McLuhan's phrase for the electric presidency — "the automated presidential surrogate will be the superlative nobody" — and the book's name for what power becomes once the office is a role imitated rather than held. Bob Dobbs treats it as the political hinge of his Trump reading; Cameron McEwen hears in it McLuhan's Joyce-like humor — a contradiction, since "nobody" has no degrees, that people nonetheless spend everything to become. New here — start with the McLuhan line in dialogue 31, then the paradox of the president who must be everybody and nobody at once.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the book's political core — McLuhan's electric-presidency phrase worked from Nixon through Zappa's "Byzantine process" to Trump, and heard by Cameron as a Joycean contradiction people ruin themselves to become
McLuhan's phrase, which Bob makes the book's political axis — the president is not a president but a surrogate imitating one, briefed into a knowledge he must keep silent, so the office is a studied vacancy rather than a seat of power.
"the automated presidential surrogate will be the superlative nobody,"
Cameron reads the phrase as McLuhan's Joyce-like humor — "nobody" has no up or down, so attaching a superlative to it is a contradiction, yet people spend "all of their lives and all of their fortunes" chasing the impossible title.
"The superlative nobody is funny on a whole bunch of different levels."
The paradox squared late in the session — McLuhan's demand that the president "be everybody" collapses into the same vacancy, against an individualist culture that reads charisma as standing out from everybody else.
"The everybody is a nobody."
Connections
McLuhan's phrase for the automated presidential surrogate, which Bob makes the book's political core.
The president who knew the establishment but never reached the surrogate's required silence.