McLuhan's term from page 130 of Understanding Media for a bypassing of speech by a kind of collective extrasensory perception. Dialogue 73 gives it the fullest treatment in the series: Cameron supplies the reading that keeps it out of mysticism, and Bob attaches it to McLuhan's private admission that he had miscalculated global management. The pairing turns the term from a forecast into an account of something that arrived and was captured.
Across the dialogues
Turned from a prophecy into a post-mortem — the thing McLuhan expected in the 1960s is judged to have happened and gone unnoticed, then to have been captured by the very forces it might have exposed
The analogy that fixes the scale — the simulation is to speech what a planetary thermostat is to housing, an infrastructural replacement rather than an enhancement.
"Just as global thermostats could bypass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses."
The forecast is graded as correct, which converts the rest of the discussion from prediction into a question about why an arrival of that size left no mark.
"I think it did happen in the 1960s, as a matter of fact."
The reading that disarms the mystical hearing — "immediate" means known-to-be-there in the way chemistry is, not intuited; the term names a theory-level grasp of media, not an altered state.
"And what he means by simulation of consciousness is like what chemistry is to the physical world."
The admission that explains the non-arrival — management could hold the evolution of media just short of the simulation, which is the one variable McLuhan says he got wrong.
"So I say McLuhan told me two separate times that he miscalculated global management."
The reversal that closes the argument — the instrument of possible awakening is the same instrument the manipulators required, so the simulation did not fail so much as change hands.
"But the very way that that might have become conscious was taken over by the forces that were manipulating consciousness."
Connections
The phrase comes from page 130, in the passage on languages as stuttering extensions.
Bob's account of the miscalculation — management held media at the stage just before the simulation could arrive.