Theology of McLuhan the Prophet

The surveillance environment of cameras everywhere (officially in and on government buildings and private businesses and unofficially in everyone’s pocket or purse) intercepted phone and email traffic, biometrics and RFID, along with voluntary, eager self-disclosures through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., serves the community’s need to know. (The need is guaranteed, whether to ensure that you adhere to the dictates of homeland or climatological security. Choose your partisan poison.) In this environment, privacy is dangerous (what are you hiding?), and the book becomes an illicit drug that incites anti-social behavior. Reading silently in solitude breeds subversion and sedition. All must plug into the matrix.

From Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage :

“Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional idea of private, isolated thoughts and action—the patterns of mechanistic technology—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electronically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful, and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early ‘mistakes’.”

In any situation, no one’s thoughts or actions are so private as to escape God’s omniscience. Technology is re-creating for us the infallible omniscience (omni science) of divinity. The subjective aim that God supplies to the advance of universal creativity pulls along our intuition of our own technological potential. Actualizing that potential, we recreate nature in our own image, giving rise to new universes.