Bob's term for the pole that has to be chosen — the deliberate engagement of the merged electric field, against the cloned ESP one is otherwise simply inside. It is a trend rather than a state: nobody occupies it, and most people only touch it when forced to perform sociality. Its other name in Bob's vocabulary is the Anthropomorphic Physical, and the page his book stops on makes it the condition of Web 2.0. New to it — start with dialogue 65.
Across the dialogues
Given its fullest statement — the deliberate, barely-held pole against the merger, and the sentence Bob''s book stops on: it is the condition of Web 2.0
The pole is defined by the mode of access rather than by content — nothing in the environment supplies it, so it exists only where it is chosen.
"you balance it off with retrieving your individual subject mystery, and that's called Anthropomorphic Physical or AP. But it can only be voluntary."
The present named as a one-sided drift — the voluntary pole thins out while the merger goes unexamined, which is the imbalance the book is written against.
"the crisis today is we're going way into barely voluntary ESP and ignoring and sticking your finger up against cloned ESP."
Its everyday form is minimal and reluctant — a performance of being human put on for occasions, not a practice.
"Voluntary ESP is what people are not doing very much. They're only... doing it when they're forced to communicate and show some kind of sociality."
The sentence the session ends on — the next phase of the network is defined by what its users must deliberately do, which leaves the phase itself an open question.
"Voluntary ESP is the condition of Web 2.0."
The pair is finally read off the page it was written for, and in the reading it changes hands — Bob defines the two poles as hidden effect against identified content, and Cameron takes the voluntary term back off him and turns it on the present, where it names not a retrieval but the condition of a news that has come apart
The page-139 definition, read aloud at last — the involuntary pole is not an occult capacity but the ordinary unavoidable residue of the analog broadcast era.
"Involuntary ESP is the collective effect of radio and TV."
The wall is what makes the voluntary pole possible at all, which dates the term: it is an artifact of the digital break rather than a perennial human option.
"the later digital world puts a wall up that allows you to separate from the collective ESP of radio and TV."
The one point in a session spent dissolving history into perennial structure where Cameron grants Bob a genuinely historical claim — the concession is narrow, and he offers no other.
"I agree with that. It's a historical happening."
The cleanest statement of the pair in the archive — the split runs along ground and figure rather than between two powers, which is why the voluntary pole keeps collapsing into mere opinion.
"So the hidden effects of media are what I mean by involuntary ESP. The voluntary is the verbal content that you're identifying with and listening to a show and deciding whether you agree with it or not, matching or making with it."
Cameron turns Bob's term against its own hopeful sense — the deliberate pole has arrived, and what it produced is not a retrieved subject but a news made of whoever decided it.
"Fragmented voluntary ESP. Isn't that what we have in the media today? The news has degenerated into whatever some person says it is. So it's inherently fragmented, but it's voluntary ESP because somebody has decided that."
Connections
The two terms are defined against each other; cloned ESP draws its power from voluntary ESP being forgotten.
Bob uses voluntary AP and voluntary ESP interchangeably for the retrieval of the individual subject.