AI and orgasm, digital orality, the unstoppable technological imperative, and the chain of Singularities: my mid-summer digest

Several months of writing, commenting, and interviews, all released in a single week

Jul 12, 2026

Hello, media determinists. The planets must have aligned: several essays, interviews, and comments went live last week, some of them after months in the making. I know, editors waited until everyone left for summer vacation and then unloaded their most valuable cargo to revive dwindling reader attention. Or, also possible, they did it simply to fill pages, since nobody reads anything anyway, as summer heat, vacations, and the FIFA World Cup all compete in eroding long reading.
Nevertheless, these essays and commentaries contain some major ideas and latest probes, so I feel compelled to gather these “media appearances” into a digest and report it to subscribers.

1) “Cascade of Singularities: a futuristic speculation” – Default.Blog

What is the relationship between humans and ai in the big picture, on the scale of mega-evolution? What may come after the human phase? After the AI phase?

AI, orgasm, post-Singularity, the paradox of self-copying, and the trial be getting high. Stirred, not shaken. And yes, why deep space exploration will never happen. Read:

2) “An Interview with Andrey Mir: Why We Can’t Stop Technology” – The Republic of Letters

…By reversing text into texting, digital media reverse literacy and retrieve orality in the form I call digital orality. Digital orality is immersive, reactive, impulsive, and instantaneous. These conditions reverse Walter Ong’s inward turn of literacy and Eric Havelock’s separation of the known from the knower, made possible by writing. We are returning from knowledge to “ways of knowing” and from abstract thinking to “lived experience.” All this retrieves the tribal conditioning of minds and cultures...

...You may point to a contradiction: the technological imperative should advance media development, so how can it return us to tribalism, a long-past stage of human history? But media themselves have advanced dramatically. The internet digitized all our knowledge and all our language, making them available to AI. Now digital orality is making all our speech available to AI. By talking digitally with one another and with AI, we show AI how to connect all meanings to all contexts. By helping AI actualize language into speech, we show it how cognitive structures work. AI needs our digital orality, and that is why we are becoming digitally oral. Our return to tribalism is merely a side effect of this media advancement.

...The maximal, ultimate extension is when a medium extends the user to the entire environment. Look at AI—it is already nearing this condition. ChatGPT fills the entire digital space. When the user, the medium, and the environment become one, this new entity automatically becomes the self-user. In this sense, media evolution has to end up in AI as the self-user, which is the final reversal of humankind. By the way, this also has to abolish mediation and media themselves. Evolution of media is paradoxically also the dissolution of media.

...Either way, while we think AI is a useful idiot, it is making useful idiots of us. Not opening Pandora’s box of AI is not an option, backlash or no backlash. I do not think humans possess the power to fight the technological imperative. But there are strategies for, if not survival, then at least a decent last stand... If traditional media literacy teaches how to use media, counter-digital media literacy focuses on how not to use them. This interview represents the latest assemblage of core and recent ideas; read:

3) “How Social Media Became Antisocial” – City Journal

…According to legend, Mark Zuckerberg said of this new medium: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” The idea sounds callous, but the intention was to shift people’s focus from distant news delivered by mass media to personal news shared by friends and family.

It mostly succeeded. Totally meaningless in terms of public interest, personal news was empowered by platform design, making users aware of the private lives of friends, acquaintances, and strangers as never before.

...As a result, an even deeper side effect flipped the original intent of Zuckerberg and other social-media pioneers. Instead of merely prioritizing the personal over the distant, social media made the distant personal, delivering it in agitated form through networks of attitudes.

...User engagement through expressing personal beliefs reached its most extreme forms by the end of the 2010s. It led to rage, animosity, censorship, and the split of the most dynamic political network, Twitter, into X and Bluesky—two highly polarized social-media environments.

…People grew tired of partisan anger and were afraid of cancellation, bullying, and trolling behavior.

...People still spend enormous amounts of time on social media, but mostly browsing feeds with interesting “features,” much as they once skimmed features in magazines, or watching short videos, much as they once watched TV. It’s a true McLuhanian reversal: from engagement back to broadcasting. Read:

4) “The End of Reading Is Here” – The Atlantic

I’ve got a brief mention, but the essay—the cover feature in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch—has lately become the most quoted and debated piece on media and postliteracy. Read:

5) “As print literacy fades, our perception of truth is warping” – Big Think

Key Takeaways:

Every dominant medium reshapes what people mean by “truth,” from tribal orality’s situational truth to print culture’s objective truth to digital media’s viral truth.
As society moves away from print literacy, it is also moving away from the habits and conditions that once made shared, objective reality easier to sustain.
AI may accelerate this shift by producing language increasingly detached from direct reality, making truth harder to verify and more dependent on human efforts to stay grounded.

Read:

6) “Why McLuhan Matters” - 2067: A Journal of Canadian Consciousness

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:

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

Read:

If you haven't done it yet, don’t forget to check out my latest book, The Technological Imperative: Why We Develop Our Media. Essays on Human Agency and AI.

If you have and liked it, please give it generous stars and a review on Amazon—it really helps increase its discoverability for others.

See other books by Andrey Mir:

Media Determinism

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