glitch

It’s been over a century since cubism and relativity shattered our mechanical assumptions about space, time and reality.

Today we live in a cubist web of instant information
that crisscrosses the entire planet at the speed of light.
And yet there are still industrial age culture critics
that believe truth should be built like a machine:

“McLuhan’s attempts to account for the general landscape of media are fragmentary and inconsistent.”
— Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan? (via @Wildcat2030)

It’s a 19th century, typographic mind
that demands that truth be written in straight lines.
McLuhan was prepping us for the 21st century.

He was an English professor, but his books were written in the grammar of electricity
… which has always befuddled critics stuck in the logic of the printed page.

To criticize McLuhan’s work for being disjointed or contradictory is as absurd as
dismissing Picasso for not painting like Rembrant
or Einstein for straying too far from Newton.

Our entire electronic environment is fragmentary and inconsistent.
Truth is no longer a chain of facts
but a collision of contradictions and co-incidences in constant motion.

Glitch is the lullaby of the 21st century techno teenager.