McLuhan's Diagnostic Toolkit for AI

McLuhan died in 1980, before the personal computer became personal, before the internet became the internet, before AI began extending the capacity for generative thought itself. But everything he wrote prepared the ground for understanding this moment. Every concept — the medium is the message, extension and amputation, hot and cool, the global village, the rear-view mirror, Narcissus as narcosis, the tetrad, acoustic space, the anti-environment, the artist as antenna — was a diagnostic tool forged in the analysis of earlier media that proves more, not less, relevant when applied to the medium that extends the most fundamental human capacity of all.