Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
The most accurate description of being online that was ever articulated comes to us from a Canadian professor. “Everybody has become porous. The light and the message go right through us,” he said during a television appearance. “At this moment, we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. … You’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. … It has deprived people really of their identity.” That’s exactly what it feels like to spend time on TikTok or X—and was said by someone who died in 1980.
If you’re not a boomer or a grad student, you may not have heard of him, but theorist Marshall McLuhan—the coiner of enduring aphorisms “the medium is the message” and “the global village”—warned us about today’s digital descent a long time ago. In March 1969, the cover of Playboy teased a feature interview with McLuhan, whose name recognition during the ’60s and ’70s was incredible. Vogue, Esquire, the Village Voice, the New Yorker, Harper’s, and Mademoiselle profiled him. The New York Times published over 30 articles about McLuhan in 1967 alone. NBC ran a documentary on him, and he was a regular guest on American and Canadian television. His fans included Andy Warhol and John Lennon. Then the backlash started. McLuhan was seen as more of a carnival barker than a scholar, and people—clearly—didn’t heed his warnings about technology.
I thought of McLuhan this June, when, in a conversation with Ross Douthat for the New York Times, billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel hesitated when asked if he “would prefer the human race to endure.”
The question was posed in a safe environment. Douthat, one of the Times’ most reliable conservatives, offered Thiel sufficient context to escape with an easy answer. Douthat prefaced his question by saying: “a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism—for transcendence of our mortal flesh—and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.” He was referencing the movement to radically enhance and evolve humans to achieve immortality. Transhumanist adherents advocate for a range of innovations, from genetic biohacking to uploading our consciousness to a computer to merge with A.I., freezing ourselves through cryonics, and robotically adapting our bodies through expansive bionics that reach the level of cyborgs.
Douthat clearly thought that Thiel would choose human over machine. But Thiel responded with a long hesitation. In a video of the exchange, Douthat—to his credit—is clearly taken aback.
Thiel has long been cagey and ambiguous about his beliefs—likely a strategic play for his career as an investor—but he has clearly been fascinated with transhumanism for a long time. This recent interview, though, seems more direct and dangerous. Thiel seems unwilling to answer the question: Does he eventually want to be a literal, honest-to-god brain in a jar wired to a Macbook Pro?
Transhumanism was coined by the English biologist Julian Huxley in a 1951 lecture, and refined in his 1957 book New Bottles for New Wine. Like his younger brother Aldous, Huxley imagined a brave new world. He quotes the philosopher Thomas Hobbes that our lives have been “nasty, brutish and short.” Most “have been afflicted with misery in one form or another— poverty, disease, ill-health, over-work, cruelty, or oppression.” Optimism and prayer haven’t fixed our problems. Only radical change will suffice, he writes: “It will begin by destroying the ideas and the institutions that stand in the way of our realizing our possibilities (or even deny that the possibilities are there to be realized).”
The human species, Huxley affirms, should embrace transhumanism: “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” This “new existence,” he argues, is our “real destiny.”
Since then, Huxley’s dictum of “man remaining man” has become stretched. The evolution from transhuman to posthuman—a new state or species rather than merely an enhanced or augmented one—has been envisioned and funded by Thiel and others, who don’t merely want to extend human lives, but to radically transform them. Thiel has turned his considerable wealth toward transhumanism. He financed the rise of an entrepreneur whose startup offered parents a way to screen and select embryos. He has invested in various anti-aging projects, as well as in the Enhanced Games, a forthcoming sports competition where athletes are encouraged to use performance-enhancing drugs in a bid to achieve “superhumanity.”
Thiel’s recent silence as to whether the human race should endure was revealing. It’s possible to think that the worst dystopian fears of A.I. are a form of collective science fiction but also worry that those with money and power (like Thiel) would gladly withdraw from the flesh while leaving the rest of us to our skin and bones.
In McLuhan’s day, the harmful technology was television. Although the medium brought people back to their tribal origins—both literally together in their living rooms and experiencing the same images from around the world—it was thought to be vapid and draining. Most importantly, McLuhan knew that television would soon be replaced by another, more inclusive medium—but his predictions of something like the internet fell on skeptical ears.
McLuhan likened our contemporary ills to the often misunderstood myth of Narcissus. The point of the story “is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images but that people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves,” resulting in “the idolatry of technology as involving a psychic numbness.” McLuhan believed that whatever technology we use—in his time, telephone, telegraph, radio, or television—surrounds us in a certain environment. We change how we communicate, and how we think, because of that environment. And because we are steeped in those environments, we often don’t realize that we are making changes.
That’s how it feels to spend time online these days. McLuhan said all of this more than 60 years ago. Although his observations were true about the electronic era, they are eerily accurate about our digital age.
Although McLuhan wasn’t a Luddite—he was wary of television, and yet he made frequent broadcast appearances—he was suspicious of technological development without a moral foundation. Born in 1911 and raised in “a loose sort of Protestantism,” McLuhan drifted toward agnosticism as an undergraduate, but converted to Catholicism during his doctoral studies at Cambridge. McLuhan embraced the Catholic doctrine that God became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. The belief anchored his media theories. “Without a body,” McLuhan warned, “man becomes violent.” Unchecked technology was a “tremendous menace” that would remove all of our privacy, but McLuhan was a realist: He knew that we could not stop innovation. For that reason, he called for a return to real human community rather than the delusion of virtual connections.
In the early 1970s, McLuhan began using pointed language in his private correspondence and public statements. In his fall 1971 convocation address at the University of Alberta, McLuhan told students that in an electronic world, people become “discarnate data, a sort of disembodied spirit coexisting and functioning simultaneously in diverse locations.” He predicted how our personal data would be collected and sold—and possibly be used against us.
Later in that Times conversation, Thiel said, “I’d rather have my body. I don’t want just a computer program that simulates me.” I’m not sure that I believe him. It sounds more like rhetorical cleanup than the truth.
In just a few years, A.I. has gone from novelty to noxious. If we continue to cede our selves to convenience, it will only get worse. McLuhan’s vision helps give meaning to our contemporary digital discontent. His message has particular resonance in America now, when the most marginalized among us are further losing their rights, and the most powerful keep track of our every keystroke. Our bodies matter, and we should endure. Don’t let the billionaires tell you otherwise.
