Hello everyone!

If you are subscribed to LessMad, or follow me on Twitter/X, then you already know that I’ve been ambushed by a rowdy and excited crowd of crypto-investors who made a crypto-coin out of my VibeKoder program.

I imagine that I’m straddling a few very different communities right now. I’ve had followers who enjoy my deep studies of McLuhan and histories of computing. I have other followers who like my journeys into mental health, healing, and sanity on LessMad.

And now I’ve got swarms of new followers who sense that I’ve got something of value and are spamming my twitter handle and trying to meme my coin all over Twitter.

I knew practically nothing about this world until a few days ago. I think that my posting about it has pissed off a lot of my old followers, …

In the December, 1957 issue of The Canadian Forum, McLuhan penned a piece titled The Subliminal Projection Project, (available to read here) wherein he intended, with his usual haughty aloofness, to deflate the post-war paranoia around subliminal messaging in ads and propaganda.

He belittles the popular fears about hidden messages in media by people who otherwise ignore the vast juggernauts of business and advertising who are “swiftly moving at present from an era when business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business.” That last line, adapted to present tense, later provides him the title of a book.

But in building his case, McLuhan makes some very surprising proclamations in reference to a very strange experiment.

In fact, the next stage beyond subliminal projection has already occurred in the providing of TV for the

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

In his critical essay James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, Marshall McLuhan makes reference (on page 38 of Interior Landscape) to a passage in critic Paul Valéry’s book Variety V (1945).

The quoted passage is on the nature of language as used by writers. Valéry calls for a reinvention of literary studies which makes use of ancient wisdom and pedagogy—the classical trivium; the figures of rhetoric in particular—to go beyond merely chronicling authors and their lives, and get scientific about language. Those who study today’s large language models will find Valéry’s observations premonitory of their own.

The following is a translation of the full passage (287-293 of Variété V) into English—undertaken, naturally, by a large language model.

The history of literature has greatly expanded in our time and now enjoys numerous academic posts. It is striking, by …

It’s here! Part two of my review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, covering not only the book itself but the predicted monumental policy changes which the book’s release has achieved.

Hosted on Katherine Dee’s Default Blog, which is definitely worth your subscription.…

Ratios

Let’s figure out just what analogy and metaphor meant for Marshall McLuhan. To begin, here’s an early summary of his conception spelled out for Modernist poet Ezra Pound. As Pound’s technique drew a great deal on his study of Mandarin, McLuhan frames his argument in terms familiar to his correspondent: that of the Chinese ideogram.

The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18^th century. The 18^th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy— the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A.

My recent dive into anthropology has taken its inevitable post-human turn with a book a friend gave me today, purchased from Book Bazaar here in Ottawa. It’s a collection of academic papers titled Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt and published in 1991.

It has inspired me to finally tell you what’s turning the frogs friggin’ gay. And, to be perfectly honest, I’m as pissed as Alex about it.

After the introduction by—of course it is, who else would it be?—novelist and founder of the cyberpunk genre William Gibson, the first paper by Canadian artist and cinema scholar David Tomas provides the perfect interpolation of Arnold van Gennep’s Rites of Passage into the realm of computer-created spaces, via the retrieval of Van Gennep’s theory by American Victor Turner.

If you don’t know what the hell I’m …

This website, Concerned Netizen, has received a major overhaul in the above-linked header pages. So if you’re wondering what the heck I’m doing here, you can find the full story (at least as best as I can figure it out) on the new About Me and Notable Media pages.

Almost like I’m preparing for something……

I’ve been doing my thing on this website since June of 2018, and doing it on ConcernedNetizen.com since February 2019. That’s nearly six years of blogging!

Some deep dives I’ve done in the past month into the nature of metamorphosis and transformation have pushed me into some deep introspection. And so, with much deliberation with my friends, I have made a decision to open up a bit more online, and have started a second blog over on Substack.

It’s called Less Mad.

Presenting myself to you here as the Concerned Netizen, I made this online persona something of a technology-buff as social commentator. From the peanut-gallery, I’ve been throwing in my two cents on the state of our messed-up relation to technology and trying to provide context from my own unique vantage point. Anyone reading can see that …

mot juste (n) the exactly right word or phrasing
—Merriam Webster

The most important benefit of reading and listening at length is to develop more felicity with using words. Ways of phrasing and thinking rub off on you with exposure to language as wielded by other people. More so than just acquiring new clichés and newly coined buzzwords, I’m thinking of all the ways which thoughts and perceptions can be ordered and built up and expressed so as to bring you, the reader or listener, into a new relation to the world and everything in it. We learn language every time we partake in it. The reward, in turn, is that one’s own speech and writing and thinking becomes enriched. Our thoughts and utterances become more nimble and nuanced and precise—or, just as importantly, direct and coarse and vague—as required.…