The Reunion of Body and the “Old” Soul

Part 2

Digital Unconceals Television

“All languages are mass media. The new mass media—film, radio, television—are new languages, their grammars as yet unknown . . ..” “The New Languages” (Marshall McLuhan, Edward “Ted” Carpenter, 1956).

Around beginning of the 21^st Century, a new paradigmatic kid on the block appeared in in the form of digital technology. During the first decade, it penetrated every tier of Western society, subsequently exposing the “grammar” or structure of the previous paradigmatic alpha—Television. To borrow a term from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the new Digital paradigm unconcealed Television’s “grammar,” which was hiding “ground.”

Television moved into a dominant media position in the West around 1950. It inherited from media predecessors Print and Radio its entire content, along with its premises, givens, and biases, all steeped in material science, modern definitions of “progress,” and a rabid hostility toward hylomorphism. For the next 50 years, Television’s “grammar” promoted lazy illusory thinking, animalistic self-indulgence, celebrity idolatry, and consumerism. Television’s grammar formed the neopagan counterculture, promoted mindless hedonism, dismantled healthy social mores, amplified racial and class resentments, and enabled the development of phony political systems run by a cabal of those controlling wealth (such as the Rockefellers and the Bank of International Settlements) and the US-British militaries and intelligence agencies. In other words, what we now casually refer to as the “Deep State,” a term neoliberals scoff at and conservatives recklessly blame for any phenomena they dislike or are afraid of (UAP/UFOs, artificial intelligence),

A Brief History of the New Paradigmatic Kid

Interesting timing for 911 to have happened almost simultaneously with the appearance of the new kid. After 911 came the Patriot Act and the beginning of a government-digital convergence under Television’s control—in operational terms, the Deep State. In a less-than-20-year span, the new kid, seemingly docile at first, grew up to be the young man who’s never wrong, exposing apexers of the Television era (including the tweener Bill Gates) left and right in the political sense.

The Deep State has desperately fought back with its formative weapon—the mainstream media (MSM). The grammar of the MSM is Television, which condenses the longer, more patience-exhausting narratives of the legacy print media, such as the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, into easily ingested catch phrases, sound bites, and memes.

But the all-knowing Digital young adult and growing numbers of conscripts (currently armed with artificial intelligence) keep exposing Deep State Television through narrative contradiction, mockery, invective, and contempt, posted to platforms like X.

Glimpses of Hylomorphic Ground

By 2016, the Digital kid had become an actual paradigm, incarnate in a number of Silicon Valley technophiles and venture capitalists, referred to in previous EXO posts as “Digital Metopes” or DMs (i.e. “leaders” in what we call the Digital Sphere). This post maintains the conceit.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, most of the DMs succumbed to Television’s propaganda campaign to preserve its human conscripts within the Deep State. But after a few years of watching multiple, stupefyingly suicidal policy decisions carried out under the presidency of Joe Biden, the most influential DMs revolted.

In a number of podcast and print interviews, apex DM Marc Andreesen confided that watching Biden and company burning down the country compelled him to search the history books for explanations. He found satisfaction in the writing of early 20^th-century social historian Robert Michels. Michels argued that all democratic organizations eventually come under the control of leaders, who become oligarchs. Andreesen and a core group of DMs decided that they needed to replace the current oligarchs represented by the Biden administration. They not only made that happen, but also installed fellow DM JD Vance as second in line to the commander-in-chief.

One of DM Vance's first acts as vice president was to deliver a lecture to the EU on its failure to honor and respect the "shared values" that had made the US and Europe what they are, specifically respect for individual freedom. Members of the EU and NATO (essentially the same organization, formed by Television grammar) expressed “shock” and “offense,” apparently still believing that they were the oligarchs in charge.

Had they been more mindful of the examples set by China, India, and Russia—along with Europe’s increasing status as persona non grata in Africa and South America—they might have grasped that Vance was restating a basic tenet of Protestant Christianity, which infused the rough-hewn fiber of early American frontier people with the common belief that made possible a revolutionary military resistance against the British Crown. Recently christened DM and Palantir CEO Steve Karp, while promoting his new book The Technological Republic, put a finer point on Vance’s remarks by saying that the US is a civilization based on “Calvinism,” which marries the seemingly contradictory doctrines of predestinarianism and free will. In other words, the US was born special and is free to target, name, and act against good and evil. Sort of what Palantir has digitally enabled the US military (and allies such as Israel) to do.

Vance and Karp were aiming their comments at the aggressive censoring policies and actions taken by both the Biden Administration and the EU against speech and actions they didn’t agree with. But were Vance, Karp, Andreesen, and the other DMs responding to indignation over censorship, or was both the censorship and their response caused by Digital unconcealment of the ground that Television obscured?

One Flew East, One Flew West, One Flew Over the Digital Sphere’s Nest

EXO believes the Digital paradigm is more accurately characterized as a “Sphere,” a civilizational subconscious mindset ordered around the focal points of language and definitions of what it means to be human. The Digital Sphere competes against two other Spheres, centered respectively around Western and Eastern civilizations. Collectively, the Three Spheres represent a classic 3-body problem that is forcing the disintegration of the old Television “world-order” and a reconfiguration of their respective original “ground.” In other words, the tug of war between the Three Spheres has awakened global humanity from its modern trance to an awareness of human spirituality in its various original cultural forms.

How and why is the Digital Sphere having what would seem to be an anachronistic effect on the “modern world”? EXO’s answer resides in the Digital Sphere’s grammar. This includes the basic architecture of the hard- and software of digital technology. Its hardware consists of circuits, made of composites of conductive and resistant materials that route electrical charges in elaborate configurations of flow (conductive) and stop (resistance). Essentially on-off switches. The software corresponds to this flow-stop/on-off circuit structure through a 0-1 binary code. The code “names” particular circuit patterns that are stored in the hardware as “memory.” Those code names can be used to retrieve that “memory.”

Thus, the Digital Sphere’s grammar depends on naming and remembering.

In contrast, Television’s grammar depends on capturing images through cameras and sounds through microphones, converting those images and sounds to radio-frequency waves, then transmitting those waves to receivers that convert the waves back into images through flicker-flash hardware in a television set. In other words, an electronic illusion-making machine. Like the radio technology it replaced, Television was invented to communicate news, entertainment, and commercial sales, all of which eventually became intertwined.

Marshall McLuhan and his sometime rival Norman Mailer were much concerned about the effects of Television on the human soul. Mailer freely used the ancient Greek term psyche. McLuhan and Mailer believed the medium was doing something pernicious to the American psyche specifically. In their own particular idioms, both asserted that Television encouraged delusional thinking. McLuhan observed the neopagan behavior of young people who grew up under Television conditions. Mailer was more preoccupied by the proliferation of sex and violence that had always been a part of America’s early culture (e.g., the frontier Indian wars, the wild west, etc.) but was somehow being ginned up by not only Television but also technology itself.

The first serious “hippie” novelist Ken Kesey picked up on the same notion in his one and only great 1963 work One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In that novel (dumbed-down in movie form), Kesey’s mental-asylum inmate narrator Chief Broom perceives at night the workings of “The Combine”: his name for a horrific, demonic transhumanist process that performs on the inmates of the asylum a more brutal and graphic version of what it is doing to the so-called sane people on the outside. The Combine’s essential character is extreme feminism, and its central aim is to emasculate men and establish a machine-like feministic tyranny. Looking back from 2025 to 1963, one could say that Kesey was onto something. Same could be said for McLuhan and Mailer.

McLuhan was always quick to point out that artists are seeing and feeling that which eventually engulfs everyone else. As a literary critic, he was able to observe artists like Mailer in mid-battle. McLuhan devised ingenious methods of assessment to understand the effects of media grammar on the human soul. Those methods provide valuable insight on how media grammar can explain what happened to humanity 75 years ago and what’s happening today under the tug of the Three Spheres.