May 12, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogue™
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 Future Presentation of the Past Is Today Always
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, Vogue and other publications report that young people are suddenly nostalgic for 2016. They are reviving old iPhones, Snapchat filters, digital cameras, Tumblr aesthetics and the slower internet culture of the mid-2010s.
Why would an age with more advanced technology suddenly become emotionally attached to an older and less sophisticated digital world?
Is this simply fashion nostalgia, or is something deeper happening to human perception and identity at electric speed?”
Nelson S. Thall replies:
It is far deeper than fashion nostalgia.
McLuhan explained decades ago that electricity abolishes sequence and replaces it with simultaneity. In the mechanical age the past disappeared gradually behind us. But electric technology retrieves everything simultaneously. McLuhan said there is no part of the past that is not with us today thanks to electricity.
This creates a completely new human environment. The individual no longer lives in stable historical sequence. All eras, styles, emotions and identities exist at once inside the electric field. The result is psychological exhaustion and temporal disorientation.
Young people are not truly nostalgic for 2016 itself. They are nostalgic for the last moment before digital life accelerated beyond human scale. Before total algorithmic saturation. Before artificial intelligence. Before reality itself began to feel unstable and synthetic.
At electric speed reality loses what McLuhan called its ‘hardware quality.’ Life begins to feel more like science fiction than physical experience. Fantasy replaces grounded identity because all times and all experiences are electronically present at once.
This is why the culture continuously recycles its own recent past. Nostalgia becomes an attempt to recover emotional sequence, stability and identity inside an environment moving too fast for the nervous system to process.
The population thinks it is choosing retro fashion and retro aesthetics. In reality the electric environment is acting invisibly upon the sensorium, pushing human beings to seek psychological refuge in earlier media environments that still appeared coherent and emotionally grounded.
This is why understanding and studying ‘Technology Ecology’™ has become essential. The most powerful effects of technology occur beneath conscious awareness while the population assumes it is merely enjoying trends, unaware that the environment itself is reshaping perception, identity and reality.
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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