September 10, 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 INDUSTRIALIZATION OF DEPRAVITY
When Technology Removes the Restraints
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, as technology removes more and more of the physical, social and moral restraints on human behavior, is there any depth of depravity mankind will not use technology to explore?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Technology does not abolish human depravity. It industrializes it. At the new electric speeds in which we now live environmentally, private ethics have disappeared as an adequate means of regulating behavior, and we have tried to substitute for them a communal ethic. Acts that once remained private can now be transmitted, reproduced, personalized and distributed almost instantly. Technology does not create the human appetite. It gives that appetite reach, speed, anonymity and scale.
This is one of the great TECHNOTRAPS of the electric age. We stare at the new machine and ask what it is capable of doing, when the more important question is what human beings will ask it to do. Professor McLuhan taught us to examine what a technology enhances, what it obsolesces, what it retrieves and what it reverses into when pushed far enough. Electric technology enhances the power of individual appetite, obsolesces many of the physical and social restraints that once limited it, retrieves forms of behavior and spectacle previously confined to fantasy or the margins, and pushed far enough reverses into a society desperately attempting to impose communal restraints upon technologies whose development continually outruns them.
The machine itself does not become depraved. That would give the machine a morality it does not possess. The danger is that human beings can now give their darkest impulses capabilities they never possessed before. What once had to be imagined can be pictured. What could be pictured can be simulated. What once required another human being may increasingly be manufactured by a machine. The ultimate question, therefore, is not whether technology has a bottom. Technology has no moral depth at all. The question is whether mankind does.
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Source: Current developments in humanoid robotics and artificial intelligence, September 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