JULY 23, 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, McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
When Coding No Longer Requires Code
The Child Learns to Command Before Learning to Construct
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, TechCrunch reported on July 23, 2026: “Edtech platform raises $4.5M to help teach students how to vibe code.” The company, Imagi, has partnered with Lovable to give students controlled access to a system in which they describe a game, website or application in ordinary language and Artificial Intelligence builds it. OpenAI has supplied a million dollars in credits so schools can use it without charge. The company argues that children should learn to build with Artificial Intelligence rather than merely consume it. If children can create programs without first learning computer code, have they become more technologically literate, or have they merely learned how to give orders to an invisible servant?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
You offer me two doors and I will take neither, because literacy is doing dishonest work. Alphabetic literacy is a technology, not competence itself. It fractures speech into visual signs, lines them up, and trains the mind toward sequence and specialism. Code is its culminating electronic artifact: literal, sequential, case-sensitive, and capable of dying from a missing semicolon. Learning code was the final mass initiation into alphabetic discipline. The child is neither more literate nor less. What is ending is its monopoly over machine-making. Something older returns: language that makes things happen. Walter Ong, McLuhan’s student, gave us a name for oral pattern returning upon literacy: secondary orality. The incantation is back, wearing a school uniform. The prompt becomes figure; the code becomes ground.
The claim that this turns consumers into builders conceals a reversal. When the machine constructs, consumption moves upstream: the student consumes programming. Yet the evidence is better than my objection is comfortable with. A student built a lawn-mowing website with a booking calendar; a teacher translated her curriculum into fifteen classroom languages. Neither stayed put. My objection is not to abstraction. Every generation of programmers has used layers it did not fully understand. But abstraction is not delegation. Earlier layers translated formal instructions by defined rules; this one interprets ordinary language probabilistically. The code can be read; the passage from intention to construction cannot. It offers what appears plausible, and a student unable to read the code cannot separate plausibility from correctness.
Now count your invisibles. Every prompt and response passes through invisible screening. The child orders an invisible servant while an invisible chaperone decides whether the order may pass. That is not the mechanic’s education. It is the training of a young executive. Let creation precede comprehension, but never replace it. Require the machine to show what it built, explain why, and teach the student to alter the code by hand, while admitting that its explanation is itself generated. The remedy is partial. Push the alternative to its limit: the child who commands everything and understands nothing is not a director. He is a user with better manners.
-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.
Contact:
nelson@themediumisthemessage.com