This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message (1967) [video] (opens in new tab)

I agree with the GP; my view is that virtually all 20th/21st century philosophers dug up classical German/Western philosophy from its grave and made their careers out of it. That philosophy had nowhere to go, so its adherents could take it anywhere in the service of their -- to be frank -- grifting. All it takes is a clever tongue capable of generating "fashionable nonsense" and a lack of intellectual integrity (see: Sokal hoax).

Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886) by Friedrich Engels, published after the death of Karl Marx, is one of the best summaries of the late development of classical German philosophy in particular. It's written in a fairly accessible style as long as you grok the Hegelian/Marxist idealist/materialist definitions.

This revolution in Western thought is best summarized by Marx in his final Thesis on Feuerbach (1845): "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

The upshot is that the best way to understand writers/philosophers like McLuhan is rather to understand their audience. Which bits of "fashionable nonsense" is sticking, and how does this reflect the conditions and interests of the audience? Presume market forces before presuming intellectual rigor.

Baudrillard doesn't actually think the Gulf war didn't literally occur. He was using trollish language deliberately to highlight his more subtle (but, perhaps, relatively straightforward) ideas that televising the war meant that Americans learning about the wildly mismatched militaries' engagements via TV did not receive in their minds an accurate representation of what really was going on out there. While Baudrillard had a cogent point to make, putting it in these terms all but ensured perpetual confusion about what he meant (as demonstrated by the commenter above you). Here's the Wikipedia summary of Baudrillard's writings:

Baudrillard argued the Gulf War was not really a war, but rather an atrocity which masqueraded as a war. Using overwhelming airpower, the American military for the most part did not directly engage in combat with the Iraqi army, and suffered few casualties. Almost nothing was made known about Iraqi deaths. Thus, the fighting "did not really take place" from the point of view of the West. Moreover, all that spectators got to know about the war was in the form of propaganda imagery. The closely watched media presentations made it impossible to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Pl...

Baudrillard's concept of "simulacrum" is connected, and perhaps more interesting, even if attempting to apply it to the world results in weird claims like this one about the Gulf war.

What’s new is that the tribes can grow worldwide without physical interaction.

Yes! And Neil Postman carried on those ideas.

Philosophy is arguably better conducted showing rather than telling. Plato did this by asking questions, others do it with poetry.

It's easy to construct refined models of the world, but it ultimately isn't particularly useful and readers often get lost in this world of ideas and end exploring things they've been told rather than things they've seen. You eventually end up with something akin to scholasticism.

Once you start to notice it, we use a lot of very complicated terms and ideas in our daily language, but it's often not immediately obvious what we mean. I often come across people talk about ideas as though they had wishes and intents. Peculiar thing. Anyway I don't think adding onto that pile of long complicated words makes the situation better.

I can confirm that a 223.28 MB PDF on Z-Library seems to be the work in question. (ISBN 1-58423-067-3) Their clearnet URLs are down right now, but the TOR link is up.

http://loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhem...

Well yes electricity is the medium, but the media still has importance. I think my comment would be more logical if you replace medium with media?

Learned something new today: https://www.shmoop.com/grammar/spelling/media-vs-medium

Thx!

It's more fun and interesting than that - here's the full quote:

Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? The title is a mistake. After the book came back from the typesetter's, it had on the cover 'Massage'. The title was supposed to read The Medium is the Message, but the typesetter made an error. After McLuhan saw the typo, he exclaimed, 'Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!' Now there are four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age.

I've 'massaged' the title above - seems most in McLuhan's spirit.