Marshall McLuhan is dead, of course, and so is Jerome Agel, the “producer” of the oracle’s most famous book, 1967’s The Medium Is The Massage: An Inventory of Effects. The only principal from the project still with us is its revolutionary graphic designer, Quentin Fiore, who turned 96 in February. The artist subsequently worked on books by or about Buckminster Fuller, Stanley Kubrick and Jerry Rubin. How are you these days, Quentin Fiore?

McLuhan not only named the Global Village but also feared it. And there’ll be no retreat. Facebook, for one, may fall into steep decline, become a virtual ghost town, but it won’t matter one bit. The new arrangement is only going to grow deeper. An ominous passage from early in the book which proved awesomely prophetic:

How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been…? I have here before me…Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions–the patterns of mechanistic technologies–are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval by the electrically computerized dossier bank–that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early ‘mistakes.’ We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change? What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?•