person
also known as Chomsky

American linguist and political critic, present in the series as a reference point Bob reaches for and then declines. In dialogue 65 the manufacture of consensus is offered as the closest familiar description of cloned ESP before being set aside: consensus produced by argument and information is a print effect, while the merger Bob is describing runs below any content at all. New to him — dialogue 65.

Across the dialogues

65

The borrowing and the refusal happen in one sentence — which is how Bob marks the difference between a critique of media content and an account of media as environment.

"cloned ESP is what, you know, Noam Chomsky calls the manufacturing of consensus. But it's not intellectual Gutenberg consensus."
Bob Dobbsasserted

Connections

contrasted withCloned ESP

Bob uses manufactured consensus as an approximation, then rejects it as a Gutenberg model.