Permanenze (e ritorni) del determinismo nella Società delle reti e nella Platform Society. Alcune piste interpretative suggerite da Understanding Media e dal pensiero di Marshall McLuhan

Within the innumerable suggestions of the book-prism Understanding Media, one of the most significant legacies, strongly re-presented as a key to analysing the relationships between technologies and the metamorphosis of society, coincides with technological determinism. Strongly contested in subsequent media studies as a manifestation of reductionism, technodeterminism appears to be a highly topical and useful conceptual tool for observing the conceptions of the main actors in Platform Society and Artificial Intelligence. Through "Understanding Media", Marshall McLuhan transforms the determinism of the Toronto School into a philosophy of history of the same intensity as Marxian determinism. Technological determinism can thus be regarded as the “ultimate ideology”, the one professed by the Big Tech tycoons, who place themselves in relation to public discourse and media system in the guise of prophetic leaders indicating new horizons of destiny for humanity. In this context, McLuhan’s general conceptual perspective can be interpreted as an original matrix of the “Californian Ideology”. This article, with a focus on discourse analysis and the framing of the topic from a sociology of communication and social theory perspective, aims to analyse the genesis and characteristics of the technological determinism elaborated by McLuhan by comparing it, in terms of long duration, permanence and returns, with that expressed by the Californian Ideology.