McLuhan's phrase for electricity as "an extension of the nervous system," which Bob promotes into the central ground of the satellite era. Where the "global theater" is the scenery everyone watches, the membrane is the environment no one can see — for Bob, the true face of Android Meme phase 1. Recurring since dialogue 05, it gets its fullest exposition in dialogue 39 — both as Bob's page-146 reading and as Cameron's archival tracing of McLuhan's two 1964 uses.
Across the dialogues
Gets its own page at last — the recurring phrase given a full working-out, Bob's page-146 reading set beside Cameron's archival proof that McLuhan used it only twice, both in 1964
Reading p.146 of his book, Bob identifies the Global Membrane with Android Meme phase 1 — the real ground of the 1960–90 era that the "global theater" only curtained, unnoticed until the internet reached the "super angelic consumer" after 1995.
"the global membrane … was the actual hidden ground of the 1960 to 90 period,"
The membrane is not a visual frame but a resonating node in which everyone "dances in the same spot" no one can see or hear — the ground for which the Global Theater's proscenium is mere scenery.
"And the membrane is a resonating node. And we're all dancing in the same spot, and you can't see or hear that spot."
Bob traces the term to McLuhan's December 1964 review of Burroughs, a coinage lately revived in B.W. Powe's book The Global Membrane.
"He uses the word global membrane in his review of Burroughs in December 64, and I heard a recent interview with Bruce Powe because his latest book is called The Global Membrane, and I didn't know if he knew it."
Reading McLuhan's 1964 foreword to Innis' Bias of Communication, Cameron finds the phrase a second time — the only other occurrence his archive shows, both dated 1964.
"electricity is, in effect, an extension of the nervous system as a kind of global membrane."
The singular-vs-plural question made explicit and left open — Bob's one timeless, contentless space "past the moon" against Cameron's synchronic plurality, the membrane forced to admit the "changeable forms" it can "snap" between
Bob's hardest statement of the membrane as one — a timeless, contentless space "always there" that "goes out past the moon," which electricity only illuminated ("the field that was already there but unseen"), never created; there is no second membrane.
"I see the Global Membrane is one space that has no content and that's always there there's only one And it goes out past the moon."
Cameron's counter reduces Bob's "only one" to a chronological artifact — the membrane is singular in time (one after another), but read synchronically, across all times at once, it is "naturally plural"; the disagreement is left standing.
"in my way of reading McLuhan, which is not chronological but is synchronic, then membrane is naturally plural."
Given its numerology against the global theater — the one dimensionless "spot" everyone co-occupies set as 1 to the theater-frame's four-part quadrophrenia, the implosion behind the proscenium arch
Bob's image for the membrane — not a place but a single dimensionless "spot," the "superangel" oneness that everyone already co-occupies ESP-close; put the Global Theater around it as a frame and the membrane is the imploded 1 to the frame's quadrophrenic 4.
"So that's the membrane, the one superangel spot we all exist in."
Turned into a clean figure/ground formula — the whole visible world of hardware named the content of the invisible membrane, the first half of the session a working-out of the Tiny Note Chart's 1-and-4 that recasts the earlier "resonating node" as the ground everything analog only curtains
Bob resolves the pair into a media-ground relation — all the visible hardware of the Global Theater is the content the membrane carries, the way a message rides a medium, so the membrane is never a thing among things but the invisible ground the whole analog world plays inside.
"I would say that the Global Theater is the content of the Global Membrane."
The founding sentence is finally read out whole, and the membrane acquires a mechanism it had been carrying without stating — nerves forming the enclosure, so the ground turns out to be made of the people inside it
Bob states the membrane's polemical function outright — it is the term he thinks the reception of McLuhan passed over in favour of the global village, and he offers his own Android Meme as the coinage that had to be invented because the better phrase went unused.
"what was lately missed was McLuhan's more relevant phrase, Global Membrane, in December 64,"
The 1964 Nation sentence read at full length, which supplies the membrane with a mechanism it had lacked on this page — not a space one occupies but the enclosure formed by outstretched nerves, so the membrane is made of the audience rather than containing it.
"Such is the law of electric media, which stretch the nerves to form a Global Membrane of enclosure."
Read as the "one" of the one-four and given an economic consequence — capitalism as the printing press's afterimage cannot survive a shared disembodied space, which is what the World Economic Forum is said to be belatedly discovering
The membrane is identified with a specific place on his chart, which makes it the merged pole against which every fragment of the four is spinning.
"It's a merge of humans via the global theater. Now that's the Global Membrane. That's the one of 14, right? That condition. The resonant node."
The membrane given an economic edge — ownership is a print effect, so the merger dissolves the thing capitalism runs on rather than being managed by it.
"Then capitalism, the afterimage of the printing press couldn't continue to function while everybody's sharing the same disembodied space and not having to own anything."
Connections
McLuhan used the phrase twice in 1964 — the December review of Burroughs and the foreword to Innis' Bias of Communication.
Bob equates the global membrane with Android Meme phase 1, the ground of the 1960–90 period.
the membrane (ground) against the "global theater" (proscenium scenery in front of it).
The hive mind merged in cloned ESP is the membrane's condition described from the inside.