The McLuhan Marshalling Machine launched: 7,534 verified quotes, compiled over 39 years

It’s the largest database of McLuhan’s quotes, all officially verified and referenced

Jul 26, 2026

On Marshall McLuhan’s 115^th birthday, July 21, 2026, an unprecedented project—the McLuhan Marshalling Machine—was made available to the public by its creator, McLuhan scholar and biographer William Kuhns.

Quick Facts

The McLuhan Marshalling Machine (the MMM):

39 years in the making…
7,534 quotes from McLuhan’s books, letters, articles, lectures and interviews
All quotes include attribution
Quotes are grouped into 246 chapters but can also be navigated through keyword clouds or by year
Fully searchable
Installed on the McLuhan Estate’s official website

UX

I was among those who had been secretly using it for a couple of years, so here is what I have to say.

The McLuhan Marshalling Machine (MMM), a quotation search engine assembled by Bill Kuhns, is more than a database—more even than the “McLuhanopedia,” as Kuhns calls it. In fact, the MMM is a continuous and cascading “probe” into the McLuhan Mosaic Mind: a searchable dictionary of over 7,000 quotations, tagged by source, date, and theme, with meticulous attribution throughout.

McLuhan was famously prolific in wit: he thought in aphorisms and produced them with ease, on the go, not only in books and articles but also in TV interviews and private conversations. Many scholars, experts, and readers have felt compelled to quote him, generating a vast body of “McLuhanisms” that circulate as a kind of expert folklore—often with vague, incorrect, or entirely absent attribution. If there were a World Cup for misattributed quotations, McLuhan would surely make it to the final.

The MMM solves this problem. Over nearly forty years (the project began in 1987), Kuhns has worked through archives and libraries to gather, connect, and verify McLuhan’s words. Now, it’s made available to the public, with the support of Michael McLuhan and the McLuhan estate. So, it’s official. The result is not just a search engine, but a reliable authority for navigating McLuhan’s ideas and tracing McLuhan quotations back to their original sources.

Organized into overlapping digital “clouds” and chapters (whichever you prefer), the collection achieves something no traditional dictionary could: it models the interplay of ideas, perhaps as they flowed and interacted in McLuhan’s own mind. Or at least it invites you to imagine so. By marshalling fragments, the MMM reveals the hidden environments of his thought—its echoes, reversals, and recurrences. It is not just a tool, but an interface to a method, inviting users to browse associatively and playfully, in the spirit of McLuhan’s maxim that “there are no passengers on Spaceship Earth, only crew,” for we are all co-navigators. And so, too, we can co-navigate the space of his thought.

Andrey Mir

More UX

Here is what prominent McLuhanists say about the McLuhan Marshalling Machine:

“The ultimate resource.” — Tom Cooper, author of Wisdom Weavers: the Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.
“Kinesthetic learning on overdrive.” — Marshall Soules, author of Play Attention.
“The McLuhan archival work and treasury we’ve been waiting for.” — B.W. Powe, author of Mysteria
“A masterwork every bit as useful as anticipated.” — Elaine Kahn, editor of Been Hoping We Might Meet Again: The Letters of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Marshall McLuhan.
“Attention, this a trap: once you started navigating you will not be able to stop.” — Derrick de Kerckhove, director of the McLuhan Centre from 1983 to 2008. Author of The Skin of Culture.