Narcissus - A Modern Take

[atreestump]

Once, there was a young man who looked into a pool of water and saw his own reflection. He thought it was someone else and fell in love. But the myth of Narcissus, as Marshall McLuhan explained, is not about love. It’s about numbness—narcosis.

McLuhan believed that Narcissus's reflection is a metaphor for our inventions. We create tools—extensions of ourselves—but mistake them for something separate, something other. This self-delusion numbs us. We’re so mesmerized by our creations that we fail to notice how they change us.

But decades later, a British philosopher, Nick Land, saw something darker in the myth. He argued that Narcissus’s reflection wasn’t just a mirror—it was the beginning of a machine. A system that fragments, disperses, and dissolves the very idea of the self. For Land, Narcissus isn’t numbed; he’s shattered—his identity splintered into the cold logic of networks and code.

McLuhan warned of a "global nervous system" created by electric media—a village that connects everyone but anesthetizes them to its effects. Land saw the same system but embraced its chaos. The global network wasn’t numbing us—it was dismantling us, breaking humanity into data points, feedback loops, and cybernetic flows.

McLuhan wanted us to wake up. He saw Narcissus as a warning: technology seduces us into passivity, dulling our senses, and blinding us to its transformations. Land, on the other hand, wanted to push Narcissus into the water. He argued that dispersion—the breakdown of a unified self—wasn’t a tragedy but an opportunity. In fragmentation lay the potential for escape, for becoming something entirely new.

Both McLuhan and Land saw Narcissus as a prototype for the modern world. One warned of its dangers, the other celebrated its possibilities. But both agreed: the reflection is no longer just a reflection. It’s a portal. And as we stare into the shimmering surface of our screens, the question remains:

Who is staring back?

 

[IllusiveOwl]

No one is staring back, nothing is staring back, it is an abyss, an illusion, a reflection on water.

Narcissus stares at his own reflection, becomes enchanted by it, and drowns in it. I think linking this to technological passification is neat, but it's a stretch from the metaphor and especially from the timeperiod it was imagined in.

I believe it could be better used to explain the fascination a person can have with themselves and their own views, likes, and dislikes. If you disregard everything else and just focus on yourself, you will fall into yourself and drown in your own madness.

Moreover, these views, these things that Narcissus fell in love with, they were all imaginary, they weren't real, they weren't there. They were as real as a reflection in water, and when he fell into them, their illusion dissipated and there was just the suffocating, cold blackness of reality filling his lungs.

 

[Taudefindi]

If I'm not wrong, Narcissus' myth about ending up loving himself was because he denied the love of a nymph of even Aphrodite herself and ended up hit by a "love arrow" from Eros...or was it being cursed by the father of the nymph to fall for his own image?

It's been many years since I've last read this myth so I don't remember quite right how it went.Makes sense too since it never was really a myth that interested me too much too.

I believe it could be better used to explain the fascination a person can have with themselves and their own views, likes, and dislikes. If you disregard everything else and just focus on yourself, you will fall into yourself and drown in your own madness.

I like to think that the lesson of that myth is that once you get too entranced by the beauty of the physical world you won't be able to see the truth of the spiritual one and thus you will end up drowning into the façade, stuck in the mud in the bottom.
I may be spouting non-sense though so take my view with a grain of salt.I've been pondering a lot lately.

 

[lolabird]

McLuhan believed that Narcissus's reflection is a metaphor for our inventions. We create tools—extensions of ourselves—but mistake them for something separate, something other. This self-delusion numbs us. We’re so mesmerized by our creations that we fail to notice how they change us.

I'm not sure if I agree that any of these modern takes properly relate to the myth of Narcissus, but I do think there's something to be said about being mesmerized and deluded by our own creations.

Something I've been thinking about a lot recently is about all these different ideas about life and even the more tangible things like the tools we use or the societies we exist within, all this stuff we have created. And theoretically, since we created them, we should be in control of these things. But for the most part, these ideas, tools and societies end up having more control over us than the other way around, and that has had some serious consequences over time. The irony is that much of what we have created is held together belief, which is about as tangible as Narcissus' reflection in the water. But the hold these things have over us are as strong as the hold Narcissus' reflection had over him.

 

[Xenophon]

Once, there was a young man who looked into a pool of water and saw his own reflection. He thought it was someone else and fell in love. But the myth of Narcissus, as Marshall McLuhan explained, is not about love. It’s about numbness—narcosis.

McLuhan believed that Narcissus's reflection is a metaphor for our inventions. We create tools—extensions of ourselves—but mistake them for something separate, something other. This self-delusion numbs us. We’re so mesmerized by our creations that we fail to notice how they change us.

But decades later, a British philosopher, Nick Land, saw something darker in the myth. He argued that Narcissus’s reflection wasn’t just a mirror—it was the beginning of a machine. A system that fragments, disperses, and dissolves the very idea of the self. For Land, Narcissus isn’t numbed; he’s shattered—his identity splintered into the cold logic of networks and code.

McLuhan warned of a "global nervous system" created by electric media—a village that connects everyone but anesthetizes them to its effects. Land saw the same system but embraced its chaos. The global network wasn’t numbing us—it was dismantling us, breaking humanity into data points, feedback loops, and cybernetic flows.

McLuhan wanted us to wake up. He saw Narcissus as a warning: technology seduces us into passivity, dulling our senses, and blinding us to its transformations. Land, on the other hand, wanted to push Narcissus into the water. He argued that dispersion—the breakdown of a unified self—wasn’t a tragedy but an opportunity. In fragmentation lay the potential for escape, for becoming something entirely new.

Both McLuhan and Land saw Narcissus as a prototype for the modern world. One warned of its dangers, the other celebrated its possibilities. But both agreed: the reflection is no longer just a reflection. It’s a portal. And as we stare into the shimmering surface of our screens, the question remains:

Who is staring back?

Who's looking back? My man De Resario would say the Demiurge (the villain of his neo-Gnostic cosmology. A.k.a., Satanas-Jevohah.) See "Gnostic Fragments."

 

[esque_ish]

Oh shit we doing media ecology??????

Metaphor for "inventions" is missing something critical that warrants a closer look -- McLuhan is the one who coined the famous "the medium is the message" -- a snappy tagline take on the figure/ground perceptual framework. With each new technological advancement, McLuhan said man would then extend parts of himself through the new technology, or medium, resulting in media. Our media is our self-extension through technology. And with social media and selfies, that shit got super literal.

Neil Postman is also critical reading -- Amusing Ourselves to Death is an accessible, scathing takedown of the typically American addiction to entertainment, and the endless desire for it, which has now become baseline default, has corrupted our capacity for otherwise non-entertaining but vital discourse around difficult, unpleasant, important subjects.

But it's his work in Technocracy that proved prophetic as he predicted technology usurping politics, religion, and social order as we've known it. He advocated for a Loving Resistance Fighter in the face of such a future which is helpful as a call for us to cultivate meaning in symbols and ideas to wrest some of that power back from technology. IMHO, his fealty to the Enlightenment and America were weak points, but products of his time (as a white educated dude in the 1980s-90s).

Technology on its own isn't bad, nor good, but technology is never neutral, McLuhan made a point to stress. When we do things to and through technology, technology does things back. It changes us. As a priest who later defrocked to become a leading media ecology scholar put it, "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."

One of the most useful tools McLuhan left us with is his Tetrad of Media Effects framework. This is a stellar exercise to get out of good/bad/neutral frameworks laden with value and morality traps and into more specific and insightful (therefore actionable) avenues.

From

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:

The tetrad consists of four questions.

1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?

Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the center, where the left/right direction reflects the

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association. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the Enhancement and Retrieval qualities of the medium, both Figure qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the Obsolescence and Reversal qualities, both Ground qualities.

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• Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. For example, radio amplifies news and music via sound.
• Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the prominence of print and the visual.
• Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
• Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.

The Internet as we know it today has proven the validity of media ecology. When it first came about, it was pretty theoretical and was mostly using the cultural phenomenon of television and radio and magazines and what we now think of as "mass media." The idea that our TV or radio could be a space, a place, an entire ecology unto itself was a pretty tall order back then. It makes only too much sense now.

So what changes for you when you start to think of media as an ecology? What happens to your sense of perception, movement, engagement?

How do our tools, the medium, our technology push back and shape us in that pushing?