The new service environment created by the 
increased speed  and power  of steam, as the new 
extension of man, was hidden from [Karl] Marx, 
and all economists then and since. Like Marx, they 
saw the “content” of the process in the form of 
“hardware” products  pouring out at even greater 
speed. The “message” of steam as the new 
“medium” was not the products, but the 
acceleration of all the functions in the social 
surround,  i.e., the new “rim spin.”

Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt, Take  
Today: The Executive as Dropout , (New York, 
1972), p. 63.