Category: Essay (Page 1 of 2)

Clinton's laptop running Claude Code, sitting on some boxes at his Beer Store job.

The Only Way Out Is Through

July 13, 2026 / Clinton / 0 Comments

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 effects of the present media landscape. And looking at what AI coding is doing today, I believe that we can make a few predictions based on historical patterns.

Why this is happening

You can now just write modern computer programs and websites by talking to AI through an old-school computer terminal. Like, it’s literally a teletype interface, from the time before graphics and computer mouses.

That’s because the most powerful and useful coding programs are text-based terminal programs, …

Marshall McLuhan: The First Second-Order Cybernetician

November 14, 2025 / Clinton / 1 Comment

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 fine book on The Process of Education, ever asked himself why there has come the sudden acceptance of the “structural” approach in all fields today. Am I really asking him whether he had any structural awareness of the new relevance of the structural approach? Had he also asked himself the causes and origins of the nonstructural approach to life and learning which had dominated the Western world in recent centuries? Since American institutions

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A plane of core memory. In other words, a very, very old RAM module with a magnetic ring to hold one bit.

Information isn’t a Substance and Ideas are not Viruses

March 21, 2024 / Clinton / 1 Comment

Look at that image above. Every ring on this “memory plane,” or RAM module, would represent one computer bit. Do those rings look like abstract 1s or 0s to you?

One reason I’ve released my 14,000 word post Cheating at Peekaboo against a Bad Faith Adversary is to put our socially constructed perceptions of “information” in its place. Especially its fluid nature; we hear everyday that information “flows” and “spreads” around our mediated environment.

This makes intuitive sense at the basic level of how gossip gets around, or how events or ideas come to everyone’s attention all at once when broadcast and widely discussed. However, at risk of being thought of as a guy who always just states the obvious, there are a few mantras I’d wish I could convince everyone to repeat to themselves daily:

Information does not have

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Clinton, the author, outside the Media Lab on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cheating at Peekaboo against a Bad-Faith Adversary

March 19, 2024 / Clinton / 4 Comments

What follows is a short book detailing the mechanisms by which computers have thwarted our sense of reality and children’s sense of embodiment, with receipts. The narrative centers Terry A. Davis, creator of TempleOS, as self-reporting on the effects of cyberspace on children; cyberspace as designed and implemented in order to sell computers to adults.

Peekaboo! ICQ!

Peekaboo is a game we play with infants in order for them to learn what child psychologist Jean Piaget termed object permanence.

A world composed of permanent objects constitutes not only a spatial universe but also a world obeying the principle of causality in the form of relationships between things, and regulated in time, without continuous annihilations or resurrections. Hence it is a universe both stable and external, relatively distinct from the internal world and one in which the subject places himself

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A pile of books by Sherry Turkle. Her 1995 book Life on the Screen lays on top of the rest.

The Benefit of Hindsight in Turkle’s Life on the Screen

March 19, 2024 / Clinton / 0 Comments

I had to make a visit to the doctor’s clinic yesterday, interrupting my writing for this website. In order to not lose much time, I grabbed a book I hadn’t yet opened, but knew would be of benefit to what I was working on: Sherry Turkle’s 1995 book Life on the Screen. I had picked it up in Boston last years while attending the Free Software Foundations annual convention, LibrePlanet 2023. Now, from having read the opening chapters, I get the unfortunate impression that to the author—at least in 1995—, I may as well have been attending a Microsoft Appreciation convention.

Of course, working with the benefit of 29 years hind-sight, I have Dr. Turkle at an extreme disadvantage. I’ve found all of her books to be absolutely invaluable as sociological histories. Further, I will personally attest that her …

A dial-up modem from 1982, the Hayes Smartmodem. A small black box with blinking lights on the front.

Modems and Codecs—The Human-Scale Stack

March 18, 2024 / Clinton / 0 Comments

It is not enough to understand computers to understand their proportions and scales. We only know that they are very complex and very fast. But they have been very complex and very fast for about half-a-century now, and it seems culture has all but given up on retaining any sense of scope for computers relative to human experience or meaning. They no longer exist within our subjective universe.

Full-stack media ecology is not just an explanation of what goes on between the top and the bottom of the computer stack; that is, between the high-level, easy-to-use interfaces and the bare metal and silicon. It’s about building the historical context for the development and growth of the stack upward and downwards, as a narrative about our lived environment, culture, and who and what we are as humans. We are embodied beings, …

LOGOS: McLuhan Among the Gnostics III

March 10, 2023 / Clinton / 0 Comments

Welcome to the third installment of Logos! I’m creating this series to fundraise for my upcoming trip to Boston, to aid the fight for our collective freedom at LibrePlanet 2023. Many thanks go out to Duncan, Leon, Gia, and Dmitriy. With their help, I’ve got a place to stay for the trip. More on that later. Last week, I promised you an installment on Embodiment. Well, 3000 words later, I’m not there yet! You’ll have to forgive my following the flow of how, it seems, the story here must proceed.

Part Three: Prufrock

In the last instalment of LOGOS, we considered Wyndham Lewis’ merger of the Time School with the approach of the Space School. Lewis, like the anthropologists from which so much of his work derived, immersed himself in society without becoming part of it. All the better to …

Tear it Down and Start Over

September 13, 2022 / Clinton / 0 Comments

Seymour Papert and Alan Kay, two foundational giants in the world of personal computer interface design in the ‘70s and ‘80s, appeared before the American congress in 1995. Specifically, they were witnesses testifying to the House Committee on ‘Technology in Education.’

They are both huge critics of the way computer education had been rolled out in schools. As an elementary school student in the ‘90s, and a product of the system they’re critiquing, I find this entire chapter in the story of microcomputers extremely enlightening for reasons of personal understanding. Kay says that dropping a Mac (let’s say) in every classroom is like dropping a piano in every classroom. Imagine that. Every classroom in the school gets their own piano, and then every teacher—none of whom, we can assume, are musicians—are given two-week long “piano” classes in September. And then …

Some vecuum tubes, also known as "electron valves." The grid inside uses a small current sent through a third wire to adjust the flow of a much stronger one between the first two.

McLuhan’s Synthesis—Part Three

July 16, 2022 / Clinton / 0 Comments

I began studying McLuhan heavily in 2017. Since I had no formal education—or even cursory introduction—to many of the subjects and fields he draws upon in his works, I had no sieve for separating his own idiosyncrasies from the mainstreams of thought within and against which he plays.

The larger part of the past five years, beyond reading and absorbing McLuhan’s primary texts has been, then, to also catch up on what everyone else has taught and learned regarding media, literary criticism, and so-called post-modernity.

That’s because reading McLuhan carefully is to read a guy who was always nitpicking whatever larger, impersonal current of thought everyone around him was being swept up in. Before the early ‘50s, he was always fighting to go against the flow.

In an unpublished polemic he wrote against public intellectual Syndey Hook in the …

McLuhan’s Synthesis—Part Two

April 13, 2022 / Clinton / 0 Comments

The Nashe Thesis

I have been setting up to make the case that a) a sense of proportion is lacking from our perception of the material world, both natural and artificial, and that b) Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) gives us the fastest and easiest way to restoring that proportional sensibility via the slow and difficult study of his work—studies I’ve been diligently undertaking since 2017.

To make my point, I must begin by hyping the first “book” he wrote, one which virtually nobody outside the circles of Media Ecology has read.

I suspect that Marshall McLuhan’s doctoral thesis for the University of Cambridge, The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time is the most audacious and erudite historical overview of philosophy and intellectual history ever written. It’s nothing less than a total synthesis of everything in …