Nick Ripatrazone explores how Walter J Scheirer’s new book A History of Fake Things on the Internet engages with Marshall McLuhan’s ideas.
‘I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits,” said media theorist Marshall McLuhan in 1969, “so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world. Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.” At the end of that decade, McLuhan was everywhere: magazine covers, primetime television, newspaper columns, college campuses, corporation boardrooms. He opined, he punned, he prophesied.
