The vision flogged by Prof de Kerckhove (see de Kerckhove’s Digital Transformation 1), in jest, one hopes, in an attempt at indirect communication, one prays, but in decided earnest, one fears, is clear at least in this respect: it sets out exactly what McLuhan spent a lifetime thinking against.

Here is McLuhan in his 1944 essay, ‘Lewis: Lemuel in Lilliput’:¹   

Anybody who has had the opportunity to observe the workings of a modern university need not be told how the “administrative policy of a great teaching body” (such is the ludicrous terminology) is a brainless submission to the currents of technological (not human) change.² (…) This [anonymous] class of men is not really detached from the ideologic machine. (…) The rulers of modern society are increasingly identified with these technicians who control “scientifically” [via] educational experiment and the Gallup poll: “In reality they are another genus of puppets, a genus of homicidal puppets, sure enough. And they bear a strange resemblance to the misanthropic masters of the doctrine of What the Public Wants.”³ This sort of revolutionary simpleton, this beaming child of the Zeitgeist is precisely the sort of ruler the modern world cannot afford to have at the head of its enormous machinery.⁴

The embedded quotation is from Lewis’ The Art of Being Ruled and ‘de Kerckhove 3’ will take up McLuhan’s extended references to this 1926 434 page “pamphlet” (as McLuhan put it to Innis). Suffice it to note here only that 75 years ago McLuhan addressed in horrified detail what de Kerckhove seemingly approvingly describes as the emerging present of today and tomorrow. Something is fundamentally amiss here, something that points beyond the understanding of McLuhan, beyond academic politics, to the very working of the age.