…our natural responses to media and to technology are irrelevant… we cannot trust our instincts or our natural physical responses to new things. They will destroy us. How are we to bypass, or offset, the merely physical response to new technology and new environments created by new technology?

This problem has not been raised by anybody, except that we have to live with it every day.

Edgar Allan Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelström” had tremendous influence on the nineteenth-century poets and symbolists like Baudelaire, Flaubert, and others. In this story, Poe imagines the situation in which a sailor, who has gone out on a fishing expedition, finds himself caught in a huge maelstrom or whirlpool. He sees that his boat will be sucked down into this thing. He begins to study the action of the ström, and observes that some things disappear and some things reappear. By studying those things that reappear and attaching himself to one of them, he saves himself. Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom. The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion of consequences of destruction. By studying the patterns 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.

Survival cannot be trusted to natural response or natural instinct, since the brain stem is not provided with any means of responding to man-made environments.