May 24, 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 Papacy and The Great Electric Engineer
A Student of Technology asks:
Why has the Vatican’s recent statement warning humanity about AI and the loss of human dignity appeared only now, when electronic technologies from the telegraph and radio to television, satellites, computers, and the internet had already transformed humanity into a discarnate global nervous system generations ago?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
The Vatican’s sudden warning about AI reveals how detached the Papacy itself has become from both the nature of man and the order of the Great Creator.
The real transformation did not begin with AI. It began generations ago with electric media. The telegraph first separated communication from bodily presence. Radio surrounded humanity with invisible electronic environments.
Television externalized the nervous system into screens. Computers digitized memory. The internet dissolved identity into networks, databanks, and permanent electronic exposure.
Long before AI appeared, humanity had already begun losing embodied existence.
McLuhan understood that electric media do not merely transmit information. They reshape consciousness itself. Human identity gradually migrated outward from the body into electronic systems of images, signals, profiles, and data.
The result was the rise of discarnate man: a humanity increasingly detached from physical presence, interior life, memory, privacy, and direct relation to Creation itself.
AI is not the final stage of this process but its most recent revolutionary phase. It openly reveals what electric civilization had already been doing invisibly for over a century: transforming man from an embodied spiritual being into informational abstraction.
That the Papacy only now sounds the alarm reveals how profoundly disconnected it has become from the spiritual reality it claims to guard.
AI did not create discarnate man.
Electricity did.
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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