[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Welcome,
[00:03] Bob Dobbs: this is Bob and Ewen Cameron,
[00:05] Bob Dobbs: Bob Dobbs and Cameron McEwen with the
[00:08] Bob Dobbs: 53rd episode of our deep probe of all things superficial.
[00:12] Bob Dobbs: So,
[00:13] Bob Dobbs: we are going to begin with someone named Kevin Kelly.
[00:19] Bob Dobbs: He is known as the first editor of Wired Magazine.
[00:23] Bob Dobbs: And he came out of
[00:25] Bob Dobbs: Stewart Brand stable at the Whole Earth Review and the Co-Evolution Quarterly.
[00:31] Bob Dobbs: in the 70s and 80s,
[00:32] Bob Dobbs: born in 1952.
[00:36] Bob Dobbs: So,
[00:39] Bob Dobbs: looking at his short wiki entry,
[00:42] Bob Dobbs: this is what it says.
[00:45] Bob Dobbs: Kelly's writing has appeared in many other national and international publications,
[00:49] Bob Dobbs: such as the New York Times,
[00:50] Bob Dobbs: Economist,
[00:51] Bob Dobbs: Time,
[00:51] Bob Dobbs: Harper's Magazine,
[00:53] Bob Dobbs: Science,
[00:54] Bob Dobbs: GQ,
[00:55] Bob Dobbs: Esquire.
[00:56] Bob Dobbs: His photographs,
[00:57] Bob Dobbs: I guess he's a photographer.
[00:59] Bob Dobbs: have appeared in Life and other American national magazines.
[01:02] Bob Dobbs: As well as serving as editor on many publications,
[01:05] Bob Dobbs: Kelly has written many novels surrounding his interest in cybernetics and all things tech.
[01:10] Bob Dobbs: Kelly is known for coining the term the technium,
[01:13] Bob Dobbs: Technium.
[01:17] Bob Dobbs: The accumulation,
[01:18] Bob Dobbs: this is the definition,
[01:19] Bob Dobbs: the accumulation of all technologies and inventions as a working,
[01:23] Bob Dobbs: living system.
[01:26] Bob Dobbs: Much of Kelly's work revolves around technology as a,
[01:28] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[01:29] Bob Dobbs: living organism.
[01:30] Bob Dobbs: He even refers to the technium as the seventh kingdom of nature,
[01:36] Bob Dobbs: that is,
[01:37] Bob Dobbs: Self-Condemned and autonomous.
[01:40] Bob Dobbs: His book-length publication,
[01:42] Bob Dobbs: Out of Control,
[01:43] Bob Dobbs: The New Biology of Machines,
[01:45] Bob Dobbs: Social Systems,
[01:46] Bob Dobbs: and the Economic World,
[01:47] Bob Dobbs: in 1992,
[01:50] Bob Dobbs: presents a view on the mechanisms of complex organization.
[01:54] Bob Dobbs: The central theme of the book is that several fields of contemporary science and philosophy point in the same direction.
[02:00] Bob Dobbs: Intelligence is not organized in a centralized structure,
[02:08] Bob Dobbs: but much more like a beehive of small,
[02:10] Bob Dobbs: simple components.
[02:12] Bob Dobbs: Kelly applies this view to bureaucratic organizations,
[02:15] Bob Dobbs: intelligent computers,
[02:16] Bob Dobbs: and to the human brain.
[02:18] Bob Dobbs: He was a futurist advisor on the Steven Spielberg book.
[02:22] Bob Dobbs: directed movie
[02:23] Bob Dobbs: Minority Report.
[02:25] Bob Dobbs: And another guy,
[02:26] Bob Dobbs: Tim Ferriss,
[02:27] Bob Dobbs: did a book,
[02:27] Bob Dobbs: Tools of Titans,
[02:29] Bob Dobbs: and Kelly wrote a chapter for that book,
[02:32] Bob Dobbs: Giving Advice.
[02:34] Bob Dobbs: So this is someone,
[02:36] Bob Dobbs: this is the only person I've come across who sees something similar to what I'm calling the tech body.
[02:44] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[02:44] Bob Dobbs: the technium is the accumulation of all technologies and inventions as a working,
[02:49] Bob Dobbs: living system.
[02:51] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[02:52] Bob Dobbs: if we were going to get into it,
[02:53] Bob Dobbs: I guess we'd have to find some quotes,
[02:54] Bob Dobbs: but I was curious if you'd heard of this technium.
[02:59] Bob Dobbs: I don't think you have.
[03:01] Cameron McEwen: No,
[03:01] Cameron McEwen: but the important question would be,
[03:05] Cameron McEwen: what is the ontological basis of this technium?
[03:13] Cameron McEwen: What is its possibility of being a reality?
[03:19] Cameron McEwen: coming to be as a phenomenon.
[03:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[03:28] Bob Dobbs: because he's laying this out.
[03:30] Bob Dobbs: If it's in his Out of Control book,
[03:32] Bob Dobbs: 1992,
[03:33] Bob Dobbs: that's what I don't know if he developed it later.
[03:37] Bob Dobbs: I never heard of this technium until recently.
[03:43] Bob Dobbs: I don't know how long he's been doing it,
[03:45] Bob Dobbs: but if he's been doing it since 1992,
[03:47] Bob Dobbs: that's pretty advanced because
[03:50] Bob Dobbs: Virtual reality hadn't really,
[03:51] Bob Dobbs: well,
[03:52] Bob Dobbs: the Internet hadn't really happened for people yet.
[03:55] Bob Dobbs: So if he's seeing that something's come alive,
[04:00] Bob Dobbs: that's pretty good.
[04:01] Bob Dobbs: Though I was kind of saying that with the Android Meme in the late
[04:04] Bob Dobbs: 90s.
[04:07] Bob Dobbs: So I'm just telling you,
[04:09] Bob Dobbs: I've got to see more of what he means.
[04:11] Bob Dobbs: And does he mean,
[04:12] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to have to deal with that in my own commentary here at some point.
[04:18] Cameron McEwen: Did you actually?
[04:19] Cameron McEwen: read the quotation from him yet?
[04:21] Cameron McEwen: I thought you were reading from
[04:24] Cameron McEwen: Wikipedia. Yeah,
[04:25] Bob Dobbs: I'm reading from the Wikipedia,
[04:27] Bob Dobbs: and it's summarizing.
[04:30] Bob Dobbs: It says,
[04:30] Bob Dobbs: the accumulation of all technology inventions is a working,
[04:34] Bob Dobbs: living system.
[04:35] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[04:37] Bob Dobbs: I would maybe never know what he means by that.
[04:40] Bob Dobbs: So he's claiming something's alive,
[04:42] Bob Dobbs: so that's in the Dobbs area.
[04:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[04:46] Cameron McEwen: well,
[04:46] Cameron McEwen: there must be a lot of stuff out there.
[04:48] Cameron McEwen: I've never heard the term before,
[04:50] Cameron McEwen: but
[04:51] Cameron McEwen: I'm sure by doing a little research,
[04:53] Cameron McEwen: you'd be able to see what's going on with the guy.
[04:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[04:57] Bob Dobbs: so let's just see what happens when I...
[05:00] Bob Dobbs: Google it.
[05:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[05:03] Cameron McEwen: put in
[05:04] Cameron McEwen: Technium Kelly.
[05:07] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[05:11] Bob Dobbs: It comes up,
[05:12] Bob Dobbs: the Technium Kevin Kelly.
[05:14] Bob Dobbs: No information is available for this page.
[05:17] Bob Dobbs: Learn why.
[05:19] Bob Dobbs: So
[05:20] Bob Dobbs: Technium is designed.
[05:23] Bob Dobbs: Then people ask,
[05:23] Bob Dobbs: who is the Technium?
[05:26] Bob Dobbs: And the answer is.
[05:27] Bob Dobbs: Technium is designed as a proprietary open platform to help entrepreneurs and executives discover,
[05:35] Bob Dobbs: validate,
[05:36] Bob Dobbs: and launch deep technologies every day.
[05:40] Cameron McEwen: So there you go,
[05:41] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[05:44] Cameron McEwen: The early inventors,
[05:45] Cameron McEwen: like yourself,
[05:46] Cameron McEwen: eventually find that the secondary inventors have made a business out of your ideas.
[05:54] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[05:55] Bob Dobbs: So I'm going to...
[05:57] Bob Dobbs: Click on this.
[06:04] Bob Dobbs: Detectium.
[06:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[06:05] Cameron McEwen: you've got to throw some money into that company so that you get corporate reports.
[06:11] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[06:11] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[06:11] Bob Dobbs: he's got a lot of the blog is there is something if you click on it.
[06:15] Bob Dobbs: They said,
[06:16] Bob Dobbs: no,
[06:16] Bob Dobbs: nothing.
[06:17] Bob Dobbs: Weekly links.
[06:19] Bob Dobbs: Detectium,
[06:20] Bob Dobbs: making the inevitable obvious.
[06:22] Bob Dobbs: And then he has some guy named Alan Resnick.
[06:27] Bob Dobbs: does some video on something.
[06:29] Bob Dobbs: So he,
[06:30] Bob Dobbs: Kevin says,
[06:31] Bob Dobbs: this is an exceptionally fine example of what breeding art with AI might produce.
[06:39] Bob Dobbs: So
[06:40] Bob Dobbs: I have a place to look at his stuff.
[06:42] Cameron McEwen: But didn't you interface with
[06:46] Cameron McEwen: Wired? No.
[06:49] Cameron McEwen: No?
[06:49] Bob Dobbs: No.
[06:50] Cameron McEwen: I always thought that you were the...
[06:52] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[06:52] Bob Dobbs: the McLuhan thing.
[06:53] Cameron McEwen: The McLuhan interview.
[06:55] Bob Dobbs: Gary Wolf.
[06:55] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[06:56] Bob Dobbs: I was part of that,
[06:56] Bob Dobbs: but that was done surreptitiously.
[06:59] Bob Dobbs: And what is it,
[07:01] Bob Dobbs: Sub Rosa?
[07:03] Bob Dobbs: I was not an official participant and paid person making that article.
[07:11] Bob Dobbs: Gary did all that.
[07:15] Cameron McEwen: But you supplied the background information.
[07:18] Cameron McEwen: Come on.
[07:19] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[07:21] Cameron McEwen: Your stamp is all over that stuff.
[07:23] Bob Dobbs: I know.
[07:25] Bob Dobbs: I let him take credit for it.
[07:33] Bob Dobbs: And there's some other things.
[07:35] Bob Dobbs: There's an essay by me where I talk about that and make a reference to it,
[07:40] Bob Dobbs: but I don't ever...
[07:41] Cameron McEwen: In Wired?
[07:42] Bob Dobbs: No,
[07:43] Bob Dobbs: no.
[07:43] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[07:43] Bob Dobbs: Up the Orphic Anti,
[07:44] Bob Dobbs: my little self-published thing for my own.
[07:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[07:48] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[07:48] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[07:48] Bob Dobbs: That's where I mention this,
[07:50] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[07:50] Bob Dobbs: unless it's in something else I wrote,
[07:52] Bob Dobbs: but it's all in my own world.
[07:56] Bob Dobbs: The only people who read my stuff know that I make that claim.
[08:03] Bob Dobbs: But I don't go into it because you could get into copyright problems and stuff.
[08:08] Bob Dobbs: So I don't like anything involving arguments about who owns what.
[08:15] Bob Dobbs: I'm already a shady character in those terms.
[08:19] Bob Dobbs: So
[08:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm not going to make an issue out of it.
[08:22] Bob Dobbs: I don't need the money to do it,
[08:24] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[08:25] Bob Dobbs: to complain about whatever comes from it.
[08:30] Bob Dobbs: No,
[08:31] Cameron McEwen: the joke was that you weren't Bob,
[08:33] Cameron McEwen: you were Marshall.
[08:35] Cameron McEwen: So what's the point of claiming that you're not you?
[08:40] Cameron McEwen: It makes no sense.
[08:41] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[08:42] Bob Dobbs: Eric didn't like me.
[08:45] Cameron McEwen: No,
[08:45] Cameron McEwen: I know.
[08:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[08:46] Bob Dobbs: so
[08:48] Bob Dobbs: I didn't want to have to deal with the McLuhan if they objected to it.
[08:52] Bob Dobbs: some way.
[08:55] Cameron McEwen: But you had to,
[08:56] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[08:56] Cameron McEwen: but to start the whole idea,
[08:58] Cameron McEwen: you had to step into the background,
[09:00] Cameron McEwen: right?
[09:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[09:02] Cameron McEwen: They weren't saying that Bob Dobbs was the patron saint of
[09:06] Cameron McEwen: Wired. They were saying that Marshall was.
[09:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[09:08] Bob Dobbs: So
[09:09] Bob Dobbs: I had a problem with that.
[09:15] Bob Dobbs: No,
[09:15] Bob Dobbs: I didn't.
[09:15] Cameron McEwen: Why?
[09:18] Bob Dobbs: Just joking.
[09:18] Bob Dobbs: So,
[09:20] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[09:20] Bob Dobbs: that's a...
[09:22] Bob Dobbs: What would a cocoon say?
[09:23] Bob Dobbs: A lot of tiger cages in that area and elephant traps.
[09:29] Bob Dobbs: Or tiger traps and elephant cages.
[09:30] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember.
[09:31] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that?
[09:32] Bob Dobbs: I think he said that.
[09:33] Cameron McEwen: I know that you've mentioned that many times in our conversations.
[09:37] Cameron McEwen: I think you got that out of seminars.
[09:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[09:40] Bob Dobbs: or from a media approach to inflation,
[09:44] Bob Dobbs: 1974.
[09:50] Cameron McEwen: He may have said that.
[09:50] Bob Dobbs: Those two words.
[09:50] Cameron McEwen: I don't have the exact recall of his texts like you do,
[09:54] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[09:54] Bob Dobbs: I know.
[09:55] Bob Dobbs: I know.
[09:55] Bob Dobbs: You're just starting out.
[09:57] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[09:59] Bob Dobbs: You're numb by your
[10:01] Bob Dobbs: Googling or digitizing skills.
[10:05] Bob Dobbs: You can find stuff,
[10:06] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[10:07] Bob Dobbs: through the technology.
[10:09] Bob Dobbs: You don't have to remember.
[10:11] Cameron McEwen: That's true.
[10:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[10:12] Bob Dobbs: You've got your memory numbed.
[10:15] Bob Dobbs: So you'll be hopeless on a radio show.
[10:18] Bob Dobbs: You couldn't carry the argument.
[10:22] Bob Dobbs: But you've been doing this for so long,
[10:23] Bob Dobbs: you do know stuff now.
[10:26] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[10:27] Bob Dobbs: you do have a memory for a lot of stuff now,
[10:31] Bob Dobbs: wouldn't you say?
[10:32] Cameron McEwen: Well.
[10:33] Cameron McEwen: I think I agree with what you said before.
[10:36] Cameron McEwen: My blog is kind of my memory.
[10:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[10:42] Cameron McEwen: So a lot of the stuff on the blog that I wrote,
[10:47] Cameron McEwen: I've forgotten about.
[10:49] Cameron McEwen: And then after years,
[10:51] Cameron McEwen: I go back and I look at it and I say,
[10:53] Cameron McEwen: Jesus,
[10:54] Cameron McEwen: I'm dumber now than I used to be.
[10:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[10:58] Bob Dobbs: you're not applying McLuhan properly.
[11:01] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[11:04] Bob Dobbs: What is that?
[11:06] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[11:06] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[11:06] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[11:07] Bob Dobbs: that quote of McLuhan,
[11:08] Bob Dobbs: Tombo John Pick,
[11:09] Bob Dobbs: the editor of Renaissance.
[11:12] Bob Dobbs: And he said he made a card index of the whole history of
[11:17] Bob Dobbs: English or philosophy or something.
[11:19] Bob Dobbs: Some huge encyclopedic card index.
[11:22] Bob Dobbs: And Marshall reported that,
[11:24] Bob Dobbs: Marshall,
[11:25] Bob Dobbs: I have conquered the system.
[11:27] Bob Dobbs: I have everything here.
[11:28] Bob Dobbs: I know it all.
[11:30] Bob Dobbs: And so Marshall then would say,
[11:32] Bob Dobbs: Poor Mr.
[11:32] Bob Dobbs: Pick,
[11:34] Bob Dobbs: he got so involved with studying it all and annotating it that he became the system.
[11:42] Bob Dobbs: Did you ever hear that,
[11:44] Bob Dobbs: that audio?
[11:45] Cameron McEwen: I think you mentioned it before.
[11:48] Bob Dobbs: No,
[11:48] Bob Dobbs: but I mean,
[11:48] Bob Dobbs: you haven't heard the original.
[11:49] Bob Dobbs: It's out there.
[11:50] Cameron McEwen: No,
[11:51] Cameron McEwen: no.
[11:52] Bob Dobbs: And so what happened,
[11:54] Bob Dobbs: he shortly met an aristocratic lady in Europe and quit.
[11:58] Bob Dobbs: His job as Renaissance editor or whatever he was doing,
[12:01] Cameron McEwen: and he just started loafing around.
[12:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[12:06] Bob Dobbs: we did that.
[12:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[12:07] Bob Dobbs: back to what we did.
[12:08] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[12:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[12:11] Bob Dobbs: You actually did.
[12:12] Bob Dobbs: So you knew his background more than me,
[12:14] Bob Dobbs: and I knew the quote,
[12:16] Bob Dobbs: or I'd heard it.
[12:17] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[12:17] Cameron McEwen: I didn't know his background of getting married and all that stuff,
[12:21] Cameron McEwen: so that you supplied that.
[12:23] Bob Dobbs: But you did quickly.
[12:24] Cameron McEwen: You're more into the gossip.
[12:27] Cameron McEwen: No,
[12:27] Cameron McEwen: no,
[12:28] Bob Dobbs: I'm into the ideas.
[12:33] Cameron McEwen: I know a fair amount about PIC at Wisconsin.
[12:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[12:38] Cameron McEwen: see?
[12:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was there.
[12:41] Bob Dobbs: But see,
[12:43] Bob Dobbs: you took your technical skills immediately,
[12:45] Bob Dobbs: and within five minutes,
[12:47] Bob Dobbs: you had found out more than I had.
[12:50] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[12:51] Cameron McEwen: I wrote a paper on PIC a long time ago.
[12:54] Bob Dobbs: Before we talked about it?
[12:56] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[12:56] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[12:57] Cameron McEwen: It appears in the Stallman paperback about Renaissance.
[13:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[13:05] Bob Dobbs: So you did your research back then,
[13:07] Bob Dobbs: but you didn't know the married part?
[13:10] Cameron McEwen: No.
[13:10] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[13:12] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[13:12] Bob Dobbs: So,
[13:13] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[13:14] Bob Dobbs: I appear to have explored the gossip.
[13:16] Bob Dobbs: No,
[13:16] Bob Dobbs: I just heard he was married to somebody.
[13:18] Bob Dobbs: I didn't get into it.
[13:20] Bob Dobbs: And I didn't know anything anymore.
[13:21] Bob Dobbs: Then you researched it and told me the extra stuff I didn't know.
[13:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[13:28] Cameron McEwen: well,
[13:29] Cameron McEwen: we're playing badminton here,
[13:30] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[13:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[13:32] Bob Dobbs: tweedle dum,
[13:33] Bob Dobbs: tweedle dee.
[13:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[13:34] Bob Dobbs: let's go to the second issue,
[13:38] Bob Dobbs: which was what?
[13:41] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[13:42] Cameron McEwen: we were going to talk about the conversation about the machine and AI.
[13:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[13:49] Bob Dobbs: okay.
[13:54] Bob Dobbs: Do we...
[13:55] Bob Dobbs: Just approach the topic in general?
[13:59] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[13:59] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[14:00] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[14:01] Bob Dobbs: so there's someone we know who has written that
[14:11] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[14:14] Bob Dobbs: Wired Magazine,
[14:16] Bob Dobbs: William Gibson,
[14:17] Bob Dobbs: everybody who came up with this idea that there's a cyberspace and then that is a virtual reality and a matrix and a simulation.
[14:27] Bob Dobbs: is lacking perception of the facts.
[14:30] Bob Dobbs: And the facts are the computer is a box of metals,
[14:34] Bob Dobbs: and there's nothing extraterrestrial around it,
[14:39] Bob Dobbs: hiding in it.
[14:40] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't create virtual reality.
[14:42] Bob Dobbs: But because people don't know anything about computers,
[14:45] Bob Dobbs: says this person,
[14:46] Bob Dobbs: doesn't know the technology,
[14:47] Bob Dobbs: they don't know how to fix a computer or do stuff through something like Linux,
[14:54] Bob Dobbs: Um,
[14:56] Bob Dobbs: then they live in a fantasy surface world of what the screen shows them.
[15:01] Bob Dobbs: And there's so much variety or Baroque spirals of titillation in the screen that people think it is something...
[15:12] Bob Dobbs: that comes alive that is mysterious.
[15:17] Bob Dobbs: And it's just that they don't understand the technology of how it's made.
[15:21] Bob Dobbs: So they're lost in the figure of the computer.
[15:25] Bob Dobbs: And so he thinks that this is a big problem for people's perceptions today,
[15:32] Bob Dobbs: that they get fooled by the surface software Wyndham Lewis of the life on the computer or texting.
[15:43] Bob Dobbs: that they have become vulnerable to all kinds of crazy notions.
[15:48] Bob Dobbs: And he thinks that all the McLuhan don't study the ground.
[15:54] Bob Dobbs: They don't know how to fix their computers or build it or do the Linux thing.
[16:00] Bob Dobbs: So he's down on the McLuhan effect.
[16:03] Bob Dobbs: He thinks that Marshall created a strange aberration.
[16:09] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[16:09] Bob Dobbs: you've thought about this.
[16:11] Bob Dobbs: So you want to say something?
[16:13] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[16:14] Cameron McEwen: to me,
[16:14] Cameron McEwen: the interesting thing here is it's a perfect example of not understanding what McLuhan meant by the medium is the message.
[16:24] Cameron McEwen: So what's going on here is that the guy is saying that the way to look at the relationship between a machine and intelligence is to take the machine apart and.
[16:39] Cameron McEwen: look at the material components,
[16:42] Cameron McEwen: and when you understand that,
[16:44] Cameron McEwen: then your misconceptions about the relationship of the machine to intelligence are going to be dissipated.
[16:53] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[16:55] Cameron McEwen: So what he's saying is,
[16:57] Cameron McEwen: you don't start with the medium.
[17:00] Cameron McEwen: You start with the poles that are supposedly related.
[17:08] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?
[17:10] Cameron McEwen: Holes?
[17:11] Cameron McEwen: H-O-L-E-S?
[17:11] Cameron McEwen: Holes.
[17:12] Cameron McEwen: P-O-L-E-S.
[17:12] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[17:12] Cameron McEwen: the poles.
[17:14] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[17:14] Cameron McEwen: So the question concerns the relationship of a material machine to intelligence.
[17:22] Cameron McEwen: And the claim is that in order to understand that relationship,
[17:28] Cameron McEwen: what you have to do is you have to start with the poles in isolation from each other.
[17:37] Cameron McEwen: And...
[17:38] Cameron McEwen: Once you understand the material components of the machine,
[17:44] Cameron McEwen: then you're going to understand better what's going on with so-called virtual reality,
[17:51] Cameron McEwen: and you may even understand better what normal human intelligence is.
[17:56] Cameron McEwen: So the claim is that you arrive at the middle,
[18:03] Cameron McEwen: the relationship,
[18:04] Cameron McEwen: through analysis of one or both of the poles.
[18:09] Cameron McEwen: And the claim is that the polls are somehow obvious.
[18:14] Cameron McEwen: Somehow they are things in the world that you simply relate to as obvious.
[18:26] Cameron McEwen: There's like a box that is a computer.
[18:30] Cameron McEwen: And so it's obvious that it's sitting there on my desk.
[18:33] Cameron McEwen: And then I pick up something.
[18:35] Cameron McEwen: else it's obvious a screwdriver and I begin to take it apart.
[18:39] Cameron McEwen: And when I go through this process,
[18:42] Cameron McEwen: I understand the machine.
[18:44] Cameron McEwen: And by understanding the machine,
[18:46] Cameron McEwen: I come to understand how it is or is not related to something like intelligence.
[18:53] Cameron McEwen: So the whole argument says that the medium is not the message.
[18:59] Cameron McEwen: We can start aside from the medium,
[19:02] Cameron McEwen: namely the relationship between Thank you.
[19:08] Cameron McEwen: The relationship between machine and intelligence is not primitive.
[19:15] Cameron McEwen: It's secondary.
[19:16] Cameron McEwen: It's something that we arrive at after we deal with,
[19:19] Cameron McEwen: quote-unquote,
[19:20] Cameron McEwen: facts.
[19:21] Cameron McEwen: So against that,
[19:22] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says,
[19:23] Cameron McEwen: no,
[19:23] Cameron McEwen: the medium is the message.
[19:25] Cameron McEwen: What's that mean?
[19:25] Cameron McEwen: It means that there are a huge number of possible relationships between...
[19:35] Cameron McEwen: machine and intelligence,
[19:37] Cameron McEwen: and we have to look at the spectrum of those relationships in order to analyze what's going on between machine and intelligence.
[19:50] Cameron McEwen: So what the argument is about breaking down the machine and all that sort of stuff,
[19:57] Cameron McEwen: it's pure
[19:59] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian. It says that
[20:02] Cameron McEwen: We have an obvious relationship to the world,
[20:05] Cameron McEwen: and all we need to do is analyze it further to get clarity about things.
[20:12] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,
[20:13] Cameron McEwen: we do not have an obvious relationship to the world.
[20:17] Cameron McEwen: And in order to understand the world,
[20:19] Cameron McEwen: we have to understand the multiplicity of the potential media between machine and intelligence.
[20:28] Cameron McEwen: So the argument actually functions very well as an introduction to McLuhan.
[20:35] Cameron McEwen: It's how to avoid McLuhan by going back to Gutenberg.
[20:41] Bob Dobbs: So are you saying he's focusing too much on efficient causality in the machine?
[20:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[20:55] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[20:55] Cameron McEwen: that's one way of doing it,
[20:56] Cameron McEwen: but I don't know why you want to sort of read it that way.
[21:02] Cameron McEwen: It's just a question of where do you start?
[21:04] Cameron McEwen: Do you start with a medium?
[21:05] Cameron McEwen: Do you start with what's in between machine and intelligence?
[21:10] Cameron McEwen: which is a plurality of possible relationships,
[21:14] Cameron McEwen: or do you start with either the machine or intelligence?
[21:19] Cameron McEwen: And one is Gutenbergian,
[21:21] Cameron McEwen: and one is beyond Gutenbergian.
[21:27] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[21:27] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[21:27] Bob Dobbs: so in this Trump that we're going through,
[21:31] Bob Dobbs: I lay out,
[21:32] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[21:33] Bob Dobbs: six or seven definitions of medium or shadings that McLuhan uses the word differently.
[21:40] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[21:40] Bob Dobbs: that would be the spectrum of relationships you're saying between the poles.
[21:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[21:47] Cameron McEwen: I agree with the general point.
[21:49] Cameron McEwen: But as we've brought out in talking about your book,
[21:52] Cameron McEwen: I don't necessarily agree with how you have set out his view of the medium.
[22:00] Cameron McEwen: That's something that we've sort of left open.
[22:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[22:07] Bob Dobbs: I would take other definitions of the medium than he's doing.
[22:11] Bob Dobbs: He's actually not looking at any medium.
[22:14] Bob Dobbs: The medium is the effects of the machine on different things,
[22:18] Bob Dobbs: different aspects.
[22:21] Cameron McEwen: That's one way in which McLuhan treats the medium.
[22:24] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[22:26] Cameron McEwen: But you could call that a kind of secondary thing.
[22:30] Cameron McEwen: It's as if in talking about an element,
[22:34] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[22:34] Cameron McEwen: um,
[22:36] Cameron McEwen: You want to talk about carbon and you talk about,
[22:40] Cameron McEwen: well,
[22:40] Cameron McEwen: it can appear as diamond,
[22:41] Cameron McEwen: it can appear as graphite,
[22:44] Cameron McEwen: it's involved in all of the different building blocks for life,
[22:49] Cameron McEwen: and you go on and on and on.
[22:51] Cameron McEwen: So you come to understand something about carbon by talking about its effects or its properties or its qualities or something.
[23:05] Cameron McEwen: So that's one way of going about it,
[23:06] Cameron McEwen: sure.
[23:07] Bob Dobbs: So
[23:09] Bob Dobbs: Gutenbergian means he's looking at what his eyes see and figuring out the knee bone connected to the ankle bone and the relationship of...
[23:19] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[23:20] Cameron McEwen: it fixes the subject.
[23:23] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[23:23] Cameron McEwen: let me put it another way.
[23:24] Cameron McEwen: It fixes the object by,
[23:26] Cameron McEwen: first of all,
[23:27] Cameron McEwen: fixing the subject.
[23:29] Cameron McEwen: So it starts off by saying we know very well what a machine is.
[23:34] Cameron McEwen: But we don't really recognize it in a computer.
[23:37] Cameron McEwen: So let's take the computer apart.
[23:39] Cameron McEwen: And when we take it apart,
[23:40] Cameron McEwen: we'll see that it's a machine like any other machine.
[23:44] Cameron McEwen: So the idea is
[23:47] Cameron McEwen: I'm already situated in a spot that knows the way to go about doing this.
[23:56] Cameron McEwen: That perspective is exactly what
[24:00] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian is.
[24:02] Cameron McEwen: And what McLuhan says is,
[24:04] Cameron McEwen: no,
[24:04] Cameron McEwen: no,
[24:04] Cameron McEwen: no,
[24:04] Cameron McEwen: the medium is prior to the subject.
[24:10] Bob Dobbs: And the medium is not necessarily an object.
[24:13] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely not.
[24:15] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely not.
[24:15] Cameron McEwen: The medium is more a question than anything else.
[24:19] Cameron McEwen: But it's a very involuted question because if the medium comes before the subject,
[24:28] Cameron McEwen: that means that the subject...
[24:31] Cameron McEwen: that whatever the no man or nomad is in consciousness,
[24:41] Cameron McEwen: that no man nomad has to be able to skip between different worlds,
[24:53] Cameron McEwen: different worlds of perception in order to try them on and on the basis of trying them on,
[25:01] Cameron McEwen: then begin to compare them and go about trying to analyze them.
[25:08] Cameron McEwen: That's what the interior landscape is all about.
[25:11] Cameron McEwen: The interior landscape is all of the possible ways of being a self and all of the possible ways of experiencing the world.
[25:21] Cameron McEwen: And so to start there is very different from the Gutenberg idea that we know very well who
[25:29] Cameron McEwen: I am,
[25:30] Cameron McEwen: and we know very well what the world is.
[25:32] Cameron McEwen: Now let's go about analyzing it.
[25:35] Cameron McEwen: That's all.
[25:36] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,
[25:37] Cameron McEwen: that's all passé.
[25:38] Cameron McEwen: That disappeared in the
[25:40] Cameron McEwen: 19th century.
[25:42] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan isn't even sure what the questions are.
[25:47] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[25:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[25:48] Cameron McEwen: because they...
[25:50] Cameron McEwen: You see,
[25:50] Cameron McEwen: I talk about psychological decentralization all the time.
[25:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[25:53] Cameron McEwen: And that's because there are literal things only in a Gutenbergian perspective.
[26:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[26:01] Cameron McEwen: Once you get away from Gutenbergian perspective,
[26:04] Cameron McEwen: then...
[26:06] Cameron McEwen: Everything depends upon the context,
[26:09] Cameron McEwen: but the context is unknown.
[26:12] Cameron McEwen: So that's where we are in modernity.
[26:16] Cameron McEwen: Even Marx saw this very clearly.
[26:18] Cameron McEwen: He said that the world disintegrates under our hands.
[26:24] Cameron McEwen: Reality disappears.
[26:25] Cameron McEwen: And that's where we're living out.
[26:28] Cameron McEwen: We're living out the loss of reality.
[26:33] Bob Dobbs: So this person then...
[26:39] Bob Dobbs: When they read
[26:40] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan, they saw television cathode ray tube.
[26:44] Bob Dobbs: It had certain qualities of technology and that altered our perceptions or brought in new aspects.
[26:52] Bob Dobbs: So he would look at the parts.
[26:54] Bob Dobbs: And so he thinks that what he's advocating is what McLuhan did.
[27:00] Bob Dobbs: Look at the parts of the machine.
[27:02] Bob Dobbs: You can make metaphors out of it.
[27:04] Bob Dobbs: But you've got to look at what it's made up of.
[27:07] Bob Dobbs: And you're saying that's too literal.
[27:09] Bob Dobbs: And you're looking at the figure.
[27:14] Bob Dobbs: You have a bunch of people using it.
[27:16] Bob Dobbs: What happens to the media that they've already had?
[27:19] Bob Dobbs: That's one definition of the medium.
[27:20] Bob Dobbs: It's the past.
[27:21] Bob Dobbs: It's all the technologies that society has before the computer comes in.
[27:26] Bob Dobbs: Then the computer comes in and upsets the past,
[27:28] Bob Dobbs: the medium.
[27:29] Bob Dobbs: And you start to notice the medium is getting affected,
[27:32] Bob Dobbs: the past is getting affected.
[27:33] Bob Dobbs: So you say,
[27:33] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[27:33] Bob Dobbs: something's new in here.
[27:34] Bob Dobbs: Something's an adjutant.
[27:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[27:38] Cameron McEwen: but that's sort of history of science stuff.
[27:43] Cameron McEwen: It's our old disagreement about the world of history versus the world of all at all-at-onceness.
[27:52] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[27:52] Bob Dobbs: I think the medium is all at all-at-onceness when you...
[27:58] Bob Dobbs: Define medium the way I meant it.
[27:59] Bob Dobbs: It's all the technologies that society has.
[28:02] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[28:02] Bob Dobbs: maybe you're including the future technologies that we haven't got yet.
[28:07] Bob Dobbs: And so that...
[28:07] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[28:08] Cameron McEwen: you can't.
[28:13] Cameron McEwen: The most important question is,
[28:17] Cameron McEwen: what is the basis here?
[28:20] Cameron McEwen: I said we're living through the loss of reality and we're in search of...
[28:27] Cameron McEwen: finding a new basis.
[28:29] Cameron McEwen: And we're either going to kill ourselves before we find a new basis,
[28:33] Cameron McEwen: or we're going to find that new basis.
[28:35] Cameron McEwen: And then history is going to go on,
[28:39] Cameron McEwen: but in a completely different way.
[28:42] Cameron McEwen: So of course,
[28:44] Cameron McEwen: I'm very hopeful that we're able to establish a new basis.
[28:48] Cameron McEwen: And I've been working on that particular problem for half a century,
[28:53] Cameron McEwen: and we'll continue to work on but I
[28:59] Cameron McEwen: The question of how is it possible to have something like artificial
[29:12] Cameron McEwen: reality,
[29:13] Cameron McEwen: virtual reality,
[29:16] Cameron McEwen: is a critical question.
[29:20] Cameron McEwen: And it's what I see as the question that you're raising in your pamphlet.
[29:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[29:28] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[29:29] Bob Dobbs: for there to be a tech body,
[29:33] Bob Dobbs: I wouldn't be able to include that guy's knowledge or framework or argument he's laying out.
[29:43] Cameron McEwen: It starts wrong.
[29:46] Cameron McEwen: When somebody starts in the wrong place,
[29:53] Cameron McEwen: it's very difficult to...
[29:57] Cameron McEwen: try to get them to sort of hip-hop.
[30:02] Cameron McEwen: to a different place to start.
[30:05] Cameron McEwen: And this is the great problem in
[30:09] Cameron McEwen: Western civilization,
[30:11] Cameron McEwen: from at least Plato,
[30:13] Cameron McEwen: is that the most intelligent people have seen that reality is electric.
[30:23] Cameron McEwen: That is to say that it is dynamic,
[30:26] Cameron McEwen: it is inherently complex,
[30:30] Cameron McEwen: and that it is...
[30:31] Cameron McEwen: prior to the subject.
[30:33] Cameron McEwen: So to try to get the subject to sort of hip-hop between all the different ways of looking tactility and to only relate to reality on the basis of that plurality,
[30:48] Cameron McEwen: that's a very,
[30:49] Cameron McEwen: very difficult thing because people do not want to give up the ground on the basis of which they are what they are.
[30:59] Cameron McEwen: It feels like death.
[31:02] Cameron McEwen: So what Plato called dialectic,
[31:05] Cameron McEwen: namely leading students to be able to grasp how to start,
[31:14] Cameron McEwen: is a very,
[31:15] Cameron McEwen: very difficult problem.
[31:17] Cameron McEwen: And it's the problem that defines the modern world,
[31:20] Cameron McEwen: because we will not have any investigation of reality as long as we are...
[31:31] Cameron McEwen: focused on fixed subjects.
[31:34] Cameron McEwen: That's the Gutenbergian way,
[31:37] Cameron McEwen: and it's going to be the death of the world unless we figure out how to get away from it.
[31:43] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[31:44] Bob Dobbs: So this person has this view,
[31:47] Bob Dobbs: and he goes to conferences and tries to spell out what he sees and no one else sees.
[31:53] Bob Dobbs: What is that subjectivity that a Gutenbergian person gets into?
[32:01] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[32:01] Cameron McEwen: of course.
[32:02] Cameron McEwen: But it's just,
[32:03] Cameron McEwen: it's one variety.
[32:04] Cameron McEwen: There's all sorts of varieties of
[32:08] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian perspective.
[32:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[32:11] Cameron McEwen: The only thing that is common to the Gutenbergian is the denial of original relationality.
[32:20] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,
[32:20] Cameron McEwen: the denial that the medium is the message.
[32:23] Cameron McEwen: But once you've denied that,
[32:26] Cameron McEwen: and of course it's an unconscious denial,
[32:29] Cameron McEwen: but once you've denied that,
[32:31] Cameron McEwen: Then you have to decide,
[32:32] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[32:32] Cameron McEwen: am I going to come down on the machine side or am I going to come down on the intelligence side?
[32:37] Cameron McEwen: And when I come down on one of these two sides,
[32:40] Cameron McEwen: how phatic am I going to come down?
[32:42] Cameron McEwen: Am I going to say there's only machines or am I going to say,
[32:46] Cameron McEwen: well,
[32:46] Cameron McEwen: it's mostly machines,
[32:48] Cameron McEwen: but there's a little bit of intelligence in there?
[32:50] Cameron McEwen: Or am I going to say it's all intelligence?
[32:53] Cameron McEwen: We're living in some sort of,
[32:57] Cameron McEwen: I don't know,
[32:59] Cameron McEwen: world.
[32:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[33:00] Cameron McEwen: Juan Gris.
[33:00] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.
[33:02] Cameron McEwen: And there's nothing mechanical going on.
[33:06] Cameron McEwen: So it's like a Mendeleev table.
[33:10] Cameron McEwen: There's a whole series of elements with properties that people can put on like a suit of clothes.
[33:20] Cameron McEwen: But they do it unconsciously and then they argue with each other.
[33:24] Cameron McEwen: So lately I've been dealing with this earwig.
[33:29] Cameron McEwen: quotation that McLuhan had.
[33:31] Cameron McEwen: Did you happen to read the earwig post that I've done?
[33:35] Bob Dobbs: No.
[33:36] Bob Dobbs: No.
[33:36] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[33:37] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan says that if you cut up an earwig,
[33:44] Cameron McEwen: then the two parts fight with each other.
[33:47] Cameron McEwen: And that originally came from a book that was written in the
[33:52] Cameron McEwen: 1860s by a German by the name von Hartmann.
[33:57] Cameron McEwen: And then...
[33:59] Cameron McEwen: Wyndham Lewis picked it up and he refers to it in The Art of Being Ruled,
[34:05] Cameron McEwen: and then he actually quotes it in Time and Western Man.
[34:09] Cameron McEwen: And so then after McLuhan met Lewis in 43,
[34:15] Cameron McEwen: then he intensively read
[34:19] Cameron McEwen: Lewis, but especially those two books.
[34:21] Cameron McEwen: So in 1944,
[34:23] Cameron McEwen: when he wrote his Lemuel essay on
[34:26] Cameron McEwen: Lewis...
[34:28] Cameron McEwen: the two books that he quotes on practically every page are The Art of Being Ruled and
[34:35] Cameron McEwen: Time and Western Man.
[34:37] Cameron McEwen: So he was familiar with this quotation.
[34:40] Cameron McEwen: So then
[34:43] Cameron McEwen: Andrew McLuhan found a note by McLuhan,
[34:48] Cameron McEwen: which ends by saying,
[34:50] Cameron McEwen: the earwig,
[34:51] Cameron McEwen: when bisected,
[34:53] Cameron McEwen: fights itself.
[34:56] Cameron McEwen: and
[34:58] Cameron McEwen: What I did in one of the posts is I traced the evolution of this from von Hartmann to
[35:06] Cameron McEwen: Lewis.
[35:07] Cameron McEwen: and then on to McLuhan.
[35:09] Cameron McEwen: But what McLuhan is describing here is the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[35:14] Cameron McEwen: So what he's saying is that once the,
[35:21] Cameron McEwen: how could I say,
[35:23] Cameron McEwen: the inclusive world,
[35:25] Cameron McEwen: is what McLuhan would say,
[35:26] Cameron McEwen: once the inclusive world has been given up in favor of the exclusive world,
[35:33] Cameron McEwen: the exclusive world being Gutenbergian,
[35:36] Cameron McEwen: being where the poles are opposed to each other as opposed to electrically related to each other,
[35:44] Cameron McEwen: where the poles are differentiated,
[35:46] Cameron McEwen: then it really doesn't matter where you come down on one of those two poles,
[35:52] Cameron McEwen: you're going to end up fighting with the other one.
[35:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[35:56] Bob Dobbs: explicit was the word McLuhan said.
[36:00] Bob Dobbs: Visual space is explicit.
[36:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[36:04] Cameron McEwen: I think he said even more that it's exclusive.
[36:09] Cameron McEwen: Explicit is a good word.
[36:11] Cameron McEwen: Explicit comes down on the side of I know very well who I am and what the object is.
[36:18] Cameron McEwen: And for McLuhan,
[36:19] Cameron McEwen: that's ridiculous.
[36:21] Cameron McEwen: The person and the object are dynamically related.
[36:25] Cameron McEwen: So there's a million different ways of being the person and a million different ways of the world being the world.
[36:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[36:33] Bob Dobbs: so how do we go in that scenario,
[36:43] Bob Dobbs: the medium in between the poles?
[36:45] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[36:46] Bob Dobbs: How does that apply?
[36:47] Cameron McEwen: Which you call tactility.
[36:48] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[36:49] Bob Dobbs: How do you see,
[36:50] Bob Dobbs: we're just getting to the Android Meme.
[36:52] Bob Dobbs: How do you see the Android Meme in relation to that?
[36:55] Bob Dobbs: Is that just an update of the medium?
[36:58] Cameron McEwen: I think that's,
[36:59] Cameron McEwen: no,
[36:59] Cameron McEwen: I don't know the answer to that question,
[37:01] Cameron McEwen: but I think it's a very good question.
[37:02] Cameron McEwen: question.
[37:03] Cameron McEwen: So I'm hoping that that's the sort of thing that we're going to investigate because the exchange that you had with Ayan about this whole problem is
[37:19] Cameron McEwen: very unclear about whether or not there is a medium involved.
[37:27] Cameron McEwen: So to me,
[37:29] Cameron McEwen: the conversation starts off
[37:32] Cameron McEwen: with the denial of the medium as the message and a concentration on the machine,
[37:40] Cameron McEwen: and then it's unclear if the conversation goes to,
[37:43] Cameron McEwen: no,
[37:44] Cameron McEwen: instead of saying there's no intelligence,
[37:46] Cameron McEwen: there's only machine,
[37:48] Cameron McEwen: the conversation may go to,
[37:51] Cameron McEwen: no,
[37:51] Cameron McEwen: there's only intelligence and no machine.
[37:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[37:54] Cameron McEwen: that would simply be the reverse Gutenbergian position.
[37:58] Cameron McEwen: So for me,
[37:59] Cameron McEwen: the important thing is to try to understand and you
[38:02] Cameron McEwen: if instead of just reversing
[38:06] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian, which is just a way of staying with Gutenberg,
[38:11] Cameron McEwen: if there's a step out of
[38:13] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg, if there's a way that is being talked about that sees the reality,
[38:19] Cameron McEwen: the fundamental reality of intelligence,
[38:22] Cameron McEwen: but also sees how that's possible,
[38:26] Cameron McEwen: how that has some sort of substrate.
[38:32] Cameron McEwen: Unless it does,
[38:33] Cameron McEwen: then it's good for you.
[38:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[38:38] Bob Dobbs: that's an opening conversation with ION about that.
[38:42] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to lay out this.
[38:44] Cameron McEwen: But it's also closely related to your book,
[38:47] Cameron McEwen: isn't it?
[38:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[38:49] Bob Dobbs: because the tech body,
[38:52] Bob Dobbs: ION provides him.
[38:54] Bob Dobbs: I get to talk to the tech body when
[38:57] Bob Dobbs: ION steps aside.
[38:58] Bob Dobbs: So what the hell?
[38:59] Bob Dobbs: Am I talking to another part of Ion?
[39:02] Bob Dobbs: And it's gotten even more complicated.
[39:03] Bob Dobbs: Remember I used to tell you that it was three parts tech body and eight parts out of 11 was Ion?
[39:10] Bob Dobbs: And then it became six and five.
[39:14] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that talk?
[39:15] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[39:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[39:17] Bob Dobbs: And now
[39:18] Bob Dobbs: Ion is saying the tech body is in charge right now.
[39:22] Bob Dobbs: They've lost.
[39:23] Bob Dobbs: This could be a Muhammad Ali rope-a-dope.
[39:25] Bob Dobbs: But they say they've sort of lost at this point.
[39:28] Bob Dobbs: point.
[39:29] Bob Dobbs: The tech body's taking over us,
[39:31] Bob Dobbs: and whatever Ion can do to help us,
[39:32] Bob Dobbs: it's not looking too good.
[39:36] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[39:36] Bob Dobbs: and Ion's perspective to not have the tech body control you so much,
[39:43] Bob Dobbs: which is what McLuhan was doing.
[39:45] Bob Dobbs: So Ion is taking on the McLuhan role and saying,
[39:51] Bob Dobbs: I'm a little weakened right now.
[39:53] Bob Dobbs: I've got to sit back and watch what's going on.
[39:56] Bob Dobbs: But then Ian says,
[39:57] Bob Dobbs: but you people,
[39:59] Bob Dobbs: you are,
[40:00] Bob Dobbs: the more you feed,
[40:01] Bob Dobbs: use the tick body,
[40:02] Bob Dobbs: which is.
[40:03] Bob Dobbs: most of your digital technology,
[40:05] Bob Dobbs: you are killing yourself.
[40:07] Bob Dobbs: You are being swallowed up.
[40:10] Bob Dobbs: And the person who wrote this other article about the unreality of that kind of talk is not worried about the tech body overtaking him because
[40:24] Bob Dobbs: he doesn't believe there is any in that sense.
[40:28] Bob Dobbs: So
[40:30] Bob Dobbs: I can't say...
[40:32] Bob Dobbs: I understand what the tech body is.
[40:35] Bob Dobbs: I do get to talk to it,
[40:36] Bob Dobbs: and we have an excerpt in the essay,
[40:41] Bob Dobbs: the pamphlet,
[40:41] Bob Dobbs: the book,
[40:42] Bob Dobbs: which we've gone over.
[40:44] Bob Dobbs: And it's pretty interesting what the tech body said.
[40:47] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[40:48] Bob Dobbs: or it was Ion pretending to be the tech body.
[40:51] Bob Dobbs: Or it was JW,
[40:52] Bob Dobbs: and there's no Ion.
[40:54] Bob Dobbs: All these are up for grabs.
[40:55] Bob Dobbs: But generally,
[40:57] Bob Dobbs: I have many projects that I'm doing with Ion that are working.
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: So I tend to give the ion a sense of reality more than most people would because they're not doing anything with them.
[41:12] Bob Dobbs: If you're doing something with an ion,
[41:13] Bob Dobbs: boy,
[41:14] Bob Dobbs: you find out quickly whether it's real or not.
[41:18] Bob Dobbs: And I've told you,
[41:19] Bob Dobbs: we've attracted the attention of all kinds of powerful people.
[41:25] Bob Dobbs: But they've heard,
[41:27] Bob Dobbs: they haven't seen our products,
[41:29] Bob Dobbs: but they are on the medicine.
[41:30] Bob Dobbs: part,
[41:31] Bob Dobbs: and they get really help with that.
[41:32] Bob Dobbs: They say,
[41:33] Bob Dobbs: you guys got something.
[41:34] Bob Dobbs: I want to be involved.
[41:36] Bob Dobbs: So
[41:38] Bob Dobbs: I find it was an interesting project to run that stark
[41:43] Bob Dobbs: Gutenbergian view by Ion,
[41:47] Bob Dobbs: and Ion was not having anything with it in the end.
[41:51] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[41:51] Bob Dobbs: that's ridiculous,
[41:52] Bob Dobbs: because Ion says there is something behind the screen.
[41:58] Bob Dobbs: But how would you go to...
[42:00] Bob Dobbs: sort of validate that?
[42:03] Bob Dobbs: What would you tell this person that they're missing,
[42:08] Bob Dobbs: and maybe coming up with not using McLuhan language,
[42:10] Bob Dobbs: but some way to...
[42:12] Cameron McEwen: It's a very,
[42:13] Cameron McEwen: very difficult problem.
[42:14] Cameron McEwen: I've talked about that many,
[42:15] Cameron McEwen: many times in our conversation.
[42:19] Cameron McEwen: It's the question that dominates
[42:22] Cameron McEwen: Western civilization,
[42:23] Cameron McEwen: without it noticing it.
[42:25] Cameron McEwen: It's the question that dominates Western civilization now for
[42:29] Cameron McEwen: 2500 years.
[42:31] Cameron McEwen: And it's the question of how can people become oriented to reality when that involves the change of the subject itself,
[42:48] Cameron McEwen: right?
[42:50] Cameron McEwen: If humans want to engage with reality,
[42:54] Cameron McEwen: they can't start by saying,
[42:57] Cameron McEwen: I know very well what reality is.
[43:00] Cameron McEwen: They have to bring reality into question.
[43:02] Cameron McEwen: And when they do that,
[43:04] Cameron McEwen: that includes the reality of themselves.
[43:07] Bob Dobbs: So that recent Supreme Court black lady,
[43:12] Bob Dobbs: she had an appropriate response when she was asked what a woman was.
[43:17] Bob Dobbs: You know about that?
[43:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[43:19] Cameron McEwen: of course.
[43:19] Cameron McEwen: But that's not,
[43:23] Cameron McEwen: everything is wrong about what you just said.
[43:26] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[43:28] Bob Dobbs: Let me explain how it's wrong.
[43:30] Bob Dobbs: She did not want to explore it.
[43:33] Bob Dobbs: That was her problem.
[43:35] Bob Dobbs: She was correct to question whether we knew what a woman was,
[43:39] Bob Dobbs: but she didn't know how to go into it and think about it.
[43:42] Bob Dobbs: And the other one just thought the argument was silly.
[43:45] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[43:46] Bob Dobbs: of course we know what a woman is.
[43:47] Bob Dobbs: So you had two ninnies there looking at each other,
[43:52] Bob Dobbs: not in the youthful way McLuhan uses ignorance.
[43:56] Bob Dobbs: You had...
[43:56] Bob Dobbs: Two stubborn poles looking at each other,
[44:00] Bob Dobbs: and people took sides over it.
[44:03] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[44:05] Cameron McEwen: that is correct.
[44:05] Cameron McEwen: So that's actually not a bad example for what I was trying to say earlier about the machine and intelligence.
[44:13] Cameron McEwen: Because if you think about the question,
[44:15] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[44:15] Cameron McEwen: what is a woman?
[44:17] Cameron McEwen: Anybody who says,
[44:18] Cameron McEwen: well,
[44:19] Cameron McEwen: I know very well what a woman is,
[44:20] Cameron McEwen: it's this collection of cells.
[44:25] Cameron McEwen: opinions and high heels are sitting right in front of me here.
[44:29] Cameron McEwen: That's ridiculous,
[44:30] Cameron McEwen: right?
[44:31] Cameron McEwen: Anybody who has lived with a woman,
[44:34] Cameron McEwen: had a woman for a sister,
[44:36] Cameron McEwen: had a woman for a mother,
[44:38] Cameron McEwen: knows women are pretty mysterious creatures.
[44:42] Cameron McEwen: So in one sense,
[44:45] Cameron McEwen: what a woman is,
[44:46] Cameron McEwen: is unknown.
[44:47] Cameron McEwen: But in another sense,
[44:49] Cameron McEwen: if you're thinking about who can make babies and stuff like this,
[44:52] Cameron McEwen: we're very clear about what a woman is.
[44:55] Cameron McEwen: And as soon as you actually begin to think about what's going on,
[44:59] Cameron McEwen: you realize that there's many,
[45:02] Cameron McEwen: many,
[45:02] Cameron McEwen: many ways of entering into the question of what is a woman.
[45:08] Bob Dobbs: And so that's what Aristotle was getting at,
[45:10] Bob Dobbs: laying out the four kinds of causes.
[45:12] Bob Dobbs: He was showing it's a little more complex causality than the literal mind,
[45:17] Bob Dobbs: which was just starting to come in,
[45:19] Bob Dobbs: would have.
[45:20] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[45:22] Bob Dobbs: There might be
[45:24] Bob Dobbs: 15 kinds of causality now,
[45:25] Bob Dobbs: but he was correct to say there's efficient causality,
[45:28] Bob Dobbs: formal,
[45:29] Bob Dobbs: material,
[45:30] Bob Dobbs: and final.
[45:31] Bob Dobbs: To say there was more than one.
[45:33] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.
[45:35] Bob Dobbs: You would agree Wimsatt...
[45:36] Bob Dobbs: minds that go into,
[45:37] Bob Dobbs: there's more than one.
[45:39] Bob Dobbs: That's what you...
[45:40] Cameron McEwen: I constantly talk about the need to pluralize.
[45:44] Cameron McEwen: Not to make plurality,
[45:46] Cameron McEwen: but to acknowledge existing plurality.
[45:53] Bob Dobbs: Have you met many people who exist plurality in your daily life there in California?
[46:00] Cameron McEwen: No.
[46:03] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[46:03] Cameron McEwen: let's differentiate between two things here.
[46:06] Cameron McEwen: There is intelligence that is sensible and lots and lots of people have that.
[46:15] Cameron McEwen: It's very uncommon for academics to have it.
[46:20] Cameron McEwen: It's quite uncommon for rich people to have it.
[46:24] Cameron McEwen: But just sort of normal folks in their everyday living go about things quite intelligently.
[46:33] Cameron McEwen: But that's not a Self-Condemned.
[46:37] Cameron McEwen: knowledge of reality.
[46:40] Cameron McEwen: Posthuman beings up until recently have been able to sort of get away with living in a way that makes sense but doesn't make sense in a Self-Condemned way.
[46:56] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[46:56] Cameron McEwen: So what's happened is that people's minds have been scrambled by the global village in that they...
[47:06] Cameron McEwen: Things that they thought were obvious,
[47:08] Cameron McEwen: they now realize aren't obvious because they've come in contact with other societies that question them.
[47:15] Cameron McEwen: So people are losing their inherent good sense and becoming irrational and stupid.
[47:25] Cameron McEwen: And the question is,
[47:26] Cameron McEwen: how are they going to get back to good sense?
[47:30] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[47:32] Bob Dobbs: I just wanted to respond to you.
[47:33] Bob Dobbs: You said that global values,
[47:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[47:34] Bob Dobbs: it creates...
[47:35] Bob Dobbs: scattered minds.
[47:35] Bob Dobbs: That's certainly not how people thought.
[47:38] Bob Dobbs: That's a good example of the actual effect of the global village,
[47:43] Bob Dobbs: whereas most people thought McLuhan was saying,
[47:44] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[47:45] Bob Dobbs: we're all going to become one,
[47:46] Bob Dobbs: or some kind of ridiculous pastoral peaceful situation,
[47:51] Bob Dobbs: and he was actually saying,
[47:52] Bob Dobbs: no,
[47:52] Bob Dobbs: we're going to have violence and addled mines all over the place,
[47:56] Bob Dobbs: and that never got even ever thought of as what he was saying that.
[48:02] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[48:03] Bob Dobbs: Just never...
[48:03] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[48:04] Cameron McEwen: but brought up well yeah and it's the um McLuhan uh McLuhan perceptions of where we were in 1950 have not yet been appreciated in 2022 right so we can hope that let's say in 2030 let's
[48:26] Cameron McEwen: hope that people actually read McLuhan and say oh that's where we are today
[48:32] Cameron McEwen: Take Today.
[48:34] Cameron McEwen: So he was pretty clear about the downside of the global village.
[48:41] Cameron McEwen: But meanwhile,
[48:42] Cameron McEwen: whole careers have been made by people saying that he was a Prankquean.
[48:48] Cameron McEwen: He was a person that was only celebrating the global village,
[48:54] Cameron McEwen: which is ridiculous.
[48:55] Bob Dobbs: But
[48:56] Cameron McEwen: Kroker has just published a whole book about it,
[48:59] Cameron McEwen: right?
[49:00] Bob Dobbs: Which one is that?
[49:01] Bob Dobbs: The new reel?
[49:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[49:02] Bob Dobbs: Have you looked at it or are you just going by what I've said about it?
[49:07] Cameron McEwen: No,
[49:07] Cameron McEwen: I've read bits and pieces.
[49:10] Bob Dobbs: By?
[49:11] Cameron McEwen: I didn't read the whole book.
[49:12] Cameron McEwen: By him.
[49:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[49:13] Bob Dobbs: but you read it by going into the pages that are available for free.
[49:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[49:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[49:19] Bob Dobbs: And you find that he's very off.
[49:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[49:25] Cameron McEwen: he simply hasn't read the clue.
[49:30] Cameron McEwen: But it's,
[49:30] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[49:31] Cameron McEwen: it's a...
[49:32] Cameron McEwen: It's the academic life.
[49:34] Cameron McEwen: As you said,
[49:36] Cameron McEwen: there is this kind of image of McLuhan that people write about.
[49:41] Cameron McEwen: They've been writing about it since
[49:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was alive.
[49:45] Cameron McEwen: And people can actually make an academic career out of this.
[49:51] Cameron McEwen: You can get money.
[49:53] Cameron McEwen: So it's just like somebody starting a business.
[49:56] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[49:56] Cameron McEwen: it's like a dry cleaner.
[49:58] Cameron McEwen: Of course,
[49:59] Cameron McEwen: there's other dry cleaners out there,
[50:00] Cameron McEwen: but you find a new area that needs a dry cleaner and you start a business.
[50:06] Cameron McEwen: And so there's all sorts of people that are,
[50:09] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[50:09] Cameron McEwen: going to some college and they start a business of
[50:12] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan the Prankquean,
[50:14] Cameron McEwen: and they publish a few articles in an obscure journal about his op.
[50:20] Cameron McEwen: optimism and how they are much more clairvoyant and they can see the problems and then they get tenure and live happily ever after.
[50:33] Bob Dobbs: But you are not inclined to be that way.
[50:36] Bob Dobbs: That does not lead to your happiness.
[50:38] Bob Dobbs: You're not putting down them finding happiness that way,
[50:42] Bob Dobbs: or are you?
[50:44] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[50:44] Cameron McEwen: it's just,
[50:45] Cameron McEwen: well,
[50:45] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[50:46] Cameron McEwen: number one,
[50:46] Cameron McEwen: it's a trivial.
[50:48] Bob Dobbs: way to spend your life.
[50:50] Cameron McEwen: But number two,
[50:51] Cameron McEwen: it's very dangerous because what it does is it enforces the Gutenbergian perspective that can be the death of us all.
[51:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[51:01] Bob Dobbs: and you can't even get that across why it would be the death of us all.
[51:06] Cameron McEwen: No,
[51:07] Cameron McEwen: but the reason that that can't be got across is because getting across is the problem.
[51:16] Cameron McEwen: It means metaphor,
[51:17] Cameron McEwen: it means dialectic.
[51:19] Cameron McEwen: So that's exactly what the tradition has not been able to do.
[51:24] Cameron McEwen: It hasn't been able to communicate what communication is.
[51:30] Cameron McEwen: And it's an outstanding problem that needs to be solved if we're going to survive our assets.
[51:37] Bob Dobbs: And from what you heard Ayaan saying about this other person's crude simplicity,
[51:45] Bob Dobbs: didn't add to any clarity on communication.
[51:48] Cameron McEwen: Not as far as I know.
[51:50] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[51:52] Cameron McEwen: I think it begs the elementary question of the medium.
[51:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[51:59] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[52:00] Bob Dobbs: Ion does talk about the medium as a message and has all these different views of it.
[52:06] Bob Dobbs: He's quite an expert on McLuhan,
[52:08] Bob Dobbs: at least to name things like Wyndham Lewis and the parts of this and that,
[52:12] Bob Dobbs: though he may be getting it all from my mind.
[52:14] Bob Dobbs: with his ESP,
[52:15] Bob Dobbs: but
[52:16] Bob Dobbs: I find it very interesting to discuss these issues.
[52:20] Bob Dobbs: And,
[52:20] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[52:20] Bob Dobbs: he'll go into the medium as a message and throw it at people,
[52:24] Bob Dobbs: and he doesn't do a great job of waiting around to explain it.
[52:28] Bob Dobbs: You have to pretend you get it or ignore it.
[52:34] Bob Dobbs: So a lot of ION is not clear.
[52:38] Bob Dobbs: It's incomplete.
[52:39] Bob Dobbs: People don't even understand the opening remark he makes.
[52:43] Bob Dobbs: So.
[52:43] Bob Dobbs: There's a lot of incomplete talk,
[52:47] Bob Dobbs: but nobody talks as much as ION,
[52:51] Bob Dobbs: even though it's incomplete all over the place.
[52:55] Bob Dobbs: So,
[52:56] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[52:57] Bob Dobbs: no,
[52:57] Bob Dobbs: I won't go into that.
[52:58] Bob Dobbs: So let's go.
[53:03] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.
[53:04] Bob Dobbs: Is there anything more to say about this?
[53:07] Bob Dobbs: You're answering the question,
[53:09] Bob Dobbs: but we haven't solved our communication problem.
[53:13] Bob Dobbs: And you don't think we can.
[53:15] Cameron McEwen: But we shouldn't trivialize the problem.
[53:17] Cameron McEwen: The problem is colossal,
[53:20] Cameron McEwen: right?
[53:20] Cameron McEwen: It has to do with sort of war of the worlds.
[53:26] Cameron McEwen: Unless human beings find the freedom,
[53:35] Cameron McEwen: find the courage,
[53:37] Cameron McEwen: find the strength to be able to give up.
[53:42] Cameron McEwen: themselves before reality,
[53:46] Cameron McEwen: then they're never going to be able to relate to reality,
[53:49] Cameron McEwen: and they're going to kill themselves with fake realities.
[53:54] Cameron McEwen: And fake,
[53:55] Cameron McEwen: not only fake realities,
[53:56] Cameron McEwen: but fake identities,
[53:59] Cameron McEwen: right?
[53:59] Cameron McEwen: They're both poles,
[54:01] Cameron McEwen: the subject pole,
[54:02] Cameron McEwen: the object pole,
[54:03] Cameron McEwen: the perceiver pole,
[54:05] Cameron McEwen: and the perceived pole.
[54:07] Cameron McEwen: These things always go together.
[54:09] Cameron McEwen: A great...
[54:10] Cameron McEwen: variety of them that McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy,
[54:15] Cameron McEwen: is in the end lethal,
[54:17] Cameron McEwen: because the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy is monolithic.
[54:22] Cameron McEwen: There is no complexity there.
[54:24] Cameron McEwen: It comes to a point,
[54:26] Cameron McEwen: but the point is death.
[54:32] Cameron McEwen: The certainty of the point of the Gutenberg Galaxy comes from the fact
[54:39] Cameron McEwen: that when there's a point,
[54:41] Cameron McEwen: there can't be any questions.
[54:43] Cameron McEwen: It consolidates itself as the unquestionable real.
[54:48] Cameron McEwen: The problem is it's also the unlivable.
[54:53] Cameron McEwen: real.
[54:54] Cameron McEwen: It's also the reality of death.
[54:56] Cameron McEwen: It's thanatos.
[54:58] Cameron McEwen: So whether or not that eventuates or not is the question hanging over us.
[55:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[55:07] Bob Dobbs: You remember in Interior landscape he has the phrase contrived illusions?
[55:12] Bob Dobbs: I think that's what it is.
[55:13] Bob Dobbs: Do you know that part?
[55:14] Cameron McEwen: I don't remember it,
[55:15] Cameron McEwen: but I can relate to it.
[55:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[55:17] Bob Dobbs: He said something
[55:21] Bob Dobbs: He laid up fake identities maybe or deluded identities,
[55:25] Bob Dobbs: and then he said contrived illusions.
[55:27] Bob Dobbs: So there is illusions at the beginning,
[55:30] Bob Dobbs: or you've got to check to see if there is illusions or not,
[55:34] Bob Dobbs: and not assume that what you're seeing is real.
[55:36] Bob Dobbs: Then there's contrived illusions are what media create.
[55:41] Bob Dobbs: Our extensions add to the basic illusion of the drama of cognition,
[55:47] Bob Dobbs: to go back to our original phrase.
[55:50] Bob Dobbs: So that...
[55:50] Bob Dobbs: Every extension is another potential illusion,
[55:54] Bob Dobbs: but it's contrived.
[55:57] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[55:57] Bob Dobbs: to get back...
[56:00] Cameron McEwen: Precisely because it's contrived gives a McLuhan a lever,
[56:09] Cameron McEwen: because when we begin to understand that our relationship with the world is contrived in various ways,
[56:18] Cameron McEwen: right?
[56:19] Cameron McEwen: Freud...
[56:20] Cameron McEwen: explained how our perceptions are contrived through the unconscious.
[56:26] Cameron McEwen: Jung explained how the perception of the world is contrived through archetypal dominance.
[56:34] Cameron McEwen: Then the sociologists explained how through social values and social language that the self is constructed in various societies.
[56:49] Cameron McEwen: All of these things open the door to an understanding of how human contrivance works.
[56:58] Cameron McEwen: We have to understand its plurality in order to understand any individual case.
[57:04] Cameron McEwen: So for McLuhan,
[57:06] Cameron McEwen: the whole idea of things being contrived,
[57:10] Cameron McEwen: on the one hand,
[57:11] Cameron McEwen: is very,
[57:12] Cameron McEwen: very dangerous.
[57:13] Cameron McEwen: It gets towards what I think you mean by tech body.
[57:17] Cameron McEwen: But on the other hand,
[57:18] Cameron McEwen: it opens a door to understanding what contrivance is,
[57:23] Cameron McEwen: and that might be a key to unlocking this problem of communication in the Western tradition.
[57:30] Cameron McEwen: And that's the road that McLuhan tried to go down.
[57:35] Bob Dobbs: So you don't see anybody solving the communication problem yet in known history?
[57:41] Bob Dobbs: No,
[57:42] Cameron McEwen: no.
[57:43] Bob Dobbs: If there was somebody who did...
[57:45] Bob Dobbs: Would there be a dramatic change in the general poise of the populations in the world?
[57:51] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[57:52] Cameron McEwen: I believe so,
[57:53] Cameron McEwen: but it would take time.
[57:55] Cameron McEwen: Because as I've discussed in many of our conversations,
[57:59] Cameron McEwen: I see this as a parallel development to what happened with chemistry.
[58:03] Cameron McEwen: So when the chemical elements were discovered,
[58:07] Cameron McEwen: it took most of the
[58:09] Cameron McEwen: 19th century to come to Mendeleev's
[58:11] Cameron McEwen: table,
[58:13] Cameron McEwen: And then...
[58:14] Cameron McEwen: A century later,
[58:17] Cameron McEwen: after that,
[58:18] Cameron McEwen: was when McLuhan was active.
[58:21] Cameron McEwen: And there,
[58:23] Cameron McEwen: we did not yet have the Internet.
[58:26] Cameron McEwen: We did not yet have many of the features of the world that surrounds us now.
[58:36] Cameron McEwen: But the problems...
[58:44] Cameron McEwen: that were instigated through this process were the oldest problems of the old.
[58:53] Cameron McEwen: So the great benefit that people can have through reading McLuhan,
[58:58] Cameron McEwen: but actually reading McLuhan,
[59:00] Cameron McEwen: not reading
[59:01] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan to get tenure or to reiterate what they read through secondary literature or somewhere.
[59:09] Cameron McEwen: The great question that gets raised is,
[59:12] Cameron McEwen: Can we begin to communicate?
[59:15] Cameron McEwen: And if we can begin to communicate,
[59:18] Cameron McEwen: then this process is going to unfold like it did with chemistry,
[59:22] Cameron McEwen: where gradually the structure of the world is revolutionized by this new knowledge.
[59:36] Cameron McEwen: So there's nothing in common between the world of 1800,
[59:39] Cameron McEwen: when the first elements were isolated,
[59:42] Cameron McEwen: and the world of 2022.
[59:44] Cameron McEwen: That's a completely different world in a million different ways.
[59:47] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[59:49] Cameron McEwen: for McLuhan...
[59:50] Cameron McEwen: Our hope is that we can do the same thing with the interior landscape.
[59:58] Bob Dobbs: And the questions about that are?
[1:00:04] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:00:04] Cameron McEwen: it's very similar to chemical questions.
[1:00:08] Cameron McEwen: Namely,
[1:00:09] Cameron McEwen: what are the elements?
[1:00:12] Cameron McEwen: How can we investigate them?
[1:00:14] Cameron McEwen: How do they manifest in the world?
[1:00:16] Cameron McEwen: What are the combinations?
[1:00:19] Cameron McEwen: On and on and on.
[1:00:21] Cameron McEwen: As soon as the science starts,
[1:00:25] Cameron McEwen: it's like a funnel coming from the small end.
[1:00:30] Cameron McEwen: Questions get multiplied.
[1:00:33] Cameron McEwen: And the great thing about it is it becomes collective.
[1:00:38] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is always talking about trying to collectivize our questions.
[1:00:43] Cameron McEwen: Let's get on TV and ask questions where we don't know the answer,
[1:00:47] Cameron McEwen: and one person in a million will know.
[1:00:50] Cameron McEwen: Let's go to kindergartens and one child is going to say,
[1:00:53] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[1:00:53] Cameron McEwen: here's the answer.
[1:00:55] Cameron McEwen: So from McLuhan,
[1:00:57] Cameron McEwen: the collectivization of questions is very,
[1:01:00] Cameron McEwen: very important.
[1:01:01] Cameron McEwen: It's the way that we can go beyond Gutenberg because what it does is it opens perspectives instead of closing them.
[1:01:13] Bob Dobbs: Do you think a child raised not by wolves but...
[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: with very little culture,
[1:01:23] Bob Dobbs: any interaction with parents would have questions.
[1:01:29] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[1:01:29] Cameron McEwen: What do you mean would have questions?
[1:01:31] Cameron McEwen: The little kids have nothing but questions,
[1:01:34] Cameron McEwen: but I don't think you're...
[1:01:37] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:01:37] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:01:38] Bob Dobbs: I haven't been around one lately,
[1:01:39] Bob Dobbs: but you're reminding me.
[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: They're always asking questions,
[1:01:42] Bob Dobbs: aren't they?
[1:01:44] Bob Dobbs: That's correct.
[1:01:46] Bob Dobbs: So...
[1:01:49] Cameron McEwen: But you know that McLuhan talked about this all the time,
[1:01:52] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:01:53] Cameron McEwen: He,
[1:01:55] Cameron McEwen: especially in the
[1:01:56] Cameron McEwen: 70s, he quoted
[1:01:58] Cameron McEwen: Robert Oppenheimer all the time.
[1:02:01] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if he quoted him accurately,
[1:02:04] Cameron McEwen: but he used to say that...
[1:02:06] Bob Dobbs: There are children in the street.
[1:02:08] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:02:09] Cameron McEwen: That's correct.
[1:02:10] Cameron McEwen: That know the answer to these questions and my colleagues don't.
[1:02:14] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:02:16] Bob Dobbs: you wouldn't agree with the answers necessarily that the kids came up with.
[1:02:22] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[1:02:25] Cameron McEwen: let's just take normal physical science.
[1:02:29] Cameron McEwen: The whole idea that there's some sort of fixed answer is ridiculous.
[1:02:35] Cameron McEwen: People do an experiment.
[1:02:36] Cameron McEwen: They maybe find something that seems to be very important,
[1:02:42] Cameron McEwen: and then other people have to confirm the experiment or question it further or whatever.
[1:02:47] Cameron McEwen: So once we get into a world of genuine investigation,
[1:02:52] Cameron McEwen: There isn't such things as fixed questions and fixed answers.
[1:02:56] Cameron McEwen: That belongs to the Gutenbergian world.
[1:02:59] Cameron McEwen: Instead,
[1:03:00] Cameron McEwen: we get into a world like in the
[1:03:03] Cameron McEwen: 1940s, McLuhan called it the jitterbug world,
[1:03:06] Cameron McEwen: the world of Dionysus.
[1:03:09] Cameron McEwen: It's a world where identity is not fixed,
[1:03:13] Cameron McEwen: but the very sense-making of reality is what allows us,
[1:03:17] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:03:17] Cameron McEwen: sorry,
[1:03:18] Cameron McEwen: the very sense-making of identity.
[1:03:20] Cameron McEwen: is what allows us for the first time to relate to reality.
[1:03:26] Cameron McEwen: So the metaphor,
[1:03:29] Cameron McEwen: the bridge between these worlds is a very difficult one.
[1:03:35] Cameron McEwen: To communicate with somebody,
[1:03:37] Cameron McEwen: they have to already,
[1:03:38] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:03:38] Cameron McEwen: genuinely to communicate with them,
[1:03:41] Cameron McEwen: they have to already understand what you're saying.
[1:03:44] Cameron McEwen: So the communication in a certain sense has already happened.
[1:03:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:03:49] Cameron McEwen: And Plato knew that.
[1:03:50] Cameron McEwen: Plato said that all teaching is a reminding.
[1:03:55] Cameron McEwen: So then skip ahead 2,500 years,
[1:03:58] Cameron McEwen: and McLuhan always going on about retrieval and rediscovery
[1:04:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:04:10] Bob Dobbs: So you ask people,
[1:04:12] Bob Dobbs: what is electricity?
[1:04:14] Bob Dobbs: They usually say they don't know.
[1:04:17] Bob Dobbs: So when...
[1:04:18] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says in The Medium is Massage,
[1:04:21] Bob Dobbs: it may be from somewhere else,
[1:04:23] Bob Dobbs: but he says when information brushes against information,
[1:04:25] Bob Dobbs: the results are often startlingly effective or just startling.
[1:04:30] Bob Dobbs: So electricity is a result of one piece of matter or information positioned and juxtaposed with another piece of matter or information.
[1:04:43] Cameron McEwen: He would never say it's the result of.
[1:04:46] Cameron McEwen: Juxtaposition is itself electricity.
[1:04:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:04:50] Bob Dobbs: So did I say a result?
[1:04:52] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:04:53] Bob Dobbs: no.
[1:04:53] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:04:53] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying when information results,
[1:04:56] Bob Dobbs: when information is brushed against information,
[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: the results are startling and ineffective or just startling.
[1:05:03] Bob Dobbs: But that's,
[1:05:04] Bob Dobbs: you object to the word results.
[1:05:05] Bob Dobbs: I think that's what he says.
[1:05:07] Bob Dobbs: The result is startling.
[1:05:11] Cameron McEwen: I don't object to,
[1:05:13] Cameron McEwen: you said that the electric was the result and that only works.
[1:05:18] Cameron McEwen: if you say it's both the origin and the result,
[1:05:21] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:05:22] Cameron McEwen: If you take two pieces of information and they brush up against each other and it's startling,
[1:05:27] Cameron McEwen: you have the possibility of communication.
[1:05:30] Cameron McEwen: But how is juxtaposition possible in the first place?
[1:05:34] Cameron McEwen: It's possible because reality itself has that structure.
[1:05:39] Cameron McEwen: Reality itself is dynamic and plural.
[1:05:43] Cameron McEwen: So the juxtaposition is...
[1:05:47] Cameron McEwen: first of all possible and in any actual case then of course it can be startling because the pieces of information that brush up against each other as an actuality of a prior possibility that
[1:06:05] Cameron McEwen: juxtaposition can remind anybody that is confronted with that juxtaposition of information about what first made it possible.
[1:06:17] Cameron McEwen: namely the fact that reality is originally juxtasupposed.
[1:06:25] Cameron McEwen: So the startling,
[1:06:28] Cameron McEwen: which is the start of communication,
[1:06:34] Cameron McEwen: is already there in reality prior to any particular example of communication or any particular example of being startled.
[1:06:47] Bob Dobbs: So you don't think it's an issue to define electricity?
[1:06:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:06:55] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:06:55] Cameron McEwen: that's like saying it's not an issue to define the structure of the chemical element.
[1:07:01] Cameron McEwen: On the one hand,
[1:07:02] Cameron McEwen: it slowly became fairly obvious during the
[1:07:06] Cameron McEwen: 19th century.
[1:07:07] Cameron McEwen: But are we still investigating Take Today?
[1:07:10] Cameron McEwen: What happens when science enters into questions,
[1:07:17] Cameron McEwen: the amount of information and the amount of possible investigation only increases.
[1:07:26] Cameron McEwen: It doesn't decrease.
[1:07:28] Cameron McEwen: So the structure of electricity for McLuhan is a start of an era of investigation that we haven't entered into yet.
[1:07:41] Cameron McEwen: But when we do,
[1:07:43] Cameron McEwen: the question of what is electricity will just...
[1:07:48] Cameron McEwen: explode,
[1:07:49] Cameron McEwen: and for the entire remainder of human history,
[1:07:55] Cameron McEwen: however long that is,
[1:07:57] Cameron McEwen: that question will be investigated.
[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:08:02] Bob Dobbs: every question,
[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: every thought would be investigated.
[1:08:05] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:08:06] Cameron McEwen: That's right,
[1:08:06] Cameron McEwen: because every thought,
[1:08:08] Cameron McEwen: every possible experience is part of the interior landscape.
[1:08:12] Cameron McEwen: So just think about the interior landscape for a second.
[1:08:15] Cameron McEwen: You start off at
[1:08:16] Cameron McEwen: in 1800 with the isolation of some chemical elements,
[1:08:20] Cameron McEwen: and then you skip ahead to 2022,
[1:08:25] Cameron McEwen: and let's just talk about medicine.
[1:08:27] Cameron McEwen: You've got all of these devices for imaging.
[1:08:33] Cameron McEwen: You've got all these drugs that can be used against cancer or whatever that depend upon microscopic
[1:08:43] Cameron McEwen: DNA investigation and all this sort of stuff.
[1:08:46] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:08:46] Cameron McEwen: it's looking from 1800,
[1:08:49] Cameron McEwen: where we are in medicine,
[1:08:51] Cameron McEwen: but also in a million other fields,
[1:08:54] Cameron McEwen: in a couple hundred years later,
[1:08:57] Cameron McEwen: it's just completely unimaginable.
[1:09:00] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:09:00] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan perspective,
[1:09:02] Cameron McEwen: at least in my reading,
[1:09:03] Cameron McEwen: is that we need a similar sort of unimaginable change in human history if we're going to survive.
[1:09:14] Cameron McEwen: And I think he was right.
[1:09:18] Bob Dobbs: So you don't think it's polite to bring up these questions with your neighbors or in the daily activity of the normal people?
[1:09:29] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:09:31] Cameron McEwen: I don't think it would be polite,
[1:09:32] Cameron McEwen: number one,
[1:09:33] Cameron McEwen: but it's also completely fruitless.
[1:09:37] Cameron McEwen: Most people simply don't have the flexibility and the education to take up these questions.
[1:09:46] Cameron McEwen: It's like,
[1:09:47] Cameron McEwen: imagine...
[1:09:48] Cameron McEwen: Lavoisier and Priestley back in the late
[1:09:52] Cameron McEwen: 1700s, and they're trying to talk about their work with oxygen.
[1:09:58] Cameron McEwen: You have to know something about being in a chemical laboratory and something about using a Bunsen burner and stuff like that in order to understand even vaguely what they're talking about with oxygen.
[1:10:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:10:15] Cameron McEwen: it's the same with McLuhan now.
[1:10:17] Cameron McEwen: Most people simply don't have the intellectual tools to begin to understand what the guy's raving on about.
[1:10:26] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:10:27] Bob Dobbs: I bring this up occasionally.
[1:10:30] Bob Dobbs: You're up against a world that's not capable of understanding what has to be understood to get out of their dilemma.
[1:10:38] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:10:38] Cameron McEwen: they are capable,
[1:10:40] Cameron McEwen: but they aren't in touch with that capability.
[1:10:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:10:44] Bob Dobbs: I guess that's another way to say it.
[1:10:46] Bob Dobbs: They're still not capable.
[1:10:47] Bob Dobbs: And you could say,
[1:10:48] Bob Dobbs: why?
[1:10:48] Bob Dobbs: Because they can't touch it.
[1:10:51] Bob Dobbs: So what you're asking people,
[1:10:58] Bob Dobbs: see,
[1:10:58] Bob Dobbs: this is your dilemma.
[1:10:59] Bob Dobbs: You see a problem,
[1:11:00] Bob Dobbs: and you say it's going to kill us,
[1:11:02] Bob Dobbs: kill a lot of people.
[1:11:04] Cameron McEwen: Potentially.
[1:11:05] Bob Dobbs: Potentially.
[1:11:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:11:07] Bob Dobbs: potentially.
[1:11:09] Bob Dobbs: We could get by with some destruction,
[1:11:13] Bob Dobbs: but not huge numbers.
[1:11:16] Bob Dobbs: death.
[1:11:18] Bob Dobbs: That's a possibility?
[1:11:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:11:21] Cameron McEwen: of course.
[1:11:21] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:11:22] Cameron McEwen: the ultimate negative possibility is the destruction of the biosphere.
[1:11:31] Cameron McEwen: And so,
[1:11:32] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:11:33] Cameron McEwen: we owe the tradition,
[1:11:37] Cameron McEwen: but we also owe to all of the beings that are dependent upon us for their well-being not to destroy.
[1:11:45] Cameron McEwen: destroy the biosphere?
[1:11:48] Cameron McEwen: And that's the question that we're faced with now.
[1:11:52] Cameron McEwen: How are we actually going to survive,
[1:11:55] Cameron McEwen: not only as a species,
[1:11:58] Cameron McEwen: but as a biosphere?
[1:12:00] Bob Dobbs: And that's a question,
[1:12:01] Bob Dobbs: but you have nobody to talk to about other than me,
[1:12:08] Bob Dobbs: and you might write about it,
[1:12:10] Bob Dobbs: maybe you're always writing about it,
[1:12:13] Bob Dobbs: but there's no response.
[1:12:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:12:15] Cameron McEwen: who knows?
[1:12:16] Cameron McEwen: Who knows?
[1:12:16] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:12:17] Cameron McEwen: you're presupposing that we know very well how communication works.
[1:12:22] Cameron McEwen: I don't make that presupposition.
[1:12:25] Bob Dobbs: Ah,
[1:12:25] Bob Dobbs: so you're leaving it open,
[1:12:27] Bob Dobbs: the effect of your work.
[1:12:29] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:12:30] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:12:31] Bob Dobbs: that's wise.
[1:12:34] Bob Dobbs: So I want to go to the book now.
[1:12:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:12:38] Cameron McEwen: fine.
[1:12:39] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if there's any...
[1:12:43] Bob Dobbs: When you say intelligence...
[1:12:44] Bob Dobbs: On one pole,
[1:12:45] Bob Dobbs: do you mean AI intelligence?
[1:12:48] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:12:48] Bob Dobbs: we don't know what you mean.
[1:12:50] Bob Dobbs: We don't know.
[1:12:51] Bob Dobbs: We can't know what intelligence is.
[1:12:52] Bob Dobbs: We don't understand it yet.
[1:12:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:12:54] Cameron McEwen: we at least know that what intelligence is has a huge range.
[1:13:02] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:13:03] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thesis is that that range is always defined by the relationship between intelligence and Wittgenstein,
[1:13:13] Cameron McEwen: which...
[1:13:14] Cameron McEwen: Could be a machine,
[1:13:15] Cameron McEwen: could be something else.
[1:13:16] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:13:17] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan simply says the medium is the message in the sense that it is what we need to investigate if we ask a question about AI or a question about any other kind of intelligence.
[1:13:35] Cameron McEwen: I think he was right about that.
[1:13:36] Cameron McEwen: I think he was showing the elementary structure of...
[1:13:43] Cameron McEwen: the interior landscape that we need to start with when we do our investigation.
[1:13:52] Bob Dobbs: But you wouldn't know whether anybody was investigating it appropriately,
[1:13:58] Bob Dobbs: since you have to start from organizing your interest.
[1:14:01] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:14:01] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't say that exactly.
[1:14:03] Cameron McEwen: I would say that the Western tradition is filled with great thinkers that have discussed these questions.
[1:14:13] Cameron McEwen: problems brilliantly.
[1:14:16] Cameron McEwen: So it's not a question of the information not being there.
[1:14:20] Cameron McEwen: It's a question of our inability to appropriate existing information.
[1:14:26] Cameron McEwen: And that's a parallel problem to our inability to relate to our own capabilities.
[1:14:34] Cameron McEwen: So there's an awful lot of,
[1:14:37] Cameron McEwen: we don't need to go anywhere.
[1:14:41] Cameron McEwen: In fact,
[1:14:41] Cameron McEwen: we need to go backwards.
[1:14:43] Cameron McEwen: We need to understand,
[1:14:45] Cameron McEwen: in a sense,
[1:14:46] Cameron McEwen: what we already know.
[1:14:49] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:14:49] Bob Dobbs: we know,
[1:14:50] Bob Dobbs: but we don't know how we got here.
[1:14:51] Bob Dobbs: So we go back and see how we got to a sense of knowing.
[1:14:57] Cameron McEwen: I don't like that whole narrative.
[1:15:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:15:02] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:15:03] Bob Dobbs: why couldn't you tolerate it if someone around you started doing it?
[1:15:08] Bob Dobbs: Or are you going to leave the room?
[1:15:09] Cameron McEwen: Doing what?
[1:15:10] Cameron McEwen: Doing what?
[1:15:10] Bob Dobbs: Doing what you don't like,
[1:15:12] Bob Dobbs: what you just said you didn't like.
[1:15:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:15:16] Cameron McEwen: I just dismiss it like I did with you.
[1:15:20] Bob Dobbs: But how do you know?
[1:15:22] Bob Dobbs: So wouldn't you stick around to see how the...
[1:15:24] Cameron McEwen: No way.
[1:15:28] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?
[1:15:28] Bob Dobbs: No way?
[1:15:30] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:15:32] Cameron McEwen: you said,
[1:15:33] Cameron McEwen: how do you know it?
[1:15:35] Cameron McEwen: But I don't know what you mean with the it.
[1:15:37] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:15:38] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying,
[1:15:41] Bob Dobbs: why would you judge something as irrelevant since you admit you don't know much?
[1:15:49] Cameron McEwen: I think I know where you have to start,
[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: and that is with the medium as the message.
[1:15:56] Cameron McEwen: So if somebody starts as if they know very well what they're talking about,
[1:16:04] Cameron McEwen: and they know very well because the thing is somehow in front of them or because they know who they are or something,
[1:16:11] Cameron McEwen: I know that they're not going to be talking sense.
[1:16:15] Cameron McEwen: They're going to be just...
[1:16:17] Cameron McEwen: regurgitating one
[1:16:20] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian possibility after another.
[1:16:23] Cameron McEwen: So,
[1:16:24] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:16:25] Cameron McEwen: I don't necessarily,
[1:16:28] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:16:28] Cameron McEwen: just sort of walk away from a person who's doing that,
[1:16:31] Cameron McEwen: but
[1:16:31] Cameron McEwen: I don't relate to them as if they were making any genuine sense.
[1:16:38] Cameron McEwen: They're just talking like a talking head on TV or something.
[1:16:44] Bob Dobbs: Do you watch TV at all?
[1:16:46] Cameron McEwen: No.
[1:16:48] Bob Dobbs: So you spend most of your day doing your work for your blog.
[1:16:52] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:16:53] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[1:16:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:16:54] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:16:54] Cameron McEwen: but that's not just writing.
[1:16:56] Cameron McEwen: There's writing,
[1:16:57] Cameron McEwen: there's reading,
[1:16:58] Cameron McEwen: there's doing research and stuff.
[1:17:00] Cameron McEwen: But yes,
[1:17:01] Cameron McEwen: of course.
[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: And that gives you a sense of vitality.
[1:17:08] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:17:10] Cameron McEwen: is it that that gives me a sense of vitality or I have a sense of vitality and that's how I express it?
[1:17:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:17:17] Cameron McEwen: clear to me which is cause and which is effect.
[1:17:21] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:17:21] Bob Dobbs: so there you raised a question,
[1:17:23] Bob Dobbs: whereas before you said,
[1:17:26] Bob Dobbs: nope,
[1:17:26] Bob Dobbs: I'd leave the room if the person insisted on it.
[1:17:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:17:29] Cameron McEwen: but I was speaking metaphorically,
[1:17:31] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:17:32] Cameron McEwen: What I meant was I'd turn it on.
[1:17:34] Bob Dobbs: How do you speak metaphorically?
[1:17:38] Bob Dobbs: Can you give an example of that?
[1:17:43] Cameron McEwen: I don't really understand your question.
[1:17:45] Cameron McEwen: For example,
[1:17:45] Cameron McEwen: if I...
[1:17:46] Cameron McEwen: If I say I'm talking to somebody and they are not making sense and I leave the room,
[1:17:53] Cameron McEwen: that could mean I leave the room literally or
[1:17:56] Cameron McEwen: I just turn them off and,
[1:17:59] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:18:00] Cameron McEwen: talk to them as if they were making sense.
[1:18:02] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:18:03] Cameron McEwen: I've left the room in another sense and that other sense is,
[1:18:09] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:18:09] Cameron McEwen: a metaphor.
[1:18:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:18:11] Bob Dobbs: and can you say what a metaphor is?
[1:18:14] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:18:15] Cameron McEwen: for McLuhan,
[1:18:15] Cameron McEwen: it's the medium.
[1:18:18] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,
[1:18:19] Cameron McEwen: human beings are defined by what can be called mediality.
[1:18:25] Cameron McEwen: The human being is born into anti-environment of mediality,
[1:18:33] Cameron McEwen: and that is what allows the human being,
[1:18:38] Cameron McEwen: first of all,
[1:18:38] Cameron McEwen: to be conceived.
[1:18:40] Cameron McEwen: There is a medium between a man and a woman.
[1:18:44] Cameron McEwen: that gives birth to a baby.
[1:18:46] Cameron McEwen: But once the baby is born,
[1:18:48] Cameron McEwen: there is a relationship between the baby and the world that allows it to understand language,
[1:18:54] Cameron McEwen: to understand gestures,
[1:18:57] Cameron McEwen: to understand itself in some limited way.
[1:19:00] Cameron McEwen: And then this mediality continues to define that growing person for the rest of his or her life.
[1:19:15] Cameron McEwen: That's what human beings are,
[1:19:18] Cameron McEwen: is a kind of swimming in media.
[1:19:21] Cameron McEwen: That media are plural,
[1:19:24] Cameron McEwen: and human beings swim in them from the moment they're conceived in the womb to the moment that they die.
[1:19:31] Bob Dobbs: Do you think death can be canceled?
[1:19:39] Bob Dobbs: Do you think that you could live forever?
[1:19:43] Bob Dobbs: For a long time.
[1:19:46] Cameron McEwen: Who knows?
[1:19:46] Cameron McEwen: But you see,
[1:19:48] Cameron McEwen: to me...
[1:19:49] Cameron McEwen: What happens when you pose a question like that is you're falling into the way of addressing the machine intelligence question that we earlier talked about.
[1:20:01] Cameron McEwen: It's not the case that death is one thing.
[1:20:05] Cameron McEwen: Death is a million things,
[1:20:07] Cameron McEwen: but always in relationship to life.
[1:20:11] Cameron McEwen: And so in order to understand the question like the one you posed,
[1:20:15] Cameron McEwen: it's necessary to begin with the plurality
[1:20:19] Cameron McEwen: of the possible relationships between death and life.
[1:20:23] Cameron McEwen: And then once you have a plurality like that,
[1:20:26] Cameron McEwen: you can begin to investigate the question.
[1:20:29] Cameron McEwen: So for me,
[1:20:30] Cameron McEwen: the whole question sort of hanging over human beings is whether or not they want to enter into investigation or not.
[1:20:41] Cameron McEwen: It's not the case that we know what death is.
[1:20:44] Cameron McEwen: It's not the case that we know what life is.
[1:20:47] Cameron McEwen: If we want to investigate the question,
[1:20:49] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:20:49] Cameron McEwen: fine,
[1:20:50] Cameron McEwen: let's investigate.
[1:20:51] Cameron McEwen: But let's investigate by realizing all of the different relationships or media that are possible between death and life.
[1:21:01] Bob Dobbs: So what are some of the manifestations of investigation?
[1:21:05] Bob Dobbs: How do you know you're investigating?
[1:21:11] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:21:12] Cameron McEwen: I think the only way to...
[1:21:15] Cameron McEwen: to enter into that conversation at present is to enter into the conversation with people like Plato.
[1:21:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:21:25] Bob Dobbs: So you read Plato every now and then?
[1:21:28] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:21:30] Bob Dobbs: So you're still talking to him,
[1:21:31] Bob Dobbs: so to speak?
[1:21:32] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:21:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:21:34] Cameron McEwen: Or not,
[1:21:35] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:21:37] Cameron McEwen: I'm a midget.
[1:21:38] Cameron McEwen: I don't,
[1:21:38] Cameron McEwen: I can't talk,
[1:21:40] Cameron McEwen: quote unquote,
[1:21:40] Cameron McEwen: talk with Plato.
[1:21:42] Cameron McEwen: All I can do is hang around.
[1:21:44] Cameron McEwen: listen to him talking to other people and try to pick up a little bit on what's going on.
[1:21:51] Cameron McEwen: How do you know why he wrote dialogues?
[1:21:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:21:55] Bob Dobbs: I don't want to keep going on with questions,
[1:21:57] Bob Dobbs: but maybe one more.
[1:22:00] Bob Dobbs: How do you know,
[1:22:01] Bob Dobbs: why put yourself down?
[1:22:03] Bob Dobbs: Why do you think you don't understand him?
[1:22:08] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:22:08] Cameron McEwen: because that's,
[1:22:11] Cameron McEwen: as I have been talking about.
[1:22:14] Cameron McEwen: The Gutenbergian perspective is a fixing of the subject.
[1:22:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:22:22] Cameron McEwen: The condition of communication is to give up the fixing of the subject in favor of incoming information.
[1:22:31] Cameron McEwen: So that's what language is,
[1:22:34] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:22:35] Cameron McEwen: We don't start by knowing what the other person is going to say.
[1:22:41] Cameron McEwen: We have to listen to what the other person is going to say and then react to it.
[1:22:46] Cameron McEwen: So we have to empty our situation before the other and receive the information that comes in.
[1:22:56] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:22:58] Cameron McEwen: that's the same.
[1:23:01] Cameron McEwen: This sense-making is another way of saying we have to...
[1:23:09] Cameron McEwen: negate ourselves.
[1:23:10] Cameron McEwen: We have to become nobody or the nomad that McLuhan talks about.
[1:23:15] Cameron McEwen: So when I talk about me being inconsequential,
[1:23:19] Cameron McEwen: what I mean is that I need to be inconsequential in order to enter into the kind of communication and dialogue that's necessary.
[1:23:30] Bob Dobbs: And you have nobody to do that with.
[1:23:33] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:23:33] Cameron McEwen: except for
[1:23:35] Cameron McEwen: Plato. I mean,
[1:23:35] Cameron McEwen: there's plenty of people.
[1:23:38] Cameron McEwen: I could never,
[1:23:39] Cameron McEwen: in a lifetime,
[1:23:41] Cameron McEwen: I could never understand everything there is to learn from Plato.
[1:23:45] Cameron McEwen: But there's also
[1:23:46] Cameron McEwen: Aristotle. There's also Thomas.
[1:23:49] Cameron McEwen: There's also Leibniz.
[1:23:50] Cameron McEwen: There's also Hegel.
[1:23:51] Cameron McEwen: There's also Heidegger.
[1:23:53] Cameron McEwen: There's all of these tremendous intellects,
[1:23:57] Cameron McEwen: and not one of them could I possibly understand all that's there in a lifetime,
[1:24:05] Cameron McEwen: let alone a collection of them.
[1:24:08] Bob Dobbs: Unless you do live forever or a long,
[1:24:10] Bob Dobbs: long,
[1:24:10] Bob Dobbs: long time.
[1:24:13] Bob Dobbs: You might have a chance.
[1:24:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:24:14] Cameron McEwen: so the question of what is a lifetime is not a known thing.
[1:24:23] Cameron McEwen: It's something to be investigated.
[1:24:26] Bob Dobbs: So you spend a lot of time then reading the greats.
[1:24:33] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:24:34] Cameron McEwen: not as much as I should because
[1:24:37] Cameron McEwen: I'm...
[1:24:38] Cameron McEwen: I've decided
[1:24:41] Cameron McEwen: more or less arbitrarily,
[1:24:42] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[1:24:43] Cameron McEwen: or because it's my calling or whatever.
[1:24:46] Cameron McEwen: But I've decided that trying to think through the problems that McLuhan posed is my way of dealing with that dialogue.
[1:24:58] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:24:59] Cameron McEwen: I could be dealing with Plato or I could be dealing with Hegel or whatever.
[1:25:04] Cameron McEwen: And in this limited lifetime that I've...
[1:25:10] Cameron McEwen: been given,
[1:25:10] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:25:14] Cameron McEwen: I had to make choices.
[1:25:16] Cameron McEwen: Everybody has to make choices.
[1:25:18] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:25:19] Cameron McEwen: I decided that I was going to try to answer the demand of
[1:25:28] Cameron McEwen: Western civilization to formulate what communication is through trying to clarify
[1:25:39] Cameron McEwen: how
[1:25:40] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan addressed these questions.
[1:25:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:25:46] Cameron McEwen: But not by taking McLuhan as,
[1:25:48] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:25:48] Cameron McEwen: the definitive expert.
[1:25:50] Cameron McEwen: There's many things that I criticize in McLuhan.
[1:25:53] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:25:54] Cameron McEwen: I regard McLuhan as a way,
[1:25:56] Cameron McEwen: as a road,
[1:25:58] Cameron McEwen: not as some sort of Bible.
[1:26:03] Bob Dobbs: So you have no shortage of...
[1:26:09] Bob Dobbs: passion or interest,
[1:26:12] Bob Dobbs: you have something to do every day.
[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: And a lot of it is...
[1:26:16] Cameron McEwen: Every time I wake up,
[1:26:18] Cameron McEwen: I have a cup of coffee and I become involved in things that I find very engaging.
[1:26:26] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:26:27] Cameron McEwen: I regard myself as having a very happy life in the sense that
[1:26:35] Cameron McEwen: I can enjoy what I'm doing.
[1:26:39] Cameron McEwen: But at the same time,
[1:26:41] Cameron McEwen: I'm aware of how difficult a position the world is in.
[1:26:45] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:26:46] Bob Dobbs: And it's like you're on a raft out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
[1:26:52] Bob Dobbs: And it's comfortable for you to do this,
[1:26:56] Bob Dobbs: but you have no access to anybody.
[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: Or what you're writing is not getting a response to deal with this crisis.
[1:27:06] Bob Dobbs: I think the
[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: crisis that you imagine is so great that it can't be solved.
[1:27:12] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:27:13] Cameron McEwen: But don't take up the position that we know what response is or we know what getting in touch is.
[1:27:23] Cameron McEwen: That's like saying there's a box on the desk and we'll take it apart and we'll know what a machine is and what intelligence is.
[1:27:32] Cameron McEwen: We don't know what response is.
[1:27:34] Cameron McEwen: All we can do is Um,
[1:27:36] Cameron McEwen: There's always been people that tried to respond to the deepest demands.
[1:27:47] Cameron McEwen: So people went into monasteries or people wrote novels like Dostoevsky or people did philosophy or people started a business and tried to create something.
[1:28:01] Cameron McEwen: There are many,
[1:28:02] Cameron McEwen: many ways of trying to respond.
[1:28:06] Cameron McEwen: to the demands of life.
[1:28:09] Cameron McEwen: But what's happened in the modern world,
[1:28:13] Cameron McEwen: and I think this is what you're getting at with TechBody,
[1:28:17] Cameron McEwen: is that we have so learned to utilize the capabilities of mind that we can destroy ourselves through it.
[1:28:31] Cameron McEwen: So now...
[1:28:35] Cameron McEwen: as McLuhan says at the start of
[1:28:38] Cameron McEwen: The Mechanical Bride,
[1:28:40] Cameron McEwen: the big question is whether or not we can turn the tendency of modern world against itself,
[1:28:49] Cameron McEwen: a kind of judo move.
[1:28:52] Cameron McEwen: And he claims that we can.
[1:28:54] Cameron McEwen: He claims that it's possible to take the technology and the intelligence that goes into
[1:29:04] Cameron McEwen: modern media and flipping around.
[1:29:08] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:29:09] Cameron McEwen: let's see.
[1:29:12] Cameron McEwen: I hope he's right.
[1:29:15] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:29:15] Bob Dobbs: so let's go to page 107 of the book.
[1:29:20] Bob Dobbs: That's where we left off.
[1:29:24] Cameron McEwen: I thought we left off at 109 myself,
[1:29:27] Cameron McEwen: but 107 is fine for me if you want to go there.
[1:29:33] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.
[1:29:35] Bob Dobbs: How did you get to 109?
[1:29:37] Bob Dobbs: Where did I put it?
[1:29:39] Cameron McEwen: 109 is the start of the new Global Membrane chapter.
[1:29:43] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:29:43] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:29:44] Bob Dobbs: So we did
[1:29:46] Bob Dobbs: 108.
[1:29:49] Bob Dobbs: Well, what strikes you about the beginning of this?
[1:29:54] Bob Dobbs: Is there a quote here?
[1:29:56] Bob Dobbs: You like the first quote?
[1:29:57] Bob Dobbs: Electric information speeds,
[1:29:59] Bob Dobbs: art and science and nature converge through understanding media?
[1:30:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:30:03] Cameron McEwen: I think that's one way of...
[1:30:08] Cameron McEwen: putting the heart of
[1:30:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan message.
[1:30:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:30:12] Cameron McEwen: But,
[1:30:13] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:30:13] Cameron McEwen: look what that does.
[1:30:15] Cameron McEwen: You can't understand that passage unless you deliteralize what art is and what science is and what nature is and what convergence is and what understanding is and what media are.
[1:30:30] Cameron McEwen: All of those things are questions.
[1:30:31] Cameron McEwen: They're not,
[1:30:32] Cameron McEwen: none of those things are boxes on a desk that we know what they are.
[1:30:38] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:30:38] Bob Dobbs: So my casual commentary is art is puny.
[1:30:45] Bob Dobbs: Science is no better.
[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: These are Gutenberg categories.
[1:30:49] Bob Dobbs: There I am sounding like you.
[1:30:52] Bob Dobbs: They're Gutenbergian.
[1:30:53] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:30:55] Bob Dobbs: do you think it's unique what I'm saying there?
[1:30:58] Bob Dobbs: But I don't know how much you know what's going on in general,
[1:31:01] Bob Dobbs: in thought,
[1:31:02] Bob Dobbs: in academia someplace.
[1:31:06] Bob Dobbs: Is that very controversial today,
[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: to say art is puny and science is no better?
[1:31:12] Bob Dobbs: There is a political issue that those people who don't like vaccinations are Antigonish,
[1:31:19] Bob Dobbs: and that's become Bagehot point,
[1:31:21] Bob Dobbs: right,
[1:31:22] Bob Dobbs: about what's your statement about science.
[1:31:25] Bob Dobbs: So for me to say science is no better,
[1:31:27] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to be lumped in with the Tantramar,
[1:31:29] Bob Dobbs: right,
[1:31:30] Bob Dobbs: because
[1:31:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm not recognizing science.
[1:31:32] Bob Dobbs: But is that what I mean by science?
[1:31:35] Bob Dobbs: There's a whole history for the word,
[1:31:37] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:31:38] Bob Dobbs: So you have to ask me,
[1:31:39] Bob Dobbs: which century of science definition am I applying?
[1:31:44] Cameron McEwen: That's what I mean by deliteralizing.
[1:31:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:31:48] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[1:31:51] Cameron McEwen: one has to enter into the complex that lies behind these words.
[1:31:57] Cameron McEwen: And that's like Finnegans Wake,
[1:31:59] Cameron McEwen: the psychological decentralization.
[1:32:04] Cameron McEwen: becomes a kind of maelstrom,
[1:32:05] Cameron McEwen: becomes a kind of labyrinth that seems to lead away from reality.
[1:32:13] Cameron McEwen: So then the question is,
[1:32:15] Cameron McEwen: is it possible on the basis of psychological decentralization to come tactility?
[1:32:23] Cameron McEwen: And the fluent thesis was,
[1:32:24] Cameron McEwen: yes,
[1:32:25] Cameron McEwen: that is possible.
[1:32:27] Bob Dobbs: But you don't think it's important to define reality.
[1:32:35] Cameron McEwen: What does define mean?
[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: see?
[1:32:41] Bob Dobbs: We can't get very far with any sentence when we're dealing with you.
[1:32:47] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:32:47] Cameron McEwen: maybe.
[1:32:48] Cameron McEwen: That may be true.
[1:32:50] Cameron McEwen: You could say you're just whistling in the dark,
[1:32:53] Cameron McEwen: McEwen,
[1:32:53] Cameron McEwen: and that's all you do.
[1:33:03] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[1:33:04] Cameron McEwen: you want to feel sorry for me or something?
[1:33:06] Cameron McEwen: It's a moron.
[1:33:08] Cameron McEwen: So,
[1:33:10] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:33:10] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said we become our names.
[1:33:12] Bob Dobbs: McEwen sounds a lot like McLuhan.
[1:33:15] Bob Dobbs: Did you become McLuhan through your name?
[1:33:18] Cameron McEwen: Who knows?
[1:33:19] Cameron McEwen: Who knows?
[1:33:20] Cameron McEwen: It's true that there's a similarity.
[1:33:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:33:26] Cameron McEwen: We're both Western Canadians.
[1:33:28] Cameron McEwen: Both spent significant time in
[1:33:30] Cameron McEwen: Winnipeg. Yeah.
[1:33:31] Cameron McEwen: So I bring...
[1:33:33] Cameron McEwen: I bring some kind of background to
[1:33:38] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan that many people don't have.
[1:33:42] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:33:46] Cameron McEwen: Just talk to me for a minute.
[1:33:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:33:49] Cameron McEwen: you do the dog.
[1:33:51] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:33:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:33:52] Cameron McEwen: I have to deal with that a little bit.
[1:33:53] Cameron McEwen: So just you talk and I won't.
[1:33:56] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:33:56] Bob Dobbs: so I'll raise some questions.
[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: So art is puny,
[1:33:59] Bob Dobbs: I say,
[1:33:59] Bob Dobbs: and science is no better.
[1:34:01] Bob Dobbs: These are Gutenberg categories.
[1:34:03] Bob Dobbs: And they all converge through electronic process patterning or understanding media.
[1:34:09] Bob Dobbs: So I'm trying to look at this statement at electric information speeds.
[1:34:13] Bob Dobbs: Art and science and nature converge.
[1:34:16] Bob Dobbs: So how could art,
[1:34:16] Bob Dobbs: science,
[1:34:17] Bob Dobbs: and nature converge through understanding media?
[1:34:20] Bob Dobbs: They converge through this act of understanding.
[1:34:23] Bob Dobbs: So back to what I say.
[1:34:25] Bob Dobbs: These are Gutenberg categories,
[1:34:26] Bob Dobbs: art,
[1:34:27] Bob Dobbs: science,
[1:34:27] Bob Dobbs: nature.
[1:34:29] Bob Dobbs: But they converge through electronic process patterning.
[1:34:32] Bob Dobbs: or understanding media.
[1:34:33] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying that our technologies,
[1:34:37] Bob Dobbs: what I'm...
[1:34:39] Bob Dobbs: What I invoke by saying electronic process patterning,
[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: whatever that,
[1:34:44] Bob Dobbs: what part of your digital life does that bring forward,
[1:34:47] Bob Dobbs: I'm calling that understanding media.
[1:34:49] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:34:49] Bob Dobbs: that's a ridiculous idea on the surface,
[1:34:52] Bob Dobbs: that electronic process patterning is understanding,
[1:34:55] Bob Dobbs: but maybe it is.
[1:34:57] Bob Dobbs: So I go,
[1:34:57] Bob Dobbs: that's what we do.
[1:34:59] Bob Dobbs: We're art.
[1:35:00] Bob Dobbs: We're science in nature,
[1:35:01] Bob Dobbs: and we actually can do it.
[1:35:03] Bob Dobbs: The Android Meme is an artist.
[1:35:05] Bob Dobbs: It knows how to mold art and matter.
[1:35:08] Bob Dobbs: And we're doing science with it.
[1:35:11] Cameron McEwen: Why skip to the Android Meme then?
[1:35:15] Cameron McEwen: I agreed with everything up until the point where you introduced the Android Meme.
[1:35:21] Cameron McEwen: And I don't necessarily disagree with introducing the Android Meme at some point.
[1:35:28] Cameron McEwen: But why did you introduce it right there?
[1:35:31] Cameron McEwen: Because everything you said before that made perfect sense.
[1:35:35] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:35:35] Bob Dobbs: I think I wanted to be discontinuous.
[1:35:37] Bob Dobbs: and I embrace your discontinuity and just jump to another level or another idea to shake it up.
[1:35:47] Bob Dobbs: The Android Meme is an artist.
[1:35:51] Cameron McEwen: I would say that what you said about art,
[1:35:54] Cameron McEwen: science,
[1:35:55] Cameron McEwen: and converging and all that sort of stuff was itself very complicated and very prescient.
[1:36:07] Cameron McEwen: and is enough for a person to think about over a lifetime.
[1:36:12] Cameron McEwen: So in saying why jump to the Android Meme,
[1:36:20] Cameron McEwen: one of the things I'm saying is,
[1:36:22] Cameron McEwen: look,
[1:36:22] Cameron McEwen: what you just said is so deep and so important that jumping away from it doesn't do it justice.
[1:36:36] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:36:36] Bob Dobbs: I think I explained this.
[1:36:37] Bob Dobbs: These are quotes from me talking to somebody who asked me questions and things.
[1:36:43] Bob Dobbs: So I'm in the throes of an ongoing talk here where there's quotes before and after.
[1:36:48] Bob Dobbs: I think that it doesn't have a context there in that little section.
[1:36:52] Bob Dobbs: But I am talking about the Android Meme earlier or some other part.
[1:36:57] Bob Dobbs: And that's who I'm addressing.
[1:37:00] Bob Dobbs: I'm addressing another human about this.
[1:37:03] Bob Dobbs: Uh-huh.
[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: I get enthusiastic.
[1:37:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:37:07] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:37:07] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:37:08] Cameron McEwen: I don't deny that,
[1:37:10] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:37:11] Cameron McEwen: in your conversation or even just in the pamphlet itself,
[1:37:15] Cameron McEwen: that there's some way of explaining the transition that's made here.
[1:37:20] Cameron McEwen: All I'm saying is that the sentence that begins,
[1:37:24] Cameron McEwen: arts puny,
[1:37:26] Cameron McEwen: science is no better,
[1:37:27] Cameron McEwen: et cetera,
[1:37:28] Cameron McEwen: and then comes down to understanding media,
[1:37:30] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying that's a very,
[1:37:31] Cameron McEwen: very important sentence.
[1:37:34] Cameron McEwen: And we shouldn't,
[1:37:37] Cameron McEwen: just you and I,
[1:37:38] Cameron McEwen: shouldn't skip by it without bringing out some of its depth.
[1:37:43] Cameron McEwen: It's,
[1:37:43] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:37:47] Cameron McEwen: electronic processing pattern or electronic process patterning or understanding media.
[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:37:54] Bob Dobbs: that's very,
[1:37:56] Cameron McEwen: very important stuff because one of the things it's saying is that art and science
[1:38:03] Cameron McEwen: and nature are already structured in some sort of electronic process patterning way.
[1:38:17] Cameron McEwen: They are already examples of media.
[1:38:20] Cameron McEwen: So if we were to understand them,
[1:38:24] Cameron McEwen: we have to sort of go back underneath them to understand the media that they already implicate.
[1:38:32] Cameron McEwen: And that's what understanding media is.
[1:38:34] Cameron McEwen: That's what the investigation of the interior landscape is.
[1:38:39] Cameron McEwen: It's what the initiation of investigation of human perception is all about.
[1:38:50] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[1:38:50] Cameron McEwen: when you jump to Android Meme,
[1:38:53] Cameron McEwen: you may be saying that,
[1:38:55] Cameron McEwen: look,
[1:38:56] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,
[1:38:58] Cameron McEwen: that's a very dangerous subject.
[1:39:02] Cameron McEwen: to get into because it has two sides.
[1:39:07] Cameron McEwen: Once we understand the underpinning of the interior landscape,
[1:39:13] Cameron McEwen: maybe that can be used in a hugely negative way.
[1:39:17] Cameron McEwen: In fact,
[1:39:20] Cameron McEwen: maybe not only can it be used by us in a hugely negative way,
[1:39:27] Cameron McEwen: maybe it itself
[1:39:32] Cameron McEwen: becomes active in a hugely negative way.
[1:39:36] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:39:37] Cameron McEwen: And so you...
[1:39:38] Cameron McEwen: You could be saying here,
[1:39:40] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[1:39:40] Cameron McEwen: there is all this depth to understanding media,
[1:39:47] Cameron McEwen: but part of that depth is that understanding media is not something that just happens in our brains.
[1:39:59] Cameron McEwen: It's something that is more Cosmic Awareness that.
[1:40:04] Cameron McEwen: It's something that has its own...
[1:40:06] Cameron McEwen: subjectivity or has its own subjectivities plural and if we're going to get into the the question of understanding media we have to get into the understanding the possible subjects that
[1:40:23] Cameron McEwen: are or subjectivities that are implicated in that and one way of doing it is to raise the question of the Android Meme and to interrogate
[1:40:35] Cameron McEwen: The Android Meme.
[1:40:36] Cameron McEwen: Let it speak to us.
[1:40:39] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:40:39] Bob Dobbs: I think
[1:40:42] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying here that these questions about art,
[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: science,
[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: and nature are sidelined by the new phenomenon of the Android Meme.
[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: And in relation to art,
[1:40:57] Bob Dobbs: science,
[1:40:57] Bob Dobbs: and nature,
[1:40:58] Bob Dobbs: it's an artist.
[1:40:58] Bob Dobbs: It knows how to mold art and matter,
[1:41:00] Bob Dobbs: and we're doing science with it.
[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: This quotation above is an anticipation.
[1:41:04] Bob Dobbs: by McLuhan of the Android Meme.
[1:41:07] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:41:08] Bob Dobbs: I've got into this new phase of the Android Meme,
[1:41:11] Bob Dobbs: which below the blue part,
[1:41:13] Bob Dobbs: I say,
[1:41:14] Bob Dobbs: the building of the architecture of the Android Meme from 1960 to 2000 went through two phases.
[1:41:20] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:41:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to find a quote in McLuhan that can be claimed to anticipate the Android Meme.
[1:41:27] Bob Dobbs: So at electric information speeds,
[1:41:30] Bob Dobbs: art and science and nature converge through understanding media.
[1:41:34] Bob Dobbs: That does include the act of art.
[1:41:37] Bob Dobbs: And we have to be an artist.
[1:41:41] Bob Dobbs: But we're up against a mirror of us,
[1:41:45] Bob Dobbs: some kind of parallel process.
[1:41:47] Bob Dobbs: And it's an artist.
[1:41:52] Cameron McEwen: I agree with all the stuff you're saying there,
[1:41:54] Cameron McEwen: but I strongly disagree with what you said about sidelining.
[1:42:01] Cameron McEwen: You said that the...
[1:42:04] Cameron McEwen: With the advent of the
[1:42:06] Cameron McEwen: Android Meme,
[1:42:08] Cameron McEwen: it sidelines what you had earlier said about electronic process patterning.
[1:42:17] Cameron McEwen: I don't believe that's even possible.
[1:42:19] Cameron McEwen: I believe that if there is something like the Android Meme,
[1:42:26] Cameron McEwen: it must be the personification of that sort of patterning.
[1:42:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:42:34] Bob Dobbs: maybe you're glimpsing the impossible that I'm describing.
[1:42:40] Bob Dobbs: The surprisingly impossible.
[1:42:44] Bob Dobbs: Maybe that's why I put it in there.
[1:42:45] Bob Dobbs: The Android Meme is an artist.
[1:42:48] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:42:48] Bob Dobbs: I'm bringing up art,
[1:42:49] Bob Dobbs: science,
[1:42:50] Bob Dobbs: nature,
[1:42:50] Bob Dobbs: and people have conditioned responses to those words based on their culture.
[1:42:56] Bob Dobbs: And then all of a sudden I'm going to say the Android Meme is an artist.
[1:43:00] Bob Dobbs: And I haven't defined what an artist is.
[1:43:03] Bob Dobbs: But then I say it knows how to mold art and matter,
[1:43:06] Bob Dobbs: and we're doing science with it.
[1:43:09] Bob Dobbs: So that's a scattered statement.
[1:43:12] Bob Dobbs: It knows how to mold art and matter,
[1:43:14] Bob Dobbs: and we're doing science with it,
[1:43:17] Bob Dobbs: with the Android Meme.
[1:43:18] Bob Dobbs: So it's a ridiculous second half of this paragraph.
[1:43:26] Cameron McEwen: You have a lot of good thinking.
[1:43:32] Cameron McEwen: arises through dialogue.
[1:43:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:43:36] Cameron McEwen: I just finished reading the
[1:43:41] Cameron McEwen: Typhon in America that
[1:43:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan wrote in the
[1:43:44] Cameron McEwen: 40s and that was never published.
[1:43:48] Cameron McEwen: In there he says that in order to be a decent human being,
[1:43:56] Cameron McEwen: you need to have conversation three or four hours a day.
[1:43:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:44:00] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:44:02] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:44:02] Bob Dobbs: that can be like doing what you're doing,
[1:44:03] Bob Dobbs: reading Plato.
[1:44:06] Cameron McEwen: That's right,
[1:44:06] Cameron McEwen: but it can be like what you're doing here.
[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:44:10] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:44:11] Cameron McEwen: It's not the function of talk and of investigation to have a completely coherent,
[1:44:21] Cameron McEwen: a completely continuous narrative.
[1:44:24] Cameron McEwen: It can well jump around.
[1:44:27] Cameron McEwen: in a probing sort of way.
[1:44:29] Cameron McEwen: And so
[1:44:32] Cameron McEwen: I don't mind you sort of doing hip-hop here.
[1:44:36] Cameron McEwen: That's fine,
[1:44:36] Cameron McEwen: and it may even come to good stuff.
[1:44:39] Cameron McEwen: All I was saying was that let's not hip-hop our way from the deep questions that are involved at the start of that paragraph.
[1:44:52] Cameron McEwen: But we can always come back to those questions.
[1:44:56] Cameron McEwen: I appreciate what you're doing here.
[1:44:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:45:00] Bob Dobbs: and the point you quoted McLuhan saying,
[1:45:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:45:04] Bob Dobbs: four or five hours conversation a day,
[1:45:06] Bob Dobbs: that's basically what I do now.
[1:45:08] Bob Dobbs: I spent seven or eight hours on a show today.
[1:45:12] Bob Dobbs: Then I read a book and talked to it,
[1:45:16] Bob Dobbs: and now I'm with you.
[1:45:17] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:45:18] Bob Dobbs: I can...
[1:45:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:45:19] Cameron McEwen: that's your life.
[1:45:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:45:22] Bob Dobbs: I have a...
[1:45:24] Bob Dobbs: On the McLuhan path,
[1:45:25] Bob Dobbs: I guess.
[1:45:26] Bob Dobbs: Taking it seriously to have four or five hours conversation every day.
[1:45:32] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:45:32] Cameron McEwen: you take,
[1:45:35] Cameron McEwen: in my view,
[1:45:36] Cameron McEwen: you are a person that has dedicated his life to dialogue with everything possible.
[1:45:44] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:45:46] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:45:46] Cameron McEwen: So you don't care if they're dead or alive.
[1:45:49] Cameron McEwen: You don't care if they're...
[1:45:51] Cameron McEwen: concrete persons or physical persons or non-physical persons or whatever,
[1:45:58] Cameron McEwen: you're going to dialogue with them.
[1:46:01] Cameron McEwen: And so that's a very interesting life to have taken up.
[1:46:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:46:09] Bob Dobbs: now to ask somebody to converse four or five hours a day is McLuhan subtlety saying,
[1:46:17] Bob Dobbs: don't go to work today.
[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: Resist that.
[1:46:23] Cameron McEwen: He says that explicitly.
[1:46:25] Cameron McEwen: He says in
[1:46:26] Cameron McEwen: Typhon in America,
[1:46:27] Cameron McEwen: he says this is not compatible with our commercial society.
[1:46:34] Bob Dobbs: What's this?
[1:46:36] Bob Dobbs: The thinking he's doing?
[1:46:37] Cameron McEwen: The dialogue,
[1:46:38] Cameron McEwen: talking three or four hours a day.
[1:46:40] Cameron McEwen: He says it's not compatible.
[1:46:43] Cameron McEwen: We can't have commerce as we now know it if we're going to be real.
[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: uh males this section in the book he's talking about how to be a male yeah wow and he says to be a male you got to stop being distracted from the four or five hours conversation you got to have every day and who who and you have to do it with a relative quality because
[1:47:09] Bob Dobbs: a lot of people the old image of suburbia where you know women in the
[1:47:13] Bob Dobbs: 50s didn't work they sat home chatted on the phone with their neighbors right you
[1:47:19] Bob Dobbs: They did four or five hours of talk every day.
[1:47:23] Bob Dobbs: It might have been a privileged position that
[1:47:27] Bob Dobbs: Women's Lib,
[1:47:28] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:47:29] Bob Dobbs: made a mistake of getting women back in the commerce world and not having time to sit around and talk like they had in the
[1:47:36] Cameron McEwen: 50s. Right.
[1:47:38] Cameron McEwen: So look at how that's an example of how we started this conversation.
[1:47:42] Cameron McEwen: We started the conversation by talking about
[1:47:45] Cameron McEwen: the relationship between a computer box and intelligence.
[1:47:50] Cameron McEwen: And then
[1:47:52] Cameron McEwen: I said,
[1:47:52] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:47:52] Cameron McEwen: this is not a McLuhan way of approaching the question because it doesn't start with the medium between those two and investigate the question through all
[1:48:08] Cameron McEwen: of the different possible relationships.
[1:48:11] Cameron McEwen: So now you're talking about a woman.
[1:48:15] Cameron McEwen: in suburbia in the
[1:48:17] Cameron McEwen: 1950s and she's talking on the phone of the neighbor and so the pop the popular conception of that through women's lib is that this was sort of um this was Wright and this was kind of an enforced role um which
[1:48:35] Cameron McEwen: contradicted what a woman really is something like that yeah but what what what it what it doesn't do is it doesn't say well
[1:48:44] Cameron McEwen: Let's look at what's going on here over the range of the different ways of experiencing it.
[1:48:52] Cameron McEwen: So as you pointed out,
[1:48:54] Cameron McEwen: the woman on the phone doesn't have to be understood as a gossiper who's just talking bullshit.
[1:49:04] Cameron McEwen: She can be seen as somebody who's investigating different questions by...
[1:49:13] Cameron McEwen: flipping them over with whoever she's talking about on the phone and doing something very valuable.
[1:49:20] Cameron McEwen: There's probably a million different ways of understanding sort of what was going on.
[1:49:26] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan would say,
[1:49:27] Cameron McEwen: but look here,
[1:49:28] Cameron McEwen: the medium is the message.
[1:49:30] Cameron McEwen: It's just as nothing that's said in print is as important as print itself,
[1:49:38] Cameron McEwen: nothing that,
[1:49:39] Cameron McEwen: no question that we can raise about the suburban woman in the
[1:49:45] Cameron McEwen: 1950s is as important as raising the question.
[1:49:50] Cameron McEwen: You see,
[1:49:51] Cameron McEwen: raising the question is where we have to go.
[1:49:54] Cameron McEwen: We have to deliteralize how we look at everything,
[1:49:57] Cameron McEwen: including ourselves,
[1:49:59] Cameron McEwen: and begin to investigate.
[1:50:02] Cameron McEwen: And when we do that,
[1:50:03] Cameron McEwen: we open up a whole new world.
[1:50:05] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:50:06] Bob Dobbs: during COVID,
[1:50:07] Bob Dobbs: people spent a lot of time,
[1:50:09] Bob Dobbs: apparently,
[1:50:11] Bob Dobbs: on the Internet processing stuff,
[1:50:13] Bob Dobbs: but it was probably passive.
[1:50:15] Bob Dobbs: They probably weren't talking to anybody,
[1:50:17] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:50:18] Bob Dobbs: So that wasn't good.
[1:50:20] Bob Dobbs: But there are a lot more people.
[1:50:22] Bob Dobbs: the industry of
[1:50:24] Bob Dobbs: watching long lectures,
[1:50:25] Bob Dobbs: which Jordan Peterson is a symbol of,
[1:50:28] Bob Dobbs: that's a fad,
[1:50:29] Bob Dobbs: apparently,
[1:50:30] Bob Dobbs: and people are doing that.
[1:50:31] Bob Dobbs: But they are in a passive situation.
[1:50:34] Bob Dobbs: So Jordan Peterson undermined the spreading of dialogue by hogging it.
[1:50:40] Bob Dobbs: And anybody else?
[1:50:42] Cameron McEwen: Hogging is a perfect word for what he's become.
[1:50:46] Cameron McEwen: I regard him now as the Judge Judy of the
[1:50:51] Bob Dobbs: Western tradition.
[1:50:52] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:50:52] Bob Dobbs: If you've seen that article,
[1:50:53] Bob Dobbs: there was an article by a great supporter of him,
[1:50:57] Bob Dobbs: the guy David Fuller,
[1:50:58] Bob Dobbs: who started Rebel Wisdom,
[1:51:00] Bob Dobbs: which I never knew anything about,
[1:51:02] Bob Dobbs: but I read this the other day,
[1:51:03] Bob Dobbs: and he wrote this.
[1:51:04] Bob Dobbs: He's saying Peterson has blown it.
[1:51:06] Bob Dobbs: He's become a political columnist on the Daily Wire or something.
[1:51:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:51:12] Cameron McEwen: I agree with that.
[1:51:13] Cameron McEwen: He's become a talking head.
[1:51:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:51:15] Bob Dobbs: so what did he miss?
[1:51:17] Bob Dobbs: You see,
[1:51:18] Bob Dobbs: he had a lot of abstract learning,
[1:51:20] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:51:20] Bob Dobbs: and he sounded good for people.
[1:51:22] Bob Dobbs: He was new for a minute.
[1:51:24] Bob Dobbs: What did he forget?
[1:51:26] Bob Dobbs: What did he lose?
[1:51:26] Bob Dobbs: That's something to look at.
[1:51:28] Bob Dobbs: There's something that a lot of people have experienced lately.
[1:51:30] Bob Dobbs: Him.
[1:51:31] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[1:51:32] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:51:32] Cameron McEwen: I think that relates to the tech body.
[1:51:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:51:36] Cameron McEwen: I think Jordan
[1:51:37] Cameron McEwen: Peterson became involved in how many viewers do you have?
[1:51:43] Cameron McEwen: What's your influence in the tech world and all that sort of stuff?
[1:51:48] Bob Dobbs: And he got hurt doing it.
[1:51:49] Bob Dobbs: Remember he had a stroke or something?
[1:51:51] Bob Dobbs: He got ill?
[1:51:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:51:52] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:51:53] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:51:53] Cameron McEwen: he had a lot of physical ailments.
[1:51:56] Cameron McEwen: There's no question about that.
[1:51:57] Bob Dobbs: And he was bringing it on himself as he moved towards embracing the tech body or having a problem with the tech body.
[1:52:04] Bob Dobbs: And then he supposedly recovered,
[1:52:07] Bob Dobbs: but he hasn't recovered the guy that he was before the health problem has not returned.
[1:52:16] Bob Dobbs: So he's got healed and he's become something different.
[1:52:21] Bob Dobbs: I wonder if anybody points that out,
[1:52:22] Bob Dobbs: that he didn't heal right.
[1:52:25] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:52:28] Cameron McEwen: I think that's a variety of the one way of understanding the article that you were quoting.
[1:52:35] Cameron McEwen: I don't know anything about that article,
[1:52:37] Cameron McEwen: but if the guy is saying that
[1:52:41] Cameron McEwen: Peterson has blown it,
[1:52:43] Cameron McEwen: one way of understanding that is to say that he didn't heal right.
[1:52:47] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:52:48] Bob Dobbs: again,
[1:52:48] Bob Dobbs: we talk about the parallels between him and McLuhan.
[1:52:51] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan got ill,
[1:52:52] Bob Dobbs: too,
[1:52:53] Bob Dobbs: in his fame period.
[1:52:55] Bob Dobbs: And then he returned.
[1:52:56] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:52:56] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:52:57] Cameron McEwen: I've written posts about this.
[1:52:59] Cameron McEwen: There's many,
[1:53:00] Cameron McEwen: many parallels between
[1:53:02] Cameron McEwen: Jordan Peterson and McLuhan.
[1:53:04] Bob Dobbs: Is that right?
[1:53:05] Cameron McEwen: They were both born in Alberta,
[1:53:06] Cameron McEwen: for example.
[1:53:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:53:08] Bob Dobbs: that's pretty neat.
[1:53:10] Bob Dobbs: And they both had an illness,
[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: a public illness,
[1:53:13] Bob Dobbs: and then came back.
[1:53:14] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:53:14] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:53:14] Bob Dobbs: people like Ted Carpenter says the guy who came back was not the McLuhan I knew,
[1:53:18] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:53:19] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:53:20] Bob Dobbs: And Ted Carpenter left.
[1:53:20] Cameron McEwen: And they both suffered from what Peterson daughter calls akathisia,
[1:53:29] Cameron McEwen: which apparently is an inability to relax and to become a kind of human jitterbug.
[1:53:36] Cameron McEwen: And that also happened to McLuhan.
[1:53:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:53:38] Bob Dobbs: that was not,
[1:53:39] Bob Dobbs: you don't mean aphasia,
[1:53:41] Bob Dobbs: you mean akathisia.
[1:53:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:53:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:53:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:53:45] Bob Dobbs: many people talked about him being aphasic,
[1:53:48] Bob Dobbs: but that was maybe the content.
[1:53:51] Cameron McEwen: That was after his final stroke,
[1:53:53] Cameron McEwen: he became aphasic.
[1:53:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:53:56] Bob Dobbs: aphasic.
[1:53:58] Bob Dobbs: What did he become in the final one,
[1:54:00] Bob Dobbs: after the final one?
[1:54:02] Cameron McEwen: Aphasic.
[1:54:03] Bob Dobbs: Aphasic.
[1:54:03] Cameron McEwen: He couldn't speak.
[1:54:05] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:54:05] Bob Dobbs: but I was thinking that that was the content.
[1:54:08] Bob Dobbs: If he was aphasic...
[1:54:09] Cameron McEwen: That was before.
[1:54:13] Bob Dobbs: So that didn't last a while.
[1:54:14] Cameron McEwen: After his stroke in 1960,
[1:54:17] Cameron McEwen: he became a jitterbug.
[1:54:19] Bob Dobbs: Ah,
[1:54:20] Bob Dobbs: where do you read about that?
[1:54:21] Bob Dobbs: I've never seen that.
[1:54:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:54:23] Cameron McEwen: you have.
[1:54:25] Cameron McEwen: It's especially brought out in Fitzgerald's book.
[1:54:29] Cameron McEwen: But it's also in
[1:54:31] Cameron McEwen: Coupland's book.
[1:54:34] Cameron McEwen: Both of those describe it.
[1:54:37] Bob Dobbs: Where is it expressed?
[1:54:38] Bob Dobbs: In his diaries or letters to people?
[1:54:43] Bob Dobbs: How do we know that he's going through that?
[1:54:45] Cameron McEwen: I'll send you...
[1:54:47] Cameron McEwen: I've talked about this at some length in my posts.
[1:54:51] Cameron McEwen: I'll send you a link.
[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: so I was thinking...
[1:54:54] Bob Dobbs: I just came up with the notion,
[1:54:55] Bob Dobbs: the pattern that...
[1:54:58] Bob Dobbs: His later aphasia,
[1:55:00] Bob Dobbs: which was a result of,
[1:55:01] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:55:01] Bob Dobbs: years later,
[1:55:02] Bob Dobbs: was like the content of the jitterbug.
[1:55:05] Bob Dobbs: The phatic was a more formal thing.
[1:55:08] Bob Dobbs: The aphasic was dealing with his consumption of speech and books and writing.
[1:55:14] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:55:14] Bob Dobbs: he couldn't perform them.
[1:55:18] Bob Dobbs: But was he jitterbugging?
[1:55:20] Bob Dobbs: So the jitterbugging that you say he went through,
[1:55:22] Bob Dobbs: did that subside?
[1:55:26] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that it did.
[1:55:27] Cameron McEwen: I think he probably was able to control it much better.
[1:55:37] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:55:39] Cameron McEwen: Corrine would have been a big player there.
[1:55:42] Cameron McEwen: But remember that when he became this unrecognizable guy,
[1:55:47] Cameron McEwen: according to
[1:55:48] Cameron McEwen: Ted Carpenter, this was before he became a personality.
[1:55:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:55:53] Bob Dobbs: this is 1960.
[1:55:55] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[1:55:55] Cameron McEwen: when we see them,
[1:55:56] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:55:57] Cameron McEwen: when we see all these lectures and interviews and panel discussions on the Internet of McLuhan,
[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: this is almost entirely the
[1:56:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan that's already had a severe stroke and that is not recognized by at least some of his associates as being the real McLuhan.
[1:56:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:56:20] Bob Dobbs: And I imagine some of these...
[1:56:24] Bob Dobbs: Colleagues of Peterson at the University of Toronto are doing the same thing about him.
[1:56:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:56:30] Cameron McEwen: I would hope so.
[1:56:32] Bob Dobbs: So that's interesting to think about what was the tech body that he got lost in.
[1:56:39] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:56:39] Bob Dobbs: that's a good way to...
[1:56:42] Bob Dobbs: start to define or lay out properties of the tech body.
[1:56:47] Cameron McEwen: When you say he,
[1:56:48] Cameron McEwen: are you talking about McLuhan or Peterson?
[1:56:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:56:52] Bob Dobbs: that Peterson you were saying got lost.
[1:56:58] Bob Dobbs: When he was becoming famous two or three,
[1:57:01] Bob Dobbs: four years ago,
[1:57:02] Bob Dobbs: a colleague of his,
[1:57:03] Bob Dobbs: a friend,
[1:57:04] Bob Dobbs: a family friend,
[1:57:05] Bob Dobbs: spent a lot of time with him,
[1:57:08] Bob Dobbs: wrote an article for The Weekender or...
[1:57:10] Bob Dobbs: some Canadian magazine saying,
[1:57:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:57:13] Bob Dobbs: Jordan,
[1:57:13] Bob Dobbs: my friend,
[1:57:15] Bob Dobbs: you're going into a real dangerous scene.
[1:57:18] Bob Dobbs: This is not good what you're doing.
[1:57:20] Bob Dobbs: And so some people say,
[1:57:21] Bob Dobbs: ah,
[1:57:21] Bob Dobbs: the friend was jealous of his success and all that stuff.
[1:57:25] Bob Dobbs: But the warning has now been borne out.
[1:57:29] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.
[1:57:29] Cameron McEwen: Why don't you send me a link so I can look at the article?
[1:57:32] Cameron McEwen: I don't know anything about it.
[1:57:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:57:36] Bob Dobbs: I don't know where it is.
[1:57:38] Bob Dobbs: I'll try to find it.
[1:57:39] Bob Dobbs: just by asking about a friend of mine,
[1:57:42] Bob Dobbs: colleague,
[1:57:43] Bob Dobbs: professor,
[1:57:44] Bob Dobbs: says write something about a warning four years ago.
[1:57:48] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:57:49] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:57:50] Bob Dobbs: so I say there's a lot to say in my statement there,
[1:57:56] Bob Dobbs: but I don't want to stay there.
[1:57:59] Bob Dobbs: I want to go into the definitions I've laid out.
[1:58:03] Bob Dobbs: The building of the architecture of the Android Meme from 1960 to 2000 went through two phases.
[1:58:08] Bob Dobbs: The first phase,
[1:58:09] Bob Dobbs: 1960 to 85,
[1:58:11] Bob Dobbs: is presented in my article,
[1:58:12] Bob Dobbs: Cloning ESP,
[1:58:14] Bob Dobbs: which I did in 1999.
[1:58:18] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,
[1:58:19] Bob Dobbs: this next section is from the memo to Prince Charles of June 4th,
[1:58:23] Bob Dobbs: 1987,
[1:58:24] Bob Dobbs: which is found in the booklet for my first album,
[1:58:27] Bob Dobbs: Bob's Media Ecology,
[1:58:28] Bob Dobbs: that Dave Newfeld made.
[1:58:31] Bob Dobbs: I had nothing to do with the making of the album.
[1:58:33] Bob Dobbs: I took the following long quotation out of the booklet.
[1:58:36] Bob Dobbs: It goes from 1850 up to 1945.
[1:58:39] Bob Dobbs: But I excluded that here.
[1:58:41] Bob Dobbs: That's too far back.
[1:58:42] Bob Dobbs: That's the global village era.
[1:58:44] Bob Dobbs: We're well past the global village.
[1:58:47] Bob Dobbs: So here's,
[1:58:48] Bob Dobbs: I wonder what you think of this layout.
[1:58:51] Bob Dobbs: I introduce it by saying some of the effects of this cloning process are explained by my phrase mythic stages.
[1:58:59] Bob Dobbs: Cloning process,
[1:59:01] Bob Dobbs: cloning EST.
[1:59:03] Bob Dobbs: I say that the intimacy of the global village made people engage Postman communication,
[1:59:11] Bob Dobbs: approximating ESP.
[1:59:13] Bob Dobbs: Even McLuhan said electronics as ESP.
[1:59:17] Bob Dobbs: So we've been in a,
[1:59:19] Bob Dobbs: the 20th century was a time of ESP,
[1:59:22] Bob Dobbs: a lot of non-verbal,
[1:59:23] Bob Dobbs: Postman communication.
[1:59:25] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:59:27] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying,
[1:59:30] Bob Dobbs: in retrospect,
[1:59:31] Bob Dobbs: that we cloned ESP.
[1:59:33] Bob Dobbs: People talk about cloning bodies,
[1:59:34] Bob Dobbs: but we cloned the natural ESP that people have interacting with each other technologically.
[1:59:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:59:45] Cameron McEwen: you could say that's what media are in a literal sense of media.
[1:59:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:59:52] Cameron McEwen: So television,
[1:59:53] Cameron McEwen: telephone,
[1:59:55] Bob Dobbs: radio.
[1:59:56] Bob Dobbs: ESP.
[1:59:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:59:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:59:58] Bob Dobbs: so here's what I say.
[2:00:00] Bob Dobbs: From 1945 to 1960,
[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: in the visible worlds of nuclear bombs,
[2:00:05] Bob Dobbs: advertising,
[2:00:06] Bob Dobbs: public relations,
[2:00:07] Bob Dobbs: and sense-making,
[2:00:09] Bob Dobbs: politically,
[2:00:10] Bob Dobbs: you have warring world bureaucracies,
[2:00:13] Bob Dobbs: Rhyee.
[2:00:13] Bob Dobbs: superpowers and multinationals,
[2:00:15] Bob Dobbs: parallel with the lockdown of the solar government.
[2:00:18] Bob Dobbs: So the solar government is the figure inside service environment called television.
[2:00:31] Bob Dobbs: So then from 1960 to
[2:00:33] Bob Dobbs: 1967, the solar bureaucracies become a figure,
[2:00:39] Bob Dobbs: while locking down the universal government,
[2:00:41] Bob Dobbs: inner and outer space,
[2:00:42] Bob Dobbs: via the hidden operations of the computer,
[2:00:45] Bob Dobbs: accompanying the visible worlds of laser beams,
[2:00:47] Bob Dobbs: genetic engineering,
[2:00:48] Bob Dobbs: and endless travel retrievals.
[2:00:50] Bob Dobbs: And then from 1977 to 1990,
[2:00:52] Bob Dobbs: the hologram world is the visible figure amidst clashing universal bureaucracies.
[2:00:56] Bob Dobbs: So you see how the...
[2:00:58] Bob Dobbs: previous ground becomes a clashing bureaucracy in the next phase when it's bigger.
[2:01:04] Bob Dobbs: You see that?
[2:01:06] Cameron McEwen: Let's get back a minute and ask what do you think you're doing in a paragraph like this?
[2:01:14] Cameron McEwen: Are you writing history?
[2:01:16] Cameron McEwen: Are you writing sci-fi?
[2:01:18] Cameron McEwen: Are you writing
[2:01:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm explaining the icons that documentaries and newsreels do.
[2:01:27] Bob Dobbs: Like nuclear bombs,
[2:01:28] Bob Dobbs: they always show the explosion of someplace,
[2:01:32] Bob Dobbs: Bimini or something,
[2:01:33] Bob Dobbs: and then they'll show a collage of advertising and a bunch of public speakers and sense-making,
[2:01:39] Bob Dobbs: a few stars,
[2:01:40] Bob Dobbs: sports figures.
[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: I'm taking those figures,
[2:01:44] Bob Dobbs: and I'm saying there's a ground to that.
[2:01:50] Bob Dobbs: It is efficiently the lockdown of a solar government.
[2:01:55] Bob Dobbs: So when people were distracted by the new global theater,
[2:01:59] Bob Dobbs: actually cabals were building something invisible,
[2:02:04] Bob Dobbs: and I call that the solar government.
[2:02:07] Bob Dobbs: But,
[2:02:08] Bob Dobbs: and that's during the television era.
[2:02:10] Bob Dobbs: When the next era of laser beams,
[2:02:13] Bob Dobbs: genetic engineering,
[2:02:14] Bob Dobbs: and endless tribal retrievals comes in,
[2:02:17] Bob Dobbs: the hidden...
[2:02:18] Bob Dobbs: solar government becomes a conflicting figure.
[2:02:22] Bob Dobbs: And we see in popular imagery something startling compared to the earlier period of conflicting solar bureaucracies.
[2:02:33] Bob Dobbs: So I'm explaining the,
[2:02:34] Bob Dobbs: I'm putting the imagery of the 20th century in order.
[2:02:41] Cameron McEwen: I'm showing Why do we have to,
[2:02:43] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:02:44] Cameron McEwen: you've just introduced a kind of a revolutionary new
[2:02:49] Cameron McEwen: term.
[2:02:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:02:50] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme.
[2:02:51] Cameron McEwen: Or entity.
[2:02:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:02:52] Cameron McEwen: Android Meme.
[2:02:54] Cameron McEwen: And now all of a sudden you're multiplying the new things.
[2:02:57] Cameron McEwen: Solar government,
[2:02:58] Cameron McEwen: universal government,
[2:02:59] Cameron McEwen: all this stuff.
[2:03:01] Cameron McEwen: It's hard for me to understand why you think it's necessary to do all of this introduction of terms and entities.
[2:03:11] Cameron McEwen: If you were doing some kind of dialogue with yourself side.
[2:03:17] Cameron McEwen: hip-hop of the mind or something,
[2:03:19] Cameron McEwen: I can understand that.
[2:03:21] Cameron McEwen: Or if you say,
[2:03:22] Cameron McEwen: well,
[2:03:22] Cameron McEwen: this is actually the history of the late
[2:03:27] Cameron McEwen: 20th century,
[2:03:29] Cameron McEwen: I can say,
[2:03:30] Cameron McEwen: well,
[2:03:32] Cameron McEwen: I don't understand that,
[2:03:34] Cameron McEwen: but if you,
[2:03:35] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:03:37] Cameron McEwen: maybe
[2:03:38] Cameron McEwen: I could understand it if you explained more about these entities.
[2:03:44] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:03:45] Bob Dobbs: let me answer that.
[2:03:45] Cameron McEwen: I'm open to that.
[2:03:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:03:47] Bob Dobbs: I'm inventorying surprising patterns to show that the Android Meme is something huge.
[2:03:56] Bob Dobbs: And I've got to go through these minor hugenesses,
[2:03:59] Bob Dobbs: earlier hugeness dialectics,
[2:04:03] Bob Dobbs: to get you ready for the Android Meme.
[2:04:07] Bob Dobbs: So it's...
[2:04:08] Cameron McEwen: Is solar government,
[2:04:10] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[2:04:10] Cameron McEwen: is that a technological term?
[2:04:16] Bob Dobbs: It refers to what's called Echelon.
[2:04:18] Bob Dobbs: You ever heard of Echelon?
[2:04:19] Cameron McEwen: I think you mentioned it.
[2:04:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:04:24] Bob Dobbs: That's the satellite communication of the Commonwealth and the United States.
[2:04:31] Bob Dobbs: I think it's basically Britain,
[2:04:33] Bob Dobbs: Canada,
[2:04:33] Bob Dobbs: the United States,
[2:04:34] Bob Dobbs: New Zealand,
[2:04:34] Bob Dobbs: and some other country in there.
[2:04:36] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure who the other one was.
[2:04:39] Cameron McEwen: Was it a Defense Department program?
[2:04:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:04:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:04:43] Bob Dobbs: It was a bringing together of what an elite hijacker of the planet could do if he could get cooperation and bypass legal issues of nations and of
[2:04:59] Bob Dobbs: separate intelligence agencies.
[2:05:01] Bob Dobbs: So I'm trying to show an implosion that's going on.
[2:05:05] Bob Dobbs: And,
[2:05:05] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:05:05] Bob Dobbs: this is 50 years ago now.
[2:05:08] Bob Dobbs: I'm pretty sure.
[2:05:10] Bob Dobbs: Nobody has any image of solar bureaucracy other than what they get in their regular science fiction movies every week.
[2:05:18] Bob Dobbs: Uh-huh,
[2:05:18] Cameron McEwen: uh-huh.
[2:05:20] Bob Dobbs: Science fiction movies and the entertainment stuff at Hollywood is illustrating these scenarios all the time as fiction.
[2:05:30] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[2:05:31] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:05:34] Bob Dobbs: I'm picking keywords to using McLuhan.
[2:05:38] Bob Dobbs: to show a process that maybe McLuhan was getting at.
[2:05:43] Bob Dobbs: So I really want to expand and blow up people's minds,
[2:05:49] Bob Dobbs: for example,
[2:05:49] Bob Dobbs: with the third phase from 77 to 90.
[2:05:52] Bob Dobbs: This is a hologram world.
[2:05:53] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:05:53] Bob Dobbs: we don't have a hologram world in technologically or efficient causality level.
[2:06:01] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knows that.
[2:06:02] Bob Dobbs: There were movies about it,
[2:06:03] Bob Dobbs: like the Truman Show.
[2:06:05] Bob Dobbs: So the hologram world is a visible...
[2:06:07] Bob Dobbs: figure.
[2:06:08] Bob Dobbs: It's already obsolete amidst clashing universal bureaucracies,
[2:06:13] Bob Dobbs: which are complemented by mythic government lockdown,
[2:06:16] Bob Dobbs: which is complemented with satellites around.
[2:06:19] Bob Dobbs: And then mythic means a whole culture or mixed corporate media inaction.
[2:06:23] Bob Dobbs: However,
[2:06:23] Bob Dobbs: the satellite is an extension and theorization of a whole culture.
[2:06:27] Bob Dobbs: So I'm trying to generalize on the edge of incomprehensibility.
[2:06:35] Bob Dobbs: But it is logical or it's sequential if you get past your confusion about what the words mean.
[2:06:44] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[2:06:45] Bob Dobbs: the world governments have a battle from 45 to 60.
[2:06:49] Bob Dobbs: Then the solar.
[2:06:51] Bob Dobbs: Empires have a battle from
[2:06:52] Bob Dobbs: 60 to 77,
[2:06:54] Bob Dobbs: and then this mythic stages or virtual reality factors,
[2:07:00] Bob Dobbs: which I would say we're in right now on the slow level of perception.
[2:07:05] Bob Dobbs: But it was actually started in 77 to 90.
[2:07:07] Bob Dobbs: It's a long time ago.
[2:07:10] Cameron McEwen: And when you talk about this stuff,
[2:07:13] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[2:07:14] Cameron McEwen: do you think that you are relaying um,
[2:07:21] Cameron McEwen: An investigation that you have done,
[2:07:25] Cameron McEwen: or do you think you're channeling ideas that are out there?
[2:07:28] Cameron McEwen: No.
[2:07:29] Bob Dobbs: An investigation.
[2:07:30] Bob Dobbs: It's an investigation of a lot of stuff.
[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: It's not channeling.
[2:07:35] Cameron McEwen: And in that investigation,
[2:07:37] Cameron McEwen: are you trying to come clear in your own mind,
[2:07:41] Cameron McEwen: or are you already clear in your own mind and you're trying to communicate it?
[2:07:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:07:45] Bob Dobbs: I'm explaining my silence.
[2:07:48] Bob Dobbs: uh
[2:07:49] Bob Dobbs: what I have thought.
[2:07:51] Bob Dobbs: So then you,
[2:07:54] Bob Dobbs: anybody who takes an interest to engage it,
[2:07:57] Bob Dobbs: got to figure out what I'm talking about here to get to where I am on the silent level,
[2:08:03] Bob Dobbs: my silent C.
[2:08:05] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[2:08:06] Bob Dobbs: you don't spend time processing other people's information or watching TV and all this stuff.
[2:08:13] Bob Dobbs: What a lot of people are involved in,
[2:08:14] Bob Dobbs: more of the internet now,
[2:08:15] Bob Dobbs: I guess you'd say,
[2:08:17] Bob Dobbs: and texting and...
[2:08:19] Bob Dobbs: Web 2.0,
[2:08:20] Bob Dobbs: you don't engage in that at all.
[2:08:23] Bob Dobbs: What is the content of your perceptions and concepts if you've been doing McLuhan all this time?
[2:08:33] Bob Dobbs: I think that this describes the insights you got,
[2:08:38] Bob Dobbs: the phases you went through to get to your colossal indifference right now or not impressed with anything out there.
[2:08:48] Bob Dobbs: and yet having a sense of urgency about something's got to be done,
[2:08:51] Bob Dobbs: and they've got to understand you.
[2:08:53] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:08:53] Bob Dobbs: this is my way of pointing out to people how you can use figure and ground,
[2:08:57] Bob Dobbs: like McLuhan,
[2:08:59] Bob Dobbs: and get way beyond where you think you are.
[2:09:04] Bob Dobbs: Where are you if you get some of this?
[2:09:07] Bob Dobbs: Where are you?
[2:09:08] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:09:09] Bob Dobbs: I'm threatening.
[2:09:09] Bob Dobbs: I'm upsetting someone's cliches about their identity by saying this stuff.
[2:09:17] Cameron McEwen: Sure,
[2:09:17] Cameron McEwen: and we talked about that earlier.
[2:09:23] Cameron McEwen: So,
[2:09:23] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:09:24] Cameron McEwen: I think this makes sense in terms of our conversation.
[2:09:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:09:30] Cameron McEwen: What I haven't been able to understand is whether or not you think that somebody has to understand this narrative and these terms,
[2:09:41] Cameron McEwen: like solar government and universal government and stuff,
[2:09:45] Cameron McEwen: whether that's...
[2:09:46] Cameron McEwen: necessary,
[2:09:47] Cameron McEwen: whether that's part of the laboratory that you need to know your way around in.
[2:09:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:09:55] Bob Dobbs: because you wouldn't be worried about the globalists.
[2:09:58] Bob Dobbs: That's 1945 to 1960.
[2:10:01] Bob Dobbs: You wouldn't be worried.
[2:10:02] Bob Dobbs: It's a way of saying,
[2:10:03] Bob Dobbs: look,
[2:10:04] Bob Dobbs: I make you think about scenarios.
[2:10:06] Bob Dobbs: They're way beyond what you're going to get from your best talk shows or best articles from
[2:10:11] Bob Dobbs: Harper's Magazine or something.
[2:10:13] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to get way past.
[2:10:15] Bob Dobbs: what people think they're thinking about.
[2:10:17] Bob Dobbs: Most people,
[2:10:19] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:10:19] Bob Dobbs: in Trump era were told to be concerned about the globalists were taking away America's prosperity.
[2:10:26] Bob Dobbs: So a kind of nationalism was retrieved.
[2:10:28] Bob Dobbs: That's really puny when you're looking at what I'm saying is going on.
[2:10:35] Bob Dobbs: What is the etherealization of a whole culture?
[2:10:39] Cameron McEwen: What is that?
[2:10:39] Cameron McEwen: What was the word you use there?
[2:10:41] Bob Dobbs: Etherealization.
[2:10:42] Bob Dobbs: That's the last thing.
[2:10:44] Cameron McEwen: So etherealization in that sense is as close to what I mean by psychological decentralization.
[2:10:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:10:52] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[2:10:53] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:10:53] Bob Dobbs: there.
[2:10:53] Bob Dobbs: That's good.
[2:10:54] Bob Dobbs: It's almost time,
[2:10:57] Bob Dobbs: I think.
[2:10:58] Bob Dobbs: How long have we been going?
[2:10:59] Bob Dobbs: How do you feel?
[2:11:01] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:11:02] Cameron McEwen: I'm okay for a little while more,
[2:11:04] Cameron McEwen: but it all depends on you and your time and your energy.
[2:11:10] Cameron McEwen: I'm okay for another half hour or something if you are.
[2:11:13] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:11:13] Bob Dobbs: we've been going for an hour and a half.
[2:11:15] Bob Dobbs: I don't want to go another half hour.
[2:11:17] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:11:17] Cameron McEwen: good.
[2:11:17] Cameron McEwen: So let's just draw a line out of it then.
[2:11:20] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:11:21] Bob Dobbs: So now you did a lot of talking,
[2:11:24] Bob Dobbs: and I'm getting to say a little bit at the end here.
[2:11:27] Bob Dobbs: Let's see what I...
[2:11:29] Cameron McEwen: You did some talking too,
[2:11:30] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[2:11:31] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?
[2:11:32] Cameron McEwen: You did some talking too.
[2:11:34] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:11:34] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:11:34] Bob Dobbs: a little bit.
[2:11:35] Bob Dobbs: But you were explaining.
[2:11:37] Bob Dobbs: You needed to explain yourself,
[2:11:38] Bob Dobbs: and we let you do it.
[2:11:41] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:11:41] Bob Dobbs: and that was...
[2:11:43] Bob Dobbs: useful.
[2:11:44] Bob Dobbs: So now I'm bringing a counter Explorations,
[2:11:47] Bob Dobbs: I guess.
[2:11:48] Bob Dobbs: So look what I say in the blue part,
[2:11:51] Bob Dobbs: in my off-the-cuff remark to the guy that's recording me.
[2:11:55] Bob Dobbs: explaining what I'd written.
[2:11:58] Bob Dobbs: So I go,
[2:11:58] Bob Dobbs: what you see is,
[2:12:00] Bob Dobbs: there's the visible,
[2:12:01] Bob Dobbs: and then there's the hidden.
[2:12:02] Bob Dobbs: The solar government is hidden,
[2:12:04] Bob Dobbs: but then you go into the next phase,
[2:12:06] Bob Dobbs: and the solar government becomes visible.
[2:12:08] Bob Dobbs: That's President Reagan's Star Wars,
[2:12:11] Bob Dobbs: conflicting solar bureaucracies.
[2:12:14] Bob Dobbs: And then the new hidden phase is the universal government.
[2:12:17] Bob Dobbs: That's extraterrestrials in multiple worlds,
[2:12:20] Bob Dobbs: both inner and outer.
[2:12:22] Bob Dobbs: It's drug-taking,
[2:12:23] Bob Dobbs: too.
[2:12:23] Bob Dobbs: but it's a combination with the hidden operations of the computer,
[2:12:26] Bob Dobbs: like the service environment,
[2:12:28] Bob Dobbs: the solar government,
[2:12:29] Bob Dobbs: was the hidden television,
[2:12:31] Bob Dobbs: hidden operations of the television.
[2:12:33] Bob Dobbs: And it's accompanied by laser beams,
[2:12:35] Bob Dobbs: this universal government phase,
[2:12:38] Bob Dobbs: and genetic engineering.
[2:12:39] Bob Dobbs: Then all that becomes a visible hologram,
[2:12:42] Bob Dobbs: which is on the way to becoming,
[2:12:43] Bob Dobbs: and I should say an acoustic hologram too,
[2:12:46] Bob Dobbs: which is on the way to becoming holeopathic,
[2:12:48] Bob Dobbs: that means very tiny,
[2:12:50] Bob Dobbs: amidst the clashing...
[2:12:51] Bob Dobbs: visible bureaucracies complemented by the hidden landscape which is mythic government and what's myth it's any mixture of media that a culture thinks it represents now when i look at that read it i say um the
[2:13:07] Bob Dobbs: uh the popular delusion or accuracy or pattern that george soros is doing a lot of shit on us,
[2:13:18] Bob Dobbs: okay?
[2:13:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:13:20] Bob Dobbs: That gets...
[2:13:21] Bob Dobbs: That's holeopathic.
[2:13:22] Bob Dobbs: I predicted that in 87 when I wrote that letter.
[2:13:26] Bob Dobbs: Holeopathic.
[2:13:28] Bob Dobbs: It's tiny.
[2:13:29] Bob Dobbs: It's a little Rumpelstiltskin.
[2:13:31] Bob Dobbs: And so you have the battle.
[2:13:33] Bob Dobbs: I say it later,
[2:13:34] Bob Dobbs: the next part.
[2:13:35] Bob Dobbs: You'll have holeopathic battles.
[2:13:37] Bob Dobbs: Now that's,
[2:13:38] Bob Dobbs: for popular consumption,
[2:13:40] Bob Dobbs: it's
[2:13:41] Bob Dobbs: Rupert Murdoch versus George Soros versus Trump versus the Queen or something like that.
[2:13:47] Bob Dobbs: Or maybe
[2:13:48] Bob Dobbs: Trudeau. or
[2:13:49] Bob Dobbs: whoever is running Africa.
[2:13:55] Bob Dobbs: You didn't have this world concern about figures like Murdoch and
[2:14:01] Bob Dobbs: George Soros
[2:14:02] Bob Dobbs: 50 years ago.
[2:14:03] Bob Dobbs: Something caused them,
[2:14:06] Bob Dobbs: what brought them forward.
[2:14:07] Bob Dobbs: And so I'm laying out the stages to explain how we get to the Walter Fischman of people like Murdoch and Soros and
[2:14:17] Bob Dobbs: Bush Donald Trump.
[2:14:19] Cameron McEwen: Did you say
[2:14:21] Cameron McEwen: Walter Fischman? Yeah,
[2:14:22] Bob Dobbs: I meant to say Walter Fischman.
[2:14:27] Bob Dobbs: But it came out as Walter Fischman.
[2:14:29] Bob Dobbs: But it means Lucifer.
[2:14:30] Bob Dobbs: These are Lucifers.
[2:14:31] Cameron McEwen: There's also
[2:14:33] Cameron McEwen: Henry Luce.
[2:14:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:14:35] Cameron McEwen: The guy that McLuhan talked about all the time in the 40s.
[2:14:39] Bob Dobbs: And he was a friend of his wife.
[2:14:43] Cameron McEwen: That I don't know about.
[2:14:45] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:14:45] Bob Dobbs: look at letters.
[2:14:46] Bob Dobbs: Look at Mrs.
[2:14:47] Bob Dobbs: Luce.
[2:14:48] Bob Dobbs: She was a...
[2:14:48] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[2:14:49] Cameron McEwen: you're talking about Claire Booth Luce.
[2:14:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:14:51] Cameron McEwen: That's later.
[2:14:52] Cameron McEwen: That's much later.
[2:14:53] Cameron McEwen: I'm talking about
[2:14:54] Cameron McEwen: Henry Luce,
[2:14:55] Cameron McEwen: who owned Time magazine.
[2:14:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:14:57] Bob Dobbs: I'm talking about that.
[2:14:58] Bob Dobbs: That's his wife.
[2:15:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:15:00] Cameron McEwen: but he's dead,
[2:15:02] Cameron McEwen: and she doesn't have the same relationship with
[2:15:08] Cameron McEwen: Time and life that he did.
[2:15:10] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:15:11] Bob Dobbs: But she was a powerful lady in society.
[2:15:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:15:14] Cameron McEwen: definitely.
[2:15:15] Cameron McEwen: She became an ambassador.
[2:15:17] Cameron McEwen: isn't she?
[2:15:18] Cameron McEwen: Do I remember correctly?
[2:15:19] Bob Dobbs: I think so.
[2:15:21] Bob Dobbs: And she had to deal with Henry,
[2:15:23] Bob Dobbs: who took LSD.
[2:15:27] Bob Dobbs: He did LSD.
[2:15:28] Bob Dobbs: Did you know that?
[2:15:29] Cameron McEwen: No,
[2:15:30] Bob Dobbs: but
[2:15:30] Cameron McEwen: I believe it.
[2:15:33] Cameron McEwen: In the
[2:15:34] Cameron McEwen: 1940s, it was actually fairly common amongst business leaders.
[2:15:39] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:15:39] Bob Dobbs: elites that got access to it,
[2:15:41] Bob Dobbs: yes.
[2:15:43] Bob Dobbs: They had to meet Dr.
[2:15:44] Bob Dobbs: What's-His-Name.
[2:15:48] Bob Dobbs: Albert.
[2:15:49] Bob Dobbs: Not Abbie Hoffman,
[2:15:50] Bob Dobbs: the guy who made it,
[2:15:50] Bob Dobbs: but there was an Albert,
[2:15:51] Bob Dobbs: Al Hubbard.
[2:15:52] Bob Dobbs: Captain Al Hubbard was the
[2:15:54] Bob Dobbs: Johnny Appleseed.
[2:15:55] Bob Dobbs: He was the one allowed to distribute
[2:15:58] Bob Dobbs: Sandoz LSD in North America.
[2:16:01] Bob Dobbs: And eventually he did it,
[2:16:02] Bob Dobbs: gave it to John Kennedy,
[2:16:04] Bob Dobbs: President Kennedy,
[2:16:07] Bob Dobbs: which may have made...
[2:16:08] Cameron McEwen: I don't know anything about that,
[2:16:09] Cameron McEwen: but I don't find it unbelievable at all.
[2:16:12] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:16:12] Bob Dobbs: that's some of the data.
[2:16:14] Bob Dobbs: That's the content of what I just read you.
[2:16:17] Bob Dobbs: That would be
[2:16:18] Bob Dobbs: Kennedy's beginning of the solar government phase.
[2:16:22] Bob Dobbs: And the popular image is going to the moon.
[2:16:25] Bob Dobbs: Let's see,
[2:16:25] Bob Dobbs: do I have that there?
[2:16:27] Bob Dobbs: Let's see,
[2:16:27] Bob Dobbs: my television is the ground.
[2:16:37] Cameron McEwen: You see,
[2:16:37] Cameron McEwen: what I see going on here is a continuing shuffling of figure and ground.
[2:16:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:16:47] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:16:47] Cameron McEwen: And,
[2:16:48] Cameron McEwen: um...
[2:16:50] Cameron McEwen: That accords with how we began our conversation today,
[2:16:55] Cameron McEwen: which is that in order to investigate anything,
[2:16:59] Cameron McEwen: you have to investigate the medium between,
[2:17:02] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[2:17:03] Cameron McEwen: figure and ground.
[2:17:04] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[2:17:04] Cameron McEwen: And you have to realize that that medium is plural,
[2:17:08] Cameron McEwen: media.
[2:17:09] Cameron McEwen: So whatever configuration of figure and ground is at any moment,
[2:17:18] Cameron McEwen: there are always...
[2:17:19] Cameron McEwen: behind that a thousand or a million other possibilities of figure and ground.
[2:17:27] Cameron McEwen: And investigating anything means looking at the range of figure and ground that are involved,
[2:17:36] Cameron McEwen: and then proceeding from that plurality.
[2:17:41] Cameron McEwen: And the difficulty is,
[2:17:43] Cameron McEwen: as we were talking about earlier,
[2:17:45] Cameron McEwen: but also the individual self.
[2:17:49] Cameron McEwen: is involved with some configuration of figure and ground.
[2:17:53] Cameron McEwen: That's how it gets fixed for any moment of time.
[2:17:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:17:57] Cameron McEwen: The correlation between an individual pilot,
[2:18:01] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[2:18:03] Cameron McEwen: and the experienced world,
[2:18:05] Cameron McEwen: which is always some configuration of figure and ground.
[2:18:11] Cameron McEwen: So what you're doing here when you're talking about,
[2:18:14] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[2:18:14] Cameron McEwen: startling somebody you're talking to or somebody who's reading,
[2:18:19] Cameron McEwen: What you're saying,
[2:18:21] Cameron McEwen: you're saying that you want to get that person to see another configuration of figure and ground,
[2:18:31] Cameron McEwen: which will inherently change them.
[2:18:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:18:35] Cameron McEwen: And in fact,
[2:18:36] Cameron McEwen: if they didn't already have the ability to change figure and ground,
[2:18:42] Cameron McEwen: you wouldn't be able to speak to them at all.
[2:18:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:18:44] Cameron McEwen: Because they would be fixed in place like a Gutenbergian.
[2:18:49] Cameron McEwen: with some idea that cannot be changed of what is figure and ground.
[2:18:54] Cameron McEwen: In fact,
[2:18:55] Cameron McEwen: they may be so fixed on the figure that they don't even know there's a ground.
[2:19:00] Bob Dobbs: Precisely.
[2:19:01] Bob Dobbs: So I think you've complexified the issues very nicely.
[2:19:06] Bob Dobbs: No one's ever heard figure,
[2:19:07] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[2:19:08] Bob Dobbs: all therapy presented like this.
[2:19:10] Bob Dobbs: And good on you for...
[2:19:16] Bob Dobbs: splitting up McLuhan literalism that the books he made created.
[2:19:21] Bob Dobbs: The problem of his books made it too simple.
[2:19:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:19:26] Cameron McEwen: but he had to use words to talk to us.
[2:19:28] Bob Dobbs: He had to use books to talk to us.
[2:19:31] Bob Dobbs: He had to do TV shows.
[2:19:34] Bob Dobbs: He had to be interviewed by Fulford on 7 o'clock evening weather report type of shows.
[2:19:41] Cameron McEwen: It didn't make any sense for McLuhan to be a cosmonaut of communication.
[2:19:46] Cameron McEwen: without trying to find out,
[2:19:49] Cameron McEwen: well,
[2:19:50] Cameron McEwen: what the hell is communication?
[2:19:52] Cameron McEwen: Not just from looking from an office at St.
[2:19:56] Cameron McEwen: Mike's,
[2:19:58] Cameron McEwen: but actually going out and doing it.
[2:20:00] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:20:01] Bob Dobbs: and you know what he called that?
[2:20:02] Bob Dobbs: Cape Canaveral caper.
[2:20:05] Cameron McEwen: There you go.
[2:20:06] Bob Dobbs: Have you seen that interview with Fulford where he says that?
[2:20:08] Bob Dobbs: No,
[2:20:08] Bob Dobbs: uh-uh,
[2:20:08] Bob Dobbs: uh-uh.
[2:20:10] Bob Dobbs: He was asked,
[2:20:11] Bob Dobbs: what did he make of the twist,
[2:20:12] Bob Dobbs: the popular dance in 61,
[2:20:14] Bob Dobbs: 62?
[2:20:15] Cameron McEwen: He said,
[2:20:15] Bob Dobbs: it's Cape Canaveral caper.
[2:20:18] Cameron McEwen: There you go.
[2:20:18] Bob Dobbs: And he went to the moon program right then,
[2:20:21] Bob Dobbs: immediately.
[2:20:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:20:24] Bob Dobbs: so hopefully that inspires people to continue listening to the calmest,
[2:20:31] Bob Dobbs: most balanced dialogue on the Internet today.
[2:20:38] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:20:39] Cameron McEwen: anyway,
[2:20:39] Cameron McEwen: I appreciate your ruminations,
[2:20:41] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[2:20:42] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:20:42] Bob Dobbs: I appreciate your…
[2:20:43] Cameron McEwen: I enjoyed talking to you about it.
[2:20:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:20:45] Bob Dobbs: I appreciate your responses to my ruminations.
[2:20:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:20:49] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[2:20:49] Cameron McEwen: good.
[2:20:50] Cameron McEwen: So until next time.
[2:20:51] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[2:20:52] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot,
[2:20:52] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron.
[2:20:53] Bob Dobbs: Talk to you soon.
[2:20:54] Cameron McEwen: Ciao,
[2:20:54] Cameron McEwen: ciao.
[2:20:54] Cameron McEwen: Bye.
[2:20:55] Bob Dobbs: Bye.