May 9, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogue™
An Exploration of Media 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 Reversal: How AI Made the Plumber the New Aristocrat
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told BlackRock CEO Larry Fink that the AI build out will create the largest infrastructure project in human history. He went on to say that the jobs would not go to coders or knowledge workers but to plumbers, electricians, carpenters and steelworkers.
McKinsey estimates the United States alone will need 130,000 more electricians and 240,000 more construction labourers by 2030. The skilled trades that the digital revolution treated as obsolete are now facing the largest labour shortage in modern history.
What is going on here? And what does Media Ecology reveal about why this is happening?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
This is McLuhan’s reversal in real time. Every technology, when pushed to its extreme, reverses into its opposite. The digital revolution spent forty years displacing the working class, automating manufacturing, offshoring labour, mocking the trades and elevating the white collar knowledge worker as the new aristocracy of the future. That revolution has now reached its extreme. And it is reversing.
The AI that was supposed to make the knowledge worker indispensable is making him obsolete. White collar entry level positions are being eliminated. Junior lawyers, junior accountants, junior coders, junior analysts are being filtered out of the job market by the very pattern recognition systems they helped to build. Meanwhile the boss of the largest AI chip company on Earth is telling Gen Z to become plumbers, electricians and carpenters. The skilled trades are facing the largest labour shortage in modern history because someone has to physically build the data centers that house the AI. McKinsey estimates the United States alone will need 130,000 more electricians and 240,000 more construction labourers by 2030.
The AI cannot build itself. The AI cannot wire its own buildings, lay its own pipes, weld its own steel, pour its own concrete. The AI cannot exist in physical reality without a human hand on a wrench. The very class of workers the digital revolution treated as obsolete has become the indispensable foundation of the AI economy. He who works with his hands now controls the infrastructure that the knowledge worker once mocked.
This is the law of reversal in its purest form. Push any technology far enough and it produces its own opposite. The digital age has produced a renaissance of the physical trades. The knowledge economy is collapsing back into the physical economy it tried to escape.
-30-
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