Kevin Kelly, the first editor of Wired, coined a word for technology as a single living organism — the technium — and Bob Dobbs opens the session with him as the one contemporary who names, from the outside, what he has been calling the tech body . But the convergence quickly gives way to the episode’s real engine: a critic who insists the computer is just “a box of metals” , and Cameron McEwen’s long unfolding of why that is the perfect way to misunderstand “the medium is the message.” The back half returns to Bob’s Trump book, where McLuhan’s line that “art and science and nature converge through understanding media” becomes an anticipation of the Android Meme as an “artist” .
Key Topics
- Kevin Kelly’s technium — “the accumulation of all technologies and inventions as a working, living system,” a new “seventh kingdom of nature” — draws Cameron’s first and standing question: what is its ontological basis?
- Against a critic who would understand the machine by taking it apart, Cameron argues that this “starts with the poles in isolation” instead of the medium between them — the Gutenbergian “denial of original relationality.”
- The medium is “prior to the subject” and “more a question than anything else” , so the interior landscape becomes “all of the possible ways of being a self and all of the possible ways of experiencing the world.”
- Cameron traces McLuhan’s “bisected earwig” — cut it and the halves fight — from the 1860s German von Hartmann through Wyndham Lewis to McLuhan’s 1944 essay , reading it as a portrait of the Gutenberg Galaxy.
- A chemistry analogy runs underneath: as it took most of the 19th century to reach Mendeleev’s table, McLuhan “recognized the elements of the interior landscape, called them media” , opening a science barely begun.
- Jordan Peterson, “the Judge Judy of the Western tradition” , is read as a talking head who “hogged” dialogue , his akathisia matched to the post-1960-stroke McLuhan.
- Reading that same convergence, Bob calls the Android Meme “an artist” that “molds art and matter” , then inventories a two-phase architecture of “solar government,” “universal government,” and a “hologram world.”
Notable Quotes
"The interior landscape is all of the possible ways of being a self and all of the possible ways of experiencing the world."
"At electric information speeds, art and science and nature converge through understanding media."
"The medium is prior to the subject."
Outline
- 0:00:18 — Kevin Kelly and the technium
- 0:06:49 — The Wired McLuhan connection; Tom Pick
- 0:14:00 — “A box of metals”: the medium is the message
- 0:24:04 — The medium prior to the subject; the interior landscape
- 0:33:44 — The earwig: von Hartmann to Lewis to McLuhan
- 0:53:49 — The Gutenberg Galaxy as thanatos
- 0:58:09 — Chemistry of the interior landscape
- 01:02:06 — Collectivizing questions; Plato
- 01:29:43 — “Art and science and nature converge”: the Android Meme as artist
- 01:43:40 — Typhon in America: conversation against commerce
- 01:50:05 — Jordan Peterson: hogging dialogue, akathisia
- 01:58:18 — The mythic stages: solar, universal, hologram government
- 02:16:37 — Figure and ground; the Cape Canaveral caper
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Typhon in America (1940s, unpublished) — its claim that a decent human life needs three or four hours of conversation a day, “not compatible with our commercial society”
- “Lemuel in Lilliput” (1944) — McLuhan’s essay on Wyndham Lewis, quoting The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man “on practically every page”
- “At electric information speeds, art and science and nature converge through understanding media” — the line Bob reads as anticipating the Android Meme
Other Works
- Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (1992) — where the technium is developed
- Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man — the relay for the “bisected earwig” image
- Douglas Coupland’s and Fitzgerald’s McLuhan biographies — cited for the post-stroke “jitterbug”
- Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans — Kelly contributed a chapter; Kelly also advised on the film Minority Report
Documents
- Up the Orphic Anti — Bob’s self-published essay, where he makes his Wired background claim
- Cloning ESP (1999) and the “Memo to Prince Charles” (June 4, 1987) — printed in the booklet for Bob’s first album Bob’s Media Ecology (made by Dave Newfeld), source of the mythic-stages architecture
People
- Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired; coined the technium)
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Stewart Brand (of the Whole Earth Review and CoEvolution Quarterly, Kelly’s milieu)
- Wyndham Lewis (painter and novelist, relay for the earwig quotation)
- Eduard von Hartmann (19th-century German source of the earwig image)
- Andrew McLuhan (found the “bisected earwig” note)
- Plato (source of “all teaching is a reminding”)
- Robert Oppenheimer (quoted on the children in the street who know the answers)
- Jordan Peterson (the “Judge Judy of the Western tradition”)
- Ted Carpenter (who left when the post-stroke McLuhan was “not the McLuhan I knew”)
- William Gibson, Gary Wolf, Tom Pick, Douglas Coupland, Dave Newfeld (figures invoked across the session)
Closing
The session’s throughline is Cameron’s insistence that every real question — about machines, women, death, or the Android Meme — begins not with the poles we think we know but with the plural medium between them, the interior landscape a science has barely started to map.
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