June 21, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogues™
Understanding Grammars of Global Cultures and Counter-Propaganda Science
by Nelson S. Thall, former President and Director.
Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
The Airwalk and the Discarnate Self
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, two unrelated forms of performance from completely different times and places have caught my attention. They appear to share something striking.
The first is the Circassian dance, a centuries old folk tradition of the North Caucasus. The woman moves with feet hidden beneath a long dress and seems to glide across the floor without taking visible steps, producing the impression of floating. The man performs sharp leaps and dramatic toe stands so quick the feet barely seem to touch the ground.
The second is the airwalk, a new street performance now surfacing on the internet. The performer appears to ride on air with feet seemingly never touching the pavement, walking forward as if gravity has been suspended.
The two performances are separated by centuries, by geography and by cultural origin. Yet both make the performer look as if they are floating on air. Is there a hidden ground connecting these otherwise unrelated figures?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Yes. The shared figure is floating. The body lifted off the earth.
The student of technology ecology is trained to ask the deeper question. When unrelated figures attract attention at the same historical moment, the issue is not the figures themselves but the environment that makes them meaningful. Every age retrieves images from the cultural warehouse. The retrievals are clues. They reveal the hidden ground acting upon perception.
Why are images of weightlessness, suspension and elevation suddenly compelling?
Because civilization has already become discarnate. It happened unnoticed across more than a century.
The telegraph began the lifting by separating communication from transportation. The telephone separated the voice from the speaker’s body. Radio carried the disembodied voice into every home. Television separated the image from physical presence and trained the population to live in a space made of light. Each step was absorbed without recognition. Disco music in the 1970s was the first mass cultural form to name the condition out loud, the word itself short for discarnate, a music of bodies dancing to a pulse generated nowhere by no one in particular.
Then the lifting accelerated. The computer externalized memory. The satellite enclosed the planet in a single broadcast environment. The smartphone put the screen into the pocket and never let it leave. Then came the engine that finished the job. High speed connectivity plus big data plus artificial intelligence. The connectivity carries the body’s attention out of the body at the speed of light. The big data is the ocean into which the dissolved self has been poured. The AI sorts and represents that self back to itself from outside the body. Mankind is now fully discarnate. The body remains in physical space, but attention, memory, commerce, friendship, work, imagination and identity all reside elsewhere, inside the electronic environment.
The first generation born and raised fully inside the late discarnate environment was Generation X. They came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, after disco had already named the condition out loud, after cable television had multiplied the screens, after the personal computer had arrived in the home. The naming itself is the diagnosis. Generation X. The X is a placeholder. The X means unnamed. The X means the generation that could not be defined because the things that had once defined a generation, place, faith, family role, community, embodied tradition, were already dissolving when they arrived. They did not lose identity. They were never given one to lose. The X in their name is the marker of the absence.
The culture is now retrieving symbols that mirror the condition it has already entered. The Circassian dance preserves an ancient image of grace lifted off the earth. The airwalk delivers a modern image of the same lifting. They are not the same figure. Yet both resonate now because both unconsciously perform what electricity has already done to the population watching them. We are all riding on air.
A civilization that has already left its body becomes fascinated with images that show the leaving. The figures differ. The ground is the same.
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All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM) was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com