Is Toronto obsolete?: Process and ambivalence in Marshall McLuhan’s urban studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article I reflect on the obsolescence of Toronto in order to enquire into the fate of the city as a viable entity within the terms of Marshall McLuhan’s investigations of the late 1960s and their relevance for today. By 1968 McLuhan had pronounced the city obsolete in a universe of globe-extending news satellites and Bucky Fuller domes, that artefactualized and programmed nature. The city as obsolete was a ‘probe’ McLuhan offered to make sense of the enhancements of supersonic speeds of jet travel that he called Jet City. Using the Dew-Line Newsletter as my central point of reference, I want to develop McLuhan’s ideas that arose in the city’s wake; these are threefold: Jet City, mini-states and the application of the Joycean nostrum the ‘the urb… it orbs’. Indeed, in the 1970s McLuhan talked more and more about cities in terms of aviation-figures, as airports coordinating flights and passages, of corporate hijackings and crashes. McLuhan asked us to imagine ‘circulating cities’ in the forms of mass migrations, for business and pleasure, of populations on the move, anticipating the multiple mobilities of the present day. Yet at the same time, revealing the lived tension of his position, he acted against plans for the downtown Spadina Expressway, against the developers, as a homeowner who still lived in a neighbourhood worth protecting from development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".