the need of. He’s going to show who he is, what 
his credentials are, that he’s tough. So anybody 
on a psychic frontier tends to get tough or violent 
and it’s happening to us on a mass scale today. It 
might even be said that at the speed of light, man 
has neither goals, objective nor private identity. 
He is an item in a data bank—software only, easily 
forgotten—and deeply resentful.

Marshall McLuhan, “A McLuhan Mosaic,Ó Marshall  
McLuhan: The Man and His Message , (Golden, 
1989), p. 3.