Arthur Kroker's The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism (2004), the book Bob quotes into pages 126–128 of his own manuscript and reads aloud across the last third of dialogue 59. Its subject is Nietzsche, Heidegger and Marx read forward into digital capitalism. In the dialogues it functions less as a source than as a foil: Cameron grants its prose real power and then uses it to draw the line the series runs on — between stating the problem superbly and finding the magic circle that would let one out of it. New to it — dialogue 59 is where both long quotations are read and argued.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the session's test case — the book Bob has been quoting into his own pages becomes the occasion for Cameron to state what separates diagnosis from exit, so a source turns into the negative example the whole method is defined against
The book enters as a citation Bob is auditing in his own manuscript, not as a text he is expounding — the reading that follows is him working out why he put it where he put it.
"And he's got a book called The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, 2004."
The first quoted sentence, whose "either/or, complicit in either case" structure is what Bob hears as agreeing with him and Cameron hears as the flaw.
"When most assuredly we have finally broken beyond the industrial stage of capitalism, finding ourselves either passive observers or active participants, but fully complicit in either case, see, whether you're passive or active, you're still involved,"
The book's self-contradiction located in a single verb — the announcement of a break it then spends the sentence retracting, which Cameron takes as diagnostic of the whole genre.
"Well, the problem is that he says we have finally broken beyond. And then, as you say, he sees that we haven't."
The concession is made in full before the objection, so that what follows cannot be read as a dismissal of the book's quality.
"Kroker is really quite excellent at stating the problem. And his language is very colorful and shows a lot of art. He's a very good word merchant."
The book gets a category rather than a rebuttal — its failure is generic to a discipline, which is what makes it worth an hour of the session.
"But that's academic media ecology. And the reason that that remains locked in Gutenberg is that it remains locked in a description of the problems or as a listing of the problems."
Connections
Kroker's 2004 book, the text Bob quotes at length in the last third of dialogue 59.
Cameron reads Kroker on Nietzsche the way Heidegger read Nietzsche — as defining a problem and pointing past it unknowingly.