McLuhan, Marshall & Nevitt, Barrington. Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, 1972.

The dropouts today are those determined to keep in touch with a fast-changing scene. (p. 4)

At electric speeds the consumer becomes producer as the public becomes participant role player. (p. 4)

The creative worker is never more powerful or more at leisure, never more the dropout from the specialist job, than when using all his faculties. (p. 5)

Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. (p. 6)

Today, effects and causes merge because they almost coincide in time and space in the new information environment. Change itself has become the main staple. (p. 6)

In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations. (p. 8)

Brides are intervals of resonance as much as means of connection, like resonating interval, they transform both areas they touch. (p. 9)

In the world of electric information, all centers of power become marginal. (p. 13)

The keys to comprehending the data, “the keys to given,” in any headache are also the “keys to the heaven”: when the hang-up is recognized as comic, it opens doors of perception that can transform all previous relationships and release tensions. Thus, a random inventory of gripes and jokes, culled from the irritant problems of any form of human organization whatever, will serve as structural clue or pattern illuminator. (p. 13)

By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. (p. 25)

Today we live in an age of simultaneity rather than of sequence. We start with the effects before the product. The consumer becomes producer. (p. 27)

One of the prices we pay for our coexistence with the motorcar in large cities is the increasing need for an ever-larger police force to maintain traffic mobility. The same process of electric speed of the new environment, felt in our schools, causes them to appear to the young as intolerable “police states,” in which everybody is kept “under surveillance” and everything is kept moving by the specialized packaging and the universal presence of functionaries. The mere existence of the “police state” anywhere is the sure sign of old arrangements being propped up by news forms that have already rendered the older forms irrelevant. (p. 31)

For if knowledge is power, reconsider the invincible weapon of organized ignorance resulting therefrom. THE IGNORANCE OF HOW TO USE NEW KNOWLEDGE STOCKPILES EXPONENTIALLY.” (p. 37)

The letters of the alphabet are an extremely aggressive extension of the body. Only teeth, in their uniformity and lineality, are comparable to the parchment or paper, permitted the organization of force at a distance, namely mobile, military bureaucracies of the great temples of Egypt and Babylon. (p. 40)

It is significant that the uniform and repeatable coinage created for the new markets predated the rise of the military bureaucracies with power to levy tribute on subject populations. Trade preceded literacy. (p. 40)

Money, like literacy, created huge, hidden service environments that speeded wealth making far beyond the agrarian processes of nature. Looking only at the visible “hardware” of money, all could agree with Aristotle that “money does not breed.” Ironically, the average, man who got hung up in this catch phrase refers to the averagium – “The day’s work which was done by tenant with beasts of burden.” As always, men see the figure more readily than its ground, just as they hear tunes more clearly than background music. (p. 41)

Gutenberg created a major frontier in America by setting up a continental interface between the preliterate and the civilized or visually specialized man. (p. 44)

New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p. 47)

Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. (p. 63)

Man is an extension of nature that remakes the nature that remakes man. (p. 66)

History makes man while man makes history: The music of the vibes. (p. 66)

There is no such thing as past history, since it is always a fiction fabricated by the preferences of the present. (p. 67)

It is hard for the conventional and uncritical mind to grasp the fact that “the meaning of meaning” is a relationship: a figure-ground process of perpetual change. (p. 86)

“There is no information in a telephone book – just DATA. (p. 87)

Any new form is always used for the old job, because those in control are the servants of past experience rather than the masers of present fact. (p. 87)

Every product as figure seeks a host medium as ground. Every product has the power of imposing its own “assumptions” or ground rules on the entire social context. (pp. 87-88)

It is the distinction of the “artist” in any field that he commands this power to convey the effects of things when the ordinary person is merely numbed or robotized by things. (p. 89)

Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things. (p. 90)

Secrecy is a function of slow information movement. Monopolies of knowledge disappear in ratio to speed-up. (p. 93)

The artist and the inventor are the ultimate enemies of the establishment. (p. 95)

The artist makes new perception that changes all the social ground rules. The inventor creates products and processes that transform environments. (p. 95)

Inevitably, as the total human social matrix shifts from the natural to the man-made; the fact of art as a substitute for nature creates a world of confusions. (p. 96)

Today, when the entire environment is directly created by man himself, the bond between man and things takes on a much greater scope and intensity of resonance. (p. 97)

Here is the specter of Pandora’s Box and the recognition that all services are paid for with disservices.” (p. 100)

In fact, the crunch has become the enormous speed-up of physical and information movement that has scrubbed and reduced community satisfactions by allowing people no time or peace to relate to one another. (p. 101)

Big Business uses market responses as guides to the selection of new products and services. The fact that the “market” is a corporate donkey, which is never given a nibble at more than one out of every two hundred “new carrots,” is only a meager index to the waste and ignorance exercised by bureaucratic idea sifters. (p. 103)

Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)

When innovation outstrips obsolescence, invention becomes the mother of necessity. (p. 111)

Measurement kills what you love. (p. 112)

Statistics prove that very few people die after ninety. (p. 114)

Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies. (p. 114)