Who Will Be Programming the Programmers?
How Arlen Wilson’s criticism of Marshall McLuhan presaged our current digital maelstrom.
Arlen Wilson, the wife of writer Robert Anton Wilson, was someone I sought to shed some light on in my book Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. I provided never before read information about Arlen’s early life, and I tried to relate just how important a presence she was in Bob’s life without losing the spotlight off RAW. While writing the book, more than a few people commented to me just how brilliant a mind Arlen had and how she was the social engine of their dyad, or as her daughter referred to them, A&B. Arlen, of course, was a poet and that work circulates throughout the web, but still little is known of her social criticism.
In the late 1960s, Arlen wrote, alongside her husband at RogerSPARK where she contributed a number of articles ranging from the criticism below to pieces detailing the emerging Feminist activism happening in Chicago. In the following article, titled “McCLUHAN MISSES THE MESSAGE OF THE MEDIA,” Arlen provides a clear analysis of McLuhan’s technocratic dream expressed in his and Quentin Fiore’ War and Peace in the Global Village.
Prop’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Finnegans Wake is the main inspiration for McLuhan’s study of war: how it played out in history and how it will break out in the future. McLuhan borrowed a page, or more specifically ten Thunderwords! from James Joyce for this book. Before him, Joyce created ten thunderwords that he put in the Wake which are meant to mark the transition to another part of the story. McLuhan makes each portmanteau one hundred letters which is another obvious homage to Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake contains nine one hundred lettered portmanteau thunderwords and one final thunderword consisting of 101 letters. (This means something to Joyce scholars, who add the numbers of all of Joyce’s Thunderwords equaling 1,001 alluding to Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern Folk Tales and a hint that this book is about a critter named HCE whose deep asleep.) I digress. I can imagine that RAW and Arlen would be excited to read War and Peace in the Global Village because they were both such huge fans of Joyce. For instance, McLuhan wanted readers to phonetically break down each thunderword and speak it aloud just as Joyce asks his readers of Finnegans Wake do. McLuhan created his thunderwords to signify the societal changes that have occurred to humanity through our creation and use of technology.
Arlen provides a quick overview of the book, listing some of McLuhan’s major points. (Although she constantly misspells his name. One wonders how that glaring mistake could have made it through the RogerSPARK’s editorial process. However, it is easy to look past this grammatical faux pas because of her argument.) She makes mentions of one of McLuhan’s most important contributions, his description of what he called “rearview-mirrorism,” or the practice of basically projecting a past onto the present. We use our current technology to enact on things from the past, which are outdated and obsolete. Yet, humanity continues to do this. Arlen relates McLuhan’s main thesis nicely when she writes that with every major technological innovation and all the dislocation and disorientation it brings, a further upheaval occurs as people’s notion of identity begins to collapse. Once this happens, she writes, “We feel certain that we have a mandate for war. The old image must be recovered…at any cost”
Arlen makes note of the sociological effects of living in a mediated environment like this. Besides feeling dislocated, disjointed, and disoriented people also experience “hebephrenic euphoria and optimism.” Hebephrenic, of course, is a term mostly used to describe a type of schizophrenic state characterized by extremely disorganized thoughts.
The most interesting part of Arlen’s criticism is found in the final paragraph when she pushes back on some of McLuhan’s assumptions. She writes:
It would seem that some major human upheaval is necessary before the full power of electronics and cybernation can be used for the good of all. Social ownership of the means of communication rather than of production in the old sense is perhaps the more correct emphasis for today. As for the arrival of the millennium via computer, it boils down to: Who will be programming the programmers? And that, in the final analysis, is up to us.
McCLUHAN MISSES THE MESSAGE OF THE MEDIA
WAR AND PEACE IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE, by Marshall McCluhan and Quentin Fiore, Bantam Books, 1968.
Reviewed by Arlen Wilson
It is the premise of this book that the electronic communication network that dominates our lives today, from TV to computers, is giving birth somewhat violently to “a new age of tribal involvement”. The “tribe’, of course, is the whole human race. This neo-tribalism is already acting as a solvent on the old system of division between people and between peoples, much to the dismay of the powers that have always thrived on such divisions.
Whole cultures or subcultures can now communicate with one another by a type of “microscopic gesticulation” quite foreign to the older literate, linear, verbal forms. A student uprising in Tokyo communicates almost instantaneously with students at Berkeley, Columbia, and the Sorbonne. A new information matriz (should be matrix?) is gridling the globe, To which the young particularly are plugged in.
The very electronic technology created to serve the needs of the military-industrial complex is its ultimate undoing, according to the authors, and Baron von Frankenstein’s problems with his wayward brainchild pale by comparison. The old pattern of big, impersonal over-centralized rival power complexes with their lack of feedback is doomed. The “software” of electronic communication is far more relevant and powerful than the “hardware” of industrial output. The implications of this last statement his only gradually, but it happen, (happens?) friends — this is a wild book.
For McLuhan is a wild man, as everyone knows by now. From the publication In 1948 of “The Mechanical Breide” up through “The Gutenberg Galaxy”, “On Understanding Media”, “The Medium Is the Message”, and now “War and Peace”, he has been standing an increasing number of people on their ears and forcing them into a sometimes painful new orientation.
A couple of years ago he was lionized and became a kind of shibboleth on Madison Avenue and the daring of big slicks. At which point this reviewer, who had been a fan, got a bit bored. Any social critic so easily absorbed and adulated by the established structure couldn’t be all that ultimately critical.
But now it verily doth appear that the Establishment may well have bitten off more than is digestible. Professor McLuhan has no intention of being swallowed too easily by anyone, friend or foe. He often writes like a speed-freak talks, trying to tell everything to everybody in the next sixty seconds or bust, and the effect only makes sense with a slower playback. But make sense it does, on subsequent readings. To further enliven and complicate matters, he has adorned these pages with marginal quotes from Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” calculated to confuse or mildly infuriate the multitudes.
Tol return to his argument — which must be followed with some concentrated effort — we are already so steeped in this new electronic environment that we are very largely unaware of its profound effect on us. Inherent in this are some very real dangers. We know about as much about our new electric element as a fish knows about water — namely nothing, since we cannot imagine ourselves out of it.
Most current attempts to analyze world conditions partake of what he calls “rear-view mirrorism”. This is the “strange pattern by which people are always adjusted to the preceding environment much as the General Staff is always superbly prepared to fight the last war.”
Among such disorientations, the “rising tide of communism” is a case of mistaking a new environmental factor for an older piece of landscape. McCluhan points out that at the same time that television began to enter the American living room a strange kind of sleuthing was on the rise. “Typically, the FBI and the CIA were looking in the rear-view mirror for the revolutionary agents who were threatening the identity of the country.”
The chief revolutionary agent was, of course, television itself. But with every major technological innovation, whether considered as an extension or as an amputation of our physical faculties, there is consequent pain, dislocation, and disorientation for those who can’t groove with it, whose self-image is threatened and who no longer know quite who or what they are.
“When our identity is in danger, we feel certain that we have a mandate for war. The old image (of familiar and measurable potency) must be recovered at any cost.”
America’s self-image has been badly shaken up not only by the Soviet Union’s forging ahead, but by the prospect of America’s being outstripped by the “backward” nations.
“All the non-industrial areas like China, India, and Africa are speeding ahead by means of electric technology….These backward countries are tribal in the noblest sense of the term. That is, they have never had a Nineteenth Century; they have entered the Twentieth Century with their family and kinship systems and closely integral patterns of associations still intact. That is to say they are far more ‘communist’ than Russia but perhaps no more ‘communist’ than our own teenagers are likely to become. To be surrounded by rapidly developing countries whose patterns of culture are widely divergent from our own has certainly upset the American image, at least among the elders.”
The only solution is to dredge up this unconscious, unadmitted malaise into the light where it can be dealt with. “The important thing to realize is that electric information systems are live environments in the full organic sense.” They are the next step in human evolution which will create a unified human race, capable of experiencing planetary waves of thought and emotion. At the same time, paradoxically, there will be of necessity a far greater degree of local autonomy and control according to cybernetic principle.
In a cybernetic age much of what passes for modern and advanced is already hopelessly outdated. “NASA is a Newtonian program, not a Twentieth Century program. It is a misappropriation of funds….The new space created by our electronic microscopes points to the immediate possibility of anti-gravitational transportation such as would eliminate the wheel and the miseries of our cities. “And before you have a chance to say “What was that again, Professor?” he’s off in seventeen other directions, one of which is the computer:
“As a sort of capsule observation it could be said that the computer is the LSD of the business world, transforming its outlook and objectives. None of the existing goals of Twentieth Century business can survive the computer for even ten years….The computer absolutely guarantees the elimination of all the businesses that it is now being brought to serve.”
McCluhan proclaims “the extreme decentralizing power of the computer in eliminating cities and all concentrations of population whatever. He envisions an earth, and a humanity totally transformed. “The dense information environment created by the computer is at present still concealed from it by a complex screen or mosaic quilt of antiquated activities….Its true function is to program and orchestrate terrestrial and galactic environments and energies in a harmonious way…a kind of console for global thermostats to pattern all sensory life in a way conducive to comfort and happiness….”
Groovy, Professor. But every major technological advance has bred not only dislocation and threat, but also hebephrenic euphoria and optimism. The sewing machine was heralded as the liberator of womankind, mechanized agriculture meant the permanent end of famine, first telegraphy and then radio were a guarantee of world peace and understanding, et cetera. One Nineteenth Century enthusiast even declared that the invention of TNT was the salvation of the working class, since it could be manufactured cheaply in anyone’s basement and hence no one need tolerate oppression from the upper classes for one moment longer than it took to create, ignite, and aim a few sticks of the magical compound.
But none of these messianic hopes for science has exactly worked out. Pre-emption by a small group for its own purposes has been the order of the era.
It would seem that some major human upheaval is necessary before the full power of electronics and cybernation can be used for the good of all. Social ownership of the means of communication rather than of production in the old sense I perhaps the more correct emphasis for today. As for the arrival of the millennium via computer, it boils down to: Who will be programming the programmers? And that, in the final analysis, is up to us.
