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 .
Key Topics
- The formula chart’s top line — “co-evolutionary anticipatory mimesis = how the media archetypes fit the Battle of Jericho in American politics” — draws on McLuhan’s 1955 Explorations essay and frames all of history as effects (ALP ground) preceding causes (HCE bureaucratic response).
- Each media era from the telegraph (1750) through the Anthropomorphic Physical (1980s–2020) anticipates its own technology by decades: Ben Franklin’s kite experiments in 1750 predate the telegraph ; Romantic poetry carries cinematic effects sixty years before film.
- Cameron reveals that McLuhan’s public account of first reading Innis was false : a 1951 letter confirms he had already read Empire and Communications and received individual essays from The Bias of Communication years earlier through W.T. Easterbrook. McLuhan later said of Innis: “I squeezed him for all I could get — the hidden ground was a satirical element.”
- Bernard Muller-Thym, McLuhan’s best man and lifelong friend, connected McLuhan to early LSD research in the 1940s through a McKinsey Associates colleague — context for McLuhan’s informed 1966 review of The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience and his reversal three years later.
- Bob describes McLuhan’s social function as analogous to Ezra Pound in London and Paris: a “magnate figure” who draws in and connects people across all fields , a “switchboard in himself.” Unlike Pound, however, McLuhan was terrible at sustaining friendships — he “alienated through his energy” the way Wyndham Lewis alienated through his temper. Bob adds that McLuhan “distilled the vortex milieu of the 1920s in himself” — Pound, Lewis, and Joyce as the precursor social formation he later embodied in Toronto.
- In the “holeopathic” phase (Reagan onward), the ALP/HCE ground flips: virtual image worlds supplant hardware as ground , and women absorb the formerly masculine bureaucratic roles McLuhan predicted they would — a flip the Tiny Note Chart (next session) will map in detail.
Notable Quotes
"Ground as technology has been swallowed by ground as image."
"I squeezed him for all I could get — the hidden ground was a satirical element. He was satirizing Innis in the long run."
"To conceive of this kind of chart built on McLuhan is itself a contribution. It's not just a replay of McLuhan — it's a recreation."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Introduction: the 10th session
- 0:01:17 — The Formula Chart: overview, location at ionandbob.com
- 0:02:44 — ALP, HCE, and the Joyce family as media structure
- 0:12:50 — Co-evolutionary anticipatory mimesis and the Battle of Jericho
- 0:24:19 — Telegraph era: Washington, manufacturing, effects preceding causes
- 0:31:58 — Movies and radio eras: Jefferson, Lincoln, the last gasp of oratory
- 0:57:45 — Television and global village; Roosevelt vs. Kennedy (stone vs. vapor)
- 01:01:16 — Computer/atom bomb era: quarks, Beatniks, the cold management of nuclear terror
- 01:09:56 — Bernard Muller-Thym and LSD: McLuhan’s 1940s briefing
- 01:14:20 — McLuhan as Ezra Pound figure
- 01:24:14 — Satellite/laser beam era: Echelon, Vietnam, Nixon as paradox
- 01:37:21 — Holeopathic cliché probes: ground becomes image, Reagan as cyborg
- 01:40:05 — The ALP/HCE flip and second-wave feminism
- 01:46:29 — The Innis chronology revised: McLuhan as Innis post-holeopathic
- 01:47:29 — Perot, mythic government, and the preview of the Tiny Note Chart
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Interior Landscape (1969) — especially the Wyndham Lewis essay; source of “the modern artist, like the scientist, develops a formula”
- Laws of Media (Marshall and Eric McLuhan) — Tetrad where Global Village “flips into your credit card as your stage”
- Take Today (1972), p. 137 — McLuhan’s use of “cause” and “effect” in quotes
- The Mechanical Bride (1951) — ads and comics as characters; mass man becoming subatomic
- “The Media Fit the Battle of Jericho,” Explorations c. 1955 — source of the chart’s top-line phrase
- McLuhan’s 1966 unpublished review of The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (from the archives)
- McLuhan’s 1953 essay “The Later Innis”
- McLuhan’s letter to Innis, early 1951 — confirms prior reading of Empire and Communications
Works by Innis
- Empire and Communications (Harold Innis, Oxford lectures 1948; published 1950)
- The Bias of Communication (Harold Innis, 1951)
Other Works
- Finnegans Wake (James Joyce, 1939)
- The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (Masters and Houston)
- Eric Havelock’s first book (1939) — discusses the epyllion form and Poe
- Havelock’s Phoenix essays (from 1946) — history of the epyllion form
- Philip K. Dick’s novels — exemplifying the “universal government” imaginative range of the 70s–80s
People
- Bob Dobbs (media theorist; creator of the Formula Chart)
- Cameron McEwen (interlocutor; McLuhan scholar)
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist; primary subject of the chart’s framework)
- Harold Innis (Canadian economic historian; major influence on McLuhan)
- Eric Havelock (classicist; unacknowledged influence on McLuhan)
- W.T. Easterbrook (economist; Innis associate and McLuhan’s Winnipeg friend)
- Bernard Muller-Thym (McLuhan’s best man; McKinsey consultant; conduit for early LSD knowledge)
- Eric McLuhan (McLuhan’s son; co-author of Laws of Media)
- Ezra Pound (poet; Bob’s social analogue for McLuhan — the cross-field connector and cultural “magnate” who runs the switchboard between disciplines)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s collaborator; co-wrote the epyllion/Tennyson essay with no mention of Havelock)
- Jordan Peterson (cited as modern instance of the Perot “classroom” phenomenon)
- Murray Gell-Mann (physicist; named quarks from Finnegans Wake in 1963)
- Buckminster Fuller (revealed 1970s satellite surveillance capability to McLuhan)
Closing
This dialogue matters because it puts the standard McLuhan-Innis origin story on firmer ground while demonstrating that Bob’s formula chart is not a gloss on McLuhan but a genuine media-theoretical instrument in its own right — one that anticipated the holeopathic and post-holeopathic conditions now visible everywhere. (, )
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