Review of Andrey Mir's The Digital Reversal: Media, Social Media, AI, and the Fate of Humanity

Andrey Mir's The Digital Reversal, building on his recent series of books with pathbreaking analyses, is so far ahead of any other scholarly work in understanding what's going on in the media world, and hence the world per se, today, that it hurts, even as it brilliantly elucidates. I'm in strong disagreement with Mir's insistence in his final chapter that humanity as we know it is inevitably doomed by the media evolution he so astutely traces and explains, but I nonetheless am sure that if you want to know where we are and perhaps what to do about this immensely difficult world we inhabit in 2025, you can do nothing better than read The Digital Reversal.

The foundation of Mir's book, the basis of its title, comes from Marshall McLuhan's "Laws of the Media," which postulate that all technologies have four modes of existence:  they amplify or enhance some aspect of communication and life, they obsolesce an aspect of life that was previously amplified, they retrieve an aspect that had previously been obsolesced, and ultimately they reverse or flip into some new kind of technology that has some relation to the original but is markedly different.   Since I first began thinking about the Laws of Media or Tetrad and published a Preface to one of McLuhan's first articles about the Laws in 1977, I've found radio and television to be a clear example of how the Laws work:  Radio amplifies speech, music, news, verbal communication by sending it instantly across great distances with no wires; obsolesces printed newspapers and wired telephones; retrieves face-to-face verbal communication; and reverses into television.   Now, lest you think that there's not much difference in the impact of radio and television, consider that radio made possible not only FDR and Churchill, but Hitler and Stalin, whereas the political impact of television brought us JFK, Reagan, and Obama, and, on the other side of the world, Gorbachev.  That's because radio boosted unseen power, in contrast to television, which showed us what the would-be people of power looked liked.  Nixon lost the television debates with JFK and thereby the election because Nixon looked sweaty and shifty in his reaction shots on TV while Kennedy looked cool and comfortable and in control.

Mir's Digital Reversal, then, delves into something that happened to us -- is still happening to us, right now -- after the revolution in personal computers and the Internet in the 1980s and 1990s.  The reversal happened quickly, virtually overnight, if we look at the time it took the printing press to make its mark, and then electronic media, and every media shift that came before those two momentous developments.  "The blogosphere, cellphones, and tablets already belongto media archaeology," Mir correctly notes.  And he proceeds to tell us the results of this reversal.   Building upon his Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers (2020), Mir notes that the search for truth and the goal of accuracy in traditional journalism has been supplanted by the quest for Likes and Shares online and the self-affirmation they provide.  Joining this reversal is what Mir calls the "emancipation of authorship" and I call "consumers becoming producers" (in New New Media, 2009), with conservatives and reactionaries joining progressives online in the 2010s, coalescing into MAGA aggrieved Americans and outright lies, electing Donald Trump in 2016, falling short in 2020 (probably due to COVID), and putting Trump back in office in last year's election.

But Mir expects this digital reversal to do far worse than Trump to humanity.  After detailing the impact of the digital reversal on everything from how we know -- epistemology -- to how we sense and perceive, in a philosophic tour-de-force that Immanuel Kant would have welcomed, Mir turns to an issue that everyone in and out of academe seems to be talking and writing about these days: AI.   And his view on that, I'm happy and unhappy to say, explicitly builds upon my "anthropotropic" theory of media evolution, that I came up with and developed in my 1978 doctoral dissertation, Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media:  as media evolve, they attempt under our invention to replicate as much of our natural modes of communication as possible, as the media extend our communication beyond our original, unmediated modes.  Writing extended our voice beyond its immediate surroundings, but sacrificed the pitch and all the acoustic characteristics of speech.  Telephone and radio eventually corrected that, but at the expense of what we see when someone talks to us face to face, in person.  Television corrected or "replayed" that crucial missing nonverbal visual aspect of speech.

Mir argues, regarding AI, that it will be responsible for the greatest flip of all:  human replay will flip into human replacement.  That is, the AI that we invented will replace us, merge with us into something in the AI's favor, in the very near future.  Among the many casualties, we won't go physically out beyond the planet into space anymore. "Deep space exploration—anything beyond Mars (and even that’s unlikely)—will never happen. There’s no real practical need for it" because "why bother escaping polluted, annoying Earth for Mars if you can escape into an induced, endlessly modifiable reality? Chasing interstellar travel is like staring into the rearview mirror."  (My response:  We'll keep going physically out into space, because we'll never find out what we're doing here in this universe from down here on this planet -- see Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion for more.)

But not going out beyond this planet is the least of Mir's apocalyptic vision for the immediate future, which "will occur sometime in the middle of this century".  Mir writes, "humans themselves are becoming digital—so far just metaphorically, but soon literally, and not in the literate sense of the word."  Not just metaphorically?  Meaning, what? That sometime around 2050, if I live that long, that my blood cells, DNA, or whatever will literally turn into some kind of digital code, which will replace my self-awareness?  Mir says about Douglas Rushkoff and his book Team Human: "he takes a moral stance and insists on people’s ability—and even duty—to seize back control of media evolution".  Who says it's out of control, let alone totally out of control?   Trump's ascension is drastically not enough to support this claim. True, he was elected U. S. President once, but he also was defeated once, and the first time he won, he nonetheless lost the popular vote.  A far more likely explanation for his success in 2024 was Biden's disastrous performance in their June 2024 debate (see my continually updated McLuhan in an Age of Social Media for more -- it makes the point that maybe debates have outlived their usefulness).

Mir's final paragraph -- all his paragraphs are deliberately the length of Tweets -- advises “'Endure and abstain' is literacy’s last resort, futile but noble."  But as Jim Bishop wrote in New York Journal-American on March 14, 1959: "The future is an opaque mirror."  Mir is flawless, perceptive, ingenious, poetic when he writes about the past up to the present.  But like any other mortal, he cannot possibly predict the future with any acumen, certainly not 25 years from now.  By then, this very book, The Digital Reversal, may well have woken enough of us up, so we don't sleepwalk into this AI nightmare.

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