The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool In the tumult of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant anew. But if you think you know Marshall McLuhan, or what he stood for - think again. By Gary Wolf Where in the waste is the wisdom?" - James Joyce In 1971, Marshall McLuhan announced a new product. With chemist Ross Hall, his nephew, McLuhan patented a formula for the removal of urine odor from underpants. The unique advantage of McLuhan's formula, for which he registered the trademark Prohtex, was that it removed the urine odor without masking other, more interesting smells - that of perspiration, for instance. In the aural and tactile environment of preliterate man, McLuhan explained, BO had been a valuable means of communication. When electronic technology turned the world into a global village, tribal odors would make a comeback, too. This prediction has yet to come true, but if body odor has not yet made a comeback, its prophet surely has. Marshall McLuhan was born in 1911 and died in 1980. By the time of his death, he had been dismissed by respectable academicians, and he was known in the popular press as an eccentric intellectual whose day in the media spotlight had come and gone. By 1980, the transformation of human life catalyzed by television was taken for granted, and it no longer seemed interesting to ask where the electronic media were taking us. But in recent years, the explosion of new media - particularly the Web - has caused new anxieties. Or to put a more McLuhanesque spin on it, the advent of new digital media has brought the conditions of the old technologies into sharper relief, and made us suddenly conscious of our media environment. In the confusion of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant again. Conservative Christian anarchist McLuhan's slogans "The medium is the message" and "The global village" are recited like mantras in every digital atelier in the world, despite the fact that hardly anyone who quotes McLuhan reads his books. Some of them McLuhan hardly wrote in the first place, trusting assistants and collaborators to cobble them together out of recordings and notes. As his biographer Philip Marchand explains, with wry sympathy, "writing books was not McLuhan's forte." Neither was McLuhan very influential as a scholar or teacher. From the beginning of his career, the Canadian professor with a doctorate from Cambridge stood outside the academic mainstream for which he had little patience. The natural incompatibility of originality and academia was probably especially difficult to overcome for McLuhan, who had received his early education in North American public schools, which, then as now, offered few advantages to their most talented students. By the time he arrived at Cambridge, McLuhan had acquired what is perhaps the defining trait of autodidacts - a kernel of personal crankiness and a resistance to established authority. In his role as social, political, and economic analyst, McLuhan was a clown. His speeches and public pronouncements helped give rise to a generation of affluent futurists and business consultants skilled at telling executives what they liked to hear, but McLuhan's own predictions and business ideas were often hilariously ill-conceived. If his urine-odor remover failed to stimulate the instincts of business executives, perhaps McLuhan could talk Tom Wolfe into collaborating on a Broadway production of a play in which the media appeared on stage as characters. This aborted script followed two other McLuhan attempts at musicals, including one in which Russian Elvis fans were given a shot at governing America. Even in areas where McLuhan was expected to be more dependable - say, pop culture - his pronouncements were often incredible. In 1968, for instance, McLuhan attempted to explain to readers of Playboy why the miniskirt was not sexy. With McLuhan, the accuracy of his commentary was beside the point. "What is truth?" asked McLuhan in 1974, and he answered with a quote he attributed to Agatha Christie's iconoclastic investigator Hercule Poirot: "Eet ees whatever upsets zee applecart." "You have not studied Joyce or Baudelaire yet, or you would have no problems in understanding my procedure," McLuhan wrote to one detractor with whom he was especially irritated. "I have no theories whatever about anything. I make observations by way of discovering contours, lines of force, and pressures. I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer." Gary Wolf (Wired.com"gary@Wired.com) is the executive editor of HotWired. He and Michael Stein are the authors of Aether Madness: An Off-Beat Guide to the Online World.