The German philosopher, invoked once but load-bearingly: Cameron cites Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche's Will to Power to argue that the will to power "is really the power to power" — a conflation that ties Nietzsche's late thought to the Tech Body's self-driving power and the Gutenberg Galaxy. New to it — start with dialogue 27.
Across the dialogues
Enters as Cameron's authority on Nietzsche — his reading of the will to power as "the power to power" is what folds Nietzsche back into the Gutenberg Galaxy's conflation
Cameron enlists Heidegger to collapse Nietzsche's will to power into "the power to power" — a self-referential conflation, which lets him read "the power that flew itself" in the tech-body interview as the same Gutenberg move.
"the will to power, at least according to Heidegger, and I think Heidegger was correct, is that the will to power is really the power to power."
Promoted from a single citation to the episode's structural spine — Being and Time as the textbook nobody understood, the "abysmal drop" its readers papered over, "in-framing" read as McLuhan's parenthesis, and the Sophist epigraph as the root of the Star Wars figure
The episode's structural frame — Being and Time (1927), written "as a kind of textbook," was understood by nobody, so Heidegger spent the rest of his life showing the "abysmal drop" its readers "tried to paper... over," the same task Cameron says McLuhan inherited.
"had come out in 1927 and literally nobody had understood what it was about."
Cameron equates McLuhan's "parenthesis" with Heidegger's "in-framing" — framing that denies the parentheses yet "needs to be seen to point beyond itself," so limitation and understanding belong together rather than opposing each other.
"he means the denial of parentheses,"
Cameron roots the whole "Star Wars" figure in Heidegger's epigraph — Being and Time opens on Plato's Sophist and its Gigantomachia, "the battle of the gods and the giants," which "can be thought of as Star Wars" becoming conscious "in the mode of being unconscious."
"The beginning of Being and Time is a quotation from Plato's Dialogue."
Supplies the session's ethical anchor rather than another perceptual term — the shepherds-of-being phrase is read against its usual sense and made to carry Cameron's whole account of what is actually at stake, with the danger relocated from human extinction to human dereliction
The phrase is rescued from its obvious reading before it is used — being is the employer, not the flock, which converts a piece of ontological piety into a job description.
"as Heidegger said, human beings are the shepherds of being. And when he said that human beings are the shepherds of being, he didn't mean that being is like sheep and human beings are shepherding being in that sense."
The reordering the whole exchange with Bob turns on — human extinction is of no consequence in itself, so the catastrophe is the abandoned charge rather than the ending.
"the terrible thing has nothing to do with us dying. It has to do with our calling to care for other things that we're not paying attention to right now."
Connections
Cameron cites Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche's will to power as "the power to power," a conflation.