Thanks for sharing. I want to hear more from him. Do you have a recommended book by McLuhan to start with?

I believe "Understanding Media" is his biggest one; source of his most famous quote "the medium is the message"

Yes, I've reread is the first 2/3rds of "Understanding Media" several times and never finished it, but would still highly recommend it. There is also some excellent old interview footage of him when he was a pop culture figure which is originally what fascinated me. For me it would have been hard to read his writing without having seen those interviews first -- he has a very distinct style of writing/talking and is interesting as an integrated person within recent history and not just a collection of ideas. On that note, I'd also recommend Videodrome.

edit: There are also more polemic anti-tech presentations of his ideas, especially by Neil Postman or Nicholas Carr which are good in their own way. But to me the fascinating thing about McLuhan himself is his dedication to presenting his views in a such a matter-of-fact way that most of his early followers were probably very antithetical to his personal beliefs.

The plants are actually farming us.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens:

“Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. . . . The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”

If you like this sort of thing, Pollan explored this before Harari in much more depth in The Botany of Desire.

This kind of take mainly seems an expression of the human tendency to see the world in terms of hierarchies l, and obsession with being near the top of those hierarchies. In this model, the idea of e.g. symbiotic relationships simply doesn't compute.

McLuhan got it mostly right, but this may be understood in a way which mischaracterizes wealth. Machines do not create value ex nihilo. Machines allow us to more effectively harvest or transform materials or information, to which we assign value. All wealth currently accessible to us derives from the sun. The vast majority of our present wealth comes from a massive geochemical battery trickle-charged over hundreds of millions of years and discharged in the last two centuries.

Implicit in the quotation, but important to recognize, is that technology is the tip of a vast edifice whose foundation is not us. We and our machines are perched (too precariously for comfort) at the top. We are the sex organs of the machine world because machines can't reproduce without us. But we can't reproduce without an ecobiological cocoon.

Everything of value in the human economy is downstream of the cocoon. I emphasize this because we too often take it for granted and assume the only relevant economic inputs are capital and labor, or we will simply innovate our way out of materials-, energy- and ecosystem-dependence. That is fantasy.