I want to start today with something that, honestly,
when I first read it, it just, it gave me goosebumps.
Oh, yeah. And I don't mean the fun kind. I mean
the spooky, wait, what kind of goosebumps? The
real glitch in the Matrix feeling. Okay, that's
a strong start. I'm listening. What have you
got? Okay, so picture this. It's 1962. Right.
JFK is in the White House. The Beatles haven't
really invaded America yet. We are living in
a world of, you know, rotary phones, three television
channels, if you're lucky, and... Libraries that
use those little wooden card catalogs. You with
me? I am absolutely with you. A completely analog
world. No clicks, no swipes. None of that. Yeah.
So in the middle of this very analog world, a
man writes down a prediction. He's describing
a future technology. Okay. And he says this technology
will, and I'm quoting here, include television
as its content, that it will obsolesce mass library
organization. This is a specific phrase that
just freaked me out. It will flip into a private
line to speedily tailored data of a saleable
kind. Speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.
Yes. In 1962, he basically predicted the targeted
Instagram ad, the algorithmic TikTok feed, the
death of the encyclopedia, all of it. Almost
30 years before the World Wide Web even existed.
That is Herbert Marshall McLuhan for you. It's
unnerving, isn't it? When you read that quote,
it doesn't feel like a guess. No. It feels like
he saw a blueprint. Like he was reading the user
manual for a machine that hadn't been built yet.
It really, really does. And that's who we're
talking about today. Marshall McLuhan. Now, I
know the name. I think most people, you know,
they've heard the name. He's the medium is the
message guy. He's the global village guy. He
is the patron saint of Wired Magazine. For sure.
And also probably the most misunderstood intellectual
of the 20th century. Well, that's exactly what
I want to get into, because I'll be honest, I've
used the phrase global village a hundred times.
Everyone asks. And I usually use it to mean,
hey, isn't it cool that I can FaceTime my friend
in Tokyo? You know, it sounds cozy. It sounds
nice. And that is exactly where most people get
it wrong. Profoundly wrong. McLuhan did not mean
it was cozy, but we'll definitely get to that.
Right. So the mission for this deep dive is to
go past the bumper stickers. I really want to
understand how this guy, who was writing before
the internet, before smartphones, before AI,
how he somehow managed to figure out exactly
how these things would mess with our heads. And
mess with our heads is, I think, exactly the
right way to put it. We aren't just looking at
McLuhan the historian. We're looking at McLuhan
the detective. Right. Or... Or maybe the mechanic.
The mechanic, I like that. Yeah, mechanic of
the mind. Yeah. Because his whole argument, and
we're going to spend a lot of time on this, is
that technology doesn't just help us do things.
It's not just a tool. It changes who we are.
It rewires us. It fundamentally rewires us. You
had this term, the sensorium. The sensorium.
I saw that word in the notes. It sounds like
a part of a spaceship. It does, doesn't it? Yeah.
But it's actually pretty simple. It just refers
to the balance of our senses. Your sight, your
hearing, touch, taste, smell. McLuhan believed
that every major technology in history turns
the volume knob up on some senses and turns it
way down on others. Okay, so like a mixing board
for our senses. A mixing board for the soul,
almost. And when you change that balance, that
mix, you change how a human being thinks, how
they feel, and ultimately how they act in the
world. So just to make this concrete, if I'm
spending my day staring at a screen versus, say,
listening to the radio or reading a book, I'm
actually a different biological entity in some
fundamental way. Effectively, yes. Your cognitive
patterns are different. The neural pathways you're
using are different. And if you change enough
individuals in the same way, you change the entire
civilization. OK, that is huge. That is a massive
claim. We absolutely have to unpack that. But
but before we get into the heavy theory, I really
need to understand who this guy was, because
in my head, a media philosopher from the 60s
should be this, you know, cool chain smoking
New Yorker hanging out with Andy Warhol. He did
eventually hang out with that crowd. You're not
wrong about that. But he definitely didn't start
there. His origins are actually much more, well,
rustic. Yeah, I was really surprised to see he
was Canadian. Not what I expected. Born in Edmonton,
Alberta in 1911. Raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
This is the prairies. We're talking harsh winters,
vast open spaces. It's not exactly the center
of the media universe. Not at all. And he wasn't
even studying media at first, was he? He started
out in engineering. He did. He enrolled at the
University of Manitoba as an engineering student.
See, that's such a weird pivot to me. How do
you go from building bridges to analyzing poetry?
It feels like two totally different brains. Well,
he only lasted a year in engineering before he
switched to English literature. But I honestly
don't think he ever really lost that engineering
mindset. It became his secret weapon. How so?
What do you mean by that? Think about what an
engineer does. They look at a structure, a bridge,
an engine, a circuit board, and they ask, how
does this work? What are the principles? How
does the stress flow? What are the mechanics?
Right. They're looking at the system, not the
paint job. Precisely. And McLuhan applied that
same lens to art and communication. He didn't
just want to know what a poem meant. He wanted
to know how it was built, what its structural
effect was on the person reading it. So he was
reverse engineering literature. Exactly. And
that whole approach got supercharged when he
went to England. He headed to Cambridge in 1934
to do his Ph .D. Okay. And... This is actually
a bit of a funny story. He already had a master's
degree from the University of Manitoba. He's,
you know, a very smart guy. But Cambridge being
Cambridge. Let me guess. They looked down their
noses at the colonial degree. Oh, completely.
They basically said, that's nice, dear. Now,
if you want to study here, you'll have to enroll
as an undergraduate again and do the whole thing
over. That's brutal. Imagine having a master's
degree and having to sit in a lecture hall with
a bunch of 18 -year -old freshmen. I would have
been furious. You'd think so, wouldn't you? But
McLellan actually spun it. He later said something
like, the advantage of being a Westerner is that
we're under no illusion that we've had an education.
He was totally willing to start from the bottom.
That's a great attitude. And it's a good thing
he did because he met two teachers there who
basically changed the entire trajectory of his
life, I .A. Richards and F .R. Levis. These are
the new criticism guys, right? I remember hearing
that term in a... college lit class, but I think
I might have fallen asleep. What actually is
new criticism? So without getting too bogged
down in academic jargon, the old way of reading
a book was to look at the biography of the author
or the history of the time period and try to
guess what the author was feeling or intending.
Right. Like Dickens must have been sad about
poverty when he wrote this. Exactly. New criticism
came along and said, forget the author. The author
is dead. Look at the text itself. Look at the
machine of the words on the page. Okay. So don't
worry if Shakespeare is having a bad day. Just
look at how the sonnet is constructed, the form.
Right. And specifically, look at the effect that
form has on the reader. I .A. Richards, one of
his teachers, had this concept he called feedforward.
Feedforward. I know feedback. What's feedforward?
So feedback is when you do something and you
get a signal back that tells you how it went.
Feedforward is the mechanism of anticipation.
It's how a complex system like a poem or an advertisement
or a human brain prepares itself for what's coming
next. It creates the conditions for its own reception.
Can you give me a real world example of that?
Sure. Think about a joke. The setup of a joke
is pure feed forward. Okay. It primes your brain.
It sets up an expectation, a pattern, specifically
so that the punchline can break that pattern
in a surprising way. If the setup doesn't work,
if that feedforward mechanism fails, the punchline
just falls flat. Right, you don't laugh. You
don't laugh. And Richards taught McLuhan to look
for that feedforward mechanism everywhere. How
does communication set the stage for its own
effect? I see. So McLuhan starts looking at everything
this way, not just poems. Exactly. He has this
huge light bulb moment where he realizes you
can analyze a newspaper, a radio broadcast or
a television set the same way you analyze a sonnet.
You don't ask, is the news on this channel true?
You ask, how does the structure of a 24 hour
news channel change the way I perceive the world?
That's the engineer coming back out again. He's
looking at the wiring. He's always looking at
the wiring. But there's one more piece of the
puzzle for McLuhan's personality that we absolutely
can't ignore. Yeah. And it's the spiritual piece.
Right. The notes mention he converted to Catholicism.
Was this just a, you know, a social thing or
was he really deep into it? Oh, he was deep,
deeply devout. And it wasn't how he was raised
at all. I think his family was Baptist, but he
became an agnostic in university. He was sort
of drifting. But then he discovered the writer
G .K. Chesterton. The guy who wrote The Father
Brown Mysteries? The very same. Chesterton was
a master of paradox, a brilliant writer and a
very public Catholic intellectual. And McLuhan
read him and was just hooked. There's a letter
McLuhan wrote to his mother in 1935 that is just.
It's heartbreakingly honest. He wrote, Had I
not encountered Chesterton, I would have remained
agnostic. Chesterton did not convince me of religious
faith, but he prevented my despair from becoming
a habit. Wow. Prevented my despair from becoming
a habit. That is, that's heavy. That sounds like
someone who was staring into the void. I think
he really was. You have to remember the time.
This is the mid -1930s. The world is sliding
towards World War II. Ideologies are clashing.
He was a highly sensitive, highly intellectual
young man seeing a world that was becoming increasingly
chaotic and meaningless. He needed an anchor.
And he found it in the church. He officially
joined the Catholic Church in 1937. And while
he was actually a very... private about his faith.
He didn't want to be pigeonholed as a Catholic
thinker. It informed absolutely everything he
did. It gave him what he called a super historical
perspective. What does that mean, a super historical
perspective? It means he felt he had a place
to stand outside of history. If you're just a
secular historian, you're kind of trapped in
your own time. You look at the 1950s and think
that's normal. Right. It's a baseline. But if
you're grounded in this 2000 year old tradition,
you can look at the 20th century and say, whoa.
This is weird. This is a blip. This isn't normal
at all. It gave him a stable point from which
to judge the chaos of modern media. It's like
having a satellite view of the planet instead
of just a street view of your own neighborhood.
That's a fantastic analogy. In fact, he privately,
he didn't say this in his books, but he privately
compared satellite technology to the Star of
Bethlehem. No way. Yes. He saw these deep connections
between the technological and the spiritual that
almost nobody else was even looking for. Okay,
so this is our guy. He's got the brain of an
engineer, the training of a literary critic,
and the soul of a Catholic mystic. What a combination.
It's an incredible combination. And he takes
this unique toolkit, and he moves to the University
of Toronto. And then in 1964, he drops the bum,
understanding media. The book that changed everything.
And launched a thousand arguments. And the phrase
that everyone knows, even if they don't know
who said it, the medium is the message. Yes.
The big one. Okay, stop. We need to really wrestle
with this. Because every single time I hear this,
I feel like it's a riddle that's designed to
annoy me. It is a bit of a riddle. It's a probe.
A medium is the message. If I watch a documentary
about the Civil War on TV, the message is the
Civil War. It's the facts. the history, the stories.
But McLuhan seems to be saying, no, no, no, no,
the message is the TV screen itself. And I'm
like, what? The screen didn't fight the Battle
of Gettysburg? That is the common reaction. It's
the logical reaction. And it's why a lot of people
dismissed him as a charlatan. But let's look
at his specific definition of message. For McLuhan,
the message isn't the content. It isn't what
is being said. Okay. The message is the change
of scale, pace, or pattern that a new innovation
introduces into human affairs. Okay, that's still
very abstract. Give me the light bulb. I know
that's his famous example. It's the perfect clarifying
example. Think about a light bulb. Does it have
any content? No, it's just a light. It doesn't
tell a story. It doesn't have a plot or characters.
It's just on. Right. Unless you're using it to
spell out words in a marquee, a light bulb is
pure medium without any content. But now think
about what the light bulb did to human life.
Well, it let us stay up late. It did more than
that. Before electric light, construction on
a building stopped at sundown. Reading stopped
at sundown. Most social life was dictated entirely
by the rising and setting of the sun. Right.
You went to bed when it got dark. The electric
light bulb completely restructured human time
and space. It allowed us to turn night into day.
It enabled the 24 -hour factory shift, which
created modern industry. It allowed for cars
to drive safely at 2 a .m. It literally created
the 247 society. So the message of the light
bulb isn't here is light. The message is the
sun is no longer your boss. Yes, exactly. The
message is the total restructuring of human life.
Now, whether you are using that light to read
the Bible. or to read a comic book, that is the
content. And McLuhan's radical claim is that
the content is almost totally irrelevant to the
deep structural change. The light bulb changed
society the same way regardless of what you were
doing under its glow. Okay, that makes perfect
sense with the light bulb because it has no content.
But let's apply it to TV because TV does have
content. It has The Sopranos or Sesame Street.
Surely it matters if I'm watching brilliant educational
programming versus, you know, reality trash.
To your personal education on this. specific
topic. Yes, of course it matters. But to your
sensorium, to the deep structures of society.
McLuhan would say, no, it doesn't matter at all.
He has this amazing quote. He says, the content
is just the juicy piece of meat carried by the
burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.
I love that quote so much. We're the watchdog.
You're conscious, critical thinking. Is the watchdog.
You're sitting there analyzing the plot of the
show. You're thinking, is this character arc
realistic? Do I agree with the politics of this
news anchor? You're chewing on the meat. Right.
And meanwhile, the burglar, the medium of television
itself, is quietly breaking into your house and
rearranging all the furniture. And what is the
furniture in this analogy? My brain. Your attention
span. Your relationship to time. Your need for
constant visual stimulation. The very fact that
you're sitting passive, immobile for hours, receiving
a constant stream of images, that physical and
mental posture is changing you, regardless of
whether the images are of saints or sinners.
So while I'm busy debating the political bias
of a news anchor, the TV medium itself is training
me to be passive and to expect problems to be
resolved in 22 minutes plus commercials. Exactly.
And if we pull that forward to the smartphone
today. Oh, God, let's do it. It's too perfect.
We spend all our time arguing about the content
on social media. Is this post misinformation?
Is this person being a bully? Is this hate speech?
Those are the content arguments. They're the
stake. Okay. McLuhan would tell us, look at the
form, look at the device, look at the infinite
scroll. The fact that it never, ever ends. The
message of the smartphone isn't the tweet you
just read. The message is that you are now available
to everyone 24 -7. The message is that your attention
is now fragmented into 15 second chunks. The
message is that you are never, ever truly alone
or bored. That's terrifying because we're all
running around trying to flex the content. You
know, let's have better content moderation. But
nobody is talking about banning the infinite
scroll itself. Because the medium is invisible
to us. We swim in it like fish swim in water.
You can't ask a fish to describe water. But gluten
was the guy trying to pull us out of the fishbowl
for a minute and say, hey, look at the water.
The water is making you grow gills. OK, I'm sold.
I get it now. I really get it. The medium is
the environment that changes us. But McLuhan
didn't stop there. He started categorizing these
media. And this is where I think he loses people
again. The whole hot and cool media thing. Ah,
yes. The famously confusing terminology. It's
super confusing because in 2024, hot means sexy
or trending or popular. And cool means... Well,
it means cool. But McLuhan says radio is hot
and TV is cool. That just feels completely backwards
to my modern ears. You have to totally reset
your vocabulary. He's not using those words the
way we do. He's borrowing from jazz slang of
the 40s and 50s. Jazz slang. Yeah. In the jazz
world back then, if a solo was hot, it was intense,
loud, fast, in your face. It left nothing to
the imagination. But if a musician was cool,
they were detached, laid back, minimalist. They
invited you in to fill the spaces they left.
OK, so hot is aggressive and cool is laid back.
Let's define them technically. What makes a medium
hot? A hot medium is high definition. And by
that, he means it is packed with data. It's full
of information. It gives you everything you need.
High definition. So like a high -resolution photograph.
A photograph is the perfect example of a hot
medium. It shows you the wrinkles, the colors,
the specific lighting. Your eye doesn't have
to do any work to figure out what it's looking
at. The information is spoon -fed to you. So
radio is hot because the audio fills your ear.
Exactly. He argued it's a single sense hearing
that is filled to the brim with information.
You just sit back and receive the download. The
key thing about hot media is they require low
participation from the audience. Low participation.
I don't have to fill in the blanks. Exactly.
Now flip it. A cool medium is low definition.
It gives you very little information. It's sketchy.
It's impressionistic. And his primary example
is TV. But wait a second. TV gives me pictures
and sound. Isn't that way more information than
radio, which is just sound? This is the crucial
point. This is where you have to remember he's
watching television in 1960. Right. Rabbit ears.
A tiny, blurry, black and white screen with a
snowy picture. Exactly. The image was terrible.
It was a mesh of scanning dots, a low -resolution
mosaic. McLuhan argued that to watch that kind
of television, your brain had to constantly subconsciously
work to connect the dots just to form a coherent
picture you were participating you were leaning
in to complete the image so cool literally means
have to do some of the work. Yes. The user has
to be active to create meaning. The telephone
is another classic cool medium. Because you can't
see the person's face. Right. You have to imagine
their expression. You have to listen carefully
to the tone of their voice to guess if they're
smiling or frowning. You are actively filling
in all the missing data. That is high participation.
A cartoon is cool for the same reason it's just
a few lines, and your brain fills in the rest.
Okay, so let me try a pop quiz. A podcast. This
thing we're doing right now, is a podcast hot
or cool? Ooh, that is a good question. By his
original logic, radio is hot, so you'd think
a podcast would be hot. But podcasts are often
so conversational, right? They're rambling, they're
intimate. And I'm probably not sitting in rapt
attention. I'm listening while I do the dishes
or go for a run. I'd argue a scripted audiobook.
read by a professional actor is hot. It's a complete
performance being delivered to you. But a rambling
chat show like this one, it might be cooler.
You feel like you're hanging out. You're interpreting
the silence, the laughter. It's more participatory.
What about something like TikTok? Extremely cool.
Not in the slang sense, but in the McLuhan sense.
The videos are short, often chaotic. They require
you to know all the pre -existing memes and inside
jokes and sounds to understand what's even happening.
Right. If you show a TikTok to your grandma,
she doesn't get it. She doesn't get it. Why?
Because she can't fill in the blanks. She doesn't
have the context. She can't participate in the
meaning making. So for her, it's just noise.
For a teenager, it's a rich, cool, highly participatory
medium. So why does this distinction even matter?
Who cares if a medium is hot or cool? What's
the point? Because McLuhan believed they create
fundamentally different types of societies. Yeah.
Different types of people. He argued that hot
media like print, which is very dense, linear
and visual, creates people who are logical, individualistic,
specialized and emotionally detached. Think left
brain people. The classic intellectual, the accountant
reading a spreadsheet in their office. Exactly.
But cool media like television. or the telephone.
He thought they create people who are more involved,
tribal, holistic, and emotional right -brain
people. He believed the massive societal shift
from a print -dominated culture to a TV -dominated
culture was literally shifting us from being
a society of logical individuals to being one
giant emotional soup. And that emotional soup...
That brings us to the Global Village. Yes. This
is part four. The great epic shift from what
he called the Gutenberg Galaxy to the Global
Village. Okay, before the village, can we talk
about Typographic Man? Because that sounds like
a truly terrible superhero. Able to alphabetize
a phone book at the speed of light. No, Typographic
Man is us. Or at least who we used to be for
about 500 years. What does that mean? McLuhan
argues that the invention of the printing press
in the 15th century didn't just give us more
books. It rewired the Western brain to think
in straight lines. Because the lines of text
on a page are straight. Left to right, top to
bottom, one word after another, in a fixed sequence,
cause and effect. Introduction, body, conclusion.
McLuhan says that living inside that environment
for five centuries made us intensely visual,
linear, and rational. It also, he argued, made
us lonely lonely how does a book make you lonely
because reading is a silent private act you do
it alone in your own head it separated us from
the group it literally invented the modern concept
of the individual before print in an oral tribal
culture nobody was an individual with a private
point of view you were just part of the tribe
print allowed you to have a private mind okay
so that's the gutenberg galaxy it's orderly it's
rational it's private and then comes the electric
wire the telegraph the radio The internet. And
suddenly the walls of that private mind are just
blown out. Information isn't linear anymore.
It's not sequential. It's simultaneous. It's
coming at you from everywhere all at once. And
this is the global village. This is the global
village. But I want you to notice the word he
chose. He didn't say global city or global library.
He said global village. Have you ever lived in
a really small village? I grew up in a suburb,
which is bad enough. Everyone knows when you
get a new package from Amazon. Exactly. Now multiply
that by a thousand. In a real preliterate village,
there is zero privacy. If you have a fight with
your spouse, the entire village hears it. If
you sneeze, the village blesses you. It is a
place of total, absolute interdependence. And
total surveillance. Everyone is in everyone else's
business. All the time. And this is the quote
you have to remember. McLuhan wrote, Terror is
the normal state of any oral society. For in
it, everything affects everything all the time.
Terror is the normal state. Yeah. That is not
cozy. Think about Twitter or X or whatever we're
calling it. Oh, God. Yeah. Is it a calm, rational
place where we exchange linear, well -reasoned
arguments? You know, it's a mob. It's a constant
riot. It's a tribal drum. It's acoustic space.
Someone beats the drum. Look at this person who
said a bad thing. And the entire village instantly
rushes to the public square to scream and throw
things. It is pure. instantaneous emotion. The
rational individual doesn't stand a chance in
that environment. That makes so much sense. We
think we're using these new tools to express
our unique selves, but really we're just rejoining
the tribe. We're giving up our hard -won privacy
to be part of the group mind again. And McLuhan
saw this coming in the 1960s. He saw that the
electronic age would re -tribalize humanity.
He said, in the electric age, Big Brother goes
inside. We don't need a dictator with cameras
watching us anymore. We watch each other. We
internalize the surveillance. That's so dark.
But, you know, when you read him, he didn't seem
to hate it or love it, for that matter. He just
observed it like a scientist looking at ants.
That was his absolute stance. He refused to be
a moralist. He had this great line. To raise
a moral complaint about this is like cussing
a buzzsaw for lopping off fingers. Laughs. I
mean, that's a fair point. If you stick your
hand in a buzzsaw, don't blame the saw for being
a saw. Exactly. The saw does what a saw does.
If you understand the mechanism of the saw, you
can use it safely and keep your fingers. If you
just stand there yelling, saws are evil, you're
going to get hurt. McLuhan's goal was awareness
of the mechanism so we wouldn't be victims of
it. He wanted us to wake up and see the water
in the fishbowl. Yes. He famously said, I wouldn't
be seen dead with a living work of art. Meaning
he didn't want to just live inside the environment
and enjoy it. He wanted to stand outside and
probe it. He was a provocateur. Speaking of being
a provocateur, the guy was a bit of a pop culture
celebrity, wasn't he? He wasn't just hiding in
the library stacks. Oh, he absolutely loved the
spotlight. He was on television constantly. He
wrote for popular magazines. He was analyzing
advertising way before it was cool. Right. The
Mechanical Bride. That was his first book from
1951. Yes. He would take these glossy magazine
ads for cars and stockings and deodorant and
analyze them with the same seriousness that a
critic would analyze a Shakespeare play. He saw
that ads were the real folk art of the 20th century
because they were designed to manipulate the
collective subconscious. And then there's the
famous typo. I love this story. His big visually
experimental book, The Medium is the Massage.
M -A -S -S -A -G -E. It was supposed to be message,
wasn't it? The original title. It was. The typesetter
at the printer made a mistake. The proof came
back from the printer and it said, the medium
is the massage. And his co -author was probably
horrified, but instead of fixing it, McLuhan
shouted, leave it alone, it's great, it's right
on target. Why? Was he just being lazy or contrary?
No. He instantly saw the four -level pun. It
was a happy accent. Okay, what are the four levels?
Well, you have message, the original idea, but
you also have mass age, as in the age of the
masses, and message, as in our messy, chaotic
era. And finally, massage. Massage, like literally
rubbing someone. Yes. because the medium works
us over. It needs our brains. It physically massages
our sensorium, changing our sensory balance.
He thought it was the most perfect accident.
That book is wild, by the way. If you haven't
seen it, listeners, you have to Google the images.
It's not just text. It's weird photos, text that
runs upside down and backwards. It looks like
a punk rock zine from the 90s, but it's from
1967. It was a cool book. He made the book itself
into a... television -like non -linear experience.
He was practicing what he preached about form.
And we absolutely can't talk about his celebrity
status without mentioning his cameo in Annie
Hall. The ultimate academic mic drop. one of
the greatest scenes in movie history. For anyone
who hasn't seen it, Woody Allen is standing in
a movie line, and this unbelievably pompous academic
guy behind him is lecturing his date about McLuhan's
theories. And he's getting it all wrong. Just
babbling, pretentious nonsense. He doesn't get
it. The medium is the message, but the message
is really the medium. Just total garbage. And
Woody Allen gets more and more frustrated, and
finally he turns to the camera and says, if only
life were like this. And he walks over to a movie
poster and pulls the real Marshall McLuhan out
from behind it. The man himself. And McLuhan
looks the pompous guy dead in the eye and says,
I heard what you were saying. You know nothing
of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong?
How you got to teach a course in anything is
totally amazing. It is the most brutal, satisfying
burn. It's the fantasy of every nerd who's ever
been stuck listening to a loudmouth in public,
to have the actual expert appear out of thin
air and just destroy them. Sadly, though, we
can't just summon Marshall McLuhan today to explain
TikTok or AI to us. We can't. But he did leave
us a tool, a specific practical tool to do it
ourselves. He called it the Tetrad. The tetrad.
This sounds like a powerful artifact from a sci
-fi movie. It kind of is. It's from his last
book, Laws of Media, which was published after
he died. He and his son Eric claim that every
human artifact, from a word to a car to a computer,
follows four consistent laws. If you want to
understand what a technology is really doing
to you and your culture, you have to ask these
four questions. Okay, let's do this. I want to
use the tetrad on something happening right now.
Let's do generative AI. That's something like
chat GPT. Well, that is a juicy one. Perfect.
Okay. The four questions of the tetrad are, what
does it enhance? What does it obsolesce? What
does it retrieve? And what does it reverse into
when pushed to its limit? Okay. Question one,
enhancement. What does AI enhance or amplify?
Well, the obvious one is it enhances the speed
of text and image production. It amplifies the
average consensus of information found on the
internet. It enhances our ability to simulate
reasoning. It enhances the first draft. I never
have to stare at a blank page again. It gets
me started. Correct. It amplifies the retrieval
of data. Okay, good. Question two, obsolescence,
what does it push aside? What becomes junk because
of AI? The high school essay. Maybe the traditional
school essay, yes. But also maybe things like
rote memorization or the job of the junior copywriter,
the need to learn basic grammar. Perhaps. It
obsolesces the struggle of writing. You know,
that painful part where you have to sit and figure
out what you actually think about something.
Yes. And McLuhan would immediately ask, if we
obsolesce the struggle, do we also obsolesce
the thinking that comes from that struggle? That's
a good question. OK, next, retrieval. What does
it bring back from the past that we thought we'd
lost? This is always the tricky one. Retrieval
usually brings back something from the deep,
often preliterate past with AI. I think it retrieves
the oracle. The oracle, like the oracle at Delphi.
Think about it. You go to a mysterious non -human
entity. You ask it a question in plain language.
It gives you an answer that sounds profound,
authoritative, but might be a complete hallucination.
It's a bit magical. It retrieves the mythic voice
from the machine. That's so true. It feels like
talking to a spirit sometimes. It's not like
Googling. It's like asking a question. Or it
retrieves orality again. You're having a conversation,
a chat, instead of performing a search query.
Okay, I like that. Final one, reversal. What
does it flip into when it's pushed to its extreme?
So when any technology overheats, it flips into
its opposite. The automobile is supposed to speed
up travel and create freedom. When there are
too many cars, it creates gridlock, which stops
travel and traps you. Right. So if AI is pushed
to the limit, what happens? If AI produces all
the new content and then the next version of
AI is trained on that synthetic content, it might
flip into absurdity. Or madness. Model collapse,
where it just starts feeding on its own tail
and speaking gibberish. Exactly. Or it flips
from being a tool for information into a tool
for pure noise, a total loss of meaning. You
can't tell what's real from what's fake, so nothing
is real. It reverses into the opposite of knowledge.
That is a dark thought, but that's the tool,
right? You can apply those four questions to
anything. Try it with your toaster. Try it with
Zoom. Try it with a fork. It works every time.
It's an amazing thinking tool. I want to touch
on one more concept from his later work before
we wrap up, because it really connects to this
madness or noise idea, the idea he had of robotism
or androidism. Right. This is from his later
work with Bruce Powers in a book called The Global
Village. He was looking at how Eastern and Western
modes of thinking were colliding in the electric
age. And he had this core idea of visual space
versus acoustic space. Right. We talked about
visual space being the Western world. It's linear,
sequential, rational, the world created by the
printed page. But acoustic space is different.
It's the world of oral cultures and now the electric
world. He had that great description, the center
is everywhere and the margin is nowhere. Which
is a perfect description of the Internet, isn't
it? There's no center of the Internet. It's a
sphere of information coming from all directions
at once. And McLuhan thought that to survive
in this new... That sounds like an insult, like
we're becoming unfeeling machines. He didn't
mean it negatively. He wasn't talking about metal
robots. He meant we would need the flexibility
to be in many places at once, to have no fixed
identity, to adjust instantly to the constant
flow of feedback. So? Like a shapeshifter. Exactly.
The old fixed point of view, the solid principled
individual who stands on a rock and says, I am
this and I believe this. He gets crushed by the
waves in the global village. The survivor is
the one who can surf the waves of information,
the one who can swing from one identity to another.
But isn't that just isn't that exhausting being
a shapeshifter all the time? Yes. Which brings
us right back to his quote about terror being
the normal state. It's a high stress, high anxiety
way to live. It sounds like we're all just reacting
all the time to everything, which would certainly
explain why everyone seems so burned out. And
why McLuhan is more relevant now than he ever
was in the 60s. He diagnosed the digital burnout
50 years before it happened. So is he always
right? I feel like we're painting him as this
flawless prophet, but surely he missed some things
or got things wrong. Oh, absolutely. He had plenty
of critics, and many of them had very valid points.
Who were the big ones who came after him? The
cultural critic Raymond Williams was a big one.
He accused McLuhan of technological determinism.
Which means? It means McLuhan talks as if technology
just happens to us, like the weather, like it
just falls out of the sky and changes us. Williams'
point was, hey, hold on. Humans invent these
machines. Corporations build them to make money.
Politicians regulate them. There are human choices
and power structures involved. Right. The Facebook
algorithm didn't just evolve in nature. A specific
engineer at Meta wrote it with the specific goal
of maximizing engagement. to sell more ads. Exactly.
Critics like Williams felt McLuhan ignored the
politics and the economics. He was so focused
on the abstract medium that he ignored the man
behind the curtain pulling the levers. That feels
like a very fair critique. If we just say the
medium is the message, it feels like we're helpless.
Like, oh, the phone made me do it. It absolves
us of responsibility. Precisely. Also, the great
writer and semiotician Umberto Eco, the guy who
wrote The Name of the Rose, he got very annoyed
with McLuhan's sloppy terminology. McLuhan would
use words like medium and channel and code and
message almost interchangeably. For a rigorous
academic, McLuhan was a complete headache. He
was a jazz musician improvising in a room full
of classical conductors. That is the perfect
metaphor. He was riffing. He called his own ideas
probes. He once said, I don't explain, I explore.
I don't explain, I explore. I like that. It's
a good excuse when you're wrong. Hey, I was just
probing. It served him well. But, yeah, he fell
out of fashion in the late 70s and 80s. People
got tired of the guru act. But then the Internet
happened and he came roaring back. Roaring back.
In the early 90s, Wired magazine basically adopted
him as their patron saint and put him on their
masthead. Because suddenly we move from the optic
age of television, which was all about watching,
to the haptic age of the Internet. Haptic, meaning
touch. The Internet is tactile. We click. We
drag. We swipe. We type. We are physically touching
and manipulating the information. It's interactive.
It's not just watching. It's doing. And McLuhan
had predicted that the electric age would retrieve
the sense of touch that the visual culture of
print had suppressed. And there it was. It's
so weird to think of a cold glass screen as tactile,
but I guess my thumb knows more about the world
than my eyes do these days. That is a very...
Very McLuhan -esque thought. I try. Okay, one
last concept to leave our listeners with. This
might be my favorite one, the rearview mirror.
We march backward into the future. I asked you
about this before we started recording, and I
still struggle to wrap my head around it. Why
are we looking in the rearview mirror? Because
the future is terrifying and unknown. The new
environment is, by its nature, invisible to us
at first. So when we get a new technology and
a new environment, we don't look at it for what
it is. We look at it through the lens of the
thing that came right before it. Can you give
me an example? When the car was invented, what
did we call it? A horseless carriage. Exactly.
We defined it by what it wasn't. We slapped an
engine on a buggy and thought of it as just a
faster carriage. We didn't understand that the
car was not a carriage at all. We didn't see
that it would create suburbs, highways, the oil
industry, and climate change. We just saw a faster
horse. We were looking at the future through
a 19th century lens. When the first movies came
out, they were just filmed stage plays. Right.
They put a stationary camera in front of a stage
and recorded the action. They didn't understand
the cut, the zoom, the montage, the unique language
of film until much, much later. They were treating
the new medium like the old one. So what are
we doing now? What's our rearview mirror for
the Internet? We still treat the Internet like
a big library or a post office. We talk about
web pages. We talk about sending mail. We try
to apply copyright laws that were meant for physical
newspapers to a fluid medium like Facebook. We're
driving 100 miles an hour into a completely new
digital future. But our eyes are glued to the
rearview mirror, looking at the familiar industrial
past because it feels safe. That explains the
constant feeling of disorientation. We're trying
to navigate a spaceship using a map that was
drawn for a steam train. And Marshall McLuhan
is the guy in the passenger seat, gently, or
maybe not so gently, tapping on the glass and
saying, put down the map, look out the windshield,
even if what you see out there is terrifying.
Wow. Marshall McLuhan, the man who saw the windshield
when everyone else was staring in the mirror.
A poet of technology. A mechanic of the mind.
You know, for a guy who died in 1980, before
the personal computer really even took off, he
seems to understand my daily life better than
I do. That's the mark of a true visionary. He
didn't just see the machines. He understood the
grammar of the machine. The hidden effects. So
here is my final thought for you, the person
listening to this. And I want to make this a
little uncomfortable. McLuhan said the content
is the juicy steak that distracts the watchdog
of the mind. You've been listening to us talk
for the last hour. That's the steak. Well, what
about the medium? Right. What about the device?
in your hand or in your pocket or the smart speaker
in your room right now? What is it doing to your
body as you listen? Are you hunched over a phone?
Are you walking through traffic with earbuds
in, not looking where you're going? Are you ignoring
a real human being in the room with you to listen
to two disembodied digital voices? How has that
specific device rewired your sensorium today?
Don't just answer the question intellectually.
Feel it in your body. And maybe just for a second
after this ends, put the device down and look
out the windshield. Thanks for diving up with
us. See you in the global village. Welcome to
the debate. Today, we are dissecting the mind
of a man who really predicted the architecture
of our digital lives before most people even
owned a color television. He was a Canadian English
professor who somehow became the patron saint
of Wired magazine, a figure who appeared on the
cover of Newsweek and the pages of Playboy and.
even silenced the pompous academic in that famous
cameo for Woody Allen's Annie Hall. I am talking,
of course, about Herbert Marshall McLuhan. A
man who was equal parts, you know, high priest
of pop and, if you believe as harsher critics,
a peddler of magical naivety. We're looking at
a legacy built on these slogans that sound incredibly
profound at two in the morning, but often fall
apart in the harsh light of day. And that is
the friction we need to explore. McLuhan is the
father of media studies. The source material
highlights that he predicted the World Wide Web
30 years early, describing a private line to
speedily tailored data. But the core question
isn't just about his predictions. It's about
his central thesis. The medium is the message.
Did McLuhan unlock the secret code of human consciousness?
Or did he just give us catchy poetry? I'm here
to argue he was a visionary, a pattern recognizer
who understood that the form of our communication
changes us fundamentally, regardless of what
we say through it. And I'm here to argue that
this very view, the medium is the message, is
a dangerous trap. It's what critics like Raymond
Williams called technological determinism. By
obsessing over the machinery, McLuhan ignores
the social context, the political decisions,
and crucially, the actual content of what we
consume. He treats technology like a weather
system we just have to endure rather than a tool
we can actually control. Okay, well, let's get
right into the machinery then. To understand
McLuhan, you have to start with his 1964 work,
Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man. His
premise is radical, but I think essential. Media
are not just passive pipes for information. They
are extensions of our biological senses. A wheel
extends the foot. A book extends the eye. and
electronic media, the telegraph, the radio, the
internet, extend our central nervous system.
Extensions of the central nervous system. It
sounds impressive, but let's just strip away
the jargon for a second. What does that actually
mean? It means that when you use a technology,
you are physically and psychologically altering
your relationship with the world. We tend to
focus on the content, you know, the specific
words in a book or the show on TV. McLuhan argued
that the content is a distraction. He called
it the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar
to distract the watchdog of the mind. While you
are arguing about the plot of the TV show, the
medium of television is rewiring how your brain
processes information. But that's where the logic
just feels slippery to me. If you ignore content,
you lose the ability to critique reality. But
OK, let's look at his favorite proof of concept,
the light bulb. The light bulb is the perfect
example because it is a medium without any content.
It doesn't speak. It doesn't show you pictures.
But does it have a message? Absolutely. The message
of the light bulb is that it allows human activity
to extend into the night. It restructures how
we associate, how we work, and how we organize
society. A brain surgery or a baseball game happening
at night? That is the message of the light. not
the surgery or the game itself. The medium changes
the scale and pace of human affairs. I will grant
you that the light bulb changes the environment,
of course. But when McLuhan expands the definition
of medium to include light bulbs and roads and
wheels and the alphabet, the term becomes so
broad it's almost useless. This was Umberto Eco's
main critique. codes, and messages all under
one umbrella. I mean, if a light bulb is a medium
and a novel is a medium, how can we possibly
analyze them with the same tools? You're mixing
infrastructure with communication. You analyze
them by looking at their structural impact on
the sensorium, not their semiotics. The light
bulb changes how we see the world just as much
as a book changes how we think about the world.
But you can't separate the structure from the
usage. Understanding media contains a claim that
I find genuinely baffling. McLuhan asserts that
the social effect of television is identical,
whether it's broadcasting children's educational
shows or violent programming. He actually wrote,
and I quote, even witlessness is not a moral
issue. He didn't mean morality doesn't exist.
He meant it's irrelevant to the structural change
the medium is causing. But that is a massive
abdication of responsibility. If we accept that
the machine does the work, regardless of what
we put on it, we absolve ourselves of any choice.
It implies that if you put a fascist on the radio
or a saint on the radio, the societal impact
is the same because radio is doing the work.
That is the definition of technological determinism.
It strips us of human agency. I disagree. I think
McLuhan argues that agency is impossible without
awareness. He famously said we look at the present
through a rearview mirror. We march backward
into the future, obsessing over the content of
the past, while the new medium works us over.
Early movies were just plays filmed on a stage.
Early TV was just radio with pictures. We don't
see the new medium's true nature until it's too
late. He wasn't telling us to give up. He was
telling us to look at the windshield so we don't
crash. The rearview mirror is a nice metaphor,
but let's apply this to history. McLuhan didn't
just analyze the present. He tried to rewrite
the past using this whole media ecology idea,
specifically in the Gutenberg Galaxy. Published
in 1962, and frankly, his most compelling historical
argument, McLuhan traced how the invention of
the printing press, specifically movable type,
created what he called typographic man. Experience
was communal and auditory. You heard the news
from the town crier. You heard scripture in church.
You didn't possess it. But print is visual. linear
and solitary. You read alone. It fostered the
habit of a fixed point of view. McLuhan argued
that this shift to visual dominance created the
conditions for individualism, for nationalism,
and even for the assembly line. The visual homogenizing
of experience allowed us to see ourselves as
separate units. And as a historian, this is where
I really have to pull the brake. To attribute
the rise of democracy, Protestantism, capitalism,
and the nation -state solely to the technology
of movable type is a gross oversimplification.
It completely ignores class struggle, economics,
theology. It's like the great man theory of history
replaced with the great machine theory. You can't
just say, Gutenberg invented the press, therefore
we got the Reformation. He isn't saying economics
didn't happen. He's saying the environment that
made those economic structures possible was typographic.
You cannot have a nation state without a standardized
print language to bind it. You can't have a scientific
method without the ability to exactly reproduce
diagrams and text for peer review. The medium
laid the groundwork for the culture. But the
crucial part is what happens next. He argued
that the electronic age, radio, TV, and now the
Internet, is reversing that whole process. We
are being retribalized. Ah, the global village.
Perhaps the most misunderstood term in his entire
canon, without a doubt. People hear global village
and they think of some Coca -Cola commercial,
everyone holding hands in harmony. But McLuhan
was very clear. He said, terror is the normal
state of any oral society. In the global village,
we move from visual space, which is logical and
compartmentalized, to acoustic space. Okay, explain
acoustic space for the listeners, because this
gets into his neurology theories, which are,
to put it mildly, contentious. Right. Visual
space is like looking at a painting. It's static,
linear, it has a perspective. It belongs to the
typographic man. Acoustic space is like being
in a dark room with surround sound. Information
comes from everywhere at once, simultaneously.
You are the center of the sphere. In an electronic
environment, think about Twitter or a 24 -hour
news cycle, we aren't detached observers anymore.
We lose our private identity and merge into a
corporate, tribal identity. We become totally
interdependent. Which sounds terrifying. It is
terrifying. He explicitly warned of panic terrors.
When everyone is involved in everyone else's
business instantly, you don't get peace, you
get friction. You get a loss of privacy. He predicted
that the loss of the private individual would
lead to violence as people scrambled to find
a new group identity. I appreciate you highlighting
the terror aspect because the utopian interpretation
is so persistent. However, the science behind
this, the visual left brain versus the acoustic
right brain, is incredibly shaky. By the time
he wrote The Global Village in 1989, he was relying
on a binary view of neurology that modern neuroscience
doesn't really support. And does the internet
actually create a tribe? I see fragmentation.
I see echo chambers. I don't see a unified village.
I see a billion fractured realities. Well, McLuhan
would argue the echo chamber is the tribe. The
retribalization implies a return to emotion and
group identity over logical, detached debate.
The internet creates microtribes that are constantly
at war. That is exactly what an acoustic oral
society looks like. Rumor, emotion, and reaction,
rather than the cool detachment of reading a
book. Well, speaking of cool and hot, we have
to tackle his categorization system. This is
the part that usually trips people up. And honestly,
the part that makes me question his rigor the
most. It's counterintuitive, I'll grant you,
but it's consistent if you follow the logic.
In Understanding Media, he classifies media based
on the degree of participation required by the
user. A hot medium is high definition. It provides
a massive amount of data to a single sense. A
photograph is hot. The radio is hot. Its spoon
feeds you the information so you don't have to
work to complete the picture. And cool media?
Cool media are low definition. They give you
very little data, which forces the audience to
participate, to fill in the gaps. The telephone
is cool because the audio quality is poor. Your
brain has to work to visualize the person. Cartoons
are cool. And crucially for the 1960s, television
was cool. And this is where it just breaks down
for me. He claims a movie is hot because it's
high res, but TV is cool because the 1960s image
was a fuzzy mosaic of dots. I mean, to the average
person, watching a film and watching TV are almost
identical passive acts. Yet McLuhan insists that
because TV is cool, it requires deep participation
and involvement, whereas radio is hot and detached.
It just feels... He argued that any hot medium
allows of less participation than a cool one.
Think about a lecture versus a seminar. A lecture
is hot. Information is blasted at you. A seminar
is cool. You have to engage to make it work.
He believed the TV generation was fundamentally
different from the radio generation because their
brains were trained to complete the mosaic. The
physical act of watching the scanning lines of
a CRT TV engaged the nervous system in a way
film didn't. But these labels, hot and cool,
they don't hold up to scrutiny. Regis Debray
called McLuhan a master of intellectual collage
for this exact reason. He just pasted labels
where he wanted them. For example, is a high
-definition podcast today hot while a scratchy
vinyl record is cool? What about a 4K television?
Is that now hot because the resolution is high?
If the classification changes with the technical
specs, it's not a law of media. It's just a tech
review. I think you're getting hung up on the
technical specs rather than the cognitive load.
The insight is that we engage differently based
on the fidelity of the signal. But I admit McLuhan
didn't write for the classifiers. He explicitly
stated he didn't want to explain, he wanted to
explore. He called his works probes. Probes is
such a convenient excuse for a lack of rigor.
It allows him to throw out a hundred ideas, have
90 be nonsense, and then claim victory on the
10 that actually land. But the ones that landed
changed the world. And his methodology wasn't
just throwing darts. Look at the medium is the
massage. A title that came from a typo. A serendipitous
typo. Yes, the typesetter wrote massage instead
of message, and McLuhan kept it. He saw message,
mess age, massage, and mass age. That book, designed
with Quentin Fiore, was a masterpiece of graphic
design. It wasn't a linear argument. It was a
visual experience. He was trying to replicate
the chaos of the electronic age in a book. He
was showing us that the book itself, the medium
of the book, was changing. It was certainly a
successful art project, but we have to address
the Fordham experiment. His son, Eric McLuhan,
tried to scientifically prove these theories,
testing light on versus light through media,
to see if they stimulated different parts of
the brain. Did it actually yield empirical results?
Not really. It was inconclusive. Dwight McDonald,
a fierce critic, noted that McLuhan's books were
full of facts that are distorted and facts that
are not facts. McLuhan wasn't an empiricist.
He was a pattern recognizer. He wasn't trying
to give you a double -blind study. He was trying
to give you a lens. And frankly, late in his
life, he did formalize his thinking into something
structured, the tetrad of media effects. I will
grant that the Tetrad is the most rigorous tool
he produced. It's certainly more useful than
the whole hot -cool dichotomy. It's a tool that
lets you strip away the judgment of good or bad
and just look at impact. He argued you can ask
four questions of any technology, a car, a smartphone,
AI. First, what does it enhance? Second, what
does it obsolesce or push aside? Third, what
does it retrieve that was previously lost? And
fourth, what does it reverse into when pushed
to its extreme? Walk us through an example. How
would he apply this today? Okay, let's take the
smartphone. It enhances accessibility and communication
speed. You are always connected. The world is
in your pocket. It obsoletes distance, the landline,
the wristwatch, and to some extent memory. You
don't need to remember phone numbers or fax anymore.
It retrieves the scroll. We are back to scrolling
like ancients reading papyrus. And we retrieved
pictorial communication of the pre -print era
via emojis and Instagram. And finally, what does
it reverse into? When pushed to the extreme,
the tool of ultimate connection reverses into
a tool of isolation and anxiety. The digital
leash. We are so connected we become lonely.
That is a compelling analysis. It's elegant.
But my issue remains. The tetrad treats the technology
as this evolving organism with its own will.
The smartphone reverses into isolation. No, designers
built algorithms to keep us addicted. Corporations
decided to harvest our data. By focusing on these
inevitable structural changes, enhancement, reversal,
we lose sight of the who. Who is building the
machine? Who is profiting from the obsolescence?
I would argue that unless we use the tetrad to
understand the nature of the organism, we are
powerless against the creators. You can't regulate
what you don't understand. If you think the smartphone
is just a phone, you've already lost the battle.
The designers themselves often don't realize
the reversal effects until they happen. The creators
of Twitter didn't set out to create political
polarization. That was an effect of the medium
itself. And I would argue that understanding
the grammar of the medium is useless if we ignore
the political economy behind it. We aren't just
fighting a medium. We are fighting a market.
This is why McLuhan's friendship with advertising
executives like Howard Gossage is problematic.
He was too comfortable with the people manipulating
the message. He consulted for IBM. He consulted
for AT &T. He was criticizing the water while
taking checks from the sharks. He was engaging
with the powers that be because they were the
one shaping the environment. He famously said
art is a distant, early warning system. He viewed
his work as art, as a way to wake people up.
A fair point, but we have to acknowledge the
limitations. We are nearing the end of our time,
and we should probably try to land this plane.
I'll stand by my assessment. Marshall McLuhan
was a fascinating cultural figure. He was the
patron saint of the digital age for a reason.
But his theories, I think, suffer from that magical
naivete described by Debray. By insisting that
the medium is the message, He leaves us with
a toolkit that is fantastic for describing the
vibe of an era, but terrible for critiquing the
actual power structures. He was a poet, perhaps
even a mystic, given his private Catholicism,
but he was not a scientist of communication.
And I will maintain that his lack of scientific
rigidity was his greatest strength. He saw what
others missed because he wasn't looking at the
data, he was looking at the environment. He predicted
the internet would retrieve the individual's
encyclopedic function. He warned us about the
panic terrors of a totally interdependent world.
Whether his definitions of hot and cool were
perfect is, at the end of the day, irrelevant
compared to the magnitude of his central insight,
that we are fish swimming in water unaware of
the water itself. McLuhan forced us to look at
the water. He certainly made us look, though
I suspect we are still arguing about what exactly
we are seeing in the reflection. Perhaps that
ambiguity is fitting for the man who said, I
don't explain, I explore. Whether you view him
as a prophet or a determinist, Marshall McLuhan
provided the vocabulary we still use to attempt
to understand our digital lives. On that, at
least we can agree. Thank you for joining us
on The Debate. Thank you.