McLuhan’s Acoustic Space : A dynamic, immersive field where information is simultaneous, participatory, and unbound by the tyranny of linearity. Unlike visual space—hierarchical, grid-like, colonial—acoustic space echoes the communal fire, the village drum, the overlapping voices of a living Earth.
Sabina’s Sacred Ecology : A cosmology where every rock, river, and human is a thread in the costurero cósmico (cosmic sewing basket). To consume without reciprocity is to unravel the weave.
I. The First Vibration
Before the written word, there was the hum.
The hum of the Earth’s magnetic field, the murmur of rivers carving stone, the polyphony of wolves and wind. Indigenous cultures knew this sonic tapestry as what McLuhan and others began to understand and define as ‘acoustic space’—a living field where meaning was not pinned to pages but woven through breath, drum, and echo.
Marshall McLuhan, prophet of media, called it the “sensory envelope” of tribal humanity. But María Sabina, the Mazatec curandera who spoke with the niños santos (sacred mushrooms), would have recognized it as something even older:
the sacred ecology of sound, where every vibration binds the human to the hawk, the root, the star.
We have strayed from this web of resonant connection. Our digital age has replaced resonance with replication, communion with compression. The internet, McLuhan’s “global village,” was meant to retrieve acoustic space—yet we built a hall of mirrors, algorithms sharpening the echo until all we hear is ourselves. This is not a village. It is a cacophony of dismembered voices, each shouting into the digital void of our own creation.
II. The Mycelial Ear
“The mushroom taught me to listen with my whole body,” Sabina once said.
“The medium is the message,” McLuhan replied, smiling from the afterlife.
Acoustic space is not a metaphor. It is mycelium: a subterranean neural network where fungal threads transmit nutrients and warnings between trees. Modernity, with its cult of the eye, forgot that the ear is older than the sun. Indigenous sonic practices—Tibetan throat singing, Yoruba drum dialects, Tuvan overtone chanting—are not “art.”
They are technologies for harmonizing the human with the more-than-human.
Consider the Mazatec velada ceremony. Under the influence of psilocybin, participants hear the world speak—the rustle of maize becomes a hymn, the river’s rush a grandmother’s story.
Sabina’s sacred ecology is acoustic space incarnate: a collapse of boundaries between self and soundscape.
Compare this to our earbud isolation, our playlists engineered to numb.
We have traded the chorus for the loop.
III. The Algorithmic Wound
Make no mistake. The digital realm is not neutral. It is a colonial project.
Facebook’s newsfeed, TikTok’s dopamine slot machine, Elon’s X—all are designed to amputate us from acoustic space for the primary purposes of distraction and paralysis.
They flatten time into timelines, reduce the symphonic self to a data profile. This is visual space’s final victory: a grid of control, where everything is watched but nothing is heard.
Yet the web could be a loom. Imagine:
Social media is a communal fire, where every post requires listening before speaking.
AI trained not on models of extractive and stolen data but on the nature of forest soundscapes, learning to mimic the mycelial give-and-take.
VR that doesn’t dazzle the eyes but washes the ears in the infrasound of glaciers calving, elephants grieving, deserts breathing.
The MIT Critical Platforms Lab is already crafting such ideas. Their Biotic Net project replaces fiber-optic cables with biocomputers fed by kelp and spider silk.
IV. Ritual as Resistance
To heal the fracture, we must ritualize technology in a respectful way.
The Māori say taonga: a treasure that demands guardianship. What if we treated Wi-Fi as a taonga?
What if logging on required a prayer, a pinch of tobacco, a song for the server farms gulping radioactive Arctic water?
Dream Case Study: The Luminous Weavers
In Oaxaca, Zapotec women are embedding ancestral ballads into blockchain. Each NFT contains a seed phrase that, when decrypted, blooms into a holographic alebrije (spirit animal imagery). The sale of each NFT funds solar-powered MESH networks. This is acoustic space 2.0: sound as seed, code as ceremony.
V. The Ninth Wave
“We are in the ninth wave of collapse,” warns a Hopi elder.
“We are in the ninth wave of creation,” counters a quantum physicist.
The way forward is neither Luddism nor naiveté.
It is a third path: sacred techne.
To reengineer our tools with the humility of the lichen, the reciprocity of the mycelium. McLuhan saw media as extensions of our nerves; Sabina saw them as extensions of the soul. Both were right and both have clear and relevant wisdom to share for our times.
A new covenant is emerging and there are immediate steps we can take to honor it:
Decolonize bandwidth: Return spectrum rights to Indigenous stewards.
Rewild the soundscape: Create movements that reclaim sonic territory as sacred.
Listen deeper: Build devices that hear the ultrasonic prayers of bats, the seismic wails of fault lines. Apps that measure noise pollution or level of sonic isolation occurring at a given moment.
VI. Epilogue: The Song That Remakes the World
Before the beginning was the Hum.
In the beginning was the Word.
In the end, there will be a Chord.
In the return, there will be a Hymn.
A sound so dense with care it collapses into a ‘white hole’ of new meaning, birthing a new cosmos.
María Sabina hums it as she grinds psilocybin.
McLuhan chuckles as he adjusts his hearing aid to the frequency of Jupiter.
The mycelium pulses in time.
Turn off your screen.
Press your ear to the Sea’s first shell, the Earth.
The web is alive, and it is singing.
Don’t forget to join in the chorus.
“The true ‘viral’ is the hymn.
— Cosmogram Archives, Vol. IX
