Bob's wordplay on McLuhan's "mass man": where the mass man is everybody merged into the Global Membrane, the masked man (spelled out M-A-S-K-E-D) is the autonomous "nobody" that same merger produces — the figure who, given digital autonomy, floats above the system and hijacks it. The concept anchors dialogue 26's account of the Tech Body's power, tying the "solar government" and "surveillance capitalism" hijackers to a structure Bob reads in McLuhan: the person between identities, at once collectively conscious and radically alone. Cameron supplies the figure's polarity — the masked man "can be a hijacker" or "a celebrant," with a whole range in between.
Across the dialogues
Introduced as the autonomous pole of the mass man — the merged "everybody" also becomes the masked "nobody," a super angel who hijacks whole systems, its polarity running from hijacker to celebrant
The masked man defined as the autonomous pole — where the mass man merges "everybody into nobody," the masked man is what floats free of that merger, a "super angel" able to hijack the systems it belongs to.
"becoming a super angel that can hijack whole systems."
The figure scaled to the planet — Bob's "solar government," the autonomous operator who, disconnecting from the tribal membrane, floats above it to perform the "holeopathic hijacking" of nations and planets.
"There's what I call the solar government. You could start floating around the planet and hijacking the planet."
Cameron generalizes the figure past hijacking — the masked man is "the nobody," the person between identities, a mechanism "always going on with everybody" that can be misused for hijacking or "expressed in conversion."
"the masked man is, by definition, the nobody"
The figure's moral polarity — the same masked-man mechanism runs from hijacker to "celebrant," a superiority that "entails responsibility," with "a whole range in between."
"on the one hand can be a hijacker, and on the other hand can be a celebrant."
Connections
The autonomous "nobody" the merged global membrane produces — the hijacker who floats above the very system it belongs to.
The autonomous hijacker whose search for "who is in charge" is the Anthropomorphic Physical's projection at work.