Like many of the invisible prophets of Silicon Valley, McLuhan became important for the tech industry because he allowed his readers to discover a secret structure underneath everyday reality. And because he made it possible to divide the world into those who could discern what was really going on and those who were unable to. The cryptic, at times confusing argument—the phrases that are perhaps more elegant than intelligible—turned out to be a strength rather than a weakness. McLuhan’s thoughts suggested that the vast majority of people looked at media, and indeed the world, in a deeply deluded way. Read Understanding Media and you’ll be privy to an arcane, elite knowledge.
So what exactly is so esoteric about McLuhan’s media theory? McLuhan regarded those analysts who focused their attention on the “content” of books or TV shows as dupes: what the medium appeared to say was “like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” The real object of study was the medium itself. But as a result of this—in its way, deeply necessary—adjustment to the way we understand media, a strange new hierarchy snuck into tech discourse. It is impressive how free of value judgment McLuhan’s description of media was. It is odd how moralistic the tone in which he framed the shift away from the content was. The medium is for those who get it. The content is for idiots, naïfs, sheep.
McLuhan, for instance, lampoons as “somnambulism” the commonsense assumption that technology “as such” is neither good nor bad, but that it becomes good or bad only in the manner of its use. And he presciently pokes fun at people who say that they personally “pay no attention to ads.” Some of this may have been a professor of literature trying hard to unlearn ingrained habits typical of his profession. Some of this may have been a desire to shock. But whatever the reason, content for McLuhan simply wasn’t a coequal part of what media were doing. It was a nullity, a distraction.
It’s likely that this de-emphasis on content set the tone for the tech industry going forward. The idea that content is in a strange way secondary, even though the platforms Silicon Valley keeps inventing depend on it, is deeply ingrained. And the terms of this value judgment strikingly resemble how McLuhan frames the problem. To create content is to be distracted. To create the “platform” is to focus on the true structure of reality. Shaping media is better than shaping the content of such media. It is the person who makes the “platform” who becomes a billionaire. The person who provides the content—be it reviews on Yelp, self-published books on Amazon, your own car and waking hours through Uber—is a rube distracted by a glittering but pointless object.
McLuhan’s culture-defining celebration of media came after decades during which his work was marked by a thoroughgoing pessimism. McLuhan’s early work was profoundly weary of modern life, and repulsed by mass media. But when he reinvented himself as a prophet of new media, McLuhan did not abandon his prior pessimistic inclinations: he had been right about postwar culture being mired in a terrible malaise, but now, thanks to new media, culture would finally leave this malaise behind. In this belief, he became useful to Silicon Valley. When his classic works of the sixties address the advent of new media, they sound apocalyptic and excited in equal measure. And why not? He continued to hate the homogeneity peddled by Madison Avenue, comic strips, and Hollywood movies, but he was now hopeful that eventually the changing media landscape would destroy all of that: modernity was terrible, but the new tribal world that would come after was going to be much better.
This way of thinking made McLuhan appealing to the counterculture. But it also ensured that he remained simpatico for the tech industry even as it increasingly left its countercultural origins behind. After all, tech too has a strange optimistic pessimism. Sure, when tech companies make their big announcements, they are all starry-eyed about the future. But when you get right down to it, the industry doesn’t have a very high opinion of how things are going. Like the producers of infomercials, tech companies are really good at seeing problems everywhere. The old way of doing X is beset by a host of problems, and product Y can finally solve them all. Where conservative nostalgists discount the present in favor of a radically different past, the tech industry finds the present lacking when compared to the incredible, candy-colored future that is right around the corner. The trick is pure McLuhan.
The more the tech industry sought to take on established, institutional knowledge, the more McLuhan provided its captains with a sense of why establishment forces were debased and not worth saving. McLuhan furnished them with a narrative of historical inevitability, a technological determinism that they could now call on to negate the consequences of their inventions—if it was fated to happen anyway, is it really their fault? Whether it comes to setting down in writing what had previously been passed down orally from generation to generation, or disseminating print to reach, create, and sustain large audiences, there is a sense that once the genie has left the bottle, there’s little point to wishing it would go back in.
While when it comes to media such inevitable progress may be plausible and even appealing, a disturbing number of McLuhan’s examples are about changes in the business cycle: one group or another being put out of work by technological change. McLuhan seems entirely unconcerned with them—and, to be fair, why should he be? He is a
