Sixty Years Ago, Tom Wolfe Asked: “What If McLuhan Is Right?” We Are Living the Answer.

JULY 21, 2026 (Marshall McLuhan's Birthday)

THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
by Nelson S. Thall Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca.

Sixty Years Ago, Tom Wolfe Asked: “What If McLuhan Is Right?”
We Are Living the Answer.

Barely a fortnight passes without Professor Marshall McLuhan, of the University of Toronto, being quoted somewhere in the world by a writer who has found, in a line McLuhan wrote decades ago, the sharpest available description of this morning’s news. Today would have been his 115th birthday, and I have noticed something strange about my old teacher. His name keeps surfacing, then vanishes for years, sometimes for decades, and just when you think he has finally been forgotten, back he comes. Forty-five years after his death, he still refuses to disappear. Why? What is it about this one man that the world cannot seem to let go of?

In 1965, the writer Tom Wolfe put the question that hung over McLuhan’s whole ascent. His essay was titled, simply, “What If He Is Right?” Wolfe asked it half in wonder and half in dread, the way you ask a thing you are not sure you want answered. Could television dissolve an empire the way the phonetic alphabet, in its heyday, dissolved the empire of Greece? McLuhan drove the same probe deeper into culture itself. “Homer was wiped out by literacy,” he observed, though the poet had been the whole education of the Greeks for centuries. If literacy could destroy Homer, he asked, would not Rock, in its turn, destroy literacy? Could rapid technological change, left uncombated, usher in a new dark age of violence and decay? Sixty years later, we are no longer asking. We know.

McLuhan keeps coming back because he gave us the one thing we never finish needing. He did not leave a collection of predictions. He left a method. He handed ordinary men and women a way to discover what their technologies were doing to them while they were still living inside them.

James Joyce called it the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the room-world. McLuhan spent his life turning that key into a practical instrument. He taught us how to read the hidden grammars of media, how to see the invisible environments that quietly shape our thoughts, our politics, our identities and our culture. That is why he disappears whenever the world seems settled, and why he returns the moment a new medium throws society into confusion. He comes back because the confusion comes back.

He is as often misunderstood as he is quoted, so let me be plain about what he offered. He was neither a booster of technology nor a prophet of doom. He was a diagnostician. He taught that every medium reshapes us while we are busy staring at its content, the way a magician holds your eye with one hand while the other does the work. His whole counsel reduced to a single instruction: study the media, and drag the buried assumptions up into the light where they can be examined. Do that, and you cease to be the medium’s servant. Fail to do it, and you become its servomechanism, so smoothly adjusted to your own machines that you no longer notice you have stopped thinking for yourself.

Permit me to take you back to 1990. Ten years after McLuhan’s death, I wrote these words for a public lecture in San Francisco:

“Marshall McLuhan has now been dead for ten years. Judging from the events of the past ten years, he is still way ahead of the world. His ideas on media ecology and the fostering of peace in a troubled world have yet to be understood or initiated. His forecasts and projections are still batting a thousand as we reflect upon the war and peace in the global theatre.”

That was thirty-six years ago, and today those words seem less remarkable than they did then. Not because Marshall changed, but because the world has finally begun to catch up with him. Artificial intelligence, social media, smart glasses, synthetic companions, algorithmic persuasion and digital tribalism are not separate stories. They are chapters in one story, and McLuhan gave us the grammar by which they can all be read together.

On Bloomsday, June 16, 1978, as one of his graduate students, I asked him: Marshall, who are you? He answered: “I’m just an objective observer who hasn’t formed any opinions about what it is that I’m surveying. I’m putting out thoughts, hoping to get reaction to help me understand better. I am like a mapmaker who is searching for new land, for more data to design maps with. I haven’t gotten home yet.”

History has now handed us nearly half a century more evidence than either of us possessed that afternoon, and looking back across those years I have come to my own conclusion. Marshall McLuhan found the cluekey. He left us the maps. The problem is not that McLuhan failed to understand the country ahead. The problem is that we have been slow to follow the roads he marked out.

Canada has produced few thinkers whose work has become more relevant with time rather than less. McLuhan is one of them. So why can we not let him go? Because every year we discover another part of the world he had already charted. Every new technology makes another page of his work suddenly readable. He did not ask us to admire him. He asked us to use what he had discovered.

Perhaps the question Tom Wolfe asked sixty years ago has finally been answered. The more important question now is whether we are prepared to use what Marshall McLuhan taught us before the next medium reshapes us again.

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All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence, aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall. © 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.

I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com