Bob's name for the merged condition of the electric field — the hive mind as a cloning of extrasensory perception by technology, the phase in which media extend media rather than human faculties. It updates McLuhan's "Electronics as ESP" from Explorations 8 by asking what happens when the discarnate state itself is cloned. Its counterpole is voluntary ESP. New to it — start with dialogue 65, where Cameron supplies the mechanism that makes it work.
Across the dialogues
Given a mechanism it had lacked — Cameron''s formulation that it draws its power from voluntary ESP precisely when voluntary ESP is forgotten, which Bob accepts without qualification
The definition and the diagnosis in one line — the merger is not people communicating better but the field circulating inside itself with people incidental to it.
"the collective hive mind is a cloning of ESP by technology, and it's doing its ESP within itself. That's the phase where media extend media and not our faculties."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 42:14
The mechanism Bob's account had been missing — the merger runs on the very faculty it conceals, which is why looking for its power source outside the individual comes up empty.
"Would it be fair to say that the mystery of cloned ESP is that it gets its power, it gets its dynamic from voluntary ESP, but only when voluntary ESP is forgotten?"Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 44:05
The name for it — extension that has lost track of what it is extending, which is the general form of the Android Meme's operation.
"That it's what could be called blind expression or blind extension?"Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 44:28
The nearest familiar term is invoked and then refused — consensus manufactured by argument is a print effect, while this operates below any content.
"cloned ESP is what, you know, Noam Chomsky calls the manufacturing of consensus. But it's not intellectual Gutenberg consensus."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 43:15
The counterculture is granted its aim and denied its object — the merger it went to Big Sur to reach had already happened, in a register no retreat was equipped to notice.
"a lot of the Esalen Institute retreats of the 60s were trying to get people back into their bodies or their other senses, not just the literate, and think that they're merging with that. But they did not recognize the incredible merger on the discarnate level."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 44:57
Connections
The merged pole against which voluntary ESP is defined.
The hive mind merged in cloned ESP is the membrane's condition described from the inside.