing?

Because there's this part of me that wants to say no one should ever feel the need to show up for anything going on here. Because Theory Underground is trying to tailor its content towards workers with earbuds. And workers with earbuds have a lot of different kinds of contexts that they're in and schedules, modes of life that make it so it's really hard to be somewhere in a routine way on a Zoom call. Right. Not only that, but if we're doing something on a Sunday, we've got people who go to church. So there's a lot of different reasons why a person might not attend something if it's live. And at the same time, that could start to feel like you're missing out. Right. And it could start to feel like there's this superegoic pressure to go. I don't like that either.

I don't like that at all.

So that's one of the things that we've been experimenting with and that I kind of want to navigate out of. I want it to be less superegoic. And at the same time, we're thinking about changes to the website and the priorities of things with the website. And so there's a lot of features. Every feature costs money, time, energy, effort. It requires real people doing things.

I think that there is a very utopian version of myself 10 years ago before I knew anything about programming that was like, why don't we have this? Why don't we have that? You know, everything seems like it could be fixed so easily. And it's like, well, because every single thing that you don't like or that could be better on the Internet requires paying a team of people to make it happen. Or if it's open-source or volunteer based, that's coming from somebody's precious time and energy.

So what I want to do later is talk about the features and we'll do that as a discussion with the programmers. But right now it's the fundamental problems and core concepts. And so the fundamental problem that I want to start out with is humans.

Humans Suck

So, humans suck.

Also, we love them, and we want to defend the human, and we want to build the conditions of possibility for the human to exist. So we want to go from humans suck to humans rock, right? That's what we want. We want to go from humans suck to humans rock. And of course, it'll always be both.

But part of the whole thing with critical media theory, CMT, especially over the last couple of years, is thinking about not the technology's effects on us, but the medium's effects on us — our possibilities for organizing and living the Good Life.

Now, the technology for the medium today includes:

• Cables underneath the ocean.

• Satellites up in space.

• Server farms spread across the Earth like Voldemort’s horcruxes.

That's the technological apparatus. But the medium is the part that mediates for consciousness, right? It mediates for your sensory apparatus, your central nervous system, right? And so Marshall McLuhan and Lewis Mumford are the OG media theorists who think about this, right? And of course, the go-to saying is the medium is the message, which is to say form, in a sort of way, matters more than content, or form selects for certain kinds of content.

And if the form, which is to say the medium, is our environment or shapes our environment and our relations to it, then in a way, we are the content of that form, how it molds us and our behavior, right?

A CMT Speed Run

I'm going to be very crass and skip over a lot. For people like Sam, who are very new here, I just want to say, you know—and I don't know how new you might be at Theory Underground, maybe you have heard me say this before, but it's worth reiterating.

It goes like this: If we're going to say that the medium is the message, okay? (Draws it on the whiteboard) And we'll have a speech bubble coming from the medium (draws the speech bubble).

And I'll start out with, you know, for Marshall McLuhan, to give you an example of what he's getting at, he thinks the Gutenberg Revolution, and with it, going to the printing press, and then the telegraph, the newspaper—that this laid the conditions for nationalism, right? One of the things people often will say is that Marxism underestimated nationalism in the 20th century. And it was easy to underestimate it because it was such a new thing, right? They were fish in water. It was easy to not take it too seriously because it hadn't really calcified into the sort of monstrous sort of reality that it became in the 20th century.

So nation-states became a really big deal. And of course, someone like Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin [not said at the time but retroactively I want to add of course this also includes liberals like Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Winston Churchill), all of whom became realists about the nation and about its efficacy, the efficacy of organizing on that basis, as opposed to an international basis, right?

It became easy to focus on this sort of nationalism idea—the mythos. But Marshall McLuhan will say that's because it starts with the newspaper, because everyone was reading the newspaper. This was something that comes from that. And I think that this is something that that book, Imagined Communities, with as well [post-lecture fact-check in footnotes].¹

OK, but for Marshall McLuhan, he's looking beyond that, right? At the point that he's intervening, we're beyond just radio. The medium has evolved to television. And so what he thinks is that we're entering a post-literate age. He's been pretty much proven correct on that, right? So we're moving towards a post-literate age. Of course, people can read stop signs and a how-to manual if they need to. But for the most part, we are beyond the time when regular working people were reading the King James Bible and Pilgrim's Progress.

And Marx was able to write in the way that he wrote in newspapers, which is something that Spencer Leonard was talking about when we were all at the bar after the Platypus Convention. He was talking about how workers used to read Marx's writing in the newspaper. They'd read it on the shop floor, right? And everyone's listening to it while it's being read. So workers with the earbuds, you know, there is a precedent. This was already happening in a sort of sense, right? Which is exciting. And we'll come back to that theme in a little bit.

But Marshall McLuhan thought that the medium with TV in particular was going to lead to a post-literate age where people are less desensitized. More united, less desensitized. And so we're talking about the global village he thought we were entering (draws it inside the speech bubble on the whiteboard), an era of the global village.

So I have to say something really quick about his theory of why he thought it was that we were going to be less desensitized. I'll use a real easy example. You don't have to understand anything about politics, history, economics, just war theory, philosophy, sociology, nothing; you don't need to have any understanding in any of these fields to see videos of babies being blown to bits or parents holding them crying on your phone and react strongly. Right.

Like so Hannah, the lone flag woman who came and talked to us on the steps of the Capitol, she makes sense in this sort of way that Marshall McLuhan is thinking.² Also, he's thinking about the age of television, right? This is when Vietnam is being shown and it's sensational. It's on TV. And it makes some people, enough people to turn out in numbers, come out for anti-war protests, right? It was a big deal. And that wouldn't have been possible and it wouldn't have happened the same way had it not been for the medium collapsing space and time and giving people this sort of direct voyeuristic sort of access to what was going on on the ground in the war. So this unites us.

But the desensitization part, what he's thinking about is how every medium enhances one sense or a couple of senses while numbing other senses. And so bookish people, you know, we have certain senses heightened while other senses are being numbed, which means that the ratio of our sensory apparatus is off kilter from primitive people who just live in the world and are living in a less mediated way.

Now, of course, we can use Kant's categories or the dogmatic image of thought in Deleuze to probelmatize the idea of unmediated perception.³ We could always critique this idea of an unmediated sense perception. Husserl would be good for that as well. Of course, everything's always mediated by the categories of the mind, by the dogmatic image of thought, by something like intentionality. We reflect on things. There's all of this other stuff between the things themselves and our direct apprehension of those things. But obviously, also, human beings, insofar as human beings exist, say, in the jungle or out in the Midwest of the United States a thousand years ago, it's unmediated in the sense of elaborate and new technological devices that are going to heighten certain senses while numbing other ones. So that's what McLuhan is getting at.

And what he's saying is that bookish people are desensitized in the way that you're able to read the newspaper and it's telling you about something terrible that's going on or some kind of a decision that has to be made, right? It becomes easy for someone like Winston Churchill to sit there and read about people in India and then write about how he considers them to be cockroaches, right? The distance and the numbing, it makes it easy to be in this sort of analytic frame of mind.

And if you watched the sensational Joe Rogan episode that happened recently, which I only saw the first hour of because it's the part that everyone talks about, where the guy who's a big defender of Israel, Douglas Murray, is on with that guy named Josh, who's a podcaster who is just into history, right? He's a comedian, but he also likes to do stuff related to history. Well, I mean, I don't want to open a can of worms here, but did you guys see this? (Some nodding and shaking heads) Well, a lot of people won't have known anything about it because a lot of you are diligently avoiding everything viral, right? Great job.

But this was particularly sensational because Douglas Murray has been this huge advocate for Israel. He thinks the biggest problem in the world right now is anti-Semitism. He's not really worried about Palestine, right? And he comes on to talk to this guy, Joe, and just out the door starts talking about how the podcasters keep talking about things that they're not experts on. And Joe, why don't you bring experts on who really know about what's going on, people who've really been there? And then this guy, he keeps kind of referring to the other person he's supposed to be sort of in dialogue with as like, who's this guy? Why is this guy here? Why should I even take him seriously? He's not an expert. And that guy's like, what, I'm not allowed to talk about it? Right? And he's like, have you been there? Douglas Murray's like, have you been there? And then, of course, everyone goes crazy because this is a podcast. And then Douglas Murray's like, have you been there? And then of course, everyone goes crazy because this is a podcast. so he's coming on to basically say the podcast is irrelevant, or at least the job of the podcast should be to platform experts. And of course, there's all kinds of reasons why people will think that's ridiculous. Though in some cases, maybe he has a point. Okay, so that's the whole sensational thing.

Well, Piers Morgan, who's even more sensational, of course, brings back on that Josh guy and then some other guy who's going to defend Israel right now. And then kind of eggs them both on, gets them going. And so this is where I'm like, okay.

The way that this ties in with McLuhan and how desensitized he thinks bookish people are is that in the case of Douglas Murray making appeals to experts, or in the case of this legal expert that Piers Morgan brings on to talk to the guy who's anti-war and just super against what's going on, Israel against Palestine right now, is that Josh, like Hannah, the flag woman who came to us on the Capitol steps and filibustered our event. Josh is just not only devastated, but also morally offended and put off by the idea that he should have to understand some kind of a theory to make sense of this. He's like, I don't care if you're saying that it's legal. I don't care if you're saying that it's justified by just war theory. It's wrong. We can see that it's wrong.

That's what Marshall McLuhan is getting at, is that once you remove the kind of education and literacy that built up Western civilization, once you kind of remove it, it becomes a little harder to justify certain things. Because now the images and the sounds allow this sort of instant feeling reaction, right? You're not reading about it. You're seeing it. Okay, but what happened?

Though it's true that we are in a post-literate world and that, as Neil Postman will also then go on to argue, we've pretty much replaced thoughtful opinions with feelings—feelings usually associated with images, whether those be brands or babies with their heads blown off—that is the fact. We have more or less gone there. We're obviously not in the global village. And that will be something that Neil Postman and Jean Baudrillard are both very clear about, right? We're not in a global village. In fact, we're completely fractured.

We're completely fractured.

This brings in the whole thesis of the PCFM, post-class fractured mass, right? Okay, we're not able to get on the same wavelength anymore. There's not a zeitgeist of the nation, right? The closest thing we've ever come to a zeitgeist of the nation would have been everyone being down in the dumps and anxious about COVID, right? Like you could kind of feel it in the air, but also there were plenty of people living their lives without any reference to that, more or less. [It’s worth adding that COVID did not unify but divided in a way that is both figurative and literal: Social distancing, with a lot of politicized blocking of friends and family.]

Okay, so we're not in the global village. Marshall McLuhan was thinking that this sort of post-literate, more emotional, communal, global village effect was going to be the message of television, the underlying subtext that would change our environment and therefore change us. But he wasn't a utopian. He was thinking we would have to develop our media literacy and actively harness the changes in technology. And obviously we did not do that. The people who've harnessed it are not doing it for any such purposes, right? And so we can always talk about the political economic reasons for why that's happening. And of course we should. And McLuhan never goes far enough. He's not critical enough, right?

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