The Watchers

luka

Well-known member
have you read Mcluhan talking about satellites and what happens to us once they are installed in orbit?
 

luka

Well-known member
“Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade [sic] environment that ends “Nature” and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed”. – From Cliché to Archetype, 1970
 

sus

Well-known member
«We already have some fail-safes. We have realized at least subconsciously if not fully and clearly and loudly - most of all loudly - that this littered debris might add up towards some greater cultural loss, that we might one day lose so much that we have as a society changed irreversibly and not for the better without our noticing, and so we have grates and filters and some watchers, many watchers, those conservatives in our society, but these watchers are terrible at telling the debris that is worth saving from the debris that is not worth saving, unable to tell needle from haystack because all the hay seems to them gold and fine, rather than incendiary straw.»
 

sus

Well-known member
«That we are stronger than them, that we can drag them through the mud and push their faces into the rutted tracks of the canons and deafen their ears on black powder, does not necessitate or prove our own legitimacy. That we have always been stronger than them, that we have always dragged them through the mud and pushed their faces into the rutted tracks of the canons and deafened their ears on black powder, this does not necessitate or our legitimacy either. For the Watchers were once draggers, the weak once strong, the deaf once deafeners. We have not changed.»

« If we do not like the Watchers, and certainly we do not, and if they are not doing a job, which they are also certainly not, then it is on us to do both the firing and the Watching.»
 

version

Well-known member
«We already have some fail-safes. We have realized at least subconsciously if not fully and clearly and loudly - most of all loudly - that this littered debris might add up towards some greater cultural loss, that we might one day lose so much that we have as a society changed irreversibly and not for the better without our noticing, and so we have grates and filters and some watchers, many watchers, those conservatives in our society, but these watchers are terrible at telling the debris that is worth saving from the debris that is not worth saving, unable to tell needle from haystack because all the hay seems to them gold and fine, rather than incendiary straw.»
Where's this from?
 

version

Well-known member
I remember hearing the idea that any given environment has to have a theatre within it so the people inside can feel they're on the outside.
 

version

Well-known member
We're in one right now. We're performing on a little stage. Everyone's online, but forums, social media etc are theatres within the internet in the way Big Brother was a theatre within the TV.
 

version

Well-known member
Gogglebox. You're sat in your home watching TV watching people sat in their home watching TV. We seem to need these microcosms to look in on.
 

version

Well-known member
Inside, amid the flurry of menservants attired in sober black suits and pristine white gloves, you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu. This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries.

The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, the owner tells people with relish, were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers.
 
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