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8:22

(In »From semiotics via memetics to the collapse of militant atheism«)

This means that the medium is not only the message, as the Canadian literary historian Marshall McLuhan clear-sightedly proclaims as early as the 1960s, but that the medium also creates the actor herself, rather than the other way around. We are literally the media with which we communicate. The netocrat of the information age therefore has a sober view of herself as an affirmative by-product of the interactive technologies that she is using in order to interact with her environment, rather than the other way around. And it is precisely because of the superiority of interactivity vis-à-vis the preceding one-directional communicating technologies – given the choice between on the one hand interactivity, with its equality at all levels, and on the other hand one-directional communication from the top down, from those in power to the masses, the current actors always choose interactivity – that ultimately the netocracy vanquish the bourgeoisie of the industrial age and take over society’s central functions. Since the ideas are fictives – concealed within ideologically coloured fictions, which move according to a certain metaphysical structure – according to the syntheist view, the ideas can never be said to be owned by any individual actor or any group of actors in any real sense.