McLuhan's "media studies as radical form of anthropology" actually follows in the steps of Vico's tradition of "new science" or approach to what can be considered science.

Anyway, written in the 17th century, Scienza Nuova describes the Universal History of what seems to always follow one from another in cycles that define eras, each of which characterized with its specific language and way of expression (ontology) from which its respective epistemology and social order organizes itself around.

He divided history in three epochs, the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes, the Age of Humans, the last phase of the last era characterized by what he called "the barbarism of reflection" - which so accurately captures the present state of affairs in the world as they are today, it is both uncanny and disturbing. He does not specify how then, in the process of gradually worsening disintegration, fragmentation, destruction and wars ("fought for self-interest and gain") mankind re-emerges into a new Age of Gods, but insists that it is all driven by what he refers to as Divine Providence.

"All civilizations go through three stages, Vico said – divine, heroic, and human. The divine period is ruled by the gods. The heroic period is adorned with victories and statues. Then comes the human era. (Here, we permit ourselves to add a footnote to Vico's oeuvre: the coin of the realm in early periods is the gods' money – Gold. Later, people switch to money of their own invention, the kind of money you make from trees...)

This last stage, says Vico, is when popular democracy arises, along with rational thinking and what Vico delightfully calls the "barbarie della reflessione" [the barbarism of reflection]. In earlier eras, people do what their gods and leaders ask of them. In the final era, they ask, "What's in it for me?"

Now, why I accent on this is because these things we call mythologies aren't really religions so much as they are kinds of science befitting that era. Conceptual personae and multiplicities, ways of capturing a lot of meaning or conceptualizing something. Feyerabend's "Philosophy of Nature" is all about that (pity I lost all my notes there). And Deleuze defines the practice of philosophy as the invention of concepts (concepts as multiplicities) - and, specifically, such that would support and make possible the construction of other kinds of social relations (collective assemblages of enunciation) impossible within the dominant discourse and such whose proliferation as multiplicities allows of the possibilities of other modes and regimes of being/becoming.

“Because, unlike in the time of the barbarism of sense, the barbarism of reflection pays attention only to the words and not to the spirit of the laws and regulations; even worse, whatever might have been claimed in these empty sounds of words is believed to be just. In this way the barbarism of reflection claims to recognize and know the just, what the regulations and laws intend, and endeavors to defraud them through the superstition of words.”

- Vico, Scienza Nuova

Thus, Morton's Hyperobjects coming close to such a conceptualization - of objects so massively distributed in time and space as to elude our registering their presence. I think this early stage of beginning anew is strongly associated with collective psychosis and schizoanalysis goes into that, as well as this study about the poetics of schizophrenic language. The necessity for collective sense-making becomes more and more urgent by the disintegration processes of rationalist self-interested individualism and alienation which fragment the coherent sense of meaningful reality spawning all kinds of group delusions and disjointed narratives.

“In mythical language, the earth became known as mother of law ... This is what the poet means when he speaks of the infinitely just earth: justissima tellus.”

 — Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth

In the way I would go about speculating, what these new "Gods"/hyperobjects or concepts applied in practice would constitute, could be defined within the paradigm of peer-to-peer crypto-networks of shared record-keeping and common coordination protocols - which already is in itself institutional by definition. The more something gets reified, the more reinforced, the more it stabilizes its presence as a fully formed entity. But such a thing, properly speaking, to be that, must operate as a complex adaptive systems.

"As with the naïve variant, here too the mythological vocabulary is deemed an early “language of science”: whereas Euclidean science used circles, squares, lines, points, and the like, the inventors of myths used social and biological concepts and managed to find concrete representations of them. In lieu of geometrical constructions, they use a story represented in pictorial images. Unlike the naïve version, however, this version assumes that, first, even the simplest facts are at least in part shaped rather than merely described by those concepts and, second, the facts are not always directly represented. Stories involving crocodiles, for example, may represent the structure of astronomic or social events. In such a case the crocodile words are not invariable building blocks of allegories but variables enabling us to identify the fixed points of the structures presented."

         - Paul Feyerabend, "Philosophy of Nature"

In other works, the behavior of the ensemble of its parts as a whole may not be predictable on the basis of the behavior of the individual components (thus, a loosely coupled system) - but, it is adaptive in the sense of how its collective behavior mutates to self-organize in response to dynamic change and micro-events, or cumulative weight of factors, etc. (i.e., a loosely coupled macro-structure composed of loosely and/or partially connected micro-structures, which form for the purpose of adapting to changing environmental circumstances for the purpose of increasing the survivability of the macro-structure).