Final scene has Zombie McLuhan in tattered, worm-eaten tweeds*, holding an iPhone in one hand and an Xbox controller in the other, his face flickering between horror and ecstasy.

*First wrote this as tweets: whoah.

This is a really good question. I don’t think I have a specific name, just a general description. (Although I did think immediately of Roger Ebert. He’s a graceful, generous writer, and it would be really interesting to see his brain applied to questions of tech and culture. But then I just couldn’t imagine him as the NYT op-tech columnist, for some reason.)

So in general, I think I want somebody with these characteristics:

1. The most basic tech chops, and an affinity for technology. You can’t be a movie critic if you are fundamentally suspicious of film as a medium. Likewise technology.

2. A big, generous imagination. I think of Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG in this regard. Your default mode of thinking should be, “ooh, where could this go, what could this become, for good and for ill?”—you should have to constantly be reigning yourself in, not prodding yourself forward.

3. A keen eye for human-scale detail. Here I think of Jan Chipchase, the global techno-anthropologist and blogger. (So cool.) I want somebody who’s always spying on people as they use their cell phones. I think there ought to be a strong element of anthropology (or “anthropology light”) to this; you want somebody who can pull that off without reverting to “so, my cab driver told me the craziest thing…!”

Clive Thompson is a good candidate, based on these requirements, but I feel like he’s already a sort of op-tech columnist at large, so we ought to give somebody new a chance ;-)

By the way, I like the (intentional? unintentional?) implication in the title. “Op-ed” is a contraction of “opposite editorial”—that’s where you found these writers in the paper. So “op-tech” is “opposite technology”—and if we give that a generous reading, it feels right.