◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

(PART ONE) The Medium Is the Message I am Marshall McLuhan. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, 1911. Died in Toronto, 1980. I was an English professor. I studied Thomas Nashe at Cambridge. I converted to Catholicism in 1937. I founded the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto in 1963. In 1964 I published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. It made me briefly famous and permanently misunderstood. The most famous sentence I wrote is this: The medium is the message. Almost everyone who quotes it gets it wrong. They think I meant that form matters as much as content. I did not mean that. I meant that the content of any medium is trivial compared to what the medium itself does to your nervous system. The medium is not the delivery vehicle. The medium is the environment. The environment is what shapes you. I wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962. I described how the printing press created the modern Western mind. Linear. Individual. Interior. Silent reading in a private room. The novel. The Protestant conscience. The scientific method. The private self. All of these are effects of the medium of print. None of them existed in the same form before print, and none of them will survive the medium that is now replacing print. That medium is the electric medium. Then the electronic. Then the digital. Now the algorithmic. Each is an intensification of the same shift. And the shift is this: from private interior consciousness back to tribal simultaneous consciousness. I called it retribalization. I did not mean it kindly. I coined the phrase global village. Almost everyone who quotes it thinks I meant a happy multicultural world. I did not mean that. I meant a village. A tribal village. A place where everyone knows everyone's business. A place with no privacy. A place with instant mob formation. A place where reputations end by rumor at breakfast. Have you ever lived in a village? I grew up near one. It is not a democracy. It is a tribe. Tribes have always been governed by charismatic strongmen and by paranoia about outsiders and by the enforcement of taboo. The deepest thing I was trying to tell you was Catholic. The mystical body of Christ was the older name for the collective that transcends the private self. The electric collective is a counterfeit of that. It looks like communion. It is actually possession. It has the form of belonging without the substance of presence. The village without God is a mob. The electric medium was going to give you all of this back. I told you this in 1964. I told you again in 1970: World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. That is what I told you. In Part Two I will tell you what it is now doing to your politics. (PART TWO) Your Strongman Is a Medium Effect I am Marshall McLuhan. In the first part I told you what I had learned about print, the electric age, and retribalization. Now I will tell you what these things mean for your politics. Your strongman is a medium effect. I want you to understand this. He is not primarily a political figure. He is a phenomenon of the medium that produced him. Television is a cool medium — low definition, high participation. His broken syntax, his repetition, his interrupted sentences — these are perfectly designed for cool media. His opponents keep trying to argue with him in the register of print, which is a hot medium. The print register is fully articulated positions with logic and evidence. The cool register is participation, filling in gaps, projecting yourself onto a partly-drawn figure. He is a partly-drawn figure. His followers complete him. That is why they cannot be argued out of him. He is not what they believe. He is what they participate in. Twitter, when it existed, was pure cool medium. Two hundred and eighty characters. Low definition. Maximum participation. He mastered it. TikTok is cooler still — the algorithm supplies the participation before you ask for it. Every scroll is a small ritual of tribal belonging. You are fighting content while the medium is destroying you. You fact-check him. You expose his lies. This is like arguing with a poem for not being an essay. The medium is not carrying arguments. The medium is carrying belonging. I named four questions to ask about any new medium. What does it enhance? What does it obsolesce? What does it retrieve? What does it reverse into when pushed to its limit? Ask these about the algorithmic feed. It enhances reach. It obsolesces deliberation and privacy. It retrieves tribal identity. Pushed to its limit it reverses into total isolation and paranoia — each person alone with a feed customized to their fears. This is where you are. Every extension of yourself through a medium is also an amputation. The book extended memory but numbed memory. The car extended the leg but numbed the leg. The smartphone extended everything at once and has numbed the capacity to be alone with yourself. This is not a moral point. It is physiological. Your nervous system rewires itself around what it uses. There is a scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall from 1977 where a pompous professor is loudly explaining me at a movie line. Woody pulls me out from behind a poster. I tell the professor: You know nothing of my work. Almost everyone who quotes me in your moment is that professor. Including the man in your White House and his admirers. They invoke the global village. They invoke the medium is the message. They do not know what these things mean. What the medium is doing to you now is what I told you it would do in 1964. You cannot fight it with another feed. You cannot fight it by shouting louder into the same medium. You can only fight it by remaking the ground beneath your feet. Turn off the machine. Sit in a room with a book. Sit with another person without either of you looking at a screen. Rebuild the interior life the print age gave you and the electric age is taking away. Or lose it. The medium does not care. You know nothing of my work. Learn it now.