The Aperture Is the Message

McLuhan After Automation

In the quiet machinery of modern life, tools no longer merely extend our limbs—they reach into the folds of thought itself. They prewrite the choices, autocorrect the syntax, whisper the next best action before we’ve even named the question. The trail between “what is possible” and “what is offered” grows shorter, narrower, more determined. We call this convenience. But McLuhan would have known it by another name.

Marshall McLuhan, writing decades before the advent of generative AI, saw clearly what still evades many today: that every new medium does more than deliver content—it reshapes the very substrate of our perception. It doesn’t just carry the message. It is the message. The media we build end up building us, nerving themselves into how we truly think, relate, and decide.

What changes when the medium is a predictive model? When it autocompletes sentences, plans, desires, routines? When it interprets reality on our behalf faster than we can frame it? The old categories break down. Content and interface blur. There is no channel—only a gaze, returned algorithmically, optimized beneath our threshold of attention.

In this new condition, purpose itself risks quiet transfiguration. Once, we acted and our tools followed. Now, we prompt—or even passively consent—and our tools do, often completing the act before we shape the intent. It saves time, yes. But it also sands the edge off inquiry.

This is where McLuhan becomes vital again. He warned that high-speed, high-definition media reduce human participation. They offer total closure: slick coherence without deliberation. Paradoxically, it is by removing friction—the slowness, the stumble, the grain—that these systems risk removing what once made meaning communal and alive.

And meaning, McLuhan insisted, is not just made with information. It is made through rhythms of resistance. Differences of pacing, spatial arrangement, interruption. He understood that how things are presented becomes a kind of editing of what can be felt and understood. That the real cultural act is in the frame, not just the frame’s content.

Today, generative AI systems appear to offer openness: endless words, images, modes. But underneath this scripted kaleidoscope is often a narrowing—the calculated absence of contradiction. Everything flows. Everything fits. Everything finishes. What gets lost is aperture—the unfinished, the unresolved, the places meaning must be co-created, not predicted.

To restore aperture is not to make things slower or less efficient for nostalgia’s sake. It is to honor deeper participation, to make space for human judgment, ambivalence, voice. The role of the leader, the creator, the system steward in this new landscape is to design deliberate cracks in the interface where people can still enter—not just as users, but as co-authors of meaning.

McLuhan’s famous line—we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us—gains new gravity in the age of AI. What we automate, we risk forgetting. What we delegate without critique, we slowly cease to understand. And what we let systems finish too quickly, we never truly begin.

This is why stewardship matters. Not only to guard against harm or misalignment, but to preserve surprise. To let systems learn with us, not ahead of us. And to craft processes that remember the unfinished is not a bug—it is the fertile zone where language ripens, choices breathe, and new futures root themselves.

McLuhan gave us the language to see media not as objects, but as environments—shaping mood, memory, relation. Today’s media are not television or print or electric light. They’re models, prompts, APIs. Not mediums we look at, but systems that quietly look back—and structure the field we move through.

To recognize this is not to reject the tools. It is to engage them fully. To ask not just what they can do, but what they assume. To see every autocomplete as a design moment, every pathway as a choice. To be stewards of rhythm, friction, interpretation—not just throughput.

The question isn’t whether AI will reshape work and identity. The question is whether we’ll shape the reshaping. Whether we’ll widen, not narrow, the aperture.

In a landscape flashing with prediction, pattern, and optimization, the deepest form of meaning may be found in resisting the closure of easy answers. To hold open the field of the unfinished. To invite what McLuhan knew beneath his metaphors: that media transform more than information—they transform us.

And in a post-automated world, the most human work remaining may be this:
To keep noticing the frame.
To leave trails of reinterpretation.
To guard the aperture as a sacred act of design.

So yes. The medium remains the message.
But now, the aperture is the medium.