Near the back of Bob’s book waits McLuhan’s strangest proposal — that computers could orchestrate the media diet of whole populations through a “global thermostat,” the scheme one professor called fascism and Cameron insists is precisely its opposite . Getting there runs through p.96’s deceptively flat line, “a cliché is an act of consciousness” , which Cameron pries open with the subjective and objective genitive until “total” and “sum” turn complicated, and through Trump as the actor who, unlike everyone else, knew he was wearing a mask . The session’s refrain, sounded first against a visiting scholar’s half-right reading of acoustic space, is that the medium is the message means meaning is always plural and relational — so any solution, including McLuhan’s, is not a command but the opening of a transparent argument.
Key Topics
- Thomas Dilworth’s conference talk read as acoustic space gotten half-right — the sphere “without margin or center,” Spengler’s decline, but a coming-down on one side of the visual/acoustic metaphor that loses the tactility and the “complete disaster” also waiting at the speed of light.
- The “Fake Explorations Group” Facebook debate over mapping the Trivium and Quadrivium onto brain hemispheres — which Cameron refuses because “the medium is media,” and every relation is “inherently plural.”
- P.96’s line unfolded through the subjective and objective genitive — does “the act belong to consciousness,” or does consciousness belong to the act? — a reading tool Cameron takes from scholastic theology and Heidegger.
- Trump as a McLuhanesque actor who, unlike everyone else, “knew that they were wearing masks” — the godlike hire-and-fire of The Apprentice later flipped into figure and ground once the whole country became the apprentice he tried to fire.
- The Playboy “global thermostat”: McLuhan’s proposal to program societies’ media environments, the “fascism” charge, and Cameron’s rebuttal that orchestration opens social dialogue rather than closing it.
- The Tech Body named as “the new art form today,” the programmer of the news we take for reality, “both cause and effect.”
Notable Quotes
"A cliché is an act of consciousness. Total consciousness is the sum of all the clichés of all the media or technologies we probe with."
"Clairvoyance is not some sort of breakthrough into total illumination. It's the ability of the community to interrogate itself in a transparent manner."
"Whatever freedom you have comes from insight into your constraints."
Outline
- 0:00:01 — Dilworth’s “At the Speed of Light” quote: “acoustic space” read half-right
- 0:08:30 — Fake Explorations Group: the Trivium, the Quadrivium, and the Hemispheres
- 0:27:30 — Trump the actor: the knowing mask and The Apprentice
- 0:32:09 — P.96: “a cliché is an act of consciousness”
- 0:44:06 — 1967’s abundance, the 1968 flip, Expo, and the brain surgery
- 01:12:47 — McLuhan and Jordan Peterson
- 01:18:26 — The Tech Body as the new art form
- 01:23:36 — Simplicity, efficiency, and blindness
- 01:25:20 — Drilling the image: tactility and corporate clairvoyance
- 01:33:06 — Plato’s static archetypes as “visual space”
- 01:38:59 — The Playboy interview: the global thermostat
- 01:57:54 — The Present: Twitter, the WEF, and the Evergreens’ final Armageddon
- 02:01:24 — McLuhan’s confidence that humans figure things out
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- From Cliché to Archetype (1970, with Wilfred Watson) — p.150, “a cliché is an act of consciousness,” the line at the center of the session
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972, with Barrington Nevitt) — p.137, percepts before concepts; p.11, where form and content merge
- Understanding Media (1964) — read as the “right hemisphere” Quadrivium
- The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) — read as the “left hemisphere” Trivium
- Laws of Media — the Tetrad, and the credit card’s “prestige for use”
- War and Peace in the Global Village — the “connubium” on p.190
- Counterblast — the “bias of all others in an effort at orchestration”
- The 1969 Playboy interview — the “global thermostat” and “civil defense against media fallout” passages
Other Works
- At the Speed of Light There Is Only Illumination (2004) — the Ottawa McLuhan-conference volume carrying Thomas Dilworth’s talk
- Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger — the biography the hosts appraise
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — “you can take two words and make a whole world”
People
- Marshall McLuhan (Canadian media theorist, the figure the dialogue orbits)
- Cameron McEwen (McLuhan scholar, editor of the McLuhan’s New Sciences blog)
- Bob Dobbs (author of the Tech-Body book under discussion)
- Thomas Dilworth (literary scholar and David Jones biographer whose conference talk Bob quotes)
- Wilfred Watson (McLuhan’s co-author on From Cliché to Archetype)
- Charles Peirce (the semiotician a Facebook debater overlays onto McLuhan)
- Mark Stahlman (media-ecology figure in the “Fake Explorations Group” debate)
- Donald Trump (the book’s subject, read as the actor who knew he wore a mask)
- Jordan Peterson (Toronto psychologist read as McLuhan’s mirror image)
- Donald Theall (McLuhan’s early-1950s graduate student; his Expo 67 essay)
- Gerd Stern (artist who alerted McLuhan’s circle to McLuhan’s “blackouts”)
- Ted Carpenter (McLuhan collaborator who balked at the “computer talk”)
- Michael Blake Read (the medium who channeled the Evergreens)
- Plato (whose static archetypes Bob reads as “visual space”)
- Oswald Spengler (invoked through Dilworth — “Western man went down the hill”)
Closing
Reading McLuhan’s most authoritarian-sounding idea, the dialogue turns it inside out: to program the media environment is fascism only if focus is impossible, and the alternative McLuhan actually proposed — like the cliché that is an act of consciousness — is an invitation to interrogate the question rather than an answer imposed.
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