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In 1993, Wired launched with Marshall McLuhan on their masthead. Silicon Valley loved “the medium is the message.”
McLuhan was famously faith-driven, a converted Catholic. He (alongside Ivan Illich) have served inspiration for @left_pad.
Best known as a steward of the pivotal open-source JavaScript compiler Babel, Henry (KB4) has spent much of his life creating open source tools – a social annotation layer for the web, a receipt printer, a faith-inflected OSS podcast. Throughout, he remains keenly aware of the effects of his “electric engineering.”
“Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as spiritual substance,” McLuhan wrote. “It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this World is a very great electric engineer.”
Those searing words anchor @left_pad’s (KB4) nascent Bible App.
“When God creates everything, he says that he creates humans in his image,” Henry told Kernel. “What that means is that we are meant to create.”
His feed-based Bible App is a new message in a familiar medium. It’s a tool built to subvert TikTok “brain rot,” and to create precedent for technology that provides more signal and less noise.
Cursory McCluhan readers may be surprised that he had more to say on his most known quote. "In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message,” he wrote in the 1974 essay, Liturgy and the Microphone. “It is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same."
Henry tells his story of where the medium & message intertwine, and along the way, encourages each of us to create our own.
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