As technology advances, civilization goes into reverse.
It was 1964 when Marshall McLuhan made this observation in his landmark book, Understanding Media.
It was not technology per se that brought about this change of direction, but the specifically electric technology that so defined the 20th, and now the 21st, century. He noted that electronic media had the effect of sending western man backward through time, beyond history into mythic, tribal memory.
It was owing chiefly to the new, instant speed of communication that the shift occurred. With the advent of the telegraph, it suddenly became possible for a message to travel faster than the messenger, leaving physical transportation in the dust.
This was a tremendous leap in the development of communications technology. For thousands of years, the art of writing had worked to detach words from the physical presence of the speaker. But writing only separated the messenger from his message by transmuting the latter into a physical, portable object: the written word. A personal messenger was still required for its delivery. Electricity dispensed with the messenger entirely.
Now with the internet, the instant speed of new technology allows us to be present, albeit partially, in many places at the same time. Such a radical transformation has a profound effect on our relationship to space and the way we think about our surroundings.
We make much of the power of media to change minds - to persuade people to adopt novel attitudes and new ways of thinking. But media affect not only our beliefs and conscious thought, but our pre-conscious perceptions. That, after all, is the primary function of media: to augment our senses, the organs of perception.
Because our environment comes to us through our senses, any change that affects our senses also affects our environment: our sense of what is, and of what is possible.
Just as the telescope forever changed our perception of the heavens, and through that change of perception altered our impression of our place in the universe, so all media alter our ambient psychological environment.
Because we take them for granted, we never fully appreciate the different modes of thought - the habits of mind - that come along with our use of any given medium. Much as a fish does not know what it means to be wet, we barely perceive the effects of submersion in our media environment.
In recent years, this has changed: technology develops at such a rapid pace that we've begun to observe, even feel its effects as they occur. We now feel like the proverbial fish out of water, lying exposed in a strange and threatening new world.
In our technological disorientation, many have noticed a changed relationship between culture and time: we have entered a world of flat sameness, as if all human development had come to an end.
In the 20th century, we knew a song by its decade. We knew classical music by its era, each period having a distinct sound or style. But now, we have nothing but echoes of what came before. No longer do we mark the decades by particular styles of music or outstanding cultural icons. New music has little of its own, films are dominated by re-makes and mashups of old hits and tired stories; video game culture has turned from the future to the past.
We've become fascinated with retro technology in general, yearning for a time before instant speeds were quite so instant as they are now. But this is a feature, not a bug, of electric culture: we seek resonance, and find it in Edenic myths of a pre-internet past - the fountainhead of pop culture, a time now locked in a circuit of unoriginal reaction.
More than originality, we prefer to curate cultural icons through which we reconnect with that mythic past. We no longer desire progress, unless it be progress that returns us to a time before progress passed its light-speed into an eternal present. Living in the technological instant, the now, our perception of time as progress has receded into the background.
The rise of artificial intelligence furthers this shift in time-perception, removing us from the realm of history and progress and taking us back to the world of myth. For what is myth but the communal compression of past and present into one multi-layered narrative structure?
Myth represents all time in a single instant.
Artificial intelligence absorbs recorded experience and compresses it into a single output, the average of all its inputs. This removes the burden of interpretation from the individual and returns it to the collective. AI stands in the place of oracle, poet, and tribal shaman as the keeper of all wisdom.
History, by contrast, is full of complexity and contradiction, a rich but ragged tapestry whose threads are never fully sewn-up. The historical man - the civilized man - must discern its narrative for himself. He brings his own critical judgement to bear as he confronts the records of the past.
But in the mythic world, there are no objective records to compare; only the single, all-conditioning narrative.
This essay will examine the difference between history and myth, and in doing so, we will consider the power of technology to determine our relationship to the past.
History, Myth, and the Collective Past
Historical time and mythic time are both expressions of a collective past.
Our collective past forms the cultural backdrop to present experience. It helps us make sense of the world as we encounter it. Although both myth and history perform this function, they do so in different ways and are associated with different types of society.
Mythic Time: the Non-Literate Tribe
Oral societies have a cultural backdrop in myth, while literate societies develop a cultural backdrop in history.
This is not to say that the mythic past, as passed down by oral tradition, has no basis in fact. Far from it. But the limitations of human memory, unaided by the written word, require that the past be simplified.
And because the past exists only in words spoken by the living, the needs of the present exert greater influence on the memory of the past.
The illiterate tribe is connected with the past only through the sounds of speech. The spoken word has no fixed existence. Unlike the written word, it is transient: our words vanish as fast as they are spoken. The only way to keep the past alive is through endless repetition. Whatever is not repeated will soon vanish from memory.
The spoken word is inherently social. Whatever is not socially meaningful, whatever lacks relevance to the present life of the community will soon be forgotten. Thus the shape of living community forms the structures of collective memory, just as the memory of each individual is structured by lived experience.
Thus embedded in the life and conversation of the community, the past is inseparable from, and dependent on, the present.
What are the characteristics of mythic time?
Purged of complexity and contradiction, oral traditions fit the past into a set of parameters friendly to the workings of human memory. The difference between what is remembered and what is forgotten is determined in large part by whether or not it is memorable. In his classic study, Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong gives us some characteristics of cultural memory in an exclusively oral society. Let’s consider these five features of non-literate traditions:
Relevant to present needs: Whatever is not continually recalled is forgotten. Permanent archives do not exist; a genealogy with no living descendants will vanish from memory forever.
Politically and socially expedient: Facts too dangerous to be spoken will not be remembered. No story exists in a vacuum, and an oral poets is highly skilled to adjust his story-telling to the needs and preferences of his audience.
Close to human life: Nothing is thought of in abstract categories, but only in terms of function and living relationship.
Larger than life: Stories that endure centre on great heroes, powerful kings, and outlandish monsters. Whatever is mundane melts away in the sea of common experience.
Homeostatic - Content follows form. The structure of mythic narrative keeps the past in balance with the present by discarding whatever is irrelevant or contradictory.
A Case Study in Structural Amnesia
Collective memory - myth - is shaped by the structures of living community.
The quickest way to understand this is to consider a striking example:
At the turn of the 20th century, the British recorded what was current among the Gonja people of Ghana.
According to tradition, the Gonja state was founded by Ndewura Jakpa. He divided the administration of the state into 7 territories, one for each of his seven sons. 60 years later, two of the seven territories had disappeared. When Gonja traditions were consulted at this time, it was told that Ndewura Jakpa had 5 sons, among whom he divided the adminstration of the state.
The other 2 had vanished from memory along with the 2 lost territorial divisions.
Walter Ong summed it up thusly: "The integrity of the past is subordinate to the integrity of the present.” In the case of the Gonja traditions, “The present [had] imposed its own economy on past remembrances."
In addition to the social considerations inherent to oral memory, the limits and effects of language itself must be taken into account. Language is the means not only for communicating with others; it is also the means whereby we structure thought. The way we express ourselves is a powerful aid to memory, and langague can provide us with powerful tools that serves to structure, cement and limit our recollections of the past. Without the aid of written records, oral societies have recourse to a variety of mnemonic practices.
Consider a few:
Stereotypes: Objects, groups, and persons are remembered by their most common and pronounced characteristics. There is little room for nuanced analysis.
Poetic devices: Poetic devices serve as mnemonics. Alliteration, parallelisms and pairs of opposite organize experience into expressions easy to remember.
Narrative conventions: The structure of a given narrative dictates the sort of information it is possible to contain within it. For example, in the Gonja myth of Ndewura Jakpa, the narrative structure required that the number of sons be equal to the number of territories in the Gonja State. That structural element is what made the story easy to remember. It is also what made it is easy to forget two of the sons after two of the territories were lost.
The structures of cultural memory are built up and solidify over time. Myths contains layers of meaning built up over generations and compressed into simple narrative structures. They act like filters, transforming experience and working to keep myth and tradition within fixed forms suitable to memorization. In our example of the seven princes, the structure of conventional narrative acts to consolidate past and preset into a single story.
Structuring Individual Memory
What happens on a cultural level in the growth of mythic memory can be compared in some ways to the growth of memory in an individual mind. On any given day a man accumulates a great deal of information and experience. But a large portion of this experience is forgotten, "sloughed off", during sleep when memories are consolidated.
The brain retains what is memorable and purges the rest. Much of what happens on a given day is typical of any day. These mundane experiences are lumped together in memory. We don't distinctly recall every detail, but those details modify our memory and affect the totality of what we consider typical.
In much the same way as cultural myth, the narrative structure of a typical day is modified gradually by additional experience.
Think of memory like a filter used to remove pollutants from the air. The pores of the filter get clogged over time, and the buildup of particles causes changes in how the filter works. It begins to require more pressure to force the air through, and it reduces the maximum size of the particles that can be passed to the other side.
Like an air filter, human memory looses flexibility over time. As we age, we require greater effort to learn new things, and we retain less of what we experience. But a young child learns at a rapid rate. The mother tongue is learned at a young age with apparent ease, and the child’s thought is formed to it by habit. But the acquisition of language as an adult is a more arduous endeavour, and we find it difficult to understand the new language without filtering it through the thought-forms of the old.
What are the characteristics of historical time?
What we call history is different from myth. History involves us in a fundamentally different sense of time. Our written records enable to separate past events into successive steps, creating the sequence we call a time-line. And since writing frees us from the constraints of human memory and simplistic narratives, history is full of complexity and contradiction. Unlike the myths of non-literate peoples, it retains obscure details even when the relevant social context no longer exists.
History is like myth in that we still conceive of it in narrative terms. But the formation of narrative and meaning in oral cultures is an entirely collective function, leaving little room for private judgement or counter-narratives. Written history creates a space for individual interpretation, but the past among non-literate peoples is shaped by the community in accordance with present social conditions.
To put it otherwise, having access to a multiplicity of records creates a broad spectrum of light which reaches its focal point in the individual mind. The written word provides the individual with an objective, impersonal link to the past. History gives us the power to form our own, private narrative separate from the social convention of the community.
Some key implications of these facts:
Written history frees the mind for creative work: It allows us to try out novel combinations of ideas without the risk of loosing the past in the process.
Written history makes space for multiple narratives: Competing and complementary records of the past can be compared, contrasted, and continually recombined in the effort to create a more perfect synthesis. As such, history holds the antidote to tradition gone off course.
Written history accommodates superfluous detail: We hold on to records with no immediate utility, but which may provide needed insight in years to come.
How Writing Transforms Time into Space
Writing gave birth to history by extending the powers of human memory.
While the unaided memory is forced to unburden itself through forgetfulness and consolidation, the art of writing unburdens the memory by transforming evanescent experience into durable, physical objects.
A written record creates a fixed reference point against which the present can be measured. Unlike individual and cultural memory, a written record is stable and unchanging. By converting the sounds of human speech into objects we can see and touch, writing allows us to compare the present with the past and to perceive the changes that take place over time. We are thus freed from being immersed in the present as we begin to stand over against history as object.
This process forever changed how we think about time. Time is now perceived as if it were a fixed, three-dimensional space, something we "move through" from point of origin to final destination.
This transmutation of time into space forms the psychological background of the modern idea of historical progress: for the word progress means to step forward, to advance. It describes the physical action of the human body. When we speak of historical progress, we use a spatial metaphor to think about time. This metaphorical connection of time and space gives birth to the concept of space-time, fundamental in much of modern scientific thought.
We take this concept, this metaphor, so much for granted that we barely perceive how it differs from time as we experience it. Without it, we have only the rhythms of daily, seasonal, and generational life, and the living reality of our mythic past in symbiotic relationship with the present.
How the Internet changed our perception of space
Before examining the effects of the latest technological developments on our relationship to time and history, we will mark how electronic communication in general, and the internet especially, have altered our perception of space. Since time and space have so long been linked together in Western thought, it stands to reason that technologies that effect our spatial awareness will have a knock on effect on our sense of time.
The 19th century invention of the telegraph marked the first time a message could travel faster than a messenger. This was the beginning of a revolution that would fundamentally reconfigure our relationship with space. The effects were slow to come, but now with internet we begin to feel the full force of this momentous change.
Because our bodies now remain in place while our words traverse the world, physical location begins to lose its value as a point of reference. The internet collapses space into a single point by making everyone present to everyone else in a single, world-wide instant. Because historical progress, as a metaphor, depends for its significance on embodied motion, the elimination of embodied motion removes the perceptual ground from under our sense of historical time. Moreover, the perceived durability of the written word is undercut as electric technology de-emphasizes physical, objective reality. In this way we lose touch with the metaphorical foundations of historic time.
Just as writing created history and infused time with a sense of progress, so our new technology, as it changes our perception of space, must change our perception of history as a progress through time.
The Internet as Metaphorical Space
A few brief examples from everyday speech will demonstrate how deeply the new media have infiltrated our perceptions.
We express our use of the internet in spacial metaphors.
Websites: These are online destinations to which we go.
Chatroom: An online social space in which we hang out.
Domains: A piece of online real estate which we administer as our kingdom.
Metaphors condition us to think about one aspect of reality in terms of another.
But the process is reflexive: the ground affects the figure as the figure affects the ground. And so as we ascribe motion to actions which involve none, we necessarily reconfigure how we think of and experience the physical world around us.
Indeed, it has even become fashionable to conceive of the world as a simulation, a mental projection of information technology. In such a schema, space as we know it, and time along with it, becomes thin, almost illusory.
To a culture accustomed to linking space and time together in its conceptions of history and physics, the reduction of space to a single point involves the flattening of time to a single instant: an eternal present without past or future. We no longer move forward through time because we no longer move forward through space.
On the internet, origin and destination are all one and same as far as our bodies are concerned. It is a web, whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere: an image of infinity.
But the infinite is the ground of space and time. It is the fixed reference by which they are measured, that in which we live and move and have our being. The merging of space-time into the infinite has the effect of removing the ground from under our feet: for a change that occurs in an eternal present can never be checked or verified. Change becomes illusion, and the way it is becomes the way it always has been.
Thus, the merger of time and eternity is inherently amnesiac. It reflects a mystical mindset fundamentally at odds with western historical development and takes us in the direction of eastern pantheism. Indeed, for the cyberspace visionaries, this has long been the goal: to swallow human difference and individual ego in a collective, universal consciousness.
The Digital World and Mythic Time
This essay is about perception and experience, not philosophy or religion. Although our perception, as conditioned by our media environment, exerts a powerful effect on philosophy and religion, our focus here is on the perception of time.
What I’ve characterized here as our new, technologically-conditioned eternal present, has some key parallels with the mythic “now” of non-literate peoples. Let us examine some apparent similarities (analogies) between the mythic time of the non-literate world and the instant world of the digital age:
The spoken word, as distinct from the written word, exists only in social context. A man acts as both speaker and hearer in turn. He cannot speak without provoking a reaction. As we’ve already observed, without writing narratives about the past are continually reacted upon by present demands, and this brings about the mythic consensus in which the whole community is submerged. Narratives are trapped in a feedback loop of communal action, a process by which independent and contrary points of view are swallowed up.
With writing, the author is insulated from his audience. He does not witness any immediate effect on his words. His work is independent and objective in that it becomes a stable, durable object, not subject to modification through the social process of consensus. Print technology amplified these social and cognitive effects of writing and gave us the modern ideal of the independent and original author.
But if technology imparts its own shape to the culture which employs it, we have now to examine the shape of the digital and electrical systems that now dominate our discourse. The hallmark of electric systems is the feedback loop: inputs from any point in the circuit affect the circuit as whole. Earlier mechanical technology relied on the manipulation of direct kinetic energy: inputs were carefully channelled to produce the specified output. Power was unidirectional.
But the instant speed of the internet works to bring author and audience back together. The latter react upon the former, with increasingly collaborative effects on the outcome. Like the electric systems in which they operate, speaker and hearer are incorporated in continuous feedback.
The effects of this feedback loop extend to our sense of time as the present imposes itself on the past: we edit our collective memory as new versions of webpages replace the old. Collaborative projects like Wikipedia bend history into conformity to the demands of present sociopolitical concerns. The road between past and present becomes a two-way street.
What’s more, we are trained to political expediency by social media algorithms. People learn to modify their speech lest it be consigned to ignoble oblivion. Many things cannot be said openly on social network for fear of political censorship. People learn to adapt to the “current thing” favoured by the regime in power.
These effects combine with the instability of the digital landscape. While not as evanescent as the spoken work, digital records are subject to decay over a relatively short period of time. Unless continually re-copied, records will be destroyed by bit-rot and other entropic forces. Just as in oral cultures, whatever is to be remembered, whether myth, legend, or genealogy, must be repeated again and again lest it be forgotten.
The Appearance of Large Language Models
With the advent Large Language Models, so-called Artificial Intelligence, the work and authority of the literate mind was automated. Historical reading, interpretation, composition and writing could all be off-loaded onto a machine.
But it always happens that whatever is automated atrophies. The habits of mind fostered by AI and LLMs will be nothing like those of an educated man in past generations.
The literate mind inhabits a plenitude of intellectual resources. It selects, judges, and assimilates its raw materials to create an internal synthesis all its own. A literate mind offers its knowledge back to the world, and the process continues as a symphony of minds in counterpoint, harmony, dissonance and resolution in the intellectual development of a culture.
AI and LLMs outsource the synthesis of thought from the inner man to an auto-generated consensus. Students now use AI to research and write their papers all at once. But without putting in the hard work to do what the machine does so easily, they will not fully develop their faculties: we will have a generation of empty vessels to be filled by LLMs and their controllers.
The Disappearance of History
At the same time AI is giving us the ability to generate easy answers to any query, access to original source material is being increasingly curtailed.
Internet search results are disappearing in a flood of AI-generated content or occluded behind a wall of censorship.
Legal attacks by copyright holders against the Internet Archive have curtailed access to many out-of-print and rare books.
Libraries are destroying entire collections, sending stacks of irreplaceable volumes to be destroyed.
In 2024, Google removed the cache feature from its search results. It was no longer possible to view previous versions of a website to see how it had been altered.
As of February 26th, 2025, Amazon has removed the option to download Kindle ebooks onto a computer. Amazon has the power to edit or remove any ebook remotely, and the reader now has no defense against the manipulation the books in his own collection.
If trends continue, we can expect search itself to be phased out of mainstream experience as the web interface is replaced by personalized AI agents.
While none of this means we will lose access to stable historical records in their entirety, it does presage a change in mental habits great enough to restructure our cultural memory in ways we can’t fully anticipate. It would be going to far to assert an exact identity between the world to come and the naive existence of an unlettered tribe. Nevertheless, there are parallels, and it we summarize them as follows:
The evanescent word: Like the passing sounds of human speech, digital records have no fixed existence. Subject to rapid decay and bit rot, whatever is not regularly copied onto new media will be forgotten. As new versions replace the old in conformity with present tastes and political demands, the originals slide into oblivion.
The ascendance of AI means the eclipse of original research. As we abdicate independent judgment in favour of predigested narratives, direct access to old source material falls into disuse. We remarked already on the removal of books from libraries, and we should expect this trend to accelerate with the change in popular behaviour being facilitated by LLMs. History bears witness to radical changes in public infrastructure accompanying the adoption of new technologies. 100 years ago people did not own cars. But the rapid rise of automobiles in the 20th century involved a transformation of urban environments so complete that it became difficult to get by without one. The same process can be observed in the recent combination of internet and cell phone use: social life, dating scene, and job market have been thoroughly integrated into technological systems to the utter neglect of former ways of doing things.
While discerning the exact shape of the future is impossible, it is reasonable to expect a rapid decline in narratives constructed independently out of historical data as we move toward total immersion in technologically generated consensus. Of course such an assertion begs the question: do we not already live in such a world, and have we not been doing so for decades?
The short answer is yes and yes. AI exists on a line with previous developments in electronic media; it only takes us further in the same direction. But heretofore literacy has existed alongside it as a countervailing force, albeit a force greatly diminished in potency. The rise of LLMS only represents the ascendancy, the supremacy - we might even say the apotheosis - of digital and electric media.
But there is a catch: the electric world rests on a foundation of knowledge and engineering rooted in the mental discipline fostered by literacy. The widespread use of AI erodes that basic discipline, and as such it threatens to undermine the very foundations of a stable, technological society. As such, if technological progress is to continue without systemic collapse, it will require the work of an intellectual elite schooled in old-order disciplines. The future that is likely to emerge will perhaps bear a greater similarity to a caste-literate order such as that of ancient Egypt than to the primitive non-literate tribe. At present we observe a growing disconnect between elite messaging and grass-roots sentiment. This conflict must be resolved if any semblance of social stability is to be maintained. But we have yet to see how much of the new order will emerge organically and to what extent it will be shaped from above.
I expect a fragmentation into smaller wholes. In the past we had fragmentation of function as smaller wholes were broken down and incorporated in the mass. But the psychological drive of electric technology pushes in the opposite direction. The feedback loops of social media foster an intense desire for an integrated existence, and the present shape of mass society has become intolerable to many.
Time-Sense and Popular Culture
It’s become a common-place in recent discourse to note the disappearance of originality and distinct trends is pop culture. Until recently we had easily distinguishable eras in film, decades in music, and generations in video games. But now it has become a blur, a copy of a copy of a copy.
The development of pop culture was a transition from a social order based around print to one based around electronic media. The term popular culture itself is somewhat of a misnomer; what we are talking about is more correctly designated mass culture. It is the product of a creative elite for consumption by the masses. The mass culture of the 19th century was shaped by literacy and propagated through printed material including novels, magazines. and religious tracts. When it came to things like music, people remained reliant on their own skill or that of local performers. It remained a highly participatory activity and still largely belonged to popular culture in the true sense of the word.
The ascendancy of the gramophone and the radio changed that as autochthonous musical traditions were absorbed by and displaced by a new musical culture mass-produced by powerful taste-makers.
But we have now passed this phase of development. The reason we no longer experience the progress of mass culture isn’t simply because creativity has declined or because of the increasingly naked propaganda and degeneracy of the taste-makers. No, the reason is that such progressive trends are technologically obsolete. Over the past two decades, Web 2.0 fully incorporated the masses - heretofore consumers - as the most important producers in the new media ecosystem. This has become our main locus of cultural experience. Our deeper immersion in the whole media process forms our perception in one continuous, unpunctuated transformation.
While we might complain about the disappearance of cultural progress and originality, the reality is that we’ve ceased to prioritize those values. Rather we put a premium on cultural resonance and a deeper communal experience. Paradoxically, this is the time-sense fostered by our new media environment, even while its recent and rapid transformations have left us feeling adrift, cut off from the psychological landscape of former generations and longing to reconnect to with a past that serves as mythic backdrop to the tribal realities of digital life.
Like the unlettered tribe, we want the old tale retold. We want the myth to live on in a new generation. But the skilled bard never recites verbatim; he knows his audience, invites their participation, and shapes the story anew. In this we witness the failure of mainstream entertainment industries. They’ve keyed in on the desire to return to familiar stories, but they’ve handled their audience clumsily. Unable - or unwilling - to read the room, they attempt to shape the audience by introducing alien values. In so doing they marginalize themselves as they alienate their audience.
Conclusion
Technological change is nothing if not paradoxical, and it often happens that new developments unleash opposite forces at one and the same time. While there are clear parallels between new and former modes of relating to the past, we must not forget that new technology is never a mere enhancement or recapitulation of what came before. It is an entirely new form, and exactly what it may turn out to be, and how it will reshape our minds and human relationships in the future, are circumstances not easily foreseen. Resemblances aside, the automobile was not, after all, a horseless carriage, and the urban, social, and economic forms to which it gave rise marked a great departure from a previous way of life. Knowing this, we have to ask ourselves what potentialities of LLMs remain undisclosed by their popular designation as “artificial intelligence.” But while we do not yet know what it will become, the name itself does offer more than a suggestion of what we can expect it to replace. The automobile so far replaced the horse-drawn carriage as to exclude the latter entirely from public transport. One hopes that the advance of so-called artificial intelligence will not similarly obviate the use of our natural faculties.
In the near-term we can expect AI to take over the way we interface with the world around us. At the same time, I fully expect to see the emergence of a new subculture of reaction. While the many experience loss of agency, those with vision will attempt to cultivate and revive traditional values and older modes of learning. Something like this occurred during the Industrial Revolution: as the people of England saw their local communities disintegrating in the face of the new mechanical and economic powers, they attempted to strengthen and revive their local traditions. But despite their efforts, they were unable to prevent the passing of Old England. The new societal infrastructure was utterly hostile to previous modes of existence.
In the coming decades, we can expect to see changes no less radical than those of the industrial revolution. And if current trends are an indication, the economic and technological forces at play could prove themselves hostile not only to our customary and recent way of life, but to life in civilization as we know it.
Works referenced:
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
