Why McLuhan Matters II: The Global Extension of the Central Nervous System
What McLuhan said in the era of TV seemed better suited to the Internet—until AI revealed what he really meant.
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:
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 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 think we need to distinguish between individual and collective consciousness...the internet itself is purely a means of creating a distributed entity of collective consciousness. AI embodies this collective nature as well - by nature of its training data, which is effectively all digitally recorded outputs of the human anthological collective intelligence - but, through its linguistic interface, which compresses this collective consciousness into something resembling individual consciousness, at least at face value. This is I think what is so unique about AI relative to the internet. In the latter, the collective consciousness was there implicitly, but there was nothing to compress it into an entity digestible as an individual unit which explicitly resembles consciousness.