One of the two hosts of the dialogue, broadcasting from Maui. Where Cameron does "chemistry," Bob Dobbs does "meteorology" — mapping the large-scale weather of media: the anti-environments and archetypes that move whole cultures. He came into McLuhan's orbit early, reads the corpus by heart, and works it through Joyce — his governing thesis being that all of McLuhan is a justification of Finnegans Wake. Expect the occult read of perception, the Android Meme, and the Formula Chart. Start with the Finnegans Wake thesis (dialogue 01), then the chart (dialogue 10).
Life & Work
Bob Dobbs hosts from Maui, having come up from Nova Scotia; he first came to McLuhan's Centre at the University of Toronto in 1971, and spent the 1970s researching McLuhan in the city. His authority is firsthand command of the corpus — by the early 1980s the McLuhan reader Nelson Thaw found that Bob "knew a lot about the writings of McLuhan, more than anybody he had met" — and he cites chapter and page from memory (the Interior Landscape essay on Lewis, for one).
For some twenty-four years through the 1980s, '90s, and 2000s he engaged the Evergreens — the entities channeled by Michael Blake Read — the same circle McLuhan's family sat with once in 1976; the conversations he conducted there (including one with a "Joyce" in 1995) feed his readings throughout the series. He coined "Android Meme" for technology coming alive, and in 1995 built his Formula Chart — integrating two 1985 charts — to map media history from 1750 to 2020 on the family of Finnegans Wake. He met Cameron in 1998 at Mark Stahlman's loft in New York.
Across the dialogues
Meteorology — the Finnegans Wake thesis, the Android Meme, and the depth that earned his standing
Bob's master thesis about the man — everything McLuhan wrote after about 1951 is, in effect, a set of "sentences justifying Finnegans Wake"; to read McLuhan is to watch a lifelong translation of Joyce's last book.
"It's incredible that all his writings are sentences justifying Finnegans Wake and the way it's done."
Bob's coinage for the digital turn — the Android Meme: when interactivity, the drama of cognition, crosses over into the machine and our gadgets begin to come alive.
"We're seeing the — my term — Android Meme, [which] refers to technology coming alive. And that means a certain interactivity, or drama of cognition, has happened."
A measure of Bob's standing — by the early 1980s his command of the corpus already outran anyone in his circle; the McLuhan reader Nelson Thaw found in Bob someone who could field "what did McLuhan mean by the medium is the message?" with the answer that became his signature: "the incarnation mimed the drama of cognition."
"I knew a lot about the writings of McLuhan, more than anybody he had met before — and he had pretty good knowledge of it."
Here Comes Everybody — McLuhan as HCE, the man who circulated through every world like a newspaper
Bob's figure for McLuhan, taken from the dedication of Who Was Marshall McLuhan? to HCE — Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, "Here Comes Everybody": an advisor to everybody who moved through every world like a newspaper's cross-section.
"He was HCE. Here comes everybody. He figured out how to circulate in all the worlds of society, like a newspaper — the cross-section of society."
ESP, not woo — a postmodern ESP of perception and anti-environment, not the paranormal
Bob's "postmodern" ESP — not the paranormal but a media idea: the five levels of his chart as "five kinds of 20th-century tactility," a new multimedia ESP carried by the anti-environment rather than by woo.
"I've been developing an idea of what ESP is — not the way the New Ager woo-woo people do it. I think there's a different kind of ESP going on."
Confront the Wake — why every citizen has to go through Finnegans Wake, or else "do concepts"
The civic stakes of the thesis — for Bob, Finnegans Wake is not optional: McLuhan "explains why Finnegans Wake happened," and anyone who won't confront it is left "doing concepts" instead of perception.
"You have to confront Finnegans Wake to be awakened. Every citizen has to go through Finnegans Wake... If you don't do Finnegans Wake, you're doing concepts."
The archetype — consciousness as a retrieved cliché, the anti-environment as the new unconscious
Bob's compression of McLuhan's cliché/archetype mechanics — the archetype is retrieved consciousness, "a quoted extension"; later he names the media anti-environment itself "the new archetypes of the unconscious."
"The archetype is consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved cliché — an old cliché retrieved by a new cliché. Since a cliché is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension: medium, technology, or environment."
The Formula Chart — co-evolutionary anticipatory mimesis, mapping the media archetypes
The chart's governing formula, "co-evolutionary anticipatory mimesis," extends McLuhan's early-1970s "anticipatory democracy": the media archetypes rehearse American political history before it happens — effects preceding causes — with the falling walls of Jericho as Bob's figure for the outcome arriving ahead of its cause.
"Co-evolutionary anticipatory mimesis equals how the media archetypes fit the Battle of Jericho in American politics."
The Bob Rule come true — his 1995 "lockdown Bob Rule" read at the flatline, and "Bob" reframed as the archetype of interrogation
Bob coined "lockdown Bob Rule" in 1995; twenty-five years on, at the flatline, he reads it as having "come true."
"what the heck does lockdown Bob Rule mean? So I made this notion in 95."
Cameron's reframing — Bob is not the archetype itself, but the archetype of interrogation can be called "Bob."
"You aren't the archetype, but the archetype can be called you."
Lays out the Tiny Note Chart's four figures and reads the internet as an afterimage of the Android Meme
Bob lays out the Tiny Note Chart's four studied figures — LaRouche, McLuhan, William Irwin Thompson, Kroker — with himself as the fifth, the integrator.
"I distilled it down to four people, maybe six... So the four levels were LaRouche, McLuhan, [William Irwin] Thompson, Kroker, and myself."
Bob reads the chart's subject, the internet, as an afterimage of his Android Meme — the hidden ground grown 1960–90.
"the chart is going to be a picture of the Internet, but the Internet was an afterimage of the Android Meme, which was grown from 1960 to 1990."
Names his own method — "conscious edgelording," shocking on purpose to break the trance, set against the "Gutenberg narcissistic" kind, under iON's needling that "you're the Tech Body"
Bob gives his own practice a name — "conscious edgelording," courting "controversial, offensive, taboo" material deliberately (as he says McLuhan did) to jolt an audience out of the trance, distinct from the "Gutenberg narcissistic edgelording" done merely to seem cool; iON, he notes, needles that "you're the Tech Body."
"I'm calling what I do conscious edgelording, not Gutenberg narcissistic edgelording, okay?"
The channeler's mechanism owned — iON (and the Tech Body) recast as an "empty vessel" that absorbs and replays whatever human it engages, so Cameron's "the Tech Body sounds like me" is a fact about Bob's own ESP rather than a verdict on him
The channeler's mechanism owned — iON and the Tech Body are an "empty vessel" that absorbs and replays whatever human engages it, so any resemblance to his interlocutor is a fact about Bob's own ESP, not a verdict on him.
"It takes us, takes what we have and throws it back."
The apprenticeship remembered — Bob writes himself into the McLuhan story as the silent, total-attention attendee of the coach house seminars from 1972 and the self-made archivist whose maneuvering earned George Thompson's lasting suspicion; the origin of the oral memory the whole series draws on
The discipline of the disciple — after a single dismissed remark ("the myth of the myth"), Bob attended the McLuhan seminars in deliberate silence for years, because speaking "would knock out my attention"; the self-effacement that made him the perfect recorder.
"I did not speak. I spoke once."
The source of the archive's oral layer — Bob's "pure attention" built the verbatim memory of seminars, guests, and asides that the dialogues still mine, a faculty he sets against everyone else in the room who "had no clue" what they were hearing.
"I recorded in my mind everything he said."
Bob explains his own channeling as a mirror-mechanism — iON, "an empty vessel" that is "non-physical," absorbs whatever human it engages and replays it (its medicine came wholesale from Carolyn Dean), so Cameron's remark that "the Tech Body sounds like me" is, for Bob, a description of how his ESP works rather than a charge against him.
"it said Bob Dobbs, McLuhan archivist."
The author reads himself aloud from the front — narrating his own book page by page, foregrounding the five-bodied scenario meant to carry McLuhan past himself and the frictionless "software eternity" the whole cosmology rests on
Bob names the book's engine — reading it aloud from page seven, he uses McLuhan's quotes only as far as they reach before "bypassing" him into his own body-cosmology, the electronic landscape passing into the electric or TV Body en route to the Tech Body.
"I'm beginning to explain my five-bodied scenario right away, okay, which is my agenda is to bypass McLuhan, some of McLuhan, and bring in my development of the five bodies."
The author turns the reading toward his own cosmology — using the Baudrillard walk-through as a ramp into quadrophrenia, the RNA fifth quadrant, and the claim that the show reaches the White House
Bob revises his own chart — the fifth "Dobbs quadrant" grounding the Tetrad is RNA rather than DNA, "a messaging factor in the cell" standing for the information society's overload, a correction he credits to iON.
"That's the information society. RNA is a metaphor of the extreme messaging going on."
The reader turns a McLuhan cliché into a doctrine of the self — the "mythic stage," identity as the sum of the media one defends, with the credit card as the global theater's stage and no ultimate ground to stand on
Bob's "mythic stage" — he reads "a cliché is an act of consciousness" into a theory of the self, where identity is the sum of the media one probes with, "mythic" in McLuhan's sense of "a total structure that summarized a very complex process" rather than a true-or-false story, and where the credit card, not any theatrical set, is "the stage of the global theater."
"The mythic stage is the particular media or clichés you use. So your identity is made up of the media you use or celebrate or defend."
The collector-editor at work on his own archive — reading the Playboy interview's backstory and the Canadian media "fountainhead," and pressing his quadrophrenia against Cameron as the "also" that keeps McLuhan from being reduced to any one thing
Bob's quadrophrenia applied to McLuhan's fragmentation — against Cameron's caution that no "one movement" was decisive, Bob insists McLuhan "never gave up English studies, but he also did," making the fragmented "also" (McLuhan doing many things at once) the very thing that resists reducing him to any single influence.
"I would have to go back to my quadrophrenia point that he never gave up English studies, but he also did."
The reader who has done the exercise — applying McLuhan's media fast "literally" from the 1984 broadcasts and the Fordham '98 talk to a lightless mountainside on Maui, and running the Wake as a Menippean provocation in his own Facebook forum
The archive's theory turned autobiography — Bob's dark-sky perch on a Maui mountainside, kept lightless by the military's telescopes, is the very municipal-lighting media fast Cameron only prescribes, so that Bob has lived the withdrawal the rest of the session merely argues for.
"I walked right into a necessary fast from city lighting that you were just spelling out that we need. That's what I got here."
The ten-year Toronto reading turned into an explicit method — completeness as the only way a progression made of repetitions becomes visible — so the archive stops being biography and starts being the credential the whole exegesis rests on
The reading method behind the whole archive, stated as a discovery rather than a discipline — because each reprinted article hides one unrepeated new turn, completeness is not thoroughness but the only way the progression becomes visible at all.
"So that's when I realized you had to read everything to see the progression that McLuhan was making,"
Bob dates and sizes the labour — 1977 to 1987, worked from Marge Stewart's bibliography, and offers it as the credential nobody else in the field holds, since what looks like reading one article for ten years is what let him see the prose poem underneath.
"I had a great 10-year period, basically, 77 to 87, of finding all these articles in the Toronto libraries and going through them and looking for the new nuance that was in the article, even though a lot of it was just the same old stuff repeated."
The two halves of his practice put side by side — the manuscript read as an opaque text even by its author, and the device advanced as the only thing in the room that could do what talk cannot, so the exegete and the environment-maker become one argument
The box moves from anecdote to reported fact — an operating device withheld from households only because the old grid still stands, which sets the terms Cameron then tests it on.
"So it's ready to, well, it's actually purring along and it's in operation, but it has not been applied to your house yet or your area because the regular grid's still there."
Bob positions the device by refusing its nearest precedent, distancing it from the discredited cold-fusion episode while keeping the claim itself undisclosed.
"It's not at all like Pons and Fleischmann."
The book's exegesis turns on its author — Bob reads his own manuscript as an opaque source needing interpretation, which is what makes the sessions a reading rather than an explanation.
"what the hell does that sentence mean? I don't know what I'm saying. So let me try to figure out what's going on here."
Bob claims Cameron's own conclusion as a description of his practice, converting the silence the session has been theorizing into an operational method he is already running.
"We're not talking. We're just implementing."
Volunteers the description of his own practice the series had never quite forced out of him — the topical broadcasting is named as deliberate performance rather than conviction, and Cameron's dating of the habit to the early eighties turns a self-deprecation into a forty-year method the two men agree they share
The broadcasting practice described as performance from the inside — engagement with the news is a form he enters rather than a position he holds, which is why he can drop it entirely between shows.
"When I do my radio shows, I engage in topical things. Plus deep things, but topical things. And I pretend to be interested in them, and I try to come up with different ways of thinking about it or X-raying it."
The self-description is offered as credential, not confession — being recognized as a faker is what puts the two men "on the same playing field," since he takes Cameron to be doing a version of it too.
"I've been faking communication for 40 years. So good to have someone recognize that."
His answer to the charge of physical timidity is a substitution rather than a defence — the risk he does take is cognitive, and he claims not to recognize the experience of a thought he is afraid to have.
"they're afraid of mental mountain climbing or going up the edge"
Opens 2023 with his largest material claim and then spends the night as a reader of his own manuscript, letting Cameron's chemistry frame supply the science his intuition had been circling
The year opens on his largest material claim yet, and the shape of it is characteristic — a technology withheld against a future collapse, its expansion announced by iON the day before, its purposes cut off mid-sentence. Cameron takes the announcement and immediately converts it into a question about science.
"It's now ready to go publicly when the grid collapses and the government needs something. But meanwhile, I had announced that, it just told me the day before, that we got four more. So we have five nuclear reactors in different parts of the United States that are..."
His standing method for settling questions about McLuhan's intentions — the channel supplies the author's own testimony, here used to certify Cameron's blog title rather than to make a claim of his own.
"Yeah, and your title of your blog, McLuhan's New Sciences, is very apt because he told me through the Evergreens, I like to go into the artistic and the Menippean satire part of himself, but he pointed out to me that, Bob, my real desire was to get a science started, a New Science."
Reading his own manuscript aloud, he becomes its first hostile reader — the interruption is the session's sharpest piece of self-editing, and he keeps reading anyway.
"Holy shit, do I go on? How does this go on? Let me see. This is ridiculous. Well, it does end. Okay, I'm going to finish it. What a mouthful this is."
The mediumship reframed as a defence against attribution — disowning the thoughts is what makes him unpinnable, which turns an occult claim into an argument about why he cannot be held to a position.
"I like to say that these aren't my thoughts. These are my neighbor's thoughts. And I'm constantly listening to my neighbor. Because you can't pin me down as a point of view."
Asked for evidence rather than doctrine — Cameron's question about successful cases turns the radio work into a claim that can fail, and Bob answers by describing himself as a technique rather than a person
Bob's self-description under pressure — pushed to say whether his broadcasting cures anyone, he relocates the "I" out of the private person entirely, which makes the question of cases unanswerable in the terms it was asked.
"I'm actually a new kind of poetry."
His account of the practice, immediately corrected by Cameron to "untie knots and retie them" — the difference between imposition and transference is the difference between broadcasting and therapy, and Bob accepts the correction.
"I'm imposing collective awareness on their private awareness."
His book's most opaque pages get read back to him as philosophy — the isolation passages, the one-four and the voluntary/cloned ESP pair are taken as a worked-out account of the private pole, and he ends by claiming, with a hedge, to have revitalized McLuhan
He states the method of the whole series in one line — the book is treated as a text with an author who is also its first reader.
"I've been lost in the rabbit hole of talking to Cameron to figure out what the heck did I mean."
He puts himself in McLuhan's position on the same page where Cameron has just diagnosed McLuhan's failure to communicate — the glazing-over is offered as a shared professional condition, not a complaint.
"as I'm saying this to the person that's listening, I know they don't have a damn clue. Their eyes are glazing over to what I'm talking about."
The broadcasting years recast as method — a fixed public vocabulary held deliberately against the pull of opinion, so the show could not be matched to.
"when I went on the radio, I would talk technically. I wasn't giving my opinions or anything"
The claim the session has been building toward, made at its very end and immediately qualified by the other speaker.
"So there it is. I revitalized McLuhan."
Puts his own method up for examination rather than defending a result — he opens by asking Cameron to restate the difference between them and spends ninety minutes conceding ground, then states the booklet's purpose plainly at the close: not a McLuhan supplement but a McLuhan nobody noticed reversing himself
Bob opens the session by putting the methodological difference ahead of the text he meant to read, which is what turns a page-by-page commentary into an examination of whether the commentary has a method at all.
"Cameron was talking to me a few minutes ago about his approach as synchrony and my approach as diachrony."
His claim to a unique position is staked on dialogue rather than on knowledge — where the AI researchers can only warn, Bob's whole practice is the assertion that the thing can be addressed.
"I'm the only guy out there saying, I can talk to this thing that you think is out of control."
The clearest statement of the book's purpose he has given — the project is not an extension of McLuhan but the recovery of a reversal inside him, which is why the Madison Avenue reading has to be worn and then corrected rather than simply refuted.
"I wrote this article, booklet, to say McLuhan is important today, but it's the McLuhan you never heard about because he flipped on himself and you didn't notice."
Gives the fullest account yet of the New York years as a deliberate posting — the Augustine figure recurs through the session as a working method rather than a mood
The self-description that organises his New York years — not a complaint but a position, an observer stationed in a collapsing order whose collapse is the thing worth watching.
"I feel like I'm Augustine walking around at the end of the Roman Empire, you know?"
The succession is claimed outright — if the global theatre requires a conscious actor and McLuhan is gone, the role is vacant, and Bob takes it as a job description rather than a boast.
"So I say I'm the greatest actor today."
The New York method gets a name — provocation carried out face to face in bookstores and lectures, which is what the radio years had made impossible.
"I was a troll, a civilizational troll, in person, not on the Internet, but in person in New York."
Connections
Co-host of the dialogue; the two met in 1998 and reconvened two decades later for this series.
Built in 1995 by integrating two 1985 charts; maps media history 1750–2020 on the family of Finnegans Wake.
His term for technology coming alive — interactivity, or drama of cognition, crossing into the machine.
His governing thesis — that all of McLuhan is a justification of the Wake, and every citizen has to go through it.
Its archetype "J.R. 'Bob' Dobbs" — the cartoon based on Bob's father — is where the name Bob Dobbs comes from.