McLuhan as Liberator of the Technologically Determined

An exciting exploration of a usually uninteresting question

I have been asked by Dan Gardner about the case against McLuhan’s being-labeled as a technological determinist in its “best form.” While I could indicate a few writings, I’d rather try my hand at making the case myself. There are too many unspoken assumptions and unexamined premises in the questions and answers I’ve seen to call any of them “best form.” Further, the very meaning of the question of technological determinism has sharpened greatly since the release of viable generalized generative AI systems. When we ask the question today, we often use the term “agency.”

That said, I’ll jump to the one-line summary argument: Marshall McLuhan was a technological determinist only insofar as he observed the all-too-often overwhelming role which our material environment plays in guiding or forcing the decisions which people—people who value agency, who with act with apparent agency, who profess agency—make.

Personally, what is most interesting about McLuhan is how he advances so-many strategies for humans regaining perception of their circumstances and retaking the reins. If observing the problem one wishes to solve makes one part of the problem, then McLuhan’s oft-made complaint about being accused of arson for yelling “Fire!” is entirely valid. And one need go no further than Robert Logan in McLuhan Misunderstood in clarifying McLuhan’s relation to determinism:

Despite his claim not to work from any theory or particular point of view many have branded him, pejoratively, as a technological determinist. We will show that he was a technological determinist, but that he was a soft determinist in the sense that technology by itself was not the only factor that determined human behaviour but that it was one of many contributing factors that needed to be reckoned with. Given that McLuhan never removed free will nor the possibility of human responsibility from his consideration of the impact of technology on society, the charge of technological determinism is really over the top.

We will show that his notion that electric media give rise to a field perspective is inconsistent with a simple interpretation of a direct causal connection between a technology and its impact. McLuhan after all was a media ecologist, perhaps the first, and although an ecological view incorporates causality, the relationships between the elements of a media ecology that includes the users and their technologies is not a simple one that can be summed up with a simple linear cause and effect form of determinism.

While it may be correct as far as it goes, I personally find the term “soft determinist” unsatisfying. It renders the question a truism: of course things are determined against our designs sometimes. The devil is in the details, and to go farther in appreciating McLuhan’s determinism, it is to them (and to the devil) we must go.

Agency is not McLuhan’s term, but, as I said, it’s now the popular term. It is the relation of our agency to that of greater, more complex systems—generative A.I. as exemplar—which lead us to question it. To make it obvious, let’s begin with the most extreme example and work backward. Imagine the typical sci-fi subject whose perceptions are enveloped, Matrix-like, in a totalizing virtual fantasy-world which neutralizes their ability to truly cause anything to happen in the real world. Their every action occurs in relation to events in micro-circuitry and the illusions of human/computer interface. Operating within this closed system, their agency is neatly insulated from the larger world within this virtual little null-space of them and their computer. They have agency within the reach of that small, enveloped system. Yet we say they lack agency, insofar as they, as an embodied person, are a servo-mechanism to this larger thing. From the outside of this closed system, their consciousness is dependent upon and governed by this larger system which encompasses and puppets them. It has goals for them, not the other way around.

A central premise of Cybernetics is that mechanical systems can exhibit telos, or fixed ends or goals. The notion of non-human purposes was contrary to what was generally accepted in science up to the 1940s. Yet a home thermostat is a mechanical system designed to equilibrate the temperature of that home around comfortable room-temperature. As I see it, then, human agency is the ability to have the dominant telos relative to ones environment (at some meaningful scale), subordinating relevant larger systems toward it.

It’s more complicated than that, however. To even properly formulate a goal, one must perceive enough of the total situation wherein one is planning one’s goal to be knowledgeable of the outcome. Poker is exciting because one can be fooled—not knowing the hands others hold creates the tension: who is fooling who? What one can and cannot sense is, thus, paramount.

I could wax on in terms of power, or controlling fate, or responsibility or blame, or drives and desires, but for consistency’s sake lets hone in on focus on the familier terms. We have the goals of systems: competing, aligning, converging, etc. And perception: when a larger system is providing a sub-system its information, the agency of that sub-system is necessarily pre-determined by the quality of information it gets. And encapsulation: larger systems swallow and use smaller ones to their own ends. Encapsulation is worth understanding: All non-trivial computer software today is written with thanks to the power of encapsulation: the nested stacks of black-boxes which each do their own thing well, blind to the larger whole. RAM is “protected” for a reason: mucking around in memory addresses which aren’t your own business tends to cause things to crash, quickly. Good software adheres to proper APIs, or channels of communication.

All this is extremely un-McLuhanesque so far. But, of course, the question of his status as a “technological determinist” is also thoroughly un-McLuhan. It is a question posed in a language foreign to his Catholic humanism. The very question is beneath him, I think. It’s like asking if Salvador Dali was being serious—it’s just the wrong sort of question to even ask, the naive question a subsumed man asks of the system which has subsumed him.

Yet, also, my job as a writer is to explain, not to condescend. So, in order to put a guy like McLuhan in a box with a useful description, I need the biggest box the popular science world has. Only cybernetics and systems theory—the most general sciences yet contrived, the very sciences of generality itself—are big enough to hold him while still answering the question to any satisfaction. And McLuhan was himself an applied cyberneticist, a widely-accepted point that I am only the latest to argue. Donald Theall’s The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (2001) goes into depth on his adoptions and critiques of cybernetic theory. And Robert Logan has made the case for McLuhan’s status as a general systems thinker.

The questions of whether or not McLuhan is a technological determinist depends on first hammering out some clear meaning of the term. Everyone is, at some point in their life, totally-helpless to larger systems. Infants depend on mothers or care-givers, prison inmates are governed by strictly-enforced institutional rules, and all of us, in times of desperation or ignorance or foolishness, must throw our fates upon larger systems and live life blindly for some duration. In other words, given that we exist in relation to a larger, complex world beyond our control, many things are unavoidably determined for us, without us.

Given this, the term technological determinism is only meaningful, it seems to me, as some kind of absolute statement about society as a whole, as an ensemble. Consider democracy. Everyone can vote, but only one party can win. Are those who vote for the losing candidate disenfranchised of their agency because of their loss? If we assume fair elections, then we say they are not disenfranchised, even given their loss, because of their membership to total group of voters. “The people have spoken,” we say, including even the losers as minority objectors. You knew you might lose when you partook in your civic duty to vote, your agency in partaking was fully validated—you understood the game you were playing and you consented to play. That game itself was the agent at the macro-scale. As a single voter, your telos was aligned and operating with it.

So common ideas like “informed consent” and “disclosure” of facts are central to questions of determinacy.

Before he became a media scholar, McLuhan was heavily interested in how modern artistic technique was demonstrating a capability for what we generally call “consciousness raising.” He compiled an entire book, unpublished but for a few essays, on The New American Vortex (1948), on how to lift post-war democracies into a cultural renaissance. You can read many of these ideas in his 1947 proposal to University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins and champion of famed Great Books Program. In the contemporaneous work Typhon in America: Guide to Chaos (1948, also unpublished), he closely examined the mechanization of humanity by speed, a fetish for “know how”, and gluttony for sensation. The thirst for “templates” and systems among Substack writers—the commodification of systems and step-by-step tutorials for achieving every end, for that matter—are familiar ways in-which individuals subordinate their own agency to pre-fabricated thought. In Typhon he, very-early, interrogates the new I.B.M. computers and test-audience movie-screenings which are measuring and reducing all human experience to a single wavy-line or response curve. This is the scientific engine behind we today think of as cultural “normalization” or flattening—the cybernetic feedback loop of consumer markets or art culture having its own responses fed back into itself, where artists are reduced to merely doing “what works.” Typhon was neutered and reworked into his first published book, The Mechanical Bride (1951).

Because modern life kept people busy and sold them easy answers to hard questions, few had the time to contemplate and banter about what it all means. Few can cultivate disinterested detachment necessary for perception without being thrown into emotional frenzy or terror. Few can suffer the ego-pains of detaching from childish things or comforts. The cradle-to-grave assembly line of distractions was constructing citizens with few or none of the incumbent responsibilities.

In the early ‘50s, McLuhan was shocked by realizing this all might be by design, and that the artistic techniques he was reading overlapped greatly with occultism mysticism. He told an audience of Catholics that the new artistic techniques for creating and shaping human consciousness and perception itself not only could be, but were being used to create a false religion for a U.N.-lead one-world government. This speech, unassumingly titled Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, is key to McLuhan’s whole oeuvre, and has been republished in a book called The Medium and the Light. We might think the notion rather paranoid for 1954, but I think such a precise fear gives clear definition to any questions of human agency McLuhan might have.

Around the same time, McLuhan’s colleague at the University of Toronto Northrop Frye was developing his seminal Anatomy of Criticism, the book which cemented the language of “archetypes” in literary studies. McLuhan’s scathing 1958 review humorously begins with reference to how some municipal water-departments sell their minute-by-minute water-usage to radio networks in order for the later to calculate audience size from toilets flushed during commercial breaks. He quickly, thereafter, airs his complaints:

The Frye’s approach to criticism as a science turns from the training of taste and discrimination by literary means to the collective producer-orientation of the new mass media of the electronic age. The archetypal approach is the groove of collective conformity and of group-dynamics, which may explain why a uniquely opaque and almost unreadable book should have become a book-of-the-month choice.

Archetypes contain magic, and archetypal story forms, derived from the anthropological riches gathered in synthetic tombs like Frazer’s Golden Bough allow modern myth-making to enchant mass audiences to do anything from take over Germany to sell toothpaste and deodorant. It does this by subsuming the individual audience members into groups; groups they are innately a part of, or don’t even recognize their own membership in! Facebook has slotted you into a particular consumer “type”, and sells you bundled to other consumers to advertisers—most people do not know what type they are in. The mechanisms behind the scenes of modern mass psychology are opaque to most. I know about Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge (2008), you know about Nudge, but that makes us a tiny minority of people who feel more educated than most voters, or consumers, who do not.

In general, people wildly underestimate the power of modern psychological science—and those who do spiral off into paranoid populism, landing in the disqualifying catchment of conspiracy loons.

As I’ve argued in another piece, it is my amateur opinion that developmental psychology quickly cleared all the low-hanging fruit by studying children before running out of steam. While trying to figure out what ideal adult maturity was, various streams either got too new-agey, akin to Ken Wilber, or annoyed feminists with how unmistakably masculine or patriarchal its propositions were. It seems like “not pathological as defined by the DSM” is now the best-defined goal for an adult that we can aim for.

McLuhan, however, provides many other avenues. That’s because he had already investigated all the new-agey stuff as art technique. He had mapped the development of consciousness raising as awareness and control, by artists, over their environment and over their audience. And his movement into media occurred as he began to see how artists worked worked alongside the other material systems of power which have long governed human affairs. A beautiful passage from Thomas Cooper’s recently released Wisdom Weavers (2025) reveals the style of McLuhan’s determinism as related to that of economics and geography as understood by famed Canadian scholar Harold Innis:

Canada was not the heroic culmination of the human spirit’s triumph over the elements. Instead, Canada was, as in a photographer’s dark room, the “positive” of a geographical “negative”: geography had dictated the beaver’s habitat which had, in turn, dictated the Canadian’s habitat…

Consequently, an important contribution by Harold Innis to the history of ideas might be called “documentary geographic determinism.” On the very first page of his Ph.D. thesis, he had written that “this spread of civilization was dependent on the geographic characteristics of the area and on the character and institutions of the people involved. The… growth of civilization was largely dominated by the physical characteristics, the geological formations, the climate, the topographical features…”

Little did Innis realize just how much influence this “complex instrument” would have upon many scholars including McLuhan.

Significantly, Innis had studied two economists as much or more than any others, Smith and Veblen. Smith’s famous formulations suggested an “invisible hand” which maintained a balanced economy, like a chess player’s hand poised over the pieces. Veblen’s paradigms introduced the “scissors blades” of “institutions” (blade one) and “technology” (blade two), which cut the outline of history.

Innis brought two significant changes to these paradigms: Smith’s “invisible hand” was made visible and called geography; Veblen’s scissors were placed within the visible hand. The hand no longer balanced supply and demand from above. Instead, it cradled culture from below; human settlements developed primarily along the watery lifelines of the palm.

McLuhan’s sprawling histories exist in order to give a long, gentle ramp for the developing reader’s mind to travel up and down. The story of humanity’s relation to its environment, the triumphs and setbacks in its quest to conquer nature and control its destiny is larger than any one group—certainly larger than any nation. Our need to belong to larger group is a vulnerability which can be exploited by those who dictate our belonging. The fact that memberships entail subordination and distribution of cognition is one used against us often. When groups are controlled, black-box style, by more powerful entities which give them potent myths and sensational stories, while suppressing each person’s time and ability to develop clear, rational thought and perception, there is little to be done but provide these people with motivation to break free.

But there is huge danger there. People have been driving themselves insane thinking about the larger systems that control them since forever. The tradition of placing oneself into larger systems is, generally, a religious one. It entails many psychological and transformative rites, developed over centuries. McLuhan put his salvation into the Catholic Church. Otherwise, however, he was not beholden to merely subsume himself into anything of this world. “Be in the world, but not of it” goes the Catholic maxim which McLuhan exemplifies. McLuhan’s thoughts about the powers which govern this world are best illustrated, perhaps, by his occasional lauding of Satan a great electronic engineer. There is no sudden awakening from the many layers of control in today’s complex world on it’s material terms without a great deal of study of the machines themselves. The media. The long tradition of how it was built up was the story of science and of art. Those are the stories McLuhan runs through again and again, quickly and slowly, through-out his dizzying works.

Constructivists lay claim to the insight that our senses are not mirrors which reflect the outside world; that our perception of the world is learned and created within us. McLuhan understood that too; and further he knew that artists and religions have known this all along. As he said in Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters,

As language itself is an infinitely greater work of art than the Illiad or the Aeneid, so is the creative act of ordinary human perception a greater thing and a more intricate process than any devised by philosophers or scientists. The poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition. It has been and will always be so; but with Edgar Poe and the symbolists this central fact was taken up to the level of conscious awareness. It then became the basis of modern science and technology. That is what Whitehead meant when he said that the great event of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the process of discovery. Because the dream of ordinary perception seen as the poetic process is the prime analogue, the magic casement opening on the secrets of created being.

The act of ordinary perception; the act by which each of us makes sense of the world, is a poetic act. I think this phrasing is far more elegant, and rich in potential, than the mechanistic term “constructed.” And the study of centuries of techniques of poetry, and sermon, and pedagogy, and exegesis—culminating in the techniques of modernist poetry—informed McLuhan’s techniques for most-gently shaking people up from their modern mechanized sleep. They’re comfortable in their rationalizations, their short histories, their group affiliations. And for loss of that, they’ll cling wildly to the next thing that comes along offering stability.

He, rather, painted far larger scenes around them, extending history and materiality in all directions. He tasked artists to create “anti-environments,” or liminal spaces within which people can get distance from their daily lives. He spoke to wake people up, most importantly, while not insulting his audience for being asleep. He tried to give them plenty of objects in the maelstrom for them to consider clinging too. He gave them lots and lots and lots of patterns for more safely-surfacing. Puzzle pieces to assemble while they float in limbo.

Modern conspiracy theory is full of moral disgust and superiority. It gives you answers fast and then praises you for discovering the pre-fabricated truths. You aren’t a sheeple, of course; you’re found us! Now you’re awakened! It’s pseudo-religious. Conspiracy culture acts as a catchment, as an envelope for neutralizing opposition to worldly power precisely by feeling like a view from above. From feeling high-up there among the determining systems, just like worldy power is. It’s dizzying—at least compared with where one remembers having been; among the ignorant masses. But it’s purely reactionary to actual worldly power.

McLuhan, by contrast, was fully aware of the spiritual and quasi-religious or occult nature of such radical metamorphoses and transformation. But he also knew it as pedagogy. As basic schooling technique, used in the West for centuries. His doctoral thesis, The Place of Thomas Nashe In the Learning of His Time, had blended educational history with pagan religion seamlessly. And so, in becoming a world-wide intellectual figure and cult figure, he actually became more what he already had been: a university professor teaching techniques of evaluating and criticizing art. He was helping his audience learn how to control their own senses, and see behind the world of media content which was filling and shaping them. He kept mostly to modern psychology.

Among the techniques he demonstrated, thinking by analogy with great formality and precision was the most important. It was an art largely lost and discredited with scientific positivism. This is where he most gets into trouble: the analogies he perceives in history, which he offers as evidence for large systems in action beneath the threshold of conscious human awareness, are often artifice. They are poetic. He might stretch them to fit the proportions of the grand design he is painting.

But when it comes to perceiving complex systems—systems of non-linear causality which are irreducible to simple flow charts of cause and effects, poetry is the compression algorithm we need to think about them at all.

McLuhan’s goal was to expand our minds; the gaps in his thinking in his “cool” prose provide space for us to bloom. Space which eventually meets the outer world at some actionable interface not some fantasy catchment. The things he does mention: telephone lines, trade routes, satellites, etc. are the infrastructures around us which try, so hard, to remain behind the scenes. Today, as bezels recede behind our high definition touch screens, it is all the more important for those of us who understand technology to reveal what is hidden.

McLuhan’s goal, also, was not to be an enemy to the great systems he was trying to illuminate. He needed to get on TV, be published, to get his material out there. But he couldn’t be detected as an enemy! He rebuked his early moralistic writings—of which, only the relatively anodyne The Mechanical Bride was widely known. He still endlessly pointed to advertisement as worthy of artist study, but without the claimed goal of counteracting their persuasive power. I think he saw that his demonstration of being unplacable was more instructive than whatever opinion he was giving: his mediumship was the message. Just watch how Norman Mailer tries, and fails, to pin McLuhan to anything!

I think McLuhan was saying a lot of great things, but I could also make the point to those who don’t buy it: McLuhan was just running into the spotlight and showing how indeterminable he was. How free he was to walk among power, grow command an audience, and say the craziest shit he could. He may have made others feel or seem to be technologically determined. Others may be NPCs by comparison, but I think we can agree that people who call others NPCs often seem like NPCs themselves.

McLuhan was showing how careful erudition, and the ways in which analogical thinking can grant one the superhuman capacity to shift psychological frames at will, can liberate people from socially-constructed modes of being. And, how, once thus liberated, the analysis of our human-made material world, and its shaping toward further emancipation from group-think and centrally-determined thought was the next logical step.

McLuhan’s faith, his Catholicism, was his shield. Appealing to what was above the worldly domain provided protection, he thought, while playing dangerous psychological and political games among the electronic engineers and self-deifying engineers of human culture. Who else could have attended a Bilderberg Conference and then poked fun at the attendees?

McLuhan seldom brought his Catholicism up in public, but he knew that those who were curious could figure it out on their own. He had the courage to stand and challenge human-made systems big and small, demonstrating an ability to escape from beneath them, because he had faith in something bigger, and something after. And it was only that which was determined in his life; not anything made by mortal hands.