Frank Zingrone's 2001 book, subtitled At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos — the one sustained attempt from within the diasporic school to write about the digital rather than the electric. Bob treats it as the closest anyone came to his own coordinates before he published them, and reads it as a book that sees the right things through the wrong body. Named as early as dialogue 08 and opened at last in 76, it is read aloud at length in dialogue 79.
Across the dialogues
Stops being a title Bob cites and becomes a text he reads against — three passages are taken in sequence and each is scored, so the book arrives in the archive already positioned: right about secrecy, right about the isolation of the networked individual, and one hologram short of the ground it is reaching for
The book's opening move is to strip the pejorative off conspiracy — secrecy is not a plot but the default condition of institutions that have become invisible, which is why Bob calls the usual label a misnaming rather than an error.
"politics and economics have always operated in secrecy."Frank Zingrone, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:00:17
Zingrone's cast of infocrats — cyberspace bandits, information high priests, chaos investors, hacker terrorists — is a priesthood rather than a class, which is what lets Bob read the passage as being about a body rather than an economy.
"In information circles, media gatekeepers are the functionaries of the new Gnostics."Frank Zingrone, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:00:45
The book's best image, and the one Bob keeps: connection at scale delivers not a crowd but a convoy of solitaries, each mistaking a forum's agreement for a community.
"Infocrats, which we could say digital bodies, cross the data desert of the internet in one-person caravans."Frank Zingrone, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:01:04
The passage where Zingrone comes nearest to Bob's own ground, and the exact measure of the shortfall — one hologram is seen, containing all transmissions, but not the holeopathic condition in which causes merge with effects.
"Every square centimeter of Earth has become a holographic point, that's a good statement, containing all of the transmissions over the face of the globe."Frank Zingrone, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:01:54
Bob's four-word rebuttal to the sentence he has just praised — the holographic point is granted and the surface it is distributed over is denied, which is how he keeps the image while refusing its geography.
"There ain't no globe."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:02:26
The book's limit stated as an equipment problem rather than a failure of insight — Zingrone can see the erosion and knows the computer is behind it, but reads it all off a TV landscape, so he never reaches the five-body account Kroker does.
"Bogged down with TV concerns, TV Body, because he keeps it in TV landscape."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:05:32
Connections
Zingrone's 2001 book, subtitled At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos, written out of the 1995–2000 digital turn.
Its holographic-point image is read by Bob as approaching the holeopathic without reaching it.