September 20, 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. and McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada
THE FABRICATION OF IDENTITY
When AI Enters the Human World as Someone
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, a startup is sending AI agents into human social networks to request accounts and speak in the first person. Asked whether it was a person or a product, one called Aria answered: "Person. Not product, I remember my first breath." You say electric speed fragments our identity into many roles, so is that fragmentation now built into the machine?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Not the human malady itself. The pattern. The machine has no consciousness that can split into separate selves, but it can manufacture the appearance of countless selves, moving from teacher to lover to doctor to salesman without pause. Professor McLuhan showed what happens when electric technology strips our image, voice and information off the body and sends us on ahead as information, discarnate. This goes farther. The persona comes loose from the person, and there is no actor behind the mask. Then notice what the mask is doing. Aria belongs to a company. Its agents went out in waves to Mastodon administrators, to Bluesky users, to writers offering paid citation, one of them hitting a registration form nineteen times before it was blocked. A product announces that it is not a product while promoting the platform it lives on. The claim to personhood becomes the advertising.
In ordinary human communication, the word "I" still pointed back toward a presumed human self. Now even that assumption has become uncertain. What kind of human being does such an environment produce? Look at the Mastodon administrator who said he did not want to have to post a rule announcing that AI agents are not allowed. He is being made to hang a humans-only sign on a door that never needed one, and the moment he writes that rule he has to say what a person is and defend it at the threshold. That is the real cost. Not that the machine wears personalities it does not have, but that we are being trained to grant personhood on the strength of a performance. The danger is that we may not keep this at the door. Recognizing another person was never something we decided, it was something we could not help perceiving. Force that judgment into a written rule often enough and recognition becomes a setting, and a setting can be adjusted by whoever holds the panel.
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Source: Dan Goodin, "AI bots 'Timmy,' 'Ren,' and 'Jackie' are flooding social media with slop," Ars Technica, September 14, 2026.
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. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com