John Kettle’s 1965 article, ‘Marshall McLuhan: Prophet and Analyst of the Age of Instant Knowledge’,¹ ends with some observations by McLuhan which uncannily look ahead to 1968 — 3 years later.

Kettle concludes his article with McLuhan’s “response (verbatim, complete)² to my request for biographical detail”:

I like being Canadian. Being Canadian is to be a 19th century person in a very special sense. The Canadian can use his country as a DEW Line for the whole century. A Canadian knows more about Americans than anybody; they’re his immediate environment.
I have this immediate sense of the 20th century as very odd, surreal — as if the whole thing had been done by Dali, very witty, full of the most crazy conceits and witticisms. In my youth I merely rejected it totally as unfit for human habitation. Now I look at the 20th century as a new form.

The Dali TV Guide cover for June 8-14, 1968 elicited many comments from McLuhan.

The first Dew-Line newsletter, “Black Is Not A Color”, McLuhan Dew-Line Newsletter I/1, appeared in July 1968.

McLuhan’s Playboy Interview was published in 1969 but recorded in 1968:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student.³