[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[00:02] Bob Dobbs: welcome.
[00:03] Bob Dobbs: This is Bob and Ewen Cameron again,
[00:05] Bob Dobbs: and this is our forty-second show,
[00:08] Bob Dobbs: and we're going to my book,
[00:10] Bob Dobbs: page 79.
[00:12] Bob Dobbs: So take a look at it,
[00:14] Bob Dobbs: if you have it.
[00:16] Bob Dobbs: So what is said at the top of 79,
[00:20] Bob Dobbs: I say the point is that the Internet brought out the fact that media aped us because the Android Meme started to look like people thanks to the new graphic user interface.
[00:31] Bob Dobbs: They were no longer reading text,
[00:32] Bob Dobbs: they were talking cartoons on your computer.
[00:35] Bob Dobbs: So it's aping us,
[00:36] Bob Dobbs: no longer shaping.
[00:38] Bob Dobbs: I keep pointing this out,
[00:39] Bob Dobbs: nobody gets it.
[00:40] Bob Dobbs: Nobody gets the significance of the fact that the Android Meme was aping us,
[00:43] Bob Dobbs: different from shaping us.
[00:45] Bob Dobbs: So you remember on the album,
[00:46] Bob Dobbs: The Medium is the Massage,
[00:49] Bob Dobbs: it says at 1856,
[00:52] Bob Dobbs: at the end of the album,
[00:54] Bob Dobbs: we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
[00:58] Bob Dobbs: So that's the cliche,
[00:59] Bob Dobbs: medium is the massage.
[01:01] Bob Dobbs: But earlier in the album,
[01:02] Bob Dobbs: at the 6th minute,
[01:03] Bob Dobbs: 24th second,
[01:04] Bob Dobbs: it says,
[01:05] Bob Dobbs: we shape our tools and thereafter our tools ape us.
[01:09] Bob Dobbs: So I take the ape thing,
[01:11] Bob Dobbs: miming,
[01:12] Bob Dobbs: but I make it literal.
[01:13] Bob Dobbs: It becomes more and more us and it eventually leads to your clone.
[01:17] Bob Dobbs: That's technology looking like you,
[01:20] Bob Dobbs: right?
[01:21] Bob Dobbs: You see that?
[01:22] Bob Dobbs: So we are moving towards being aped.
[01:26] Cameron McEwen: But aping...
[01:28] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,
[01:29] Cameron McEwen: it would go back to Lewis.
[01:33] Bob Dobbs: Apes of God.
[01:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[01:35] Cameron McEwen: and he would be taking aping in a variety of senses,
[01:41] Cameron McEwen: right?
[01:42] Cameron McEwen: It's not only to create resemblance,
[01:47] Cameron McEwen: it's also to cartoon,
[01:50] Cameron McEwen: as you say right there,
[01:53] Cameron McEwen: and it's to cartoon both positively and negatively.
[02:00] Cameron McEwen: So there's a lot going on in the word aping,
[02:03] Cameron McEwen: for sure.
[02:03] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[02:04] Bob Dobbs: and actually the quote I read is at the bottom of 78 in my format.
[02:08] Bob Dobbs: It may not be in yours.
[02:11] Bob Dobbs: So then I go to the top of 79,
[02:14] Bob Dobbs: and I say,
[02:15] Bob Dobbs: aping,
[02:16] Bob Dobbs: that's in quotes,
[02:17] Bob Dobbs: aping is not like shaping.
[02:18] Bob Dobbs: It apes us.
[02:19] Bob Dobbs: It imitates us.
[02:21] Bob Dobbs: And I say the first stage of the Android Meme,
[02:24] Bob Dobbs: the global hologram,
[02:26] Bob Dobbs: started imitating people.
[02:27] Bob Dobbs: Showing the rough parts of humans,
[02:29] Bob Dobbs: violent TV,
[02:30] Bob Dobbs: stupid talk shows,
[02:32] Bob Dobbs: violent talk shows.
[02:33] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[02:34] Bob Dobbs: it was very austere and antiseptic in the 50s,
[02:39] Bob Dobbs: right?
[02:39] Bob Dobbs: Everything was so proper.
[02:41] Bob Dobbs: It's amazing you go back and look at them compared to the noise of the
[02:46] Bob Dobbs: 90s. Do you know what I mean?
[02:47] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[02:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[02:49] Bob Dobbs: And that,
[02:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[02:50] Bob Dobbs: anybody from the
[02:51] Bob Dobbs: 50s, an adult,
[02:52] Bob Dobbs: would be shocked at in 40 years what was going on,
[02:56] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[02:56] Bob Dobbs: But the audience got used to it.
[02:59] Bob Dobbs: And in McLuhan forward to
[03:03] Bob Dobbs: Wilson Bryan Key Subliminal Seduction,
[03:06] Bob Dobbs: he kind of Explorations why there's sexual imagery and death imagery in the
[03:13] Bob Dobbs: Ed pictures,
[03:13] Bob Dobbs: the drinks and stuff,
[03:15] Bob Dobbs: because he said the more sex there is,
[03:18] Bob Dobbs: or whatever you call that,
[03:19] Bob Dobbs: hedonism,
[03:21] Bob Dobbs: the world becomes more violent.
[03:24] Bob Dobbs: That's an important point.
[03:26] Bob Dobbs: So that the ads,
[03:27] Bob Dobbs: if they did have subliminals in them,
[03:30] Bob Dobbs: they would have to have positive and negative images,
[03:35] Bob Dobbs: sex and death.
[03:36] Bob Dobbs: So the going together of sex and death,
[03:41] Bob Dobbs: he presents it as if it's answering the mystery that Key doesn't get,
[03:44] Bob Dobbs: Wilson Bryan Key.
[03:46] Bob Dobbs: He never seems to understand why this is happening,
[03:50] Bob Dobbs: but McLuhan says it has to be.
[03:52] Bob Dobbs: But that's anticipating what I'm talking about.
[03:56] Bob Dobbs: The human reality is mimed and it just keeps escalating.
[04:04] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[04:05] Bob Dobbs: it's not an issue of sex and violence,
[04:07] Bob Dobbs: that's a given.
[04:08] Bob Dobbs: Now it is the corruption of drug addiction and the crudeness in social life.
[04:19] Bob Dobbs: No approximation of decency.
[04:21] Bob Dobbs: What other complaints do they have?
[04:24] Bob Dobbs: People being,
[04:24] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[04:24] Bob Dobbs: dumb.
[04:27] Cameron McEwen: Swearing.
[04:28] Bob Dobbs: Swearing and slovenly dress.
[04:33] Bob Dobbs: You see a lot of that in California.
[04:36] Bob Dobbs: People going to the supermarket.
[04:38] Bob Dobbs: I started being there in the 90s and seeing it then.
[04:41] Bob Dobbs: Going to the supermarket wearing nothing.
[04:49] Cameron McEwen: Slovenly in mind as well.
[04:52] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[04:54] Cameron McEwen: At least for somebody like myself,
[04:56] Cameron McEwen: and I think this was generally true,
[04:58] Cameron McEwen: if you were coming out of Canada or coming out of the flyover country and you came to
[05:05] Cameron McEwen: California in the late
[05:09] Cameron McEwen: 60s or
[05:10] Cameron McEwen: 70s, then it seemed like a different planet.
[05:13] Cameron McEwen: It seemed,
[05:14] Cameron McEwen: and the women were so accepting and so...
[05:22] Cameron McEwen: sort of cool compared to any woman you'd ever seen in your life,
[05:28] Cameron McEwen: that this was,
[05:31] Cameron McEwen: it was just like a society that had no clothes on.
[05:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[05:35] Cameron McEwen: It was great.
[05:37] Bob Dobbs: A nudist colony.
[05:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[05:39] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[05:40] Bob Dobbs: I think what I wanted to say is that as you get past the,
[05:43] Bob Dobbs: well,
[05:43] Bob Dobbs: the sex and violence is happening,
[05:46] Bob Dobbs: more and more people are abusive in their relationships and stoned,
[05:50] Bob Dobbs: You get...
[05:51] Bob Dobbs: crudeness in communication,
[05:53] Bob Dobbs: chemical body communication,
[05:55] Bob Dobbs: speech.
[05:56] Bob Dobbs: And so by the
[05:57] Bob Dobbs: 90s, everybody said,
[05:58] Bob Dobbs: fuck this,
[05:59] Bob Dobbs: fuck that,
[05:59] Bob Dobbs: which they did not say in the 60s and 50s,
[06:02] Bob Dobbs: right?
[06:02] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[06:03] Bob Dobbs: You did not say that.
[06:05] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan said that fuck was a tactile word.
[06:08] Bob Dobbs: So as we got more and more into tactility,
[06:10] Bob Dobbs: extension of it in the tactile global hologram,
[06:13] Bob Dobbs: people's language just became more tactile.
[06:17] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[06:17] Bob Dobbs: And everybody is swearing.
[06:19] Bob Dobbs: I mean...
[06:21] Bob Dobbs: Trump probably swore during a couple of his speeches a couple of years ago.
[06:25] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[06:25] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[06:27] Cameron McEwen: And Ian and Bob,
[06:29] Cameron McEwen: you've got
[06:31] Cameron McEwen: Trump swearing.
[06:32] Bob Dobbs: Is that right?
[06:35] Cameron McEwen: Calling somebody a fucking idiot.
[06:36] Cameron McEwen: I forget who.
[06:39] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[06:39] Cameron McEwen: General Milley.
[06:41] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[06:42] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[06:43] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[06:44] Bob Dobbs: That's a few months ago.
[06:46] Bob Dobbs: You remember that.
[06:47] Bob Dobbs: It's not this week's posting.
[06:49] Cameron McEwen: No.
[06:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[06:50] Cameron McEwen: well,
[06:50] Cameron McEwen: a few weeks ago,
[06:51] Cameron McEwen: I think.
[06:52] Cameron McEwen: Tell me this,
[06:53] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[06:53] Cameron McEwen: because I don't really understand it myself.
[06:56] Cameron McEwen: I haven't given any thought to it.
[06:58] Cameron McEwen: But the emerging tactility comes out disguised,
[07:08] Cameron McEwen: right?
[07:08] Cameron McEwen: It comes out in a very crude form.
[07:12] Cameron McEwen: Abrasive.
[07:13] Bob Dobbs: Abrasive and abrupt are the words McLuhan used.
[07:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[07:16] Bob Dobbs: that's what I mean by tactility.
[07:17] Bob Dobbs: Most people think it was a flowing thing.
[07:19] Bob Dobbs: But we talked about the last episode about that's a holdover of the sleek surfaces of automobiles in the first half of the 20th century.
[07:29] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[07:29] Bob Dobbs: the hot media had a smooth surface,
[07:32] Bob Dobbs: and people thought they were flowing when they started to get into the tactile world.
[07:39] Bob Dobbs: And
[07:40] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan talks about flux and flow,
[07:42] Bob Dobbs: and people thought that was this condition I'm talking about.
[07:47] Bob Dobbs: And then it became part of the...
[07:48] Bob Dobbs: normal vernacular,
[07:50] Bob Dobbs: you go with the flow.
[07:52] Cameron McEwen: But in all of this,
[07:59] Cameron McEwen: what we're talking about is tactility as a kind of manifestation,
[08:04] Cameron McEwen: right?
[08:05] Cameron McEwen: In the sense of you have carbon as an element,
[08:10] Cameron McEwen: and then you have graphite as a manifestation of that element,
[08:15] Cameron McEwen: but you could also have
[08:18] Cameron McEwen: a diamond or you could also have carbon in a whole bunch of compounds.
[08:25] Cameron McEwen: So,
[08:28] Cameron McEwen: tactility,
[08:31] Cameron McEwen: if it appears smooth,
[08:33] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[08:34] Cameron McEwen: on a car or if it appears crude as on some sort of television show,
[08:43] Cameron McEwen: those are not tactility itself.
[08:46] Cameron McEwen: What they are is
[08:47] Cameron McEwen: manifestations of tactility.
[08:50] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[08:50] Bob Dobbs: because tactility is not a sense.
[08:52] Bob Dobbs: So it translates into what you're just saying,
[08:54] Bob Dobbs: those two qualities.
[08:55] Bob Dobbs: That's the sensory approximation of tactility.
[08:58] Cameron McEwen: Approximation or expression?
[09:02] Bob Dobbs: Expression,
[09:03] Bob Dobbs: approximation.
[09:04] Bob Dobbs: It is not tactility,
[09:05] Bob Dobbs: but it's how tactility comes across when you translate it into your senses.
[09:10] Bob Dobbs: Maybe it's even proprioceptive and haptic.
[09:14] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[09:14] Cameron McEwen: but doesn't that tell us
[09:16] Cameron McEwen: Some interesting things about how McLuhan thinks about the senses,
[09:21] Cameron McEwen: right?
[09:22] Cameron McEwen: The senses are not,
[09:25] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[09:26] Cameron McEwen: seeing or hearing or something like this.
[09:30] Cameron McEwen: They're structures that express themselves in various ways.
[09:37] Cameron McEwen: And so in order to understand,
[09:38] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[09:39] Cameron McEwen: tactility,
[09:40] Cameron McEwen: you have to understand the structure of tactility and then the different ways in which that structure can express itself.
[09:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[09:50] Bob Dobbs: the quote you sent me tonight,
[09:51] Bob Dobbs: Nihilism Exposed,
[09:52] Bob Dobbs: 1955,
[09:54] Bob Dobbs: it is the business of the artist to be constantly shifting the scenery of existence about in accordance with his infallible intuition of the cosmic weather.
[10:02] Bob Dobbs: The shifting of the scenery of existence is the shifting of uh,
[10:06] Bob Dobbs: of the senses,
[10:08] Bob Dobbs: but the senses are manifest,
[10:10] Bob Dobbs: the shifting is the invisible tactility.
[10:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[10:14] Cameron McEwen: I'd agree with that.
[10:16] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[10:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[10:16] Bob Dobbs: So then you say,
[10:20] Bob Dobbs: global situation.
[10:23] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[10:24] Bob Dobbs: the way and the degree in which these events interpenetrate varies,
[10:28] Bob Dobbs: and the degree,
[10:29] Bob Dobbs: this is from 1959,
[10:30] Bob Dobbs: and the degree to which they enter the minds of decision-makers varies.
[10:34] Bob Dobbs: But in the world about us,
[10:35] Bob Dobbs: the endless decisions that are being taken by many kinds of people are taken habitually in an atmosphere in which everything happens at once.
[10:42] Bob Dobbs: That's what you're trying to say,
[10:45] Bob Dobbs: the manifestation,
[10:47] Bob Dobbs: the expression of an increasingly tactile ineffability of the global hologram.
[10:56] Bob Dobbs: So the world is,
[10:57] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said TV was tactile,
[10:59] Bob Dobbs: but then by the late
[11:01] Bob Dobbs: 60s, the global anti-environment tactile.
[11:03] Bob Dobbs: because TV has a tactile relationship to the other media,
[11:06] Bob Dobbs: which means there's some resonant node that's forming,
[11:09] Bob Dobbs: the Global Membrane,
[11:10] Bob Dobbs: which you can't see or feel because it's not a sense,
[11:14] Bob Dobbs: but the interaction,
[11:16] Bob Dobbs: the translation of it into a known sense is increasingly abrasive,
[11:22] Bob Dobbs: abrupt,
[11:22] Bob Dobbs: and interactive.
[11:24] Bob Dobbs: And the world,
[11:25] Bob Dobbs: you see what's funny,
[11:26] Bob Dobbs: you can look at the images of science fiction in the first half of the 20th century where people...
[11:31] Bob Dobbs: talk about a future situation,
[11:33] Bob Dobbs: like,
[11:34] Bob Dobbs: say,
[11:34] Bob Dobbs: Brave New World.
[11:35] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[11:36] Bob Dobbs: the people are on drugs,
[11:37] Bob Dobbs: but the abrasiveness and the rudeness and the indecency,
[11:42] Bob Dobbs: the way people turned out by the year 2000,
[11:44] Bob Dobbs: is not portrayed in the novels of the science fiction of Pryde War II.
[11:51] Bob Dobbs: They don't see what McLuhan called the surface manners of life becoming,
[11:57] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[11:58] Bob Dobbs: more tactile,
[11:59] Bob Dobbs: which is abrupt and...
[12:01] Bob Dobbs: and crude because it's more abrasive.
[12:04] Bob Dobbs: The interaction,
[12:05] Bob Dobbs: the bumping,
[12:07] Bob Dobbs: which you think is in the brain,
[12:09] Bob Dobbs: this flow of data coming in with your senses,
[12:12] Bob Dobbs: which might be synesthetic,
[12:14] Bob Dobbs: and then this ineffable organism of non-sensory tactility organizes the data into a coherent consciousness according to the bias of the culture.
[12:25] Bob Dobbs: That,
[12:25] Bob Dobbs: in old terms,
[12:26] Bob Dobbs: would be the mind,
[12:26] Bob Dobbs: right?
[12:27] Bob Dobbs: Humans don't know what the mind is.
[12:29] Bob Dobbs: But the blankness,
[12:30] Bob Dobbs: the nothingness of tactility is mind.
[12:33] Bob Dobbs: It's an update of that word,
[12:35] Bob Dobbs: right?
[12:37] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[12:38] Bob Dobbs: correct.
[12:39] Cameron McEwen: Generally,
[12:40] Cameron McEwen: that's not only not seen in McLuhan research,
[12:45] Cameron McEwen: it's avoided.
[12:47] Cameron McEwen: It's like ideas that are penned off somewhere that you can't go near because it's radioactive.
[12:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[12:58] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[12:58] Bob Dobbs: I know there's a couple of books in the late 50s.
[13:01] Bob Dobbs: The Coming Race Mind War,
[13:02] Bob Dobbs: the war for the men's minds,
[13:05] Bob Dobbs: and that's visual
[13:07] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg interpretation of brain content or propaganda messages.
[13:13] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan,
[13:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[13:14] Bob Dobbs: spent his life saying,
[13:14] Bob Dobbs: no,
[13:14] Bob Dobbs: there's anti-environment effect.
[13:16] Bob Dobbs: The mind war is tactility.
[13:19] Bob Dobbs: It's actually,
[13:21] Bob Dobbs: you get a glimpse of mind if you see it as an expression of tactility,
[13:26] Bob Dobbs: because he brings in the senses.
[13:28] Bob Dobbs: whereas the traditional literate thing is the mind is split from the body,
[13:31] Bob Dobbs: right?
[13:32] Bob Dobbs: And that's a mistake,
[13:34] Bob Dobbs: but that's a visual bias.
[13:36] Bob Dobbs: So you'll hear politicians,
[13:40] Bob Dobbs: that's about as far as they got.
[13:42] Bob Dobbs: It's a battle for men's minds,
[13:43] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[13:44] Bob Dobbs: But it's a battle within the tactile interfaces,
[13:49] Bob Dobbs: which is anthropomorphized or made back on the chemical body terms of mind.
[13:55] Bob Dobbs: So we're still in...
[13:56] Bob Dobbs: If you know mind is tactility,
[13:59] Bob Dobbs: you can go back and read something written in 1910 that might say,
[14:03] Bob Dobbs: the battle for men's minds,
[14:04] Bob Dobbs: that's tactility.
[14:06] Bob Dobbs: You can see those words are appropriate if you know mind means that,
[14:10] Bob Dobbs: or at least McLuhan updated the imaging or the operation of the collective mind.
[14:17] Bob Dobbs: So that's...
[14:19] Cameron McEwen: You can see that in the Greeks already.
[14:22] Bob Dobbs: For example...
[14:26] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[14:27] Cameron McEwen: the Greeks are often talking about different ways of looking at the world,
[14:35] Cameron McEwen: different types of mind.
[14:38] Cameron McEwen: This is what,
[14:42] Cameron McEwen: excuse me,
[14:42] Cameron McEwen: this is what Havelock saw as arising as a result of the alphabet.
[14:49] Cameron McEwen: For the first time,
[14:50] Cameron McEwen: people become conscious of different ways of exercising the mind.
[14:55] Cameron McEwen: And so...
[14:57] Cameron McEwen: In Plato and Aristotle,
[14:58] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[14:59] Cameron McEwen: there's a great concern with how different philosophers look at things and how the ways in which they're right and wrong in doing that.
[15:10] Cameron McEwen: So what you were talking about in 1910,
[15:13] Cameron McEwen: which I think is absolutely right,
[15:16] Cameron McEwen: actually is also characteristic of Plato and Aristotle.
[15:21] Cameron McEwen: So it's characteristic of the whole tradition for 2,500 years.
[15:26] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[15:26] Bob Dobbs: and the alphabet and writing brought in nuances of meaning in semantics,
[15:36] Bob Dobbs: so it got more complicated in people's communication,
[15:41] Bob Dobbs: whereas preliterate people were more abrupt.
[15:44] Bob Dobbs: They were aware of resonance and multilevel,
[15:46] Bob Dobbs: but they lived abruptly,
[15:48] Bob Dobbs: whereas the alphabetic effect made humans...
[15:55] Bob Dobbs: The opposite.
[15:56] Bob Dobbs: They were not as blunt.
[15:58] Bob Dobbs: They were abstract.
[16:00] Bob Dobbs: But the ground was simple.
[16:05] Bob Dobbs: Whereas in the preliterate,
[16:06] Bob Dobbs: the figure is abruptness,
[16:09] Bob Dobbs: but they're aware of the multilevel complexity.
[16:12] Bob Dobbs: Once you get into the writings,
[16:14] Bob Dobbs: Plato and Aristotle's time,
[16:16] Bob Dobbs: the figure is the abstraction,
[16:22] Bob Dobbs: non-abruptness,
[16:23] Bob Dobbs: the multiple.
[16:24] Bob Dobbs: multiple nuances of meaning,
[16:27] Bob Dobbs: which leads into dialectics and arguments over semantics.
[16:31] Bob Dobbs: But the ground of it is a simple flattening caused by the alphabet.
[16:36] Bob Dobbs: So two-figure grounds there.
[16:40] Bob Dobbs: So then you get to this time,
[16:43] Bob Dobbs: tactility,
[16:45] Bob Dobbs: and I have this in the Kroker quadrant,
[16:47] Bob Dobbs: because the way Kroker writes,
[16:49] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about technology in simple terms coming alive.
[16:54] Bob Dobbs: But he translated it into surplus flesh sitting on the sidelines while technology becomes a vicious battle.
[17:04] Bob Dobbs: So that's tactility,
[17:05] Bob Dobbs: but it's among media that are not involved with the chemical body,
[17:10] Bob Dobbs: like previous analog media were extensions.
[17:13] Bob Dobbs: It's independent of and separate.
[17:15] Bob Dobbs: So
[17:15] Bob Dobbs: Kroker would say that the genes left the chemical body and leaped into the technology,
[17:21] Bob Dobbs: the cyberspace.
[17:23] Bob Dobbs: and took on the world,
[17:25] Bob Dobbs: that world.
[17:26] Bob Dobbs: So,
[17:27] Bob Dobbs: tactility squared was what I was trying to get at in terms of this beginning of a separation between technology and chemical body life,
[17:38] Bob Dobbs: what people called physical,
[17:39] Bob Dobbs: which was enhanced by literacy.
[17:42] Bob Dobbs: Before that,
[17:43] Bob Dobbs: people had more ineffable sense.
[17:45] Bob Dobbs: They had the five humors or the four humors.
[17:48] Bob Dobbs: They weren't so locked into the 3D image that printing press brought in.
[17:52] Bob Dobbs: They were...
[17:53] Bob Dobbs: biased during the
[17:56] Bob Dobbs: Catholic Church era,
[17:57] Bob Dobbs: the manuscript era,
[17:58] Bob Dobbs: 1500 years up to the printing press,
[18:01] Bob Dobbs: and other parts of the world didn't go through that.
[18:03] Bob Dobbs: They still had crude,
[18:06] Bob Dobbs: primitive oral tactile or audile visual tactility.
[18:11] Bob Dobbs: So you can see across the world,
[18:14] Bob Dobbs: most of the world was still audile tactile.
[18:16] Bob Dobbs: This weird mutation was happening with the phonetic alphabet in Europe and then the manuscript.
[18:23] Bob Dobbs: That was suppressing awareness of tactility.
[18:26] Bob Dobbs: So you can see in the Victorian era,
[18:28] Bob Dobbs: the ultimate peak of it,
[18:29] Bob Dobbs: before it flips into the crazy 1910 reality for Western,
[18:35] Bob Dobbs: for Europe,
[18:37] Bob Dobbs: everybody is trying to be stiff and proper and surface decent.
[18:40] Bob Dobbs: They wouldn't talk about politics.
[18:41] Bob Dobbs: The cliche was,
[18:42] Bob Dobbs: no talk about politics or religion in public,
[18:45] Bob Dobbs: right?
[18:46] Bob Dobbs: Remember that cliche about the Victorian era?
[18:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[18:50] Cameron McEwen: but the...
[18:53] Cameron McEwen: When that is said is exactly the time when the penny press is evolving into nonstop talk about war and religion and
[19:09] Cameron McEwen: people's affairs.
[19:09] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[19:09] Cameron McEwen: you know what McLuhan called it?
[19:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[19:11] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan called it in Understanding Media,
[19:13] Bob Dobbs: human interest,
[19:14] Bob Dobbs: in quotes,
[19:15] Bob Dobbs: human interest took over in journalism.
[19:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[19:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[19:20] Cameron McEwen: That's sort of the downstairs of the upstairs that you're talking about.
[19:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[19:24] Bob Dobbs: that's the Victorian veneer of proper visual propriety is going away,
[19:33] Bob Dobbs: but it has its final supernova of everybody's extreme.
[19:38] Bob Dobbs: And so you have in London,
[19:40] Bob Dobbs: this is where
[19:41] Bob Dobbs: W.T. Stead comes along,
[19:42] Bob Dobbs: and he exposes all the fucking society.
[19:47] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?
[19:49] Cameron McEwen: No,
[19:49] Cameron McEwen: I understand.
[19:49] Cameron McEwen: I think I'm laughing.
[19:50] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[19:51] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[19:51] Bob Dobbs: All of Bitcoin society is,
[19:53] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[19:54] Bob Dobbs: raping women and stuff.
[19:58] Bob Dobbs: This was just before they could start really getting jobs,
[20:01] Bob Dobbs: right?
[20:02] Bob Dobbs: The only choice was to be a prostitute.
[20:05] Bob Dobbs: And
[20:06] Bob Dobbs: W.T. Stead,
[20:06] Bob Dobbs: who was Joyce's hero,
[20:08] Bob Dobbs: and there's Grace Eckley's books on Finnegans Wake,
[20:11] Bob Dobbs: sees Stead as a major character reference for HCE,
[20:16] Bob Dobbs: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker.
[20:18] Bob Dobbs: So Stead, an interesting guy,
[20:19] Bob Dobbs: but he's the one who exposed the child prostitution and just child abuse and slavery and all that,
[20:27] Bob Dobbs: and started to change the society of London,
[20:32] Bob Dobbs: which led to
[20:33] Bob Dobbs: Fabian socialism,
[20:34] Bob Dobbs: and people really tried to perfect society even more.
[20:37] Bob Dobbs: But he was the guy who was the catalyst,
[20:39] Bob Dobbs: and he was put in jail in 1885 for doing that.
[20:44] Bob Dobbs: And he was a big scandal.
[20:45] Bob Dobbs: And then he started...
[20:46] Bob Dobbs: a Reader's Digest kind of newsletter,
[20:48] Bob Dobbs: and that was popular all over the world.
[20:50] Bob Dobbs: So Stead was a big deal.
[20:52] Bob Dobbs: And if you go to
[20:54] Bob Dobbs: 91st Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan,
[20:56] Bob Dobbs: there's the reservoir and a wall around the reservoir,
[21:00] Bob Dobbs: and right at the corner of
[21:02] Bob Dobbs: 5th and 91st,
[21:03] Bob Dobbs: there's a statue to W.T.
[21:05] Bob Dobbs: Stead because he was coming over on the Titanic,
[21:08] Bob Dobbs: and he drowned in the Titanic,
[21:10] Bob Dobbs: but he was sponsored by the
[21:12] Bob Dobbs: Burroughs and the wealthy elite of New York.
[21:15] Bob Dobbs: who then become,
[21:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[21:16] Bob Dobbs: in Ezra Pound's time,
[21:18] Bob Dobbs: Jewish conspirators,
[21:21] Bob Dobbs: causing World War II and that.
[21:23] Bob Dobbs: But they were sponsoring.
[21:27] Bob Dobbs: The rich people needed a guy to talk about things with more of the electric hive mind or beginning to be appreciative or not being so crude towards the working class.
[21:40] Bob Dobbs: You had to put on a veneer of including them.
[21:42] Bob Dobbs: And so you start to have a lot of reforms.
[21:45] Bob Dobbs: And Stead was the guy who did that,
[21:48] Bob Dobbs: but he's not known.
[21:53] Bob Dobbs: So the mess of what you just said,
[21:56] Bob Dobbs: the underbelly of the downstairs,
[21:59] Bob Dobbs: Stead is the figure for moving it and preparing to go into the electric world where you start to wear your conscience on your sleeve and you start to put on people and try not to be class.
[22:13] Bob Dobbs: And this is what Lewis sort of got upset about,
[22:16] Bob Dobbs: that the artists were putting on this hypocritical hanging out with the working class,
[22:22] Bob Dobbs: or hanging out with people and dropping the Victorian propriety.
[22:28] Bob Dobbs: So you have a lot of scandals in the Bloomsbury group where everybody's fucking everybody else,
[22:33] Bob Dobbs: right?
[22:36] Bob Dobbs: The couples,
[22:37] Bob Dobbs: the married couples.
[22:38] Bob Dobbs: And so that is...
[22:43] Bob Dobbs: So why did you bring up,
[22:46] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[22:46] Bob Dobbs: so the mind.
[22:49] Bob Dobbs: So the battle for men's mind is what's coming in in the early part of the 20th century.
[22:55] Bob Dobbs: And that's actually erroneous.
[22:57] Bob Dobbs: It's a battle over what to do with the new extended tactility with the electric media,
[23:03] Bob Dobbs: radio,
[23:04] Bob Dobbs: movies,
[23:04] Bob Dobbs: telephones,
[23:05] Bob Dobbs: and then television.
[23:07] Bob Dobbs: That tactility no culture could handle.
[23:10] Bob Dobbs: And then when the...
[23:12] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme comes along and technology separates from the chemical body,
[23:16] Bob Dobbs: takes on a life of its own,
[23:18] Bob Dobbs: and the population over the last 34 years has to get used to it.
[23:21] Bob Dobbs: The media is out of control.
[23:23] Bob Dobbs: We can't control the media.
[23:24] Bob Dobbs: That's a popular expression of something that's not in anybody's social framing.
[23:31] Bob Dobbs: So
[23:32] Bob Dobbs: I call that the squaring of tactility.
[23:35] Bob Dobbs: So the Android Meme is the squaring of tactility.
[23:38] Bob Dobbs: The tactility leaps out of the...
[23:41] Bob Dobbs: first nature,
[23:42] Bob Dobbs: and goes into second nature in extremists.
[23:47] Bob Dobbs: And that's led to the hyper-texting
[23:50] Bob Dobbs: ESP world of today,
[23:53] Bob Dobbs: where the kids don't,
[23:56] Bob Dobbs: the general impression of older people is that the young kids don't talk much.
[24:00] Bob Dobbs: They're just texting in silence,
[24:03] Bob Dobbs: right?
[24:03] Bob Dobbs: And that's a kind of ESP.
[24:06] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan writes in the
[24:07] Bob Dobbs: 50s, there's an analog ESP.
[24:09] Bob Dobbs: with the television environment.
[24:11] Bob Dobbs: But then the global theater complicates that,
[24:14] Bob Dobbs: and then you get an extended ESP.
[24:17] Bob Dobbs: plus the digital autonomy of the individual we talked about last time,
[24:22] Bob Dobbs: the isolation of the chemical body that he doesn't have in the hive mind of the 50s and
[24:29] Bob Dobbs: 60s.
[24:31] Bob Dobbs: So then the abrasiveness of an individual,
[24:33] Bob Dobbs: which becomes the alt-right,
[24:35] Bob Dobbs: all these people,
[24:37] Bob Dobbs: many just working class or who got their own blogs and
[24:42] Bob Dobbs: Web 2.0,
[24:43] Bob Dobbs: expressing and abrasive and yelling at Wolf Blitzer and CNN and mainstream media,
[24:49] Bob Dobbs: which is an old afterimage of centralized media of the analog era.
[24:55] Bob Dobbs: So everybody's yelling and screaming and maintaining their and making a big value out of their independence,
[25:02] Bob Dobbs: out of their freedom,
[25:03] Bob Dobbs: their rights,
[25:04] Bob Dobbs: their individual rights.
[25:05] Bob Dobbs: And that's the meme retrieval Trump ran on.
[25:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[25:11] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[25:13] Cameron McEwen: I think that's a good story.
[25:15] Bob Dobbs: Good,
[25:16] Bob Dobbs: good.
[25:17] Bob Dobbs: And did I make it too linear?
[25:19] Bob Dobbs: The phasal shifts?
[25:23] Cameron McEwen: No,
[25:24] Cameron McEwen: no,
[25:24] Cameron McEwen: no.
[25:25] Cameron McEwen: I think that's important for your book.
[25:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[25:29] Cameron McEwen: Your pamphlet.
[25:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[25:31] Bob Dobbs: so I'm talking about that here.
[25:33] Bob Dobbs: So let's see what I say.
[25:35] Bob Dobbs: Where's evidence that I did say that?
[25:39] Bob Dobbs: So I have here a top of 79.
[25:42] Bob Dobbs: Aping is not like shaping.
[25:44] Bob Dobbs: It apes us.
[25:45] Bob Dobbs: It imitates us.
[25:47] Bob Dobbs: And I say the first stage of the Android Meme.
[25:49] Bob Dobbs: First stage,
[25:50] Bob Dobbs: the global hologram started imitating people,
[25:53] Bob Dobbs: showing the rough parts of humans.
[25:54] Bob Dobbs: Violent TV,
[25:55] Bob Dobbs: stupid talk shows,
[25:56] Bob Dobbs: violent talk shows.
[25:57] Bob Dobbs: This was the way humans were,
[25:59] Bob Dobbs: and TV was no longer a polite place.
[26:02] Bob Dobbs: That'd be in the
[26:03] Bob Dobbs: 50s. It became a rough place,
[26:05] Bob Dobbs: and that was the Android Meme,
[26:06] Bob Dobbs: looking like people.
[26:08] Bob Dobbs: And people get...
[26:09] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[26:09] Bob Dobbs: this is a silly...
[26:11] Bob Dobbs: statement,
[26:11] Bob Dobbs: Edward,
[26:12] Bob Dobbs: I mean looking like people,
[26:13] Bob Dobbs: but I'm trying to say that the humans are becoming more tactile in their chemical bodies and they're more and more adjusting to the tactility.
[26:23] Bob Dobbs: So it's actually looking like rough,
[26:26] Bob Dobbs: preliterate people.
[26:29] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[26:30] Bob Dobbs: Losing the whole surface propriety of visual space.
[26:38] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying that's the way people really are.
[26:40] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[26:40] Bob Dobbs: for the majority of humanity,
[26:41] Bob Dobbs: they weren't literate.
[26:42] Bob Dobbs: They weren't visual.
[26:43] Bob Dobbs: They were like that.
[26:46] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[26:46] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[26:46] Cameron McEwen: and we all are like that.
[26:48] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[26:49] Cameron McEwen: it's not as if some people are and some people aren't.
[26:54] Cameron McEwen: Everybody in their dreams and in their desires and taking a shit or whatever has this aspect to them.
[27:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[27:07] Bob Dobbs: they used to call it the animal aspect.
[27:11] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,
[27:11] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[27:12] Cameron McEwen: And I keep thinking,
[27:13] Cameron McEwen: as we're talking about this stuff,
[27:15] Cameron McEwen: I keep thinking about
[27:17] Cameron McEwen: Greek temples with gorgons and other Monstre Gai like this being a part of the temple.
[27:29] Cameron McEwen: And then in cathedrals.
[27:35] Cameron McEwen: The gorgons.
[27:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[27:37] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[27:38] Cameron McEwen: So it's not as if this view or this take on human nature is new in the
[27:50] Cameron McEwen: 1990s.
[27:52] Cameron McEwen: It's a review,
[27:56] Cameron McEwen: it's a retrieval of something that's always been known,
[28:02] Cameron McEwen: but periodically.
[28:04] Cameron McEwen: Like in the Victorian age or like in the
[28:08] Cameron McEwen: 1950s, as you were saying,
[28:10] Cameron McEwen: that side of humanity gets suppressed and then you get a stupid mask,
[28:16] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[28:18] Cameron McEwen: sort of an idiot mask over society.
[28:22] Bob Dobbs: In the
[28:22] Bob Dobbs: 50s or later in the
[28:23] Bob Dobbs: 90s?
[28:25] Cameron McEwen: No, in the 50s is when you have the idiot mask and in the 90s you have more of the gargoyle mask.
[28:32] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[28:33] Bob Dobbs: because people are participating more.
[28:35] Bob Dobbs: There's less literate hierarchy,
[28:37] Bob Dobbs: so everybody jumps in on the action.
[28:39] Bob Dobbs: And then you get the jumbotron and football games and just recreation.
[28:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan used to say,
[28:47] Bob Dobbs: everybody,
[28:47] Bob Dobbs: no matter who you are,
[28:48] Bob Dobbs: is a nobody at the ballgame.
[28:51] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[28:51] Bob Dobbs: So that more and more rowdy audience.
[28:54] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[28:54] Bob Dobbs: it really makes sense,
[28:55] Bob Dobbs: the progression.
[28:56] Bob Dobbs: Who would have predicted five years ago that people would say,
[28:59] Bob Dobbs: fuck.
[29:00] Bob Dobbs: President.
[29:00] Bob Dobbs: Fuck the president.
[29:01] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[29:01] Bob Dobbs: it's fuck Joe Biden.
[29:04] Bob Dobbs: As a fucking global chant at a football game.
[29:07] Bob Dobbs: You know what
[29:08] Bob Dobbs: I mean?
[29:08] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[29:09] Bob Dobbs: We are,
[29:10] Bob Dobbs: we've become the Roman,
[29:11] Bob Dobbs: we update the Roman,
[29:13] Bob Dobbs: the cliche of the Roman stadium.
[29:15] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[29:15] Bob Dobbs: Coliseum.
[29:16] Bob Dobbs: Coliseum.
[29:18] Bob Dobbs: But it's in the communication world.
[29:21] Bob Dobbs: of crudeness,
[29:22] Bob Dobbs: right?
[29:22] Bob Dobbs: We're not watching people get slaughtered physically.
[29:25] Bob Dobbs: We're watching them be fucking incredibly outrageous and impolite in public expression to the point they're saying the president fucked Joe Biden.
[29:35] Bob Dobbs: And then there's the irony,
[29:37] Bob Dobbs: the participatory irony of that this girl or somebody changes to go Brandon to cover up something,
[29:42] Bob Dobbs: bring in some old fashioned mainstream media decency.
[29:45] Bob Dobbs: And it didn't work.
[29:46] Bob Dobbs: And so that but allowed everybody to be crude indirectly.
[29:50] Bob Dobbs: by saying go Brandon,
[29:53] Bob Dobbs: whatever it is,
[29:54] Bob Dobbs: instead of fuck Biden,
[29:55] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[29:56] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[29:58] Cameron McEwen: But we should notice Innis that in the change you were noting,
[30:06] Cameron McEwen: say between the Romans and
[30:09] Cameron McEwen: 1990s, it's not that the slaughter is not going on,
[30:15] Cameron McEwen: right?
[30:15] Bob Dobbs: The slaughter is going on in the fucking hospitals and everywhere else.
[30:18] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[30:19] Cameron McEwen: and...
[30:20] Cameron McEwen: And all over the world with drone killings and all sorts of stuff.
[30:25] Cameron McEwen: So this kind of supposed rough tactility actually is another veneer.
[30:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[30:34] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[30:35] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[30:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[30:37] Cameron McEwen: It's an interesting dialectic going on.
[30:39] Bob Dobbs: You could call it,
[30:40] Bob Dobbs: it's a nostalgia for chemical body.
[30:43] Bob Dobbs: Simple violence.
[30:45] Bob Dobbs: Let's get back to simple violence.
[30:46] Bob Dobbs: It's not that complex.
[30:48] Bob Dobbs: Body Drift.
[30:49] Bob Dobbs: quadrophrenia violence that we're experiencing.
[30:52] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[30:53] Bob Dobbs: So the,
[30:54] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[30:55] Bob Dobbs: like
[30:56] Bob Dobbs: I was going to say,
[30:58] Bob Dobbs: my mother was shocked when people started wearing sneakers every day.
[31:03] Bob Dobbs: For her,
[31:04] Bob Dobbs: sneakers was gymnasium.
[31:06] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[31:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[31:07] Bob Dobbs: It was a proper place for sneakers.
[31:09] Bob Dobbs: You did not walk around or go to the mall with sneakers on,
[31:13] Bob Dobbs: for fuck's sake.
[31:14] Bob Dobbs: It was ridiculous.
[31:15] Bob Dobbs: And I think about how she was shocked by that.
[31:18] Bob Dobbs: 60s and
[31:19] Bob Dobbs: 70s, and what,
[31:21] Bob Dobbs: this is the slovenliness we get the early view of in California.
[31:26] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[31:26] Bob Dobbs: people wore sneakers and didn't tie them.
[31:32] Bob Dobbs: And I always wondered,
[31:33] Bob Dobbs: you're dragging your shoelaces into dog shit,
[31:35] Bob Dobbs: and you're walking back home and walking around with your dirty,
[31:39] Bob Dobbs: dangling shoelaces.
[31:42] Bob Dobbs: I couldn't,
[31:43] Bob Dobbs: I wouldn't do that.
[31:44] Bob Dobbs: I'd always keep,
[31:45] Bob Dobbs: I kept it with a stiff.
[31:47] Bob Dobbs: What does Dylan say?
[31:47] Bob Dobbs: Keep a clean nose?
[31:49] Bob Dobbs: I made sure my shoelaces were tied.
[31:53] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[31:53] Cameron McEwen: And people were going with their untied sneakers to church.
[31:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[32:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[32:01] Cameron McEwen: It really got to people.
[32:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[32:02] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[32:03] Bob Dobbs: So it is,
[32:05] Bob Dobbs: this is exactly what McLuhan was pointing out.
[32:08] Bob Dobbs: He called it,
[32:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[32:09] Bob Dobbs: going from upstairs to downstairs.
[32:11] Bob Dobbs: He saw we were going to become slovenly pigs.
[32:14] Bob Dobbs: He predicted that.
[32:16] Bob Dobbs: And we were compared to what people would have said 80 years ago.
[32:20] Bob Dobbs: But as we slowly became that,
[32:23] Bob Dobbs: nobody complained.
[32:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[32:26] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[32:26] Cameron McEwen: It was like sitting in the bath with the temperature slowly increasing.
[32:32] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[32:32] Bob Dobbs: right.
[32:33] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[32:33] Bob Dobbs: let me tell you something.
[32:35] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[32:36] Bob Dobbs: in Hawaii,
[32:37] Bob Dobbs: Maui,
[32:38] Bob Dobbs: it's quite pristine in a sense.
[32:40] Bob Dobbs: Beautiful weather all the time.
[32:42] Bob Dobbs: Nice,
[32:43] Bob Dobbs: clean air.
[32:44] Bob Dobbs: No industrial pollution kind of thing.
[32:47] Bob Dobbs: So
[32:49] Bob Dobbs: I went back to Canada,
[32:51] Bob Dobbs: Ottawa,
[32:51] Bob Dobbs: in the summer.
[32:52] Bob Dobbs: I was there for the anniversary,
[32:54] Bob Dobbs: 150th anniversary,
[32:55] Bob Dobbs: so I had to be 1917,
[32:57] Bob Dobbs: because Canada became a country in 1867.
[33:02] Bob Dobbs: So I was there.
[33:03] Bob Dobbs: I arrived on Bloomsday,
[33:04] Bob Dobbs: June 16th,
[33:04] Bob Dobbs: and I spent three weeks going through the archives.
[33:08] Bob Dobbs: After I'd been given this present of all this
[33:10] Bob Dobbs: 13,000 items,
[33:11] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to go and look at what the archives looked like.
[33:13] Bob Dobbs: And Carolyn was doing something,
[33:15] Bob Dobbs: so I had time to do this.
[33:18] Bob Dobbs: But when I went to a couple of concerts,
[33:21] Bob Dobbs: I couldn't believe the slovenliness of Canadians.
[33:26] Bob Dobbs: I hadn't been around Canadians for
[33:29] Bob Dobbs: 20 years.
[33:30] Bob Dobbs: I was in New York,
[33:31] Bob Dobbs: and that's pretty rough.
[33:32] Bob Dobbs: But then I'd been in
[33:34] Bob Dobbs: Hawaii nine years.
[33:36] Bob Dobbs: That's like living in a clean bubble or something.
[33:39] Bob Dobbs: And
[33:40] Bob Dobbs: I just saw the women.
[33:41] Bob Dobbs: there were what's some
[33:43] Bob Dobbs: concert,
[33:43] Bob Dobbs: everybody's drinking beer and fucking smoking up and all this shit.
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: you were starting to be free on the marijuana,
[33:49] Bob Dobbs: too.
[33:50] Bob Dobbs: I found that Canada,
[33:53] Bob Dobbs: it's not what I thought in the 80s and 90s when I lived in Toronto,
[33:56] Bob Dobbs: but to me,
[33:57] Bob Dobbs: Canadian people,
[33:58] Bob Dobbs: women,
[33:59] Bob Dobbs: men,
[33:59] Bob Dobbs: in their
[34:01] Bob Dobbs: 30s to 50s were bumpkins,
[34:03] Bob Dobbs: rural bumpkins,
[34:05] Bob Dobbs: and slovenly.
[34:07] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[34:07] Bob Dobbs: I just really was surprised.
[34:10] Bob Dobbs: Because Canada used to be a clean place compared to America,
[34:13] Bob Dobbs: right?
[34:14] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[34:14] Bob Dobbs: correct.
[34:15] Bob Dobbs: But something changed.
[34:17] Cameron McEwen: Canadians take things that they've seen in the United States to an extreme.
[34:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[34:27] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[34:27] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[34:28] Cameron McEwen: One of the ways in which
[34:31] Cameron McEwen: Canada is the Don Theall is not by consciously seeing things that America needs to become aware of,
[34:41] Cameron McEwen: but by turning them into comedy.
[34:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[34:46] Cameron McEwen: So that's why you have so many Canadians that are stand-up comics or in
[34:50] Cameron McEwen: Second City and stuff like that.
[34:52] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[34:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[34:53] Bob Dobbs: Canadians were the leading age.
[34:55] Bob Dobbs: Lorne Michaels,
[34:55] Bob Dobbs: and he's still,
[34:58] Bob Dobbs: it's 50 years now from Lorne Michaels at Saturday Night Live.
[35:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[35:03] Bob Dobbs: And almost,
[35:05] Bob Dobbs: well,
[35:05] Bob Dobbs: 35,
[35:06] Bob Dobbs: 45.
[35:07] Bob Dobbs: But that's right.
[35:08] Bob Dobbs: A lot of major comedians came out of Canada.
[35:11] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[35:14] Cameron McEwen: I can remember when I...
[35:15] Cameron McEwen: I was in grad school for a couple of years in Edmonton.
[35:20] Cameron McEwen: And you'd go to the bar,
[35:26] Cameron McEwen: maybe you'd play some industrial league hockey or something like this.
[35:30] Cameron McEwen: And then you'd go to the bar and people would just be talking,
[35:35] Cameron McEwen: half drunk,
[35:37] Cameron McEwen: about the world around them.
[35:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[35:39] Cameron McEwen: And it was funny as hell.
[35:42] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[35:43] Cameron McEwen: These guys were plumbers and electricians and stuff like this,
[35:47] Cameron McEwen: but they could see sort of what was going on in an exaggerated way and laughing about it.
[35:55] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[35:55] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[35:56] Bob Dobbs: that's what McLuhan said,
[35:57] Bob Dobbs: that Canadians had the advantage of being beside the beast,
[36:00] Bob Dobbs: and this is why CanLit became important around the rest of the world,
[36:03] Bob Dobbs: because
[36:04] Bob Dobbs: Canadian authors were writing about the media dynamic of North America,
[36:08] Bob Dobbs: focused on
[36:09] Bob Dobbs: America becoming a service environment.
[36:11] Bob Dobbs: And the Canadians registered it with a detached,
[36:15] Bob Dobbs: littered,
[36:16] Bob Dobbs: philosophical perspective,
[36:17] Bob Dobbs: which leads into humor.
[36:19] Bob Dobbs: So,
[36:19] Bob Dobbs: right.
[36:19] Bob Dobbs: So Canadians,
[36:22] Bob Dobbs: they had a bit of detachment,
[36:23] Bob Dobbs: more than the Americans did about their own scene.
[36:26] Bob Dobbs: And that led to comedy and self-reflexiveness about the media anti-environment all of North America was in.
[36:34] Bob Dobbs: But the Canadians had this peculiar detachment.
[36:37] Bob Dobbs: I'm just thinking now,
[36:38] Bob Dobbs: they were like the butlers.
[36:40] Bob Dobbs: And the servants who are joking about the aristocrat bosses down in the basement.
[36:45] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[36:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[36:46] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[36:46] Cameron McEwen: that's right.
[36:47] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[36:48] Cameron McEwen: And to some extent,
[36:49] Cameron McEwen: I believe that's been lost,
[36:51] Cameron McEwen: or at least it's in the process of being lost,
[36:56] Cameron McEwen: because
[36:57] Cameron McEwen: Canada is just being swallowed by the American Monstre Gai.
[37:03] Bob Dobbs: So,
[37:04] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[37:04] Bob Dobbs: there's something.
[37:06] Bob Dobbs: Canada doesn't have the charisma it used to have.
[37:09] Bob Dobbs: No,
[37:10] Cameron McEwen: for sure.
[37:10] Bob Dobbs: because it was a balanced,
[37:12] Bob Dobbs: literate,
[37:13] Bob Dobbs: sane position.
[37:14] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[37:14] Bob Dobbs: Lester Pearson,
[37:15] Bob Dobbs: Peace Prize,
[37:16] Bob Dobbs: and all that stuff.
[37:19] Bob Dobbs: But that liberal humanism,
[37:21] Bob Dobbs: it's like the last enclave of liberal decency,
[37:25] Bob Dobbs: and it's been abandoned everywhere,
[37:29] Bob Dobbs: and Canada is finding it hard to adjust to the new tough,
[37:34] Bob Dobbs: abrasive,
[37:34] Bob Dobbs: tactile,
[37:35] Bob Dobbs: squared world.
[37:36] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[37:38] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[37:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[37:39] Cameron McEwen: Canada's lost,
[37:40] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[37:41] Cameron McEwen: at the moment.
[37:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[37:43] Bob Dobbs: And when did you kind of notice?
[37:44] Bob Dobbs: Would you go back to Canada and notice this or just pick up on it while you were in California?
[37:52] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[37:52] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[37:53] Cameron McEwen: I mean...
[37:54] Bob Dobbs: Would you have said that about Canada 15 years ago?
[37:59] Cameron McEwen: No,
[37:59] Cameron McEwen: probably not.
[38:00] Cameron McEwen: Probably not.
[38:01] Cameron McEwen: I would probably have said 15 years ago that
[38:06] Cameron McEwen: Canada was very divided.
[38:09] Cameron McEwen: Innis perceptions of itself and of the world.
[38:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[38:13] Bob Dobbs: it hadn't totally fallen yet.
[38:16] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[38:17] Bob Dobbs: And
[38:18] Bob Dobbs: I see this kid,
[38:19] Bob Dobbs: you have a kid prime minister,
[38:21] Bob Dobbs: which is maybe
[38:23] Bob Dobbs: Canadians trying to maintain their innocence.
[38:25] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[38:26] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[38:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[38:26] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[38:28] Cameron McEwen: And of course,
[38:29] Cameron McEwen: it's doing the exact opposite.
[38:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[38:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[38:33] Bob Dobbs: and Trudeau is,
[38:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[38:34] Bob Dobbs: that among today in the COVID world,
[38:38] Bob Dobbs: They lumped Canada in with Australia as run by the British Empire,
[38:44] Bob Dobbs: and it's a fascist place in dealing with the COVID problem.
[38:50] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[38:51] Bob Dobbs: Canada's lost.
[38:53] Bob Dobbs: I hear people,
[38:53] Bob Dobbs: Americans,
[38:54] Bob Dobbs: talk about this.
[38:55] Bob Dobbs: Joe Rogan was,
[38:56] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[38:56] Bob Dobbs: saying it.
[38:57] Bob Dobbs: He was putting down Canada.
[38:58] Bob Dobbs: It's going along with the Australian authoritarianism or whatever's going on there.
[39:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[39:04] Cameron McEwen: At least in Australia,
[39:05] Cameron McEwen: they're rebelling.
[39:06] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[39:07] Cameron McEwen: Canada and
[39:08] Cameron McEwen: Canada,
[39:08] Cameron McEwen: they just go along with it.
[39:10] Cameron McEwen: It's unbelievable.
[39:11] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[39:11] Bob Dobbs: There's nothing in Canada.
[39:13] Bob Dobbs: There's no way of publicly expressing himself.
[39:17] Bob Dobbs: It's sort of so passive and given up.
[39:20] Bob Dobbs: Just do to us what you want.
[39:23] Bob Dobbs: You know?
[39:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[39:27] Bob Dobbs: go ahead.
[39:28] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[39:30] Cameron McEwen: even people that are very intelligent just mime what they've heard the day before from the CBC and
[39:40] Cameron McEwen: CTV and the major media in Toronto.
[39:44] Bob Dobbs: And they find Trump incredibly ugly,
[39:46] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[39:46] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[39:47] Cameron McEwen: just
[39:51] Cameron McEwen: Canadian elections can be maintained as either pro and Trump.
[39:59] Cameron McEwen: into the indefinite future,
[40:00] Cameron McEwen: then
[40:01] Cameron McEwen: Canada will always be ruled by some variety of Trump.
[40:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[40:07] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan first wrote about that in the
[40:11] Bob Dobbs: 70s when
[40:13] Bob Dobbs: Trudeau kind of lost around 1974.
[40:18] Bob Dobbs: He got close.
[40:18] Bob Dobbs: He almost lost to Stanfield.
[40:21] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan wrote an article saying that people thought they were dealing with Nixon.
[40:25] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[40:25] Bob Dobbs: the American news media was...
[40:28] Bob Dobbs: really starting to dominate America,
[40:30] Bob Dobbs: I mean Canada for
[40:32] Bob Dobbs: Canadians. And so the Canadian,
[40:34] Bob Dobbs: the
[40:35] Bob Dobbs: Nixon, Watergate Nixon,
[40:37] Bob Dobbs: or those troubles of 73-74,
[40:40] Bob Dobbs: entered into the imagery of Canadian elections.
[40:43] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that article?
[40:45] Cameron McEwen: No,
[40:46] Cameron McEwen: but it sounds right.
[40:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[40:50] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[40:50] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[40:51] Bob Dobbs: Nixon's problems affected Trudeau.
[40:54] Bob Dobbs: It got overlaid somehow.
[40:55] Bob Dobbs: And so I'm saying that's an early version of you're either Varronian,
[40:59] Bob Dobbs: but you're Trump or Trump.
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: There's no Canadian culture,
[41:04] Bob Dobbs: no Canadian political structure.
[41:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[41:07] Cameron McEwen: because
[41:08] Cameron McEwen: Toronto desperately wants to be in the United States.
[41:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[41:13] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[41:14] Cameron McEwen: And Toronto basically decides the Canadian election.
[41:17] Cameron McEwen: There's so many seats in metropolitan Toronto that if you can convince
[41:24] Cameron McEwen: the Torontonians,
[41:26] Cameron McEwen: that they're being American by voting for Trudeau,
[41:29] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[41:30] Cameron McEwen: then everybody's going to vote for Trudeau.
[41:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[41:34] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan said in
[41:35] Bob Dobbs: Take Today that the baby boomers and younger would just get jobs in the industrial hardware world of the
[41:44] Bob Dobbs: 60s and 70s as jumping off points into some more cool software job,
[41:48] Bob Dobbs: role-playing.
[41:50] Bob Dobbs: So he said they'd use the industrial structures.
[41:53] Bob Dobbs: to leap into something else.
[41:55] Bob Dobbs: And
[41:58] Bob Dobbs: Toronto is where Canadians go to leap to the States in their careers.
[42:04] Cameron McEwen: Good point.
[42:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[42:07] Bob Dobbs: And,
[42:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[42:08] Bob Dobbs: a lot of them go to Hollywood.
[42:10] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[42:11] Cameron McEwen: sure.
[42:12] Cameron McEwen: Or to
[42:17] Cameron McEwen: Silicon Valley.
[42:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[42:19] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[42:19] Cameron McEwen: Or to New York Tech City.
[42:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[42:22] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[42:23] Cameron McEwen: That's a huge problem for Canada,
[42:25] Cameron McEwen: the brain drain.
[42:27] Cameron McEwen: As soon as people are understood to have mastered something,
[42:32] Cameron McEwen: could be comedy,
[42:33] Cameron McEwen: could be software,
[42:35] Cameron McEwen: could be anything,
[42:36] Cameron McEwen: then they get bought into the United States.
[42:41] Cameron McEwen: And even in hockey,
[42:43] Cameron McEwen: you look at the United States national hockey team usually has two or three guys who speak.
[42:51] Cameron McEwen: father was on the Canadian team.
[42:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[42:53] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[42:54] Cameron McEwen: But meanwhile,
[42:54] Cameron McEwen: they've come down to play in an American team,
[42:57] Cameron McEwen: have had kids in America,
[42:59] Cameron McEwen: and then those kids grow up to be great American hockey players.
[43:04] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[43:06] Bob Dobbs: They might have been raised in,
[43:07] Bob Dobbs: well,
[43:08] Bob Dobbs: they were raised with Canadian fathers,
[43:10] Bob Dobbs: played hockey from the time they were two years old,
[43:13] Bob Dobbs: right?
[43:14] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[43:14] Bob Dobbs: They grew their kids to get into the NHL.
[43:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[43:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[43:20] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[43:20] Bob Dobbs: so we're talking about the ripples of the weather,
[43:23] Bob Dobbs: the psychic weather of media,
[43:26] Bob Dobbs: in the main expression for post-literate people,
[43:31] Bob Dobbs: sports.
[43:33] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[43:33] Bob Dobbs: sports is the language of art for people.
[43:40] Bob Dobbs: It's the way people see themselves in sport.
[43:43] Bob Dobbs: So,
[43:46] Bob Dobbs: when we had the head-butting in England,
[43:48] Bob Dobbs: in the soccer hooligans,
[43:51] Bob Dobbs: Has it...
[43:52] Bob Dobbs: Remember they had to change the rules in hockey by the
[43:55] Bob Dobbs: 90s? They had to stop the fucking...
[43:58] Bob Dobbs: I wasn't watching it.
[43:59] Bob Dobbs: It was in the States,
[44:00] Bob Dobbs: but I heard about it.
[44:01] Bob Dobbs: They had to tone down the violence of hockey around the
[44:06] Bob Dobbs: 90s or so.
[44:07] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that?
[44:08] Bob Dobbs: They brought in some Victor rules because the tactility was getting into the game.
[44:14] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[44:15] Cameron McEwen: that's happening in football right now.
[44:18] Cameron McEwen: As we speak in the NFL,
[44:23] Cameron McEwen: there's all kinds of new rules about what is roughing and what is,
[44:32] Cameron McEwen: I forget what they call it,
[44:35] Cameron McEwen: maybe it's called roughing the passer.
[44:38] Cameron McEwen: But nowadays,
[44:39] Cameron McEwen: there's a whole bunch of rules that have to do with violence,
[44:44] Cameron McEwen: which were...
[44:46] Cameron McEwen: only propagated in the last few years,
[44:49] Cameron McEwen: in which are actually,
[44:51] Cameron McEwen: when these penalties are called now,
[44:53] Cameron McEwen: it changes the results of games.
[44:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[44:57] Bob Dobbs: So what was the violence happening before that in football?
[45:02] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[45:03] Cameron McEwen: people,
[45:04] Cameron McEwen: what was happening is that the game of football was so violent that when people retired...
[45:12] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[45:12] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[45:12] Bob Dobbs: the brain injuries and all that.
[45:14] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[45:14] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[45:15] Cameron McEwen: and people committing suicide.
[45:17] Cameron McEwen: So the NFL had to do something because they were getting sued,
[45:24] Cameron McEwen: and the owners were worried about the image they were projecting,
[45:31] Cameron McEwen: and they wanted to have more women viewers and more kid viewers.
[45:36] Cameron McEwen: They wanted to turn the NFL into everybody's living room,
[45:40] Cameron McEwen: basically.
[45:41] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[45:41] Bob Dobbs: when did this change happen?
[45:43] Bob Dobbs: Five years ago?
[45:44] Bob Dobbs: Ten years ago?
[45:45] Bob Dobbs: You're saying it's happening right now.
[45:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[45:48] Cameron McEwen: well,
[45:48] Cameron McEwen: it's reaching an extreme now.
[45:50] Cameron McEwen: I think it's at a point where it's going to turn back the other way.
[45:54] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[45:54] Cameron McEwen: They're going to take away some of these penalties because they're getting just ridiculous.
[45:59] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[46:00] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[46:01] Bob Dobbs: so McLuhan talked about the safety belt in the cars.
[46:06] Bob Dobbs: What do you call those straps,
[46:07] Bob Dobbs: the things you strap on yourself?
[46:08] Bob Dobbs: I don't have a car.
[46:09] Cameron McEwen: A safety belt,
[46:10] Cameron McEwen: I think they're called.
[46:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[46:11] Bob Dobbs: So he said...
[46:13] Bob Dobbs: That was the populist expression of media ecology.
[46:16] Bob Dobbs: We now could see the effects of traffic and that we could get killed and so we started to get became cowards so we'd strap ourselves in and protect ourselves and then they put those bubbles in there.
[46:28] Bob Dobbs: But you think back at the 30s,
[46:30] Bob Dobbs: 40s,
[46:31] Bob Dobbs: 50s people raced around.
[46:32] Bob Dobbs: I don't know how they survived but they would live with this no protection,
[46:38] Bob Dobbs: right?
[46:39] Bob Dobbs: So the seatbelt happened to the Yep.
[46:42] Bob Dobbs: the hardware figure,
[46:44] Bob Dobbs: the car,
[46:45] Bob Dobbs: now you're talking about a seatbelt where people live in the TV body,
[46:50] Bob Dobbs: the entertainment of the TV body,
[46:52] Bob Dobbs: sports,
[46:52] Bob Dobbs: they put a seatbelt on it,
[46:54] Bob Dobbs: hockey and football.
[46:55] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[46:57] Bob Dobbs: It's the populist form of media ecology,
[47:00] Bob Dobbs: right?
[47:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[47:02] Cameron McEwen: But it's so ridiculous,
[47:05] Cameron McEwen: right?
[47:05] Cameron McEwen: The amount of violence going on in the world,
[47:09] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[47:10] Cameron McEwen: in the neighborhoods.
[47:10] Bob Dobbs: 50.
[47:11] Bob Dobbs: 50 people killed every fucking weekend in Chicago.
[47:15] Bob Dobbs: Nobody would tolerate that.
[47:17] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[47:18] Cameron McEwen: And then thousands and thousands of people killed around the world.
[47:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[47:22] Cameron McEwen: And it's of no interest at all to the mainstream.
[47:24] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[47:26] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[47:26] Bob Dobbs: I got a Ivins from that.
[47:28] Bob Dobbs: The chemical body became obsolete,
[47:30] Bob Dobbs: started to become obsolete in the radio era.
[47:33] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan said that's why it was not a problem to kill 6,000 people.
[47:37] Bob Dobbs: 6 million people,
[47:38] Bob Dobbs: right?
[47:39] Bob Dobbs: It was just the obsolete chemical body.
[47:41] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[47:42] Bob Dobbs: you take the concentration thing,
[47:43] Bob Dobbs: which is a short duration,
[47:46] Bob Dobbs: and it's now,
[47:47] Bob Dobbs: since the 50s,
[47:47] Bob Dobbs: spread over the whole planet,
[47:49] Bob Dobbs: where we're used to,
[47:50] Bob Dobbs: oh yeah,
[47:50] Bob Dobbs: a million people died of starvation,
[47:52] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[47:52] Bob Dobbs: that's what the global concentration camp evoked.
[47:56] Bob Dobbs: The smaller,
[47:57] Bob Dobbs: the world of the Nazi camps went over around the globe.
[48:01] Bob Dobbs: And so we're used to living in Auschwitz,
[48:04] Bob Dobbs: a global Auschwitz,
[48:05] Bob Dobbs: with millions of people being slaughtered all the time.
[48:08] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[48:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[48:09] Cameron McEwen: and so for McLuhan,
[48:12] Cameron McEwen: the great book about this stuff was Mechanization Takes Command,
[48:17] Cameron McEwen: Giedion's book.
[48:17] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[48:19] Bob Dobbs: and is there the violence of social life in there?
[48:24] Cameron McEwen: No,
[48:24] Cameron McEwen: no,
[48:25] Cameron McEwen: no.
[48:26] Bob Dobbs: Just the mechanization of the chemical body.
[48:30] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[48:30] Cameron McEwen: it's hinted at,
[48:32] Cameron McEwen: and it's got a long,
[48:34] Cameron McEwen: long discussion of...
[48:37] Cameron McEwen: the slaughtering of animals for food.
[48:40] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[48:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[48:42] Cameron McEwen: How the food industry became mechanized.
[48:45] Cameron McEwen: And so the subtopic there is that this is also happening with people.
[48:51] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[48:51] Bob Dobbs: and more and more it happened in hospitals.
[48:54] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan said co-anesthetic allowed the surgeons to do more and more torturous things on people.
[49:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[49:03] Bob Dobbs: He said that after he fucking got it,
[49:05] Bob Dobbs: after he had 22 hours under the knife,
[49:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[49:09] Bob Dobbs: in 67.
[49:11] Bob Dobbs: Again,
[49:11] Bob Dobbs: that shows you McLuhan is writing on a diary level,
[49:15] Bob Dobbs: because in 68,
[49:16] Bob Dobbs: after his surgery and all that,
[49:18] Bob Dobbs: in More Peaceful Ivins,
[49:20] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about the hidden anti-environment co-anesthetic.
[49:23] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[49:23] Bob Dobbs: why apply it to surgery?
[49:24] Bob Dobbs: Apply it to recovery,
[49:26] Bob Dobbs: he said.
[49:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[49:27] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[49:28] Cameron McEwen: And the same thing happens again after he had his heart attack in 1970.
[49:35] Cameron McEwen: Then for a couple of years after that,
[49:37] Cameron McEwen: he's complaining about how the recovery is worse than the disease.
[49:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[49:41] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[49:43] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[49:44] Bob Dobbs: so this is by means of explaining what I meant by tactility squared.
[49:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[49:52] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[49:52] Cameron McEwen: So we're sort of going round and round that topic.
[49:57] Cameron McEwen: Which is fine.
[49:58] Cameron McEwen: That's a good way of explaining it.
[50:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[50:01] Bob Dobbs: And so
[50:02] Bob Dobbs: I said...
[50:05] Cameron McEwen: In fact,
[50:05] Cameron McEwen: you even used the phrase,
[50:07] Cameron McEwen: the Baroque spiral of tactility squared.
[50:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[50:11] Bob Dobbs: And spiral is too smooth.
[50:13] Bob Dobbs: It's part of it.
[50:14] Bob Dobbs: But you have to show the discontinuous part of the spiral.
[50:19] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[50:20] Cameron McEwen: It should be the maelstrom.
[50:22] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[50:23] Bob Dobbs: But maybe the fractal is a repeating thing.
[50:26] Bob Dobbs: But the fractal is complexifying the spiral,
[50:30] Bob Dobbs: right?
[50:31] Bob Dobbs: Or it's turning into a binary.
[50:34] Bob Dobbs: It's all the same,
[50:35] Bob Dobbs: same,
[50:35] Bob Dobbs: same,
[50:36] Bob Dobbs: then it shifts,
[50:36] Bob Dobbs: then it's the same,
[50:37] Bob Dobbs: same,
[50:37] Bob Dobbs: same,
[50:38] Bob Dobbs: and then it shifts to a new pattern.
[50:40] Bob Dobbs: It's simple,
[50:42] Bob Dobbs: the fractal,
[50:43] Bob Dobbs: the Mandelbrot fractal,
[50:44] Bob Dobbs: right?
[50:44] Bob Dobbs: Because you're having a repeating pattern.
[50:47] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[50:47] Bob Dobbs: And I guess...
[50:49] Cameron McEwen: If you compare it to the maelstrom,
[50:51] Cameron McEwen: right?
[50:51] Cameron McEwen: In the maelstrom,
[50:52] Cameron McEwen: some things are going down,
[50:53] Cameron McEwen: some things are going up.
[50:56] Bob Dobbs: That would be a better image of the spiral.
[50:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[50:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[51:01] Cameron McEwen: Because you don't know what's actually happening.
[51:05] Cameron McEwen: You're a part of something that denies orientation.
[51:11] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[51:11] Bob Dobbs: and the popular image of that was chaos,
[51:13] Bob Dobbs: and get chaos physics,
[51:15] Bob Dobbs: chaos math,
[51:16] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[51:16] Bob Dobbs: chaos entered people.
[51:18] Bob Dobbs: Why did people start talking about chaos and sort of saying it got a self-organized order out of it,
[51:24] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[51:26] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[51:26] Bob Dobbs: they were unconsciously retrieving the wisdom of Poe,
[51:31] Bob Dobbs: where the guy grabbed on the barrel and went down into the vortex and popped back up.
[51:35] Bob Dobbs: So there's order in chaos.
[51:38] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[51:38] Bob Dobbs: that was a whole meme in physics.
[51:42] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[51:44] Bob Dobbs: Francisco Varela and Humberto somebody from Chile,
[51:48] Bob Dobbs: they were the popularizers of that.
[51:51] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I'm talking about?
[51:53] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[51:53] Cameron McEwen: I do.
[51:54] Cameron McEwen: It was going on in the humanities as well.
[51:57] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm talking about.
[52:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[52:01] Cameron McEwen: And then you had
[52:02] Cameron McEwen: Max Smart.
[52:04] Cameron McEwen: I forget the name of his show,
[52:05] Cameron McEwen: but the enemy was KAOS,
[52:08] Cameron McEwen: right?
[52:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[52:09] Cameron McEwen: The agents of KAOS.
[52:10] Bob Dobbs: Versus control?
[52:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[52:12] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[52:14] Bob Dobbs: That's tetrad management versus the phatic
[52:18] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme going past tetrad human control.
[52:23] Bob Dobbs: Now that's,
[52:25] Bob Dobbs: what did you just,
[52:26] Bob Dobbs: Get Smart was the show.
[52:28] Bob Dobbs: Get Smart,
[52:29] Cameron McEwen: that's it,
[52:29] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[52:30] Bob Dobbs: So it was in 92 or so,
[52:33] Bob Dobbs: 91,
[52:34] Bob Dobbs: 92,
[52:34] Bob Dobbs: I went up to York and Eric was on a panel with a bunch of people.
[52:39] Bob Dobbs: And in the question period,
[52:41] Bob Dobbs: I yelled that out.
[52:42] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[52:42] Bob Dobbs: we're witnessing tetrad management.
[52:44] Bob Dobbs: And I made a pattern out of,
[52:46] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[52:47] Bob Dobbs: Henry Kissinger's a tetrad manager.
[52:49] Bob Dobbs: And I kind of said what you said,
[52:50] Bob Dobbs: the chaos and then the trying to get order,
[52:53] Bob Dobbs: but the pen pad was taking over,
[52:55] Bob Dobbs: stopping the chemical body's attempt to,
[52:57] Bob Dobbs: the CIA's attempt to maintain order.
[53:00] Bob Dobbs: And
[53:01] Bob Dobbs: Eric, he shifts his head one way and he went to another.
[53:04] Bob Dobbs: Like,
[53:04] Bob Dobbs: I think he knew kind of what I meant.
[53:06] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[53:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[53:08] Bob Dobbs: And his head,
[53:09] Bob Dobbs: I saw his head getting knocked around.
[53:11] Bob Dobbs: He just shifted.
[53:13] Bob Dobbs: He was looking like,
[53:13] Bob Dobbs: where am I?
[53:14] Bob Dobbs: And then years later,
[53:15] Bob Dobbs: I found out that he said in some...
[53:18] Bob Dobbs: public thing.
[53:19] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[53:19] Bob Dobbs: well,
[53:20] Bob Dobbs: Bob Dobbs says that,
[53:21] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[53:21] Bob Dobbs: kids are the Tetrad manager.
[53:23] Bob Dobbs: He took it in.
[53:24] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[53:25] Bob Dobbs: He understood.
[53:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[53:27] Bob Dobbs: I see the CIA or the management of the word that makes the market.
[53:30] Bob Dobbs: That's Tetrad management on the daily pattern recognition level,
[53:34] Bob Dobbs: because everybody has to know the daily pattern.
[53:37] Bob Dobbs: That's why they watch the news or they used to.
[53:40] Bob Dobbs: And that is what was managed.
[53:44] Bob Dobbs: The White House,
[53:44] Bob Dobbs: the word that makes the market,
[53:46] Bob Dobbs: managed the...
[53:48] Bob Dobbs: ongoing chaos of new patterns that people were noticing,
[53:52] Bob Dobbs: which were effects of the software world,
[53:54] Bob Dobbs: not the hardware media,
[53:56] Bob Dobbs: the software media,
[53:57] Bob Dobbs: because people were processing imagery 24-7 once you got into the...
[54:03] Cameron McEwen: Nowadays,
[54:03] Cameron McEwen: the presidential office can't even manage itself.
[54:07] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[54:08] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[54:08] Bob Dobbs: that's where
[54:09] Bob Dobbs: Trump...
[54:12] Bob Dobbs: Ion said that Obama was the last president,
[54:14] Bob Dobbs: Trump was not a president.
[54:16] Bob Dobbs: He was expressing the present.
[54:17] Bob Dobbs: total chaos that we were getting in the extremes of web 2.0 because everybody was expressing themselves so violently all over the place and then that led to the alt-right icon but um
[54:30] Bob Dobbs: Somebody wanted to get back to decency or some kind of order of the Tetra,
[54:36] Bob Dobbs: get the Tetra managers back in control away from the phatic Trump.
[54:41] Bob Dobbs: And they came up with this fucking idiot.
[54:43] Bob Dobbs: And it was so rearview mirror,
[54:46] Bob Dobbs: it failed within three months.
[54:48] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[54:49] Bob Dobbs: And now there's nothing but hatred for the White House.
[54:55] Bob Dobbs: Disgust with it.
[54:56] Bob Dobbs: Because they couldn't manage the media.
[54:58] Bob Dobbs: Because the White House was not the central organizing point anymore.
[55:02] Bob Dobbs: Trump ruined that.
[55:04] Bob Dobbs: You can't have a chaotic guy that Trump image was in the word that makes the market,
[55:10] Bob Dobbs: which was the White House.
[55:11] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan called them the trigger men,
[55:13] Bob Dobbs: right?
[55:14] Bob Dobbs: History was a trigger man.
[55:15] Bob Dobbs: He's the one who organized the big patterns.
[55:18] Bob Dobbs: You remember that quote?
[55:20] Cameron McEwen: Trump also made by the media,
[55:22] Cameron McEwen: right?
[55:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[55:24] Cameron McEwen: It was the media itself in some sort of...
[55:28] Bob Dobbs: I wouldn't even call it media.
[55:29] Bob Dobbs: I'd call it Android Meme or tech body.
[55:32] Bob Dobbs: Trump in response to the tech body.
[55:34] Bob Dobbs: He's part of the tech body manufacturing,
[55:36] Bob Dobbs: which we're trying to get to explaining.
[55:39] Bob Dobbs: So
[55:40] Bob Dobbs: I'll explain that more when we get there.
[55:42] Bob Dobbs: But what were you saying about it?
[55:44] Bob Dobbs: Did you want to finish your sentence about that?
[55:46] Cameron McEwen: No,
[55:48] Cameron McEwen: I just wanted to say that it's not the case that things can't be managed.
[55:55] Cameron McEwen: It's the things that you want to manage.
[55:57] Cameron McEwen: have themselves imploded.
[56:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[56:03] Bob Dobbs: You can't have management.
[56:04] Bob Dobbs: No,
[56:05] Cameron McEwen: that's right.
[56:06] Cameron McEwen: The whole concept of management explodes.
[56:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[56:10] Bob Dobbs: and that was expressed by McLuhan in the 60s when he said,
[56:13] Bob Dobbs: a great philosopher king could not bring order to our time.
[56:17] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[56:17] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[56:18] Bob Dobbs: the elder,
[56:19] Bob Dobbs: the wise elders,
[56:20] Bob Dobbs: the SubGenius elders,
[56:21] Bob Dobbs: it was beyond.
[56:23] Bob Dobbs: And it's interesting,
[56:24] Bob Dobbs: he came to produce Trudeau,
[56:25] Bob Dobbs: who had...
[56:27] Bob Dobbs: a wise charisma,
[56:29] Bob Dobbs: but he also had a tribal face,
[56:31] Bob Dobbs: and he actually had a sense of humor in a way.
[56:34] Bob Dobbs: Remember how he made fun of the Queen?
[56:36] Bob Dobbs: He sailed down the banister in Buckingham Palace and things like that.
[56:41] Bob Dobbs: He was Trump walking in front of the Queen a few years ago.
[56:46] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan would point out that you could not have a Trudeau in the White House because America was on the spot.
[56:53] Bob Dobbs: It was the control mechanism.
[56:55] Bob Dobbs: And you couldn't have such casual a land that Trudeau had in the serious white house.
[57:01] Bob Dobbs: You had to have serious deadpan faces like Nixon's or LBJ,
[57:07] Bob Dobbs: right?
[57:08] Bob Dobbs: And then Carter,
[57:09] Bob Dobbs: Carter,
[57:09] Bob Dobbs: he ruined it.
[57:10] Bob Dobbs: His face was too boyish.
[57:11] Bob Dobbs: He didn't keep on the demeanor.
[57:14] Bob Dobbs: What is it?
[57:14] Bob Dobbs: The demeanor?
[57:17] Bob Dobbs: What the word is?
[57:18] Bob Dobbs: Demeanor.
[57:20] Bob Dobbs: The demeanor.
[57:20] Bob Dobbs: He didn't have the demeanor of sobriety.
[57:25] Bob Dobbs: which Nixon had.
[57:26] Bob Dobbs: Because remember,
[57:27] Bob Dobbs: Nixon was the corrupt lawyer,
[57:29] Bob Dobbs: and he was up against the surfer Kennedy.
[57:32] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[57:32] Bob Dobbs: the surfer Kennedy wins in 60,
[57:34] Bob Dobbs: but by 68,
[57:36] Bob Dobbs: the violent year,
[57:37] Bob Dobbs: getting into the global tactility,
[57:39] Bob Dobbs: the global theater,
[57:40] Bob Dobbs: you need a more serious guy,
[57:42] Bob Dobbs: a guy who knew how to handle the mafia and work with the mafia,
[57:46] Bob Dobbs: right?
[57:46] Bob Dobbs: That's Nixon in 68.
[57:49] Bob Dobbs: And then you have...
[57:53] Bob Dobbs: After the boyishness of Carter,
[57:55] Bob Dobbs: you brought in a very serious deadpan face,
[58:00] Bob Dobbs: early precursor to George Bush
[58:03] Bob Dobbs: Jr.'s dumb face,
[58:05] Bob Dobbs: and then even Trump.
[58:08] Bob Dobbs: But Reagan,
[58:10] Bob Dobbs: he had to represent a small-town sobriety.
[58:13] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[58:14] Cameron McEwen: No longer urban.
[58:16] Cameron McEwen: He was a Carter update,
[58:18] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[58:20] Bob Dobbs: All the presidents stand on the previous images and add new wrinkles to it.
[58:25] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[58:26] Bob Dobbs: Bill Clinton was everybody,
[58:27] Bob Dobbs: Kennedy,
[58:28] Bob Dobbs: Reagan,
[58:28] Bob Dobbs: the whole quadrophrenia panoply.
[58:31] Bob Dobbs: Then that flipped.
[58:32] Bob Dobbs: People,
[58:33] Bob Dobbs: in a way,
[58:34] Bob Dobbs: didn't care about the White House image anymore.
[58:36] Bob Dobbs: They were sick of having to monitor it,
[58:38] Bob Dobbs: and Gore and Clinton blew it.
[58:39] Bob Dobbs: So they brought in a guy who consciously bragged that he didn't read the newspapers and was not informed.
[58:45] Bob Dobbs: That was George Bush Jr.
[58:48] Bob Dobbs: He was a Postman guy,
[58:50] Bob Dobbs: image,
[58:50] Bob Dobbs: or charisma.
[58:52] Cameron McEwen: Postman in every way.
[58:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[58:55] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[58:56] Bob Dobbs: And then they had to bring in a smoothie,
[58:59] Bob Dobbs: and remember,
[59:00] Bob Dobbs: tactility is black.
[59:01] Bob Dobbs: That's the color of tactility.
[59:03] Bob Dobbs: The colour is black.
[59:04] Bob Dobbs: So they had to bring in a hyper-solid tactile image,
[59:08] Bob Dobbs: black tactile image,
[59:09] Bob Dobbs: and that's Obama,
[59:10] Bob Dobbs: who was supposedly very sober and measured and wise.
[59:17] Bob Dobbs: Even though he kept contradicting himself with the wars he got himself into and the droning,
[59:21] Bob Dobbs: but he had an appeal to a sobriety
[59:25] Bob Dobbs: But he had he was a black sobriety sobriety.
[59:27] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[59:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[59:30] Bob Dobbs: and then that flipped into
[59:32] Bob Dobbs: No more
[59:34] Cameron McEwen: White House.
[59:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[59:35] Cameron McEwen: Obama was sort of the last gasp attempt to show that management was still possible.
[59:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[59:44] Cameron McEwen: Not possible in the old white...
[59:47] Bob Dobbs: White way.
[59:47] Cameron McEwen: Executive white shirt way.
[59:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[59:50] Cameron McEwen: But in a new inclusive way.
[59:54] Cameron McEwen: But of course,
[59:55] Cameron McEwen: it was just a mask.
[59:57] Cameron McEwen: And in the background,
[59:59] Cameron McEwen: all the old bullshit was going on.
[1:00:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:00:02] Bob Dobbs: so listen to this.
[1:00:03] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:00:04] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said in the
[1:00:06] Bob Dobbs: 60s, the black population,
[1:00:08] Bob Dobbs: symbolized by new civil rights,
[1:00:11] Bob Dobbs: were taking on literate values right when the white people were abandoning literate values and going tribal.
[1:00:18] Bob Dobbs: That's the counterculture and the
[1:00:23] Bob Dobbs: New Age and whatever the white
[1:00:25] Bob Dobbs: Protestants got into in terms of not being...
[1:00:30] Bob Dobbs: upright
[1:00:31] Bob Dobbs: Catholics anymore,
[1:00:33] Bob Dobbs: or upright citizens.
[1:00:34] Bob Dobbs: They were floundering around all over the place.
[1:00:36] Bob Dobbs: Think of that movie Shampoo.
[1:00:38] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that Warren Beatty in Shampoo?
[1:00:41] Bob Dobbs: That was an expression of that.
[1:00:42] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:00:42] Cameron McEwen: I saw it decades ago.
[1:00:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:00:44] Cameron McEwen: that's like the
[1:00:45] Bob Dobbs: 70s or something,
[1:00:46] Bob Dobbs: maybe late 60s.
[1:00:48] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:00:49] Bob Dobbs: you're right.
[1:00:49] Bob Dobbs: What I'm saying,
[1:00:50] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan did comment on the inadequacy of the white face,
[1:00:53] Bob Dobbs: the chiaroscuro of the white face,
[1:00:56] Bob Dobbs: could not meet the sculptural...
[1:00:58] Bob Dobbs: ivory quality of the black face.
[1:01:02] Bob Dobbs: So that was more tribal.
[1:01:03] Bob Dobbs: It didn't have literate personality in it.
[1:01:06] Bob Dobbs: So in the
[1:01:08] Bob Dobbs: 60s, the whites were leaving the literacy and the blacks were trying to become literacy.
[1:01:13] Bob Dobbs: And remember,
[1:01:13] Bob Dobbs: he said the Watts riots where people realized that this literacy ain't working.
[1:01:18] Bob Dobbs: We don't want it.
[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: We want to be electric.
[1:01:20] Bob Dobbs: And eventually they got their act together and took over with hip hop or rap.
[1:01:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:01:26] Bob Dobbs: which ran as a popper,
[1:01:27] Bob Dobbs: still going sort of,
[1:01:29] Bob Dobbs: for 30 or 40 years,
[1:01:31] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:01:31] Bob Dobbs: Rock and roll didn't last that long.
[1:01:33] Bob Dobbs: All the different styles of music never got a
[1:01:37] Bob Dobbs: 40-year empire,
[1:01:40] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:01:40] Bob Dobbs: So something about rap was relevant to the electric eternity we were getting into,
[1:01:48] Bob Dobbs: where nothing's going to change by Reagan time.
[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:01:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:01:53] Cameron McEwen: It's a tribal encyclopedia Neurotica.
[1:01:56] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:01:57] Bob Dobbs: And then,
[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: so you had a delay in the white structure management of the White House,
[1:02:03] Bob Dobbs: so you had a black guy,
[1:02:06] Bob Dobbs: an oral black guy,
[1:02:08] Bob Dobbs: trying to be white or accepted as white.
[1:02:12] Cameron McEwen: Doing a better job of being white than any white person.
[1:02:16] Bob Dobbs: Say that again?
[1:02:17] Cameron McEwen: He was doing a better job at being white than any white person.
[1:02:20] Bob Dobbs: Because he had the requisite deadpan,
[1:02:22] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:02:23] Bob Dobbs: cool face.
[1:02:25] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:02:25] Cameron McEwen: and he had the gift of the gab.
[1:02:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:02:28] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:02:28] Bob Dobbs: he was a smooth...
[1:02:30] Bob Dobbs: That would be white talk,
[1:02:32] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:02:32] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:02:33] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:02:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:02:34] Bob Dobbs: white talk and a black face.
[1:02:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:02:38] Bob Dobbs: you know that McLuhan said that the black bottom of the 20s came back as the white bottom of the 60s.
[1:02:46] Bob Dobbs: Do you know that line?
[1:02:47] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:02:48] Cameron McEwen: but that's interesting.
[1:02:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:02:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:02:50] Bob Dobbs: the Black Bottom is the,
[1:02:51] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember any of their names,
[1:02:54] Bob Dobbs: but,
[1:02:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:02:54] Bob Dobbs: whatever the blues,
[1:02:56] Bob Dobbs: Betty somebody,
[1:02:57] Bob Dobbs: whoever those blues girls were in the
[1:02:59] Cameron McEwen: 20s. In Paris.
[1:03:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:03:02] Bob Dobbs: they were sexy.
[1:03:03] Bob Dobbs: But the White Bottom is Woodstock and the suburban kids that run around naked.
[1:03:09] Bob Dobbs: So that's what he said.
[1:03:10] Bob Dobbs: The White Bottom came up in the
[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: 60s as a retrieval of the Black Bottom.
[1:03:16] Bob Dobbs: But it had to be the white people doing it.
[1:03:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:03:21] Cameron McEwen: that happened on many levels,
[1:03:23] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:03:24] Cameron McEwen: Black music and all of the major sports basically went from white to black.
[1:03:34] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:03:36] Bob Dobbs: So then you have the Rolling Stones and John Mayall.
[1:03:43] Bob Dobbs: They brought in the blues into
[1:03:48] Bob Dobbs: Dean Martin land,
[1:03:49] Bob Dobbs: top 40 music.
[1:03:51] Bob Dobbs: And then you had the Motown,
[1:03:52] Bob Dobbs: so that was raunchy for its time,
[1:03:55] Bob Dobbs: but the blues came in,
[1:03:57] Bob Dobbs: and then you had the sleek disco,
[1:04:01] Bob Dobbs: which is somehow the beginning of the digital world,
[1:04:06] Bob Dobbs: the cable world,
[1:04:09] Bob Dobbs: the beginning of the computer world in the late 70s.
[1:04:12] Bob Dobbs: It went out,
[1:04:13] Bob Dobbs: it left the blues mode,
[1:04:15] Bob Dobbs: and I remember hearing up in,
[1:04:16] Bob Dobbs: living up in Canada,
[1:04:18] Bob Dobbs: some
[1:04:19] Bob Dobbs: Muddy Waters,
[1:04:19] Bob Dobbs: those guys.
[1:04:20] Bob Dobbs: on As It Happens,
[1:04:22] Bob Dobbs: saying that these black guys,
[1:04:23] Bob Dobbs: who were very popular in the early 70s,
[1:04:25] Bob Dobbs: because the British people,
[1:04:29] Bob Dobbs: they acknowledged that they had recycled blue stuff.
[1:04:34] Bob Dobbs: The
[1:04:34] Bob Dobbs: Arnaz Maggie Haberman said that they can't get gigs,
[1:04:37] Bob Dobbs: that disco took over.
[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: And then disco was seen as very surfaced by some people,
[1:04:42] Bob Dobbs: depending on your age and when you entered into the tactile mix of rock music.
[1:04:48] Bob Dobbs: The disco wiped out the black level.
[1:04:52] Bob Dobbs: And then there was like new tech,
[1:04:55] Bob Dobbs: new waves came in.
[1:04:56] Bob Dobbs: So you're starting to get into high-tech music,
[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: or they put the word tech in,
[1:05:00] Bob Dobbs: which was really just software.
[1:05:04] Bob Dobbs: Computer screens taking over,
[1:05:06] Bob Dobbs: whatever you call them.
[1:05:07] Bob Dobbs: They're tactile,
[1:05:08] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[1:05:08] Bob Dobbs: the computer screen.
[1:05:11] Bob Dobbs: And then the blacks come back in with non-music,
[1:05:16] Bob Dobbs: with guttural grunting,
[1:05:17] Bob Dobbs: caveman grunting,
[1:05:18] Bob Dobbs: which is rap.
[1:05:21] Bob Dobbs: You get that?
[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: sort of,
[1:05:24] Cameron McEwen: but I mean,
[1:05:25] Cameron McEwen: it's more than grunting,
[1:05:28] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:05:28] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:05:28] Bob Dobbs: but for the white person,
[1:05:30] Bob Dobbs: it is not music.
[1:05:32] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:05:32] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[1:05:33] Cameron McEwen: you're talking about from a certain perspective.
[1:05:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:05:35] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:05:35] Bob Dobbs: the majority of North Americans are white,
[1:05:38] Bob Dobbs: and they're reacting to the fads.
[1:05:41] Bob Dobbs: And so I've encountered many people I knew when rap came in,
[1:05:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:05:47] Bob Dobbs: by the mid-'80s,
[1:05:48] Bob Dobbs: because I was at CKLN,
[1:05:51] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:05:52] Bob Dobbs: I could see a lot of the baby boomers or even Generation Xers were having trouble accepting rap.
[1:05:58] Bob Dobbs: It just was too non-musical.
[1:06:01] Bob Dobbs: crazy,
[1:06:02] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:06:03] Bob Dobbs: and the scratching of the record.
[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: But then,
[1:06:07] Bob Dobbs: 30 years of that,
[1:06:09] Bob Dobbs: it's just like people hated the Beatles in the 60s were dancing to the Beatles at their weddings in the
[1:06:15] Bob Dobbs: 80s. Well,
[1:06:17] Bob Dobbs: rap became accepted.
[1:06:19] Bob Dobbs: The population got molded by the frequencies of the Android Meme era,
[1:06:24] Bob Dobbs: let's say,
[1:06:25] Bob Dobbs: and the rap resonated with that.
[1:06:27] Bob Dobbs: Rap and hip-hop.
[1:06:30] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:06:30] Cameron McEwen: the whole world is rapping.
[1:06:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:06:33] Bob Dobbs: and that's where we're moving.
[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: We've been in an electric eternity since the
[1:06:38] Bob Dobbs: 80s. We had completely wiped out literacy and any vestiges of any sanity,
[1:06:44] Bob Dobbs: and so that's why the Reagan image was trying to retrieve it,
[1:06:46] Bob Dobbs: but on a small-town,
[1:06:48] Bob Dobbs: non-literate level.
[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:06:51] Bob Dobbs: the local yokel of small-town reality is what Reagan was appealing to,
[1:06:55] Bob Dobbs: and then it's actually happened through politics from that point on.
[1:06:59] Bob Dobbs: Because only 30%
[1:07:00] Bob Dobbs: of Americans vote.
[1:07:01] Bob Dobbs: 70%
[1:07:02] Bob Dobbs: don't engage in it.
[1:07:03] Bob Dobbs: It's not a anti-environment.
[1:07:05] Bob Dobbs: They're living beyond it.
[1:07:07] Bob Dobbs: Multi-leveled,
[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: quadrophrenia.
[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: So once we got to the Reagan era,
[1:07:15] Bob Dobbs: fundamentalism,
[1:07:16] Bob Dobbs: conservatism of preserving your national image went all over the planet.
[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: You understand?
[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: The fundamentalists of global tourism took over.
[1:07:27] Bob Dobbs: every country started to celebrate its tribal institutions.
[1:07:32] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:07:33] Cameron McEwen: but as show business,
[1:07:36] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[1:07:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:07:37] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:07:38] Cameron McEwen: as show business.
[1:07:39] Cameron McEwen: It was no longer possible to have the traditions as traditions.
[1:07:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:07:47] Bob Dobbs: because nobody lived them anymore.
[1:07:48] Bob Dobbs: They were becoming fragmented and atomized in the chip body.
[1:07:52] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:07:54] Cameron McEwen: Many things can't be done if they're observed.
[1:07:58] Bob Dobbs: Did you say observed or observed?
[1:08:02] Cameron McEwen: Observed.
[1:08:03] Cameron McEwen: Seen.
[1:08:04] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:08:04] Bob Dobbs: They can't happen if they're seen,
[1:08:06] Bob Dobbs: if they're conscious.
[1:08:08] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:08:08] Cameron McEwen: So just as an example,
[1:08:11] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[1:08:12] Cameron McEwen: when we're talking about their transition from Carter to Reagan,
[1:08:16] Cameron McEwen: Reagan certainly did have this small-town image,
[1:08:21] Cameron McEwen: Nixon,
[1:08:21] Cameron McEwen: Illinois.
[1:08:23] Cameron McEwen: But so did Carter.
[1:08:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:08:27] Cameron McEwen: What Reagan did was he made the small-town image complex by showing that it was compatible with entertainment.
[1:08:36] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:08:37] Bob Dobbs: and he became an emperor.
[1:08:43] Bob Dobbs: There was a book written by a ton of media people,
[1:08:45] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:08:46] Bob Dobbs: hip guys in New York,
[1:08:47] Bob Dobbs: about how Reagan was retrieving the Chinese emperor.
[1:08:50] Bob Dobbs: He was putting on the whole global environment,
[1:08:54] Bob Dobbs: and the Russians were losing.
[1:08:56] Cameron McEwen: Again,
[1:08:57] Cameron McEwen: because he was an actor and he had had all these different roles.
[1:09:02] Bob Dobbs: That implied a sophistication of his Posthuman,
[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: of his simple Posthuman.
[1:09:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:09:07] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:09:07] Cameron McEwen: but it is that having all those roles is what an emperor is,
[1:09:13] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:09:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:09:14] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:09:15] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:09:15] Bob Dobbs: Carter was trying to go somewhere,
[1:09:17] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan would say,
[1:09:19] Bob Dobbs: the old-fashioned leader.
[1:09:20] Bob Dobbs: But the emperor didn't go anywhere.
[1:09:21] Bob Dobbs: He just put everybody on.
[1:09:23] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:09:24] Bob Dobbs: Reagan brought that in.
[1:09:25] Bob Dobbs: And it required to be apolitical,
[1:09:29] Bob Dobbs: beyond all the normal literate issues,
[1:09:32] Bob Dobbs: and put everybody on.
[1:09:33] Bob Dobbs: And an image of that,
[1:09:34] Bob Dobbs: putting everybody on,
[1:09:35] Bob Dobbs: is the actor.
[1:09:36] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan predicted the actor and Reagan would become president in 76.
[1:09:42] Bob Dobbs: Did you know that?
[1:09:43] Bob Dobbs: In People magazine.
[1:09:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:09:45] Cameron McEwen: you've mentioned that.
[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: he predicted that Reagan was the perfect guy who merged himself with his role.
[1:09:54] Bob Dobbs: He became the role,
[1:09:55] Bob Dobbs: like a zombie,
[1:09:56] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.
[1:09:59] Bob Dobbs: And that was the fact that he was,
[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: an actor.
[1:10:02] Bob Dobbs: But everybody was becoming an actor.
[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: here's another pattern.
[1:10:05] Bob Dobbs: Because the global theater turned everybody into actors and all crew,
[1:10:10] Bob Dobbs: remember that statement by McLuhan?
[1:10:12] Bob Dobbs: all crew then you had to have a traditional actor a bona fide real actor as an anti-environment to the whole population becoming actors yeah that's funny that's right yeah and the participation mystique is the whole world became acting and
[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: so fuck this we need standards bring back a great actor ronald reagan who actually was a lousy actor but he used to he used to talk about i don't know how true this is but i got this from a brussels
[1:10:40] Bob Dobbs: She quoted a few stories when he was president.
[1:10:42] Bob Dobbs: He would talk about his life in World War II,
[1:10:46] Bob Dobbs: his service,
[1:10:48] Bob Dobbs: and he'd be talking about the movies he was in.
[1:10:53] Bob Dobbs: So there was levels of insanity that nobody could really deal with,
[1:10:57] Bob Dobbs: and it was ignored.
[1:10:58] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:11:00] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:11:01] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:11:02] Cameron McEwen: And his ranch up in the sky fits this perfectly.
[1:11:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:11:09] Bob Dobbs: aren't you near his ranch?
[1:11:11] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:11:12] Cameron McEwen: near enough.
[1:11:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:11:13] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:11:14] Bob Dobbs: And Nixon was nearby in San Clemente.
[1:11:18] Bob Dobbs: They all went to the paradise.
[1:11:19] Cameron McEwen: And his birthplace in Whittier.
[1:11:21] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:11:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:11:25] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:11:25] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:11:26] Bob Dobbs: they all went to the utopia of California.
[1:11:30] Bob Dobbs: Everybody retired in California.
[1:11:33] Bob Dobbs: Now...
[1:11:35] Bob Dobbs: What a mess California is now,
[1:11:36] Bob Dobbs: for fuck's sake.
[1:11:37] Bob Dobbs: It's just incredible,
[1:11:38] Bob Dobbs: the flip there.
[1:11:40] Bob Dobbs: What is it with the governor just not handling the homeless?
[1:11:46] Bob Dobbs: What is a
[1:11:49] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan version of why the homeless cannot be handled properly in L.A.,
[1:11:53] Bob Dobbs: say,
[1:11:53] Bob Dobbs: or San Francisco?
[1:11:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:11:54] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:11:55] Cameron McEwen: you see,
[1:11:56] Cameron McEwen: the whole question is what properly means.
[1:12:01] Cameron McEwen: for the governor and...
[1:12:04] Cameron McEwen: from the people that vote for him properly in terms of the homeless is to either leave them alone or to aid their homelessness as homeless.
[1:12:17] Cameron McEwen: So for that type of thinking,
[1:12:24] Cameron McEwen: homelessness is more or less what we all are.
[1:12:29] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:12:30] Cameron McEwen: that's what I'm going to quote you.
[1:12:32] Bob Dobbs: In 64.
[1:12:33] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media that we were going to become drifting homeless people.
[1:12:39] Bob Dobbs: He said that.
[1:12:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:12:41] Cameron McEwen: That's what tactility is in a certain sense.
[1:12:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:12:43] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:12:44] Bob Dobbs: So as over the next 50 years,
[1:12:47] Bob Dobbs: the whole world becomes homeless because they're living in many different spaces,
[1:12:52] Bob Dobbs: quadrophrenia spaces.
[1:12:54] Bob Dobbs: So there now is great respect for homeless people.
[1:12:57] Bob Dobbs: And they're allowed to have the rights to set up a tent wherever they want to.
[1:13:02] Bob Dobbs: That would be archetypalizing the chemical body homelessness.
[1:13:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:13:07] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:13:07] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:13:08] Cameron McEwen: they're the only authentic ones.
[1:13:11] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:13:12] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:13:12] Bob Dobbs: We're honoring the real people,
[1:13:14] Bob Dobbs: just like Reagan was a real actor,
[1:13:16] Bob Dobbs: not these aviders in your neighborhood.
[1:13:21] Bob Dobbs: So this is updating the application of McLuhan patterns.
[1:13:26] Bob Dobbs: It works.
[1:13:28] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:13:29] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:13:29] Cameron McEwen: sir.
[1:13:30] Bob Dobbs: So we're Innis electric eternity.
[1:13:33] Bob Dobbs: Donald Trump objected to it,
[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: and he wanted to get back to some place.
[1:13:37] Bob Dobbs: He called it America.
[1:13:38] Bob Dobbs: Bring back America.
[1:13:39] Bob Dobbs: Make America great again.
[1:13:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:13:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:13:41] Cameron McEwen: But all of these things were not external to the world of entertainment.
[1:13:48] Cameron McEwen: They were internal to it.
[1:13:50] Cameron McEwen: That's the big problem with
[1:13:53] Cameron McEwen: Trumpism and all this stuff,
[1:13:55] Cameron McEwen: is that it's true that it would be...
[1:14:02] Cameron McEwen: good to see through the world of entertainment.
[1:14:06] Cameron McEwen: But to try to do that with Trump a very difficult matter.
[1:14:10] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:14:10] Bob Dobbs: because politics was becoming more entertaining than entertainment.
[1:14:17] Cameron McEwen: Sure,
[1:14:18] Cameron McEwen: as McLuhan said.
[1:14:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:14:19] Bob Dobbs: the viciousness.
[1:14:21] Bob Dobbs: I think Zappa said that politics was the
[1:14:26] Bob Dobbs: B-level of the entertainment world.
[1:14:28] Bob Dobbs: It was for the B-grade actors.
[1:14:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:14:31] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:14:31] Cameron McEwen: that's good.
[1:14:31] Bob Dobbs: The ugly actors.
[1:14:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:14:34] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:14:35] Bob Dobbs: and then everything becomes politics.
[1:14:37] Bob Dobbs: So there isn't politics.
[1:14:38] Bob Dobbs: And everybody is supposedly yelling and screaming at each other.
[1:14:42] Bob Dobbs: America has become very divided and all the other stuff they've been saying for the last five years since Trump in.
[1:14:48] Bob Dobbs: Trump expressed the...
[1:14:50] Bob Dobbs: extreme lack of civility in all of our bodies,
[1:14:55] Bob Dobbs: all of our bodies,
[1:14:56] Bob Dobbs: not just the chemical body.
[1:15:00] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:15:01] Bob Dobbs: And then we got our comeuppance.
[1:15:04] Bob Dobbs: We got the fucking plague,
[1:15:06] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:15:10] Bob Dobbs: And then you have this great media ecology where everybody's forced to stay home.
[1:15:15] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:15:15] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan wrote that.
[1:15:16] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[1:15:17] Bob Dobbs: I suggest people stay home.
[1:15:19] Bob Dobbs: He wrote that like in the early
[1:15:21] Bob Dobbs: 70s. He thought that people were going out and being activists and having movements.
[1:15:26] Bob Dobbs: He thought that was all a waste of time because the electric eternity that was coming in would Kostelanetz them all.
[1:15:31] Bob Dobbs: So we eventually all became McLuhan.
[1:15:34] Bob Dobbs: We stayed home with COVID.
[1:15:38] Cameron McEwen: So when you called that media ecology,
[1:15:41] Cameron McEwen: you mean sort of peace beyond understanding?
[1:15:45] Cameron McEwen: Is that what you mean?
[1:15:46] Bob Dobbs: The electric eternity,
[1:15:47] Bob Dobbs: you mean?
[1:15:49] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:15:49] Cameron McEwen: but when you call it media ecology by staying home,
[1:15:56] Cameron McEwen: they're staying out of the battle of media and everything else.
[1:16:01] Bob Dobbs: They're cutting down the natural instinct to participate,
[1:16:05] Bob Dobbs: to bounce it off by a yoga.
[1:16:07] Bob Dobbs: He said the new yoga will be service environment.
[1:16:12] Bob Dobbs: He said that in Forbes in 1966.
[1:16:15] Bob Dobbs: That was a good line.
[1:16:17] Bob Dobbs: And so over time...
[1:16:19] Bob Dobbs: To this point,
[1:16:20] Bob Dobbs: you would stay home and do service environment and wouldn't be disrupting the ecology by engaging in the normal tactile chaos of everyday life,
[1:16:30] Bob Dobbs: of the multiple bodies that were starting to be grown.
[1:16:33] Bob Dobbs: So you withdraw,
[1:16:35] Bob Dobbs: you withdrew from being the content.
[1:16:40] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:16:42] Cameron McEwen: that's one of the ways that he analyzed
[1:16:46] Cameron McEwen: Eastern...
[1:16:47] Bob Dobbs: religions like buddhism yes everybody's a dropout another thing he said in understanding media the dropout phenomenon was going to spread all kinds of things will be dropouts and you could say the 70 percent that don't vote are dropouts from civic responsibility right
[1:17:07] Cameron McEwen: but but on mcclellan's analysis everybody is dropping out all the time uh we don't have any notion of it
[1:17:16] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:17:16] Bob Dobbs: and dropping in.
[1:17:18] Bob Dobbs: That's in Take Today.
[1:17:19] Bob Dobbs: Drop out and drop in.
[1:17:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:17:23] Cameron McEwen: that's the whole mode of human perception,
[1:17:27] Cameron McEwen: dropping in and out every second,
[1:17:30] Cameron McEwen: every microsecond.
[1:17:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:17:32] Bob Dobbs: that became anti-environment.
[1:17:33] Bob Dobbs: That got extended,
[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: the drop in,
[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: drop out.
[1:17:37] Bob Dobbs: So that may be what hip-hop means.
[1:17:40] Bob Dobbs: You hop from body to body,
[1:17:42] Bob Dobbs: environment anti-environment.
[1:17:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:17:44] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:17:45] Cameron McEwen: Perception to perception,
[1:17:48] Cameron McEwen: personality to personality,
[1:17:50] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:17:52] Cameron McEwen: So it's got a major,
[1:17:57] Cameron McEwen: what might be called a positive pole to it.
[1:18:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:18:01] Bob Dobbs: and so the jumping,
[1:18:06] Bob Dobbs: oh yeah,
[1:18:07] Bob Dobbs: so in the literate age,
[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: to not be flat on matchable.
[1:18:13] Bob Dobbs: You had to be known what you were.
[1:18:14] Bob Dobbs: You were Catholic or something.
[1:18:16] Bob Dobbs: Couldn't talk about it in public,
[1:18:17] Bob Dobbs: but everybody knew you were Catholic.
[1:18:19] Bob Dobbs: So it was simple matching and categorization.
[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: And if you started to play with that in any way,
[1:18:25] Bob Dobbs: you were a hypocrite,
[1:18:26] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:18:27] Bob Dobbs: You started to move into the Posthuman,
[1:18:30] Bob Dobbs: electric or preliterate Posthuman.
[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: as over the last 30 years,
[1:18:35] Bob Dobbs: people started to put on different anti-environment,
[1:18:38] Bob Dobbs: hypocrisy got accepted.
[1:18:40] Bob Dobbs: or literate hypocrisy,
[1:18:41] Bob Dobbs: the problem of
[1:18:42] Bob Dobbs: hypocrisy for literate people got accepted and everybody became a liar and it was given uh you know you you would accept chemical body lying because you were hopping from anti-environment to another and so you would get people um
[1:18:58] Bob Dobbs: in their social lives would be in very different anti-environment from whatever their job was they would surprise whether some people would join cults uh other people would um become you know drug addicts
[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: on the weekend or something.
[1:19:13] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:19:15] Bob Dobbs: But the Posthuman of anti-environment and of bodies is the new hypocrisy.
[1:19:21] Cameron McEwen: But McLuhan was very interesting in pointing out that people would find lying entirely acceptable and admirable in some contexts,
[1:19:37] Cameron McEwen: but not in others.
[1:19:38] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:19:39] Cameron McEwen: so you've been talking about people who were Catholic and then they weren't Catholic.
[1:19:46] Cameron McEwen: People didn't say to themselves,
[1:19:49] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:19:50] Cameron McEwen: I can be a Catholic even though I'm lying.
[1:19:53] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:19:54] Cameron McEwen: that was impossible for them,
[1:19:55] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:19:56] Cameron McEwen: But if they talked about going to a bar and giving the wrong name or saying they weren't married or something like that,
[1:20:03] Cameron McEwen: then that was great.
[1:20:05] Bob Dobbs: Yep,
[1:20:06] Bob Dobbs: that made you more fluid.
[1:20:07] Bob Dobbs: you can enjoy all the different anti-environment.
[1:20:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:20:10] Cameron McEwen: so this is this rough tactility that you're talking about,
[1:20:17] Cameron McEwen: where people weren't,
[1:20:20] Cameron McEwen: they were out of control,
[1:20:22] Cameron McEwen: and that they had different dominance in different aspects of their lives,
[1:20:28] Cameron McEwen: and they had no idea how to square these dominance.
[1:20:33] Bob Dobbs: With their old values.
[1:20:34] Bob Dobbs: the so-called values of Christmas,
[1:20:36] Bob Dobbs: Easter,
[1:20:36] Bob Dobbs: or Thanksgiving.
[1:20:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:20:39] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:20:39] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:20:39] Cameron McEwen: all of those were involved in the mix now.
[1:20:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:20:43] Bob Dobbs: and so for a lot of people,
[1:20:45] Bob Dobbs: every day was a party,
[1:20:47] Bob Dobbs: a holiday.
[1:20:49] Bob Dobbs: I remember McLuhan saying in the early
[1:20:52] Bob Dobbs: 70s, he says,
[1:20:53] Bob Dobbs: why do anything more than six months?
[1:20:56] Bob Dobbs: And on top of that,
[1:20:58] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[1:20:58] Bob Dobbs: I know a friend,
[1:20:59] Bob Dobbs: he just quit his job and he got unemployment for a year or two.
[1:21:03] Bob Dobbs: That was quite shocking in the early 70s that people could just drop out and do nothing,
[1:21:07] Bob Dobbs: and the welfare society would give them some money.
[1:21:11] Bob Dobbs: That flipped into hard times by the Vincent Sherry.
[1:21:15] Bob Dobbs: The welfare stuff was starting to be imposed upon and cut back,
[1:21:21] Bob Dobbs: and then that made people lose their jobs.
[1:21:26] Bob Dobbs: They'd get into the part-time economy,
[1:21:28] Bob Dobbs: the temp economy,
[1:21:29] Bob Dobbs: and the stress of...
[1:21:31] Bob Dobbs: Could they get welfare,
[1:21:32] Bob Dobbs: get a little bit?
[1:21:34] Bob Dobbs: And overall,
[1:21:34] Bob Dobbs: the population started to experience what McLuhan called tribal hardship.
[1:21:38] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:21:39] Bob Dobbs: in literate societies,
[1:21:40] Bob Dobbs: affluence and poverty.
[1:21:42] Bob Dobbs: But not in tribal societies.
[1:21:43] Bob Dobbs: Everybody shares hardship.
[1:21:45] Bob Dobbs: So by the 80s and the Reagan era,
[1:21:48] Bob Dobbs: there was stagflation and all these problems and more and more unemployment.
[1:21:53] Bob Dobbs: So people started to experience hardship.
[1:21:55] Bob Dobbs: And then that made them more casual and rough and drug or...
[1:21:59] Bob Dobbs: alcohol-oriented and just giving up and not being civilized and proper anymore and showing up at work at 9 to 5 every week,
[1:22:09] Bob Dobbs: every day.
[1:22:10] Cameron McEwen: So they didn't have values,
[1:22:12] Cameron McEwen: but they needed values more than ever.
[1:22:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:22:15] Cameron McEwen: Although they didn't know they were expressing values.
[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: And you know what that led into?
[1:22:19] Bob Dobbs: That led into fundamentalists,
[1:22:20] Bob Dobbs: everybody becoming a born-again Christian.
[1:22:22] Bob Dobbs: That was the attempt to retrieve literate values.
[1:22:26] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[1:22:28] Bob Dobbs: Virtue.
[1:22:28] Bob Dobbs: Sure,
[1:22:28] Cameron McEwen: of course.
[1:22:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:22:31] Bob Dobbs: I remember.
[1:22:32] Cameron McEwen: It's one rebound of being at loose ends.
[1:22:35] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:22:36] Bob Dobbs: And I remember
[1:22:37] Bob Dobbs: Mailer, you know,
[1:22:39] Bob Dobbs: he was popular in the
[1:22:40] Bob Dobbs: 60s as an interacting guy running for mayor and all this,
[1:22:44] Bob Dobbs: beating up his wives.
[1:22:45] Bob Dobbs: He had all kinds of different images.
[1:22:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:22:48] Cameron McEwen: boxing.
[1:22:49] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:22:49] Bob Dobbs: and he faded out by the
[1:22:51] Bob Dobbs: 80s. And I saw him being interviewed sometime in the 80s,
[1:22:55] Bob Dobbs: way after his time.
[1:22:56] Bob Dobbs: He still was putting out...
[1:22:58] Bob Dobbs: novels that were popular,
[1:22:59] Bob Dobbs: but he was no longer in the public sphere.
[1:23:02] Bob Dobbs: And he said,
[1:23:03] Bob Dobbs: what I've discovered is that Americans are obsessed with virtue.
[1:23:07] Bob Dobbs: So I thought that was a good statement.
[1:23:08] Bob Dobbs: I adapted that with a bit of a McLuhan angle,
[1:23:11] Bob Dobbs: virtue being literate values,
[1:23:13] Bob Dobbs: what we were just saying.
[1:23:14] Bob Dobbs: People got into retrieving some kind of value,
[1:23:18] Bob Dobbs: and it became religious.
[1:23:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:23:20] Cameron McEwen: He was so intense.
[1:23:22] Cameron McEwen: Nietzsche had said this in the
[1:23:25] Cameron McEwen: 1870s and 80s,
[1:23:26] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:23:28] Cameron McEwen: the fate of Western civilization is that people can't live without a morality.
[1:23:36] Cameron McEwen: It's just that they don't have a traditional morality anymore.
[1:23:40] Cameron McEwen: And that they would do anything.
[1:23:45] Cameron McEwen: Suicide themselves,
[1:23:47] Cameron McEwen: suicide the entire planet out of morality.
[1:23:51] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:23:52] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan called that wearing your conscience on your sleeve.
[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: So people would find different forms of trying to be decent,
[1:24:00] Bob Dobbs: like a lot of donation to charities or causes or dropping out and becoming,
[1:24:06] Bob Dobbs: get involved with causes yourself,
[1:24:08] Bob Dobbs: like the World Vision
[1:24:10] Bob Dobbs: Organization. They'd go out to the rest of the world and,
[1:24:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:24:14] Bob Dobbs: be missionaries.
[1:24:15] Bob Dobbs: People who weren't inclined to be missionaries normally,
[1:24:18] Bob Dobbs: but eventually would,
[1:24:19] Bob Dobbs: in their identity crisis,
[1:24:20] Bob Dobbs: become missionaries and drop out of North America,
[1:24:23] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.
[1:24:26] Cameron McEwen: All of this stuff is very manipulable.
[1:24:29] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:24:29] Cameron McEwen: So behind all this stuff are media anti-environment.
[1:24:35] Cameron McEwen: Surveillance.
[1:24:36] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:24:36] Cameron McEwen: surveilling and suggesting.
[1:24:38] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:24:38] Bob Dobbs: that's what I mean.
[1:24:39] Cameron McEwen: Suggesting ways to be a good person and stuff.
[1:24:42] Bob Dobbs: The advertising was doing the surveilling,
[1:24:45] Bob Dobbs: and they could be a little more conscious of the trends and then reflect images back in the commercials and that and sell products as people formed identities just from watching advertising.
[1:24:57] Bob Dobbs: As they confused information from the program to the commercial,
[1:25:01] Bob Dobbs: it all blurred.
[1:25:02] Bob Dobbs: So advertising got into this archetypal level of actually giving values to people.
[1:25:07] Bob Dobbs: And ads no longer...
[1:25:10] Bob Dobbs: did the hard sell,
[1:25:11] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said.
[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: They started to do the soft sell,
[1:25:13] Bob Dobbs: which is their product that you're watching the commercial for had all these incredible values to it.
[1:25:19] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:25:19] Bob Dobbs: Values.
[1:25:21] Cameron McEwen: But also there was no barrier,
[1:25:24] Cameron McEwen: any border anymore between entertainment and ads.
[1:25:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:25:29] Cameron McEwen: and religion.
[1:25:31] Cameron McEwen: Everything was ads.
[1:25:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:25:33] Bob Dobbs: and that's where Finnegans Wake predicted that.
[1:25:36] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake mimed where we got to.
[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: by the 80s,
[1:25:41] Bob Dobbs: the mixture of everything,
[1:25:43] Bob Dobbs: all the institutions.
[1:25:46] Bob Dobbs: So what the mixture...
[1:25:48] Bob Dobbs: Then when the Internet came in,
[1:25:50] Bob Dobbs: you then could ignore the iconography,
[1:25:54] Bob Dobbs: the mixed media iconography of the TV landscape,
[1:25:57] Bob Dobbs: which was going to become,
[1:25:59] Bob Dobbs: under digitalization,
[1:26:00] Bob Dobbs: the TV body.
[1:26:01] Bob Dobbs: But when people started to have the chip landscape with the Internet,
[1:26:04] Bob Dobbs: and it gradually became the chip body...
[1:26:06] Bob Dobbs: They're now orbiting around all the old analog media and all the institutions.
[1:26:12] Bob Dobbs: Bode had talked about the orbiting economy.
[1:26:15] Bob Dobbs: So that is another part of eternity,
[1:26:20] Bob Dobbs: is the autonomy.
[1:26:22] Bob Dobbs: And everybody's saying,
[1:26:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:26:24] Bob Dobbs: they go to work and they go home and they get on the computer and start attacking people or whatever they do,
[1:26:28] Bob Dobbs: whatever form they're in,
[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:26:30] Bob Dobbs: Expressing literate bashing opinions against each other.
[1:26:36] Bob Dobbs: That became
[1:26:37] Bob Dobbs: Reddit.
[1:26:38] Bob Dobbs: Clinton experienced the Reddit world.
[1:26:40] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting hearing he grew up with it and how the alt-right and the Trump showed up in Reddit in 2013 and 2014,
[1:26:50] Bob Dobbs: before Trump up.
[1:26:53] Bob Dobbs: And they were out to get the matriarchs of the society,
[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: largely university professor feminists,
[1:27:01] Bob Dobbs: who had taken over academia.
[1:27:03] Bob Dobbs: But Theall told me that,
[1:27:06] Bob Dobbs: in his experience,
[1:27:07] Bob Dobbs: the feminists took over the cultural studies,
[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: and they wouldn't teach Joyce anymore.
[1:27:12] Bob Dobbs: That would be in the 90s and
[1:27:13] Bob Dobbs: 2000s. That was too male or too something.
[1:27:17] Bob Dobbs: And so the women took over in the
[1:27:21] Bob Dobbs: 2000s, running the culture and academia,
[1:27:26] Bob Dobbs: and then the alt-right was a reaction to that by the discarnate,
[1:27:30] Bob Dobbs: Body Drift male principle,
[1:27:32] Bob Dobbs: we'll call them.
[1:27:32] Bob Dobbs: because they're not males.
[1:27:34] Bob Dobbs: They're not chemical body males.
[1:27:35] Bob Dobbs: They're the male principle or a male ironic,
[1:27:39] Bob Dobbs: satirical,
[1:27:40] Bob Dobbs: Menippean attitude.
[1:27:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:27:43] Cameron McEwen: a male mask.
[1:27:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:27:44] Bob Dobbs: the male mask was a figure Trump wrote in on.
[1:27:51] Bob Dobbs: And the audience saw that and they supported him.
[1:27:54] Bob Dobbs: The male mask people.
[1:27:56] Bob Dobbs: And the women were appalled.
[1:27:58] Bob Dobbs: Remember?
[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: They had a global protest.
[1:28:03] Bob Dobbs: The day after he was sworn in?
[1:28:06] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:28:06] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:28:06] Bob Dobbs: it wasn't the election.
[1:28:07] Bob Dobbs: Remember they all wore pink hats,
[1:28:09] Bob Dobbs: a million women,
[1:28:11] Bob Dobbs: and they went to Washington and they protested the inauguration?
[1:28:14] Cameron McEwen: Vaguely,
[1:28:14] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:28:15] Cameron McEwen: Like the Million Man March.
[1:28:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:28:17] Bob Dobbs: it was the Million Women March.
[1:28:19] Bob Dobbs: But it was an expression of people being humiliated.
[1:28:23] Bob Dobbs: The women,
[1:28:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said,
[1:28:26] Bob Dobbs: people would feel more and more ripped off in the
[1:28:29] Bob Dobbs: 1670s.
[1:28:30] Bob Dobbs: their old chemical body identities were just not going to make it anymore.
[1:28:34] Bob Dobbs: So they were very...
[1:28:36] Bob Dobbs: Anti-environment was the postmodern word for it.
[1:28:38] Bob Dobbs: A lot of anti-environment happened,
[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:28:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:28:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:28:42] Cameron McEwen: Another favorite word of Nietzsche.
[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:28:45] Cameron McEwen: It came in 100 years after he died.
[1:28:48] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:28:49] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:28:49] Bob Dobbs: He predicted The Coming Race shifts or the big psychic storms.
[1:28:55] Bob Dobbs: So the anti-environment and disgust with everything.
[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan wrote about that just before he died.
[1:29:01] Bob Dobbs: So the women were disgusted at what had been polluting the TV body.
[1:29:09] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:29:09] Bob Dobbs: the TV by then interior landscape,
[1:29:12] Bob Dobbs: it's a body.
[1:29:13] Bob Dobbs: And everybody has one-fifth of themselves has the TV body.
[1:29:16] Bob Dobbs: And the women objected to the pollution that had stormed into the TV body.
[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: That was Trump image.
[1:29:22] Bob Dobbs: And an anti-female,
[1:29:24] Bob Dobbs: they took it personally.
[1:29:26] Bob Dobbs: This is Antigonish.
[1:29:27] Bob Dobbs: And then the Me Too thing happened.
[1:29:31] Bob Dobbs: So you can,
[1:29:33] Bob Dobbs: now what we're saying,
[1:29:34] Bob Dobbs: I don't think there's anybody in the world saying what we're saying.
[1:29:37] Bob Dobbs: They don't know McLuhan enough to apply it.
[1:29:39] Bob Dobbs: But it's very unique how we're analyzing what's happening.
[1:29:43] Bob Dobbs: Beyond normal editorials and columns using right,
[1:29:47] Bob Dobbs: left,
[1:29:48] Bob Dobbs: or smart,
[1:29:49] Bob Dobbs: stupid categories of literacy.
[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: You don't apply,
[1:29:52] Bob Dobbs: you don't use those categories Innis situation.
[1:29:55] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[1:29:56] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[1:29:58] Cameron McEwen: One thing I noticed is that in our talks,
[1:30:01] Cameron McEwen: the amount of text that we're going through in your book is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
[1:30:10] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:30:10] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[1:30:10] Bob Dobbs: the more you understand my text,
[1:30:12] Bob Dobbs: you don't need it.
[1:30:13] Bob Dobbs: You're now joining the game.
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: You've entered into the fray here.
[1:30:18] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:30:19] Cameron McEwen: a phrase like tactility squared,
[1:30:21] Cameron McEwen: which is where we started,
[1:30:23] Cameron McEwen: is so loaded.
[1:30:25] Cameron McEwen: It's so important.
[1:30:27] Bob Dobbs: It's almost too big.
[1:30:28] Bob Dobbs: It's too big.
[1:30:31] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:30:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:30:32] Cameron McEwen: it's like the history of the universe.
[1:30:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:30:35] Bob Dobbs: we've squared the history of the universe.
[1:30:40] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I'm saying here.
[1:30:41] Bob Dobbs: Let me just finish this.
[1:30:46] Bob Dobbs: It imitates us,
[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: the aping.
[1:30:49] Bob Dobbs: And I say the first stage of the Android Meme,
[1:30:51] Bob Dobbs: the global hologram,
[1:30:53] Bob Dobbs: that's in the 60s,
[1:30:54] Bob Dobbs: started imitating people showing the rough parts of humans.
[1:30:57] Bob Dobbs: violent TV,
[1:30:58] Bob Dobbs: stupid talk shows,
[1:30:59] Bob Dobbs: violent talk shows.
[1:31:00] Bob Dobbs: That's where we got to.
[1:31:01] Bob Dobbs: So the rest of the quote is,
[1:31:03] Bob Dobbs: this was the way humans were,
[1:31:04] Bob Dobbs: and TV was no longer a polite place.
[1:31:07] Bob Dobbs: It became a rough place,
[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: and that was the Android Meme looking like people.
[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: actually,
[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: I didn't say this.
[1:31:11] Bob Dobbs: And people got distracted by that.
[1:31:13] Bob Dobbs: I didn't say this line.
[1:31:15] Bob Dobbs: And people got distracted by that and didn't know they were being simulated by the Android Meme.
[1:31:20] Bob Dobbs: They got distracted at the imitation of their chemical body issues,
[1:31:24] Bob Dobbs: the violence of chemical body.
[1:31:25] Bob Dobbs: And everybody started complaining that the population was getting dumber,
[1:31:28] Bob Dobbs: and they missed the building of the TV body and the chip body.
[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: That came in as a novelty,
[1:31:36] Bob Dobbs: maybe an escape from the disgust they were seeing in the TV body or the TV landscape with the violent TV content.
[1:31:45] Cameron McEwen: These bodies that you're talking about are getting born?
[1:31:49] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:31:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:31:51] Cameron McEwen: but are they getting born because of a preexisting?
[1:31:56] Cameron McEwen: possibility that was always there or are they getting born because they have a technological presupposition that's only now available?
[1:32:09] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:32:10] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:32:10] Bob Dobbs: when TV was TV as anti-environment in the 50s and
[1:32:14] Bob Dobbs: 60s, then it started to break up and become something different with cable TV.
[1:32:18] Bob Dobbs: And I don't know how much...
[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: Digitalization was in cable TV,
[1:32:22] Bob Dobbs: but when you get to the digital world of the Internet,
[1:32:26] Bob Dobbs: that absorbs the TV landscape,
[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: the chemical body landscape,
[1:32:31] Bob Dobbs: and the astral landscape.
[1:32:32] Bob Dobbs: It shrinks it,
[1:32:33] Bob Dobbs: and you become,
[1:32:34] Bob Dobbs: you have the whole TV landscape,
[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: huge environment,
[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: 50,
[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: 60,
[1:32:38] Bob Dobbs: becomes an organ attached to you like a barnacle.
[1:32:42] Bob Dobbs: And so you have the whole TV experience in your Palm Pilot.
[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: It's shrunk.
[1:32:47] Bob Dobbs: Anti-environment of it is shrunk.
[1:32:49] Bob Dobbs: So the digitization is making the TV landscape,
[1:32:55] Bob Dobbs: the chemical body landscape,
[1:32:56] Bob Dobbs: and the astral landscape is making them bodies.
[1:32:59] Bob Dobbs: That's the pattern here.
[1:33:00] Bob Dobbs: So the digital technology made this happen,
[1:33:02] Bob Dobbs: and then the chip body was digitization itself,
[1:33:06] Bob Dobbs: and that became self-conscious,
[1:33:08] Bob Dobbs: you could say.
[1:33:09] Bob Dobbs: And then that becomes the Kenner meme,
[1:33:11] Bob Dobbs: and technology comes alive.
[1:33:13] Bob Dobbs: That would be the chip body.
[1:33:15] Bob Dobbs: The chip world was digitizing the other spaces.
[1:33:18] Bob Dobbs: the other landscapes,
[1:33:19] Bob Dobbs: but then what happens to itself?
[1:33:23] Bob Dobbs: It becomes self-reflexive,
[1:33:24] Bob Dobbs: self-conscious something.
[1:33:26] Bob Dobbs: So you could say the chip body is squared.
[1:33:31] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?
[1:33:32] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:33:32] Bob Dobbs: the chip body,
[1:33:33] Bob Dobbs: the chip landscape is digitizing everything.
[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: That's normal common sense.
[1:33:38] Bob Dobbs: But it gradually becomes shrunk and becomes a person's new body.
[1:33:42] Bob Dobbs: And so it's absorbing and digitizing the previous landscapes.
[1:33:46] Bob Dobbs: And then itself...
[1:33:49] Bob Dobbs: You could say Web 2.0 becomes a super vehicle where people were kings of their own media.
[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: They became broadcasters.
[1:34:00] Bob Dobbs: Whoever fucking saw that coming?
[1:34:02] Bob Dobbs: Where everybody could be their own TV station.
[1:34:08] Bob Dobbs: And nobody,
[1:34:09] Bob Dobbs: I don't think anybody wrote novels about that as part of 1984 or Brave New World or even
[1:34:17] Bob Dobbs: Neuromancer.
[1:34:19] Bob Dobbs: Gibson is timid.
[1:34:21] Bob Dobbs: His cyberspace stuff in Neuromancer,
[1:34:24] Bob Dobbs: which came out,
[1:34:24] Bob Dobbs: what,
[1:34:25] Bob Dobbs: 1984 or so?
[1:34:28] Bob Dobbs: That's timid compared to the reality of
[1:34:31] Bob Dobbs: 2.0 in the last 10 years.
[1:34:34] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:34:35] Cameron McEwen: But if you went back and looked at what
[1:34:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was talking about with Xerox and the Xeroxization of society,
[1:34:47] Cameron McEwen: you would see a lot of what's happening right now.
[1:34:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:34:49] Bob Dobbs: Xerox,
[1:34:50] Bob Dobbs: the book made everybody a reader.
[1:34:52] Bob Dobbs: Xerox made everybody a publisher.
[1:34:55] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:34:56] Bob Dobbs: That's what he said.
[1:34:57] Bob Dobbs: So then,
[1:34:58] Bob Dobbs: I don't think he said it,
[1:35:00] Bob Dobbs: but...
[1:35:00] Bob Dobbs: The internet or the digitization that was coming would make everybody a broadcasting network.
[1:35:06] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:35:07] Bob Dobbs: And then on top of that,
[1:35:09] Bob Dobbs: you would not only broadcast,
[1:35:10] Bob Dobbs: you would surveil more.
[1:35:12] Bob Dobbs: You'd experience more.
[1:35:13] Bob Dobbs: So you became your own intelligence agency.
[1:35:17] Bob Dobbs: Because you were spying on everybody in the chip body.
[1:35:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:35:21] Cameron McEwen: that's right.
[1:35:22] Cameron McEwen: And you had,
[1:35:24] Cameron McEwen: it's just normal to talk about your number of...
[1:35:27] Cameron McEwen: followers and all of that sort of stuff.
[1:35:30] Bob Dobbs: Everybody had a cult.
[1:35:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:35:33] Bob Dobbs: that's important to realize that.
[1:35:35] Bob Dobbs: The cults were a phenomenon in the baby boomers.
[1:35:39] Bob Dobbs: But once you get into Generation X and the millennials,
[1:35:43] Bob Dobbs: everybody aspires to be an influencer,
[1:35:45] Bob Dobbs: to be a cult.
[1:35:46] Bob Dobbs: It's not a stigma anymore.
[1:35:48] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:35:50] Bob Dobbs: So you see what we're saying.
[1:35:52] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.
[1:35:53] Bob Dobbs: I know Wired Magazine.
[1:35:55] Bob Dobbs: occasionally in the
[1:35:56] Bob Dobbs: 90s would predict.
[1:35:57] Bob Dobbs: They said,
[1:35:58] Bob Dobbs: something's coming here,
[1:35:59] Bob Dobbs: something weird.
[1:35:59] Bob Dobbs: I remember reading an article around 2010 where the next stage in the chip economy was the companies would have to give away everything.
[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: Google would have to give away stuff as opposed to who?
[1:36:17] Bob Dobbs: There's Google and YouTube maybe.
[1:36:19] Bob Dobbs: But the point is that information,
[1:36:22] Bob Dobbs: you've got a superior position in the market.
[1:36:24] Cameron McEwen: the guy was saying and it happened uh that the more free you gave people the more um uh you like more popular that's the story of apple right right apple was the other company they they give away the camera for free right
[1:36:43] Cameron McEwen: and inside the phone is a radio that's for free inside the phone is a tv that's for free let's see all the analog media yeah for free
[1:36:55] Bob Dobbs: So what that meant,
[1:36:56] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:36:57] Bob Dobbs: so what happened is the Android Meme,
[1:37:00] Bob Dobbs: this separate world that you didn't notice that had left you,
[1:37:03] Bob Dobbs: started selling ridiculous data about what you did,
[1:37:08] Bob Dobbs: what you said about yourselves.
[1:37:10] Bob Dobbs: And that was a weird new economy now called surveillance capitalism by that
[1:37:15] Bob Dobbs: Harvard professor,
[1:37:16] Bob Dobbs: that woman.
[1:37:17] Bob Dobbs: But they are selling from like 2012 on.
[1:37:22] Bob Dobbs: They are selling the exchange of.
[1:37:24] Bob Dobbs: of nothing,
[1:37:25] Bob Dobbs: of data about what people,
[1:37:26] Bob Dobbs: they could make patterns or they thought they could make patterns out of it.
[1:37:30] Bob Dobbs: And so they start selling it to each other,
[1:37:32] Bob Dobbs: Facebook and Amazon and
[1:37:34] Bob Dobbs: Apple or whatever other companies.
[1:37:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:37:37] Cameron McEwen: and it doesn't matter.
[1:37:39] Cameron McEwen: All relation to truth or importance has been lost.
[1:37:43] Cameron McEwen: All that matters is that you can sell this stuff and you can become the biggest company in the world by doing it.
[1:37:49] Bob Dobbs: And doing nothing.
[1:37:52] Bob Dobbs: That was,
[1:37:53] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:37:53] Bob Dobbs: older people say,
[1:37:54] Bob Dobbs: I don't understand what's going on.
[1:37:55] Bob Dobbs: These companies,
[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: what do they do?
[1:37:59] Bob Dobbs: But they actually were just digital anti-environment.
[1:38:01] Bob Dobbs: That's why they were,
[1:38:02] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:38:02] Bob Dobbs: utilities.
[1:38:03] Bob Dobbs: But they weren't seen as utilities in the industrial mentality,
[1:38:07] Bob Dobbs: litter mentality of America.
[1:38:08] Bob Dobbs: You had to have private ownership.
[1:38:10] Bob Dobbs: You had to sell shit.
[1:38:11] Bob Dobbs: And so they made up the selling of the medium itself,
[1:38:15] Bob Dobbs: of the exchange action,
[1:38:17] Bob Dobbs: of digital packets.
[1:38:19] Cameron McEwen: Which McLuhan had foreseen.
[1:38:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan tried to tell General Electric and corporations and IBM that they were in the wrong business.
[1:38:30] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know what the name of their business was.
[1:38:32] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:38:33] Cameron McEwen: But what he told them was that it's pattern recognition.
[1:38:37] Cameron McEwen: It's information about your users.
[1:38:40] Cameron McEwen: It's about allowing your users to be the medium.
[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: Of course,
[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: they understood none of that.
[1:38:47] Cameron McEwen: But had they invested in those things,
[1:38:51] Cameron McEwen: They would now be the huge corporations that Apple and Alphabet and...
[1:38:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:38:57] Bob Dobbs: IBM failed.
[1:38:58] Bob Dobbs: They were too part of the older analog phase.
[1:39:01] Bob Dobbs: They couldn't get the digital phase.
[1:39:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:39:03] Cameron McEwen: same with GE.
[1:39:04] Cameron McEwen: GE was a very early mover in many computers.
[1:39:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:39:09] Bob Dobbs: and maybe you could say
[1:39:11] Bob Dobbs: Ma Bell.
[1:39:12] Bob Dobbs: That was broken up.
[1:39:14] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:39:14] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:39:14] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:39:15] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:39:15] Bob Dobbs: Is that AT&T?
[1:39:18] Bob Dobbs: What was that?
[1:39:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:39:20] Cameron McEwen: Ma Bell was AT&T.
[1:39:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:39:22] Bob Dobbs: and they got broken up.
[1:39:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:39:24] Cameron McEwen: but their biggest problem was that McLuhan said to them,
[1:39:29] Cameron McEwen: look,
[1:39:29] Cameron McEwen: you're in the information business,
[1:39:31] Cameron McEwen: and they never did understand that.
[1:39:34] Cameron McEwen: Maybe they haven't understood it yet.
[1:39:35] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:39:36] Bob Dobbs: because what's information?
[1:39:37] Bob Dobbs: That's books,
[1:39:39] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:39:39] Bob Dobbs: Books are information.
[1:39:41] Bob Dobbs: That's serious shit,
[1:39:42] Bob Dobbs: the literate background of America built on the printing press.
[1:39:45] Bob Dobbs: So they never understood.
[1:39:47] Bob Dobbs: that
[1:39:47] Bob Dobbs: the electrical vortex as information,
[1:39:50] Bob Dobbs: as knowledge.
[1:39:51] Bob Dobbs: On the content level,
[1:39:52] Bob Dobbs: you would say,
[1:39:53] Bob Dobbs: I guess.
[1:39:56] Bob Dobbs: So the medium is the message.
[1:39:59] Bob Dobbs: The fact that
[1:40:00] Bob Dobbs: Facebook was just a medium with no content,
[1:40:04] Bob Dobbs: you make your own content,
[1:40:07] Bob Dobbs: that is a step beyond the analog media world that McLuhan talking about.
[1:40:12] Bob Dobbs: That,
[1:40:12] Bob Dobbs: in a way,
[1:40:13] Bob Dobbs: is the medium becoming self-conscious.
[1:40:16] Bob Dobbs: It was able to turn itself into apparent content that could be sold.
[1:40:21] Bob Dobbs: But it still was just a fucking technology that you could type on and explore at many levels.
[1:40:28] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:40:28] Cameron McEwen: But notice it's free.
[1:40:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:40:31] Cameron McEwen: It seems to be free.
[1:40:33] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:40:34] Cameron McEwen: And it's like a billboard,
[1:40:36] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:40:37] Cameron McEwen: The billboard takes over a public space,
[1:40:42] Cameron McEwen: but the public has no claim on it.
[1:40:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:40:46] Cameron McEwen: So the billboard is able to generate income.
[1:40:50] Cameron McEwen: precisely because it's not charged for the public space that it assumes.
[1:40:57] Bob Dobbs: It becomes anti-environment,
[1:40:59] Bob Dobbs: and it's new,
[1:41:01] Bob Dobbs: so it's not considered taxable or commercialized or something that we consider an invasion.
[1:41:10] Bob Dobbs: It's a new novelty.
[1:41:11] Bob Dobbs: It's a new extension of ourselves that we wallow around in and don't know the implications for older media that it is.
[1:41:18] Bob Dobbs: Older media being the economy.
[1:41:21] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:41:21] Cameron McEwen: or for our children,
[1:41:22] Cameron McEwen: or for anything.
[1:41:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:41:24] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:41:25] Bob Dobbs: That's the massive irresponsibility that McLuhan was addressing.
[1:41:28] Bob Dobbs: That is the new hypocrisy.
[1:41:30] Bob Dobbs: Remember he said,
[1:41:32] Bob Dobbs: your private conscience is trivial.
[1:41:35] Bob Dobbs: The areas of concern you have in your private conscience are nothing compared to the collective responsibility that you're ignoring.
[1:41:43] Bob Dobbs: Because you're allowing,
[1:41:44] Bob Dobbs: you're giving these Monstre Gai bombs.
[1:41:46] Bob Dobbs: to your kids for Christmas,
[1:41:48] Bob Dobbs: and they're going to blow up your family.
[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[1:41:52] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[1:41:53] Bob Dobbs: Massive.
[1:41:54] Bob Dobbs: Would that be,
[1:41:55] Bob Dobbs: it's a kind of hypocrisy to refuse to notice that,
[1:41:58] Bob Dobbs: to say.
[1:41:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:42:02] Cameron McEwen: it's a hypocrisy that extends all the way to self-harm and self-suicide.
[1:42:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:42:11] Bob Dobbs: and collective suicide too.
[1:42:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:42:14] Bob Dobbs: absolutely.
[1:42:15] Bob Dobbs: Why did.
[1:42:16] Bob Dobbs: the industrial hardware,
[1:42:18] Bob Dobbs: the roads and all that,
[1:42:20] Bob Dobbs: were ignored from the 80s on in the United States.
[1:42:22] Bob Dobbs: And nobody fucking repaired the bridges.
[1:42:25] Bob Dobbs: Where were they?
[1:42:25] Bob Dobbs: They were lost in other spaces.
[1:42:27] Bob Dobbs: They weren't on planet anymore,
[1:42:29] Bob Dobbs: on the chemical body planet.
[1:42:30] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:42:31] Bob Dobbs: Did you ever wonder how the hell could they let all these highways go?
[1:42:35] Bob Dobbs: Whereas countries who are doing newer technology and didn't have that backlog,
[1:42:40] Bob Dobbs: like China,
[1:42:40] Bob Dobbs: were having the most developed trains that were way better than anything here in North America.
[1:42:46] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[1:42:46] Bob Dobbs: They implemented that stuff.
[1:42:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:42:49] Cameron McEwen: and are doing so right this minute.
[1:42:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:42:52] Bob Dobbs: and then you have,
[1:42:53] Bob Dobbs: so then in the United States,
[1:42:55] Bob Dobbs: North America,
[1:42:56] Bob Dobbs: you have people miming the Body Drift dangling ganglia and the endless stimulation of that by doing drugs on all levels.
[1:43:05] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[1:43:05] Bob Dobbs: from fentanyl to whatever the latest stuff is,
[1:43:08] Bob Dobbs: which is killing thousands of people.
[1:43:10] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:43:10] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:43:11] Cameron McEwen: but the drugging.
[1:43:15] Cameron McEwen: It doesn't just take place through chemical drugs.
[1:43:19] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:43:21] Cameron McEwen: if you look at Canada now,
[1:43:23] Cameron McEwen: these big storms that just hit British Columbia and took out all of the roads and the rail lines and stuff so that
[1:43:30] Cameron McEwen: Vancouver became an island on the West Coast,
[1:43:34] Cameron McEwen: cut off from the rest of Canada.
[1:43:37] Cameron McEwen: What kind of stupidity has to be...
[1:43:44] Cameron McEwen: has to have taken control of people's minds,
[1:43:48] Cameron McEwen: that they haven't built the kinds of highways and the kinds of tunnels that the whole rest of the world is building to protect themselves from stuff like this.
[1:44:00] Cameron McEwen: You look at Norway,
[1:44:01] Cameron McEwen: you look at China,
[1:44:02] Cameron McEwen: you look at
[1:44:03] Cameron McEwen: Austria, you look at Switzerland,
[1:44:05] Cameron McEwen: you look at France,
[1:44:06] Cameron McEwen: you look at Italy.
[1:44:08] Cameron McEwen: All of these countries are doing what Canada needs to do.
[1:44:12] Cameron McEwen: But the Canadians are drugged out,
[1:44:14] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:44:15] Cameron McEwen: Not necessarily on drugs.
[1:44:16] Cameron McEwen: They're just drugged out.
[1:44:17] Bob Dobbs: They're drugged out on analog media.
[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: Analog media.
[1:44:21] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:44:22] Cameron McEwen: whatever it is.
[1:44:23] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:44:23] Bob Dobbs: listen,
[1:44:24] Bob Dobbs: this could be it.
[1:44:25] Bob Dobbs: Because America was built on the printing press,
[1:44:27] Bob Dobbs: so it's the most abstracted schizoid as a literate effect,
[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: the Gutenberg effect.
[1:44:32] Bob Dobbs: Europe and them,
[1:44:33] Bob Dobbs: they weren't ecologists,
[1:44:35] Bob Dobbs: but they had more ecological understanding of the effects of technologies anti-environment.
[1:44:40] Bob Dobbs: than North America's.
[1:44:41] Bob Dobbs: North America's the most abstract,
[1:44:43] Bob Dobbs: inscrutable people.
[1:44:45] Bob Dobbs: That's what McLuhan said,
[1:44:46] Bob Dobbs: that China was no longer,
[1:44:48] Bob Dobbs: it's no longer the inscrutable East,
[1:44:49] Bob Dobbs: the inscrutable West for most of the world.
[1:44:51] Bob Dobbs: Look at this crazy place that lost touch with its chemical body reality.
[1:44:56] Bob Dobbs: And so they make a big...
[1:44:58] Bob Dobbs: problem out of climate change and the ecology,
[1:45:01] Bob Dobbs: the ecology of religion,
[1:45:03] Bob Dobbs: but they're not doing it to their industrial media anti-environment.
[1:45:07] Bob Dobbs: They don't see it.
[1:45:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:45:10] Cameron McEwen: that's exactly right.
[1:45:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:45:13] Cameron McEwen: They're a very peculiar type of blindness.
[1:45:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:45:17] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:45:18] Bob Dobbs: the big factor is whether you're a literate society or not.
[1:45:21] Bob Dobbs: Literacy creates a huge blindness under the onslaught of the electric.
[1:45:27] Bob Dobbs: Because it traumatizes the literate.
[1:45:29] Bob Dobbs: But Americans were more traumatized than anybody.
[1:45:32] Bob Dobbs: The Europeans were traumatized for McDonald's restaurants or something.
[1:45:36] Bob Dobbs: Something that appeared to invade their chemical body world there.
[1:45:40] Bob Dobbs: But they aren't as effective as...
[1:45:45] Bob Dobbs: Who's ecological?
[1:45:47] Bob Dobbs: Maybe China.
[1:45:48] Bob Dobbs: They wouldn't allow...
[1:45:49] Bob Dobbs: They don't let the Internet come in and wreck their society.
[1:45:52] Bob Dobbs: They really control it,
[1:45:53] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:45:54] Bob Dobbs: So they're ecological with the Internet.
[1:45:56] Bob Dobbs: But because it's global and solar,
[1:45:59] Bob Dobbs: nobody really can stop the erosion that the tactility squared is doing to everybody,
[1:46:04] Bob Dobbs: to every culture.
[1:46:06] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:46:07] Cameron McEwen: that's right.
[1:46:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:46:08] Bob Dobbs: that's the Armageddon,
[1:46:09] Bob Dobbs: the apocalypse.
[1:46:11] Bob Dobbs: I say that the electric media is the fifth horseman of the apocalypse.
[1:46:17] Bob Dobbs: Not seen.
[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: they're all reading the Bible.
[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: once they didn't before the printing press,
[1:46:23] Bob Dobbs: but.
[1:46:24] Bob Dobbs: The Protestants read the Bible,
[1:46:25] Bob Dobbs: and they studied the Revelations and the four horsemen of the apocalypse,
[1:46:29] Bob Dobbs: and they had these chemical body,
[1:46:31] Bob Dobbs: famine,
[1:46:32] Bob Dobbs: starvation,
[1:46:32] Bob Dobbs: whatever those four are.
[1:46:34] Bob Dobbs: And they missed that the Protestant world out of Europe started building this hidden virus called technology.
[1:46:43] Bob Dobbs: And they built the industrial technology,
[1:46:45] Bob Dobbs: then the electric technology.
[1:46:47] Bob Dobbs: And I guess that was taken over by America,
[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: but it's still the West.
[1:46:50] Bob Dobbs: That was a Monstre Gai.
[1:46:52] Bob Dobbs: sneaking up on everybody while everybody was trying to do something about the war,
[1:46:57] Bob Dobbs: the four horsemen.
[1:46:58] Bob Dobbs: They were trying to prevent that.
[1:47:00] Bob Dobbs: But that was rearview mirror.
[1:47:02] Bob Dobbs: So I think
[1:47:03] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake is an upgrade of the Book of Revelation because it's showing you the Monstre Gai of media that was being sneaking up on the Western world.
[1:47:14] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:47:14] Cameron McEwen: But wouldn't McLuhan say to this that the electrical Monstre Gai is us?
[1:47:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:47:21] Bob Dobbs: they are us.
[1:47:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:47:23] Bob Dobbs: we're all super kings.
[1:47:26] Cameron McEwen: But that means that it's not something that we have to control out there.
[1:47:33] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:47:35] Cameron McEwen: If we're going to do something about the anti-environment,
[1:47:39] Cameron McEwen: it's something that we have to understand about ourselves and that we actually can understand because it's us.
[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: That's the service environment is the new yoga.
[1:47:50] Bob Dobbs: And he has a great line in Take Today that government,
[1:47:54] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if that's the exact word,
[1:47:56] Bob Dobbs: but it's basically the idea is that psychic ecology cannot happen on a national or international level.
[1:48:03] Bob Dobbs: It happens on a media ecology level in terms of service environment as the new yoga.
[1:48:09] Bob Dobbs: Yoga being a disciplined meditative act or something,
[1:48:12] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:48:12] Bob Dobbs: for monasteries.
[1:48:13] Cameron McEwen: But isn't yoga Innis sense part of the apocalypse?
[1:48:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:48:20] Cameron McEwen: Isn't it insofar as the best we can do is sort of entertain ourselves about this stuff?
[1:48:30] Bob Dobbs: It's inadequate.
[1:48:31] Bob Dobbs: There is no solution other than understanding what's going on.
[1:48:35] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:48:36] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:48:37] Cameron McEwen: I completely agree with that.
[1:48:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:48:39] Bob Dobbs: And you can't do anything about it,
[1:48:41] Bob Dobbs: but at least it's like someone said that in the concentration camps,
[1:48:45] Bob Dobbs: the victims,
[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: the pain was really a mental pain.
[1:48:49] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know why it was happening.
[1:48:50] Bob Dobbs: Why are we being killed like this?
[1:48:53] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:48:54] Bob Dobbs: today,
[1:48:55] Bob Dobbs: the best you can do is understand why you're going to be killed collectively.
[1:48:59] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:49:00] Cameron McEwen: But you see,
[1:49:00] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[1:49:01] Cameron McEwen: I think this is where we may have a difference,
[1:49:05] Cameron McEwen: and that is
[1:49:06] Cameron McEwen: I keep talking about chemistry and the need for science.
[1:49:11] Cameron McEwen: And what I'm not saying is that we need to have more of the physical sciences.
[1:49:17] Cameron McEwen: What I'm saying is,
[1:49:18] Cameron McEwen: is that understanding is not something that can be limited to individuals.
[1:49:25] Cameron McEwen: Science is itself a collective activity that involves everybody one way or another and involves all things.
[1:49:38] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:49:39] Bob Dobbs: I have a great answer for that.
[1:49:41] Bob Dobbs: I understood...
[1:49:43] Bob Dobbs: that McLuhan created the new science,
[1:49:44] Bob Dobbs: a new language for collective understanding.
[1:49:47] Bob Dobbs: He talked about that.
[1:49:48] Bob Dobbs: People are not being collectively responsible for the anti-environment they're creating.
[1:49:52] Bob Dobbs: That's why the private conscience doesn't matter.
[1:49:54] Bob Dobbs: So I got on there on the radio,
[1:49:56] Bob Dobbs: and I was,
[1:49:56] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:49:57] Bob Dobbs: a fascist telling everybody,
[1:49:58] Bob Dobbs: you have to know this shit.
[1:50:00] Bob Dobbs: I don't care what else you do.
[1:50:01] Bob Dobbs: If you're a Catholic,
[1:50:03] Bob Dobbs: or a mystic,
[1:50:04] Bob Dobbs: or whatever things you could be,
[1:50:05] Bob Dobbs: an artist or a scientist,
[1:50:07] Bob Dobbs: you have to understand the media ecology because that's what is in public.
[1:50:11] Bob Dobbs: That is the public language,
[1:50:12] Bob Dobbs: the public dialogue,
[1:50:14] Bob Dobbs: not your private opinion.
[1:50:16] Bob Dobbs: That was my stance.
[1:50:17] Bob Dobbs: So many people said,
[1:50:19] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[1:50:19] Bob Dobbs: you're a fucking phatic.
[1:50:21] Bob Dobbs: You're saying we've got to fucking turn off PBS nuts.
[1:50:24] Bob Dobbs: Nobody understood their collective responsibility,
[1:50:27] Bob Dobbs: and that's what I put on.
[1:50:29] Cameron McEwen: But if you imagine alchemists and pharmacists and mining engineers around 1780,
[1:50:41] Cameron McEwen: You can imagine them having different opinions,
[1:50:46] Cameron McEwen: some of them very strident,
[1:50:49] Cameron McEwen: about what they were doing,
[1:50:51] Cameron McEwen: what was the nature of the materials that they were working with.
[1:50:55] Cameron McEwen: And gradually,
[1:50:57] Cameron McEwen: starting around 1780,
[1:51:01] Cameron McEwen: people began to understand that the way to focus these activities was in terms of the chemical elements.
[1:51:09] Cameron McEwen: And the reason that chemical elements were able to gain traction and then change the whole world over the next 200 years was that they had practical results.
[1:51:22] Bob Dobbs: A collective knowledge.
[1:51:23] Bob Dobbs: Everybody can see the anti-environment,
[1:51:26] Bob Dobbs: which had to have the framework of literacy to get on to start to fix it and look at these things and categorize them.
[1:51:33] Bob Dobbs: You had to have the book to frame that.
[1:51:35] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:51:36] Cameron McEwen: But now,
[1:51:37] Cameron McEwen: but now.
[1:51:39] Cameron McEwen: within understanding media,
[1:51:43] Cameron McEwen: the book and literacy would be part of,
[1:51:45] Cameron McEwen: not only part of the how of the study,
[1:51:48] Cameron McEwen: but also part of the what of the study,
[1:51:52] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:51:52] Cameron McEwen: So the understanding that McLuhan saw as necessary was collective and would not be forced.
[1:52:01] Cameron McEwen: It would not be the object of an imperative.
[1:52:05] Cameron McEwen: You have to do this,
[1:52:06] Cameron McEwen: you have to do that.
[1:52:08] Cameron McEwen: it would build on itself just as the physical sciences did in the
[1:52:14] Cameron McEwen: 19th century.
[1:52:17] Cameron McEwen: They would find ways of,
[1:52:20] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[1:52:21] Cameron McEwen: right now going on in the world,
[1:52:24] Cameron McEwen: there's this huge contest between exceptionalism,
[1:52:28] Cameron McEwen: one exceptional nation,
[1:52:30] Cameron McEwen: and Muller-Thym.
[1:52:32] Cameron McEwen: And if that is not going to end in disaster,
[1:52:38] Cameron McEwen: It's going to end because people see through the categories of these things,
[1:52:48] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:52:49] Cameron McEwen: And what could be more practical than finding a way to end the potential of apocalypse?
[1:52:55] Cameron McEwen: Nothing.
[1:52:57] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:52:57] Bob Dobbs: And this is where we've become aware of tactility.
[1:53:01] Bob Dobbs: It's become a figure.
[1:53:03] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[1:53:03] Bob Dobbs: we've become aware of the mind.
[1:53:05] Bob Dobbs: which is what McLuhan used to write in the
[1:53:07] Bob Dobbs: 50s, that we had extended the learning process.
[1:53:10] Bob Dobbs: Remember how he went on about that?
[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: The drama of cognition and the process of creating a society.
[1:53:17] Bob Dobbs: He talks about that in that book by the Norwegian aristocrat,
[1:53:22] Bob Dobbs: Forms of Social Survival.
[1:53:24] Bob Dobbs: He said this is where the oligarchs are going to use Christianity as a public ideology of managing the world under,
[1:53:33] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:53:33] Bob Dobbs: love,
[1:53:34] Bob Dobbs: Christian love.
[1:53:34] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:53:36] Bob Dobbs: And he saw that's what Lucifer would do when he,
[1:53:38] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:53:38] Bob Dobbs: the prince of the air.
[1:53:43] Cameron McEwen: That's because what you have going on there is you have an ideology of global control.
[1:53:53] Cameron McEwen: And so
[1:53:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was warning against what
[1:53:57] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan said.
[1:53:57] Bob Dobbs: That's Orpheus.
[1:53:58] Bob Dobbs: Orpheus tuned the world,
[1:53:59] Bob Dobbs: which is where I got Orpheus from.
[1:54:02] Bob Dobbs: Him saying that Orpheus could tune the world today.
[1:54:05] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:54:06] Cameron McEwen: So he said that in regard to Schafer.
[1:54:11] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:54:11] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:54:11] Bob Dobbs: he did.
[1:54:12] Bob Dobbs: Tuning the sky.
[1:54:13] Bob Dobbs: What is the sky?
[1:54:14] Bob Dobbs: That's a nothingness.
[1:54:16] Bob Dobbs: But it is tactility in a way,
[1:54:18] Bob Dobbs: in a sense.
[1:54:18] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:54:18] Bob Dobbs: It's content.
[1:54:20] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:54:20] Cameron McEwen: So just as with nuclear weapons,
[1:54:25] Cameron McEwen: we have something that can be hugely destructive or it can be something constructive.
[1:54:32] Cameron McEwen: It's exactly the same with mind.
[1:54:35] Cameron McEwen: We're either going to suicide ourselves through mind,
[1:54:42] Cameron McEwen: or mind is going to find a way out of the cul-de-sac.
[1:54:45] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:54:46] Bob Dobbs: and that's why,
[1:54:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:54:48] Bob Dobbs: one of the things I had to take a while to figure out what he meant,
[1:54:51] Bob Dobbs: if you read McLuhan closely and in his articles,
[1:54:55] Bob Dobbs: he'd say we were extending the learning process,
[1:54:58] Bob Dobbs: the creative process itself,
[1:55:00] Bob Dobbs: the act of creating,
[1:55:02] Bob Dobbs: of thinking and making stuff,
[1:55:03] Bob Dobbs: which...
[1:55:04] Bob Dobbs: the Western world was celebrating for 300 years,
[1:55:06] Bob Dobbs: called it progress,
[1:55:08] Bob Dobbs: that became the figure,
[1:55:09] Bob Dobbs: the learning process itself.
[1:55:11] Bob Dobbs: And so what took over since the 50s was cognitive studies.
[1:55:15] Bob Dobbs: But that's just a left hemisphere specialization and complexification of the basic point that the global hologram had extended the learning process.
[1:55:24] Bob Dobbs: So that meant that you didn't need school,
[1:55:27] Bob Dobbs: or you had to do school differently if everybody was learning anyways,
[1:55:31] Bob Dobbs: and it was anti-environment.
[1:55:33] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?
[1:55:33] Bob Dobbs: That could be what you're calling your interior landscape,
[1:55:36] Bob Dobbs: exploring your interior landscape.
[1:55:38] Bob Dobbs: So you know that phrase,
[1:55:40] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:55:41] Bob Dobbs: Extending the learning process.
[1:55:45] Bob Dobbs: And then he said,
[1:55:46] Bob Dobbs: that's how you made a society.
[1:55:48] Bob Dobbs: You have the conscious means to make culture.
[1:55:50] Bob Dobbs: And advertising and media trends is the haphazard bourgeois forming of consciousness and cultures,
[1:55:58] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:55:59] Bob Dobbs: five of them every 12 months.
[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: So you have the extending of the learning process,
[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: which can go in one of two directions.
[1:56:09] Cameron McEwen: It either leads you into hell,
[1:56:12] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:56:12] Cameron McEwen: I think in the
[1:56:15] Cameron McEwen: Christian humanism lecture in 1954,
[1:56:21] Cameron McEwen: didn't he say we've got ourselves onto Mount Purgatory?
[1:56:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:56:27] Cameron McEwen: And either we're going to hell or we're going to invent a new way.
[1:56:32] Cameron McEwen: of living in peace.
[1:56:34] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:56:35] Bob Dobbs: and so,
[1:56:37] Bob Dobbs: what did you...
[1:56:43] Bob Dobbs: You were just saying about mind.
[1:56:45] Bob Dobbs: We're extending the mind.
[1:56:46] Bob Dobbs: We're becoming conscious and recognizing that it's a complex act to recognize that.
[1:56:54] Bob Dobbs: A complex act of the mind to recognize that you extended the mind and it's doing you in.
[1:57:01] Bob Dobbs: So what is the mind to do?
[1:57:03] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:57:03] Bob Dobbs: Thompson,
[1:57:04] Bob Dobbs: William Irwin Thompson,
[1:57:05] Bob Dobbs: had an interesting pattern.
[1:57:06] Bob Dobbs: He went through five phases of...
[1:57:09] Bob Dobbs: Development of humans,
[1:57:10] Bob Dobbs: Paleolithic,
[1:57:10] Bob Dobbs: Neolithic,
[1:57:11] Bob Dobbs: and then the
[1:57:13] Bob Dobbs: Mediterranean thing,
[1:57:15] Bob Dobbs: then the industrial,
[1:57:16] Bob Dobbs: then the planetary,
[1:57:17] Bob Dobbs: the electronic global planetary.
[1:57:19] Bob Dobbs: And each one had a victim.
[1:57:21] Bob Dobbs: The first victim was animals,
[1:57:24] Bob Dobbs: then woman,
[1:57:26] Bob Dobbs: then man and language,
[1:57:30] Bob Dobbs: I think it was,
[1:57:31] Bob Dobbs: then agriculture,
[1:57:35] Bob Dobbs: some phase in there.
[1:57:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:57:36] Cameron McEwen: nature maybe.
[1:57:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:57:37] Bob Dobbs: nature.
[1:57:38] Bob Dobbs: But the...
[1:57:39] Bob Dobbs: The victim in the 20th century in the planetary fifth phase was the mind.
[1:57:45] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:57:46] Bob Dobbs: so the left hemisphere,
[1:57:47] Bob Dobbs: especially part of the mind,
[1:57:49] Bob Dobbs: is what's numbed.
[1:57:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:57:51] Bob Dobbs: something I was going to say was the numbing.
[1:57:56] Cameron McEwen: In all of these things,
[1:57:59] Cameron McEwen: what gets sacrificed is what needs to be retrieved,
[1:58:04] Cameron McEwen: what needs to be protected,
[1:58:06] Cameron McEwen: and which is potentially...
[1:58:08] Cameron McEwen: What can save?
[1:58:10] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:58:10] Bob Dobbs: you have to retrieve the role of knowing in a new way.
[1:58:14] Cameron McEwen: So when we're talking about the exteriorization of learning,
[1:58:19] Cameron McEwen: what happens there is that there you become a consciousness of nothing.
[1:58:25] Cameron McEwen: Tactility involves a kind of flip through nothing.
[1:58:30] Cameron McEwen: And that becomes conscious,
[1:58:34] Cameron McEwen: not necessarily as a positive thing.
[1:58:37] Cameron McEwen: It becomes conscious in various ways,
[1:58:40] Cameron McEwen: and that is what needs to be understood.
[1:58:44] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:58:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:58:46] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I was trying to say two minutes ago.
[1:58:49] Bob Dobbs: The hell is you think everybody's getting dumb,
[1:58:52] Bob Dobbs: but actually everybody's engaging in processing the daily learning of pattern recognition just to keep up or have a sense of sharing the discarnate community.
[1:59:01] Bob Dobbs: So we're misinterpreting the
[1:59:03] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake.
[1:59:05] Bob Dobbs: as Finnegans Wake becoming numb and dumb.
[1:59:08] Bob Dobbs: And the literate people in New York,
[1:59:10] Bob Dobbs: they feel superior,
[1:59:12] Bob Dobbs: their rear view mirroring it,
[1:59:13] Bob Dobbs: and they don't see the population become smarter than anybody because it's processing everything,
[1:59:17] Bob Dobbs: which is beyond educational categories.
[1:59:20] Bob Dobbs: Just people have to be almost geniuses in adjusting to what's going on all the day,
[1:59:25] Bob Dobbs: every day,
[1:59:26] Bob Dobbs: in the information society.
[1:59:28] Bob Dobbs: And we're calling that dumb because nobody has time to talk to it.
[1:59:32] Bob Dobbs: They're just keeping up.
[1:59:33] Bob Dobbs: And they don't have the language to talk back to it.
[1:59:35] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan provided the language to talk back to it and become conscious of this process that made everybody appear to be becoming dumb.
[1:59:43] Cameron McEwen: And the process that you're talking about is actually the new science.
[1:59:47] Bob Dobbs: That's it.
[1:59:48] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[1:59:49] Cameron McEwen: I was going to say that.
[1:59:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:59:51] Cameron McEwen: because what's going on is everybody working on collective problems and solutions.
[1:59:59] Cameron McEwen: But it's as if...
[2:00:02] Cameron McEwen: we're harvesting the grain,
[2:00:04] Cameron McEwen: but then we're leaving it in the field.
[2:00:06] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:00:07] Bob Dobbs: And so that's where we,
[2:00:09] Bob Dobbs: there's a,
[2:00:10] Bob Dobbs: he called it complex clairvoyance was going on.
[2:00:13] Bob Dobbs: People are processing information,
[2:00:14] Bob Dobbs: making patterns,
[2:00:15] Bob Dobbs: but they haven't got time to communicate it,
[2:00:17] Bob Dobbs: but they absorb it,
[2:00:18] Bob Dobbs: and then they might notice it in other people,
[2:00:20] Bob Dobbs: or it happens in their jobs,
[2:00:21] Bob Dobbs: they just start coordinating.
[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: So we are really super intelligent responding beings,
[2:00:27] Bob Dobbs: else we would have blown ourselves up 50 years ago.
[2:00:30] Bob Dobbs: if we were still stupid.
[2:00:33] Bob Dobbs: And the elites who were hoping to have a nuclear war and trying to have one,
[2:00:38] Bob Dobbs: still are,
[2:00:40] Bob Dobbs: some of the military are still trying to do it,
[2:00:44] Bob Dobbs: they can't mobilize the popular,
[2:00:46] Bob Dobbs: the discarded super angels to get focused on it because the people are dealing with their daily apocalypse,
[2:00:52] Bob Dobbs: which is a constant revelation.
[2:00:55] Bob Dobbs: That's what apocalypse means.
[2:00:57] Bob Dobbs: The constant revelation of whatever new bullshit that they got to notice and be able to talk about or at least be aware of.
[2:01:04] Bob Dobbs: And so you've got,
[2:01:05] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:01:05] Bob Dobbs: 70 percent of the population doesn't vote and they know the election was stolen and they don't care because they don't live in that world.
[2:01:13] Bob Dobbs: They live beyond that in the super angelic.
[2:01:15] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't matter who the hell president who's president kind of thing.
[2:01:21] Bob Dobbs: You don't pay attention to what the president says about any fucking issue.
[2:01:25] Bob Dobbs: You immediately say it's not relevant.
[2:01:28] Bob Dobbs: First of all,
[2:01:28] Bob Dobbs: he's speaking in English.
[2:01:29] Bob Dobbs: That's wrong.
[2:01:30] Bob Dobbs: You've got to speak in fucking
[2:01:32] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake to talk to all the people that are listening,
[2:01:34] Bob Dobbs: all the cultures.
[2:01:37] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[2:01:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:01:38] Cameron McEwen: well,
[2:01:39] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:01:41] Cameron McEwen: listening to the president or the president's press secretary or something,
[2:01:46] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:01:47] Cameron McEwen: it's like eating sawdust.
[2:01:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:01:50] Cameron McEwen: Nobody does that.
[2:01:51] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:01:52] Cameron McEwen: The media has the terrible job of trying to make that digestible for people.
[2:02:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:02:03] Bob Dobbs: what you've got to have happening here is the media,
[2:02:06] Bob Dobbs: the microphones and press conferences are anti-environment,
[2:02:10] Bob Dobbs: and they have to be done because everybody has to keep talking to each other.
[2:02:13] Bob Dobbs: It's a form of typing.
[2:02:15] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:02:16] Bob Dobbs: I don't pay attention to the weather.
[2:02:18] Bob Dobbs: I notice the weather.
[2:02:19] Bob Dobbs: It's nice.
[2:02:19] Bob Dobbs: but I don't fucking concentrate all day long.
[2:02:23] Bob Dobbs: Jen Psaki and her press conference,
[2:02:25] Bob Dobbs: they're fucking weather,
[2:02:26] Bob Dobbs: and they have to be done.
[2:02:28] Bob Dobbs: You have to make a pattern for the day,
[2:02:29] Bob Dobbs: and she goes out and responds to the journalist.
[2:02:32] Bob Dobbs: So the biggest employment is covering the information society.
[2:02:38] Bob Dobbs: That's journalism.
[2:02:39] Bob Dobbs: That's all the media,
[2:02:40] Bob Dobbs: covering.
[2:02:40] Bob Dobbs: More people covered the
[2:02:42] Bob Dobbs: Vietnam War than have fought in it,
[2:02:44] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:02:45] Bob Dobbs: So the global coverage is the robotic world we live in.
[2:02:48] Bob Dobbs: And that is the Android Meme,
[2:02:50] Bob Dobbs: or now the tech body.
[2:02:51] Bob Dobbs: A monstrous,
[2:02:52] Bob Dobbs: robotic,
[2:02:53] Bob Dobbs: autonomic fucking thing that nobody has any control over.
[2:02:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:02:59] Cameron McEwen: so the stuff at the top of my page,
[2:03:04] Cameron McEwen: 80,
[2:03:06] Cameron McEwen: when you go through the years,
[2:03:09] Cameron McEwen: we sort of come up to that point,
[2:03:12] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:03:13] Cameron McEwen: So it's actually a very good point on which to end.
[2:03:17] Cameron McEwen: because it gives us a starting place for next time.
[2:03:21] Bob Dobbs: I'll make a note of this right away as soon as we hang up.
[2:03:24] Bob Dobbs: We're starting at page 80 with my
[2:03:26] Bob Dobbs: 40s, 50s chart there.
[2:03:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:03:28] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[2:03:29] Bob Dobbs: Quadrivium,
[2:03:29] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:03:30] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:03:30] Bob Dobbs: now we know what we meant.
[2:03:32] Bob Dobbs: Now we know we've worked ourselves up to understand what the hell I wrote.
[2:03:35] Bob Dobbs: But that's why I enjoy these dialogues because
[2:03:40] Bob Dobbs: I'm writing ahead of myself.
[2:03:42] Bob Dobbs: I'm actually using the correct language,
[2:03:44] Bob Dobbs: but it takes it.
[2:03:45] Bob Dobbs: It takes a dialogue or some kind of Explorations of what I meant.
[2:03:49] Bob Dobbs: And that's what McLuhan said.
[2:03:50] Bob Dobbs: He didn't know what he thought until he said it.
[2:03:53] Bob Dobbs: So I said it,
[2:03:54] Bob Dobbs: now I'm figuring out what I said.
[2:03:57] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[2:03:57] Cameron McEwen: right.
[2:03:57] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:03:57] Cameron McEwen: that's the great virtue of your mind is that it is ahead of you.
[2:04:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:04:03] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:04:03] Bob Dobbs: I live ahead of myself.
[2:04:04] Bob Dobbs: That's what I am saying.
[2:04:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:04:07] Cameron McEwen: for sure.
[2:04:08] Bob Dobbs: So that leads to all kinds of public synchronicities,
[2:04:10] Bob Dobbs: but that's another story.
[2:04:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:04:13] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:04:14] Bob Dobbs: so...
[2:04:14] Bob Dobbs: Very good.
[2:04:16] Bob Dobbs: That was an exciting Explorations.
[2:04:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:04:19] Cameron McEwen: thanks,
[2:04:19] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[2:04:20] Cameron McEwen: I understand Tactility Squared a lot better.
[2:04:23] Cameron McEwen: We touched on a lot of interesting things,
[2:04:26] Cameron McEwen: so I appreciate it.
[2:04:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:04:27] Bob Dobbs: I definitely say this one has got a lot of up-to-date modern pattern recognition in it.
[2:04:32] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[2:04:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:04:33] Bob Dobbs: great.
[2:04:34] Bob Dobbs: All right,
[2:04:34] Bob Dobbs: talk to you in two weeks,
[2:04:35] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron.
[2:04:36] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[2:04:36] Cameron McEwen: thanks,
[2:04:36] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[2:04:36] Cameron McEwen: Bye-bye.
[2:04:37] Bob Dobbs: You're welcome.
[2:04:37] Bob Dobbs: Bye.