The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
- Marshall McLuhan
How we create, share, and comprehend digital content is changing with artificial intelligence (AI) breakthroughs. We are experiencing a McLuhanization of information and the systems that mediate it.
What does McLuhanization mean?
It indicates our digital content is expanding. It is becoming entangled in the “global village”—a pulsing internet ecosystem of lively information flows. The information is becoming more ubiquitous, nuanced, and differentiated. This growth presupposes using AI to make sense of all the info and its meaning. It also presupposes a different way to approach information and how it influences cultural shifts and attenuates our thinking.
How fast is the growth, though? Visualize this: a flow of digital creativity is released online every second. A study by DOMO highlights this trend where the internet expands rapidly with content. In just a minute, Facebook users share 293,000 status updates, Twitter users post 456,000 tweets, and YouTube users upload 500 hours of video content.
Importantly, this content expansion has implications for the future of human liberty and our shared mastery over knowledge. It enables us to challenge nation-state propaganda and use surplus data to create fairness in media. This push toward fairness via technology means humanity will see a further departure from biological and physical constraints.
In this essay, I will discuss how this content boom facilitates the emergence of content collectives that wield AI-powered antipropaganda campaigns. I will detail how these circumstances represent stirrings of an extropian media theory, which expresses how information evolution improves the accuracy of our knowledge and augments us for the better.
What are Content Collectives?
Content collectives are associations of creatives who share unorthodox ideas and spread information contrary to state-controlled, legacy news. They use various technologies, especially AI, to uplift and augment their efforts. They aim to destabilize the state and pave the way for revolutionary information delivery.
Early examples of content collectives include alternative media hubs like Free Thought Project, World Alternative Media, The Anti-Media, and Parlor. Many of these outlets have been censored. Others still exist. More are emerging.
What are some examples of content collectives?
Anonymous
One successful content collective is the group of hacktivists known as Anonymous. They are a decentralized affiliation of individuals that disrupt government and corporate functioning. They protect free speech, expose corruption, and fight the censor. They are known for their hard-hitting slogan:
We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We remember. Expect us.
The Anonymous collective made waves by throwing a wrench into the gears of MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal. They hacked these organizations by unleashing a string of DDoS (denial of service) attacks, a response to them blocking Wikileaks from receiving donations.
Anonymous has been effective due to its flexible, decentralized structure. This contrasts with inflexible state bureaucracy. Without a clear base, Anonymous embodies the ethos of dissidence. These makers and hackers commit themselves to sharing transformative messages—often in the form of computer code—exploiting the flaws of the authoritarian apparatus.
In many ways, Anonymous is similar to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks
Wikileaks is a not-for-profit media organization founded by cypherpunk Julian Assange. It emerged in 2006. They publish classified documents from anonymous sources worldwide.
What sets Wikileaks apart is its ability to ensure the anonymity of many of its sources. This secrecy encourages whistleblowers to expose the opaque insides of government. For instance, the release of the Afghan War Logs and Iraq War Logs revealed the unsettling realities of war, contradicting the sanitized versions peddled by state-run media.
For some illuminating content, it is worth viewing the "Collateral Murder" video leaked by Chelsea Manning and published by Wikileaks in 2010. The video is horrifying. It depicts a gunship helicopter shooting innocent reporters. The soldiers can be heard bragging like they are playing Call of Duty.
As we further explore media and technology, the role of content collectives becomes more layered and complex. These collectives become the de facto harbingers of change, feeding the rise of artificial intelligence in content creation.
AI Use Case for the Counter Manufacture of Consent and Combating State Narratives
AI tools allow content collectives to analyze propaganda and generate counter-propaganda. Phillip K. Dick described how individuals try to alter consensus reality. He said:
'The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.'
Good actors can defensively deploy AI to control words and images and expose government chicanery. It empowers content collectives to create more robust, diverse, and stimulating narratives. This shift is essential in combating the pervasive influence of state-generated disinformation.
Linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky expressed the current predicament. His image of "manufacturing consent" indicates the media's primary function. It is not to inform but to manufacture support for government policies and corporate interests. He argues the press achieves this by selectively reporting on issues and framing them biasedly to exclude alternative perspectives. Chomsky elaborated:
The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.
What is worse than “concentrated wealth” is that governments drum up support for warmongering and enslavement. Politicians inspire people to worship red-and-white striped bits of cloth and consume content created within newsrooms full of sycophants. Tragically, nation states have employed propaganda for centuries to guide public opinion
Steps to Contest Narrative Dominance
Today, we are on the cusp of revolution. Content collectives can use artificial intelligence to contest and overturn this long-established supremacy.
How exactly will they achieve this, though?
Here are the key strategies:
Propaganda Analysis: AI tools, with their capacity for pattern recognition and data analysis, can study and understand the intricacies of state propaganda.
Hybrid Content: AI-assisted content-creation tools can generate engaging content tailored to the audience's preferences.
Opposition and equalization: With the insights gained from propaganda analysis and the power of engaging content, content collectives can counteract state narratives by exposing their tactics.
With these strategies, no one has to accept and consume information passively. People can engage directly with a content collective. They can shape the narrative and challenge the status quo. However, censorship is also a major problem plaguing open content circulation and the alternative media sector. Content collectives must combat this censorship ecosystem to affect change.
Censorship Ecosystems
Censorship has been pervasive throughout the life of the nation state. It is how the political class keeps everyone hypnotized and comatose. In this way, the state has molded media and tech into a censorship ecosystem, where the state and its associates silence dissenting opinions.
Historically, the media and big tech were dedicated to conveying the truth but have been corrupted. Some argue they always operated as a byproduct of state power. Regardless, the modern media ecosystem is part of a censorship ecosystem: a complex web of interactions that serves the interests of the privileged elite.
Big tech censorship, chilling effects, and consensus trance
Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google have been accused of being involved in heavy censorship. They deplatform or shadowban users who question mainstream talking points. This attack on contrarian voices has created a chilling effect. Dissidents voluntarily gag themselves for fear of bans or investigations by the police.
I mentioned The Free Thought Project and The Anti-Media earlier. These groups were enmeshed in a 2018 mass censorship campaign initiated by Facebook in coordination with Twitter, Youtube, and Google. The social media giants removed contrarian pages along with their followers. During the 2018 mass banning, Alex Jones's pages were also purged. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Spotify collaborated to ban his material. They did this under the guise that Jones' violated community policies.
This egregious censorship shows the nation state colludes with big tech to lull people into apathy and indifference. They trap innocent folks in what psychologist Charles Tart called a "consensus trance": a fog where people follow their routine and dismiss totalitarianism around them.
However, with the arrival of content collectives and the armamentarium of tech at our disposal, anyone can oppose propaganda and censorship. We can now approach a new way of thinking about the future of media through extropian thought.
Extropianism
Before exploring the idea of extropian media theory, we must grasp extropianism.
Futurist Max More expressed the principles in the 1980s and established the Extropy Institute in the 1990s. He explained extropianism as a futurist movement that uses technology and science to unleash human potential. Extropians seek to push physical and social boundaries and promote an open society. The idea is based on transcending biological limitations and achieving a post-human existence.
'Extropy' refers to a system’s order, vitality, and capacity for improvement. The opposite of extropy is entropy: a system's tendency to degrade. These systems include everything from bacteria to dogs, humans, stars, and universes, which inevitably dissolve into atomized goo via heat decay. Extropians believe that by harnessing the power of technology, humans can reverse the effects of entropy.
Extropianism is largely based on principles of human longevity and synthetic enhancement. The modus operandi is self-transformation, transcendence, and overcoming the monkey body.
However, extropianism also extols the importance of self-sufficiency and individual freedom. This push toward liberty is why an extropian media theory thrives in the networked and globalized cultural environment.
But what exactly does an extropian theory of media look like?
Extropian Media Theory and the Augmented Future
Imagine a world in which traditional systems do not dictate the media. Imagine the boundaries of discourse are constantly being pushed. Imagine all information being reshaped and augmented by AI for fairness and accuracy.
The theory proposes deploying novel technologies (such as AI) to cultivate a media ecosystem that is constantly evolving and self-accelerating. By doing so, humankind overcomes the prejudices of traditional media.
Extropian media theory rejects the idea of media as static and singular, instead envisioning it as dynamic, tailored, and multifaceted. Circulating media thus constantly refines itself through iterative feedback loops as populations consume it. By leveraging AI through content collectives, the nature and shape of media itself is continually transformed.
McLuhan foresaw the transformative nature of electronic media and emergent cyberculture through the global village—the web of electronic communication. However, he could not have foreseen how AI would allow media to dissolve state-based, legacy architectures. The overarching goal of this new media revolution is human transformation and the maximization of extropy.
Media Singularity
But this theory goes beyond the advocacy of maximizing extropy. It heralds a radical change in our perspectives, ethics, and consciousness. Extropian media theory predicts the complete breakdown of centralized apparatuses of control and all the cultural attitudes and mores derived from it.
We have already seen how the breakdown can occur, but what will be the result?
A democratized digital agora where communications, content, messages, memes, and other data fragments circulate fairly. It is through this process that we restore order to the human mind. People start to introspect more and allow elbow room for shifts in consciousness and perspective.
It has already begun.
Instead of global catastrophe, many apocalyptic and end-of-times visions see a global awakening or consciousness shift. But this awakening may not be happening due only to technology. Technology is merely a catalyst for the changes erupting all around.
Thinkers as diverse as Terence McKenna, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Daniel Pinchbeck and others have dedicated volumes to catastrophising or glorifying the coming “final event” or “eschaton” or “omega point.”
The bottom line is that some major occurrence or "singularity" is about to reshape the essence of humanity in a non-destructive fashion. This event is epitomized by using electronic media combined with AI to churn out greater quantities of information with greater quantities of truth and novelty. It is an “information awakening” or “media singularity.” However, this awakening must include erasing outdated, cannibalistic media structures.
Awakening from Informational Hegemony
The power elite has always tried to cannabalize and hoard knowledge at the expense of everyone. In the dark ages, the Catholic church collected large caches of books, literature, and research; it used this informational hegemony and monopoly over the peasants with impunity. They exalted themselves as the gatekeepers of literacy and wisdom. They repressed revolt with intimidation, violence, and witch hunts. Some suggest this “knowledge hoarding” is a myth, but we know with certainty the Church punished people for blasphemy and made many into apostates for sharing heretical knowledge.
The church hegemony never left. It metamorphosed, assuming the form of the State, media, and big tech. But since the internet made hoarding and controlling information more difficult, they began to mix high-quality information with “malinformation.” That is quality information or content corrupted by fake news, fraud, and deceitful agendas.
The content collectives and AI approaches mentioned allow for the final flowering of information. This maturation will uplift humanity beyond the apelike barbarism of its bloodied past. Humanity’s revolution is not just a technical revolution; it’s a revolution of the human spirit. It is an appeal to build open societies of digital abundance and truth.
Conclusion: Ozymandias Story
As we stand on the precipice of this new era, the age-old battle between content creators and propagandists has found its final battlefield: the information realm.
The rise of AI and the capabilities it confers fundamentally alters the landscape of content creation and media. Content collectives, driven by the boundless creativity of human intellect, are mounting a formidable offense against propaganda and content control.
This paradigm shift towards AI-enabled content collectives signifies the dawn of a new era in media. Expanding on McLuhan, we perceive a future where the “medium” is no longer confined to the physicality of technology. Instead, it extends to AI and its ability to reshape the human mind.
The future also brings possibilities for genuine and uninhibited expression that transcends political boundaries. This free digital media environment manifests the conditions for expanding our potential. It permits the maturation of all extropian goals: upgraded humans, longer life spans, and machine-human hybrids—which authoritarian structures have heretofore hampered through embargoes on information exchange.
However, these structures and their information hegemonies are starting to crumble, fall to pieces, and cease to exist. We are living in a technologically-propelled Ozymandias story, where we hospice these legacy systems out of existence. And thank goodness for it; it is our birthright to move well beyond the confines of control.