In an interview on The World Wide Web

First, Marshall McLuhan’s book, The Medium is the Massage, which was originally published in 1967. Why is this book relevant to a discussion about the history and significance of the Internet?

Well, in a bizarre way that I can’t explain through anything other than through McLuhan’s sort of freakish brilliance, he understood immediately before it had ever happened what the future history of the Net was going to be. How networks of the size we now have would behave, how they would affect us socially, and basically everybody who’s been trying to theorise the Net ever since has been playing catch-up to him. The language he employs is, of course, somewhat quaint, and his tone is basically Messianic but if you really want to look at what everybody else is building on, it’s really McLuhan's ideas. Yeah, it’s amusingly of its time, and it has that sort of 60s-era Utopianism, but it’s also amazingly up-to-date.