But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.

Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening

I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.

Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.

The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation

Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.

Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don't produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.