A Marshall McLuhan Odyssey and Probe
William Kuhns https://www.williamkuhns.ca kuhns.bill@gmail.com
“The intelligence of the universe is social.” Marcus Aurelius
“The machine’s danger to society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it.” Norbert Wiener
“There are means of sustaining civilization by the very same media which have dissolved the older media and technologies.”
Marshall McLuhan (1960, 6)
PART I. THE NEED
“If we knew what we were doing we wouldn’t do it.” (1962a, 1)
McLuhan’s axiom “If we knew what we were doing we wouldn’t do it” most certainly applies to social media. The toxic outcomes of social media have landed us in our current grave predicament. America and much of the rest of the world is effectively under the thumb of an autocratic power-hungry figure whose only clear goals seem to be amassing ever greater power and aggrandizing wealth for his family and his oligarch friends.
Social media, that commercially successful manufacturer of rage, has fractured the American public into warring camps and brought us to this state of extreme civic jeopardy. Social media has also inflicted other damages. Most notably:
- Hijacking the attention of young and old alike by converting endless streaming feeds into constant production of the peppy brain hormone dopamine.
- Isolating us from one another in the guise of connecting us.
- Creating high rates of depression and suicides among teenagers
I begin with social media because, more than with search and research, it is in the domain of social media that Artificial Intelligence is sure to make its surest template as it enters our society in transformative ways.
Yet we are led to ask: is McLuhan’s fine axiom “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t do it” universally true and applicable everywhere? Couldn’t there be circumstances in which knowing what we’re doing could justify going ahead and doing it? Artificial Intelligence is a powerful case in point. Should this technology be avoided, renounced, rescinded, because we don’t know exactly what we will be doing with it? Could AI play a role in moving us toward goals that McLuhan envisaged? Could AI help us grow?
The prospects for AI enhancing us rather than detracting from us is a prospect that faces many long odds. But I would like to make a long-shot proposition of one way that AI could help us expand the reach of our ability to communicate. Flip McLuhan’s axiom on its head: If we did know what we were doing — and if its foreseeable benefits outweighed the downsides – isn’t there a strong argument to be made, that we should go ahead and try it?
The obstacles are prodigious, and one obstacle sums up many of the others. It goes by the name of Trump. He may be the most destabilizing force in recent history. A New Yorker cover showed multiple images of Trump tossing, twisting and batting a beachball-sized balloon embossed with the world’s nations. In the final image, the balloon bursts.
As with so much else that McLuhan forecasted with spot-on accuracy, he predicted Trump.
The political candidate who understands TV – whatever his party, goals or beliefs – can gain power unknown in history. (1969a, 62)
Yet McLuhan underestimated how such “power unknown in history” would be used. In his 1964 masterwork, Understanding Media, he asked “What has been the effect of TV on our political life?” His answer was several shades too optimistic for today’s circumstances.
Here at least, great traditions of critical awareness and vigilance testify to the safeguards we have posted against the dastardly uses of power.
(1964a, 329)
Say what?
Marshall McLuhan’s name is most often linked to his dazzling, flashbulb-bright and flashbulb-quick burst of fame in the mid-1960’s. The walloping attention he attracted in that era is a double affront to his legacy. First, that unfortunate timing made it so much easier for his many later critics to brush him off as more — and mere — sixties’ ephemera, alongside miniskirts, LSD, op art and Twiggy. But there is a much graver problem: McLuhan’s association with that era carries the subliminal suggestion that his ideas applied primarily to media and events of that time, when, in fact, McLuhan’s relevance to the mid-1960’s is titanically overshadowed by his relevance to the mid-2020’s.
At lightning speeds, in a confusing storm of ways, America is being whirled adrift from its Enlightenment genesis as a liberal democracy and turned into a pariah nation squared against its long-established allies and trading partners.
America faces the prospect of a stifling isolation as other nations refuse to trade or negotiate with it. Internally, its autocratic leadership is becoming day by day more openly fascist.
This chain of events is entirely the effect of the polarizing of dedicated news media, and the rise of social media. Yet another sign of McLuhan’s accuracy in both his advice about media and his warnings that the retribalizing of our civilization could dangerously challenge the civic order with “irrational social behavior” (1959).
Social media, which began only in 2002, promised to connect us. Instead, social media has created the greatest rift between Americans since the Civil War – and installed a wanna-be global tyrant as U.S. president. Two defining factors provoking that rift are post-literacy and its payload, retribalization – both predicted and robustly described by McLuhan.
In Digital Future in the Rear View Mirror, McLuhan scholar Andrey Mir has stunningly charted our recent reversal to a tribal ethos, certainly among the resolutely post-literate. Mir points out that the divisiveness we find ourselves in is not a result of ideologies, or economics or political conflicts; It is entirely the effect of those rage manufacturers, social media. Facebook and its ilk have so dramatically accelerated our plunge into atavistic retribalization and irrationality that social media should more accurately be known as neotribal media.
If media got us into our current mess, can media extricate us from it? What would such media look like? This is the admittedly wild-eyed hypothesis that – based on the prospect of truly mature Artificial Intelligence and a string of suggestions from Marshall McLuhan — I will shortly present.
We are, in this juncture of history, at the intersection of several crossroads that will decide the quality of life for North Americans in coming years. These crossroads can be navigated wisely or blithely ignored in continued distraction and indifference. The most conspicuous of these crossroads is the choice we will make, out of wisdom or continued inertia and inattention, between democracy and the fascist regime of a 21st century emperor — followed, almost certainly, by later emperors, the republic of America succumbing to the fate of the republic of Rome after Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his soldiers in 49 B.C.E.
Is there a way of averting that fate? Of reawakening democracy? There may be if we acknowledge that a more decisive crossroad at which we stand today could be the role to be played by advanced Artificial Intelligence in human communication.
Will AI become an instrument of oppression, that monitors our conversations and communications so attentively and perceptively that its acute attention silences any hints of dissatisfaction or deviance? Or will AI offer such a powerful goad to the evolution of communication that it recapitulates the original invention of language and reinvents the very nature and the deepest prospects of communication itself?
As a society we are already waist-deep in a quagmire of our own making. As it stands, if we don’t act, smartly and dramatically, the quicksand will soon swallow us whole and the 21st century will become a reversion to the barbarisms and despair of earlier times; we will all be complicit in the efforts of Trump and his brazen bunch to Make America Grotesque Again.
What would it take to extricate ourselves? AI could be an invaluable asset. But currently, AI is on track to become a widely used and favored tool of an oligarchy whose principals include the CEOs and designers of the AI Revolution itself.
“We Must Cease to Kiss the Whip That Lashes Us”
Benjamin Labatut’s 2023 novel The MANIAC revisits the prehistory and birth of Artificial Intelligence by relating the stories of two of its founders. The first, in a narrative that clocks three quarters of the pages of the book, is the mathematical wizard John von Neumann. Computer design owes as much to von Neumann as it does to Alan Turing.
The second story Labatut tells is that of Denis Hassabis and his initiative DeepMind. Hassabis raised an Artificial Intelligence to exceptional creative smarts by encouraging it to learn, as one encourages a child to learn. In 2014 Hassabis and his partners sold DeepMind to Google for upwards of $625 million. Google kept Hassabis on as the driving force at DeepMind. In 2016 Google asked Hassabis to make a dramatic public demonstration of DeepMind’s advanced intelligence.
Labatut writes:
[Google and Hassabis and his partners] had not even begun hiring their full team when already wild rumors about the rise of the AI apocalypse were flying around the internet. Everyone wondered where they would start. Would they train an artificial intelligence to diagnose cancer? Would they focus on nuclear fusion? Would they try to create a hitherto unimaginable means of communication? (2024, 184)
Hassabis proposed that DeepMind tackle a tournament against the world’s most accomplished human in the game of Go, “the most complex and profound [game] that humanity has ever conceived,” as Labatut writes.
I frankly wish that DeepMind had tackled that “hitherto unimaginable means of communication.” I’m curious whether it would resemble the rough new paradigm I have cobbled together out of a handful of offhand suggestions from McLuhan.
Before I start into that thread of his suggestions, it’s important to address a persistently nagging issue.
In the many conversations roused recently by Artificial Intelligence, AI’s potential for expanding the spectrum of human communication is not often heard. Why is that? Perhaps because today’s designers and promoters of AI see a bigger payoff in treating this promisingtechnology as a universal replacement and stand-in — machines with smarts nearly equal to our own, taking on many of our more onerous duties and chores or, in time, becoming our intellectual superiors, perhaps even our accepted masters – what I call a case of creating imposters and giving them the keys to the head office.
In the poem “Correspondences” from Fleurs du Mal (1857), Charles Baudelaire described the world becoming a “forest of resemblances.” That phrase strikes me as the most apropos description of what is coming at us with terrific rising velocity as we are confronted with ever-more convincing humanoid robots and intelligences which prove difficult to distinguish from our own.
Already frequent unfamiliar voices over a telephone make us wonder if we are communicating with a person or a machine. Multiply this confusion a few thousandfold. A walk down a city street may involve passing as many humanoids as humans, and the confusions will prove particularly upsetting when what should be moral decisions are made not by people we can confront, but by algorithms that we cannot. As AI grows, so will our confusions.
Yet if we look to AI’s potentials in assisting us, we can make one confident prediction. It stands to reason that the magnitude of AI’s potential should achieve breakthroughs of equal demonstrable potential in any field that AI is directed to excel at – such as Hassabis showed when the DeepMind player Alpha Go crushed the world’s reigning Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016. AI could prove its mettle in the design of quantum computers, or in a breakthrough in human communication of such a magnitude that it might be greeted as “the reinvention of communication itself”.
The current disinterest in the computer as a channel into radically new frontiers of communication has not always been the case. Some of the best minds to probe the future effects of the computer have accented the computer as a route to growing our capacity for communication. After all, computer communication forms the backbone of that foundational twenty-first century digital technology, the internet.
In 1995, the virtual reality inventor Jaron Lanier wrote, “I have always thought of the computer as a glorified telephone.” Lanier has objected to the name artificial intelligence, claiming that every attribution we make of a machine’s intelligence involves a demeaning of our own. He has called the productions of Large Language Models “mashups” of human contributions. He defines information as “alienated human experience.” Lanier has been a steady critic of the AI industry and sees communication as AI’s North Star.
For a more forceful and humanistic critique of computers locking out communication, I recommend going back to 1950, six years before the phrase “artificial intelligence” was coined — and the very year that Alan Turing, in his essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” made the destination of the AI industry the building of machines that would prove themselves by hoodwinking and confusing us. That very year, 1950, marks the appearance of one of the wisest and most farsighted writings in computer history.
The Human Use of Human Beings was penned by Norbert Wiener, an esteemed MIT mathematician. Wiener will be credited forever for coining the term cybernetics, after the Greek word kybernētēs (κυβερνήτης) for steersman.
Wiener described the computer as a “communication machine.” He regarded communication as the central ability that enables humans to be human. As he wrote:
…for man to be alive is for him to participate in a world-wide scheme of communication. It is to have the liberty to test new opinions and to find which of them point somewhere, and which of them simply confuse us. [Communication] enables us to have the variability to fit into the world in more places than one, the variability which may lead us to have soldiers when we need soldiers, but which also leads us to have saints when we need saints. It is precisely this variability and this communicative integrity of man which I find to be violated and crippled by the present tendency to huddle together according to a comprehensive prearranged plan, which is handed to us from above. We must cease to kiss the whip that lashes us.(1950, 217)
That fine passage occurs in “Voices of Rigidity,” the final chapter of the 1950 edition of The Human Use of Human Beings. Regrettably, the passage will not be found in later editions, nor will the chapter in which it appeared. Wiener’s concluding chapter foresaw the computer being used to herd, control and subjugate humans – “the whip that lashes us.” Reportedly, Wiener’s colleagues at MIT and elsewhere found his strongly phrased warning offensive and complained to the publisher. The chapter was removed from later editions, of which there have been many. (In early 2025, the book remains in print, in the twelfth printing of its second edition.) Anyone who gains access to the 1950 edition can read Wiener’s brutal comparison of socially controlling computers to the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and the Jesuit order of the Catholic Church, both depicted by Wiener as disastrously constricting “totalizing” societies. (Note: I have discovered a pdf of the 1950 edition online; its url is included in the footnotes.)
Wiener does not propose an alternative in which the evolved computer might drive a radically evolutionary new stage in human communication. But then neither did Wiener foresee a network of globally linked computers such as the internet. One important thing Wiener did brilliantly was to underline communication as being that ability which makes the most “human use of human beings.”
Even with the excision of its final chapter, Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings stands like a night watchman at a railway switch, waving a lantern announcing, “Go this way, do not go that way”. The Human Use of Human Beings remains among the most humanistic of texts about the future of computing. In the early years of our AI Age, Wiener’s book deserves a wide readership.
To take Wiener’s warning seriously, what can we discern at this early stage, of AI becoming “the whip that lashes us”?
There is little question, whether by attention and intention or by inattention and distraction, AI will tend to usher in a new age of communication. If current trends persist, the predominant effect of AI on communication will be to amplify and concretize the algorithmic drivers of social media, manufacturing even more rage and promoting and aggravating our social divisions. How can amplifying our present fractures in any way be to our larger benefit?
Induced to Kiss the Whip
Social media can be clearly seen as a misbegotten social experiment, one that continues to this day. According to Meta, 3 billion people log into Facebook every month.
To grasp the many disastrous upshots of social media, I urge you to read Nicholas Carr’s widely researched and powerfully presented autopsy, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. Superbloom should be essential reading for any of us entering the Age of AI, because social media is likely to be the surest precursor to the most dangerous infiltrations of AI.
“We must cease to kiss the whip that lashes us.” Social media proves how powerful will be the inducements to kiss that whip. We might rightly regard social media as the progenitor of highly surveillant AI, suggesting that we will tend to overlook AI’s habit of listening in on our conversations and thoughts, given how AI’s presence in our lives keeps us well rewarded with lively bursts of dopamine and oxytocin, the perk-you-up brain hormones that makes both scrolling of a social media feed and the hand cranking of a slot machine so powerfully addictive.
Recently I went into the Privacy settings in Word to turn off Connected Experience, which opens my writing to Microsoft’s AI. I was informed that the services of MS’s AI writing aide Copilot would be seriously compromised. No problem. When I write, I prefer to fly solo, no need for a copilot. But I have been writing for many years. For someone starting out, a copilot assist is probably a sweet temptation.
Very few startup writers in our digital era will likely read – or much less share the concerns of — a 1966 essay by Robert Theobald in which he warned:
…computer systems, not men, will first realize humanity’s age-old dream of a universal language, and…the subtleties and nuances of human thought will risk being mediated through the restricted and standardized symbols of computer communication. (Dechert, ed., 1966,
In its current paleolithic state, Copilot finishes sentences with stock phrasing, corrects spelling and errors in construction and punctuation. I think of the assistance offered by Copilot as the equivalent of a child’s bedroom nanny cam. Today’s writing apps like Copilot could be called nanny comms.
But ten or fifteen years from now, as AI evolves, what will Copilot and other apps like it, evolve into? You or I might outline a piece of writing and submit the concept and a few key points to an advanced writing app like the evolved Copilot and a minute or two later, receive a draft that you or I can expand, chop down, modify. Copilot would then become an active, deeply intimate collaborator. The farther we travel that path, the more we will be surrendering our thinking process, our mental and expressive habits, our preferences and dislikes. Already we’d be stroking – if perhaps, not yet kissing — the whip.
And beyond that stage – when we do come to kiss the whip? We needn’t bother to set words to paper at all. Just speak a few words to Copilot, now become effectively the actual Pilot. We might be startled, at that stage, to encounter anyone under the age of 90 who insists on writing out every word and sentence and paragraph without an assist from an AI.
In the 1980s, airline pilots faced a comparable challenge as the aircraft manufacturers and their software designers introduced automated systems for landing a jumbo jet. In its early years these landing systems were called “fly-by-wire.” Today virtually all commercial aviation is equipped with automated takeoff and landing. In that era, a few pilots protested, and those who objected and flat-out refused to activate the software landing procedures found their tenure as pilots foreshortened. Will comparable pressures dictate the future of writing?
An AI-Inflected Future of Communication: the Bleak Scenario
Historically, dictators like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, XI Jinping and Kim Jong Un have relied on neighbors and family members to inform on anyone who dares voice a sliver of protest or any sentiment of disgruntlement with the regime. In the age of AI, human informants may prove unnecessary. Every digital instrument we touch or encounter can be an informant. As we already know, from advertising that targets an issue that came up in last night’s dinner conversation, cell phones can tune into our conversations, even when they’re inactive. Already, our email messages, carried on the cloud, are open windows to AI. So are documents we write or read in MS Word if the Privacy option “Connected Experience” has not been disabled. AI systems have proven to be as adept at lip reading as they are at facial recognition. And they are becoming highly qualified at reading micro expressions to detect when someone is lying. For an iron-gripping totalizing state – one as inflexible and all-controlling as Norbert Wiener warned about in the extracted chapter “Voices of Rigidity” – it’s difficult to think of anything this side of thought scans that could improve on the surveillance potential of AI in our current, digitally mediated lives.
The result? We would all be locked into an AI enforced confinement. A confinement of self-imposed silence.
In 1791, Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher-economist and author of the Utilitarian school of thought — a theory that defines good as whatever gives the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people — proposed a hyper-surveillant prison, which he called the Panopticon. In the Panopticon, a central watchtower looks around at a circular perimeter of cells. The doors of these cells needn’t be kept locked; the prisoners are constantly being watched. Although never built, the Panopticon became a conceptual model of unceasing, universal surveillance. Lately, the closed-circuit video camera and AI are reinventing the panopticon.
In mainland China today an estimated 250 million closed circuit TV cameras keep an active watch on streets, street crossings, alleyways, building entrances, busses and train cars, escalators and elevators. One cannot walk two blocks in a city in China without being monitored by several video cameras. Any pedestrian who dares to jaywalk will be spotted and tagged, so that another camera will capture the jaywalker’s face and gait, and a recognition system will attach name and full identification, ensuring that the culprit faces a severe fine or worse.
The effect of China’s exorbitant, universal surveillance has been to reduce on-camera miscreances to almost nothing. Everyone learns to be compliant. Everyone knows they are being watched.
Follow that logic into a dystopic scenario in which an unrelenting, Stalin-breathing American autocrat installs everywhere tentacles of the system known as The Absolute Inquisitor (AI) to shoulder aside both Orwell’s Big Brother and China’s ubiquitous CCTV cameras with its fine-grained, wide-net, ceaselessly suspicious attention.
Anything we say, in the privacy of our homes or in a walk in the woods, so long as our cell phones are in our pockets, is overheard by AI. Anything we write to one another, even in a sealed envelope that goes into the mail can be x-rayed and read by AI, becoming potential grist for the Secret Police. The net effect on human communication? A terrible reign – an iron confinement — of self-imposed silence.
The thoughts that most of us most ache to share, we cannot. We dare not. What in Norbert Wiener’s phrase makes the most human use of human beings – communication – would be denied to us.
It would be as if a continent-wide smothering blanket had been lowered over every conversation, ever spoken and written word we utter. AI would lock us all behind inescapable, self-imposed bars of silence.
How many would even care? In Germany in the 1930s, as memoirs and histories attest, many Germans ceased to be bothered by Nazi flamboyance or the familiar violence of brownshirts roughing up Jews. Retreating to their favorite beer halls, most everyone adjusted. We too, retreating to watch Netflix or football and basketball games, would adjust.
Meantime we would enjoy – yea, welcome — AI into numerous dimensions of our lives. Purchase or lease a robo-companion to assist an aging relative at mealtimes and for bathroom needs. Rely on an AI tutor to help the kids with their homework. Give a home-based robo-maid the laundry to run. All while keeping conscientiously mute about totalitarian regime of government that we resent more than we tolerate. Allowing AI deep into our lives, in such an implacable and resolute silence, are we not kissing the whip that lashes us?
Without radical measures to dislocate and unmoor the authoritarian regime that has made so much progress elbowing away restrictions since the 2024 election, is this our future?
Or is there an alternative? Can AI be directed to grow communication rather than stifle and thwart it? There may be a way. And the best place to look for it may well be in the thinking of that figure most prophetic of advanced humanistic technology, Marshall McLuhan.
I propose tracking – then briefly unpacking – some of McLuhan’s more enlightening remarks that offer guidance into the terra incognita of our emergent technologies, particularly computers designed to resemble and outreach the human mind.
Think of these brief passages of McLuhan’s as breadcrumbs. I trust that these breadcrumbs define a path through our current wilderness, that confusing, ever-expanding “forest of resemblances.” More, McLuhan’s suggestions begin to give shape to what, with AI’s assistance, could offer glimpses into what may be a radically new, future paradigm of human communication.
Start where McLuhan suggests we start: with a definition of the desired effect.
[Poe] pointed to the possibility of writing poetry backwards, starting with the effect desired and then proceeding to discover the “causes” or means for the desired effect. (1989, 73)
Working backwards, as always, in the conditions of electric information, one need only know the right question in order to find the right answer. (1973, 15)
Begin with the effect desired. This was a pet axiom of McLuhan’s, drawn, he said, from his surest models in literature, the symbolist poets. As to the effect he most desired? Thinking long-term, he envisioned electric technologies leading to a “psychic integration,” which he sometimes dubbed “corporate consciousness,” that knit many sources of independent individual consciousness into a larger whole.
Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. (1969a, 72)
[We are stuck in]… the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means. (1970, 202)
What new goals are contained in the new means of Artificial Intelligence? I would argue that one, certainly, is expanding the potential of communication, particularly in areas where today we have only the crudest and most primitive modes of expression.
McLuhan’s Grand Dream for the Future
The dream of universal shared consciousness remained a fixed attractor for McLuhan, his North Star. Over the years he gave it several names, within many phrasings. The following passages have been arranged to read chronologically.
As we push our electric technology it will flip/open in the form of corporate consciousness. The present interim is baffling because it has a closed character, with which we know not how to deal. An electric system is very much like a small tribal society—that is, ecological and homeostatic. (1963 [1987, 291])
The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. (1964a, 80)
There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure. (1964b, 108)
We are individually overwhelmed by corporate consciousness and by the inclusive experience of mankind both past and present. It would be a comic irony if men proved unable to cope with abundance and riches in both the economic and psychic order. It is not likely to happen. (1966, [1997, 89])
PLAYBOY: Are you talking about global telepathy?
McLUHAN: Precisely. Already, computers offer the potential of instantaneous translation of any code or language into any other code or language. If a data feedback is possible through the computer, why not a feed forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a world computer? Via the computer, we could logically proceed from translating languages to bypassing them entirely in favor of an integral cosmic unconsciousness somewhat similar to the collective unconscious envisioned by Bergson. (1969 [1995, 262])
Earth in the next century will have its collective consciousness lifted off the planet’s surface into a dense electronic symphony where all nations – if they still exist as separate entities – may live in a clutch of spontaneous synaesthesia, painfully aware of the triumphs and wounds of one another. (1989, 95)
The computer is the first component of that hybrid of video-related technologies which will move us toward a world consciousness. It steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed of light, reducing numbers to body count by touch. When pushed to its limits, the product of the computer reverses into simultaneous pattern recognition (acoustic space), eroding or bypassing mechanical processes in all sequential operations. It brings back the Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that “numbers are all”; and at the same time, it dissolves hierarchy in favor of decentralization. Any business corporation requiring the use of computers for communication and record-keeping will have no other alternative but to decentralize.” (1989, 103)
What McLuhan foresees – “cosmic consciousness” — a “global membrane” — “global telepathy” — a “dense electronic symphony” – “world consciousness” — is today nowhere in sight, even with the help of current AI. Conceivably, such shared consciousness could be an outcome of what futurist Ray Kurzweil anticipates as the “Singularity,” when superintelligent AI is neurologically wired to the human brain, creating a symbiosis of artificial and natural minds.
But there is no question: McLuhan’s dream should be the implicit outcome or effect of the new paradigm of communication that I am sketching, using leads and suggestions from his thought.
How is the dream to be achieved? Certainly, by a technology that will mimic the actions of a “global telepathy”.
With television both sight and sound were out of the wire and our culture stepped from the grip of mechanization for the first time since the invention of writing, 5,000 years ago. (1955 [1997, 163])
As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP. (1969a, 72)
In both passages McLuhan acknowledges a profound, vastly reaching transformation as the result of electric and electronic media: our post-literate shift from media of the eye, dominated by the book, to media of the ear, dominated by movies, radio, TV and the internet: our civilization retribalizing and restarting from something deeply akin to its original starting point.
McLuhan regarded his most important contribution to be his announcement that post-literate civilization will “return to involvement in the most primitive modes of human consciousness.” (1972b, 204)
Because we live amid the scaffolding and trappings of so much advanced technology, we are not attentively conscious of our new retribalized environment, another theme that McLuhan treated in detail. Yet the tribal nature of our strange new condition in the media-saturated 21st century cannot be denied. What is MAGA if not a self-acknowledged tribe?
It is an awakening exercise to tune into to McLuhan’s descriptions of what it means to return to our tribal roots. These passages are also arranged chronologically:
We are back in acoustic space. We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. Hands have no tears to flow. (1955a, 33)
What I wish to show is that today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing. (1955b, 2)
The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization and application of knowledge…Our electronic world now calls for a unified global field of awareness; the kind of private consciousness appropriate to literate man can be viewed as an unbearable kink in the collective consciousness demanded by electronic information movement. (1963, 125)
The paradox today is that the ground of the latest Western technologies is electronic and simultaneous, and thus structurally right-hemisphere and “Oriental” and oral in its nature and effects. This situation began with the telegraph more than a century ago. Still, the overwhelming pattern of procedures in the Western world remains lineal, sequential, and connected in political and legal institutions, and also in education and commerce, but not in entertainment or art. A formula for complete chaos! (1988, 80)
Note how declarative and transformative is the break that he describes between our print and linear perspective – the domain of the all-deciding eye – and the simultaneous, disconnected world we inhabit under the aegis of the ear, as we come to inhabit acoustic space. Where does this transforming moment lead us in terms of a new paradigm of communication?
First a guideline that he proposed in thinking about that very question:
This strange gap between the specialist, visual world and the integral, auditory world needs to be better understood today above all, for it contains the key to an understanding of what automation and cybernetics imply. (1966, 97-98)
What can be learned from a gap? But if we flip the notion – as McLuhan was fond of doing, with so many notions – into its opposite, we can revisit that gap as a bridge. How would we go about building that bridge?
The purpose of that bridge would be to enable an ease of dialogue between the specialist, visual literate world and the neotribal, auditory world. What would be the missing element for enabling that dialogue? The literate representatives would likely select an individual to speak on their behalf. But would the neotribal community?
PART II. THE NEOTRIBAL VOICE
“…the electric age in which we stand as the primitives of an undeveloped and unknown culture.” (1961 [2005, 7])
“…but post-literate tribal is a very different matter from pre-literate tribal.” (1968b)
Imagine, not that many years from now—
A long lineup of people are waiting for the closed gates of a stadium – tonight’s concert venue — to open. They have arrived hours early for one of their all-time favorite performers. All heads are tilted to cell phones. Then, from the popular prankish AI social media app “Gotcha!” that virtually everyone shares, comes the prompt: “Improv flashmob? Care to join? Yes / No.
Almost a hundred total strangers, already well attuned to these AI-driven shenanigans, click Yes and follow the orchestrating suggestions of the AI app “Gotcha!” First, they form into several lines. Then they begin a dance with high kicks and lunging arms. Their dance movements are soon accompanied with the melody of one of the most popular songs of the performer they’re waiting to hear. The lyrics they sing are takes on a well-known song and they revise it so it speaks not to a lover as in the original song, but to the performer, who will only hear it later, on a bystander’s video.
Tell me you’ve waited, sing me your song
Can’t live without you, waiting too long
Eighty-odd people sing these fresh lyrics in a tightening synch. Their dance steadily become as synchronized. Their knees jerk high up, their arms flash out in striking unison and the patterns of their steps carve precision lines into bisections and radials. The moves come easily to the dancers, even though they are as fresh and unrehearsed as the new lyrics.
A scattering of observers will later report that a spontaneous flashmob outperformed the famed singer onstage that night. Homemade videos will later be edited into a fluid form that becomes a must-watch item on Tik Tok.
Is such a spontaneous scenario remotely possible?
Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogenous and the simultaneous. It is painful but fruitful. (1962, 141)
The new corporate identity of electronic man has arrived so suddenly that it still coexists with private and individual identity. (1973, E13)
If we find it as difficult to imagine such a fully spontaneous and improvised scenario, isn’t that the same as asking a bushman of a hundred thousand years ago to imagine the most glowing lines of Shakespeare?
Currently, how well can we express a collective thought or feeling spontaneously? In short, what is the dfexpressive reach of our current spontaneous neotribal voice?
There’s the outburst of the fans’ roar at a touchdown in a stadium. There’s the standingapplause that follows a concert. There’s the laughter of an audience at a comic’s joke. In Middle Eastern cultures there are occasions when numerous people engage together in that controlled throat warble called ululation, often to mourn, sometimes to celebrate.
Frankly, those examples pretty much exhaust our current vocabulary for uttering our collective thoughts and feelings in an impromptu neotribal voice.
Yet if we are truly “primitives of an undeveloped and unknown culture”, doesn’t it stand to reason that our expressions would be equally as primitive?
We might be well advised toregard the crowd’s cheer, the audience’s applause, as contemporary variants of the primitive grunts and howls, the whistles that mimic birds, the proto-expressions that later evolved into spoken languages among our ancestors some 200,000to 150,000years ago.
The invention of language took thousands of years and many generations. I propose that the new communication paradigm that AI can help us create will be much speedier and by its maturity, will constitute a new form of utterance in which we speak collectively, spontaneously, coherently, within one or two generations.
To anyone coming anew to groups that speak fluently in the neotribal voice, the experience would appear to involve telepathy. Indeed, if telepathy does exist as a latent potential in that shared domain that Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, perhaps the neotribal voice would help stir it awake.
In the example of the spontaneous flash mob, is there an active choreographer at work? But wouldn’t that be AI’s role, to “orchestrate our energies”? As McLuhan phrased it in his 1969 Playboy interview:
This is the real use of the computer, not to expedite marketing or solve technical problems but to speed the process of discovery and orchestrate terrestrial—and eventually galactic—environments and energies. Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. (1969a, 72)
I have not found a passage in McLuhan’s output where he specifically addresses the need for retribalized people to speak in a newly minted neotribal voice. On many occasions, however, he did anticipate the contraction and the eventual expiration of spoken and written language.
Electric technology does not need words any more than the digital computer needs numbers.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 80.
while bemoaning the decline of literacy and the obsolescence of the book, the literari have typically ignored the immanence of the decline of speech itself. The individual word, as a store of information and feeling, is already yielding to macrocscopic gesticulation. (1968a, 90-91)
In the age of the photograph, language takes on a graphic or iconic character, whose “meaning” belongs very little to the semantic universe, and not at all to the republic of letters. (1964a, 196)
In the computer age, speech yields to macrocosmic gesticulation or the direct interface of total cultures. The silent movies began this move. (1969b, 13)
The language of visual forms is, therefore, one which lies to hand as an unused Esperanto at everybody’s command. (1956 [1995, 300])
[Someday we may see] …a kind of computerized ESP with consciousness as the corporate content of the environment – and eventually, maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience the way dreams do now. (1965, The New Yorker, 44)
The future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world, like a technological expression of the action of consciousness. E.S.P. (1967, 167)
What can we know about our potential neotribal voice? It will follow several trajectories, which could almost be stated as laws.
- It will be a new kind of corporate voice. Over recent centuries the dominant voice we’ve heard from TV, newspapers, movies, and recently the internet, has been a corporate Many-to-Many voice that has laboriously pre-formed everything it utters. To McLuhan the word “corporate” best described not a capitalist enterprise but our retribalized associations roused by electric media.
The neotribal voice is a radically new corporate voice. It speaks Many to Many and in principle it can utter anything that the older corporate voice could. However, instead of pre-forming those utterances, it shapes them spontaneously.
- Individuals cannot speak in the neotribal voice except as contributors to a larger process. The new voice must beuttered by at least two of us. It grows in authenticity and authority, the more of us who speak it.
- The voice will not necessarily or even primarily issue from lungs and voice box: it can be spoken in music, in dance, in every form of expression available to our bodies and those extensions of our bodies, our technologies. All earlier content of previous media may serve as kernels of expression in the neotribal voice.
- Once is it being uttered, the voice will be irresistible to anyone immersed in it, much ashandclapping and singing in chorus to a performance are irresistible to anyone in audiences engaged in those collective expressions.
- The voice will have two modes, fast and slow. In its fast mode the contributions are intuitive and immediate, as in the flashmob described above. In its slow mode, such as widespread conversations that culminate in choices and decisions, the voice will only have its utterance clearly understoodwhen it issues a fully assembled,self-assembling message.
- The voice will speak as individuals have spoken in every language invented have spoken — spontaneously, improvisationally, out of free-forming influences.
- The voice will innately reject pre-formed efforts to control, master or divert it.
- The voice will accent the strongly felt and the intuitive over the strictly logical. It will be propelled by the emotional core at the heart of neotribal concerns. Therefore, it will speak more innately from the right hemisphere of the brain than from the left hemisphere, which is the primary source of language, spoken and written.
- Its most pronounced achievements will be playful, cooperative more than competitive, and the appeal of joining in will very frequently be a flashpoint of fun.
Which came first: language or the enriched human consciousness we know today as our own? According to both McLuhan and Derek Bickerton, one kept remaking the other. The title of Bickerton’s book attests as much: Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans.
If we are searching to fine-tune a coherent collective consciousness, isn’t it more likely that we can do this only once we’ve developed a natural voice in which groups can speak with feeling, coherence and articulate power? Indeed, until we have launched and mastered a competent neotribal voice, isn’t it pointless to argue what groups can or cannot do?
When two runners’ legs are tied and they race “three-legged,” their performance is generally inferior to that of single runners. Must this always be the case? Isn’t it possible that three-legged runners could someday dramatically outpace their two-legged competitors? And couldn’t tennis players sharing a paddle conceivably outplay singular masters of the game?
But isn’t it also possible that groups could spawn original ideas, nurse intuitions and burst with creative flashes? The memoirs describing comedy teams working in writers’ rooms for TV and movie scripting suggest that group creativity is a potential we have barely begun to tap.
In his 1971 Convocation Address at the University of Alberta, McLuhan said:
There is no kind of problem that baffles one or a dozen experts that cannot be solved at once by a million minds that are given a chance simultaneously to tackle a problem. The satisfaction of individual prestige, which we formerly derived from the possession of expertise, must now yield to the much greater satisfactions of dialogue and group discovery. (1971a)
We know what we can accomplish in any vein of effort through highly practiced teamwork. We do not yet have any notion what we can accomplish given the focused singularity of mind and purpose grounded in a group’s utterance in a newly minted, AI-enabled neotribal voice, one poised, conceivably, to become over time, our new native tongue.
Where would we most widely look for guidance – at least to analogues — in creating such a voice?
PART III. SUGGESTIVE ANALOGUES
The first and foremost useful guide, or analogue to the invention of a neotribal voice is the origin of language. The current science of Paleolinguistics estimates that this process occurred between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago, and left no direct records, so the origin of language becomes a subject inevitably shrouded in the mists of distant time.
What else can guide us in the creation of a neotribal voice?
Conversation is sure to be an essential aspect of the growing new voice. Start with McLuhan’s thinking on conversation. Among his most insightful remarks are these:
Conversation is improvisation, so that the new interest in musical improvisation reveals new aspects of the meaning of verbal conversation. (1957, 3)
For dialogue is not light on, but light through, which is the difference between film andTV. (1961a, 97)
Conversation is, for me, something like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a game in which you play all sorts of nose-dives and air-tumbles. (1971 [1997, 283])
Dialogue demands ignorance as a resource and a spur to exploration. (1971 [2017, 4])
The ability to thread many conversations into a coherent whole – call it a Conversation Distillery — may prove to be one of the major contributions of AI to the neotribal voice. Consider the voluntary reviews written for TV shows or restaurants or specific lodgings in Air B&B. How are those likely to evolve in the next 20 years – with or without the assist of a powerful new neotribal voice? With distillation, the positives and negatives can be streamlined, summarized, and given weights based on frequency and perhaps dates of submissions. Without that assist, the strings of comments would go on interminably.
Beyond looking to the invention of language and the nature of conversation, what other analogues and models can give us a good idea how and where to launch the starting efforts in growing a neotribval voice?
Animal and Plant Analogues
What can we learn and apply from animals and plants, including even, yes, trees, about group communication and the coherent expressive behavior of large groups?
At the Monterey Aquarium in California, in a tank the size of a small room, I once watched a school of thousands of anchovies swimming in a formation so geometrically pristine it might have brought salutes from members of a precision Marine drill squad.
A much larger fish that looked to me like a barracuda invaded the school. The anchovies split apart cleanly as a piece of quartz would, when struck at a fault line. The barracuda did not snap at any but swam through the new corridor created by the phenomenally cohesive school of fish. I have since learned that schools of anchovies are not alone in performing such highly orchestrated maneuvers to escape predators. Such an extremely evolved degree of collective consciousness does indeed resemble – and perhaps may involve an actual form of – telepathy. Zoology has very little understanding of these coherent group actions. But in other domains there has been more progress.
Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson co-authored the Pulitzer Prize winning 1990 book The Ants. In their masterful 2008 study The Superorganism: the Beauty Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies, Hölldobler and Wilson resuscitated and sought to validate a long-discredited 19th century term first proposed by English philosopher Herbert Spencer: the superorganism. Hölldobler and Wilson argued the case that an insect colony is a single animal raised exponentially to a higher level. Each insect serves as a cell. The colony’s caste system functions as its immune system. Foragers serve the role of eyes and ears of the larger organism. The colony has no brain but its iron laws of cooperation can give the impression that, in responding to threatening conditions — such as flooding, or attacks by the ants of another colony — the colony generates innovative strategies. Those laws of cooperation can mutate finely from a colony’s experience, so that although every ant in a colony dies within months, a colony’s accumulated “memories” of successful strategems have been known to endure for decades. Ultimately, should we take “superorganism” as a distinctive new sort of phylum and species of the animal kingdom, or as a powerful metaphor? At minimum, “superorganism” gives a vivid name to a phenomenon that previously had gone unnamed: a long-term insect colony’s ability to harvest the lessons and adapt from the experience of its short-lived inhabitants.
There are innumerable other examples from the animal kingdom that can serve to provide grist for the development of a neotribal voice. And the fauna should not be kept too separate from their ecological partners the flora. Recent science has shown that the trees in a forest live and act in communities, protecting one another and communicating effectively with one another. Trees may have a form of consciousness and emotions, too. They certainly seem capable of empathy. If a tree is sawed down, or stricken by lightning and killed, the stump is sometimes kept alive by neighboring trees feeding it sap and other chemicals through filigree mycorrhizal fungi, that connect root tips underground so thoroughly their broad-reach presence in the world’s forests is known as the Wood Wide Web. If an invasive species of insect, such as the tent caterpillar, should attack one tree, that tree will send out scent-based signals warning its neighbors to put up a defense by releasing chemicals that discourage the insects from attacking.
What we stand to learn from tree and animal communication will only expand as AI helps us learn the languages that animals speak. CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) is playing thousands of click-like soundings of sperm whales to computers in hopes of learning the vocabulary and perhaps grammar and syntax of sperm whale language – in short, translating into active modern languages the full dialect of one form of whale speak.
Jazz Improvisation
If jazz is considered as a break with mechanism in the direction of the discontinuous, the participant, the spontaneous and improvisational, it can also be seen as a return to a sort of oral poetry in which performance is both creation and composition. (1964a, 280)
The potential of the neotribal voice is suggested nowhere so vividly as in music, particularly jazz. In The Jazz Tradition, Martin Williams writes:
But at the same time that jazz depends on the individual, it also depends on group cooperation. In all its styles, jazz involved some degree of collective ensemble improvisation, and in this it differs from Western music even at those times in it history when improvisation was required. The high degree of individuality, together with the mutual respect and cooperation required in a jazz ensemble, carry with them philosophical implications that are so exciting and far-reaching that one almost hesitates to contemplate them. It is as if jazz were saying to us that not only is far greater individuality possible to man than he has so far allowed himself, but that such individuality, far from being a threat to a cooperative social structure, can actually enhance society. (1993, 263)
In his magisterial study Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation Paul F. Berliner describes improvisation as “conversing in music.” This phrase suggests that improvisation skills are not only valuable in rousing the full creative spirit of a musical group, they are essential to any robust, curiosity-driven, non-persuasive, outcome-oriented conversation.
In a sense, the entire repertory of jazz improv guides are summed up in Miles Davis’s famous rebuke, “Don’t play what you hear, play what you don’t hear.”
The lessons of improvisation to be drawn from the history of jazz are well laid out in Berliner’s encyclopedic investigation, researched largely through extensive interviews with jazz players. A book worthy of standing beside Berliner’s Thinking in Jazz is The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece by Eric Nisenson. What may be the most popular jazz album of all time was recorded in two spare sessions in the spring of 1959, with no rehearsals, only one second take, and no starting points beyond Miles handing a few scraps of melodic riffs to his musicians before they started. Kind of Blue stands as the most consummate feat of sheer improvisation in jazz history.
Improvisation Beyond Jazz
Jazz is not the only context for successful group improvisation. The earliest well-documented use of improvisational theatre in Western history is found in the Atellan Farce of ancient Rome, circa 391 B.C.E. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, commedia del’arte performers improvised based on a broad outline of their characters and their conflicts, played out in the streets of Italy. In the 1890s, theatrical theorists and directors such as the Russian Konstantin Stanislavski and the Frenchman Jacques Copeau, founders of two major streams of acting theory, both relied on vigorous improvisation in the training of actors.
Beginning with the Compass, a small Chicago theatre in the 1950s — later reincarnated as Second City – American improv comedy has grown a rich tradition of performers and has profoundly inflected American comedy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The wholly improv TV show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” has been running since 2014 and as of this writing is in its 21st season. Any episode serves as a vivid demonstration of the needs and the payoffs of strong improvisation.
Successful improv comedy – and theatre — comes down to players following five primal rules.
Rule #1: Say “YES, AND” … For a story to grow, the players must first agree to the basic premise/situation and set-up, and at each opportunity, contribute to its growth.
Rule #2: Build up, don’t break down. Always add to the narrative, rather than repeating what the audience knows.
Rule #3: Don’t ask questions. Instead, contribute new information.
Rule #4: There are no wrong contributions.
Rule #5: Everyone participates. And brings their A-game.
There are innumerable further rules, and a range of useful exercises, laid out in the many fine improv manuals, of which the earliest most influential has been Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theatre (1963).
Polyrhythmic Harmonies
McLuhan’s sidekick and collaborator, Edmund Carpenter, has written:
When literate man dances, he keeps step to the music. His marching bands have drum majors; his orchestras, conductors. Every player is synchronized to a single beat.
In West Africa, every player has his own downbeat. There may be as many as five simultaneous rhythms – the melody and four percussion parts. Three rhythms are widely common in preliterate music: melody, hand clapping & tapping the feet. The individual performs all three simultaneously, though not in synchronization. The combined result is neither chaos nor conformity, but a complex pattern of interweaving rhythms, each with its own integrity. (1973, 36)
The neotribal voice is not a voice of choral repetitions. As McLuhan has said on many occasions:
our modern world is going back into the Finn cycle [Joycean for neotribal], but wide awake. (1970, transcript, 12)
“Wide awake” means that individual consciousness continues and predominates, and individuals will make distinctive contributions, as the multi-rhythmic percussionists of West Africa do. It’s instructive to recall Martin Williams’ remark above, that contributing individually to a weave of music simultaneously enlarges both a communal effort and individual achievement – a paradox with “philosophical implications that are so exciting and far-reaching that one almost hesitates to contemplate them.”
Street Art
Global travel has become a treadmill, taking us to new places that remind us of other places, yet one more way that our world is becoming ever so many more embodiments of Baudelaire’s “forest of resemblances.” As travel destinations become nearly indistinguishable from one another, the missing element in a new place is hearing and registering the authentic voice of the people who live in a fresh and distinctive culture. Where can their voices be most fluently heard?
My friend and colleague Marshall Soules would tell you that the best source for recognizing that voice in new locales is their street art. For decades, Soules has been photographing street art in cities around the world. He defines street art as “a collaborative global palimpsest inventing a new language speaking with images.” (2025)
Already street art serves as an early living thread of the neotribal voice and suggests itself as a potent metaphor of its sources and potentials. The secret ingredient to street art – as of any true expression in the neotribal voice — may be anonymity. It is not irrelevant that the world’s most recognized street artist, Banksy, is the pseudonym of an unknown artist or cabal of artists.
Writers’ Room
In his comedy play “Laughter on the 23rd Floor”—which he sharply improved upon in the 2001 film version — Neil Simon revisits his apprenticeship in writing TV comedy for Sid Caesar in the early 1950s. One setting is Sid Caesar’s writers’ room, but the lively kick in the comedy is seeing the dynamics of a writers room play out whenever the writers are together, when a newly launched jibe undergoes a gauntlet of tongues, attracting ever sharper and fresher additions and variations. The characters in the play are based on well-known figures who went on to comic success as TV or movie writers, such as Mel Tolkin (Your Show of Shows), Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H), and Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, etc.). Memoirs by veterans of writers’ rooms suggest that those focused gatherings serve much the same function that a neotribal-voice-orchestrating AI would: nurturing, growing and ultimately harvesting the best from diverse sources.
Distributed Cognition in Theory and Practice
A fresh branch of cognitive psychology emerged since the 1990s, the academic shadow, perhaps, cast by such advances in skilled cooperation as extremely advanced collaborative strategies in videogames and the impressive recent upticks in synchronized sports. All provide suggestive guides into processes of extremely focused collaborations which can issue in startling, unexpected outcomes. The leads here could help guide early efforts in creating designs, for example, of puzzles that require large teams to solve and cannot be solved by individuals.
PART IV. IN CONCLUSION…
These thoughts offer little more than an extremely incomplete handful of early hints at a much larger potential than I can adequately begin to encompass in this short space. There are many dimensions to my admittedly exorbitant wild wish that I have not begun to touch upon. What might be the most far-reaching prospective upsides of a neotribal voice? What unimaginable thoughts might be expressed in it? What insights would it open to us? What new potentials would it open — in the short term, and in the long term? How might it evolve and what, a century or two later, might it evolve into? It is equally important to ask, what are its potential downsides? To apply Wiener’s theme in “Voices of Rigidity,” is it conceivable that one day a society might refuse anything to be uttered unless it is uttered in the collective voice?
Surely one dimension of the neotribal voice worth exploring is its innate claim to democracy, and perhaps its contribution to maintaining democracy in a stable form under the reign of AI.
Can any human tool make a claim to be more democratically crafted than language? The surest precedent to the creation of a neotribal voice was the creation of language. If a successful neotribal voice should grow into something that would be regarded as a new language, surely it would repeat that original process – and, one hopes, encourage something heartily comparable on the political front.
It is only fitting that the final word in this odyssey and probe go to McLuhan, yet another voicing of his faith in the future of computers. From The Global Village, published nine years after his death:
The computer is the first component of that hybrid of video-related technologies which will move us toward a world consciousness. It steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed of light, reducing numbers to body count by touch. When pushed to its limits, the product of the computer reverses into simultaneous pattern recognition (acoustic space), eroding or bypassing mechanical processes in all sequential operations. It brings back the Pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that “numbers are all”; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy in favor of decentralization. Any business corporation requiring the use of computers for communication and record-keeping will have no other alternative but to decentralize. (1989, 103)
NOTES
Berliner, Paul F. (1994) Thinking in Jazz: the Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Carpenter, Edmund (1973) Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! New York: Bantam Books, the 1974 Bantam edition
Dechert, Robert (1966), ed. The Social Impact of Cybernetics. Notre Dame, IND: University of Notre Dame Press
Labatut, Benjamin (2023) The MANIAC. New York: Penguin Press, epub edition
McLuhan, Eric, ed. (1995) Essential McLuhan. Toronto: Anansi Press
McLuhan, Marshall (1955a) “An Historical Approach to the Media of Communication”, speech given at Columbia University, July 26, 1955, typescript
McLuhan, Marshall (1955b) “Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath”, Shenandoah: The Washington And Lee University Review, Vol. VII, No. 1, Autumn; later reprinted in Explorations 4
McLuhan, Marshall (1956) “The Media Fit the Battle of Jericho”, Explorations 6 (1956),reprinted in McLuhan Eric, ed., Essential McLuhan (1995), Toronto: Anansi Press
McLuhan, Marshall (1957). “Jazz and Modern Letters,” Explorations 7. Toronto
McLuhan, Marshall (1959) Speech to the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, Sept. 23, 1959. The full speech is republished whole on the website www.mcLuhansnewsciences.com
McLuhan, Marshall (1960) Untitled, undated CBC Interview transcript
McLuhan, Marshall, (1961a) “The New Media and the New Education,” The Basilian Teacher, December
McLuhan, Marshall (1961b) “The Humanities In The Electronic Age”, a Speech to the annual meeting of The Humanities Association of Canada, Montreal, June 1961, First Published in The Humanities Association Bulletin , Vol. xxxiv, No.1, Fall; reprinted as McLuhan Unbound # 7, Ginko Press, 2005, p 7.
McLuhan, Marshall (1962a) “Technology Kills Democracy, McLuhan Warns Exchangers,” University of Toronto Varsity [student newspaper], Vol LXXXII, No. 26,November 19 (LAC)
McLuhan, Marshall (1962b) The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press
McLuhan, Marshall (1963a) Letter to John I. Snyder, Jr., August 4, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987). Toronto: Oxford University Press
McLuhan, Marshall (1963b) “The Agenbite of /Outwit”, Location Magazine, Vol.1, No.1
McLuhan, Marshall (1964), Understanding Media. New York: Routledge Publishing
McLuhan, Marshall (1965), quoted in “The Talk of the Town,” by an unidentified staff writer, The New Yorker, May 15
McLuhan, Marshall (1967) “The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion”, Perspecta, Vol.11
McLuhan, Marshall (1968a) with Agel, Jerome and Fiore, Quentin, War and Peace in the Global Village. New York: Bantam Books
McLuhan, Marshall (1968b) “The End of Polite Society”, Marshall McLuhan, Malcolm Muggeridge, Norman Mailer, Moderated by Robert Fulford, The Way It is, CBC Television.
McLuhan, Marshall (1969a), Playboy Interview, Playboy, March issue.
McLuhan, Marshall (1969b) Counterblast. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart
McLuhan, Marshall (1970a), “Speaking Freely,” interview with Edwin Newman on WNBC-TV, December 27
McLuhan, Marshall with Watson, Wilfrid (1970b), (1970, 202). From Cliché to Archetype. New York: The Viking Press
McLuhan, Marshall (1971a), Convocation Address, Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta, November 20th (LAC)
McLuhan, Marshall (1971b) “Roles, Masks and Performances”. Republished in McLuhan Unbound (2005), Richmond, CA: Gingko Press
McLuhan, Marshall (1971c), Letter to Pete Buckner, October 28, 1971 (LAC), quoted in W. T. Gordon, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (1997). New York: Basic Books
McLuhan, Marshall with Nevitt, Barringtond (1972) d. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
McLuhan, Marshall (1973a)“Politics as Theatre” (1973), Performing Arts in Canada Winter 10: 4
McLuhan, Marshall (1973b) “Mr. Nixon and the Dropout Strategy”. The New York Times, July 29
McLuhan, Marshall with McLuhan, Eric (1988) Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press
McLuhan, Marshall, with Powers, Bruce (1989) The Global Village. New York: Oxford University Press
Nisensen, Eric (2001) The Making of Kind of Blue. New York: St. Martin’s Press
Soules, Marshall (2025), private email to W. Kuhns, of April 11
Spolin, Viola (1963) Improvisaton for the Theatre: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press
Theobald, Robert, (1966) “Cybernetics and the Problems of Social Reorganization” in Dechert, Robert, The Social Impact of Cybernetics. Notre Dame, IND: University of Notre Dame Press
Wiener, Norbert (1950) The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Note: a pdf of the original 1950 first edition, with its final chapter intact, is now available online: https://monoskop.org/images/9/90/Wiener_Norbert_The_Human_Use_of_Human_Beings_1950.pdf
Williams, Martin (1993), The Jazz Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press.
