Tea at Trianon: The Medium Is the Menace

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, April 28, 2022

The Medium Is the Menace

From City-Journal:

The discussion of the merits and demerits of technology has continued ever since Plato. It has flared up recently, as the pace of technological change has accelerated. Writing took millennia to spread; the Internet conquered the planet in decades. The speed has amplified the shock, making the arguments of the techno-skeptic Thamus more tangible. In the 1990s, the Internet was praised as a great repository of knowledge. In the 2000s, it was hailed as an environment of free communication. But since the 2010s, it has often been considered a danger—both to people and institutions.

The logic of our faculties’ migration into media, extended far enough, leads to a complete human resettling into media. The more our capabilities migrate to media, the more our power grows over our physical and social environments—and the more essential it is to improve the potency of our media. The migration of physical abilities to, say, a stone ax dealt with only a tiny fraction of our needs. The Internet, by contrast, caters to all human collective and personal activities.

Indeed, we are nearly all the way there, save for some physical daily routines. Media are increasingly taking over our body’s work to accomplish those physical and intellectual tasks better and faster, which frees up time to spend on—what else?—consuming and developing media. As McLuhan said, “[M]an becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world.” In exchange for developing them, media offer us “nectar” in the form of conveniences of all sorts. Convenience can make humans dependent, however; and in the digital universe, this can certainly seem at times like a loss of freedom and independence.

We’re not just spending time on the Internet. We are investing time in its improvement. If value in digital capitalism is created in the very process of a platform’s use, then we are all working for digital capitalism. Every time we click a link, react to a story, or share it with others, we help the Internet to evolve, like a bee pollinating flowers, in McLuhan’s formulation. Improving the relevance of online content, our day-and-night labor of clicks enhances the Internet’s convenience for us, which, in turn, strengthens its power over us, making us develop its protocols and devices. Having collapsed the space between people—as well as between people and knowledge—the Internet has freed up the time formerly needed to cover that space. In exchange for this service, the Internet expropriates our time. (Read more.)