Chemistry and Mediology
Dialogue 01 · October 20, 2020
Bob Dobbs and Cameron McEwen reconvene after a three-to-four-year gap, opening a run of dialogues from a sheaf of questions Cameron had emailed since they last spoke. What begins as a tour of McLuhan’s touchstones — the Drama of Cognition, Finnegans Wake, Wyndham Lewis — tightens by the end into a single consequential reading of what “the medium is the message” really means, and into the “chemistry versus meteorology” distinction that will divide Bob’s and Cameron’s approaches for the rest of the series.
Arrogant Superiority and the Tech Body
Dialogue 02 · November 10, 2020
Three weeks after their first recorded dialogue, Bob Dobbs and Cameron McEwen reconvene to work through Bob’s newly published 187-page essay on McLuhan and the “Tech Body” — written over three months and posted October 31, 2020. Cameron has read it closely, with sticky notes, and brings a set of questions about voice, time, and the essay’s operating mode. The conversation turns into a sustained meditation on what it means to think rigorously about media at all.
Second Sight and the Science of Media
Dialogue 03 · November 19, 2020
Resuming mid-conversation from the previous session, Cameron finishes his account of the NAEB years and then reads McLuhan’s whole intellectual formation — from Muller-Thym and the epyllion form through Kuhn to Skornia — as the slow making of a Kuhnian revolution in the humanities, unlocked one interlocutor at a time.
The Cul-de-sac: Nietzsche, Percepts, and the Way Out
Dialogue 04 · November 26, 2020
In their fourth session, Bob and Cameron take up the philosophical structure underlying all the previous conversations: the cul-de-sac. Cameron traces it from his Princeton undergraduate thesis on Nietzsche’s second untimely meditation, through a disappointing visit to McLuhan’s Coach House in fall 1968, and into a precise six-step account of how Western thought advanced — step by step — into nihilism. The second half reads closely from Bob’s essay to show that McLuhan’s distinction between “light through” and “light on” is the answer Nietzsche could see the need for but couldn’t reach.
Psychological Decentralization: The Cul-de-sac and Phatic Communion
Dialogue 05 · December 10, 2020
In their fifth and longest session — nearly two and a half hours — Bob and Cameron press deeper into the cul-de-sac than anywhere else in the series. Cameron hardens it into a genuine metaphysical trap: if everything said about media is itself shaped by media, and we have always already started, renewal can come from no vantage outside the regress. Against that, Bob sets the most radical proposal McLuhan ever made — a rarely read 1949 essay on “psychological decentralization,” which locates renewal not above the situation but in millions of individual acts of will.
The Orchestra and the Medium: Giedion, the Winnipeg Boys, and Making
Dialogue 06 · December 17, 2020
Their sixth session opens the formal reading of Bob’s essay What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump, but its most consequential thread is a genealogy: “the medium is the message” as the residue of a failure, not an aphorism. Cameron traces it to Sigfried Giedion’s orchestra — gather the best minds from every faculty to voice the common truth they already share — which McLuhan carried into the culture-and-technology seminar; when that seminar collapsed, the phrase was what was left standing.
Trump as Shaman: Stuttering, Quotation, and the Interior Landscape
Dialogue 07 · December 24, 2020
Recorded on Christmas Eve 2020, this is the longest and most philosophically dense session yet. Cameron opens on a fresh image of the cul-de-sac — a landscape of canyons, where what you need is always just over the ridge in the next canyon, and the human condition is nothing but the crossing between them. From there the hosts bend toward a single wager: that consciousness is being turned inside out.
Interior Landscape: Chemistry, Ambiguity, and the Grammar of Media
Dialogue 08 · December 31, 2020
Recorded on New Year’s Eve 2020, this is the most autobiographical and the most systematic session at once — and the two are a single arc. Cameron tells the story of his own formation — Princeton, Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty, and the decade he spent alone on the Nietzschean cul-de-sac — and shows how the whole of it finally converged on McLuhan’s project.
Bottom-Up, Top-Down: Bob’s Charts and the History of Media
Dialogue 09 · January 7, 2021
The ninth session opens with Bob walking Cameron through his 1985 charts — available at ionandbob.com under “Bob’s Charts.” Two charts are the focus: the “bottom-up” chart mapping cultural history from the phonetic alphabet through the second coming (c. 1980s), and the complementary “top-down identity” chart tracing the power bureaucracy through the same eras. Cameron’s job is to translate Bob’s diachronic (through-time) reading into his own synchronic (figure-and-ground spectrum) framework; he finds that they converge more closely than either had expected.
The Bob Dobbs Formula Chart: Media Archetypes and American Political History
Dialogue 10 · January 14, 2021
Bob Dobbs walks Cameron McEwen through the Bob Dobbs Formula Chart — a 1995 synthesis of his two 1985 media charts, structured around the family of Finnegans Wake, with ALP and HCE as dual grounds and Shem, Shaun, and Issy as figures. Across eight media eras from the telegraph through the Anthropomorphic Physical phase, it maps 270 years of media history against American political figures from Washington to Perot, showing how effects precede their causes by decades. Along the way, Cameron supplies a significant correction to the record: Marshall McLuhan’s public account of first reading Harold Innis was false.
The Inflation Crowd: Humiliation, the Flatline, and the Tiny Note Chart
Dialogue 11 · January 21, 2021
The Bob Dobbs Formula Chart reaches its bottom levels — the holeopathic Cliché Probes, the Anthropomorphic Physical, and the “flatline” where the ground gives out — before Bob and Cameron read McLuhan’s 1974 essay “Media and the Inflation Crowd” end to end. The session closes with the companion Tiny Note Chart and Bob’s account of xenochrony.
The Tiny Note Chart: The Android Meme as Afterimage
Dialogue 12 · January 28, 2021
Leaving the Bob Dobbs Formula Chart at the flatline, Bob and Cameron cross over to its companion, the Tiny Note Chart. The first hour digresses out of the chart’s bottom row into memes and the Android Meme — the GameStop short squeeze had everyone “memeing” stocks, and Bob boasts that his coinage “won” over “virtualizing” — then the phone as “the new gum” and time as causes merging with effects.
The Tiny Note Chart: Cosmic Awareness, the Holeopathic Satellite, and Trump as the Name
Dialogue 13 · February 11, 2021
The thirteenth session on Bob’s book What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump is a long detour: rather than read the Tiny Note Chart top to bottom, Bob heads straight for its bottom-right corner and the “Rumpelstiltskin” that lives there, and Cameron keeps returning to a single question — why range over such enormous variety at all. The chart, it turns out, is a machine for naming: what its interacting parts finally do is “pose the question of the name”, and the name Bob is working toward is Trump.
The Tiny Note Chart: Lockdown Bob Rule and the Science of the Interior Landscape
Dialogue 14 · February 18, 2021
The third straight session on the Tiny Note Chart divides in two. Bob first walks the chart cell by cell — the DNA/RNA row, the subatomic particles, the Shakespeare tragedies, the Platonic solids, and the five “numbers” that head its columns — until Cameron proposes that the phrase “all four plus stages of apprehension” is what really names it. From there the conversation becomes an argument about what to do with a chart: can pattern recognition be turned into a science, or does it only certify the personality of the one who drew it?
The Unused Esperanto, the Android Meme, and the Citadel of Consciousness
Dialogue 15 · February 25, 2021
The Tiny Note Chart gets its send-off, and the session turns, for its long middle, to a single contested word. Bob has used “Esperanto” for years to name what McLuhan was after; Cameron, who has always resisted it, tracks down McLuhan’s one mention — visual form as “an unused Esperanto at everybody’s command” — and reads it as a doorway rather than a destination. From there the conversation becomes a patient reconstruction of how McLuhan reached “the medium is the message”: the search for a “common focus” as decisive for perception as the chemical elements were for the physical world.
The Alchemist and the Chemist, the Cloud of Faces, and McLuhan the Comedian
Dialogue 16 · March 4, 2021
The question the Tiny Note Chart left hanging comes back open: is McLuhan the ground of the chart’s four figures, or just one figure caught inside a larger pattern? Cameron presses it through a sustained analogy — reporters visiting the labs of alchemists and chemists around 1800 — to ask Bob for his “principle of recognition,” what in a blind paragraph lets him say “this is LaRouche” or “this is McLuhan.”
The Vertical Now, the Airplane View, and the Clinics of Truth
Dialogue 17 · March 11, 2021
The seventeenth session opens on the vertical dimension of the Tiny Note Chart. Bob reads it through McLuhan’s ratio car is to movie as airplane is to TV and the “air perspective on the human scene”, but Cameron keeps pulling the chart toward a harder question: is it a shareable method, or only Bob’s private instrument?
The Citadel, the Gap, and the Nova Scotia School of Communication
Dialogue 18 · March 18, 2021
Why can no institution on earth even pose the question of peace? Cameron McEwen’s answer is a cul-de-sac — a dead end Western thought entered that blocks the very perception needed to escape it, so that a program carried into the White House would meet “absolutely no understanding,” Republican or Democrat alike. Across the first hour he presses the case through an island-in-peril parable and insists the only exit is a chemistry-like collective research into media — not a think tank, not a broadcast, not a technological fix.
The Technique of Flight, and the Trump Book’s First Two Quotes
Dialogue 19 · March 25, 2021
Before opening his own Trump book, Bob hands the session to Cameron, whose February 2021 essay “The Technique of Flight” becomes a lens for reading McLuhan through a rarely-cited 1961 article and Bertrand Russell’s “technique of suspended judgment”. The paradox at its center — “how not to have a point of view” — runs from the Romantics, who fixed experience in the aesthetic moment, through the Cubist destruction of the single viewpoint, to electric media that make the unconscious “flight” between moments visible.
The May 1959 Letter, the Cultic Toilette, and Trump the Cognitive Artist
Dialogue 20 · April 1, 2021
A McLuhan letter from May 1959 — written out of a Winnipeg talk, sent to a Maclean-Hunter executive who “didn’t understand it” — turns out to carry the earliest “global village” Cameron knows of, five years before Understanding Media. From its “do-it-yourself world” the twentieth session builds a single frame for reading Bob’s Trump text: McLuhan’s early-1950s split between two schools of art, the moral-cathartic and the cognitive, and Trump as the cognitive artist to whom ethical judgment simply cannot stick.
Interview with the Tech Body: iON, the Five Bodies, and the Condition Your Condition Is In
Dialogue 21 · April 8, 2021
The last item in Bob’s Trump book is an interview — with “the Tech Body” — and the twenty-first session reads it start to finish. Bob first lays out the framework it presupposes: iON, the channeled “anti-environment” he began talking to by accident in 2009, and a five-body model whose newest mutation, the “Tech Body,” he says “created Trump”.
The Tech Body as ‘the Single Driver’: the Ark of the Covenant, Nick Land’s Nothing, and the Android Meme Acquiring Personality
Dialogue 22 · April 15, 2021
Bob calls it “the punchline of the book,” and in the twenty-second session he and Cameron finally reach it — resuming “at the top of PDF 181” to read the Tech Body’s own answer, that it has been “attacked, captured, and moved” and is now “the driver, the single driver”. The session is Cameron pressing that claim from two sides at once: the interview’s slippery grammar, where the speaker “keeps jumping around” and refuses to “stay in one noun,” and the contradiction that the Tech Body is at once “part of iON” and “some kind of satanic power”.
The Tech Body’s ‘Based Reality’: Furry Lint, the Two Robots, and the Protein of the Interior Landscape
Dialogue 23 · April 22, 2021
“I may have got that backwards.” McLuhan’s shrug over whether cliché becomes archetype or archetype becomes cliché opens this final session on the tech-body interview — and Cameron refuses the indifference: reversibility, he says, is “built into what humans are.” From that flip the conversation descends into a “topsy-turvy” world where the self that would make sense of things “has fallen apart” — “there is no you.”
Interrogating the Black Power: Menippean Satire, the Alive Mind, and Making the Memes Become Science
Dialogue 24 · April 29, 2021
For once the essay stays closed. This is “a different kind of conversation” — no reading of the tech-body interview, but a running argument over whether the Tech Body is even negative. Cameron’s answer organizes the session: what looks like technology “taking away the power” is really a “giving away” of it, and the only way from the first two positions into the third is “to interrogate the black power”. Around that turn cluster a long history of Menippean satire, the test of the “alive mind,” and Cameron’s centerpiece — that the scattered memes must “become science.”
Without Ezra Pound There Is No McLuhan: the Bland Condition, the Peterson Mirror, and Giving Away the Power
Dialogue 25 · June 10, 2021
Page 183, and the Tech Body is still talking. The reading of Bob’s Trump essay reaches its most extreme line — “without Ezra Pound, there is no Marshall McLuhan” — which Bob defends as “a correct fallacy” and Cameron turns into biography: the poet whose eclectic erudition tore McLuhan out of literary provincialism into politics and history.
The Anthropomorphic Physical, the Coach House Years, and the Masked Man
Dialogue 26 · June 17, 2021
A single coined term carries this session. The Anthropomorphic Physical — Bob’s name for the fifth, “Dobbs” quadrant of the Tiny Note Chart — is the register in which humans project human qualities into the anti-environment, and picking up the question dialogue 25 left for “next week”, Bob gives it its fullest definition before folding Nietzsche’s nihilism into the chart as one “style of anthropomorphism.” The long middle is memoir: Bob’s years as the silent attendee at McLuhan’s coach house seminars and an ambivalent portrait of Ted Carpenter, the “athlete of media” who curdled into bitterness.
The Tech Body’s Last Word: the Gutenberg Galaxy, and the Esoteric Observer
Dialogue 27 · June 24, 2021
The twenty-seventh session closes the book. Reading “the last bit where TechBody has the final word” — the concluding pages of the appendix to Bob’s Trump book — the two hosts spend most of the hour on a single McLuhanite figure: the Tech Body’s warning that “you’re looking at the event horizon and judging your condition based on where you see other conditions conflate,” which Cameron reads as “a precise description of the Gutenberg Galaxy”.
’Undo 45’: the Tech Body’s Trump Prophecy, the Monster of Figure and Ground, and Bob’s McLuhan Years
Dialogue 28 · July 1, 2021
A dropped call becomes an omen: last week’s recording cut off at the 45-minute mark just as the reading reached the crowd’s cry to “Undo 45,” which Cameron takes as a McLuhanite “feed forward.” Finishing the tech-body dialogue from Bob’s Trump book, the two turn Bob’s closing instruction — “make this quote about Catch-22 more famous than the medium is the message” — into a whole program for reading the late McLuhan.
‘What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump’: the Shaman, the Two Schools, and the Forged Check
Dialogue 29 · July 8, 2021
Bob reopens his Trump book from the very front, and its opening essay turns out to run on a distinction he says almost no one knows — McLuhan’s two schools of the creative act. The cathartic, moral view - the reflex of journalism and the humanities - can only write “a forged check on our hopes and sympathies”; the cognitive view reads the world’s “radiant signatures,” and only it, Bob argues, can perceive a president like Trump.
The Communication Problem: the Cul-de-Sac, the Evergreens, and Making vs Matching
Dialogue 30 · July 15, 2021
Ten sessions deep in the end of Bob’s Trump book, the pair finally turn to its front page — and immediately snag on a single word. Cameron’s correction of Bob’s “conceptual/perceptual” pairing opens onto the session’s real subject: the communication problem, the 2,500-year failure of great perceivers to hand on what they saw.
The Global Village Theater, Big Brother Inside, and the Superlative Nobody
Dialogue 31 · July 22, 2021
Having read the end of Bob’s Trump book across the previous sessions, the two turn back to the second Part (the book)‘s opening pages — and Cameron names the method the book shares with its subjects: to reveal things “in and through” Trump the way Bob reveals them “in and through” McLuhan, channeling a phrase McLuhan never developed, “the global village theater”. What follows is a near line-by-line reading toward the book’s political core, the “superlative nobody,” before the back half turns philosophical — cliché and archetype, frictionlessness, and the two forms of mind.
Balance as the Last Word: Overkill, the Meanings of Medium, and Easterbrook’s Uncertainty
Dialogue 32 · July 29, 2021
“Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them” — the Take Today line Cameron reads to open the session turns the “relative peace” of nuclear overkill into its own deadliest danger, and sets the word he returns to all hour: balance. McLuhan the Catholic holds that “balance is the last word,” but only ever as a teeter-totter, balanced by unbalance. The rest of the dialogue tests that conviction against the changing meanings of “medium” and, at length, a 1960 argument over whether uncertainty disables or enables thought.
Reading Baudrillard’s Simulations: the Disappearance of the Medium, the Genetic Code, and ‘We Are All Louds’
Dialogue 33 · August 5, 2021
On p.27 of Bob’s Trump book sits a long passage from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations — the one text, Bob argues, to have caught the disappearance of medium and message alongside Marshall McLuhan. Across the thirty-third session the two read it line by line: Cameron hears the whole passage as the cul-de-sac described from inside, its real subject the genesis of a world where life and TV have dissolved into each other, while Bob hears in it the book’s first real word on the Trump phenomenon.
The Magic of Gutenberg: Innis’ Nineteenth Century, Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril, and Tactility Squared into AI
Dialogue 34 · August 19, 2021
A footnote turns out to hold a century. Finishing his line-by-line reading of Jean Baudrillard, Bob hands the hour to Cameron, who has been rereading Harold Innis’ 1946 Political Economy in the Modern State — and finds, in the last note of an essay on nineteenth-century English literature, Edward Bulwer-Lytton writing in 1833 that “the magic of Gutenberg conjured a wide chasm between the past and future history of mankind”. The Gutenberg Galaxy, stated a century and a quarter early.
The Tech Body Reads Baudrillard: Simulation, the Cul-de-Sac, Trump as Unconscious Artist, and Quadrophrenia
Dialogue 35 · August 26, 2021
A page-by-page reading of Jean Baudrillard’s “Precession of Simulacra” becomes the occasion for a larger wager: that everything the French theorist gropes toward, McLuhan had already said. Cameron keeps returning Baudrillard’s simulation to a single diagnosis — the modern world talking its way into a cul-de-sac it cannot exit — while Bob turns the reading toward his own project, updating McLuhan so he “anticipated the Tech Body,” technology come alive and orchestrating every digital medium, with Donald Trump as its unconscious artist.
The McLuhan Industry and the Archive: Signing the Counterfeit Check, Archive Fever, and the Battle of the Colossi
Dialogue 36 · September 9, 2021
Can Art get anyone out of the cul-de-sac? The thirty-sixth dialogue turns Cameron McEwen’s answer — no, because the artist must “sign” the work and the signature rests on nothing but itself, what McLuhan called “signing a counterfeit check” — into a single sustained figure: the archive.
The Archive Incarnate: Archive Fever, Process as Figure, and Innis’ Balance
Dialogue 37 · September 23, 2021
An archive begins here as something almost banal — a place where you stop. Prompted by Cameron McEwen’s reading of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, the two hosts follow that stopping-place from Hermes’ roadside markers to the pyramids and the Alexandrian library, then collapse it into the present as Bob Dobbs’s governing formula: the Tech Body is “the archive incarnate”. From there the archive turns ephemeral, and Finnegans Wake becomes its prophet.
The Trump Tetrad: Figure and Ground, the So-What Letter, and the Optophone
Dialogue 38 · October 7, 2021
Chapter 6 of Bob Dobbs’ Trump book closes on a four-power Tetrad — Trump enhancing the Rumpelstiltskin effect over the Android Meme, obsolescing the continuous iconic presidency, retrieving the knight and the vampire, and reversing into an emperor-cum-saint.
The Super Angel and the Global Membrane: Lewis’ Angels, Kroker’s Body Drift, and the Annotated Wake
Dialogue 39 · October 21, 2021
A session that opens on p.174 of the Trump book and turns straight back to p.146, until the detour becomes the episode. Bob Dobbs sets the Global Membrane — the unseen ground of the 1960–90 world, which he ties to the Android Meme’s first phase — against the merely scenic “global theater,” then builds toward the super angel: the discarnate human who, unlike an angel fixed to one “there,” is everywhere at once.
Tactility Squared and the Co-anesthetic God-Self: Lewis’ Quadrophrenia, Gibson’s Cyberspace, and Cliché McLuhan Made an Archetypal Cliché-Probe
Dialogue 40 · November 4, 2021
Touch, in McLuhan’s sense, is not a fifth sense but contrast — the interplay of the merging and the abruptly interrupting — and the whole session turns on the half everyone drops. Reading p.77 of the What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump book, Bob Dobbs argues that the “merged” globalist bias discounted tactility’s abrasive-confrontational pole and so never saw the tribal, Trump-symbolized return coming; that the computer-and-satellite “Global Theater” is “tactility squared.”
One Membrane or Many: Tactility’s Both/And Knot, the Meme McLuhan ‘Discovered’ in 1953, and Tools That Ape Us
Dialogue 41 · November 25, 2021
Is the Global Membrane one thing or many? Resuming at the top of p.77 of his book on the Tech Body and Trump, Bob Dobbs holds that the membrane is a single timeless, contentless space “that goes out past the moon,” while Cameron McEwen counters that it is singular only in chronological time and, read synchronically, “naturally plural”. Between those poles the session works through tactility’s “knotted” both/and, the Android Meme as tools that “ape” rather than shape us, and the 1953 essays in which Bob says McLuhan “discovered the techne meme” inside Finnegans Wake.
Tactility Squared: Tools That Ape Us, the Maelstrom of Chaos and Tetrad Management, and Mind as the Fifth Victim
Dialogue 42 · December 9, 2021
Bob’s book reaches p.79 and the line the whole session turns on: our tools no longer shape us, they ape us — the graphic interface making media “look like people,” talking cartoons on a screen. From that pun Bob and Cameron build toward “tactility squared,” the point where the Android Meme cuts technology loose from the chemical body and media goes “out of control”, then follow the idea across a Victorian detour, a full theory of Presidents as images, and the Chip Body turning “self-conscious.”
The Trivium and the Quadrivium: Tactility as Interplay, McLuhan’s Failure, and the Five Bodies
Dialogue 43 · December 23, 2021
Reading the bottom of p.79, Cameron stops Bob on a single word: if the Quadrivium is “a higher level type of tactility,” then tactility cannot be something that “changes with time”. From that objection the session builds Bob’s decade chart of Marshall McLuhan — the 1940s Trivium, the 1950s Quadrivium, the 1960s Satellite-and-Cyborg anti-environment — and runs out past the chart to the Android Meme, the Five Bodies, and the Tech Body.
From Cliché to Archetype: Gossage’s Four Phases, the Musician McLuhan, and the Connubium of Outbreeding and Inbreeding
Dialogue 44 · January 20, 2022
Back at the top of p.81 of his book on the Tech Body and Trump, Bob reads out a passage by the adman Howard Gossage — a new medium runs from last word to cliché to art form to archetype — and recognizes it as the seed McLuhan distilled into From Cliché to Archetype. The first half turns that four-phase pattern every way it will go: mapped onto the Trivium and Quadrivium, sped into “baroque spirals,” and read through a McLuhan who “blurs” every category the way Finnegans Wake does.
The Musician, the Numb, and the Connubium: Self-Amputation, Process Patterns, and the Peace of Absolute Difference
Dialogue 45 · February 17, 2022
A single line at the top of p.82 — McLuhan’s “connubium of a superterrestrial kind” — sets the whole session spiraling. What opens as a portrait of McLuhan the “musician” turns into an inquiry into “the numb,” the missing factor Bob Dobbs and Cameron McEwen take to be the real discovery buried under the media theory, and closes by recasting McLuhan himself as the “servant of language”.
Global Theater and the Eleven: The Gap, the War as Labyrinth, and Causes Become Effects via Concepts
Dialogue 46 · March 17, 2022
P.87 turns the book into Part Two, and with it the global village becomes the Global Theater — not a later stage, Cameron McEwen argues, but a derivative of the village, the same all-at-once ground seen as an art form. The session’s master figure is the “eleven” — iON’s “11-11,” which Cameron reads as two strokes divided by an irreducible gap, the gap that also underlies death, communication, and the war three weeks old in Ukraine. It ends in close quotation on the “sacred page 137,” where McLuhan writes that causes become effects via concepts.
Reading McLuhan as Collage: The Parenthesized Planet, Tactility as Virtual Reality, and Canada as Anti-Environment
Dialogue 47 · April 14, 2022
The reading reaches p.89 of Bob’s book, and the method shows itself: a collage of McLuhan quotes — From Cliché to Archetype, Take Today, the letters — whose meaning lives in the jumps between them. The keystone is a single word, the planet “parenthesized by an anti-environment”, which Cameron reads as the limitation that at once bounds human beings and lets them understand — Heidegger’s “abysmal drop” that readers of Being and Time papered over instead.
The Global Thermostat: Orchestration as Not-Fascism, the Cliché as Act of Consciousness, and Trump’s Knowing Mask
Dialogue 48 · April 28, 2022
Near the back of Bob’s book waits McLuhan’s strangest proposal — that computers could orchestrate the media diet of whole populations through a “global thermostat,” the scheme one professor called fascism and Cameron insists is precisely its opposite. Getting there runs through p.96’s deceptively flat line, “a cliché is an act of consciousness”, which Cameron pries open with the subjective and objective genitive until “total” and “sum” turn complicated, and through Trump as the actor who, unlike everyone else, knew he was wearing a mask.
Change and the Eternals: The 1969 Playboy Interview, the Wandering Gypsy Scholars, and the Innis–Lewis Dispute
Dialogue 49 · May 19, 2022
At the bottom of p.97 waits McLuhan’s oddest reassurance — that automation and cybernation could “smooth the transition” out of the convulsions of 1968 — and the session turns it into a quarrel about what could possibly change at all. The hinge is a distinction Cameron keeps redrawing: people do change, but that is not the same as the disappearance of the eternals, so the laws of media are eternal only the way Galileo’s laws are — the weather unstable, the laws beneath it knowable.
The Media Fast: Programming the Planet, the Maelstrom, and Reading Finnegans Wake
Dialogue 50 · June 9, 2022
How do you understand a medium you are living inside? Session 50 takes McLuhan’s blunt answer — the media fast — and works it from a crank’s practical stunt into a method. Reading the 1969 Playboy interview at the bottom of p.98, Bob Dobbs and Cameron McEwen follow McLuhan’s proposal to program societies with “a network of global thermostats” and his small-town experiment of switching off radio or TV for a couple of weeks, which Cameron reframes as a methodological demand — the gap a person or society must step into to see the media environment at all.
The Media Themselves Are the Art Form: Forces 1973, the Tech Body as Avant-Garde, and McLuhan Past Jung
Dialogue 51 · June 23, 2022
At the top of p.101 sits a rare 1973 McLuhan interview from Forces magazine, and its claim that “the media themselves have become the new art forms” sets the whole session’s agenda. Bob reads the avant-garde out of the galleries and into the media themselves, pushing the line forward to the book’s thesis — that Trump is the Tech Body — while Cameron keeps turning each equation back into a question, asking how the little word “is” actually functions.
Universal Dialogue: McLuhan Past Jung, the Orphic Hymn of Revelation, and the Android Meme (Phase One)
Dialogue 52 · July 7, 2022
The McLuhan research community, Cameron opens, is “more than a little ironic” — a heritage industry with “almost no dialogue” — and that paradox launches a sprawling sixth reading session that finally reaches the book’s destination.
The Medium Between Machine and Intelligence: Kelly’s Technium, the Earwig, and the Android Meme as Artist
Dialogue 53 · July 21, 2022
Kevin Kelly, the first editor of Wired, coined a word for technology as a single living organism — the technium — and Bob Dobbs opens the session with him as the one contemporary who names, from the outside, what he has been calling the tech body. But the convergence quickly gives way to the episode’s real engine: a critic who insists the computer is just “a box of metals”, and Cameron McEwen’s long unfolding of why that is the perfect way to misunderstand “the medium is the message.”
The Global Membrane (Phase One): Holeopathic Cliché Probes, the Co-anesthetic Center, and the Grunt That Makes the Market
Dialogue 54 · August 4, 2022
Resuming their line-by-line reading of Bob’s Trump/Tech Body book at p.109, the dialogue arrives at a single dense coinage: the holeopathic cliché probe, Bob’s name for a meme he says he had “right there in 1987”. Fusing homeopathy’s ever-diluted-but-potent substance with the hologram, it lets Bob and Cameron McEwen trace how the satellite-era anti-environment shrinks the whole world into every individual at once — a co-anesthetic center that turns out to be “nowhere” — and how McLuhan’s late word for all of it, “structure,” bottoms out in the “grunt” that “makes the market”.
The Global Membrane and the Android Meme (Phase One, continued): Lockdown Governments, the Six Schools of Media Ecology, and Memories of the Centre
Dialogue 55 · September 1, 2022
Resuming the line-by-line reading of Bob’s Trump / Tech Body booklet at p.109, the session opens on two of Cameron McEwen’s questions — what Bob means by lockdown, and how the Global Theater becomes the Global Membrane. The first half works them into a single figure: the invisible resonant node everyone already shares, of which all the visible hardware is only the “content.”
Mythic Stages and the Two Exposures: Epstein as Super Angel, and the Unchartable
Dialogue 56 · September 15, 2022
A cliché, pushed far enough, flips into an archetype — and back. That figure, read off the 1977 City as Classroom, sets the session’s method: every pair Bob works with is one McLuhan eventually collapses. Cameron opens by refusing the most familiar explanation of why McLuhan contradicts himself, calling probing “an invention” made to excuse “something that doesn’t need excusing”. What replaces it is a pair of vocabularies for the same predicament — Bob’s mythic stages and Cameron’s shortcut — which meet in the maelstrom, the only place either will say thought actually happens.
Everything in Quotes: The Bureaucratic Ballet and the Interval as Commodity
Dialogue 57 · September 29, 2022
Half a page of Take Today has more scare quotes than sentences, and Bob’s claim is that the punctuation is the argument: there is no hardware age, no haves or have-nots, nobody under surveillance. Cameron will not let the reading settle there. Where Bob folds McLuhan’s “hang-up” straight into the cul-de-sac, Cameron insists the word is polyvalent and points somewhere — a dead end and a doorway read from different sides.
Help Beautify Junkyards: Instant Replay and the Cognitive Thrills of Pattern Recognition
Dialogue 58 · October 13, 2022
A sign in a Toronto junkyard — throw something lovely away today, help beautify junkyards — is the motto McLuhan hands to camp in a 1975 essay, and by the session’s end it has become a description of how thinking works. The way in is academic publish-or-perish, essays churned out that are “basically the same stuff”, which is exactly what Bob spent ten years in the Toronto libraries reading closely enough to find the one unrepeated turn each version carries.
The Science of Magic Circles: Silence, the Box, and Kroker’s Nihilism
Dialogue 59 · October 27, 2022
A circle you can leave only by entering another one — Humboldt’s figure for language, quoted by McLuhan around p.30 of the Gutenberg Galaxy — is what Cameron builds an entire method on here. If every medium you name turns into a message needing a further medium, the regress has no floor — and his answer is that the regress is the exit, not the trap, refused only because entering it costs you your orientation.
No Anchor Has Legitimacy: The Anthropomorphic and the Audience of the Intellect
Dialogue 60 · November 17, 2022
One word runs the length of this session, and it enters almost by accident. Reading his own sentence about “anchoring our icon of this complexity in the after image of the bureaucratic chemical body,” Bob Dobbs is stopped by Cameron McEwen’s first question of the night: does anchoring mean only limiting, or something more like emphasis? Bob calls it a fetish, an identity crisis, a wish to “get solid somewheres.”
Bless the Locomotives: The Separateness of Man
Dialogue 61 · December 1, 2022
A single sentence in a 1970 Rolling Stone report has bothered Bob Dobbs for fifty years: writing “scrapped the old tribal traditions of Homer and Hesiod, but retrieved the private individual man, an ancient form dredged up from way, way back.” Private is supposed to be a literate effect, so what is it doing in the Paleolithic? Between sessions Cameron McEwen went looking and came back not with one corroborating passage but a series, beginning with a 1970 letter on Eric Havelock in which Marshall McLuhan says the alphabet “retrieved the primordial role of individual and pre-tribal awareness.”
The Spark and the Adyton: Vico’s Cave and the Darkness of the Medium
Dialogue 62 · December 22, 2022
A paragraph from Vico’s New Science was supposed to settle the argument the previous session left open. Giants wandering the mountain heights are stopped by the first thunder after the flood, take refuge in caves, and humble themselves before a divinity they imagine as Jove — which Bob Dobbs reads as a portrait of the solitary individual before the tribe.
A New Genus of Sciences: Chemistry in 1800 and the Invisible Environment
Dialogue 63 · January 19, 2023
In 1800 the chemical environment was fully active — determining everything in our bodies and in the cosmos to its furthest reaches — and nobody could see it, invisible on McLuhan’s principle precisely because it was the environment. That is the analogy Cameron McEwen lays out end to end in the first session of 2023, at Bob Dobbs’s request, as the working model for what a new science would have to be: not a discovery of new things but a way of focusing old ones that different researchers can share.
A Certain Encouragement: Divided Consciousness and the Tech Body
Dialogue 64 · February 2, 2023
One sentence, emailed between sessions, takes over the whole evening: the very components that make for a divided consciousness can, “with a certain encouragement,” become the means of an inclusive one. Neither man lets the vague phrase stand. Cameron McEwen eventually answers that the encouragement is faith, then immediately knots it — faith cannot come through works, because it must already be there in order to do the work.
The Stem Cell of Consciousness: Pre-Tribal Awareness and the Art Formula
Dialogue 65 · February 16, 2023
Two words in a quotation Bob found — “private awareness” — turn out to name the thing Cameron has been unable to say for years. He arrives with the claim in full: pre-tribal awareness is McLuhan’s most important topic, and what McLuhan was after under that name is the stem cell of human consciousness, a single originary structure that is never met as itself, only in the particular experiences it makes possible. McLuhan’s own word for it, Cameron says, is the art formula.
The Philosopher Is Not a Citizen of Any Thought Community: Wittgenstein, Detached Observation, and the Second Science
Dialogue 66 · March 2, 2023
A line from a shoebox of unpublished notes turns out to define the term this series has spent five sessions on. Wittgenstein wrote that the philosopher is not a citizen of any thought community; read “thought community” as tribe and the sentence is a definition of pre-tribal awareness composed by someone who had never encountered the phrase.
The Audience of the Intellect: Phatic Communion, Miming, and the Six Schools of Media Ecology
Dialogue 67 · March 30, 2023
A quotation the pair have been working for several sessions finally runs out, and the phrase it ends on turns out to be the door rather than the wall. From Cliché to Archetype closes with “a close liaison between private and corporate awareness”, and Cameron immediately routes it back through Eliot and Richards: what passes between people does so not by a conscious process but by a kind of immersion in which they learn without knowing they are learning.
The X-Ray Process: Nevitt’s Consciousness, Manhunting, and the Centralization That Never Left
Dialogue 68 · April 20, 2023
Three quotations nobody has read carry this session, and not one of them comes from the McLuhan anybody quotes. The first is Barry Nevitt’s, from a booklet printed for a 1980 futurists’ conference: consciousness “will prove to be an effect of speeding up cliché to archetype processes in the brain”. Cameron declines to settle it, opening the sentence into a scientific reading, then a reading pushed back to the first human beings, and leaving both standing.
Synchrony and Diachrony: The New Science, the Committee, and Content Consuming Form
Dialogue 69 · May 11, 2023
Bob opens at the top of p.139 — part four, Android Meme Phase 2 — and then sets the book down to ask Cameron to restate the difference the two of them named years ago, Cameron synchrony and Bob diachrony. Cameron answers by taking Bob’s own chart away from him, since the Tiny Note Chart applies all the time, and narrows two years of methodological disagreement to a single term, pre-tribal awareness.
The Tactile Chain: Hildebrand to Carpenter, and the Super Angel
Dialogue 70 · May 25, 2023
A sentence McLuhan published in 1961 turns out to contain a genealogy neither host had read as one. Cameron produces it while they are talking about something else — the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin taught the Hildebrand stress on visual forms as haptic, and Wölfflin’s pupil Giedion embodied it in Space, Time and Architecture — and Bob begins assembling the names aloud until there are seven of them, a chain of transmission for tactility that runs from art criticism of the 1900s to Carpenter’s Eskimo work.
Shrinking the Hologram: Holeopathic Cliché Probes and the Tiny Note
Dialogue 71 · June 15, 2023
A word carried unexamined through sixty dialogues finally gets taken apart. Reading aloud from his own 1987 memoir, Bob stops at “holeopathic” and derives it — homeopathy plus hologram — which commits the session to defending a strange proposition: that the satellite’s global hologram, like a diluted remedy, grows more potent as it shrinks toward pure memory. Most of the night is spent looking for a warrant for that.
The Trap Door to the Wake: Scapes, the Five Bodies, and Module as Meme
Dialogue 72 · July 13, 2023
One word stops the reading. Bob is a paragraph into p.150 of the Trump book when Cameron picks out scapes and says only “that’s a good word” — and the rest of the session is what that remark asks for. The old media environments did not vanish when digital shrank them; they were bureaucratized into archives, museums, and McLuhan’s mini-states, a collective wealth heavy enough that nothing proportionate is left to topple.
The Pollstergeist Operations: From the Mechanical Bride to the Miscalculation of Global Management
Dialogue 73 · July 27, 2023
One word turns out to bracket a career. Bob is reading his own commentary on page 155 when he notices, for the first time, that it opens on Pollstergeist, and Cameron immediately asks whether McLuhan hadn’t used the same word in The Mechanical Bride — his first book, against an essay published in the last year of his life. Halfway through the session Cameron finds the sentence on page 47 and reads it out, and the two ends close on each other.