Marshall McLuhan and Project 69

Hello and welcome everyone. This is Active Inference Guest Stream 69.1 on February 6th, 2024. Really looking forward to this session and conversation with Andrew McLuhan. We will be hearing about Marshall McLuhan and Project 69. So it's an incredibly auspicious numerological coincidence and I look forward to hearing about what you're going to share right now, Andrew. So thank you very much. To you. Thank you. Yeah, well, I noticed that the stream was 69.1 or whatever. So I thought, well, I guess I know what I'm going to talk about. You know, actually, numbers, numerology is important in McLuhan work. Maybe not in the full blown mystical sense of it, although that too sometimes. But the number 69 comes up a few times in a very vanilla kind of way. Um, well, Marshall loved the number three for a few reasons. Uh, the Trivium was a pet subject of his grammar, rhetoric, dialectic. Uh, there was his PhD work, uh, on the Trivium, for example. Um, also the Holy Trinity, you know, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Um, and the McLuhan's lived in Toronto for the longest time at number three, which would park, which seemed auspicious to them, I'm sure. Um, you know, 69. Three is, is a route of 69, of course. Um, Marshall McLuhan was 69 years old when he died. Uh, amazingly enough, he wasn't, uh, that old according, you know, people tend to live longer than that. I often wonder if he'd lived five more years, you know, even five more years, where would his work have taken him? What direction? Um, I think about this a lot when people, when people say, well, what would Marshall McLuhan say about this? Or if Marshall McLuhan was here today, what would he say? And even on, on my own, when I, when I'm, you know, when I have a topic, I'm, I'm thinking about researching or writing, I ask myself, you know, what would Marshall say about this? And the answer is, we have no way of knowing because he only died at the age. He wasn't 70 years old when he died. He could have had a lot more, um, time to develop his work. Uh, at the time of his death, he'd already developed his work a lot further than what most people know about, you know, his whole work with the laws of media with my father. If he'd had another five or 10 years, how much further would he develop that work? And what would he say about today? With that in mind, you know, if he had lived another decade, he would have actually seen the early internet. He died in 1980. Um, I think about these things, but, you know, number 69, uh, brings to mind to me, uh, project 69, which, uh, was a grant awarded by the NAEB, the National Association of Educational Broadcasters from Washington, DC, to Marshall McLuhan in order to, uh, undergo a study in understanding new media. Um, this was in 1958. Marshall received this, uh, important grant, foundational grant for him. Um, the first major grant he received with his friend, Ted Carpenter was in the early 1950s, um, from the Ford Foundation. And that started off, uh, a culture and communication seminar they undertook, which was an early interdisciplinary study of communication, which turned into for, for Marshall and others, the birth of media studies, not simply communication studies, the enlarging of this category from simple communication to media, to all human innovation and its effects. Um, the, the second very important grant was this NAEB grant, which, um, gave Marshall the resources, uh, to undergo serious study of technology and media. And the results of his studies for the next two years, 58 to 60, um, would really underpin and inform the rest of his, his work for the next, uh, two decades almost. This is when Marshall came up with this formulation, the medium is the message, among, among other things. Um, it's when, when Marshall, uh, received this grant, which was for essentially to create a high school curriculum for understanding media. Um, Marshall set about, uh, doing that and he delivered it in, in what's called the report on the project and…