Post

Looking back: for all their exuberances I enjoy that Ong, McLuhan, Kittler, etc are oriented to discontinuity in media history. Other, more sober historicisms are great too but they can tend toward "there is nothing new under the sun". Obviously something is very new in AI; we need to know what/how.

22/5/26, 4:55 pm0 reposts12 likes

Tim Carmody

@tcarmody.bsky.social

22 May

Agreed — I also like how they find pre- and post-figurations everywhere, eg McLuhan on how print orients us towards the visual, which gets further accelerated by film and TV

Ryan Heuser

@ryanheuser.com

22 May

Yes it's also part of the long history of labor automation and the Macy conferences and cybernetics and a thousand other historical vectors, but that doesn't mean that, now, today, "AI" doesn't exert itself as a highly discontinuous cultural formation—it clearly does, that's what makes it important.