[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[00:02] Bob Dobbs: this is Cameron and Bob,
[00:03] Bob Dobbs: and we're starting our
[00:06] Bob Dobbs: 68th episode on April 20th,
[00:08] Bob Dobbs: 2023.
[00:11] Bob Dobbs: We'll be going for a couple of years,
[00:14] Bob Dobbs: and we're on page 165 of my
[00:18] Bob Dobbs: Trump slash TechBody book.
[00:20] Cameron McEwen: 135,
[00:22] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[00:23] Bob Dobbs: What did I say?
[00:23] Cameron McEwen: 65.
[00:25] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[00:25] Bob Dobbs: 135.
[00:28] Bob Dobbs: And if you don't have a copy of my book...
[00:33] Bob Dobbs: I can email it to you if you email me.
[00:38] Cameron McEwen: You can also just Google for it.
[00:40] Cameron McEwen: It's up at the New Explorations website,
[00:43] Cameron McEwen: right?
[00:44] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[00:46] Bob Dobbs: You have to go in there,
[00:47] Bob Dobbs: and then you go inside that.
[00:49] Bob Dobbs: You have to find where I'm listed in their site.
[00:53] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[00:54] Cameron McEwen: Google gives a link,
[00:55] Cameron McEwen: I think.
[00:56] Cameron McEwen: When you search for your book,
[00:58] Cameron McEwen: the link goes directly to it.
[01:01] Cameron McEwen: A Google search.
[01:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[01:02] Bob Dobbs: good.
[01:03] Bob Dobbs: So,
[01:06] Bob Dobbs: we are going over quotes,
[01:08] Bob Dobbs: so it's good for you to have the quotes visible.
[01:12] Bob Dobbs: Some of them are complex.
[01:13] Bob Dobbs: So,
[01:14] Bob Dobbs: we're looking at one at the bottom of page 135,
[01:20] Bob Dobbs: which is from Barrington Nevitt and his booklet called ABC of Prophecy,
[01:26] Bob Dobbs: which he put together in 1980.
[01:29] Bob Dobbs: for the first World Futurist Association's conference in Toronto.
[01:35] Bob Dobbs: I think it was in June 1980,
[01:38] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan was honored there for his role as a futurist,
[01:42] Bob Dobbs: supposedly,
[01:43] Bob Dobbs: yet he could not speak.
[01:45] Bob Dobbs: He had that aphasia and stuff,
[01:48] Bob Dobbs: and he'd be dead in a few,
[01:49] Bob Dobbs: well,
[01:50] Bob Dobbs: at the end of the year,
[01:51] Bob Dobbs: six months later.
[01:52] Bob Dobbs: So
[01:55] Bob Dobbs: Barry had his little book at a booth there.
[01:58] Bob Dobbs: And then he met a guy,
[02:01] Bob Dobbs: Dennis,
[02:01] Bob Dobbs: somebody from Concordia University,
[02:03] Bob Dobbs: a professor,
[02:04] Bob Dobbs: who liked the booklet and invited Barry to Concordia to speak to his class.
[02:10] Bob Dobbs: He had some kind of communications class.
[02:13] Bob Dobbs: And
[02:15] Bob Dobbs: Barry went back there every year.
[02:17] Bob Dobbs: And a little story,
[02:19] Bob Dobbs: once Nelson Thall went with him.
[02:21] Bob Dobbs: And it may not have been at Concordia.
[02:23] Bob Dobbs: It may have been some other place,
[02:24] Bob Dobbs: in Ottawa or something.
[02:25] Bob Dobbs: And they were...
[02:28] Bob Dobbs: they were talking to people in grade 8,
[02:31] Bob Dobbs: students in grade 8,
[02:32] Bob Dobbs: and Barry didn't change his regular speech one iota,
[02:37] Bob Dobbs: as if he was talking to executives for these kids.
[02:40] Bob Dobbs: And that was quite funny to Nelson,
[02:44] Bob Dobbs: that Barry was not really noticing the ground,
[02:47] Bob Dobbs: even though that's what the whole lecture was about.
[02:49] Bob Dobbs: So that's the eccentric story about Barry,
[02:55] Bob Dobbs: or about Barry the eccentric.
[02:59] Bob Dobbs: The other story about him is
[03:01] Bob Dobbs: Marg Stewart.
[03:02] Bob Dobbs: She saw
[03:03] Bob Dobbs: Barry and
[03:05] Bob Dobbs: Marshall on David Frost in 1972 when they were promoting Take Today,
[03:09] Bob Dobbs: the executive's dropout.
[03:11] Bob Dobbs: And
[03:13] Bob Dobbs: Marg Stewart said Barry Nevitt was like a mad hatter.
[03:16] Bob Dobbs: He just talked,
[03:17] Bob Dobbs: talked,
[03:18] Bob Dobbs: talked,
[03:18] Bob Dobbs: and out-talked McLuhan,
[03:20] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[03:22] Bob Dobbs: with too much of a chatterbox for her taste.
[03:25] Bob Dobbs: So there's another example of this.
[03:27] Bob Dobbs: eccentric Barry Nevitt,
[03:28] Bob Dobbs: who built the Global Village,
[03:31] Bob Dobbs: or maybe Global Theater,
[03:33] Bob Dobbs: for
[03:34] Bob Dobbs: Norwegian companies,
[03:35] Bob Dobbs: companies all over the world.
[03:36] Bob Dobbs: He was an engineer in the 50s and 60s and built the towers that linked everybody up,
[03:41] Bob Dobbs: I guess.
[03:44] Bob Dobbs: So,
[03:47] Bob Dobbs: and to finish it off,
[03:48] Bob Dobbs: Ryerson College in Toronto,
[03:50] Bob Dobbs: Ryerson University was named after...
[03:54] Bob Dobbs: Barry Nevitt grandfather or something,
[03:55] Bob Dobbs: he came from the Ryerson family,
[03:58] Bob Dobbs: the status family of Toronto.
[04:00] Bob Dobbs: But he grew up in China.
[04:04] Bob Dobbs: His parents were Chinese missionaries or missionaries in China.
[04:09] Bob Dobbs: So Barry got around.
[04:10] Bob Dobbs: He also was in the Soviet Union.
[04:16] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if he was a Marxist,
[04:17] Bob Dobbs: but he was interested in it in the early
[04:20] Bob Dobbs: 30s. So he saw whatever Stalin was doing.
[04:23] Bob Dobbs: in
[04:24] Bob Dobbs: Moscow. Then he went to,
[04:26] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[04:26] Bob Dobbs: Munich,
[04:27] Bob Dobbs: Germany,
[04:28] Bob Dobbs: and he saw the
[04:30] Bob Dobbs: Nazis marching down the thoroughfares there in
[04:35] Bob Dobbs: Munich, and they had public address systems and stuff,
[04:40] Bob Dobbs: and they just scared the shit out of everybody in Paris.
[04:42] Bob Dobbs: And he was really frightened by their performance,
[04:46] Bob Dobbs: their electrification on the streets of Munich.
[04:50] Bob Dobbs: So he saw that.
[04:52] Bob Dobbs: Then he came back to Toronto.
[04:53] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.
[04:58] Bob Dobbs: So Barry...
[04:59] Bob Dobbs: I've got a nicer copy of this book together,
[05:01] Bob Dobbs: a second edition,
[05:03] Bob Dobbs: and that's what I'm quoting.
[05:05] Bob Dobbs: The second edition,
[05:06] Bob Dobbs: 1985,
[05:07] Bob Dobbs: page 46.
[05:09] Bob Dobbs: So he says,
[05:11] Bob Dobbs: I didn't have the quote yet,
[05:12] Bob Dobbs: did I?
[05:14] Bob Dobbs: No,
[05:14] Bob Dobbs: I don't.
[05:15] Cameron McEwen: You haven't read it on this episode,
[05:17] Cameron McEwen: no.
[05:18] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[05:19] Bob Dobbs: So the quote says,
[05:20] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan foresees that consciousness,
[05:23] Bob Dobbs: and consciousness is in quotes,
[05:25] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan foresees that consciousness will prove to be an effect.
[05:29] Bob Dobbs: of speeding up cliché to archetype processes in the brain.
[05:34] Bob Dobbs: So cliche hyphen archetype is italicized in the quote.
[05:40] Bob Dobbs: So Marshall McLuhan foresees that consciousness will prove to be an effect of speeding up cliche archetype processes in the brain.
[05:47] Bob Dobbs: So that's one part of the tetrad.
[05:51] Bob Dobbs: And what does he mean by that?
[05:57] Bob Dobbs: You affect you.
[05:58] Bob Dobbs: You speed up the turnover of a process of a new environment becoming a figure and a cliché.
[06:06] Bob Dobbs: And that is what consciousness is,
[06:07] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[06:08] Bob Dobbs: in a way,
[06:09] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said.
[06:10] Bob Dobbs: In general terms,
[06:11] Bob Dobbs: people became conscious of the previous environment once it was obsolesced or had become cliché and subsumed by a new invisible environment.
[06:20] Bob Dobbs: And then a cliché,
[06:22] Bob Dobbs: after a while,
[06:23] Bob Dobbs: becomes an archetype.
[06:25] Bob Dobbs: So it's like an aging or a...
[06:29] Bob Dobbs: A framing of a process,
[06:32] Bob Dobbs: different levels of framing,
[06:34] Bob Dobbs: which is called awareness or consciousness.
[06:37] Bob Dobbs: But that's only a bit of consciousness.
[06:41] Bob Dobbs: You have to see the process,
[06:43] Bob Dobbs: which I would say includes enhancement and chiasmus.
[06:51] Bob Dobbs: So
[06:52] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if Barry is streamlining it or...
[06:56] Bob Dobbs: Or that's why his consciousness is in quotes.
[06:58] Bob Dobbs: It's not real consciousness,
[07:00] Bob Dobbs: if it's just a cliche archetype process.
[07:02] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,
[07:05] Bob Dobbs: I have that quote,
[07:06] Bob Dobbs: and then
[07:07] Bob Dobbs: I give a little talk about it,
[07:10] Bob Dobbs: which is in...
[07:11] Cameron McEwen: Before we go on to your talk,
[07:14] Cameron McEwen: let me just say a few things about the quotation.
[07:18] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[07:18] Cameron McEwen: Because it's subject to different readings,
[07:22] Cameron McEwen: and being subject to different readings...
[07:26] Cameron McEwen: is sort of the,
[07:29] Cameron McEwen: gives me the impression of McLuhan's fingerprints on this sentence.
[07:39] Cameron McEwen: It's an example,
[07:43] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[07:44] Cameron McEwen: of the way
[07:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thought and wrote,
[07:50] Cameron McEwen: which is difficult for people to understand because
[07:53] Cameron McEwen: There are different levels of meaning built into the sentence.
[07:58] Cameron McEwen: So,
[07:59] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[08:00] Cameron McEwen: you pointed out that consciousness is in quotation marks.
[08:04] Cameron McEwen: So the question is,
[08:06] Cameron McEwen: well,
[08:07] Cameron McEwen: what is that?
[08:12] Cameron McEwen: One reading would be that consciousness,
[08:19] Cameron McEwen: and notice that he then goes on to say,
[08:22] Cameron McEwen: will prove.
[08:23] Cameron McEwen: to be.
[08:24] Cameron McEwen: So he seems to be saying that our understanding of consciousness is going to emerge in the future,
[08:37] Cameron McEwen: will prove to be.
[08:39] Cameron McEwen: But what consciousness proves to be in the future is what it always has been in the past,
[08:51] Bob Dobbs: right?
[08:51] Cameron McEwen: So...
[08:51] Bob Dobbs: It's an effect.
[08:52] Cameron McEwen: It's like,
[08:53] Cameron McEwen: pardon me?
[08:53] Bob Dobbs: It's an effect.
[08:56] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[08:56] Cameron McEwen: So,
[08:57] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[08:58] Cameron McEwen: the effect is another whole reading of this.
[09:03] Cameron McEwen: So the first reading I was suggesting is what might be called a scientific reading.
[09:11] Cameron McEwen: So if we put this into chemical terms.
[09:18] Cameron McEwen: We could say Marshall McLuhan foresees that chemistry will prove to be right now.
[09:24] Cameron McEwen: When chemistry emerged in the
[09:28] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,
[09:30] Cameron McEwen: there was nothing new about what it was talking about.
[09:36] Cameron McEwen: Chemistry had always been at work,
[09:39] Cameron McEwen: but it hadn't been known.
[09:41] Cameron McEwen: So what was new was a new way of.
[09:47] Cameron McEwen: focusing and talking about what had always been the case.
[09:52] Cameron McEwen: And so one reading of this sentence is that through a speeding up of cliche archetype processes,
[09:59] Cameron McEwen: it will become clear what consciousness always has been.
[10:05] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[10:05] Bob Dobbs: what it's always been is cliche,
[10:07] Bob Dobbs: and the knowing of it becomes archetype.
[10:11] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[10:11] Cameron McEwen: you could say that,
[10:13] Cameron McEwen: but there is no such thing as a cliché that is not related to an archetype.
[10:21] Cameron McEwen: So the ignorance of the cliché to archetype process was a cliché,
[10:30] Cameron McEwen: but it was always already part of a cliché to archetype process.
[10:35] Cameron McEwen: That process is something that was expressed,
[10:40] Cameron McEwen: but unknown.
[10:43] Cameron McEwen: Just in the exact same way as human bodies and the human environment was always chemical,
[10:50] Cameron McEwen: but it wasn't known.
[10:53] Cameron McEwen: So in that reading of the sentence,
[10:57] Cameron McEwen: what consciousness is emerges in an electric environment through the speeding up of the process that has always been in play.
[11:09] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[11:10] Bob Dobbs: and now there's a larger process.
[11:11] Bob Dobbs: the environment is making people aware of brain consciousness,
[11:17] Bob Dobbs: which is a subset.
[11:20] Bob Dobbs: It's not the complete consciousness that human is experiencing.
[11:23] Bob Dobbs: That's why it's being quoted.
[11:26] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[11:26] Cameron McEwen: but another reading is that consciousness will prove to be,
[11:31] Cameron McEwen: that is to say,
[11:32] Cameron McEwen: what consciousness was,
[11:36] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[11:36] Cameron McEwen: in the beginning,
[11:37] Cameron McEwen: when human beings first emerged on the planet.
[11:41] Cameron McEwen: And
[11:43] Cameron McEwen: I believe there's no such thing as an unconscious human being.
[11:47] Cameron McEwen: Human beings per se were conscious,
[11:50] Cameron McEwen: but it will prove to be.
[11:51] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,
[11:52] Cameron McEwen: we will come to understand that that consciousness was an effect of the speeding up of the cliche archetype processes.
[12:01] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,
[12:02] Cameron McEwen: the human being was a peculiar type of animal that had a kind of gap.
[12:10] Cameron McEwen: between cliche and archetype,
[12:13] Cameron McEwen: which made possible the flipping of cliches.
[12:19] Cameron McEwen: And the flipping of cliches was related to the flipping of archetypes.
[12:25] Cameron McEwen: So this peculiar type of animal existed in a fluid environment that wasn't available to all of the other animals because...
[12:39] Cameron McEwen: the cliche archetype process in the other animals was too slow.
[12:46] Cameron McEwen: They didn't have the flip that was always going on with humans,
[12:56] Cameron McEwen: and that
[12:57] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan called the recreating aspect of consciousness.
[13:06] Cameron McEwen: That is to say that for McLuhan,
[13:09] Cameron McEwen: The artistic creation is simply a replay of the creation that's always going on already in all human consciousness.
[13:19] Cameron McEwen: And that creation in human consciousness is the need of human beings to continually revisit the cliche archetype relation.
[13:36] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[13:37] Bob Dobbs: And it shows that the big complaint for people is they haven't got enough time to live.
[13:43] Bob Dobbs: There's too much speeding up of the environment.
[13:46] Bob Dobbs: But actually,
[13:47] Bob Dobbs: speeding up has a healthy effect.
[13:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[13:54] Cameron McEwen: a slowing down effect,
[13:55] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[13:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[13:56] Bob Dobbs: it flips and slows down,
[13:57] Bob Dobbs: but it's a healthy effect.
[13:58] Bob Dobbs: People are not getting dumber.
[14:00] Bob Dobbs: Their terms for what's described,
[14:02] Bob Dobbs: what's going on,
[14:03] Bob Dobbs: is what's dumb.
[14:05] Bob Dobbs: They need an update of their language,
[14:07] Bob Dobbs: which is what McLuhan attempted.
[14:09] Bob Dobbs: So you need to understand what this sentence is to get to the larger consciousness that's speeding up,
[14:17] Bob Dobbs: even disappearing.
[14:21] Bob Dobbs: There's no consciousness possible in the individual sense.
[14:24] Bob Dobbs: So that's why you have to look at the environment.
[14:27] Bob Dobbs: Your consciousness is outside of yourself.
[14:31] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[14:31] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[14:32] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[14:33] Cameron McEwen: So they...
[14:34] Cameron McEwen: The loss of identity in an electric environment cannot be seen only in terms of the
[14:44] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian identity.
[14:47] Cameron McEwen: The loss of identity has also to be seen as a kind of positive aspect of the new kind of social identity that becomes imperative within an electric environment.
[15:01] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[15:02] Bob Dobbs: it's a positive effect.
[15:04] Bob Dobbs: or healthy.
[15:05] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what.
[15:07] Bob Dobbs: Do you want to bring in value adjustment here?
[15:09] Bob Dobbs: Not really.
[15:10] Cameron McEwen: No,
[15:11] Cameron McEwen: I agree with you.
[15:13] Bob Dobbs: It's a new experience that if you're hip to it,
[15:17] Bob Dobbs: you can enjoy it.
[15:19] Bob Dobbs: Actually have your senses expanded to actually getting more perceptive.
[15:25] Cameron McEwen: It's revealing in the sense of light through.
[15:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[15:30] Bob Dobbs: transparency.
[15:31] Bob Dobbs: So what I say about it in my little blue type,
[15:38] Bob Dobbs: my conversational statement,
[15:40] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[15:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm reposting McLuhan's idea that the speed up of the cliche archetype process is creating consciousness.
[15:48] Bob Dobbs: I'm sprinkling some other key statements throughout,
[15:51] Bob Dobbs: repeating them to help project the idea of voluntary ESP.
[15:55] Bob Dobbs: So I guess the new consciousness gets people's only terms are intuition or ESP.
[16:04] Bob Dobbs: So I'm trying to explain how we get to ESP,
[16:07] Bob Dobbs: even though it's not that simple to define what ESP is.
[16:10] Bob Dobbs: I just did,
[16:12] Bob Dobbs: in technical terms,
[16:14] Bob Dobbs: what you were saying.
[16:15] Bob Dobbs: So this was my way to approach what is ESP,
[16:21] Bob Dobbs: using this quotation.
[16:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[16:23] Cameron McEwen: that's a good point.
[16:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[16:25] Bob Dobbs: So then I say,
[16:27] Bob Dobbs: this is not in the blue oral.
[16:29] Bob Dobbs: This is the technical talk,
[16:30] Bob Dobbs: textbook talk here in black.
[16:34] Bob Dobbs: Voluntary ESP is a condition of Web 2.0.
[16:39] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[16:39] Bob Dobbs: I have put note 48 by that.
[16:41] Bob Dobbs: What is that?
[16:44] Cameron McEwen: You refer to your essay,
[16:47] Cameron McEwen: cloning ESP.
[16:48] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[16:48] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[16:49] Bob Dobbs: cloning ESP.
[16:49] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[16:51] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[16:52] Bob Dobbs: so we'll get back to where it was.
[17:00] Cameron McEwen: That's the first line after the blue.
[17:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[17:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[17:06] Bob Dobbs: The digital technology,
[17:07] Bob Dobbs: then I say,
[17:08] Bob Dobbs: the digital technology that was being developed on the corporate and military fronts was not noticed.
[17:13] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan,
[17:13] Bob Dobbs: at best,
[17:14] Bob Dobbs: became regarded as an historian,
[17:17] Bob Dobbs: albeit a comprehensive one,
[17:19] Bob Dobbs: of analog media,
[17:21] Bob Dobbs: despite his chapter on automation in Understanding Media.
[17:25] Bob Dobbs: But soon,
[17:25] Bob Dobbs: the Global Membrane is affected by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs,
[17:29] Bob Dobbs: among others,
[17:30] Bob Dobbs: developing the personal computer.
[17:32] Bob Dobbs: That started to radically change the past.
[17:35] Bob Dobbs: all of the old institutions,
[17:36] Bob Dobbs: because that was McLuhan's later definition of the medium.
[17:40] Bob Dobbs: It was the institutions already given as part of the society and were cliché and known.
[17:46] Bob Dobbs: So the personal commuter is radically changing the past,
[17:50] Bob Dobbs: all of the old institutions.
[17:52] Bob Dobbs: However,
[17:52] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan himself saw that the notion of the medium as the message,
[17:57] Bob Dobbs: massage,
[17:58] Bob Dobbs: mess age,
[17:59] Bob Dobbs: and mass age was soon to be inapplicable to the law of the situation.
[18:05] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[18:05] Bob Dobbs: that's a pretty interesting statement.
[18:08] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan saw that the notion of the medium as the message massage,
[18:11] Bob Dobbs: message massage,
[18:12] Bob Dobbs: was soon to be inapplicable.
[18:13] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[18:14] Bob Dobbs: what the hell was I saying?
[18:16] Bob Dobbs: So
[18:17] Bob Dobbs: I make a statement,
[18:19] Bob Dobbs: orally,
[18:20] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan and Barry Nevitt serialized Take Today in the magazine Modern Office Procedures in 1976.
[18:27] Bob Dobbs: Talk about hiding it away.
[18:30] Bob Dobbs: So there's something that nobody knows.
[18:32] Bob Dobbs: Have you got those articles?
[18:33] Cameron McEwen: No,
[18:34] Cameron McEwen: I don't.
[18:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[18:36] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.
[18:37] Bob Dobbs: I'm not going to Xerox all of them right now,
[18:38] Bob Dobbs: but there's a lot of them.
[18:41] Bob Dobbs: They did about,
[18:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[18:42] Bob Dobbs: 12 issues,
[18:43] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[18:43] Bob Dobbs: and interesting summaries of Take Today.
[18:48] Cameron McEwen: But it's not just word for word from Take Today,
[18:52] Cameron McEwen: right?
[18:53] Bob Dobbs: No,
[18:54] Bob Dobbs: I don't think so.
[18:55] Bob Dobbs: I think it probably got some new statements in there.
[18:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[18:59] Cameron McEwen: that would be interesting to look at.
[19:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[19:01] Bob Dobbs: and what's amazing is,
[19:04] Bob Dobbs: Uh...
[19:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[19:06] Bob Dobbs: I showed up there in summer of 74 with Cynthia Lozier,
[19:12] Bob Dobbs: who knew McLuhan,
[19:14] Bob Dobbs: and she was a friend of Derrick de Kerckhove.
[19:15] Bob Dobbs: So we go into the office,
[19:18] Bob Dobbs: and it's Saturday afternoon,
[19:19] Bob Dobbs: it's open,
[19:21] Bob Dobbs: and we hear McLuhan and some other person talking upstairs,
[19:24] Bob Dobbs: and they're defining terms.
[19:26] Bob Dobbs: And I remember,
[19:28] Bob Dobbs: Marshall,
[19:28] Bob Dobbs: I could hear him say,
[19:29] Bob Dobbs: well,
[19:29] Bob Dobbs: inflation is pregnancy.
[19:31] Bob Dobbs: And the other guy said something to that.
[19:34] Bob Dobbs: So they were throwing their aphorisms back and forth to each other.
[19:38] Bob Dobbs: Then they became aware we were there,
[19:39] Bob Dobbs: so they came down.
[19:41] Bob Dobbs: And it turned out the man he was talking to was Barry Nevitt.
[19:45] Bob Dobbs: So that's when I met Barry.
[19:47] Bob Dobbs: And they were working on their serialization of Take Today.
[19:54] Bob Dobbs: So if I ever look at it again,
[19:57] Bob Dobbs: I'll see where the word predacy shows up,
[19:59] Bob Dobbs: if that's in the serialization.
[20:02] Bob Dobbs: But I remember him saying that.
[20:04] Bob Dobbs: And what a place to serialize it.
[20:08] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[20:08] Bob Dobbs: he was pretty well.
[20:10] Bob Dobbs: Nobody interested in him in 1976,
[20:13] Bob Dobbs: so what best he got.
[20:15] Bob Dobbs: And that's important.
[20:17] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[20:17] Bob Dobbs: it's a major book,
[20:18] Bob Dobbs: and serialization helps people get into it.
[20:21] Bob Dobbs: And they had to put it into an obscure magazine,
[20:24] Bob Dobbs: which is,
[20:25] Bob Dobbs: did he mean that?
[20:26] Bob Dobbs: Would he do that on purpose?
[20:29] Cameron McEwen: I have no idea.
[20:30] Cameron McEwen: Notice how it's kind of the reverse of what usually happens,
[20:34] Cameron McEwen: right?
[20:34] Cameron McEwen: Usually you have the serialization,
[20:37] Cameron McEwen: and then that turns into a book.
[20:39] Cameron McEwen: And that was already the case with people like Dickens and Dostoevsky in the
[20:45] Cameron McEwen: 19th century.
[20:46] Cameron McEwen: So here you have the
[20:49] Cameron McEwen: 20th century,
[20:50] Cameron McEwen: and you have first the book,
[20:51] Cameron McEwen: and then it gets serialized.
[20:54] Bob Dobbs: Talk about hiding it away.
[20:56] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[20:58] Cameron McEwen: I've never seen a single issue of modern office procedures.
[21:02] Cameron McEwen: I've looked,
[21:03] Cameron McEwen: but
[21:05] Cameron McEwen: I've never seen one,
[21:06] Cameron McEwen: never seen the opportunity to buy one.
[21:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[21:08] Bob Dobbs: it probably ran for a year or two,
[21:11] Bob Dobbs: and that was it.
[21:12] Cameron McEwen: So
[21:13] Bob Dobbs: I don't remember.
[21:16] Bob Dobbs: They must have had it at the library.
[21:18] Bob Dobbs: I don't remember buying it,
[21:19] Bob Dobbs: but I remember Xeroxing it a lot.
[21:22] Bob Dobbs: So,
[21:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[21:23] Bob Dobbs: U of T library,
[21:24] Bob Dobbs: somebody had it.
[21:26] Bob Dobbs: Toronto was a good place.
[21:27] Bob Dobbs: It was the paradise of libraries,
[21:29] Bob Dobbs: Toronto was.
[21:30] Bob Dobbs: It was a literate city.
[21:32] Bob Dobbs: Libraries everywhere.
[21:33] Bob Dobbs: So
[21:35] Bob Dobbs: I took advantage of that in 77,
[21:36] Bob Dobbs: 78.
[21:37] Bob Dobbs: when we first moved there.
[21:41] Bob Dobbs: So there is something unique.
[21:42] Bob Dobbs: Is it listed in the inventory at Ottawa?
[21:45] Cameron McEwen: No,
[21:47] Cameron McEwen: no.
[21:48] Cameron McEwen: That's a good question.
[21:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[21:52] Bob Dobbs: While we're talking,
[21:53] Bob Dobbs: if you have a chance,
[21:54] Bob Dobbs: tinker with your computer there and see.
[21:58] Bob Dobbs: You have the list if you come up with it,
[22:00] Bob Dobbs: but I don't want it to distract from you.
[22:01] Bob Dobbs: Maybe we'll do it after.
[22:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[22:04] Bob Dobbs: I don't remember seeing it there.
[22:07] Bob Dobbs: That'd be amazing.
[22:07] Bob Dobbs: This could be the key article or the key hidden something.
[22:12] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[22:15] Bob Dobbs: The next quote is from,
[22:20] Bob Dobbs: this is another obscure thing,
[22:22] Bob Dobbs: McLean's magazine.
[22:23] Bob Dobbs: There was a bunch of people interviewed in the January 74 issue.
[22:28] Bob Dobbs: And there's this little quote by Marshall McLuhan,
[22:29] Bob Dobbs: not that very much.
[22:31] Bob Dobbs: And the question is,
[22:33] Bob Dobbs: what's in store for 74?
[22:35] Bob Dobbs: X-ray vision.
[22:36] Cameron McEwen: Is this the whole quote that he had in the claims,
[22:41] Cameron McEwen: that issue?
[22:43] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.
[22:44] Bob Dobbs: I would say it is.
[22:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[22:47] Bob Dobbs: that's the whole quote.
[22:48] Bob Dobbs: Because,
[22:48] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[22:48] Bob Dobbs: everybody had just a little soundbite.
[22:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[22:51] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[22:51] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[22:52] Bob Dobbs: So what you're going to see in this one,
[22:54] Bob Dobbs: he talks about centralization.
[22:57] Bob Dobbs: He always said before that,
[22:58] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[22:58] Bob Dobbs: it's gone.
[23:00] Bob Dobbs: But he's saying it's still here and it will be enhanced as well as decentralizing.
[23:05] Bob Dobbs: That's new.
[23:05] Cameron McEwen: It's like a...
[23:06] Cameron McEwen: It's like a commentary on 2023.
[23:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[23:10] Bob Dobbs: And in that same time in 74,
[23:14] Bob Dobbs: in the fall of 74,
[23:15] Bob Dobbs: so 10 months later,
[23:17] Bob Dobbs: he writes a little notice for a banker's magazine.
[23:20] Bob Dobbs: And in that,
[23:21] Bob Dobbs: he says the banker will have to go into politics to get a,
[23:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[23:26] Bob Dobbs: economic power is not control in the Global Membrane.
[23:32] Bob Dobbs: So they have to become a figure in the White House.
[23:35] Bob Dobbs: So right there in the fall of 74,
[23:37] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if it was happening.
[23:38] Bob Dobbs: You have to look up the dates.
[23:41] Bob Dobbs: Nelson Rockefeller was being vetted for replacing,
[23:46] Bob Dobbs: to be the vice president for Gerald Ford right after Watergate.
[23:50] Bob Dobbs: So Nixon resigned on August 8,
[23:52] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[23:52] Bob Dobbs: 1974,
[23:54] Bob Dobbs: and then they had to get a new vice president because the former vice president,
[23:57] Bob Dobbs: Gerald Ford,
[23:58] Bob Dobbs: had become president.
[23:59] Bob Dobbs: So it's Nelson Rockefeller.
[24:02] Bob Dobbs: made his move to get into the White House.
[24:04] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[24:04] Bob Dobbs: that's when the conspiracy theory reality really took off among literate people,
[24:11] Bob Dobbs: journalists and ne'er-do-wells and malcontents,
[24:15] Bob Dobbs: because the church committee was going to happen around then,
[24:19] Bob Dobbs: 75,
[24:20] Bob Dobbs: investigate the CIA.
[24:21] Bob Dobbs: So it was all this top-down stuff.
[24:23] Bob Dobbs: And
[24:24] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was on it,
[24:27] Bob Dobbs: accidentally or intentionally,
[24:29] Bob Dobbs: by,
[24:29] Bob Dobbs: for the first time,
[24:30] Bob Dobbs: talking about the...
[24:32] Bob Dobbs: ongoing world of centralization.
[24:34] Bob Dobbs: And that was what was a figure in Watergate and in the church committee investigations of CIA and all that.
[24:43] Bob Dobbs: So now I remember him being interviewed around that time and he said,
[24:47] Bob Dobbs: we're into not only an information hunting environment,
[24:51] Bob Dobbs: we're into a manhunting environment.
[24:53] Bob Dobbs: That seemed to be the first time he said that,
[24:56] Bob Dobbs: manhunting.
[24:57] Bob Dobbs: So for me,
[24:59] Bob Dobbs: as the
[25:01] Bob Dobbs: Global theater shrunk and became a Global Membrane and then
[25:06] Bob Dobbs: Electric media is becoming digitized and so becoming smaller.
[25:10] Bob Dobbs: The human form,
[25:11] Bob Dobbs: or what I call the chemical body,
[25:13] Bob Dobbs: became figure again.
[25:15] Bob Dobbs: And so people were running around to look at the figure as the cause.
[25:20] Bob Dobbs: So it's actually the environment became embedded in the human form,
[25:25] Bob Dobbs: and the human form was now the cause,
[25:27] Bob Dobbs: not the technical environment.
[25:30] Bob Dobbs: And he has in Playboy,
[25:31] Bob Dobbs: in 1968,
[25:32] Bob Dobbs: he talks about,
[25:33] Bob Dobbs: or March 69,
[25:35] Bob Dobbs: He talks about the content becoming environment.
[25:38] Bob Dobbs: So he had that phrase a couple years later,
[25:40] Bob Dobbs: the user is the content.
[25:42] Bob Dobbs: So the chemical body is the content.
[25:44] Bob Dobbs: The content is the new ground.
[25:46] Bob Dobbs: And in the speed up,
[25:48] Bob Dobbs: which he talks about on page 11 of Take Today,
[25:52] Bob Dobbs: you can't tell the difference between the man and the figure,
[25:54] Bob Dobbs: the ground and man.
[25:56] Bob Dobbs: So it's all coming together there.
[25:58] Bob Dobbs: And so that's where looking for who's causing what.
[26:03] Bob Dobbs: which is what happened in Watergate,
[26:06] Bob Dobbs: the grievance,
[26:08] Bob Dobbs: where's the grievance applied?
[26:09] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan actually switched from technologies were the ground,
[26:15] Bob Dobbs: it had sped up to now the human form was the ground,
[26:19] Bob Dobbs: or at least as much as part of the technical ground.
[26:22] Bob Dobbs: And if you look at that quote,
[26:23] Bob Dobbs: I think I have it,
[26:24] Bob Dobbs: I should have it in here,
[26:27] Bob Dobbs: his statement,
[26:28] Bob Dobbs: a technical statement about man becomes both figure and ground.
[26:31] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm seeing in this quote here that I'm going to read.
[26:37] Bob Dobbs: I haven't read it yet.
[26:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[26:40] Cameron McEwen: Let me just say that
[26:42] Cameron McEwen: I'm doing some posts right now.
[26:46] Cameron McEwen: I've published two of them,
[26:47] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[26:48] Cameron McEwen: online at the
[26:50] Cameron McEwen: New Sciences website on exactly this topic.
[26:56] Cameron McEwen: I call it the harmonization of the planet.
[27:00] Cameron McEwen: which is a phrase from McLuhan.
[27:03] Bob Dobbs: Let me say this.
[27:04] Bob Dobbs: Remember the phrase in Take Today,
[27:07] Bob Dobbs: we go from the dehumanization of the
[27:09] Bob Dobbs: 19th century mechanical era to the superhumanization of the electronic media that is in Take Today.
[27:18] Bob Dobbs: That's another way of what you're talking about.
[27:21] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[27:21] Cameron McEwen: sir.
[27:22] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[27:22] Cameron McEwen: it is.
[27:23] Cameron McEwen: But
[27:23] Cameron McEwen: I think we need to be careful.
[27:25] Cameron McEwen: You said that the human form is the chemical body.
[27:31] Cameron McEwen: It includes the chemical body,
[27:33] Cameron McEwen: but I don't think you can equate the human form as
[27:38] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan uses it.
[27:40] Bob Dobbs: You have to bring in the discarnate face.
[27:42] Bob Dobbs: No,
[27:42] Bob Dobbs: I know it's difficult.
[27:44] Bob Dobbs: Later I get the four or five bodies model,
[27:46] Bob Dobbs: but
[27:47] Bob Dobbs: I'm just sort of talking simply now.
[27:52] Bob Dobbs: And yes,
[27:52] Bob Dobbs: it should be corrected what I'm saying,
[27:54] Bob Dobbs: but yeah,
[27:54] Bob Dobbs: it's not the human form.
[27:57] Bob Dobbs: But,
[27:57] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[27:58] Bob Dobbs: there is this rearview mirror aspect where humans are now superhumanized,
[28:03] Bob Dobbs: super angels or harmonizing of the environment.
[28:07] Bob Dobbs: The human thinks it's a person,
[28:09] Bob Dobbs: a chemical body,
[28:11] Bob Dobbs: and they run around manhunting chemical bodies to see who's causing what.
[28:15] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?
[28:17] Cameron McEwen: Sure,
[28:18] Cameron McEwen: sure.
[28:18] Bob Dobbs: That's the rearview mirror.
[28:20] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[28:21] Cameron McEwen: it's a misperception that sort of drives.
[28:26] Cameron McEwen: commerce and drives everything else.
[28:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[28:29] Bob Dobbs: that's probably the beginning of pointing out how the tech body and Trump merge.
[28:36] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[28:37] Cameron McEwen: There's more to Trump than Donald Trump,
[28:40] Bob Dobbs: the chemical body,
[28:43] Bob Dobbs: which people don't understand.
[28:44] Bob Dobbs: So,
[28:45] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[28:45] Bob Dobbs: so let's see what this quote says.
[28:48] Bob Dobbs: So here is one among ten people,
[28:52] Bob Dobbs: just another voice in the ether,
[28:54] Bob Dobbs: and he says,
[28:55] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.
[28:56] Bob Dobbs: Major political trends in the immediate future are bound to relate to the effects of TV on North Americans.
[29:04] Bob Dobbs: Does that mean not TV on the rest of the world?
[29:09] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[29:10] Bob Dobbs: is this like that's the environment,
[29:12] Bob Dobbs: TV in North America?
[29:14] Bob Dobbs: I don't think so,
[29:14] Bob Dobbs: but I'm just looking at what he's saying there.
[29:18] Cameron McEwen: I think he means that the effect is first of all to be seen.
[29:26] Cameron McEwen: on North Americans because the TV has been broadly in people's homes for longer here than elsewhere.
[29:36] Cameron McEwen: And so it's just you read,
[29:38] Cameron McEwen: it's like reading the future and the present.
[29:42] Cameron McEwen: It's not that the effects of TV will be limited here.
[29:46] Cameron McEwen: It's just they're readable here.
[29:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[29:49] Bob Dobbs: major trends.
[29:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[29:50] Bob Dobbs: major political trends in the immediate future are bound to relate to the effects of TV on North Americans.
[29:57] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[29:57] Bob Dobbs: if you actually said that today,
[29:58] Bob Dobbs: you'd be called a racist,
[29:59] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[29:59] Bob Dobbs: right?
[30:03] Bob Dobbs: Highlighting the North Americans too much.
[30:05] Bob Dobbs: So,
[30:06] Bob Dobbs: the power of TV to reveal the motives of action in the human countenance is part of the general x-ray process inherent in electric technology.
[30:14] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[30:14] Bob Dobbs: there's a sentence you never saw him say.
[30:18] Bob Dobbs: Words like that.
[30:19] Bob Dobbs: The power of TV to reveal the motives of action in the human countenance is part of the general x-ray process inherent in electric technology.
[30:27] Bob Dobbs: He has in Take Today the question,
[30:30] Bob Dobbs: is your face or your name your fame or something,
[30:35] Bob Dobbs: your key to fame?
[30:36] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that?
[30:38] Cameron McEwen: I don't remember that,
[30:39] Cameron McEwen: but it's interesting given recognition technologies.
[30:47] Cameron McEwen: going on and being used as passwords for computers.
[30:51] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[30:52] Bob Dobbs: So the human countenance,
[30:54] Bob Dobbs: the TV reveals a lot in the human countenance.
[30:59] Bob Dobbs: That's why people start wearing sunglasses all the time,
[31:01] Bob Dobbs: no matter where they are.
[31:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[31:05] Bob Dobbs: the Watergate hearings made this clear when the boys in the back room became show business.
[31:10] Bob Dobbs: Show business in quotes.
[31:12] Bob Dobbs: The impossibility of secrecy.
[31:14] Bob Dobbs: Impossibility of secrecy under electronic conditions makes espionage and,
[31:18] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[31:18] Bob Dobbs: there's manhunting the principal activity of our time and renders all the old forms of wheeler-dealering impracticable.
[31:30] Cameron McEwen: Notice the two readings of show business,
[31:34] Cameron McEwen: right?
[31:34] Cameron McEwen: You have show business as media and movies and all that sort of stuff.
[31:40] Cameron McEwen: But in an electric environment,
[31:42] Cameron McEwen: everything becomes...
[31:44] Cameron McEwen: the business of showing.
[31:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[31:46] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[31:47] Cameron McEwen: Electric technology allows things to be read.
[31:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[31:52] Bob Dobbs: There's no more secrecy.
[31:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[31:56] Bob Dobbs: The impossibility of secrecy under electronic conditions makes espionage and manhunting the principal activity of our time,
[32:03] Bob Dobbs: and they would show old-fashioned espionage and manhunting where the TV shows.
[32:07] Bob Dobbs: I Spy,
[32:08] Bob Dobbs: whatever other ones,
[32:10] Bob Dobbs: there was all kinds of them in the 60s and 70s.
[32:13] Bob Dobbs: And also detective shows.
[32:18] Cameron McEwen: Notice how it's typical of McLuhan to have a show business and quotes like that,
[32:24] Cameron McEwen: and then to explain what he's talking about.
[32:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[32:31] Cameron McEwen: Most people would read that as sort of going on to something else.
[32:36] Cameron McEwen: But in fact,
[32:37] Cameron McEwen: he's going backwards to say,
[32:39] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[32:40] Cameron McEwen: here's what I mean.
[32:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[32:42] Bob Dobbs: He often does that.
[32:44] Bob Dobbs: Everything's on show.
[32:45] Bob Dobbs: No secrets.
[32:47] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.
[32:48] Bob Dobbs: And what was I just saying before that?
[32:49] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I had something that I said.
[32:53] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.
[32:53] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember what I said a minute ago?
[32:55] Cameron McEwen: You were talking about manhunting.
[32:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[32:58] Bob Dobbs: manhunting.
[32:59] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[32:59] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[33:00] Bob Dobbs: In the 70s,
[33:01] Bob Dobbs: the major figures of TV for adults in the 70s were those detective shows like Beretta,
[33:06] Bob Dobbs: Columbo,
[33:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[33:09] Bob Dobbs: manhunting.
[33:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[33:11] Cameron McEwen: What was the John Cassavetes one was good.
[33:14] Bob Dobbs: I don't remember that.
[33:17] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[33:17] Bob Dobbs: you mean he was the Asian guy?
[33:21] Bob Dobbs: Kung Fu?
[33:23] Cameron McEwen: No,
[33:24] Cameron McEwen: There was
[33:25] Cameron McEwen: Mike Hammer was one,
[33:26] Cameron McEwen: and then the competition to
[33:30] Bob Dobbs: Mike Hammer.
[33:31] Bob Dobbs: Magnum P.I.
[33:32] Bob Dobbs: was another one.
[33:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[33:34] Cameron McEwen: there was a whole raft of them.
[33:37] Bob Dobbs: They were the main things.
[33:38] Bob Dobbs: I remember somebody telling me his father.
[33:40] Bob Dobbs: You couldn't talk to him on Sunday night.
[33:42] Bob Dobbs: He had to watch whatever was on,
[33:43] Bob Dobbs: Columbo or something.
[33:44] Bob Dobbs: Every week,
[33:45] Bob Dobbs: you had to watch it.
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: Because that was the way people replayed the process of cognition of living under electric conditions.
[33:53] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[33:53] Bob Dobbs: Everybody was a detective.
[33:55] Bob Dobbs: Just to see,
[33:56] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[33:56] Bob Dobbs: where it's at and what's going on,
[33:58] Bob Dobbs: you had to keep up with the pattern recognition.
[34:00] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[34:01] Bob Dobbs: So the game that mimed that,
[34:05] Bob Dobbs: the game is an art form that mimes the main activity of society.
[34:08] Bob Dobbs: So the main activity is espionage and...
[34:10] Bob Dobbs: And manhunting,
[34:11] Bob Dobbs: so the game of that would be detective shows.
[34:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[34:15] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[34:15] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[34:15] Bob Dobbs: Telly Savalas,
[34:16] Bob Dobbs: what was he?
[34:19] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[34:21] Bob Dobbs: He had suckers,
[34:23] Bob Dobbs: lollipops.
[34:23] Cameron McEwen: No,
[34:24] Cameron McEwen: I remember it well,
[34:25] Cameron McEwen: but I can't remember the names these people used.
[34:28] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[34:28] Cameron McEwen: I think one guy was Johnny Staccato was me.
[34:31] Bob Dobbs: I didn't watch them.
[34:33] Bob Dobbs: I wasn't into TV.
[34:34] Bob Dobbs: I just knew about them.
[34:36] Bob Dobbs: But the thing is.
[34:38] Bob Dobbs: These are archetypes for that era.
[34:42] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[34:43] Bob Dobbs: And that's the pop culture.
[34:44] Bob Dobbs: That's the Dickens of novels of the 19th century.
[34:47] Bob Dobbs: Now are these figures in different major media.
[34:51] Bob Dobbs: And the detective,
[34:54] Bob Dobbs: because television could be more the present than movies.
[34:57] Bob Dobbs: It could show the process across society faster.
[35:01] Bob Dobbs: So the detective shows...
[35:04] Cameron McEwen: Notice how these things have become impossible,
[35:07] Cameron McEwen: right?
[35:07] Cameron McEwen: You cannot have a good Western or a good detective show anymore.
[35:15] Bob Dobbs: They have to be self-conscious and deprecating,
[35:18] Bob Dobbs: self-deprecating.
[35:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[35:19] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[35:19] Cameron McEwen: So the only good cowboy is like a woman cowboy or a gay cowboy.
[35:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[35:25] Bob Dobbs: a gay cowboy.
[35:27] Cameron McEwen: And the only good detective is like a four-year-old girl or something.
[35:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[35:31] Bob Dobbs: or some transgender dude.
[35:34] Bob Dobbs: so this is interesting about this oh yeah,
[35:41] Bob Dobbs: so Marshall McLuhan was talking about the power and the reason for detective stories and Edgar Allan Poe and all that stuff in the
[35:47] Bob Dobbs: 19th century it was the beginning of the retracing of the stages of apprehension and the effects preceding the causes all that stuff was in the detective fiction of the 30s remember
[36:01] Bob Dobbs: Q.D. Leavis Thanks.
[36:03] Bob Dobbs: wrote about the sin of reading detective thrillers?
[36:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[36:08] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[36:11] Cameron McEwen: That was the power of the readership market over what was written by authors.
[36:25] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[36:26] Bob Dobbs: I would say it wasn't the power of the readership market.
[36:30] Bob Dobbs: It was the power of the detective form because it met the needs of the new electric probing.
[36:36] Bob Dobbs: Or even,
[36:37] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[36:37] Bob Dobbs: newspaper times in the 19th century.
[36:39] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan said that Edgar Allan Poe was a major inventor,
[36:44] Bob Dobbs: and he invented the detective story.
[36:47] Bob Dobbs: And then symbolist poets developed stuff from Poe in France.
[36:53] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan is talking about how the detective thing,
[36:56] Bob Dobbs: it's already a...
[36:58] Bob Dobbs: archetype almost for McLuhan in the 40s.
[37:00] Bob Dobbs: Sure,
[37:01] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[37:02] Bob Dobbs: So then we witness it as content in the global theater from the
[37:10] Bob Dobbs: 60s on.
[37:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[37:11] Cameron McEwen: just to put a footnote in there,
[37:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's essay on Poe was published,
[37:17] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[37:18] Cameron McEwen: in 1943.
[37:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[37:21] Cameron McEwen: And he then included it in
[37:23] Cameron McEwen: Interior landscape in 1969.
[37:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[37:28] Cameron McEwen: So it's one of the earliest essays included in the interior landscape.
[37:34] Cameron McEwen: And it's important to see that
[37:40] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thought it was topical
[37:43] Cameron McEwen: 25 years later.
[37:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[37:46] Bob Dobbs: and
[37:47] Bob Dobbs: I was talking to John Cage in New York about 1975.
[37:53] Bob Dobbs: He did a performance,
[37:54] Bob Dobbs: took a friend to him.
[37:55] Bob Dobbs: So we went out after.
[37:57] Bob Dobbs: a bunch of us you know at a restaurant to talk and uh at one point i said what do you make i knew all about his involvement with McLuhan but so i said uh something like what do you make of McLuhan he says well i regard McLuhan as a detective and
[38:14] Bob Dobbs: shortly after that McLuhan had himself photographed with the sherlock holmes costume on yeah yeah so um this is important You know,
[38:24] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan.
[38:25] Cameron McEwen: Cage was a detective of mushroom hunting.
[38:30] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[38:30] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[38:31] Bob Dobbs: And you have to look at,
[38:33] Bob Dobbs: here's the detective taking over in pop culture in the 70s.
[38:36] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan,
[38:36] Bob Dobbs: he didn't show himself as a detective in the
[38:38] Bob Dobbs: 50s or 60s.
[38:39] Bob Dobbs: He did it in the 70s to reflect what was going on and how he was on top of it with his costume.
[38:45] Bob Dobbs: So that's the part of the theater of McLuhan or the comedy of McLuhan.
[38:53] Cameron McEwen: Or the tragedy of McLuhan,
[38:55] Cameron McEwen: because it all reflects an inability to communicate,
[38:59] Cameron McEwen: driving him to try new means.
[39:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[39:03] Bob Dobbs: words weren't making it anymore.
[39:05] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[39:06] Bob Dobbs: So,
[39:08] Bob Dobbs: the impossibility of secrecy.
[39:10] Bob Dobbs: So,
[39:10] Bob Dobbs: see,
[39:11] Bob Dobbs: and he says in Take Today that,
[39:13] Bob Dobbs: or even on the back cover,
[39:15] Bob Dobbs: the book cover sleeve,
[39:16] Bob Dobbs: he talks about all the old institutions of espionage become fodder for showbiz.
[39:22] Bob Dobbs: it's
[39:22] Bob Dobbs: It's not actually where the business,
[39:25] Bob Dobbs: where the knowing is.
[39:28] Bob Dobbs: Political espionage,
[39:29] Bob Dobbs: corporate espionage is for the motivated somnambulist.
[39:34] Bob Dobbs: If you want to see what is worth knowing and what is the process of secrecy,
[39:39] Bob Dobbs: what is still secret,
[39:41] Bob Dobbs: even though secrecy per se,
[39:43] Bob Dobbs: bureaucratic secrecy is gone,
[39:45] Bob Dobbs: what is the new secrets?
[39:47] Bob Dobbs: That's what he was showing,
[39:49] Bob Dobbs: the new secrets,
[39:50] Bob Dobbs: temporary.
[39:51] Bob Dobbs: Anybody could see them if it was pointed out to them.
[39:58] Cameron McEwen: And notice how that's a replay of what he was doing with advertisements.
[40:04] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[40:05] Cameron McEwen: He was saying that what people think is manipulation in advertising isn't where the manipulation is.
[40:14] Cameron McEwen: The manipulation is behind that.
[40:18] Cameron McEwen: The focus groups.
[40:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[40:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[40:21] Cameron McEwen: you have to see it as a palimpsest.
[40:24] Cameron McEwen: You have to be able to look through the obvious manipulation of advertising to understand the real manipulation that's going on and that's environmental.
[40:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[40:36] Bob Dobbs: the people objected maybe instinctively to advertising as an aesthetic experience,
[40:42] Bob Dobbs: but they gladly joined any focus groups or any being in ads.
[40:47] Bob Dobbs: Everybody would try to be in ads,
[40:48] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[40:48] Bob Dobbs: So there's the hypocrisy there of getting it mixed up,
[40:53] Bob Dobbs: missing what the ads were.
[40:55] Bob Dobbs: And so the advertising,
[40:58] Bob Dobbs: it was accepted that they...
[40:59] Bob Dobbs: These companies could come around anywhere and say,
[41:01] Bob Dobbs: hey,
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: people,
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: we want to hear your opinions about this and that.
[41:05] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knew that was espionage.
[41:10] Bob Dobbs: Are you a communist?
[41:14] Cameron McEwen: I get email every single day asking for my opinion.
[41:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[41:20] Bob Dobbs: I've never given an opinion,
[41:21] Bob Dobbs: never had one.
[41:22] Cameron McEwen: No,
[41:22] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[41:23] Cameron McEwen: I would never ever answer anything like that.
[41:27] Bob Dobbs: But see,
[41:28] Bob Dobbs: this is such a...
[41:28] Cameron McEwen: They continue to arrive.
[41:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[41:31] Bob Dobbs: So this is...
[41:32] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[41:32] Bob Dobbs: that's the Android meme.
[41:33] Bob Dobbs: They have no respecter of persons.
[41:35] Bob Dobbs: They don't care what you said before.
[41:37] Bob Dobbs: You're still father.
[41:40] Bob Dobbs: But what's incredible is this great statement is in the middle of other stupid comments about whatever people said.
[41:47] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[41:47] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[41:48] Bob Dobbs: I think I only made a copy of McLuhan.
[41:51] Bob Dobbs: I should have copied everybody else just to contrast what silly things...
[41:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[41:55] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan would...
[41:56] Cameron McEwen: could be read as a comment on those comments.
[41:59] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[42:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[42:00] Bob Dobbs: he would say,
[42:00] Bob Dobbs: this article is the example of espionage.
[42:04] Bob Dobbs: You're not making any money off me,
[42:06] Bob Dobbs: so I'm going to say some stuff you don't understand.
[42:09] Bob Dobbs: But it's announcing,
[42:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[42:15] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about Watergate,
[42:16] Bob Dobbs: that's the headlines coming out of the White House,
[42:19] Bob Dobbs: that's the ground on the content level,
[42:22] Bob Dobbs: and about the process of what was going on.
[42:24] Bob Dobbs: And,
[42:24] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[42:25] Bob Dobbs: he said advertising was part of daily espionage.
[42:29] Bob Dobbs: So there's so much in this little quote.
[42:33] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[42:34] Cameron McEwen: this one sentence about electric power will be used by the old guard of 19th century minds to implement even further the patterns of centralized hardware and authority.
[42:46] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[42:46] Cameron McEwen: that's that's a perfect reading of
[42:49] Cameron McEwen: 2023. Yeah.
[42:52] Bob Dobbs: Electric power.
[42:53] Cameron McEwen: Amazing.
[42:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[42:54] Bob Dobbs: electric power will be used by the old guard of 19th century minds,
[42:57] Bob Dobbs: which is still there.
[42:59] Bob Dobbs: Old media,
[42:59] Bob Dobbs: it's hard to get rid of old media or old memes.
[43:04] Bob Dobbs: Electric power will be used to implement,
[43:06] Bob Dobbs: hijack even further the established,
[43:10] Bob Dobbs: I'm putting in the word established,
[43:11] Bob Dobbs: the established patterns of centralized hardware and authority.
[43:14] Bob Dobbs: And there will be a continuing rejection of consumer values and specialism.
[43:19] Bob Dobbs: And there's the problem.
[43:20] Bob Dobbs: The bureaucracy that runs the consumer level,
[43:23] Bob Dobbs: The economy,
[43:25] Bob Dobbs: the money zone,
[43:28] Bob Dobbs: they got a problem selling their stuff.
[43:33] Bob Dobbs: There's a rejection.
[43:34] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[43:35] Bob Dobbs: there's also a flip maybe by the 80s where people's identity became shopping.
[43:42] Bob Dobbs: As fundamentalism took over around the world,
[43:45] Bob Dobbs: religious fundamentalism,
[43:46] Bob Dobbs: America's techno involvement of new environments became our fundamentalism.
[43:52] Bob Dobbs: So people took on shopping as a statement of political identity.
[43:58] Bob Dobbs: And Bush,
[43:59] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[43:59] Bob Dobbs: in 2001,
[44:01] Bob Dobbs: after
[44:02] Bob Dobbs: 9-1-1, he told everybody,
[44:03] Bob Dobbs: OK,
[44:03] Bob Dobbs: resume shopping,
[44:05] Bob Dobbs: which is a crazy statement.
[44:07] Bob Dobbs: So this is a 70s mood,
[44:10] Bob Dobbs: 60s and
[44:11] Bob Dobbs: 70s, that's going to be flipped in the 80s.
[44:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[44:15] Cameron McEwen: And notice after COVID,
[44:18] Cameron McEwen: people were supposed to resume shopping,
[44:20] Cameron McEwen: right?
[44:23] Cameron McEwen: The same meme has been flipped over over and over again for the last 50 years.
[44:32] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[44:32] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[44:32] Bob Dobbs: isn't there a problem with shopping and that now?
[44:35] Bob Dobbs: Isn't the economy suffering or inflation or something?
[44:40] Bob Dobbs: They weren't able to retrieve the shopping as well.
[44:44] Cameron McEwen: No,
[44:45] Cameron McEwen: the malls are closing,
[44:46] Cameron McEwen: etc.
[44:47] Cameron McEwen: But if you go to stores these days.
[44:51] Cameron McEwen: They're packed.
[44:53] Cameron McEwen: The freeways are packed.
[44:54] Cameron McEwen: The stores are packed.
[44:55] Cameron McEwen: People are trying to get back to where they were,
[44:59] Cameron McEwen: but they have no idea where they were.
[45:01] Cameron McEwen: So it's very hard to do.
[45:04] Bob Dobbs: And the malls are closing?
[45:06] Cameron McEwen: What's that?
[45:07] Bob Dobbs: The malls are closing?
[45:09] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[45:09] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[45:09] Cameron McEwen: Why?
[45:10] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[45:10] Bob Dobbs: they're packed.
[45:11] Bob Dobbs: Nobody's got any money to buy anything?
[45:15] Cameron McEwen: I think that's the case,
[45:16] Cameron McEwen: but for decades,
[45:19] Cameron McEwen: malls have been sort of becoming lower class,
[45:25] Cameron McEwen: and that's why they're closing.
[45:27] Cameron McEwen: Oh.
[45:29] Cameron McEwen: The big brands have been extracting themselves from malls.
[45:35] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[45:35] Bob Dobbs: so that's also the...
[45:36] Bob Dobbs: Take over Amazon,
[45:37] Bob Dobbs: digital shopping.
[45:39] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[45:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[45:42] Bob Dobbs: you don't need to go to the mall.
[45:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[45:44] Cameron McEwen: so people don't go to the mall to shop.
[45:46] Cameron McEwen: They go to the mall to be in some sort of social experience.
[45:51] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[45:51] Bob Dobbs: and that wore out over the last 40 years,
[45:54] Bob Dobbs: 30 years.
[45:55] Bob Dobbs: It's now low class.
[45:56] Bob Dobbs: It's a ghetto now.
[45:58] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[46:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[46:00] Bob Dobbs: a lot of homeless people probably hanging out there.
[46:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[46:03] Bob Dobbs: so there's an interesting effect.
[46:09] Bob Dobbs: So that's a very,
[46:10] Bob Dobbs: he doesn't talk about this other places.
[46:13] Bob Dobbs: Electric power will be used by the old guard to further prop up patterns of centralized hardware and authority.
[46:21] Bob Dobbs: See,
[46:21] Bob Dobbs: he always thought,
[46:22] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[46:22] Bob Dobbs: that's all going to go away,
[46:24] Bob Dobbs: or he emphasized that point.
[46:26] Bob Dobbs: But this is the first time you're seeing,
[46:29] Bob Dobbs: it's the start of the movement toward 1984,
[46:35] Bob Dobbs: that icon.
[46:35] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[46:35] Cameron McEwen: And part of it.
[46:36] Cameron McEwen: Part of the problem for a person like McLuhan is that what he is seeing is 50 or 75 or 100 years in the future,
[46:46] Cameron McEwen: and he's talking about that,
[46:48] Cameron McEwen: and he can't believe that other people don't see it.
[46:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[46:50] Cameron McEwen: That nobody sees it.
[46:53] Bob Dobbs: Yep,
[46:55] Bob Dobbs: which is odd.
[46:56] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[46:57] Bob Dobbs: it's a strange experience being a prophet.
[47:00] Bob Dobbs: I know it well myself.
[47:03] Bob Dobbs: What's wrong with you people?
[47:05] Bob Dobbs: It's pretty obvious what I'm seeing.
[47:08] Bob Dobbs: What was that?
[47:09] Bob Dobbs: He used to quote a cartoon,
[47:11] Bob Dobbs: Li'l Abner or something.
[47:13] Bob Dobbs: Barry used to quote Li'l Abner.
[47:15] Bob Dobbs: If anybody can see,
[47:16] Bob Dobbs: I can see it.
[47:17] Bob Dobbs: I think that was his statement.
[47:20] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[47:20] Bob Dobbs: so this is a great quote.
[47:21] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[47:21] Bob Dobbs: why did I put it there?
[47:25] Bob Dobbs: So what do I say?
[47:28] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[47:29] Bob Dobbs: I raised that question.
[47:30] Bob Dobbs: What's special about this quotation?
[47:31] Bob Dobbs: This is my oral rambling.
[47:33] Bob Dobbs: What's special about this quotation?
[47:35] Bob Dobbs: It's the only time
[47:40] Bob Dobbs: I ever saw one of its themes.
[47:42] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan usually talking about trends of decentralization,
[47:45] Bob Dobbs: but here he's saying,
[47:45] Bob Dobbs: no,
[47:46] Bob Dobbs: centralization will continue.
[47:48] Bob Dobbs: And that gets us,
[47:49] Bob Dobbs: well,
[47:49] Bob Dobbs: you were talking about this,
[47:50] Bob Dobbs: that gets us up to the Patriot Act,
[47:52] Bob Dobbs: 2001.
[47:53] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[47:54] Bob Dobbs: that old obsolete surveillance,
[47:57] Bob Dobbs: centralized surveillance,
[47:58] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother operations,
[47:59] Bob Dobbs: still goes on.
[48:00] Bob Dobbs: It's a phase of technology in the first half of the 20th century,
[48:04] Bob Dobbs: but it doesn't go away.
[48:06] Bob Dobbs: One can't stop it.
[48:08] Bob Dobbs: While the decentralization is people making their own clothes,
[48:11] Bob Dobbs: for example,
[48:12] Bob Dobbs: girls making up their own fashion styles,
[48:14] Bob Dobbs: rejecting packaged consumer patterns.
[48:16] Bob Dobbs: That started in the
[48:18] Bob Dobbs: 70s. A lot of the boomer women would start buying
[48:21] Bob Dobbs: 20s clothes.
[48:22] Bob Dobbs: I remember that said.
[48:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[48:25] Bob Dobbs: That's what's important about this quotation above.
[48:27] Bob Dobbs: It's the first time McLuhan acknowledges that centralization is carrying on.
[48:31] Bob Dobbs: It's still occurring.
[48:32] Bob Dobbs: And you see the previous sentence in the quotation rehearses the typical espionage and manhunting theme.
[48:39] Bob Dobbs: That's in quotes,
[48:40] Bob Dobbs: espionage and manhunting theme.
[48:42] Bob Dobbs: Normal business activity.
[48:44] Bob Dobbs: Watergate was the old boys'
[48:46] Bob Dobbs: network in showbiz.
[48:48] Bob Dobbs: It was a known in the information society that secrecy was obsolete.
[48:53] Bob Dobbs: There was nothing to hide.
[48:55] Bob Dobbs: Therefore,
[48:55] Bob Dobbs: the hidden big brother is casually exposed here by McLuhan.
[49:00] Bob Dobbs: It's referred to.
[49:01] Bob Dobbs: It's not a threat.
[49:03] Bob Dobbs: What's a threat now is not to know or understand the X-ray power of television in the later media.
[49:12] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[49:12] Bob Dobbs: that's a mouthful.
[49:13] Bob Dobbs: Any comment on that?
[49:16] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[49:17] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[49:17] Cameron McEwen: it is a mouthful,
[49:18] Cameron McEwen: but it's more or less what we were talking about prior to your blue text here.
[49:24] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[49:26] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan saw that something like
[49:32] Cameron McEwen: TikTok would be seen as a centralizing power.
[49:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[49:42] Bob Dobbs: this is his theme of everybody getting involved,
[49:45] Bob Dobbs: participation.
[49:46] Bob Dobbs: This is hyper-participation,
[49:48] Bob Dobbs: and it gets organized.
[49:50] Bob Dobbs: By this time,
[49:51] Bob Dobbs: the managers of the society understand this.
[49:54] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[49:55] Cameron McEwen: So it seems like it's decentralized.
[49:58] Cameron McEwen: Everybody can do their own thing.
[50:05] Cameron McEwen: They do their own thing at minute
[50:08] Cameron McEwen: X and at minute X plus one.
[50:11] Cameron McEwen: And those two things don't have to have anything to do with each other,
[50:16] Cameron McEwen: even for the same person.
[50:19] Cameron McEwen: And then you take that over all of society.
[50:22] Cameron McEwen: And it seems like you have extreme decentralization,
[50:27] Cameron McEwen: but in fact,
[50:28] Cameron McEwen: it's extreme centralization.
[50:31] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[50:31] Bob Dobbs: So then by the time you get to Reagan,
[50:33] Bob Dobbs: you have a yearning for a sense of psychological decentralization.
[50:38] Bob Dobbs: So the 80s are considered super conformist beyond whatever people thought the
[50:44] Bob Dobbs: 50s were.
[50:46] Bob Dobbs: And so the hyper conformity,
[50:48] Bob Dobbs: at least of one aspect of public consciousness,
[50:52] Bob Dobbs: He comes in with the Reagan era,
[50:55] Bob Dobbs: and Reagan is seen as trying to get the world back to a small town mentality.
[51:00] Bob Dobbs: But see,
[51:00] Bob Dobbs: that's the image of centralization.
[51:03] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[51:06] Cameron McEwen: Centralization gets broken apart into bad centralization and good centralization.
[51:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[51:14] Cameron McEwen: And so under Reagan,
[51:15] Cameron McEwen: what people are looking for is how do we find good centralization again?
[51:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[51:22] Bob Dobbs: So the conspiracy theorists are still running amok in the 80s and seeing this as a trilateral commission and David Rockefeller taking over.
[51:33] Bob Dobbs: They don't see it's actually the people want a centralized.
[51:38] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother's good.
[51:39] Bob Dobbs: They like Big Brother.
[51:40] Bob Dobbs: They like Ollie North.
[51:41] Bob Dobbs: His plan called Rex 84 in 1984 came out of the
[51:47] Bob Dobbs: Iran-Contra syndrome.
[51:49] Bob Dobbs: But the interesting thing is...
[51:51] Bob Dobbs: People are misidentifying causes and effects.
[51:56] Bob Dobbs: And so,
[51:57] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[51:58] Bob Dobbs: what's his name?
[51:59] Bob Dobbs: Biden.
[52:00] Bob Dobbs: He came out last year saying there's too many people being conspiracy theorists.
[52:04] Bob Dobbs: He complained about it,
[52:06] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[52:08] Bob Dobbs: See,
[52:08] Bob Dobbs: that's a that's a symptom of misidentifying what's going on.
[52:12] Bob Dobbs: Like you're saying this 2023 is looking for a centralization.
[52:17] Bob Dobbs: But of course,
[52:17] Bob Dobbs: for the whole.
[52:19] Bob Dobbs: Global Membrane,
[52:20] Bob Dobbs: which is called the world or globalism.
[52:22] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[52:23] Bob Dobbs: technically,
[52:24] Bob Dobbs: the old terrestrial environment is what people think is being organized into a global structure.
[52:30] Bob Dobbs: That's a long time ago.
[52:31] Bob Dobbs: We've got solar government problems is what's really trying to be organized now.
[52:36] Bob Dobbs: A yearning for centralization on the solar level.
[52:40] Bob Dobbs: So what I'm saying here and what you're supporting is mandatory.
[52:47] Bob Dobbs: definitions of the new elements.
[52:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm laying out the
[52:51] Bob Dobbs: E equals MC squared,
[52:52] Bob Dobbs: the technical terms for talking about what's happening,
[52:55] Bob Dobbs: not the journalistic terms or the journalistic panics.
[53:03] Bob Dobbs: Be interesting if a lot of people heard this stuff,
[53:06] Bob Dobbs: what would they do with it?
[53:07] Bob Dobbs: You know?
[53:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[53:12] Cameron McEwen: that's sort of a great question hanging over the world.
[53:17] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[53:18] Bob Dobbs: so do I need to reread this again?
[53:27] Bob Dobbs: I don't think so.
[53:29] Bob Dobbs: So I do make this interesting statement.
[53:31] Bob Dobbs: What's a threat now is not to know or understand the X-ray power of television in the later media.
[53:37] Bob Dobbs: So people like Kroker and the Postmodernists will start talking about a screenal economy.
[53:44] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't a TV economy.
[53:46] Bob Dobbs: There were screens everywhere,
[53:47] Bob Dobbs: computers,
[53:48] Bob Dobbs: TV.
[53:49] Bob Dobbs: So
[53:50] Bob Dobbs: I think that screen is what I'm getting at,
[53:52] Bob Dobbs: the X-ray power of television for all media,
[53:56] Bob Dobbs: all analog media.
[53:58] Bob Dobbs: That's the beginning of the digitized ground makes the screen the X-ray of everything.
[54:07] Bob Dobbs: And then there's no secrets.
[54:09] Bob Dobbs: So then everything becomes obscene or what was called obscene becomes...
[54:15] Cameron McEwen: marketable yeah so if we go back uh to the quotation from Barry Nevitt at the bottom of 135 uh Marshall McLuhan foresees that consciousness will prove to be an effect of the speeding up you
[54:35] Cameron McEwen: say in regard to that that um
[54:39] Cameron McEwen: What's a threat now is not to know or understand the x-ray power of television and later media.
[54:45] Cameron McEwen: What you're saying,
[54:46] Cameron McEwen: along with Barry,
[54:48] Cameron McEwen: is that there's a new sense of consciousness that is shaping things.
[54:55] Cameron McEwen: But as we go about shaping things according to that sort of consciousness,
[55:02] Cameron McEwen: we don't know what we're doing.
[55:04] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[55:05] Cameron McEwen: And that's the threat.
[55:08] Bob Dobbs: And then that becomes a desire for external centralization.
[55:12] Bob Dobbs: Somebody out there must know what they're doing.
[55:14] Bob Dobbs: Let them take over.
[55:17] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[55:18] Cameron McEwen: And there's a good and a bad sense to that,
[55:20] Cameron McEwen: right?
[55:20] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[55:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[55:20] Bob Dobbs: so 1984 comes in and nobody is worried about it.
[55:28] Bob Dobbs: It's a joke.
[55:29] Bob Dobbs: They don't see it.
[55:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[55:32] Cameron McEwen: It's incredible.
[55:34] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[55:34] Bob Dobbs: it flipped.
[55:35] Bob Dobbs: So that's why he said back in 1950,
[55:38] Bob Dobbs: Orwell was a doofus.
[55:39] Bob Dobbs: He had no clue what was going on.
[55:40] Bob Dobbs: He was not preparing for us,
[55:43] Bob Dobbs: preparing what was happening for us.
[55:47] Bob Dobbs: So I remember Christopher Hitchens,
[55:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[55:50] Bob Dobbs: the famous Washington journalist,
[55:53] Bob Dobbs: praising George Orwell in 1984.
[55:56] Bob Dobbs: There's a guy who,
[55:58] Bob Dobbs: rearview mirror,
[55:59] Bob Dobbs: and I actually met him at one point,
[56:01] Bob Dobbs: There was a conference in...
[56:04] Bob Dobbs: In New York City I went to at New School Social Research.
[56:08] Bob Dobbs: I don't know when,
[56:09] Bob Dobbs: this would be mid-90s.
[56:12] Bob Dobbs: And on the panel was
[56:15] Bob Dobbs: George Steiner,
[56:16] Bob Dobbs: a friend of McLuhan,
[56:19] Bob Dobbs: Christopher Hitchens,
[56:22] Bob Dobbs: Zizek,
[56:23] Bob Dobbs: before he became well-known.
[56:24] Bob Dobbs: You know that guy Zizek?
[56:25] Bob Dobbs: Z-I-Z-E-K?
[56:26] Bob Dobbs: Sure,
[56:26] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[56:28] Bob Dobbs: Zizek and some other well-known guy.
[56:32] Bob Dobbs: So before the conference,
[56:34] Bob Dobbs: I did not know who Zizek was.
[56:35] Bob Dobbs: I saw this guy in a very hyper state of panic talking to someone else.
[56:41] Bob Dobbs: And I said,
[56:41] Bob Dobbs: that guy is like having a breakdown in front of everybody.
[56:47] Bob Dobbs: So then the panel started,
[56:49] Bob Dobbs: and this guy,
[56:52] Bob Dobbs: who turned out to be Zizek,
[56:54] Bob Dobbs: continued to be in a hyper,
[56:56] Bob Dobbs: paranoid,
[56:57] Bob Dobbs: odd,
[56:58] Bob Dobbs: hyper state,
[57:00] Bob Dobbs: very unapproved,
[57:01] Bob Dobbs: very...
[57:01] Bob Dobbs: inappropriate compared to the relaxed George Steiner and Christopher Hitchens and the other guys.
[57:06] Cameron McEwen: He's still like that today.
[57:08] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?
[57:09] Cameron McEwen: He's still like that today.
[57:11] Bob Dobbs: So
[57:12] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[57:12] Bob Dobbs: this guy's ridiculous.
[57:14] Bob Dobbs: I missed the ground.
[57:15] Bob Dobbs: He was the ground.
[57:16] Bob Dobbs: He was going to become the big figure,
[57:18] Bob Dobbs: the McLuhan of the next 10 years,
[57:20] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[57:22] Bob Dobbs: And I saw him when he was,
[57:24] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[57:26] Bob Dobbs: maybe he was seeing something no one else saw or his concepts that he could say about it.
[57:31] Bob Dobbs: And so his writing style was becoming popular,
[57:34] Bob Dobbs: but he probably was ready to be noticed and he wasn't being noticed enough.
[57:40] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[57:41] Bob Dobbs: Christopher Hitchens,
[57:43] Bob Dobbs: first of all,
[57:44] Bob Dobbs: Steiner,
[57:46] Bob Dobbs: before or after the panel,
[57:47] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember,
[57:48] Bob Dobbs: he came up to me and says,
[57:50] Bob Dobbs: we just got talking and
[57:53] Bob Dobbs: I think I brought up McLuhan and that.
[57:55] Bob Dobbs: And he says,
[57:56] Bob Dobbs: why are you here?
[57:57] Bob Dobbs: So I'd like to see what...
[58:00] Bob Dobbs: academics are doing.
[58:01] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[58:02] Bob Dobbs: we're a waste of time,
[58:03] Bob Dobbs: Bob.
[58:05] Bob Dobbs: Steiner told me that he was being honored at the New York Library around the same time,
[58:11] Bob Dobbs: public library.
[58:11] Bob Dobbs: He was a big archetype.
[58:15] Bob Dobbs: Yet he didn't believe in anything he was doing.
[58:17] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[58:19] Bob Dobbs: you're a waste of your time,
[58:20] Bob Dobbs: Bob.
[58:20] Bob Dobbs: But I knew I wasn't.
[58:21] Bob Dobbs: I wouldn't have known he would say that.
[58:23] Bob Dobbs: That's why I knew we were not spies,
[58:24] Bob Dobbs: for fuck's sake.
[58:26] Bob Dobbs: I was doing great espionage.
[58:28] Bob Dobbs: And then Christopher Hitchens comes up to me.
[58:30] Bob Dobbs: And he says,
[58:33] Bob Dobbs: what do you know about,
[58:34] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[58:34] Bob Dobbs: I asked him questions at that point.
[58:35] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[58:36] Bob Dobbs: my question showed that I knew a lot about McLuhan and it was relevant to what they were saying.
[58:41] Bob Dobbs: So Hitchens comes up to me and he says,
[58:44] Bob Dobbs: you know anything about Harold Innis?
[58:45] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[58:46] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[58:46] Bob Dobbs: I know a lot.
[58:47] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[58:48] Bob Dobbs: I need to find out some stuff.
[58:49] Bob Dobbs: I want to write about McLuhan,
[58:50] Bob Dobbs: but I'm going to do it through the Innis angle.
[58:53] Bob Dobbs: So I don't know what he knew.
[58:54] Bob Dobbs: So a couple days later,
[58:56] Bob Dobbs: I give him my phone number.
[58:57] Bob Dobbs: He left a message and...
[59:00] Bob Dobbs: And then I called him back,
[59:01] Bob Dobbs: no answer.
[59:02] Bob Dobbs: And then he called me back and he said he was leaving town and he couldn't meet.
[59:06] Bob Dobbs: We were supposedly starting to get to meet.
[59:09] Bob Dobbs: And
[59:09] Bob Dobbs: I never heard from him,
[59:10] Bob Dobbs: so he forgot about it.
[59:12] Bob Dobbs: Other things changed his mind or got him focused.
[59:15] Bob Dobbs: It was probably just after Wired magazine,
[59:18] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[59:18] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was back in the imagery again.
[59:21] Bob Dobbs: So he would have to do his hit job on him like he did
[59:25] Bob Dobbs: Mother Teresa.
[59:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[59:27] Cameron McEwen: that was his style.
[59:28] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[59:29] Bob Dobbs: But he got distracted.
[59:30] Bob Dobbs: So that was the end of my
[59:34] Bob Dobbs: Hitchens engagement.
[59:35] Bob Dobbs: And let's see.
[59:37] Bob Dobbs: There was a guy named Paul Ryan who was in the audience.
[59:40] Bob Dobbs: You know that name,
[59:41] Bob Dobbs: Paul Ryan?
[59:43] Cameron McEwen: I know the politician,
[59:44] Cameron McEwen: but I doubt that that's the same guy.
[59:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[59:47] Bob Dobbs: So he came up and introduced himself to me.
[59:50] Bob Dobbs: And,
[59:51] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[59:51] Bob Dobbs: he introduced myself to me.
[59:55] Bob Dobbs: He was a McLuhan fan,
[59:57] Bob Dobbs: so as I got to know him and he invited me over to his place in the West Side and gave me his history,
[1:00:02] Bob Dobbs: he was
[1:00:03] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter's assistant at the Fordham scene in 68.
[1:00:08] Bob Dobbs: And he was a priest,
[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: and he was listening to
[1:00:13] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan and those guys in 66,
[1:00:14] Bob Dobbs: 67,
[1:00:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:00:15] Bob Dobbs: when they were doing the Tony Schwartz scene,
[1:00:18] Bob Dobbs: and I heard him on WBAI,
[1:00:19] Bob Dobbs: and he said,
[1:00:20] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:00:20] Bob Dobbs: these guys are interesting.
[1:00:21] Bob Dobbs: This is a guy who's a Catholic,
[1:00:23] Bob Dobbs: but maybe he's not sure if being a priest is important anymore.
[1:00:26] Bob Dobbs: So he went over and got talking to McLuhan,
[1:00:30] Bob Dobbs: and then
[1:00:31] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter showed up,
[1:00:32] Bob Dobbs: and he became a great friend of
[1:00:35] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter's. So,
[1:00:36] Bob Dobbs: again...
[1:00:37] Bob Dobbs: By going to this ridiculous panel in the afternoon of a Wednesday that nobody would go to,
[1:00:44] Bob Dobbs: I had all kinds of interesting connections came out of it.
[1:00:47] Bob Dobbs: That's what you had to do.
[1:00:47] Bob Dobbs: You had to go to the ground.
[1:00:49] Bob Dobbs: The panels were ground in a lot of cultural activity.
[1:00:53] Bob Dobbs: And that's part of the meaning of my book,
[1:00:54] Bob Dobbs: Phatic Communion.
[1:00:55] Bob Dobbs: It's a panel,
[1:00:56] Bob Dobbs: which is the main form of knowing for everybody in society from the 80s on.
[1:01:05] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:01:05] Bob Dobbs: corporations,
[1:01:06] Bob Dobbs: medicine,
[1:01:07] Bob Dobbs: everything,
[1:01:07] Bob Dobbs: everybody went to panels,
[1:01:08] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:01:09] Bob Dobbs: Go to conventions,
[1:01:11] Bob Dobbs: business write-off.
[1:01:12] Bob Dobbs: But the panel,
[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: a mosaic of opinions that
[1:01:17] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was supporting,
[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: it's like an interdisciplinary on the popular level.
[1:01:22] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I mean?
[1:01:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:01:25] Bob Dobbs: So it's a major cultural phenomenon.
[1:01:26] Bob Dobbs: You don't hear people talk about it as a cultural phenomenon,
[1:01:29] Bob Dobbs: which I'm doing right now for the first time.
[1:01:31] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:01:31] Bob Dobbs: I've said it before,
[1:01:32] Bob Dobbs: but...
[1:01:33] Bob Dobbs: for here.
[1:01:34] Cameron McEwen: Dali talks about panels in that interview he did in 68.
[1:01:39] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[1:01:41] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan,
[1:01:42] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[1:01:42] Cameron McEwen: was saying that everything has to become panels,
[1:01:46] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:01:46] Cameron McEwen: The news has to become panels and all this.
[1:01:49] Cameron McEwen: And when
[1:01:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan sort of laid down the pattern that was followed by the news teams.
[1:02:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:02:04] Bob Dobbs: friendly teamness and teaming.
[1:02:06] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:02:07] Bob Dobbs: Friendness or something.
[1:02:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:02:08] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:02:09] Bob Dobbs: That thing he did for ABC News in 71,
[1:02:12] Bob Dobbs: that pamphlet.
[1:02:13] Bob Dobbs: So what,
[1:02:14] Bob Dobbs: I don't remember seeing him say everything has to be a panel.
[1:02:17] Bob Dobbs: Where did you see that?
[1:02:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:02:21] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that McLuhan said that.
[1:02:23] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:02:23] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[1:02:24] Cameron McEwen: that's what networking is all about,
[1:02:26] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:02:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:02:27] Cameron McEwen: It's a panel.
[1:02:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:02:30] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying that.
[1:02:31] Cameron McEwen: Dali talks about panels.
[1:02:33] Bob Dobbs: That's amazing.
[1:02:35] Cameron McEwen: And talks about them being dead.
[1:02:39] Bob Dobbs: That means they're obsolete.
[1:02:41] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's going to be doing it.
[1:02:43] Cameron McEwen: That's correct.
[1:02:45] Bob Dobbs: So that's an interesting pattern.
[1:02:47] Bob Dobbs: So why were we talking about the panels?
[1:02:50] Bob Dobbs: I like my idea.
[1:02:51] Bob Dobbs: It's the popularization of interdisciplinary studies.
[1:02:53] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:02:56] Bob Dobbs: explorations in the
[1:02:57] Bob Dobbs: 50s, McLuhan's group was the first panel in academia.
[1:03:01] Bob Dobbs: Turned into a magazine.
[1:03:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:03:05] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:03:05] Bob Dobbs: What else were we saying?
[1:03:07] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:03:08] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:03:08] Bob Dobbs: panels were what I was an anthropologist of.
[1:03:10] Bob Dobbs: I studied panels.
[1:03:11] Bob Dobbs: I went to a lot of them in New York.
[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: That's where I got to see all the names in so many fields,
[1:03:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:03:17] Bob Dobbs: just by.
[1:03:18] Bob Dobbs: And the other phenomenon was
[1:03:21] Bob Dobbs: Barnes & Noble authors.
[1:03:23] Bob Dobbs: That's another big phenomenon in literate America is the authors coming around doing a book tour.
[1:03:32] Bob Dobbs: And speaking at bookstores and everybody,
[1:03:37] Bob Dobbs: they have to be grilled by the public.
[1:03:39] Bob Dobbs: They have to be interrogated,
[1:03:41] Bob Dobbs: investigated.
[1:03:43] Bob Dobbs: They have to go through the public espionage of them.
[1:03:49] Cameron McEwen: You can say that manhunting is going on by the consumers of these people.
[1:03:53] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:03:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:03:57] Bob Dobbs: manhunting is...
[1:03:59] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:04:00] Bob Dobbs: I always thought if I had a book and I had a tour,
[1:04:02] Bob Dobbs: I wouldn't like it.
[1:04:03] Bob Dobbs: That would be a drag,
[1:04:04] Bob Dobbs: going around having to sign books and answer people's stuff.
[1:04:11] Bob Dobbs: I'd want to give good answers,
[1:04:13] Bob Dobbs: but you couldn't in a short,
[1:04:14] Bob Dobbs: brief bullshit,
[1:04:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:04:15] Bob Dobbs: just be phatic.
[1:04:16] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:04:18] Bob Dobbs: I'm glad my book didn't make it.
[1:04:21] Cameron McEwen: You'd be monetizing your signature.
[1:04:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:04:24] Bob Dobbs: I remember Carolyn,
[1:04:26] Bob Dobbs: she had a book coming out.
[1:04:29] Bob Dobbs: Might have been the miracle of magnesium in 2001 or 2002.
[1:04:32] Bob Dobbs: And so she was scheduled to go on a book tour right after it turned out to be 9-1-1.
[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: So it got canceled.
[1:04:40] Bob Dobbs: She was happy because you had to do it.
[1:04:42] Bob Dobbs: The company would make you go on a book tour.
[1:04:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:04:44] Cameron McEwen: it was probably part of the contract.
[1:04:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:04:47] Bob Dobbs: And so she was relieved by 9-1-1 from doing that.
[1:04:50] Bob Dobbs: So that was good.
[1:04:52] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.
[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: We did that quote.
[1:04:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:04:59] Cameron McEwen: so we're at 137.
[1:05:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:05:02] Cameron McEwen: And you have already done the blue text,
[1:05:08] Cameron McEwen: but the black text.
[1:05:10] Cameron McEwen: which comes after that,
[1:05:14] Cameron McEwen: is interesting because we've sort of already talked about it without getting into it.
[1:05:22] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:05:23] Bob Dobbs: so
[1:05:23] Bob Dobbs: I see that it starts above that,
[1:05:28] Bob Dobbs: the black stuff.
[1:05:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:05:32] Bob Dobbs: the message.
[1:05:33] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying
[1:05:34] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan himself saw that the notion of the medium as a massage...
[1:05:38] Bob Dobbs: Message,
[1:05:38] Bob Dobbs: massage,
[1:05:39] Bob Dobbs: message,
[1:05:39] Bob Dobbs: message was soon to be inapplicable to the law of the situation.
[1:05:43] Bob Dobbs: So this is,
[1:05:44] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[1:05:46] Bob Dobbs: the effects there,
[1:05:47] Bob Dobbs: the decrease of consumer values,
[1:05:50] Bob Dobbs: the espionage.
[1:05:52] Bob Dobbs: People actually stopped buying stuff maybe in the long run because they're too busy spying and watching.
[1:05:57] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:05:58] Bob Dobbs: the huge popularity of the discussion shows on Fox and CNN.
[1:06:04] Bob Dobbs: It's nothing but panels.
[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: It's not news anymore.
[1:06:07] Bob Dobbs: opinionating.
[1:06:11] Cameron McEwen: Part of the problem was that people already had everything.
[1:06:14] Cameron McEwen: It became hard to find stuff that you didn't have.
[1:06:18] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:06:18] Bob Dobbs: so you'd watch panels trying to explain why you didn't have anything anymore.
[1:06:22] Cameron McEwen: But it's also McLuhan's notion of communism,
[1:06:25] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:06:27] Cameron McEwen: We already have it.
[1:06:29] Cameron McEwen: It's not something that we need a revolution for,
[1:06:31] Cameron McEwen: number one,
[1:06:32] Cameron McEwen: and number two,
[1:06:33] Cameron McEwen: it's not something we need to fear,
[1:06:35] Cameron McEwen: because we already are it.
[1:06:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:06:37] Bob Dobbs: I noticed in Ria,
[1:06:38] Bob Dobbs: just think of that today,
[1:06:40] Bob Dobbs: in Lewis,
[1:06:42] Bob Dobbs: he knows that people are going through hardware communism.
[1:06:45] Bob Dobbs: He calls it the proletarianization,
[1:06:48] Bob Dobbs: and the elites don't notice this,
[1:06:51] Bob Dobbs: that everybody is proletarianized.
[1:06:54] Bob Dobbs: But he was also picking up,
[1:06:56] Bob Dobbs: starting to perceive the software communism,
[1:06:59] Bob Dobbs: which he called the educationalist state.
[1:07:02] Bob Dobbs: And he saw this information thing taking over.
[1:07:06] Bob Dobbs: Obsolescing the artist,
[1:07:09] Bob Dobbs: but he doesn't get as far as McLuhan.
[1:07:11] Bob Dobbs: When you read Lewis,
[1:07:12] Bob Dobbs: you see that McLuhan redid
[1:07:15] Bob Dobbs: Lewis and completed Lewis and sort of tidied up the probing,
[1:07:21] Bob Dobbs: the groping of Lewis.
[1:07:25] Cameron McEwen: Could the reverse also be said?
[1:07:30] Cameron McEwen: When I read Lewis...
[1:07:33] Cameron McEwen: I see too much conceptualization going on.
[1:07:37] Cameron McEwen: He's trying to find what the pattern is.
[1:07:41] Cameron McEwen: And what happens with McLuhan is he kind of blows up the conceptualization going on in Lewis and lets things be more messy.
[1:07:51] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:07:51] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:07:51] Bob Dobbs: Lewis knows that his conceptualization is not his real goal.
[1:07:57] Bob Dobbs: It's not getting anywhere.
[1:07:58] Bob Dobbs: So that's why he spends a lot of time satirizing.
[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: other people's concepts and in a way wasting his time.
[1:08:05] Bob Dobbs: But at the time before McLuhan,
[1:08:09] Bob Dobbs: the people weren't ready for what McLuhan was going to do.
[1:08:12] Bob Dobbs: So they were quadriplegically engaging with all kinds of concepts and getting rigidified on the centralized level in politics in the
[1:08:20] Bob Dobbs: 30s. And Lewis was caught in the middle of it all with a greater awareness,
[1:08:25] Bob Dobbs: but he didn't have the process clear enough.
[1:08:29] Bob Dobbs: that McLuhan got later because it was later.
[1:08:33] Bob Dobbs: And it was a replay for McLuhan.
[1:08:35] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:08:36] Bob Dobbs: he replayed Lewis.
[1:08:38] Bob Dobbs: But
[1:08:39] Bob Dobbs: I would say that Lewis,
[1:08:41] Bob Dobbs: in the end,
[1:08:41] Bob Dobbs: he makes fun of concepts.
[1:08:44] Bob Dobbs: He is ultimately working from a perceptual level.
[1:08:47] Bob Dobbs: And that's why they can't figure out what he is,
[1:08:49] Bob Dobbs: what's his opinion.
[1:08:51] Bob Dobbs: And he seems to be just hopping all over the place,
[1:08:54] Bob Dobbs: taking pot shots at everybody.
[1:08:56] Bob Dobbs: But he has to know their concepts to do it.
[1:08:59] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:09:00] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:09:00] Cameron McEwen: I think that's true.
[1:09:04] Cameron McEwen: So he's sort of doing hip hop,
[1:09:08] Cameron McEwen: but he's not happy about having to do hip hop.
[1:09:14] Cameron McEwen: He would like to be able to write or draw in a way that made sense in a sense of sense that has disappeared.
[1:09:29] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:09:29] Bob Dobbs: he was trying to get back to the waltz.
[1:09:30] Bob Dobbs: He called it space.
[1:09:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:09:33] Bob Dobbs: As a verse versus time and rhythm.
[1:09:34] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:09:35] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:09:36] Cameron McEwen: Get away from time.
[1:09:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:09:38] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:09:39] Bob Dobbs: but at the same time,
[1:09:40] Bob Dobbs: it's interesting.
[1:09:43] Bob Dobbs: He is learning to adapt to the present,
[1:09:45] Bob Dobbs: even though he's complaining,
[1:09:46] Bob Dobbs: fighting all the way.
[1:09:48] Bob Dobbs: He's doing better than other people.
[1:09:50] Bob Dobbs: That's America causing man.
[1:09:52] Bob Dobbs: In 48,
[1:09:52] Bob Dobbs: he tells the Europeans that,
[1:09:55] Bob Dobbs: you don't know,
[1:09:56] Bob Dobbs: America is the future.
[1:09:57] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:09:57] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:09:57] Bob Dobbs: Europeans are still snobbish toward America.
[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: They're
[1:10:02] Bob Dobbs: Parisian sensibility.
[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: like Trudeau,
[1:10:05] Bob Dobbs: when he was a young rich kid in the
[1:10:07] Bob Dobbs: 40s, he goes to Paris.
[1:10:08] Bob Dobbs: They think that's where it's at,
[1:10:09] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:10:10] Bob Dobbs: They don't get what's going on in America.
[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: You probably can look it up.
[1:10:15] Bob Dobbs: Trudeau probably went to
[1:10:16] Bob Dobbs: Paris in 1948,
[1:10:19] Bob Dobbs: and here's Lewis telling them,
[1:10:19] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:10:19] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:10:20] Bob Dobbs: go down to New York City.
[1:10:23] Bob Dobbs: Go just to America,
[1:10:24] Bob Dobbs: and you'll see the real action of the global theater becoming the global theater.
[1:10:29] Bob Dobbs: So Lewis,
[1:10:37] Bob Dobbs: he's very good at,
[1:10:39] Bob Dobbs: if you can read him closely,
[1:10:42] Bob Dobbs: you don't...
[1:10:44] Bob Dobbs: end up labeling a fascist or a Hitler lover or something.
[1:10:47] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:10:47] Cameron McEwen: no,
[1:10:47] Cameron McEwen: of course not.
[1:10:49] Bob Dobbs: But that's all the establishment could say about him back then.
[1:10:55] Bob Dobbs: He was threatening people with his knowing.
[1:10:58] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:10:58] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:11:00] Cameron McEwen: They were afraid of what he was saying.
[1:11:03] Cameron McEwen: They couldn't digest it,
[1:11:05] Cameron McEwen: and so they had to attack him.
[1:11:08] Cameron McEwen: And you see that they had to silence him.
[1:11:12] Bob Dobbs: He got cancelled.
[1:11:13] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:11:14] Cameron McEwen: A lot of what was done to Lewis is what's done regularly to everybody.
[1:11:20] Bob Dobbs: To you and your neighbor.
[1:11:21] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:11:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:11:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:11:24] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:11:24] Bob Dobbs: So we're doing,
[1:11:31] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:11:31] Bob Dobbs: I go down here and there's a quote,
[1:11:34] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:11:34] Bob Dobbs: culture of quantum fluctuations.
[1:11:37] Bob Dobbs: It got cut off.
[1:11:39] Bob Dobbs: Do you see the black part?
[1:11:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:11:42] Cameron McEwen: I don't know where that comes from.
[1:11:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:11:45] Bob Dobbs: so,
[1:11:45] Bob Dobbs: okay.
[1:11:45] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:11:45] Bob Dobbs: I'm just going to go back up and read the next quote above it.
[1:11:50] Bob Dobbs: So this is an interview,
[1:11:55] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan,
[1:11:56] Bob Dobbs: McLean's Magazine,
[1:11:57] Bob Dobbs: March 7,
[1:11:58] Bob Dobbs: 1987.
[1:12:02] Bob Dobbs: Why do I have that in letters?
[1:12:08] Bob Dobbs: Why would this interview be in the letters?
[1:12:10] Bob Dobbs: Is that correct?
[1:12:13] Cameron McEwen: I've kind of lost where you are.
[1:12:15] Cameron McEwen: What page are you on?
[1:12:16] Bob Dobbs: At the top of 138.
[1:12:23] Bob Dobbs: The previous quote was 136 into 137.
[1:12:26] Bob Dobbs: Then there was the long blue part.
[1:12:28] Bob Dobbs: And then a new quote I'm going to do,
[1:12:30] Bob Dobbs: which is at the bottom,
[1:12:31] Bob Dobbs: 137.
[1:12:33] Bob Dobbs: But I'm looking at the identity of it,
[1:12:35] Bob Dobbs: 138.
[1:12:37] Bob Dobbs: And it says it's an interview with McLuhan in letters.
[1:12:43] Cameron McEwen: letters is kind of a funny book in that sometimes they stuck stuff in as a letter that had actually appeared in some other form.
[1:12:58] Cameron McEwen: And that may be what's going on here.
[1:13:00] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure.
[1:13:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:13:01] Bob Dobbs: we'll have to look at that later.
[1:13:03] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,
[1:13:04] Bob Dobbs: this is a...
[1:13:05] Bob Dobbs: Now Marshall McLuhan coming near the end of his days.
[1:13:07] Bob Dobbs: It's 1977.
[1:13:10] Bob Dobbs: So here's what he says.
[1:13:13] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:13:14] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[1:13:14] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:13:15] Bob Dobbs: when things change at very high speeds,
[1:13:16] Bob Dobbs: a need for continuity develops.
[1:13:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:13:18] Bob Dobbs: there he is,
[1:13:20] Bob Dobbs: the centralization retrieval desire.
[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: The novelty of acoustic and tactility in the 50s and
[1:13:30] Bob Dobbs: 60s for North Americans has worn off.
[1:13:32] Bob Dobbs: They're now yearning to get back to their chief feature,
[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: as Gurdjieff would call it,
[1:13:36] Bob Dobbs: which is visual space and the fundamentalism of the culture built on the book.
[1:13:41] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to get back to that now,
[1:13:43] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:13:43] Bob Dobbs: It's gone too far.
[1:13:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:13:47] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:13:48] Cameron McEwen: that's the dialectic slash dilemma that is still at play.
[1:13:55] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:13:56] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:13:56] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:13:57] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[1:13:57] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:13:57] Bob Dobbs: when things change at very high speeds,
[1:13:59] Bob Dobbs: a need for continuity develops.
[1:14:01] Bob Dobbs: You see,
[1:14:01] Bob Dobbs: you're in such a complete discontinuity at high speed.
[1:14:05] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:14:05] Bob Dobbs: see,
[1:14:05] Bob Dobbs: what's good about these quotes is
[1:14:08] Bob Dobbs: This is way beyond Madison Avenue,
[1:14:09] Bob Dobbs: 1967 McLuhan's.
[1:14:12] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan dealing with what's changed in the next decade and what's coming,
[1:14:16] Bob Dobbs: and no one talks about what he saw in his later work in the
[1:14:22] Bob Dobbs: 70s. You know what I mean?
[1:14:24] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[1:14:26] Cameron McEwen: He's the only one that sees,
[1:14:28] Cameron McEwen: he saw then what's going on now,
[1:14:32] Cameron McEwen: and people still don't see what he saw then.
[1:14:35] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:14:36] Bob Dobbs: The
[1:14:39] Bob Dobbs: I was going to say,
[1:14:39] Bob Dobbs: he,
[1:14:42] Bob Dobbs: I forget.
[1:14:43] Cameron McEwen: You were talking about his later work.
[1:14:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:14:46] Bob Dobbs: but then a big change is his op-ed in 1974,
[1:14:53] Bob Dobbs: A Media Approach to Inflation.
[1:14:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:14:56] Cameron McEwen: I knew you were going to bring that up.
[1:14:58] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?
[1:14:59] Cameron McEwen: I knew you were going to bring that up.
[1:15:00] Bob Dobbs: That's an archetype of Bob's mind.
[1:15:05] Bob Dobbs: But the thing is,
[1:15:07] Bob Dobbs: I would be reading this stuff in the 70s and go over to the Coach House and the regulars there.
[1:15:13] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know about it.
[1:15:14] Bob Dobbs: They didn't read it.
[1:15:15] Bob Dobbs: They didn't,
[1:15:16] Bob Dobbs: hey,
[1:15:16] Bob Dobbs: look,
[1:15:17] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan talking what's happening right now and making interesting patterns.
[1:15:22] Bob Dobbs: And some old fogey would say,
[1:15:25] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:15:26] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan hasn't been relevant.
[1:15:27] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:15:27] Bob Dobbs: I remember.
[1:15:29] Bob Dobbs: He says with the Cliché to Archetype in 71,
[1:15:33] Bob Dobbs: 70-71,
[1:15:34] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[1:15:35] Bob Dobbs: this book is way better than Understanding Media.
[1:15:40] Bob Dobbs: And you have nothing since the last 50 years of saying McLuhan's main work is Understanding Media.
[1:15:46] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:15:47] Bob Dobbs: that's silly.
[1:15:49] Bob Dobbs: But these,
[1:15:50] Bob Dobbs: so what is good about what I'm presenting here are these quotes that nobody knows.
[1:15:54] Bob Dobbs: And we're spelling out,
[1:15:56] Bob Dobbs: look at what they're saying.
[1:15:58] Bob Dobbs: It's beyond what anybody else is saying as a futurist.
[1:16:02] Bob Dobbs: He's actually talking technically about what's happening to people.
[1:16:06] Bob Dobbs: So he says,
[1:16:07] Bob Dobbs: you see,
[1:16:07] Bob Dobbs: you're in such a complete discontinuity at high speed.
[1:16:11] Bob Dobbs: Everything you're looking at now is gone in a second.
[1:16:14] Bob Dobbs: And our demands are to hang on to older things.
[1:16:18] Bob Dobbs: So the antique store,
[1:16:19] Bob Dobbs: there's the antique store fashion I was telling you.
[1:16:21] Bob Dobbs: So the antique stores and the love of taking the varnish off of old tables,
[1:16:26] Bob Dobbs: revealing their original state.
[1:16:27] Bob Dobbs: And that sort of thing is a passion today.
[1:16:29] Bob Dobbs: Remember in Toronto in the 70s,
[1:16:31] Bob Dobbs: everybody got into rebuilding their homes or getting old homes and rebuilding them.
[1:16:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:16:37] Cameron McEwen: still going on.
[1:16:40] Bob Dobbs: I don't see any of that in Maui,
[1:16:41] Bob Dobbs: so I'm out of touch there.
[1:16:44] Bob Dobbs: And revealing their original state and that sort of thing,
[1:16:46] Bob Dobbs: it's a passion today.
[1:16:48] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:16:48] Bob Dobbs: he was always noticing what his neighbors were doing.
[1:16:51] Bob Dobbs: That's all he was doing.
[1:16:53] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't trying to write a novel.
[1:16:54] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't trying to do it.
[1:16:56] Bob Dobbs: The work became a novel in a way later,
[1:16:59] Bob Dobbs: it accumulated,
[1:16:59] Bob Dobbs: but he wasn't trying to make a movie.
[1:17:02] Bob Dobbs: With conversational media,
[1:17:04] Bob Dobbs: you could just notice what your neighbor's doing and go on Robert Fulford's afternoon show and say a few patterns.
[1:17:10] Bob Dobbs: That was it.
[1:17:11] Bob Dobbs: You wrapped it up,
[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: put it away.
[1:17:13] Bob Dobbs: Hollywood would try to make movies out of it,
[1:17:16] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:17:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:17:18] Cameron McEwen: so what I see going on here is McLuhan looking at the surface of things and saying,
[1:17:25] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[1:17:25] Cameron McEwen: here's what's going on.
[1:17:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:17:27] Bob Dobbs: he was postmodern.
[1:17:29] Bob Dobbs: The surface told more than,
[1:17:30] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:17:30] Bob Dobbs: literate depth.
[1:17:32] Bob Dobbs: And remember his definition of Menippean satire to somebody,
[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: and maybe that
[1:17:37] Bob Dobbs: Korniansky guy in 1976,
[1:17:40] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[1:17:41] Bob Dobbs: Menippean satire is a satire of the surface manners of life.
[1:17:45] Bob Dobbs: The surface manners.
[1:17:47] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:17:48] Cameron McEwen: But notice that when you have...
[1:17:55] Cameron McEwen: Discontinuity at high speed.
[1:17:58] Cameron McEwen: That is disconcerting,
[1:18:00] Cameron McEwen: disorienting,
[1:18:01] Cameron McEwen: disorganizing.
[1:18:04] Cameron McEwen: But on the other hand,
[1:18:05] Cameron McEwen: it permits a new kind of reading.
[1:18:09] Cameron McEwen: So the discontinuity of surface and depth is what allows the reading of the surface.
[1:18:19] Bob Dobbs: And that's fitting its wake.
[1:18:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:18:24] Cameron McEwen: everything in an electric environment.
[1:18:26] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:18:27] Cameron McEwen: The electric environment reveals,
[1:18:30] Cameron McEwen: but it does not reveal except through discontinuity.
[1:18:36] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:18:37] Bob Dobbs: you're getting to tactility is becoming a figure.
[1:18:40] Bob Dobbs: So what is the ground?
[1:18:42] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:18:44] Bob Dobbs: I was sort of seeing the human form,
[1:18:48] Bob Dobbs: the Anthropomorphic Physical as the ground.
[1:18:50] Bob Dobbs: I was trying to show that in my chart.
[1:18:53] Bob Dobbs: the
[1:18:54] Bob Dobbs: Just to see if there was any human reality for yourself was the new pressure.
[1:18:59] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:18:59] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:19:01] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:19:01] Cameron McEwen: That's discontinuity as explosion.
[1:19:06] Cameron McEwen: And what had to be appreciated was the implosion in that explosion.
[1:19:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:19:13] Cameron McEwen: So the human form is the natural need of humans for creativity.
[1:19:22] Cameron McEwen: creativity.
[1:19:23] Cameron McEwen: It's the gap between cliche and archetype.
[1:19:26] Cameron McEwen: It's what everybody is doing all the time,
[1:19:30] Cameron McEwen: but don't know that they're doing.
[1:19:32] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:19:33] Bob Dobbs: so see,
[1:19:33] Bob Dobbs: this is where I explain why my quadrant,
[1:19:36] Bob Dobbs: the fifth quadrant on the chart,
[1:19:38] Bob Dobbs: is Anthropomorphic Physical.
[1:19:40] Bob Dobbs: You have people now,
[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: the kids,
[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: whether they want to be puppies and things,
[1:19:48] Bob Dobbs: the anthropomorphic
[1:19:50] Bob Dobbs: is being challenged or being broken up and nobody knows what is anthropomorphic other than the environments around them.
[1:19:58] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:19:59] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:20:00] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:20:01] Bob Dobbs: So let's see if I get to that.
[1:20:02] Bob Dobbs: I think I do get to that with the AP and the AM later,
[1:20:06] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:20:07] Bob Dobbs: So this is the first time we've walked right into explaining the effect of tactility becoming figure,
[1:20:15] Bob Dobbs: which is what he lays out in
[1:20:18] Bob Dobbs: Media Approach to Inflation.
[1:20:19] Bob Dobbs: And that becomes gambling on futures,
[1:20:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:20:23] Bob Dobbs: in Wall Street.
[1:20:25] Bob Dobbs: Gambling on the interval.
[1:20:27] Bob Dobbs: The interval is now figure.
[1:20:29] Bob Dobbs: And it's a rapid interval.
[1:20:31] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:20:31] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:20:32] Bob Dobbs: like,
[1:20:32] Bob Dobbs: we know that the Wall Street companies,
[1:20:35] Bob Dobbs: they move out to New Jersey to be near the machine that runs Wall Street.
[1:20:41] Bob Dobbs: And they try to get their cables as close to that building so that they can see the signals before the other guy,
[1:20:48] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:20:49] Cameron McEwen: Uh-huh.
[1:20:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:20:50] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:20:50] Bob Dobbs: Which is ridiculously non-human,
[1:20:55] Bob Dobbs: for fuck's sake.
[1:20:56] Bob Dobbs: But what is the economy when you're doing that?
[1:20:59] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I mean?
[1:21:02] Bob Dobbs: What is the economy?
[1:21:04] Bob Dobbs: It's hyper-communication in a ridiculous level where it's just for the machines.
[1:21:10] Bob Dobbs: It's basically the machines.
[1:21:13] Cameron McEwen: And notice the conflict with the word economy,
[1:21:17] Cameron McEwen: which basically means household in Greek.
[1:21:20] Cameron McEwen: So you have a distension.
[1:21:25] Cameron McEwen: Between this crazy idea of the economy being entirely a matter of being first,
[1:21:35] Cameron McEwen: and then you have economy as the household,
[1:21:39] Cameron McEwen: that is to say,
[1:21:42] Cameron McEwen: what at the end of the day is last.
[1:21:45] Cameron McEwen: And those things become dissociated.
[1:21:50] Bob Dobbs: And then people don't know they are families anymore.
[1:21:53] Bob Dobbs: And then they start claiming they're different genders.
[1:21:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:21:59] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:22:01] Bob Dobbs: so he's saying the varnishing is a new passion.
[1:22:07] Bob Dobbs: In order to think,
[1:22:08] Bob Dobbs: you have to forget most of what you are experiencing in order to relate it to earlier things that you knew.
[1:22:15] Bob Dobbs: Otherwise,
[1:22:16] Bob Dobbs: you can't...
[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: for anything from what you were seeing.
[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: What an incredible statement.
[1:22:21] Bob Dobbs: No publicity for that.
[1:22:23] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:22:23] Bob Dobbs: that's in McLean's magazine.
[1:22:25] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:22:25] Bob Dobbs: Peter,
[1:22:26] Bob Dobbs: who was the guy at McLean's that liked him?
[1:22:28] Bob Dobbs: The editor,
[1:22:29] Bob Dobbs: Peter somebody.
[1:22:30] Bob Dobbs: He didn't stop.
[1:22:32] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:22:32] Bob Dobbs: he highlighted the interview,
[1:22:33] Bob Dobbs: but nobody made a headline out of it.
[1:22:38] Cameron McEwen: The guy's name started with Newman.
[1:22:41] Cameron McEwen: Newman.
[1:22:41] Cameron McEwen: Peter
[1:22:42] Cameron McEwen: Newman, yeah.
[1:22:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:22:44] Bob Dobbs: So the thing is,
[1:22:45] Bob Dobbs: is that...
[1:22:46] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:22:46] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan got Global Village and Media Business Messages as a headline.
[1:22:49] Bob Dobbs: This should have been a headline.
[1:22:51] Bob Dobbs: In order to think,
[1:22:52] Bob Dobbs: you have to forget most of what you're experiencing in order to relate it to earlier things that you knew.
[1:22:56] Bob Dobbs: Otherwise,
[1:22:56] Bob Dobbs: you can't infer anything from what you're seeing.
[1:23:00] Bob Dobbs: Those statements should be well known.
[1:23:03] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:23:04] Bob Dobbs: you could see people when they took drugs,
[1:23:06] Bob Dobbs: they were going through that experience.
[1:23:08] Bob Dobbs: Sure,
[1:23:09] Cameron McEwen: sure.
[1:23:09] Cameron McEwen: That's what we were just talking about with the need for distance.
[1:23:13] Cameron McEwen: which on the one hand is disorienting,
[1:23:16] Cameron McEwen: but on the other hand it's enabling.
[1:23:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:23:19] Cameron McEwen: And that's sort of the problem that people are caught up in.
[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: So you can see why the Bible prediction that the mark of the beast and its global centralization known as the Antichrist and all that,
[1:23:31] Bob Dobbs: you can see why that's coming,
[1:23:34] Bob Dobbs: that people will want it.
[1:23:37] Bob Dobbs: It's an extension of the centralization retrieval.
[1:23:41] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:23:43] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:23:44] Bob Dobbs: so then...
[1:23:45] Cameron McEwen: It's an attempt to see where it's at.
[1:23:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:23:50] Bob Dobbs: and then to bounce off.
[1:23:51] Bob Dobbs: When you see what's at,
[1:23:52] Bob Dobbs: which is you look and you can't see anything,
[1:23:55] Bob Dobbs: you demand some reasonable supernatural form to take over.
[1:24:01] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[1:24:03] Cameron McEwen: Notice how that,
[1:24:04] Cameron McEwen: what you just said,
[1:24:05] Cameron McEwen: notice how it relates to what you just read.
[1:24:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:24:08] Cameron McEwen: In order to think,
[1:24:09] Cameron McEwen: you have to forget most of what you're experiencing.
[1:24:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:24:13] Bob Dobbs: you have to go back in the past to find something that you like,
[1:24:17] Bob Dobbs: that's familiar.
[1:24:18] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm going to be.
[1:24:20] Bob Dobbs: Your identity is another part of identity,
[1:24:22] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:24:23] Bob Dobbs: Looking for something in the past that you can claim fits your astrological sign or something.
[1:24:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:24:30] Cameron McEwen: and that is the humanization of the planet or the harmonization of the planet.
[1:24:36] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:24:37] Bob Dobbs: So at the speed of light,
[1:24:39] Bob Dobbs: which is now the normal speed,
[1:24:40] Bob Dobbs: speed of most information on TV,
[1:24:42] Bob Dobbs: radio,
[1:24:42] Bob Dobbs: telephone,
[1:24:43] Bob Dobbs: and so on.
[1:24:43] Bob Dobbs: At that speed,
[1:24:45] Bob Dobbs: the need to forget has become a form of nostalgia.
[1:24:50] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[1:24:51] Bob Dobbs: The need to forget has become a form where you can't forget the present.
[1:24:56] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:24:56] Bob Dobbs: you're living in the present and it's attacking you,
[1:24:59] Bob Dobbs: so you hope not to be able to see it.
[1:25:02] Bob Dobbs: But you can't get back to anything.
[1:25:04] Bob Dobbs: You'll try.
[1:25:05] Bob Dobbs: It won't work.
[1:25:06] Bob Dobbs: So trying to get back,
[1:25:08] Bob Dobbs: which is seen as a nostalgia,
[1:25:09] Bob Dobbs: fails.
[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: The speed,
[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: the need to forget has become,
[1:25:14] Bob Dobbs: you're yearning for when you could forget.
[1:25:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:25:19] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:25:21] Cameron McEwen: this is typical of McLuhan's writing.
[1:25:25] Cameron McEwen: I don't even know if he did it consciously,
[1:25:29] Cameron McEwen: but it's just a whole series of levels that is both an example of thinking and an inciting of thinking at once.
[1:25:45] Bob Dobbs: Inciting?
[1:25:48] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:25:48] Cameron McEwen: an inciting.
[1:25:49] Cameron McEwen: So when he says that the need to forget has become a form of nostalgia,
[1:25:54] Cameron McEwen: you can say nostalgia is not forgetting,
[1:25:58] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:25:59] Cameron McEwen: So the need to forget has become a form of not forgetting.
[1:26:03] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:26:04] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:26:06] Cameron McEwen: it's just a very complex statement.
[1:26:10] Cameron McEwen: It's a joy to try to grapple with.
[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: Remember he used to say,
[1:26:16] Bob Dobbs: The past ain't what it used to be.
[1:26:18] Bob Dobbs: The future is so thinking ain't what it used to be.
[1:26:21] Bob Dobbs: Or pata-recognition ain't what it used to be.
[1:26:24] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:26:25] Bob Dobbs: Forgetting isn't what it used to be.
[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,
[1:26:30] Bob Dobbs: kudos to me for finding these quotes.
[1:26:34] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:26:36] Cameron McEwen: I think I have his letters here.
[1:26:38] Cameron McEwen: Let me look up.
[1:26:39] Cameron McEwen: 177.
[1:26:42] Cameron McEwen: 177 to see if.
[1:26:44] Bob Dobbs: What's going on there?
[1:26:45] Cameron McEwen: ...or if it's a good reference.
[1:27:00] Bob Dobbs: This is an excerpt from McLean's magazine,
[1:27:02] Bob Dobbs: supposedly...
[1:27:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:27:03] Cameron McEwen: you know what this is?
[1:27:04] Cameron McEwen: It's part of a discussion.
[1:27:09] Cameron McEwen: It's not a letter.
[1:27:11] Cameron McEwen: It's the editorial...
[1:27:13] Cameron McEwen: introducing a section of the letters.
[1:27:15] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:27:16] Cameron McEwen: And so it's one of the things that sort of gets screwed up in this edition.
[1:27:26] Cameron McEwen: I'm trying to see,
[1:27:27] Cameron McEwen: oh here we go,
[1:27:28] Cameron McEwen: it's yeah so it's a quotation from that Maclean's article that's in an editorial insertion in the letters.
[1:27:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:27:43] Bob Dobbs: by William Toye.
[1:27:46] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:27:46] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:27:47] Cameron McEwen: Toye and or
[1:27:50] Cameron McEwen: Corinne and...
[1:27:51] Bob Dobbs: Matie.
[1:27:51] Bob Dobbs: Matie.
[1:27:52] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:27:53] Bob Dobbs: it was Toye.
[1:27:54] Bob Dobbs: I remember
[1:27:55] Bob Dobbs: Dave Neufeld's father was a good friend of Mr.
[1:27:58] Bob Dobbs: Toye,
[1:27:58] Bob Dobbs: and we heard a lot of Toye's complaints working with
[1:28:03] Bob Dobbs: Mrs. McLuhan and Matie through Dave's father.
[1:28:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:28:08] Bob Dobbs: Again,
[1:28:08] Bob Dobbs: I find out what's going on behind the scenes in the level anthropomorphic grievance.
[1:28:13] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:28:13] Cameron McEwen: They also weren't happy with him.
[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: where did you hear that?
[1:28:17] Cameron McEwen: There was a lot of tension going on.
[1:28:21] Bob Dobbs: Where did you hear that from?
[1:28:22] Cameron McEwen: From Corinne.
[1:28:23] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:28:24] Bob Dobbs: okay.
[1:28:24] Bob Dobbs: The thing is,
[1:28:25] Bob Dobbs: he did a good job.
[1:28:27] Bob Dobbs: His footnotes are great.
[1:28:28] Bob Dobbs: He fills in everybody.
[1:28:29] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:28:29] Cameron McEwen: sometimes.
[1:28:30] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes they're not accurate.
[1:28:35] Cameron McEwen: The thing is,
[1:28:36] Cameron McEwen: he tries to be a little bit of a know-it-all.
[1:28:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:28:39] Cameron McEwen: He tries to say stuff like what McLuhan was really talking about or what he was really referring to.
[1:28:46] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:28:47] Cameron McEwen: So I'm not a big fan of Toye.
[1:28:49] Cameron McEwen: Maybe you like him better than I do.
[1:28:51] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:28:51] Bob Dobbs: at least he was reading stuff that no one saw and commenting on it.
[1:28:55] Bob Dobbs: That's what I liked.
[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: He learned a lot doing that.
[1:28:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:28:58] Cameron McEwen: okay.
[1:28:59] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:29:00] Cameron McEwen: So what he did is he allowed McLuhan to inform him.
[1:29:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:29:04] Cameron McEwen: That's the best.
[1:29:05] Cameron McEwen: part of his notes.
[1:29:07] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:29:08] Bob Dobbs: and then his user's content response is what you're complaining about.
[1:29:12] Bob Dobbs: He got informed but he may not have seen it perfectly.
[1:29:17] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes it's misleading.
[1:29:20] Cameron McEwen: What I meant by him working with
[1:29:24] Cameron McEwen: Corinne and Matie on his notes is that sometimes there's stuff that can only have come from Corinne.
[1:29:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:29:33] Cameron McEwen: Like when she talks about
[1:29:36] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's blackout starting in 1959,
[1:29:42] Cameron McEwen: that's a note in the letters.
[1:29:44] Cameron McEwen: Toye didn't know anything about that.
[1:29:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:29:46] Cameron McEwen: So that comes right from Corinne,
[1:29:48] Cameron McEwen: and she got it in there.
[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: I think I like that Toye would give good footnotes about all the different people.
[1:29:55] Bob Dobbs: that were being written to.
[1:29:59] Bob Dobbs: He looked it up.
[1:30:00] Bob Dobbs: He was thorough.
[1:30:01] Bob Dobbs: Everything was explained.
[1:30:03] Cameron McEwen: His stuff is often surfaced.
[1:30:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:30:07] Cameron McEwen: So he'll say something about somebody that
[1:30:11] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan knew in Winnipeg,
[1:30:14] Cameron McEwen: but the footnote will talk about the guy being a professor at McMaster and Hamilton or something like that.
[1:30:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:30:22] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:30:22] Cameron McEwen: And he doesn't know that.
[1:30:25] Cameron McEwen: there was this deeper connection to McLuhan's and McLuhan family back in Winnipeg.
[1:30:31] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:30:34] Cameron McEwen: But it's,
[1:30:34] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:30:35] Cameron McEwen: it's not horrible.
[1:30:36] Cameron McEwen: It's just,
[1:30:37] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:30:37] Cameron McEwen: the letters that we have is one volume of four volumes that were put together.
[1:30:44] Cameron McEwen: And the
[1:30:46] Cameron McEwen: OUP and Toye then cut it back to one volume.
[1:30:50] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know that.
[1:30:51] Bob Dobbs: There were four volumes worth?
[1:30:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:30:54] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[1:30:55] Cameron McEwen: And there's a lot of information about this at the
[1:30:58] Cameron McEwen: York University website.
[1:31:01] Cameron McEwen: I'll send you a link if you want.
[1:31:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:31:03] Bob Dobbs: I've never seen that.
[1:31:05] Bob Dobbs: The York University...
[1:31:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:31:06] Cameron McEwen: that's the...
[1:31:12] Cameron McEwen: What am I trying to say here?
[1:31:13] Cameron McEwen: The papers of the...
[1:31:19] Cameron McEwen: I forget the name of the business that Matie had.
[1:31:24] Cameron McEwen: But all of her papers are at York.
[1:31:28] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[1:31:29] Cameron McEwen: And so the original four volumes of the letters are all there.
[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: You're kidding.
[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: There's all kinds of letters there?
[1:31:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:31:37] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[1:31:38] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know that.
[1:31:40] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I have time to go back there,
[1:31:42] Bob Dobbs: but it's very interesting.
[1:31:46] Bob Dobbs: Certainly didn't know that.
[1:31:47] Bob Dobbs: When did that all happen?
[1:31:50] Cameron McEwen: I don't know when the papers.
[1:31:53] Cameron McEwen: went there,
[1:31:54] Cameron McEwen: but
[1:31:56] Cameron McEwen: I think they've been there for at least 10 years,
[1:31:59] Cameron McEwen: maybe longer.
[1:32:00] Bob Dobbs: I don't think anybody knows that.
[1:32:01] Bob Dobbs: You're the only guy who knows this.
[1:32:04] Bob Dobbs: Send me the link and I'll put it around the various McLuhan places to turn everybody on to it.
[1:32:09] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:32:10] Cameron McEwen: fine.
[1:32:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:32:12] Cameron McEwen: so the original edition was four volumes cut down to one,
[1:32:17] Cameron McEwen: and all of that stuff is at York.
[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: So there's all these letters.
[1:32:22] Bob Dobbs: to people that aren't in the first volume that we don't know about,
[1:32:27] Bob Dobbs: but that are,
[1:32:28] Bob Dobbs: I saw the cabinets,
[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: man,
[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: they were big.
[1:32:31] Bob Dobbs: There was a lot of letters.
[1:32:34] Bob Dobbs: So many of those letters,
[1:32:36] Bob Dobbs: if you don't go there,
[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: you're not reading a lot of stuff that's new.
[1:32:42] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[1:32:43] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[1:32:43] Cameron McEwen: So in the different biographies of McLuhan,
[1:32:50] Cameron McEwen: there's often quotations from letters.
[1:32:53] Cameron McEwen: that aren't in letters.
[1:32:54] Bob Dobbs: Is that right?
[1:32:54] Cameron McEwen: And those quotations are often very interesting.
[1:32:58] Cameron McEwen: So that gives a hint of what's in these other three volumes.
[1:33:03] Bob Dobbs: So you haven't gone through them all?
[1:33:05] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:33:06] Cameron McEwen: uh-uh.
[1:33:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:33:07] Bob Dobbs: so you're saying that some writer...
[1:33:10] Cameron McEwen: Pardon me?
[1:33:11] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:33:11] Bob Dobbs: what were you just saying?
[1:33:14] Cameron McEwen: That I haven't seen those letters,
[1:33:15] Cameron McEwen: but I have to go and see them at some point.
[1:33:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:33:19] Bob Dobbs: we can see them online,
[1:33:20] Bob Dobbs: can't we?
[1:33:21] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:33:21] Cameron McEwen: no.
[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: they're not online.
[1:33:24] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:33:24] Cameron McEwen: no,
[1:33:24] Cameron McEwen: no.
[1:33:25] Cameron McEwen: All it is is reference to them.
[1:33:27] Bob Dobbs: Wow.
[1:33:27] Bob Dobbs: So you've got to go up there.
[1:33:29] Bob Dobbs: So there are people who will quote a letter or two,
[1:33:31] Bob Dobbs: and you look it up,
[1:33:31] Bob Dobbs: it's not in the letters book.
[1:33:34] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:33:35] Cameron McEwen: And oftentimes,
[1:33:37] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[1:33:38] Cameron McEwen: in Terry Gordon's book,
[1:33:40] Cameron McEwen: he quotes letters that are in Ottawa and are not in letters.
[1:33:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:33:46] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:33:47] Cameron McEwen: But I don't know that anybody has done a thorough job.
[1:33:52] Cameron McEwen: on the original four volumes of letters.
[1:33:55] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:33:56] Bob Dobbs: that's incredible.
[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: that's new information there,
[1:34:00] Bob Dobbs: people.
[1:34:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:34:04] Bob Dobbs: so the link you'll send me will give me a guide to whose letters are there.
[1:34:11] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:34:11] Bob Dobbs: Wow,
[1:34:11] Bob Dobbs: that'd be interesting.
[1:34:14] Bob Dobbs: You mean I've got to go back to Toronto one more time?
[1:34:17] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,
[1:34:17] Cameron McEwen: maybe.
[1:34:19] Cameron McEwen: But I don't want to promise.
[1:34:21] Cameron McEwen: that there's a breakdown of every letter.
[1:34:27] Cameron McEwen: I haven't been at the site for a while,
[1:34:30] Cameron McEwen: and I don't know how reliable my memory is of it,
[1:34:33] Cameron McEwen: but I'll send you the information,
[1:34:36] Cameron McEwen: and maybe the next time we talk,
[1:34:39] Cameron McEwen: we can go over that.
[1:34:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:34:41] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:34:45] Bob Dobbs: let's see.
[1:34:48] Bob Dobbs: All right,
[1:34:48] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:34:48] Bob Dobbs: we did that quote.
[1:34:50] Bob Dobbs: Very important quote,
[1:34:51] Bob Dobbs: and then
[1:34:52] Bob Dobbs: I say...
[1:34:55] Bob Dobbs: This is McLuhan saying what Arthur Kroker writes 15 years later about A,
[1:35:00] Bob Dobbs: and then I have it in,
[1:35:01] Bob Dobbs: um,
[1:35:04] Bob Dobbs: oh that's right,
[1:35:05] Bob Dobbs: this is a very important sentence from Kroker,
[1:35:07] Bob Dobbs: that's what it is.
[1:35:09] Bob Dobbs: It should be in blue,
[1:35:11] Bob Dobbs: do you know what I mean?
[1:35:13] Bob Dobbs: But it's a quote,
[1:35:14] Bob Dobbs: so I'm highlighting it,
[1:35:15] Bob Dobbs: so it's a mixture there.
[1:35:17] Bob Dobbs: So you see that?
[1:35:18] Bob Dobbs: This is McLuhan saying what Arthur Kroker writes 15 years later about A,
[1:35:21] Bob Dobbs: and this is what
[1:35:22] Bob Dobbs: Kroker said.
[1:35:23] Bob Dobbs: We were in a culture of quantum fluctuations where you can only know that you have never seen what you thought you were looking at because you have never really heard what you were listening to.
[1:35:32] Bob Dobbs: There's an excellent quote by
[1:35:34] Bob Dobbs: Ray Doring McLuhan.
[1:35:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:35:38] Bob Dobbs: What a great quote.
[1:35:40] Bob Dobbs: I quote that a lot,
[1:35:41] Bob Dobbs: that we're in a culture of quantum fluctuations where,
[1:35:43] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:35:44] Bob Dobbs: it's very tiny fluctuations where you can only know that you have never seen what you thought you were looking at because you have never really heard what you were listening to.
[1:35:52] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:35:52] Bob Dobbs: man.
[1:35:53] Bob Dobbs: This is,
[1:35:55] Bob Dobbs: it's not post-human.
[1:35:56] Bob Dobbs: You could say it's Anthropomorphic Physical.
[1:35:59] Bob Dobbs: Humans can project anything,
[1:36:01] Bob Dobbs: so not just human.
[1:36:03] Bob Dobbs: And so
[1:36:04] Bob Dobbs: I think we might see this a lot in the millennials,
[1:36:08] Bob Dobbs: their identification with communication itself,
[1:36:11] Bob Dobbs: known as texting,
[1:36:13] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:36:14] Bob Dobbs: The fetishizing,
[1:36:15] Bob Dobbs: the unable to stop looking.
[1:36:19] Bob Dobbs: So you've got to keep looking at your,
[1:36:22] Bob Dobbs: what's it called,
[1:36:22] Bob Dobbs: black mirror.
[1:36:24] Bob Dobbs: to see what you're not seeing.
[1:36:26] Bob Dobbs: So it's that gets into the negative form of mathematics or negative forms of physics,
[1:36:32] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:36:33] Bob Dobbs: We're living in negative nothingness.
[1:36:37] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:36:37] Cameron McEwen: definitely.
[1:36:37] Bob Dobbs: That's definitely that's interesting.
[1:36:40] Cameron McEwen: And that's what in my reading of cultural history,
[1:36:45] Cameron McEwen: that's where Nietzsche deposited us in the
[1:36:49] Cameron McEwen: 1880s.
[1:36:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah. And we're still trying to deal with
[1:36:53] Cameron McEwen: what he called nihilism,
[1:36:55] Cameron McEwen: which is the pre-tribal awareness of nothing.
[1:37:00] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:37:01] Bob Dobbs: and that's why
[1:37:02] Bob Dobbs: Trump was a phase of development from that.
[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: He couldn't finish his sentences,
[1:37:06] Bob Dobbs: but
[1:37:06] Bob Dobbs: Biden's even more of the president.
[1:37:08] Bob Dobbs: He can't finish his syllables.
[1:37:10] Bob Dobbs: But it's the nihilism of communication.
[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: Biden is a perfect image of where we're at.
[1:37:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:37:20] Cameron McEwen: and your idea about Trump is...
[1:37:23] Cameron McEwen: that he's a perfect image,
[1:37:27] Cameron McEwen: not necessarily of where we're at,
[1:37:29] Cameron McEwen: but of the engine of where we're at.
[1:37:31] Cameron McEwen: Can I put it that way?
[1:37:33] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:37:34] Bob Dobbs: but he's a tech body.
[1:37:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:37:36] Cameron McEwen: but isn't the tech body the engine of where we're at?
[1:37:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:37:39] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:37:40] Bob Dobbs: I would say that the White House is not an engine anymore.
[1:37:45] Bob Dobbs: That's why you put a weakling in like Biden,
[1:37:49] Bob Dobbs: but everything is still all about Trump.
[1:37:53] Bob Dobbs: It's still impeaching him,
[1:37:54] Bob Dobbs: still driving,
[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: still trying to catch him,
[1:37:57] Bob Dobbs: Rumpelstiltskin.
[1:38:00] Bob Dobbs: Because that's the tech body,
[1:38:01] Bob Dobbs: that's what we're actually up against.
[1:38:05] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if Trump is that because he got there first,
[1:38:09] Bob Dobbs: or he himself is so quadrophrenia,
[1:38:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:38:14] Bob Dobbs: discontinuous in so many ways that...
[1:38:21] Bob Dobbs: A Biden image is too limited.
[1:38:24] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't cover.
[1:38:26] Bob Dobbs: He's not doing anything.
[1:38:26] Bob Dobbs: Trump is doing things all over the place.
[1:38:28] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:38:31] Bob Dobbs: he's engaging every one of his extended faculties.
[1:38:34] Bob Dobbs: Biden,
[1:38:35] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:38:36] Bob Dobbs: in a way,
[1:38:37] Bob Dobbs: Trump is trying to prevent the Biden effect on himself.
[1:38:43] Bob Dobbs: He's busy everywhere,
[1:38:45] Bob Dobbs: trying to rebuild stuff.
[1:38:47] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:38:48] Bob Dobbs: Biden gave up.
[1:38:49] Bob Dobbs: His image gave up.
[1:38:50] Bob Dobbs: He's not even bothering governing.
[1:38:52] Bob Dobbs: He went to Ireland and he says,
[1:38:54] Bob Dobbs: I like it here.
[1:38:54] Bob Dobbs: I'm not going back.
[1:39:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:39:02] Bob Dobbs: so that's an interesting point of my book is that I might have to do an addendum and talk about the meaning of Biden as an extension of Trump,
[1:39:13] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[1:39:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:39:14] Cameron McEwen: that would be interesting.
[1:39:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:39:16] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:39:17] Bob Dobbs: so...
[1:39:19] Cameron McEwen: I want to point out here in the quotation from
[1:39:22] Cameron McEwen: Kroker, you mentioned that it's a redoing of McLuhan.
[1:39:27] Cameron McEwen: And in fact,
[1:39:29] Cameron McEwen: it's the sort of thing that McLuhan did all the time.
[1:39:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:39:32] Cameron McEwen: And pointed out the dialectic between looking and listening.
[1:39:37] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:39:38] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:39:39] Cameron McEwen: I'm doing a post right now,
[1:39:41] Cameron McEwen: actually.
[1:39:42] Cameron McEwen: I just put it up the other day on
[1:39:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan taking the rear view mirror.
[1:39:48] Cameron McEwen: and making it into the ear view mirror.
[1:39:51] Bob Dobbs: Ah,
[1:39:52] Cameron McEwen: you know what?
[1:39:54] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.
[1:39:57] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:39:57] Cameron McEwen: you were...
[1:39:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:39:58] Bob Dobbs: I was inspired to say something.
[1:40:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:40:01] Cameron McEwen: go ahead.
[1:40:03] Bob Dobbs: In an article in the mid-60s,
[1:40:04] Bob Dobbs: I think it's called
[1:40:06] Bob Dobbs: The Crack in the Rearview Mirror,
[1:40:08] Bob Dobbs: he talks about the rearview mirror as the art form.
[1:40:13] Bob Dobbs: People think,
[1:40:14] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:40:15] Bob Dobbs: you don't want to be involved with the rearview mirror.
[1:40:17] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:40:17] Bob Dobbs: that's all you have at a certain point.
[1:40:20] Bob Dobbs: And so it becomes...
[1:40:21] Bob Dobbs: which is the best kind of rearview mirror to use.
[1:40:25] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:40:26] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:40:27] Cameron McEwen: In a speed up,
[1:40:29] Cameron McEwen: there's nothing new.
[1:40:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:40:32] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:40:32] Bob Dobbs: he used to say,
[1:40:33] Bob Dobbs: what is the cliche?
[1:40:34] Bob Dobbs: There's nothing old under the sun.
[1:40:36] Bob Dobbs: He used to say,
[1:40:37] Bob Dobbs: there's nothing new under the sun,
[1:40:39] Bob Dobbs: something,
[1:40:39] Bob Dobbs: or no.
[1:40:41] Bob Dobbs: I think he used to say there's nothing old.
[1:40:42] Bob Dobbs: He changed it.
[1:40:44] Bob Dobbs: So what's the cliche?
[1:40:45] Bob Dobbs: There's nothing old under the sun.
[1:40:47] Cameron McEwen: There's nothing new.
[1:40:48] Cameron McEwen: Nothing new.
[1:40:50] Bob Dobbs: Nothing new under the sun.
[1:40:51] Bob Dobbs: is the cliche.
[1:40:52] Bob Dobbs: So there's nothing old under the sun.
[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: Ah,
[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: see,
[1:40:56] Bob Dobbs: nothing is obsolete.
[1:40:57] Bob Dobbs: If everything's obsolete,
[1:40:58] Bob Dobbs: then everything's usable.
[1:41:00] Bob Dobbs: So everything,
[1:41:01] Bob Dobbs: and that's part of,
[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[1:41:04] Bob Dobbs: the quantum media approach to inflation is that everything is insurable.
[1:41:09] Bob Dobbs: Nothing is old.
[1:41:11] Bob Dobbs: Everything is new.
[1:41:13] Bob Dobbs: You find new places to put value in,
[1:41:16] Bob Dobbs: temporary value.
[1:41:17] Bob Dobbs: You get that?
[1:41:22] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:41:24] Cameron McEwen: I thought you were saying that everything is replayed,
[1:41:27] Cameron McEwen: but then you flipped into...
[1:41:28] Cameron McEwen: No.
[1:41:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:41:30] Bob Dobbs: everything is new.
[1:41:31] Bob Dobbs: Everything is,
[1:41:32] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:41:32] Bob Dobbs: exploitable.
[1:41:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:41:34] Bob Dobbs: if obsolescence is defined by McLuhan as it's useless,
[1:41:38] Bob Dobbs: so it can be sold.
[1:41:41] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:41:42] Bob Dobbs: it's obsolete,
[1:41:42] Bob Dobbs: so it works.
[1:41:44] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:41:44] Bob Dobbs: that means everything is obsolete,
[1:41:46] Bob Dobbs: so therefore it can work.
[1:41:48] Bob Dobbs: So everything becomes new again,
[1:41:50] Bob Dobbs: becomes retrieved.
[1:41:52] Bob Dobbs: And in the media approach to inflation,
[1:41:53] Bob Dobbs: he talks about how everything is insurable.
[1:41:56] Bob Dobbs: You can make anything be insured.
[1:41:59] Bob Dobbs: So that means you can find new value in long-lost things.
[1:42:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:42:05] Cameron McEwen: I think this is,
[1:42:06] Cameron McEwen: isn't this just a variation on etherization?
[1:42:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:42:12] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:42:13] Bob Dobbs: doing more with less.
[1:42:14] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:42:14] Bob Dobbs: how about doing more with everything?
[1:42:17] Bob Dobbs: So maybe it's the opposite now.
[1:42:22] Cameron McEwen: Notice we've gone back to the Barry Nevitt quote about consciousness.
[1:42:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:42:30] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:42:30] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:42:34] Bob Dobbs: Everything becomes consciousness.
[1:42:35] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:42:35] Bob Dobbs: that's part of the anthropomorphic projection.
[1:42:38] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:42:39] Bob Dobbs: So if you're projecting human comfort or security,
[1:42:45] Bob Dobbs: you ensure everything.
[1:42:47] Bob Dobbs: I mean...
[1:42:48] Bob Dobbs: He lists a bunch of absurd things that are insured.
[1:42:50] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember them.
[1:42:52] Bob Dobbs: But,
[1:42:53] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: some of them are pretty crazy back in the 70s.
[1:42:56] Bob Dobbs: So what do people insure today?
[1:43:01] Bob Dobbs: What?
[1:43:02] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.
[1:43:03] Bob Dobbs: I don't do it myself.
[1:43:04] Cameron McEwen: For example,
[1:43:06] Cameron McEwen: if you're on a football team,
[1:43:09] Cameron McEwen: you can insure yourself against injuries.
[1:43:11] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:43:12] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:43:13] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:43:13] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:43:13] Cameron McEwen: that's...
[1:43:16] Cameron McEwen: The insurance industry has reached into everything.
[1:43:20] Cameron McEwen: So you can insure yourself.
[1:43:22] Cameron McEwen: If you're making a movie,
[1:43:23] Cameron McEwen: you can insure yourself against it not being completed.
[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: Or even making any money.
[1:43:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:43:30] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:43:30] Cameron McEwen: if it's not completed,
[1:43:32] Cameron McEwen: all you do is lose money.
[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:43:34] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:43:34] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:43:34] Bob Dobbs: that's what I'm getting at.
[1:43:35] Bob Dobbs: So there's nothing old under the sun.
[1:43:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:43:43] Bob Dobbs: the cliche is there's nothing but old.
[1:43:45] Bob Dobbs: But no,
[1:43:47] Bob Dobbs: everything's new.
[1:43:48] Bob Dobbs: Everything is projected.
[1:43:51] Bob Dobbs: You can project values into it.
[1:43:52] Bob Dobbs: Kroker wrote about that in the 80s.
[1:43:54] Bob Dobbs: The valuation of values just went excessive.
[1:44:01] Bob Dobbs: That's like everything as content can be a temporary ground,
[1:44:05] Bob Dobbs: literally a ground,
[1:44:06] Bob Dobbs: security.
[1:44:14] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:44:14] Cameron McEwen: go ahead.
[1:44:16] Cameron McEwen: I can feel that there's a thought here that needs to be expressed.
[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: so maybe I'll do it here in the blue section.
[1:44:24] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:44:25] Bob Dobbs: I say,
[1:44:25] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:44:26] Bob Dobbs: here's the forgotten McLuhan quotation,
[1:44:28] Bob Dobbs: where he's saying much the same thing.
[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: Quote,
[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: you have to forget most of what you're experiencing in order to relate it to earlier things you knew.
[1:44:36] Bob Dobbs: End of quote.
[1:44:36] Bob Dobbs: You can't refer back to the reference.
[1:44:39] Bob Dobbs: You can't infer anything from what you're seeing.
[1:44:42] Bob Dobbs: That's a very useful McLuhan statement.
[1:44:45] Bob Dobbs: He's starting to get into,
[1:44:46] Bob Dobbs: like Kroker,
[1:44:47] Bob Dobbs: what you can't see.
[1:44:48] Bob Dobbs: You're not using your eyes.
[1:44:50] Bob Dobbs: Your eyes aren't necessary.
[1:44:51] Bob Dobbs: That's the Global Membrane.
[1:44:54] Bob Dobbs: Actually,
[1:44:54] Bob Dobbs: you have to retrieve thought and the ability to think up stuff that no one else will think about to create a temporary ground.
[1:45:03] Bob Dobbs: So you don't go by what people are knowing.
[1:45:06] Bob Dobbs: You've got to come up with what they don't know,
[1:45:09] Bob Dobbs: what they aren't thinking of.
[1:45:11] Bob Dobbs: Not in terms of the ground.
[1:45:13] Bob Dobbs: You can make anything ground by your retrieving an idea and a memory of something that used to be existing.
[1:45:25] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:45:25] Cameron McEwen: the ground is always already there.
[1:45:31] Cameron McEwen: All that's known of the ground is a figure.
[1:45:34] Cameron McEwen: So then what happens in an electric environment is that the ground becomes exposed,
[1:45:41] Cameron McEwen: but it becomes exposed in its plurality.
[1:45:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:45:47] Bob Dobbs: which is your discontinuity.
[1:45:49] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:45:50] Cameron McEwen: So people used to think that they had a problem.
[1:45:53] Cameron McEwen: at the level of figure,
[1:45:55] Cameron McEwen: but now it turns out that they have an analogous problem at the level of ground,
[1:46:01] Cameron McEwen: and that is absolutely disorienting.
[1:46:07] Cameron McEwen: So the only way forward is to go into that deorientation,
[1:46:17] Cameron McEwen: that absolute loss of orientation.
[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: so this is where I get into page 139,
[1:46:24] Bob Dobbs: part 4,
[1:46:24] Bob Dobbs: Android meme,
[1:46:26] Bob Dobbs: phase 2.
[1:46:27] Bob Dobbs: So we've done,
[1:46:28] Bob Dobbs: we've completed Android meme phase 1,
[1:46:30] Bob Dobbs: now Android meme phase 2,
[1:46:32] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:46:33] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said electronics is ESP.
[1:46:35] Bob Dobbs: So it's been a world of ESP,
[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: for 100 years.
[1:46:39] Bob Dobbs: Now we get into voluntary and involuntary ESP.
[1:46:43] Bob Dobbs: That's my new categories for what you just said is what we've got to do.
[1:46:52] Bob Dobbs: So maybe we should stop there.
[1:46:56] Bob Dobbs: It's a whole new area.
[1:46:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:46:59] Cameron McEwen: it's a good boundary stone.
[1:47:01] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[1:47:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:47:03] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:47:03] Bob Dobbs: let me just check part three.
[1:47:06] Bob Dobbs: Is that called Android meme Phase
[1:47:09] Bob Dobbs: 1? I think it is.
[1:47:11] Bob Dobbs: Trying to find my list of chapters.
[1:47:17] Cameron McEwen: Have to go back to the start of the book.
[1:47:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:47:19] Bob Dobbs: so I have Global Village.
[1:47:21] Bob Dobbs: then global theater,
[1:47:22] Bob Dobbs: then Global Membrane or Android meme phase one,
[1:47:28] Bob Dobbs: then Android meme phase two,
[1:47:30] Bob Dobbs: and then Anthropomorphic Physical.
[1:47:32] Bob Dobbs: See?
[1:47:33] Bob Dobbs: There it is.
[1:47:34] Bob Dobbs: Anthropomorphic Physical.
[1:47:36] Bob Dobbs: And then tech body.
[1:47:37] Bob Dobbs: So there it is.
[1:47:39] Bob Dobbs: That's what's coming.
[1:47:41] Bob Dobbs: We're getting into the good stuff now.
[1:47:44] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:47:44] Cameron McEwen: good.
[1:47:45] Cameron McEwen: Complete.
[1:47:45] Cameron McEwen: Some of those topics we already named in our discussion today.
[1:47:49] Cameron McEwen: So that's cool.
[1:47:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:47:53] Bob Dobbs: we're keeping up with ourselves.
[1:47:55] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:47:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:47:57] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:47:57] Bob Dobbs: that's really good.
[1:47:58] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot,
[1:47:59] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.
[1:48:00] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:48:00] Cameron McEwen: you too,
[1:48:00] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[1:48:01] Bob Dobbs: Yep,
[1:48:01] Bob Dobbs: talk to you later.
[1:48:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:48:02] Bob Dobbs: bye.
[1:48:02] Cameron McEwen: Bye-bye.