Marshall McLuhan | Distant Early Warning

Marshall McLuhan

Distant Early Warning

Toronto, Canada: Self-published, 1969

54 pp., 6.35 by 8.89 cm., boxed

Edition size unknown

In 1968, after having moved back to Toronto from New York, Marshall McLuhan began publishing a monthly newsletter, advertised with no shortage of hyperbole: 

“THIS IS AN INVITATION TO JOIN A SELECT GROUP OF BUSINESS, ACADEMIC AND GOVERNMENT LEADERS WHO ARE ABOUT TO RECEIVE WHAT MUST BE THE MOST STARTLING NEWSPAPER EVER WRITTEN.” 

The project - produced with his son Eric and New Yorker Eugene Schwartz - was essentially a well-designed repurposing of pithy aphoristic statements by McLuhan, designed for corporate clients desperate not to miss out on the next big thing. 

“Which technological breakthroughs are completely hidden from your view?” asked a New York Times advertisement promoting the series. 

The newsletter took it’s name from the Distant Early Warning Line, a system of radar stations in the far northern Arctic region of Canada (as well as Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland) which were set up to detect incoming Soviet bombers during the Cold War, and warn of any sea-and-land invasions.

“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it”, Marshall McLuhan wrote in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 

The series lasted less than two years, and the most notable of the issues was Volume 2, Number 1, which was accompanied by this deck of playing cards, designed by McLuhan and Harley Parker.

A pre-cursor to the Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt Oblique Strategies, the deck was designed to be used as a problem-solving device, a bottle-neck breaker. Printed as a functional deck of poker cards, the cards feature quotes from McLuhan himself, alongside W.C. Fields, Jacques Ellul, Sam Butler, John Cage and others. The texts include “The chicken was the egg’s idea for getting more eggs”, “Silence is all the sounds of the Environment at once” and, naturally, “The Medium is the Message”.

The cards were packaged in green, red, black, blue, or brown slipcases, and contained an instruction sheet with more purple prose (“an intellectual’s card deck!”) along with the rules of the game: 

"In addition to the conventional card games, the Dew Line deck performs as THE MANAGEMENT GAME. Proceed as follows:

(a) Take any card. Relate the aphorism to your current hang-up.

(b) Call to mind a private or corporate problem as you shuffle the cards. Select a card and apply its message.

(c) Take three cards. Experiment with different arrangements of these until they yield new insights and patterns in your problem.

(d) Deal yourself three cards. Pick a pair to maximize the comic side of your problem.

TO OBTAIN YOUR SCORE

(1) If you get your breakthrough in thirty seconds or less, you are a top Dew Liner!

(2) Those who get their million dollar solution in less than two minutes have not yet been promoted to the level of their incompetence.

(3) If it takes you three minutes or more, try another problem."

"Indeed, what one notices is McLuhan’s appeal to artists and corporations alike. Both craved the next new thing.”

- Alex Kitnick, Distant early warning: Marshall McLuhan and the transformation of the avant-garde