Bob’s book reaches p.79 and the line the whole session turns on: our tools no longer shape us, they ape us — the graphic interface making media “look like people,” talking cartoons on a screen . From that pun Bob and Cameron build toward “tactility squared,” the point where the Android Meme cuts technology loose from the chemical body and media goes “out of control” , then follow the idea across a Victorian detour, a full theory of Presidents as images, and the Chip Body turning “self-conscious.” The long arc lands on a single stake: Mind itself, cast as the fifth-phase victim, and the “new science” of reading the pattern-recognition everyone is already doing without noticing .
Key Topics
- Tactility recast as a manifestation, not a sense — Cameron’s carbon-and-graphite analogy for how one structure surfaces as a car’s gloss or a TV show’s crudeness (“manifestations of tactility”).
- The Victorian “supernova” of “human interest” journalism — the penny press’s nonstop talk that McLuhan said “took over in journalism,” with W.T. Stead standing at the hinge.
- A global “seatbelt”: hockey and NFL rules read as the populist media ecology strapped onto the TV Body, sport as “the language of art” for post-literate people.
- Chaos physics, Get Smart’s KAOS, and “tetrad management” — order glimpsed in the maelstrom, with the White House no longer able to manage even itself.
- A theory of US Presidents as images, from Nixon’s deadpan “demeanor” to Obama’s “black sobriety.”
- The Chip Body turning “self-conscious,” surveillance capitalism, and the firms McLuhan told were “in the wrong business.”
Notable Quotes
"So the Android Meme is the squaring of tactility."
"The electric media is the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. Not seen."
"We're either going to suicide ourselves through mind, or mind is going to find a way out of the cul-de-sac."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Aping, not shaping: p.79
- 0:02:47 — Sex, death, and mimed humanity
- 0:07:52 — Tactility as manifestation, not a sense
- 0:12:56 — Mind as tactility; the battle for men’s minds
- 0:18:49 — The Victorian supernova: human interest
- 0:27:10 — Gargoyle mask vs idiot mask
- 0:32:02 — Canada and the butler’s detachment
- 0:43:18 — The seatbelt on the TV Body
- 0:50:04 — The Baroque spiral: maelstrom and fractal
- 0:51:10 — Chaos, KAOS, and Tetrad management
- 0:56:17 — Presidents as images
- 01:01:25 — Rap, the electric eternity, and the Reagan retrieval
- 01:12:32 — Homelessness, virtue, and the new hypocrisy
- 01:32:08 — The Chip Body, self-conscious, and surveillance capitalism
- 01:41:24 — The Fifth Horseman: media as Apocalypse
- 01:52:56 — Mind, the New Science, and extending the learning process
- 01:58:45 — We’re not getting dumber: complex clairvoyance
- 02:02:58 — Closing: writing ahead of himself
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Understanding Media (1964) — source of “human interest took over in journalism” and the line that we would become “drifting homeless people”
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout — Baby Boomers using the industrial structures “to leap into something else”
- “Nihilism Exposed” (1955) — the artist “shifting the scenery of existence… in accordance with his infallible intuition of the cosmic weather”
Works by Bob Dobbs
Other Works
- Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God — where Cameron traces McLuhan’s sense of “aping”
- Wyndham Lewis, Monstre Gai — the “monster” figure Bob invokes for media and the American swallowing of Canada
- Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction — McLuhan’s foreword on sex, death, and violence in advertising
- Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command — the mechanized slaughter of animals as a subtopic of what happens to people
- William Gibson, Neuromancer — the “timid” cyberspace outrun by Web 2.0
- Edgar Allan Poe, “A Descent into the Maelström” — the mariner who rides the vortex back up, “order in chaos”
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — “an upgrade of the Book of Revelation”
- Shoshana Zuboff — the Harvard scholar who named “surveillance capitalism”
- Get Smart — the TV show whose enemy “KAOS” battles “CONTROL”
People
- Bob Dobbs (media theorist, co-host)
- Cameron McEwen (McLuhan scholar, co-host)
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist whose work anchors the whole reading)
- Wyndham Lewis (modernist writer and painter; McLuhan’s “greatest tactile eye thinker”)
- Wilson Bryan Key (author on subliminal advertising)
- W.T. Stead (Victorian campaigning journalist at the hinge of “human interest”)
- Eric Havelock (classicist on the alphabet and Greek consciousness)
- Plato and Aristotle (the Greek concern with different ways of exercising the mind)
- Arthur Kroker (theorist of “surplus flesh” and technology “coming alive”)
- Siegfried Giedion (historian of mechanization)
- William Gibson (cyberpunk novelist)
- Shoshana Zuboff (theorist of surveillance capitalism)
- William Irwin Thompson (New Age teacher of the five-phase schema of victims)
- R. Murray Schafer (author of “The Tuning of the World,” the new Orpheus)
- Norman Mailer (novelist: “Americans are obsessed with virtue”)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (philosopher on morality one “can’t live without”)
- Eric McLuhan (Marshall’s son, on the York University panel where Bob shouted “tetrad management”)
- Henry Kissinger (named as “a tetrad manager”)
- Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana (Chilean popularizers of chaos/complexity)
- Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Donald Trump (US Presidents read as images)
Closing
By working p.79 into “tactility squared,” the session turns Bob’s densest coinage into a working claim — that the media “out of control” and the mind said to be its final victim are the same event seen from two sides.
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