The reversal of explosion into implosion: AI as the true affordance of digital media
Deep space colonization is already losing to digital space colonization
The affordance of artificial intelligence originally emerged to boost our networking with each other and with knowledge. Every new medium first arrives to meet old needs—but then it unleashes its own affordances that reshape everything. So did digital media. Reed more in: The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution.
Between the first man in the air (1903) and the first man in space (1961), less time passed than between the first man in space and now. Space exploration hasn’t advanced much since the 1960s—it has basically stalled.
Human expansion reached the whole planet, then orbit—and then stopped. It’s too risky, too expensive, and no longer truly necessary to move the human body faster or farther. Space expansion seems to have hit its limits of feasibility or practicality. Time to reverse.
Sci-fi dreams of deep space exploration turned out to be just fantasy. Deep space exploration—anything beyond Mars (and even that’s unlikely)—will never happen. There’s no real practical need for it.
The deep space ambitions of humankind echoed the old Age of Discovery, when second sons, lacking land and inheritance, set out overseas seeking treasure or new lands to conquer and settle. Musk’s Mars colonization program reflects a similar drive—new lands to settle.
Meanwhile, the technological advancement needed to mine minerals or resettle in deep space will likely be enough to synthesize any material—if materials are even needed, because that level of development shall also let humans resettle into a different space: digital.
Why bother sending costly missions for gems and pepper if you can just synthesize them? Why bother escaping polluted, annoying Earth for Mars if you can escape into an induced, endlessly modifiable reality? Chasing interstellar travel is like staring into the rearview mirror.[i]
Deep space colonization is already losing to digital space colonization. Deep-space travel demands enormous resources and mobilization, while digital resettlement is cheaper, carried out through dispersed efforts, and poses no physical risk at the R&D stage.
Most importantly, digital resettlement is the only future that fits the logic of media evolution (except for humanity’s self-destruction, of course). Instead of sending our physical bodies into space, media evolution refocused on digitizing and relaying the discarnate human mind.
After explosive acceleration in the 20th century, humans’ physical expansion reached its limits. The conditions for a reversal have ripened. “The stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electric form reverses explosion into implosion,” said McLuhan in 1964.[ii]
“This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the ‘noosphere’ or a technological brain for the world,” wrote McLuhan.[iii] (Many of his ideas, including this one, sounded like puzzling metaphors in the TV era but have become self-evident in the digital age.)
The noosphere was perhaps the first media ecological term. It posited that human cognitive and technological activity forms our econiche, enveloping the entire planet. For Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere was a “thinking layer” of the Earth because it was populated by humans.
McLuhan’s reading of the noosphere—the “technological brain for the world”—is something else. It’s not just a layer of cognitive activity but collective consciousness on a planetary scale. The internet, of course, embodies it far better than electronic media (but wait for AI).
The ecological view of a human-shaped environment evolved from extending our senses into the physical world to extending ourselves into an induced, digital reality, where we replay our formerly organic lives within digital space, by digital means.
Despite the self-imposed tweet-size limitation, I can’t resist quoting a long passage from McLuhan’s introduction to Understanding Media, where he compressed an ecological understanding of the entire media evolution into a single paragraph—and, in passing, predicted 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. 1/3
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— 2/3
—the technological simulation of consciousness (It’s AI. Emphasis 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.”[iv] 3/3
Digital media didn’t just detach the “disembodied spirit” from the human body—electronic media did that too—but also let this spirit operate within an induced reality. It didn’t take long for specific digital amenities to emerge to support this spirit’s functioning.
Digital media provided hosting, data navigation (search), relevance algorithms, networking, bots, smart aids—all kinds of facilities and services to meet the needs of our digital personas. Over time, digital amenities grew more sophisticated and began to interact with each other.
The digital environment has grown smarter. Catering to users’ needs, it developed intelligent faculties that became its core feature—its message (in the sense of McLuhan’s “The medium is the message”). Digital media have become a Petri dish for emergent non-human intelligence.
Overcoming space-time, extending our nervous system across the planet, even turning the user into content—electronic media could do all that. So what’s the unique affordance of digital media? The unique affordance of digital media is the affordance of artificial intelligence.
The affordance of artificial intelligence originally emerged to boost our networking with each other and with knowledge. Every new medium first arrives to meet old needs—but then it unleashes its own affordances that reshape everything. So did digital media.
In the big picture, the digital service of networking was “used” by media evolution to lure us into using and developing digital media. Once we were hooked, their true affordance took over: digital media use human engagement as training tokens for large language models.
To extend Levinson’s idea of “human replay”[v]: digital media offered us a nearly perfect replay of the entire human persona in our image and after our likeness—but then reversed human replaying into human replacing, as media always do to the human organs or faculties they extend.
The reversal of human replaying into human replacing is an inevitable side effect of the reversal of explosion into implosion, when the mediated environment gets suddenly squeezed into not just the user’s perception but the user’s interaction—when interaction becomes environment.
Since media are extensions of humans, media evolution exploded humankind into the world. The final stage of this extension—the Singularity—will be the last reversal: it will implode the world into humankind, when humankind, its medium, and its environment become one.
Reed more in: The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
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)
[i] I discussed the deep space vs. digital space colonization in the 2010 essay “The Chain of Singularities: A futuristic speculation.”
[ii] McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. P. 35.
[iii] McLuhan, Marshall. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.
[iv] McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. P. 3.
[v] Levinson, Paul. (2017). Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media.