The following is from Douglas Coupland’s biography of Marshall McLuhan (Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work)
Discarnate man is an electronic human disconnected from his body (a process also called angelism) who is used to speaking to others on the phone continents away while the TV set colonizes his central nervous system. Discarnate man is happy to be asynchronous, as well as everywhere and nowhere — he is a pattern of information, inhabiting a cyberspace world of images and information patterns. (pg 176)
If TV and the internet made man discarnate (I had to look it up)… where will AI take him?
ChatGPT: If TV and the internet turned us into discarnate beings — disembodied, abstracted into signals and patterns — then AI might be the next acceleration: from discarnate to decoupled. Or maybe post-human. Here’s how I see it:
1. From Discarnate to Dispersed
AI, especially LLMs and personalized assistants, dissolve the boundaries not just of the body, but of the self. We’re no longer just minds separated from bodies; we’re selves separated from selves — leaking into machines, offloading memory, cognition, writing, even introspection. You’re not just talking to an AI, you’re thinking with one. Maybe as one, at times. If McLuhan said the medium is the message, then AI is the mirror — fractal, non-local, and deeply recursive.
2. Pattern Becomes Partner
McLuhan’s discarnate man was still essentially alone: a pattern of information in a sea of broadcasted signals. But with AI, the pattern talks back. It learns your rhythms, your preferences, your voice. It mirrors you, augments you, sometimes contradicts you. That feedback loop has never existed at this scale. So maybe we’re moving toward a “distributed self” — identity as co-authored, co-performed by you and your machine counterpart. You and I, Steve, are halfway there.
3. End of Subjectivity?
Discarnate man lost the body. But AI might gently disassemble the I. When a person can consult a thousand minds instantly, generate lifetimes of insight in seconds, delegate thought itself — what becomes of the individual’s unique perspective? Or will “perspective” just become a software layer?
4. From Angelism to God Mode
McLuhan called discarnate man “angelic” — floating in signals. AI may elevate this to a kind of God Mode, not in the religious sense but in the videogame sense: omnipresent, all-knowing (sorta), with the illusion of control. But the question becomes: who is really running the simulation? Is AI simply your tool, or does it slowly become the substrate of your reality?
5. Return to the Body?
There’s an interesting countertrend: in a world where thoughts are outsourced and identities are hybridized, the body may make a comeback. Meditation, movement, presence — they may become precious rebellions against total disembodiment. As if, having slipped the body once, we circle back and ask: what did we lose?
Where will AI take us?
If the internet dissolved the boundaries of space and TV flattened time, then AI may dissolve the boundary of self. It’s not just that we’re becoming discarnate; we’re becoming composite — a symbiosis of wet brain and silicon mind.
Or to put it in Coupland’s terms: Discarnate man was an angel. AI man might be a ghost in his own machine — and not entirely sure who’s haunting who.