“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.” Its counter-movement is a search for a way out that runs not around the resulting nothing but through it, toward the “third position” Bob and Cameron variously call tactility, superposition, and the interior landscape.
Key Topics
- Cameron dates the present directly to Nietzsche, who “predicted, foresaw… in the 1870s and 1880s” the cul-de-sac of lost orientation “150 years ago,” “including wars of unprecedented devastation.”
- Bob’s audio play Who’s Forgotten Furry Lint? turns Larry Flynt into the emblem of the individual who “rises up out of the discarnate mob and starts getting attention,” only to be “quickly suppressed… brushed off the fabric” of society.
- Bob reads the Tech Body’s “based reality” as basement — “the whole society went downstairs into the basement,” into “the world of furry lint,” “the sleazy world of the deep state.”
- Bob and Cameron split the robot in two — the “fixed” Gutenberg robot that woke to having “been a robot for 500 years,” and the “confused” electronic robot flipping between “autonomy and total slavery.”
- Cameron routes Niels Bohr’s “superposition” — “the middle position of both together” — into what McLuhan calls tactility — the principle of quantum computing that “rests on” and computes faster, “not [being] tied to either-or.”
- Cameron’s centerpiece: the interior landscape “cannot be less complicated than the exterior,” a “protein” folded in countless ways that a barely-begun science must learn to read.
Notable Quotes
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth."
"The topsy-turvy is the next step of enslavement."
"If you go into the nothing and allow yourself to experience what's there, then you find out that there's an orientation... native to the nothing."
Outline
- 0:00:06 — The reversal: cliché and archetype
- 0:03:23 — The cul-de-sac Nietzsche foresaw, and the question of linearity
- 0:08:09 — The Medium and the Light: Lewis made cool for TV
- 0:10:24 — Furry Lint: Mae Brussell and the suppressed individual
- 0:14:38 — Meeting Mae Brussell
- 0:23:44 — Project Paperclip, von Braun, and Gravity’s Rainbow
- 0:30:27 — “A based reality”: the society that went downstairs
- 0:34:28 — Educated fools, Ezra Pound, and the box
- 0:37:27 — “There is no you”: the disappearing subject
- 0:43:04 — Why is the Tech Body forthcoming?
- 0:46:41 — Don’t resist: topsy-turvy as the next lockstep
- 0:52:15 — The robot wakes: Pavlov, reparations, media ecology
- 0:56:17 — Two kinds of robot: angels, cyborgs, and Winnipeg
- 01:01:26 — Niels Bohr and the two profound truths
- 01:03:39 — The yo-yo and the slinger
- 01:06:15 — The third position: superposition and quantum computing
- 01:19:14 — The protein: the interior landscape’s complexity
- 01:23:07 — Holeopathic quadrophrenia and the living Tetrad
- 01:30:56 — Through the nothing: superposition as the only exit
- 01:35:55 — Chemistry: the possibility that was always there
- 01:43:09 — The structured nothing and native orientation
- 01:45:51 — Conscious edgelording and the secret of creation
- 01:48:47 — Kinds of nothingness; the Zen interval
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970) — the cliché↔archetype dialectic whose reversibility opens the session
- “A Media Approach to Inflation” (1974 New York Times op-ed) — the tactile interval becoming “the futures market”
- The Medium and the Light — the 1959 St. Michael’s talk on Lewis and Protestant fury
- McLuhan: Hot & Cool (ed. Gerald Emanuel Stearn) — the anthology’s comments on the “Golden Section” (p. 107) and the “Zen interval” (p. 106)
Other Works
- Bruce Powers and Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village — the opposition of “angels and robots”
- Finnegans Wake (James Joyce) — the family reversals that model the Tech Body’s “going back and forth”
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) — the postwar novel that “used McLuhan”
- Who’s Forgotten Furry Lint? — Bob’s audio play recasting Larry Flynt
People
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Cameron McEwen (the philosopher of the pair, reader of Nietzsche)
- Bob Dobbs (the “meteorologist” of media, host from Maui)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (source of the cul-de-sac foreseen 150 years ago)
- Wyndham Lewis (the “cool” writer, and the four-part self)
- Harold Innis (theorist of the node — the fur-trade post beside the poem)
- Niels Bohr (Danish physicist behind complementarity and superposition)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan collaborator who quoted Bohr’s two truths)
- Plato (invoked as “germane” across millennia)
- Mae Brussell (conspiracy researcher and radio broadcaster, Bob’s “phone buddy”)
- Larry Flynt (Hustler publisher recast as “Furry Lint”)
- Augustine (Church Father invoked for the “third term”)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake)
- Ezra Pound (the poet the “educated fools” only “prove… was right”)
- Wernher von Braun (Peenemünde rocket scientist brought over by Project Paperclip)
- Thomas Pynchon (novelist of Gravity’s Rainbow)
- Paul Benioff, Richard Feynman, Yuri Manin, and Peter Shor (early figures in quantum computing)
Closing
Against a world that has lost its “you,” the dialogue’s wager is that the exit is not another point of view but a superposition — the tactile “third position” McLuhan reached for in the 1970s, now legible in everything from quantum computing to the folded complexity of a protein.
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