"You know, Marshall McLuhan would have utterly hated this. He couldn't stand this sort of thing. He was a medievalist; he was a classical scholar."

"Engineering Future Culture," held in the basement of the Drake, was devoid of any real grounding in McLuhan. It became an interminable discussion on the preservation of Internet blogs. Terms like "revisioning" and "recontextualize" were tossed around like lighters at a Ku Klux Klan meeting, and frequent citations were made to "engineering social change," which led one to nervously recall another group of people who, during the Weimar Republic, also met in basements and advocated social change. As one festival-goer succinctly observed after spending three hours listening to "Engineering Future Culture," "This is shit."

...

As the last few intellectual thrusts of "Probing McLuhan" wound down, a figure rose from the crowd and said a few words. The voice was eerily reminiscent of the Master, as was the rhetoric. It was Eric McLuhan. "The new media won't fit into the classroom," he told the audience. "It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask."