Marshall McLuhan
A recurring media thinker behind essays on tools, learning, writing, and technological environments.
McLuhan is rarely the explicit subject of the essays here, but he is often the conceptual atmosphere behind them. Technologies of Learning, a 2024 Primer, How We Build Software in the Age of AI, and even On Christian Metz all move in a recognizably McLuhanite direction: tools and media matter not only because of their content, but because they reorganize perception, habit, and the social environment around them.
That indirectness is exactly why he keeps reappearing. He gives the site a way to move from local observations about slides, CLIs, or software architecture to broader questions about media history and cultural form.
Related
A guide to the site's writing on e-learning, instructional media, and educational form.
Essays on how AI changes drafting, collaboration, authorship, and the writing process itself.
The emerging ecology of terminal agents, skills, interfaces, and machine-native software tooling.
Read Next
- Technologies of Learning, a 2024 Primer
Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by the various media. - Marshal McLuhan
- How We Build Software in the Age of AI
This essay argues that AI is reshaping software at an architectural level — moving from human-centered applications to a composable agentic ecosystem where CLIs, Skills, and MCP form distinct layers that agents invoke as primary users.
- On Christian Metz: Cinema and Language
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan
