everyone ought to know by now. That is, when Tom 
Wolfe compared his work to Darwin and Freud he 
was right on the money. Marshall McLuhan—for all 
of the flaws that one might find in his work—was a 
magnificent, insightful, brilliant pioneer in a field 
that was just opening up. Well, he opened it up. I 
mean, he was able to say things at a time that 
nobody else could perceive. For example, his first 
book, The Mechanical Bride , which was an analysis 
of the advertising world in which advertising was 
taken seriously as an academic fact of life. What 
he discovered was essentially the techniques for 
the management of human consciousness. Nobody 
else thought that any of this stuff had any power,