Arthur Kroker's 1993 book, subtitled Virtual Reality, Android Music, and Electric Flesh. Bob reads it as the best of the post-McLuhan attempts — a book that is "attempting to complexify what McLuhan simplified" — and dates Kroker's adoption of "android" to the same years as his own. The long passage on gene astronauts warp-jumping out of the body is read whole in episode 76 and then deliberately left unopened: Cameron judges it too good to gloss at the end of a session, so it becomes the agenda for the next one. Enter there.
Across the dialogues
Promoted from quarry to set text, read aloud at length and treated as a rival attempt on the same ground rather than a source to be plundered — which is why the session breaks off mid-passage and schedules its unpacking for the next one
The book is introduced with its subtitle intact, which matters because each of its three terms names a strand Bob has been running separately for thirty years.
"So that's from his great book, Spasm, in 1993, subtitled Virtual Reality, Android Music, and Electric Flesh."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:56:31
Bob's standing verdict on the whole post-McLuhan literature, delivered here as praise — the complication is the point, not a failure of nerve.
"it is attempting to complexify what McLuhan simplified."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:56:52
A parallel invention rather than a borrowing, which is how Bob keeps Kroker as a peer instead of a source and preserves his own claim on the Android Meme.
"He's starting to use the word android in that period, around the time I'm starting to use it."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:56:40
The passage opens in the past perfect — not a prediction of departure but a report that it already happened, which is the tense Bob's own work has used since the eighties.
"Maybe we are already living in another dimension of space travel, in a subspace warp jump."Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:57:00
Kroker's central figure, and the reason Bob reads him rather than the theorists of disembodiment — the exit from the body is made concrete and biological instead of metaphysical.
"Not simply the violent expulsion of the body from the weight of earthly gravity into galactic space, but the development of microscopic gene astronauts."Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:57:14
Bob domesticates the figure by finding it already in a 1976 comic novel, which is his habitual move — the theory arrives late to what fiction had staged.
"you see the genes parasited in that novel by Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:58:23
The passage is annexed to Bob's own periodization — Kroker's genes leaving chemistry become the transfer between two of the Five Bodies, which is how a 1993 book gets read as documentation of the chart.
"It's the warp jump from the Android Meme to the Tech Body."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:58:41
The sentence Bob stops on, and the reason the passage is left for next time — its rhetoric is doing something his own prose does not attempt.
"The primal gene, therefore, finally prepared to abandon its evolutionary home in bodily chemistry, to fulfill his destiny by going virtual"Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:59:25
The unguarded reaction that certifies the passage as the session's high-water mark, and immediately raises the question of whether McLuhan could have written it.
"what a fucking quote"Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:59:35
The book is not glossed but deferred — a rare move in this series, and the reason Spasm carries forward as an open agenda item rather than a closed citation.
"Maybe because that quote is so impressive and so interesting, maybe what we want to do is leave it for the next time."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 2:00:41
Read at last, and then read a second time with every "gene" replaced by "meme" — the deferred citation turns into the hinge of Bob's argument, the book supplying the passage his own vocabulary could not write
The image Bob held two sessions for supplies the physical picture his warp-jump vocabulary lacked — departure rendered as a launch rather than an abstraction.
"Not simply the violent expulsion of the body from the weight of earthly gravity into galactic space, but the development of microscopic gene astronauts."Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 2:00:33
Kroker dates the departure to the present tense, which is what makes the passage usable as Bob's periodization instead of as prophecy.
"This is a time of primordial genetic rocketry, in which genes suddenly are accelerated into orbit around their previous liquid station in plodding human bodies."Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 1:53:17
The line Bob most wants, because its shrug does the work — the migration is posed as unremarkable, so the burden falls on any reader who thinks it strange.
"And why shouldn't genes go cybernetic?"Arthur Kroker, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 1:53:44
The substitution Bob performs line by line is given its justification — if the two were never distinct, rereading the passage with "meme" is recovering what it said rather than rewriting it.
"I think your insight, as I understand it, is that genes were always memes. And so what is told by Darwin in evolutionary history is actually a history of memes."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 78 (16 Nov 2023), 2:02:00
Connections
Kroker's 1993 book, subtitled Virtual Reality, Android Music, and Electric Flesh.
Bob dates Kroker's use of "android" to the same period as his own, and takes the Android Meme processor from this book and its companions.
Bob reads the genes' warp jump out of bodily chemistry as the passage from the Android Meme to the Tech Body.