SANDMAN’s Mass Media Department is headquartered at Granite Peak and is charged with monitoring and manipulating the global information ecosystem.

Mass Media currently somewhat divided along generational lines. On the one side are the “old guard” of middle-aged men — and they’re almost all men — who look like they could’ve worked for IBM, or Raytheon, or RAND, or McCann Erickson 10 years ago. Skinny ties, crewcuts, slide rules, game theory charts, mass psych textbooks, but now gone slightly to seed, with bushy sideburns and colorful plaid sports coats. Kendrick Mead falls into this camp.

On the other side are a batch of shockingly young people in their mid-20s who dress relatively conservatively, but not like an intern from UCLA working for CREEP, all blue suits with brass buttons. Instead they more closely resemble the wild-eyed ex-activists who graduated college in ‘68 or ‘69 at the crest and subsequent retreat of the student movements and lost a little faith in their generation. Kids who really got into reading McLuhan and Adorno and Debord (or, maybe, in some cases, Ayn Rand and Stewart Brand) as undergrads and maybe went to grad school for mass psych or the nascent field of media studies or even just plain old philosophy or philology. Weirdos who maybe dig jazz or prog rock and have every book written by Teilhard de Chardin and wishes there was a goddamn arthouse movie theater somewhere in the blighted nowhere hell-hole desert where they’re stationed. Hipster technocrats, basically.

During his brief visit to the Peak in March ‘73, Marshall got the sense that everyone in Mass Media was on quaaludes and worse. They seemed to have no conversational inhibitions and jostled up against the primarily military mood of the Granite Peak installation. They were extremely weird and particularly interested in Archie Ransom.