Marshall McLuhan was usually a genuinely incisive thinker and not the mountebank that some make him out to be. His writings still have a lot to teach us about the great paradigm shift we’re currently experiencing. But he was prone to sometimes wildly misread the future like anyone who constantly traffics in tea leaves. One glaring example was his prediction at the end of the 1960s that there might soon be genocide in America. In a 1969 Playboy interview, he opined that the shift from mechanical to technological culture might cause just that to occur. An excerpt:

Playboy:

What, specifically, do you think will happen to [the black man]?

Marshall McLuhan:

At best, he will have to make a painful adjustment to two conflicting cultures and technologies, the visual-mechanical and the electric world; at worst, he will be exterminated.

Playboy:

Exterminated?

Marshall McLuhan:

I seriously fear the possibility, though God knows I hope I’m proved wrong. As I’ve tried to point out, the one inexorable consequence of any identity quest generated by environmental upheaval is tremendous violence. This violence has traditionally been directed at the tribal man who challenged visual-mechanical culture, as with the genocide against the Indian and the institutionalized dehumanization of the Negro. Today, the process is reversed and the violence is being meted out, during this transitional period, to those who are nonassimilable into the new tribe. Not because of his skin color but because he is in a limbo between mechanical and electric cultures, the Negro is a threat, a rival tribe that cannot be digested by the new order. The fate of such tribes is often extermination.•