Media Theory Quotes

“Cynical views of humans as a mindless mob, incapable of behaving intelligently and peacefully, are used to justify keeping us apart and denying us roles as autonomous actors.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.”
― Alexander R. Galloway

“If we don't truly know what something is programmed to do, chances are it is programming us. Once that happens, we may as well be machines ourselves.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization — not to mention their reason for being — reflects the world-view promoted by the technology. Therefore, when an old technology is assaulted by a new one, institutions are threatened. When institutions are threatened, a culture finds itself in crisis.”
― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

“Eliza flips open Weird Tales March 1999, Hey I just had a fun lil spark of inspiration. I know you're busy this summer but I was wondering if maybe at the end of summer you would be interested in doing an afterward for my new book Satanic Panic & the Very Special Episodes. The book is a materialist counterfeit reality. The book was inspired by my 400th viewing of one of my all time favorite movie The Truman Show and I was thinking about the psychological implications of that flick, about how even after Jim Carrey's escape from the dome would he ever truly be able to trust his surroundings. I don't think so. I'm also reading some classic madness-caused-by-society texts like Anti-Oedipus and Foucault's Madness and Civilization. And I'm also reading about all of the classic kinds of schizo delusional thinking like delusions of reference, fregoli syndrome (in my opinion the scariest of all delusions), stuff like that. The book is a meta tavern confession. These two guys are sitting in a super shabby tavern and they've both basically forgotten how they got into this shabby tavern and they both kind of convince themselves and each other that they're on a set that's meant to look like a shabby tavern. The shabby construction they believe exists to give them a hint that they exist in a counterfeit reality. There are some fun neoplasms in the book like omniscinditus. One of the characters invents that word and says the word means "special secret purpose or message hidden inside common objects and concepts." The two characters basically convince themselves that everything has omniscinditus. And as I've been writing this book my mind has wandered back to mediation technology because my mind always wanders back to mediation technology. For the afterword I was wondering if I could give you a prompt for an essay that I want to be both a thing that informs Satanic Panic and the afterword. I need an expert. My prompt is, if you are down (and if you are not down I totally understand and will not be offended), about mediation technology in the hands of hypercapitalists and the algorithm as a delusion machine. I don't know what the prompt question(s) would be here. It's not necessarily a question about truth or falsity. Or maybe it's not quite a question of is this a possibility? Maybe the question(s) are about a composite of the old world and our new mediation tech as a behaviorism machine that tricks us into loving the machine. And maybe the question has something to do with the Descartes demon and tech and the old saying about how everyone throughout history has thought-demons lived in tech, but what if mediated tech became so advanced a "demon" could be invented. My thoughts always return to "well if a corporation or government or intelligence agency (some overflowing with incompetence and other silliness) can send people to a south american country or a middle eastern country or elsewhere and those people can, part of the time, successfully rally citizens and do a coup, why couldn't a technology successfully psychologically manipulate on a mass level as well? Is that what we are saying? That peepers in foreign lands can be easily tricked into coups and stuff like that? Are we talking about mind control and the Air Loom? If so, why is it when we speak of mass mind control happening in the US, scoffs happen? And why wouldn't money-powers go out of their way to create a delusion machine? Is having your masses ebb and flow between slight delusion to full to peace and tranquility and back to delusion beneficial to the money-powers and capitalism? I feel like the arrival of anxiety meeting the hope of tranquility and having that move back and forth over and over must be beneficial. And even if a psychological manipulation technology that advanced is far off, does that mean that powers-that-be are not working on making that a reality? In the book, I'm attempting to frame all of this in a materialist way without any mediation technology…”
― Chase Griffin

“I'm not sure what cyberpunk catechism means. It's making me think of the late-cap mediums being embedded with hermeneutics-of-suspicion trigger mechanisms. Is that what she means? Is she randomly talking about how the late-cap mediums made one want to search until they confirmed some sort of bias. Do you catch my westerlies? I don't know if I am expressing this very well. I mean that the mediums no longer informed or entertained like the mediums of yore. The mediums of late-cap only appeared to inform or entertain. Underneath the surface, one found that the mediums were built to make one say, “Aha! So that is what other people are like!”
― Chase Griffin

“Yes. That’s right. Don’t be so judgy. I am politely interacting with
the hermeneutics-of-suspicion minds of the Carcosa dwellers, embedding the superstructure of the blatherings with base corruptions, presenting forms concealing reality, floottering reflexes and
echoes of other determining forces that do fundamental work in
manifesting any real social change.
And the susceptible dwellers are always down for discussion,
which I appreciate to no end.
And the ideology of the nineteenth coming from minds like Nietzsche, Comte, Kant, Marx, and Hegel was analyzed in the twentieth century by minds like James, Freud, and Jung, and then that
analysis of nineteenth century ideology was itself critiqued in the
twenty-first century, the age of hyperprofilicity, and that critique
of the analysis of nineteenth century ideology metamorphosed into
a new type of cluster of ideologies and then into a steadfast adherence of the pseudoscientific theory of the critique of the analysis.”
― Chase Griffin, Schlemiel Gaucho: An Improv Comedy Magick Grimoire