I was going through my database of aphorisms that I collected in the 80’s. These two quotes prompted this article:

In the Eighties, as we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self, and what remains of community will disappear.

~ Marshall McLuhan, Living at the Speed of Light (1979), 6

This is where William Burroughs comes in with his Naked Lunch. When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.

~ Marshall McLuhan, in McLuhan, Hot or Cool. (1967), 261