How Communication Infrastructure Shapes Human Subjects, Not Just Messages

Garner advances a provocation with deep implications for critical theory: the medium condition — the technological and communicative infrastructure through which people encounter one another — is more historically determinative than the material condition foregrounded by Marxist and Frankfurt School analysis. Walter Benjamin's work on mechanical reproduction and Marshall McLuhan's media ecology gesture toward this claim, but neither follows it to its full conclusion. The medium does not merely transmit subjectivity; it constitutes it. The printing press did not carry scientific ideas to waiting minds — it restructured cognition itself, making the sustained, cumulative reasoning of the scientific treatise possible for the first time.

Applied to the present, this framework reframes the problem of global pluralism. The current social coordination mechanism — video conferencing, recording, asynchronous distribution, global accessibility — is making it logistically possible for people to encounter radical difference without the economic and geographic barriers that previously mediated or foreclosed such encounters. Crucially, this is participatory rather than representational. One is not consuming a narrative about diversity but inhabiting a space of genuine, unscripted encounter with otherness. That experiential difference is formative: it produces subjects who have practiced navigating difference, not merely subjects who have been instructed to value it.

This is why Garner insists that racism, xenophobia, and structural exclusion cannot be adequately addressed through information campaigns or moral argumentation. If the exclusion is structural — embedded in how societies organize human contact — then the intervention must also be structural. The only new structure adequate to the scale of the problem is a coordination mechanism that brings people into authentic encounter with difference repeatedly, at global scale, allowing participation to do what persuasion cannot.