The Eclipse of God: Marshall McLuhan's Critique of Digital Technology

Marshall McLuhan foresaw the power of technology to transform human nature from within a Catholic lens, and his keen observations can help guide Catholic thought about digital technology during this time of tumultuous change. McLuhan converted to Catholicism as an adult, and entered the Church on his knees, saying “that is the only way in.”[1] He was baptized and confirmed on Holy Thursday, March 25, 1937, and Marshall’s son Eric shares that “the person most surprised by Marshall McLuhan’s conversion to Catholicism was Marshall himself.”[2] Still, McLuhan deliberately kept his Christianity out of his work because he was concerned that Christian overtones held the potential to moralize his work and divert people from perceiving his goal, which was not to assess whether technology was good or bad, but understand how media was transforming the human condition.

McLuhan remains a cornerstone of media theory whose most enduring phrase is, “The medium is the message.” McLuhan believed Jesus Christ is the fullest embodiment of that axiom. The medium of Jesus—the crucified and risen divine-man who heals the sick, casts out demons, and forgives sins—is the eternal and unchanging message of salvation. “In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.”[3]

For other technologies, however, McLuhan argued that whenever media change, the message changes with it. To highlight this precept, McLuhan viewed the Reformation as less a doctrinal clash and more of a technological revolution. The change in medium occasioned by the invention of the Gutenberg printing press changed the message; the experience of the Gospel shifted from a communally shared auditory experience—faith comes through hearing—to a privately experienced visual one—faith comes through reading. Affordable copies of the Bible and rising literacy rates transformed the message of the Gospel, and McLuhan asserts, “there was not a single individual at the Council of Trent who understood the effects of print on the spiritual schism and psychic distress of the religious and political life of that time.”[4] The printed Bible displaced a hierarchical religious structure and replaced it with an egalitarian sea of individual interpretations. The message of salvation was correspondingly transformed from a corporate experience facilitated by the Church to a situation where each person became responsible for their own salvation through private faith.

With one eye McLuhan viewed the world as a Catholic, while the other eye saw how technological changes impact and transform the human experience. Using these two lenses, McLuhan predicted something like the Internet in 1962, and when contemplating the emergence of this networked intelligence, he foresaw that this discarnate world of electronic information would be the ultimate threat to the incarnate Church. McLuhan mused:

I think that this could be the time of the Antichrist. When electricity allows for the simultaneity of all information for every human being, it is Lucifer’s moment. He is the greatest electrical engineer. Technically speaking, the age in which we live is certainly favorable to an Antichrist. Just think: each person can instantly be tuned to a “new Christ” and mistake him for the real Christ. At such times it becomes crucial to hear properly and to tune yourself in to the right frequency.[5]

McLuhan invokes Luke 8:18 to provide a biblical warning—“Heed how you hear”—and to understand McLuhan’s suggestion that the current age is favorable to the rise of the Antichrist, it is necessary to revisit who (or what) the Antichrist is.

The Catechism prophesies the Church’s ultimate trial in the following terms:

Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.[6]

The Antichrist is not a single person or thing, but a process of religious deception that offers an apparent solution to human problems that is incompatible with faith. Through this spiritual deception, humanity comes to glorify the creature instead of the Creator. McLuhan suggests the Internet—which allows for the spontaneity of all information for every human being—is critically important to the Antichrist’s ascendancy. Unpacking how Internet-based communications facilitate this multilayered deception includes accounting for the deception inherent in the medium (the form of internet-based communications), the content of the messages, and then the pseudo-messianic metanarrative (the big story) explicitly and implicitly told through and by this medium.

The first level of spiritual deception occurs in the intrinsic nature of disembodied, digital communication. As McLuhan puts it:

Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as a spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ.[7]

A global, universally networked intelligence imitates the mystical body insofar as it becomes a formidable force that, like the Eucharist, creates a binding unity out of human diversity. Ethereal digital communications like blogs, vlogs, TikTok, Instagram Reels “go viral,” infecting the consciousness of a population, uniting them in a cause or value system. The Antichrist’s spiritual illusion accomplished through electronic information environments is that individuals make genuine spiritual connections with other human beings, making a physical Church unnecessary. This discarnate world is a “tremendous menace to an incarnate Church” because humanity becomes “hypnotized by their own technologies.”[8]

Online platforms are privately (not publicly) owned and operated, and they prize engagement. As X (formerly Twitter) has amply demonstrated, nothing breeds engagement quite like mutual contempt. “If two people argue on a social media platform, drawing others into the feud, it’s not hard to see who wins: the platform.”[9] Algorithms create echo chambers, micro-communities strongly bonded to one another, often through a group identity defined in opposition to other micro-communities. The drama plays out as an “escalation to extremes,” where both sides fully commit to the destruction of the other, proving McLuhan’s observation that electronic communications possess a knack for retrieving the most primal form of awareness.[10] Perhaps most sadly, this tribalism occurs within the cadre of Catholic commentators on the web, obscuring the real Jesus and confusing followers who might rightly wonder, “Will the real Catholic please stand up?”

The spiritual illusion created by these ethereal forms of electronic communications is further fostered by their infinite immediacy. Unlike a book with covers or even an enormous library with thousands of shelves, there is no beginning nor end to the Internet, no entrance or exit to its collection of web-enabled applications and digitally networked environments. The human desire for newness and novelty meets its perfect home on the Internet, where no boundary exists and every good—material or informational—can be bought and consumed, fueling an insatiable appetite. The Internet amplifies General Motors’ “organized creation of dissatisfaction,” giving birth to a restless spirit that must be kept constantly on the move.[11] As C.S. Lewis notes in The Screwtape Letters, “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,”[12] or in other words, the infinite scroll, that addictive and ubiquitous feature of cell phones that seamlessly delivers non-stop content to receptive users.

The content messages carried on this medium also facilitate a spiritual deception by causing us to look down instead of up. Humans are primarily lovers, and Catholic anthropology asserts we are hard-wired for God. Constant connectivity represents a digitally mediated fog that displaces the love of God through infinite distraction, and whenever humans are separated from the love of God, bad things happen. Into the divine vacuum created by God’s displacement flows what McLuhan called the “terrestrial paradise of gadgets,” carrying a nonstop series of harmful messages that corrupt the human person. In Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, web-entrepreneur Luke Burgis describes how our innate desire for God is replaced by other models of desire:

Smartphones project the desires of billions of people to us through social media, Google searches, and restaurant and hotel reviews. The neurological addictiveness of smartphones is real; but our addiction to the desires of others, which smartphones give us unfettered access to, is the metaphysical threat.[13]

The Internet displays a model of happiness for everyone, and the performative nature of social media depicts life idealized. To be human is to desire, and we often want what other people want (what Burgis calls mimetic desire), but this endlessly misdirected desire comes with a cost. There is a direct relationship between screentime and depression because real human lives fall short of social media influencers. Asa Raskin, the inventor of infinite scroll, details that hundreds of engineers behind every technological product have worked hard to make technology maximally addicting by parading a cornucopia of model desires that users want to mimic. Audio-visual communications constantly relayed in a disembodied time with no spatial constraints are increasingly tailored to reinforce individualistic desire, and this desire makes users feel inferior, dissatisfied, and restless.

All too often, the desire for God is not just interrupted by beautiful people living fantastic lives. It is deliberately hijacked by bad actors who want to destroy souls. Several studies have established a connection between the amount of time teens spend on smartphones and rates of depression, and the younger a child is when they first own a smartphone, the more likely they are to have problems with their mental health.[14] With this in mind, Mark Zuckerberg’s apology to Congress in early 2024 is a bellwether event in the social recognition that time spent on this new medium is hazardous because the messages often include toxic content that fuels eating disorders, revenge porn, and mental health crises leading to suicide. McLuhan observed that “psychic diseases can now be treated for what they are, namely manifestations of the response to man-made technologies.”[15] Society must now figure out how to heal people from self-inflicted wounds incurred while online.

The medium is the message, and the most insidious spiritual deception is that these various platforms tell their own story about the purpose of human life. The truth may be able to prosper alongside the lie, but misinformation, disinformation, and radicalization lead people away from The Truth into my truth. The only story that matters is the story we invent, thus accomplishing the Antichrist’s goal, where people glorify the creature instead of the Creator. The greatest damage from this new front in the spiritual battle is caused by the postmodern era’s rejection of all metanarratives, most especially the Christian story of the Fall, the Redemption, and the Universal Call to Holiness. Justin Brierly argues that the current collapse of the Christian story is the overwhelming reason for today’s meaning crisis. As Brierly sums it up, the postmodern narrative offers “no plotlines or cues, no scripting or directions, and certainly no playwright to bring it all together in the end.”[16]

If a valid metanarrative remains in the postmodern context, however, it is the story of human moral and technological progress now referred to as transhumanism. It is not necessary or possible for a full-length discussion of transhumanism here, but a brief sketch of this story highlights how it achieves McLuhan’s prediction (and the Antichrist’s goals) by profoundly (yet subtly) transforming the Christian story. In short, the transhumanist story depicts creation as a cosmic accident, so it cannot be good. Worse, it is irredeemable. Innocent people suffer unfairly, and only human ingenuity can overcome these natural limitations, possibly even providing eternal life through the construction of digitally preserved clones (see Ann Shin’s documentary A.rtificial I.mmortality). Because there is no God, humans cannot be made in his image; instead, each individual constructs their own identity and decides the meaning of the good life, choosing what technological modifications achieve their ends. Human technological invention holds the potential to redeem this fallen human nature through biotechnical engineering.

Transformation (or more properly Transfiguration) has always been central to the Christian story; God became man so that people could become God, so that we could go beyond the form we have and be transfigured in the image of Jesus Christ. The transhumanist story downgrades the very meaning of transformation from a spiritual one to a materialist one. Humans are godlike creatures in a random, unexplainable universe with no purpose who must redeem themselves without any recourse to divine support.[17] McLuhan noticed that the evolutionary process had shifted from biology to technology, and that technology would now drive the universal process of identity construction. The ability to easily build malleable online personas and avatars supports other progressive Western social movements that suggest identity is a fluid, self-determined construct.

Again, McLuhan was not interested in questioning whether the development of electronic information environments is good or bad, but to diagnose accurately what is happening. And if this analysis is accurate, this is what seems to be happening: humans are lovers, and what we love becomes what we worship. Many have come to worship the powerful promises of comfort, convenience, and control that digital technology offers. The ethereal network of Internet enabled applications communicates the ideology of technology, that we must adopt technology without considering either the aim or the consequences, not paying adequate attention to the fact that everyday practices shape our desires and the image of the good life. Companies increasingly find their economic value comes from the habits they create, and web-supported technologies and the proliferation of social media have been carefully crafted to be addictive in ways that addictive substances never will be because abstinence is not an option.[18]

Addiction usually comes with the deception of freedom—that the addict can govern and regulate their addiction—and this addiction to the pseudo-spiritual world of the web and its content misshapes desires, entrenches tribalism, erodes mental health, invites infinite distraction, and makes the real Christ ever more difficult to find. The medium and the messages the medium carries seamlessly spread the only remaining metanarrative of the postmodern era—that we are our own creators, and technology can redeem our faults, limitations, and possibly even create everlasting (albeit digital) life, because humans are nothing more than a collection of biochemical, neuronal impulses.

So, what can be done, if anything? Not much. The Church must pass through this trial that will shake the belief of many, and even if this is not the final apostasy prophesied in the Catehchism, it is certainly a Western apostasy. The numbers of the religious decline are well known; approximately 30% of U.S. adults identify as people who have no religious affiliation, a number that jumps to almost half for the generations born between 1980 and 2012, or precisely those generations who have grown up digital.[19] There appears to be a strong relationship between affluence, access to technology, and apostasy.

If there is anything that can be done, it begins with McLuhan’s observation that:

There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the “Prince of this World” is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of the new hardware and software, a great electrical engineer, and a great master of the media.[20]

There is no harm in reminding ourselves that there is an Evil One who wishes to destroy us, and the Antichrist’s masterstroke is to be invisible, to have snuck into our pockets and the palms of our hands.

Clearly recognizing this situation is akin to remembering that Jesus is always directing us to be ready and keep awake. In a similar vein, Michael Harris puts the situation like this: “Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice. First notice difference. And then, every time, choose.”[21] Notice the alienating impact of technology in your life. Remember Lucifer is the great electrical engineer and put your phone down when you get home from work. Choose to go to Mass. Consciously partake in the Eucharist. Go out of your way to meet members of the congregation.

The antidote, now and forever, shall be the spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. As McLuhan, the Catholic guide for thinking about digital technology puts it, “It is only at the level of a lived Christianity that the medium really is the message.”[22] The message of Jesus must pass into your life and into your intentional and deliberate choice to not allow digital technology to come between you and God.