Science & Tech Quote by Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan’s trick is to make “progress” sound like a boomerang. Technology, he argues, doesn’t just add capabilities; it flips the logic of the world it enters. The line lands because it refuses the comforting story that automation simply means less work for humans. Instead, it predicts a weird cultural backlash: the more machines professionalize and streamline life, the more people feel compelled to reclaim agency through small, hands-on acts.

“Reverses the characteristics” is classic McLuhan: media and tools reshape the environment so thoroughly that yesterday’s solution becomes today’s problem. Convenience breeds dependency; dependency breeds resentment; resentment becomes a market for self-reliance. In the subtext is an indictment of passive consumption. Automation promises to liberate us from labor, but it can also strip away competence, intimacy with materials, and the sense that we’re authors of our own lives. “Do it yourself” becomes less a hobby than a psychological counterweight.

Context matters: McLuhan is writing out of the mid-century acceleration of mass media and industrial standardization, when television and corporate manufacturing were turning experience into packaged product. He anticipates the paradox that mass systems generate niches. The same technologies that centralize power also distribute tools and instruction, letting amateurs copy what used to require institutions. DIY isn’t anti-technology here; it’s technology’s shadow, a form of rebellion that the system can conveniently sell back to you as a kit, a platform, a lifestyle.