From Mr. McLuhan's famous Playboy interview

do i think this is desirable nor do i think it is hell, in a way i think this is what is happening (with all the details that are different and all the forgetting of "substantial" or "material" that this formulation looks like to make forget), basically that the symbolic power of city and country, of nomad and sedentary, of Bürger und Bauer and many things connected to these oppositions are going away and marketing systems and the stock market as we know them today will soon be dead as the dodo. The great detail question is, what does soon mean?

for sure there are a lot of signs that those things are already here. marketing means nothing more than reading these ten or twelve books of it; no matter where you learn or do so. its already sailing under another flag than in th 60s. william gibson writes about another part of this story in 'pattern recognition'. worth a look. what is known in the u-states since the 60s as cybernation wont be denied nowadays. the thing that really annoyes me today is, that it is still a hassle to be nomadic. it's still a myth that getting connected at least is easy in cities. berlin proofs otherwise. a while ago i still believed the myth: it's just a problem of rural areas ... like galicia.

that last thing is what I put in parentheses. The sharpness of this observation is being reached by abstracting away the "material details". It seems to me that McLuhan had to pay this price to see the core in the sixties and we still need to strip reality to clearly see some of the movements. On PR only so much: the 3^rd best thing to understand men is watch one when he tries to understand women. There is a limit. And: In the end you won't want to wear CPUs.

and the other two things? recently i watched a real macho trying to accepted that he loves a woman and lately trying to tell her this. a play in endless acts. and just as much: complicated, muy complicado. nearly impossible to understand.

do McLuhans observations match with a film like "blade runner"? I'm just pondering about the nomadic aspects of life in L.A. ~2019 depicted in this movie. Could this be related to McLuhans village (neglecting the aspect that H. Ford does read a print newspaper in front of an Atari advert ;-)?

by the way