This morning Douglas Rushkoff released a short piece which fit so naturally into the course of my writing here that I felt compelled to offer a friendly response. Doug observes the present political moment as struggle-against-collapse of the old, legacy order of hierarchical systems of power. This order is standing in the way of younger generations ready to instantiate a fairer world—using magick.
To the rescue come not just smart people, but weird ones. Resilient ones who can metabolize radical change. People capable of imagining and creating new approaches to engineering reality. This used to be the province of the counterculture — but magick has always had a darker, more power-obsessed side as well. For every Wiccan healer there were always a few salesmen reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich or Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, which applied the influence and self-hypnosis elements of magic to the acquisition of power and wealth. Donald Trump himself attended the sermons of Norman Vincent Peale as a child in church. He preached that we can think and speak things into reality.
Well, we can all play at that game. When reality becomes unhinged, it is up to good people everywhere to learn the techniques required to navigate it and bend the landscape to our collective will. It’s not about which old guy is the right guy to take the torch and lead us forward. It’s about forging the communities of solidarity and collective action required for us all to move forward together. We must seize the tools for this co-creation.
There is something very useful in this formulation of magick in light of the role the romantic visionary poet and artist William Blake played in Marshall McLuhan’s media ecology. There are several layers of superficial, semantic opposition we will have to cut through to see the common ground between Rushkoff’s occult formulation of what McLuhan always saw as artistic.
Let’s see if I can take the Magickal line of inquiry in a constructive direction.
The Limits of Marxist Abstraction
I’ve read enough analysis of technology through a Marxist lens to understand the basic “origin story” of abstraction in that school of thought. More or less, Marxists point to money and the legalistic parsing-up of the world into properties and commodities for private purchase and ownership as the primary culprits.
Once corporate charters allowed certain business monopoly rights, backed by military force, there became these massive abstract entities called corporations which could create a pipeline of primary to secondary to tertiary industry. These industries (of resource extraction, processing and manufacture, and retail and service, respectively) employed individuals whose labour was divided across the group, alienating them from work of their own hands. These workers would be paid in a currency they’d then use to purchase-back the commodities that they and those of their class made—always at a profit to those with the state-enforced monopoly.
I’ve no issue with recognizing all these subjects as abstract. Money and value systems and legal contracts are exemplary of abstraction, indeed. I just dont’ see these things as base to abstraction. And so I don’t see it as providing the logic necessary to explain abstraction today.
I’ve already addressed this (albeit too succinctly) in my long piece on the hijacking of the developmental processes of object permanence in children by high-level computer interfaces, Cheating at Peekaboo Against a Bad Faith Adversary:
The image of the hacker in McKenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifesto (as in paragraphs 17-20, and 74 and 75) is precisely wrong insofar as it posits that the hacker works toward ever-increasing levels of abstraction. Up may certainly be a direction one can hack, but not the only one. As I argued in the close to my speech to the Free Software Foundation at LibrePlanet 2023, the hacker today predominantly hacks down the layers of abstraction back to the material reality. In doing so, means to potentially bring culture back to ground are dug up. The hacker reveals what lays underneath once what is underneath is no longer something intrusive which we wish to hide; when it has become something which has been missing so long that it has become mysterious again.
This theme of hacking-down is one I recapitulated more fully yesterday, as a process McLuhan achieved by application of poetic interpretation of metaphor in four parts to the material world.
While researching the history of accounting for my 2023 LibrePlanet presentation, I found a clear line-of-sight through to the origin of the double-entry book-keeping.
The work of keeping separate, redundant accounts and then periodically “balancing the books” was a mechanical task of symbolic manipulation. It was, thus, a machine—or the machine upon-which our modern financial institutions were founded. From counting houses through to punch-cards—which predated electronic computers for several decades, you ought to know—to computerized banking today.
Big Wheels Keep Turning
A tool, McLuhan explains, is an extension of a part of our body or “nervous system” (i.e. mind or brain). A machine is an externalization of a human process. The process of consistent, rhythmic pedaling the treadle of a spinning jenny, sewing machine, or pottery wheel became externalized with the electric motor.
McLuhan, in Understanding Media, cites W.B. Yeats to demonstrate how abstraction created mechanism, by externalization of human process.
But poets like Blake were far ahead of Newton in their response to the challenge of the clock. Blake spoke of the need to be delivered “from single vision and Newton’s sleep,” knowing very well that Newton’s response to the challenge of the new mechanism was itself merely a mechanical repetition of the challenge. Blake saw Newton and Locke and other as hypnotized Narcissus types quite unable to meet the challenge of mechanism. W.B. Yeats gave the full Blakean version of Newton and Locke in a famous epigram:
Locke Sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning jenny
Out of his side.Yeats presents Locke, the philosopher of mechanical and lineal assocationism, as hypnotized by his own image. The “garden,” or unified consciousness, ended. Eighteenth-century man got an extension of himself in the form of the spinning machine that Yeats endows with its full sexual significance. Woman, herself, is thus seen as a technological extension of man’s being.
Blake’s counterstrategy for his age was to meet mechanism with organic myth. Today, deep in the electric age, organic myth is itself a simple and automatic response capable of mathematical formulation and expression, without any of the imaginative perception of Blake about it. Had he encountered the electric age, Blake would not have met its challenge with a mere repetition of electric form. For myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.
Before we deeper-examine this quote, let’s understand the dynamic here at work.
If we have some process, and we get a machine to do it instead of doing it ourselves by hand—say, having a calculator sum a few numbers, or count our calories, or present us as a few political pundits from the shoulder-up to work out some well-reasoned political opinions—then we have externalized a part of ourselves into a machine.
If we never learned to do the thing for ourselves; if we were born into a world where some inventor already created the machine, and the dynamics of the process were never mastered by us to begin with, then the situation is different. There is no reversion to the old way.
I can handwrite in a notebook whenever I’d like. But if I never went past basic printing in elementary school, I’d likely never write without a computer to type on or a phone to thumb at, or some voice-to-text software to dictate to. Handwriting a draft, handwriting a final draft, handwriting or typing-up a good copy takes time and is redundant—but it reveals writing as a process. The generation which invented easy word-processing alleviated itself of much of the burden of that process. And their children’s children will never learn that process as a matter which takes place entirely within their own hands.
Heart and Mind
Five years ago, I made a very good video, with transcript, on the two major books of architectural historian Siegfried Giedion. During World War II, Giedion was driven to explore the rift between the heart and mind caused by the industrial revolution, and exhibited the complementary, twin pathologies of each without the other as exhibited in the material world. Heart without mind lead to lush, dream-like delusions of excessive ornament and sensuousness. Mind without heart led to austere and ugly aesthetics, and brutal, inhuman machines.
Heart, then, materially lifts away a dream-world of sensation from material reality—it’s pathology is to smother awareness in deep pillows and lush curtains, fake facades and grotesque indulgences of fantasy. It’s singular mode of abstraction is cyberspace. Mind, by contrast, is materialistic and ruthlessly calculating. It drives for efficiency and extraction and cares not for your feelings. It’s pathology is the abstraction decried by Marxists. Nota Bene the historical timing here: Marxism was developed during the apogee of the mind-over-heart world of industrialism.
Of Visionaries and Machines
In the quote above, we see McLuhan claim that Blake today would not be the Blake of his time. For the same reasons, nor should the Marxists. Blake had a “counterstrategy” of employing myth to work against the deadened world of all-mind, no heart. In our world of cyberspace and endless myth, where the mechanics of how the material world works are buried under endless simulation, McLuhan suggests the visionary Blake would operate from some different principle.
He doesn’t specify just what that principle is, but I believe that we can assume McLuhan was too busy demonstrating that principle in action to give it much explicit articulation.
That the spinning-wheel was taken from man’s side is Yeats’ way of describing the externalization of process into machine. This was not a novel observation—in fact this relation of humans to their creations was common knowledge at the time.
It seems to me that, when the “machine” which has usurped your “handicraft” is the size of a factory, it is a natural impulse to desire ownership of that factory by and for the workers.
On a personal level, that inclination toward control over one’s externalized processes into machine has shrunk to the personal. I champion Free Software over its imposter, the “open source movement,” because I want to control and own the box which has so much of my being within it.
This is what I was saying yesterday about McLuhan’s use of poetry and metaphor to go-down the stack back to the material world. This is what he learned from Siegfried Giedion, his friend and a contributor to McLuhan and Carpenter’s Explorations journal. If you want to understand what part of you was robbed from you, then you trace the evolution of all the things which were taken out of the original, ideal store-house of handicraft and human-scale process.
The pathology of consumerism today, I believe, is a twin process. On one hand, commerce has robbed you of an education of what you might do for yourself and your community by socially constructing a life of ease in ignorance and delegation. On the other, it makes you reliant on commerce to, at cost, perform these processes-you-never-had for you.
The good life is having everything done for you—so why learn how to do for one’s self? Why have home-ec class and learn to cook, when you’d probably just fuck it up? Just let Betty Crocker get the cake ready for you, or “skip the dishes” and have take-out delivered to your door! Why perform your own regular back-ups in case your hard drive fails—why not just pay the cloud to manage your data for you? Why fix your own car? Just take it back to the dealer—assuming you paid for the extended maintenance plan, etc.
It takes the poetical faculty of recognizing layers and layers of evolving analogy and metaphor beneath the endless rebrandings and reinventions of false “innovation” in marketing which sell the old thing as new. To get beneath the all-heart, no-mind of advertised dreams of luxury and ease and freedom from worry, without the brutal all-mind, no-heart recourse to violent and self-serving individualism in a ruthless world.
On Collective Solidarity
There is, I believe, a fatal omission in the call for solidarity between the young artists—or practitioners of reality-shaping magick—which neglects the education which would lead to mastery over the material and technical world. That is, I wonder if solidarity toward political ends is a holdover of the factory-sized means of production of the 19th century mechanical world.
Of course movements require the building of coalitions and groups which can rally together to achieve means. But if the specific goal is to over-come the alienation of living in fragments, then the electric age McLuhan discussed has brought that problem down to personal size. You own several supercomputers. And yet, unless you are a Free Software user, you have externalized and fragmented yourself into “apps” you don’t control, and which constantly betray you.
It is all too easy to classify my argument in purely political terms—since I’m arguing for individual autonomy over one’s own affairs, I’m speaking from a libertarian perspective. And that’s a dirty word in left-wing circles.
But what I’m suggesting is that maturity today entails overcoming learned helplessness which is induced by coercive marketing propaganda. Learned helplessness which enslaves you to commercial services and interests to perform for you what you could do for yourself. The libertarian archetype is someone who moves out to the woods to raise chickens and protect them with guns. Or who desires total deregulation, so-as to create a monopolistic, rent-extracting business empire. Neither lifestyle seems appealing to me—it’s a reaction against society as a whole. A romantic one on the first hand, and a Machiavellian one on the other.
But the idea of collective world-building coming from a younger generation who studies the magick of social construction and poetry before learning how to manage their own affairs and control their own individual private life seems immature. If one ceases to exist absent the constant, 24/7 company of specifically those who recognize you for being you, then you have not yet left one’s nest. If your budget and diet and health and mode of getting around one’s city is entirely externalized into your smartphone, and you would be lost in life without that phone, than I quite frankly don’t give a damn about your political beliefs—let alone hitching my fortunes to your organized collective.
Young people do not understand computers. Computers were made so easy to use in the 1980s, by the work of many artists who did understand them, that children could learn them through play. Piaget’s protege Seymour Papert brought us to the cusp of programming class replacing algebra class—and then the commercial software killed the computer-programming elementary-school student in the nest. What passes for computer programming today is entirely high-level and captured. It is a world of commodity software and playing in some tiny corner of some major corporations’ sand box—it’s not a world of owning your means of production.
I don’t care if your kid learned JavaScript or web development or python or even a systems language—they’re still totally enslaved to corporations if their art relies on them paying for all the major commercial software which continues to become more and more exploitative. Adobe charges for Photoshop and the rest by the month—and it wants to own your art too. Microsoft owns GitHub, and wants programmers to be an affinity group who see “open source” as good resumé padding—not to see computer owners as a group organized against the corporations who would steal back and monopolize the Promethean fire they unleashed in ‘70s and ‘80s.
The paternalistic good-shepherding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is no simple replacement for the radically-liberating empowerment offered by the Free Software Foundation—who would benefit from your monetary support today.
The continued insistence that people in tech, or who use computers regularly understand computers—can be called tech people, or tech whizzes—is the most vicious lie commercial marketing has yet concocted. Those who burden children with this praise are unqualified to give it. It underlies the impostor syndrome of an entire generation; the psychological effects will take generations to fix.
I do not see progress in the continued drive toward community building across groups whose common affinity is to be lost in a groundless world of myth and symbols and limitless self-recreation in Cyberia without the technical knowledge or life skills which adults growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s could take for granted. Skills like walking a city and finding one’s way to one’s destination by asking strangers for directions, or walking into a restaurant without checking its rating online, or being able to journal privately instead of spill one’s guts to the internet every day.
There will always be the hierarchy of adults and children—its the job of adults to develop children into new adults. And adulthood entails awareness of more than manipulation of symbols or music or media content or images. It entails having had a long developmental period—hopefully in childhood—of patiently developing habits of controlled relation to one’s habitat. Not just one’s social identity, but one’s embodied presence in one’s physical environment.
It’s the long boring slog of growing up—and by treating kids as little adults who can engage in magickal warfare, we’re robbing them of any power to do so effectively. What good is a spell cast on a medium you don’t even own, except to hypnotize your own allies?
Growing Up
The process of maturation, of psychological development in the Piagetian tradition, entails motions of merger and separation. These movements take the structure of rites of passage, as articulated by van Gennep. From a social-construction standpoint, they are movements into group identity and, then, into individuation, and then back into group identity. From a media ecology standpoint, they are movements of merger with ones extensions and environments, and then individuation of leaving one’s environment for anti-environments, where one must regrow and relearn what limbs and processes technology has amputated.
What makes occultism occult, McLuhan suggested, was the failure to understand right-hemisphere thinking—how it is that myth and symbol are made of metaphor, and how metaphor actually functions in a poetic sense.
What Siegfried Giedion gave McLuhan was a panoply of examples of how heart and mind, feeling and rational thought, have been rent and re-knit through successive ages of invention and art. How the individual and the collective have formed and reformed.
Magick today must entail a scientific understanding of our material world in order to be realistic and not utopian. The work of building community—at least any community I’m interested in joining—entails more than Blakean visions, but also the investigative prowess of the detective in piecing together the scattered fragments of the world’s material make-up—and the shards of our own splintered, reflected psyches.
Communities which seek to create magickal spaces of ritual which are outside of the mundane are, I believe, attempting to bring the frictionless, limitless world of cyberspace into manifest material reality. The real world is not cyberspace, however, and queer nature of living IRL as who one is online—i.e. who one is on the internet, or in private experience with fantasy fiction—is setting children up for unnecessary imbalance of being we today call queerness.
Most of the draw of conservative politics today is the recognition of the need for individuation and ability to resist the coercion of media magic. To escape lemming herd-identities which occasionally veer off a cliff—or are driven off a cliff malignantly for profit by large corporations. The processes for living in the mundane world are mundane, but essential. The body needs food; your bank account will need a growing savings account for many years to come; survival in the public sphere necessitates patience and social graces and tolerance for dissent.
Men in the kitchen too was the solution to women being in the kitchen—not the death of the kitchen for take-out and TV dinners. Or, worse, into a dream-space for concocting faux-restaurant culinary creations one fantasizes Gordan Ramsey praising. Chef Jean-Pierre is dominating YouTube because he’s undoing the magick of dramatic television kitchens, where everything is a competition and everything must be perfect. He’s hacking through the programming, to make being in the kitchen every day a little more fun. He’s robbing restaurants and gig-work delivery services of millions of dollars by teaching people how to cook at home as a daily chore.
This is the magick we need today. Not to create visions of dreams. But to make the material, mundane world one for taking back personal control. The sort of self-sufficiency that builds personal confidence. That lets you look strangers in the eye. That gives you the courage to take risks, or go outside one’s safety zone. To know that one grows up in microworlds like the kitchen, and the Commodore 64, and that the death of one’s old identity is the rebirth of someone new, ready for a bigger world.
I’m not impressed by magick which only occurs in carefully prepared environments, set up for such magick to occur, only on crowds selected for efficacy. Real magick takes place in the real world. It’d take place in conversations with people who are nothing like you, and happen in places you’ve never been before. It’s a charisma which transcends affinity groups. It takes not only owning ones queerness, but also there being so-much-more to one’s self that one’s queerness becomes a pocket ace. It takes one’s queerness in stride, not in pride.
When future generations consist of individuals who prove they can handle their personal, private affairs capably, only then will they be the adults who can partake in realistic group action. I really do think that progressive causes, if they re-frame their appreciation of abstraction into the relations of individuals and groups to the material world at large—rather than the legacy of economic regimes—could find a whole new frontier of ideas to revitalize their spell-book.
When the factory was the unit of physical production, it took the organization of workers to reclaim the processes which have been externalized from them. Marxist theory needs to catch up with the new terrain of overcoming the alienation they diagnosed.
So long as conservatives have the monopoly on the rhetoric concerning the individuation-half of development, the status quo will continue.