Every new medium of mass communication arrives cloaked in mystery, and always—without fail—its earliest adopters believe they are speaking with the dead, with spirits, with some other realm. The telegraph whistled with ghostly clicks. Radio hissed with voices out of nowhere. Even the television flickered like a séance, promising messages from the beyond. From the beginning, these technologies carried within them an inherent relation to the divine—or at least to the absence of it.

The first true mass medium was the printing press. With it came the end of a unified spiritual order. Where once the divine could only be accessed through the sacred intermediaries of priest, Church, and tradition, suddenly one could sit alone and read—forming an interiority, an ego, a self. Protestantism was born. So was the novel. So was the idea that I might find truth without you.

It is from here that the modern world slips toward Nietzsche’s death of God. And in that famous funeral announcement, Nietzsche also warns: in the absence of God, the swarm takes over. The collective. The crowd. Mass media. The void must be filled.

Is it possible that future media technologies were not invented simply to connect us to one another, but to fill the gaping God-shaped hole? The telegraph, the radio, the television—they were all greeted as spiritual instruments, ways to touch the ineffable. Today, the secular mystics of Silicon Valley speak of uploading the soul, merging with AI, living forever. Immortality without heaven. We have lost the divine and cannot bear to die. So instead we worship the preservation of our worldly selves: in data, in servers, in silicon.

Marshall McLuhan, perhaps Canada’s most prescient prophet, saw all this and smiled. For him, this retribalization was a return to magic, to mystery. But here he errs. Mass media does not redeem the death of God. It only distracts from it.

We don’t need another app. We need to put our phones down. Go outside, into the Canadian wilderness. Touch the earth. Taste terroir. Let the wind say what the algorithm never will.