The Future is Technoclassical: Signs of the McLuhan Century (Part One)

It is fairly straightforward (and glum) to observe that our culture’s dependence on, and even reverence for, technological innovation has, in large part, led to the widespread displacement of the humanities by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) in institutions of higher learning. Nevertheless, the perhaps unexpected ways in which our technological culture is implicated in a revival of the liberal arts – the classical foundation of the ‘humanities’ and the ‘sciences’ alike – may, paradoxically, reveal the more essential pattern defining the present and the future.

As the integrated study of the scientific, aesthetic, and ethical foundations of western culture, the Trivium (the liberal arts of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (the liberal arts of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) are receiving growing appreciation in formative cultural areas, if not in state universities themselves. This can be seen, not only in the “Classical Education Boom,”¹ wherein hundreds of K-12 private and charter schools grounded in the liberal arts have appeared across the United States in the last decade, but also in the increasing recognition by tech entrepreneurs of the necessity of philosophical and artistic formation to the creative development and wise deployment of emergent digital technologies. In this context, Scott Hartley, author of The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, argues that, with the ability of AI to perform “rote, routine, and perhaps even marginally creative tasks,” the prospect of humans becoming “more critically thinking, more collaborative, more creative beings” is particularly vital.²

Beyond the role of humanistic education in refining one’s creative and critical abilities, however, the surprising alliance between tech innovators and classical learning appears to embody a fundamental shift in the perceptual orientation driving our culture.  While casting it in an overwhelmingly negative light, Emily Singeisen designates this shift as “technoclassical.” Referring to the recent growth of private colleges receiving funding from the tech industry and administered by figures – such as the controversial Jordan Peterson – who have developed large online followings by pushing back against the perceived “left-wing” DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) model governing many state universities, Singeisen, quoting her colleague Tasso Hartzog, defines technoclassicism as “the drawing of an equivalency between ancient philosophy, Christian faith, and the rapid accumulation of capital through digital technology.”³

Such a nexus – in its positive expression – is amply demonstrated in Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.  The CEO of the software firm Palantir Technologies, which, among other things, provides AI-driven data analysis and weaponry to the US Department of Defense, Karp’s fundamental proposition is that, in order to develop the cutting-edge technologies it needs for geopolitical advantage, the United States – and the Western world at large – must abandon the cultural relativism and amoral consumerism that has stifled the commitment to civic virtue for the past half a century and return to a sense of collective identity energized by the intellectual, ethical, and even religious traditions of Western culture. Essential to this project, Karp notes, is an adamant rejection of “postmodernism’s” replacement of authoritative truth claims with a secularizing – and, as Karp suggests, cowardly – deference to radical pluralism and cultural difference.  As Karp bemoans, “We have withdrawn just as much from making ethical judgments about the good life as we have aesthetic judgments about beauty. The postmodern disinclination to make normative claims and value judgments has begun to erode our collective ability to make descriptive claims about truth as well.”⁴

While Karp’s polemic clearly reflects a broader tendency in digital culture to oppose the politically correct or so-called “woke” attacks on traditional western institutions that have characterized the American political “left” in recent decades, Karp’s assertion that the “postmodernism” of late 20^th century culture cannot survive into the future is one that has been increasingly mirrored by writers on the political left.  For instance, drawing on the Marxist cultural theorist Frederic Jameson’s formulation of postmodernism as the loss of rational detachment and historical rootedness – and thus the very ontological distinction between self and other – due to the frenzied and ecstatic circulation of televisual media images, Chun observes that digital “[n]etworks dissolve postmodern disorientation. In the late twentieth century, individual subjects seemed mired in a haze: ‘placeless’ architecture, frenetic commodification, unrelenting globalization, and media saturation. There was a growing consensus that it was now impossible for individuals to apprehend, let alone comprehend, their relation to the world around them…”⁵ Due to the wide-ranging analytic precision of the digital media environment, however, the irrational blurring of ontological categories and cultural boundaries indicative of the postmodern media universe can no longer be sustained; as Chun writes, digital networks “animate and locate ‘wherever’ architecture; they resolve multiculturalism through neighborhood predictors that bypass yet reinforce categories such as race, gender, sexuality; they replace postmodern relativism with data analytics.”⁶

It is, in this context, deeply instructive that, just as Karp – the capitalist tech entrepreneur – equates postmodern relativism with a rootless hedonism that has directed Silicon Valley away from making necessary civic contributions to producing meaningless consumer apps, the left wing “accelerationists” Williams and Srnicek, in their influential 2013 manifesto #Accelerate, distance themselves from the postmodern suspicion of authoritative rationality and instead articulate a “postcapitalist” vision of human solidarity, in which technological innovations are mobilized “towards a completion of the Enlightenment project of self-criticism and self mastery, rather than its elimination” (362).⁷

While Karp’s understanding of rationality and virtue bears a more explicit connection to the classical western tradition than Williams and Srnicek’s, what is essential to note is that, in both visions, the classical principles underlying the liberal arts – principles dethroned by 20^th century postmodernism – have resurfaced within the contemporary technological imagination: namely that human existence is grounded on absolute moral foundations and that, along with the universe itself, such foundations manifest a coherent order that is intelligible to the human intellect.

Despite one’s political leanings, therefore, the unique potential of digital media to inspire in the human psyche a return to cultural and existential foundations may suggest, albeit vaguely, that we are increasingly living in a technoclassical culture.  If this is the case, however, certain basic questions arise. For instance, how can we more precisely define the contours of this technoclassical culture, along with its opportunities and threats? If we must indeed return to an education founded on the classical liberal arts, how might this education be properly related to the contemporary technological environment? In other words, how might the “techno” and the “classical” be most harmoniously aligned?

In the following posts, we will turn to the 20^th century media theorist Marshall McLuhan for assistance in answering these questions. For, while his work has inspired a plethora of academic commentary, McLuhan’s perception most vital to the technoclassical present – namely that the technological shaping of the human person must be understood through a revival of the liberal arts, and that, conversely, the liberal arts tradition must be revived through understanding the technological shaping of the human person – requires significant study and development, beyond what a blog can provide. Nevertheless, through such modest engagement, we might recognize signs that, if the 21^st century can be described as the “software century” as Karp claims, it may also be described – and perhaps more aptly – as the “McLuhan century.”

[See Part II here]

1. Kevin Mahnken, “Amid the Pandemic, a Classical Education Boom: What if the Next Big School Trend Is 2,500 Years Old?,” The 74, March 2023. ↩︎
2. Scott Hartlet, “Full Stack Human,” Medium, June 2023. ↩︎
3. Emily Waller Singeisen, “Trojan Horse Universities: How Tech Billionaires and Alt-Right Figures Legitimise Intolerance in Classics,” Working Classicists, July 2024. ↩︎
4. Karp, The Technological Republic, 81. ↩︎
5. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to remain the same: Habitual new media, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 40.  ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Critical Legal Thinking, May 2013. ↩︎