Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge.

In plain language: how do we know what we know—and what shapes the way we know it?

In an era where epistemology has been reformatted into 30-second TikTok clips, Marshall McLuhan’s most famous phrase—“the medium is the message”—has never been more relevant.

But what did McLuhan actually mean?

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher and media theorist who spent his career studying how communication technologies shape human perception, behavior, and society.

His core insight was deceptively simple:

Media don’t just deliver information.

They restructure how humans think.

Books, print, television, radio, and digital platforms don’t merely carry messages—they reconfigure the cognitive environment in which those messages are interpreted.

McLuhan argued that the printing press dramatically increased human intelligence—not because of the content it distributed, but because reading itself requires time, focus, and internal synthesis.

Reading forces the brain to:

• Move deliberately from word to word
• Construct meaning internally
• Generate images, arguments, and counterarguments
• Engage in private, reflective thought

Print culture created individuals.

But electricity changed the game.

Television and electronic media moved information faster than reflection, collapsing time for deliberation. McLuhan warned that speed would replace thought, and spectacle would replace reasoning.

He never called people stupid—he was a polite Canadian—but George Carlin said the quiet part out loud.

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan uses the myth of Narcissus to explain how technologies function as extensions of ourselves.

• Wheels extend feet
• Hammers extend arms
• Cameras extend eyes

But every extension comes with a cost.

Narcissus wasn’t admiring his reflection—he was trapped in a feedback loop, hypnotized by an extension of himself. The image didn’t enlighten him. It narcotized him.

McLuhan’s warning was clear: when humans fail to recognize media as extensions, they fall into trance.

McLuhan divided media into two categories:

Cool media require active participation. Reading is cool. Meaning must be constructed by the reader.

Hot media overwhelm the senses with high-definition information. Television, photography, and video flood perception instantly.

Hot media short-circuit critical thought.

They favor posture, aesthetics, emotion, and immediacy.

Pretty faces. Seductive voices. Music, rhythm, motion.

Meaning becomes mutable. Context collapses.

Neil Postman, McLuhan’s intellectual successor, explored these ideas in Amusing Ourselves to Death.

He demonstrated how political discourse changes depending on the medium.

In print, arguments stand or fall on logic and coherence.

In television, arguments are inseparable from appearance, charisma, and pacing.

A written debate allows time for critique.

A televised debate rewards performance.

This isn’t corruption.

It’s structural.

McLuhan predicted that electronic media would collapse the world into a “global village”—a hyper-connected environment where everyone reacts simultaneously to shared stimuli.

Smartphones and social platforms completed that vision.

Today, global attention is organized by a small number of platforms optimized for speed, engagement, and emotional response. Algorithms don’t debate ideas—they amplify signals.

The result is not dialogue, but synchronization.

We behave less like deliberative citizens and more like networked organisms—responding in waves, clustering into tribes, reacting in unison.

If dominance hierarchies and neurotransmitters form the hardware of human behavior, then media are the software.

Biology sets the rules.

Media decide how those rules are played.

Money, McLuhan argued, is the master metaphor—the medium that binds modern society. It structures time, labor, desire, and value.

We wake to it. We organize around it. We chase it.

Viewed this way, modern humans resemble ant colonies—highly organized, role-differentiated systems driven by incentives and signals.

There are: Queens, Drones, Contractors, Workers.

And strict hierarchies governing behavior.

The difference is that ants don’t mistake the system for freedom.

If you don’t understand how the medium shapes the message, you’ll spend your life arguing content inside structures designed to defeat you.

McLuhan didn’t tell us what to think.

He showed us what thinking is shaped by.

That insight is the bridge between biology and culture.

Between hardware and software.

And it’s why the medium is—still—the message.

Continue to We Behave Like Ants.