discarnate

“At this moment, we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. … You’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. … It has deprived people really of their identity.”

In his fall 1971 convocation address at the University of Alberta, McLuhan told students that in an electronic world, people become “discarnate data, a sort of disembodied spirit coexisting and functioning simultaneously in diverse locations.”

Two years ago, he announced $1 million in grants from his Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for research "into contact and communication with post-mortem or discarnate consciousness."

“If we see a shadow going through one wall and through another, we don’t know for sure if it was a discarnate human spirit or E.T.,” he said.

We already inhabit a world in which we’re subject to the opaque judgments of discarnate algorithms with eyes and ears everywhere and bodies nowhere.