Wish I'd said that - Jan. 9, 2020

“The future is, of course, an illusion. Nothing has happened there yet.... Among Marshall McLuhan’s many intriguing metaphors, the most paradoxical one is his reference to ‘rearview mirror’ thinking. All of us, he said, are speeding along a highway with our eyes fixed on the rearview mirror… He believed that only a few avantgarde artists (and, of course, himself) were capable of looking through the windshield so that they might tell us where we are going. The irony here is that the windshield is also a rearview mirror of sorts, for whatever future we see is only – can only be – a projection of the past.... Imagined futures are always more about where we have been than where we are going.”

Start of author’s “Introduction” to Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century