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 second half tells the chart’s origin story in MIHR, a device Bob’s wife Carolyn practiced with in 1990s New York , and lays out its structure — four figures plus Bob as integrator, with the internet read as “an afterimage of the Android Meme.”
Key Topics
- Bob argues the Android Meme “took over the creative process,” ransacking clichés as probes without recognizing it as probing , while Cameron is confused by “cliché probe” — when people pick up clichés “they’re doing anything but probing.”
- The phone is “the new gum,” an ultra-uptight self-involvement that must “express the opposite” , and ecstasy becomes “a variant or a synonym for lockdown.”
- The chart folds time so “the effect shows itself before the cause,” a “maelstrom effect” ; the Tiny Note exists “to move it out of the sequence of the Formula Chart.”
- On the chart’s presidential “me,” “everybody becomes a me,” inflated by Web 2.0 , and Bob reads Trump as the figure who “took over” and “locked everybody down.”
- The chart’s origin is MIHR — “magnetically influenced homeopathic remedies,” an unproven device punning on MIR, the Russian space station — which Bob says “caused the chart.”
- Four figures — Lyndon LaRouche, McLuhan, William Irwin Thompson, and Arthur Kroker — map to the device’s four parts, McLuhan as acupuncture “because I have him interacting with China” , each paired to a modernist vortex — Pound, Lewis, Eliot, Yeats — with Joyce “redone” as Bob the integrator.
Notable Quotes
"The user is the content, there is a liberation. Orwell and Huxley got it wrong... McLuhan got it."
"We have abducted ourselves to death, possessed, way beyond being amused."
"I made Finnegans Wake into a chart. Herculean Act."
Outline
- 0:00:33 — Leaving the Formula Chart: the flatline as clue
- 0:09:40 — Holeopathic cliché probes: memes and the Android Meme
- 0:14:13 — Cliché or probe? Language, gaps, and Finnegans Wake
- 0:21:49 — The phone, ecstasy, and lockdown
- 0:59:28 — Time: causes merging with effects
- 1:03:37 — The presidential me: Trump and the flatline
- 1:16:01 — The Tiny Note Chart in Flipside
- 1:18:47 — Origin of the chart: the MIHR device and Carolyn’s New York practice
- 1:40:29 — Building the chart: four figures
- 1:41:59 — MIHR and MIR: homeopathy, acupuncture, and the space station
- 2:06:21 — The chart’s structure: afterimage of the Android Meme
- 2:10:40 — MIHR’s parts mapped: McLuhan as acupuncture
- 2:23:15 — The big now: Sputnik, despotic equilibrium, and COVID
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — source of the “cliché probe,” the poet in “the rag and bone shop” making archetypes from refuse
- “Media and the Inflation Crowd” — re-read for McLuhan on Sputnik as “a new ground for man in the sky”
Other Works
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976) — where “meme” was coined
- Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987) — the “ecstasy” in the chart’s Dobbs quadrant
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death — which Bob calls “not violent enough”
- Finnegans Wake — the book Bob says he “made into a chart”
- Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring (1913) — the riot-as-artwork analogy for Trump
- W.B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” — the “rag and bone shop of the heart”
Documents & Charts
- Bob Dobbs Formula Chart and the Tiny Note Chart — the two companion documents
- The MIHR device — the unproven remedy Bob credits with “causing” the chart
- Flipside — the punk pop-culture magazine that printed the chart by 1996
People
- Bob Dobbs (media analyst and chart-maker at the center of the dialogue)
- Cameron McEwen (McLuhan scholar and Bob’s interlocutor)
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist mapped to acupuncture on the chart)
- Richard Dawkins (biologist who coined “meme”)
- Lyndon LaRouche, William Irwin Thompson, Arthur Kroker (three of the chart’s four figures)
- Carolyn (Bob’s wife, who practiced with the MIHR device in New York)
- Donald Trump (read as “the ultimate me” of the flatline)
- Frank Luntz (pollster on Trump’s inverted mistakes)
- Alan Watts, Tom Wolfe, Harold Innis, Tim Berners-Lee (figures invoked across the session)
- Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce (the modernist vortices paired to the chart’s figures)
Closing
Read together, the two charts turn Bob’s flatline into a method: the Tiny Note Chart reads the internet as an afterimage of the Android Meme, and traces the whole apparatus back to a homemade device on a New York kitchen table.
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