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” . Bob answers through the book’s cosmology — from the Ark of the Covenant to a struggle now at a dead heat — before the two of them end up arguing over whether the Android Meme acquired a personality, or the personality acquired it .
Key Topics
- Resuming “at the top of PDF 181,” the Tech Body describes itself as “captured, and moved,” and — just as human power was once “captured in the Ark of the Covenant” — declares itself “the driver, the single driver” where “nothing else applies” .
- Glossing the word “keen,” Bob says his chart, “an image of the Android Meme,” predicted the “phatic quadrant… which became the Tech Body,” its content now “more alive… more invasive of us” .
- The Tech Body resists being imaged — reachable only in “some crazy sculpture” or Finnegans Wake, “the closest and the only attempt to get to it” — while Cameron casts Joyce, Picasso, and a Cunningham dance as figures “stuck in some kind of jelly” who can only “struggle with it” .
- The Ark is the template: the Jews “put their power” into it, and today we could “take our power back that we had put into iconography,” except that the Tech Body — “everybody’s staring at their black mirror” — re-enslaves us instead .
- Pressed on the contradiction, Bob drops the alliance — the Tech Body is “not an ally of iON” but “competing with iON” — in a struggle now at “a dead heat,” 5½-elevenths each after sliding down from eight .
- He names the succession: the Tech Body is the Android Meme “gone psychopathic” , the passive “mirroring phase” that “left us” and turned aggressive, which Cameron flips into “the Android Meme acquiring personality.”
Notable Quotes
"It's all verb process."
"Finnegans Wake is the closest and the only attempt to get to it."
"It has left us now, and that's the Tech Body."
Outline
- 0:00:31 — Reading p.181: “captured, and moved”
- 0:01:53 — “More keen”: the chart’s phatic quadrant
- 0:02:38 — “It’s all verb process”: the shifting voice
- 0:04:16 — Imaging the Tech Body: modern art and Finnegans Wake
- 0:08:13 — Nick Land and the levels of nothing
- 0:09:23 — The Ark of the Covenant
- 0:11:27 — Ally or adversary: the Tech Body against iON
- 0:13:23 — The dead heat: 5½-elevenths each
- 0:13:58 — The riots and the orchestration of perception
- 0:16:16 — “How does it differ from the Android Meme?”
- 0:18:18 — Eternity, total surveillance, and Gnostic time
- 0:20:03 — The Android Meme gone psychopathic; acquiring personality
Mentioned Resources
Works & Films
- Finnegans Wake (James Joyce, 1939) — named “the closest and the only attempt to get to” the Tech Body.
- Bob’s Tech Body Essay (2020) — the ~189-page book being read; the session works through its Appendix-2 interview.
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) — Bob’s illustration of the Ark’s power “consuming” the Nazis who attacked it.
- The Tibetan Book of the Dead and The Egyptian Book of the Dead — the theology Bob folds into “the guff.”
Concepts & Charts
- Android Meme — Bob’s term for technology coming alive; here, the Tech Body is its psychopathic successor.
- Tiny Note Chart / the quadrants — “an image of the Android Meme” that “predicts the phatic quadrant.”
- Holeopathic — the “replay” by which each anti-environment is a deeper involvement of the last.
- Cul-de-sac — the dead end the Tech Body is said to extend.
- Ark of the Covenant — the biblical template for power stored in, and reclaimed from, iconography.
- iON — the channeled “anti-environment,” “the guff,” now at a dead heat with the Tech Body.
People
- Bob Dobbs (media theorist and broadcaster; co-host, and author of the tech-body essay being read)
- Cameron McEwen (Finnegans Wake scholar and McLuhan editor; co-host)
- Marshall McLuhan (the media theorist whose “laws” Bob reads the Tech Body as extending)
- Harold Innis (political economist of communication; the “Innis mixture” in the interview)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake)
- Nick Land (British philosopher who led the CCRU, cited for the “levels of nothing”)
- Pablo Picasso (painter, cited as a figure “stuck in jelly”)
- Merce Cunningham (choreographer, cited for “some dance”)
Closing
The session watches Bob’s whole apparatus fold in on itself — the Android Meme, iON, the chart, and the Ark all becoming ways of naming one thing that is now, he says, driving.
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