If Culture Is An Operating System, Ours Is Postmodernism

An Analogy For The Postmodern Turn

“Shamans have always known this…that culture is an operating system. That’s all it is. And that the operating system can be wiped out and replaced with something else.” - Terence McKenna

Introduction

In a past life I owned and operated a commercial recording studio in the High Park area of Toronto, Ontario. Because my studio was close to Dundas West subway station, I was able to garner interest from artists all over the GTA. That, combined with affordable rates, and what certain clients described as a “hot mic,” attracted rap crews in the hundreds over the course of my 20 years in the music business. One notable occasion, a group of talented rappers who had produced a beat with strange sounding dialog overlayed throughout the piece used my studio to record their vocals. The dialog mixed into the beat was a weird mad scientist-like voice speaking about some way far out stuff. Because I was just hearing bits and pieces, I couldn’t really fully grasp what was being expressed, but I immediately understood the attraction to the weirdness of the narrator. It was just cool sounding. When the session was over I asked who that guy on the recording was and what the hell was he talking about. They gave me the link to a youtube video of American ethnobotanist, Terence McKenna.

In the video, McKenna describes the use of psychedelic plants that “perturb brain chemistry” and apparently wipe clean a person's cultural operating system. Once I understood what this was all about I was less interested in the psychedelics part, but thought that the analogy of culture as an operating system was fascinating. In recent days I’ve been thinking about this analogy and how it can be applied to describe the cultural shift I have previously called the postmodern turn into identity politics (aka wokeism). In this essay I explore the idea that perhaps postmodernism should be considered the architecture of our current cultural operating system. 

Whereas in the 1990s and early 2000s our Western cultural O/S had evolved into Postmodernism: Political Correctness, by 2015 it had been updated to Postmodernism: Wokeism. The most sufficient definition of wokeism I have yet to formulate is - reified postmodern identity politics with totalitarian characteristics (formulation mostly stolen from James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Frances Widdowson).

Terrance McKenna - Culture Is Your Operating System

What McKenna is saying is that most people are running some version of the current flawed cultural operating system, but that they don't have to. According to McKenna, one only needs to find a Shaman and take ayahuasca in order to shed one's cultural O/S. But Marshall McLuhan had similar ideas that involved the programming of selective media, not the use of psychotropics, in order for an individual to create an operating system different from the one they are subject to in the prevailing culture. Although he didn’t frame it this way, the O/S analogy still works, and unlike tripping on magic mushrooms, I like the sobriety and agency involved with the McLuhan approach.

Nevertheless, McKenna has some interesting ideas and a unique way with words. He explains that when a cultural operating system is wiped clean - “this is true nakedness.”

“You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche. Desmond Morris called it the Naked Ape. And it's from that position, a position outside the cultural operating system that we can begin to ask real questions about what it means to be human. What kind of circumstances are we caught in?  And what kind of structures, if any, can we put in place to assuage the pain and accentuate the glory and the wonder that lurks waiting for us in this very narrow slice of time between the birth canal and the yawning grave. In other words we have to return to first premises” - Terrance McKenna

I have never experimented with psychedelic plants, nor do I advocate for or against them. My interest here is in the concept of culture functioning as an operating system because the implications of not just - updates, patches, plugins and extensions, but - bugs, malware, viruses and system crashes, are all aspects of the analogy. Can you see why I’m attracted to this idea when considering our current culture war (which Douglas Murray has aptly described as the West’s war on itself)?

If viruses and malware ultimately lead us to a system crash, then it is through the innovative scripts and plugins of counter woke dissidence that we can prevent it. Maybe even restore aspects of the operating system to McKenna’s first premises, and from there, begin iterating anew.

What To Do With The Western CPU 

Before the Western world foolishly installed a postmodern operating system into the Central Processing Units (CPU) of its liberal societies, certain terms were unnecessary or redundant. Social Justice is only required in a postmodern condition. Before the postmodern turn, justice, with no further qualifiers, was imperfectly, albeit sufficiently equipped to cover the miscellany of concerns that manifest under the law. Jurisprudence, being an evolving process iterating through layers of accumulative precedent, has a direct link to real social activity, with all of its conflicts intrinsic to human progress and association, and thereby updates itself throughout all modern epochs by way of this direct involvement in human affairs. Social Justice is a recursive distraction. 

Around 1960, the postmodern O/S updates began to appear. Each update reflected an anti-West ideological gain, seen as fundamental changes in modern conceptions of the social fabric, from the public discourse level, through virtually all sites of cultural exchange. These updates are small and incremental, but in aggregate they amount to a shift. And then a series of shifts, until a society is not recognizable to its pre-postmodern form.

Western culture has for decades been experiencing these operating system updates as slow and steady encroachments of ideology that sees the liberal order of the West as fundamentally opposed to human liberation. In a similar vein, this twisted ideal excuses the suppression of the rights of certain non-believers, and even outright violence committed by adherents to this anti-west ideology. Clearly we have a bug in the system. This O/S has many bugs. But they are beyond the scope of my purpose here. I simply want to present the notion that postmodernism is the general condition around which our culture is currently set. The previous operating system was Enlightenment modernity, and postmodernism is now running on top of it, opposing it, expanding and re-writing the scripts — it is bulldozing modernity’s rationality and liberalism. 

The operating system of Postmodernism: Wokeism gets multiple updates and patches every day. Identity politics coded for intersectionality and queer theory compatibility result in each successive version taking on more of a totalitarian character. Like an unfeeling artificial intelligence, it is only programmed to spread and reproduce itself. People like myself are ringing the alarm, sending pop ups that say “virus detected”, “error!”, but the masses are just clicking the “X”. Out of sight, out of mind? How long can an infected operating system keep running, until it crashes?