Futurology

These insights are courtesy of journalist Benjamin Carlson, the author of the linked piece.

Here are 6 things McLuhan got right about our world.

1. We live most of the time outside our bodies. "When you’re on the telephone, or on radio, or on TV, you don’t have a physical body," he says here in 1977. "You’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you." By spending most of our time online, we relate to the world not as creatures of flesh and blood—but as floating images.

2. Our identities are porous. When we relate to one another as massless images, instantaneously around the world, we detach from our private selves, and are submerged in other people's cares, concerns, histories. The electronic age "has deprived people, really, of their private identity," he says. "Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light."

3. Social media is changing us neurologically and psychologically. "The medium is the message," his most famous dictum, says the most important change wrought by any new technology is not its content, but its form. In other words, when it comes to substantively impacting the human species, it’s not what’s said on social media that matters. What matters is that social media is part of our lives.

4. AI makes job specialization irrelevant. With the rise of automation, McLuhan predicted: work and leisure become intermixed. information is monetized; self-employment rises; and retraining repeatedly for new roles becomes the new norm for our careers.

5. In the global village, we all are gossips and snoops. As geographic limits break down, our curiosity about others' dramas runs rampant. "The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged and poking his nose into everybody else’s business," McLuhan says. "The global village is a world in which you don’t necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else’s business. And much involvement in everybody else’s life."

6. AI makes—and remakes—information just for you. For better or worse, we no longer live in the same world of facts. Facts are presented a la carte and personalized. When you need to know something, "you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs and your problems," McLuhan says. "And they at once Xerox, with the help of computers from the libraries of the world, all the latest material just for you personally, not as something to be put out on the bookshelf."

Three people who got everything right.

Alan Toffler and his wife Heidi were sociologists in the 1960s. They predicted the "Third Wave" and "Future Shock"

The Third Wave posited that the coming Digital Revolution would change the world as much as the switch from hunting to farming, and the jump from farming to the Industrial Era. "Future Shock" was the term they came up with to describe the social upheaval that comes when people are unwilling/unable to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

Science fiction novelist John Brunner won the 1969 Hugo award for Best Novel. "Stand On Zanzibar" is set in the early 21st Century. Brunner predicted everything from legalized pot to video games to personalized advertising to mass shooters...

McLuhan got a whole lot of stuff right, but I feel like the "global village" turned out to be a Potemkin village. We don't concern ourselves with "everybody else’s" business. We closely watch only the tiny fraction of the world that's magnified by its popularity until it seems like everything. The selection is wider and more diverse than it used to be in the days of television and we have more channels to choose from now, but even the most carefully curated fediverse feed is still a long way from seeing the whole world or the whole picture of any big part of it.