The twenty-seventh session closes the book. Reading “the last bit where TechBody has the final word” — the concluding pages of the appendix to Bob’s Trump book — the two hosts spend most of the hour on a single McLuhanite figure: the Tech Body’s warning that “you’re looking at the event horizon and judging your condition based on where you see other conditions conflate,” which Cameron reads as “a precise description of the Gutenberg Galaxy” . Everything after it — the algorithm as a linear “prose pattern,” self-correcting machines “leaving the human condition,” progress that “may be suicidal” — becomes a variation on conflation against tactility, the missing hyphen. The long closing movement turns to memoir, recovering “the medium is the message” as an aside rather than a blaring headline , before the phone drops and the session ends.
Key Topics
- Bob explains his anonymous narrator: he “wanted to make it anonymous” because his five-body model “had merged,” so it “should have been anybody with a space between any and body” .
- The session’s spine — the “event horizon” line read as the Gutenberg Galaxy, where “perspective necessarily conflates” — against the shared method of insisting on “tactility” and the hyphen, “one way of saying that this is not the Gutenberg galaxy” .
- The Tech Body’s algorithm decoded: “an algorithm is a prose pattern,” and “prose is another word for linear” , with loop and leap “probably etymologically identical” .
- Self-correcting technology “leaving the human condition” — “the machines are driving this now, not you” — so that “we’ve lost the ability to read double,” confining ourselves to the singular reading Cameron calls “the algorithm” .
- Power at the essay’s climax, from “the power that flew itself was always there” back to Nietzsche , whom Cameron reads through Heidegger: “the will to power is really the power to power. It’s a conflation” .
- A Captain Beefheart interview on why “people gave up looking at Van Gogh paintings and started driving around in Cadillacs” , and McLuhan’s line recovered as an aside rather than a headline .
Notable Quotes
"Perspective necessarily conflates."
"The power that flew itself was always there. People were starting from Pong."
"It could be said as an aside, the medium is the message."
Outline
- 0:00:13 — Finishing the book: the Tech Body’s last word
- 0:05:41 — The event horizon and the Gutenberg Galaxy
- 0:11:18 — The algorithm: prose, loop, and leap
- 0:18:32 — Books, oral cultures, and the printing-press fall
- 0:20:49 — Value judgments and the esoteric observer
- 0:25:52 — The Tech Body’s conclusion: machines beyond human hands
- 0:27:43 — The absurdity of progress
- 0:34:44 — Pong, power, and the will to power
- 0:38:17 — Captain Beefheart: Van Gogh vs. Cadillacs
- 0:42:09 — The digital body and the play of authorship
- 0:46:02 — iON’s cosmology: the non-physical and the Gap
- 01:00:30 — Money, wars, and conspiracy TV
- 01:23:43 — McLuhan on the side: the faster mind
- 01:28:38 — “The medium is the message” as an aside
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) — used less as a text than as the name for the visual-perspectival regime of conflation
- Take Today — source of the “money transaction” line Bob wants readers to memorize to “update McLuhan”
- The Mechanical Bride — the early value-judgment book McLuhan later found “comical,” per the Playboy interview
Works by Bob Dobbs
- What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump (Bob’s tech-body essay on Donald Trump) — the book whose final appendix-pages this session reads to the close
Other Works
- Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica (1969) — the album Bob ranks among the greatest; source of the Van Gogh-and-Cadillacs interview
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power — his final, unfinished book, read through Heidegger as “the power to power”
People
- Bob Dobbs (co-host; author of the Trump book and the tech-body essay)
- Cameron McEwen (co-host; the Nietzsche scholar of the pair)
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist, the figure the dialogue orbits)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (the philosopher whose will to power is routed into the tech-body reading)
- Martin Heidegger (German philosopher, cited for reading the will to power as “the power to power”)
- Captain Beefheart (avant-garde musician whose interview Bob reads as accidental media ecology)
- Pierre Schaeffer (French musique concrète composer, McLuhan’s interlocutor in a Paris dialogue)
- Derrick de Kerckhove (McLuhan associate who translated for him in the Schaeffer dialogue)
- Abbie Hoffman (activist who phoned McLuhan for advice on his own media book)
- Patti Smith (rock musician on whom Bob demonstrates the McLuhanite “aside”)
- Norman Mailer (McLuhan’s hot, confrontational foil in the 1967 televised debate)
- Plato (the standard of already-known thought Western history has failed to communicate)
- iON (Bob’s channeled “Para-Environ,” distinguished here from the Tech Body’s own voice) — listen to the actual recording of the Tech Body here
- Donald Trump (subject of the book the series reads to its end)
Closing
The last of the tech-body sessions, the dialogue turns the whole reading into one figure — conflation against the hyphen — and finds it everywhere, from the algorithm to the Cadillac to the aside that carries the message.
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