The Frailest Thing

Philosophize this is great. If you were a fan of McLuhan, you should read L.M. Sarcasas. His blog (https://thefrailestthing.com/) was how I was introduced to McLuhan, Postman, and other philosophers of media and technology. He has unfortunately shuttered that blog, but he has a substack newsletter thing that talks about similar things: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/people/1810437-l-m-sacasas

Interesting and thought provoking article(s). They are a bit involved so I'll post some of my thoughts/notes on them here: -- The background reading article [1] Disciplinary surveillance . . . was simple: the prisoners would stay in line because they had to assume that they were always being watched. No violence was necessary, the internalized gaze of the surveillance apparatus disciplined the behavior of the prisoner. So general FUD of the capabilities of nation states keeping citizens in line. This seems to align with current trends. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord wrote, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” A society of spectacle is one where interactions are not with the people themselves, but with their public image/representation (facebook, Instagram, etc). Following, a society of disciplinary spectacle is one where individuals interact through lossy representations that are subject to FUD+surveillance. So not only does representation effectively become the self, the representation is subject to an insidious type of control in the form of disciplinary surveillance--meaning the self is subject to this control as well. -- The actual linked article Memory, in the ways that historians tend to use it, refers to a group's perception of the past. The word memory is used because this perception does not necessarily represent historical truths--like individual memory does not always represent an…

This concept is also known as Borg Complex: https://thefrailestthing.com/2013/03/01/borg-complex-a-primer/