This article by James Poulos–"McLuhanomics: The Medium versus the Market" in American Affairs is worth taking a look at. Short excerpt:
Instead of making what McLuhan called “the global village” into a harmonious, happy, liberated place—freed of all mind controllers by the universal operating system of unplanned order—digital technology did what many now recognize as the opposite. From former Googler James Williams (Stand Out of Our Light) to VR pioneer Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) to early Facebook investor Roger McNamee (Zucked), scandalized hippie elites now scramble to decry social credit, automated “surveillance,” algorithmic nudging, and other digital technologies as black magic used by tech villains to “hack our minds”—taking us back to the bad old days of oppressive top-down propagandists who must heroically be resisted through protest, disobedience, dropping out, and turning on.
Yet while it appears to them—and many in their audience—that the scales have fallen from their eyes, the panicked “resistance” steadfastly refuses to consider what McLuhan leads us to conclude: digital technology has introduced a new context, a new ground, that fundamentally reshapes emergence and its function in human life. The real revolutionaries now are not humans at all, but machines, leading their naïve programmers, ignorant of McLuhan’s teachings, to a dehumanized future they refuse to imagine.
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