technologies are shot through with myths that frame the story of time.

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For the true apocalypticist, the sense that history is about to turn a corner conjures up a psychological stance far more complex than optimism or pessimism, because the apocalyptic turn partly derives its power from the commingling and even confusion of salvation and doom. Even the old school visions of the biblical apocalypticists were deeply polarized, split between rapture and plague, the New Jerusalem and the Antichrist, the coming of the Messiah and the final trip to the pit. McLuhan’s schizophrenia on this account could be extreme. On the one hand, he could proclaim, as he did to Playboy in 1969, that computer networks hold out the promise of creating “a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the Logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.” Invoking Dante’s belief that humans will live as broken fragments until we are “unified into an inclusive consciousness,” McLuhan brought it all down to brass tacks: “In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.”1 But at nearly the same time, McLuhan was capable of nursing vastly darker views about the new technoculture. In a letter to the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, McLuhan flip-flopped on his Playboy vision in about the starkest terms imaginable:
Davis, Erik.