McLuhan, Media & Messages (10/2018)
At Hiark, we’ve read a lot of Marshall McLuhan. We love it, and tbqh, we don’t always fully understand it. We like to believe that’s how he wanted it. The equal-part poetry-futurism-techno-sociology lends itself well to being amazed by (which we are) and confused by (ditto).
Our reverence for McLuhan influenced the founding of Hiark, and continues to shape our thinking on how to realize our vision for using tech to change ourselves. While McLuhan famously asserted that “the medium is the message,” which we take to mean that the way information is transmitted dramatically impacts the takeaway from the sent information, we at Hiark somewhat disagree. We prefer the weak-form of McLuhan which is: the medium is a component of the message. Yeah, sort of milquetoast, but we are huge proponents of information-rich messages.
If the medium was the entirety of the message then a phone call from the police saying your father had died would convey the same information as a phone call from a telemarketer selling life insurance. Certainly, big picture, century or millennia-level timelines, which McLuhan thought on, life insurance and individual lives may be more-or-less rounding errors compared to the tech that brought the message and its impact on the society it developed it. But we’re unfortunately more myopic than McLuhan, and prefer to think about how tech can impact the present delivery of novel information.
The more impactful quote from McLuhan that has shaped Hiark is “Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plan world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely in providing him with wealth.” Wow. We are the medium of tech’s transformation, from papyrus to PowerPoint. We chose what to combine, elaborate, extend and evolve. And as tech’s genitals, we derive pleasure from tech. Though to be fair, it should be tech deriving pleasure from us (and who is to say it doesn’t?). How true does McLuhan’s quote ring? Tech certainly expedites certain wishes, but all wishes? Is wealth all that we truly want?
If we take McLuhan’s premise that tech speeds up the acquisition of what we want, then could it not be that we have been wanting largely superficial things? Perhaps we’ve been aiming too low? Much of the low hanging fruit has been gobbled up by the victors of this tech iteration, and at Hiark, we feel it’s time to set our sights higher up the tree and focus on the challenging, difficult-to-reach fruits.
I’ve often asked, “Where is technology taking us?” in line with an oft-misattributed quote “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” which was not MM. Tim Berners Lee or the other internet architects most assuredly didn’t foresee Russian bots, troll farms, fake news, and ethnic killings motivated by Facebook posts. Once a tool is created, the imagination will creatively apply it to vastly different problems than the original use case. We are, after all, tech’s rather promiscuous genitals.
But at Hiark, we’ve tried not to passively accept the common usage of these tools, to be mere passengers on the riverboat tech’s current is pulling us down. We (collectively) have some say in where tech takes us. True, there’s no turning back. The genie is out of the bottle, horse out of the barn, whatever trite imagery you prefer. We’re all on this river being taken in a general direction. But we can be rudders, we can alter the course to avoid whirlpools, or to get nearer a beautiful vista. It is up to us to use tech to deliver (expeditiously) what we desire, so we had better be more intentional about what we desire!
Big picture, well beyond any human life span, we have no real idea where tech is taking us. Like with Gutenberg or farming or petrol, we can make broad-stroke guesses, about SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUALS or dystopian panopticons, but it’s unlikely we have ultimate control over where the river we’re on will dump us.
Smaller, more actionable picture, we absolutely do get to decide how we individually deploy technology in our lives and allocate our attention. At Hiark, our mission, everything we have done and will do, is to use technology to help make individual lives better. We want to help people daily reach their new personal best, however they define it. To do this, we’re initially focused on trying to remove the obstacles to our growth, our idiosyncratic blind spots, through feedback from close contacts. But this is just the start. We must collectively see the necessity of articulating what we desire from tech, and then supporting those things built to meet those desires. We think technology should do more than provide tools for actualizing our idealized self (in Horney’s framework), and avoiding our real selves. The idealized self is a false construct build in response to basic anxiety about our worth. FB, IG, and their ilk exist to prey upon that anxiety; to trick the thirsty into drinking salt water. Building digital shrines to our pretend selves and then wondering why we feel empty or worse after prostrating before them has had its time. We can do better, but will only do better if we consciously craft our tools to meet our higher needs. We must elevate our wishes for technology to help technology deliver them to us! Left to its own, floating with the leisurely current of lowest-common-denominator offerings, we’ll be pulled along the path of least resistance. We can see this in likes, retweets, and cheap notoriety for having the least sense of shame, honor or personal integrity.
At Hiark, we can’t offer a smooth trip down the river. We can’t guarantee demanding that technology serve our higher needs will yield what we hope it does. But we can offer the opportunity to try to make more of these tools than our current titans are. We desire technology to help improve who we are as people rather than just accelerate us toward McLuhan’s end of “wealth.” Hiark is our attempt to be conscious about our role in technology manifesting our desires. If we don’t consciously choose to aim higher, to use technology to help us grow, it will continue to deliver to us our unconscious desires — the unexamined, ugly underbits of our psyches that have been profitably pumped out for the past 10 years. It is time to demand more of technology and more of ourselves.
