The great digital reversal

By Andrey Mir on December 17, 2025 • ( 0 )

The latest book by media theorist Andrey Mir raises hypotheses that are as lucid as they are unsettling about the future of literate culture and the human race itself. By Eugenio Palopoli.

This is a review of The Digital Reversal in Revista Seúl by Eugenio Palopoli. A writer couldn’t have dreamed of a more elaborate analysis. All the basic points from the book are highlighted and presented in a very intelligent and metaphorical manner. I am reposting the review with the kind permission of Eugenio. (The review is in Spanish, but the automatic translation seems to catch all the metaphors and sharpness of the original.) – A.M.

The Digital Reversal – Andrey Mir, Popular Media Ecology, 2025. US$9.99, 248-page ebook.

The way I came across Andrey Mir’s work is typical of the digital literacy culture that this author analyzes with such depth and clarity: I don’t remember exactly how. But it’s very likely that it was through some cross-reference in one of the many newsletters, Substack accounts, or X/Twitter feeds that we feel compelled to follow in order to believe we can still access some semblance of understanding of the world. This is all assuming, of course, that traditional media are practically finished and given the distrust we feel toward much of the academic output from here, there, and everywhere.

What initially caught my attention about Mir and led me to subscribe to his posts were his comments about Martin Gurri and his now-famous book, The Revolt of the Public. Mir claimed that for years he had considered himself a kind of intellectual twin of Gurri, but that more recently his thinking had changed: now we find ourselves in one of the many “reversals” or “inversions” (the two closest and equally unsatisfactory ways to translate “reversals”) of the digital age. One in which power and control have once again shifted from ordinary people or users (the public) to platforms and, more generally, to institutions.

I gradually became acquainted with Mir’s work in ebook format, and in recent years he has been remarkably prolific: from a certain optimism shared with Gurri in Human as Media (2014), to the more pessimistic (or frankly bleak) Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers (2020) and Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror (2024). His most recent book is The Digital Reversal, undoubtedly the culmination and synthesis of his intellectual shift: a comprehensive theory of the transformations that digital media are producing in all aspects of human life.

So, The Digital Reversal is a book with a rare virtue: it seems to have lucid and coherent explanations for absolutely everything, from the most fundamental questions in the history of human thought to the most curious minutiae (why Louis C.K. is the funniest and most intelligent comedian of all time, why people used to exaggerate their joy on TV with constant “wow!” exclamations, why we can’t stop using memes, stickers, and emojis in our digital communication). Mir is not only rigorous and relentless in his reasoning, but the very rigor of his arguments leads him into territories he only ventures into and prefers to retreat from. Even so, he isn’t afraid to take the core of his theory to the extreme of predicting apocalyptic scenarios for some point no more than the next 20 or 25 years. Perhaps the total submission of humans to new forms of machines and artificial intelligence, perhaps the complete fusion between living organisms and digital media, perhaps the singularity that more and more scientists and tech gurus are also predicting as imminent. Certainly, Mir’s most extreme predictions encounter criticism even among authors who have praised his work, but it is nonetheless impossible to deny that scenarios that just three or four decades ago could only be imagined in various genres of fiction (cyberpunk literature, the films of David Cronenberg) are now being considered serious hypotheses.

Reversals everywhere

Andrey Mir’s primary interest is media ecology, and his theories derive largely from the work of Walter Ong and, especially, Marshall McLuhan. In several passages, Mir provides examples of how certain ideas of McLuhan’s, which at the time may have been misinterpreted, misunderstood, or overlooked, are much better understood in this new era of digital media and are even easily corroborated at every turn in our daily lives.

The Digital Reversal is structured around this McLuhanian concept of “reversal,” one of the four laws of media formulated by McLuhan in his tetrad: amplification, obsolescence, recovery, and reversal. According to this last law, when a medium is taken to its extremes or reaches its limits, it tends to reverse its effects. The classic example is the car: designed to increase mobility and speed, when there are too many of them on the streets, their effect is reversed in traffic jams, turning highways into parking lots.

Mir’s central thesis is that we live in an era of massive and accelerated reversals. Why now? First, because any medium, when taken to its extremes, reverses its effects; and second, because the speed of digital media is such that “all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.” We currently live at digital speed, the ultimate speed of social interaction.

Mir takes his time to review, one by one, the major reversals he finds evident in our present. One of the most significant is the shift from literacy to post-literacy, and more specifically toward what he calls “digital orality.” This is not a mere metaphor: Mir argues that digital media are reversing the cognitive and cultural effects that writing, the alphabet, and printing produced over the preceding millennia.

It was writing that produced our “introspective turn,” that which allowed for abstract contemplation, structured thought in a linear and sequential manner, and fostered individualism. Hence the predominance of literate culture, which valued deliberation, structured thought, and critical distance from the object of knowledge. And it was electronic media that began to reverse this process by promoting what McLuhan called “empathic engagement.” Radio and especially television immersed users in an induced environment, similar to the perception of “acoustic space” in oral cultures. This inaugurated what Ong called “secondary orality”: a new, technologically mediated orality that nonetheless recovered tribal features.

Thus, says Mir, digital media complete this reversal. The new “digital orality” doesn’t primarily refer to vocalization or video formats (although it certainly includes podcasts and the endless flow of images and sounds offered by platforms like TikTok and YouTube shorts), but rather to a cognitive and cultural state: conversational, impulsive, immersive. Even when we write (when we post on social media or send WhatsApp messages), we don’t do so in a “literary” way (as in books), but rather it’s a form of writing used orally: for immediate, emotionally charged exchanges, where the relationship takes precedence over the content.

The result of post-literacy is therefore retribalization. Mir does not interpret any of the phenomena he analyzes as the product of grand conspiracies or deviations from a virtuous path to which one might perhaps return, but rather as determinisms dictated by the simple and natural evolution of human media. Thus, he does not believe that social networks are a “cesspool” nor that their development is due to the political decisions of their controllers, but rather that, by their very nature as a product of post-literacy, social networks recreate the cognitive conditions of ancient tribes, with their relational bias (who says something matters more than what is said), their agonism (competition for status), and their constant demand for affirmation from others.

Mir elaborates on the reversal of his notion of the “viral editor” of the blog and early social media era—a kind of collective intelligence that allowed for the validation of news and the exchange of ideas through virality—to the “viral inquisitor” of today, an equally collective mechanism that now functions as an ideological police force. Virality no longer serves merely to validate information but also monitors attitudes, punishes deviations, and imposes orthodoxies. Social media has become the typical arena for cancel culture, the ostracized fate that awaits those who do not demonstrate sufficient loyalty to the values of a particular group.

We don’t hate post-journalism enough

As we mentioned earlier, in The Digital Reversal, Mir revisits and updates several of the issues that interest him most. Journalism is one of them. Mir believes that the highest (and most profitable) expressions of this institution were only possible after the establishment of a business model based on advertising revenue sometime in the 20^th century. The fact that media owners could access a vast network of advertisers (often with conflicting interests) allowed the profession to flourish, but it also guaranteed the independence of newsrooms and raised their professional standards.

However, that independent, prestigious, and well-resourced journalism met its end along with the century that gave birth to it. In the new digital age, advertisers migrated to new platforms, initially tentatively, then en masse. The time then came for a new reversal, this time toward the business models of earlier eras: partisan journalism, at the service of a party or interest group, or media outlets in the hands of one or more capitalist partners with the capacity to absorb the losses. The third option on the menu of this reversal, dear readers and contributors to Seoul, is precisely the subscription model. Not only does this publication depend heavily on the direct contributions of its readers, but so do many of the larger, more traditional newspapers that managed to survive the digital wave.

The resulting dynamic is not positive, according to Mir. In his opinion, subscriptions are much more like donations than a typical exchange of money for services. At best, what happens with this new model is that media outlets no longer compete to provide news, but rather to validate the concerns of their audiences. This, and nothing else, is the reason for the end of journalism as an expression of “the world as it is,” with its search for objective truths beyond obvious ideological biases, and its replacement with postjournalism, which expresses “the world as it should be,” according to the validated desires of its audiences or the tribe that funds it.

Again: this transformation is neither a conspiracy nor a moral decline, but a purely media effect, resulting from changes in the economic and technological infrastructure. And those convinced that the standards of mainstream journalism in Western democracies have shifted excessively to the left are not wrong. For Mir, this is simply because it was the younger, university-educated, and progressive audience that first reached digital media, demanding validation of their viewpoints. What has happened in recent years, then, is a reaction (a reversal), but not toward the center, rather toward the opposite extremes.

Mir understands that current polarization is not primarily political, but rather media-driven. Social media platforms are designed to extract engagement, and the design that best achieves this is the one that amplifies emotional extremes. Algorithms don’t have political biases: they have a structural bias toward intensity. In digital discourse, identities compete for affirmation in an environment where extreme signaling is necessary to stand out. The center is discouraged: it doesn’t generate likes, it doesn’t go viral, it’s invisible.

Traditional media amplify this dynamic. Having lost advertising revenue, their digital versions compete for ideologically committed audiences. The advertising model manufactured consensus; the subscription model manufactures fury. Progressive media pushes left, conservative media push right, and the space for cross-party dialogue collapses.

Footnote: The recent news of Bari Weiss’s appointment as editor-in-chief of CBS News (in addition to the sale of her website, The Free Press, to Paramount for $150 million), a decision most observers interpreted as an attempt by a major media outlet to reclaim better journalistic practices and a more centrist approach, could be considered a case that contradicts Mir’s arguments, and so he decided to write something about it. He doesn’t retract his ideas; he simply believes we should wait and see how it turns out. Well, we’ll wait and see.

Predictions

A comprehensive review of each and every one of the reversals that Andrey Mir identifies far exceeds the scope of a simple critique. Suffice it to say that the book has brilliant and incredibly convincing moments when it repeatedly contrasts the broad cultural phenomena that the natural evolution of human media has produced with their subsequent reversal by the current stage of digital orality. Among these reversals, we can briefly mention the following:

Epistemological: from objective truth to crowdsourced truth (validated by virality); from classifying knowledge to searching through prompts; from reading books to asking AI.
Sensory-cognitive: from structured thinking (books) to infinite flow (scrolling); from light that illuminates external objects (allowing their analysis) to light that transmits information in itself, screens that favor immersion; from valued effort to rewarded click.
Cultural: from institutions that seek the truth to academic activism; from television spectacle to digital carnival; from feelings to what Mir calls “intensities” (performative, signaling); from patriarchy to feminism, and then to gender fluidity.
Identity: Media evolution has culminated in the reversal of identity into digital credentials and status. Who you are matters more than what you do.
Empathy overload, a typical phenomenon of social networks: thanks to social media, we observe how performative empathy becomes a mandatory demand and finally a moral police force.

However, the most controversial section of The Digital Reversal is, as we mentioned at the beginning, the final chapter on the “reversal of humanity.” Mir speculates on the logical end of media evolution: the complete fusion of user, medium, and environment. He argues that artificial intelligence will achieve general intelligence not through self-developed consciousness (the Skynet scenario) nor through brain-machine interfaces (although these may accelerate the process), but through the technological imperative: the emergent force that drives any medium toward its maximum possible performance, with or without human intent.

In this interpretation, humans are “the sexual organs of the media” (McLuhan): we aid media evolution while it rewards us with likes, like cute and obedient pets. We have handed over to machines the entirety of human knowledge accumulated over centuries of history so they can train their LLMs (large language models). We have seen how AI first defeated our great chess champions and then outplayed us in any strategic or cognitive game, and we have observed how machines continue to learn without any human intervention whatsoever.

It no longer matters how governments or the tech companies themselves intend to manage or regulate artificial intelligence: the genie is out of the bottle, and the reversal process is inevitable. Reversal to what? As we said before: to some kind of dystopia that only the most fevered minds of science fiction could imagine. Mir says that Elon Musk’s trips to Mars are merely a distraction for a few: The race for outer space cannot compete in speed with the human extension into inner space made possible by digital media.

It’s true, Mir could be wrong, and his predictions could very well turn out to be a trap of his own reasoning. Just as he considered that the Bari Weiss case should be explained by the black swan event, it could also happen that the reversals simply don’t occur, that they stop, or that they take us somewhere else. In any case, after selling us a Matrix-like scenario where there’s no option of a pill to wake us up, Mir now intends to sell us a survival manual for those who want to become Neo: his next book, announced for next year, will be called Counter-Digital Media Literacy. A great remedy for a great ill.

By Eugenio Palopoli in Revista Seúl, November 2, 2025.

Other books by Andrey Mir: