I was poking around in some old files and came across this quotation which (without arrogance) I had to look up to make sure was from my own brain and not a book of Marshall McLuhan’s:
Continuous progress, innovation, constant change (“the only constant is change”) is a kind of straitjacket, a rigidly enforced ideology, which prevents true freedom of thought and fullness of being as thoroughly, and perhaps more thoroughly because of its invisibility, as any totalitarianism.
The idea is that one way to prevent people from thinking and being free and in charge of their own lives is to offer them a shiny new way of doing things so often that they are always learning a system and never using it to achieve anything. Think of all those times you open a program to do something only to be prompted to make an upgrade and find yourself minutes or even hours later having forgotten your goal. If you think of civilization, especially computer-driven civilization, as a vast piece of software designed to maximize human happiness …
We need more information about all this information.