01
McLuhan In the Age of AI
On a crisp autumn morning in 1964, the first 'media theorist' Marshall McLuhan sat across from a journalist in his cluttered University of Toronto office, surrounded by towers of dog-eared books and yellowing…
Series & reading path
Media, Innis, McLuhan & AI
How intelligent machines reorganize media environments, empires, attention, language, and cultural form.
02
Language as Statistically Generated Virus: AI, LLM's and Words Gone Viral
The viral transmission began, as modern epidemics often do, with a seemingly innocuous interaction. Sarah Chen, a sophomore studying comparative literature at Berkely, sat hunched over her laptop in the early autumn…
03
AI's Large Language Models and Language Gone Viral
The concept of "Language as a Virus" originated with American writer William S. Burroughs' provocative 1962 metaphor and evolved in the 21st centuy into a sophisticated analytical new millennia framework perfectly…
04
Dust in the Wind: AI, Spores and Media Specificity
In June 2025, a psychedelic rock band called The Velvet Sundown released their debut album, "Floating on Echoes. Within weeks, they had amassed over a million monthly listeners on Spotify. Their single "Dust on the…
05
Marshall McLuhan and AI: Figure and Ground
Marshall McLuhan’s "ground and figure" framework is a method of media analysis that asserts new technologies (figure) create entirely new, often invisible, environments (ground) that restructure human perception and…
06
Empire and the Machine: Harold Innis, AI and Communications Media
In the fourth millennium before Christ, somewhere along the Nile, an Egyptian priest looked at the star Sirius's reflection in the water and created an illustrative token, 'flood'. The connection between the priest's…
07
Harold Innis, Empire and AI: Biases of the Machine
Ask a question in 2026 — any question, about anything — and the answer arrives before the asking is over. It appears in clean sans-serif font, fluent, confident, unsigned, synthesized from sources you never see,…