American literary agent, anthologist, and founder of the "third culture" and edge.org. In Dialogue 38 Bob tells his long story as a case of McLuhan's diffuse, unwanted influence: the young Brockman, mocked with his face on the Head (1968) poster, crammed Bucky Fuller and McLuhan to write By the Late John Brockman (1969), then built a career agenting William Irwin Thompson and other early-1970s thinkers and making "hip physicists" into public figures. Bob is the source of the physics-book "demon nuclei" in his own chart, and Brockman is the connection who steered Bob to Gerd Stern in 1993.
Across the dialogues
Enters as Bob's exhibit of the influence McLuhan did not want — the literary agent who cross-pollinated McLuhan into the culture industry and became a "third culture" broker without grasping him
Bob dates Brockman's self-mythologizing debut — the 1969 book written by cramming the era's "heavy" authors — as the seed of a career spent brokering other people's ideas.
"he put out a book called By the Late John Brockman,"
In Brockman's 100 Philosophers, McLuhan is number 100 — a placement Bob adopts as his own 1977 conviction, even as he casts Brockman himself as a "trivial" reader of McLuhan.
"McLuhan's the last philosopher."