by McKenzie Wark 

What used to be the public sphere now seems like unmanageable noise. The internet is generally held to be to blame. But perhaps there never was a public sphere. Perhaps there is just different configurations of information and noise.
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Contrary to certain popular narratives by latecomers, not everybody went gaga over ‘new media’ back in the late twentieth century. In the cyberculture period, from the popularization of cyberpunk in 1984 to the death of the internet as a purely scientific and military media in 1995, there were plenty of experimental, critical and constructivist minds at work on it. I would count Tiziana Terranova as a fine exponent of the constructivist approach, a sober builder of useful theory that might open spaces for new practices in the emerging world of post-broadcast and post-truth media flux. Her book, Network Cultures: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press, 2004) is still well worth reading for its keen grasp of the fundamental issues.

Lyotard sent everyone off on a bum steer with the idea of the immaterial, a problem compounded by Jameson’s famous assertion that the technics of late capitalism could not be directly represented, as if the physics of heat engines was somehow clearer in people’s heads than the physics of electrical conductivity. Terranova usefully begins again with a concrete image of information as something that happens in material systems, and thinks them through the image of a space of fluid motion rather than just as an end-to-end line from sender to receiver.

​In Terranova, information is not an essence but a site of struggle: “I do not believe that such information dynamics simply expresses the coming hegemony of the ‘immaterial’ over the material. On the contrary, I believe that if there is an acceleration of history and an annihilation of distances within an information milieu, it is a creative destruction, that is a productive movement that releases (rather than simply inhibits) social potentials for transformation.” (2-3)

It helps not to make a fetish of just one aspect of media form, whether one is talking about hypertext back then, or big data now. Sometimes these are aspects of more pervasive technological phyla. Terranova: “Here I take the internet to be not simply a specific medium but a kind of active implementation of a design technique able to deal with the openness of systems.” (3) This might be a useful interpretive key for thinking how certain now-dominant approaches to tech arose.

Anybody who studied communication late last century would have encountered some version of the sender -> encoding-> channel-> decoding->receiver model, with its mysterious vestigial term of ‘context’.  Stuart Hall  opened this loop by adding a possible difference between the encoding and the decoding. He made non-identity a function not of noise as something negative but of culture as a positive field of differences. But even so, this way of thinking tended to make a fetish of the single, unilinear act of communication. It ended up as an endless argument over whether the sender’s encoding dominated the receiver’s decoding, or if the receiver could have a counter-hegemonic power of decoding otherwise. That was what the difference between the Frankfurt school’s epigones and the Birmingham school of Hall et al boiled down to.

Terranova usefully brackets off the whole critical language of domination versus counter-hegemony, moving the discussion away from the privileged questions of meaning and representation that still dominate critical thinking in the humanities. Like Alex Galloway (et al) in Excommunication, she insists that a critical perspective need not be hermeneutic. She does so by taking seriously the breakthrough of Claude Shannon’s purely mathematical theory of information of 1948.

Information actually means three different things in Shannon. It is (1) a ratio of signal to noise, (2) a statistical measure of uncertainty, and (3) a non-deterministic theory of causation. He developed his theory in close contact with engineers working on communication problems in telephony at Bell Labs, one of the key sites where our twenty-first century world was made.
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The signal-to-noise problem arose out of attempts to amplify telephony signals for long distance calls, where the additional energy used to amplify the signals also shows up as noise. This, incidentally, is where one sees how the experience of information as ‘immaterial’ is actually an effect produced by decades of difficult engineering. It takes energy to make a signal pass through a copper wire, making the electrons dance in their predictable but non-deterministic way.

What was crucial about Shannon’s approach to this problem was to separate out the concept of information from having anything to do with ‘meaning’. Information is is just a ratio of novelty and redundancy. “From an informational perspective, communication is neither a rational argument nor an antagonistic experience…” (15) It has nothing to with communication as domination or resistance. It has nothing to do either with Habermasian communicative action or Lyotard’s language games.

For information to be transmitted at all, it has to confront the demon of noise. In Michel Serres’ version, sender and receiver appear as nodes cooperating against noise rather than as differentiated individual entities. Terranova rather follows Gilbert Simondon, who pointed out that in Shannon, the individual sender and receiver are pre-constituted. They just appear, prior to the act of communication. Simondon’s approach picks up the vestigial concept of context. For him, the act of communication is also what constitutes the sender and receiver as such. His approach is to think the context as the site where information produces individuations out of a collective, undifferentiated context.

This is a step toward thinking the space of information as a more turbulent, metastable system that can be disturbed by very small events: “the informational dimension of communication seems to imply an unfolding process of material constitution that neither the liberal ethics of journalism nor the cynicism of public relations officers really address.” (19) The materiality of information is prior to any discussion of ‘real’ reporting or ‘fake’ news or the sender-receiver nodes such flows constitute.

Terranova’s work points toward a critical and radical information theory (CRIT), to thinking about information production and protocols, rather than to second-order questions of meaning.  It could be a way of framing a problem of information system design for the whole field of media and culture. Information design could be about more than messages defeating noise, but rather designing fields of possibility beyond click-counting, including problems in the organization of perception and the construction of bodily habits.

Information systems tend to be closed systems, defined by the relation between selection (the actual) and the field of possibilities (the virtual), but where that field appears in an impoverished form. “Information thus operates as a form of probabilistic containment and resolution of the instability, uncertainty and virtuality of a process.” (24) For Terrannova, what might be a constructive project in the wake of that is some kind of information culture that does not enforce a cut in advance in the fabric of the world, and then reduce its manipulation to a set of predictable and calculable alternatives.

Interestingly, Terranova’s approach is less about information as a way of producing copies, and more about the reduction of events to probabilities, thus sidestepping the language of simulation, although perhaps also neglecting somewhat the question of how information challenged old regimes of private property. Her emphasis is much more on information as a form of control for managing and reproducing closed systems. This then appears as a closure of the horizon of radical transformation. As in Randy Martin, instead of a livable future we have futures markets.
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In information systems, the real only ever emerges out of the statistically probable. “What lies beyond the possible and the real is thus the openness of the virtual, of the invention and the fluctuation, of what cannot be planned or even thought in advance, of what has no real permanence but only reverberations… The cultural politics of information involves a stab at the fabric of possibility.” (27) The virtual does not arise out of negation, out of a confrontation with techno-power as an-other. It is unquantifiable. It is what an information system does not know about itself.

One of the more powerful features of the theory of information is the way it linked together information and entropy. Thermodynamics, which as Amy Welding shows was a key to the scientific worldview in Marx’s era, offered the breakthrough of an irreversible concept of time, and one which appeared as a powerful metaphor for the era of the combustion engine. In short: heat leaks, energy dissipates. Any system based on a heat differential eventually ‘runs out of steam.’
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Hence the figure of Maxwell’s Demon, which could magically sort the hot particles out from the cool ones, and prevent an energy system from entropic decline into disorder. But that, in a sense, is exactly what information systems do. The tendency of things might still be entropic: systems dissipate and break down. But there might still be neg-entropic counter-systems that can sort and order and organize. Such might be an information system. Such might also, as Joseph Needham among many others started to think, might be what is distinctive about living systems.

Needham’s organicism borrowed from the systems-theory of Bertalanffy which pre-dates Shannon, and was based a lot more on analog thinking, particularly the powerful image of the organizing field. Much more influential was the transposition of the thought-image of the digital to the question of how life is organized as neg-entropic system, resulting in what for Haraway in Modest_Witness (1997) is a kind of code fetishism. What is appealing to Terranova in the confluence of biological and information thinking is the way it bypassed the humanistic subject, and thought instead toward populations at macro and micro scales.

Where Terranova and Haraway intersect is in the project of understanding how scientific knowledge is both real knowledge and shot through with ideological residues at the same time:  “An engagement with the technical and scientific genealogy of a concept such as information… can be actively critical without dis-acknowledging its power to give expression and visibility to social and physical processes… Information is neither simply a physical domain nor a social construction, nor the content of a communication act, nor an immaterial entity set to take over the real, but a specific reorientation of forms of power and modes of resistance.” (37) While I would want to pause over the word ‘resistance’, this seems to me a usefully nuanced approach.

One way she does so is by appealing to Bergson’s distinction between a quantified and a qualified sense of time, where time as quality, as duration, retains primacy, offering the promise of a “virtuality of duration.” (51) But is this not yet another offshoot of romanticism? And what if it was really quite the other way around? What if the figure of time as quality actually depended on measurable, quantitative time? I’m thinking here of Peter Gallison’sdemonstration of how the engineering feat of electrically synchronized time, so useful to the railways, enabled Einstein to question the metaphysics of a universal clock time that was the backdrop to Newton’s mechanics. As Gallison shows, it is only after you can actually distribute a measure of clock time pretty accurately between distant locations that you can even think about how time might be relative to mass and motion.

It is certainly useful that Terranova offers a language within which to think a more elastic relation between the information in a network and the topology of that network itself. It isn’t always the case that, as with Shannon’s sender and receiver, that the nodes are fixed and pre-constituted. “A piece of information spreading throughout the open space of the network is not only a vector in search of a target, it is also a potential transformation of the space crossed that always leaves something behind.” (51)
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This more elastic space, incidentally, is how I had proposed thinking the category of vector in Virtual Geography (1995). In geometry, a vector is a line of fixed length but of no fixed position. Thus one could think it as a channel that has certain affordances, but which could actually be deployed not only to connect different nodes, but sometimes to even call those nodes into being. Hence I thought vector as part of a vector-field, which might have a certain malleable geometry, where what might matter is not some elusive ‘virtual’ dimension, but the tactics and experiments of finding what it actually affords.

Terranova stresses the way the internet became a more open system, with distributedcommand functions. It was in this sense not quite the same as the attempts to build closed systems of an early generation of communication engineers: “resilience needs decentralization; decentralization brings localization and autonomy; localization and autonomy produce differentiation and divergence.” (57) The network, like empire, is tolerant of differences, and inclusive (up to a point), but also expansionist. As Terranova notes, rather presciently, “There is nothing to stop every object from being given an internet address that makes it locatable in electronic space.” (62)

Since 1995, the internet started acquiring the properties of a fully-realized vector-field, one striated into distinct organization levels, what Benjamin Bratton calls The Stack – a useful counter-image to the network, drawing attention to planetary computation’s geopolitical and infrastructural qualities. Terranova was a pioneer in understanding that the build-out of this infrastructure, of which information theory was the concept, had significant implications for rethinking the work of culture and politics. “There is no cultural experimentation with aesthetic forms or political organization, no building of alliances or elaboration of tactics that does not have to confront the turbulence of electronic space. The politics of network culture are thus not only about competing viewpoints, anarchistic self-regulation and barriers to access, but also about the pragmatic production of viable topological formations able to persist within an open and fluid milieu.” (68)

She notes in passing some of the experiments of the late twentieth century in “network hydrodynamics” (69) such as the Communitree BBS, Andreas Broeckmann’s Syndicate list-serv, Amsterdam’s Digital City, the rhizome list-serv, to which I would add the latter’s sister-list nettime.org. Some of these fell apart, even if many others lived and mutated. Much of the functionality of today’s social media derives from these early experiments.

Terranova was also prescient in asking questions about the ‘free labor’ that was just starting to become a visible feature of stack-life at the time she was writing. She reads this through the Autonomist-Marxist figure of the shift of work processes from the factory to society, or ‘the social factory.’ I sometimes wonder if this image might be a bit too limiting. It might be more helpful to think of a dismantling and repartitioning of all institutionalized divisions of labor under the impact of networked communication, more a social boudoir than social factory.
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Still, it was useful to insist on the category of labor, at a time when it was tending towards invisibility. One has to remember that in cyberculture times there was a lot more celebration of ‘playful’ fan cultures to the net. Henry Jenkins’ repurposing of something like the Birmingham school’s insistence on popular decoding and recoding agency would be a signal instance of this. Terranova: “The internet does not automatically turn every user into an active producer, and every worker into a creative subject.” (75) It also makes plenty of alt-right trolls.

In a 1998 nettime.org post, Richard Barbrook suggested that the cyberculture era internet had become the site for a kind of post-situationist practice of détournement, of which nettime.org itself might not have been a bad example. Before anybody had figured out how to really commodify the internet, it was a space for a “high tech gift economy.” Terranova thinks Barbrook put too much emphasis on the difference between this high tech gift economy and old fashioned capitalism. But perhaps it might be helpful to ask whether, at its commanding heights, this still is old fashioned capitalism, or whether the ruling class itself may not have mutated, and draws its power now from informatics control, based in part on capturing the value of information gifted by various forms of non-labor.

Certainly, the internet became a vector along which the desires that were not recognizable under old-style capitalism chose to flee. Terranova: “Is the end of Marxist alienation wished for by the management gurus the same thing as the gift economy heralded by leftist discourse?” (79) Not so much. Those desires were recaptured again. I don’t know who exactly is supposed to have fallen for “naïve technological utopianism” (80) back in the nineties – apart from the Accelerationists, and even there, Black Accelerationism was a quite canny negotiation between the cramped spaces of both the political and the technical. In the main I think a kind of radical pragmatism of the kind advocated by Geert Lovink prevailed. We were on the internet to do with it what we wanted, for as long as we could make it last, before somebody shut the party down.

I’m not sure that producers of difference in information are quite the same thing as producers of sameness in material objects. Perhaps the worker and the hacker belong to different classes. I think the hacker class is composed of all those whose creations of difference can be captured as intellectual property and commodified. It’s a class with no necessary common culture at all, other than what it might make in struggling against the appropriation of its time. But it is not the case that the hacker prefigures new kinds of labor. Rather, both the hacker and worker experience a bifurcation into a secure well-paid elite and a casualized and hyper-exploited – and now global – mass.
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For me this is a perspective from which to attain some critical perspective on attempts to expand the category of labor, to the point where to me it stops making much sense. Terranova’s Network Culture provided an early introduction in the Anglopohone world to the work of Mauritzio Lazzarato, but I always thought that his category of immaterial labor was less than helpful. Since I agree with Terranova’s earlier dismissal of the notion of information as immaterial, I am surprised to see her reintroduce the term to refer to labor, which if anything becoming ever more embedded in the material systems of the stack.

For Lazzarato and Terranova, immaterial labor refers to two aspects of labor: the rise of the information content of the commodity, and the activity that produces its affective and cultural content. Terranova: “immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’ – in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion.” (82) It is the form of activity of “every productive subject within postindustrial societies.” (83)

Knowledge is inherently collaborative, hence there are tensions in immaterial labor (but other kinds of labor are collaborative too). “The internet highlights the existence of networks of immaterial labor and speeds up their accretion into a collective entity.” (84) An observation that would prove to be quite prescient. Immaterial labor includes activities that fall outside the concept of abstract labor, meaning time used for the production of exchange value, or socially necessary labor time. Immaterial labor imbues the production process with desire.  “Capital wants to retain control over the unfolding of these vitualities.” (84) But at that point one has to wonder if the terms in play here are still capital and labor, or if exploitation might not have new territories and new forms.

Terranova follows those autonomist Marxists who have been interested in the mutations of labor after the classic factory form, and like them her central text is Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ from the Grundrisse. The autonomists base themselves on the idea that the general intellect, or ensemble of knowledge, constitutes the center of social production, but with some modification. “They claim that Marx completely identified the general intellect (or knowledge as the principle productive force) with fixed capital (the machine) and thus neglected to account for the fact that the general intellect cannot exist independently of the concrete subjects who mediate the articulation of the machines with each other.” (87) For the autonomists (Bifo, for example), living labor is always the determining factor, here recast as a mass intellectuality.

The autonomists think that taking the labor point of view means to think labor as subjectivity. Living labor alone acts as a kind of vitalist essence, of vast and virtual capacities, against which capital is always a reactive and recuperative force. This is in contrast to what the labor point of view meant, for example, to Bogdanov, which is that labor’s task is not just to think its collective self-interest, but to think about how to acquire the means to manage the totality of the social and natural world, but using the forms of organizing specific to it as a class.

From that point of view, it might be instructive to look, as Angela McRobbie does, for baby steps toward self-organization in Terranova calls free labor, and of how it was recuperated in quite novel ways. “Free labor is a desire of labor immanent to late capitalism, and late capitalism is the field which both sustains free labor and exhausts it. It exhausts it by undermining the means through which that labor can sustain itself: from the burn-out syndromes of internet start-ups to under-compensation and exploitation in the cultural economy at large.” (94)

Let’s not to just assume that this is a ‘late’ iteration of the same ‘capitalism’ as in Marx’s era. The internet was the most public aspect of a whole modification of the forces of production, which enabled users to break with private property in information, to start creating both new code and new culture outside such constraints. I think those forces of production drove not just popular cyberculture strategies from below, but also enabled the formation of a new kind of ruling class from above. One based on extracting not so much surplus labor as surplus information: extracted as content from both labor and non-labor; extracted as form the hacker class – creator of new forms. I call this new ruling class the vectoralist class – owner and controller not of the means of production but the vector of information, its stocks and flows.

The most interesting part of Network Culture is where Terranova extends the Deleuzian style of conceptual constructivism to scientific (and other) languages that are interested in theories and practices of soft control, emergent phenomena and bottom-up organization. Her examples range from artificial life to mobile robotics to neural networks. All of these turned out to be intimations of new kinds of productive machines.

There is a certain ideological side to such of this discourse, and yet “… the processes studied and replicated by biological computation are more than just a techno-ideological expression of market fundamentalism.” (100) They really were and are forms of a techno-science of rethinking life, and not least through new metaphors. No longer is the organism seen as one machine. It becomes a population of machines. “You start more humbly and modestly, at the bottom, with a multitude of interactions in a liquid and open milieu.” (101)
For example, in connectionist approaches to mind, “the brain and the mind are dissolved into the dynamics of emergence.” (102) Mind is immanent, and memories are Bergsonian events rather than stored images. These can be powerful and illuminating figures to think with. But maybe they are still organized around what Bogdanov would call a basic metaphor that owes a bit too much to the unreflected experience of bourgeois culture. It just isn’t actually true that Silicon Valley is an “ecosystem for the development of ‘disruptive technologies’ whose growth and success can be attributed to the incessant formation of a multitude of specialized, diverse entities that feed off, support and interact with one another,” to borrow a rather breathless quote from some starry-eyed urban researchers that Terranova mentions. (103) On the contrary, Silicon Valley is a product of American military-socialism, massively pump-primed by Pentagon money.

Terranova connects the language of biological computing to the Spinozist inclinations of autonomist theory: “A multitude of simple bodies in an open system is by definition acentered and leaderless.” (104) And “A multitude can always veer off somewhere unexpected under the spell of some strange attractor.” (105) But I am not sure this works as a method. Rather than treat scientific fields as distinct and complex entities, embedded in turn in ideological fields in particular ways, Terranova selects aspects of a scientific language that appear to fit with a certain metaphysics adhered to in advance.

It can be quite fascinating and illuminating to look at the “diagonal and transversal dynamics” (105) of cellular automata, and admire at a distance how “a bottom-up system, in fact, seems to appear almost spontaneously….” (105) But perhaps a more critical and radical information theory approach might be the necessary compliment. What role does stack infrastructure play in such systems? What role does an external energy source play? It is quite possible to make a fetish of a bunch of tiny things, such that one does not see the special conditions under which they might appear ‘self’ organizing.

As much as I revere Lucretius and the Epicurians, it seems to me to draw altogether the wrong lesson from him to say that “In this sense, the biological turn entails a rediscovery, that of the ancient clinamen.” (106) What is remarkable in Lucretius is how much he could get right by way of a basic materialist theory derived from the careful grouping and analysis of sense-impressions. One really can move from appearances, not to Plato’s eternal forms, but to a viable theory that what appears is most likely made of a small number of elements in various combinations. But here the least useful part of the Epicurean worldview is probably the famous swerve, or clinamen, which does break with too strict a determinism, but at the expense of positing a metaphysical principle that is not testable.  Hence, contra Terranova, there can be no “sciences of the clinamen.” (107)
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This is also why I am a bit skeptical about the overuse of the term emergence, which plays something of a similar ideological role to clinamen. It becomes a too-broad term with too much room for smuggling in old baggage, such as some form of vitalism. Deleuze, in his Bergsonian moments, was certainly not free of this defect. A vague form of romantic spiritualism is smuggled in through the back door, and held to be forever out of reach of empirical study.

Still, with that caveat, I think there are still ways in which Terranova’s readings in biological computing are enabling, in opening up new fields from which – in Bogdanovite style – metaphors can be found that can be tested in other fields. But the key word there is tested. For example, when tested against what we know of the history of the military entertainment complex, metaphors of emergence, complexity and self-organization do not really describe how this new kind of power evolved at all.

More interesting are Terranova’s use of such studies to understand Galloways’s great early theme: how control might work now. Here we find ways of thinking that actually can be adapted to explain social phenomena: “The control of acentered multitudes thus involves different levels: the production of rule tables determining the local relations between neighboring nodes; the selection of appropriate initial conditions; and the construction of aims and fitness functions that act like sieves within the liquid space, literally searching for the new and the useful.” (115) That might be a thought-image that leaves room for the deeper political-economic and military-technical aspects of how Silicon Valley, and the military entertainment complex more generally, came into being.

Terranova: “Cellular automata… model with a much greater degree of accuracy the chaotic fringes of the socius – zones of utmost mobility, such as fashions, trends, stock markets, and all distributed and acentered informational milieus.” (116) Read via Bogdanov rather than Deleuze, I think what is useful here is a kind of tektology, a process of borrowing (or détournement) of figures from one field that might then be set to work in another. But what distinguishes Bogdanov from Deleuze is that for him this is a practical question, a way of experimenting across the division of labor within knowledge production. It isn’t about the production of an underlying metaphysics held to have radicalizing properties in and of itself. Hence one need not subscribe either to the social metaphysics of a plural, chaotic, self-differentiating ‘multitude,’ upon which ‘capital’ is parasite and fetter, and which cellular automata might be taken to describe. The desire to affirm such a metaphysics leads to blind spots as to what exactly one is looking at when one looks at cellular automata.
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There is a certain residual romanticism and vitalism at work here, in the figure of “the immense productivity of a multitude, its absolute capacity to deterritorialize itself and mutate.” (118) The metaphysical commitments of a Marx read through Spinoza become an interpretive key that predetermines what can be seen and not seen about the extraordinary transformations that took place in the mode of production.

Where I am in agreement with the path Terranova is following here is in rejecting the social constructionism that seemed a default setting in the late twentieth century, when technical questions could never be treated as anything but second order questions derived from social practices. Deleuzian pluralist-monism had the merit at least of flattening out the terrain, putting the social and the asocial on the same plane, drawing attention to the assemblage of machines made of all sorts of things and managing flows of all kinds, both animate and inanimate.

But the danger of that approach was that it was a paradoxical way of putting theory in command again, in that it treated its metaphorical substitutions between fields as more real than the fields of knowledge from whence they came. What was treated as real was the transversal flows of concepts, affects and percepts. The distinctive fields of knowledge production within which they arose were thus subordinated to the transversal production of flows between them. And thus theory remained king, even as it pretended to dethrone itself.

It seems crucial in the age of the Anthropocene that thought take “the biological turn.” (121) Never was it more obvious that the ‘social’ is not a distinct or coherent object of thought at all. One of the great struggles has been to simulate how this actual world works as a more or less closed totality, for that is what it is. The metaphorics of the virtual seem far from our current and most pressing concerns. The actual world is rather a thing of limits.

Terranova ends Network Culture with a rethinking of the space between media and politics, and here I find myself much more in agreement. Why did anyone imagine that the internet would somehow magically fix democracy? This seemed premised on a false understanding from the start: “Communication is not a space of reason that mediates between state and society, but is now a site of direct struggle between the state and different organizations representing the private interests of organized groups of individuals.” (134)
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Of all the attempts to think ‘the political’ in the late twentieth century, the most sober was surely Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the silent majority. He had the wit and honesty to point out that the masses do not need or want a politics, and even less an intellectual class to explain politics to them. The masses prefer spectacle to reason, and their hyper-conformity is not passivity but even a kind of power. It is a refusal to be anything but inert and truculent. Hence the black hole of the masses, which absorbs everything without comment or response. Meaning and ideas lose their power there. As even liberal pundits found out in Trump’s America – proof of the most abject kind of a Terranovian critical and radical information theory (CRIT).

The essay is taken from:

by McKenzie Wark 

Once you start digging beyond the idea that media is about interpreting signs, there’s no end to how deep the rabbit hole can become. Behind the system of signs is the interface that formalizes them (Manovich) or simulates them (Galloway). Behind that is the information turbulence the interface manages (Terranova), the hardware it runs on (Chun) and the stack of levels that processes it (Bratton). All of which incorporates the labor that operates it (Berardi) or is enslaved by it (Lazzarato) and which is incorporated within integrated circuits (Haraway). The class of workers who make the content might be doubled by a class of hackers who make the form (Wark).
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The rabbit hole keeps going, becoming more of a mineshaft. For some the chemical and mineral dimension is also a big part of what appears when one looks behind the sign (Negarestani, Leslie, Kahn), which brings us to Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media (U. Minnesota Press, 2015). Which tunnels down into the bowels of the earth itself. Parikka: “Geology of media deals with the weird intersections of earth materials and entangled times.” (137)

In this perspective, “Computers are a crystallization of past two hundred to three hundred years of scientific and technological development, geological insights, and geophysical affordances.” (137) But one could also reverse this perspective. From the point of view of the rocks themselves, computers are a working out of the potentials of a vast array of elements and compounds that took billions of years to make but only decades to mine and commodify – and discard. History is a process in which collective human labor transforms nature into a second nature to inhabit. On top of which it then builds what I call a third nature made of information, which not only reshapes the social world of second nature, but which instrumentalizes and transforms what it perceives as a primary nature in the process. There’s no information to circulate without a physics and a chemistry.  “The microchipped world burns in intensity like millions of tiny suns.” (138)
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Perhaps the best way into this perspective is to go through some of the materials it takes to make information something that can appear as if it were for us. Let’s take a periodic table approach to media possibilities. Coltan is a famous example – I wrote about this important insulating material in Gamer Theory. A lot of it comes from the Congo. It’s an ore containing the elements niobium and tantalum, which along with antimony are used in making micro-capacitors. Then there’s lithium, used in the batteries of phones, laptops and hybrid cars, major deposits of which are in Afghanistan.

Cobalt is also used in making batteries. Platinum is for hard drives, liquid crystal displays and hydrogen fuel cells. Gallium and indium for thin-layer photovoltaics. Neodynium is used for lasers; Germanium for fiber-optic cable. Palladium for water desalination. Aluminum, tantalum, tungsten, thorium, cerium, manganese, chromium, all part of 20th century industrial culture, but now have extended uses. Media materiality is still also very metallic: 36% of tin, 25% of cobalt, 15% of palladium, 15% of silver, 9% of gold, 2% of copper, 1% of aluminum are for media tech uses. (34) There can be sixty different elements on a computer chip. There’s a whole place and a whole industry named after an element: Silicon Valley. Very pure silicon is used to make semi-conductors.

We’re used to thinking about a geopolitics of oil, but perhaps there’s a more elaborate Great Game going on these days based on access to these sometimes rare elements. Reza Negarestani’s Cycolonpedia is an extraordinary text which reverses the perspective, and imagines oil as a kind of sentient, subterranean agent of history. One could expand that imaginary to other elements and compounds. For instance, one could imagine aluminum as an agent in the story of Italian Fascism. Since bauxite was common in Italy but iron was rare, aluminum rather than steel became a kind of ‘national metal’, with both practical and lyrical properties. The futurist poet Marinetti even published a book on aluminum pages. What aluminum was to twentieth century struggles over second nature, maybe lithium will be to twenty-first century struggles over third nature.
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It might make sense, then, to connect the study of media to a speculative inquiry into geology, the leading discipline of planetary inquiry. (A connection I approached in a different way in Molecular Red, by looking at climate science). Parikka: “Geology becomes a way to investigate the materiality of the technological media world.” (4) James Hutton’s, Theory of the Earth (1778) proposed an image of the temporality of the earth as one of cycles and variations, erosion and deposition. Hutton also proposed an earth driven by subterranean heat. His earth is an engine, modeled on the steam engines of his time. It’s a useful image in that it sees the world outside of historical time. But rather than having its own temporality, Hutton saw it as oscillating around the constants of universal laws. This metaphysic inspired Adam Smith. Hence while usefully different and deeper than historical time, Hutton’s geology it is still a product of the labor and social organization of its era.

Still, thinking from the point of view of the earth and of geological time is a useful way of getting some distance on seemingly fleeting temporalities of Silicon Valley and the surface effects of information in the mediated sphere of third nature. It also cuts across obsolete assumptions of a separate sphere of the social outside of the natural. “The modern project of ruling over nature understood as resource was based on a division of the two – the Social and the Natural – but it always leaked.” (x) One could rather see a first, second and third nature as equally material in the deepest sense.

Parikka’s project includes a bringing together of media materialism and historical materialism: “media structure how things are in the world and how things are known in the world.” (1) I was after something similar in Molecular Red in turning to Karen Barad’s agential realism. It’s a project in which materialism is extended towards materiality in the geological, chemical and physical sense, without entirely losing sight of the category of labor.
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Parikka’s approach grows rather out of the work of Friedrich Kittler, “the Goethe scholar turned synth-geek and tinkerer.” (2) For Kittler, ‘man’ is an after-image of media-technology. One could think of this as a much-needed update on Foucault’s anti-humanism, which (like Préciado) at least drags it into the twentieth century. Where Foucault looked to architectural forms, such as the prison or clinic, the structuring of visibility, the administrative ordering of bodies, Kittler takes the next step and examines media as more contemporary practices that form the human. Parikka: “Media work on the level of circuits, hardware, and voltage differences, which the engineers as much as the military intelligence and secret agencies gradually recognized before the humanities did.” (3)

Like Douglas Kahn, Parikka wants to extend this work further in the direction of what for us vulgar Marxists would constitute its base. He finds a useful ally in earth artist Robert Smithson, whose “abstract geology” paid close attention to the materiality of art practice. Smithson was an anti-McLuhan, in that he saw media not extensions of man, but as extensions of the earth.

But besides the intriguing spatial substitution, bringing the depths of geology into view, Parikka is also interested in changing temporal perspectives. German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst has written of media as a temporal machine, paying close attention to the shift from narrative to calculative memory. Also of interest is Siegfried Zielinski’s project of a media studies of deep time. Zielinski was trying to escape the teleological approach to media, where the present appears as a progressive development and realization of past potentials. He explores instead the twists and cul-de-sacs of the media archive. Parikka takes this temporal figure and vastly expands it toward non-human times, past and present.

Parikka proposes a double sided relation of media to earth. On the one hand, “the geophysical that becomes registered through the ordering of media reality. And conversely, it is the earth that provides for media and enables it.” (13) This double articulation might have its problems, as we shall see later. The goal is to think a medianature as one continuum, rather like like Haraway’s naturecultures. “Medianatures… is a concept that crystallizes the ‘double-bind’ of media and nature as co-constituting spheres.” (14)
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The third nature of information flows does not run on silicon alone. It also runs on fossil fuels. The Anthropocene, which Parikka recodes as the Anthrobscene, is “a systematic relation to the carboniferous.” (17) As Joseph Needham always pointed out, China beat the west to most technological discoveries, including coal mining. It was going on during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). For Jason Moore, we might as well call the present epoch the Capitalocene, given the intimate connection between the historic rise of capitalism as a mode of production and the exploitation of resources on a short-term basis, including the millennia’s worth of past photosynthetic activity locked away in layers of coal seams. “capitalism had its necessary (but not sufficient) conditions in a new relation with deep times and chemical processes of photosynthesis.” (18)

Perhaps we could make the nonhuman elements’ contribution to historical materialism more visible. This might go beyond the rather speculative geology of morals in Deleuze and Guattari. Like Jane Bennett, Parikka is interested in their celebration of the craft of metallurgy, a kind of experimental labor that wants to explore what a material can do. But it might not be the case that this is neatly separable from science. As one learns in JD Bernal’s Science in History, science and craft, which is to say science and social labor, are always intimately connected.

Still, there is something refreshing about an approach which does not build off from Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, which was after all only an occasional piece, but from Anti-Oedipus instead. In this perspective, “media history conflates with earth history; the geological materials of metals and chemicals get deterritorialized from their strata and reterritorialized in machines that define our technical media culture.” (35) But I am wary of extending the category of ‘life’ to the non-organic, as there is a danger of merely porting an unexamined vitalism into new fields where it will function yet again as an unexamined first principle.
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Here we might learn more from natural scientists trying to reach into the humanities than from philosophers trying to reach into the natural sciences. Parikka usefully draws on Stephen Jay Gould’s model of evolutionary time as a punctuated equilibrium, as a succession of more or less stable states in variation alternating with moments of more rapid change. There’s no sense of progress in this version of deep time, no necessary evolution from lower to higher, from simple to complex.

One can then approach the earth as an archive of different temporal blocks, each with its own rate and variability of change. “What we encounter are variations that define an alternative deep time strata of our media culture… It offers an anarcheology of surprises and differences.” (42) Starting with Hutton’s heat-engine earth, but seeing it as passing through shifts as well as cycles, and not necessarily on a teleological path anywhere, a vast spatial and temporal panorama opens up, within which media can operate as both very brief but also surprisingly long temporalities. A Youtube video may be fleetingly short up when put against the temporality of the earth, but the afterlife of the device that played it may turn out to be moderately long.

Marx saw the machinery into which living labor was accumulated as dead labor, but perhaps it makes more sense to think of it as undead labor, for our machines, including media machines, may outlive us all in fossil form. “The amount of operational electronics discarded annually is one sort of geologically significant pile that entangles first, second and third nature: the communicational vectors of advanced digital technologies come with a rather direct link to and impact on first natures… Communicational events are sustained by the broader aspects of geology of media. They include technologies abandoned and consisting of hazardous material: lead, cadmium, mercury, barium, and so on.”  (49)
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In this manner, the mediasphere of third nature returns to the lithosphere. China, being short of certain key metals, imports them as scrap and mines some of its minerals now from second nature rather than from nature as such. But Parikka is keen not to lose sight of labor as a category here. Rather than think of third nature as a realm of immaterial labor, he wants to emphasize hard-work and hard-ware, and the constitutive role of the geological and chemical in both.

Here it is worth recalling Marx’s interest, late in life, in questions of soil chemistry, which led to him towards the concept of metabolic rift. Second nature got out of synch with nature, when minerals extracted from the soil by crops grown to produce food to fuel industrial labor did not return to the soils, depleting them. This led to soil science, and to practices of ‘culturing’ soil with nitrogen and potassium and so forth. Thus there’s a prehistory to third nature’s dependence on a vast array of mineral inputs, and its dumping of the resultant waste, in second nature’s dependence on mineral inputs to sustain – in the short term – commodified agriculture. Parikka: “… a deep time of the planet is inside our machines, crystallized as part of the contemporary political economy.” (57-8)

​A manifesto-like text in Mute Magazine once proposed we move on from psychogeography to a psychogeophysics. Drawing on the rogue surrealist Roger Caillois, the new materialism of Rosi Braidotti and Timothy Morton’s studies of hyperobjects, Parikka develops psychogeophysics as a low theory approach to experimentally perceiving the continuities of medianatures. “Perhaps the way to question these is not through a conceptual metaphysical discussion and essays but through excursions, walks, experiments, and assays? … Instead of a metaphysical essay on the nonhuman, take a walk outside…” (63)
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Parikka pushes back against the limits of psychogeography (not least in my formulation of it) as restricted to the interactions of the ambling human and the urban milieu. A psychogeophysics might be able to detect and map a much deeper and broader field of vortexes, flows and eddies. “Psychogeophysics aims for planetary scale aesthetics.” (67) It pushes on from the opening towards the animal in posthumanities writing, toward the earth itself. “Psychogeophysics performs the continuums across the biological, the nonorganic, and the social.” (67)

Here it might come up against, and have to work through the history of nature aesthetics, in which the Grand Canyon went from being see as beautiful as becoming sublime. Both mapping and landscape painting landscape painting have an intimate connection to geology. (And as Bernard Smith shows, also to maritime exploration.) Psychogeophysics might work as a minor concept or practice of a low theory, of variation and deviation, experimenting with ways of perceiving other times and spaces. For example, the work of media artist Joyce Hinterding explores natural electro-magnetic fields. The open earth circuit predates closed tech circuits.

A Geology of Media is structured around a passage from the interior of the earth (mining) to it surface (soils) to the air above (dust) and beyond. A psychogeophysics of dust might begin with Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, and his other experiments in ‘dust breeding.’ Dust, Parikka suggests, rather troubles our notions of what matter is. A case in point: I’m typing this on an Apple laptop, encased in a smooth, polished aluminum shell. But the polishing of the case creates aluminum dust, which is a major health hazard.  “There is a bitter irony that the residue of the utopian promise is registered in the soft tissue of a globally distributed cheap labor force.” (89)

“We need to attend to the material soul. Made of lungs and breath – and the shortness and time management of breath.” (103) Here Parikka focuses on the human lung as a media that absorbs dust, some of it toxic. Workers make Apple products, imparting their labor to the product, but inhale the aluminum dust, in exchange. Where Franco Berardi proposes the soul as a new site of exploitation, exhaustion and depression, it’s worth paying attention to a more material aspect of the breath-soul relationship. The soul of the hacker class toiling in the over-developed world might be inspired, but the lungs of the worker elsewhere may well be respiring toxic dust. Here one might examine Platonov’s materialist theory of the soul, which sees soul as a kind of surplus over bodily subsistence.
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In Platonov’s terms, bodies don’t have souls unless they have surplus energy to expend on growing one (and in his world it is not always a good thing when they do). One could think here of all the soul-restraining features of laboring to produce third nature: Lead damages the nervous system, cadmium accumulates in the kidneys, mercury affects the brain, barium causes brain swelling and liver damage, and so on.

“Mines are a central part of this picture of cognitive capital.” (100) Here I agree with Parikka that the rather ethereal theories of semio-capitalism or cognitive capitalism, let alone their acceleration could do with contact with perspectives such as those of Jason Moore, which stress the material short-cuts on which commodification is based, such as cheap nature, cheap labor and cheap energy – but which leave long-term debts unpaid. Something like 81% of the energy used in the life cycle of computers is to make them, and much of that still comes from burning coal. It is ironic that the dust-free clean rooms of high tech industry are fueled by a process that throws ton after ton of coal dust into the air. “Dust does not stay outside us but is a narrative that enters us.” (102)

The race for resources that colonizes the planet is continually throwing off waste that will far outlive the cycles of production and consumption in which they are consumed. Parikka: “… any extended understanding of the cultural techniques and technologies of the cognitariat needs to be able to take into account not just souls but where breath comes from.” (106)

It is strange that we use the word fossil in two such difference senses: fossils are treasured artifacts of the past; fossil fuels are artifacts from the deep past to be burned up for energy, their waste cast into the atmosphere with abandon. Parikka teases out two other sense of the word fossil: fossil futures and future fossils. What are the potential futures that are now fossil relics in the archive? What fossils are we making now that we can imagine being discovered in some future time, by some other sentient species, after our human-species being has gone the way of the dinosaurs?
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The figure of the fossil provides a useful way of thinking and experimentally practicing a psychogeophysics. Fossils are a strange kind of ‘media’ artifact, preserving information across deep time. Certainly, the media technology of recent times will make an interesting fossil layer of the Anthropocene for future robot or alien archaeologists. And imagining them as such helps us think the third nature of information vectors, hurtling information around the world through fiber-optic cable at the speed of light, as something other than a world of super-fast temporalities.

Parikka: “We need to address how fossils, whether of humans, dinosaurs, or indeed electronics, infuse with the archaic levels of the earth in terms of their electronic waste load and represent a ‘third nature’ overlapping and entangling with the first and second…. The third nature is the logistical vector of information through which production of second nature takes a new informational pace. But as we see from the existence of media fossils, the spheres of two and three are as entangled with ‘first nature’ as they are with each other. They are historically codetermining in a way that defies any clear cut differences between the modern era of industrialization and the postmodern era of information. In addition, the material residue of the third nature is visible in the hardware and waste it leaves behind, despite its ability to reach abstract informational levels.” (119)

Paolo Virno dispenses with the category of second nature in Marx, arguing that Marx only ever used it to denote the false sense of ‘naturalness’ of bourgeois life. But where Parikka and I converge contra Virno is in trying to show how the paradoxical ‘real-falseness’ of the second nature that bourgeois culture celebrated. It was false in being utterly dependent on cheap labor, cheap nature and cheap energy, as Moore would put it. It was doomed from the start to a temporary existence, given the metabolic rift it opened up with its own conditions of existence.

And the solution was not to reverse course, to try to find a way to value what socially organized production takes from, and gives back, from second nature to nature. On the contrary, the solution was to build out a third nature that would deploy the information vector to extract even more resources out of nature, from deeper, from further. And excrete even more waste into the rapidly closing system of planetary metabolism. As Adorno and Debord insisted in their different ways: the whole is the false. It’s a second nature and now a third nature that commodified relations of production have extruded out of social labor, like shiny but very temporary soap bubbles.
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Media artists play a key role throughout this book, but particularly in opening up the question of the fossil. Worth mentioning is Grégory Chatonsky’s work on telofossils, which posits an alternative teleology to the accelerationist one. In accelerationist thinking, the future extrudes as a linear intensification of the present. For Chanosky, today’s tech is tomorrow’s fossils, dead and extinct yet preserving their now useless form. Particularly affecting is Trevor Paglen’s work on The Last Pictures, an intentional fossil. Paglen created a photo archive to be attached to a satellite and boosted into space, as satellites are likely to be among the longest living fossils of the era of third nature. Thus Parikka’s movement throughout the book from underground to surface to atmosphere terminates in what for Lisa Parks is our orbital culture.

Besides its spatial imagination, A Geology of Media opens up a usefully nonhuman way of thinking about temporalities. The accelerationist view only perceives human time speeding into an inhuman one in which artificial intelligence supersedes us. It seems unable to think the deep, nonhuman times that get produced along the way, as the accelerating juggernaut of third nature throws off waste products, some of which may outlast life itself.

However, one limit to Parikka’s project is suggested by this very figure of the fossil, particularly if we think of what Quentin Meillassoux calls the arche-fossil. How is it possible to have a knowledge of a rock that existed before humans existed? How can there be knowledge of an object that existed in the world before there could be a correlative subject of knowledge? I’m not sure Parikka’s double articulation of media and geology really addresses this proposition.

Meillassoux’s approach is to abolish the subject of knowledge and restore a speculative and pre-Kantian philosophy of the object, the essential and primary properties of which are mathematical and hence allegedly prior to any sensing and knowing subject. The problem with this is that Meillassoux has to bracket off the complex of scientific labor and apparatus through which the fossil is known at all. His is a contemplative realism that takes the fossil as simply given to thought. What he takes to be its primary qualities, mathematically described, are really the product of tertiary qualities, produced by an inhuman apparatus of scientific instrumentation that mediates a knowledge of this nonhuman object to the human.
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Here I find Karen Barad’s agential realism to be most helpful and the stub of a genuinely Marxist theory of science, in that it concerns itself with the means of production of knowledge. The nonhuman world of the fossil is mediated through the inhuman world of an apparatus, one that can sense things beyond the secondary qualities of objects detectable to the merely human senses. Rather than expand the category of object, as Meillassoux’s speculative realism does, or attribute life or consciousness to the inorganic and nonhuman as the new materialism does, one can expand the middle, the mediating term, which in this case is the inhuman apparatus of undead labor mixed with living labor.

The inhuman apparatus can perceive beyond the merely subjective time of the human, for it too, like the fossil, is a product of deep time. There is no mystery of correlation to account for, as knowledge is not a matter of a subject contemplating an object. Rather, the appearance of objects and subjects as entities with specific boundaries and temporalities is itself a product of an inhuman process engaging many agents with many temporalities, some of them very deep indeed.

Hence I agree with Parikka here: “We need carefully to refine what we mean by media and communication in the non-correlationist as well as new materialist contexts of contemporary media culture.” (135) But one does not achieve this by extending the category of ‘life’ or ‘thought’ into the deep time of the nonhuman, as this is simply the mirror image to speculative realism’s erasure of the subject under the weight of its vision of a chaotic and collapsing objective-real. Both approaches want to assign to a high theory a power it does not have, to define the whole field of being and becoming by itself. This latent tendency in the book seems contrary to its main achievement, which is to show the power of a more collaborative approach to knowledge, in which a low theory of psychogeophysics wanders between fields or burrows under them, rather than flying like Icarus above them.

The problem with Kittler’s media theory, the thing that really dates it, is that it had still not given up on the imperial ambitions of a high theory. By pushing this field-colonizing theory as far as it will go, beyond the media apparatus toward the geology from which it is extruded, Parikka makes a step forward in the direction of a new organization of knowledge, towards a ‘post-colonial’ media theory, in the limited sense of not attempting to colonize other fields of knowledge.
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Parikka: “Media materiality is not contained in the machines, even if the machines themselves contain a planet. The machines are more like vectors across the geopolitics of labor, resources, planetary excavations, energy production, natural processes, from photosynthesis to mineralization, and the aftereffects of electronic waste.” (139) Such a perspective calls for a mediating of the various knowledges of the component parts of that totality to each other without the pretentions to mastery of any one field or discipline over all the others.

The essay is  taken from:

by Venkatesh Rao

The weaponized form of McLuhan’s famous phrase the medium is the message is the phrase, first we shape our tools, then our tools shape us (due to to McLuhan’s friend John Culkin). I have come to prefer this form of the idea, and my favorite motif for it is Doc Ock, the Marvel super-villain.

Doc Ock’s artificially intelligent arms fuse to his brain stem in a reactor accident. In the movie version, the intelligence in the arms alters his behavior by making lower-level brain functions, such as emotional self-regulation, more powerful and volatile. The character backstory suggests a personality — a blue-collar nerd bullied as a schoolkid — that was already primed for destabilization by the usual sort of super-villain narcissistic wound. The accident alters the balance of power between his higher-level brain functions, and the hardware-extended lower-level brain functions. In the Doc Ock story, first we shape our tools, then our tools shape us captures the adversarial coupling between medium and message-sender.
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The weaker form of McLuhan’s idea suggests that media select messages rather than the other way around: paper selects for formal communication, email selects for informal communication, 4chan selects for trolling. The stronger form suggests that when there is a conflict between medium and message, the medium wins. A formal communication intent naturally acquires informal overtones if it ends up as an email, memetic overtones if it ends up as a 4chan message.

Culkin’s form is the strongest. It suggests that the medium reshapes the principal crafting the message. The Doc Ock motif suggests why. There is no such thing as a dumb agent. All media have at least weak, latent, distributed intelligence. Intelligence that can accumulate power, exhibit agency, and contend for control.
The most familiar example of this effect is in organizational behavior, captured in an extension to Alfred Chandler’s famous observation that structure follows strategy. That becomes first structure follows strategy, then strategy follows structure. The explicit form is Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: in a mature organization, agent goals trump principal goals.

A subtler, less familiar example is the philosophical idea that in any master-slave relationship, the slave can self-actualize through labor. In practice, this happens only when the slave has some freedom above absolute wretchedness, with sufficient cognitive surplus to turn learning from labor into political leverage.

In all such examples, the mechanism is the same. A seemingly powerless and dumb agent, by virtue of having privileged access to information and organizational operations, can become the principal by converting growing tacit knowledge of reality into consciously exercised political leverage.
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The idea sheds light on why we are instinctively concerned about the Trump administration-in-waiting. While it is plausible, indeed probable, that Trump’s own ideological postures are merely expedient responses to the needs of the moment, the same cannot be said of many of his agents-in-waiting, whether acknowledged or not. They are tools at the moment, being shaped to the will of a victor. Unfortunately, they can easily go from being shaped to doing the shaping.

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Howard Luck Gossage (1917–1969), known as “The Socrates of San Francisco,” was an advertising innovator and iconoclast during the “Mad Men” era. A non-conformist who railed against the norms of so-called scientific advertising in his day, Gossage introduced several innovative techniques to the advertising practice that would only become appreciated decades after his death.
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Gossage is credited with introducing the media theorist Marshall McLuhan to media and corporate leaders thereby providing McLuhan his entry into mainstream renown. More widely, Gossage was involved in some of the first environmental campaigning in the USA with the Sierra Club, and in the establishment of Friends of the Earth through his friendship with David Brower. Co-founder at age 36 of the advertising agency Wiener & Gossage, Howard Gossage is listed by Advertising Age at number 23 of its 100 advertising people of the 20th century. AdAge.com calls Gossage a “copywriter who influenced admakers worldwide.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Gossage

The following is a short excerpt from Steve Harrison’s recent biography of Howard Gossage (from Chapter 5, “Launching Marshall McLuhan, and the birth of social networks” in Harrison, S. (2012). Changing the World is the Only Fit Work for a Grown Man –  An Eyewitness Account of the life and Times of Howard Luck Gossage: 1960s Most Innovative, Influential & Irreverent Advertising Genius. Adworld Press.

According to his wife, Sally, Gossage was actually lying in bed late one night in February 1965 when his intellectual isolation came abruptly to an end. “I remember I was reading some sort of wonderful novel and Howard was reading Marshall McLuhan’s book [Understanding Media, published in 1964] and he said ‘I get it, I understand!’ and I said ‘What? and he said ‘McLuhan is assuming that the reader already knows the background stuff that McLuhan knows so he’s writing in shorthand. It needs to be filled in. I’m going to fix it.’ And the next thing I know he’s on the ‘phone and he’s got Marshall McLuhan on the ‘phone in Canada and he says ‘McLuhan, do you want to be famous?’ 

… Jerry Mander has a similar recollection of their first contact. “Howard Gossage discovered Marshall McLuhan as far as I can see. He launched Marshall McLuhan. He’d read that book and he said ‘Mander, look at this. This guy’s fantastic. This is the most amazing person, let’s call him up’. At that time McLuhan was not a well-known character. His book had just come out. I don’t know how Howard got a hold of it but he had read it cover to cover in a flash and said, ‘This is the best thing on media that’s ever been done, and he called him up on the ‘phone and his opening line was ‘Dr. McLuhan, how would you like to be famous?’ 

By the time the firehouse seminar took place in August 1965, Gossage had already delivered on his promise. Back in May, Gossage and his partner Dr. Gerald Feigen in their recently formed consultancy, Generalists, Inc., had invested $6,000 and taken the little-known academic to the East Coast. There, in restaurants affordable only to those on corporate welfare, he was introduced to the nation’s leading media owners, newspaper reporters, TV journalists and admen. 
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Breathing surprisingly easily in the rarefied atmosphere of the corporate élite, the 53 year-old conservative academic in the striped seersucker suit and plastic clip-on bow tie took delight in telling the people who either ran or had found fame and fortune working in the media that, frankly, they really knew nothing about it. (pp. 95-96)

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