Anonymous ID: d5cf8b Feb. 26, 2018, 6:41 p.m. No.506088   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6101 >>6169 >>6247

The Electronic Revolution is an essay collection by William S. Burroughs

It talks about using words/voices as a weapon

 

Part two, "Electronic Revolution" concerns the power of alphabetic non-pictorial languages to control people. It draws attention to the subversive influence of the word virus on humans and dangerous possibilities of using human voice as a weapon. Recording words on tape recorders and employing the Cut-up technique can easily lead to the false news broadcasts or garbled political speeches causing confusion and psychic control over individuals.

 

The basic idea of language as a virus has been widely used and quoted from several of Burroughs' interviews. Here is a passage from the text:

 

I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. (…) we may forget that a written word is an image and that written words are images in sequence that is to say moving pictures. (…) My basis theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made the spoken word possible. Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz has put forward an interesting theory as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that the word was a virus of what he calls biologic mutation effecting a biologic change in its host which was then genetically conveyed. One reason that apes cannot talk is because the structure of their inner throats is simply not designed to formulate words. He postulates that alteration in inner throat structure were occasioned by a virus illness