To reprogram the cultures of the globe becomes as natural an undertaking as curriculum revision in a university.

Radio created Hitler as a delinquent Peter Pan, charged with cosmic emanation. Would not a high degree of awareness of these media effects (e.g. radio in Nigeria or in any tribal territory) enable us to set up social therapies and immunizing programs exactly comparable to medical action in the face of an endemic disease?

A full understanding of the sensory typology of cultures on one hand, and the sensory order and impact of art and technology on the other hand, affords the possibility of a human environment sensorially programmed for the maximal use of the human powers of learning.

The total programming of the human environment by information is more and more within reach with satellite broadcasting. The world environment can be programmed as a single shared experience. Increasingly, as information levels rise and improve, we share the experience of this planet as a single thing with everybody.

How, then, does the artist respond to an electric world in which everything is at once? I suggest that his most imaginative response is first to point out the existence of this world (as it shapes us), and not to be misled into interest in the old machinery of the industrial age. Secondly, the artist tends to respond by pointing out that this all-at-once environment has now itself become a work of art. For the first time in history we have enough power, energy, and ability to program the entire human environment as a work of art. The artist has begun to enter on this kind of enterprise with a whole variety of sallies and witty performances - some of them merely Pop art performances. If you take a piece of the environment and put it inside an art gallery this is a way of announcing that, from now on, the environment itself is a work of art ... It is a sort of anticipation of the immediate future in which we are going to tackle the business of programming or shaping every aspect of the human environment as a human artefact. This surely implies that we must shape it so as to heighten human awareness — rather than black out perception.

The need of our time is for a means of measuring sensory thresholds and a means of discovering exactly what changes occur in these thresholds as a result of the advent of any particular technology. With such knowledge in hand, it would be possible to program a reasonable and orderly future for any human community. Such knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostatic control of room temperatures.

To reprogram the cultures of the globe becomes as natural an undertaking as curriculum revision in a university. Since new media are new environments that reprocess psyche and society in successive ways, why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects meant for fragmented sections of society and reprogram the environment itself? Such is Burroughs’ vision.

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

Each new technology — new environment — is a reprogramming of sensory life. … The new one is always unperceived. We see the Emperor’s old clothes. Only children and artists are antisocial enough to see the new ones.

The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion of consequences of destruction. By studying the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.

….. I think the computer is admirably suited to the artistic programming of such an environment, of taking over the task of programming the environment itself as a work of art, instead of programming the content as a work of art.

The familiar idea of “making the news” now yields to making the world itself. For the best part of a century we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious. The complementary of this process would seem to be the “natural” program for the period ahead: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness. This procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness radically different from former consciousness. Everybody becomes a voluntary participant in creating diversity without loss of identity. Man is the content of the environment he creates, whether of “hardware” or software,” whether of consciousness of unconsciousness. There is therefore no technical alternative to “humanism” even though for many this would include the divine grace of the superhuman. INNOVATION IS OBSOLETE, SO IS OBSOLESCENCE, AS INFORMATION SEED-UP TRANSFORMS MAN AND HIS WORLD INTO ART FORM.
AFINN-AGAIN-ARRAY-SURRECTION!

McLUHAN Automation and cybernation can play an essential role in smoothing the transition to the new society.
PLAYBOY: How?
McLUHAN: The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. Already, it’s technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways.
PLAYBOY: How do you program an entire society—beneficially or otherwise?
McLUHAN: There’s nothing at all difficult about putting computers in the position where they will be able to conduct carefully orchestrated programming of the sensory life of whole populations. I know it sounds rather science-fictional, but if you understood cybernetics you’d realize we could do it today. The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their over-all needs, creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses. We could program five hours less of TV in Italy to promote the reading of newspapers during an election, or lay on an additional 25 hours of TV in Venezuela to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio the preceding month. By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate, just as we are beginning to learn how to maintain equilibrium among the world’s competing economies.
PLAYBOY: How does such environmental programing, however enlightened in intent, differ from Pavlovian brainwashing?
McLUHAN: Your question reflects the usual panic of people confronted with unexplored technologies. I’m not saying such panic isn’t justified, or that such environmental programing couldn’t be brainwashing, or far worse—merely that such reactions are useless and distracting. Though I think the programing of societies could actually be conducted quite constructively and humanistically, I don’t want to be in the position of a Hiroshima physicist extolling the potential of nuclear energy in the first days of August 1945. But an understanding of media’s effects constitutes a civil defense against media fallout. The alarm of so many people, however, at the prospect of corporate programing’s creation of a complete service environment on this planet is rather like fearing that a municipal lighting system will deprive the individual of the right to adjust each light to his own favorite level of intensity. Computer technology can—and doubtless will—program entire environments to fulfill the social needs and sensory preferences of communities and nations. The content of that programing, however, depends on the nature of future societies—but that is in our own hands.

The human sensorium in terms of systems development permits and tends to demand a programming of the environment itself. The future of the economy in terms of our new technology strongly points towards the need to program environments rather than to make commodities to put into environments. This is tantamount to saying that the future of advertising is to supplant products by providing the satisfactions in every greater depth, with increasing independence from the product. This has been a strong tendency within advertising for decades and yet it may seem a mere fantasy. It is this kind of fantasy that we are living out in the electronic age.

We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery.

Paramount Studios or Disneyland or Universal City were, and are vast reservoirs of mobile city sets for any age or culture. These are “disposable cities” such as we associate with world fairs and Expo since 1851 and the Crystal Palace. It is typical of the 19th century mind of the current [city] “planners” that they should consider the mobility problem in terms of the obsolete car, and truck and train. In the mobster phrase of the 20’s, they have chosen us as eligible for the “cement kimono” treatment.

The environment is increasingly programmed. And programmed much more richly than any classroom ever was. Now I think that this might not be a bad theme to meditate upon: that for the first time in human history the outside environment is richer than the inside classroom. This has never happened before as far as I know. Always in the past the inside classroom was richer than the ordinary environment of that time.

The human environment is a teaching machine, infallible. It’s possible now to program it. It’s no longer necessary to have a curriculum. You can now program an environment so as to create the effects of literacy without ever having taught people how to read or write.