🎣Weekly Catch #1.3

Marshall McLuhan, shmackdown😶, Masks...,The Sphere, && FIGs#RipJamesP.Carse

Sep 21, 2025

(hey yall!)

*substitute coffee for caffeine tea* status update: in desperate need of an iron infusion:(

Better late than never, right? I don’t have much to say this week, I’ll just share what’s been on my mind, plate, screen, and headphones:

📣Announcements:

Stopped reading The Source of Self Regard by Toni Morrison because it was very boring in comparison to my other books so i’ll try again later
Reading Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell ❤️🌎
Watching Full Metal Alchemist w/@James
Chrysalis COOLing party coming up!! Still getting my crib together XD

Marshall McLuhan: “The Philosopher of Communication”

Never scream for help, scream FIRE 😳

“The conflict going on in Vietnam has a corresponding conflict within ourselves, we have a hot war being reported on a cool medium and it creates a great deal of distaste and reluctance in the population at large. So cool is involving and hot is not… A cop told a friend in New York, if you’re ever in trouble never shout help—shout fire. If you shout fire all the windows will go up, if you shout help you’ll get nothing. Help is too involving it demands too much for most people— they’re afraid. Fire isn’t involving its a hot medium. If you want, you can throw a blanket, or throw a bucket without being personally involved at all. This is an extreme example of this strange conflict between hot and cool.”

On The Future 🚀

Forecasting and intellectualism don’t mix well… Forecasting is closer to an art form, it has to be felt in the present. Intellectualism, by contrast, looks outward for answers, while art looks inward. McLuhan says it’s the inward turn that helps us survive, and I’d argue it’s the practice of art itself that allows for our survival as a collective:

“The television has this extraordinary effect by driving western man inwards, man has triumphed against nature because he’s been oriented outward.”

So what does it mean to be oriented outward?

McLuhan again:

“People have always been unaware of new environments—because they’re afraid of them. From the moment of birth, people get a sense that the new environment around them is hostile. It’s a real threat to their whole existence, so every time an environment changes we hasten to seek security and comfort in the old environment. Heres a passage from Shakespeare: One touch of nature makes the whole world kin that each with one consent pursues newborn Gods though they be made and molded of things past. The new is always made up of the old or rather what people see in the new is always the old thing. Like the rearview mirror. Their attention is always focused on the rearview mirror never the present image or the present fact.”

This fear of the new keeps us trapped in our minds. Anxiety prevents us from being present an d expressing ourselves in the present. Art, however, steers the opposite behavior: it anchors us in the now. And in expressing the present, art transforms it into the past—and the past, in turn, is what forecasts the future.

“The chances of understanding the changes in your own time are very small, except through the memes provided by artists. Artists are people who enjoy living in the present.”

If you want to know more about the future, turn your passion into expression through whatever art-form is compatible with your skills and gifts.

Medium is the Message

A medium is never neutral. It doesn’t simply carry information; it reshapes the people who use it. A new medium doesn’t just add to human experience—it completely alters it.

“They don’t think of the new medium, they only think of the old medium because the old medium is the content of the new medium.”

To live fully in the present, we need to embrace discovery through new forms of education, new technologies, and new ways of communicating. Each medium gives us a new image of the body by altering our senses: temperature, sound, touch, and input. Every medium is an extension of some human faculty: the wheel extends the foot, the book extends the eye, clothing extends the skin, and circuits extend the central nervous system.

“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech.”

💨 Brain Fart: Maybe Take Your Mask Off??

I’ve been thinking a lot about masks, and I don’t have a conclusion... What do we conceal or protect when we decide (if we decide) to put them on?

For a while, I was very anti-mask.#Girard I believed that if you can discern what is authentic(true for you) and transcend your environment, then it’s your duty to protect and practice that. But in reality, that can be unrealistic. Sometimes masks are useful. They save energy, shield us from social friction and anxiety, and let us blend in just enough to find intersections and community.

Not to mention, there are ways to be authentic to a side of yourself compatible with the mask you wear.

My favorite and the most extreme example of masks are double lives: Jem & the Holograms, Twelfth Night, Hannah Montana, Batman, and Spiderman. Each character gained freedoms their “true” selves couldn’t never cash in—whether it was breaking gender barriers or escaping child celebrity commodification. Society has rules and laws we can’t always escape, so we adapt.

But then again… do we have to? I’m still not sure.

Sunday Dinner (it was soo good) 😌

I am so happy I & my partner are skilled enough chefs to bring the South wherever we go…I was shmacking on it hard. Attack-down shmack-down. 🔥

philosofounder_

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The Sphere (1998)- ⭐️⭐️ (.5)

Hot Take🌶️: Finite & Infinite Games Teaser #RIPJamesP.Carse

Why is being poor sometimes grant more freedom than middle/upper/rich class? Freedom is my number one value, without it there is no me(in practice). I prioritize it over stability, and even over safety—so I’ve always had a high risk tolerance.

Poor people are often freer because they don’t have to keep up appearances, which expend energy on insignificant games... They can chase wild dreams without worrying about looking respectable because they’re already considered otherwise. They eat what they want, listen to what they want, dress how they want, and decorate their homes however they want. Very extreme wealth grants the same only with the addition of financial freedom of the rich and the stability of the middle class. Their lives aren’t organized around maintaining permission to “play” in the middle-class performance games.

James P. Carse writes:

“Finite players must be selected. One senses a compulsion to maintain a certain level of performance, because permission to play in these games can be canceled.”

Finite games are played to win. Every move is made towards an outcome of victory; whatever isn’t in service of winning doesn’t matter. This constant vigilance tricks the finite player into thinking every move is mandatory. Every social class plays their own finite games. But infinite players don’t see these class games as their identity so none of it is mandatory. The middle-class mentality, that you must perform to be accepted, pimps you out to the whims of capitalism. If you are to use capitalism as a tool, you can’t let it use you.

“Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a game to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. The constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the competition can lead them to believe that every move they make, they must make.”

But sometimes, you just can’t refuse to play:

“It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impossible. There are games that seem to be life and death. In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid by terrible suffering or death.”

Even in extreme cases, whoever takes on the commanded role does so by choice—that’s how powerful the illusion of necessity is:

“Certainly, the price for refusing is high, but that there is a price at all points to the fact that oppressors themselves acknowledge that even the weakest of their subjects must agree to be oppressed.”
“Fields of play simply do not impose themselves on us. Therefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.”

It’s all in your mind, as Di Mello would say.

Even when you can’t control your material conditions, you can choose how you relate to them. Poor people may not have middle-class “security,” but they can refuse the performance. They can live as infinite players—defining their own rules, finding joy in what they already have, chasing impossible dreams, expressing themselves in ways that don’t require validation that they belong and can play (unless you’re in a gang😳)…

The middle class is trapped by the fear of losing the status that they played so hard for. They mistake permission to play for survival itself. They believe they must maintain appearances or else they’ll fall out of the game. But the infinite player sees that the game is optional. Remember you can play, but don’t let it define you. #Transcend