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In his work, he contrasted the two most dominant modes of social culture found in human societies:

1. Tribal

Pre-literate cultures are tribal.

Tribal people inhabit a sensual, dynamic and non-linear world. Reality is taken in through all the five senses, words are seen as a kind of magic, and the emphasis is on communicating knowledge through oral storytelling.

the instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing——rather than enlarging——the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences.

2. Literate

Modern cultures are literate.

They evolved from the development of the printing press and mass literacy, which imposes linear thought and reliance on sight at the expense of other more interactive senses. Literate cultures place an emphasis on communicating knowledge through written language and abstract ideas.

Literate cultures are outward-looking, individualist, and generally less hostile to other cultures.

While the individualism and literacy of what he called “Western man” lead to the rise of the modern world based around logic and order, he argued the age of electronic media would have a re-tribalizing effect on Western culture that would alter sensory patterns and return literate people to a tribal, emotionally volatile state.

Tribal cultures are inward-looking, collectivist and often hostile to other cultures.

Particularly in countries where literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly traumatic process, since the clash of the old segmented visual culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity, a vacuum of the self, which generates tremendous violence——violence that is simply an identity quest, private or corporate, social or commercial….”

Incredibly, McLuhan was saying this decades before the invention of the World Wide Web and the mobile revolution that massively accelerated this process.

What we’re seeing today is a re-tribalization of literate Western people but much of it is happening beyond the traditional boundaries of human culture: race, ethnicity, family, religion, and gender.

In fact, many of the more radical communities forming among the dispossessed and underemployed are openly hostile to traditional human cultures and Western values like freedom of speech and association. People’s frustrated identity quest can lead them to the violence of nihilism and self-destruction.

To make matters worse, we are increasingly stuck in Internet filter bubbles and safe spaces without exposure to different ideas and perspectives. We are seeing the rise of many new interest and identity groups that are re-tribalizing and losing compassion and tolerance for those who think, believe and act differently.

Video tends to bias towards the “peek-a-book world”: trivial content that vanishes in seconds, constantly flickering images, yet the viewer has a hard time turning away no matter the subject… because the medium is just so darn entertaining

Education ≠ entertainment

School is about asking questions; TV is about passive consumption. School is about the development of language; TV demands attention to images.

TV is always fun and entertaining; serious education is not.

by equating education with entertainment children would never learn the rigorous of serious schooling.

The written word, for example, tends to bias the message towards linear thinking, logic, exposition, and delayed response.

To teach a subject without the history of how it happened “is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product,” he said. “It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know.

To teach about the atom without Democritus, to teach about electricity without Faraday, to teach about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, to teach about music without Haydn, is to refuse our students access to The Great Conversation. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots

Fear Huxley’s future, not Orwell’s. Everyone is worried about Big Brother… but we should really fear ourselves. We live in a society where we can spend hours on devices entertaining ourselves.

We can amuse ourselves to death.

How we talk is how we think. “Any significant change in our ways of talking can lead to a change in point of view.”

The words we use convey meaning and if you can convince others to use your words, perspectives can shift.

Technology is a doubled-edged sword. Technology giveth and taketh away.

The printing press allowed us to codify and pass down knowledge reliability but in exchange we gave up our memories.

Mobile phones gave us constant communication but now we’re always distracted and never alone.

What should I read first?

You should start with Amusing Ourselves to Death:

The foreword is brilliant. It’s short, here’s an excerpt:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression.

But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.

In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

For me at least, reading Haque is like trying to hold a conversation with somebody who only speaks in apocalyptic jazz scat.

I read a tweet the other day that said, “looking at Twitter is like microdosing poison.” It’s true

How? The internet of 2020 is ruled by the “attention economy”. People’s attention is commodified in a way that never happened before. In the attention economy there’s an arms race to capture clicks and reads. Nuance, painstaking insight and subtlety does not deliver attention.

Marshall McLuhan wrote “The medium is the message”. What he meant by that is that the medium through which information is transmitted structures that information. It does so either through changing the behaviour of the author or the receiver of the information, or both. It is the medium that shapes the character of interaction.

From a very basic perspective, think of a lightbulb in a windowless room. The lightbulb is the medium by which people in the room can see each other. It enables people to behave in a way that they wouldn’t or couldn’t if there was no lightbulb in the room.

Now think of Twitter as a medium, how do you convey nuance and deep insight into a 280 character “microblog”? Is it any wonder that scrolling on Twitter feels like you’re speeding through hell in a convertible? You feel the sizzle of rage but somehow come out intact.

His articles read like old school sales letters: each short paragraph makes you read the next. He “twists the knife”, as copywriters say, by layering agitation on agitation, directly addressing his reader:

The text is breathless, rhythmic with machine-gun punctuation, and imaginatively vivid

If you read the articles, you’ll see that Haque is well-meaning. He wants positive change. And to be fair, he has his own answers to society’s problems. He has credentials too, he’s a trained economist, he’s been a contributor to some serious academic publications and an author of books, real books.

Believe me, I’m sold on the destination but feel a bit carsick on the journey. The tone is so hysterical as to be meaningless. It serves only to entrench people deeper into their world-views rather than engaging and enlightening them.