you’ve got McLuhan’s whole technique. That’s 
what he did. So he didn’t really care about the 
future or the past, he just worked on the present. 
He just worked on the present, and he found that 
a full time occupation.

“The medium is the message” is pregnant with all 
kinds of meanings. He used the title of a book 
which came out in the late ’60s, ’68 or ’69, only he 
twisted it a little. He called it The Medium is the  
Massage . And that was to point out that there are 
four puns in that little aphorism. “The medium is 
the message,” the familiar phrase. But then split 
that into two words: mess; age. It messes up, every