Bob Dobbs's term for the older media environments — radio, TV, newspaper, book — once they stop being environments and become landscapes you move through: archives, museums, and bureaucracies preserving the wealth they created. The word arrives in dialogue 72 from a paragraph of the Trump pamphlet, and Cameron McEwen's reaction to it ("that's a good word") redirects the whole session. Its force is that the scapes do not go away when they are displaced: they must still be fed and housed, and their collective weight is what leaves revolutionaries with nothing left to topple. New to it — start with dialogue 72.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the word the session is built on — Cameron singles it out of a paragraph Bob is merely reading aloud, and it turns the media past from something displaced into something bureaucratized and still owed a living
The scapes are what digital communication left behind — the massive media landscapes shrunk small enough to sit inside a phone, which is what gives the chemical body its new autonomy.
"they gradually shrunk those massive techno-environments."
Cameron's four-word intervention is what promotes the term — Bob is reading the pamphlet aloud and would have moved past it, and the rest of the session is the elaboration this remark asks for.
"That's a good word."
The political consequence, stated as what the revolutionaries of every stripe failed to foresee — displaced media become collective wealth and collective memory rather than disappearing, so there is no longer an enemy proportionate to the anger.
"what the revolutionaries, anarchists, right, left, center, missed is that the old media environments would be bureaucratized."
Cameron supplies the developmental reading Bob had not made explicit — the scapes start as figures one can name and evolve into forms there is not yet any way of relating to.
"I think I hear you saying that there's a kind of evolution going on where these mini-states slash archives slash scapes begin as recognizable figures."
The generation raised inside them is described as feeding rather than studying — which is why Bob says politics and the institutions have nothing left to say to them.
"Their dangling ganglia is eating all these scapes in many states."
Connections
McLuhan's "mini-states" is the term Bob reaches for once Cameron stops him on the word — the same bureaucratized media landscapes under an earlier name.
The scapes are the analog residue the Android Meme's second phase replays as its content.