The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of

Self-amputation forbids self-recognition.

In the arts this meant starting with the effect and then inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that effect and no other.

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other

Nothing follows from following, except change. So the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant.

We have been through the three stages of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion that occur in every disease or stress of life,

They missed the all-important fact that when the workers are permitted to join their energies to a process of learning and discovery, the increased efficiency is phenomenal.

Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.

We are entering the new age of education that is programmed for discovery rather than instruction.