If it works, it's obsolete!

IF IT WORKS,
IT’S
OBSOLETE
Marshall McLuhanisms
-thoughts in italics

The story of modern America begins With the discovery of the white man by
The Indians.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public
incredulity.

Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.

The nature of people demands that most of them be engaged in the most
frivolous possible activities—like making money.

With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is
“sent.”

Money is the poor man’s credit card.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into
the future.

Spaceship earth is still operated by railway conductors, just as NASA is
managed by men with Newtonian goals.

Invention is the mother of necessities.

You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?

Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.
So does the glossy sheen/lacquer of beauty...

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
So true!

Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones?

The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it.

People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

The road is our major architectural form.
Correct! When a developer says that a project is 40 or 50% open space... don't believe it... because chances are, 35% of it is roadway. Same idea goes with the parking lot


Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.

Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.
True! Malls and businesses are in constant reinvention... heck, even Architecture has fallen into the realm of fashion... look no further than Vegas, where modernism is layered onto "obsolete" postmodernism

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

News, far more than art, is artifact.

When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

Tomorrow is our permanent address.

All advertising advertises advertising.
And so the dog wags its tail, and chases it at the same time...

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

“Camp” is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives.

This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little.
In the case of the corporate world... so true... millions of people atrophy wasting their time waiting for their next paycheck... and not using their noodles to do something productive...


Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

The missing link created far more interest than all the chains and explanations of being.

In
big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be
clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab
for isolating dangerous viruses.
The status quo is 10x lovelier than a big, new, game-changing idea, why? its so much easier... the one who benefits the most from a game-changer, is also the one that is oftentimes marginalized by the status-quo.

When a thing is current, it creates currency.


Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.
Case in point... a lot of educated people, churn out crappy work.


Men
on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous
identities. Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.
This is true... and not necessarily negative or positive... people who grow and improve themselves adapt a migrant's mindset... one without firm neighborhoods and unbound by frontiers... the moment you're too confortable... you're not growing anymore...

The future of the book is the blurb.
People don't read anymore... tsk tsk...

The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.

At the speed of light, policies and political parties yield place to charismatic images.

“I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.”

—Copyright © 1986, McLuhan Associates, Ltd.