Dialogue 74 — Transcript

[00:01] Bob Dobbs: Hello,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: this is Bob and Cameron McEwen,

[00:04] Bob Dobbs: and we're recording the

[00:07] Bob Dobbs: 74th episode of our ongoing explanation,

[00:11] Bob Dobbs: exegesis of my book on Trump and the tech body.

[00:14] Bob Dobbs: And we're at page 158,

[00:17] Bob Dobbs: in the middle of the page,

[00:19] Bob Dobbs: and we're looking at a fantastic quote that

[00:23] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan and Barry Nevitt end their book,

[00:25] Bob Dobbs: Take Today,

[00:26] Bob Dobbs: The Executive as Dropout,

[00:26] Bob Dobbs: 1972.

[00:28] Bob Dobbs: They end the book with this quote.

[00:30] Bob Dobbs: page 297 we mentioned it last episode that we'd be doing it and but and talking to cameron before the the recording here he found a quote in um McLuhan op-ed in 1974 i think it's september 21st or something 1974 where he talks about um stuff

[00:52] Bob Dobbs: that nobody has acknowledged yet and uh to me well i've been explaining some of the stuff

[00:58] Bob Dobbs: about cold play.

[00:59] Bob Dobbs: An exciting thing has happened.

[01:01] Bob Dobbs: Our cold play is now our technology for endless electricity.

[01:05] Bob Dobbs: Generating endless electricity is now public.

[01:08] Bob Dobbs: And so I was talking to Cameron about it and reminding him of this quote.

[01:13] Bob Dobbs: So when he said it,

[01:14] Bob Dobbs: I remembered it.

[01:16] Bob Dobbs: I remember that sentence,

[01:17] Bob Dobbs: but he applies it to what we're doing with iON,

[01:21] Bob Dobbs: whatever iON is.

[01:22] Bob Dobbs: So I said,

[01:23] Bob Dobbs: let's start with that quote.

[01:24] Bob Dobbs: So Cameron's going to read from

[01:30] Bob Dobbs: 1974,

[01:32] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan op-ed.

[01:33] Cameron McEwen: September

[01:34] Cameron McEwen: 21st, in fact.

[01:35] Cameron McEwen: And in the preceding sentence,

[01:40] Cameron McEwen: he talks about what he calls the perpetual interface of flux.

[01:48] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[01:49] Cameron McEwen: So he goes on from that and he says,

[01:51] Cameron McEwen: however,

[01:52] Cameron McEwen: in the pulsating world of the intervals,

[01:55] Cameron McEwen: which I guess is another way of saying perpetual interface of flux,

[01:59] Cameron McEwen: In the pulsating world of the intervals in electronic information,

[02:03] Cameron McEwen: there are innumerable opportunities to seize and abstract the interval itself as a new kind of object to be exploited.

[02:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[02:14] Bob Dobbs: now that article is titled

[02:17] Bob Dobbs: A Media Approach to Inflation.

[02:19] Bob Dobbs: The economy is starting to go crazy after the oil crisis of 73 and then...

[02:26] Bob Dobbs: Nixon gets water-gated and then nobody knows New York City goes bankrupt in 75 and it just gets strange the economy so that's the beginning of the futurist part and he talks about the futures role in the economy and that's exploiting the interval well

[02:44] Bob Dobbs: exploiting the interval for economic reasons so this point that where tactility was the ground in the 20th century via the extended electricity

[02:55] Bob Dobbs: or the extension of our central nervous system,

[02:58] Bob Dobbs: it now becomes a figure and exploited.

[03:01] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[03:02] Bob Dobbs: you have the merger on page 11 of Take Today of man is both figure and ground,

[03:06] Bob Dobbs: and content is ground.

[03:08] Bob Dobbs: The form and content have merged.

[03:10] Bob Dobbs: So

[03:11] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if you could say the tactile interval is just a figure.

[03:15] Bob Dobbs: It's still the ground,

[03:16] Bob Dobbs: but something has shifted.

[03:18] Bob Dobbs: We moved somewhere else,

[03:19] Bob Dobbs: and probably I would say with my Tiny Note chart,

[03:23] Bob Dobbs: which was not done for another 20 years after that article,

[03:27] Bob Dobbs: we are shifting into something anthropomorphic in the Dobbs quadrant of the chart.

[03:34] Bob Dobbs: Anthropomorphic,

[03:35] Bob Dobbs: the projection of raw human,

[03:37] Bob Dobbs: what humans might think they are as opposed to everything else.

[03:41] Bob Dobbs: They think they're different.

[03:43] Bob Dobbs: It's a new kind of anthropomorphism,

[03:45] Bob Dobbs: and that would mean,

[03:47] Bob Dobbs: that would be the ground for this tactility or the interval becoming figure.

[03:52] Bob Dobbs: That's the best I can say about it.

[03:54] Bob Dobbs: The rest is all interactive dialogue.

[03:58] Cameron McEwen: In the same paragraph,

[03:59] Cameron McEwen: he says,

[04:00] Cameron McEwen: inflation makes everything a figure against the ground of public interest.

[04:06] Cameron McEwen: So public interest there can be taken as what you were just calling anthropomorphism.

[04:12] Bob Dobbs: The human,

[04:14] Bob Dobbs: people thinking that humans need to know something,

[04:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[04:17] Bob Dobbs: public interest.

[04:19] Bob Dobbs: Of course,

[04:20] Bob Dobbs: it could be...

[04:21] Bob Dobbs: There's many publics under electric conditions,

[04:23] Bob Dobbs: so the word public is more 19th century.

[04:26] Bob Dobbs: But he also says that human interest comes in in journalism with the telegraph.

[04:30] Bob Dobbs: Human interest.

[04:33] Bob Dobbs: Journalism before that was,

[04:34] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[04:34] Bob Dobbs: politics and ideas,

[04:36] Bob Dobbs: not the crazy stories that we have nothing of on an organ like the Daily Mail.

[04:42] Bob Dobbs: You go on there and there's millions of ridiculous stories about crazy things that people are doing that are maybe of human interest.

[04:50] Bob Dobbs: So public is,

[04:51] Bob Dobbs: so I always remember that word in relation to the word public interest.

[04:54] Bob Dobbs: Now that might have been picked by Barry.

[04:57] Bob Dobbs: It might not have McLuhan resonances in it.

[05:00] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,

[05:01] Bob Dobbs: you're right.

[05:02] Bob Dobbs: Public interest.

[05:03] Bob Dobbs: What a strange way to say what is left after the erosion of all media.

[05:09] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[05:10] Bob Dobbs: What is left is public interest.

[05:12] Bob Dobbs: And

[05:13] Bob Dobbs: I guess the admin have been trying to figure out,

[05:16] Bob Dobbs: anticipate where the public interest would go.

[05:19] Bob Dobbs: And usually they don't figure it out.

[05:22] Bob Dobbs: They get in there real fast because there's less cultural snobbery about.

[05:27] Bob Dobbs: getting involved with pop culture uh you know over the last 50 years so they the marketers they just look for where the kids are what are they what ridiculous thing they're into now oh there it is doesn't matter whether it's culture or not just fucking sell it so that's the

[05:42] Bob Dobbs: teenagers are the are the uh antenna of public interest i just made that up public interest is ambiguous right yeah so uh when he later said

[05:56] Cameron McEwen: says opportunities to seize and abstract the interval itself.

[06:03] Cameron McEwen: What an opportunity does on one side is turn into interest in the financial sense of exploiting

[06:17] Cameron McEwen: a new kind of object.

[06:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[06:19] Bob Dobbs: that's fitting the new into the old tools.

[06:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[06:23] Cameron McEwen: So.

[06:25] Cameron McEwen: When he says everything a figure against the ground of public interest,

[06:30] Cameron McEwen: that has many,

[06:31] Cameron McEwen: many meanings.

[06:33] Cameron McEwen: One of the meanings is financial,

[06:36] Cameron McEwen: just like one of the meanings of inflation is financial.

[06:41] Cameron McEwen: But in neither case is that the only interest.

[06:45] Cameron McEwen: It has to be seen in the spectrum of the senses.

[06:50] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[06:50] Bob Dobbs: and I would say,

[06:51] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[06:51] Bob Dobbs: the public,

[06:52] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said,

[06:53] Bob Dobbs: was a 19th century extension of the printing press in that era,

[06:58] Bob Dobbs: and it was a homogeneous,

[07:00] Bob Dobbs: solid thing.

[07:01] Bob Dobbs: Then the electric world smashed it and decentralized it,

[07:04] Bob Dobbs: and many different publics happened.

[07:06] Bob Dobbs: But as the world imploded under holeopathic global theater conditions,

[07:10] Bob Dobbs: you could come back to what McLuhan called a collective consciousness.

[07:14] Bob Dobbs: That could,

[07:15] Bob Dobbs: we now have a public,

[07:16] Bob Dobbs: which is...

[07:17] Bob Dobbs: It's every 8 billion people engaged in that public.

[07:19] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[07:20] Bob Dobbs: it's re-amalgamated.

[07:21] Bob Dobbs: I could see using the term public in that new way.

[07:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[07:25] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[07:26] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[07:26] Bob Dobbs: It's like the,

[07:28] Bob Dobbs: what do we call it?

[07:28] Bob Dobbs: It's the Android meme or the resonant node.

[07:32] Bob Dobbs: That stuff,

[07:33] Bob Dobbs: that imploded node that people,

[07:35] Bob Dobbs: the whole world lives in.

[07:37] Bob Dobbs: And whatever they're looking at,

[07:39] Bob Dobbs: that's public interest.

[07:40] Bob Dobbs: There's one public again,

[07:41] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.

[07:42] Bob Dobbs: And if you're trying to translate into finance,

[07:45] Bob Dobbs: you're going to put it into 19th century terms.

[07:46] Bob Dobbs: So that's another aspect of public,

[07:51] Bob Dobbs: public financial interest or what,

[07:53] Bob Dobbs: how it can be exploited.

[07:56] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[07:56] Bob Dobbs: because everybody's engaged in a collective espionage,

[08:00] Bob Dobbs: looking how to jump off the industrial establishment,

[08:04] Bob Dobbs: the pay rent,

[08:06] Bob Dobbs: mortgage,

[08:06] Bob Dobbs: all that stuff into some kind of glorious,

[08:09] Bob Dobbs: endless income.

[08:09] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[08:10] Bob Dobbs: That's what everybody is waiting for.

[08:12] Bob Dobbs: That opportunity.

[08:14] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[08:15] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan talked about that from very early on.

[08:19] Cameron McEwen: It's the privatization of public asset.

[08:24] Bob Dobbs: Asset?

[08:24] Bob Dobbs: A-S-S-E-T?

[08:26] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[08:26] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[08:27] Bob Dobbs: I was going to say,

[08:29] Bob Dobbs: what was the word?

[08:30] Bob Dobbs: Extrapolate.

[08:31] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?

[08:32] Cameron McEwen: I said for

[08:34] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, what the economy is,

[08:38] Cameron McEwen: is basically the privatization of a public asset.

[08:43] Cameron McEwen: And the public asset,

[08:45] Cameron McEwen: in the widest sense,

[08:46] Cameron McEwen: is the public itself.

[08:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[08:48] Bob Dobbs: and the public interest,

[08:49] Bob Dobbs: the resonant node.

[08:50] Bob Dobbs: So the privatization of public asset,

[08:55] Bob Dobbs: I had an idea about that.

[08:59] Bob Dobbs: And it's an odd kind of privatization,

[09:02] Bob Dobbs: not a 19th century privatization.

[09:03] Bob Dobbs: Actually,

[09:04] Bob Dobbs: it probably goes back to what we're talking about,

[09:05] Bob Dobbs: the pre-tribal autonomy.

[09:10] Bob Dobbs: That's what people want.

[09:10] Bob Dobbs: They want autonomy from the...

[09:12] Bob Dobbs: the global mosh pit you know and that's what billionaires their charisma is they've got autonomy supposedly and um that would be um the privatization of public access and asset and the public asset is the collective android

[09:29] Bob Dobbs: meme phenomenon we're talking about which now has become the tech body that everybody is um

[09:35] Bob Dobbs: Like a page defending his wake,

[09:37] Bob Dobbs: multiply,

[09:38] Bob Dobbs: multiply,

[09:39] Bob Dobbs: connect,

[09:40] Bob Dobbs: multiply connected,

[09:41] Bob Dobbs: interfacing,

[09:41] Bob Dobbs: interpenetrating,

[09:42] Bob Dobbs: interpellating,

[09:44] Bob Dobbs: Pomo word,

[09:45] Bob Dobbs: all this ridiculous,

[09:46] Bob Dobbs: incredible interaction that's going on by our five bodies and more.

[09:52] Bob Dobbs: And its goal is the privatization of...

[09:59] Bob Dobbs: the public asset.

[09:59] Bob Dobbs: And the public asset is that collective consciousness of all kinds of things happening and new phenomena popping up that if you get in there early,

[10:08] Bob Dobbs: you might get some autonomy or cash.

[10:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[10:14] Cameron McEwen: So autonomy in an old sense.

[10:19] Cameron McEwen: What's wanted is something that is yet to be defined.

[10:28] Cameron McEwen: In that situation of yet to be defined,

[10:32] Cameron McEwen: we go back to some sort of aristocracy or something in the past.

[10:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[10:38] Bob Dobbs: And the,

[10:39] Bob Dobbs: again,

[10:40] Bob Dobbs: no thought,

[10:41] Bob Dobbs: the privatization of public asset,

[10:42] Bob Dobbs: the,

[10:46] Bob Dobbs: see,

[10:47] Bob Dobbs: we're all looking at everything.

[10:48] Bob Dobbs: You're looking at the news or whatever part you pick up.

[10:52] Bob Dobbs: Trump is a major figure in that.

[10:54] Bob Dobbs: He's the asshole,

[10:55] Bob Dobbs: the public asshole as asset,

[10:57] Bob Dobbs: right?

[10:58] Bob Dobbs: And everybody's looking at how to privatization is like going back and getting any kind of analog media that's now privatized.

[11:11] Bob Dobbs: And you're constantly involved with this digital chaos slash fascism,

[11:19] Bob Dobbs: totalitarianism that everybody's a victim of and can exploit.

[11:25] Bob Dobbs: So.

[11:26] Bob Dobbs: It's the most democratic reality that ever could be in terms of opportunity.

[11:33] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[11:34] Bob Dobbs: the disservices are nobody can take responsibility for the effects of their actual privatization.

[11:43] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[11:43] Cameron McEwen: But plus,

[11:46] Cameron McEwen: the big disservice is that the whole environment has its own...

[11:58] Cameron McEwen: acceleration now.

[12:00] Cameron McEwen: It is completely out of individual or even collective control.

[12:05] Bob Dobbs: It's even hard to get what you could claim is the public interest.

[12:12] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[12:13] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't stop enough to find out what it is today.

[12:17] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[12:17] Cameron McEwen: So you have the exploitation of public interest at the very moment that public interest has disappeared.

[12:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[12:25] Bob Dobbs: And And...

[12:27] Bob Dobbs: Part of the exploitation is that you're part of the elite that can dictate the big patterns we talked about last week.

[12:32] Bob Dobbs: So you're in the White House.

[12:34] Bob Dobbs: You can name,

[12:35] Bob Dobbs: Biden can name what everybody has to do,

[12:40] Bob Dobbs: and he rules what is forced on people to claim is the obsolete public interest.

[12:49] Bob Dobbs: And then what's interesting is that it looks like he's involved in everything.

[12:54] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan used to talk about this,

[12:55] Bob Dobbs: the super connectedness of the electric situation,

[12:59] Bob Dobbs: which creates paranoia,

[13:00] Bob Dobbs: but it makes everybody involved with everybody.

[13:02] Bob Dobbs: So everybody looks like they're part of some conspiracy.

[13:06] Bob Dobbs: If you actually point them up over something,

[13:08] Bob Dobbs: right?

[13:09] Bob Dobbs: The connections of them become,

[13:11] Bob Dobbs: they go all over the place.

[13:12] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[13:13] Bob Dobbs: there's probably a fact in the Biden's connections,

[13:18] Bob Dobbs: China,

[13:19] Bob Dobbs: Ukraine and all that stuff.

[13:21] Bob Dobbs: But what is the legal context?

[13:24] Bob Dobbs: If they can keep hijacking the public interest,

[13:27] Bob Dobbs: and we don't know,

[13:29] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[13:29] Bob Dobbs: Trump is all happy that he's getting indicted for the fourth time.

[13:34] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[13:35] Bob Dobbs: the donations come in,

[13:36] Bob Dobbs: he's going to sell T-shirts of a picture of himself in jail.

[13:39] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[13:41] Bob Dobbs: his moves are,

[13:43] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[13:44] Bob Dobbs: we don't know the success of what he's doing to bounce off his absurdity with Biden's absurdity.

[13:52] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[13:52] Bob Dobbs: two absurdities happening here.

[13:55] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[13:55] Cameron McEwen: it's like your phrase,

[13:57] Cameron McEwen: the civil war of the media.

[13:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[13:59] Cameron McEwen: Because what's going on is far bigger than individuals fighting with each other or trying to get elected or something like that.

[14:07] Bob Dobbs: That's where you get into the tech body.

[14:09] Bob Dobbs: It's the machinic fighting among itself right in front of you and pretending,

[14:14] Bob Dobbs: making you think you're part of it.

[14:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[14:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[14:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[14:18] Cameron McEwen: But we should note that when you talk about the legal situation,

[14:21] Cameron McEwen: the legal situation is a piece.

[14:25] Cameron McEwen: in a chessboard,

[14:30] Cameron McEwen: right?

[14:30] Cameron McEwen: So it's not as if the legal situation is one thing.

[14:34] Cameron McEwen: The legal situation is a whole bunch of things that can be assembled in different ways and used in different ways.

[14:41] Cameron McEwen: And we're seeing this use of the legal situation right in front of us.

[14:47] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[14:47] Bob Dobbs: and so that's where...

[14:49] Bob Dobbs: That's another way of everything being interconnected.

[14:53] Bob Dobbs: Anything,

[14:53] Bob Dobbs: a legal situation can become a sport thing or an entertainment or a war.

[14:59] Bob Dobbs: All the categories overlap,

[15:01] Bob Dobbs: like a page of Finnegans Wake.

[15:03] Bob Dobbs: And that is what you've got to learn how to be detached from.

[15:06] Bob Dobbs: You've got to see how that's happening and how it's going to suck you in at some point.

[15:11] Bob Dobbs: It's always going to pop up something that you didn't think you'd be interested in,

[15:14] Bob Dobbs: and all of a sudden you're interested in it,

[15:16] Bob Dobbs: and you're dragged in.

[15:18] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[15:19] Cameron McEwen: you already...

[15:20] Cameron McEwen: You always have been dragged in.

[15:23] Cameron McEwen: It's already happened in the past.

[15:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[15:26] Cameron McEwen: And

[15:26] Cameron McEwen: I just noticed that for everybody that you used the word re-amalgamate a while back.

[15:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[15:35] Cameron McEwen: And of course,

[15:35] Cameron McEwen: that's from Joyce.

[15:37] Cameron McEwen: And now you're bringing the conversation back to Joyce again.

[15:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[15:43] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[15:44] Bob Dobbs: nothing beats the Finnegans Wake for what it shows.

[15:46] Bob Dobbs: It's a painting of our situation,

[15:48] Bob Dobbs: or it's a movie of our situation,

[15:50] Bob Dobbs: or it's a TV broadcast,

[15:52] Bob Dobbs: or it's some maniac talking the whole time.

[15:55] Bob Dobbs: It's like iON talking 33,000 hours,

[15:58] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[16:03] Bob Dobbs: But it's quite remarkable.

[16:05] Bob Dobbs: When you get to this level we're talking about,

[16:07] Bob Dobbs: it's an aesthetic appreciation of what's going on.

[16:10] Bob Dobbs: It's aesthetics.

[16:14] Bob Dobbs: stay in aesthetics,

[16:15] Bob Dobbs: then it all of a sudden becomes responsibility or care or something else.

[16:18] Bob Dobbs: But there's an aspect of getting this that's enjoyable.

[16:22] Bob Dobbs: The mind likes an aesthetic pattern.

[16:27] Bob Dobbs: And what we're describing is an aesthetic situation.

[16:29] Cameron McEwen: It's another way of exploiting the situation.

[16:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[16:35] Bob Dobbs: So the I have to see if it comes up again.

[16:41] Bob Dobbs: I had another aspect there.

[16:42] Bob Dobbs: You've got public asset

[16:43] Bob Dobbs: Public interest.

[16:48] Bob Dobbs: So the public interest is the interplay of all these things that we're saying are mixing in with each other,

[16:58] Bob Dobbs: and that's the tactile interval,

[17:00] Bob Dobbs: the interplay of all these things.

[17:02] Bob Dobbs: So interplay of interconnected,

[17:06] Bob Dobbs: interpolating,

[17:07] Bob Dobbs: mutual merging,

[17:08] Bob Dobbs: re-amalgamation,

[17:09] Bob Dobbs: and then crack up.

[17:12] Bob Dobbs: That is what tactility is,

[17:13] Bob Dobbs: because tactility is not a sense.

[17:15] Bob Dobbs: So we've actually hoiked up nothing as an exploitable object.

[17:20] Bob Dobbs: And so much of wealth today is made from nothing,

[17:24] Bob Dobbs: from stupid gossip or just nothing.

[17:28] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[17:29] Cameron McEwen: And that can be said to be the death of God.

[17:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[17:35] Cameron McEwen: When tactility is taken to be an experience,

[17:40] Bob Dobbs: exploitable asset and god has died yeah and and uh so that's the beast yeah the mark of the beast or the antichrist those uh archetypal themes there god's

[17:56] Bob Dobbs: got a tough time i i remember would you say again the civil war of media yes and Norman Mailer said an interview in 73 that technology had gotten and you know he's well versed uh

[18:09] Bob Dobbs: up to a point on McLuhan,

[18:10] Bob Dobbs: so he probably had McLuhan in mind,

[18:12] Bob Dobbs: he said technology got to the point that both God and Satan were nervous.

[18:18] Bob Dobbs: They both were being threatened.

[18:20] Cameron McEwen: Nervous?

[18:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[18:21] Bob Dobbs: nervous,

[18:22] Bob Dobbs: apprehensive,

[18:23] Bob Dobbs: technology was going to wipe them out.

[18:27] Bob Dobbs: And so you're saying,

[18:28] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[18:28] Bob Dobbs: God got killed.

[18:32] Bob Dobbs: So there it leaves it up in the air about how to bring back God or whatever that is.

[18:37] Bob Dobbs: that people anthropomorphically think they need,

[18:40] Bob Dobbs: that's the crisis.

[18:41] Bob Dobbs: And I guess you would call that's the identity.

[18:44] Bob Dobbs: How do you bring back the God identity?

[18:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[18:47] Bob Dobbs: How do you bring back something special?

[18:50] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[18:51] Cameron McEwen: And what McLuhan's formula is,

[18:56] Cameron McEwen: is that people want to bring back something special,

[18:59] Cameron McEwen: that is to say something particular,

[19:02] Cameron McEwen: but you can only do that by becoming hyper-general.

[19:07] Cameron McEwen: So to put it into media terms,

[19:11] Cameron McEwen: if you want to preserve the values of the literate civilization,

[19:17] Cameron McEwen: the only way you can do that is by talking about media plural.

[19:22] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[19:23] Cameron McEwen: So if you understand media plural,

[19:26] Cameron McEwen: then you can go back to the literary environment and you can live in it in a new way.

[19:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[19:35] Bob Dobbs: and the content of the literary is...

[19:37] Bob Dobbs: speech so our dialogue is a way of doing what you just said the task is correct right we're doing that we're talking anyway

[19:48] Cameron McEwen: What?

[19:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[19:49] Bob Dobbs: we're trying.

[19:49] Cameron McEwen: We're trying.

[19:50] Bob Dobbs: And we're doing pretty good,

[19:51] Bob Dobbs: and we know how futile it is,

[19:53] Bob Dobbs: but you still have glimpses of temporary success or aesthetics,

[20:01] Bob Dobbs: interesting patterns.

[20:03] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[20:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[20:04] Cameron McEwen: And that relates directly to this great quotation at the end of

[20:10] Cameron McEwen: Take Today.

[20:12] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[20:12] Bob Dobbs: Let's go to that.

[20:13] Cameron McEwen: With programming the unconscious.

[20:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[20:17] Bob Dobbs: So the...

[20:18] Bob Dobbs: Making the news in the first line,

[20:21] Bob Dobbs: that's making the public interest of the moment.

[20:26] Bob Dobbs: Making the public interest.

[20:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[20:29] Cameron McEwen: that's,

[20:29] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[20:30] Cameron McEwen: 1800 to 1950 or something like that.

[20:34] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[20:35] Bob Dobbs: So,

[20:36] Bob Dobbs: it says,

[20:38] Bob Dobbs: last page of the book,

[20:39] Bob Dobbs: page 297,

[20:40] Bob Dobbs: the familiar idea of making the news,

[20:43] Bob Dobbs: and this is on page 158.

[20:46] Bob Dobbs: The familiar idea of making the news now yields to making the world itself.

[20:50] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[20:51] Bob Dobbs: that's amazing,

[20:52] Bob Dobbs: right?

[20:53] Bob Dobbs: Making the world.

[20:54] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[20:54] Bob Dobbs: we were trying to say that,

[20:56] Bob Dobbs: to make,

[20:57] Bob Dobbs: and to realize you're in the middle of the making process.

[21:00] Bob Dobbs: You're helping to make the world.

[21:02] Cameron McEwen: It's very important to realize that the word make in McLuhan is a technical word.

[21:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[21:15] Cameron McEwen: It does not...

[21:17] Cameron McEwen: only mean fabricating something.

[21:21] Cameron McEwen: Making is what is different from merging or matching.

[21:30] Bob Dobbs: That could be the anthropomorphic.

[21:33] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[21:33] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[21:34] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[21:36] Cameron McEwen: That names the task and virtue of the anthropomorphic at the same time that it names its...

[21:45] Cameron McEwen: finitude and limitation.

[21:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[21:48] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[21:48] Cameron McEwen: So making is in regard to truth,

[21:51] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[21:53] Cameron McEwen: is the formulation of truth that is admittedly and avowedly limited.

[22:05] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[22:05] Cameron McEwen: So matching is the attempt to take over truth.

[22:12] Cameron McEwen: But that for human beings,

[22:13] Cameron McEwen: that's not possible.

[22:15] Cameron McEwen: It's

[22:15] Cameron McEwen: That's the impossible desire that motivates human beings,

[22:24] Cameron McEwen: but is the great evil.

[22:27] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[22:27] Bob Dobbs: And the

[22:28] Bob Dobbs: POMO, postmodern,

[22:33] Bob Dobbs: what was I going to say?

[22:34] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[22:34] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[22:34] Bob Dobbs: the postmodern trend that you heard in the 80s and 90s or until recently was that there was no more truth.

[22:41] Bob Dobbs: The problem with that.

[22:42] Bob Dobbs: They did not talk about the process that made that a percept that you just did.

[22:49] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard and them don't go that far.

[22:51] Bob Dobbs: They just say there's no truth,

[22:52] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[22:53] Bob Dobbs: and it's immature.

[22:54] Bob Dobbs: It's very limited.

[22:55] Bob Dobbs: You've got to build on McLuhan's words to say it accurately.

[23:00] Cameron McEwen: I believe that that's correct,

[23:02] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[23:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[23:03] Bob Dobbs: about the death of truth or why people can't find truth.

[23:07] Bob Dobbs: So then it says,

[23:08] Bob Dobbs: for the best part of a century,

[23:10] Bob Dobbs: so that's

[23:12] Bob Dobbs: 1870s.

[23:13] Bob Dobbs: That is after

[23:15] Bob Dobbs: Baudelaire, getting to Mallarmé and the Symbolists,

[23:20] Bob Dobbs: and what else is happening in the world?

[23:23] Bob Dobbs: The Paris Commune.

[23:24] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[23:25] Cameron McEwen: anthropology is getting born.

[23:27] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[23:27] Cameron McEwen: So anthropology starts up and people start doing research into primitive cultures,

[23:35] Cameron McEwen: like Tylor,

[23:36] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[23:37] Cameron McEwen: and Frazer.

[23:38] Cameron McEwen: So they're doing that.

[23:39] Cameron McEwen: And then that's also the time when...

[23:43] Cameron McEwen: Depth psychology is getting started,

[23:45] Cameron McEwen: so people are beginning to do research on schizophrenia and paranoia.

[23:51] Cameron McEwen: And so these are all retrievals and replays of tribal unconscious that are getting a megaphone in the daily press.

[24:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[24:06] Bob Dobbs: that's the beginning of the tribal unconscious or the anthropomorphic.

[24:11] Cameron McEwen: Yep.

[24:12] Cameron McEwen: A new sense of the anthropomorphic.

[24:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[24:15] Bob Dobbs: Going back and looking at the primitive forms of human social organization and trying to see what is the essence or the human in there,

[24:23] Bob Dobbs: and that's an anthropomorphic effort.

[24:25] Bob Dobbs: So the other thing was the Paris Commune,

[24:29] Bob Dobbs: the Franco-Prussian War.

[24:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[24:34] Bob Dobbs: I'll just say it.

[24:34] Bob Dobbs: That's enough.

[24:35] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,

[24:36] Bob Dobbs: that's 100 years before this paragraph.

[24:39] Bob Dobbs: For the best part of a century,

[24:40] Bob Dobbs: we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious.

[24:46] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan is not saying that's good.

[24:48] Bob Dobbs: or bad.

[24:49] Bob Dobbs: He says technical statements.

[24:51] Bob Dobbs: He's saying exactly what's being retrieved.

[24:54] Bob Dobbs: And in a way,

[24:54] Bob Dobbs: it's beginning of public interest,

[25:00] Bob Dobbs: but not as we've been saying public interest.

[25:04] Bob Dobbs: So you go into the tribal unconscious first on the way to understanding what the word public interest,

[25:10] Bob Dobbs: the phrase meant today,

[25:12] Bob Dobbs: or when it was written.

[25:15] Cameron McEwen: You could even say that definition

[25:18] Cameron McEwen: of public interest is the tribe.

[25:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[25:22] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[25:22] Cameron McEwen: That's what a tribe is.

[25:24] Bob Dobbs: So the public interest is becoming the locus of the Android meme unconsciously.

[25:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[25:36] Cameron McEwen: I think you could say that,

[25:37] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[25:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[25:39] Bob Dobbs: So then,

[25:40] Bob Dobbs: now McLuhan says something astounding,

[25:43] Bob Dobbs: or

[25:43] Bob Dobbs: Nevitt does,

[25:46] Bob Dobbs: to make you realize that...

[25:47] Bob Dobbs: There's more involved in the Madison Avenue version of McLuhan as a lover of the tribal or a retrieval of the tribal.

[25:54] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[25:55] Bob Dobbs: there has to be some more.

[25:57] Bob Dobbs: It's more complex.

[25:58] Bob Dobbs: And this next sentence does it.

[26:00] Bob Dobbs: The complementary of this.

[26:01] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[26:01] Bob Dobbs: there's another.

[26:02] Bob Dobbs: There's another aspect to this thing.

[26:04] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[26:04] Bob Dobbs: the complementary of this process would seem to be the natural program for the period ahead.

[26:09] Bob Dobbs: Natural in quotes.

[26:11] Bob Dobbs: That has to be talked about.

[26:13] Bob Dobbs: Why is that in quotes?

[26:14] Bob Dobbs: For the period ahead.

[26:15] Bob Dobbs: And what is that?

[26:16] Bob Dobbs: And it's italicized.

[26:17] Bob Dobbs: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness.

[26:22] Bob Dobbs: What?

[26:23] Bob Dobbs: What is it?

[26:24] Bob Dobbs: Are you seeing any form of consciousness out there?

[26:26] Bob Dobbs: I don't think so.

[26:27] Bob Dobbs: I don't see anybody being conscious.

[26:29] Bob Dobbs: Whatever attempts they say they're being conscious are exploitable and leads to cults and stuff.

[26:35] Cameron McEwen: So what the heck is the rule of the thing?

[26:39] Cameron McEwen: Sorry to interrupt,

[26:40] Cameron McEwen: but we need to note that complementary is another technical word.

[26:48] Cameron McEwen: This is what McLuhan is recording here is synchronistic with the development of quantum mechanics.

[27:01] Cameron McEwen: And the great guru of quantum mechanics from the

[27:08] Cameron McEwen: 1920s until around 1960 is Niels Bohr.

[27:13] Cameron McEwen: And one of Niels Bohr's central...

[27:17] Cameron McEwen: ideas is complementarity.

[27:20] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[27:21] Bob Dobbs: And what did you say?

[27:22] Bob Dobbs: What are the great rulers?

[27:24] Bob Dobbs: Maybe you said rulers?

[27:25] Cameron McEwen: No,

[27:25] Cameron McEwen: gurus.

[27:26] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[27:26] Bob Dobbs: guru.

[27:27] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[27:28] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[27:29] Bob Dobbs: So look at this.

[27:31] Bob Dobbs: The beginning of the tactile interval as an artifact or something to be exploited and where this is going,

[27:39] Bob Dobbs: if you get in about the

[27:40] Bob Dobbs: 1890s, they discover the electron.

[27:43] Bob Dobbs: The electron is an early image of the tactile interval.

[27:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[27:49] Cameron McEwen: so the electron was discovered just at the beginning of the 20th century,

[27:55] Cameron McEwen: right?

[27:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[27:56] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying 1897.

[27:58] Bob Dobbs: Let me just look that up.

[27:59] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[27:59] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[27:59] Cameron McEwen: so we're agreeing on that.

[28:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:01] Bob Dobbs: I just want to see what it says.

[28:04] Cameron McEwen: That was Thomson,

[28:05] Cameron McEwen: wasn't it,

[28:05] Cameron McEwen: or one of those guys?

[28:07] Bob Dobbs: Who'd you say?

[28:08] Cameron McEwen: Thomson.

[28:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:10] Bob Dobbs: it's probably Thomson.

[28:11] Bob Dobbs: Let me see.

[28:14] Bob Dobbs: Wikipedia,

[28:15] Bob Dobbs: J.J.

[28:15] Bob Dobbs: Thomson discovered in 1897.

[28:19] Bob Dobbs: And then we could,

[28:21] Bob Dobbs: how is it defined?

[28:22] Bob Dobbs: Electrons are negatively charged subatomic particles that can be either bound to an atom or free.

[28:28] Bob Dobbs: So it can be both.

[28:29] Cameron McEwen: But this is before,

[28:31] Cameron McEwen: at this point in time,

[28:32] Cameron McEwen: people don't yet understand the structure of the atom.

[28:38] Cameron McEwen: That will come soon after.

[28:40] Bob Dobbs: The structure of the electron.

[28:42] Cameron McEwen: Pardon me?

[28:43] Bob Dobbs: The structure of the electron.

[28:45] Cameron McEwen: No,

[28:46] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying the electron.

[28:48] Cameron McEwen: the discovery of the electron will contribute to an understanding of the structure of the atom,

[28:55] Cameron McEwen: which is going to come

[28:57] Cameron McEwen: 10 years later.

[28:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[28:59] Bob Dobbs: An electron that is bound to an atom is one of the three primary types of particles within the atom.

[29:04] Bob Dobbs: The other two are protons and neutrons.

[29:06] Bob Dobbs: Together,

[29:06] Bob Dobbs: protons and electrons form an atom's nucleus.

[29:09] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[29:09] Bob Dobbs: what happens 10 years later that you're saying something about the atom?

[29:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[29:13] Cameron McEwen: that's when people learn.

[29:18] Cameron McEwen: The structure of the atom in the first decade of the 20th century,

[29:24] Cameron McEwen: I believe.

[29:25] Cameron McEwen: I'm just speaking off the top of my head here,

[29:27] Cameron McEwen: but

[29:29] Cameron McEwen: I think that that's when the structure of the atom was understood,

[29:33] Cameron McEwen: partially on the basis of the discovery of the electron.

[29:37] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[29:37] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[29:38] Bob Dobbs: who gets credit for what you're saying?

[29:42] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[29:43] Cameron McEwen: I should know the answer to that.

[29:46] Cameron McEwen: Who was it that...

[29:48] Cameron McEwen: It's another English.

[29:50] Cameron McEwen: a physicist at Cambridge.

[29:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[29:57] Bob Dobbs: here's something.

[29:58] Bob Dobbs: What is an atom?

[29:59] Bob Dobbs: Definition and structure.

[30:00] Bob Dobbs: Let's see if they give some anthropomorphic source of this.

[30:07] Bob Dobbs: No.

[30:08] Bob Dobbs: So I'm going to go to the Wikipedia and see what they say about the atom.

[30:15] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[30:15] Bob Dobbs: you've got a problem here.

[30:16] Bob Dobbs: It says it's a superhero.

[30:19] Bob Dobbs: So it's some cartoon characters.

[30:21] Bob Dobbs: So how do I get the atom?

[30:24] Bob Dobbs: The atom is a Wikipedia thing.

[30:29] Bob Dobbs: So I'll put in atom and

[30:31] Bob Dobbs: Wiki.

[30:41] Bob Dobbs: Okay, atom Wikipedia.

[30:45] Cameron McEwen: The problem is the

[30:49] Cameron McEwen: Entry is going to be huge.

[30:51] Cameron McEwen: It's going to be difficult to get the information.

[30:54] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[30:54] Bob Dobbs: So talk about the ancient Greek thing.

[30:57] Bob Dobbs: Then they get to the English chemist John Dalton in the early

[31:02] Bob Dobbs: 1800s did something.

[31:03] Bob Dobbs: And then isomerism,

[31:06] Bob Dobbs: Friedrich Wohler,

[31:07] Bob Dobbs: 1874,

[31:10] Bob Dobbs: Jacobus Hoff proposed that the carbon atom bonds to other atoms in a tetrahedral arrangement.

[31:16] Bob Dobbs: Then Brownian motion.

[31:19] Bob Dobbs: The British botanist Robert Brown observed that the dust particles inside pollen grains floating in water constantly jiggle about for no apparent reason.

[31:30] Bob Dobbs: In 1905,

[31:32] Bob Dobbs: Albert Einstein theorized that this Brownian motion was caused by the water molecules continuously knocking the grains about and developed a mathematical model to describe it.

[31:40] Bob Dobbs: This model was validated experimentally in

[31:43] Bob Dobbs: 1908 by French physicist Jean Perrin,

[31:47] Bob Dobbs: P-E-R-R-I-N who used Einstein

[31:48] Bob Dobbs: Einstein's equation to calculate the number of atoms in a mole and the size of atoms.

[31:54] Bob Dobbs: Then they go into Thomson,

[31:56] Bob Dobbs: discover that cathode rays are not electromagnetic waves,

[32:00] Bob Dobbs: but made of particles.

[32:02] Bob Dobbs: Then you have

[32:04] Bob Dobbs: Thomson seems to,

[32:09] Bob Dobbs: he comes under scrutiny by Rutherford and Geiger.

[32:12] Cameron McEwen: I think Rutherford is who I was trying to think of.

[32:15] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[32:16] Bob Dobbs: So he doubts the Thomson model,

[32:20] Bob Dobbs: and they get into the alpha particles,

[32:22] Bob Dobbs: and then Thomson had encountered a similar problem in his work on cathode rays,

[32:28] Bob Dobbs: which he solved by creating a near-perfect vacuum in his instruments.

[32:31] Bob Dobbs: Rutherford did not think he'd run into the same problem because alpha particles are much heavier than electrons.

[32:37] Bob Dobbs: According to Thomson's model of the atom,

[32:38] Bob Dobbs: the positive charge in the atom is not concentrated enough to produce an electric field strong enough to deflect an alpha particle.

[32:46] Bob Dobbs: And electrons are so lightweight they should be pushed aside effortlessly by the much heavier alpha particles.

[32:51] Bob Dobbs: Yet there was scattering.

[32:53] Bob Dobbs: So

[32:53] Bob Dobbs: Rutherford and his colleagues decided to investigate this scattering carefully.

[32:58] Bob Dobbs: So between 1908 and 1913,

[33:00] Bob Dobbs: they performed a series of experiments in which they bombarded thin foils of metal with alpha particles.

[33:05] Bob Dobbs: They spotted alpha particles being deflected by angles greater than 90 degrees.

[33:09] Bob Dobbs: To explain this,

[33:10] Bob Dobbs: Rutherford proposed that the positive charge of the atom is not distributed through the atom.

[33:14] Bob Dobbs: throughout the atom's volume,

[33:16] Bob Dobbs: as Thomson believed,

[33:17] Bob Dobbs: but is concentrated in a tiny nucleus at the center.

[33:21] Bob Dobbs: Only such an intense concentration of charge could produce an electric field strong enough to deflect the alpha particles as observed.

[33:28] Bob Dobbs: Then,

[33:29] Bob Dobbs: while experimenting with radioactive decay,

[33:33] Bob Dobbs: Frederick Soddy,

[33:34] Bob Dobbs: a radiochemist,

[33:35] Bob Dobbs: discovered there appeared to be more than one type of atom at each position on the periodic table.

[33:40] Bob Dobbs: These atoms had the same properties,

[33:42] Bob Dobbs: but different atomic weights.

[33:44] Bob Dobbs: The term isotope was coined by Margaret Todd as a suitable name for atoms of differing weight that belong to the same element.

[33:50] Bob Dobbs: J.J.

[33:51] Bob Dobbs: Thomson created a technique for isotope separation through his work on ionized gases,

[33:56] Bob Dobbs: which subsequently led to the discovery of stable isotopes.

[34:00] Bob Dobbs: Then,

[34:00] Bob Dobbs: in Niels Bohr,

[34:01] Bob Dobbs: 1913,

[34:02] Bob Dobbs: proposed a model in which electrons of an atom were assumed to orbit the nucleus,

[34:09] Bob Dobbs: but could only do so in a finite set of orbits,

[34:11] Bob Dobbs: or could jump between these orbits.

[34:14] Bob Dobbs: only in discrete changes of energy corresponding to absorption or radiation of a photon.

[34:19] Bob Dobbs: Then he says a bunch of stuff,

[34:21] Bob Dobbs: and then later in the same year,

[34:22] Bob Dobbs: Henry Moseley provided additional experimental evidence in favor of Niels Bohr's theory.

[34:27] Bob Dobbs: These results refined Rutherford's and Antonius van den Broek's model,

[34:33] Bob Dobbs: which proposed that the atom contains in its nucleus a number of positive nuclear charges that is equal to its atomic number in the periodic table.

[34:41] Bob Dobbs: under these experiments

[34:43] Bob Dobbs: The atomic number was not known to be a physical and experimental quantity.

[34:47] Bob Dobbs: That it is equal to the atomic nuclear charge remains the accepted atomic model today.

[34:53] Bob Dobbs: Chemical bonds between atoms were explained by Gilbert Newton Lewis in 1916 as the interactions between their constituent electrons,

[35:01] Bob Dobbs: as the chemical properties of the elements.

[35:05] Bob Dobbs: So all these guys are exploring tactility.

[35:07] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[35:09] Bob Dobbs: absolutely.

[35:10] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[35:12] Bob Dobbs: As the chemical properties of the elements were known to largely repeat themselves according to the periodic law,

[35:16] Bob Dobbs: in 1919,

[35:18] Bob Dobbs: the American chemist Irving Langmuir suggested that this could be explained if the electrons in an atom were connected or clustered in some manner.

[35:26] Bob Dobbs: Groups of electrons were thought to occupy a set of electron shells above the nucleus.

[35:31] Bob Dobbs: So then they say the Bohr model of the atom was the first complete physical model of the atom.

[35:37] Bob Dobbs: It described the overall structure of the atom,

[35:39] Bob Dobbs: how atoms bond each other,

[35:41] Bob Dobbs: and predicted the spectral lines of hydrogen.

[35:43] Bob Dobbs: Bohr's model was not perfect and was soon so preceded by the more accurate Schrodinger model,

[35:48] Bob Dobbs: but it was sufficient to evaporate any remaining doubts that matter is composed of atoms.

[35:53] Bob Dobbs: For chemists,

[35:53] Bob Dobbs: the idea of the atom had been a useful heuristic tool,

[35:57] Bob Dobbs: but physicists had doubts as to whether matter really is made up of atoms,

[36:00] Bob Dobbs: as nobody had yet developed a complete physical model of the atom.

[36:05] Bob Dobbs: So you have all these guys.

[36:06] Bob Dobbs: out.

[36:07] Bob Dobbs: Bohr gets the credit,

[36:08] Bob Dobbs: but there's all these guys.

[36:09] Bob Dobbs: This is a tactile teamwork exploration of the tactile object.

[36:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[36:15] Bob Dobbs: And that's why they never complete it.

[36:17] Bob Dobbs: They don't complete it.

[36:19] Cameron McEwen: It's public interest investigating public interest.

[36:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[36:22] Bob Dobbs: it's the first manifestation of public interest.

[36:26] Bob Dobbs: And the global node is happening,

[36:27] Bob Dobbs: the resonant node.

[36:28] Bob Dobbs: People are starting to get really imploded in the telegraph and telephone environment.

[36:35] Bob Dobbs: So,

[36:35] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[36:36] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[36:37] Cameron McEwen: the telephone isn't there yet,

[36:38] Cameron McEwen: is it?

[36:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[36:39] Bob Dobbs: the telephone's in the 1880s.

[36:41] Bob Dobbs: I'll just check that.

[36:42] Cameron McEwen: But it's just a local thing.

[36:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[36:46] Cameron McEwen: It hasn't become a network yet,

[36:48] Cameron McEwen: I don't think.

[36:50] Cameron McEwen: But it's around the same time that it gets built out into a network.

[36:54] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[36:54] Bob Dobbs: So in 76,

[36:59] Bob Dobbs: Bell gets the patent.

[37:05] Bob Dobbs: Early history,

[37:13] Bob Dobbs: timeline of early development,

[37:15] Bob Dobbs: so it goes from 1844,

[37:17] Bob Dobbs: so you get up to 1877,

[37:21] Bob Dobbs: Thomas Edison files a patent application.

[37:29] Bob Dobbs: In January 30th,

[37:30] Bob Dobbs: 1877,

[37:31] Bob Dobbs: Bell is given a patent,

[37:32] Bob Dobbs: but then Edison gets something...

[37:36] Bob Dobbs: on April

[37:37] Bob Dobbs: 27th, a few months later.

[37:38] Bob Dobbs: Early commercial instruments,

[37:40] Bob Dobbs: when do they start doing that?

[37:54] Bob Dobbs: They're just saying the beginning of the 20th century.

[37:58] Bob Dobbs: There's different kinds of early telephones.

[38:01] Cameron McEwen: Yep,

[38:02] Cameron McEwen: yep.

[38:03] Cameron McEwen: So that's,

[38:03] Cameron McEwen: notice...

[38:04] Cameron McEwen: The electron's 1897,

[38:08] Cameron McEwen: the form of the atom is 1908 to 1911.

[38:14] Cameron McEwen: 1913.

[38:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[38:15] Cameron McEwen: that was Bohr,

[38:16] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[38:16] Cameron McEwen: 1913.

[38:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[38:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[38:19] Cameron McEwen: but Rutherford is

[38:21] Cameron McEwen: 08 to 11.

[38:22] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[38:22] Cameron McEwen: So a lot is happening at this time in science,

[38:30] Cameron McEwen: and what will happen in the mid-1920s,

[38:34] Cameron McEwen: 20s is that

[38:37] Cameron McEwen: Bohr and Heisenberg and people like this will formulate quantum mechanics.

[38:46] Bob Dobbs: That's at the Copenhagen conference in 27.

[38:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[38:50] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[38:51] Cameron McEwen: And so the uncertainty principle will be announced which

[39:03] Cameron McEwen: is that with subatomic particles,

[39:08] Cameron McEwen: which have been investigated since the electron was isolated in 97,

[39:15] Cameron McEwen: with subatomic particles,

[39:17] Cameron McEwen: you can't simultaneously both measure their place and their momentum.

[39:22] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[39:23] Cameron McEwen: And so that's the uncertainty principle.

[39:25] Cameron McEwen: And so then

[39:29] Cameron McEwen: Bohr says,

[39:29] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[39:31] Cameron McEwen: These things are complementary.

[39:33] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[39:34] Cameron McEwen: that brings us back to the quotation in

[39:37] Cameron McEwen: Take Today,

[39:38] Cameron McEwen: where the complementary of this process,

[39:42] Cameron McEwen: this is complementarity can be taken to be something out of the

[39:48] Cameron McEwen: I Ching in

[39:51] Cameron McEwen: China, or it can be taken to be the way up and the way down of Heraclitus,

[39:55] Cameron McEwen: or it can be taken to be the most up-to-date science in the 20th century.

[40:02] Cameron McEwen: quantum mechanics.

[40:07] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is constantly talking about the flip,

[40:10] Cameron McEwen: and what he means by the flip is the constant inversion of figure and ground.

[40:18] Cameron McEwen: And so when he talks about complementary here,

[40:22] Cameron McEwen: all of those senses from thousands of years of history and from um,

[40:30] Cameron McEwen: technological developments like telephone networking or from scientific investigation like we've been talking about into the atom and the measurement of particles.

[40:44] Cameron McEwen: All of these things are built into how this works and why this works.

[40:50] Bob Dobbs: And it's an increasingly corporate teamwork.

[40:53] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[40:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[40:54] Cameron McEwen: And so the science is teamwork.

[40:59] Cameron McEwen: The telephone network is teamwork.

[41:04] Cameron McEwen: All of this is what could be called the revelation of ground.

[41:13] Cameron McEwen: So all of this teamwork was always going on,

[41:15] Cameron McEwen: but it couldn't be seen.

[41:18] Cameron McEwen: And suddenly,

[41:20] Cameron McEwen: if you start looking at primitive tribes,

[41:24] Cameron McEwen: or if you start looking at the unconscious,

[41:29] Cameron McEwen: that is not an individual unconscious,

[41:34] Cameron McEwen: it's a collective unconscious,

[41:36] Cameron McEwen: to use Jung's term.

[41:39] Cameron McEwen: All of these things are suddenly showing the human interest that's always been in the background,

[41:46] Cameron McEwen: but couldn't be seen.

[41:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[41:48] Bob Dobbs: and because it's a shrinking Global Village,

[41:50] Bob Dobbs: and everybody is in touch with each other,

[41:52] Bob Dobbs: bouncing off each other,

[41:53] Bob Dobbs: publishing and talking on phones and telegraphing each other.

[41:57] Bob Dobbs: The team has come together,

[42:01] Bob Dobbs: and I would say it's the last emphasis of individuals.

[42:07] Bob Dobbs: You get World War II,

[42:09] Bob Dobbs: and then it's corporate after that.

[42:11] Bob Dobbs: And you don't have famous people.

[42:14] Bob Dobbs: You don't have figures like Einstein and Bohr,

[42:17] Bob Dobbs: cultural figures.

[42:19] Bob Dobbs: What is the scientist of the

[42:23] Bob Dobbs: 50s and 60s?

[42:23] Bob Dobbs: What's in the image?

[42:24] Bob Dobbs: Who was the guy?

[42:27] Bob Dobbs: Who was the woman?

[42:29] Bob Dobbs: You really tried to find...

[42:32] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan talks about that in one of his lectures.

[42:34] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was the image.

[42:36] Bob Dobbs: Hey,

[42:36] Bob Dobbs: no,

[42:37] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was the new scientist.

[42:38] Bob Dobbs: Nobody recognized him.

[42:39] Bob Dobbs: In terms of the individual consciousness still being a contender,

[42:42] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was that.

[42:46] Bob Dobbs: That's why everybody got involved with him and got influenced by him because he was covering on the whole thing.

[42:51] Bob Dobbs: So he was actually coming up with the unified field theory.

[42:57] Cameron McEwen: I think that's true,

[42:58] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[42:59] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[43:00] Cameron McEwen: It's a unified field theory of the humanization of the planet,

[43:06] Cameron McEwen: a way called the harmonization of the planet.

[43:09] Bob Dobbs: Moving,

[43:09] Bob Dobbs: groping towards privatization and the autonomy sense,

[43:13] Bob Dobbs: as we were talking about.

[43:14] Bob Dobbs: So,

[43:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[43:15] Bob Dobbs: the Copenhagen conference,

[43:17] Bob Dobbs: it's an argument between Einstein and Bohr and a bunch of people,

[43:21] Bob Dobbs: and they are the figures.

[43:22] Bob Dobbs: This is a famous picture of all those guys that are in that conference.

[43:27] Bob Dobbs: They all become individually famous,

[43:29] Bob Dobbs: right?

[43:29] Bob Dobbs: Google and everybody's in that picture.

[43:32] Bob Dobbs: There's about 30 of them.

[43:35] Bob Dobbs: But see,

[43:36] Bob Dobbs: you're trying to say there's a literate individual that's causing this,

[43:39] Bob Dobbs: that's making this new world.

[43:41] Bob Dobbs: But it's really a team,

[43:42] Bob Dobbs: and they're exploring the tactile interval or the public interest,

[43:46] Bob Dobbs: and then that is not articulated consciously until McLuhan,

[43:51] Bob Dobbs: and he's building on the other scientists,

[43:54] Bob Dobbs: in quotes.

[43:55] Bob Dobbs: Pound,

[43:56] Bob Dobbs: Eliot,

[43:56] Bob Dobbs: Joyce,

[43:57] Bob Dobbs: and Lewis,

[43:58] Bob Dobbs: right?

[43:59] Bob Dobbs: They're exploring this thing,

[44:01] Bob Dobbs: a new kind of science.

[44:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[44:04] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[44:04] Cameron McEwen: So that's what I'm doing in my Substack newsletter.

[44:11] Cameron McEwen: I'm trying to show that it might be that quantum mechanics can't be put properly.

[44:25] Cameron McEwen: aside from something like what McLuhan was doing.

[44:30] Bob Dobbs: You can't separate it from McLuhan?

[44:32] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you're saying?

[44:33] Bob Dobbs: What do you mean it can't be put aside?

[44:44] Cameron McEwen: I don't think I said that.

[44:46] Cameron McEwen: You must have misunderstood.

[44:47] Cameron McEwen: I was saying that it can't be put properly or it can't be put without contradiction unless you go to something like what McLuhan was doing.

[45:03] Bob Dobbs: Via the men in 1914,

[45:05] Bob Dobbs: via their issues.

[45:07] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[45:08] Bob Dobbs: See,

[45:08] Bob Dobbs: there's the,

[45:09] Bob Dobbs: remember,

[45:09] Bob Dobbs: he says that Joyce takes on Einstein.

[45:13] Bob Dobbs: That's McLuhan announcing,

[45:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm a scientist,

[45:15] Bob Dobbs: I'm from a tradition,

[45:17] Bob Dobbs: and we're not lab guys.

[45:19] Bob Dobbs: We're looking at language and media or cultural artifacts,

[45:24] Bob Dobbs: and that's forming,

[45:25] Bob Dobbs: that's as much as a process of forming the world as electrons.

[45:30] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[45:30] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[45:31] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[45:32] Cameron McEwen: So the sentence that you wrote,

[45:37] Cameron McEwen: that you read from the last page of Take Today,

[45:46] Cameron McEwen: says what you just said.

[45:49] Cameron McEwen: But what you just said amounts to an enlargement and a clarification of it.

[45:56] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[45:57] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[45:57] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan clarified Joyce and then

[46:00] Bob Dobbs: Dobbs and...

[46:01] Bob Dobbs: Cameron clarified,

[46:06] Cameron McEwen: talking is a fluid.

[46:06] Cameron McEwen: But just,

[46:07] Cameron McEwen: so

[46:08] Cameron McEwen: I'll read that sentence again,

[46:09] Cameron McEwen: because it's so important.

[46:12] Cameron McEwen: The complementary of this process would seem to be the natural program for the period ahead,

[46:20] Cameron McEwen: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness.

[46:27] Cameron McEwen: That's a very heavy sentence.

[46:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[46:30] Bob Dobbs: and natural,

[46:31] Bob Dobbs: I now see why that's called natural.

[46:34] Bob Dobbs: It's actually absurd,

[46:36] Bob Dobbs: chaotic,

[46:38] Bob Dobbs: multi-level,

[46:39] Bob Dobbs: invisible.

[46:39] Bob Dobbs: It's not natural the way people think visually we're natural.

[46:43] Bob Dobbs: If it's natural,

[46:45] Bob Dobbs: you can see it.

[46:46] Bob Dobbs: It's natural.

[46:46] Bob Dobbs: It's a cliche.

[46:48] Bob Dobbs: And what he's looking at is something that's not natural,

[46:52] Bob Dobbs: but it means it's the obvious way to go,

[46:56] Bob Dobbs: nothing to do with appearance.

[46:58] Bob Dobbs: It's the obvious program.

[47:00] Cameron McEwen: It's the new natural.

[47:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[47:03] Cameron McEwen: It's what he,

[47:03] Cameron McEwen: in Laws of Media,

[47:05] Cameron McEwen: it's what he calls second nature.

[47:07] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[47:08] Cameron McEwen: So first nature is what has been left behind,

[47:13] Cameron McEwen: especially after the satellite.

[47:17] Cameron McEwen: But now there is a new nature,

[47:20] Cameron McEwen: a second nature,

[47:22] Cameron McEwen: and that has to do with,

[47:25] Cameron McEwen: it's complementary to the old nature.

[47:28] Cameron McEwen: to first nature and it's going to have to do with instead of the unconscious programming the conscious it's going to be the conscious programming the unconscious right so the the physicists are the last guys doing first trying to figure out first nature the

[47:49] Bob Dobbs: then McLuhan comes in says no second nature media the virtual is more important than first nature.

[47:59] Bob Dobbs: So then I was going to say another part.

[48:01] Bob Dobbs: So the...

[48:06] Cameron McEwen: It's not...

[48:06] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't say it's more important.

[48:08] Cameron McEwen: I think you just said that too quickly.

[48:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[48:10] Cameron McEwen: it's complementary.

[48:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[48:13] Cameron McEwen: it's complementary.

[48:14] Cameron McEwen: It's implicated in...

[48:15] Cameron McEwen: It's new.

[48:18] Bob Dobbs: It's the newer new.

[48:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[48:20] Bob Dobbs: so this is what they say,

[48:21] Bob Dobbs: that physics lost its charisma in the second half of the 20th century and biology took over.

[48:26] Bob Dobbs: But biology is the earth as art form,

[48:29] Bob Dobbs: right?

[48:30] Bob Dobbs: That's what you said,

[48:31] Bob Dobbs: the effect of the satellite.

[48:33] Bob Dobbs: And again,

[48:34] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan goes deeper by showing why these things become figures.

[48:38] Bob Dobbs: Physicist falls off,

[48:41] Bob Dobbs: biology becomes a figure.

[48:43] Bob Dobbs: William Irwin Thompson wrote about that,

[48:44] Bob Dobbs: how biology took over as the organizer of public interest.

[48:50] Bob Dobbs: And it's just a figure for McLuhan's talk.

[48:52] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's talk is better.

[48:56] Bob Dobbs: If you have a truth,

[48:57] Bob Dobbs: you come up with something,

[48:58] Bob Dobbs: you're explaining something to people,

[49:00] Bob Dobbs: and it should be half understandable,

[49:03] Bob Dobbs: but there's no explainer,

[49:05] Bob Dobbs: like Thomson explaining matter and the electron,

[49:08] Bob Dobbs: and Bohr's explaining the atom,

[49:10] Bob Dobbs: but there's a new level that needs to be explained,

[49:13] Bob Dobbs: and that's the complementary second nature,

[49:17] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan is the explainer of that,

[49:18] Bob Dobbs: so he's the scientist of it.

[49:21] Bob Dobbs: He's the one who says it,

[49:22] Bob Dobbs: and tells you what's it.

[49:24] Bob Dobbs: What it does,

[49:24] Bob Dobbs: and it has a huge impact.

[49:26] Bob Dobbs: Everybody knows there's something to what he's doing,

[49:29] Bob Dobbs: and they all jump in and try to exploit it in some way.

[49:33] Cameron McEwen: So the term complementary,

[49:37] Cameron McEwen: which was complementarity for Bohr,

[49:42] Cameron McEwen: we should say Bohr,

[49:43] Cameron McEwen: B-O-H-R,

[49:46] Cameron McEwen: for people who don't recognize the word,

[49:48] Cameron McEwen: Niels Bohr,

[49:51] Cameron McEwen: complementarity has a gap to it.

[49:54] Cameron McEwen: And that gap introduces uncertainty.

[49:58] Cameron McEwen: So when

[50:02] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan...

[50:03] Cameron McEwen: comes along and suggests a new language,

[50:08] Cameron McEwen: a kind of new paradigm for understanding this stuff.

[50:11] Cameron McEwen: The great problem he has is that in order to speak that language,

[50:16] Cameron McEwen: you have to cross this gap.

[50:19] Cameron McEwen: And there's a huge reluctance to do that.

[50:22] Cameron McEwen: People want to use the rearview mirror instead of going across the gap.

[50:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[50:29] Bob Dobbs: they think it's a death of the anthropomorphic if they do that.

[50:32] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[50:34] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[50:36] Bob Dobbs: So,

[50:36] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[50:36] Bob Dobbs: he's the New Science.

[50:38] Bob Dobbs: He's making a New Science,

[50:39] Bob Dobbs: and it's a qualified term,

[50:41] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[50:42] Bob Dobbs: Many volumes have to be written to say that it doesn't mean what you think science means,

[50:47] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[50:49] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[50:51] Bob Dobbs: And so there's a the achieved form of consciousness.

[50:55] Bob Dobbs: So I asked Barry Nevitt,

[50:57] Bob Dobbs: what does that refer to?

[50:58] Bob Dobbs: And he says,

[50:59] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake.

[51:00] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan's the expert on Finnegans Wake.

[51:02] Bob Dobbs: or at least a practical use of Finnegans Wake.

[51:05] Bob Dobbs: And so McLuhan arrived at the new reasonably achieved form of consciousness.

[51:11] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[51:12] Cameron McEwen: But we didn't read the last sentence,

[51:15] Cameron McEwen: which is also very,

[51:16] Cameron McEwen: very important.

[51:18] Cameron McEwen: So we need to read that.

[51:20] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[51:21] Bob Dobbs: so I just wanted to say that,

[51:23] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[51:23] Bob Dobbs: arrogantly,

[51:24] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is declaring himself quite conscious,

[51:27] Bob Dobbs: and other people are going to have to go through him.

[51:30] Bob Dobbs: to get that consciousness,

[51:31] Bob Dobbs: go through his method,

[51:32] Bob Dobbs: to get a similar autonomy from the tribal unconscious.

[51:38] Bob Dobbs: That's what's so silly about McLuhan,

[51:40] Bob Dobbs: is that he's attached to all this tribal unconscious replays that is the main means of making conventional analog media wealth,

[51:49] Bob Dobbs: right?

[51:50] Bob Dobbs: From music to conventions.

[51:53] Bob Dobbs: All this tribal trying to find what the public interest is.

[51:57] Bob Dobbs: You just have to stay home if you understand McLuhan,

[52:00] Bob Dobbs: and you've got a better view than whatever convention

[52:03] Bob Dobbs: Noam Chomsky is at,

[52:04] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[52:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[52:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[52:08] Bob Dobbs: This procedure…

[52:10] Cameron McEwen: Let's just notice,

[52:10] Cameron McEwen: though,

[52:11] Cameron McEwen: that for McLuhan,

[52:15] Cameron McEwen: the tetrad is always at work.

[52:18] Cameron McEwen: So when he's proposing something that's radically new,

[52:21] Cameron McEwen: it's also radically old.

[52:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[52:24] Cameron McEwen: And radically retrieved.

[52:25] Cameron McEwen: It's always…

[52:26] Cameron McEwen: It's always a retrieval.

[52:29] Bob Dobbs: And it's always flipping in the middle.

[52:31] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[52:32] Cameron McEwen: It's always,

[52:32] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[52:34] Cameron McEwen: just like the model of the atom.

[52:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[52:37] Cameron McEwen: And just like quantum mechanics attempt to understand that model of the atom.

[52:46] Cameron McEwen: There is nothing that is stable.

[52:49] Cameron McEwen: You cannot,

[52:51] Cameron McEwen: the very attempt at stability falsifies.

[52:56] Cameron McEwen: what you're doing because of the uncertainty principle.

[52:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[53:00] Bob Dobbs: and the gyroscope is an interesting image.

[53:07] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[53:09] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[53:09] Cameron McEwen: So it achieves orientation through movement.

[53:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[53:16] Bob Dobbs: So now all this is a procedure,

[53:18] Bob Dobbs: a formula,

[53:20] Bob Dobbs: a method,

[53:20] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[53:21] Bob Dobbs: like an update of Francis Bacon's method.

[53:24] Bob Dobbs: This procedure...

[53:25] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[53:26] Bob Dobbs: you're reading this and making the news,

[53:28] Bob Dobbs: human consciousness,

[53:30] Bob Dobbs: unconscious,

[53:31] Bob Dobbs: forms of consciousness.

[53:32] Bob Dobbs: This is a procedure,

[53:33] Bob Dobbs: sir?

[53:35] Bob Dobbs: What's the procedure here?

[53:36] Bob Dobbs: But it is a gyroscopic procedure,

[53:39] Bob Dobbs: tetrad.

[53:41] Bob Dobbs: And you've got that famous quote,

[53:44] Bob Dobbs: paragraph on page 614,

[53:47] Bob Dobbs: the bottom,

[53:48] Bob Dobbs: the Finnegans Wake,

[53:49] Bob Dobbs: and it goes into

[53:51] Bob Dobbs: 615, and it begins with...

[53:54] Bob Dobbs: tetradomational.

[53:56] Bob Dobbs: The tetrad is in there.

[53:58] Bob Dobbs: Our whole mill wheel something tetradomational.

[54:03] Bob Dobbs: Those words are so perfect about the procedure of what Joyce is trying to communicate.

[54:11] Bob Dobbs: He's trying to communicate the procedure of how he makes the wake.

[54:14] Bob Dobbs: And then McLuhan comes along and applies it sociologically,

[54:18] Bob Dobbs: well,

[54:18] Bob Dobbs: on a bigger scale.

[54:20] Bob Dobbs: He moves it out of the verbal module.

[54:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[54:24] Cameron McEwen: well,

[54:24] Cameron McEwen: that word domational is a great one.

[54:30] Cameron McEwen: It says...

[54:31] Cameron McEwen: that in order to understand a domain,

[54:33] Cameron McEwen: you have to understand domains.

[54:36] Cameron McEwen: That's what the domational would be.

[54:39] Bob Dobbs: And I'm also thinking,

[54:40] Bob Dobbs: he talks in the essay on Joyce in Interior landscape,

[54:44] Bob Dobbs: one of the essays,

[54:44] Bob Dobbs: he says,

[54:45] Bob Dobbs: it is domition.

[54:47] Bob Dobbs: The

[54:48] Bob Dobbs: Roman Empire,

[54:49] Bob Dobbs: about 200 after

[54:52] Bob Dobbs: Jesus was born,

[54:53] Bob Dobbs: it's domition.

[54:56] Bob Dobbs: crazy guy.

[54:57] Bob Dobbs: He's overseeing the dismantling of the Roman Empire.

[55:00] Bob Dobbs: It's really falling apart.

[55:02] Bob Dobbs: So it's interesting how McLuhan takes a historical figure and says that is a description of the process it's undergoing sociologically.

[55:11] Bob Dobbs: So I'm thinking of Domitian as part of Domation.

[55:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[55:17] Cameron McEwen: interesting.

[55:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[55:18] Bob Dobbs: if you remember,

[55:19] Bob Dobbs: look it up.

[55:20] Bob Dobbs: You'll see he just says it is Domitian.

[55:22] Bob Dobbs: He names the guy.

[55:24] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[55:25] Bob Dobbs: let's just see,

[55:26] Bob Dobbs: my accurate about,

[55:28] Bob Dobbs: is it 200 AD he is,

[55:30] Bob Dobbs: or BC,

[55:32] Bob Dobbs: was it

[55:33] Bob Dobbs: ACE, after the common error or something?

[55:38] Bob Dobbs: The new term,

[55:39] Bob Dobbs: Domitian,

[55:43] Bob Dobbs: it says Domitian,

[55:43] Bob Dobbs: Roman emperor and tyrant of Rome.

[55:49] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[55:49] Bob Dobbs: I'm off a hundred.

[55:51] Bob Dobbs: He is from...

[55:56] Cameron McEwen: uh he's emperor from 81 to 96 so it's actually right after quote uh jesus so if there was a jesus and um uh it's just after uh it's after nero and there was a whole series of uh tyrants

[56:13] Cameron McEwen: there yes and then a hundred years later was when they got the good emperors for a while yeah it says

[56:21] Bob Dobbs: As a consequence,

[56:23] Bob Dobbs: Domitian was popular with the people in the army,

[56:25] Bob Dobbs: but considered a tyrant by members of the Roman Senate.

[56:28] Bob Dobbs: Domitian's reign came to an end in 96,

[56:31] Bob Dobbs: which is McLuhan's number,

[56:32] Bob Dobbs: 69 and

[56:33] Bob Dobbs: 96, when he was assassinated by court officials.

[56:37] Bob Dobbs: He was succeeded the same day by his advisor,

[56:40] Bob Dobbs: Nerva.

[56:41] Bob Dobbs: After his death,

[56:42] Bob Dobbs: Domitian's memory was condemned to oblivion by the Senate,

[56:46] Bob Dobbs: while senatorial and equestrian authors such as Tacitus

[56:50] Bob Dobbs: Pliny the Younger and Suetonius propagated the view of Domitian as a cruel and paranoid tyrant.

[56:56] Bob Dobbs: Modern revisionists instead have characterized Domitian as a ruthless but efficient autocrat,

[57:00] Bob Dobbs: whose cultural,

[57:01] Bob Dobbs: economic,

[57:01] Bob Dobbs: and political programs provided the foundation of the peaceful second century.

[57:05] Bob Dobbs: That's what you're calling the nice dictators,

[57:10] Bob Dobbs: right?

[57:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[57:11] Cameron McEwen: I think it started towards the end of the second century.

[57:21] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[57:22] Cameron McEwen: like Marcus Aurelius,

[57:23] Cameron McEwen: for example.

[57:25] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[57:27] Cameron McEwen: The empire lucked out by having like four or five relatively good emperors in a row.

[57:36] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[57:36] Bob Dobbs: Let me just see if this comes up.

[57:40] Bob Dobbs: Roman emperors,

[57:41] Bob Dobbs: if there's a list.

[57:44] Bob Dobbs: Give me

[57:46] Bob Dobbs: Roman emperors in order.

[57:49] Bob Dobbs: Chronological list.

[57:53] Bob Dobbs: You've got

[57:58] Bob Dobbs: Domitian,

[58:02] Bob Dobbs: 2nd century.

[58:05] Bob Dobbs: I have to get rid of these.

[58:06] Bob Dobbs: Things are in the way.

[58:15] Bob Dobbs: So you have

[58:17] Bob Dobbs: Nerva, then you have Trajan.

[58:18] Bob Dobbs: Trajan,

[58:19] Bob Dobbs: Hadrian.

[58:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[58:20] Cameron McEwen: Trajan,

[58:21] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[58:21] Cameron McEwen: those are very good.

[58:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[58:23] Cameron McEwen: Trajan,

[58:23] Cameron McEwen: Hadrian.

[58:24] Bob Dobbs: Antoninus,

[58:25] Bob Dobbs: Antoninus,

[58:26] Bob Dobbs: Pius,

[58:27] Bob Dobbs: Marcus Aurelius,

[58:28] Bob Dobbs: Lucius Verus,

[58:30] Bob Dobbs: Commodus,

[58:31] Bob Dobbs: Publius Helvius,

[58:33] Bob Dobbs: Pertinax,

[58:34] Bob Dobbs: Marcus Didius Severus Julianus,

[58:36] Bob Dobbs: I don't know these guys,

[58:37] Bob Dobbs: Septimius Severus,

[58:39] Bob Dobbs: then the third century is Caracalla,

[58:41] Bob Dobbs: Publius,

[58:42] Bob Dobbs: Geta,

[58:42] Bob Dobbs: Macrinus.

[58:43] Bob Dobbs: So,

[58:43] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[58:44] Bob Dobbs: basically you're thinking of...

[58:45] Bob Dobbs: Trajan,

[58:45] Bob Dobbs: Hadrian,

[58:46] Bob Dobbs: and Tony's Marcus Aurelius,

[58:47] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[58:48] Bob Dobbs: right?

[58:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[58:49] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[58:49] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[58:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[58:50] Bob Dobbs: that gets you up to 180 at the end of Marcus Aurelius.

[58:57] Bob Dobbs: So Domitian is a transition there.

[59:00] Bob Dobbs: He's a peak.

[59:00] Bob Dobbs: He's an autocrat,

[59:01] Bob Dobbs: extreme tyrant,

[59:02] Bob Dobbs: but he also had some other thing going for him.

[59:05] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he created a public order of the media of the day,

[59:09] Bob Dobbs: and that was necessary.

[59:11] Bob Dobbs: Too much chaos.

[59:13] Bob Dobbs: in that transition caused by

[59:16] Bob Dobbs: Jesus. Jesus upset everything.

[59:20] Bob Dobbs: Okay?

[59:22] Bob Dobbs: So,

[59:23] Bob Dobbs: this procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness radically different from former consciousness.

[59:28] Bob Dobbs: Whoa,

[59:29] Bob Dobbs: what a sentence that is

[59:32] Bob Dobbs: Anybody experiencing this new consciousness?

[59:35] Bob Dobbs: This procedure.

[59:36] Bob Dobbs: So the procedure,

[59:37] Bob Dobbs: now that's making a world.

[59:39] Bob Dobbs: He's making a new world,

[59:41] Bob Dobbs: a new form of consciousness,

[59:42] Bob Dobbs: consciously.

[59:45] Bob Dobbs: It's radically different from any kind of normal consciousness,

[59:48] Bob Dobbs: maybe even anthropomorphic consciousness up to that point.

[59:53] Bob Dobbs: So what a statement,

[59:54] Bob Dobbs: eh?

[59:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[59:55] Cameron McEwen: so to understand that,

[59:59] Cameron McEwen: there's no way to understand that.

[1:00:02] Cameron McEwen: as something unique because in order to understand it as something unique,

[1:00:10] Cameron McEwen: you would have to look into the future and see how that future will evolve.

[1:00:18] Cameron McEwen: So science fiction and things like that make that attempt.

[1:00:23] Cameron McEwen: But the better way to do it,

[1:00:27] Cameron McEwen: in my view,

[1:00:28] Cameron McEwen: is to look back at...

[1:00:30] Cameron McEwen: let's say 1780,

[1:00:33] Cameron McEwen: look at the century between 1780 and 1880.

[1:00:38] Cameron McEwen: And what happens during that time is that chemistry is born.

[1:00:43] Cameron McEwen: And when chemistry is born,

[1:00:45] Cameron McEwen: then literally everything changes.

[1:00:49] Cameron McEwen: How people work,

[1:00:51] Cameron McEwen: how people go from here to there,

[1:00:55] Cameron McEwen: what the environment is,

[1:00:56] Cameron McEwen: how to make things.

[1:00:58] Cameron McEwen: on and on and on and on.

[1:01:01] Cameron McEwen: And what McLuhan predicts is that exactly that same thing is going to happen to us.

[1:01:07] Cameron McEwen: It is already happening to us,

[1:01:11] Cameron McEwen: but it's going to happen through a new kind of science.

[1:01:15] Cameron McEwen: And that new kind of science has not yet been defined,

[1:01:20] Cameron McEwen: but when it is defined,

[1:01:22] Cameron McEwen: it's going to be the programming of the unconscious,

[1:01:25] Cameron McEwen: but with the recently achieved forms of consciousness.

[1:01:28] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:01:29] Bob Dobbs: and that could be indicated in his 1955 title,

[1:01:32] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:01:33] Bob Dobbs: The Alchemy of Media.

[1:01:36] Bob Dobbs: That could be the phrase you're looking for.

[1:01:39] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.

[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: You have matter,

[1:01:42] Bob Dobbs: which is contained in the Gutenberg framework,

[1:01:45] Bob Dobbs: and,

[1:01:46] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:01:47] Bob Dobbs: they base matter through chemistry.

[1:01:49] Bob Dobbs: Now you move out of matter,

[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: which is a product of the Gutenberg effect,

[1:01:55] Bob Dobbs: into something that's living,

[1:01:56] Bob Dobbs: organic,

[1:01:57] Bob Dobbs: and ongoing.

[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: the electric now which is hard to pin down what time it is and that is the new well tribal unconscious at first but McLuhan says we must become conscious of it like the chemist did and

[1:02:14] Bob Dobbs: that becomes a radically different you're um you're in the second nature you're in the interval between first and second nature or in a third nature or something it's a new thing which

[1:02:26] Bob Dobbs: Modern words virtual and cyborg are attempting to describe.

[1:02:31] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:02:32] Cameron McEwen: Inadequately.

[1:02:33] Cameron McEwen: When we met in

[1:02:35] Cameron McEwen: New York in

[1:02:36] Cameron McEwen: 1998, I was trying to describe how that transition would occur.

[1:02:47] Cameron McEwen: And it was my view then,

[1:02:48] Cameron McEwen: and it remains my view now,

[1:02:50] Cameron McEwen: that it can only occur through recognition of Thank you.

[1:02:56] Cameron McEwen: the forms of consciousness,

[1:02:59] Cameron McEwen: which is media.

[1:03:01] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:03:01] Cameron McEwen: So only when the elementary structure of media becomes generally recognized can we advance into this new sort of human

[1:03:19] Cameron McEwen: world where we will know the effects of what we're doing.

[1:03:25] Bob Dobbs: thinking before we do them and know them and that will change everything yeah and you said the word elementary that's the elements like in chemistry now you have the elements of media now the that's why the linear chronological

[1:03:42] Bob Dobbs: laying out of the stages of actual environments like an Understanding Media you have to bring you know that's where you say well bob you're being too linear well you do the linear for the first part

[1:03:53] Bob Dobbs: Then you get into simultaneous,

[1:03:54] Bob Dobbs: and that's when you learn how to maneuver Finnegans Wake,

[1:03:58] Bob Dobbs: which is a simultaneous presentation of what looked like linear phases or stages that you have to become aware of.

[1:04:06] Bob Dobbs: That's media,

[1:04:07] Bob Dobbs: because now there's no media.

[1:04:10] Bob Dobbs: We don't know what it is,

[1:04:11] Bob Dobbs: but the term media doesn't do it properly.

[1:04:17] Bob Dobbs: So you have the history of media as a...

[1:04:22] Bob Dobbs: establishing different phases of consciousness.

[1:04:25] Bob Dobbs: So you become aware of that,

[1:04:27] Bob Dobbs: and you see the process of unconscious becoming conscious in each medium era.

[1:04:32] Bob Dobbs: But you now have to confront the present,

[1:04:35] Bob Dobbs: which we're describing,

[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: which is not a present.

[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: We're not sure what it is.

[1:04:39] Bob Dobbs: It might even have nothing to do with the anthropomorphic,

[1:04:43] Bob Dobbs: which we call the tech body.

[1:04:45] Bob Dobbs: And becoming conscious of that outcome is the task before people.

[1:04:52] Bob Dobbs: And then how to communicate to someone else,

[1:04:55] Bob Dobbs: or even if you need to.

[1:04:57] Cameron McEwen: And that,

[1:04:58] Cameron McEwen: if we go back to the inflation article in the New York Times,

[1:05:04] Cameron McEwen: The huge problem to this is that...

[1:05:09] Cameron McEwen: The work of trying to achieve this new consciousness,

[1:05:15] Cameron McEwen: at every stage of that,

[1:05:18] Cameron McEwen: it can be exploited.

[1:05:20] Cameron McEwen: And the exploitation is a tremendous danger that's part of the saving process.

[1:05:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:05:29] Bob Dobbs: and it's part of the saving process.

[1:05:33] Bob Dobbs: It saves us.

[1:05:35] Cameron McEwen: You're saying it saves us?

[1:05:36] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:05:36] Cameron McEwen: saving.

[1:05:37] Cameron McEwen: It's not a past.

[1:05:39] Cameron McEwen: It's not saved.

[1:05:40] Cameron McEwen: It's the attempt at saving.

[1:05:42] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:05:43] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[1:05:44] Cameron McEwen: It's a,

[1:05:45] Cameron McEwen: when the world goes nuts,

[1:05:53] Cameron McEwen: the McLuhan program is to attempt to salvage a new kind of consciousness,

[1:06:01] Cameron McEwen: a new kind of sanity.

[1:06:03] Cameron McEwen: But the problem is every...

[1:06:05] Cameron McEwen: step along the way can be exploited as a product,

[1:06:11] Cameron McEwen: like Facebook,

[1:06:12] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:06:13] Cameron McEwen: and that creates all kinds of...

[1:06:22] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:06:22] Cameron McEwen: that and the danger.

[1:06:26] Cameron McEwen: So an unconscious that is sort of looming over us,

[1:06:32] Cameron McEwen: like Goya's colossal forms.

[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:06:36] Bob Dobbs: so what were we just saying?

[1:06:47] Bob Dobbs: What was the word I threw in before

[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: Goya? I forget the word I just said.

[1:06:59] Bob Dobbs: Try to say what you said a little bit.

[1:07:05] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:07:06] Cameron McEwen: I was saying that the procedure of trying to evoke a new form of consciousness,

[1:07:15] Cameron McEwen: to read what

[1:07:16] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan has here,

[1:07:18] Cameron McEwen: that procedure is what might be called a saving process.

[1:07:25] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:07:25] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:07:25] Cameron McEwen: It attempts to establish a new form of sanity for a world that has gone insane.

[1:07:32] Cameron McEwen: But the problem is...

[1:07:34] Cameron McEwen: that at every step of that saving process,

[1:07:42] Cameron McEwen: there can be an exploitation,

[1:07:45] Cameron McEwen: an attempt to privatize this public process,

[1:07:49] Cameron McEwen: and that attempt to privatize presents tremendous danger to the world.

[1:07:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:08:00] Bob Dobbs: the White House is...

[1:08:02] Bob Dobbs: the,

[1:08:02] Bob Dobbs: the,

[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: the function of the president of the White House is that exploiter.

[1:08:07] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:08:08] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:08:09] Cameron McEwen: And it's the public face or the private voice of the collective exploiter,

[1:08:19] Cameron McEwen: which is

[1:08:21] Cameron McEwen: NATO or which is Western civilization or,

[1:08:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:08:26] Cameron McEwen: it's got a bunch of names.

[1:08:29] Bob Dobbs: So I think there might be one more paragraph.

[1:08:32] Bob Dobbs: Remember McLuhan says,

[1:08:34] Bob Dobbs: some would think it's supernatural.

[1:08:37] Bob Dobbs: Is that the paragraph before?

[1:08:41] Bob Dobbs: You got your Take Today there.

[1:08:42] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:08:43] Cameron McEwen: I think there is either one more sentence or one more paragraph after this.

[1:08:50] Cameron McEwen: Let me see if I have that.

[1:08:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:08:51] Cameron McEwen: I think you're right.

[1:08:52] Bob Dobbs: After the procedure sentence,

[1:08:54] Bob Dobbs: I think the word supernatural comes up.

[1:08:59] Cameron McEwen: I have tape today here,

[1:09:01] Cameron McEwen: so

[1:09:02] Cameron McEwen: I'll just flip to that last page.

[1:09:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:09:22] Cameron McEwen: so a new form of consciousness.

[1:09:28] Cameron McEwen: radically different from former consciousness.

[1:09:32] Cameron McEwen: And then there is two sentences.

[1:09:39] Cameron McEwen: There are actually three if we include

[1:09:41] Cameron McEwen: Finnegan, Array!

[1:09:42] Cameron McEwen: Surrection! which is the last line of Take Today.

[1:09:47] Cameron McEwen: But he says,

[1:09:49] Cameron McEwen: Everybody becomes a voluntary participant in creating diversity without loss of identity.

[1:09:58] Cameron McEwen: Man is the content of the environment he creates,

[1:10:01] Cameron McEwen: whether of hardware or software,

[1:10:04] Cameron McEwen: whether of consciousness or unconsciousness.

[1:10:07] Cameron McEwen: There is therefore no technical alternative to humanism,

[1:10:11] Cameron McEwen: even though for many this would include the divine grace of the superhuman.

[1:10:17] Cameron McEwen: Innovation is obsolete,

[1:10:20] Cameron McEwen: so is obsolescence.

[1:10:22] Cameron McEwen: As information speed up,

[1:10:24] Cameron McEwen: transforms man and his world into art form.

[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:10:29] Cameron McEwen: Then again,

[1:10:29] Cameron McEwen: Array! Surrection!

[1:10:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:10:32] Bob Dobbs: that was a superhuman.

[1:10:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:10:35] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:10:35] Bob Dobbs: And that's a big part of the argument over where we're going,

[1:10:38] Bob Dobbs: whether it's superhuman or not.

[1:10:39] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:10:40] Bob Dobbs: that's the,

[1:10:41] Bob Dobbs: some say we're getting dumber and dumber.

[1:10:43] Bob Dobbs: Others say,

[1:10:43] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:10:43] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:10:44] Bob Dobbs: we're going to a new transcendence.

[1:10:45] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:10:46] Bob Dobbs: that's the content argument.

[1:10:49] Bob Dobbs: That's the rearview mirror argument.

[1:10:52] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:10:52] Cameron McEwen: but it's,

[1:10:53] Cameron McEwen: but

[1:10:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is saying both of those,

[1:10:55] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:10:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:10:57] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,

[1:11:00] Cameron McEwen: much of his late work has to do with a critique.

[1:11:05] Cameron McEwen: of the superhuman.

[1:11:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:11:07] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:11:07] Cameron McEwen: So this idea that we can be everywhere at once and that we can have control over who gets born and who doesn't get born or who

[1:11:24] Cameron McEwen: dies naturally or who dies unnaturally.

[1:11:27] Cameron McEwen: All of these kind of superhuman things,

[1:11:30] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thought was terrible.

[1:11:36] Cameron McEwen: But here he's evoking the superhuman in its most positive sense.

[1:11:43] Cameron McEwen: So this constant ambiguity is something that can never be got rid of,

[1:11:54] Cameron McEwen: but there can be a science of it,

[1:11:57] Cameron McEwen: and that science of it is the conscious programming of the unconscious.

[1:12:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:12:04] Bob Dobbs: and the world is art form.

[1:12:06] Bob Dobbs: Media is art form.

[1:12:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:12:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:12:09] Bob Dobbs: that was a good little explanation there of the lines I left out.

[1:12:16] Bob Dobbs: What is it the words before he says,

[1:12:19] Bob Dobbs: but some would call the superhuman.

[1:12:20] Bob Dobbs: What is the sentence,

[1:12:22] Bob Dobbs: the part before that?

[1:12:23] Bob Dobbs: What does it say in that sentence?

[1:12:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:12:28] Cameron McEwen: I'm just looking for it.

[1:12:30] Cameron McEwen: So that particular sentence is.

[1:12:32] Cameron McEwen: There is therefore no technical alternative to humanism,

[1:12:36] Cameron McEwen: even though for many this would include the divine grace of the superhuman.

[1:12:41] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:12:42] Cameron McEwen: leave that there.

[1:12:44] Bob Dobbs: Humanism is generally a literate thing,

[1:12:48] Bob Dobbs: a Gutenberg thing.

[1:12:49] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:12:50] Cameron McEwen: But he's also alluding to what he calls harmonization.

[1:12:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:12:57] Bob Dobbs: And then you get the last page of...

[1:13:01] Bob Dobbs: War and Peace and Global Village is really important.

[1:13:03] Bob Dobbs: The last couple of paragraphs there,

[1:13:04] Bob Dobbs: you would overlay those,

[1:13:06] Bob Dobbs: you bring those ideas or words into this,

[1:13:08] Bob Dobbs: what we're analyzing here.

[1:13:10] Bob Dobbs: But it's really important.

[1:13:13] Bob Dobbs: It could be humanism,

[1:13:14] Bob Dobbs: and then it goes to the other extreme,

[1:13:15] Bob Dobbs: supernatural.

[1:13:17] Bob Dobbs: There's your spectrum of forms,

[1:13:18] Bob Dobbs: maybe.

[1:13:19] Bob Dobbs: Do you want to go into that,

[1:13:21] Bob Dobbs: your idea of the spectrum of forms?

[1:13:24] Bob Dobbs: Or what is the next part here?

[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: Let's just see what comes after this.

[1:13:28] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:13:28] Bob Dobbs: I point out...

[1:13:30] Bob Dobbs: The secret,

[1:13:31] Bob Dobbs: somebody finally asked Barry,

[1:13:33] Bob Dobbs: what the hell is the recently achieved forms of consciousness?

[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: It's important to have one of them give an answer.

[1:13:39] Bob Dobbs: And it's a surprising answer at the time,

[1:13:41] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake.

[1:13:43] Bob Dobbs: And then you have television hasn't been in the Civil War between media since the 60s.

[1:13:50] Bob Dobbs: What the hell am I meaning by that?

[1:13:51] Bob Dobbs: It hasn't been in the Civil War.

[1:13:54] Bob Dobbs: The global theater was the antagonistic actor,

[1:13:56] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:13:57] Bob Dobbs: in the 60s,

[1:13:57] Bob Dobbs: superseded by the instant replay in the early

[1:14:00] Bob Dobbs: 70s.

[1:14:00] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:14:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to say something new there.

[1:14:05] Bob Dobbs: It's not TV.

[1:14:07] Bob Dobbs: That's the

[1:14:08] Bob Dobbs: 50s. The global theater was the antagonistic actor.

[1:14:12] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:14:12] Bob Dobbs: the antagonistic actor is the beginning of the psychopathology of the tech body.

[1:14:18] Bob Dobbs: It's going to go through the Android meme phase after global theater,

[1:14:21] Bob Dobbs: but then it's going to get into tech body antagonism.

[1:14:25] Bob Dobbs: And then the instant replay,

[1:14:27] Bob Dobbs: that's being...

[1:14:29] Bob Dobbs: experience all the time the replay.

[1:14:32] Bob Dobbs: That's maybe your retrieval,

[1:14:34] Bob Dobbs: extending and retrieving.

[1:14:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:14:37] Cameron McEwen: so this sort of raises the question that we always get into between the linear and the simultaneous.

[1:14:52] Cameron McEwen: When you talk about television hasn't been in the Civil War since the

[1:14:58] Cameron McEwen: 60s, and then you get into the global theater and the instant replay,

[1:15:05] Cameron McEwen: what are you trying to...

[1:15:06] Cameron McEwen: point out through this linear progression?

[1:15:10] Bob Dobbs: That people's idea of McLuhan,

[1:15:13] Bob Dobbs: and he's an expert on television,

[1:15:15] Bob Dobbs: and that's as far as they go.

[1:15:16] Bob Dobbs: There was so much that came after television,

[1:15:19] Bob Dobbs: which was his main work in the 60s and 70s.

[1:15:21] Bob Dobbs: Television is the

[1:15:23] Bob Dobbs: 50s. So I'm trying to say there's a whole bunch of stuff nobody dealt with.

[1:15:27] Bob Dobbs: The global theater as an antagonistic actor,

[1:15:30] Bob Dobbs: and then the instant replay,

[1:15:31] Bob Dobbs: and then that becomes the Android meme,

[1:15:33] Bob Dobbs: and then the tech body.

[1:15:34] Bob Dobbs: That is them.

[1:15:35] Bob Dobbs: important that the layered developments of your imagery of what media are.

[1:15:41] Cameron McEwen: Gotcha.

[1:15:42] Cameron McEwen: So what you're saying is the...

[1:15:44] Bob Dobbs: I'm including part of the simultaneity,

[1:15:49] Bob Dobbs: the categories that nobody includes.

[1:15:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:15:54] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:15:54] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:15:54] Cameron McEwen: I get that,

[1:15:55] Cameron McEwen: and

[1:15:56] Cameron McEwen: I endorse that as well.

[1:15:58] Cameron McEwen: Good.

[1:15:58] Cameron McEwen: So it's not a...

[1:16:00] Cameron McEwen: You're not talking in a sort of an ontological...

[1:16:05] Cameron McEwen: level here.

[1:16:07] Cameron McEwen: You're talking history a little bit like we were doing with the atom earlier.

[1:16:12] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:16:13] Cameron McEwen: You're talking about how a certain kind of consciousness was developed and how it was enlarged and enriched.

[1:16:24] Bob Dobbs: By subsequent developments and the ongoing never-ending,

[1:16:28] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says in the end of

[1:16:31] Bob Dobbs: Culture Is Our Business,

[1:16:31] Bob Dobbs: there's no finish line.

[1:16:33] Bob Dobbs: Look at the next sentence.

[1:16:35] Bob Dobbs: Down in 159,

[1:16:36] Bob Dobbs: the beginning of the digital,

[1:16:37] Bob Dobbs: the Android meme,

[1:16:38] Bob Dobbs: would be the cable TV scenario in the late 70s,

[1:16:41] Bob Dobbs: early 80s.

[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: these are sequential processes that,

[1:16:46] Bob Dobbs: for the average human,

[1:16:48] Bob Dobbs: happens in sequence.

[1:16:49] Bob Dobbs: There was television,

[1:16:50] Bob Dobbs: then there was the global theater,

[1:16:52] Bob Dobbs: then there was the replay,

[1:16:53] Bob Dobbs: and then there's the digital.

[1:16:54] Bob Dobbs: That's how they see it.

[1:16:55] Bob Dobbs: But that's the natural,

[1:16:59] Bob Dobbs: erroneous natural,

[1:17:01] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:17:01] Bob Dobbs: It's natural to think of that sequence.

[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: but it's erroneous.

[1:17:04] Bob Dobbs: So we're trying to get them out of the sequential,

[1:17:09] Bob Dobbs: but to stick with television and just talk about what TV as media does is nowhere near explaining how we got to here.

[1:17:20] Bob Dobbs: You've got to add these other processes that are included in the dot of the simultaneity.

[1:17:29] Cameron McEwen: And when you've come up to the digital,

[1:17:31] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:17:33] Cameron McEwen: then you

[1:17:33] Cameron McEwen: That gives new insight into what TV always was.

[1:17:39] Cameron McEwen: But the message of television still hasn't been received,

[1:17:47] Cameron McEwen: let alone back in the

[1:17:49] Bob Dobbs: 1950s. What was that?

[1:17:50] Bob Dobbs: By no one,

[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: did you say?

[1:17:54] Bob Dobbs: By no one in the

[1:17:56] Bob Dobbs: 1950s, what was the word?

[1:17:59] Cameron McEwen: I might have said by no means or something.

[1:18:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:18:01] Bob Dobbs: by no means,

[1:18:02] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[1:18:06] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:18:06] Bob Dobbs: you've got kids today,

[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: they don't know what television is,

[1:18:10] Bob Dobbs: never experienced it.

[1:18:11] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:18:11] Bob Dobbs: what they do experience is the screenal.

[1:18:13] Bob Dobbs: I like the way Kroker subsumes these stages,

[1:18:17] Bob Dobbs: television,

[1:18:17] Bob Dobbs: instant replay,

[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: the digital,

[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: the Android meme,

[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: what's the other one,

[1:18:25] Bob Dobbs: and the global theater,

[1:18:26] Bob Dobbs: as the screenal.

[1:18:27] Bob Dobbs: It's all the screen.

[1:18:30] Bob Dobbs: That's a good,

[1:18:31] Bob Dobbs: and cable TV.

[1:18:32] Bob Dobbs: the screen.

[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: The screenal is the passive massager compared to the tech body.

[1:18:40] Bob Dobbs: Tech body is the screenal becoming some kind of psychopath or sociopath,

[1:18:48] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:18:49] Cameron McEwen: When you say becoming,

[1:18:53] Cameron McEwen: is that a linear process or is that the revelation of what the screenal always was?

[1:19:02] Cameron McEwen: wasn't understood as psychopathic.

[1:19:05] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:19:07] Bob Dobbs: It's easy to say,

[1:19:08] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[1:19:08] Bob Dobbs: both,

[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: but you've got to know how to do both.

[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: You've got to know how to do the sequence and you've got to know how to do the simultaneous.

[1:19:16] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[1:19:17] Cameron McEwen: correct,

[1:19:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:19:18] Bob Dobbs: And the constant flip between them.

[1:19:21] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?

[1:19:23] Cameron McEwen: And to live the constant flip between them.

[1:19:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: so the simultaneous is...

[1:19:28] Bob Dobbs: is Joyce and Finnegans Wake,

[1:19:30] Bob Dobbs: and the sequential is the science part of McLuhan.

[1:19:37] Bob Dobbs: right hemisphere,

[1:19:38] Bob Dobbs: even left hemisphere,

[1:19:40] Bob Dobbs: as an artifact.

[1:19:43] Bob Dobbs: And then they become environments.

[1:19:45] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:19:45] Bob Dobbs: the left hemisphere is an environment,

[1:19:47] Bob Dobbs: the Gutenberg,

[1:19:48] Bob Dobbs: and then the right hemisphere is the digital or the electronic.

[1:19:53] Bob Dobbs: And then maybe the digital is the corpus callosum,

[1:19:58] Bob Dobbs: and that's the interval.

[1:20:00] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:20:01] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:20:02] Cameron McEwen: but all,

[1:20:04] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:20:05] Cameron McEwen: the digital.

[1:20:06] Cameron McEwen: Corpus callosum is,

[1:20:09] Cameron McEwen: these are figures for the underlying ground,

[1:20:15] Cameron McEwen: which is tactility or the interval or the electric.

[1:20:20] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:20:23] Cameron McEwen: the language here is very ambivalent,

[1:20:31] Cameron McEwen: but it's

[1:20:35] Cameron McEwen: a language that can be learned and when it is learned then it gives the kind of human environment that

[1:20:48] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan wants to evoke at the end of

[1:20:52] Cameron McEwen: Take Today.

[1:20:53] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:20:53] Bob Dobbs: so that's the unsaid.

[1:20:58] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:20:59] Bob Dobbs: And the unsaid means,

[1:21:01] Bob Dobbs: if I'm doing it consciously,

[1:21:03] Bob Dobbs: that leaves you room.

[1:21:05] Bob Dobbs: To say something,

[1:21:06] Bob Dobbs: add to what I say,

[1:21:08] Bob Dobbs: and what you add determines whether you understood me or not,

[1:21:12] Bob Dobbs: on the larger point of the simultaneous.

[1:21:17] Bob Dobbs: So all that,

[1:21:18] Bob Dobbs: as you were talking,

[1:21:20] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking you're groping for the word what is unsaid.

[1:21:24] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:21:25] Bob Dobbs: I can say a nice,

[1:21:26] Bob Dobbs: wonderful paragraph,

[1:21:28] Bob Dobbs: but it's not the whole story.

[1:21:29] Bob Dobbs: And the better you're at understanding me,

[1:21:32] Bob Dobbs: which means understanding the collective...

[1:21:35] Bob Dobbs: Consciousness,

[1:21:35] Bob Dobbs: the collective language,

[1:21:36] Bob Dobbs: not our personal stuff.

[1:21:38] Bob Dobbs: And your response,

[1:21:41] Bob Dobbs: when I stop and let the gap create room for you to speak,

[1:21:46] Bob Dobbs: the quality of your response indicates what you understand of what I said.

[1:21:52] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:21:55] Cameron McEwen: The issue is,

[1:21:56] Cameron McEwen: are we using a common language?

[1:21:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:21:59] Cameron McEwen: Are we communicating with each other in the attempt to...

[1:22:05] Cameron McEwen: introduce a new type of communication generally.

[1:22:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:22:10] Bob Dobbs: so we're using McLuhan archival expertise to complete each other.

[1:22:15] Bob Dobbs: That's our language,

[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: is our knowledge of McLuhan statements and the whole range of them.

[1:22:22] Bob Dobbs: And we've done that this whole series.

[1:22:25] Bob Dobbs: You'll say something,

[1:22:26] Bob Dobbs: then I'll complement it and complete it.

[1:22:29] Bob Dobbs: And you'll say,

[1:22:29] Bob Dobbs: exactly.

[1:22:31] Bob Dobbs: So you know I understand what you're saying.

[1:22:34] Bob Dobbs: I know the right words to say in response.

[1:22:37] Bob Dobbs: While this has a synergistic effect where you're moving towards an interesting insight pattern that will shine at some point from this accurate interplay.

[1:22:48] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:22:50] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:22:52] Cameron McEwen: So we're trying to get to some place that we're also exemplifying.

[1:22:59] Bob Dobbs: We're also what?

[1:23:00] Bob Dobbs: Exemplified?

[1:23:02] Cameron McEwen: Exemplified.

[1:23:03] Cameron McEwen: exemplifying.

[1:23:04] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:23:05] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[1:23:06] Cameron McEwen: And that's the way things always work.

[1:23:10] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[1:23:12] Cameron McEwen: if a child is being taught language,

[1:23:16] Cameron McEwen: they cannot understand the teaching without understanding language.

[1:23:21] Cameron McEwen: So there's a flip in time that goes on.

[1:23:25] Cameron McEwen: And that flip in time defines what human beings are.

[1:23:30] Cameron McEwen: Human beings live a very particular

[1:23:32] Cameron McEwen: peculiar time where they can work towards where they already were,

[1:23:39] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:23:40] Bob Dobbs: Where they already were.

[1:23:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:23:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:23:43] Cameron McEwen: So what

[1:23:44] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says in talking about Finnegans Wake,

[1:23:48] Cameron McEwen: someplace that,

[1:23:49] Cameron McEwen: doesn't he say,

[1:23:51] Cameron McEwen: I have to repeat what I was about to say?

[1:23:54] Bob Dobbs: He says that in something else fresh.

[1:23:58] Cameron McEwen: Explorations eight,

[1:23:59] Cameron McEwen: I think.

[1:24:00] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:24:00] Bob Dobbs: number eight.

[1:24:01] Cameron McEwen: Seven or eight.

[1:24:01] Cameron McEwen: Eight.

[1:24:03] Bob Dobbs: Let me repeat what I was about to say.

[1:24:06] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:24:07] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:24:08] Cameron McEwen: And that sums up what we're doing and what human beings are always doing.

[1:24:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:24:15] Cameron McEwen: But the big question is whether they can become conscious of that,

[1:24:20] Cameron McEwen: this peculiar notion of time.

[1:24:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:24:23] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said once that his work is for those who have a superiority complex.

[1:24:28] Bob Dobbs: So having the recently achieved form of consciousness,

[1:24:31] Bob Dobbs: we're moving towards...

[1:24:33] Bob Dobbs: a quote superiority complex uh seeing what everybody was saying but we're adding a level of conscious because we're including all the different categories that gutenberg created of knowledge of brilliance of expertise and

[1:24:49] Bob Dobbs: we're able to subsume them into present awareness present extension and uh that's a talent to be able to do that to um take all that's happened

[1:25:04] Bob Dobbs: and not be impressed that we are we're at a newer place than that than what we master in all the different disciplines so the all the disciplines were end up to be specialties and they stopped dialoguing the way we are correct

[1:25:24] Bob Dobbs: and they didn't have the language to do it they didn't have the environment and with television and the satellite which completes

[1:25:31] Bob Dobbs: the extensions,

[1:25:32] Bob Dobbs: we arrived at a time when you should come up with the language,

[1:25:35] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan did.

[1:25:36] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:25:38] Cameron McEwen: So let me just read a couple texts here from

[1:25:44] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan.

[1:25:45] Cameron McEwen: They're both texts that we like very much,

[1:25:50] Cameron McEwen: and it's one that you just cited with the phrase arrogant superiority.

[1:25:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:25:57] Cameron McEwen: So here he is from the Hot and Cool interview.

[1:26:01] Cameron McEwen: Media,

[1:26:02] Cameron McEwen: after all,

[1:26:02] Cameron McEwen: are only extensions of ourselves.

[1:26:05] Cameron McEwen: The road to Understanding Media effects begins with arrogant superiority.

[1:26:13] Cameron McEwen: If one lacked this sense of superiority,

[1:26:16] Cameron McEwen: this detachment,

[1:26:18] Cameron McEwen: it would be quite impossible to write about them.

[1:26:21] Cameron McEwen: It would be like an octopus attacking the Great Pyramids.

[1:26:25] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[1:26:25] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:26:26] Bob Dobbs: I totally forgot that he said that.

[1:26:28] Bob Dobbs: I know he said it somehow,

[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: but I forgot that was where it is.

[1:26:31] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:26:32] Cameron McEwen: but here he is from the Playboy interview.

[1:26:35] Cameron McEwen: But without this detached involvement,

[1:26:38] Cameron McEwen: I would never objectively observe media.

[1:26:41] Cameron McEwen: It would be like an octopus grappling with the Empire State Building.

[1:26:46] Bob Dobbs: He repeats himself.

[1:26:48] Bob Dobbs: And when was the first one?

[1:26:54] Cameron McEwen: How do you mean?

[1:26:55] Cameron McEwen: When was that?

[1:26:57] Cameron McEwen: Do you want the whole thing again?

[1:27:00] Cameron McEwen: Date-wise.

[1:27:00] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:27:01] Cameron McEwen: 67 was the Hot and Cool interview.

[1:27:02] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:27:02] Bob Dobbs: And so within a year,

[1:27:04] Bob Dobbs: in 68,

[1:27:06] Bob Dobbs: he's doing it again.

[1:27:08] Cameron McEwen: The Playboy interview,

[1:27:09] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:27:11] Cameron McEwen: But look at what he's saying here in terms of what we've been discussing earlier.

[1:27:19] Cameron McEwen: We're talking about a situation in which the world...

[1:27:24] Cameron McEwen: is sort of spiraling out of control because it has no language to talk about what it's doing,

[1:27:32] Cameron McEwen: where it's at.

[1:27:35] Cameron McEwen: So that's like an octopus attacking the Great Pyramids or an octopus grappling with the Empire State Building.

[1:27:43] Cameron McEwen: The world has evolved into a kind of impossible situation where it can't do anything but step on its own feet,

[1:27:53] Cameron McEwen: Which is what?

[1:27:54] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:27:54] Cameron McEwen: an insane octopus is always doing,

[1:27:58] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:27:58] Cameron McEwen: Because its feet are everywhere.

[1:28:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:28:01] Cameron McEwen: So he says that what you need is this arrogant superiority.

[1:28:07] Cameron McEwen: And he says that this sense of superiority is a sense of detachment.

[1:28:16] Cameron McEwen: So what he's saying is the...

[1:28:21] Cameron McEwen: What we need is a New Science,

[1:28:26] Cameron McEwen: because a New Science gives a new sort of detachment from ourselves that tells us what we're doing.

[1:28:38] Cameron McEwen: And so this sense of arrogant superiority,

[1:28:41] Cameron McEwen: what is that?

[1:28:42] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:28:42] Cameron McEwen: that's the New Science that always is telling us what we're doing,

[1:28:48] Cameron McEwen: gives us orientation.

[1:28:50] Cameron McEwen: But it can only happen when we understand ourselves in a new way.

[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: That's the effect.

[1:28:57] Bob Dobbs: He's talking technically.

[1:28:58] Bob Dobbs: He's not talking about a personal emotion,

[1:29:00] Bob Dobbs: arrogance,

[1:29:00] Bob Dobbs: priority.

[1:29:01] Bob Dobbs: It's the recently achieved form of consciousness or that level of experience.

[1:29:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:29:09] Bob Dobbs: And it's great because it throws people off.

[1:29:11] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:29:12] Bob Dobbs: he's saying we should become megalomaniacs,

[1:29:14] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:29:15] Bob Dobbs: No.

[1:29:16] Bob Dobbs: But you have to know that you think.

[1:29:18] Bob Dobbs: That that's what arrogance or superiority refers to.

[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: You only have one meaning for it.

[1:29:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:29:25] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:29:26] Bob Dobbs: So there was,

[1:29:27] Bob Dobbs: here's something I want to say before I forget.

[1:29:30] Bob Dobbs: I was looking through Paul Krassner's,

[1:29:33] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:29:33] Bob Dobbs: actually I was listening to an interview with

[1:29:36] Bob Dobbs: Mae Brussell with Paul Krassner in 1972,

[1:29:39] Bob Dobbs: and they mentioned an article by Eric Norden in

[1:29:45] Bob Dobbs: The Realist,

[1:29:45] Bob Dobbs: Krassner's mad magazine,

[1:29:47] Bob Dobbs: he was the first underground paper,

[1:29:49] Bob Dobbs: The Realist started in the late

[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: 50s. So in 66,

[1:29:53] Bob Dobbs: Eric Norden...

[1:29:54] Bob Dobbs: who interviewed McLuhan for Playboy,

[1:29:56] Bob Dobbs: writes this incredible article.

[1:29:59] Bob Dobbs: And it's very prophetic in terms of the assassination of Kennedy and the new paranoia and all this stuff and the failure of liberals.

[1:30:09] Bob Dobbs: Liberals are screwing up.

[1:30:10] Bob Dobbs: I will send it to you.

[1:30:12] Bob Dobbs: I think you'll find it quite interesting that the awareness,

[1:30:16] Bob Dobbs: quite aware and sophisticated,

[1:30:17] Bob Dobbs: comes to McLuhan and can't understand McLuhan.

[1:30:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:30:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:30:23] Cameron McEwen: I was going to say to you that you've mentioned in past conversations that Norden didn't understand anything about McLuhan,

[1:30:31] Cameron McEwen: and McLuhan had to rewrite the interview to some extent.

[1:30:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:30:35] Bob Dobbs: he got McLuhan to write the answers.

[1:30:40] Bob Dobbs: It was not oral,

[1:30:41] Bob Dobbs: eventually.

[1:30:43] Bob Dobbs: And that's why McLuhan,

[1:30:44] Bob Dobbs: people say,

[1:30:45] Bob Dobbs: how can a guy say that?

[1:30:46] Bob Dobbs: He has a whole column or page of commentary,

[1:30:49] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:30:50] Bob Dobbs: It's just his science.

[1:30:51] Bob Dobbs: talking technically,

[1:30:53] Bob Dobbs: but it's not the kind of thing you do in a Playboy interview or any interview.

[1:30:57] Bob Dobbs: You don't talk like that.

[1:30:59] Bob Dobbs: Somebody said he talks like a book or something.

[1:31:03] Bob Dobbs: But he didn't talk it.

[1:31:05] Bob Dobbs: He could talk it,

[1:31:06] Bob Dobbs: but he basically wrote it.

[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: That's what's not understood.

[1:31:12] Cameron McEwen: In this case,

[1:31:13] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:31:14] Cameron McEwen: we do have all sorts of examples of him speaking.

[1:31:20] Cameron McEwen: extemporaneously.

[1:31:21] Cameron McEwen: And sometimes he said absolutely brilliant stuff,

[1:31:28] Cameron McEwen: along with saying a tremendous amount of repetitive,

[1:31:33] Cameron McEwen: banal stuff.

[1:31:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:31:37] Bob Dobbs: So what's interesting,

[1:31:37] Bob Dobbs: you read Eric Norden's Sophisticated Awareness,

[1:31:40] Bob Dobbs: the New York literati.

[1:31:42] Bob Dobbs: He had some authority because he gets to do a lot of Playboy interviews in the 60s.

[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: He does Stanley Kubrick.

[1:31:49] Bob Dobbs: So I had some...

[1:31:50] Bob Dobbs: status there.

[1:31:51] Bob Dobbs: He wrote some novels,

[1:31:52] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[1:31:53] Bob Dobbs: and he's writing for the avant-garde magazine,

[1:31:55] Bob Dobbs: The Realist.

[1:31:56] Bob Dobbs: But the important point is his lack of understanding of what McLuhan was saying.

[1:32:03] Bob Dobbs: And that's the difference.

[1:32:05] Bob Dobbs: Basically,

[1:32:07] Bob Dobbs: Norden was living back in the 20s,

[1:32:08] Bob Dobbs: and he encountered the 60s,

[1:32:09] Bob Dobbs: and he didn't know what to make of it.

[1:32:15] Cameron McEwen: But isn't a big problem here that

[1:32:18] Cameron McEwen: In order to understand

[1:32:20] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's language,

[1:32:23] Cameron McEwen: you need to engage with him repeatedly,

[1:32:28] Cameron McEwen: where you say to yourself,

[1:32:32] Cameron McEwen: here's something I don't understand,

[1:32:33] Cameron McEwen: or here's something that I think is wrong,

[1:32:37] Cameron McEwen: and it's not McLuhan that's wrong,

[1:32:40] Cameron McEwen: it's not McLuhan that's not understanding,

[1:32:43] Cameron McEwen: it's me.

[1:32:45] Cameron McEwen: And you have to kind of reverse on yourself all the time.

[1:32:48] Cameron McEwen: And through that process,

[1:32:50] Cameron McEwen: you learn his language.

[1:32:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:32:52] Cameron McEwen: And so you've done that.

[1:32:54] Cameron McEwen: I've done that.

[1:32:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:32:56] Cameron McEwen: Maybe a few other people have done that,

[1:32:57] Cameron McEwen: but most people have not.

[1:33:00] Cameron McEwen: And if you just come to McLuhan without that preparation,

[1:33:06] Cameron McEwen: then there's no way to understand what he's talking about.

[1:33:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:33:12] Bob Dobbs: And it's more out there than abstract art or surrealistic art.

[1:33:18] Bob Dobbs: It's another level of perception that nobody's doing in the other art forms,

[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: in the old Gutenberg art forms.

[1:33:24] Bob Dobbs: And that way he was the greatest actor of his day.

[1:33:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:33:31] Cameron McEwen: so that's sort of what

[1:33:33] Cameron McEwen: John Cage recognized in

[1:33:35] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, right?

[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:33:37] Cameron McEwen: That

[1:33:37] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was talking about processes that

[1:33:45] Cameron McEwen: Cage and his fellow artists...

[1:33:47] Cameron McEwen: We're sort of grappling towards and we're expressing on one level.

[1:33:52] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:33:53] Cameron McEwen: Cage recognized that McLuhan was talking about this stuff on another level.

[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: and

[1:34:00] Bob Dobbs: Cage and them couldn't solve their problems because they're staying within the Gutenberg performance.

[1:34:04] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan figured how to use all his faculties,

[1:34:09] Bob Dobbs: mainly around speech and maybe what he was wearing,

[1:34:13] Bob Dobbs: as a communication.

[1:34:15] Bob Dobbs: As a movie,

[1:34:16] Bob Dobbs: as a TV show,

[1:34:17] Bob Dobbs: as a composition,

[1:34:18] Bob Dobbs: even one of silence,

[1:34:21] Bob Dobbs: all those forms that avant-garde were doing were falling short of what McLuhan was doing.

[1:34:28] Bob Dobbs: They would have to give up their program,

[1:34:30] Bob Dobbs: their art,

[1:34:31] Bob Dobbs: for a while and sit at McLuhan's feet and learn the language and do the procedure and figure it out.

[1:34:37] Bob Dobbs: Then see what they can do with the old arts.

[1:34:41] Bob Dobbs: Might not want to do anything after that.

[1:34:44] Cameron McEwen: I agree with that,

[1:34:45] Cameron McEwen: but

[1:34:46] Cameron McEwen: I would say that at the same time,

[1:34:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was sitting at the feet of lots of artists.

[1:34:55] Cameron McEwen: He wasn't evolving this stuff.

[1:34:58] Cameron McEwen: just sort of a cloud in his brain or something,

[1:35:02] Cameron McEwen: he was interrogating the arts and all of the arts,

[1:35:09] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:35:10] Cameron McEwen: music and sculpture.

[1:35:11] Bob Dobbs: He was responding to their contribution to the dialogue and they didn't know how to respond to his response.

[1:35:19] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:35:21] Cameron McEwen: yes.

[1:35:21] Cameron McEwen: But he was being a part...

[1:35:23] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[1:35:23] Bob Dobbs: he's detached involvement.

[1:35:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:35:26] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:35:26] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:35:27] Bob Dobbs: And he's involved.

[1:35:27] Bob Dobbs: He's looking at what Cage does.

[1:35:29] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:35:29] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:35:29] Bob Dobbs: this is very interesting.

[1:35:30] Bob Dobbs: I say this to that.

[1:35:32] Bob Dobbs: And then Cage is sort of thrown by that and then goes off and tries to find an answer for McLuhan.

[1:35:37] Bob Dobbs: He's not ready to give a response right then and maybe never could.

[1:35:43] Bob Dobbs: So they actually put McLuhan on a pedestal and don't dialogue with him because they haven't learned how to do it.

[1:35:49] Bob Dobbs: They're too stuck in their specialism.

[1:35:54] Bob Dobbs: Yet he's talking to their specialism.

[1:35:57] Bob Dobbs: Improving on it,

[1:35:58] Bob Dobbs: showing this is what you mean,

[1:36:00] Bob Dobbs: Mr.

[1:36:01] Bob Dobbs: Cage,

[1:36:01] Bob Dobbs: not what you think you mean.

[1:36:02] Bob Dobbs: This is what you mean.

[1:36:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:36:06] Cameron McEwen: And so that's that is like taking the step towards a new paradigm.

[1:36:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:36:13] Cameron McEwen: Towards a new language.

[1:36:17] Cameron McEwen: It's like somebody as

[1:36:22] Cameron McEwen: Watt, for example,

[1:36:23] Cameron McEwen: is doing the steam engine.

[1:36:25] Cameron McEwen: And then later people come along and they say,

[1:36:28] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:36:29] Cameron McEwen: here is the chemical understanding of what was going on with those molecules in the steam engine.

[1:36:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:36:39] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:36:40] Cameron McEwen: And something like that is going on with McLuhan.

[1:36:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:36:45] Bob Dobbs: here's what the public interest,

[1:36:46] Bob Dobbs: why it happened,

[1:36:47] Bob Dobbs: why it went that way.

[1:36:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:36:49] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:36:51] Cameron McEwen: It's like a new understanding of dynamics.

[1:36:55] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:36:55] Bob Dobbs: and it's a new kind of ESP because he's talking about the culture which he,

[1:37:00] Bob Dobbs: as a human being,

[1:37:01] Bob Dobbs: has no real proof of what he perceives.

[1:37:06] Bob Dobbs: He's projecting,

[1:37:06] Bob Dobbs: as people say,

[1:37:07] Bob Dobbs: his opinion and making a big deal out of it.

[1:37:10] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:37:10] Bob Dobbs: it's not his opinion,

[1:37:11] Bob Dobbs: and it's a kind of ESP.

[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: He knew how to respond to streaking when it happened correctly,

[1:37:17] Bob Dobbs: to say what it meant.

[1:37:19] Bob Dobbs: Nobody else knew that streaking meant what he said it meant,

[1:37:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:37:24] Bob Dobbs: going nowhere fast.

[1:37:26] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:37:26] Cameron McEwen: notice that science introduces ESP.

[1:37:34] Cameron McEwen: When chemistry gets going between 1780 and 1880,

[1:37:42] Cameron McEwen: what happens is there's a new kind of information in the world that comes to humans sort of automatically.

[1:37:51] Cameron McEwen: It comes to humans through everything,

[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: through...

[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: what they eat and how they eat and how they go somewhere and how they interact with other humans and stuff there's this new layer of information to the world caused by the electric environment the outer the outer extensions their outer activity was grounded by an internal extension an extension of the internal correct

[1:38:17] Cameron McEwen: correct and this is um uh this is a form of esp yeah

[1:38:24] Cameron McEwen: because it's constantly incoming information that is not sensory in the normal sense of sense.

[1:38:39] Bob Dobbs: Not the normal inputs.

[1:38:41] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:38:44] Bob Dobbs: Very good.

[1:38:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:38:45] Bob Dobbs: electronics is ESP.

[1:38:47] Bob Dobbs: ESP was natural,

[1:38:49] Bob Dobbs: but it's not literate at ESP.

[1:38:52] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:38:54] Cameron McEwen: It's the second nature.

[1:38:57] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:38:58] Bob Dobbs: and a lot of the comedy channel,

[1:39:03] Bob Dobbs: they make people aware of what they've been noticing on the ESP level.

[1:39:08] Bob Dobbs: So a comedian can come in and talk about conventional events,

[1:39:11] Bob Dobbs: often media characters,

[1:39:12] Bob Dobbs: celebrities and this and that,

[1:39:14] Bob Dobbs: lay out some patterns,

[1:39:15] Bob Dobbs: and you see the people lighting up.

[1:39:17] Bob Dobbs: They're laughing,

[1:39:18] Bob Dobbs: but they're learning.

[1:39:21] Bob Dobbs: And so...

[1:39:23] Bob Dobbs: The ESP that was there,

[1:39:25] Bob Dobbs: the comedian evokes.

[1:39:28] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:39:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:39:29] Cameron McEwen: George Carlin did that especially.

[1:39:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:39:33] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:39:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:39:33] Bob Dobbs: he listened to many of my recordings of my shows.

[1:39:37] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:39:37] Cameron McEwen: yeah?

[1:39:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:39:38] Bob Dobbs: Jerry Fialka was doing Zappa and got him,

[1:39:43] Bob Dobbs: helped

[1:39:44] Bob Dobbs: Zappa's wife organize the mail order thing because

[1:39:48] Bob Dobbs: Zappa wasn't being promoted by the record companies properly.

[1:39:50] Bob Dobbs: So George Carlin was in a slump in the early

[1:39:53] Bob Dobbs: 90s and he...

[1:39:55] Bob Dobbs: He found out about how successful Zappa's mail order catalog was and he found out Jerry was part of it.

[1:40:00] Bob Dobbs: So he asked Jerry to work at Carlin's every now and then.

[1:40:04] Bob Dobbs: And Zappa was dying of cancer.

[1:40:05] Bob Dobbs: This is in 93.

[1:40:07] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:40:08] Bob Dobbs: Carlin gets a hold of Jerry and so Jerry starts helping him get his mail order thing going.

[1:40:15] Bob Dobbs: And I visited there one day and

[1:40:18] Bob Dobbs: I didn't get to meet George.

[1:40:19] Bob Dobbs: He was down on the first floor in his office talking to a comedian from

[1:40:23] Bob Dobbs: The Simpsons.

[1:40:26] Bob Dobbs: and making Carlin laugh.

[1:40:27] Bob Dobbs: So Jerry and I were talking,

[1:40:28] Bob Dobbs: but the point was,

[1:40:30] Bob Dobbs: I said,

[1:40:31] Bob Dobbs: Jerry,

[1:40:31] Bob Dobbs: give Carlin some of my recordings from my CKLN show.

[1:40:36] Bob Dobbs: And Jerry did that.

[1:40:38] Bob Dobbs: And he didn't hear back about them for a year.

[1:40:42] Bob Dobbs: Finally,

[1:40:42] Bob Dobbs: after a year,

[1:40:42] Bob Dobbs: Carlin returned them,

[1:40:44] Bob Dobbs: and he says,

[1:40:45] Bob Dobbs: I can't understand this guy.

[1:40:50] Bob Dobbs: And they're funny,

[1:40:50] Bob Dobbs: what I'm saying,

[1:40:51] Bob Dobbs: but he didn't get what it was.

[1:40:54] Bob Dobbs: That's what I was just saying about

[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: John Cage couldn't get McLuhan.

[1:40:58] Bob Dobbs: He didn't know how to respond.

[1:40:59] Bob Dobbs: Carlin didn't know how to respond to me.

[1:41:03] Cameron McEwen: But maybe he understood on another level.

[1:41:07] Cameron McEwen: Maybe he understood without understanding.

[1:41:10] Cameron McEwen: Like when a child is learning a language,

[1:41:13] Cameron McEwen: they don't really know that they're learning the language.

[1:41:15] Cameron McEwen: They don't have the means to do that,

[1:41:18] Cameron McEwen: but they learn it.

[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: so here's the proof.

[1:41:20] Bob Dobbs: He then...

[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: in 94,

[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: 95,

[1:41:23] Bob Dobbs: took off again.

[1:41:24] Bob Dobbs: He had a big retrieval.

[1:41:25] Bob Dobbs: And the Carl and everybody who talks about now is that guy,

[1:41:29] Bob Dobbs: after he heard my tapes,

[1:41:31] Bob Dobbs: he started doing these seminars and doing a lot about language.

[1:41:35] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:41:35] Bob Dobbs: I've seen some of these shows,

[1:41:37] Bob Dobbs: and I said to Jerry,

[1:41:38] Bob Dobbs: he got that from me.

[1:41:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:41:40] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:41:41] Bob Dobbs: So he actually did.

[1:41:43] Cameron McEwen: And I think I told you already that when

[1:41:47] Cameron McEwen: Carlin was a boy,

[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: he went to school.

[1:41:51] Cameron McEwen: school on the

[1:41:53] Cameron McEwen: Upper West Side.

[1:41:55] Cameron McEwen: And one of his classmates was the daughter of

[1:42:00] Cameron McEwen: Bernie Muller-Thym.

[1:42:02] Bob Dobbs: Really?

[1:42:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:42:03] Cameron McEwen: who is the best man at McLuhan's wedding and the godfather of both Eric and Mary.

[1:42:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:42:09] Bob Dobbs: the original McLuhan partner,

[1:42:12] Bob Dobbs: the original comedian partner of McLuhan.

[1:42:15] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:42:16] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:42:17] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:42:19] Cameron McEwen: uh,

[1:42:19] Cameron McEwen: uh,

[1:42:20] Cameron McEwen: uh,

[1:42:20] Cameron McEwen: Carlin's first girlfriend was the daughter of

[1:42:25] Cameron McEwen: Muller-Thym.

[1:42:26] Bob Dobbs: Holy cow.

[1:42:27] Cameron McEwen: And so

[1:42:29] Cameron McEwen: Carlin had this connection with

[1:42:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan via Muller-Thym and then via you without ever having a direct connection with him.

[1:42:42] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:42:42] Bob Dobbs: And what did you say?

[1:42:48] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:42:49] Bob Dobbs: so he dated the daughter.

[1:42:52] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:42:52] Bob Dobbs: I thought there was some other thing in there you said about

[1:42:55] Bob Dobbs: Muller-Thym. I don't know.

[1:42:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:42:57] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:42:59] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:43:00] Bob Dobbs: there he was involved with the ground.

[1:43:02] Bob Dobbs: And he may have been one of the first teaching the

[1:43:08] Bob Dobbs: ESP comedian.

[1:43:10] Bob Dobbs: Because as people got more into that,

[1:43:13] Bob Dobbs: living ESP in the

[1:43:14] Bob Dobbs: 90s, that's when he really blossomed.

[1:43:15] Bob Dobbs: He ended his career with...

[1:43:18] Bob Dobbs: really big success,

[1:43:19] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:43:20] Bob Dobbs: No one knows that he was in a slump for a few years before that.

[1:43:24] Bob Dobbs: And so the linguistic aspect that I noticed,

[1:43:28] Bob Dobbs: and Jerry did,

[1:43:30] Bob Dobbs: was his translating what he had learned from my tapes.

[1:43:34] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:43:34] Bob Dobbs: it's pretty fucking arrogant to say this,

[1:43:39] Bob Dobbs: but I'm talking technically here.

[1:43:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:43:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:43:43] Cameron McEwen: The thing that I mentioned,

[1:43:45] Cameron McEwen: and you may have wanted to say something about it,

[1:43:48] Cameron McEwen: is I said that Muller-Thym was the best man at the wedding.

[1:43:52] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:43:52] Bob Dobbs: that's what it was.

[1:43:54] Cameron McEwen: And then the godfather of

[1:43:56] Cameron McEwen: Eric and Mary.

[1:43:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:43:57] Bob Dobbs: so he was the best man at

[1:43:59] Bob Dobbs: Marshall's wedding,

[1:44:00] Bob Dobbs: which was on the run in August 39,

[1:44:05] Bob Dobbs: August 4,

[1:44:05] Bob Dobbs: I think.

[1:44:06] Bob Dobbs: And then you're saying he was the godfather?

[1:44:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:44:10] Cameron McEwen: he was godfather of both Eric.

[1:44:13] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:44:13] Cameron McEwen: Mary.

[1:44:15] Bob Dobbs: And probably Terry,

[1:44:16] Bob Dobbs: since they were twins.

[1:44:17] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:44:18] Cameron McEwen: he wasn't.

[1:44:18] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:44:18] Cameron McEwen: they had two separate godparents for the twins.

[1:44:24] Cameron McEwen: But originally,

[1:44:27] Cameron McEwen: what happened with Mary is that somebody else was going to be the godparent,

[1:44:34] Cameron McEwen: the godfather,

[1:44:35] Cameron McEwen: and something happened.

[1:44:38] Cameron McEwen: I can't remember off the top of my head what it was,

[1:44:41] Cameron McEwen: but they needed a godparent at the last moment.

[1:44:46] Cameron McEwen: And so

[1:44:49] Cameron McEwen: Marshall turned to

[1:44:51] Cameron McEwen: Bernie, and he became the godparent of Mary,

[1:44:57] Cameron McEwen: even though it was unusual to have a godparent of two children.

[1:45:02] Cameron McEwen: Usually you want to have separate godparents for each child.

[1:45:07] Bob Dobbs: And he also had to be quick on his feet for the marriage,

[1:45:11] Bob Dobbs: because wasn't that done really quickly?

[1:45:15] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan went down and met the family.

[1:45:19] Bob Dobbs: And then they,

[1:45:20] Bob Dobbs: remember,

[1:45:21] Bob Dobbs: he told Mary to buzz off if she wouldn't marry him.

[1:45:24] Bob Dobbs: And she changes her view and says,

[1:45:27] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[1:45:27] Bob Dobbs: So I think they go down and meet the parents and then they run back up and get the passports and take off.

[1:45:32] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:45:32] Cameron McEwen: I see.

[1:45:33] Cameron McEwen: You're saying Mary,

[1:45:34] Cameron McEwen: but you mean Corinne.

[1:45:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:45:36] Bob Dobbs: Corinne.

[1:45:37] Bob Dobbs: Sorry.

[1:45:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:45:37] Bob Dobbs: Corinne.

[1:45:38] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:45:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:45:39] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:45:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:45:41] Cameron McEwen: that marriage was.

[1:45:42] Cameron McEwen: very quick.

[1:45:43] Cameron McEwen: Basically,

[1:45:44] Cameron McEwen: they were together in

[1:45:46] Cameron McEwen: St. Louis,

[1:45:48] Cameron McEwen: and they were at a junction where they were either saying goodbye or they were going to get married.

[1:45:58] Cameron McEwen: I think Corinne's point of view was,

[1:46:00] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:46:01] Cameron McEwen: we don't have to get married right away.

[1:46:02] Cameron McEwen: If we're serious and we love each other,

[1:46:05] Cameron McEwen: then when you come back from England,

[1:46:08] Cameron McEwen: that'll be time enough.

[1:46:10] Cameron McEwen: And Marshall said,

[1:46:11] Cameron McEwen: no way,

[1:46:12] Cameron McEwen: I'm not going to do it.

[1:46:13] Cameron McEwen: We're either getting married now or we're signing off.

[1:46:16] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:46:17] Cameron McEwen: Corinne said,

[1:46:18] Cameron McEwen: okay.

[1:46:19] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:46:19] Cameron McEwen: originally she had said,

[1:46:21] Cameron McEwen: okay,

[1:46:22] Cameron McEwen: so we're signing off.

[1:46:23] Cameron McEwen: I'm going back to

[1:46:25] Cameron McEwen: Texas. And so she had made the arrangements to go back to Texas,

[1:46:30] Cameron McEwen: and she decided at the very last minute that they were going to get married.

[1:46:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: she decided not to go back.

[1:46:39] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:46:40] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:46:40] Cameron McEwen: And so that meant that they had to not only get married,

[1:46:45] Cameron McEwen: but she didn't have a passport.

[1:46:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:46:48] Cameron McEwen: And she didn't,

[1:46:50] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[1:46:50] Cameron McEwen: have tickets to go on the boat.

[1:46:55] Cameron McEwen: All of that had to be done very rapidly.

[1:47:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:47:00] Bob Dobbs: And did they go down and did they go and see their parents?

[1:47:04] Bob Dobbs: I know it sounds like it was too fast,

[1:47:05] Bob Dobbs: but they go to see the parents at some point.

[1:47:08] Bob Dobbs: and I've

[1:47:11] Bob Dobbs: Would that be before the crisis weekend,

[1:47:13] Bob Dobbs: so to speak?

[1:47:16] Cameron McEwen: I think what you may be thinking of is I believe Corinne went back.

[1:47:22] Cameron McEwen: Marshall had to do something else,

[1:47:24] Cameron McEwen: had to get something organized.

[1:47:26] Cameron McEwen: But I think Corinne made a quick trip back to,

[1:47:30] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:47:31] Cameron McEwen: tell her parents what had happened and to maybe get,

[1:47:36] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:47:37] Cameron McEwen: clothes and stuff like that.

[1:47:39] Cameron McEwen: And then they met somewhere.

[1:47:42] Cameron McEwen: Maybe they didn't even meet again until New York.

[1:47:44] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure.

[1:47:45] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:47:45] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: I'm right to think that they needed to contact the parents.

[1:47:49] Bob Dobbs: They had to go back and do something.

[1:47:51] Bob Dobbs: They had to tell them in person what was going on.

[1:47:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:47:53] Cameron McEwen: but Marshall didn't.

[1:47:55] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:47:56] Cameron McEwen: that was just Corinne,

[1:47:57] Cameron McEwen: I think.

[1:47:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:47:59] Cameron McEwen: My memory is that she went alone after they got married.

[1:48:04] Cameron McEwen: But,

[1:48:06] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:48:06] Cameron McEwen: that's just off the top of my head.

[1:48:08] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:48:08] Bob Dobbs: so that was good.

[1:48:12] Bob Dobbs: Let's just see.

[1:48:13] Bob Dobbs: We're going to end soon,

[1:48:14] Bob Dobbs: but I want to see what I say.

[1:48:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:48:18] Cameron McEwen: we're almost at the new chapter,

[1:48:19] Cameron McEwen: so we just have to finish the chapter we're on.

[1:48:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:48:25] Bob Dobbs: what is that?

[1:48:27] Bob Dobbs: We only have one page left.

[1:48:29] Cameron McEwen: That's right,

[1:48:30] Cameron McEwen: 159 we have to do.

[1:48:32] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:48:32] Bob Dobbs: let's see if we can do that.

[1:48:34] Cameron McEwen: And you already started that with the...

[1:48:37] Cameron McEwen: Digital being part of the sequence with television,

[1:48:42] Cameron McEwen: global theater,

[1:48:44] Cameron McEwen: and instant replay.

[1:48:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: So the beginning of the digital,

[1:48:47] Bob Dobbs: which I'm calling the Android meme,

[1:48:49] Bob Dobbs: would be the cable TV scenario in the late 70s,

[1:48:52] Bob Dobbs: early 80s.

[1:48:53] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying cable TV is somehow digital.

[1:48:59] Cameron McEwen: And notice how if you call the...

[1:49:05] Cameron McEwen: digital,

[1:49:05] Cameron McEwen: if you call that the Android meme,

[1:49:08] Cameron McEwen: then that goes to the inflation article where the where tactility can be made into a product.

[1:49:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:49:20] Cameron McEwen: so the digital takeover by the Android main.

[1:49:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:49:24] Bob Dobbs: the digital.

[1:49:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:49:26] Bob Dobbs: that's the ground because the digital hijacks and exploits the analog.

[1:49:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:49:34] Bob Dobbs: And so the analog is tactility,

[1:49:39] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:49:40] Bob Dobbs: electric tactility.

[1:49:41] Bob Dobbs: And something has to exploit that.

[1:49:43] Bob Dobbs: And yeah,

[1:49:43] Bob Dobbs: you're right,

[1:49:44] Bob Dobbs: that's the digital.

[1:49:45] Bob Dobbs: The digital is what takes over.

[1:49:47] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I ever had that clear in reference to that essay,

[1:49:52] Bob Dobbs: Media Approach to Inflation.

[1:49:54] Bob Dobbs: The ground,

[1:49:55] Bob Dobbs: I was saying,

[1:49:55] Bob Dobbs: what is the ground when tactile is the figure?

[1:49:58] Bob Dobbs: It's the digital,

[1:49:59] Bob Dobbs: which is the machines starting to extend themselves,

[1:50:02] Bob Dobbs: not our faculties.

[1:50:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:50:06] Cameron McEwen: I can buy that.

[1:50:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:50:07] Bob Dobbs: so let's see if I say something like that.

[1:50:11] Bob Dobbs: So I say,

[1:50:11] Bob Dobbs: that's when digital,

[1:50:13] Bob Dobbs: this is in the casual part,

[1:50:15] Bob Dobbs: that's when digital autonomy started coming in.

[1:50:17] Bob Dobbs: People could make their own video recordings on their VCRs and tape shows for when they want to watch them later.

[1:50:24] Bob Dobbs: So that's the beginning of the AP,

[1:50:26] Bob Dobbs: the Anthropomorphic Physical,

[1:50:28] Bob Dobbs: the autonomy.

[1:50:29] Bob Dobbs: In other words,

[1:50:29] Bob Dobbs: the human has found a way to get detached from the global mishmash,

[1:50:33] Bob Dobbs: the global implosion,

[1:50:35] Bob Dobbs: the global super-involvement.

[1:50:37] Bob Dobbs: How do you get your arrogant superiority back?

[1:50:40] Bob Dobbs: You get it through the digital,

[1:50:41] Bob Dobbs: which starts to give you freedom from the imposition of analog media.

[1:50:47] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:50:48] Cameron McEwen: But of course,

[1:50:48] Cameron McEwen: this is all,

[1:50:50] Cameron McEwen: it's freedom,

[1:50:51] Cameron McEwen: freedom slash pseudo-freedom,

[1:50:54] Cameron McEwen: and digital slash pseudo-digital,

[1:50:58] Cameron McEwen: etc.,

[1:50:58] Cameron McEwen: etc.

[1:50:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:51:00] Bob Dobbs: this is not the solution.

[1:51:02] Bob Dobbs: It's the environment that's presenting the solution that you have to become conscious of.

[1:51:07] Bob Dobbs: You have to become conscious of the effects of it.

[1:51:10] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:51:11] Bob Dobbs: So the digital was obsolesced by the afterimage.

[1:51:15] Bob Dobbs: That's the Internet of the

[1:51:16] Bob Dobbs: 90s.

[1:51:17] Bob Dobbs: So the digital and the Android meme for me is the ground of the Tiny Note chart from 1960 to 1990.

[1:51:24] Bob Dobbs: Many of the

[1:51:25] Bob Dobbs: MIT computer scientists of the

[1:51:28] Bob Dobbs: 50s, 40s and 50s,

[1:51:29] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:51:29] Bob Dobbs: the

[1:51:30] Bob Dobbs: Macy guys,

[1:51:31] Bob Dobbs: Macy Conference,

[1:51:32] Bob Dobbs: they strike out on their own to actually become autonomous in 1960 and form companies in Boston.

[1:51:40] Bob Dobbs: And so they start to exploit the digital situation.

[1:51:46] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:51:48] Bob Dobbs: And that completes by 1991-92,

[1:51:52] Bob Dobbs: and then the afterimage of that is the Internet,

[1:51:56] Bob Dobbs: which means,

[1:51:57] Bob Dobbs: just like the tactility is the afterimage in the

[1:52:00] Bob Dobbs: 70s article,

[1:52:02] Bob Dobbs: the Internet.

[1:52:03] Bob Dobbs: So what is the ground of the Internet,

[1:52:06] Bob Dobbs: which is an afterimage?

[1:52:07] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:52:07] Bob Dobbs: I guess it's the Android meme phase 2 or the tech body.

[1:52:11] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[1:52:12] Bob Dobbs: We'll have to see what I come up with there.

[1:52:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:52:15] Cameron McEwen: But notice,

[1:52:17] Cameron McEwen: so what you're talking about in the 1960s is,

[1:52:22] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:52:23] Cameron McEwen: DEC,

[1:52:23] Cameron McEwen: D-E-C,

[1:52:25] Cameron McEwen: Digital Electronic Company.

[1:52:27] Cameron McEwen: So the center of this in Boston moves to

[1:52:44] Cameron McEwen: California.

[1:52:44] Bob Dobbs: California,

[1:52:47] Cameron McEwen: Silicon Valley,

[1:52:50] Cameron McEwen: and that's the movement that you're talking about between the image and the afterimage is the same as that movement from

[1:53:00] Cameron McEwen: East Coast to West Coast.

[1:53:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:53:02] Bob Dobbs: and you're calling the West Coast tech?

[1:53:06] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:53:06] Cameron McEwen: I was saying that the

[1:53:09] Cameron McEwen: DEC, D-E-C,

[1:53:11] Cameron McEwen: the DEC company,

[1:53:12] Cameron McEwen: which made many computers,

[1:53:15] Cameron McEwen: which was actually a fairly big computer.

[1:53:19] Cameron McEwen: DEC was the center of the technology in Boston.

[1:53:28] Cameron McEwen: And so by

[1:53:30] Cameron McEwen: 1990, many of those companies were basically bankrupt in Boston.

[1:53:36] Cameron McEwen: And their business had been taken over by the micro.

[1:53:44] Cameron McEwen: So microcomputers got named as being smaller than the mini.

[1:53:50] Bob Dobbs: And what was the company?

[1:53:52] Bob Dobbs: Is that Hewlett-Packard?

[1:53:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:53:56] Cameron McEwen: Hewlett-Packard,

[1:53:57] Bob Dobbs: Apple.

[1:54:02] Bob Dobbs: Sun something.

[1:54:04] Bob Dobbs: Sun systems.

[1:54:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:54:06] Cameron McEwen: so

[1:54:08] Cameron McEwen: Sun, that came out of Stanford.

[1:54:13] Cameron McEwen: That was,

[1:54:13] Cameron McEwen: Sun was

[1:54:15] Cameron McEwen: Stanford University Network.

[1:54:18] Cameron McEwen: And that came out of

[1:54:21] Cameron McEwen: Stanford just like Google later did.

[1:54:24] Cameron McEwen: So all of these are Silicon Valley companies that took over the business from Boston,

[1:54:36] Cameron McEwen: and now they're in the process of losing it,

[1:54:39] Cameron McEwen: but probably losing it to centers that are outside the United States.

[1:54:46] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:54:46] Bob Dobbs: they're losing it to us,

[1:54:48] Bob Dobbs: to iON Dome.

[1:54:48] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,

[1:54:49] Bob Dobbs: maybe.

[1:54:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:54:51] Bob Dobbs: so the...

[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: So I would say East Coast is

[1:54:57] Bob Dobbs: New York,

[1:54:59] Bob Dobbs: LA is

[1:55:00] Bob Dobbs: West Coast.

[1:55:01] Bob Dobbs: I have it on the Tiny Note that

[1:55:06] Bob Dobbs: Atlantis is the left hemisphere technology of the East Coast and Europe,

[1:55:12] Bob Dobbs: and Lemuria is the moving towards the Pacific and the technology of the Silicon

[1:55:17] Bob Dobbs: Valley.

[1:55:19] Bob Dobbs: So I would say that's going from...

[1:55:26] Bob Dobbs: Wiener on the East Coast to McLuhan on the West Coast?

[1:55:29] Bob Dobbs: Because McLuhan is more identified with the California scene in the long run,

[1:55:35] Bob Dobbs: his popular image in the media,

[1:55:36] Bob Dobbs: than the East Coast.

[1:55:38] Bob Dobbs: Would you agree with that?

[1:55:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:55:40] Cameron McEwen: because

[1:55:41] Cameron McEwen: California is more like Southern culture than it is like the Northern culture.

[1:55:49] Bob Dobbs: Of New York,

[1:55:50] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:55:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had always...

[1:55:52] Cameron McEwen: He's been a bigger fan of the South against the North.

[1:55:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:55:58] Bob Dobbs: and I think one of the McLuhan daughters is an employee of

[1:56:08] Bob Dobbs: Facebook or Google.

[1:56:13] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:56:14] Bob Dobbs: the daughters of...

[1:56:15] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:56:16] Cameron McEwen: her husband.

[1:56:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:56:18] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:56:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:56:19] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:56:20] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:56:20] Cameron McEwen: The husband of...

[1:56:22] Cameron McEwen: one of the kids.

[1:56:23] Bob Dobbs: I think it's the daughter of Eric,

[1:56:25] Bob Dobbs: her husband.

[1:56:26] Bob Dobbs: Maybe her name is Ann or something.

[1:56:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:56:29] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:56:29] Cameron McEwen: I think that's right.

[1:56:30] Cameron McEwen: I think you're absolutely right about that,

[1:56:32] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:56:33] Bob Dobbs: So the only McLuhan employee,

[1:56:35] Bob Dobbs: the only offspring of McLuhan ends up in California.

[1:56:40] Cameron McEwen: appropriately.

[1:56:44] Bob Dobbs: That's the language of God.

[1:56:47] Cameron McEwen: The movement is going with the sun,

[1:56:54] Cameron McEwen: right,

[1:56:55] Cameron McEwen: from east to west,

[1:56:57] Cameron McEwen: and it keeps on going until it gets to Maui.

[1:57:00] Bob Dobbs: That's right,

[1:57:02] Bob Dobbs: the new world.

[1:57:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:57:10] Bob Dobbs: The digital was obsolesced by the afterimage,

[1:57:13] Bob Dobbs: the internet of the

[1:57:14] Bob Dobbs: 90s, of the Android meme.

[1:57:17] Bob Dobbs: The afterimage of the Android meme,

[1:57:19] Bob Dobbs: and this afterimage is phase two.

[1:57:22] Bob Dobbs: Android meme,

[1:57:24] Bob Dobbs: phase one is 1960 to 1990.

[1:57:27] Bob Dobbs: Phase two of the Android meme is the afterimage,

[1:57:30] Bob Dobbs: what we call the internet,

[1:57:32] Bob Dobbs: wherein the Civil War was not in the mediascape anymore.

[1:57:35] Bob Dobbs: So that's partly what I'm saying up above about TV was not the Civil War.

[1:57:39] Bob Dobbs: not in the Civil War.

[1:57:40] Bob Dobbs: There's a new one.

[1:57:41] Bob Dobbs: Wherein the Civil War was not in the mediascape anymore,

[1:57:44] Bob Dobbs: the tactile interplay between analog versus digital media squared,

[1:57:48] Bob Dobbs: but between the autonomous parts of the after image of the Android meme,

[1:57:54] Bob Dobbs: not involved with or indifferent to surplus flesh.

[1:57:57] Bob Dobbs: Now let me see that.

[1:57:58] Bob Dobbs: Wherein the Civil War was not in the mediascape anymore,

[1:58:01] Bob Dobbs: that's analog media,

[1:58:04] Bob Dobbs: and that's the tactile interplay between analog versus digital.

[1:58:07] Bob Dobbs: It moved into the autonomous parts of the after image of the phase one Android meme.

[1:58:14] Bob Dobbs: And that means not involved and different to surplus flesh because it's the machinic that's being extended.

[1:58:20] Bob Dobbs: Not anything from the human flesh.

[1:58:24] Bob Dobbs: Not involved with.

[1:58:25] Bob Dobbs: Indifferent to surplus flesh.

[1:58:28] Bob Dobbs: So the autonomous parts of the after image are what I say in other parts,

[1:58:34] Bob Dobbs: the machine starts extending itself.

[1:58:36] Bob Dobbs: So phase one is the machine extending itself.

[1:58:40] Bob Dobbs: Now let me see.

[1:58:41] Bob Dobbs: Is the machine extending itself in the ground in the 60s?

[1:58:45] Bob Dobbs: Maybe.

[1:58:46] Bob Dobbs: Definitely it's doing it in the

[1:58:49] Bob Dobbs: 90s. And people don't know what they're buying.

[1:58:52] Bob Dobbs: They don't understand these machines,

[1:58:53] Bob Dobbs: where they came from.

[1:58:55] Bob Dobbs: They're not from our bodies.

[1:58:58] Cameron McEwen: Can we say that Android meme phase one is

[1:59:03] Cameron McEwen: Android meme unconscious?

[1:59:05] Cameron McEwen: And Android meme phase two is Android meme conscious.

[1:59:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:59:10] Bob Dobbs: because the unconscious,

[1:59:11] Bob Dobbs: there's no clue.

[1:59:13] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:59:13] Bob Dobbs: DEC and these companies you were citing,

[1:59:16] Bob Dobbs: they're digital,

[1:59:19] Bob Dobbs: but aren't they more embedded in analog media in a sense?

[1:59:27] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[1:59:28] Bob Dobbs: What are they in relation to analog media?

[1:59:35] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:59:35] Cameron McEwen: you could say that they're a digital component of an analog culture,

[1:59:44] Cameron McEwen: of an analog economy.

[1:59:46] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:59:47] Bob Dobbs: the digital is the unconscious.

[1:59:51] Bob Dobbs: It's not even noticed,

[1:59:56] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:59:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:59:57] Cameron McEwen: it's an efficiency tool,

[2:00:00] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[2:00:01] Bob Dobbs: Efficiency,

[2:00:01] Bob Dobbs: right.

[2:00:02] Bob Dobbs: So it's the Android meme phase one,

[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: which is the unconscious.

[2:00:05] Bob Dobbs: And that becomes the figure in Android meme Phase 2.

[2:00:09] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:00:10] Cameron McEwen: So here you have a whole culture or a whole economy.

[2:00:15] Cameron McEwen: And that's what

[2:00:18] Cameron McEwen: Silicon Valley was the brain of this new creature.

[2:00:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:00:22] Bob Dobbs: and obsolescence flesh,

[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: surplus flesh.

[2:00:27] Bob Dobbs: And so this is great.

[2:00:30] Bob Dobbs: So you're helping make my book make sense.

[2:00:36] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:00:38] Cameron McEwen: it can't be done unless the sense is already there.

[2:00:41] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[2:00:42] Bob Dobbs: and I'm thinking that's what McLuhan did.

[2:00:43] Bob Dobbs: He had to go public and make his stuff part of the public dialogue to find out what he meant.

[2:00:51] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[2:00:52] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:00:52] Cameron McEwen: he often said that.

[2:00:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:00:55] Cameron McEwen: That's why he liked talking so much.

[2:00:57] Cameron McEwen: And one of the reasons he never reviewed his essays or his books is that um,

[2:01:05] Cameron McEwen: He didn't want to become involved with trying to figure out what he was talking about.

[2:01:13] Cameron McEwen: He wanted to move on to the next thing.

[2:01:15] Bob Dobbs: He wanted to find out what you were talking about,

[2:01:19] Bob Dobbs: meaning the others,

[2:01:20] Bob Dobbs: not himself.

[2:01:23] Bob Dobbs: So then I say...

[2:01:25] Bob Dobbs: The traditional war was a civil war of the media,

[2:01:27] Bob Dobbs: with bankers on the sidelines.

[2:01:29] Bob Dobbs: But the civil war in the...

[2:01:31] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:01:31] Bob Dobbs: this is...

[2:01:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm predicting...

[2:01:32] Bob Dobbs: This should be an interesting statement here.

[2:01:34] Bob Dobbs: I don't even remember it.

[2:01:35] Bob Dobbs: But the civil war in the

[2:01:37] Bob Dobbs: 90s is between the parts of the afterimage,

[2:01:40] Bob Dobbs: or the machining,

[2:01:41] Bob Dobbs: not media environments.

[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: And it's indifferent to surplus flesh,

[2:01:44] Bob Dobbs: because surplus flesh of the chemical body was starting to be bigger than the digital environment.

[2:01:49] Bob Dobbs: That's interesting.

[2:01:50] Bob Dobbs: This is where the AP we're coming up to,

[2:01:53] Bob Dobbs: the Anthropomorphic Physical,

[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: is coming back,

[2:01:56] Bob Dobbs: which I have as the ground of my chart,

[2:01:58] Bob Dobbs: the Dobbs quadrant.

[2:02:00] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:02:01] Bob Dobbs: it's beneath the analog media of the first four quadrants.

[2:02:09] Bob Dobbs: And remember,

[2:02:09] Bob Dobbs: the digital part of the analog media of the four quadrants is the column on the left,

[2:02:15] Bob Dobbs: the holeopathic.

[2:02:18] Bob Dobbs: That's the shrinking,

[2:02:19] Bob Dobbs: shrinking.

[2:02:20] Bob Dobbs: and swallowing of the hologram,

[2:02:22] Bob Dobbs: that's a digital process.

[2:02:26] Bob Dobbs: So the digital is there in the ground,

[2:02:29] Bob Dobbs: in the words holeopathic,

[2:02:33] Bob Dobbs: and the first four quadrants.

[2:02:35] Bob Dobbs: And we're moving towards the deeper ground.

[2:02:38] Bob Dobbs: Is the chemical body becoming something new,

[2:02:42] Bob Dobbs: multi-bodied?

[2:02:44] Bob Dobbs: Or that's what we project on it as our Anthropomorphic Physical,

[2:02:48] Bob Dobbs: that we have different bodies.

[2:02:51] Cameron McEwen: But at a yet deeper level,

[2:02:57] Cameron McEwen: what's going on here is what's called humanism in the last paragraph of

[2:03:03] Cameron McEwen: Take Today,

[2:03:05] Cameron McEwen: or harmonization in different parts of

[2:03:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's work.

[2:03:11] Cameron McEwen: So the issue of what is the human?

[2:03:20] Cameron McEwen: is a kind of cloud that's descending upon everything.

[2:03:28] Cameron McEwen: And the parts of that cloud can be exploited into products or they can be considered

[2:03:46] Cameron McEwen: as a new understanding.

[2:03:50] Cameron McEwen: And the battle is between those two senses of humanism.

[2:03:59] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:03:59] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:04:00] Bob Dobbs: Deleuze and Guattari talk about the body without organs.

[2:04:08] Bob Dobbs: But Kroker comes along and talks about organs without bodies.

[2:04:11] Bob Dobbs: And that's what I mean by the parts,

[2:04:15] Bob Dobbs: the parts of the afterimage is...

[2:04:18] Bob Dobbs: The digital ear,

[2:04:19] Bob Dobbs: the digital tongue that Kroker talks about,

[2:04:22] Bob Dobbs: the floating parts of the splayed

[2:04:27] Bob Dobbs: S-P-L-A-Y-E-D of the chemical body.

[2:04:30] Bob Dobbs: So these parts are floating around as figures.

[2:04:35] Bob Dobbs: That's the closest of remembering the chemical body that we were extending in the analog phase.

[2:04:42] Bob Dobbs: Now you're in the digital.

[2:04:43] Bob Dobbs: And so you've got the floating parts of the body.

[2:04:50] Bob Dobbs: organs without bodies,

[2:04:52] Bob Dobbs: and the body itself is the surplus flesh which has been cast aside,

[2:04:56] Bob Dobbs: and it's imploding or becoming something that's bigger than the digital,

[2:05:02] Bob Dobbs: and that's the AP.

[2:05:04] Bob Dobbs: So the next paragraph,

[2:05:06] Bob Dobbs: today one is wearing the Android meme on one's wrist.

[2:05:11] Bob Dobbs: Now what is the wrist part of?

[2:05:14] Bob Dobbs: It's not part of your chemical body.

[2:05:17] Bob Dobbs: Maybe it's just the wrist,

[2:05:18] Bob Dobbs: it's a separate organ.

[2:05:21] Bob Dobbs: And the Android meme is smaller than it.

[2:05:23] Bob Dobbs: It holds the Android meme.

[2:05:25] Bob Dobbs: That's what I mean,

[2:05:25] Bob Dobbs: that the AP is holding the scattered afterimage of the parts and of the first Android meme phase.

[2:05:35] Bob Dobbs: So surplus flesh is expendable.

[2:05:38] Bob Dobbs: Unions die.

[2:05:39] Bob Dobbs: That's trade unions,

[2:05:40] Bob Dobbs: workers'

[2:05:41] Bob Dobbs: unions die.

[2:05:42] Bob Dobbs: Nobody cares.

[2:05:43] Bob Dobbs: They just want to get home and engage their TV body and chip body.

[2:05:49] Bob Dobbs: So then

[2:05:50] Bob Dobbs: I say,

[2:05:51] Bob Dobbs: Web 2.0 replays the analog eras.

[2:05:55] Bob Dobbs: That's the internet.

[2:05:56] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme.

[2:05:58] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:05:58] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:05:58] Bob Dobbs: no.

[2:05:59] Bob Dobbs: Web 2.0 is the social media.

[2:06:01] Bob Dobbs: The teens.

[2:06:03] Bob Dobbs: Web 2.0 replays the analog eras.

[2:06:06] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme sculpting everybody into a pharaoh.

[2:06:09] Bob Dobbs: That's the,

[2:06:10] Bob Dobbs: that's the,

[2:06:11] Bob Dobbs: um...

[2:06:12] Bob Dobbs: Uh,

[2:06:13] Bob Dobbs: co-anesthesia putting you in the director's seat.

[2:06:17] Bob Dobbs: One of the great services of the Android meme.

[2:06:19] Bob Dobbs: Here's my picture of that war mapped out.

[2:06:22] Bob Dobbs: In late 1995,

[2:06:24] Bob Dobbs: and that's the Tiny Note chart,

[2:06:26] Bob Dobbs: that's a picture of the war.

[2:06:29] Bob Dobbs: And the war is,

[2:06:31] Bob Dobbs: I just jumped ahead just a second,

[2:06:37] Bob Dobbs: the war is the Android meme sculpting everybody into a pharaoh.

[2:06:48] Bob Dobbs: And I'm thinking of McLuhan in the Burroughs book,

[2:06:50] Bob Dobbs: and Burroughs...

[2:06:51] Bob Dobbs: essay in 1964 saying it is Egyptian where we were at in the Global Membrane phase.

[2:07:00] Bob Dobbs: So then what do I do?

[2:07:01] Bob Dobbs: That ends.

[2:07:02] Bob Dobbs: So then we're it.

[2:07:04] Bob Dobbs: Now I'm getting to the AP.

[2:07:06] Bob Dobbs: I didn't even know it was coming.

[2:07:10] Bob Dobbs: I forgot.

[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:07:12] Bob Dobbs: that was a pretty good explanation of how we got to the AP,

[2:07:14] Bob Dobbs: which we're going to find out what I meant by having you comment on it.

[2:07:19] Cameron McEwen: There you go.

[2:07:22] Cameron McEwen: And you brought up

[2:07:24] Cameron McEwen: Egypt a couple times there,

[2:07:25] Cameron McEwen: and we should remember the characterization of the age as octopus attacking the Great Pyramid.

[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:07:34] Bob Dobbs: good point.

[2:07:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:07:35] Bob Dobbs: And the

[2:07:38] Bob Dobbs: Empire State Building is a modern pyramid,

[2:07:40] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[2:07:41] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:07:41] Cameron McEwen: Yep.

[2:07:43] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:07:44] Bob Dobbs: so awesome.

[2:07:48] Bob Dobbs: That's fantastic.

[2:07:50] Bob Dobbs: We only got 20 pages or so left.

[2:07:53] Cameron McEwen: Yep.

[2:07:54] Cameron McEwen: We may have to start again though,

[2:07:56] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[2:07:56] Cameron McEwen: because as we get towards the end of the book,

[2:08:01] Cameron McEwen: at least in my case,

[2:08:02] Cameron McEwen: I'm understanding more about the start of the book.

[2:08:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:08:07] Bob Dobbs: What did I mean?

[2:08:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:08:09] Bob Dobbs: We find out what was the impulse that got me going,

[2:08:12] Bob Dobbs: which was the tech body,

[2:08:13] Bob Dobbs: but we didn't know what it was.

[2:08:15] Bob Dobbs: So we've talked ourselves into understanding the effects.

[2:08:19] Bob Dobbs: in this article so we're arriving at the causes correct awesome amazing so is this is this the first novel a new kind of science fiction novel where bob talks to somebody who kind of knows what he's talking about and then we find out what the book's about well

[2:08:39] Cameron McEwen: we talked about that circle in the in the course of our conversation today that's everything human works like that yeah Thank you.

[2:08:49] Cameron McEwen: you always arrive at a point that was already the case.

[2:08:58] Cameron McEwen: You go towards the past.

[2:09:00] Cameron McEwen: You have to repeat what you were about to say.

[2:09:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:09:04] Bob Dobbs: Now listen to this.

[2:09:04] Bob Dobbs: So in an interview in 91,

[2:09:06] Bob Dobbs: Zappa was asked something.

[2:09:10] Bob Dobbs: Whether art was imitating life or life was imitating art.

[2:09:14] Bob Dobbs: Now this is what's popular.

[2:09:16] Bob Dobbs: Just an average person talking to Frank,

[2:09:18] Bob Dobbs: but they've been massaged by the

[2:09:20] Bob Dobbs: Android meme 1960-1990 to understand McLuhan instinctively that the interplay of art and life was getting blurred.

[2:09:29] Bob Dobbs: So he says,

[2:09:30] Bob Dobbs: what is it,

[2:09:30] Bob Dobbs: Frank?

[2:09:30] Bob Dobbs: Is it art imitating life or life imitating art?

[2:09:33] Bob Dobbs: And he says,

[2:09:34] Bob Dobbs: it's both.

[2:09:35] Bob Dobbs: It's loops.

[2:09:37] Bob Dobbs: And looping is,

[2:09:38] Bob Dobbs: I say,

[2:09:40] Bob Dobbs: tactility.

[2:09:41] Bob Dobbs: So what you were just saying is we're looping.

[2:09:45] Bob Dobbs: the past,

[2:09:45] Bob Dobbs: the present,

[2:09:46] Bob Dobbs: the future.

[2:09:47] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?

[2:09:48] Bob Dobbs: We're going back.

[2:09:50] Bob Dobbs: What did you just say?

[2:09:52] Bob Dobbs: It was accurate.

[2:09:53] Bob Dobbs: It was the looping.

[2:09:55] Cameron McEwen: We have to repeat what we were about to say.

[2:09:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:09:58] Cameron McEwen: That's straight from McLuhan.

[2:10:00] Cameron McEwen: But if you think of a child learning language,

[2:10:08] Cameron McEwen: the child cannot understand the instructions unless it understands language.

[2:10:15] Cameron McEwen: but the instructions are about how to understand language.

[2:10:18] Cameron McEwen: So that kind of loop is always going on with humans,

[2:10:23] Cameron McEwen: but it's unconscious and it's not used for proper understanding.

[2:10:32] Cameron McEwen: So what we're trying to do is we're trying to say that we're trying to use language to teach a new language.

[2:10:41] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:10:41] Bob Dobbs: and the...

[2:10:44] Bob Dobbs: Thanks,

[2:10:44] Bob Dobbs: guys.

[2:10:45] Bob Dobbs: First,

[2:10:46] Bob Dobbs: leading up to the Gutenberg era,

[2:10:47] Bob Dobbs: art imitates life.

[2:10:49] Bob Dobbs: Then,

[2:10:49] Bob Dobbs: in the electric age,

[2:10:50] Bob Dobbs: life imitates art.

[2:10:51] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:10:52] Bob Dobbs: they're looping back and forth,

[2:10:54] Bob Dobbs: but that's the sequential.

[2:10:57] Bob Dobbs: First,

[2:10:58] Bob Dobbs: art imitates life,

[2:10:59] Bob Dobbs: and then life imitates art.

[2:11:01] Bob Dobbs: Then you realize it's simultaneous,

[2:11:03] Bob Dobbs: and you never began where you thought you were,

[2:11:06] Bob Dobbs: and that becomes the looping tactile blur,

[2:11:08] Bob Dobbs: which is always our condition.

[2:11:10] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:11:10] Bob Dobbs: the cloud.

[2:11:12] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:11:12] Bob Dobbs: I end with this.

[2:11:13] Bob Dobbs: The cloud,

[2:11:14] Bob Dobbs: iON talks about the cloud,

[2:11:16] Bob Dobbs: and he talks about the Google...

[2:11:18] Bob Dobbs: Microsoft cloud,

[2:11:19] Bob Dobbs: and iON is making a new cloud,

[2:11:22] Bob Dobbs: a better cloud.

[2:11:23] Bob Dobbs: And it's very interesting how he describes it.

[2:11:26] Bob Dobbs: We're not sure what it is,

[2:11:27] Bob Dobbs: but we're growing it.

[2:11:29] Bob Dobbs: And

[2:11:30] Bob Dobbs: I would call the cloud,

[2:11:32] Bob Dobbs: the way you were saying it,

[2:11:33] Bob Dobbs: the mystery landscape,

[2:11:34] Bob Dobbs: which is becoming the mystery body.

[2:11:38] Bob Dobbs: We're moving into the cloud,

[2:11:41] Bob Dobbs: which is the mystery body.

[2:11:43] Bob Dobbs: The parts of ourselves that we never understood are now becoming figure.

[2:11:47] Bob Dobbs: That's the cloud you see falling over people today.

[2:11:51] Bob Dobbs: But we have moved...

[2:11:53] Bob Dobbs: What?

[2:11:54] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:11:54] Cameron McEwen: I'm just agreeing with you.

[2:11:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:11:56] Bob Dobbs: And we're moving into the hexadic,

[2:11:58] Bob Dobbs: into the sixth level,

[2:12:00] Bob Dobbs: which is IONdom,

[2:12:01] Bob Dobbs: and maybe the new ground.

[2:12:03] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:12:03] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying...

[2:12:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:12:03] Cameron McEwen: and that mysticism is the New Science.

[2:12:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:12:08] Bob Dobbs: But it's beyond all the cliches of what mysticism is.

[2:12:13] Bob Dobbs: Nothing to do with that.

[2:12:15] Bob Dobbs: Just like it's all beyond the cliches of what science is.

[2:12:18] Bob Dobbs: It is a new situation that cannot be understood,

[2:12:21] Bob Dobbs: and here's the breakthrough technology happening just now,

[2:12:25] Bob Dobbs: so we're talking this way appropriately.

[2:12:28] Bob Dobbs: It's being caused by the events at Georgia Power where they're announcing something new,

[2:12:33] Bob Dobbs: and they fucking had to lie,

[2:12:35] Bob Dobbs: and it's nowhere near what they're fucking trying to describe.

[2:12:38] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:12:38] Bob Dobbs: there it is.

[2:12:39] Bob Dobbs: That's what Finnegans Wake started off,

[2:12:44] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:12:47] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:12:47] Cameron McEwen: I don't want to say right because I haven't fully understood what you said,

[2:12:52] Cameron McEwen: but I don't think I can understand that at the moment.

[2:12:55] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:12:55] Bob Dobbs: the point is that

[2:12:57] Bob Dobbs: Dobbs is making stuff,

[2:12:58] Bob Dobbs: and he never needed to know anything about what he was doing.

[2:13:05] Bob Dobbs: That's ESP.

[2:13:07] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[2:13:08] Cameron McEwen: That is ESP.

[2:13:09] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:13:09] Bob Dobbs: there we have it.

[2:13:10] Bob Dobbs: You understand something.

[2:13:11] Bob Dobbs: Here at page 169.

[2:13:15] Bob Dobbs: at the top.

[2:13:15] Bob Dobbs: So fantastic.

[2:13:16] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:13:17] Bob Dobbs: thanks a lot,

[2:13:17] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.

[2:13:18] Bob Dobbs: Very good.

[2:13:18] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[2:13:18] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[2:13:19] Cameron McEwen: Look forward.

[2:13:20] Bob Dobbs: Bye.

[2:13:21] Bob Dobbs: Talk to you next.