The Algorithm is the New War Drum | QMM #2
On Hypnosis and the Battle for our Senses
Quixote’s Media Meditations #2
Assignment: “War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extensions of our bodies...More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture.”
What are your personal or what are our cultural sensory ratios?
“The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man. The fact that most conscious experience has little ‘visuality’ in it is lost on him.”
- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
Our contemporary, cultural sense-ratios are spectacularly centred on sight. The historical inundation of text, reading, and writing into European high culture and later others worldwide is largely responsible for this lopsidedness. Our senses (which were previously more inclined to include deeper auditory and olfactory relationships) have become highly visual - at least 80% visual, according to recent studies. This is to speak of modern, Anglophone peoples. The number fluctuates across cultures.
Following the invention of the printing press in the fourteenth century, printed text could be automatically replicated and easily carried to distant lands and people. The word became mobile in ways we couldn’t previously conceive of. While the majority of the world’s people, even up until the end of the twentieth century were not illiterate, we can wonder how the slow and subtle invasion of the text into the collective consciousness of a culture shifted the culture’s understandings, even if most people could not read or write. How does literacy, or more accurately the effects of literacy, even among a small group of the ruling class or intellectuals, filter down and into the rest of the population?
Text is a visual medium. It forces us to use our eyes instead of our ears, which is the case with the spoken as opposed to the written or the printed word. In his essay, Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show, Philosopher Ivan Illich noted that the Middle German language of the late Middle Ages had approximately 158 words to describe smells or aromas. The contemporary German language now has thirty-two words, “at best,” to describe such olfactory inputs. Moreover, most of the words in question only exist in local dialects, today. I don’t imagine that it’s much different in modern English, either. Paradoxically, we can use history (most often a textual medium) to track the loss or lessening of our cultural olfactory relationships.
Since the Middle Ages, we’ve not only seen the invention of the printing press as a vehicle for visual media, but also the photograph, the television, and now the computer and smartphone (among many others). The experts say that the other fifteen percent of our sense ratio not reserved for visual inputs is taken up by four other senses (with smell and hearing amounting to ten percent). In The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Marshall McLuhan uses the official psychological definition (of his time) for “hypnosis” to describe the imbalance of our current sense ratio: hypnosis as the overwhelming of one sense at the expense of all others.
This unequivocally describes the modern condition. Our round eyes, strapped to flat screens, the former reduced to the shape of the latter with every dopamine click. We already know this. We inhabit it as it inhabits us. The observation isn’t new. But why then isn’t media ecology at the top of our to-study lists?
War
Consider the recent inundation of war porn that’s flooded news media and especially social movements’ social media feeds. Videos of bombings, murdered children, raped wives, terrified civilians, evil enemies, incessant dehumanization, and the promise of much more to come. And if you look away or don’t take a side, “it’s because you’re privileged…” or “because you can afford to do so…” Anti-cultures of guilt and shame thriving in “social movements” long after the Church figured out how to weaponize them.
“War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to [the] technological extension of our bodies…”
It’s as if the so-called voice of the voiceless is suddenly conspiring with the algorithm overlords to ensure that your diet is only complete with as much screen violence as one can stomach and then some. What makes you think that staring at murdered babies carried through the street by their keening parents or the exact moment a hospital gets bombed somehow makes you virtuous or informed? It doesn’t. Among other things, it makes you desensitized. It makes you hypnotized. In the context of the war machine, it might even make you complicit. (Not guilty. Responsible).
What if, we could imagine these things, as horrible as they are, without having to see it up close and personally, as if a post-truth world somehow justifies the filming and distribution of more and more horror? War and the fear of war demands your eyes stay glued to the bloodshed, the bombs, and the breaking news. It requires offerings, which in this case, is your attention, captured and filtered through the same dominating mediums and mechanisms that feed the arms industry, authoritarianism, and ignorance.
Refusing to tune into the social media spectacle, currently set to the War Channel, might be a form of civil disobedience for our times. This could be your small, yet resolute ceasefire you declare between your willingness to feed the algorithm and its hold on you. A way of starving the hypnosis.
Likewise, it doesn’t make you pro-war, pro-Israeli, or pro-Hamas. It doesn’t make you guilty. There are countless other ways to protest that don’t require your constant support of data mining industries (calling your local representative, marching in the street, reading books about the history of the conflict, divesting from arms industry-affiliated companies or products, etc.). There are myriad paths toward peace-making, solidarity, and civil disobedience that don’t demand likes, shares, and screen addiction, that don’t deepen our visual narcosis. After all, who and what does your doom-scrolling benefit? Peace? Palestine?
Not a turning away, not an act of wilful ignorance, but an act of turning off. Fuck, read the newspaper if you need to, but remember that the screen and the war are anesthetic (i.e. etymologically “against sensation”). It is anxiety-inducing torment, that we are prodded to live through virtually and vicariously. Nobody can act accordingly in such a situation. There are too many strings being pulled in too many directions. The algorithm is bigger than war, now, or perhaps that’s where war’s front lines are to be found, now. Here, on this screen.
This isn’t an ask to turn away from what’s happening elsewhere. It is a recognition that a globalized news cycle is a distraction from wherever here and now is, and the work that is required of us, where we are. We can contend with the complexities that don’t fit neatly into a single or singular political worldview. We can do so, by attending not just to one political issue at a time, alone, and not just to whichever hot topic offers the most dopamine or cortisol or opportunity for virtue-signalling or even solidarity it can muster. The current war in Israel/Palestine is just an example.
We can remember that there are many more that properly unveil the reality that, for so many of us, what we know about a given political situation is often tantamount to how much of it we’ve seen on our screens, how much of it the algorithms have let us see. The question is, what lies beyond and how apt can we actually be to what’s happening in the world when refusing the ‘rithm is seen as betrayal and culpability. Again, it can make one wonder who or what we’re really on the side of, who or what we’re really fighting for.
Rebellion
Given the stats and the screens, the withering and the wars, we could remember McLuhan’s work and continue to ask if (and how) we are living under the sway of culturally conjured, sensory hypnosis. We can go further and ask what our maps of sense perception offer us if they too were created or fall under this collective hypnosis. What if our relative hypnosis is blocking our capacity to engage in other, undefined sense perception, and how do our current media technologies inhibit or deepen that hypnosis? As I write this and as you read it, I ask: are we being pulled further into the eye, or can we begin to break the spell of the visual imbalance we inhabit and inherit through this very medium?
What might that look like? How might we return to a sense ratio that deepens and weaves together every other sense? Would that even be possible in a single lifetime? What kind of consequences – schizophrenia being one, alienation another – might there be for someone or some group of people who would attempt such a thing? What kinds of alternatives to a screened-in worldview could we conjure to undermine our collective myopia and the proliferation of war?
Are we slaves to our technology, to our media? How might we escape this hypnotic state we so casually ignore? I ask, because, that’s the war that all others are subsumed in at the moment.
These QMM reflections on technology, language, media ecology & literacy are provoked by
’s mandatory, must-take Understanding Media Intensive. You can find out more about the course, here. Likewise, you can get the news straight from McLuhan’s mouth by reading his Substack, here.