A world without walls and an electronic culture without limit

Abstract

This article explores the contours of McLuhan’s prescience in the present media ecology at the intersection of the simultaneous global crises represented by authoritarian nationalism, the COVID-19 pandemic and anthropogenic climate change. This article considers the emergence of new forms of collective political subjectivity and tribalism occasioned by the internet and social media and reflects on the apparent limits of our ability to leverage technical expertise or knowledge to solve persistent problems in the material world. Finally, this article reflects on the historical instance of electronic communications media and how it intensively accelerates and compresses time in the conceptual, cultural and affective space in what Neil Postman termed ‘Technocracy’ to rethink twentieth-century ideas of the citizen subject.