All of this seems to define the way tech practices dropping out of college: It’s a gesture of risk-taking that’s actually largely drained of risk. It’s a gesture of rejection that seems stuck on the very thing it’s supposedly rejecting.
Dropping out is still understood as a rejection of a certain elite. But it is an anti-elitism whose very point is to usher you as quickly as possible into another elite—the elite of those who are sufficiently tuned in, the elite of those who get it, the ones who see through the world that the squares are happy to inhabit. This was as true for Leary and his cohort as it is for Zuckerberg and his. Dropping out may feel like you’re opening yourself up to a wider world, but in most cases you just shut yourself off from the world in a new way. This has shaped a certain kind of discourse—witness how Donald Trump has leveraged anti-elitism while being convinced that you need a picture ID to buy a head of lettuce.
It has certainly shaped the tech industry’s somewhat tortured relationship to universality. The tech giants want to make things happen for “everybody.” But often “everybody” means “people like me.” When the ride-share service Lyft premiered its new service Lyft Shuttle, which would have replaced individual cars with vans driving on predetermined routes, a Twitter user famously quipped, “That’s a bus. You invented a bus.” But that’s only half the story: Lyft had invented a bus for only people in possession of a smartphone, the savvy to use it, and the credit card to set up the app. You can drop out of college, you can leave your dorm, but the dorm, it seems, will nevertheless haunt your endeavors.
And finally, this elitist anti-elitism has also shaped business practices. In this context, another thinker emerges as central, one who, in fact, is often credited with inspiring Leary’s phrase about dropping out. Marshall McLuhan—as unlikely an inspiration as you were going to get—was a literature professor from Toronto who would mix reflections on the Iliad with diatribes about the Sunday funnies.
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There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall in which Allen’s character and Diane Keaton’s character wait in line at a movie theater, while behind them a graying academic type prattles on about Fellini, Bergman, and Marshall McLuhan. Allen’s character grows incensed and pleads his case across the fourth wall to the audience. The academic type notices and pushes back: he teaches a class at Columbia and is confident that his insights into McLuhan’s work have “a great deal of validity.”
Just when you think things can’t get any more absurd, Allen pulls from behind a standee the actual Marshall McLuhan, who informs the academic type, “You know nothing of my work.” And he adds the supremely mystifying line, “You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.”
The scene encapsulates McLuhan’s theory rather neatly. McLuhan is famous for the claim that “the medium is the message.” What he meant by this is that the way in which radios, TVs, or phones address us is more important than what they say when they do. In this case, Allen is alluding to the fact that film is an interactive medium: we are being addressed not as a remote community, as in a radio broadcast, but instead as direct visual witnesses. Before turning to McLuhan, Allen’s character has already made his case, that the guy behind him is a nuisance, across the fourth wall to us filmgoers.
The scene in Annie Hall epitomizes how readily available McLuhan’s ideas were in the 1960s and ’70s. Unless you were an Oscar-winning filmmaker, you couldn’t pluck the literal McLuhan out of thin air, of course. But you could certainly invoke his ideas with about as much (apparent) ease. It’s safe to say laypeople are less familiar with McLuhan’s ideas today than they were then, and it’s also safe to say that many who regurgitated his theories, like the gentleman in Annie Hall, didn’t actually understand them all that well. And given the line the actual McLuhan speaks in the scene, we, the viewers, will likely fear we’re misunderstanding him as well.
Did that mean his whole fallacy was wrong? In a way, no, since knowing to invoke McLuhan was perhaps a better proof of his theories than actually understanding those theories. Maybe that is also why Allen left McLuhan’s odd line in the final version of the script and the final cut of the film. After all, the point of the scene is that Allen is able to pull the actual McLuhan from behind the standee and have him settle a dispute directly—not what McLuhan actually says, which in no way resolves the dispute. And this was true in the sixties already: invoking McLuhan was a way to show you were switched on, tuned in, vibing, or whatever other media metaphor you want to use to show you’ve grasped what’s happening. You got it, and if you couldn’t quite say what it was, that mattered less than that you got it.
The central way in which the medium can be the message has to do with what it asks us to do, how it asks us to behave toward it. To be addressed as a reader, a listener, an audience member is how human beings are constituted as
