July 14, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
by Nelson S. Thall Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca.
The Disappearance of the Outside
Identity Needs Privacy as Thought Needs Silence.
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, you have written here about the camera that looks back at us, and about the glasses that would remember our days for us. This is a different question. Marshall McLuhan once observed that North Americans uniquely sought privacy out of doors, and even turned the automobile into a private room. Yet a company has now brought to market smart glasses with no camera at all, saying plainly that it wants the people around the wearer to feel safe from being filmed, and this month investors valued that company at a billion dollars for the decision. Meanwhile a state attorney general is investigating the camera-equipped versions as a privacy nightmare, and a city's courts have banned them from the building. Have manufacturers suddenly rediscovered privacy, or are they quietly redesigning their products before society redesigns them for them? What does Technology Ecology reveal about why a civilization has suddenly become so sensitive to privacy?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
He gave us the clue fifty years ago, in an essay called "Inside on the Outside, or the Spaced-Out American." North Americans, he wrote, may be the only people in the world who go outside to be alone and inside to be social. Europeans go out to be together and come home for solitude. We reversed it. That is why we turned the automobile into a moving room, a private refuge where a man could think and talk and become himself. Privacy was never merely a legal right. It was an environment in which identity could grow.
Now weigh the glasses by what they do. They enhance the eye past its own reach, naming what it sees and keeping what it saw. They make obsolete the anonymous public, the stranger who stays strange, the face that passes and is gone. They retrieve the village, where every man was known to every other and nothing was ever private. And driven to their limit they reverse, for they abolish the distinction between inside and outside altogether. The stranger on the sidewalk may know your name before he introduces himself. Public space loses the anonymity that once made it possible to be alone among others. Every public place becomes electronically indoors.
Society is not resisting because it has discovered privacy. It is resisting because it has begun to feel privacy disappear, and we seldom notice an environment until it begins to vanish. The manufacturers felt it first, as merchants always do. They have not become moral. They have become accurate. A camera worn on the face has turned from an asset into a liability, and the billion dollars you mention was not paid for a conscience. It was paid for a correct reading of the ground. Yesterday the camera sold the glasses. Today the absence of the camera sells them.
But mark what was actually withdrawn, for here is the deeper turn. The camera is gone. The microphones remain, four of them, transcribing the conversation as it happens. The stranger is still captured, only as text rather than as image. What the market rejected was not surveillance. It was visual surveillance. They took away the eye and left the ear, because we feel the lens and we do not feel the ear. Marshall McLuhan taught that every medium creates a new environment before we have noticed the old one, and that the effect is felt long after it has done its work. So the question is not whether the glasses can see us. It is whether, having traded the eye we feared for the ear we never thought to fear, we shall remember why privacy mattered at all. Identity requires privacy in the same way that thought requires silence. Remove the environment, and the thing it nourished begins quietly to disappear.
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News Sources: Ivan Mehta, "Smart glasses without a camera? Even Realities bets productivity beats recording everyone," TechCrunch, July 11, 2026; Kate Park, "Smart glasses maker Even Realities hits $1B valuation with $150M funding led by Meituan, Tencent," TechCrunch, July 6, 2026. Marshall McLuhan, "Inside on the Outside, or the Spaced-Out American," Journal of Communication, Autumn 1976.
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