The (Black) Elephant in the Room: McLuhan and the Racial
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background This article combines Marshall McLuhan’s media theory with the “racial contract” theory of political philosopher Charles Mills.Analysis Mills critiques the older, Western “social contract,” which holds that “Western man” moves from a “state of nature” (or McLuhan’s tribal man) into “civilization” (McLuhan’s detribal man and retribal man) via organizing with similar humans to establish the rules, laws, codes, guidelines, and, as is argued here, technologies necessary for human cohabitation. Mills argues that there are racial assumptions of the social contract, meaning only some are consenting signatories, particularly White men; thus, the social contract is actually a racial contract.Conclusion and implications McLuhan’s media theory is consistent with Mills’ racial contract: tribal man resides in a state of nature, awaiting man’s detribal or retribal benevolence.ContexteCet article combine la théorie des médias de Marshall McLuhan et la théorie sur le « contrat racial » du philosophe politique Charles W. Mills.Analyse Mills critique le vieux « contrat social » occidental, qui maintient que « l’homme occidental » passe d’un « état de nature » (l’homme tribal selon McLuhan) jusqu’à la « civilisation » (l’homme détribalisé et l’homme retribalisé selon McLuhan) en collaborant avec ses semblables afin d’établir les règles, lois, codes, directives et, tel que soutenu dans cet article, les technologies nécessaires pour la cohabitation humaine. Mills soutient que le contrat social comporte des suppositions raciales, du fait que certains hommes seulement—particulièrement des hommes blancs—en sont des signataires consentants; ainsi, le contrat social est réellement un contrat racial.Conclusion et implications La théorie des médias de McLuhan est en accord avec le contrat racial de Mills : l’homme tribal vit dans l’état de nature, en attente de la bienveillance de l’homme détribalisé ou retribalisé.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 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 it