McLuhan on the cloud

As a footnote to my previous post on Marshall McLuhan and his legacy (tomorrow is the centenary of his birth), I share the following excerpt from a 1969 Playboy interview, in which he describes his vision of the end point of what we today call cloud computing. As is typical of McLuhan, there's brilliance here, but there's also a whole lot of bad craziness. At least I hope it's bad craziness. MCLUHAN: Automation and cybernation can play an essential role in smoothing the transition to the new society. PLAYBOY: How? MCLUHAN: The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. Already, it's technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways. PLAYBOY: How do you program an entire society - beneficially or otherwise? MCLUHAN: There's nothing at all difficult about putting computers in the position where they will be able to conduct carefully orchestrated programing of the sensory life of whole populations. I know it sounds rather science-fictional, but if you understood cybernetics you'd realize we could do it today. The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should...