"What [Marshall] McLuhan recognized, but did not explicitly state, was that our new highly advanced electronic media if used by evolutionarily unadvanced mortals will lead to cultural annihilation. These new media that work with the speed of light require a new spiritual consciousness of Light. They are so fantastically efficient that they cannot work to the good unless we are good; they only can be safely used if we tell the truth and live in the Truth. If we try to check and control them for lesser purposes, such as power, gain, misrepresentation, and the accumulation of wealth for private proerty in cyberspace, then blockages in the flow will generate distortions, noise, and a generalized cultural entropy in which no human relationships are possible...
Nothing less than truth, goodness, and a Buddhist universal compassion are going to get us through this transition from industrialization to planetization. Our level of consciousness has now become the biggest obstruction to the continuity of human existence. We have made normalcy nonviable, so we have opted for an 'up or out' scenario in cultural evolution. We either shift upward to a new culture of a higher spirituality to turn our electronic technologies into cathedrals of light, or we slide downward to darkness and entropy in a war of each against all."
--William Irwin Thompson, Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, pp.9-10
This quotation connects with a number of threads from Beams that I wanted to highlight:
Joe Corbett shows how our current corporation-dominated mediascape is leaving us evolutionarily unadvanced (in Thompson's words).
Br. TJ's TEDx talk on how Beams and Struts attempts to respond to the noise of the current media world and shift towards more depth, goodness, and beauty (I'm not sure we've quite hit cathedral of light qualities around here but we're trying).
And last but not least, Jeremy Johnson's piece on William Irwin Thompson himself (which inspired me to crack open this book that I just quoted from).
