Every new technology necessitates a new war

Marshall McLuhan

The literate man is the natural sucker for propaganda. — MM

Marshall McLuhan is most famous perhaps for his book, The Medium is the Message. However, I prefer the LP version with the accidentally-on-purpose turn of phrase, The Medium is the Massage.

That book is not a book in a normal sense. Yes, it is printed and has a cover and uses the codex and stitching to keep pages together, but it is more an experience than a book. He followed up on this book with a lesser known one called War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968. Working with the same collaborator, Quentin Fiore, the book again is in a non-linear style.

A non-linear book is actually quite hard to pull off. It’s unsurprising than that McLuhan was such a fan of James Joyce.

One of the probes as McLuhan calls them that he makes in this book, revolves around the stirrup. The stirrup allows a knight to make a mounted attack without dismounting from his horse. But, according to McLuhan, it fundamentally alters society around the stirrup:

The stirrup that led to the armor abolished the yeoman’s small holdings in favor of the lordly domain and created the same revolution that occurred in America — small farmer to lordly corporation.

He continues:

Few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history. The requirements of the new mode of warfare which it made possible found expression in a new form of western European society dominated by an aristocracy of warriors endowed with land so that they might fight in a new and highly specialized way.

The stirrup was eventually replaced with gunpowder, and a new kind of civilization came from that. Drone warfare is the next stirrup. When used by the state, it can hold entire armies back as in done in Ukraine, or keep a major waterway closed, as in Iran. The state uses drones for surveillance already. But imagine if a large group of citizens in a country had drones. Like the bullet, it is a great equalizer.

What good is a nuclear weapon against a cheap drone?

In the remainder of this post, there are a series of diptychs of quotes from War and Peace in the Global Village and YouTube clips. McLuhan was quite fond of this method as well, often pairing his writing with images and quotes from James Joyce.

The method is a bit jarring I will admit. It can be frustrating as it demands explanation, but refuses to give it. But sometimes, this method is need to provide an anti-environment — to tell fish they swim in water.

If you enjoy this kind of thing, ediblspaceships is quite good at it here on substack.

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When our identity is in danger, we feel certain that we have a mandate for war. - MM

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve.

— Woodrow Wilson, Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany (1917)

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Every new technology necessities a new war — MM

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If soldiers serve only for pay, the army is not likely to concern itself deeply in politics — at least so long as the pay is forthcoming. But, as with Cromwells’ men, they serve with a view to the salvation of their souls, they are unlikely long to be politically neutral, at least in a wicked country.

— MM, quoting Galbraith

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They have discovered the great principle that real news is bad news. Up till now advertising has been all good news and, therefore, gets very little attention. —MM

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However, when we seek to rally the corporate energies for sharply defined objectives, we do not hesitate to impose uniforms. Bot the military costume of the citizen as robot and the ceremonial costume of the elite at dignified functions are exact parallel to the tribal use of costume. —MM

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Governments will operate only through force or the threat of force, and that all other principles of control will be left to education, religion, and commerce. If this continues to be the case, we may as well give up. A government can never create a free people with the techniques now allotted to it.

—MM quoting Skinner.

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In his book Propaganda, Jacques Ellul elucidated the nature of propaganda not as the content of any particular medium or institution but as the total culture in action, a clear instance of macroscopic gesticulation. —MM

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All media or technologies, languages as much as weaponry, create new environments or habitats, which become the milieux for new species or technologies. — MM

”That left me with a choice. Either fade into irrelevance, or islands, or build something that actually matter.” — CEO of Anduril in the above video.

For my mother Thetis the goddess of the silver feet tells me
I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day my death. Either,
if I stay here and fight beside the city of Trojans,
my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;
but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,
the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life
left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly. (Iliad 9.410-416)