Essential McLuhan 80 Sheshell ebb music wayriver she flows. The hidden ground and force of the anthropological enterprise, as much as the business world of the consumer-producer, lay in the power of instant electric communication to restore all things to an inclusive present. By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. The naïveté of the anthropologists, “secure” in a civilized literate stockade, is matched again and again by would-be innovators who head for specific goals: ERLE STANLEY GARDNER WORLD’S BIGGEST SELLING WRITER DEAD (Toronto Star, March 12, 1970) The author of Perry Mason often felt the irony of his situation. Having set out to write, that he might have leisure for hunting and fishing, he spent his life dictating to a team of secretaries. The hidden ground of his plight was precisely hunting and fishing. His hero, Perry Mason, is a full-time hunter and fisher of men and clues. The sleuth, the undercover man, is a major posture of the hunter against the new electric ground of the telephone and TV. Man Hunter and Sleuth: Posture and Imposture In one of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures his quarry demurs when Holmes declares that he had seen him at a particular spot. The quarry retorts that “I saw nobody following me there.” And Holmes comments, “That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.” Half the world today is engaged in keeping the other half “under surveillance.” This, in fact, is the hang-up of the age of “software” and information. In the preceding “hardware” age the “haves” of the world had kept the “have-nots” under “surveillance.” This old beat for flatfoots has now been relegated to the world of popular entertainment. The police state is no work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulating sirens. That is a way of seeing that the espionage activities of our multitudinous man hunters “crediting” agencies are not only archaic, but redundant and irrelevant. GALLUPING ESPIONAGE CREATES THE UNPERSON! THE MAN THAT NEVER WAS POSTURE AND IMPOSTURE AS WAYS OF LIFE NOW MERGE IN THE GLOBAL THEATER