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 conversation broadens into McLuhan’s collaborators , the story of his unfinished TV project with David Greenberg , and a preview of two further charts for the next session .
Key Topics
- The bottom-up chart (1985) uses six columns of figure against a ground of “secret government” — meaning technology as the hidden shaper, not human bureaucrats. Across seven eras (phonetic alphabet through the “second coming” phase), Bob places cultural clichés: Christ, Shakespeare, Dickens, Einstein/Freud/Joyce, Beatles/McLuhan, Reagan/Pope John Paul II, and Star Wars. Cameron: “You’re dealing with shifts over time that need to be accounted for by anything like what I call chemistry — it’s not enough to say water is hydrogen and oxygen; you also have to say what happens when you put water and iron together.”
- The top-down identity chart is the companion: same eras, but ground = literal human power bureaucrats (Rome, House of Habsburg, Britain, Rockefellers). Technology here is the previous medium used as a control instrument — bureaucrats “freeze on the controls.” McLuhan in the early 70s admitted he didn’t foresee how much management could delay technological effects: “It got bottled up.”
- “Furry Lint” — Bob’s label for charismatic figures (JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, Larry Flynt) who become threatening to the establishment and are flicked off the fabric of the Global Theater. Once the Global Theater exists, famous figures are famous everywhere at once — “Caesar never had that” — which makes them both more powerful and more easily targeted.
- Cameron: “Metaphysical promiscuity” — Bob Dobbs’ term for the baby-boomer cultural pattern of hopping from one inspiring intellectual to another without staying. People couldn’t maintain attention on McLuhan’s charts because of constant new “second-coming” implosions. The problem persists: people now roam the internet the way McLuhan’s mind roamed disciplines — but still sleepwalking.
- The dialogue closes with a biographical interlude: Cameron’s years near Princeton working for a digital philosophy company (they passed on a “Digital McLuhan” project with George Sanderson) ; McLuhan’s late-70s California phase, his collaborators, and the David Greenberg TV series that his stroke aborted in 1979.
Notable Quotes
"What McLuhan was doing since the 1940s was a sort of conscious promiscuity. He was following Giedion's lead to see the commonalities and things, or the disjunctions, for that matter."
"The lucky people who got these charts, they profited from it, you know, because they could see it. They were living it and they didn't know it."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Introduction: ionandbob.com, session context (8th on the book, 9th total)
- 0:01:30 — Bottom-up chart: structure, categories, secret government as ironic ground
- 0:03:00 — Cameron: bottom-up maps the figure-and-ground spectrum
- 0:07:30 — Phonetic alphabet/papyrus era: Christ / Plato & Aristotle / spoken word / tribe / family / Caesar
- 0:17:41 — Eric Havelock: family-based education before Plato
- 0:23:37 — Print era: Shakespeare / Francis Bacon / manuscript / village / tribe / Martin Luther
- 0:27:02 — Newspaper era: Dickens / Darwin & Marx / printed novel / town / village / Luddites
- 0:27:50 — Radio/telephone era: Al Capone / Einstein, Freud, Joyce / radio & movies / nation / city / McCarthyism
- 0:28:17 — Global village → Global Theater; Sputnik, satellites, space imagination
- 0:37:09 — TV era: Beatles / Norman Mailer & McLuhan / Color TV / planet / nation / JFK assassination
- 0:40:06 — Club of Rome / Club of Ruin; McLuhan on ecology as figures
- 0:42:44 — Satellite / “second coming” era: Reagan, Pope John Paul II / furry lint / Star Wars / outer space as ghetto
- 0:47:50 — Second coming = time of perpetual change (Evergreens); McLuhan and the “technological body of Christ”
- 0:56:00 — Cameron maps satellite/second coming in his terms
- 01:03:07 — Metaphysical promiscuity; conspiracy journalism → conspiracy theory
- 01:05:01 — Top-down identity chart: literal bureaucratic secret government, same eras
- 01:14:19 — Eric Voegelin and McLuhan’s Gnosticism (1953–55)
- 01:15:59 — McLuhan and Rome (1973 advisor appointment); resumed Gnosticism complaints
- 01:19:16 — Technological government: elites freeze on the controls of the previous medium
- 01:25:40 — Church of SubGenius (1983); Bob meme as shuttle between figure and ground
- 01:37:00 — Left-right hemisphere: McLuhan sick and looking for formulas; the Tetrad; humor McLuhan lost
- 01:53:43 — McLuhan: management delayed what he thought was unfolding; “The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, and Planets” (Varsity Graduate, 1971)
- 01:55:39 — Cameron: McLuhan in 1958 didn’t know the practical ramifications; Barry Nevitt brought them
- 01:58:47 — McLuhan’s collaborator sequence: Muller-Thym, Carpenter, Skornia, Capon, Schwartz, Harley Parker, Nevitt, Greenberg
- 02:00:35 — Harley Parker: taught McLuhan art or prompted him?
- 02:12:08 — David Greenberg and the aborted PBS TV series (1976–79)
- 02:16:11 — McLuhan’s California pull; UBC 1957–58; Santa Barbara 1960; Gossage 1965–67; Mary McLuhan’s Gossage years
- 02:24:12 — McLuhan as Western Canadian: discomfort in the East
- 02:26:08 — Cameron’s biography: LA, Chicago, Princeton, Chicago, California; digital philosophy company
- 02:27:29 — George Sanderson and the failed Digital McLuhan project (c. 1998)
- 02:38:00 — McLuhan’s interdisciplinary mind vs. today’s internet promiscuity: same motion, different consciousness
- 02:39:14 — Preview: formula chart and Tiny Note Chart for next session
Mentioned Resources
Bob’s charts (ionandbob.com → Popular Bob Posts → Bob’s Charts, charts 12–15)
- Bottom-Up Chart (1985) — cultural history from phonetic alphabet to “second coming”
- Top-Down Identity Chart (1985) — power bureaucracy in parallel
- Bob Dobbs Formula Chart — merges both, organized around Finnegans Wake characters (HCE / ALP), 1750–2020
- Tiny Note Chart — zooms into 1960–1990 Android Meme ground; previews next session
McLuhan works referenced
- Take Today (1972, with Barry Nevitt) — “man becomes figure and ground,” p. 11
- Through the Vanishing Point (1968, with Harley Parker) — visual space
- “The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, and Planets” — Varsity Graduate, 1971
- “Sight, Sound, and Fury” — Commonweal, 1954
- “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” — lecture at St. Joseph’s, Hartford, 1954
- Counterblast (1969) — “age of paratroopers”; operation over huge spans of time
Other works and people
- Howard Gossage — San Francisco ad man; source of cliché → art form → archetype schema (from Gerald Stearn’s McLuhan: Hot and Cool, 1967)
- Barry Nevitt — brought practical/industrial and Asian thought; parents were missionaries in China
- Eric Havelock — Greek education; family-based learning pre-400 BC; Plato as rupture
- Eric Voegelin — political philosopher; McLuhan’s 1955 Kenner review ends “let us go and rejoin the one”
- David Greenberg — Mary McLuhan’s partner; planned PBS TV series aborted by McLuhan’s stroke
- George Sanderson — Nova Scotia; Antigonish Review; Digital McLuhan project (c. 1998)
- Church of SubGenius — 1983 parody religion; cover image based on Bob’s father’s face; prefigured Bob’s role as interface
Closing
This dialogue is the most didactic of the series — Bob the teacher, Cameron the translator — and the effect is illuminating: two frameworks that looked incompatible reveal themselves as the same thing seen from different angles, one moving through time, the other holding still.
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