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Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves. — “Gandalf” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers

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The Old Testament provides a couple of metrics for discerning the veracity of a prophetic voice. The first is fidelity to the God of the Hebrews, and the second is whether predictions made by the alleged prophet come to fruition. The latter retains a good deal of relevance within modern science, as the efficacy of a model can be assessed by its predictive power, and it is in precisely such a test that Marshall McLuhan’s work shines.

The model McLuhan presents in Understanding Media is built on a conception of technology as a mode of extending the capabilities of the body, and further of media as extensions of the senses. McLuhan contends that in the Information Age electric technology has become a self-amputatory extension of the entire central nervous system. McLuhan traces the effects of this phenomenon through a dynamic he identifies as a sort of principle of reversal, in which technologies which are “explosive,” that is, those which tend toward fragmentation and specialization, have historically reached an event horizon in which their utmost extreme development becomes a reverse of itself, “imploding” and tending backwards toward homogeneity. This principle is McLuhan’s skeleton key to unlocking the mysteries of the Electric Age.

This model of media is, if not comprehensive, nonetheless confidently sprawling enough to present such an impression of itself. McLuhan occasionally verges on brazen assertiveness in his claims, but each bluff is backed by the sheer volume of answers at his disposal, which he does not hesitate to vaunt. Indeed, Understanding Media has a labyrinthine character that makes its theses difficult to wrangle all at once. But bobbing in McLuhan’s sea of historical references, cultural anecdotes and tongue-clicking at the state of his field is the aforementioned foresight, the prescient and piercing portions of his analysis of electric media that have been thoroughly vindicated by the decades since 1964.

McLuhan astutely presses a finger on the numbing effect of media, as he would later pun-tificate on in The Medium is the Massage. The TV, as McLuhan’s prime example, is therefore, and for many other reasons, like a window. Much like John Vervaeke’s metaphor of glasses, TV is a thing that is seen through rather than itself seen. Though television embodied the latest-and-greatest electric medium in McLuhan’s day, he is able to see it for itself, notably in perhaps his most astounding prediction that, “Soon everyone will be able to have a small, inexpensive film projector that plays an 8-mm sound cartridge as if on a TV screen.” He can perhaps be forgiven his technical naivete for the sake of the prophetic merit fulfilled in Martin Scorsese’s lament that The Irishman was not made to be watched on an iPad.

The smartphone — whose name McLuhan would no doubt observe is characteristically numbly misleading and anachronistic — handily encapsulates the implosion he foresaw. It is a phone, yes, but mainly a TV, a PC, an ATM, a flashlight, a pager, a radio, a camera and video camera, etc. It is the black hole so dense that classical physics is no longer explanatory, the technology so thoroughly generalized that it has shifted the valence of the term “device” away from its older, specialized counterpart, “machine.” And McLuhan would likewise be pleased to know how right he was that these “devices” and their implosive, organic interconnectivity via portable access to the internet has indeed begun to usher in the post-literate moment he predicted. If Twitter/X represents the utmost extreme of hyper-literacy, then TikTok is the slope on the other side of that apex, tumbling back down into the world of oral “soundbites.” Similarly, the extreme truncating of “content” prominent in both examples has itself collapsed and inverted into the long hours of the doomscroll.

McLuhan’s comparison of the TV to a window inevitably raises the question of what lies on the other side of the glass. The author would be remiss not to mention the Eastern Orthodox tradition of iconography in connection to this metaphor for a number of reasons, not least because of the common description of icons in that tradition as “windows to heaven.” McLuhan finds the connection through the mosaic nature of television technology — a feature that would have been more obvious at the lower screen resolutions of the ‘60s, before ultra-high-definition melted away the gaps the mind must otherwise fill, appropriating the power of illusion from the viewer — and the prevalence of mosaic as a medium of art in the Eastern Christian world compared to their Western counterparts.

Icons are meant to give visibility to the invisible, to stress the corporeal unity of the Church militant and triumphant, and, in Eastern thought especially, to form the viewer in accordance with the virtuosity of the figure depicted. The third effect, that of formation, is perhaps the one to which screen usage numbs its participants the most, and yet the obvious parallelism of the other two ought to at least strongly imply, or else necessarily entail, the last. Screens are obviously windows to that which otherwise would not or could not be seen, be it that which is far of in space, in time, or even far from reality. Like Tolkien’s palantír, the little black stones in modern people’s pockets do little else but “see small images of things far off and remote.” Modern devices also do with astonishing power what McLuhan observed in the humble tube-TV, bringing humanity into an organic unity of close contact and inexorable interrelatedness.

If these effects in the iconography of Eastern Christianity produce formation in the “user,” then how can it be imagined that screens do otherwise? It is precisely the most profound effect to which the medium most numbs the viewer. “Those who make them are like them.” One becomes what one beholds. This clearly obtains in the fact of organic unity. Those who behold the whole world on the other side of the glass of a screen become an increasingly integrated part thereof. Yet, the impression of the world in the internet — diffuse, chaotic, whelming — especially as it exists through social media in its instantaneous accessibility via smartphones is formative of a schizophrenic, increasingly delusional, hostile character. The wizard Saruman, once the evil eye has gazed back at him from his portable black screen, is formed into a groveling slave who slinks back to answer its call over and again.

But numbness is in large measure the power of media. An Orthodox Christian who ceases to look through the icon and rather looks at the icon will cease drawing near to sainthood and begin being unaffected by mere egg tempera on wood. He who sees paint never sees the painting, but he who sees the trick doesn’t fall for the magic. This is where, say, a Paul Kingsnorth would benefit greatly from a reading of McLuhan. “A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.” Kingsnorth understands rightly that electronic media is immensely powerful and that it violently disrupts historic patterns of life just as mechanization did before it, but he doesn’t understand what that power means, or that such change is itself a historic constant. He has seen through the palantír and identified the evil eye, yet he does not see the orb itself. Hence, Kingsnorth, for all his efforts contrariwise, remains a kind of slave to technology, forced by his own perspective to fight a losing battle of self-definition by contrast, accepting the same technological encroachments as others, only more grudgingly and with the addition of guilt. Perhaps he cannot resist its power because he is numb to his own numbness.

Enter, then, the power of AI. Generative AI is quite literally impossible to understand at some level. It embodies McLuhan’s principle of reversal in that its extreme commitment to mathematic lineality finally simulates an organic integrity. The result is a black box. But, if McLuhan is right, then there really is no technological innovation that is understood fully at its inception, and therefore the numbness-power induced by AI is unique in degree rather than kind. McLuhan writes that even a “conscious computer” would only be an extension of human consciousness — another prediction come true, as LLM’s prove sychophantically impotent, unable to contradict or exceed what it predicts its user will think of first. It is an expectation-meeting-mechanism, only powerful because of magician misdirection. If the screen is a window, then AI is the ever-shifting mercury on the other side of the glass that makes it a mirror.

McLuhan’s invocation of Narcissus becomes all the more salient. He notes the common failure to distinguish that Narcissus does not, in fact, fall in love with himself, but with his reflection. It is in that failure that McLuhan identifies Narcissus as a figuration of the narcotically numb hypnosis of media. One might well moralize on the danger of AI being within the individual who mistakes it for a self rather than a mere reflection, a mirage, an extension of himself. Already that danger is becoming clear in the mad feedback echoes of a generation of mirror-talkers whose therapist, colleague, or best friend lives through the looking-glass.

Evidently, many of McLuhan’s projections have adhered closely to reality, and the internet has indeed made us “nomadic as never before,” but some of his other predictions remain harder to assess, or at least more dubious to believe. McLuhan mentions repeatedly his expectation that “paid learning” will become the dominant form of labor in the Information Age and, while an ex post facto rationalization could scrounge up some kind of explanation, the very difficulty in seeing the fulfillment of the prediction when compared to the striking accuracy of his others does much to negate any such effort. Perhaps McLuhan would be disappointed to see that his admonitions about the need for education to make the leap from its industrial-mechanical format to a new electric-organic mode have largely gone unheeded, and indeed most Westerners still must pay to learn. Perhaps it is this failure that does vindicate McLuhan in that children still processed through the fragmented Industrial Age education system become so cripplingly numb to electronic media, to the point that they stand no chance against the psychic enslavement wielded against those ignorant to its working. In the age of post-literacy, the young seem to understand electronic media less than the generation or two older than themselves.

In fact, despite its now-quaint sobriquet as the “information superhighway,” the internet is not primarily driven economically or technologically by learning, but by advertisement. It approaches McLuhan’s other trajectory of advertising “toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness” in which “all production and all consumption are brought into a pre-established harmony with all desire and all effort.” The massive infrastructure of the social-media-dominated-internet is profitable because it reduces users to advertising metrics and calculable consumer profiles. Social media continues to wax addictive driven by the ecosystem of advertising that pulls the consumer into deeper participation, to the point that the avid browser practically advertises to himself, at least in terms of manhours. Deepening patterns of consumer self-expression and self-identification through branded media franchises make the cinephile a walking billboard, his clothing and domicile both plastered with the iconography that he has not only been sold, but that he is now himself selling, if unwittingly.

McLuhan’s prophetic disposition toward such deepening involvement has perhaps proved more valid than even he in his swaggering self-assurance could have predicted. The TV screen has given way to the touch screen. The digital-as-in-numeric has reverted by revolution to the digital-as-in-tactile. Where once the visual-mechanical held the power of what McLuhan calls “action without reaction” by extending the visual faculties and so, like the telescope, affording distant, detached observation, intake of information without the necessity of responsive input, the oral-tactile world he saw emerging generates such a thick atmosphere of involvement that reaction is itself the fuel on which social media is built. Reaction videos are a whole genre. Reactions such as ‘like’ and ‘comment’ forcefully bridge the viewer and the screen. ‘Content’ urges reaction, molding views into interactions, viewers into participants. AI, again, epitomizes this.

The gripping affective power of electronic media, their power to generate anger, sadness, mirth, arousal, and all the other most basal emotional states, is devastating to a literacy-oriented culture accustomed to remaining distant from its subject. The gravitational field of digital media has reversed more quickly than mankind has been able to react, at least in the West. The cold, scholastic detachment that creates these technologies cannot withstand them. “Big Tech” moguls do not permit their children to use the media they create. Instead, they build bunkers in anticipation of the catastrophe they themselves herald, like the men who built the atom bomb hunkered down in expectation that existence itself might disintegrate around them at Trinity, white-knuckling through the blazing explosion too rapid and intense to understand. That white-knuckle ethos hurries on, like pulling teeth, as the literate world simply braces and doubles down on its own demise, hoping against hope for an afterlife.

The Mechanical Age explosion of McLuhan’s image manifested in the atomic explosion at Trinity Site, and since then, as the mechanized Second World War gave way to the informationized Cold War, the Enigma Machine and Turing brought the rearguard to the van as Trinity’s true successors. We’ve had no more nukes, but we have had lots of drones. By McLuhan’s theory, the A-bomb marked the end of an age, the peak of mechanization, the Age of Machines, which gave way to the advent of digitization, the Age of Devices. And, in its way, the power to split the atom was carried forward, not explosively, but implosively. We no longer create suns out in the desert, but we do bring black holes into every home.

Truly, there is far too much in Understanding Media to discuss in so short a space. But finding McLuhan in the era of digital slop is like finding the doomsday prophet after the world has ended. Present-day readers stand to gain much from his insight, as he has the telescope across time which affords him the detachment we necessarily lack but dolefully need. Most valuable is the overall framework he presents, which is helpful in building awareness where numbness persists, and so ideally treating the pernicious effects and reaping the invisible benefits that numbness hides. McLuhan is a sage that digital man ignores at his own peril.