Distant Early Warning

A Conversational Card Game

The “DEW Line” — was a now defunct system of radar stations in the far northern Arctic region of Canada. The DEW Line was set up to detect incoming Soviet bombers during the Cold War, and provide early warning of any sea-and-land invasion.

Marshall McLuhan’s DEW-Line deck of cards takes as its point of departure that artists (the creative consciousness) are a sort of cultural Distant Early Warning that are able to indicate or warn or prognosticate that change is to arrive shortly. Marshall McLuhan’s card deck from 1969, “Distant Early Warning” is undergrided by this recognition of the value of the ‘artist’ to which we might assign as well those who operate and create at the vanguard between what is and what could become.

This captures the essence of how artists perceive and signal shifts in culture before they become evident to the masses.

Those with a kind of consciousness that is able to (or wants, or can’t-help-but-to) make sense of the weak signals they feel; the things at the edge of perception or the edge of ‘sensible’, perhaps.

This idea is vividly embodied in Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker’s Distant Early Warning deck of cards—a tool designed not merely as a game or exercise in wit, but as a means to obtain insight and discovery through the technique of juxtaposition.

Many will note that it was around the same cultural moment in the 1970s, musician and artist Brian Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt introduced the Oblique Strategies card deck.

Oblique Strategies is subtitled “Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas.” This card deck was a kind of methodological procedural analog algorithm, intended to promote creativity by encouraging lateral thinking. Each card presents a challenging constraint designed to help the creative consciousness break through blocks and conceptual hurdles — and have whimsical fun in the process — through non-analytic, and very much less-structured forms of decision-making. Pick a card and do as it says, as “oblique” as the reference might be. One is compelled to give over to sense and feeling rather than instrumentalized and analytic specficity.

(We see Oblique Strategies make an appearance — maybe, depending on the specific ‘build’ of the generative documentary — in Gary Hustwit’s film ’Eno’. In the first version I saw, musician-artist Laurie Anderson pulls a card from the deck and shows it to camera at one point.)

I collect these things. I even make these things. I am grateful to have received the McLuhan Distant Early Warning deck from Andrew McLuhan recently.

Both of these decks emerged during times of significant social and technological change—a period when traditional structures were questioned, and new forms of expression were sought. Both share a common sensibility: eschewing formal analytic mechanics and quantitative analysis by leveraging randomness and juxtaposition. The hypothesis to this is that such an approach to sense-making helps unlock insights and foster creativity. By presenting players with unexpected combinations and prompts, both decks encourage a departure from structured, quantitative, and ‘evidence-based’ sense-making.

The Distant Early Warning deck allows players to embark on a “cool trip into exotic regions,” blending conventional games with media elements that are both verbal and pictorial. It’s a conversational card game where the importance lies not just in the identity of the cards, but in the varied relationships and juxtapositions between them. This mirrors McLuhan’s belief that “the medium is the message,” emphasizing that meaning arises from the interplay of ideas rather than linear analysis.

Similarly, Oblique Strategies offers aphorisms that prompt lateral thinking, serving as catalysts for creative breakthroughs. The cards are designed to nudge artists out of their habitual thought processes, allowing for new perspectives to emerge. This method aligns with the principle of embracing uncertainty and the unexpected to stimulate innovation.

The significance of these decks lies in their promotion of non-analytic approaches to sense-making. They highlight the value of intuition, randomness, and the subconscious in decision-making processes. By stepping away from structured frameworks, artists and thinkers can tap into deeper levels of creativity, uncovering insights that might remain hidden within conventional methodologies.

In essence, both the Distant Early Warning and Oblique Strategies serve as tools of a kind. They compel us to explore our world through the technique of juxtaposition. They embody the idea that artists, as kinds of cultural DEW-Lines, act as early warning systems—sensing and communicating changes, confusion, the rich, non-sense reading to be made sense-of. This concept underscores the importance of the creative consciousness in helping map and navigate the contingent complexities and the not-yet-known.