From: Deranged Mutant <wlkngowl@unix.asb.com>
Date: Thu, 8 Feb 1996 09:22:55 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Marshall McLuhan and encryption...
Message-ID: <199602060846.DAA12400@bb.hks.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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jf_avon@citenet.net (Jean-Francois Avon (JFA Technologies, QC, Canada)) 
wrote:
>
>>  Nick's a big shot at Wired magazine.  So it should be no surprise 
>>  to learn that Wired attacked cypherpunks in its 01 96 issue.  In 
>>  a fake interview with "Wired's patron saint," Marshall McLuhan is 
>>  made to say (p 130): 
>> 
>>    Concerns about privacy and anonymity are outdated. Cypherpunks 
>>    think they are rebels with a cause, but they are really senti- 
>>    mentalists. 
>
>Well, maybe McL. would have spit such nonsense, very characteristical of him.
>
>"The media is the message" is among the biggests con jobs performed on humanity.
>It's like having a guy dying form thirst and telling him: "The pipe is the beverage"...

Actually, that is a common distortion of McLuhan.  When McLuhan said
that, he meant that the use of a medium (by "medium" he meant any 
technology)
communicated more than just its content.  What he found interesting was
the effect of a lot of people watching TV, the same channels at the same
time, as being meaningful itself, irregardless of what was on the TV.

He probably would not have been anti-crypto, IMO, and would have found
its widespread usage as signifying something... the cryptomedium would
be a message independent of the encrypted messages.

As for this crapola about privacy concerns being outdated, they are very
much up-to-date.  The traditional public/private distinction has quite a
few philisophical problems, but the concerns are more imporant now than
a hundred or a thousand years ago.

If anything, the crap that Nick pupports is what's outdated... the public
individual in the polis is long dead, in part because of mass media.
Note that traditional/modernist/existential conceptions were 
pro-identity.
Postmodern critiques are anti-identity; anonymous dividualism is a mode
of resistence to the "15-minutes-of-fame" hype.

Recommend you read Foucault's "Subject and Power" and Deleuze's
"Postscript on the societies of control".  [Oh yeah, the Wired people
did a nice spin calling Foucault an alt.sex.bondage neo-Stalinist.
Ad hominim attacks are wonderful, aren't they... but that's another 
thread]

[..]
>
>Dear Wired peoples and Mr. McLuhan: get lost!

Wired I wdn't miss. McLuhan? He's dead, and probably would have
thought crypto to be a good thing.  But it's just like a church to
fingerpuppet dead prophets into spouting the current dogma.  The
Wired people are too busy paying abblutions to McLuhan's shadow on
the cave walls.

[..]
>     He is partially right.  With Renaissance, came the idea that Reason and human mind 
>were powerfull and that knowledge, because man's only survival tool is reason, is a value 
>to pursue.  
>
>But french revolution did not convey theses ideas, neither
>did Napoleon.  And Hitler definitely not.   
>All of the three were, ultimately, collectivists or looters.

Yep. And McLuhan was actually an individualist, in the sense that
tribal societies are individualist.  There's a difference between
communitarianism and community, between socialism and sociability.

Rob.


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