VR: Ce n'est pas MTV.

The first announcement of the collapse was made by Arnold Toynbee in a first-page footnote of the first volume of A Study of History (1934-1939), wherein he proposed the notion that the "modern" period ended sometime between 1850 and 1875, and the "post-modern" period begins.

Lest anyone be misled, Toynbee's sense of the "post-modern" has absolutely nothing to do with certain pseudo-revolutionary tracts of so-called Post-Modernists barking about Postmodernism and Protomodernism. Their self-important claims are often nothing more than astute descriptions of the early effects of electrocracy, and specifically television, upon the death of the modern, the death of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy and practice, and nineteenth-century political and social institutions. Electrocracy, however, signals much more than that and includes the death of language and being.

If the term "technocracy" is defined as it was originally, it is a mechanized state of society governed by engineers, a state which has abolished the gold standard and adopted units of heat in its stead. "Electrocracy" might be defined as a non-human, electromagnetized state of global culture governed by the simultaneous effects and affects of electrical and electronic instruments -- instruments ranging from alternating-current generators to microwave ovens, to medical imagizers, to advanced satellite telemetry. In this hyper-organic, hyper-abstract state of the instantaneous, all previous conditions governing quantity and quality are abolished and meaningful currency becomes the ephemeral bandwidths of the electromagnetic spectrum. At present the major tutelary symbols and determinants of electrocratic culture are, of course, commercial television and digital computers, and they are about to be superceded by virtual reality technology.

In the Ministry of Electrocracy we are all merely digital encryptions for bandwidths and wavelengths. The value of any one of us is relevant only to the degree that one affects the organization of the electromagnetic spectrum, and if not the entire spectrum, then that part of it relevant to the human condition, however wired or wireless.The implications of such transfiguration of human value and industry are quite shocking. They will become more so, the more that they are experienced and recognized. At the omphalic centre of all the accumulated perception is the pessimistic pronouncement that meaningful language is all but dead. And with that realization comes the numbing supposition that we are nothing more than social autists.

However sociopathic, the perscription remains: objectify reality; convulse the sensible being; dissociate thought into selflessness; regress; transform pain into pleasure, violence into art, art into simulation, and simulation into simulation. All the while retain the facade of normal sentience, then let the facade become an ever more expensive commodity fetish.

It is not at all surprising that electrocratic forms of communication overwhelm and disorient human rationality, since electrocratic are instant while organic-electric move at, or near, the speed of sound. The direct and indirect perceptions by artists and others of such phenomenology are objective. It is not fortuitous that the artistic techniques of Dada-Surrealism eventually became techniques for standard advertising copy since they seem to persuade the human sensibility that electrocracy is rational. And it is not fortuitous that Electrocracy has taken on the guise of a techno-dada-surreality, or that its current theatre of action, VR, would appear to be even more like three-dimensional versions of MTV videos.

While the poet Lautreamont considered Surrealism as beautiful "as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", the aesthetics of cyberspace occur, according to Rheingold, "at the intersection of stereoscopy and simulation." By extension then, the aesthetics of Electrocracy are dependent on projective animism and willful illusion.

Aesthetics are one thing, but a social rationale dependent upon projective animism and willful illusion is quite another. Actual Electrocracy does not resemble any human element at all despite its apparent facility for special effects. If we are to make any use of it whatsoever -- for the medical industry if nothing else -- we must closely investigate and define what it is and what it is not. At the moment we are implementing it as a kind of catholicon, a partial or universal remedy for the human condition. Without close examination, regulation and application, all it will do for that condition is electrocute it one genome at a time. All that it has done is transform much of human communication and decision-making into a decontextualized hypertextuality.

Despite claims of great educational effectiveness -- that especially by interested parties -- the only paradigm taught by formal television is the paradigm of the instant, the cauterizing, imploding electric instant, the instant without process or transformation. As for content, the curriculi of "disordered thinking," "distorted thinking" and "magical thought" taught by Sesame Street et al. is about to fully maturate into VR, into "wraparound TV." What that actually means has been no where systematically or holistically discussed.

A great deal is known about what it means to think like television, but perhaps it is considered too culturally subversive to popularize the observations. Nevertheless, we are readily anticipating the exhilaration of a leap into VR where we will learn to act like television. According to Jaron Lanier that means we may have such experiential illusions as being "turned into wild dragons... dancing on top of a huge pearl" or growing fingertips on our eyes, and eyes on our fingertips. Lanier hopes to treat us to "post-symbolic" VR or the direct illusion of rational and irrational experience without the intermediary of language.

If that is to be our ontological hysteria, let it be. But let us be as prepared for it as possible. The best intention of this television thinker and actor is to think and act through and around technology toward integral language.