The Medium Was Never the Message

Every Monday morning, without fail, the email arrived. The subject line varied slightly — something about the week ahead, or the quarter, or the “journey” the team was on — but the tone never did. Warm. Vague. Gently motivational. The kind of prose that sounds purposeful until you try to summarise it.

A developer friend of mine — someone with too much curiosity and just enough free time — decided to find out whether it needed a human to write it. He fed six months of the chief’s weekly missives into a Markov chain generator and pointed it at a blank page.

The output:

“15 working days to go until we close Chapter 2. I hope you had an excellent opportunity for Staff and Alumni Network invites you to engage further…”

He sent it round. We laughed. Then we read it again.

Was it actually wrong?

This is the unsettling part. The Markov output wasn’t noticeably worse than the original. It had the same rhythm. The same gestures toward meaning. The same vague forward momentum.

Marshall McLuhan’s line is “the medium is the message” — by which he meant the channel of communication shapes what’s communicated, independently of the content. The email wasn’t the words. The email was the act of sending it.

Our chief could have sent a blank message every week and communicated roughly the same thing: I’m here. I’m thinking about us. Here comes the week.

The Markov chain just made that legible.

We weren’t alone

Someone else had the same idea. In 2015, a computer was fed every Friends script ever written and asked to produce an episode. The result was, per the write-up, “hauntingly accurate.” The Friends writers probably didn’t take it as a compliment. I imagine our chief wouldn’t have either.

What this actually is

It’s not a story about machines replacing humans. The Markov chain was dumb — it had no idea what it was saying. It just knew what word typically followed what other word, in this particular voice, on this particular topic.

The story is about what we ask writing to do that writing can’t do. Emails like that one carry weight because of who sends them and when. Strip those two things out and there’s often very little left.

The medium really was the message. The words were just furniture.