We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), the Canadian media theorist best known for “the medium is the message,” repeatedly argued that societies initially understand new technologies through the lens of older ones. The line about driving into the future via the rearview mirror is commonly associated with his late-1960s/early-1970s commentary on how people and institutions respond to rapid media change—by relying on familiar categories and past experience. It fits his broader claim that the effects of new media environments are hard to perceive while we are living inside them, so we default to retrospective models (the “rearview mirror”) rather than developing new perceptual tools for the present.

The metaphor suggests that our orientation toward what comes next is largely backward-looking: we navigate emerging realities using concepts formed by earlier conditions. McLuhan’s point is not merely that we learn from history, but that we often misread the present by forcing it into outdated frameworks—treating new media as if they were extensions of old media, and new social arrangements as if they were old ones. The result is a kind of cultural “autopilot,” where the future arrives but is interpreted as a replay of the past. The quote encapsulates McLuhan’s warning that genuine understanding requires noticing the present environment itself, not just its familiar content.