When images or identity, private or corporate, are confused the natural response is blind violence. Such violence is never a quest for a goal but for an image.

How persistently the face of murderous violence associates itself with know-how! It is hard to say why the public target of such a factory should be any happier than the recipient of a bomb or shell.

Since violence is the inevitable means of quest for identity when the old image, private or corporate, is smudged by the new technology, war is automatic as a means of recovering identity.

Violence is a norm on any frontier. Why? Because on the frontier men have forgotten, or left behind, their old identities.

Violence is directed toward image-making, not goals . . . The Columbia students have no goals, neither do the Negroes. As long as we provide them with new technology, they must struggle for a new image.

Violence is the effort to maintain or restore a weakened psyche.

Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

Violence means the violation of territories, whether political or psychic, physical or moral… To invade the private person, or to invade a group with teaching, with doctrines, with entertainment, all these are alike forms of violence.

The violence that all electric media inflict on their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience to their private individual selves, even as instant involvement supresses private identity.

The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.

Yes, all forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody. So you become very violent.