That is, the planet has become an anti-environment, an art form, an extension of consciousness, yielding new perception of the new man-made environment.

The next phase of this extension will naturally concern the action of making consciousness technologically.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

A very satisfactory approach is provided by Jacques Ellul in Propaganda. He points out that propaganda is not a particular message via a particular medium but is the total culture in action.

The successor to politics with be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times. So politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be so much more powerful than he could ever be.

The literate man is the natural sucker for propaganda. You cannot propagandize a Native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas. Therefore, propaganda is our Achilles heel. It's our weak point. We will buy anything if it's got a good, hard sell tied to it. And so propaganda is the great big soft spot in the makeup of the literate man.

In Propaganda, Jacques Ellul contends that it is the total culture in action that is propaganda, or teaching.

"Propaganda cannot succeed where people have no trace of Western culture." These words of Jacques Ellul in Propaganda draw attention to one of the crucial features of Western history.

An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960s

Let me suggest that it may be possible to write programs for changes, not only in consciousness but in the unconscious in the future.

For with the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting.

The future of investment on this planet is going to be overwhelmingly the restoration of the planet itself through all the phases of its development.

There is nothing inherently impossible in the computer, or that type of technology, extending consciousness itself as a universal environment.

The scientist lives in a world of matching, and his idea of proof or verification is just the matching evidence against evidence. When somebody doesn’t match but makes a new breakthrough, this is just as disturbing to the scientist as to the educator. It upsets the whole apple cart.

There is no difference of result between our entertainment industry and the Asian or Soviet brainwashing programs. Our revulsion is irrationally channeled towards the deliberate intention of reshaping consciousness because we have had centuries to devise more subtle and complex ways of achieving the same end… The Soviet and Asian areas having so little pre-electronic technology feel no inhibitions about following the logic of the electronic and the instantaneous.

Any well-adjusted person is brainwashed. Only the artist fights against it. Jacques Ellul point out that propaganda ends where dialogue begins. What has been called brainwashing is really getting properly organized for living according to the technology available. We call it education.”