Daily Inspiration Quote by Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan flips a supposedly terminal word into a launchpad, and the audacity is the point. “Obsolescence” usually lands like a verdict: discarded tech, dead formats, outmoded ideas. He insists it’s not a burial but a birth, smuggling a very McLuhan premise into a sentence that reads like a bumper sticker and behaves like a theory: media don’t vanish; they mutate into environments.

The line carries the subtext of his famous tetrad (even if you’ve never heard of it): every new medium enhances something, makes something else obsolete, retrieves older forms, and then reverses into its own opposite. Obsolescence, then, is less about disappearance than reassignment. The telegraph didn’t kill writing; it reorganized time. Television didn’t end politics; it turned politics into performance. Smartphones didn’t eliminate the self; they outsourced it to feeds, clouds, and metrics.

Context matters: McLuhan was writing in a mid-century moment when mass media felt like an incoming weather system - not just changing what people knew, but how they sensed and processed reality. So “beginning” isn’t optimistic; it’s diagnostic. When something becomes obsolete, the cultural energy doesn’t dissipate, it relocates. Old forms get pushed into niches, reappear as nostalgia, or return as “authenticity” (vinyl, film cameras, live theater) precisely because the dominant medium has changed the value of slowness and texture.

There’s also a warning baked in: if obsolescence is a beginning, then every innovation is also a starting gun for new dependencies, new blind spots, new power arrangements. McLuhan’s cheerfully ominous trick is making progress sound like a cycle you can’t opt out of - only learn to read.