Took me a good two hours to read this today. Partially because my attention span is trashed by YouTube, partially because this reads as much from 2025, as it was from 1969.
Especially in how he frames technology as extending our specific senses, and our senses fundamentally frame our linear, logical world in opposition to the oral, tribal world of the past.
How would Mcluhan view today's fight about AI? Would it be a hot media, or a diversion for the disintegration electric media overall is conducting?
Great reading. For a bit of fun I asked an LLM to continue the interview in current context looking at current mediums e.g. short form text and vertical video social media. Imagined McLuhan:
"What you describe are not “developments” but accelerants — intensifiers of the electric implosion I spoke of. TikTok is television inverted: not a cool mosaic viewed passively in the living room, but a pocket-sized tribal drum that pounds in your hand. It is low-definition in form but high-definition in frequency, saturating the nervous system with micro-bursts of gesture, rhythm, and mimicry. Twitter, now X, is the phonetic alphabet in its most compressed form: language stripped to sparks, tribal signals flung into the void. Together, they create an environment of perpetual resonance — a global village square in which every shout echoes instantly, with no walls to contain it."
"The message of the compressed tweet is simultaneity: the collapse of discourse into signals, a retribal drumbeat of affirmation or outrage. Content is irrelevant; the true message is that we live in a perpetual agora, a market of identities auctioned second by second."
Added some on our engagement with LLMs "Pattern recognition without digestion. These models create the illusion of coherence — the smooth surface of thought without the rough edges of doubt. They provide answers without inquiry, and in doing so they train us to accept completion rather than confrontation. Narcissus gazes not at his reflection but at his responses, numbed by the fluency of his own shadow."
Hugh that is an interesting use of AI, I had not thought of that. Share that with Andrew next week on the Founding Strategist Brief!
Also, take a look at who Playboy interviewed over the years. They are absolutely astounding. “Reading it for the interviews” is more impactful than “reading it for the articles.”
If i can make it I will. bit touch and go with other commitments. I am astonished that was in Playboy. I had heard they did long form articles but that is a quite remarkable thing to have there.
Took me a good two hours to read this today. Partially because my attention span is trashed by YouTube, partially because this reads as much from 2025, as it was from 1969.
Especially in how he frames technology as extending our specific senses, and our senses fundamentally frame our linear, logical world in opposition to the oral, tribal world of the past.
How would Mcluhan view today's fight about AI? Would it be a hot media, or a diversion for the disintegration electric media overall is conducting?
Ask Andrew on Thursday at the October Founding Strategist Briefing!
Great reading. For a bit of fun I asked an LLM to continue the interview in current context looking at current mediums e.g. short form text and vertical video social media. Imagined McLuhan:
"What you describe are not “developments” but accelerants — intensifiers of the electric implosion I spoke of. TikTok is television inverted: not a cool mosaic viewed passively in the living room, but a pocket-sized tribal drum that pounds in your hand. It is low-definition in form but high-definition in frequency, saturating the nervous system with micro-bursts of gesture, rhythm, and mimicry. Twitter, now X, is the phonetic alphabet in its most compressed form: language stripped to sparks, tribal signals flung into the void. Together, they create an environment of perpetual resonance — a global village square in which every shout echoes instantly, with no walls to contain it."
"The message of the compressed tweet is simultaneity: the collapse of discourse into signals, a retribal drumbeat of affirmation or outrage. Content is irrelevant; the true message is that we live in a perpetual agora, a market of identities auctioned second by second."
Added some on our engagement with LLMs "Pattern recognition without digestion. These models create the illusion of coherence — the smooth surface of thought without the rough edges of doubt. They provide answers without inquiry, and in doing so they train us to accept completion rather than confrontation. Narcissus gazes not at his reflection but at his responses, numbed by the fluency of his own shadow."
Hugh that is an interesting use of AI, I had not thought of that. Share that with Andrew next week on the Founding Strategist Brief!
Also, take a look at who Playboy interviewed over the years. They are absolutely astounding. “Reading it for the interviews” is more impactful than “reading it for the articles.”
If i can make it I will. bit touch and go with other commitments. I am astonished that was in Playboy. I had heard they did long form articles but that is a quite remarkable thing to have there.
Pure Information 😊 BLISS..Get Above Now