McLuhan knew nothing about the internet or AI, yet he identified their media effects, which barely glimmered in electronic media, seen by almost no one except him. An excerpt from an essay in the new Canadian journal “2067”; read the full essay here.

McLuhan wrote that electric wires extended human nerves beyond the body: “man succeeds in translating his central nervous system into electronic circuitry.” That extension changed people and moved society from the era of mechanical tools into the electric era.

When the electric grid extends the “grid” of nerves and neurons into the outside world, humans can “experience” remote events instantly and personally. The telegraph started this by detaching communication from transportation, making electric messages instant. Radio and TV followed by adding live sound and moving images, letting millions “be there” at the scene, together and in real time. A distant revolution—or any other event—could now happen to vast audiences simultaneously the moment it was televised.

“What emerges is a total field of inclusive awareness. The old patterns of psychic and social adjustment become irrelevant,” wrote McLuhan.[4] He argued that electronic media gave humans a god-like ability of omnipresence in the form of a “disembodied spirit,” “the angelic discarnate man of the electric age who is always in the presence of all the other men in the world.”

The telegraph, radio, and TV formed a clear progression: they extended the central nervous system into the world through wires, each step bringing communication closer to natural audiovisual perception. The internet went much further by turning passive witnesses into active participants. Electricity sped up communication; digital media sped up interaction. McLuhan’s idea of the electronic extension of the central nervous system fully unfolds only with digital media. Now we do not just observe remote events but interact instantly and remotely with the entire world. It is internet users who become fully fledged “disembodied spirits” and “angelic, discarnate people.” Because of this interactivity, momentous events around the world are not just televised for “empathic involvement” (another of McLuhan’s term) but trigger real empathic engagement and come to our homes, streets, and campuses.

Smartphones made online omnipresence portable—isn’t that a “god-like ability” on a new level? The wired has turned into wireless and become an even more powerful, more natural‑like extension of personal presence. The internet is a far better extension of nerves and neurons than television.

Yet even the internet did not reveal the full depth of McLuhan’s concept. It’s AI that now completes that logic. AI extends our nerves and neurons so effectively that it begins to replace them with its own processing capacities, rerouting our perception of the world directly into itself, perceiving the world for us and, increasingly, instead of us.

McLuhan knew nothing about the internet or AI, yet he identified these media effects that barely glimmered in electronic media, seen by almost no one except him. Here is my favorite quote, in which McLuhan thought he was describing electronic media, but in fact he described the digital era, prophesying—almost in passing—the emergence of AI:

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness [emphasis is mine. — A.M.], when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.

This is the one, highlighted: “We approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness…” Ten years ago, many would have read it as a prediction of the internet. Now, we can see that this passage, written in 1964, predicted AI.

This is an excerpt from an essay in a new Canadian journal, “2067,” on applied McLuhan in the AI era, covering:

• I. Media as Human Extensions and AI

• II. The Global Extension of the Central Nervous System and AI

• III. Digital Tribalism in the Global Village

• IV. Digital Overload, Numbness, and Amputation and AI

• V. Surviving the Digital Maelstrom

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)

McLuhan’s analytical approach is particularly relevant as we move to the next medium that will likely change everything: AI. So, I have selected five of his ideas to help make sense of digital media and the emerging AI. An excerpt from an essay in the new Canadian journal “2067”; read the full essay here.

I. Media as Human Extensions

McLuhan used “media” broadly, to include any tools, technologies, or interfaces that mediate our interactions with environments. According to him, “All media are extensions of some human faculty — psychic or physical.”[1] He even put it in the title of his major work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

The idea was not new. Many thinkers realized that technology enhances human capacities, enabling us to reach further and faster than the body alone allows. Sigmund Freud wrote in his 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents: “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.” McLuhan took this insight to the next level, turning it into the central concept for understanding media.

Some extensions are obvious: a hammer extends the fist, and a knife extends the teeth and nails. This means they enhance the functions of these organs, making humans “prosthetic gods” compared to animals. The same applies to cognitive faculties: writing is the extension of memory.

Other extensions require some imagination and abstract thinking. The machine gun extends the teeth and nails too, way beyond what a knife can do. Clothing extends the skin, but so does the fence, which shields humans from dangerous surroundings, just as the skin protects the body. And so do city walls and the city itself: they extend and thicken our skin, serving as extra layers between us and outside dangers.

Of course, this is not the only thing the city does, but this lens opens a new way to see how technologies work. Writing extends memory into an external device, but so do computers, the internet, and now AI. We keep most of our memory outside ourselves, which tremendously enhances our cognitive powers, completing the transformation into “prosthetic gods.”

Some abstract examples of extensions made by McLuhan himself sounded poetic in his time, but in the digital era they read like design descriptions. For example: “Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”[2] This is basically the core principle of the large language model (LLM), described sixty years before ChatGPT.

Grasping the concept of extension, you can’t help but apply it to different technologies and come up with strikingly McLuhanesque conclusions. Try it. For example, a rocket ship is obviously the ultimate extension of the foot, and the nuke is the ultimate extension of the fist. Is AI the ultimate extension of humankind? (The answer is “yes.”)

This is an excerpt from an essay in a new Canadian journal, “2067,” on applied McLuhan in the AI era, covering:

• I. Media as Human Extensions and AI

• II. The Global Extension of the Central Nervous System and AI

• III. Digital Tribalism in the Global Village

• IV. Digital Overload, Numbness, and Amputation and AI

• V. Surviving the Digital Maelstrom

  ---

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 presentation is an outline of a work in progress that will soon be published as a book with a catalogue of practical tips, followed by the basic media-ecological principles that frame them. The working title is Counter-Digital Media Literacy: Practical Tips. For now, this is just a lazy blog post—mostly to see how the ideas look after being laid out. But anyone with comments or criticism is most welcome.

And yes, there is a lot of other funny stuff there.

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 surprising resilience of the book

The data show that print books remain surprisingly resilient. Despite the incredible growth of reels and video consumption, despite the galloping digitalization, the number of people who say they still read print books remains relatively stable. Or, one could say, the decline has not been as dramatic as might have been expected: from 72% in 2011 to 64% in 2026, as a recent Pew Research study revealed.

Maybe people will stick with books? Maybe, burned out on digital life and exhausted by screens and newsfeeds, they’ll drift back to the long, deep, slow reading that only books can offer? Maybe books will even stage a comeback?

Optimists often point to vinyl as proof that obsolete media can rise again. After being crushed by the CD boom of the 1990s and early 2000s, vinyl has indeed made a remarkable comeback. For almost twenty years, vinyl listening and collecting have climbed steadily, with sales and revenue rising—and, quite surprisingly, with Gen Z fueling much of that growth.

In 2025, total vinyl record sales revenue surpassed $1 billion for the first time since 1983, representing 76% of all non-digital recorded music sales in the US that year. Source: Jordan, Jilayne. (June 5, 2026). The Surprising Resurrection of the Vinyl Records Industry in the Digital Age.

The factors of book decline

The “comeback” of vinyl does look like a “reversal of reversal,” as a friend of mine suggested. What if a process driven by a digital reversal, such as the reversal of book literacy, reaches its limits or full extent (the conditions of reversal, according to McLuhan) and then reverses into its opposite, back to its previous condition? Can the decline of book reading hit rock bottom and bounce into its own reversal, just as vinyl listening did?

No. Unfortunately, there are several factors that do not allow for the “reversal of reversal” of literacy—the comeback of the book.

1. Industrial decline. The book industry was an ecosystem in which production, distribution, and consumption sustained profitability, which, in turn, maintained the infrastructure. A decline in one component affects the entire ecosystem. Amid shrinking markets, especially in non-fiction and academic publishing, many publishers have shifted to small print runs and very high prices, relying on bulk sales to a limited number of institutional buyers such as libraries. Such a publishing strategy does the opposite of what publishing is supposed to do: it effectively isolates authors from readers forever.

Luckily, digital media provide incredible post-industrial opportunities of emancipated authorship. With the right skills and determination, an author can become an indie publisher with global reach. Look no further for an example: my books are sold from Argentina to Denmark and New Zealand because 1) I have a new industrial-scale ecosystem at my disposal (Amazon), and 2) previous work in print media equipped me with all the required skills—a nice severance package we journalists received from the dying profession.

A revelation of the secrets from “behind the scenes.” The rearview-mirror photo for the cover of Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror was taken in my car. The photo of the “dead trees” for the cover of Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers was taken next to my apartment in Kingston (the trees are not dead—it was just winter). Professional photography and design might have added some surplus value, but actually not much, and certainly not enough to make a crucial, threshold-level difference.

Post-industrial infrastructure for creativity, along with technologically emancipated authorship, gives a versatile author with some media expertise all the necessary tools. That is a great gain. Alas, there is a trade-off: the factors driving book reading down are not on the production side—they are on the consumption side.

2. The decline of long reading. The habit of long reading has been brutally undermined by the newsfeed. As text reversed into texting, writing and reading have turned from a cognitive exercise into a behavioral activity. Literacy has reversed into orality, but now it is digital orality: instant, impulsive, and conversational.

This oral-like way of receiving information about the world through digital devices rewires the brain. Long reading becomes too slow and even burdensome at the level of neurophysiology. But even that is not the harshest blow dealt to long reading.

3. Media competition. Slow media with weaker sensorial triggers cannot compete for human time with fast media rich in sensorial triggers. The fastest and most seductive media formats compete with one another for human attention. Slow, deep reading has no chance of even entering that competition. Time scarcity is crucial, and there is no plausible development leading to more favorable conditions for deep and long reading. That train left the station long ago.

But what about vinyl?

Why, then, has vinyl returned? As a format of media consumption, vinyl is slow and fairly demanding. In digital media, persuasive design strives to eliminate friction. Vinyl goes against the grain. It requires special equipment and arrangements for listening, as well as a significant chunk of time devoted to that particular activity. In this respect, vinyl is remarkably similar to books. This is, in fact, a very interesting and seemingly promising comparison.

What does vinyl do that books cannot? There are two things.

1) Vinyl allows you to do something else at the same time, such as partying, spending time with friends or loved ones, or doing chores. Books do not allow this. Reading is highly exclusive—it demands your full attention, leaving no space for multitasking.

2) Vinyl massages (McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage) the sensorium with powerful sensations. Some insist that the sensation—the quality of sound—is even exquisite. Books cannot do that.

Most importantly, vinyl has not actually returned. It has merely regained some ground after its archenemy, the CD, died. The same study of vinyl (the brilliant one, I recommend) testifies: “While this growth is impressive, it should be noted that it represents only 9% of US recorded music sales revenue across all formats. Digital downloading and streaming remain the primary ways people listen to music.”

So, by the return of vinyl, we mean a noticeable increase within what remains a very small share of the market. Is it possible for books? Maybe, why not?

Another interesting factor contributing to vinyl’s “comeback” was the marketing strategy of leading pop stars. They found that releasing music in album format suited their touring strategy: a vinyl album provides a coherent body of material around which a concert tour can be organized. Concerts remain a major—if not the major—source of revenue for many musicians.

Alas, writers generally cannot tour with book-sized products of their art. Public events such as book readings and signings cannot become “concerts” matching the scale of the product. Yet, there may be a lesson here. Proactive promotion of the format may revive public interest in it. If you are the Taylor Swift of book literacy, advocating for book reading may increase the public appetite for it.

In the meantime, another game changer is arriving: AI. AI emancipates music production even further. It makes music creation available to more people not only technologically but, so to speak, creatively as well. Now even the lack of a musical ear or musical education is no longer an obstacle: AI can compensate for almost any lack of skill or talent. As with AI-assisted book production, the skill that matters most is no longer book literacy, music literacy, or talent, but prompt literacy.

How will AI affect the recording industry in general and vinyl in particular? There is a premonition that nothing good will come of it—not even for those musical “creators” who use AI. Their overproduction may corrupt the art, undermine the industry, and contribute to the broader inflation of publicly traded creativity.

What about the “reversal of the reversal”?

In conditions of accelerated time, any reversal escalates and reaches its extreme, its limits, or its full potential, and thus quickly creates the conditions for the next reversal. But the next reversal never leads back to the “before” condition. It always reverses some other qualities or features, escalating into a chain of reversals in which next reversals are always adjacent but never symmetrical. It is not a pendulum.

The clearest illustration is feminism. When patriarchy reached its full potential, it reversed into feminism. But when feminism reached its own extremes, it did not reverse back into patriarchy. Instead, it reversed into sex fluidity and trans activism. And even though some forms of trans activism may resemble patriarchy (men in women’s spaces), it is not the patriarchy it used to be. (See Feminism as a media effect and the chain of gender reversals, a chapter in The Digital Reversal.)

All subsequent reversals reverse something new. In fact, one of the two essential features of reversal is not reversal itself but the reaching of limits and extreme forms. This is what dominates the chain of reversals in accelerated time: a sequence of extremes perpetually reversing some previous functions or features. From this point of view, not only is the previous stage impossible after a reversal, but no stage is sustainable or even lasting; everything escalates into “a McLuhanian apocalypse,” to use Carlos Scolari’s metaphor.

So the logical exercise of a “reversal of reversal” does not lead to the possibility of a book comeback—or a comeback of anything that was previously reversed.

What remains of the book?

The remnants of book reading will survive in the sanctuaries of those who value long reading and are determined to make the necessary effort. Print books seem resilient—in studies that ask people whether they read books. Surprisingly, there are no studies measuring the actual time spent with books as a share of the daily media diet. But there are many studies tracking the dynamics of media consumption. They all show the dramatically shrinking share of traditional media. Book reading is likely simply invisible in the average media diet today, despite people saying that they still read.

In The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse fantasized about Castalia—an isolated province of intellectuals pursuing knowledge as an aesthetic synthesis of the arts, sciences, and meaning. But a better reference may be the historical Respublica Literaria, an invisible college of intellectuals that emerged in the late Middle Ages and ushered in the Enlightenment. Literacy was on the rise, but it was “semi-literacy” (Havelock)—not yet mass literacy, but literacy limited to educated circles, when the number of writers roughly equaled the number of readers.

Now we are approaching the same conditions, but from the other end—from the end of full literacy—rewinding history backward toward semi-literacy. In a sense, Substack is already a parody of the Respublica Literaria: an enclosed space where the number of readers roughly coincides with the number of writers.

There are factors that can boost book reading to some degree: digital burnout, vintage or status consumption (as McLuhan suggested, old media may sometimes return as art objects), educational efforts or vigorous advocacy for books.

There are also factors that drive book reading into further decline, and the greatest of them is generational change. New generations are arriving that have never read a single book. There is no reason for them to suddenly start, and no advocacy for books can change that on a statistically significant scale.

There will be, perhaps, a tiny fraction of the new generations that picks up book reading in affluent and educated families. Compared to total annihilation, the preservation of book reading in some demographics seems benevolent—at least to those demographics. They preserve a longer attention span and greater capacities for deep concentration, self-reflection, and long-term planning. At the same time, the isolation of such capacities in certain demographics will signify a new digital divide.

The term “digital divide” once meant social inequality: affluent demographics had better digital access. But that, too, has reversed. Statistics now clearly show that “vulnerable” demographics have much “better” digital access—they spend substantially more time on digital devices than affluent demographics. Conversely, affluent families have better access—often deliberately enforced access—to book reading. This is a new digital divide.

Orality and literacy shape different kinds of minds and cultures. So does digital orality: it rewires the brain and dismantles cognitive capacities cultivated by literacy—concentration, delayed gratification, self-discipline, rationality, long-term planning, and so on. Therefore, the new digital divide will also be a cognitive divide—a divide in cognitive capacities between demographics capable of deep reading and those that are not.

Perhaps this is the single most profound reason for advocating book literacy in schools and, especially, in families. (And this is also the essence of counter-digital media literacy—a work in progress).

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)

“A neo-Romantic hyper-Modernist whose milieu is composed of trees and screens, wind and wires, mythology and media, sentences and sensations” – that’s B. W. Powe. His formative years at the University of Toronto were unique: he was a student of two outstanding Canadian visionaries, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. McLuhan’s media ecology and Frye’s “literary ecology,” as Powe calls it, shaped who B.W. became: a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist, philosopher, a teacher at Toronto’s York University, and portraitist of modern Canadian intellectualism; he has personally met and known eight Canadian prime ministers and many other northern luminaries.

We met on June 8, 2026, in Stouffville, just north of Toronto, to talk about his memories of McLuhan, refined over the years. I sent my main questions to BW in advance, so he’d have time to recall special memories. It paid off: he came up with untold stories about McLuhan—real gems, as you’ll see.

Source: McLuhan Galaxy. B.W. Powe Nominated for the 2022 Medium & Light Award, February 10, 2022. York University Associate Professor Powe won the prestigious Medium & Light Award, which recognizes the universal dimensions of the life and work of renowned Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan.

AM: How did you meet McLuhan?

BW: I left undergraduate school with the intention to write. I traveled for a year or two with manuscripts under my arm, novels and poetry. None of them were good, but writing was what I wanted to do with my life. Then I was lucky to win a scholarship and go to the University of Toronto, where I studied with McLuhan and Frye.

I was eager to get into McLuhan’s class. I wanted to be in his presence—because of his books and my obsession with media. It was 1978; I was twenty-three. It turned out to be the last class he taught. There were only six students. The class was really an informal discussion in his office: he’d sprawl on the couch and we’d listen. His health wasn’t good. He would fall asleep at times. But to me he was a larger-than-life figure, almost mythic. I listened more than I talked. I wanted to absorb what he was saying.

Keep in mind that he’d become isolated by that time. To many at the University, he was no longer the media guru, no longer the major cultural figure that he’d been in the ’60s and early ’70s. Yet he was one of the most original minds of our time. So, there was bitterness in him about being sidelined, a certain crankiness and anger. At his own University, an English literature professor who’d become the world-renowned media guru was regarded with skepticism, if not contempt. My MA adviser discouraged me from taking his class, saying I’d find it useless. That, of course, only made me more determined to study with McLuhan.

AM: How would you explain his loneliness or even rejection in academia? Was it envy? Was it a backlash against his popularity in mass culture?

BW: He’d been a household name for years, so yes, there was envy. There was also territoriality: he explored many subjects from many angles; he was always crossing into someone else’s specialty. And there was, as you said, the mass-culture aspect of his fame. Some people in academia took that as a sign that he wasn’t “the real thing” —unlike them, the “true academics.” He was iconoclastic about what he said and did, and that too was regarded as anti-academic. He was also complex in his relations with others; he could be very provocative and forthright.

But it was different for us, the students. There were only six of us, we got a lot of attention. I think he was sensitive to how isolated he was, and it affected the way he spoke to people. When he was with those he saw as part of his circle, he was attentive and protective. It was his way of insulating himself from the unremitting hostility he was experiencing outside this circle. To those who really listened—his students—he was congenial, collegial, and cordial. He was deeply welcoming; he’d always make time for you. You could go to see him, and he’d walk out of a meeting to talk to you.

He had an extraordinary sense of humor—he loved to laugh and loved to make others laugh. He kept files of jokes that he pulled out when the moment called for it. Jokes mattered to him: as he said, there’s always a grievance behind a joke. A joke often reveals your ground, your context. He encouraged us to bring in jokes, too. I’ve tried doing that in my own gatherings.

His congeniality showed in many ways. He would invite our class to his home around Thanksgiving and before Christmas and over Easter. He’d bring us over and ply us with wine or beer, something that would get you untenured in a hurry today. That’s how I came to know Corinne and Teri McLuhan (wife and daughter — A.M.). Corinne was a warm, witty hostess. She liked to make Punch for her guests and pour alcohol into it. Close friends and colleagues would be there too. Marshall would smoke his cigar, sip his wine, and hold forth. He was happy in his home environment.

Besides the students, you’d see Bob Logan, a young professor, Derrick de Kerckhove, his associate at the Centre for Culture and Technology, and Eric, McLuhan’s eldest son, who worked with him on Laws of Media. I got to know them, and they became lifelong friends. Part of why I still revere and idealize that time is that it felt like a utopian garden of study and ideas, where I could discuss anything with remarkable people.

I think we sensed that McLuhan was teetering on the edge of the abyss. There was a feeling that we had to take what we could from him and preserve and carry forward his legacy. He had a stroke in September 1979, so Bob Logan completed his next class. (McLuhan never fully recovered from the stroke and passed away on December 31, 1980.—A.M.)

AM. Can you share any particular personal story about McLuhan?

BW. One memory stands out: my final exam with McLuhan. He didn’t really like my papers very much. I was 23 and didn’t know anything. All I knew was that I had to create. But he had read some of my pieces in a university newspaper—poetry, stories, that mix of essay and poetics that I was trying, which was in an embryonic state at the time. He’d read some of those writings and liked them. He was genuinely encouraging, and it wasn’t just a professorial pat on the shoulder. I’d written a two-part series on Ezra Pound, and he was fulsome in praise. But not when it came to the student papers I submitted in the course. He thought they were figure without ground—but that wasn’t something I could understand at the time.

For the final, there was an extensive reading list covering science, art, technology and poetry: students had to choose six books and discuss them. We talked, then I asked Marshall a question, and he spoke for forty minutes non-stop. I don’t think he ever knew my first name—he called me “Mr. Powe”. When he finished, he said, “Well, Mr. Powe, that was an interesting conversation. I’ve entered an ‘A’ for you.”

In retrospect, I like to think that maybe I just asked him the right question. One that triggered his thinking and was worthy of his forty-minute monologue. Again, I truly believed my role was to listen, to absorb, not to give an opinion.

And that was it. Then he asked me if I was going to continue in postgraduate school and do my PhD. I said no, I was going to go out and write. He sat back and said, “Well, Mr. Powe, that’s a dangerous road to take.”

Then he invited me for lunch. He said, “Please come by and have lunch, but you’ll come as a friend now, not as a student.” A few months later we had lunch and we talked. You asked about his quirks: he was the worst dresser I’ve ever seen. In his famous article “What if he is right?”, Tom Wolfe mentioned that Marshall didn’t seem to care what he wore, and it was true. That day at the St. Michael’s faculty cafeteria, he was wearing a flowered Hawaiian shirt that was just sort of, you know, verging on the undignified. Not what you would have expected. His conversation over lunch was packed with comments and recommendations. He knew by then I was serious about leaving school to write books, and he said, “Well, Mr. Powe, you’ll have a very interesting destiny.” Looking back, I’m not sure if he meant destiny or fate.

AM. What did he mean when he said writing is “dangerous road?”

BW. I don’t think he meant “dangerous” as in starving, though that was implicit. But that side of it didn’t bother me—it sounded thrilling. He meant stepping off a safer career track and taking the obscure path, following creativity and inspiration, where the words will go. The danger was getting lost, becoming obscure and enigmatic, even to yourself, with no one understanding you. Over time the dangers became clearer: it was impractical, financially precarious, hard on mental health and love relationships, and I eventually realized I couldn’t survive on writing alone and had to become a teacher.

After Marshall had a stroke and returned from the hospital, Eric invited me to see him at the house. There was a communal aspect around McLuhan with Derrick, Bob, and Eric; they became a kind of fraternity in the way they helped Marshall and each other. They helped me, too. They were older and I was just a former student, but they knew I wanted to write, and they stayed in touch, especially Bob, who to this day supports my books and ideas. At one point, Eric hired me to work for his consulting company so I could keep working on The Solitary Outlaw. I taught grammar and rhetoric to businesspeople. The family was supportive, too—Corinne, Michael, Stephanie, Elizabeth and Teri. Teri became a good friend; she’s been encouraging and inspiring ever since. They took me under their wing and made sure I kept going.

The Solitary Outlaw (1987—A.M.) became my first authentic book, and one of the first books to advocate McLuhan’s centrality to communication studies. If I may, it was also one of the first works to recognize Pierre Trudeau, the former prime minister, as an intellectual with a vision of Canada as a cosmopolitan country with a different destiny from both the United States and the European Union. That destiny, for Trudeau, rested, not on civil wars or violent revolution or disruption, but on multilingualism and communications that could link vast, various territories. Trudeau drew on de Chardin’s vision of human interconnection through the evolving noosphere, which also resonates with McLuhan’s global village. He championed many linguistic, cultural identities rather than a national or market identity—a powerful idea. This means a multitude of voices: personae, not persona. Multiple selves, multiform expressions. A cosmopolis, without walls.

AM: It’s well known that Trudeau was in McLuhan’s orbit and that they discussed politics, culture, and communication. Bob Logan tells a memorable story about Trudeau attending McLuhan’s Monday night seminar at the Coach House. How did you come to know Trudeau? Was it through McLuhan?

BW: I came to know Trudeau through Teri McLuhan. I was writing The Solitary Outlaw, which had sections on Glenn Gould, McLuhan, and Trudeau—three Canadian visionaries—and I said I wanted to meet him. Teri gave me his home address and said, “Write to him, and if he’s interested, he’ll answer.” I wrote a letter to him, and to my surprise a couple of weeks later he phoned. He said, “I’m not interested in interviews. I don’t do them. But if you want to have lunch, you can make of it what you will.” After that, we would have lunch once or twice a year, and we talked, right up until the year he died. We talked a great deal about what we were reading.

AM: Can you recall any remark of McLuhan that could have become a famous one-liner but has never been published?

BW. Once in class, we were talking about music and art. The range of his conversations was always astonishing and stimulating. Sometimes he’d pause and seem to blank out for a moment, then say something oracular. One afternoon he paused, then suddenly said, “In the electronic age, we’re living entirely by music.”

I have to say this went straight into my soul like nothing else. I’ve never found it in anything he wrote. Nowhere in his letters, nowhere in his papers. Over the years, I asked Eric and Teri if they knew it: they’d never heard him say this. Maybe I hallucinated it. But that aphorism has been the spark for everything I’ve done.

“In the electronic age, we’re living entirely by music” seems an offhand remark. But it’s a beautiful sentence. It likely replays Walter Pater’s idea in The Renaissance that all art aspires to the condition of music, in a variation and extension.

AM. What does it mean—by music? Did he mean spherical resonance, audial space, the features of orality retrieved by electric media?

BW. He meant the currents’ rhythms, intonations, pulsations, the polyphony of voices and echoes, everyone speaking and flowing together, like the vocal textures of Finnegans Wake. It’s a stream of thought contrary to systematic, linear conception: it’s associative, echoing, reverberant, spherical, vortex-like. It resonates with me very much. I know my books are narratively challenged, but that’s because I’ve tried to make riffing, resonance, pulsing and reverberation—the tonality and the momentum—a key to writing and reading.

When I discussed this McLuhan phrase one day with Derrick de Kerckhove, he said that everything I’ve done has been a footnote to that aphorism. I found that very charming. (A McLuhanist will immediately recognize the reference: McLuhan said that his own work was just a footnote to Harold Innis.—A.M.)

McLuhan thrived on taking inherited ideas and reinventing them in his immediate way. As I said once at a seminar at the U of T, “Have you noticed how McLuhan vaporizes his collaborators?” When he worked with Harley Parker or whoever, they ended up sounding like him. He absorbed them completely. By the end of the day, you wouldn’t remember Parker, you’d remember McLuhan. Bob Logan and Derrick were there, and Bob—who had collaborated with McLuhan—with deepest humility said: “Yes, it’s true.” When you were around McLuhan, you started to sound like him, and the ideas that emerged sounded like his.

AM. Speaking of linear versus spherical. This is my point of disagreement or rebellion against McLuhan. In City as Classroom and elsewhere, he argued that print literacy locked the West into conception, while electric media push us into a spherical, simultaneous, audio-tactile mode of perception that the West had largely lost. So he insisted that we needed to train perception. And that was very acute and relevant in the 1960s and 1970s, as he urged us to prepare for the electric maelstrom. But now that maelstrom has already happened. Concept-driven literate culture reached its peak in the West by the end of the twentieth century and is now reversing. McLuhan observed how it began with television, but digital media are completing the reversal of print culture—what I call the digital reversal. We now live in an oral-like, spherical, simultaneous mode of perception. What we are lacking now is not perception at all: everything is perception in digital orality. What we are lacking now is conception. We lack literate, alphabetic qualities: linearity, sequence, structure, rationality, deep focus, individual inquiry, the separation of the knower from the known. Instead of totalizing environmental immersion in digital media, we need our literate detachment back. It’s the only way to resist tribalism. So I’d say we no longer need to train perception; we need to train conception. Do you agree? Shall we revise McLuhan in this regard?

BW: Yes, I’ve noticed this in your books and in our email conversations. I have a series of responses to that.

First, a non-systematic, non-linear, analogical, allusive, vortex-like way of thinking is natural to me. It’s intuitive, it’s not a theory, or a construct. It’s how I sense and think. I was trained in music: my mother was a musician, I was a guitarist, I started out in music at YorkU. I tend to think musically, associatively. And for me, music isn’t just about systematically following a score; it’s more like jazz: you’re improvising, co-creating, modulating, quoting, listening, echoing. This carries over into writing, which for me is a matter of voicing. When I hear the voices, the book works: if I can’t hear its voices, it’s a struggle.

The question you’re raising makes sense to me: our e-domain is now like this with perception dominating conception, and everything echoing and linking to everything else. A way to deal with the tension between perception and conception is to see them as environment and counter-environment: they need each other for us to become aware of where we are, who we are, what we’re doing, where we may be going.

I noticed an interesting process of response in my students. When we talked about McLuhan and Frye, they admired McLuhan, loved his aphorisms, loved playing with their openness. But they responded well to Frye because he’s linear and systematic. They could see what I call “literary ecology” in his work, a deep reading approach emergent through conceptualizing and the line of persuasion, which, incidentally, drove McLuhan crazy in their agon with one another. (B.W. Powe wrote a book analyzing the groundbreaking theories and tense relationship between his two teachers: Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Apocalypse and Alchemy, 2014.—A.M.)

McLuhan’s creative approach to expression was intuitive and acoustic. He could write linear prose, but he preferred riffing, gaps, echoing, and multiple voices. Frye’s lectures—and this is surely interesting— were a stupefying drone, because he’d simply read what he’d written. Yet when you read the lectures yourself and track them in your mind, you can follow his argument and see where he’s going. His highly principled effort to give you a cohesive literary philosophy profoundly appeals to people, because they may want harmonious ordering, the codes of the imagination. That was the difference in their styles of delivery. My students, I think, liked to mix McLuhan’s aphoristic thinking and Frye’s symmetries. You can see them as opposites, like perception and conception, and you can see them as two approaches igniting and enriching each other.

There’s a paradox here, I agree: digital media favors sensation, not conception as print did. Should we emphasize conception or perception, given the whirlwind of technological transforming? I take your point that a linear, sequential counter-environment makes sense when experience is “all at once” and constantly consumed by present e-technologies. But I wouldn’t frame it as an “either-or.” It’s a perpetual figure/ground dynamic, concept and percept speaking to and altering each other as environment and counter-environment.

There are concepts in my work. You’d find this in Mysteria (Mysteria is BW’s latest book; check out my review of it. – A.M.). You can just flow with it, but Mysteria has a crisis concept. It evokes a sensibility before and during the isolations and breakdowns of the pandemic. Breakdown, break in, break loose, break on through to the other side. I’ve been shaped by call and response, echo, reverberation, intervals, discord, disjunctions, pulse, story telling, silences. I sense these, hear them, work with them, live with them; if I rejected or reformatted these, Mysteria wouldn’t have come from my immersion in breakdown, breakthrough.

In your book, Andrey, there’s a fascinating story about an experiment showing how people like reading AI-generated text. This set off alarm bells for me and brought back questions central to Frye’s literary ecology, questions I make pivotal for my students: why read? Why do we read at all? In the experiment you described, people read for content, which is why AI-generated writing statistically prevailed. I read for style and the dreamlike mutability of forms. I see McLuhan and Frye as leading Canadian literary stylists—I know this may be a subversive approach to them. Whether you agree with their content, you can read them for their styles of writing and thinking, drawing your inspirations and reflections from that, beyond whatever content you find in them.

AM. And their styles of writing and thinking are kind of opposite.

I believe they’re complementary: yin and yang. They—and others who express the originality of the Canadian psyche, like Gould and Trudeau, Alice Munro and Anne Carson—are unique not only for the concepts they produced but also for the style and forms of their writing, thinking, and creativity.

You know, when I read some commentaries on McLuhan, I think—can we see that he was conceptualizing at a level of literary poetics and wit and he was perceiving on the go? He could do both: linear and spherical, conceptual and perceptual. I see it like that, rather than an “either-or” dialectic. An all-at-once dynamic, where the mutability and interaction of these forms transform into something new. McLuhan always said: make it new.

And I like to add, make it strange. And wild. These may be responses to your questions. Yes, the environment of literacy and linearity is being replaced by the counter-environment of spherical digital simultaneity. What if we found new forms instead of clinging to old ones? It may seem merely eccentric—but let’s explore the wilds. What I’m trying to preserve and reveal is strangeness. I don’t find AI strange; it’s homogenizing. I mean, the phenomenon of AI is strange, but not its effects. To stay not-AI, look for style, inspired forms and voices.

Merging and synthesizing forms may illuminate the tension between the oral and literary, the perceptual and conceptual. The environment created by AI isn’t literary, yet it isn’t analog or metaphorical either. But there may be another approach to creating a counter-environment in the age of AI: embracing eccentricity, spirit and strangeness, weaving content into style and concept into percept, just as our original teachers did in their envisioning.

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)

Unlike animals living in a natural environment with its natural affordances, humans live in a man-made environment shaped by our technologies—by our media. Human environmental affordances are media affordances. The concept of affordance is central to media ecology. Excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

You cannot walk on water unless you’re Jesus or a Jesus lizard. Water affords only swimming, gliding, diving, or sinking. The materiality of the environment dictates the ways in which we can interact with it. Based on the verb “afford,” psychologist James Gibson coined the term affordance in the late 1960s to describe the kinds of interactions an environment makes available to its inhabitants.

Different affordances are offered by different elements of the “terrestrial environment.” Affordances, however, describe not the innate physical characteristics of these elements but rather the compatibility of users with those characteristics. For example, the affordances of water are not the same for humans, swans, and fish. Each of these “users” has its own “compatibility” with water.

Affordances are not just possibilities for use: they invite users to act in certain ways. In the 1980s and later, Donald Norman extended Gibson’s theory of affordances to technological design and human-computer interaction. He wrote:

Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.[1]

A “Norman door” is a famous metaphor for failed design, in which a door’s appearance gives misleading cues about how it should be used. It describes a door whose design—its handle, plate, shape, or placement—makes people push when they should pull, or pull when they should push, often requiring extra signs or instructions to compensate.
Ironically, Don Norman was a usability advocate who taught designers to employ affordances. He used confusing doors merely to illustrate bad design—yet he ended up with his name attached to a design failure in which affordances mislead rather than guide.

Things around us tell us what we can or cannot do with them. Among the predecessors who helped shape his concept, Gibson quoted Kurt Koffka, who wrote in his 1935 book Principles of Gestalt Psychology: “Each thing says what it is. ... A fruit says ‘Eat me’; water says ‘Drink me’; thunder says ‘Fear me’.”[2]

Unlike animals living in a natural environment with its natural affordances, humans live in a man-made environment shaped by the interfaces and products of our technologies—by our media. The affordances of the human environment are media affordances. The concept of affordance is therefore central to media ecology.

Just like Vito Corleone, environments make us offers we can’t refuse. The concept of affordance illustrates the compelling power of media. As long as a medium offers some convenience (an extension in time and space), we cannot help but use it in the ways its affordances dictate. Affordance is a manifestation of environmental passive aggression. A metaphorical illustration of this is a stranger politely holding a door for you well in advance of your reaching it, thus making you hurry; this stranger creates an affordance for you, and you have to fit in.

Some affordances could be called hard affordances—they offer only certain ways of interacting with objects, such as a door with a metal plate or a staircase. You can only push that door or walk up and down those stairs. Other environments offer soft affordances: they can be interacted with in a variety of ways but still invite users to choose a “preferred” use.

For example, social media seemingly provide a variety of applications. Users can chat, look for friends and useful information, promote themselves and their businesses, create communities, or organize political action. You’d think you could use social media simply to do what you want. But the design of social media is aimed at maximizing engagement for better ad targeting. This design favours behaviours that elicit stronger responses, and such behaviours are more likely to consist of salient rather than modest manifestations. In other words, whatever opportunities social media provide, their ultimate environmental affordance leads to the amplification of extremes and, eventually, to polarization. Individually, we can withdraw or abstain, but, as a society, we’ve been given an offer we can’t refuse. Society cannot help but engage more and more on social media and become more polarized. Affordance—even a seemingly soft, inviting affordance—in fact, compels.

In any ecosystem, affordances are more powerful than restrictions. Restrictions can be resisted; mass resistance to restrictions can even generate enough force to overturn the ecosystem. Unlike restrictions, affordances are intangible, as they shape behaviour imperceptibly. It is hard to resist something you do not sense. Mass resistance to affordances is impossible.

Another approach to the theory of affordances can be found within the framework of systems theory. In his Media Ecology, Lance Strate refers to the “relationship of downward causation.” Any part of a system has a set of functions predefined by its role within the system. Strate writes:

Downward causality is the causality of the environment in relation to that which it contains, or the system to its parts, and it is a causality based on constraints, rather than the positive impetus of efficient cause.[3]

The system “obliges” its parts through downward causality. A piece of a puzzle must fit the picture. A wolf occupies its place in the food chain. An actor must perform their role in a play. A footballer must play a certain position on the team. The game invites him to do certain things, while their role on the team constrains him. Downward causality can be seen as a type of environmental affordance. If you are part of a system, the system is your environment, and the affordance it offers is likely to be a rather hard one—not merely inviting, but often dictating.

Keeping the concept of environmental affordances in mind, it is quite justifiable to state that, yes, the stirrup caused feudalism. And, yes, wolves changed the Yellowstone ecosystem. And, yes, electricity created the global village. Place the concept of environmental affordances behind such “techno-deterministic” statements, and you will see that this is an ecological, not technological, kind of determinism: media determinism.

Robert Logan, who, taking a cue from McLuhan, established the connection between the alphabet and monotheism, does not insist on direct causality. “It is not possible to establish any causal relations or direct impacts,” he states. But his wording implies the role of environmental affordances, too:

We shall find, however, that the alphabet provided a climate in which abstract notions such as monotheism, codified law, science, and logic could flourish.[4]

I’d go further and say that his concept implies that, yes, monotheism, codified law, abstract science, and deductive logic were, indeed, effects of the alphabet, as the title of his book, The Alphabet Effect, directly suggests. Phonetic writing introduced symbols that bore no resemblance to what they signified. This placed the minds of its users at a level of abstraction that had previously been unattainable: mental constructions became completely detached from sensory experience. In turn, abstraction untethered from sensory reality afforded the concept of the spiritual absolute, which happened to be beneficial for the Hebrews, the inventors of the proto-alphabet, in their struggle for national identity against the surrounding polytheistic powers. The spiritual absolute—one God above all—turned out to be superior to the cohorts of Egyptian or Babylonian gods-specialists with their ancient craft-magic. Monotheism is the ultimate development—and the ultimate affordance—of the symbolic abstraction brought about by phonetic writing.

The compelling affordance of media does not mean that a medium, wherever and whenever it is introduced, automatically leads to a predetermined and identical response in any ecosystem. The affordances of a medium interact with other environmental affordances and shape unique equilibria under different conditions. Nevertheless, the affordances of a given medium form recognizable patterns of environmental response. The ecological determinism of media gives us an optic through which to see the logic of historical processes. Moreover, history itself is linear and progressive precisely because of the logic of media evolution.

Interestingly, we tend to believe more in the transformative power of the wheel than in that of papyrus. In this regard, Postman writes:

We have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance.[5]

The notion of clay tablets causing Sumerian urbanization, papyrus causing the Roman Empire, or the alphabet causing monotheism may sound reductionist, indeed; however, the statement “The Internet has changed everything” is entirely acceptable. This is either because the terraforming power of media has grown over time or because we did not fully understand the environmental effects of past media.

Read more about affordances, the Alphabet Effect, digital orality, and media ecology in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

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] Norman, Donald. (1988). The Psychology of Everyday Things, p. 9.

[2] Gibson, James. (1986 [1979]). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 138.

[3] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology, p. 178.

[4] Logan, Robert. (2004 [1986]). The Alphabet Effect, p. 143.

[5] Postman, Neil. (2006 [1985]). Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 157.

Hello, media determinists. This is an unconventional post, focused on publishing housekeeping and full of shameless self-promotion. So feel free to skip it if you don’t have time or patience for that sort of thing. It’s fairly short, though.

As vacation season begins, people may read more. Seasonal marketing is a cheap trick, of course, and among people interested in media, book choices most likely aren’t really driven by discounts. Yet this is still one of the few options left to an author, beyond writing.

The competition with AI is ramping up. AI hits the book market twice. On the production side, it has already tripled the number of new releases. On the consumption side, it is replacing deep reading with quick Q&A exchanges with ChatGPT or whatever people use. To keep human reading of human writing alive, not many options remain. Every little bit helps, so a seasonal marketing campaign it is.

The writers who established themselves with major publishing houses before AI, in the era of book printing, have secured more or less sustainable positions in the era of book prompting. The writers who are just starting out now have vanishingly small chances. I’m stuck somewhere in between. I’ve been writing about media for a couple of decades, but it was mostly a side hustle until recently. I wish I’d had 3–4 more years before ChatGPT and Claude began crashing the book market, but we have what we have.

I’ve got a list of six books on media, written during this long decade of digital transition, between the Twitter revolutions and the emergence of AI. Some of them have sold in the thousands, which is not bad for indie publishing. I thought they would become an asset that would grow in value, especially as I kept writing, adding a book every year or so: the new and old titles compounded and sold one another.

And it did go rather well, at least up to roughly a year ago. I still think they store a decent amount of good ideas, but content inflation, driven by book prompting instead of writing, has shortened the future of this investment to the “now.” No complaint here; the logic of the technological imperative is implacable—who would know better than me, the one who wrote the book on human replay as human replacement. But there is still some room for human maneuver: for human-to-human interaction and for humans supporting humans.

So the prices of all my books drop by 20–40% for the summer reading month, from June 8 to July 8. If you came across one of my titles and liked it, you may want to check out the others. I have compiled a list with brief descriptions. If you’re not sure where to start, these descriptions should help you pick one that fits your appetite for understanding media.

Check it out, read, repost this (reposting is the new blurb).

Summer reading: six media titles on sale for a month

1. The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media. Essays on Human Agency and AI

2026—just published. 134 pages.

Do humans shape technology, or does technology shape us? This book develops the concept of the technological imperative: the inherent tendency of any medium to evolve toward greater performance and capability. Acting as the invisible hand of media evolution, it drives technologies toward their ideal forms.

Consider the evolution of the hammer: from an ugly piece of rock to an elegant modern design. Now apply this to AI. AI is evolving toward its own “ideal” form at unprecedented speed. But what is the “ideal” form of AI? Where is the technological imperative driving it?

This isn’t another AI book. It places AI and other new media within the broader patterns of media evolution, a process driven by the technological imperative, a force that may ultimately outgrow humans.

Summer reading sale:

• Kindle ebook

• Other ebook retailers

• Paperback

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2. The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution

Published: 2025. 250 pages.

According to McLuhan’s Laws of Media, each medium reverses its effects when it reaches its limits, its full potential. Like cars: they help us move faster, but when their use reaches extreme levels, mobility reverses into traffic jams.

With electricity, humankind reached the speed limit in communication; now, with digital media, we have reached the speed limit of social interaction. Never before has our interaction with each other and the environment been so fast—instant.

No wonder everything is now reaching its extreme forms and reversing, merging into one global, cataclysmic Digital Reversal. The Digital Reversal is a fast-paced “thread-saga,” written in tweets, that explores and explains how digital media accelerate and reverse everything.

Recommendations, references, and reviews

• The Digital Reversal was recommended by Joseph Weisenthal of Bloomberg on The Ezra Klein Show in The New York Times. (And here are the book recommendations from that episode.)

• “Everything you know and everything you are is becoming its opposite.” Review of The Digital Reversal by William Kuhns. New Explorations.

• “The Great Digital Reversal.” Review of The Digital Reversal by Eugenio Palopoli. Revista Seúl.

• “Understanding the Law of Reversal (I): Humans as extensions of media.” Review of Andrey Mir’s The Digital Reversal in the context of McLuhan’s Laws of Media, by Carlos A. Scolari.

• Andrey Mir’s Digital Reversals. Review by Sam Kahn. Castalia.

Summer reading sale:

• Kindle ebook

• Other ebook retailers

• Paperback

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3. The Viral Inquisitor and Other Essays on Postjournalism and Media Ecology

Published: 2024. 189 pages.

This collection of essays unpacks the biggest ideas behind the internet age: from the rise of postjournalism to the role of “lazy authorship” in shaping what we see, share, and believe. The internet didn’t just speed up communication—it transformed it, replacing traditional gatekeepers with a new, invisible force, the “Viral Editor”: the collective engine that decides what spreads and what dies online.

But that was just the beginning. As algorithms overtook digital platforms to amplify user engagement, the Viral Editor mutated into the Viral Inquisitor. In this new phase, algorithms and engagement loops don’t just report what’s viral—they demand allegiance, creating a dispersed digital tribunal where affirmation and outrage serve as proof of belonging. Collective editing has flipped into collective policing, and self-informing has flipped into mutual cancelling.

Drawing from media ecology, McLuhan’s insights, and real-world events, The Viral Inquisitor explains how viral validation replaced traditional authority, how journalism abandoned objectivity for affirmation, and why digital culture rewards identity over merit. The book explores how “digital orality”—our hybrid form of online speech—reshapes everything from ethics to education, and why the collapse of media boundaries has left us in a state of constant reaction.

Summer reading sale:

• Kindle ebook

• Other ebook retailers

• Paperback

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

Published: 2024. 330 pages.

Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror explores digital change as the historical reversal of literacy into digital orality.

Digital orality rewinds the historical Axial Age. According to Karl Jaspers (1949), the Axial Age (the 8th–3rd centuries BCE) was a period of human “awakening.” This process aligned with the emergence of writing and the alphabet effect.

2.5 millennia ago, the transition from orality to literacy marked the shift from myth to logos, from magic to faith, from polytheism to monotheism, from customs to laws, from moral relativism to moral absolutes, from practical and negotiated truths to objective and absolute truth, from environmental and collective immersion to abstract thinking and individual detachment, from the “circle of life” to personal destiny, from the agitation of tribal belonging to the individual tragedy of (not-)becoming.

Now, by reversing literacy and retrieving orality, digital media are replaying these processes backward. In this book, the effects of orality and literacy are cataloged to observe how they shape digital society.

Recommendations, references, and reviews

• The Death of Gutenberg. Is the rise of digital media causing the fall of literacy? Review of Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror by Geoff Shullenberger. City Journal.

• The Fifth Wave: Andrey Mir takes on world history. Review of Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror by Martin Gurri. Discourse.

Summer reading sale:

• Kindle ebook

• Other ebook retailers

• Paperback

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5. Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization

Published: 2020; revised in 2025. 360 pages.

This is my best-selling book so far, with thousands of copies sold. It introduced the concept of postjournalism—the term that many people in media and politics now use, often without realizing it came from this book.

The main cause of the mutation of journalism into postjournalism was not political; it was media ecological and economic. Journalism was funded predominantly by advertising, but the internet took ads away. The news media were forced to switch from plentiful ad revenue to desperately seeking subscriptions.

The ad-driven media manufactured consent. The reader-driven media manufacture anger. The former served consumerism. The latter serve polarization. The book explores polarization as a media effect.

Recommendations, references, and reviews

• Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers was recommended by Martin Gurri on The Ezra Klein Show in The New York Times (the book recommendations are here).

• How the news business’s economics altered the news itself. By George F. Will. The Washington Post.

• How to understand the rage economy. Review of Postjournalism by Murtaza Hussain. The Intercept.

• Slouching Toward Post-Journalism. By Martin Gurri. City Journal.

• How economics drives news media. Review of Postjournalism by Arnold Kling. EconLib.

• Things fall apart: why journalism might not survive what’s coming next. By Danyl Mclauchlan. The Spinoff , New Zealand.

Summer reading sale:

• Kindle ebook

• Other ebook retailers

• Paperback

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6. Human as media. The emancipation of authorship

Published: 2014. 100 pages.

Human as Media introduced one of the fundamental effects of the internet: the emancipation of authorship. Over 6,000 years of writing, there have been about 300 million authors—people capable of communicating their opinions beyond their physical reach. By 2013, thanks to the internet, the number of authors had reached two billion, historically almost instantly.

Emancipated authorship created a new environment of alternative, crowdsourced agenda-setting and triggered a chain of subsequent media effects, from skyrocketing activism to polarization, from the “crisis of authority” (Martin Gurri) to postjournalism.

(This book also connected me with Martin Gurri, whose first edition of The Revolt of the Public was published in the same year (2014). We happened to analyze the same cultural phenomena: Martin from the political angle and I from the media ecology standpoint.)

Recommendations, references, and reviews

• Mir-roring McLuhan in the digital era. By William Kuhns. New Explorations.

Summer reading sale:

• Kindle ebook

• Other ebook retailers

• Paperback

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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)

A report from the past, when the McLuhan community in Toronto had a blast: in October 2015, McLuhan’s Coach House was reopened and hosted McLuhan activities for a couple of years.

For media ecologists, the Coach House has always been a place of force. On October 21, 2015, the McLuhans and McLuhanists gathered at the Coach House at the University of Toronto to re-establish the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology for the 21st century.

The name “Centre for Culture and Technology” was initially just “a card pinned to the door of Marshall McLuhan’s office in the English Department” back in 1963. Here is a brief story of the Centre for Culture and Technology, better known as the Coach House:

In the early 1950s, McLuhan began the Communication and Culture seminars, funded by the Ford Foundation, at the University of Toronto. As his reputation grew, he received a growing number of offers from other universities and, to keep him, the university created the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963… McLuhan remained at the University of Toronto through 1979, spending much of this time as head of his Centre for Culture and Technology…

It then had no organized program for research or teaching, but gained in prestige from the world-wide popularity of Understanding Media (1964) and grew in McLuhan’s last decade in Toronto, assisted by Derrick de Kerckhove and McLuhan’s son Eric, who became a director of the McLuhan Program International. In 1994, the McLuhan Program became a part of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. The program’s curriculum is based on the works of Marshall McLuhan and other media theorists. In 2009, the Faculty of Information launched the Coach House Institute (CHI) as a clearly defined research unit under which the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology now operates.

This October, the Coach House reclaimed its historical title: the Centre for Culture and Technology (not just “The McLuhan Program”). Now the Coach House has a new sign:

Michael McLuhan told stories about this place, mentioning famous people who visited the Coach House. Among them were, for example, John Lennon and Yoko Ono: McLuhan interviewed them during their “War Is Over” billboard campaign in 1969 for Canadian television. “They sat right at that spot, where the gentleman in red is standing, and talked to Marshall McLuhan about peace,” said Michael.

This was a remarkable interview, in which John Lenon nearly wrote a new song with the lyrics by Marshall McLuhan’s daughter, Stephanie.

This door remembers many historical figures, including Pierre Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada at the time and father of the newly elected Justin Trudeau.

Just as Canada was celebrating the Liberals’ victory and welcoming the new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, Robert Logan told a story about McLuhan and Trudeau Sr., who was Prime Minister in the late 1970s. McLuhan had invited the Prime Minister to one of his Monday night seminars at the Coach House. He was supposed to arrive with Trudeau and had asked Bob Logan to lead the seminar. McLuhan wanted to surprise the participants by walking in with such a prominent guest. But he himself was surprised when the Prime Minister entered the room, looked at Logan, and said, “Hi Bob, how are you?” As it turned out, they knew each other, because Bob Logan was one of his advisers.

Here is how Robert Logan retells the story in his recent book, McLuhan Misunderstood: Setting the Record Straight.

“Let me relay one example in which he wanted to play a trick on his students. One day not long after I began working with him, Marshall asked me to host his weekly Monday-night seminar. He told me he was having dinner with Prime Minister Trudeau and he wanted to bring the PM to the seminar and surprise the group, so I was to say nothing about this. I kept my word. When I heard the motorcycles accompanying the PM approach the coach house where we held our seminar, I, and I alone in that room, knew what was about to happen. McLuhan strode into the room and exclaimed, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Prime Minister of Canada.’ Mr. Trudeau came into the room looked around to greet everyone, spotted me, and said, “Bob, hi! How are you?” Marshall’s jaw dropped, for he did not know that I was one of Trudeau’s policy advisors; I had never gotten around to telling him about my work in politics. He enjoyed the trick he played on the seminar group, and I enjoyed the one I played on him.” (Logan, Robert K. 2013. McLuhan Misunderstood: Setting the Record Straight)

Eric McLuhan recalled his father being asked, in this room, “How to study media?” “Study language,” was Marshall’s answer.

And here we are taking a selfie, numbed in McLuhan’s “zombie trance of Narcissus narcosis”… though still enjoyable, at least for me.

By the way, Eric McLuhan is launching his latest book, The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia and the Soul: An Odyssey, at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology this Friday, November 6.

On my way back home, miles away from Toronto, later that night, I met Eric and Andrew McLuhan once again and had another 15 minutes of memorable conversation.

P.S. This was an archive story, a report from Marshall McLuhan’s Coach House relaunch in Toronto on October 21, 2015.

P.P.S. Eleven years later, the Coach House is still here, but the only reminder of McLuhan is a plaque by the entrance.

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)

In the time remaining for human creativity,
the main and final challenge for human writers
will be the search for a form
that provides the fastest possible impression
and sense-making.

1. Because of AI, content is no longer king

1.1. Not only is content plentiful, but it is also now AI-generated.

1.2. With the arrival of AI, writers have lost their monopoly on creating narratives, both fiction and non-fiction.

1.3. An unknown number of people without writing skills, but with writing ambitions and strong prompting skills, have joined the club.

1.4. Prompting extends writing—and prompting also replaces writing.

1.5. AI, working as a research assistant and ghostwriter, can produce essays and books of comparable quality and in incomparably larger quantities than legacy writers.

1.5.1. With good prompts and editing, it’s not AI slop. AI-generated writing can be of decent quality. (Detective Del: “Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Robot Sonny: Can *you*?)

1.5.2. But quality doesn’t even matter, because the enormous quantity oversaturates the market and draws already scarce reader attention away from human writers.

1.6. The data suggests that fiction categories are generally less affected by the LLM-driven surge in book production than non-fiction. Most fiction genres occupy the bottom third of the ranking, whereas non-fiction dominates the top.

1.6.1. This might mean that non-fiction either seems more lucrative or more doable for AI book prompters.

1.7. When AI triples the release of books amid fading readership, even quality books have vanishing chances of making an impact.

1.8. The decline is already noticeable in Amazon sales reports.

1.8.1. One may say that it is just that some books are not selling well, and that you need to write and market better.

1.8.2. You always need to do better, true, but there is also circumstantial evidence that the decline has already started.

1.8.2.1. For example, events that used to have a significant and long-lasting effect on book sales, such as a mention of your book in a leading outlet like The New York Times or The Atlantic, now have a boosting effect on sales that lasts only half as long as it did just a couple of years ago.

1.9. AI prompters have an advantage over writers: they produce content faster, without writer’s block, without the agony of creation, without self-doubt, and without procrastination.

1.10. The monopoly of legacy writers over literary creation is gone.

1.11. Writers are joining journalists, who were wiped out a decade ago by hordes of bloggers, influencers, and podcasters—by the emancipation of authorship.

1.11.1. Journalism suffered when the internet emancipated the authorship of the crowd. Now the internet has emancipated the authorship of an even more powerful competitor: artificial intelligence.

1.12. But there is one writer’s skill that neither AI prompters nor AI can confidently appropriate: mastery of new forms and styles.

2. I tried

2.1. I wrote The Digital Reversal: The Thread-Saga of Media Evolution entirely in tweets, with each paragraph strictly under 280 characters. With 1,295 tweets, it became the first “tweetise” in history, a reversal of “treatise.”

2.2. The result? Ambiguous.

2.2.1. Marketing. I thought it would stand out for its form, and many said it was cool, but the marketing boost from the form fell below expectations. There was too much noise from oversupply to break through with such a weak signal. And, of course, even a unique form needs more marketing resources than I have.

2.2.2. Readability. The tweet format disciplines the author: in plain prose, the book would have been twice as long. The brevity and the shorter book are good for reading, no doubt about that. But readers with more traditional habits also complained about the “terse” style. Someone noted that the experiment showed how the tweet format, designed for instant replies, conflicts with long-form prose meant to develop thoughts.

2.2.2.1. That is true. As Neil Postman said, “You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content... You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.”

2.3. The experiment with the “thread-saga” in The Digital Reversal was not a failure—it received plenty of enthusiastic responses and became one of my bestselling books. “Tweetise” is a cool feature. Yet the form itself did not become a success of scandalous proportions, as I had secretly hoped, so I need to look further.

2.4. But if this form has not become a solution, what guarantees do we have that another form will—or that any form is a solution at all?

2.4.1. We don’t.

2.4.2. But this is the only path a writer can still walk without being intercepted by AI.

3. Where to look

3.1. In the literary tradition, all experiments with form revolved around the task of packing: how to pack ideas and sensations into a specific form serving an aesthetic or intellectual purpose.

3.2. That approach has been made obsolete by AI. The issue is not even that AI can mimic any form of aesthetic or intellectual “packing.” The issue is that AI prompting has boosted supply and made packing irrelevant when the chance of unpacking is near zero.

3.3. The search for form has to tackle the issue of unpacking (digital reversal!). Market oversaturation and reader fatigue demand that any new form deliver instant impression, instant unpacking, and instant sense-making.

3.4. The post-literary forms of instant unpacking I am thinking about, to survive the remaining 3–5 years of human writing, are explainers, listicles (including the Wittgensteinian listicle), PechaKucha, posters and dazibao, and their various syntheses.

4. Explainer

4.1. Explainers were perhaps the first literary reaction to the shrinking attention span, because journalism was the first creative practice to face the extinction threat brought by the internet.

4.1.1. So we journalists have already experienced it, many of us more than once.

4.2. The explainer was a format of so-called explanatory journalism, designed to present data in plain language, but in a modular structure, for already weakened attention.

4.2. The major proponent of the format was Vox, founded in 2014 by Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, and Melissa Bell. Other examples included The Upshot at The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight, founded by Nate Silver. This was a significant trend in the media at the time.

4.3. For writing under AI pressure, the explainer can be useful not for its essence (explaining) but for its modular form, which is easy to unpack: Q&A, cards, and so on.

5. Listicle

5.1. “Listicle” comes from “list + article.” It’s a short article written in the form of a list. The format is easily recognized by typical headlines like “10 Amazing Facts About Spider-Man” or “Seven of the Oldest Pieces of Art Ever Created.”

5.2. The first listicle was the Ten Commandments. The principle has also been used in books, for example, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

5.3. Listicles are designed for rapid scanning. This was clearly a response to the demise of deep, linear reading among media audiences. BuzzFeed reached the peak of its popularity in the early 2010s almost exclusively thanks to its signature listicles.

5.4. Listicles relieve authors of the angst of composing a structure: you don’t need to tie the parts of your piece smoothly together if they are simply listed under numbers. You don’t even need a narrative structure. But that is a solution on the side of packing.

5.5. For easy unpacking, listicles offer modular reading, even skimming, that suits fragmented attention.

5.6. A listicle is also a proper way to reuse existing interesting content in the form of a summary, a format inherently designed for long packing and quick unpacking.

5.7. The main “unpacking” trick of the listicle is that readers anticipate something digestible if it is counted. The finite number in the headline promises brevity and specificity. Just compare: which would you choose, “Important Facts About Listicles” or “10 Important Facts About Listicles”? Or, even more intriguing, “10.5 Important Facts About Listicles?”

5.8. Personally, I like what I call the Wittgensteinian listicle, a format used by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It adopts the modular form of the listicle but structures its modules into a hierarchy of subordinate levels, just as in this essay.

5.8.1. I believe this format is elegant. Does it serve quick unpacking? That depends on execution. But it certainly has the potential to seduce and guide the reader’s attention.

5.8.2. Most importantly, by segmenting a listicle into a hierarchy of thoughts, the author can command the rhythm of reading, somewhat like swing in jazz, if measured correctly.

5.8.3. There is a natural limit: you can hardly employ this style for an entire book; it would likely make the book overly cumbersome. The Wittgensteinian listicle can be a good form for a short essay and a component to mix with other formats in a book.

6. PechaKucha

6.1. PechaKucha is a slide-presentation format invented by architects in Tokyo in 2003 as a response to long, overloaded PowerPoint presentations.

6.2. Fast delivery and unpacking are built-in features of the format, thanks to the “20×20” constraint: 20 slides, 20 seconds for each, with auto-flipping, for a fixed presentation length of 6 minutes 40 seconds.

6.2.1. The format is inherently meant for long packing and quick unpacking.

6.3. One might wonder what this has to do with publishing. I found a practical application. Twenty years ago, when I was editing a financial magazine, I invited industry leaders and experts to share slides from their conference presentations. I selected a set of slides and developed them into a recurring PechaKucha section in the magazine, which became quite popular.

6.4. In print, PechaKucha resembles comics, but non-fiction comics.

6.5. The idea of mixing graphics with theses was used by Marshall McLuhan in his 1967 The Medium Is the Massage, created in collaboration with graphic designer Quentin Fiore.

6.5.1. But unlike the McLuhan–Fiore book, and much like comics, PechaKucha in publishing brings a modular uniformity similar to listicles or explainer cards.

6.6. Non-fiction modular comics, a book made in slides, can be an interesting experiment, but it degrades deep linear reading, a typical accusation made against comics. It may work better as a graphic supplement or a section.

7. Posters, dazibao, etc.

7.1. Short texts presented in graphic form (dazibao, or big-character posters) or accompanied by graphic elements (posters) were typical of an era of rising literacy and strong residual orality, when the masses were still unable to engage in long, deep reading.

7.2. As digital media reverse print literacy into digital orality, these conditions are returning, but now as a regression, a movement backward, an “unlettering” of a sort.

7.3. So looking for any form that degrades literacy into modular, fragmented, rhythmic, visually arresting reading can help market non-fiction.

7.4. It has a price, of course: by leveraging the effects of these forms, a writer contributes to the demise of literacy.

8. Attention management

8.1. Why does mastery of form remain a human prerogative in writing? Charisma. One needs:

• to decide to do this strange thing: not to follow patterns but to invent them, and

• to pursue this decision with perseverance, yet also with a sense of adequacy.

8.1.1. This seems to remain human so far.

8.2. When digital media and then AI stripped journalism of what had long been regarded as its prerogatives—news, informing the public, creativity—it became clear what the true competence of journalists had been all along: content management and attention management.

8.2.3. These skills are universal, transferable, and highly demanded in the digital economy.

8.2.4. Others still learn; we journalists already know how to do it. It was a severance package we received from good old journalism.

8.3. Writers are about to discover what remains their exclusive prerogative once creativity and writing themselves are taken away by AI prompters.

8.3.1. My wager is that it is the mastery of form.

8.4. Also, as everything literary reverses and “progresses” backward, or downshifts, writing itself may be downgraded to journalism. Turning a book into a magazine may be an experiment that fits the conditions of vanishing literacy.

8.4.1. People did not read magazines so much as flip through them, stopping occasionally to read. The frequency and length of these stops characterized the quality of a magazine.

8.5. Multiformat and modularity can ease unpacking.

8.6. The future of the book is the blurb, said McLuhan.

9. Or not? Or is it nobler in the mind to suffer?

9.1. All these formal experiments reject and denigrate traditional deep linear reading.

9.2. Curiously, while deep linear reading will shrink among the masses, there will always remain bookworms who will keep reading to the end, unaware that the Singularity, or whatever passes for it, has already happened, until it literally hits them, pun not intended.

9.3. Just like Respublika Literaria, the medieval virtual community of learned men that formed at the dawn of modern literacy, or Castalia, the isolated province of scholars in Hermann Hesse’s 1943 novel The Glass Bead Game, a similar cocoon of the literati will condense during the decline of literacy.

9.4. Perhaps a writer must accept his fate and stick to those last readers.

9.4.1. You never catch up with changing times, especially when times accelerate.

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)

“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:

Appendix

Robert Logan: Cataloging McLuhan Reversals

This is an excerpt from McLuhan in Reverse: His General Theory of Media (GToM) by Robert K. Logan (2021). Published with the kind permission of Robert Logan.

This chapter is a catalog of McLuhan reversals based on his writings and his observations of the oral, written and electric ages of communication. In addition, it also contains a projection of what his reversals might have been if he had survived into the digital age, which sadly he did not. The purpose of this chapter is to collect all of McLuhan’s reversals and McLuhan-like reversals in one place to support the hypothesis that thinking in terms of reversals was an integral part of McLuhan’s approach to understanding media and their impacts and is also a useful tool for understanding the digital technologies that he never had a chance to experience.

McLuhan’s reversals have been divided into three categories based on his writings and a fourth category has been added, namely McLuhan-like reversals for the digital age:

1) reversals that were part of McLuhan’s methodology as used in his General Theory of Media;

2) reversals that are associated with the transition from the age of oral communication to the age of written communication and mechanical forms;

3) reversals that are associated with the transition from the age of written communication and mechanical forms to electric forms of communication; and

4) reversals that are associated with the transition from the age of electric forms of communication to digital age of communication formulated in the spirit of McLuhan reversals.

1) Catalog of McLuhan’s Use of Reversals in His Methodology

• figure reverses into ground or environment

• percept reverses into concept

• cause reverses into effect

• environment reverses into anti-environment

• media reverse into extensions of man

• extensions of man reverse into amputations

• media reverse into environments

• medium reverses into massage

• environments as passive wrapping reverse into environments as active processes

• a medium pushed too far reverses into complementary or opposite form

• a work of art or performance reverses into the public or audience

• content reverses into user (“the user is the content”)

• exposition reverses into exploration

• service of media reverses into disservice of media

• patterns of technology use reverses into patterns of societal organization

• obsolesced technology reverses into an art form

• invention reverses into mother of necessity

• user of a medium reverses into servomechanism of that medium

• jokes reverse into grievances

• content or message reverses into the medium (“the medium is the message”)

• communication as the

• transmission of information reverses into communication as

• participation in a common experience

2) Reversals from Oral Age to the Age of Written Communication

• ear reverses into eye

• oral reverses into literate

• acoustic space reverses into visual space

• bard reverses into scribe

• poetry reverses into prose

• Homer reverses into written history as in Thucydides

• Eric Havelocks’s tribal encyclopedia reverses into codified law

• tribe reverses into city state

• tallies reverse into numeric notation

• apprenticeship learning reverses into formal education

3) Reversals from the Age of Written Communication and Mechanical Forms to the Age of Electric Communication and Forms

• the literate reverses into the electric

• mechanical technology reverses into electric technology

• patterns of written communication reverse into patterns of oral communication

• visual space reverses into acoustic space

• the written page reverses into the movie and TV screen

• linear causal connections reverse into a field or ecological approach

• consumers reverse into producers

• the age of manufactured goods reverses into the age of “do it yourself”

• automation reverses into do it yourself

• DIY as home improvements reverses into DIY as a culture

• goal-seeking or job reverses into role-playing

• centralism reverses into decentralism

• specialism and expertise reverses into interdisciplinarity

• expert reverses into group discovery and the task force

• individual effort reverses into task force

• monopolies of knowledge reverses into crowd sourcing

• linear sequential mechanical ordering reverses into instantaneity and all-at-onceness

• fragmentation, specialization reverses into wholeness, diversity, involvement

• separation of function reverses into integrated and organic integration

• detachment reverses into involvement

• Eastern cultural forms reverse into Western cultural forms

• Western cultural forms reverse into Eastern cultural forms

• country side reverses into the city as focus of commerce

• city reverses into countryside as place of leisure

• joke reverses into one-liner

• classification reverses into pattern recognition

• fixed point of view reverses into interface and pattern

• connection reverses into pattern

• answers reverse into questions in education

• hardware reverses into software

• mechanical forms reverse into electronic forms

• explosion reverses into implosion

• local culture reverses into universal global culture

• city forms reverse into highway forms

• highway form reverses into city form

• in modern industry the artist reverses from the ivory tower to the control tower

• industrial labor reverses into learning as a paid occupation

4) Reversals in the Digital Age

With the exception of the reversal of electric mass media into the digital media the reversals of the digital age are the same as those in the electric age. All of the above reversals for electric media apply for digital media. However, some of the reversals in the digital age are different in character because they are more pronounced. We list here each of these reversals that are more pronounced. We indicate for each of these (in parentheses) in what sense they differ from the same reversal in the electric age.

• pattern of digital communication reverses into pattern of oral communication
  (Internet-based writing such as email and texting have a more pronounced oral characteristic to them.)

• visual space reverses into acoustic space
  (The Internet facilitates the arrival of information on a global scale. Smart phone users are bombarded on all sides from a variety of electronic messages unlike the viewers of TV and the listeners of radio.)

• linear causal connection reverses into a field or ecological approach
  (In the digital age there is the addition feature that the field elements are interconnected by the Internet and other forms of networking.)

• consumer reverses into producer

• age of manufactured goods reverses into the age of “do it yourself”

• automation reverses into do it yourself

• DIY as home improvements reverses into DIY as a culture
  (There are more “do it yourself” options available in the digital age than the electric age such as: self-publishing, making things using 3D printing. In addition, because of the two-way flow of information with the Internet users can create their own artistic or journalistic creations and find audiences using such outlets as personalized Web sites, blogs, podcasts, and postings on YouTube, Vimeo, and social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Reddit and TikTok.

• goal-seeking or job reverses into role-playing
  (Many more folks are self-employed using the Net and the Web as a platform to earn a living or start a business online.)

• centralism reverses into decentralism
  (The Internet and the Web are totally decentralized. With personal computers and smart phones connected to the Internet users are at the center of a global flow of information that they can access from almost any place on the planet. In addition, because of the two-way flow of information that the Internet facilitates they can also get their message out anywhere they find themselves.)

• specialism and expertise reverses into interdisciplinarity
  (The reversal from specialism and expertise into interdisciplinarity because of the ease of access to information and collaborators. The reporting of research is not so siloed because of the Internet.)

• expert reverses into group discovery and the task force
  (The Internet facilitates collaboration on a global scale.)

• individual effort reverses into task force
  (more so in the digital age because of the ease of access to collaborators using the Internet)

• monopolies of knowledge reverses into crowd sourcing
  (The Internet facilitates accessing the knowledge of others on a global scale.)

• linear sequential mechanical ordering reverses into instantaneity and all-at-onceness
  (the transmission of information speeds up with digital media and hence things are even more instantaneous and all-at-once.)

• Eastern cultural forms reverse into Western cultural forms

• Western cultural forms reverse into Eastern cultural forms
  (Cultural exchanges increase through the use of digital technologies that facilitate communication on a global level.)

• mainframes reverse into personal computers [a McLuhan prediction]

• products reverse into services [a McLuhan prediction]

• printed book as a product reverses into a service [a McLuhan prediction]
  (McLuhan’s predictions from the electric age were realized in the digital age for all three of these developments with e-book as the format in which the printed book becomes a service.)

• hardware reverses into software [a McLuhan prediction]
  (This is what literally happened in the digital age)

• explosion reverses into implosion
  (all forms of human knowledge and expression implode on the Internet)

• local culture reverses into universal global culture
  (The Internet facilitates cultural exchanges and hence facilitates the creation of a universal global culture)

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).

1. Writing separated the knower from the known (Havelock).

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…

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3 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 is now experiencing the digital reversal because, with digital media, not only our communication but all our interactions have reached the limit of speed—instantaneity. Never before has human interaction with the environment been faster than the 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 excerpt from my 2025 The Digital Reversal, speculating on why the more literate a society is, the harder the digital reversal hits.

The totality and selectivity of the digital reversal

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.