McKenna

Mckenna notes

The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its wheels. They spend their days in activities which largely boil down to counting and measuring, living in a world of rationalized abstraction which has little relation to or harmony with the great biological rhythms and processes. As a matter of fact, mental activities of this kind can now be done far more efficiently by machines than by men — so much so that in a not too distant future the human brain may be an obsolete mechanism for logical calculation. Already the human computer is widely displaced by mechanical and electrical computers of far greater speed and efficiency. If, then, man’s principal asset and value is his brain and his ability to calculate, he will become an unsaleable commodity in an era when the mechanical operation of reasoning can be done more effectively by machines.

this line of thought is what moves me to make works that are reinforcing the little beauties of nature, animals, sexuality, and relationships. if we are ultimately going to pretend to be machines, id like to pretend to be an animal for a bit longer.

In McKennas lecture "Psychedelics int he Age of Intelligent Machines", he says : [It was] Ludwig von Bertalanffy, I think, who said in his book General Systems Theory, he said: "People are not machines but in every opportunity where they're allowed to behave like machines, they will so behave." In other words, we tend to fall into the well of habit. Though the glory of our humanness is our spontaneous creativity, we too as creatures of physics and chemistry, of memory and hope, tend to fall into repetitious patterns. These repetitious patterns are the death of creativity. They diminish our humanness. They diminish our individuality, make each of us somehow like cogs in some larger system.

said 'we are not machines, every chance we have to act like one, we take it". that statement hurts me because of its truth. instead of feeling the intimacy between us and those around us, we close ourselves into our devices and interact with each others intersests and not with the character of the person.

"gratify his soul's hunger for truth and beauty,"

The Mechanical Bride Folklore of Industrial Man

most salient feature

aimed at persuasion

“Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now.

chose the ads and articles included in his book not only to draw attention to their symbolism and their implications for the corporate entities that created and disseminated them, but also to mull over what such advertising implies about the wider society at which it is aimed.