Status Updates From The Pentagon of Power (The ...

Mumford in 1970 makes excellent & still valid I think point that the colossal catastrophes of the twin world wars have been swept under the rug by the attempt to 'restore normality'. The level of hatred, sadism and destruction from those wars was so great that it permanently traumatized the human spirit in myriad ways.

" The residual quasi-human organisms that would be left would float in a mechanical-electronic void of man's own making" !!!!!!!!! 60 years ago!!!

" our present over Reliance upon the computer model intelligence might, in the event of a worldwide catastrophe brought on by its lack of human dimensions, induce such a paroxysm of collective rage and unrestrained violence as would destroy the entire structure long before it had reached the ideal Terminus of absolute control" INSHALLAH

Mumford obliterates Arthur C Clarke: who was a favorite writer of mine when I was 12. Only now do I perceive the close link between Clarkes homosexuality and his glorification of space, the machine, and everything that leaves reproductive normal humanity behind.

Mumford loathes McLuhan because he doesnt detect the bitter irony behind all Mcluhans proclamations.

" for a culture like the present one to cultivate its transience and ephemerality, as if dynamism were an absolute value and stability of any kind a handicap, is to ignore the plain facts not only of organic continuity but of physical existence."

Diversification precedes homogenization

1st step: unification of power and authority in the person of a Divine King.
2nd: displacement of actual King by bureaucratic military organization
3rd: fabrication of the all embracing megamachine itself--an equivalent supreme ruler wholly of a mechanical nature without human parts or attributes.

The strangest generation was those born in the late 19th century who were middle-aged at the peak of the Cold War. The Douglas Macarthurs & Allen Dulleses.