Time & Perspective Quote by Marshall McLuhan

Progress, McLuhan suggests, is a kind of controlled skid: we floor it toward what comes next while our eyes stay glued to what just happened. The line works because it weaponizes an everyday object the reader trusts. A rearview mirror is a safety device, a tool for orientation, but it is also a built-in bias machine. It makes the past legible and the future a blur. McLuhan turns that mundane asymmetry into a diagnosis of modern culture.

The intent is less nostalgic than accusatory. He is pointing at how societies absorb new media by translating it into old categories: early film staged itself like theater; television borrowed radio's formats; the internet was first treated as a library, then a mall. We don't just remember the past; we use it as the template for what counts as "normal", which makes the future arrive disguised as a familiar sequel.

The subtext is McLuhan's broader argument that our tools remake our perception faster than our language can keep up. When a new medium appears, we reach for inherited metaphors to domesticate it, and that act of domestication hides the real shift: not new content, but new habits of attention, authority, and social organization. Looking backward is comforting because it's interpretable; looking forward requires admitting we are cognitively under-equipped.

Context matters: writing in the postwar acceleration of television, advertising, and electronics, McLuhan saw a society narrating its own transformation with yesterday's storyboards. The warning isn't "don't learn from history". It's that history, unexamined, becomes a steering wheel attached to the wrong end of the car.