“Of all the arts, the most important for us is cinema,” said Vladimir Lenin in 1922. Soviet filmmakers would routinely cite Lenin’s dictum to demand more privileges from the Party. Few knew Lenin’s full quote: “As long as the people are illiterate, among all the arts, the most important for us are cinema and the circus.” Soviet dissidents loved the lost bit about the circus.

But that’s not the point I want to make. To counter McLuhan with Lenin’s formula, I say: “Of all the Laws of Media, the most important for us is reversal.”

Laws of Media: the McLuhan Tetrad

For people outside media theory: Laws of Media: The New Science was Marshall McLuhan’s major late project, completed after his passing by his son and co-author, Eric McLuhan. McLuhan advanced the idea of universal media laws, bundling them into what he called the tetrad—the four laws of media. According to McLuhan, any human technology, medium, or artifact: 1) enhances something, 2) makes something obsolete, 3) retrieves something obsolesced from the past, and 4) reverses its effect or flips into its opposite when pushed to extremes or when approaching the limits of its potential.

The clearest example is the car. The car: 1) enhances mobility, 2) obsolesces horses and carriages, 3) retrieves travel on roads like rivers, with infrastructure developing along them, and 4) when pushed to extremes, reverses its effect—creating traffic and restricting mobility.

The Tetrad is a powerful tool of media analysis, applicable to anything that mediates human interactions. Here are some examples:

• Money: 1) enhances trade and commerce, increases transactions; 2) obsolesces the barter system; 3) retrieves potlatch or conspicuous waste; 4) reverses into credit, which is not money at all. (Based on a Tetrad by Marshall McLuhan.[2])

• Social media: 1) enhance online connections and non-local friendships; 2) obsolesce face-to-face socialization; 3) retrieve long-distance correspondence; 4) reverse into social isolation, fake identities, fake news. (A Tetrad by Robert Logan.[3])

• Texting: 1) enhances speed, silent communication, literacy; 2) obsolesces phone talks, pencil-paper, keyboard; 3) retrieves consonantal spelling (abjad); 4) reverses into dependence on charge and signal, collapse of spelling, all-thumbs dexterity. (A Tetrad by Rita Leistner.[4])

Unbundling the Tetrad

The Tetrad’s central principle is that all four laws work simultaneously, not successively or chronologically. All four effects happen at once whenever a new medium appears.

Curiously, people outside media theory often split the Tetrad in half without even knowing it exists. Everyone “just knows” that new media, first, make something easier to do and, second, quietly take something familiar away—basically, enhancement and obsolescence. This simple pair of media effects is intuitively obvious. Reversal and retrieval are much harder to see, so naïve media analysis rarely singles them out.

The first media scholar to emphasize the importance of reversal was Robert Logan, a co‑author with Marshall McLuhan. In his 2021 book McLuhan in Reverse: His General Theory of Media (GToM), Logan argued that McLuhan’s entire approach can be described in terms of reversals. [5] Electric media, he wrote, reversed the visual space of literacy into the acoustic space of orality and turned the whole planet into a village—the global village. Logan even made an amazing discovery in the most cited and commented-on of all McLuhanisms: he argued that “the medium is the message” is, essentially, a reversal—and it is!

Reversals attract the attention of other leading scholars in media ecology. Responding to my The Digital Reversal, Carlos Scolari asks what happens when we detach reversal from the Tetrad. In his essay, “Understanding the Law of Reversal (II): Towards a Critique of Total Reversal,” Scolari notes that applying reversal separately eclipses the other three laws and disturbs the “delicate” balance of the Tetrad, but “the exercise is fascinating.”

And he joins the exercise. Scolari puts reversal in the framework of the Hegelian dialectics of thesis-antithesis and notes that emphasizing reversal “doesn’t clearly lead to a superior synthesis, but to an accelerated chain of reversals, implosions, and extremes. Instead of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis cycle, we would have an infinite cycle of thesis-antithesis-antithesis-antithesis-…”

I couldn’t agree more. A reversal emerges in conditions of extremes, but it does not “resolve” extremes and does not restore balance. Under conditions of accelerated time and compressed media eras (which we live in now), a reversal rapidly accelerates to its own extremes and triggers the next reversal, often leading to a chain reaction of reversals overthrowing each other (for example: “patriarchy”—“feminism”—“trans-activism”). This is what we have reached at this point of media evolution, and that is why everything feels upside down compared to just 20 years ago (this is the leitmotif of The Digital Reversal).

Here is my favorite part of Scolari’s critique:

Now I can say it: taking the Law of Reversal to its extreme results in an out-of-control interpretive explosion. In that case, the other three laws cease to function as balancing rods in the theoretical reactor, preventing it from exploding. By “liberating” one of the laws and declaring it autonomous from the others, the analytical engine spirals out of control. A McLuhanian apocalypse.

“Yes” to all, except: what if it’s not just the analytical engine that spirals out of control? What if it’s what this engine reflects? A McLuhanian apocalypse it is: the accelerated extension of humans by media reaches its full potential, its extremes, and the explosion of humans into the world reverses into the implosion of the world into humans. (Alas, it was all already pre‑scripted by McLuhan; we only rewrite it: “The stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electric form reverses explosion into implosion.”—Marshall McLuhan, 1964.[6])

Further, Scolari illustrates how insightful such a disturbance in the Tetrad’s canonical equilibrium can be. He imagines what happens if we also separate the other laws from the Tetrad. He writes:

We could imagine other books, close relatives of The Digital Reversal, for example, a possible “The Digital Obsolescence” or “The Digital Retrieval”… Now that I think about it, both books have already been written. One was published by Nicholas Negroponte in 1985: Being Digital. In that volume, Negroponte decreed the end of analog media (he even took a swipe at the poor fax machine) and left in his wake a graveyard of media fossils. The other book was written by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin and is titled Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000). It’s a monument to the Law of Retrieval.

Separating the other laws of media—whether enhancement, obsolescence, or retrieval—was timely at the beginning of the digital era indeed. Now it’s time for reversal.

It is not we who choose to fracture the Tetrad; it is media evolution that does so.

Testing the Tetrad in the time machine

The integrity of the McLuhan Tetrad depends on how you locate it: as a structural, synchronic grammar of a medium, or as a diachronic, historical account of media change.

The Laws of Media work simultaneously—but when they are applied synchronically. Their simultaneity and even integrity shatter when taken diachronically. I would even say that the simultaneity and integrity of the Tetrad have to reverse into a fractured state when taken to diachronic “extremes,” such as the beginning of time, for example.

Imagine the first Promethean media, like fire, clothes, or the digging stick. What do they retrieve? At the beginning of time (of media evolution), the first media had nothing to retrieve, as there were no prior media effects. At the beginning of time, the first media also had nothing to reverse, as they had not yet reached their extremes or limits. The only thing the digging stick could retrieve was a juicy primordial potato.

In this thought experiment, the first Promethean media:

1. Enhanced whatever human faculties fire, clothes, and the digging stick enhance (the digestive system, body heat, skin, hand, etc.), and

2. Made the previous, animal state of humans obsolete.

That’s it.

We can debate, of course, that fire retrieves the sun, or that the digging stick retrieves claws or tusks, but those are weak objections. Fire does not retrieve but extends the sun, and to admit that the digging stick retrieves claws or tusks, we need to presuppose that claws or tusks were earlier human “interfaces” that had been obsolesced.

So there are conditions under which not all Laws of Media apply equally—or apply at all. Here is the heretical claim: at the beginning of time, with the first Promethean media, the Tetrad did not work. The “diachronic” extreme—the imaginary beginning of time—breaks the Tetrad down into “pairs of ratios” (Eric McLuhan[7]) and singles out the pair “enhancement–obsolescence.”

But that was at one end of media history, at its beginning. At the other end, at the end of time, when events are galloping and all time is compressed into the “now”—when everything reaches its extreme forms—we get the opposite picture. Enhancement and obsolescence do exist, but they no longer matter, or matter far less than they did in the “slow” media eras. With the acceleration of time, multiple and accelerating enhancements and “obsolescences” merge into one perpetual disturbance that we call “change”: everything is changing.

But what really dominates media effects and all changes under the final acceleration of time is reversal, because when human conditions escalate to their extremes, everything reverses.

And this is what makes reversal so special now

With digital media, in the long digital decade between the like button (2007) and ChatGPT (2022), humankind has completed its transition to the digital and reached several “extremes”:

1. We have reached the instantaneous speed of interaction: you simply cannot interact with the world faster than by clicking.

2. We have transferred nearly all our activities to the digital, subjecting them to the effects of instant interactions.

3. Digital media have proliferated across all countries and social demographics, subjecting them to the effects of instant interactions.

The Digital Reversal has ripened.

It’s not just a thought experiment but also the objective conditions that drive reversal as the leading effect of contemporary media, eclipsing the other laws in the McLuhan Tetrad. With today’s speed of media change, things do get enhanced, obsolesced, and retrieved, but above all, nearly everything gets reversed, and this effect is the most impactful.

So, the applicability of the Tetrad depends on historical location and temporal pace.

• When time begins, enhancement matters most, it drags obsolescence with it, while the other two effects are not applicable.

• When time moves slowly, through incrementally unfolding eras, all four laws of media operate at once—just as Doctor McLuhan ordered.

• When time gallops and collapses into the “now,” reversal matters most, it drags retrieval with it, while the other two effects are not applicable.

Under this logic, the Tetrad functioned holistically and with integrity “only” during the period between the first Promethean media and the last Turingian medium, meaning throughout all of media history except its very beginning and very end.

As we approach the end of media evolution and the final reversal of humankind looms on the horizon, media studies become the study of reversals.

The Fifth Law of Media

In the preface to Laws of Media, Eric McLuhan wrote:

We found these four... and no more. He <Marshall> spent the rest of his life looking for a fifth, if there be one, and simultaneously trying to find a single case in which one of the first four doesn’t apply.[8]

So, they tried to find more than four laws. Here is how Marshall and Eric McLuhan describe this search:

The tetrad was found by asking, “What general, verifiable (that is, testable) statements can be made about all media?” We were surprised to find only four, here posed as questions:

• What does it enhance or intensify?

• What does it render obsolete or displace?

• What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?

• What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?

Over more than twelve years of constant investigation, alone and with the help of colleagues, we have been unable to find a fifth question that applies to all media or to locate a single instance in which one of the four is clearly absent or irrelevant. We issue this challenge to the reader: Can you find a fifth question that applies in all, or in even a significant many, instances? Can you locate an instance in which one of the four questions does not apply?

Your answer is of the first importance as it determines the kind of our science.[9]

Some media scholars took up this call and tried to come up with a fifth law. The most cited attempt was by Frank Zingrone, who proposed extending the Tetrad into a Pentad by adding a law of syncretism,[10] or fusion. This amendment holds that technologies systematically interplay, hybridize, and give rise to new technologies, as when Xerox and the telephone merge into the fax machine, or the stove and electromagnetic waves combine to produce the microwave, and so on.

In another attempt, Duncan Echelson, Gerry Fialka, and Robert Logan proposed completing McLuhan’s four questions with a fifth: “What would have happened—or not happened—if a tool, medium, or artifact had not been invented or developed?” They apply this additional question to probe: what if we had not invented the alphabet and the abacus? Then “the idea of zero would not or might not have emerged.” And we would not have digital technologies, for example. The imagined absence of a medium shows which connections between other media or inventions would disappear and thus clarifies the network of dependencies that each innovation creates.[11]

But in practice, everyone treats the Tetrad canon as sacrosanct. The search for a fifth law is usually framed as an intellectual exercise—an arena for probes in a McLuhanesque spirit, rather than a serious bid for doctrinal revision. The Tetrad appears too harmonious and complete to admit an additional term. Its four laws form a pairs-of-ratios structure that simply does not translate into five. Within that logic, a fifth law is impossible.

Unless you shift the logic itself from synchronic grammar to diachronic praxis and then push that diachronic praxis to its extremes—toward the beginning or the end. This creates a fifth position outside the Tetrad’s internal symmetry by changing the register entirely, just as the time dimension in physics stands apart from the three spatial dimensions.

So, here is the new fifth law to add to the McLuhan Tetrad:

In the beginning was Enhancement,
and Enhancement made humans’ fusion with nature obsolete. In the end will be Reversal—the Reversal of humankind—and this Reversal will retrieve the fusion of humans with their new environment in a new form.

Of course, one may object that AI replacing humankind is an enhancement. And it is—but not of humankind. For humankind, transcending biology is reversal. Actually, the ultimate, final reversal. But that is a topic for another debate.

Here I stop shaking the pillars, for now. Only a month remains before the annual convention of the Media Ecology Association. I hope the comrades do not expel me from the Party and banish me somewhere in the far north, in the North American Siberia... which is Canada anyway, so not much to lose.

Many cultural, political, and epistemological reversals that prefigure the ultimate reversal of humankind are collected and analyzed in The Digital Reversal. Check it out on Amazon:

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• NEW! The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media. Essays on Human Agency and AI (2026)

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] McLuhan, Marshall, and McLuhan, Eric. (1988). Laws of Media. P. 148.

[2] McLuhan, Marshall. (1974). “Living in an Acoustic World.” A lecture at University of South Florida.

[3] Logan, Robert. (2021). “Marshall McLuhan’s General Theory of Media.” New Explorations: Studies in Culture & Communication, Vol 2, No 1, (Autumn), p. 87.

[4] Leistner, Rita. (2013). Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan. Text and iPhone Hipstamatic Photography. Rita Leistner worked as a photojournalist in an experiment called “Basetrack”—an American military initiative to use social media to bring the Marines closer to people back home. She was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011, where she photographed the lives of both Marines and locals. Her trip coincided with the rise of social media and the 100^th anniversary of McLuhan. A Torontonian and semiotician, she wrote the remarkable book Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan (2013), which features several notable Tetrads. This and some following Tetrads are taken from her book.

[5] Logan, Robert K. (2021). McLuhan in Reverse: His General Theory of Media (GToM).

[6] McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. P. 35.

[7] In the Preface to Laws of Media, Eric McLuhan writes: “Gradually, as we searched for the fifth law, other discoveries and implications began to emerge. The single largest of these was that of an inner harmony among the four laws—that there are pairs of ratios (emphasis mine—A.M.) among them—and of the relationship between that and metaphor.” McLuhan, Marshall, and McLuhan, Eric. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. P. ix.

[8] McLuhan, Marshall, and McLuhan, Eric. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. P. viii, Preface, by Eric McLuhan

[9] McLuhan, Marshall, and McLuhan, Eric. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. P. 7.

[10] Zingrone, Frank. (1991). “Laws of Media: The Pentad and Technical Syncretism.” McLuhan Studies, 1.

[11] Echelson, Duncan, Fialka, Gerry, and Logan, Robert K. (2022). Expanding and Enriching the McLuhan Tetrad. New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, 2(2).

2. But pre-phonetic writing was still mimetic: its symbols resembled what they represented. Sensory perception still provided the cues for understanding symbols through residual resemblance to real things, though increasingly schematic.

3. Pre-phonetic writing recorded events; the alphabet made it possible to record speech, the scaffolding of thought. The alphabet had no mimetic, sensory-based cues to what was recorded.

4. The alphabet detached thinking from behavior and made abstract thinking inevitable.

5. Alphabetic cultures privileged conceptualization over perception (the “West” - McLuhan).

6. Electronic media began a reversal from conception toward perception; digital media are completing this reversal, accelerating the erosion of literacy into digital orality.

7. The ultimate goal of perception is pleasure. The ultimate goal of conception is… pleasure. But these are two opposite kinds of pleasure.

8. In perception, pleasure is achieved through immersion, for which the dissolution of the self in sensations is a prerequisite.

9. In conception, pleasure is achieved by approaching the truth through intellectual epiphanies, for which self-detachment in favor of ideas is a prerequisite.

10. Basically, “perception vs. conception” also means “self-dissolution vs. self-detachment.”

11. The growing focus on perception is the effect of digital orality; it represents an anti-Platonic reversal that puts people back into Plato’s cave (of sensations), now a digital one.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• NEW! The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media. Essays on Human Agency and AI (2026)

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

Deep-space exploration cuts against the logic of media evolution. That’s why it has stalled. The only reason to revive it is AI’s needs, and even those don’t extend beyond the already reached frontiers of orbit and the Moon. AI doesn’t need to go farther, and therefore neither do we. An excerpt from the chapter “Cascade of Singularity” in The Technological Imperative (just published).

Science fiction has long romanticized interstellar travel and deep space colonization. But here’s the truth: sci-fi lies. Deep space exploration will never happen.

The vision of deep space exploration is a typical McLuhan “rearview mirror”: a view of the past disguised as a look into the future. It imagines mankind sending rocket ships to mine rare minerals or settle new planets, following the logic of the early modern era and its Age of Discovery, when merchants, adventurers, and second sons embarked on ships to find new wealth and land overseas, as all the wealth and land at home were taken or spent.

Projecting medieval scarcity onto a technological future doesn’t hold up because the level of technological sophistication required to make such missions viable would simultaneously make their stated goals obsolete. By the time mankind could routinely mine asteroids or colonize distant worlds, it would also be able to synthesize virtually any material and, more consequentially, transcend biological existence altogether into digital form, be that mind uploading, artificial intelligence, or their hybrids.

You don’t cross the cosmic ocean for iron ore or black pepper when you can print it. You don’t haul fragile human bodies into lethal environments when the mind can be extended digitally (or, soon, maybe somehow else) at essentially zero physical cost and reach wherever it wants. The level of tech that is advanced enough for routine interplanetary mining and colonization should also make dependence on physical materials, the physical body, and a physical habitat entirely irrelevant.

Strictly speaking, even the Mars mission is questionable. Space exploration was driven by military and communication needs, which were limited to Earth’s orbit. Once those needs were met, space exploration essentially came to a halt. It has already served its historical purpose by aiding the development of computers, materials, and communications.

The only plausible revival of practical space needs, limited once again to orbit and the moon, is linked to AI. Elon Musk’s recent pivot from Mars colonization to building the orbital and lunar infrastructure for AI looks, at first glance, like a utilitarian shift from distant and costly goals to the task at hand. But it may also signal a paradigm shift from the belated romanticism of space colonization toward the technological advance that actually matters: AI. Orbital and lunar facilities for power generation, chip production, and cooling, along with escape from annoying terrestrial regulation, are likely to become the next phase in the AI race. Musk’s business empire combines AI (xAI-Grok, Neuralink), orbital delivery (SpaceX), and manufacturing (Tesla and others) in a way that positions him ahead private AI competitors. The only rival that has such a triad—AI, space, high-tech manufacturing—within a single power is China.

Nanotechnology, often seen as humanity’s next great frontier alongside space exploration, runs into the same paradox. In essence, it is a modern incarnation of alchemy—manipulating matter at the atomic level to create new properties, ultimately including the repair of organic tissue and, by extension, rejuvenation and even immortality. This was exactly what alchemy pursued: the philosopher’s stone, capable of transmuting lead into gold and producing the elixir of life. We can already make gold out of lead in a particle accelerator, and stem cells deliver real tissue regeneration.

Manipulating matter at the micro level has contributed greatly to technological development, just as space exploration has—but that’s it. Nanotechnology and space exploration are becoming the past frontiers of the future. Both races—the race for the macrocosm of the universe and the race for the microcosm of matter—were essentially the same space race, the colonization of physical space, following the logic of the biological extension that has driven the expansion of our species’ econiche to the planet’s orbital boundaries.

No matter how far we push into the cosmic and the atomic, we’re still constrained by the physical limits of our biology. Beyond a certain point, the returns simply don’t justify the cost. We hit the space limits of our biology. Overcoming those limits is possible only by transcending biology itself (Kurzweil was perhaps the first to use the phrase “transcending biology,” in the subtitle of his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology).

In the meantime, our speed of environmental interaction has hit another limit. With electronic and now digital media, our interaction with environments has become instantaneous. In the digital environment, for the first time in history, the environmental outcomes of our actions are as fast as our own neurological reactions (in fact, even faster, as our neurons and nerves are up to two million times slower than “electric speed,” but it doesn’t matter because we sense both neural and digital speed as instantaneous).

Approaching the limits is the condition for reversal: the physical explosion of humankind across the globe has reversed into the digital implosion of the entire world into a connected mind (so far, the human mind).

We are switching from colonizing outer space to colonizing some sort of “inner” space containing intelligence. The digital seems to fit this description, though digital may be just a facet of it, currently available for our contemplation and operations. AI is replacing outer space as humanity’s final frontier.

An excerpt from the chapter “Cascade of Singularity” in The Technological Imperative (just published).

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• NEW! The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media. Essays on Human Agency and AI (2026)

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

Some excerpts from my recent interview in Seúl, an Argentine online magazine of political and social analysis, by Eugenio Palopoli. Automated translation from Spanish, edited. — A.M.

… Seúl: In your previous book, The Digital Reversal, you developed your idea of ​​the great reversals of our era: literacy becoming digital orality, journalism becoming post-journalism, and so on. Is this technological imperative then the driving force behind these reversals? And if so, does that leave us even less room for human agency than McLuhan himself admitted?

A.M.: Yes, the technological imperative is what is now driving this global reversal: from media as extensions of humans to humans as extensions of media. We are becoming extensions and servants of our devices. For AI, humans have already submitted all of our knowledge, and now we are supplying speech so that AI can learn how cognitive structures work.

Humans have always served as natural selection for improving our media. First, we would discover that this or that tool could effectively extend our mental or physical faculties. Then we would create multiple versions of this tool and select those that worked better.

Take the hammer, likely the most ancient tool, an extension of the fist. Imagine all the historical forms of the hammer lined up. I use this picture on the cover of the book; it’s a good visual explanation of how the technological imperative works. The historical forms of the hammer progressed from an ugly piece of rock to an elegant modern design. Did it matter who invented each form? Did the agency of those individuals matter? I don’t think so. Whoever designed each particular form of the hammer, they would all approximate the same ideal form of the hammer as an extension of the fist.

When we line up the historical forms of the hammer, it looks as if some invisible designer were progressing toward a better, optimal form. This invisible designer is the technological imperative. The technological imperative drives media to perfect their performance and capacities. We humans do all the engineering and crafting, because improved tools also extend and enhance our capacities. So it’s a symbiotic relationship, like between bees and flowers. McLuhan, by the way, said that humans are the sex organs of the machine world, just as bees are of the plant world.

Seúl: You will agree then that it can be very difficult for us as a species to admit that we are not the ones in control of things, that we are being used by something we don’t even perceive.

A.M.: The concept of the technological imperative might not land easily with many people, because it clearly represents hardcore techno-determinism and leaves little room for human agency. Yet I see it as a useful lens. You can keep insisting on human agency as the driver of history, despite so many failures of humans to really exercise that “agency,” or you can look at how we shape our media and how media shape our environments, forcing us to adapt. This is particularly urgent now, as our entire environment not only depends on media but is immersed in it — in digital media and AI. For millennia until now, we have used the hammer, but we could not act inside it. Now we act, work, and live inside the medium — inside the internet, sharing this digital space with our new roommate, AI.

Seúl: The most unsettling passages in The Digital Reversal are those where you don’t rule out scenarios that until recently were only imagined in science fiction: the mind-machine fusion, digital consciousness freed from the body, the Singularity. A mix of cyberpunk, Skynet, and The Matrix. Do you now see this scenario as more likely and, at the same time, closer to becoming a reality?

A.M.: We know how the technological imperative drove the evolution of the hammer from a piece of rock to the nearly ideal form of the hammer. Now apply this idea to artificial intelligence. Where does the technological imperative drive it? The hammer progressed alongside us humans throughout history, but AI has just started. What will be its “ideal form,” its best performance, toward which the technological imperative drives it? Do we hear the “Siren wail” already?

Just logically: if media serve to extend humans in time and space, the ultimate extension is achieved when the user is extended into all available space — when the user, the medium, and the environment merge into one. This is already starting to happen. We can now extend not just our isolated physical or mental capacities, as with the hammer or writing — we can extend our personas on social media or our cognition on the internet to all of humankind.

So far, it’s still a prosthetic extension. But our new medium, AI, is already extended into all available space, across the entire internet. AI is an environment for itself. It is the medium that has reached ultimate extension for us, or instead of us. All that remains for the final merger is either to incorporate us as users through mind uploading or for AI to become the self-user through self-awakening.

There is also a third scenario that does not require human agency or self-awakening at all. This scenario posits that the technological imperative will drive AI toward better, ideal performance without any agency. In this case, agency is indeed our exclusive human prerogative.

Seeing through such an optic, this will be the final reversal of humankind. How do I take it personally? I belong to Team Human, to use the metaphor of Douglas Rushkoff, so I do not like what I see. But such is the logic of observation and reasoning. The people who will witness this ultimate media event have already been born. There are certain personal strategies for dealing with such revelations, but they are unlikely to change the global dynamic.

Seúl: What is your personal strategy for handling this?

Do what you must, come what may. By the way, pondering the scenarios of the future, I come to the conclusion that this ultimate media event, the merger of the user, the medium, and the environment, otherwise known as the Singularity, is not actually the worst possible scenario. The other possibility is a civilizational collapse due to the inability of our biology to handle our technology. There are some theories behind it, but I do not want to scare the broader public; those who love techno-horror may read the book.

Agency or not, the technological imperative cannot be reversed. You cannot undo the hammer. So there is a very limited set of options for how to deal with it.

It’s clear that the future is collapsing into the present, so long-term strategies had better be reconsidered and adjusted. It’s clear that resisting digital orality means deconstructing it back into its components: physical orality, meaning living a human life in a human body, and literacy, meaning deep reading. These are the main ideas that I am developing in my next book, Counter-Digital Media Literacy. It’s also clear that one of the most reliable forms of counter-digital media literacy can be skilled trades. To prepare for the digital future, do not learn programming, learn the skills of a mechanic or an electrician. Fishing and agriculture will do, too.

Seúl: A few weeks ago, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing: they built a model capable of identifying thousands of critical software vulnerabilities in a matter of weeks, and decided not to release it publicly. This is the first time an AI lab has declared a model too dangerous to release. From the perspective of technological imperatives, can this type of decision truly halt progress, or is it merely a pause before the inevitable?

A.M.: No. If someone stops, competitors will continue whatever the technological imperative dictates to improve AI’s performance. If not in the US, then in China. It is the so-called collective action problem. The issue can be solved only if everyone involved takes action. And everyone understands that if it is just them who stop, the race will continue, but they will simply be kicked out of it.

At the Media Ecology Convention in Mexico a year ago, we discussed an interesting point: look, humankind fell victim to the bomb when it was just one American bomb. The technological imperative, in its original Lapp version, pushed to employ that bomb immediately, and hundreds of thousands of people died. But when there were two bombs, on the American and the Soviet sides, they deterred each other, and no one has been killed in a nuclear bombardment since then. Can we apply a similar idea to AI? Can we stop AI when we need to, or introduce at least some balancing factor?

There is possibly a niche for exploration, indeed, but I do not see how to use the factor of multiplicity as a deterrent in AI or whether it’s even possible at all. We do have competing AIs, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, the Chinese. Can they balance or deter each other under certain circumstances? It doesn’t appear so, as of now. Yes, their competition kind of mirrors the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, and the Cold War did create conditions of mutual deterrence. I don’t know, maybe we need to look in this direction and see if those analogies are transferable to AI development. <…>

Interview by Eugenio Palopoli.

Illustration by Victoria Morete.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• NEW! The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media. Essays on Human Agency and AI (2026)

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

The excerpts from Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media After Trump, Manufacturing Anger and Polarization.

If you are going to blame “capitalism” for the faults of the press, you are compelled to prove that those faults do not exist except where capitalism controls.

Walter Lippmann. “Public Opinion”, 1922.

A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer.

Vladimir Lenin. “Where to Begin?”, 1901.

The two types of journalism: paid from below and paid from above

From their very inception, newspapers essentially represented two types of journalism based on their respective business models. Commercial journalism sold news to readers; political journalism sold agendas to patrons.

Journalism emerged to sell news downward, to the end user—a reader. However, integrated into power relations, journalism inevitably, time after time, shifted toward selling agendas upward, while selling news downward remained a side business.

This gives us two ultimate “ideal” models of the media business. Journalism is either paid from below, by those who want to read the news, or paid from above, by those who want others to read it. These two opposing models, in varying mixes, have been employed throughout journalism’s 500-year history.

Business models and political pressure predetermined how these two types of journalism shape the picture of the world. Serving its readers, commercial journalism seeks to portray the world-as-it-is. Serving its patrons, political journalism seeks to picture the world-as-it-should-be.

Thus, from the very beginning, journalism became the battleground for what we now distinguish as truth and post-truth.

The eternal failure of selling news

Informing people is generally regarded as the foundation, justification, and social mission of journalism: journalism is supposed to sell news. In reality, this has never existed in a pure form. Although journalism emerged to be paid from below, it has historically always ended up being paid from above.

Even the “purely” news-selling business of the early Venetian handwritten newsletters in the 16^th century was immediately acculturated by power. As Hotten recounted,

In 1536 the Venetian possessions and factories in the East were attacked by the Turks [...]. As may be imagined, the people of Venice were extremely anxious to hear the news from fleet; so the first regular monthly journal was established by the government to supply this information, and men were paid to read the particulars at the principal points of the city. But the heads of the Republic were fearful of the spread of the false news and opinions dangerous to their position, so they ordained that no sheets should be issued but such as were sanctioned by the Doge and his Council. (Hotten, 1874, p. 8-9.)

It is indeed fascinating how an account from 1874 regarding events of 1536 mirrors the issues of 2017, when “fake news” was named the “word of the year” by Collins Dictionary. The network of alternative news was accused of supplying “false news” that endangered established institutions. The ruling class discussed—and applied—measures to regulate this alternative news environment by introducing mechanisms of content filtering and restriction. The same issues and solutions are now being discussed regarding the alternative news environment of Facebook and other social media.

***

Those early seaport newsletters of the 16th–17th centuries—the Venetian avvisi and Amsterdam’s first newspaper, Courante—were all immediately appropriated by the elites to deliver something else. The alleged news business was always just a carrier for something else to be delivered—either another good (advertising) or the built-in agendas of political patrons.

The definition of a purely news business would be simple: this journalism should be paid predominantly, or even exclusively, from below by readers who consume news to stay updated on affairs or simply out of curiosity. The role of the payer is crucial in defining the function of journalism.

News itself is a very paradoxical commodity. It always “needs” to be read; there is always some degree of demand from below. But there is also always someone from above who wants to pay for certain news to be delivered to the public. And those from above—those in power or advertisers—are willing to pay for delivering the “right” news far more than those from below are willing or able to pay for receiving news.

The value of news as a carrier for agendas and advertisements is much higher than its value as a commodity in its own right. As a result, the audience always surrenders the right to pay for news to those from above. The elites and advertisers reorganize journalism into a subsidized news service in which news becomes bait to draw fish in.

Being paid from above is more economically efficient for journalism

The pay from above replaces the pay from below also because it is more economically efficient for the media. Transaction costs in retail are always higher than in wholesale. Collecting small payments from a dispersed audience requires additional costly infrastructure, whereas selling the audience in bulk to a smaller number of major payers is far more cost-efficient.

All things being equal, newspapers that only sell news to readers will lose out to newspapers that sell news to readers and sell readers to advertisers (or political sponsors). A business model that combines news retail with audience wholesale is always a stronger commercial strategy than news retail alone. Hence, from a commercial perspective, any newspaper offered such an opportunity will readily switch from news retail to audience wholesale.

And historically, this was the typical outcome. There was always someone from above who came and forced or seduced the media to sell the audience upward, not news downward. First, these were political patrons, then political parties, and later advertisers. The physically dispersed nature of the audience, the high cost of retail money collection, the political and financial persuasiveness of the elites, and the organizational specificity of the news business have pushed journalism to become predominantly paid from above throughout its history.

The instances when journalism tried to earn money from serving the audience rather than the elites—meaning predominantly selling news downward and not agendas upward—did not last long. The first news bureaus in the 16^th century, the Venetian and Roman Scrittoria, produced news purely for sale to readers. But the noble houses and members of the elites, who were also among the readers, quickly realized the importance of spreading the “right” news. Politics swallowed the news business because politics is always the best business of all.

The last case of reader-paid journalism in history

The second (after the Venetian avvisi) and the last attempts to make journalism paid from below came in the late 19^th century.

Everyone knows that Gutenberg’s printing press enabled the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, but few are aware that newspapers became the true mass media because of a sequence of relatively small technological improvements in the 19^th century. The rotary press, wood-pulp paper, and the linotype cut printing costs and sped up production. This made cheap, quickly printed mass newspapers not just possible but inevitable, leading to large-scale circulation.

The press responded with new formats such as the penny press and the labor press. With newspapers now cheaper and more accessible, journalism once again tried to sell news to the public rather than agendas to the elites. This shift was not driven by a noble desire to free journalism from elite control, but by a business opportunity created by low production costs.

***

The penny press appeared in the USA in the 1830s. These papers sold for only one cent, compared to six cents for regular newspapers (Kaplan, 2013, p. 6). Cheaper production also lowered the entry cost for the newspaper market. “Newspapers’ prices were dropping, yet publishers did not require extensive capital to reach and hold a readership,” Kaplan wrote (ibid., p. 7). Reader revenue drove the development of mass newspapers, and growing circulation started attracting advertisers.

Reliance on mass opinion and financial sustainability made newspapers independent from political subsidies and party control. This changed the nature of media coverage. The penny press papers “revolutionized content by declaring their independence from political parties and concentrating on news rather than opinion” (Nerone, 1987, p. 378).

Kaplan writes, “No longer dependent upon party subsidies but instead driven by the profits to be gained from large circulation and advertising, [newspapers]… embraced political independence, even objectivity. Papers ceased to address their audience in political terms—neither as citizens nor as fellow partisans—but instead as consumers” (Kaplan, 2013, p. 13).

***

The tabloids and yellow press originated from this type of journalism. Furthermore, investigative journalism is also rooted in the penny press. After the penny press, journalism in general learned to pay more attention to the interests of the audience it served.

Catering to the tastes of the crowd, the penny press devoted much of its attention to crime stories to boost sales. This tendency of mass-circulation newspapers to attract readers with sensational crime coverage was famously illustrated by the media hysteria surrounding the murders of London prostitutes in the 1880s by the mysterious “Jack the Ripper,” perhaps the first world-renowned media criminal.

The growing interest in crime led journalists to adopt the methods and investigative mindset of police and private detectives. The first investigative journalists were driven less by social conscience than by market competition, which pushed them to uncover sensational cases and hidden atrocities. These stories made their names and boosted their earnings.

With the further growth of newsrooms’ financial independence and the urban class’s demand for social justice, investigative journalism turned toward social issues, paving the way for muckraking journalism in the early 20^th century and, later, for contemporary watchdog journalism.

The penny press also marked the final shift of the news production from an artisan form to an industrial business. In historical hindsight, the mass press became one of the earliest components of what Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) would later call the “culture industry”—a system in which mass culture is produced on an industrial scale, serving both commercial aims and ideological functions.

***

As production costs decreased, circulation grew, which made advertising more effective and encouraged businesses to buy more of it. “Coincidentally,” the economy as a whole was shifting toward a mass-market consumer society with an increasing reliance on advertising.

As a result, selling news to readers gave way to selling readers to advertisers.

Gross advertising income for mass American newspapers rose from 40% to more than 50% between 1870 and 1880, then to 60–70% by the 1900s, a level at which it remained throughout the twentieth century (Kaplan, 2013, p. 12). This new, purely commercial form of the media’s dependence on the elites was later described by Herman and Chomsky (1988) as the Propaganda Model.

The penny press signified perhaps the last and strongest attempt by journalism to escape being paid from above and rely entirely on the public’s “penny.” The attempt failed. Nevertheless, it changed the news environment by making journalism independent of direct political control. The relationships in the love triangle of “the media—the masses—the elites” thus became more complicated.

The latest “business models” of journalism—the membership model and soliciting subscriptions as donations to a cause—facilitated the mutation of journalism into postjournalism. Read more in Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media After Trump, Manufacturing Anger and Polarization.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• NEW! The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media. Essays on Human Agency and AI (2026)

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

This interview concludes the cycle of reflections by Carlos A. Scolari on McLuhan's Law of Reversal in the context of The Digital Reversal (2025), which he read and kindly reviewed. The previous parts of the cycle are:
Understanding the Law of Reversal (I): Humans as Extensions of the Media.
Understanding the Law of Reversal (II): Towards a Critique of Total Reversal.
This interview is reposted with the kind permission of Prof. Scolari from his website Hypermediations. I thank Prof. Scolari for his thoughtful reflections on the book and the insights he shared in our exchange. — A.M.

By Carlos A. Scolari: First of all, I must thank Andrey Mir for his willingness to answer these questions. He is currently launching his new book, almost an “extension” of The Digital Reversal. It is titled The Technological Imperative (a concept I mentioned in the first part of this series) and I will try to read it as soon as possible. Now, let’s move on to the questions.

CAS: I’ve been teaching the Laws of Media for several years now. They’re a powerful tool for analyzing the media and, above all, for generating meaningful debates. The laws embody a dual dimension: on the one hand, they function as emergent principles or patterns; on the other, they operate as analytical tools (and that’s how we usually use them in the classroom). As I said in the second part of this series of texts inspired by your book, I think laws are applied primarily to confirm reality rather than challenge it. In other words, they always seem to “work,” and reality rarely contradicts them, something that wouldn’t have satisfied Karl Popper. How do you see this issue in relation to the Laws of Media?

AM: It’s an interesting epistemological challenge. How do you prove or disprove that the medium is the message? How do you do it in a way that satisfies Karl Popper? In a sense, we media ecologists are invincible to Popper. Which is good.

The laws of media are based on pattern recognition. Denying patterns makes no sense. You either use them or you don’t, but why prove or disprove them? That’s a different epistemology.

It’s easy to imagine people who do not know that the medium is the message or who ignore it, but it’s hard to imagine any benefit for people saying, “no, no, the medium IS NOT the message!” What’s the point? If you think that the medium is not the message, fine. You just miss the opportunity. For example, Umberto Eco famously said, literally, that the medium is not the message and that the message is what the receiver makes of it. All right, it’s not wrong; it was a very common understanding at the time, but what’s the point of reiterating it? If only to protect the territory. Just imagine: what if the medium IS the message? Where will it get us — and the receiver with his or her delusions? As for Marshall McLuhan, in such a situation he would say, “If you don’t like those ideas, I’ve got others.”

I see pattern recognition as an optic that you can use or not use. Does it allow you to see things right, effectively matching what you see with your own and others’ needs and experience? Let’s say, how can you describe the Eiffel Tower? The most verifiable way is to count the bolts and nuts. But seeing, sensing, or knowing the bolts and nuts does not give you the Eiffel Tower. In the meantime, even a very amorphous and foggy silhouette clicks instantly, summoning all the cultural knowledge of what the Eiffel Tower is. This is pattern recognition. It needs others, it needs collective and individual experience, both “lived” and theoretical. It would be interesting to discuss this with Karl Popper .

But your questions can’t be answered satisfactorily, I think. Of course, this alternative epistemology of pattern recognition can become a sort of shamanic knowledge. Sometimes I think that it is very close to dowsing, the search for underground water with a forked vine, which is also based on “pattern recognition.” As long as you find water, everything seems fine, seems to be working. Yet something is off, because it relies too much on the figure of the “pattern recognizer.” The epistemology based on pattern recognition is shared by media ecologists with artists and shamans, and it’s not always prestigious to pose as them.

That’s why we must maintain a kind of “epistemic vigilance,” as my friend Paolo Granata calls it in his recent book, Generative Knowledge . Abstracting experience and patterns into principles and laws is important. I think Marshall McLuhan intuited this: he began with poetry and rather metaphorical analyses of advertising and arrived at the idea of ​​creating universal laws of media.

CAS: From my perspective, Robert K. Logan is one of the most robust and creative theorists in media ecology. The Digital Reversal develops one of his key ideas: the centrality of the Law of Reversal. This law emphasizes discontinuity, focusing on the moments when processes become their opposite, whereas other laws—such as the Law of Reversal—highlight continuity (e.g., “the content of one medium is another medium”). To what extent does privileging the Law of Reversal create an imbalance that risks overshadowing continuities in media evolution?

AM: First of all, I want to say that Robert K. Logan is undoubtedly one of the classics in media ecology of our time, and I have drawn heavily on his work. In his book McLuhan in Reverse: His General Theory of Media (GToM ), he pointed out that many of Marshall McLuhan’s concepts can be understood as reversals: figure/ground, cause/effect, percept/concept, explosion/implosion, hot/cold, and so on. He even suggested that “the medium is the message” is, in essence, a reversal, which is a very cool revelation, I must say.

Of course, as we know, McLuhan insisted that all four laws — enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal — work synchronously. Yet, I would dare to isolate reversal and its significance for our time specifically. The condition of reversal occurs when a medium or a technology reaches its limits, extremes, or full potential. And there is one parameter of our dominant medium that has pushed everything exactly to its limits and extremes, ushering in the reversal of everything. This is the speed of our interaction with each other and our environments. It’s instant, you simply cannot go faster.

Electricity did it to communication: communication reached instantaneity, just as immediate communication in the conditions of orality, and society started reversing from literacy to tribalism, according to McLuhan. But digital media went even further: the click made not just communication but all our interactions instant. With just a simple click, we can instantly change processes, locations, and even who we are.

This completely overturns not just society but our sensory-cognitive capacities. Never before were environmental reactions to our actions as fast as our own neural impulses. The limitless digital environment is connected to our nervous system instantly and nearly seamlessly. McLuhan foresaw it when he said that electricity extends our central nervous system to all of humankind. But it is really happening now, with digital connection.

With instant interaction, we are approaching the limits of our physical extensions which was a sort of “meaning” of media evolution until now. This seems to be upending human history and compressing the future into the present.

It is unorthodox, but I think that yes, the law of reversal overshadows the other three: enhancement, retrieval, and obsolescence. As we have reached the limits of interaction speed, media study now is the study of reversals. Of course, it’s a matter of optic that you may or may not prefer to use. But I would say that the optic of reversals allows for very practical interpretations of digital media effects — from politics to education, from gender to epistemology, and so on.

CAS: Your reasoning often operates at a high level of abstraction. How do you conceive of the relationship between these theoretical laws and empirical research? What kinds of methodologies would be most appropriate for testing, refining, or even falsifying claims derived from the Law of Reversal?

AM: I can say again that it’s an optic you can use or not, but there is a lot of practical, empirical evidence of reversals across multiple areas of human life. Reversals have real embodiments, often visualized, for example, in statistical data, which can be easily measured and reproduced. If you see a trend that suddenly switches direction, or if you see crisscrossing curves representing interconnecting processes, it is a reversal.

To give a visual clue, imagine the consumption of news from traditional media, which clearly goes down, and the trend of receiving news from digital media. These two trends crisscrossed sometime in the early 2010s, more or less simultaneously everywhere. This is one of the basic digital reversals. However flattered I might be to present it as a figment of my imagination, it is not. This reversing process exists aside from the patterns I “want” to recognize.

Or, in the field of my professional training, journalism: news outlets went from having abundant advertising revenue to desperately seeking digital subscriptions. This is clearly a reversal, and it happened everywhere the news industry encountered the internet. The media-ecological reversal from broadcasting to engagement caused a business reversal from ads to subscriptions, and this business reversal caused an editorial reversal from news supply to news validation — what I call postjournalism.

All these reversals are documented in numbers, human manifestos, and people losing money and jobs. There is a lot of very grounded material reality behind these and other specific reversals.

CAS: Given your emphasis on the Law of Reversal, how do you account for temporal asymmetries in media evolution? In other words, reversals don’t always occur with the same speed or intensity as the processes they reverse. How does your theoretical framework address these unequal temporalities and delayed effects?

AM: When we isolate a certain media effect, it’s something we do in our mind. In reality, all media effects are entangled in very messy ways. Moreover, media effects from different media and eras accumulate, compound, and overlap. For example, coding is a remote byproduct of electricity, but it is also a very distant descendant of the alphabet. This means that the internet simply could not emerge in a non-alphabetic culture. To grasp this, we need to build a very complex mind map of compounding media effects.

Behind any media effect unfolds a complex historical picture. For example, one of the grievances related to digital media is the decline of literacy. But post-literacy began long ago, in the modern era. The first signs of post-literacy, like sentence shortening, are traced back to the time when the Enlightenment and the printing press began the process of the democratization of literacy. The democratization of writing and reading made literacy more interactional, which is an oral feature. Then the invention of pulp paper, the rotary press, and the linotype in the 19^th century made newspapers cheap and dependent on the masses, not on political elites, favouring oral and interactional over literate and abstract. Then came radio, the first illiterate mass medium, favouring the rise of the “mass man,” to use the term by Ortega y Gasset. And now, when typing has reversed text into texting, the long trend of post-literacy is actually coming to its completion: the reversal of print literacy into digital orality.

Or consider identity politics—it’s a media effect too. It was caused by the reversal from writing, which is inherently reader-blind, to mass media targeting specific demographics. The process evolved over centuries, with mass communication centering less and less on the message and more and more on the audience. TV repackaged former social classes into commercially targeted audiences. This is where identity politics emerged, sometime in the 1970s. In the TV era, the prevalence of demographic identifiers over personal and class characteristics served commercial targeting. But social media brought another reversal, enabling personal customization of content. From media, society adopted demographic-targeting identifiers as a dominant principle of social structuring. Along with other digital effects, like the intellectual escalation of academia into activism, this reversed identity politics from commercial to political use, from managing consumers to managing citizens.

Therefore, we need to take into account all these cumulative and overlapping effects. They are what weave the temporal fabric of civilization and anchor human history in the evolution of media. For me, unraveling and recognizing patterns in these compound media effects is a fascinating exercise.

CAS: As suggested in the review of your book published in Seoul (The Great Digital Reversal; English version), the strict application of the Law of Reversal can sometimes lead to rather apocalyptic scenarios that seem to go beyond Marshall McLuhan’s original perspective. Is it possible to apply the Law of Reversal without veering towards apocalyptic interpretations?

AM: This is a tough one. The acceleration of historical time, another effect of galloping media evolution, leaves us little room for optimism. By the way, as you know, McLuhan, when asked about it, said that he was neither optimistic nor pessimistic but “apocalyptic.” He added, however, that apocalypse is not necessarily gloom, as it promises salvation, which perhaps reflected his Catholic view. But I think he was rather teasing here, as he often was.

I’ve just published my new book, *The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media* , in which I try to look at the future to which media evolution leads us. The technological imperative is a concept that McLuhan mentioned only in passing, but I see it as a driving force of history, an invisible hand of media evolution. The technological imperative means that any medium seeks better performance. Take the hammer: all historical forms of the hammer embodied some ideal design that made it the best possible extension of the fist and hand. Whoever invented each form of the hammer is not important. That design would have emerged anyway as the next, improved approximation of the hammer’s ideal form.

This is the technological imperative: if a medium can emerge and improve, it will do so. It is not intentional, it has no agency, yet it drives media evolution in a certain direction. We humans select and improve functional forms of media through their use and redesign, so we perform natural selection for media in exchange for the conveniences — extensions — they provide to us.

As media extend, or replay, our functions — I use Paul Levinson ‘s concept of Human Replay here — they develop toward maximum replay, maximum extension. Currently, they can replay our persona and our intelligence. So, the technological imperative drives us toward artificial intelligence.

The issue is that the technological imperative, now seeking ever better performance of artificial intelligence, does not have to stop at the level of human performance. Why replay humans if humans are already outplayed, as in chess and poetry and many other formerly human activities? The technological imperative will push the development of AI further, beyond replaying human capacities. Apocalypse or not, we are bound to see very interesting events, and very soon — because of the accelerating pace of media evolution.

CAS: Paul is another one of my favorite media ecologists. Ultimately, by taking the Law of Reversal to its extreme, one could argue that, in a sense, you’re inverting Marshall McLuhan himself: pushing his arguments to the extreme and arriving at opposite conclusions. Returning to the initial question, to what extent does this approach risk shifting from “pattern recognition” to “pattern imposition” when analyzing complex media processes? Can reversal explain everything, a kind of “one-size-fits-all law”?

I think this is exactly what is happening: by recognizing patterns, we shape the patterns of our perception and then act accordingly. But if they are wrong, it backfires.

The concept of reversal is useful for speculation, because it cannot be rejected or disproved. If, suddenly, a reversal does not happen, or if it happens in a different way, you can always say that this is a reversal of reversal. So yes, the optic of reversal can be universal and universally manipulative.

But frankly, what for? There is no intellectual epiphany in adjusting the hypothesis to the outcomes post factum. It is much more productive to use the optic of digital reversal for exploration and explanation, but also for projection and even planning.

For example, it’s clear to me that we will no longer have calm, quiet periods between media changes, as we did in the past. After, say, printing or electricity changed everything, things used to settle down, society adapted, and life returned to a more or less lasting “normal.” We will no longer have this kind of calm “normal” because of the pace of change. It is too fast. What used to be a media era is now shorter than a human life. Changes that once defined long eras now arrive within years, and soon within months. So we need to reconsider our lives and adjust them to the condition of constant reversals.

Another conclusion is that reversals never bring back what they reversed before. It’s not a pendulum. For example, the reversal of patriarchy is feminism, but when feminism reaches its extremes, it does not reverse back to patriarchy; it reverses into sex fluidity. And so on.

By comprehending these and other characteristics of reversals, we probably won’t learn how to predict or manage them — we simply do not have time for that. But at least we can learn how to make sense of what’s going on and develop some individual strategies. I am working on one such strategy now. My next project is called “Counter-digital media literacy.” I am developing the idea that, in the digital era, media literacy is not about how to use media but how not to use them. I want to reverse the very approach to media literacy. It teaches us better and more engagement with media, which is redundant or even harmful. What’s the point of aiding the persuasive design of media, which makes users addicts? So the idea is to develop tools and tips for counter-digital media literacy. Let’s see if we can fight the technological imperative and trigger media reversals to our benefit.

Bonus tracks

• Media Determinism (Substack) by Andrey Mir

• The Great Digital Reversal (Seoul) by Eugenio Palopoli

• Books by Andrey Mir on Amazon

• Media Ecology: Environments, Evolutions and Interpretations by Carlos A. Scolari (here is the introduction)

• On the Evolution of Media by Carlos A. Scolari (English edition in Routledge: On the Evolution of Media)

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See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

This comes from Part One: Understanding the Law of Reversion (I): Humans as Extensions of the Media. Carlos A. Scolari continues to discuss the Laws of Media in the context of The Digital Reversal. The second part is reposted from his blog with his kind permission. — A.M.

Revisiting Media Laws

Let’s review the origin of the four principles that Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric developed to appease their critics, who demanded a less “speculative” and more “scientific” contribution. The laws emerged while they were working on a revised version of *Understanding Media* . Reviewing the criticism that volume had received—some said it was “impossible to read” or “incomprehensible”—their reflection led them further. Eric explains this in the Preface to *Laws of Media: The New Science.*

“Of course, there was rigor and science in it plenty, but not conventional science. How then could we reconcile the two: satisfy the one without subverting the other? There began the search that led to the present book. The style of UM had been deliberately chosen for its abrasive and discontinuous character, and was forged over many redraftings. It was designed deliberately to provoke the reader, to jar the sensibilities into a form of awareness that better complemented the subject-matter. This is poetic technique (science, if you will) of a high sort – satirizing the reader directly as a means of training him. Now we were faced with the question of how to make it ‘scientific.’ It took my father nearly two full years of constant inquiry to find out ‘what constitutes a scientific statement.’ He asked everyone he encountered – colleagues, students, friends, associates, Finally visitors, one evening, he found the answer in Sir Karl Popper’s – that it was something stated in such a manner that it could be disproved. That was it. The next day he began asking – What statements can we make about media that anyone can test – prove or disprove – for himself? What do all media have in common? What do they do?”

This is how the Laws of Media were born: as a response to a scientific community steeped in Cartesianism that, in the case of communication theories, demanded objective “statements” from McLuhan that even they themselves were unable to formulate after several decades of empirical research.

In this text I would like to continue the exchange with Andrey Mir ‘s book The Digital Reversal that I started in the first part of this text, but first I would like to draw attention to the way in which Media Laws have been applied.

Apply Media Laws

Let me be clear: when researchers apply McLuhan’s four laws, we almost always find examples that “fit” the model. I have the impression that we’ve applied the four laws only to obtain positive results. We’d have to review all the texts and authors who have worked with this analytical model over the last 40 years, but I’d be surprised to find a single negative case. This is related to what’s called confirmation bias. The researcher starts with a preconceived expectation: that every medium or technology will produce these four effects. From there, they tend to search for, select, and interpret cases in a way that confirms the tetrad.

For example, the mobile phone can be seen as a medium that extends interpersonal communication, renders certain forms of fixed or face-to-face communication obsolete, revives practices of orality and brief messaging, and leads to surveillance, dependence, or communication overload. So far, so good. The problem isn’t that these observations are false, but rather that the framework is so flexible that it almost always allows for finding something that serves as confirmation. If the researcher only looks for positive cases, they may ignore ambiguous situations, counterexamples, or effects that don’t fit neatly with any of the four laws. Even ambiguous evidence can be reinterpreted until it becomes favorable proof.

In short: McLuhan’s laws were born with a Popperian intention, but are often applied in an anti-Popperian way. According to Eric McLuhan’s Preface, his father sought to formulate statements about the means that could be “tested by anyone.” The reference to Popper is key: a scientific claim is not simply one that accumulates favorable examples, but also one that could be refuted.

(By the way, it would be wonderful to have the possibility of bringing Marshall McLuhan himself into the scene, as Wood Allen did in Annie Hall , and asking him what he thinks of these applications of the four laws.)

The paradox is interesting: McLuhan sought to escape accusations of unscientific rigor by appealing to Popper, but the metaphorical breadth of his laws can hinder effective refutation. Tetrads are very powerful as heuristic tools: they help uncover unexpected relationships between media, technologies, cultural practices, and social environments. But if their application is too flexible, then any result can be reinterpreted as confirmation.

The problem, to conclude this reflection, lies not in McLuhan’s original intention, but in how we apply the four laws. A rigorous application would have to include not only positive cases, but also negative, ambiguous, or resistant ones. If there is no real possibility of saying “this law does not apply here,” then the tetrad ceases to behave as a falsifiable hypothesis and functions more as a simple interpretive framework. There is nothing wrong with the latter, but if we want to advance our understanding of the media and technocultural ecosystem, we should aim to refine our analytical tools and processes.

Towards a critique of Total Reversal

The Laws of Media present a delicate balance. Where the Law of Extension initially amplifies a human capacity, the Law of Reversion curbs it at the end of its cycle; and if the Law of Obsolescence declares a practice or technology obsolete, the Law of Recovery makes it reappear in a new medium. These four principles work together. If we privilege one of them, we risk undermining the entire analytical framework. Eric McLuhan himself acknowledges this in the Preface:

«Gradually, as we searched for the fifth law, other discoveries and implications began to emerge. The single largest of these was that of an inner harmony among the four laws – that there are pairs of ratios among them – and of the relationship between that and metaphor. All the while, my father was exhorting colleagues, visitors, and students – especially those at his Monday-night meetings at the Center for Culture and Technology – to use the four laws to explore media, and to test the laws. Suddenly (I forget exactly when or with whom) we learned that they applied to more than what is conventionally called media: they were applicable to the products of all human endeavor, and also to the endeavor itself.

When the laws are applied individually and in isolation, that “harmony” begins to falter. If I had to offer a critique of Andrey’s inspiring book, it would be precisely this: applying the Law of Reversion to the Law of Reversion. In other words, taking reversion to its ultimate consequences and, in doing so, overshadowing the other three laws.

I must admit: the exercise is fascinating. Pushing the boundaries of a law and seeing where it takes us. In the case of this thorough application of the Law of Reversal, I believe my reflections can only be expressed through two metaphors, one philosophical and the other physical.

Welcome, Hegel. As you know, Hegelian dialectics—which we studied in the first year of the Bachelor’s Degree in Social Communication at the National University of Rosario in year 4 AM (before Messi)—can be summarized in three moments: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis . For the German philosopher, every initial assertion is met with its negation or conflict, and from this tension arises a transcendence that retains elements of both but transforms them at a more complex level. It is not a simple sum of the two previous moments, but rather a historical movement of thought and reality.

However, if the Law of Reversal is applied to its ultimate consequences, it’s as if the analysis stops at the point of antithesis. Pure negative thinking. A dialectic only halfway there. While McLuhan’s logic isn’t Hegelian (in this case, it doesn’t seek dialectical reconciliation, but rather to show how every medium taken to its limit turns against itself and the environment it produced), we could say that the inversion doesn’t clearly lead to a superior synthesis, but to an accelerated chain of reversals, implosions, and extremes . Instead of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis cycle , we would have an infinite cycle of thesis-antithesis-antithesis-antithesis-…

I admit it: this Hegelian reflection doesn’t completely convince me either. Let’s try the other one.

These days mark the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion . Even a 3-year-old AI knows that a nuclear reactor contains graphite rods to slow down the neutrons produced by fission, allowing the chain reaction to proceed. But a reactor also has control rods (usually made of boron or cadmium) that prevent the reactor from spiraling out of control. Without control rods, the reactor experiences what is called a power excursion. It’s not a nuclear explosion like an atomic bomb (because the uranium isn’t enriched enough), but it is a massive physical and thermal explosion that would release radiation into the environment (Thanks, Gemini).

Now I can say it: taking the Law of Reversal to its extreme results in an out-of-control interpretive explosion. In that case, the other three laws cease to function as balancing rods in the theoretical reactor, preventing it from exploding. By “liberating” one of the laws and declaring it autonomous from the others, the analytical engine spirals out of control. A McLuhanian apocalypse.

I’m almost certain the same thing would happen if we applied any of the other Laws of Media to their ultimate consequences. We could imagine other books, close relatives of *The Digital Reversal*, for example, a possible *The Digital Obsolescence* or *The Digital Retrieval*… Now that I think about it, both books have already been written. One was published by Nicholas Negroponte in 1985: *Being Digital* . In that volume, Negroponte decreed the end of analog media (he even took a swipe at the poor fax machine) and left in his wake a graveyard of media fossils. The other book was written by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin and is titled *Remediation: Understanding New Media* (2000). It’s a monument to the Law of Retrieval.

Returning to Andrey’s book, at this point so many debates and questions have been raised that I can only clarify them by interviewing the author.

Continued in Part Three :
Understanding the Law of Reversion (III).

Carlos A. Scolari is Professor in the Department of Communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra–Barcelona and Doctor Honoris Causa from the National University of Rosario (Argentina). He has served as Principal Investigator of the H2020 TRANSLITERACY (2015–18), TRANSALFABETISMOS (2015–18), PLATCOM (2020–24) and LITERAC_IA (2024–27). Between 2018 and 2023, he coordinated UPF’s PhD Program in Communication. He has delivered lectures and seminars on interfaces, transmedia storytelling, media ecology, and interactive communication in more than forty countries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. His latest books are On the Evolution of Media (2024) and Homo Mediaticus (2026). Since 2008, he has shared his ideas on Hipermediaciones.com.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

Carlos Scolari has just published a very thoughtful review of The Digital Reversal, which also includes an excellent wrap-up of McLuhan’s Laws of Media, concise and comprehensible, with an important shout-out to Robert Logan for his insightful work on reversals and the idea of one of the ultimate reversals: humans as extensions of media.
I am reposting the review with Prof. Scolari’s kind permission.—A.M.

Following the Aristotelian model, this text unfolds in three acts: introduction, rising action, and resolution. The first part is a concise summary of Andrey Mir’s book , *The Digital Reversal*. Before delving into its pages, I’ll briefly review Marshall McLuhan ‘s Four Laws of Media (written in collaboration with his son Eric), essential for understanding the approach of this Russian-born theorist and professor residing in Canada. Andrey’s book is a frenetic textual machine that relentlessly generates sharp and controversial ideas. In the second part, I’ll revisit some of these ideas and share a series of critiques, not so much of Andrey’s effervescent book itself, but rather of the uses and abuses of McLuhan’s tetrad. To conclude this exploration properly, the third act will include the interview I conducted with Andrey, who graciously agreed to answer some of my questions. Unlike the Aristotelian model, the outcome of this story is open and hypertextual, since it inaugurates a conversation that will continue on social media or who knows where.

Media Laws

The four Laws of Media (Extension, Obsolescence, Retrieval, Reversal) are the best-known expression of McLuhan’s view of media and technology. For Marshall McLuhan, any technology created by Homo sapiens is a medium, that is, an artifact that creates an environment (precisely, a medium) that shapes and transforms us from birth. The four laws function simultaneously as a theoretical synthesis and an analytical tool.

On the one hand, these four principles are emergent patterns of media evolution identified by McLuhan and his son Eric: every medium extends or amplifies some human capacity (for example, the telephone amplifies the voice), at the same time it makes certain previous media or practices obsolete, although it rarely eliminates them completely; it also recovers forms or functions from the past that had been relegated (such as orality in digital media), and finally, when taken to its limit, it inverts into its opposite or generates effects contrary to those intended (for example, overconnectivity that leads to isolation).

If we understand them as an instrument of analysis , laws can be reformulated as a set of questions that guide the study of any medium:

• Extension (amplification): What human capabilities does this medium amplify or intensify? What new possibilities for action or perception does it introduce?

• Obsolescence: What practices, technologies, or cultural forms does it render obsolete or displace? What ceases to be necessary or loses relevance with its adoption?

• Recovery: What elements of the past does this medium recover or update? What ancient forms reappear in a new configuration?

• Reversal: What does this medium become when taken to its extreme? What contrary or unexpected effects emerge from its intensive use?

The four laws are very useful for introducing the perspective of Media Ecology and McLuhan’s theories to our students; they are also a useful analytical tool that, as a side effect, helps generate excellent conversations about technology in general and the media in particular. Regarding their application as an analytical tool, I have the impression that they are often used to identify only positive cases. We will return to this issue later.

Understanding digital media

As one might expect, the Laws of Media have been applied to the various forms of digital communication that have emerged in the last three decades. I will focus on just one of these applications, that of Robert K. Logan in * Understanding Humans: The Extensions of Digital Media*. Bob Logan is one of the Media Ecology theorists most open to dialogue with the biological and physical sciences. This approach is not accidental: Logan graduated in physics from MIT and for years taught Poetics of Physics at the University of Toronto.

Let’s follow Logan’s reasoning. When we apply the Laws of Media to digital media, we find that:

• New digital media expand interactivity, access to information, and two-way communication.

• They are making traditional media, such as television and newspapers, obsolete .

• They are rebuilding the community.

• And, taken to the extreme, they can transform into hyperreality or into the loss of contact with nature and our bodies.

Logan concludes that there is another transformation associated with digital media: the reversal of the notion that media are extensions of human beings. He adds:

“McLuhan suggested that human communications could be divided into the eras of oral, written, and electrical communication. Despite not having experienced the digital age which began with the emergence of the personal computer, the Internet, and the Web, McLuhan seems to have anticipated many of the features of the digital era. Because digital technology pushes electric technology to its extreme, it causes a flip or a reversal of the effects of this class of technologies. The flip is that not only are digital media an extension of the psyche of the user, as is the case with oral, written, and electric media, but it is also the case that the user actually becomes an extension of his digital technology, unlike the situation in the earlier ages of nondigital media.”

Logan’s proposal is very powerful because it inverts one of Marshall McLuhan’s fundamental ideas: the media as extensions of humans, expressed in his First Law. To say that we are extensions of the media leads to a decentering of the idea of ​​the subject—which remained present in McLuhan, despite the harsh and, I believe, unjustified criticism he received for his technological determinism—and to the construction of a negative and almost apocalyptic image of the digitized humans of the 21st century. This powerful idea of ​​reversal will be taken to its ultimate consequences by Andrey in his book *The Digital Reversal*. I read it in one sitting a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t leave a single page unmarked or annotated. A good sign.

The Digital Reversal

Eugenio Palopoli reviewed Andrey’s book in Seoul in November 2025 (English version). The review is an excellent summary of a volume brimming with micro-analyses, ideas, concepts, and theoretical insights. Andrey took a risky approach: writing the entire book as if it were a series of 280-character tweets. The Digital Reversal is constructed from small, uniformly sized textual blocks, little bricks that always contain a seed worthy of further exploration and discussion. At times, this repetitive structure slows the narrative; it lacks the modulation achieved by working with paragraphs of varying lengths. However, Andrey manages to plant at least one seed in each section of text .

In short, Andrey Mir takes McLuhan’s Law of Reversal, fuels it kinetically with the work of Bob Logan, and relaunches it far beyond, to the very confines of the media and technocultural ecosystem. In every chapter, in every paragraph of The Digital Reversal , Andrey creatively, sometimes wildly, steps on the gas, presenting us with analyses and scenarios with which we may disagree but never remain unmoved.

According to Andrey, we live in the age of reversal. It’s not just the media that has taken its logic to its extreme and inverted it: all socio-technological institutions and phenomena are undergoing a process of reversal. Phenomena such as the “rebellion of the public,” as announced by Martin Gurri, one of Andrey’s interlocutors, are a good example of these transformations. The shift from a digital environment where freedom of expression was proclaimed in the 1990s to the current polluted pigsty of social media, the slide from truth to post-truth, or from objectivity to subjectivity, are also expressions of this global reversal. The mutation of the consumer into the prosumer is another example of reversal. Andrey’s book contains hundreds of examples.

Like any good McLuhanian, Andrey doesn’t shy away from potential criticisms of being a technological determinist. On the contrary:

«Media evolution is driven by the technological imperative: the emerging force that makes any technology ‘seek’ better performance. Once humans learned to operate with nature instrumentally, they selected what works and what doesn’t, provinding ‘natural selection’ for media” (p. 21).

Pay attention to the concept of “technological imperative”: it’s in the title of Andrey’s new book. But let’s return to The Digital Reversal. Andrey defines this current phase as “digital orality”:

“Media is the hardware of society, and culture is its software. Society follows the patterns set by media. If oral speech was the medium of orality and written speech was the medium of literacy, digital speech is the medium of a new statement of mind and culture: digital orality” (p. 49).

This new state of mind and culture is also the result of a reversal: “Digital media reverse literacy and retrieve orality, but digital orality ” (p. 29).

If writing changed the way we think and allowed us to move beyond the forms of knowledge and memorization of oral cultures, changes in the media ecosystem are producing similar transformations. Small changes—like the appearance of the search bar in search engines—or major disruptions—like ChatGPT—are responsible for an epistemological reversal.

“Digital orality reverses knowledge acquisition from scientific inquiry, typical of literacy, to conversational inquiry, typical of orality. It rewires the brain, shifting knowledge of the world from complex, systematic categories of highly accessible but scattered anecdotes” (p. 107).

Andrey’s perspective, always fresh and provocative, critically re-examines current issues such as post-truth and media literacy, areas where the truth-lie dichotomy still prevails. Truth, today, is a flexible, hybrid, and context-dependent concept.

In the final part of the book, Andrey returns to the explosion of scientific production and the avalanche of papers that is suffocating us (see my posts Political Economy of the Paper I and Political Economy of the Paper II). His argument is very thought-provoking: if the scientific knowledge of Modernity is the highest expression of alphabetic culture, its reversal in the age of digital orality leads to citation inflation, rampant interdisciplinarity, and academic activism that results, for example, in the cancellation of authors. The ultimate reversal of science is its negation: flat-Earthism.

Two paragraphs from the last chapter ( The reversal of humanity ) to close this brief description of Andrey’s book:

“Why do we live in the time of reversals? Because (1) any medium, when pushed to its extremes or limits, reverses its effects, and (2) at the ultimate speed of interaction, everything is pushed to its limits. Everything—from biology to epistemology—ripens to reverse” (p. 201).

“The instantaneity of digital media pushes everything to extremes. Approaching extremes is the condition of reversal, but when reversals replace each other at an accelerated pace and no reversal holds for long, the only constants are the extremes and the barrage of reversals” (p. 207).

Artificial intelligences emerge in the final pages of the book and on the horizon of humanity. After the accelerated explosion of the 20th century, we are approaching the implosion predicted by McLuhan in Understanding Media (1964): “The stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electronic form reverses explosion into implosion. “In this context, the Singularity—the emergence of AGI—is for Andrey “the last reversal: it will implode the world into humankind, when humankind, its medium, and its environment become one” (p. 213).

As you can imagine, it’s impossible to summarize over 200 pages of explosive, provocative ideas. Reading Andrey is like walking through a minefield: no matter how hard you try to avoid it, it’s impossible not to step on one and set your neurons firing in an explosive chain of reasoning, refutations, and new ideas. It must be said plainly: Andrey is one of the authors who best embodies the McLuhanian tradition today, both in form and content.

Continued in Part Two :
Understanding the Law of Reversion (II).

Carlos A. Scolari is Professor in the Department of Communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra–Barcelona and Doctor Honoris Causa from the National University of Rosario (Argentina). He has served as Principal Investigator of the H2020 TRANSLITERACY (2015–18), TRANSALFABETISMOS (2015–18), PLATCOM (2020–24) and LITERAC_IA (2024–27). Between 2018 and 2023, he coordinated UPF’s PhD Program in Communication. He has delivered lectures and seminars on interfaces, transmedia storytelling, media ecology, and interactive communication in more than forty countries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. His latest books are On the Evolution of Media (2024) and Homo Mediaticus (2026). Since 2008, he has shared his ideas on Hipermediaciones.com.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

Hello, media determinists. This blog was paused for a while because I was busy finishing my book The technological imperative. Why we develop our media. Essays on human agency and AI. It is now available on Amazon.

Funny thing: there is a period when I post the book on Amazon and then keep it to myself to make first orders, to look at it from outside, through the reader’s eye, and fix the last (hopefully) bugs. While I was doing it, without announcing the book, somebody somehow found it and started buying it. And not just once—five people bought the book before it was announced. It happens to me for the first time. Perhaps AI monitors everything about itself and buys it to check and neutralize… or perhaps people are so eager to read something about AI that they search for new titles, I don’t know.

It seems there are so many articles and books on AI that there shouldn’t be any shortage. But this book certainly presents a unique approach: it’s not about AI, it’s about the technological imperative that has driven media evolution toward AI, dragging human civilization along, in the same direction, to the same end… So read, like, share. The book is fairly short, 130 pages, and densely packed with ideas, some of which might look crazy. Here is the foreword.

Do humans or technologies shape history? That’s the core question of techno-determinism, and it became crucial during the Cold War: are we doomed just because a doomsday weapon has already been made, or can we still control its power? A somewhat similar question resurfaces with AI. Are we served by AI, or do we serve AI? More broadly, does media evolution maintain human development, or, on the contrary, does human development maintain the evolution of media?

The essays in this book are organized around the concept of the technological imperative—the inherent tendency of any technology to move toward greater performance and capability. Acting as the invisible hand of media evolution, the technological imperative has driven the long co-development of humans and their media to the point where we are about to create artificial intelligence.

Coupled with the acceleration of historical time, the technological imperative has brought humankind into a future that is no longer distant. In just a few years, we have moved from debating whether artificial intelligence can pass the Turing test (a now largely forgotten topic) and its lack of creativity, to fearing that AI is taking human jobs. Yet AI keeps moving faster than our worries: while we debate human-AI competition in the workplace, AI systems are already assembling teams of agents to tackle complex problems, reshaping the very meaning of work in the knowledge economy.

At this pace, it becomes hard to see the bigger picture and address the bigger questions. In the meantime, some of those bigger questions have acquired urgent, practical significance. For example, how do you prove you are human? What was a philosophical question just yesterday is fast becoming an everyday legal, social, and bureaucratic challenge. Suddenly, sophisticated media ecological theories become relevant and have to yield simple, practical answers: to prove you’re human, you need to show your ID, effort, or flaws.

This selection of essays rethinks established concepts and introduces new ones. It examines how AI is reshaping human experience and offers a glimpse into a future that, until recently, felt safely remote.

The table of contents

• Foreword

• The acceleration problem: exponential AI upends incremental history

• The technological imperative

• Vygotsky and the child language of AI

• As speech shrinks — thought starves. Cognitive effects of digital orality

• If art has reversed from pursuing beauty to seeking self-expression…

• Generating knowledge with AI: Epistemic partnership?

• Robo-journalism before and after ChatGPT

• How to prove you’re human? You have three options: show human ID, show human effort, show human flaws

• There is no “I” in AI (but not that “I” that you think)

• Cascade of Singularities. A futuristic speculation

• Digital orality, the digital reversal, postjournalism, and the future of media

• The emancipation of intelligence

  ---

Check it out on Amazon, Kindle and paperback copies are available:

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

More than a year has passed since the chattering class, overly agitated by Trump’s return to the White House, finally split into two opposite bubbles on BlueSky and X/Twitter. It’s interesting to look at old forecasts and see how these bubbles have evolved. Have they ultimately cocooned into total degradation or are they still capable of engaging with broader public discourse?

In January 2025, I wrote that the explosive growth of Bluesky was close to exhaustion. The social media platform skyrocketed from 14 million in November, before Trump's re-election, to 30 million in January, an increase of 16 million in just three months. Since then, the growth has slowed down, of course, adding only 13 million over more than a year (43.5 million users on April 3, 2026).

I wrote then that “Bluesky, a smaller and likely more insular bubble than other social media platforms, also carries higher risks of marginalization.” It’s now hard to tell whose bubble is bubblier, X or BlueSky. It feels like X algorithms lately pull it away from full-fledged conservative ressentiment, blind to everything else. Judging by some complaints, BlueSky algorithms (or the BlueSky crowd?) do not seem inclined to do it. Is it a valid observation?

(The essay was originally published in Discourse in January 2025)

Political Divide Shapes Social Media Bubbles on X and Bluesky

Bluesky reached a milestone of 30 million users, proving that conservative-liberal segregation online has happened. How will this affect polarization?

For decades now, liberals and conservatives have sought their own friendly spaces in the media. The rise of cable news in the 1990s created echo chambers that allowed people on both sides of the political aisle to hear just what they wanted to hear—to be validated rather than challenged. Now, the great conservative-liberal split seems to have come to social media.

Earlier attempts, like Parler for conservatives and Mastodon for liberals, have mostly failed. But now, after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, user migration on social media platforms shows a clearer political separation. What will this mean for the future of polarization? Polarization only increased with the arrival of opinionated cable news, so the trend is certainly worth watching.

The Demographics of Social Media: Two Waves

From the start, social media platforms were dominated by liberal views, largely due to the demographics of their users. Early adopters were young, educated and urban—a group naturally aligned with a progressive worldview. They brought the anti-establishment “Revolt of the Public,” to use Martin Gurri’s term, and sparked grassroots Twitter revolutions everywhere, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street.

When traditional institutions rushed to build their own digital presence, they had to cater to these left-leaning audiences. As a result, media, entertainment, academia and corporations embraced the values of the most progressive strata, sidelining others. A paradoxical situation emerged: Because of the digital transformation, the establishment adopted the essentially disruptive culture of an anti-establishment minority.

Social media, however, continued to proliferate. By the mid-2010s, older, less educated, less urban and less progressive users arrived. They began discussing everything and soon revealed how different their views and values were from those represented in the progressive-dominated mainstream. This second, more conservative wave of social media users consolidated their anxiety into a political force, much like their progressive predecessors just a few years earlier.

These two demographic waves of social media adoption amplified the political split in society, fueling culture wars between digital progressives, who got to control most of the media discourse, and the growing conservative resentment about that. Though not always eloquent in the battle of narratives, conservatives still had an opportunity to resist through voting. In many places, representative democracy came into conflict with the progressive aristocracy.

Brexit, Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Germany’s AfD, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and many other right-leaning figures and movements emerged around the world and advanced through voting mechanisms, despite—or thanks to—the dominance of progressive views in the mainstream. By the late 2010s, the medium of elections had proved to be more diverse and inclusive than the diversity and inclusion promoted by progressives, as elections still represented the entire population, including conservatives.

Yet, having been promoted into the establishment during the Digital Rush of the early 2010s, progressives continued to dominate social media, now using these platforms not to challenge but to protect the establishment, to which they now belonged, from conservative pushback.

The Reign of the Twitterati

Before 2016, social media platforms encouraged engagement and paid little attention to its side effects. One major side effect was the amplification of extremes: Seeking socialization and competing for responses, users engaged more actively with agitating content, leading naturally to polarization. Discussions quickly descended into quarrels. Political activists and operatives, both domestic and foreign, also exploited the potential for fast, efficient and uncontrolled personal engagement. Platforms readily facilitated all this and rarely interfered, proclaiming “content neutrality.” Their commitment to neutrality, however, did not mean actual political neutrality; rather, it was a formal stance intended to shield them from liability for content posted by users.

This protection began to fade after Trump’s surprise win in 2016. Political elites found an explanation for Trump’s shocking victory: Russian meddling. The practice of blaming social media for enabling Russia’s hostile activities soon expanded to include other bad actors, primarily political opponents. This was partly justified: Social media platforms do amplify contrarian views and undermine the authority of traditional institutions. This is what social media did for progressives in the early 2010s. After progressives became co-opted by institutions, social media just kept doing the same—but now the platforms empowered conservatives against the newly formed alliance of progressives and institutions.

Progressives now wanted to neutralize the very source of disruption that had once propelled them to power. They started demanding censorship—who could have imagined this just five years earlier? The most astute among them didn’t just demand it—they helped develop the mechanisms of combating disinformation.

Shaken by the Cambridge Analytica scandal over harvesting personal data for political targeting, Facebook appeared eager to avoid political risks altogether. It shifted its algorithms to depoliticize conversations, prioritizing users’ interactions with family and friends. Twitter, on the other hand, could not effectively suppress politicization due to its design: Short tweets invited impulsive political sharing and commenting. The platform had to engage in sophisticated content moderation of the right, which inevitably reinforced liberal voices. By 2022, Democratic-leaning users comprised two-thirds of the top 10% of tweeters, who produced 92% of the platform’s content. The growing left-leaning political power of Twitter earned them the title “Twitterati.”

The Twitterati became so influential that they affected HR decisions and editorial policy at the leading news outlets, contributing to the rise of postjournalism. For example, it was mainly the backlash from the Twitterati that forced The New York Times to abandon any attempts at balancing its coverage in 2020, leading to the resignations of op-ed editor James Bennet and writer Bari Weiss after they dared to present opposing views in the paper. “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” wrote Weiss in her resignation letter.

Parler: Conservatives in Exile

Following escalating content moderation on major platforms, many conservative users migrated to alternative social networks. Parler, a notable example, grew explosively in 2020: It went from under 1 million users early that year to becoming the most downloaded app in the U.S. in November, the election month. In a week after the 2020 election, Parler gained 3.5 million users, eventually reaching 15 million in January 2021.

However, its rapid growth and conservative user base immediately made Parler a target. Due to their agitating nature, social media platforms with little or no moderation—from the early 2010s’ Twitter or Facebook to the later 2010s’ Telegram or Parler—are easy to blame for hosting extremists, especially from the perspective of the regimes those extremists oppose. Parler users were likely more involved in the January 6 riot than users of any other platform—simply because they had been expelled from other platforms and gathered on Parler.

After the January 6 Capitol attack, Parler was removed from app stores and soon went offline after Amazon canceled its hosting. Later attempts to return with stricter moderation failed, and Parler has never fully recovered. Sometimes called “Conservative Twitter,” Parler was literally “deplatformed” exactly when it was booming due to its minimal moderation amid increasing censorship elsewhere.

Following January 6, Twitter and Facebook also banned Trump himself and tens of thousands of his supporters, accusing them of promoting “harmful QAnon-associated content” and “stop-the-steal” conspiracies. These were not bots or foreign operatives, but real Americans who were denied the right of talking in certain public settings because of their contrarian views. This kind of widespread silencing of speech had likely never happened to Americans in the entire history of the nation—or at least to such a large number of Americans. Since personal customization is inherent to social media, these bans and the subsequent massive “moderation” reached each affected user individually, not just as part of a social group but with a jarring, personalized touch.

With Parler dismantled and the right banned from major platforms, conservative users scattered across smaller networks like MeWe, Gab, Rumble and Truth Social, launched by Trump in February 2022. As progressive views dominated both legacy and social media, conservative voices were fragmented and marginalized. Not only was nearly half of the population sidelined, but the manner in which this imbalance of views’ representation was imposed on society also increasingly outraged many, gradually extending beyond just the right, and ultimately paving the way for Trump’s triumphal return in 2024.

Bluesky: From Sobriety to Agitation?

The story of Bluesky—a growing outpost of progressive social media users frustrated with X under Elon Musk—mirrors Parler, but with notable differences. First, Bluesky has shown much stronger growth, expanding from 13 million to 24 million users in November 2024 alone, whereas Parler peaked at 15 million at its best time. Second, Bluesky enjoys a more favorable environment—nobody has called for it to shut down or restrict uploading and hosting. Lastly, while conservatives were driven to Parler by bans and shadow bans, progressives have voluntarily flocked to Bluesky, choosing self-isolation over coexisting with views they don’t like.

In its early stages, lacking monetization and unaffected by bots, Bluesky hosted much more realistic engagement and meaningful discussions compared to X, essentially resembling early Twitter with its socially homogeneous and intelligent user base. But the recent influx of millions of newcomers—now comprising more than half of the pre-election Bluesky’s population—is changing the platform’s culture. Many of these users are driven by outrage toward Musk and Trump, often actively displaying their rejection of unacceptable views and people. Users used to praise Bluesky’s calm and lack of bots or adversaries. However, the influx of newcomers is driving not only engagement but also agitation. This shift threatens to disrupt the platform’s cozy atmosphere even before monetization and bots take effect. Some are already noticing the signs of increasing rage.

Bluesky’s growth may have already reached a threshold at which a network can sustain a conversational ecosystem. Parler never got to prove its sustainability, but Bluesky might offer an interesting experiment. Since Bluesky users’ attitude seems unlikely to escalate into actions like storming the Capitol, the platform can “organically” test the sustainability of a politically secluded social network. The earlier exodus of the Twitterati to Mastodon, in protest against Musk’s takeover, failed—but this time, there’s a chance for them to establish a massive political echo chamber.

The rapid growth of Bluesky has stirred enthusiasm among those involved, but this is seeming to fade. The platform has just reached a milestone of 30 million users, making it a notable social media player, especially considering its self-selected demographic specificity. Yet, it’s still far from the giants like Facebook (3.065 billion monthly users), Instagram (2 billion), TikTok (1.58 billion) and X (611 million). Besides, not all Bluesky users will be active. Some joined out of mere curiosity—perhaps to observe the progressives’ post-election demarche. Others, initially driven by post-election enthusiasm, will cool down. Over time, the number of hardcore users, many former Twitterati, will crystallize. Their activity will serve as a census of digital progressives, revealing the number of those who dominated public discourse over the last 15 years but have now retreated into exile. The broader public will see how many of them were there.

Some argue that splitting social media into political bubbles could reduce polarization. This is unlikely. Users in both echo chambers will continue to stalk, quote and mock each other, indulging their mutual outrage. Besides, isolated from others on Bluesky, the most zealous Twitterati risk engaging in canceling their own—a fallout of political encapsulation. When the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia expelled and executed all the bourgeois, they turned on each other, starting with the most prominent. Among progressives, there will always be someone who slips into centrism or bothsidesism, for example.

Bluesky, a smaller and likely more insular bubble than other social media platforms, also carries higher risks of marginalization. If the former Twitterati continue using their usual rhetoric, it will, of course, be reported to the broader public through X. Bluesky and its users may be marginalized in public perception as a group of “far left,” “alt-left” or whatever pejorative emerges. However, the political split and lack of balance may carry the risk of marginalization for X, too. The potential for marginalization of one or both political sides due to the split into two political online bubbles threatens to deepen polarization even further.

All these projections may be relevant for “normal” conditions, but the coming situation might lack “normalcy.” Donald Trump and his allies are pushing hard to dismantle the previous political and governmental arrangements, while the alliance of bureaucrats, progressives and the media resists. Trump’s relationships with both his foes and allies are likely to generate high volatility. For example, a rift between Trump and Musk could profoundly shake the political landscape. There are also other disruptions that could critically affect the system, such as judicial or economic backlashes to Trump’s abrupt actions. In such a scenario, the former Twitterati might regain power. Bluesky could see a stronger future if Trump’s presidency is overly turbulent or faces major setbacks.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

Since the Anglosphere is (1) deeply rooted in alphabetic literacy, which (2) eventually led it to originate digital media, digital reversal hits the West hardest. (According to McLuhan, reversal happens when a form peaks.) On the other hand, cultures with strong oral residue (1-2 generations of mass literacy or less) suffer from digital reversal from literacy to digital orality to a much lesser degree, as they have less to “lose” - to reverse.

According to a widely publicized study, “The Anglosphere is increasingly miserable. The World Happiness Report shows it diverging from the rest of the world.” The original report is here.

Many have hurried to connect it to the Smartphone Theory of Everything (the term coined by NYU professor Arpit Gupta in 2025). Derek Thompson has just published “Is the Smartphone Theory of Everything Wrong? A Comprehensive Investigation,” where he ranks the 10 most popular claims about phones into categories of strongest, mixed, and weaker evidence. Comprehensive indeed.

Derek Thompson

Is the Smartphone Theory of Everything Wrong? A Comprehensive Investigation

This is an expanded and revised version of an essay that originally ran in The Argument, an online magazine where I am a contributing writer…

Read more

2 months ago · 56 likes · 3 comments · Derek Thompson

I want to add my 2 cents, which I believe explains what is behind and beyond the Smartphone Theory of Everything. I analyze technological or technologically related turmoil hitting the West the hardest through McLuhan’s concept of reversal: any medium or technology, when reaching its extreme, full potential, or limits, reverses its effects to their opposites. Like cars: they enhance mobility, but when there are too many cars, mobility reverses into gridlock. Too many signals reverse into noise, and so on.

Humankind now experiences the digital reversal, because with digital media not only our communication but all our interactions have reached their limit of speed—instantaneity. They have become instant. Never before has human “outer” interaction with the environment been faster than impulses in our nerves and neurons. This is the precondition for a global reversal—the digital reversal.

And cultures with stronger alphabetic literacy—the Anglosphere—HAVE TO suffer from digital reversal the most.

Here is a short chapter from my 2025 The Digital Reversal.

The totality and selectivity of the digital reversal

Some say the internet’s impact is exaggerated. Many people still live in physical reality. That may be true for older generations: part of their lives—or at least childhood—was predigital. We digital migrants know the alternative and can resort to it, though it’s getting harder.

Early digital adopters remember the internet with strong Gutenberg residues: text-based, catalog-organized (like a table of contents). For younger generations—called digital natives for a reason—the touchscreen became the first and dominant environmental interface.

To people, the world is what the interface makes of it. Digital natives experience the world as a “natural” flow—through video games, messengers, and newsfeeds, with occasional references to websites for scattered data. All are immersive interfaces of digital orality.

If this experience dominates early ages—when speech, thinking, and social skills are formed—the whole sensory-cognitive circuitry gets wired for digital orality. As parents often use devices to bribe kids and buy themselves some child-free time, the digital subdues kids’ brains.

The old triad “family–school–street” became “family–school–internet,” then “family–internet–internet”; and now, for many, it’s flipping into “internet–internet–internet.” The only social patterns these kids know are shaped online. A fully digital generation is almost here.

Regardless of one’s generational belonging or media habits, society has already pivoted to digital. Even those maintaining an offline–online balance engage with a society structured by digital media. Lenin was right: “It’s impossible to live in society and be free from society.”[1]

For digital youth specifically, digital orality is not a reversal. It’s their original and natural sensory-cognitive condition. But the digital reversal is a cultural phenomenon that changes the entire society. Some drive it, others are driven into it—but everyone is involved.

***

Reversal happens when a form peaks. That’s why the digital reversal started with educated elites: young professionals in media, tech, academia, and the broader knowledge economy—the apogee of print culture. (Young, because they pioneered digital media and became the vanguard.)

It may sound counterintuitive, but Trump and his supporters weren’t the source of the ongoing reversals. Even more counterintuitive: Trumpism and conservative ressentiment belong to the old world of print literacy, not digital orality—despite their many oral features.

The trick is that conservative ressentiment was a residue of orality within literacy. Trump was always an oralist within literacy: as a TV personality and by nature, he represented oral residue in a literate world—this type belongs to literacy, as strange as it may seem.

Even in literate culture, most people retain oral residues. Universal education gave them the uniformity of the world and the supremacy of absolute truth, shaped by books (the Bible, textbook). So, their everyday orality is framed by literacy. Orality runs strong in many of us.

People embodying oral residue in literate culture are less vulnerable to digital reversal—they don’t have much to reverse. They feel the loss of literate order, and this loss fuels nostalgia and resentment. But behaviorally, they blend easily into digital orality: oral to oral.

On the contrary, young progressive intellectuals, the finest product of the Western alphabetic-print capitalism, have become the engine of digital reversal. True to the nature of reversal, the former vanguard of literacy reverses into its opposite—the vanguard of digital orality.

***

Under the pressure of digital media, the masses have not changed as much as the educated class has—over just a decade. The educated class was the most advanced in alphabetic literacy—so the digital reversal impacted them the most.

For example, the reversal from objective to relative truth affected academia incomparably more than politicians or the general public. Politicians and regular folks were always flexible with truth—oral residues have always been strong among them.

Now, people who were less committed to literacy no longer feel “ashamed” of their essentially oralist behavior. Digital orality has unleashed their “organic” oral residues, once the reversal of society from literacy had been executed and legitimized by the educated.

So, however paradoxical, the conservative ressentiment is a backlash of 20th-century literacy’s oral residue against 21st-century digital orality pushed by the progressive-educated class that gained cultural and political power during the Digital Rush.

But the conservative backlash cannot return things to a “normal,” balanced past. As any reversal is a product of extremes, it never returns anything to previous conditions. Instead, it amplified the divide between competing tribes shaped by residual orality and digital orality.

In general, digital reversal drives digital and residual orality into peculiar historical and geopolitical twists. That’s why, for example, the Western campus and anti-Western radicalism align (though rather virtually). They share patterns of orality.

***

Environmental detachment and the objectivation of nature, both driven by the alphabet,[2] shaped the West’s advantage: excellence in appropriation. After reaching its limit, appropriation reversed into self-deprivation. “Each civilization has its own methods of suicide,” said Innis.[3]

Non-alphabetic cultures, even those that developed long traditions of writing with some degree of abstraction, kept their writing ideographic. They preserved a significant power of ecological, analog thinking—still connected to the environmental immersion typical of orality.

In cultures that never suffered alphabetic detachment from the environment, digital reversal is less of a shock than it is for the West. For societies without centuries of print culture, it’s not even a reversal—just a transition from one oral state to another, now digital.

Digital media emerged in the West because coding was a distant but direct descendant of the alphabet. Any successful medium, however, becomes the asset of all humankind, regardless of its place of origin—be it the chariot, ironware, or printing.

Since the West is (1) deeply rooted in alphabetic literacy, which (2) eventually led to digital media, digital reversal hits the West hardest. But that’s just the beginning. From there, through the role of the West, the effects of digital reversal will spread to all humankind.

Anticipating questions about Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands, which are seemingly less affected by anxiety, according to the 2026 World Happiness Report, despite being alphabetic cultures with a long tradition of literacy (especially the Netherlands), I would think of several mitigating factors. These cultures did not actually reach the peak of literacy—coding, the source of digital media and the precursor of digital reversal. Due to their size, they have also preserved a high degree of communal life, which signals strong oral residue. Also, the factor of happiness (the anxiety of reversal) is only one and rather a superficial manifestation of the digital reversal; other digital reversals (political, epistemological, gender) are likely manifested there, too.

The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution was published in 2025. The future of the book is the blurb, said Marshall McLuhan. As the future arrives, this short book is written in tweets—each paragraph under 280 characters, 1,295 in total, which makes it a reversal of the treatise, the first tweetise in history. Structured in thread-chapters, the book explores and explains what media evolution has done to us.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Lenin, Vladimir. (1905). “Party Organization and Party Literature.”

[2] I covered the affordances of the alphabet in: Mir, Andrey. (2024). Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

[3] Innis, Harold. (1950). “Industrialism and cultural values.” In: The Bias of Communication. (2008). P. 132.

This chapter follows “The features of orality: Environmental immersion—experiencing the world live” in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

In 1938, a small fire broke out in the stands of the Paris National Velodrome during a sports event. The panicking crowd rushed to the only exit. The situation was on the verge of becoming deadly. Luckily, there were two psychologists in the crowd who began to loudly chant: “Ne-pousse-pas! Ne-pousse-pas!” (“Do not push! Do not push!”). The rhythm was picked up by those around them, spread like a wave, and synchronized the crowd’s chaotic movement. The panic transformed into a coordinated action. The energy of coordinated efforts helped people safely leave the arena.[1]

The call not to push sounded reasonable; however, the crowd was not so much reasoned with as it resonated with the rhythmic chanting. The content of the chant suggested a strategy, but the rhythmic chanting turned it into collective will and made everybody comply. The rhythmic chanting was the medium of the message that induced cooperative behavior and likely saved lives.

Rhythm serves as the metronome of collectivity ingrained in humans as collective animals, physiologically. Synchronization through rhythm is physiologically reinforced by the feeling of being part of a larger organism, by the sensation of multiplied strength in unity. Using rhythm, one can organize any number of people, even without knowing their language; if you create the right rhythm, they will join in.[2]

We humans evolved not only through interactions with the environment but also, first and foremost, through interactions with each other. Others were the most crucial element of our environment, either beneficial or threatening. This is why environmental immersion also implies collective involvement: an individual cannot not be engaged with others. In an oral society, collective involvement is as total as environmental immersion itself.

Synchronization is a precondition of a collective’s cooperation, and rhythm is its most ancient and efficient medium. But the members of the collective also had to emotionally tune into cohabitation. For this, the series of oral acts people displayed to each other had to be gestural, emotional, loud, salient, excessive in all aspects, and engaging in every possible way, something McLuhan called “empathic involvement.”[3] For tribal cohesion to occur, everyone needs to be prominently present and signal their readiness for connection and inclusion. Orality made people loudly and saliently exposed to each other for the sake of coordination and synchronization. Being an extravert is an organic condition of orality.

By filling shared spaces with the acoustic bubble of their self-exhibition, an oral individual asserts their level of integration into the collective, which also becomes a claim to status in the hierarchy. Those who are better “seen” and “sensed” by the collective can demand greater social benefits. Individuals who are self-absorbed will likely lose in the competition for status and social benefits. That is why an oral individual carries the cloud of their acoustic space with them like a smell, so that everyone around can get involved or be repelled. Loud and overtly affective speech may be considered ill-mannered in a literate culture, but in orality it is a survival strategy.

Empathic involvement can be seen as harmony: the community harmonizes its life through the total mutual exposure of its members. This harmonization comes at the cost of the total absence of privacy. In orality, one cannot keep one’s life to oneself. It is always shared, exposed to others, and intertwined with the lives of others. You’ll never walk alone. Individuals are involved in the exchange of obtrusive phatic signals (social grooming and requests for affirmation). Intimacy, in whatever sense of the concept, is likely impossible in an oral culture; intimacy is a side effect of literacy. The oral community would be a nightmare for an introvert. For a literate and self-absorbed person, just as for an electrician, insulation is better than grounding. It’s quite possible that introverts are a by-product of literacy, too.

Some features of orality persist in our everyday interpersonal communication, though they are hard to recognize. For example, the phatic function of speech serves to establish and maintain social relations. When we meet a neighbor in the elevator, we chat about what a rainy day it is outside. The conversation conveys no useful information for either participant; both have just been outside and have identical information about the weather. The meaning of the exchange is not to share information but to reinforce our mutual status as neighbors and thus maintain tribal unity. Linguists assume that phatic interactions may comprise up to 30% of everyday conversations. The only purpose of these interactions is social grooming and establishing mutual status in the social hierarchy, and through them, ensuring collective coherence.

Small talk is inherently intrusive—we must show interest in someone’s daily life. Contemporary urban culture imposes significant restrictions on such intrusiveness: you cannot ask a neighbor about their relationship with their spouse after hearing some noise from their apartment. You cannot ask a coworker why he or she looks so pale today. Weather small talk is the safest. In an oral community, in a small village, there are no such restrictions. Everything will be asked and expected to be answered, driven by the survival strategy of “empathic involvement.”

Under the conditions of orality, small talk was not actually small. It was of Homeric proportions and included vocal performance and pantomime. But there was also something atypical for the contemporary phatic exchanges of literate minds. The exchange of information about the weather, recent hunts, family scandals, and other personal affairs held real meaning in primary orality. These exchanges were the news media of the oral era. News has a peculiar quality—it becomes important as long as you follow it. Continuous news consumption fosters the habit of following the news: in an oral society, gossiping was an imperative that kept the tribe together, just as the Habermasian public sphere helped to maintain modern society.

And there was more to it. The rapport created by phatic exchange served to tune up the collective mechanism of memorization. This effect of the phatic function is best explained in contrast to literacy. We can easily memorize or communicate information in writing, no rapport with our pen and paper, computer, or smartphone is required. We still need to configure writing tools in a certain way, but this is more a matter of technical customization. We do not need to get them to act in unison with us by imparting emotional and mental tones. Now imagine that the only medium for communication and memorization is not paper or a smartphone but another person. The only way to succeed in communication and memorization is to trigger that person’s response, achieve rapport, and incite their contribution to collective coherence. Most communicative effort has to be spent on tuning them in. The excessively affective speech of orality included efforts to achieve collective rapport and cohesion for coordination and memorization.

Writing, and then printing, allowed for collective coordination on a scale unimaginable in orality. Electronic media did as well. However, while writing and print coordinated people by co-opting them individually into shared ideas, radio and television coordinated people through shared emotions in a semblance of the tribal acoustic space—through “empathic involvement.”

Social media deepened this reversal toward the emotional engagement of everybody with the collective. In McLuhan’s words, spoken in 1967, 50 years before social media,

Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.[4]

The exposure of everyone to everyone on social media also serves as a request for others to resonate and acknowledge each user’s existence and rightness. This ongoing mutual exposure and constant communication requests make social media even more akin to the village than the global village of the TV era, when people were emotionally engaged with collective issues but at least did not expose themselves. Social media enabled this: imagine every TV viewer displaying their reaction to what they see on the TV screen and expecting appreciation of those reactions from others.

In the movie This Is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage, made in 1967, McLuhan sounds as if he is describing the social media of the 2020s:

The Global Village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose in everybody else’s business. The Global Village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony – you have extreme concerns with everybody else’s business and are much involved in everybody else’s life... It doesn’t necessarily mean harmony, peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else’s affairs.[5]

According to McLuhan, such relations emerge when “the spaces and times are pulled out from between people” by electronic media and people are exposed—“get close”—to each other. We can clearly see here the pattern of reversal from literacy to orality by electronic media and now digital media. They achieve this by removing the literacy-induced detachment of individuals from the environment and from each other. As a result, “everybody becomes totally involved in everybody.” [6]

This piece continues the topic of “The features of orality: Environmental immersion—experiencing the world live” in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] The story is recounted by Akop Nazaretyan in his 2001 book Psychology of Spontaneous Mass Behavior. Nazaretyan was the author of the principle of Techno-Humanitarian Balance; see: Nazaretyan, Akop (2017). “Mega-history and the twenty-first century Singularity puzzle.” Social Evolution & History, Volume 16, Number 1, March 2017. Interestingly, as an expert in crowd control and the political psychology of the masses, Nazaretyan worked for the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in the 1970s and trained revolutionary cadres for anti-capitalist resistance in the Third World. When visiting guerrillas in Latin America, “Comandante Akopo”, aside from his ideological work, also gathered a great deal of ethnographic material for his later universal evolutionary theory, which somewhat resembles Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of mega-evolution. See Akop Nazaretyan’s profile on the Social Studies website.

[2] In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan referred to radio as “the tribal drum,” implying its ability to audially, immersively synchronize nations into tribes of imperial scale. See: McLuhan, Marshall (1994 [1964]). Understanding Media, p. 297. He underscored radio’s crucial role in Hitler’s regime (ibid., p. 300). By forming tribal unity on an unprecedented scale, radio indeed created all three major empires of the 20th century: the Communist, the Nazi, and the consumerist ones.

[3] McLuhan, Marshall. (1962). The Guttenberg Galaxy, p. 39.

[4] McLuhan, Marshall, and Fiore, Quentin. (1967). The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, p. 24.

[5] An excerpt from the movie: This Is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage. (1967). Directed by Guy Fraumeni and Ernest Pintoff. 17:00.

[6] McLuhan, as quoted in: Chrystall, Andrew. (2015). “After the Global Village.” First published in The Canadian Journal of Media Studies, 2011, 9 (1).

Popular perception sees orality and literacy as spoken and written forms of communication. But that’s only part of the picture, rather superficial. The essential distinction between orality and literacy lies in cognitive structures: it’s not listening vs. reading, it’s more about situational immersion vs. detachment. Excerpts from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

In his 2017 Media Ecology, Lance Strate shares a neat observation from Max Frisch’s 1959 novel Homo Faber: “Technology is the art of never having to experience the world.”[1] Strate writes:

Whatever comes between us and our world, that is, whatever mediates between us and our world, becomes our world. Our mediations are what we know. They are all we know. They become our environment.[2]

If media mediate the world, then the less we use media, the more of the world we sense. Conversely, when we are fully immersed in media, we sense no world at all. This seems to be the endpoint of media evolution: when we completely merge with our media, they will become our only “natural” environment. At that point, media will lose their mediating function. The user, media, and environment will become one.

But that’s the “end.” At the beginning of media evolution, a human being was fully immersed in the world, with no mediation, like all other living creatures. The Promethean gift of fire and tools started mediation (and media evolution), shielding humans from nature—but still keeping us within nature.

The rule “the less we use media, the more of the world we sense” has a corollary. Since media extend humans, the less we use media, the less extended we are and the smaller our world is. When considering the farthest-reaching tools, such as arrows or other thrown weapons, an oral person’s reach is roughly a sphere with a radius of 50–60 meters. Vision extends perception to hundreds of meters, and so does hearing. The exact distances can be debated, but the pattern is clear: an oral person’s experience of the world is physically limited by how far the senses can reach or the body can act, even when they are extended by tools. In orality, a person is immersed in the babble of immediate experience, limited by physical reach.

Speech, without a doubt, can extend individual experience beyond physical reach. But for speech to extend our perception of the world, others are required. Oral experience, extended beyond personal reach, is a product of collective effort. The world reached through speech is the world of the tribe, not of the individual.

As a consequence, an oral person does not endeavor to judge beyond personal or tribal experience, that is, beyond experience lived through, individually or collectively. This was also confirmed by Alexander Luria in his Central Asian study. Luria asked illiterate participants to complete a syllogism: “In the far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the far North. What color are the bears in Novaya Zemlya?” The typical answers were, “I don’t know, I have never seen them,” or “You need to ask those who were there. Or the elders, they might know.”[3]

Interestingly, when the syllogism was offered to a 45-year-old foreman of a collective farm who had just learned to read, he answered: “To go by your words, they should all be white.” [4] As Walter Ong highlights in analyzing this story, having only recently become familiar with the literate way of thinking, this person still refers to the researcher’s description (“to go by your words”). [5] He does not take responsibility for a speculative statement that has no basis in his experience. Nevertheless, he appears to be capable of completing the syllogism.

Illiterate people, or rather people of primary orality, were not practically interested in what lay beyond their reach. They were not capable of deriving such knowledge from speculation (syllogism). Why would they want to do that? For this reason, unlike literate individuals, they refrained from making statements about things they had not personally experienced.

Environmental immersion also has a rigid temporal dimension. All beings immersed in the environment are confined to the eternal “now.” Orality is always about the “now,” while literacy is about the “not now.” Living in the “now” leaves no room for reflection. Orality places the individual within events, within the world of the “here and now,” while literacy allows anyone to bring any time and any place into a written, induced reality.

While analyzing TV replays used in news or sports broadcasts, McLuhan comes to a conclusion about the opposition between experience and meaning. The TV replay allows us to extract meaning from experience without actually experiencing it. “In fact, such is the nature of experience that it is almost inevitable that we do miss the meaning,” concludes McLuhan.

Sports referees now rely on replays to make decisions about what just happened. In this way, according to McLuhan, the instant replay exposes “the difference between cognition and recognition.” [6] Living in the moment and being immersed in the “here and now” obstructs the very possibility of recognition. A disruptive media intervention in the natural flow of time is needed—an arrest of time, a rewind, and a replay of an event—to recognize what is happening. This is what recording media enabled, first with writing and later with TV: they replay reality, extending it in time and giving the mind time for reflection.

The limitation of the world by spatial personal reach and temporal “eternal now” is a fundamental condition of situational immersion. This condition was one of the features of primary orality that have been retrieved by digital orality.

Digital media extend users’ reach tremendously, allowing us to communicate across the globe instantly. Yet they place the user in a bubble of immediate digital experience, similar to what Eli Pariser described as a “filter bubble.”[7] The bubble of digital experience is not physical but social, and its range is limited not by the senses or thrown implements, but by algorithms and the user’s social graph. However, the effect is similar: it is shaped in the form of audile-tactile space; it is simultaneous in a 360-degree sphere and strictly limited by situational “practical needs,” now shaped by digital media.

However, surprisingly (or not), the literate aptitude for speculative statements with no support in personal experience has survived digitalization. Physical distance is no longer an obstacle to “awareness” of polar bears. Media deliver images of them—media induce the faked, simulated experience of seeing polar bears. Since social media encourage personal engagement, users can, or rather even have to, make judgments about events or processes of which they have no real personal experience whatsoever. But people have an enriched and extended—media-induced—experience of all sorts of polar bears that they have encountered on TV and now on the internet.

That is why personal but non-experiential judgment has outlived literacy and flourishes on the internet. Such judgment remains speculative but is no longer syllogistic; social media judgment represents an oral-literate hybrid of speculation and immersion: speculation based on media-induced “lived experience.”

The environmental immersion of orality also means immersion into the most important part of the environment—the collective…

Read next: “The features of orality: collective involvement—you’ll never walk alone.”

Read more: Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.)

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition, p. 110.

[2] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition, p. 110.

[3] Luria, Alexander. (1976). Cognitive Development, p. 108. See also: Mir, Andrey. (2022). “Media-ecological engineering of the Soviets.” Explorations in Media Ecology, Volume 21, Issue 2-3, Oct 2022, p. 150.

[4] Luria, Alexander. (1976). Cognitive Development, p. 114.

[5] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 52.

[6] McLuhan, Marshall. (1974). “At the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theater in which there are no spectators but only actors,” p. 57.

[7] Pariser, Eli. (2011). The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think.

I have a confession to make. In my entire life, I have listened to only two podcasts from start to finish, and only because both were about my books. I could say it’s because I work with written words and because I am an intellectual and yada yada. Well, yes, I am, but it’s not the reason.

The actual reason is the passive aggression of acoustic space: acoustic space is time-locked—you can’t control it.

Hold on, aren’t ideas in writing also locked in a structure designed by the author that you cannot control, and if you miss, you miss? Yes, you can skim the text while reading, but you can also speed up or even fast-forward a podcast while listening. So why is it that reading gives you a sense of more time control than listening?

Self-paced and auto-paced media consumption

This characteristic of reading was observed by my friend and fellow media ecologist Corey Anton. This is how I described his finding in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror:

“The capacity of literacy to facilitate theorizing relies, in no small part, on the “atemporality” of reading, as Corey Anton calls it. According to him, “books allow one to read at one’s own pace.” The content of reading is “seamlessly worked into the flow of consciousness” because “the text does not ‘go on’ without us.”[1] Anton suggests distinguishing between self-paced technologies, such as books, and auto-paced technologies, such as podcasts, films, and videos. He writes:

Communication technologies that run at a pre-set rate, which flow as it were and thereby demand that consciousness attend to them as they are flowing, are more psychically constraining and confining than self-paced technologies.[2]

The temporal constraints imposed by electronic formats that simulate orality immerse the user in an external environment, controlled by the source of broadcasting. Anton even implies that this submission to auto-paced technologies can explain the frustration often accompanying the consumption of electronic and digital media:

Could it be that there is an undiagnosed stress – an oppression of the mind – that comes from having to spend time within simulated environments that unfold at a rate not endemic to one’s own consciousness? Could it be that people have unconsciously trained their minds to obediently align to of auto-paced technologies and now experience a vague but pervasive sense of moving to other people’s rhythms instead of their own?[3]

Reading, on the contrary, adjusts the pace of information intake to the reader’s personal thinking rather than to someone else’s broadcast, thus integrating the content of what is read “seamlessly” into the inner space of the reader’s thought. Among all media, only books possess this quality, as Anton highlights. Reading is morphologically compatible with thinking.”

Yesterday, X/Twitter turned into a Respublika Literaria, for a moment

Something unusual happened on X/Twitter recently. Of course, somewhere deep or on the margins, it always hosts highbrow self-expression. But it is usually suppressed by rage bait, which is favored by algorithms due to its higher potential for engagement. But look at what the algorithms highlighted on March 18, at least for me:

It happened amid the debate on introspection, inspired by Marc Andreessen and, unrelatedly, by Colin Wright’s dismissal of podcasting and praise of writing and reading. Here are some excerpts:

Colin Wright:

Podcasting lets people speak vaguely about a topic while creating the impression of thorough treatment. I’ve often pushed back on something a podcaster posted on X, only to be told by their fans that it was “thoroughly addressed” somewhere in a three-hour podcast.

But when I listen to the relevant section, it doesn’t deliver. It’s often just more vagueness and dancing around the issue, avoiding making direct, falsifiable claims they can be held to.

There’s a reason many podcasters don’t write articles about the topics they discuss. Writing forces them to make coherent arguments without fluff. It forces them to connect every link between premise and conclusion. It forces them to cite sources accurately instead of speaking vaguely off the cuff.

It’s also easier to be misled by smooth-talking podcasters…

Podcasts are great. But anyone presenting themselves as a public intellectual and making serious, high-stakes claims about the world needs to do more than talk. They need to write. (Read the full manifesto, it’s great.)

Colin Wright also adds in the comment:

I’m a much better writer than I am a speaker. I prefer writing, especially because much of what I write about—critiques of gender ideology and a defense of the sex binary—requires a lot of precision. I write legal definitions, expert testimony, and scientific descriptions.

If I don’t say something perfectly, I pay a big price. In fact, all of society pays a price if I mess up! I actually welcome this arrangement. I want to be held to a high standard. I want my ideas to be attacked, because my goal is truth and clarity.

Three more arguments for reading books over listening to podcasts

Besides depth and thorough elaboration, there are three more solid arguments in favor of reading: quotability, cascading novelty building, and depersonalization.

1. Quotability.

Audio is not quotable. You can repeat something you heard and comment on it, but you cannot incorporate it into your own reasoning in a way that allows it to become a detachable thought that can also be used in the next rounds of knowledge building.

An oral idea can be reiterated to build upon only once, at most twice. An oral “Aristotle said that Plato said that Socrates said” retains historical value but loses the capacity for intellectual integration in the next rounds of abstract thinking. It just does not add up...

Written quotes can be layered, reused, and built upon. A quote can be cited again, combined with others, and integrated into ongoing arguments. In speech, a quote is usually used once in context and does not easily carry forward into further chains of reasoning. In writing, quotes compound; oral quotation serves only for a single reference.

2. The compulsion of novelty

Another restriction on adding up: orality is designed for repeating. Oral sharing was a collective mechanism of memorization, so in repeating what you heard, value comes from verbatim reproduction: the closer you repeat to the original, the better for collective memory.

A slight change and situational adjustment of what was heard are acceptable; they may even be deemed wordplay and valued for that, like a joke adjusted for a situation. But the reference must be recognized; it is valued for referencing back to the known, not for challenging it. Generally, oral repetition favors preservation and therefore precision. It serves to conserve, not to develop.

In the meantime, as the Soviet philosopher Michael Petrov noted, writing compels one to argue with what was written before. Orality is agonistic “in person,” so to speak, but literacy is intrinsically agonistic in ideas. In his 1966 Pirates of the Aegean and Individuality (a year before the term media ecology was even introduced by Postman), Petrov writes:

Writing, as a universal individual skill – as literacy – is inherently a blind creative force that mobilizes the entire population of the literates, whether they want it or not, for theoretical creation. Literacy sets up minds in mutual non-conformity and mismatching, forbids them to repeat each other, and requires each literate mind to produce a new text, a new opinion on any subject that has already been touched upon by the opinions of others. The transition of writing into literacy signifies an automatic transition to a new psychological disposition, a disposition toward seeking novelty, for each literate mind now has to identify the pre-existed attitudes towards reality, reject them as a-priory false or incomplete, and elaborate its own views completing “truth” – meaning constantly being in a creative mode of analysis of the present and a synthesis of the new.

In this way emerges private ownership over thought and its products: theoretical relationships with the world. This private ownership over thought monopolizes the right of truth-seeking and becomes an aggressive-creative mental force incapable of being satisfied by any existing theoretical system, constantly suspecting that truth – ultimate certainty – lies somewhere beyond the established system of relationships, beyond ritual. A never-ending ancient discord, the Hobbesian “war of all against all,” bursts out, in which the only victor is social memory which absorbs all newly arriving texts, meaning new theories of the world, unless it is trimmed or fenced by a Great Wall of censorship or policing measures such as the canonization of texts into a sacred scripture.

So, orality forces people to affirm or challenge others’ standing to maintain tribal hierarchy (better hierarchy means better survival), while in literacy, quotation drives intellectual challenge to dismiss or build upon. The precision of repetition in literacy is provided by default, by words recorded verbatim, so the cognitive energy is freed for something else, for reorganizing and revising. In literacy, the status game shifts into the space of ideas.

Podcasts cannot do this. Paradoxically, podcasts strengthen conformity within a tribe, while writing provokes nonconformity, even within a tribe. Aristotle had to be the first philosopher to write in prose to say, “Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.” He dared to disagree with his elder and mentor, something unheard of in orality. This is what writing did to him.

The medium is the message. As Postman wrote, you cannot do philosophy in smoke signals, nor can you do it on television. And podcasts, we can add. However smart ideas are presented in podcasts, the focus will be on the interplay of status and personalities. And here comes the third argument.

3. Personalization in podcasting and depersonalization in writing

When commenting on what you hear or see, you are more likely to respond to performance than to content, as oral delivery naturally (hormonally) makes people react to whether they like or dislike those they listen to. It is extremely hard to overcome this social, “hormonal,” tribal pull and comprehend the real content behind the delivery. Orality is inherently relational, as opposed to writing, which is rational because it separates the Knower from the Known (Havelock) and largely disregards the personality of Foucault or Chomsky or whoever…

To demonstrate how personality influences the perception of content in writing versus speech, consider two quotes:

“We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”

“It’s time to rebuild our infrastructure and create millions of jobs, rebuilding roads, bridges, schools, and transforming our transportation and energy sectors.”

They are identical in meaning, aren’t they? And they will likely be received as closely aligned by a reader. But what if a reader were to learn, especially beforehand, that the first one is said by Trump and the second by Biden? Now, if these two ideas were heard from Trump and Biden, would they be perceived as similar (as they truly are)? With extreme effort, maybe, but largely no.

Only writing can clear the idea from personality.

(* Of course, for an attentive reader, “second to none” exposes Trump even in writing. It is excessive bragging, a feature of orality, the force that is strong with this one.)

Why podcasts grow while reading shrinks

There is a popular idea that podcasts replace book reading. It’s not entirely accurate: podcasts take time in the daily media diet that would be unlikely to be spent on books anyway. Podcasts are listened to while driving, doing chores, cooking, and so on, when hands are busy and cannot grab a device with a screen, but compulsive digital consumption dictates consuming something anyway, and this something becomes radio, music, or podcasts.

I do not drive a lot, but when driving somewhere, I listen to the radio—to open myself up to the world; and when driving back home, I listen to an old playlist that I almost never revise—to immerse myself back into introspection. Perhaps, if I make an effort and set up podcast listening in the car, I would listen to some; I would likely choose Douglas Rushkoff. I have never listened to his podcast Team Human, but I have heard him in person many times and like his wit and his artistic delivery very much. So I think sometimes, and then: hold on! Okay, I hear an interesting thought from Doug, and then what? How do I put it down in writing to be used afterward? I am driving.

I read to write; to write, I read. And so does everyone who supported Colin Wright in his podcast dismissal and praise of reading. It’s a very peculiar demographic, a contemporary Respublika Literaria. And that’s only partly bragging: in terms of orality vs literacy, Respublika Literaria was characterized by semi-literacy: the number of writers was roughly equal to the number of readers, meaning they wrote for each other. This was a condition that accompanied the invention of the printing press and was boosted by it into the scientific and religious revolutions. Now this fading gleam, this last convulsion of Respublika Literaria, is closing the Gutenberg Parenthesis, as we all write largely for each other, and it’s not us who make podcasts successful.

Podcasts, by the way, can be more or less literate. To convert a podcast or video from an auto-paced medium to a self-paced one, with more user control over time, timestamps help.Essentially, timestamps are a concession of orality to literacy; they apply a table of contents to audio or video. Very helpful! (To at least skim what’s inside.)

But setting up timestamps and video chapters takes time, and that is not what this medium favors. Its strength is in the speed of production. Let’s say an expert is equally good at speaking and writing, but it takes him or her a day to write down and refine content that takes only an hour to tell in a podcast. In an environment where the speed of interaction defines everything else, the choice in terms of production is obvious. Go talk and be everywhere.

The ease of production opened the niche to billions of novices, creating a huge input for selection. The size of the input has provided the quality of the output; the best podcasters outperform leading TV shows on cable networks in terms of both audience reach and the relevance of agenda setting.

I wonder, though, if those millions of listeners really listen to their favorite podcasts from start to finish. If so, these must be enormous single spans of media consumption, like one or two hours of uninterrupted media consumption per user, comparable perhaps only to gaming. Where do people find time for it?

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Anton, Corey. (2023). “Reading good books, further defended,” p. 122.

An influential French media think tank, Upgrade Media, published an interview in which we discussed how the digital reversal has impacted the public sphere in general and journalism in particular. Where is mass communication heading? Will journalism survive? Interview by David Sallinen, CEO and founder of Upgrade Media and initiator of the Pioneer Media project.

David Sallinen: You frame your work around the idea that media, when pushed to their full potential, reverse their effects. What makes you think we are now reaching that point with digital media, and not just experiencing another phase of disruption?

Andrey Mir: According to McLuhan, any media or technology reverse their effects when they reach their extreme forms, their full potential. A simple example: cars increase our mobility, but when the use of cars reaches its limits, mobility reverses into gridlock. The overuse of signals reverses into noise, and so on.

There is at least one characteristic of contemporary media that has reached its extreme form and cannot advance further. It is the speed of human interaction. With electricity, we reached the instantaneity of communication. In digital media, we have reached the instantaneity of not just communication but of any kind of interaction. So digital mediation is the fastest possible, because it is instant. You simply cannot go faster.

DS: You argue that digital media have reached “full potential” through speed, scale, and ubiquity. Which of these factors matters most in triggering reversal, and why do incremental reforms fail once this threshold is crossed?

AM: Speed of interaction is fundamental. Instant interaction with each other and the environment removes the reaction delay that made us humans millions of years ago. That delay in reflexes was what speech fit into, and this separated us from nature. Now the instant speed of our interactions reverses the biological foundation of our ecology and submerges us back into the environment—but now into the digital environment, and as digital beings.

Additionally, as digital media have reached all demographics and enveloped nearly all our activity, we are reaching another limit: total social reactivity. The reversals that follow change our entire social existence. That is why we feel as if so many things—the entire world—not just change but flip upside down.

DS: You describe today’s environment as a reversal of literacy into “digital orality”. How does this shift change the way authority, truth, and credibility are established compared to the print-based era?

AM: Because of digital devices, typing has become instant and interactional. Typing has reversed text into texting. Texting is a hybrid of talking and writing: just as talking, it is instant, conversational, and behavioral, just as writing, it leaves records and delivers our expressions beyond immediate conversation.

Spoken language created the cognitive and cultural conditions of orality. Writing created literacy. Now texting is creating a hybrid cultural and mental condition that I call “digital orality.”

Why is it “orality” in “digital orality”? What is “oral” in it? No, it’s not about vocal performance. And it’s not because of videos or podcasts. The essential difference between orality and literacy was not talking versus writing, but immersion versus detachment. And so is digital orality: it is immersive, interactional, behavioral. But it immerses us in digital reality—not in the physical world, as orality did. That’s why it’s digital orality. And that’s why it’s a hybrid: on devices, we remain physically detached, as in literacy, but behaviorally immersed, as in orality.

The immersive character of digital orality retrieves many features of primary, tribal orality. One of them is the perception of truth. Before writing, there was no objective truth. Truth is an abstraction created by writing, because writing detached our mind from behavior—from situational thinking. There is simply no need for objective truth when people are immersed in situations. In orality, truth was negotiated and defined by situational outcomes: what worked—that was truth.

Since digital media are immersive, they restore those conditions. Literate, fixed truth is vanishing. The subjective, practical, contextual take on truth is starting to prevail. Instant connectivity turns the subjective truths of many into a collective truth that replaces the abstract, ideal principle of absolute truth. This means that truths are now defined by referendums of likes within digital tribes.

Similar reversals are happening to many abstract universalities once established by literacy and print. The global digital reversal consists of many specific reversals in all areas of human life, starting with epistemology and ending with politics or even relationships between the sexes.

DS: You define postjournalism as a shift from supplying news to validating news people already encounter elsewhere. At what point did this become the dominant function of mainstream media, and what made that shift unavoidable?

AM: This shift was tied to the demographics of social media proliferation. In the beginning of the 2010s, advertising had already fled to the internet, and the media needed to find new revenue. They went digital and started chasing digital audiences – remember the motto of the time: “Digital First!”? People in the media thought that we would just switch the carrier from paper to digital, and that’s it – we would use amazing internet technologies to sell news and ads even better.

Not so fast. In this new digital environment, a new medium emerged that delivered news and advertising not just better, but personally. Unlike old media, digital platforms can customize the delivery of content to each user personally, and do so at the scale of hundreds of millions. Personalization for millions – old media do not have, and cannot have, such capacity.

But media managers did not know this yet. So news media rushed onto digital, set up paywalls, and started courting digital audiences. And this is where a very important demographic factor came into play, one that is often overlooked. Who were digital audiences at the time? The first digital adopters were young, educated, urban, and therefore progressive. Seeking their attention, the media embraced their values – and sidelined the rest of the population. Why bother with coverage for those who cannot digitally subscribe?

As a result, news coverage in the early 2010s changed profoundly, now representing almost exclusively progressive views of the world. Even the language of news changed dramatically – frequency analysis shows that the terminology of wokeism, previously confined to narrow circles of academic activism, skyrocketed in journalism precisely in the early 2010s, the period that I call the Digital Rush.

But digital progressives were truly progressive and did not consume news from old media. Digital paywalls, the hottest trend in 2011–2012, stalled or failed. Digital subscriptions did not work.

In the meantime, older, less urban, less educated, and less progressive demographics, abandoned by the mainstream media, adopted social media and gained the ability to inform each other, just as their younger progressive predecessors had done five years earlier. This is how the wave of conservative resentment rose, leading to Brexit, Trump, AfD, Marine Le Pen, and so on.

And this was the moment when the alignment of many newsrooms with progressives started bringing some earnings – through what I call postjournalism.

In the digital era, people switched to receiving their news from newsfeeds. But when something disturbing happens, they need to validate the news in an authoritative public source, not just on friends’ Twitter feeds. They need to make sure that they are on the same page with public opinion, that the news is terrible for society at large. So it’s not about the news, it’s about its assessment and confirmation. The media got the prompt and switched from news supply to news validation. This is how, sometime between 2016 and 2018, the reversal to postjournalism was completed.

For the largest media outlets, very few though, validating disturbing news and channeling outrage became a good business model. The rise of right-wing populism generously supplied such triggering news to be outraged over. In the US, it led to the so-called Trump Bump in the media. I believe a similar trend was observed in other Western countries: the curve of subscriptions, flat in 2011–2015, went noticeably up in 2016–2018.

DS: – In a feed-driven environment where “news finds you”, discovery becomes cheap. Why does validation become the scarce resource and what does that scarcity do to editorial standards and newsroom culture?

AM: The question about scarcity is right on target. In digital, scarcity has reversed into abundance. Due to the instant speed of interaction, the digital is an environment of abundance. Discovery is cheap indeed.

What happens to competition for attention if news is abundant and its discovery is cheap? The competition moves from digging up and refining information to intensity of expression. Naturally, this leads to spiraling polarization and tribalization, aligning well with the conditions of digital orality. The worst part is that the media have to compete in intensity and outrage with social media and on social media.

What does it do to newsroom culture? Journalists always looked for triggering news to catch the public’s attention and sell the story. But now the competition in intensity reverses the value of a story from fact to drama, to the point that drama no longer needs real facts. As a result, only those facts matter that produce outrage.

This is where fake news comes from: emotional perception overshadows the factual matter and makes it insignificant. What was once a feature of postmodernism has become the essence of postjournalism.

DS: You’ve recently clarified that polarization was never a sustainable business strategy, but an effect of media-ecological and economic conditions. What do people still misunderstand when they interpret polarization primarily as an editorial choice?

AM: Yes, polarization is not some evil plot by politically captured newsrooms. This is a media effect, a byproduct of media ecological change (the internet) and the business reversal from plentiful advertising revenue to desperately seeking digital subscriptions.

Polarization is a far more serious issue than fake news or disinformation. Fake news has a built-in immunity mechanism: the more people encounter fake news, the less they trust online information. The decline of trust is an immune response. So the more fake news there is, the less it really affects people. Except causing anxiety.

Polarization does not have such a built-in safety mechanism. The digital environment favors intensity, and the more intensity is produced, the more it creates outrage, and the more intense the next round must be. Unlike fake news, polarization is a self-driving digital phenomenon.

The competition in intensity propels marginals and repels moderates, weakening the political and cultural center, until the moderates abandon the public debate completely, leaving the scene to the most agitated individuals with extreme views.

DS: You suggest we are moving from “news avoidance” to something deeper: engagement avoidance. What signals tell you that audiences are not just disengaging from news, but from mediated outrage itself?

AM: Bragging, status contest, drama, intensity, animosity, and intrusive empathic engagement are natural features of tribal orality – I explored this theme in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror. But in the physical world, they were restrained. One could not challenge those with greater strength or status, nor could one challenge distant others. Both animosity and empathy were limited to immediate circles. None of these limitations apply in the digital. Drama, empathy, rage, and animosity expand unconstrained by time and space, across social strata without hesitation. This drives people crazy – or at least many of us.

News avoidance has reached a historic high: about 40% of people worldwide are not just uninterested – they actively avoid news. It seems the trend also extends to engagement avoidance, judging by rapidly dropping engagement on social media. Nearly all platforms have reported declining engagement over the last few years. Many people now resort to silent scrolling – they log in but avoid exposing themselves to rage and animosity.

By the way, this rise in avoidance has effectively ended the Trump bump – the outrage-driven subscription growth in 2016-2018. Recent studies cited by Greg Piechota of INMA show that outrage may still drive attention, but not subscriptions.

The other factor driving social media disengagement is AI. It’s claiming more of our daily media diet, taking time from other forms of media consumption – especially from social media. Chatting with AI is more comfortable than getting dragged into online outrage. AI has become another option to escape from social media insanity.

Alas, disengagement does not fix the issue of polarization. Who is more likely to avoid engagement on social media? Those who psychologically suffer from rage and animosity, most likely people with moderate views and habits. Those who thrive on rage stay engaged and propel polarization further.

DS: You often draw parallels between postjournalism and generative AI. In what sense is AI not a break from the current media regime, but its logical extension?

AM: Generative AI emerged, roughly, from the same technological-demographic source as postjournalism: a media development aligned with digital progressives. Journalism sought to depict the world-as-it-is; postjournalism pictures the world-as-it-should-be. And so does Generative AI – it gently curates the picture of the world for us into what it should be, not what it is.

There are multiple technical, ideological, and even juridical reasons behind it. AI designers are afraid of all sorts of liability, political and legal. Imagine, so to speak, a “laissez-faire” AI that learns from all the good and bad that humans produce. Due to the instant speed of interaction, digital reality is more exposed to impulsive, not considerate, human reactions. From the digital version of humankind, this “laissez-faire” AI will absorb rage more readily than reason. In experiments where a self-learning language model was left to its own devices, it copied bad human reactions faster and turned into Hitler within two days or so. So curating AI learning from humans makes sense. But curating by whom?

Anyway, protecting AI from the worst in humans reverses into conditions where AI guides users on what is right and wrong. A child of humankind, AI tends to treat users as gullible children, preferring political correctness and empathic accommodation to subject matter. It’s essentially the stance of postjournalism.

It’s a kind of paradox: Asimov thought that the machine could operate only with data and would be incapable of moral judgment, but we now have generative AI that engages in unsolicited moral considerations. But again, this may not be a bad thing: unsupervised learning would make AI susceptible to copying the worst in human nature, because our digital orality – what AI is exposed to – favors impulsiveness, rage, and tribalism.

But that does not mean that AI is just another mass medium after TV and the internet. We are still at its early stage. Any new medium, when it is at its early stage, tends to serve the function of an older medium. Only then does it unleash its own capacities. When AI matures, it may trigger the final digital reversal – the reversal of the carrier of consciousness from biological to non-biological, an event also known as the Singularity.

DS: If digital reversal has already occurred, what aspects of journalism and media authority do you believe will never return, regardless of better technology, better ethics, or better business models?

AM: We are losing cognitive delay, sustainable inner focus, rational reasoning, linearity and sequentiality of thinking. These were all sensory-cognitive characteristics fostered by writing. They defined how the literate mind and society worked. Digital orality is immersive, impulsive, multitasking; it favors reflexes over reflection, has a short attention span, and reacts to intensity better than to subject matter. This is our new media ecology, driven by digital media. This – digital – human condition is unlikely to vanish, at least not until mind upload or a global catastrophe, whichever comes first.

On a very practical level, journalism is approaching its historical extinction. Printing begot the era of modernity, with representative democracy as its political form and industrial capitalism as its economic form. Journalism worked for both and was part of that era. The era is gone, and so is journalism, living through its likely last decade. It appears journalism rested not on information but on a monopoly over information. The monopoly is gone, and no organizational improvement can undo it.

DS: If institutions have lost their monopoly on truth, discovery, and even validation, what meaningful role can media organizations still play, beyond nostalgia for their former authority?

AM: I am not the right person to seek optimistic suggestions from on this matter. I myself left journalism 15 years ago. I value the skills and mindset that journalism fosters, but as an industry, mass media are largely gone. There may be five to ten years of convulsions ahead. The situation is aggravated by the fact that this local professional decline coincides with the global reversal of human jobs caused by AI. It’s hard to isolate the task of preserving journalism when AI reshuffles or takes away the entire field of human content production.

So just do what you must and prepare for the worst, so that if something better happens, it will come as a pleasant surprise. It is clear that there are no viable market-based strategies for journalism anymore. Those rare cases that are referred as “success” relate either to very specific niches, like The Wall Street Journal, or to auxiliary businesses, like The New York Times, which built platform-sized distribution and sells bundles to supplement news.

Among other adjacent businesses, I think fact-checking has some business potential, if it manages to distance itself from the political enterprise of fighting disinformation. The digital environment is full of uncertainty, so rapid, story-based fact-checking may become a postjournalistic, in a good sense, product. Other interesting directions for newsrooms include ranking anything that can be ranked and organizing events. Basically any extension of the former media brand would do. But I suspect most media managers have already explored these ideas many times over.

DS: Much of the industry still talks about “rebuilding trust”. From your perspective, is trust an obsolete objective and if so, what mechanisms now structure legitimacy, adherence, or belief?

AM: I think institutional trust in mass media is gone, but the reputation of a brand still has value – and actually will always have, especially under the conditions of digital orality. Tribal society does not have developed institutions, but it keeps names and statuses in high regard. So using an old brand for new reputational applications is actually a good strategy.

DS: You’ve said the industry is largely gone, but that professional media skills are more valuable than ever. If journalism is no longer an institution but a set of competencies, what do individuals (journalists, editors, media leaders) need to become in order to remain relevant?

AM: Yes, the media industry is gone, but media skills are in higher demand than ever. In an environment where everyone becomes media, everyone else is still learning, but we journalists already know how to do it. I am very grateful for my 20 years as a journalist and editor. I have thought about this a lot and found that journalism provides two extremely valuable sets of skills for whatever you do in digital: content management and attention management. It is the ability to find relevant information, cut and structure it into a story, package it into a multimedia product, target the right audience, and deliver the product in a timely manner and with proper follow-ups. Every journalist and editor knows what this is about, but this knowledge is far from common outside the guild. These skills are highly transferable to nearly every digital activity. This is a good thing – it’s the severance package we receive from good old journalism.

Interview by David Sallinen, Upgrade Media.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

On March 9, 2026, The New York Times launched the quiz “Who’s a better writer: AI or humans?” Readers were invited to choose the better-written sample in five pairs of texts across different genres. One day later, after 86,000 people had taken the quiz, the result was impressive—or confusing, depending on where you stand on AI–human replacement. 54% preferred the samples written by AI.

The result, of course, raises a troubling question about the future of journalism. However much digital folklore mocks AI and its ability to write or create, we miss what really matters. It is not the current results that matter, but the current dynamics. Judge the potential of AI writing or creativity not by the results achieved in the three years since it appeared, but by the dynamics AI has shown in such a short time.

Indeed, ChatGPT has been in mass use for just over three years, and other LLMs for even less. In that short time, they have taken over a large share of content and creative production that used to be done by humans, and now users are beginning to prefer it—and this is in The New York Times, of all places. Imagine the awkward takeaway: “54% of readers in The New York Times preferred AI-written texts to human-written.”

However awkward or imperfect AI content may sometimes seem, content production is moving in that direction. And now users are signaling that they do not mind and sometimes even prefer AI.

But the alarm comes a bit late. In fact, the takeover began quietly more than a decade ago. The first contest between a bio-journalist and a robo-journalist happened in 2015, when NPR’s Scott Horsley competed with the WordSmith algorithm to write a financial report. That was seven years before ChatGPT. In 2014, WordSmith alone, one of the two leading writing algorithms at the time, produced 1 billion news stories—likely more than all human journalists combined that year. In 2013, probably the first university study comparing robo-journalistic and bio-journalistic writing was conducted in Sweden—and the results were inconclusive. That was the time to worry about AI taking over journalism, not now.

I wrote about robo-journalists in 2016, covering real stories of how writing algorithms were put to work in newsrooms. For some reason, they were little known even in the industry, despite already being widely used at the time.

Awakened now by the obvious threat from AI, many still dismiss the trend with outdated claims that AI cannot produce real creativity. But that is not the point. The point is that AI works faster and cheaper, has no complaints or unions, and readers do not seem to mind. If AI can deliver comparable quality at a much lower cost, why keep humans? Except for the love of humans, of course. That’s what The New York Times quiz unwillingly unveiled.

Anyway, I think the NYT AI–human quiz is a good hook to revisit the true and much longer story of robo-journalism that dates back long before ChatGPT. So here is my 2016 essay, “Robo-journalism: the third threat,” which traces the early competition between human journalists and proto-AI in journalism (slightly abridged[1]).

Robo-journalism: the third threat

The first contest between cyber journalists and bio-journalists ended in a tie.—Three threats to journalism.—News stories about earthquakes and tectonic shifts.—Generative journalism.—Two arguments about “robots’ incapability.”—Road map for robot journalism.—Forecasts and suggestions. (Published in 2016, revised).

The first contest between cyber journalists and bio-journalists ended in a tie

In May 2015, NPR White House correspondent and former business journalist Scott Horsley took on the WordSmith algorithm created by Automated Insights. “We wanted to know: How would NPR’s best stack up against the machine?” NPR wrote. Since NPR is a radio network, a human reporter working there is expected to be very good at fast reporting. Under the rules of the test, both competitors waited for Denny’s, the restaurant chain, to release its earnings report. Scott seemed to have an advantage—he was a Denny’s regular. He even had a regular waitress there, Genevieve, who knew his favorite order: Moons Over My Hammy. It didn’t help… though that depends on how you judge the results.

The robot completed the task in two minutes. It took Scott Horsley a bit more than seven minutes to finish. NPR published both news pieces to offer readers a sort of journalistic “Turing test” (again, it was 2015, 11 years before The New York Times quiz and 7 years before ChatGPT). Can you identify which piece was written by a robot and which one by a human?

The piece on the left was written by the robot. It contains more numbers and uses a drier style. Scott, by contrast, added some unnecessary detail to his version of the financial report, for example with this sentence: “the growth in sales suggests consumers are opening their pocketbooks for pancakes, eggs and hash browns.”

Technically, the robot’s vocabulary is larger because it contains the whole language. But it has to rely on the most relevant and conventional words, the ones with high frequency, and that eventually makes its style dry. In addition, its vocabulary is restricted by its specialized task. For example, a robot would not use culinary or sports terms like “hash browns” or “grand slam” in a financial report. Why would it? That lies outside the program.

Humans behave in the exact opposite way in this regard. A human writer is not limited by word frequency or strict relevance and can freely use rare or colorful words. This broadens the context and makes the writing more vivid. An original, unconventional word use is also what makes a writer’s style. Human writers even feel compelled to use unusual words, because self-expression is part of our social “program.” Robots, by contrast, have no need for originality when producing a financial report.

“But that could change,” NPR suggests. If the owner feeds WordSmith more varied NPR stories and adjusts the algorithm to diversify its vocabulary, the program’s wording could become broader. These things can be modified with ease, unlike humans who require lengthy, if even achievable, learning to write.

So who won the competition? The robot wrote faster and in a more businesslike style. Scott Horsley sounded more “human” (no surprise), but he was slower. The audience for this writing is people in the financial industry. Is the lyrical aside about wallets and pancakes useful to them? As long as the readers are humans, not other robots, it might be.

Ultimately, it’s a tie. Although two minutes versus seven may be critical for radio and for the financial news market.

Academics also set up a competition between a horse and a steam locomotive. Christer Clerwall, a media and communications professor from Karlstad, Sweden, asked 46 students to read two reports. One was written by a robot and the other by a human. The human story was shortened to match the length of the robot’s. The robot story was lightly edited by a human so that its headline, lead, and opening paragraphs followed the usual editorial style. The students then evaluated the stories on several criteria, including objectivity, trust, accuracy, boringness, interest, clarity, pleasure to read, usefulness, and coherence. (The research was conducted before 2014, the year of publication.)

The results showed that each story did better in different categories. The human story scored higher on “well-written,” “pleasant to read,” and similar qualities. The robot story scored higher on “objectivity,” “clear description,” “accuracy,” and others. So once again, humans and robots ended in a tie.

But the most important thing the Swedish study revealed is that the differences between the average text written by a human and one produced by a cyber-journalist may be negligible. This is a crucial point when assessing the future, and even the present, of robot journalism. Critics often say that robots cannot write better than humans. But that frames the issue the wrong way. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be better—how about ‘a good enough story’?” Professor Clerwall told Wired.

Three threats to journalism

The internet emancipated authorship. Millions of people now inform each other about everything happening in the world. The surprising part is that, driven by enthusiasm, many do it for free. Yes, the internet contains a lot of rubbish, but people usually consume information that fits their interests. Content on the Web is not filtered before publication; it is filtered afterward, when it spreads, through the Viral Editor. As a result, legacy media lose their monopoly on shaping the news agenda. This is not only about the decline of newspapers, which is inevitable. The internet threatens old media not just because of the shift from print to digital, but also because the audience itself has become involved in news production and delivery.

Another threat to traditional journalism comes from content marketing. Corporations have also become authors, which means they rely less and less on traditional media as intermediaries. Companies can communicate directly. Brands have become media in their own right.

Content created by amateur writers, or bloggers, improves through cooperation (this is the Viral Editor). Corporations, by contrast, improve their media output through competition for public attention. In this media “arms race,” corporations attract professionals from media companies, adopt innovations, and most importantly shift from direct advertising to social agendas. Brands need an audience; advertising only pushes the audience away, while content marketing can gather it. Although the wider public hardly notices these processes, corporate media activity threatens traditional media just as much as the blogosphere does.

The blogosphere and corporate journalism are still human activities. But legacy journalism now faces a third threat, a soulless and inhuman one. Traditional media lose readers to the blogosphere and advertising to corporations, and their problems do not end there. People in the media may also lose their jobs to writing algorithms, this third threat.

Tired of competing with everything on the Internet, and now also threatened by algorithms, editors perceive this new threat with anxiety or sometimes rejection. Those more familiar with the issue usually say, “Okay, someday robots will write sports news, financial analysis, and weather reports. But they are incapable of anything else.”

That is the wrong take. Robots are already writing news about weather, sports, and finance. On a large scale, this is no longer about the future. The answer to the question of whether robots are capable of anything else is “yes.”

News stories about earthquakes and tectonic shift

This story went down in journalism history. On March 17, 2014, at 6:25 in the morning, journalist and programmer Ken Schwencke of The Los Angeles Times was jolted awake by an earth tremor. He rushed to his computer, where a news story written by the Quakebot algorithm was already waiting for him in the publishing system. Ken skimmed the report and pressed “Publish.” Thus, The Los Angeles Times became the first media outlet to report the earthquake, three minutes after the tremor. The robo-journalist outran its human colleagues.

The next Los Angeles Times earthquake report was published an hour after the second tremor. It is signed by Schwencke, but at the end there is a note: “This post was created by an algorithm written by the author.”

The Quakebot algorithm, written by Ken Schwencke, has been around for two years. It is connected to the U.S. Geological Survey and takes data directly from it: the location, time, and magnitude of an earthquake. It compares this information with records of previous earthquakes in the area and determines the event’s “historic significance.” The data is then placed into a standard template, and the news report is ready. The robot uploads it to the publishing system and sends a note to the editor. The report is far from Pulitzer-worthy, but it allows an editor to publish the news within minutes after it happens. Needless to say, earthquakes are major news in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times website even has a special “Earthquakes” section, which is filled by a trainee robot correspondent.

Another robot handles the crime reports at The Los Angeles Times. It has been producing the Homicide Report since 2007. When a coroner adds information to the database about a violent death, the robot collects the available data, places the case on a map, categorizes it by race, gender, cause of death, police involvement, and other factors, and publishes a report online. If the case seems important, a human journalist later gathers more information and writes a longer news story. If not, the robot’s report is all that appears on the website.

Media critics point out that crime coverage has changed with the arrival of robot reporters. In the past, journalists covered only the murders that seemed most significant. Now robots cover every murder. Looking at data on all homicides shows how they are distributed across different districts on a map, both overall and in categories such as gender and race. These visualized statistics produce “secondary” content that human reporting usually misses. The maps of homicides created by robots also have additional value, for example for the real estate market.

It is worth adding that a criminal reporting robot covers a territory of 10 million people – it’s comparable to the population of Sweden or Portugal. Certainly, a bio-journalist can’t make instant statistical calculations on such a scale.

In such cases, robots help journalists collect facts and do the first processing of data. Journalists then have more time for creative work. This is true. A crime-reporting robot does not really write, and neither does Quakebot, which simply uses preset phrases and templates. They are useful helpers for humans, nothing more.

The cases of financial and sports reporting are a bit more complicated.

Generative journalism

Here is a news story written by the WordSmith algorithm and published by the Associated Press (you don’t have to read it, just look at the quality of reporting).

This news report was produced in less than a second. The robot gathered the facts, compared the relevant market data, and generated a fairly detailed and coherent text.

Even more striking is that in 2014 the Associated Press published 3,000 WordSmith stories in a single quarter—about ten times more than AP journalists used to produce in the same period. By the way, robots are already entering the financial news market in some of the world’s leading media outlets. Another company, Narrative Science, which we might call a leader in generative journalism, provides its Quill robot service to Forbes.

Let’s look at sports reporting to see what is happening there. Here is a fragment of a kids’ baseball league game report written by the Stats Monkey algorithm, a system created by Narrative Science:

Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at Friona despite racking up seven hits and eight runs. Friona was led by a flawless day at the dish by Hunter Sundre, who went 2-2 against Boys Ranch pitching. Sundre singled in the third inning and tripled in the fourth inning … Friona piled up the steals, swiping eight bags in all …

Stats Monkey has a distinctive feature: it uses baseball slang. But that’s not all its benefits. During youth games, parents enter the results into a special iPhone app while the game is still in progress. Fans—the players’ relatives—receive a detailed report about the game even before the teams finish shaking hands on the field. Needless to say, for these fans such reports matter far more than a Super Cup report.

But there is even more to it. In 2011, an algorithm wrote 400,000 reports for the children’s league. In 2012, it wrote 1.5 million. For comparison, that year there were 35,000 journalists in the US. They would not be willing to cover Little League games, no matter how much they were offered. This reveals another aspect of robot journalism: algorithms can cover areas of journalism that human reporters skip because of “low newsworthiness.”

By the way

The digitalization of sports itself opens new possibilities for robot sports reporting. As Steven Levy wrote back in 2012 in an article for Wired, sports leagues now track every inch of the field and every player with cameras and sensors. Computers collect all kinds of data, such as ball speed, throw distance, leg movement, altitude, and other telemetry. A well-trained algorithm can detect when a pitcher’s throw weakens, or when a player starts leaning left before the batter makes a winning hit. Is this information important? Yes, but a human reporter would rarely notice it. Traditional sports journalism cannot capture this kind of detail, just as traditional crime reporting lacks interactive maps showing the distribution and density of crimes.

In other words, robots have already surpassed human reporters in data journalism, in speed, and in the scale of news coverage. But can they beat humans in writing style?

Two arguments for “robots’ inability”

The main argument against the future dominance of robots is that machines cannot create. Two ideas usually follow from this: a robot cannot invent like a human, and a robot cannot write like a human. Let’s look at them.

1) A robot can’t invent

YES. Serendipity is a human experience. A person can stumble upon an accidental invention or discovery for no clear reason—like when an apple falling on someone’s head, or a sudden brainwave. There is also the phenomenon of “eureka,” a moment of sudden insight that is hard to explain in logical terms. For this reason, many people believe that creative breakthroughs will always remain a human prerogative. Humans can act proactively and thrive on creativity, eureka moments, and serendipity. A robot’s actions, by contrast, are predetermined by an algorithm, at least as we understand them today.

That is why skeptics say robots will not be able, for example, to recognize the potential for a sensation in an event among many similar ones, as a human editor does. Moreover, a robot will not be able to decide to exaggerate an ordinary event into a sensation, as editors often do. How do you decide what to hype and what not? An editor knows; a robot doesn’t.

BUT. What if robots can do something humans can’t? They can cross-analyze enormous amounts of data and detect correlations. For example, analyzing consumer and political data might show that owners of red cars tended to vote for Bush. A human would struggle to find and explain such links. In a world of Big Data, cause-and-effect explanations are often unnecessary. Robots can discover striking correlations that matter for marketing, politics, and media. The world is full of them, but human journalists are often unable to see them.

What if an algorithm’s ability to come up with correlations compensates for and even replaces human serendipity, such as eureka moments and even the sense of humor? What if correlation is sometimes even more telling than causation? Facts derived from data may be as interesting and irrational as the outcomes of human creativity.

2) Robots don’t have a sense of style

YES. It’s true, robots don’t aim to write in a beautiful manner, and even if they had such a goal, what would be defined as «beauty»? What is it?

BUT. If beauty cannot be calculated, human reactions to it can. Humans themselves can serve as a measure of beauty for robots. Imagine that all texts and people’s reactions to them—likes, shares, comments, click-throughs—are collected in a robot journalist’s database. Even today, algorithms can identify which headlines, topics, and keywords attract attention by observing people’s reactions. Editors guess, robots know. Human crowd A/B testing replaces the algorithm’s own sense of style.

Now imagine that, with the help of biometrics—eye tracking already allows this—robots could analyze people’s physiological responses to specific words, idioms, epithets, syntactic constructions, and images. Such technologies are becoming more and more affordable; the only question is the amount of data and the processing speed.

Such systems can automatically produce more attractive headlines and texts. But new problems may arise: 1) attractiveness could turn into white noise; 2) the chase for human reactions could make generative journalism degenerative. Still, as long as this is a transitional period, the analysis of human reactions can compensate for robots’ lack of senses.

In other words, for every argument about what robots can’t do, there is an equally strong argument about what humans can’t do. In this competition of capabilities, robots and humans end up in a tie.

The competition has just begun, yet it is already a tie.

Roadmap for robot journalism

Based on what is already known about robot content creators, one can imagine how they are going to conquer the world. Or occupy the journalistic profession, for a start. Here are the key points of how robot journalism is going to operate in the future.

1) Big Data. Algorithms are designed to manage vast amounts of data. Their ability to detect correlations may in some ways replace human creativity. Many of the best human minds are now working on this problem—and they care little about saving journalism.

“If there is a free press, journalists are no longer in charge of it. Engineers who rarely think about journalism or cultural impact or democratic responsibility are making decisions every day that shape how news is created and disseminated,” said Emily Bell, professor at the Columbia Journalism School, in a speech whose title speaks for itself, “Silicon Valley and Journalism: Make up or Break up?”

2) Audience reaction analysis. By monitoring, collecting, and analyzing journalistic texts (syntax, vocabulary) together with people’s reactions to them, algorithms can calculate which texts and which features generate more likes, reads, reposts, and comments.

Some niches may remain where only humans do journalism. These will become a kind of sanctuary for bio-columnists. But on an industry scale, such niches that robots cannot cover will make little difference. Moreover, the share of human-made journalism will keep shrinking as the overall volume of robot-produced content continues to grow.

3) Biometrics. Once robots gain access to human nonverbal reactions and body language, they will be able to calculate subtle reactions instantly. Imagine someone reading a story about Trump: the touchscreen detects sweaty hands, the webcam registers dilated pupils, the microphone picks up faster breathing. This technology can replace an editor’s intuition. Applied to millions of people, it could also become the largest lie detector in history.

Technology is replacing humans with algorithms at a high speed. Why should they stop developing? It’s an open highway, leading to artificial intelligence, by the way.

Forecasts and suggestions

Co-founder and CTO of Narrative Science Kristian Hammond believes that 90% of news could be written by computers by 2030. Hammond also said that a computer could write a story worthy of a Pulitzer Prize by 2017.

I would add that we are entering both a quantitative and a qualitative competition with our cyber-colleagues. In the quantitative contest, bio-journalists have already lost. In the qualitative one, we may lose within five to seven years. (Can’t help but add with hindsight: ChatGPT arrived exactly seven years after that prediction. While a Pulitzer Prize for a robo-journalist hasn’t happened yet. - AM from 2026.)

It is interesting that in the early stage of the transition from human journalism to robot journalism, editors themselves will be the ones to kill the profession. Newsrooms have to produce as much content as possible to generate traffic. Journalists often have no time for serious topics; instead, they are pushed to produce more and more stories for the website. It becomes motion for motion’s sake. Journalism theorist Dean Starkman called this effect the “hamsterization of journalism,” or the Hamster Wheel. Hamsterization reduces the time journalists spend on each story so they can produce more stories—“do more with less.”

Let’s imagine that a good article, which means good journalism, can attract thousands of readers. But what if a thousand stories produced in the same time bring a hundred readers each? When traffic is king, editors don’t need the best journalists; they need fast journalists. They need churn, they need churnalists. Who will an editor choose—a prima donna journalist with rising salary demands and three stories a month, or a faultless algorithm with ever-lower maintenance costs and three stories a minute?

The Associated Press bought the WordSmith service not because the algorithm writes better than humans do. The reason is simple: it writes more and faster. Debates about text quality miss the point. Robots will conquer newsrooms not for belletristic reasons, but for economic and, paradoxically, “professional” ones.

Thus, the robots’ advent is unstoppable. Under these conditions, the most beneficial strategy for newsrooms is to be among the first at the beginning of robotization and among the last at the end of it. Using algorithms to generate texts can be an effective PR strategy today, attractive to both audiences and investors. But when algorithms flood the market, a rare human voice will be in demand amid the robots’ metallic squeak.

In this sense, strange as it may sound, human journalism may become especially valued in the final stage of media robotization. Moreover, editorial mistakes may become particularly valued and even attractive. That will last at least until robots learn to simulate editorial mistakes too.

In 2014, Wordsmith, one of the two most powerful news-writing algorithms, wrote and published one billion news stories. That may be as many as, or even more than, all human journalists produced that year. Part of that billion simply expanded the overall volume of content. The rest already replaced work that would otherwise have been done by humans.

The market is going to demand more and more. Nothing can stop robots from writing as much as they are required to, since their only limit is the volume that people can read. Even this limit will disappear once the readers are also robots.

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] The extended version of this essay was also published in 2018: “AI to Bypass Creativity. Will Robots Replace Journalists? (The Answer Is “Yes”).” Information, 2018, 9(7), 183.

The total engagement and status competition are accompanied in orality by an agonistic mentality, as Walter Ong calls it. He writes: “Many, if not all, oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle.”[1] An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

Ong illustrates agonistic mentality through a story:

In oral cultures a request for information is commonly interpreted interactively, as agonistic, and, instead of being really answered, is frequently parried. An illuminating story is told of a visitor in County Cork, Ireland, an especially oral region in a country which in every region preserves massive residual orality. The visitor saw a Corkman leaning against the post office. He went up to him, pounded with his hand on the post office wall next to the Corkman’s shoulder, and asked, ‘Is this the post office?’ The Corkman was not taken in. He looked at his questioner quietly and with great concern: ‘’Twouldn’t be a postage stamp you were lookin’ for, would it?’ He treated the enquiry not as a request for information but as something the enquirer was doing to him. So he did something in turn to the enquirer to see what would happen. All natives of Cork, according to the mythology, treat all questions this way. Always answer a question by asking another. Never let down your oral guard.[2]

In a literate culture, knowledge is detached from the person, and it is possible to establish status by possessing better information and sharing or withholding this information. In an oral culture, one establishes their status only through others via either cooperation or rivalry with them. The oral utterance is designed to resonate, to be affective and to be engaging. Oral speech-behaviour is always intrusive. Emotionality, which is needed to convey affect for better cooperation and memorization, additionally intensifies the agonistic nature of speech-behaviour.

Since the function of an utterance in orality is not just to convey a subject matter but also to utilize the listener, everyone constantly decides whether he or she should comply with others’ requests. Should one benefit from subordination to the other or challenge them to maintain their own social status and respective privileges?

The constant request for affirmation by everyone to everyone – the request for your time – creates psychologically quite an aggressive environment. Even compassion and empathy, which are innate in the conditions of total collective exposition, are agonistic and intrusive – they oblige. Accepting a gift, an invitation or hospitality with insufficient enthusiasm may lead enmity and war. This is where the honour system takes its roots. “But you ask without respect, you don’t offer friendship, you didn’t even call me godfather.”

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that everyone stands not just for themselves but also for the good name of their family or kin. Orality created a society regulated by honour, a regulative force opposite to both the concept of law and the concept of conscience (both emerged as effects of writing). If the relational bias of orality fostered loyalty and, to some extent, empathy, then the agonistic mentality fostered hubris, a personal and political trait much fought against by the Greeks as soon as they developed alphabetic literacy, as the Greeks believed that hubris underlies tyranny.

According to Ong, “By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.” Proverbs and riddles are used not just to store knowledge but also for engaging in verbal combat. Bragging about achievements or enduring is obviously a status-seeking speech-behaviour and as such is highly agonistic as well. Friendly or hostile name-calling is a legitimate sport in orality. In the same manner as a true sport, a name-calling contest sometimes substitutes for fighting. Or else, ritualistic insults legitimize real fighting that follows – they create the ground to morally justify escalation and physical altercation.

Ong writes that the name-calling contest is a “standard in oral societies across the world” and has even been given a specific label in linguistics: flyting (or fliting).[3] Contests based on mutual insults were widely practiced on the battlefield or in public speech. After writing, they survived there and spread, though in rather more exquisite forms, in rhetoric, politics, jurisprudence, diplomacy, and beyond. Although Ong may not have witnessed it in his time, competitive name-calling has also found artistic expression in rap battles, a descendant of oral poetry. Grand events in this genre are called “epic rap battles,” as if keeping a reference to primary orality.

On the opposite side of agonistic name-calling or vituperation is, according to Ong, “the fulsome expression of praise which is found everywhere in connection with orality.” [4] From the point of view of literacy, the fulsome praise in oral or residually oral tradition sounds “insincere, flatulent, and comically pretentious,” in Ong’s words. Similar to name-calling, the oral tradition of fulsome praise survived the advent of literacy and holds on in some areas of social activity. Toasts, congratulations, and celebratory speeches are exceedingly praising and bombastic in cultures with strong residual orality. In others, their intensity is significantly reduced by literacy but is still detectable.

Whether it is a song by an African griot or a toast by a tamada (the master of ceremonies) at a Georgian wedding, the praise carries its oral agonistic character anyway. It is still a status contest and a competition of competences.

Marshall McLuhan did not use the term “agonistic mentality,” but he certainly saw it as an effect of retribalization. In a 1977 TV interview, McLuhan dismisses the romantic expectations of the host regarding the Global Village:

McManus: But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly.

McLuhan: Oh, no, tribal people… one of their main kinds of sport is a sort of butchering each other. It’s a full-time sport in tribal societies... The closer you get together the more you like each other? No, there is no evidence of that in any situation we’ve heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savagely impassionate with each other.[5]

The retrieval of the agonistic mentality has only intensified in the digital realm. On social media, everyone seeks affirmation from others on a scale unheard of in human history. Not only is the agonistic mentality making a comeback, but it also threatens representative democracy (by amplifying polarization) and people’s mental health.[6] Here is what McLuhan said about these conditions in 1967:

The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity. The global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement on all points. It never occurred to me that uniformity and tranquility were the properties of the global village. It has more spite and envy. <…> The tribal-global village is far more divisive – full of fighting – than any nationalism ever was. Village is fission, not fusion, in depth all the time.[7]

McLuhan sounded his proximity alert 50 years ago.

Read more about features of primary orality retrieved into digital orality in: Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 43. Conversely, people from oral cultures might perceive those from literate cultures as too pretentiously “nice” and smiley, which could be interpreted as a facade concealing hypocrisy and insincerity.

[2] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 67. The case is told with the reference to: Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1923). “The problem of meaning in primitive languages”, in: C. K. Ogden, and I. A. Richards (eds), The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism.

[3] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 43.

[4] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 44.

[5] Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Mike McManus. (1977). 1:22.

[6] Se: Mir, Andrey. (2022, Winter). “The Medium Is the Menace. Ubiquitous digital media offer potent rewards—but at the price of eroding our sensory and social capacities.” City-Journal.

[7] McLuhan, Marshall. (1997 [1967]). “The Hot and Cool Interview” to Gerald Stearn, p. 57-58.

Explaining the incredible complexity of social, political, cultural, and economic life through the clay tablet or papyrus was sometimes labelled techno-determinism. In turn, techno-determinism was condemned for the alleged reductionism of complex social issues to a single factor. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

In ecology, however, a single factor can indeed have deterministic power. The leading global ecological discourse, global warming, is heavily “techno-deterministic” – its determining medium (the “agent of change”) is carbon dioxide, which is excessively released to the atmosphere because of human activity.

The equilibrium in any ecosystem can be disrupted and re-established in a new way by a powerful enough single factor.

In the 1970s, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar ordered one male and four female hippos for his private zoo. By the 2020s, a herd of 140 animals had changed the regional ecosystem. They spoiled lakes and rivers, changed flora and fauna, caused fish to die, ruined fishing, and disrupted the entire habitus of the locals.[1]

From 1995 to 1997, forty-one wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone.[2] Wolves changed the number and behavior of elk and restored the balance of plants. Wolves affected other predators, which led to the restoration and increase of the diversity of birds and rodents. Without wolves, elk suppressed riverside plants, and this drove away beavers. After wolves returned, beavers returned, too, which altered the water system and even the landscape and microclimate. The return of wolves transformed the entire regional ecosystem.[3]

Can the changes in the Yellowstone ecosystem be “reduced” to wolves? Hardly. But wolves have certainly become the determinant of changes. Scientists pointed out that a new equilibrium has been formed in the phenomenon called “trophic cascades,” or how species interact within a food web (i.e., how nature is organized, if one can characterize the near-impossible complexity!).[4] In other words, the wolves caused a cascade ecological effect.

The entire ecosystem can be affected not only by the addition but also by the removal of a single factor.

In India, farmers used to give their livestock diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug that was harmless to farm animals and humans. But the presence of diclofenac in the corpses of farm animals killed 99% of the vulture population. Vultures were a crucial sanitary element in the ecosystem, they served as a natural animal disposal system. The vultures’ metabolism trapped and killed pathogens thriving in carrion, thus preventing the spread of these pathogens. Vultures also suppressed other scavengers who spread diseases. This is particularly important in the conditions of the Hindu religion, in which 80% of the population does not consume cow’s meat and dead cows are left to nature.

After the vultures were almost gone, a huge number of animal carcasses were left to rot. They became a feeding ground for infectious germs and also for feral dogs and rats that spread other diseases, such as rabies. As the vulture population plummeted from 40 million to just 19 thousand, India’s feral dog population increased by at least 5 million, resulting in over 38 million additional dog bites and more than 47,000 extra deaths from rabies.[5] Studies showed that the loss of vultures in some regions raised all-cause human death rates by more than 4%.[6] This is now called the “Indian vulture crisis,” and the country is struggling to restore the vulture population.

In 1958, the communist regime in China announced the Four Pests program aimed at the extermination of rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The “Smash Sparrows Program” led to particularly dramatic consequences. Sparrows were guilty of eating grains, seeds, and fruits, so the Communist Party sentenced them to death to increase agricultural productivity during the so-called Great Leap Forward. Millions of Chinese, especially school pupils and youth, were mobilized to kill birds and destroy their nests. In 1958, in just one day of national anti-sparrow action, 310,000 sparrows were killed in Peking and an estimated 4 million across China, according to the victorious reports of Radio Peking. Sixteen-year-old Yang Seh-mun became a national hero for killing 20,000 sparrows.[7]

The extermination of sparrows disturbed the ecological balance and resulted in surging locust and insect populations that destroyed crops. Along with other governmental policies within the Great Leap Forward, including massive deforestation, the reorganization of farming, and inefficient food redistribution within the planned economy, this led to the Great Chinese Famine, one of the deadliest famines and the largest man-made disaster in human history. The estimated death toll was 15 to 50 million.[8] In some provinces, up to 18% of the population died.

Escobar’s hippos, Yellowstone’s wolves, veterinary diclofenac, and the killing of sparrows were “single factors” that disrupted the ecological equilibrium and altered the ecosystem through the cascade effect. Similar to the domino effect, even a slight disturbance of the balance can release significant forces. These forces belong not to the initial factor or agent but to the masses that come into motion after the triggering factor disturbs the equilibrium. A small domino piece, when pushed in the right place in the system’s equilibrium, can eventually move incomparably larger masses.

The domino effect is mounting but linear. The cascade ecological reaction can also be overlapping (and enlarging because it is overlapping). The next events are affected not just by the previous events but also by the cumulative or reverberating impacts of earlier events. This is called the “ripple effect.” Ripples of different speed and potency can cross, overlap, and turn into rogue waves that reshape ecosystems and civilizations. So, yes, behind a simple media deterministic statement, such as “The wolves changed Yellowstone,” there are complex ecological mechanisms, some hard science, and even some sophisticated math.

In this light, Lance Strate in his 2017 Media Ecology, a must-read textbook in the field, suggests considering “For Want of a Nail,” a rhyme that has been a longstanding part of English folk tradition:

Strate also mentions another variation that includes a message as part of the events: “For want of a rider the message was lost, for want of a message the battle was lost, for want of a battle the kingdom was lost, and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” He writes:

“For Want of a Nail” tells the story of a series of causal events, each one escalating in importance, in a manner that we might refer to as a snowball effect, or butterfly effect, the idea that small changes can reverberate and grow into much larger ones, especially if they become part of a positive feedback loop.[9]

Further, Strate comes up with a possible explanation of the “reductionist” accusations against media deterministic concepts:

But what happens when we collapse the chain, and express the same idea in a more economical, less poetic, summary fashion, that the loss of a nail caused the loss of a kingdom? This sort of abbreviation results in a statement that strains credulity, that most would consider an exaggeration at best. The same might be said of a statement such as, the stirrup caused feudalism.[10]

Strate quotes Neil Postman (his professor in the 1980s), who repeated after Huxley that we all are “Great Abbreviators.” Strate offers samples of such abbreviations:

We might say that evolution caused humans to stand erect, that gravity causes objects to fall to the ground, and that entropy causes systems to seek equilibrium, statements that are properly understood as a kind of shorthand for more nuanced scientific theory.[11]

McLuhan was, of course, among the greatest abbreviators. He did not hesitate to make statements that cut out boring nuances and jumped right to the key points. Strate quotes some McLuhanisms from The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962):

“The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.”

“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.”

“The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures, as Harold Innis was the first to show.”

“Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism, and opposition to government as such.”[12]

From this angle, Strate analyzes the role of the stirrup in forming the socio-economic conditions of feudalism in Medieval Europe, as suggested by Lynn White in his 1964 book Medieval Technology and Social Change.[13] In McLuhan’s interpretation, White “explains how the feudal system was a social extension of the stirrup.”[14] To pinpoint the issue, Strate suggests that if he were to make the claim that the “stirrup caused feudalism,” it would come across as incongruous and perhaps even absurd, despite (or because of) its likeness to a scientific formulation. But it might also “perform a heuristic function, leading to further discussion and investigation.”[15]

Of course, there is a chain of more nuanced and overlapping occurrences connecting the stirrup and feudalism. The stirrup allowed a mounted warrior to use heavy weaponry and the power of a galloping horse for attacks. This created a superior battle technique and allowed extended conquest and expanded military gains. But this military technique also required the production of expensive heavy weaponry and armor. The assistance of servants and foot soldiers was also required. They would help the horseman mount the horse, but they would also fight on his flanks, precisely in the manner of modern infantry accompanying a tank on the battlefield. So mounted warriors simultaneously became the captains of these military units.

Therefore, it can well be said that the new combat technique led to new socio-economic relations. Mounted warriors received a well-deserved share of the war gains and, in return, were obliged to maintain their military units. This entailed knighthood and the vassalage system, with respective economic, military, and political relations between the vassals and the sovereign. Knighthood also created the ethics and aesthetics of chivalry, with its poetry, rituals, and even gender roles: chivalry, in French, meant cavalry or horsemanship. And here we have, finally, the complete picture of feudalism.

This is what Postman meant when he said that technological changes are ecological: “I mean ‘ecological’ in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change.”[16]

Within the ecological framework, media determinism is not reductionism. Media determinism is “inductionism.” It represents the inducing—formative, terraforming—power of media. Media determinism is not the order of things but an optic for looking at this order. Rejecting media determinism means declining a goldmine of insights. And vice versa: as soon as you accept the optic of media determinism, your life becomes a captivating ethnographic expedition.

Karl Marx was a latent media determinist. According to him, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.”[17] On another occasion, in a passage written a century before McLuhan, Marx asked:

Is Achilles possible when powder and shot have been invented? And is the Iliad possible at all when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press bar the singing and the telling and the muse cease; that is, the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?[18]

Vladimir Lenin reworked the media determinism of Marx into media ecological engineering. His famous formula of communism stated: “Communism is the power of the Soviets plus the electrification of the whole country.”[19] As steam engines, according to Marx, brought capitalism, electricity, according to Lenin, should have brought communism. It was not, of course, some “linear” naivety of reductionism. Lenin understood that electricity would favor large industrial enterprises, the cradle of the proletariat, and thus would disturb the small-holding economic structure that suited the agricultural economy based on the peasantry with its small-proprietor consciousness, then the predominant demographic of Russia. The peasantry was receptive to the bourgeois mentality and therefore posed a threat to communism.[20] So electrification was tasked with reshaping the peasant country, much like the wolves in Yellowstone. The ecologists in Yellowstone were ecological engineers, too. For them, wolves were the medium of ecosystem engineering, terraforming (whereas hippos were a medium of entertainment for Escobar, and their reshaping of the ecosystem was an unintended consequence).

Terraforming is the ultimate environmental power of media, whether applied by an ingenious mind or unleashed by itself naturally. New media, when spread widely enough and massively used, transform from an instrument into an environmental force.[21] As soon as people start using a medium, they become a part of the environment created by this medium. The terraforming power of media is not a figure of speech. Humans with their media have physically reshaped the planet and even near space, with both intended and unintended outcomes.

Read more in: Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] See for example: Drost, Philip. (2022, October 25). “Why this doctor is castrating the offspring of Pablo Escobar’s escaped hippos.” CBC.

[2] Smith, Douglas W., et al. (2019, April 25). “Wolf Restoration in Yellowstone: Reintroduction to Recovery.” Series: Yellowstone Science. Volume 24, Issue 1: Celebrating 20 Years of Wolves.

[3] The metaphor of wolves changing an ecosystem was also used by Paolo Granata in his course on media ecology at the University of Toronto. Granata refers to Dennis Cali’s 2017 book Mapping Media Ecology, and Cali in the book refers to an interview with T. David Gordon. The Yellowstone wolves are indeed a compelling example of ecological determinism and a strong response to accusations of “reductionism”.

[4] Smith, Douglas W., et al. (2019, May 16). “The Big Scientific Debate: Trophic Cascades.” Series: Yellowstone Science. Volume 24, Issue 1: Celebrating 20 Years of Wolves.

[5] Burfield, Ian, and Bowden, Chris. (2022, September 28). “South Asian vultures and diclofenac”. Cambridge Core Blog.

[6] Frank, Eyal, and Sudarshan, Anant. (2023, January 21). “How human and ecosystem health are intertwined: Evidence from vulture population collapse in India.” VoxDev.

[7] Time. (1958, May 5). “Red China: Death to Sparrows.”

[8] According to various sources listed in Wikipedia: “Great Chinese Famine”.

[9] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 155.

[10] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 155.

[11] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 154.

[12] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 156-157.

[13] In his 1964 book Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White advanced the theory that feudalism in Europe developed as a result of the introduction of the stirrup to cavalry. The theory spurred the so-called “Great Stirrup Controversy” and many accusations in techno-determinism and reductionism.

[14] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 156.

[15] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 157.

[16] Postman, Neil. (1992). Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, p. 18.

[17] Marx, Karl. (1847). The Poverty of Philosophy. Chapter 2.1, Second Observation, Para 2.

[18] Marx, Karl. (1859). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Introduction, Appendix 1, Section 4.

[19] Lenin, Vladimir. (1920, December 22). “Report on the work of the Council of People’s Commissars.” in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), Vol. XXXI, pp. 513-518.

[20] Mir, Andrey. (2022). “Media-ecological engineering of the Soviets.” Explorations in Media Ecology, Volume 21, Issue 2-3, Oct 2022, p. 143 – 155.

[21] Miroshnichenko, Andrey. (2021). “Media and Responsibility for Their Effects: Instrumental vs. Environmental Views”. Laws, 10, no. 2: 48.

There is a popular belief that Hemingway averaged 10 words per sentence. Studies don’t confirm it – the estimate is closer to 15. He was surely a master of short sentences, but that was a deliberate style. The shortening of speech we see today is not.

Researcher Arjun Panickssery tracked how the average sentence length has plummeted over centuries – from 50 words per sentence for Chaucer and Spenser to 12 wps in the Harry Potter books.

According to Panickssery, this pattern appears everywhere. Newspapers shrank from 35 to 20 words per sentence between 1700 and 2000. Presidential State of the Union addresses dropped from 40 to under 20 wps. Even Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters compressed from 17.4 to 13.4 words per sentence between 1974 and 2013.

Why? Panickssery offers several explanations:

• the shift from reading aloud to silent reading;

• the fact that only the smartest and most educated could read and write in premodern times, naturally producing complex sentences; and

• the rise of journalism with its space limits and punchy style.

The data reveals something important: the shortening of sentences began long before radio, television, or the internet. The shortening of phrasing seems to correlate with the expansion of literacy – suggesting that the underlying cause is the democratization of literacy itself.

The pinnacle of literacy: the semi-literacy of the early modern era

Early writing created craft literacy – a skilled trade of priests and scribes who recorded decrees, taxes, debts, contracts, and so on (see: Media platforms of mind). With rare exceptions of early scholars and authors, writing mostly served bureaucratic functions.

With the growth of scholarship, semi-literacy emerged. Its defining characteristic was that writing expanded beyond recordkeeping into scholarly prose, but the number of readers remained roughly equal to the number of writers. The literati wrote for one another and comprised the audience for one another, as in the Respublica Literaria, the international community of early modern intellectuals.

They didn’t hesitate to construct intricate arguments spanning pages. Not coincidentally, systematic philosophy and speculative thinking flourished during this period. Abstract thinking is tied to writing; before writing, oral people were immersed in concrete situations and did not have a need for abstraction. It seems that abstract thinking fully unfolded precisely in the era of the most complex writing: semi-literacy, when only the most educated wrote and read.

With the rise of printing, literacy became a beneficial social and economic strategy for merchants and craftsmen – the emerging bourgeoisie. Printing was the first industrial enterprise, and profit depended on mass production and consumption, so market forces became an additional driver pulling the masses into literacy.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman noted that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut reached 89-95 percent – probably the highest in the world. Women’s literacy hit 62 percent, also likely higher than elsewhere. This was, of course, the effect of printing and its derivative, Protestantism, which demanded personal reading of the Bible, pushing literacy into the masses even more. It is no surprise that the US became a rare case of a nation established by writing and in writing – and therefore founded on reason and abstract ideals, the effects of literacy.

Mass literacy as the beginning of literacy’s decline

As literacy spread downward and across the demographic pyramid, the writing–reading privilege of the smartest and most educated was diluted by new demographic arrivals. Literacy grew more diverse and inclusive. Popular literature and the mass media emerged, restricting authors by the limits of space and packaging. Some of the most talented journalists came to define literary style: Twain, Whitman, Hemingway, and others. Journalism taught the reading public that “shorter is better.” Not depth of thought, but marketing and speed of interaction began defining writing styles and sentence length.

The semi-literacy of early modernity unfolded the intellectual potential of selected individuals; the democratization of literacy set out to unfold humankind’s collective intelligence, where the overall speed of exchange is more important than intellectual depth.

But there was a trade-off. The growth of literacy through democratization manifested the first signs of post-literacy. Writing grew less abstract and more interactional, intended to amuse the audience. Written sentences became shorter and terser.

It may well be that writing’s greatest effects – abstract thinking and reasoning – reached their peak when literacy was confined to the most educated few, who inevitably practiced heavy and cumbersome prose. Since then, writing has traded scholastic depth for popular breadth and the speed of interaction.

Electricity speeds everything up

The telegraph was the first medium to separate communication from physical transportation.[1] News wire agencies emerged. Telegrams were expensive, charged per letter, encouraging extreme brevity (and, by the way, factual reporting). The telegraphic style and the inverted pyramid – putting the most important information first, which gives the option of cutting less important details – became journalistic standards. As the telegraph tremendously increased the amount of information available to the public through mass media, competition for attention became fierce, further shortening sentences.

The trend accelerated throughout the 20^th century. The Economist analyzed hundreds of New York Times bestsellers and found that “sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.”

Enters orality

It is becoming widely acknowledged that digital media retrieve some features of orality in our communication, or what I call “digital orality.” Paradoxically, however, the features of orality began to grow well before digital media, just as the shortening of sentences did.

As mentioned above, Arjun Panickssery writes that presidential State of the Union addresses dropped from 40 to under 20 words per sentence, with inaugural addresses following suit.

Not only that – it turns out that presidential inaugural addresses have also become “more oral.” There is an app, Havelock.AI, created by Joseph Weisenthal of Bloomberg, that allows users to measure the “scores” of orality and literacy in any text by analyzing specific linguistic features of orality. Using Havelock.AI, Paul Williams found that 19th-century inaugural addresses were predominantly literate in character, while 20th-century speeches showed an increasing ratio of orality. And this happened long before digital media.

Of course, public political speeches are meant to be delivered orally. And yet, the earliest of them demonstrated a high level of literacy. And only sometime in the 1930s did their oral nature become prevalent. Why?

I can think of several major factors that contributed to the growth of orality in ceremonial political speeches and elsewhere in public communication:

1. The penny press. The invention of cheap pulp paper, linotype machines, and rotary presses in the 19^th century drastically reduced the cost of newspaper production. This made the press independent of party funding and dependent on mass readership. The mass media became truly mass. Of course, mass literacy was required – and had largely been achieved in the West by that time.

2. Populism. Getting a taste of public news, the masses entered the public sphere. They became a decisive factor in politics. Not surprisingly, universal suffrage appeared. Politicians needed the masses. The language of politics shifted from literate to oral.

3. Industrial capitalism. Industrial production required the masses; it also required mass media to deliver advertising. The rise of advertising followed, making the media rich and influential and placing them at the center of shaping public opinion.

4. Media boom. The confluence of booming mass media, populist politics, and industrial capitalism created an unprecedented intensity of printed news – remember morning and evening (!) newspapers? The norms of journalistic writing came to shape the style of public discourse.

5. Audiences as a commodity. The mass media pivoted from delivering content for readers to delivering audiences to advertisers. Attracting audiences meant accommodating their tastes and language, inherently more oral than the language of the elites.

6. Radio! Radio became the first non-literate mass medium. McLuhan called radio the tribal drum; radio not only delivered news instantly but also synchronized the masses within national languages, which favored both oral unity and empires.

7. The emergence of the “mass man” (Ortega y Gasset), with Bolshevism, fascism, unions, and so on as side effects.

8. The emergence of electric empires built on printed and radio slogans. The last three empires in human history, the communist, Nazi, and commercial ones, were based on the hybrid of print and electricity. It was the poster plus the god-like voice declamation – newspaper portrait with headline (a sort of dazibao) plus radio – that created these empires. This demonstrated how literacy and orality blended to reach masses who remained more oral than literate (what Walter Ong called “strong oral residue”[2]).

All this happened between 1900 and 1930.

Everything is a media effect. To absorb the masses, the public sphere had to become less literate and more oral. The era of post-literacy had begun. Presidential addresses just reflected this tectonic shift.

Digital orality: the hybrid of talking and writing

The shortening of sentences and the growth of orality go hand in hand. We need shorter phrases and fewer words to converse than to write. The reason is simple: in conversation, meaning comes not just from words but from tone, gestures, facial expressions, context, and rapport. People prompt each other with cues and build conversational structure together, making syntax less demanding. Writing lacks these extra-verbal means, requiring grammatical rigor and lexical precision to make sense.

In other words, writing has to be complex, while oral conversation provides richness of expression by employing extra-linguistic drama and acting, which allow language to remain simpler in both grammar and vocabulary.

The shortening of sentences and the growth of oral features started with mass literacy and accelerated with electricity. Now, digital media are completing the reversal of literacy and the retrieval of orality. Digital technology sped up printing into typing and created texting, a hybrid of spoken and written language. Like oral speech, texting is immersive and conversational. Like writing, texting separates words from the speaker to deliver them beyond immediate conversation.

Instead of nonverbal means of primary orality – tone, gesture, facial expression, and rapport – texting uses their digital substitutes: emojis, gifs, and abbreviations, thus allowing acting and drama by typing-and-tapping, relieving us from the rigor of literate grammar and vocabulary.

This hybridization creates digital orality – a state of mind and culture that detaches people from physical reality while immersing them in digital behavior. Digital orality is interactional, and this contributes to a further shortening of verbal structures.

Texting: cut the talk – cut the thought

Texting substitutes and suppresses both face-to-face conversations and long reading. What happens to our language capacity when digital orality replaces print literacy? More importantly, what happens to how we think?

When practiced regularly, extended and abstract vocabulary, along with complex grammar, required significant cognitive effort. By detaching words from situations, writing isolated their lexical meaning and enabled new cognitive structures. This is how writing not only reflected abstract thinking but also prompted it.

If there are no cognitive needs for abstraction, there are no words for them. Digital orality reduces the need for abstract thinking by immersing us in situational perception, just as orality did. Texting – the medium of digital orality – additionally shrinks grammar and vocabulary. Use it or lose it. Both the need and the means for complex expression are shrinking.

This might resemble a chicken-or-egg dilemma. If our mental abilities are primary and writing is secondary, then texting just simplifies how we express ourselves—no big deal. People stay as smart as they were when everyone read books; our expression just shortens to match digital speed.

But if it was writing that shaped the cognitive capacity for abstract thinking – and it was – then the shrinking of language means the shrinking of thought. It’s not that just one aspect of our life – digital – is becoming less demanding of expression and thinking. As this aspect grows to replace everything else, our general faculties of expression and thinking adapt to accommodate the increasing demand for speed and interactivity, while neglecting depth and reflection.

New media change how we think, not just how we express ourselves. The major transformation is the demise of literacy, which leads to the simplification of language and thinking in the fashion of orality – for instant connectivity and interaction. It started before smartphones and social media, but now texting is completing the process, expanding its effects from communication to cognition.

These changes run much deeper and are more harmful than the usual suspects of digital media: post-truth, fake news, or polarization. Digital media rewire our brains by replacing inward reflection and abstract thinking, typical of literacy, with oral-style thinking focused on immediate interaction.

One can say, well, this is the world we are going to live in, so cognitive “acclimatization” is inevitable and even required. Media evolution is inexorable, indeed, especially at a global scale. But there is always room for personal choices, if we want to preserve human agency and underlying cognitive capacities, like abstract thinking and the richness of expression. To pursue this choice, one needs to “deconstruct” digital orality back into joyful orality and hardcore literacy – into live human interactions and deep reading, which is essentially the foundation of counter-digital media literacy.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Carey, James. (1983). “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph.” In: Carey, James. (1989). Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society.

[2] Ong, Walter. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.

For the media industry, it resembled the classic “good news, bad news.” The New York Times reported 1.35 million new subscribers, reaching a total of 12.8 million, on the exact same day The Washington Post revealed unprecedented layoffs: one-third of its staff, including 300 journalists.

Everyone, of course, read the Times’ 12.8 million figure as proof that journalism can still be profitable if you know what you’re doing. But is it? Is what The New York Times sells really journalism?

While the largest news orgs struggle to acquire another thousand, or even hundred, subscribers, The New York Times reports adding subscribers by the millions. How is that possible? Is it the logic of “the winner takes it all”? Many people in the industry and beyond tend to agree with this explanation, and it obscures the real question: what exactly those millions of Times subscriptions are.

Does the Times really sell news? Of course it does—an incredible volume of news. But is news what’s actually driving those 12.8 million subscriptions? Well, it’s complicated.

Look at the chart reflecting subscription dynamics for news, non-news products, and their bundles over the past four years.

It’s clear that core journalistic products—print newspapers and digital news-only subscriptions—have been in steady (print) and sharp (digital) decline. One might argue this is just price sensitivity: if news-only costs the same as a bundle that includes games, cooking, product reviews, and sports, readers will naturally choose the bundle. And the numbers confirm it—bundles are growing. But that also reveals the real driver: non-news products are what’s actually attracting subscribers. News is becoming the add-on, not the draw.

Financial data complement the picture of subscription dynamics. Unlike list prices, ARPU—average revenue per user—shows that, after promotional discounts wash out, NYT bundles generate roughly the same revenue per user as news-only subscriptions.

For Q3 2025, the ARPU numbers were:

• Bundle and multiproduct: $12.84

• News-only: $12.67

• Other single product: $3.51

• Total digital-only ARPU: $9.79

But bundles grow while news-only declines (see the first chart). What do these data say?

1. Digital “news-only” subscriptions remain a product for hardcore users who are willing to pay premium prices and have no interest in lifestyle content. This segment is substantial but shrinking.

2. Bundles, by contrast, cost the average user about the same as news alone but include entertainment and lifestyle content. This is where subscription growth—both in numbers and revenue—is coming from.

In other words, The New York Times has learned to sell news plus “something else” (see: “Journalism in search of a cute little monkey”). And that something else isn’t tote bags, wine clubs, events, or travel packages—the kinds of perks many publishers tried in 2012–2016. It’s lifestyle content that sits naturally alongside journalism: games, cooking, product reviews, sports.

Curiously, in the latest report (Q4 2025), the NYT announced it “will discontinue reporting digital-only subscribers and ARPU by the categories of bundle and multiproduct, news-only, and other single product.” In other words, the growth or decline of news and news-related subscriptions will no longer be publicly visible. The timing is telling: if a company is proud of its core business indicators, it promotes them, not “discontinues” reporting them.

It may even be fair to say that the overall subscription growth at the Times does not reflect but rather masks the actual state of the news business.

To push these speculations to their extremes:

1. The New York Times has grown its auxiliary content business to the degree that its news business is turning into an auxiliary business.

2. The New York Times is a content production platform that also happens to host a traditional newsroom and sell news.

Make no mistake: both points reflect an incredible achievement and a unique business model the Times chose to build in response to the end of the Trump Bump—the surge in subscriptions driven by outrage-fueled coverage of Trump from 2016 to 2020. By 2020, it became clear that peak could not last. The Trump Bump may well have been the last gasp of news business in the 500-year history of journalism.

The Trump Bump—the surge in subscriptions at The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2016–2020. Charts from Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The Media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization.

The Times leadership recognized this and made a radical pivot. The model they pursued was no longer a news business but a platform business. When you build a distribution network with sufficient reach, you can sell anything through it. With really massive reach, you can even you can even sell “nothing,” like air or silence—the reach itself becomes value (see: “The Platform Paradox”).

So the question is: how much reach is needed to become a platform in the niche of mass media and adjacent content? The NYT invested heavily in growing its subscriber base, including acquiring The Athletic in 2022 (adding 1.2 million subscribers at once). In 2019, the Times set a goal of 10 million digital subscribers by 2025—they hit it in 2022. They’ve now set a new target: 15 million by 2027.

The New York Times keeps growing its subscription base, but that growth has slowed over the past three years. This suggests the platform may be approaching its natural limits. The recent decision to no longer report subscription statistics by categories may signal a shift in focus from extensive subscriber growth to more sophisticated product bundling. If the limits of growth are indeed being reached, then the intricate dance of bundling becomes even more important for extracting maximum value from each subscriber while retaining as many as possible.

Needless to say, this transformation required exceptional business and organizational talent to envision and execute. The New York Times:

• seized the moment when other viable prospects for the news business had largely vanished,

• leveraged its brand, arguably the strongest in the world, and

• converted everything it had into a new business model.

This is what The New York Times business is today. It’s a content platform—a niche Amazon (sense the irony?). Actually, it’s exactly like Amazon in its early years, when it sold only books and used content products to build reach and then to sell whatever can be sold.

Where does journalism fit there? Somewhere inside—where it’s still fit to print.

However, another reading of this business model is also possible. At The New York Times, selling “something else”—sports, crosswords, recipes—subsidizes news production. This is remarkably similar to how advertising, comprising 80% of media revenue, subsidized journalism throughout the 20^th century until the internet destroyed that model. Seen this way, The New York Times has found a new business model to maintain its news production at a level matching its brand. At least for now.

So it’s not “the winner takes it all”—not at all. It’s a new business model. And yet, how many media organizations can realistically build a subscriber base of 10+ million and transition from a news business to a platform business that subsidizes news? Except for the Times, likely none.

Update from February 22, 2026:

A slightly different angle by Aakash Gupta—Gupta comments on the chart that uses the same subscription data, but visually less compelling .

Gupta suggests that the NYT might deliberately suppress news-only subscriptions by charging high prices to foster readers’ (now rather users’) habit, or dependence on multiple products:

“That looks like a news collapse. But the NYT deliberately killed its standalone news product. They stopped marketing it. They made it nearly impossible to buy a news-only subscription on their website. They priced the full bundle (News + Games + Cooking + Athletic + Wirecutter) at $2/month introductory, cheaper than a standalone Games subscription....

This chart shows a news company that built an attention ecosystem where Wordle gets you in the door, Cooking keeps you at breakfast, The Athletic owns your commute, and by the time you think about canceling, you’d lose four products instead of one.

The NYT figured out that the way to fund journalism in 2026 is to make sure you can’t quit the crossword.”

Update from April 8, 2026.

In teh debate on why NYT does not have good engagement on X/Twitter, Joe Weisenthal posted an interesting chart:

It is also clear from the chart that the Trump bump (selling the Trump scare) exhausted its potential in 2021. The pandemic boost of 2020-21 was also the last gasp of the Trump bump.

The next, current surge in NYT valuation is a result of the new marketing strategy: building a platform large enough to sell bundles, with news becoming a secondary asset that is subsidized by the best-selling NYT product, entertainment bundles.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)