Design or Be Designed: The Choice Marshall McLuhan Made (and So Must You)
See the hidden systems shaping your mind, your work, and your world — before they shape you.
What if you could see the forces shaping your mind long before anyone else, and no one believed you?
What if the systems everyone trusted — the ones shaping business, culture, and even personal identity — were quietly reprogramming how people think, act, and connect? What would it cost you to call that out?
Marshall McLuhan paid that cost.
Long before social media fractured attention, long before the internet collapsed distance, long before politics became spectacle, McLuhan mapped the invisible architectures of modern life.
He saw the systems most refused to see — and dared to name them. In doing so, he was branded a crank, a mystic, a trickster. Yet his clarity, not his comfort, made him one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.
This is not just his story. It’s a blueprint for creators, entrepreneurs, and leaders who want to stop drifting and start designing their lives with intention. Because the world McLuhan foresaw is the one you’re navigating right now.
Let’s step into the moment where his clarity collided with a world unwilling to listen.
1️⃣ Introduction: The Laugh Heard Around the World
Montreal, 1967. The air vibrated with the hum of progress.
Expo 67, Canada’s world’s fair, had transformed the city into a monument to human achievement. From the Habitat 67 housing complex to the soaring American pavilion, every structure seemed to promise a future of abundance and technological wonder.
Nations showcased their space-age designs and aspirations for global unity. The mood was confident, almost giddy, as if history itself had decided to take a victory lap in the middle of the Cold War.
Among the spectacular displays of machinery, rockets, and television screens, one small stage attracted an unusual crowd: academics, businesspeople, journalists, and government officials eager — or perhaps simply curious — to hear from a Canadian professor whose name had become increasingly hard to ignore in recent years.
Marshall McLuhan, with his sharp features and slender frame, did not appear to be a man about to unsettle the certainties of a modern age so enamoured with its own reflection. Yet that was exactly what he had come to do.
When McLuhan stepped to the microphone, the room settled into an expectant hush. He spoke softly, without flourish.
“The medium,” he said, “is the message.”
The phrase hung in the air. It was not new; he had been saying it for years. But here, at the symbolic heart of humankind’s technological spectacle, it felt like a challenge hurled at the future itself.
The response was immediate: a ripple of laughter, polite at first, then more awkward as people realized McLuhan wasn’t joking. Some shifted in their seats. A few whispered to neighbours, amused or puzzled. Cameras clicked. Notebook pages filled with question marks and half-understood phrases.
McLuhan did not seem to mind. If anything, he appeared detached, almost amused by the reaction. He was used to this. For over a decade, his ideas had provoked confusion, dismissal, and derision in equal measure.
Among fellow scholars, he was often branded a mystic or an intellectual trickster. In business circles, his warnings about the unintended consequences of media systems were seen as esoteric distractions from the practical work of selling products and building brands.
Even admirers struggled to pin him down, torn between seeing him as a visionary or a provocateur.
Yet McLuhan’s calm masked urgency.
To him, Expo 67 was not just a showcase of technological brilliance; it was a vast confirmation of his deepest concern: that humanity had become so entranced by its tools that it no longer recognized how those tools were reshaping thought, perception, and society at a fundamental level.
The audience’s laughter was part of the very pattern he sought to expose — a reflex of a culture unwilling or unable to see its own reflection in the technologies it adored.
The moment was emblematic of a broader tension. The 1960s were a decade of both immense possibility and deep anxiety. The world teetered between utopian visions and existential dread.
Satellites and mainframe computers promised to unite the globe, but the shadow of nuclear annihilation hung over that promise. Television brought distant wars and civil rights struggles into living rooms, collapsing the space between private and public life.
In this environment, McLuhan’s insistence that media were not neutral channels but active shapers of human destiny was both prophetic and profoundly unsettling.
McLuhan’s critics often accused him of obscurity, of playing with words to mask a lack of substance. But his intent was the opposite: to disrupt the comfortable assumptions of an age that believed itself beyond illusion.
By focusing on the form of communication — the medium — rather than its content, he compelled listeners to confront the hidden structures that shaped their experience.
In doing so, he made enemies of those invested in the status quo, ranging from advertising executives to media moguls to government technocrats who preferred to view communication as a tool of control, rather than a force with a will of its own.
That day at Expo 67, the laughter that greeted McLuhan’s words was more than just a misunderstanding. It was a defence mechanism, the nervous reaction of a culture dimly aware that it had lost track of the forces shaping it.
McLuhan stood firm, his gaze steady, as if watching a tidal wave no one else could see. He knew the cost of clarity in an age of noise. He had paid it many times before. And he would pay it again, in the years ahead, as his ideas spread faster than their meaning could catch up, misquoted, misused, and often ignored where they mattered most.
But for those willing to listen, really listen, McLuhan offered something rare: a chance to step outside the invisible systems of the present and glimpse the shape of things to come.
It was an invitation not to predict the future, but to see the present with new eyes and, perhaps, to take responsibility for the world being made in the image of its machines.
2️⃣ Context: The World McLuhan Refused to See as Fixed
In the years leading up to Expo 67, North America had come to see itself as the master of modernity.
The Second World War had left Europe battered and cautious, but the United States and Canada emerged confident, rich, and convinced that technology was destiny.
New suburbs, stretching endlessly beyond cities like Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, and Los Angeles, were built on the promise of convenience and speed. Cars, televisions, refrigerators, and radios flooded households at rates unimaginable a generation earlier.
The future, it seemed, belonged to those who could produce and consume the most, and faster than ever before.
Political power reflected this technological faith. U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Kennedy spoke of science and innovation as the engines of democracy. Canada, eager to assert its modern identity, poured resources into communications infrastructure, aerospace, and nuclear research.
The Cold War accelerated the race for ever more advanced systems of control and influence. Satellites were launched not just to explore space, but to surveil, broadcast, and dominate information on a planetary scale.
The space race, television diplomacy, and mass media advertising were not separate phenomena; they were all expressions of a civilization intoxicated with its own tools.
And yet, beneath this optimism lay fractures. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the rise of counterculture revealed a society increasingly at odds with itself.
Television beamed scenes of police brutality and battlefield carnage into middle-class living rooms, shattering illusions of order and righteousness. The very media that had been celebrated as triumphs of progress were becoming the battlegrounds on which culture wars were fought.
In this world, communication was seen largely as a tool to be wielded. Business and government leaders spoke of “messaging” and “broadcast reach.” Advertising agencies mastered the art of selling not just products, but identities. Political campaigns became contests of image as much as policy.
And within the academy, media were mostly treated as transparent vessels — pipes that carried ideas, news, or entertainment from sender to receiver. The important thing, it was assumed, was what those pipes carried, not the pipes themselves.
Marshall McLuhan’s refusal to accept that view put him at odds with almost every establishment. Trained as a literary scholar, he had started by examining how print culture shaped the human mind — how the linearity of the printed word trained readers to think in sequence, to privilege cause and effect, to separate thought from emotion.
His work revealed that technologies were not neutral extensions of human will. They were environments — invisible, immersive, and transformative.
What set McLuhan apart was not that he pointed out new technologies were changing the world. That was obvious.
It was that he argued the real effects of technology were not in their content or intended uses, but in the subtle, structural changes they made to human perception, behaviour, and social organization.
The printing press didn’t just spread knowledge; it created the modern self. The telegraph didn’t just send messages; it compressed time and space, making the world feel smaller and faster. The radio didn’t just entertain; it forged national identities.
And now, television was doing something altogether more radical: dissolving the boundaries between public and private life, between event and spectacle.
In McLuhan’s eyes, society’s failure to see this was not an accident. It was a blind spot produced by the very systems people took for granted. The book-dominated culture of the West had taught generations to focus on content — to value words, arguments, and narratives.
This bias toward the obvious had made it almost impossible to notice the deeper, systemic effects of form. As McLuhan put it, people were like fish unable to see the water they swim in.
By the early 1960s, McLuhan’s perspective had placed him in an uncomfortable position. He was celebrated in popular magazines and invited to speak at corporate retreats, yet dismissed by many intellectuals as obscure or unserious.
His language, filled with paradoxes and aphorisms, frustrated those looking for traditional academic argument. His critics accused him of offering puzzles instead of solutions. But McLuhan wasn’t offering solutions — not yet.
He was offering diagnosis. And in a time when the diagnosis itself was unwelcome, that made him dangerous.
The cultural blindness he tried to expose had consequences far beyond media studies. It shaped how nations saw their place in the world, how corporations designed their products, and how individuals understood their own identities.
As the 1960s progressed, the tensions McLuhan identified became impossible to ignore. The same technologies that promised unity were breeding fragmentation. The same media that promised connection were amplifying division. The tools meant to inform were becoming tools of manipulation.
And still, most failed to see the pattern.
For the modern reader — for leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs seeking to build lives and businesses with intention — this context matters.
McLuhan’s time was not just a backdrop for his ideas; it was a warning.
The forces shaping our thinking are often invisible precisely because they are everywhere. To reclaim agency, we must first learn to see the systems we inhabit.
That was the challenge McLuhan laid at the feet of his own era, and it remains ours today.
3️⃣ Main Events: The Mind That Mapped the Unseen
By the time Understanding Media appeared in 1964, Marshall McLuhan had already spent over a decade pulling at the threads that tied technology to human consciousness.
The book hit with the force of a stone thrown through a glass house. Its opening declaration — “The medium is the message” — was not a clever slogan. It was McLuhan’s starkest warning: that technologies, regardless of their content, restructured human experience at a foundational level.
The printing press had forged the modern mind; now, electronic media were forging something else entirely — faster, less linear, more immersive, and, McLuhan feared, more susceptible to manipulation.
The reaction was swift and divided. Popular culture, always hungry for novelty, seized upon McLuhan’s catchphrases. Time magazine dubbed him the “high priest of popcult and metaphysician of media.” He was profiled in Life, interviewed by Playboy, and even parodied in stand-up routines and late-night television.
Woody Allen would later immortalize him in Annie Hall, where McLuhan makes a surprise appearance to silence a pedantic academic in a movie line, a moment that captured his strange status as both a critic of media culture and one of its most unlikely stars.
But within the academy, and among many business and political elites, McLuhan’s rise was greeted with skepticism or outright hostility. Colleagues at the University of Toronto, where he taught at St. Michael’s College, often regarded him as eccentric, if not incomprehensible.
His style, dense with aphorisms, paradoxes, and references to everything from medieval philosophy to modern advertising, baffled those trained in traditional scholarly argument. Reviewers accused him of obscurity, of replacing rigorous analysis with wordplay, of offering diagnosis without cure.
Yet McLuhan remained focused on what he saw as his real work: making visible the invisible environments shaping society.
His ideas were not born in isolation.
His collaboration with colleagues like Edmund Carpenter, an anthropologist who shared his fascination with media’s effects on culture, helped sharpen his thinking. Together, they explored how different technologies — print, radio, television — altered the structures of awareness in both modern and indigenous societies.
Their 1950s and early 1960s research into the role of oral traditions and visual media in tribal cultures provided evidence for McLuhan’s broader theory: that shifts in dominant media reshaped not just individual minds but entire social orders.
McLuhan’s forecasts were as precise as they were disquieting. He saw that television, unlike print, created an environment of participation, pulling viewers into the immediacy of images and sounds. He warned that this would erode the detachment and critical distance cultivated by centuries of print culture.
Politics, he predicted, would become theatre; leaders would be chosen as much for their charisma on screen as for their ideas. He saw that media’s instant reach would compress the globe into what he called a “global village” — not a utopia of harmony, but a space where ancient tribal dynamics of gossip, surveillance, and conformity would re-emerge on a planetary scale.
In business and government circles, these ideas landed awkwardly.
Corporate executives preferred to think of television and radio as tools to drive consumption. Political strategists saw media as instruments to deliver messages, not as environments that shaped the very terms of debate. McLuhan’s claim that the form mattered more than the content sounded, to many, like dangerous relativism or intellectual mischief.
And yet, McLuhan’s influence spread, often in distorted or misunderstood ways. Advertising agencies mined his work for language to repackage their pitches. Media executives cited him in speeches without grappling with his critique.
His name became a brand: “McLuhanesque” invoked as shorthand for any vague notion of media savviness. But the core of his warning, that media would transform not just how we communicate, but who we are, was largely ignored where it counted most.
Behind the scenes, McLuhan continued to wrestle with the implications of his theories. His later work, such as The Medium is the Massage (1967, co-created with graphic designer Quentin Fiore), aimed to reach wider audiences with its bold visuals and compressed text.
The book became a bestseller, but even then, many readers treated it as a curiosity rather than a call to reflection. McLuhan’s increasing concern was that society was racing deeper into environments it no longer controlled — with technologies creating feedback loops that accelerated change beyond conscious human direction.
The political and cultural upheavals of the late 1960s seemed to bear out his insights. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War protests, the rise of youth countercultures, the growing distrust of government — all unfolded in a media-saturated space where images and spectacle often carried more weight than argument or fact.
McLuhan’s claim that media were not extensions of man but environments that shaped man found grim confirmation in the spectacle-driven crises of the time.
In private, McLuhan maintained that his purpose was not to moralize, but to offer tools for understanding. His work was, in his own words, an attempt at pattern recognition, helping others see the hidden architectures beneath the surface of daily life.
But this, too, invited misunderstanding. To some, he seemed to celebrate the very media he critiqued. To others, his refusal to propose clear solutions smacked of evasion or complicity.
What many missed was that McLuhan saw diagnosis as the necessary first step toward agency. As he often reminded his audiences: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
For today’s creators, entrepreneurs, and leaders, the arc of McLuhan’s career offers a sobering lesson. Clarity about systems — about the unseen forces structuring our work, our relationships, and our sense of self — rarely earns applause. It invites resistance, distortion, and sometimes derision.
But as McLuhan’s life shows, it is precisely this clarity that distinguishes those who lead from those who follow. His struggle was not just with media theory; it was with the human tendency to mistake comfort for truth, and familiarity for understanding.
4️⃣ Conclusion: The Cost and Gift of Clarity
Marshall McLuhan did not live to see the full consequences of the media environments he spent his career trying to map.
When he died in 1980 after years of declining health following a severe stroke, the digital revolution was only beginning to crest. Personal computers were emerging, but the Internet remained largely an academic tool.
