Ep. 11 - Andrew McLuhan on Needling The Somnambulists about How We've Never Been Autonomous

“I’m not content to merely sit back and let the juggernaut roll over me.”

This week on Humans On The Loop I welcome Andrew McLuhan, author, teacher, and Director of The McLuhan Institute, a generational ark for media theory in a world that desperately needs more help understanding the relationships between our tools, our minds, and our society.

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Chapters

0:00:00 - Teaser
0:01:17 - Intro
0:06:38 - Partial Agency & The Great Inversion
0:11:53 - Three Generations of McLuhan Theorists
0:21:51 - Poetry & Prose, Narratives & Networks
0:34:43 - Artists Show Us The Way
0:41:29 - The Persistence of Memory vs. The Web As Palimpsest
0:51:36 - AI in The Tetrad
0:58:19 - Opting Out & The Slow Food Media Diet
1:05:40 - Outro & Announcements

Mentioned Media & People

The McLuhan Newsletter
Sleight of Mind: How Marshall McLuhan 'Read the Contemporary World.'
‘He wasn’t ahead of his time, he was ahead of his contemporaries’, my dad said to me…
Read more
The McLuhan Newsletter
The Rebirth of the City as a Classroom
The following thoughts are all the more odd or revolutionary as they are coming from Marshall McLuhan, a teacher and lover of literature and education, who taught poetry and literature in universities for his entire career, with a side hustle study of culture and technology. And they are coming from over half a century ago…
Read more
The McLuhan Newsletter
Understanding the Present, by Understanding Media
Let’s back up a little bit…
Read more

Magick and Enlightenment, with Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford by Weird Studies Podcast
Nora Bateson
Gregory Bateson
William Irwin Thompson
From Nowhere by Eric Wargo
The Ascent of Information by Caleb Scharf
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
The Interior Landscape by Marshall McLuhan
Ezra Pound
Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock
Jay-Z
T.S. Eliot