Dialogue 78 — Transcript

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Hello,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: this is Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs with episode number 78 of our x-ray of my book about Trump and the tech body.

[00:13] Bob Dobbs: And we're at the page 160.

[00:14] Bob Dobbs: Is it

[00:15] Bob Dobbs: 160, Cameron?

[00:20] Cameron McEwen: That's the 160 is the start of the AP chapter.

[00:25] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[00:25] Bob Dobbs: So we're down.

[00:28] Cameron McEwen: That's where they that's where the quotation is.

[00:30] Cameron McEwen: from Finnegans Wake,

[00:31] Cameron McEwen: page 21.

[00:33] Bob Dobbs: So section 5,

[00:34] Bob Dobbs: the Anthropomorphic Physical,

[00:36] Bob Dobbs: page 160 at the bottom of the page,

[00:40] Bob Dobbs: is a quote from Finnegans Wake.

[00:42] Bob Dobbs: So

[00:43] Bob Dobbs: I say before that,

[00:46] Bob Dobbs: I say the media fit the Battle of Jericho,

[00:48] Bob Dobbs: which is the title of McLuhan's

[00:51] Bob Dobbs: Explorations magazine,

[00:53] Bob Dobbs: issue number 6,

[00:54] Bob Dobbs: July

[00:56] Bob Dobbs: 1956.

[00:58] Bob Dobbs: So then I said,

[00:58] Bob Dobbs: the walls are knocked down,

[01:00] Bob Dobbs: referring to the Battle of Jericho.

[01:02] Bob Dobbs: The walls are knocked down for the chemical body and astral body via analog media.

[01:07] Bob Dobbs: So that was radio,

[01:08] Bob Dobbs: TV,

[01:10] Bob Dobbs: and analog computer.

[01:12] Bob Dobbs: First half of the 20th century,

[01:13] Bob Dobbs: so to speak,

[01:14] Bob Dobbs: is knocking down the walls of...

[01:18] Bob Dobbs: The analog media is knocking down the walls of chemical body and astral body.

[01:22] Bob Dobbs: So you have a retrieval of the occult,

[01:24] Bob Dobbs: said McLuhan.

[01:25] Bob Dobbs: You have a lot of people...

[01:28] Bob Dobbs: sort of looking beyond

[01:30] Bob Dobbs: Western literate religion.

[01:33] Bob Dobbs: And so that's the effect of the telegraph opening up something between what I call the astral landscape and the chemical landscape.

[01:41] Bob Dobbs: The electric environment knocks the walls down.

[01:46] Cameron McEwen: Why do you say that the electrical environment is analog?

[01:51] Bob Dobbs: It's not digital.

[01:54] Bob Dobbs: It's the broadcasting.

[01:56] Bob Dobbs: Media,

[01:57] Bob Dobbs: the first half of the 20th century,

[01:58] Bob Dobbs: radio and television.

[02:03] Cameron McEwen: But the enabling technology slash presupposition is digital,

[02:15] Cameron McEwen: right?

[02:16] Bob Dobbs: No,

[02:16] Bob Dobbs: no,

[02:16] Bob Dobbs: digital technology hasn't started as an environment yet.

[02:20] Bob Dobbs: That's in the second half of the 20th century.

[02:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[02:25] Cameron McEwen: um...

[02:26] Cameron McEwen: Maybe you could explain that because,

[02:28] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[02:29] Cameron McEwen: number one,

[02:29] Cameron McEwen: it gets into our usual difference between the diachronic and the synchronic.

[02:38] Cameron McEwen: But just sort of as a matter of fact,

[02:42] Cameron McEwen: doesn't the digital possibility begin with

[02:50] Cameron McEwen: Faraday and with the telegraph?

[02:55] Cameron McEwen: explorations into magnetism starting in the second quarter of the

[03:01] Cameron McEwen: 19th century?

[03:03] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[03:03] Bob Dobbs: so if you look up analog media,

[03:05] Bob Dobbs: it's defined as,

[03:07] Bob Dobbs: example of analog media are the font-based media,

[03:10] Bob Dobbs: in brackets,

[03:11] Bob Dobbs: signs,

[03:11] Bob Dobbs: letters,

[03:12] Bob Dobbs: leaflets,

[03:13] Bob Dobbs: print media,

[03:14] Bob Dobbs: in brackets,

[03:15] Bob Dobbs: book,

[03:15] Bob Dobbs: newspaper,

[03:15] Bob Dobbs: magazine,

[03:16] Bob Dobbs: broadcast media,

[03:18] Bob Dobbs: in brackets,

[03:19] Bob Dobbs: radio,

[03:20] Bob Dobbs: television,

[03:20] Bob Dobbs: and then telegraph,

[03:22] Bob Dobbs: telex,

[03:22] Bob Dobbs: telephone,

[03:23] Bob Dobbs: telefax,

[03:24] Bob Dobbs: records.

[03:25] Bob Dobbs: Audio,

[03:25] Bob Dobbs: cassette,

[03:26] Bob Dobbs: film,

[03:26] Bob Dobbs: photography,

[03:27] Bob Dobbs: video,

[03:27] Bob Dobbs: traffic signs.

[03:28] Bob Dobbs: So that's just a general use of the phrase analog media,

[03:33] Bob Dobbs: and that's all pre-digital.

[03:35] Cameron McEwen: Where did you find that that you were reading?

[03:38] Cameron McEwen: Where did you find that?

[03:39] Bob Dobbs: It's under analog media.

[03:44] Bob Dobbs: So if you put in a word,

[03:48] Bob Dobbs: so I said analog media,

[03:49] Bob Dobbs: up comes this stuff and it says,

[03:51] Bob Dobbs: people ask,

[03:51] Bob Dobbs: what is the difference between analog and digital media?

[03:54] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what it is.

[03:54] Bob Dobbs: It's not Wikipedia.

[03:56] Bob Dobbs: It says some guy,

[03:57] Bob Dobbs: jornlenkfeld.com.

[03:59] Bob Dobbs: So I don't know what that is,

[04:00] Bob Dobbs: but let's just see what the difference is.

[04:06] Bob Dobbs: While analog systems represent data using a continuous signal,

[04:11] Bob Dobbs: digital systems represent data using discrete values.

[04:14] Bob Dobbs: Digital systems are generally more immune to noise and more accurate than analog systems,

[04:20] Bob Dobbs: but they also require more bandwidth and are more complex.

[04:24] Bob Dobbs: So then,

[04:25] Bob Dobbs: that's one statement.

[04:26] Bob Dobbs: Let's look at another one.

[04:29] Bob Dobbs: Let's see what this says.

[04:32] Bob Dobbs: It says,

[04:32] Bob Dobbs: analog and digital signals are used to transmit information,

[04:37] Bob Dobbs: such as any audio or video,

[04:39] Bob Dobbs: usually through electric signals.

[04:41] Bob Dobbs: In digital technology,

[04:42] Bob Dobbs: the translation of information is into binary format,

[04:45] Bob Dobbs: either 0 or 1,

[04:47] Bob Dobbs: and information is translated into electric pulses of varying amplitude.

[04:51] Bob Dobbs: And information is translated into electric pulses of varying amplitude in analog technology.

[04:58] Bob Dobbs: So they generally make a distinction.

[05:02] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[05:02] Cameron McEwen: I understand.

[05:03] Cameron McEwen: So you're using a distinction that is outside of McLuhan.

[05:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[05:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan has a different idea about these things.

[05:11] Cameron McEwen: So

[05:12] Cameron McEwen: I understand what you're saying now.

[05:14] Cameron McEwen: So this is like the difference between a record,

[05:18] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[05:21] Cameron McEwen: was analog until

[05:23] Cameron McEwen: CDs. Yeah.

[05:25] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[05:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[05:28] Bob Dobbs: I use the terms analog media,

[05:29] Bob Dobbs: digital media.

[05:31] Bob Dobbs: Because I don't think McLuhan said analog media very much.

[05:35] Bob Dobbs: Did he ever say that phrase versus digital?

[05:37] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that he did.

[05:39] Cameron McEwen: But he certainly had a different idea about how to talk about these things.

[05:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[05:46] Bob Dobbs: I saw a lecture in September of 78 to a bunch of psychologists.

[05:50] Bob Dobbs: And he went on about,

[05:51] Bob Dobbs: we made a big mistake shifting to digital computers.

[05:55] Bob Dobbs: We should have gone with analog computers.

[05:57] Bob Dobbs: I had no idea what he was referring to.

[06:00] Bob Dobbs: And he didn't say anything.

[06:01] Bob Dobbs: And I've never found much on that statement or what he means by we took the wrong turn by going digital,

[06:08] Bob Dobbs: which he would call the two-bit wit,

[06:10] Bob Dobbs: right?

[06:11] Bob Dobbs: The two-bit wit of the computer world.

[06:13] Cameron McEwen: So what would he...

[06:15] Cameron McEwen: I think he gets into that a bit in Take Today.

[06:21] Cameron McEwen: I've wondered about that quite a bit.

[06:23] Cameron McEwen: And I think what he's talking about...

[06:25] Cameron McEwen: What have you wondered about?

[06:26] Bob Dobbs: Did his use of that phrase analog computer?

[06:30] Cameron McEwen: No,

[06:30] Cameron McEwen: the two-bit.

[06:32] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[06:32] Cameron McEwen: the two-bit width.

[06:34] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[06:35] Cameron McEwen: and the strange thing about that is that ordinarily what he would say is when you get into the two-bit width,

[06:47] Cameron McEwen: you have the extension of the human faculty,

[06:53] Cameron McEwen: or faculties,

[06:53] Cameron McEwen: plural,

[06:54] Cameron McEwen: And it's that that gives us the possibility of understanding.

[06:59] Cameron McEwen: who we are and what we're doing.

[07:01] Cameron McEwen: But then he starts talking about two-bit wit negatively.

[07:05] Cameron McEwen: And I've tried to figure out what was going on there.

[07:08] Cameron McEwen: And I think what's going on there is that he's saying that humans,

[07:15] Cameron McEwen: as analog,

[07:18] Cameron McEwen: have taken over the digital and are using it analogically.

[07:25] Cameron McEwen: And that is the great danger.

[07:28] Bob Dobbs: And what was your beginning sentence?

[07:30] Bob Dobbs: You said that he said two-bit wet,

[07:32] Bob Dobbs: and he meant that as a positive attribute?

[07:35] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[07:36] Cameron McEwen: Originally,

[07:37] Cameron McEwen: what he was thinking was that technologies like television,

[07:42] Cameron McEwen: which externalize the human faculties,

[07:46] Cameron McEwen: allow that to be understood for the first time.

[07:50] Bob Dobbs: The fact you're extending,

[07:52] Bob Dobbs: the extension point.

[07:54] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[07:55] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[07:55] Cameron McEwen: But then...

[07:56] Cameron McEwen: he came to see that this,

[07:59] Cameron McEwen: in fact,

[07:59] Cameron McEwen: was a great danger,

[08:01] Cameron McEwen: that what was happening was that this nuclear technology was being put to service for analog ends.

[08:13] Bob Dobbs: And what are analog ends?

[08:15] Cameron McEwen: Analog ends are the will to empire,

[08:23] Cameron McEwen: the will to...

[08:27] Cameron McEwen: capture tomorrow.

[08:30] Bob Dobbs: Is that because the digital media is two-way and NLOG isn't?

[08:36] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[08:38] Cameron McEwen: that's right,

[08:39] Cameron McEwen: but

[08:41] Cameron McEwen: I think this probably relates to Finnegans Wake in the sense that

[08:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan at first was thinking that when we get clear about media

[08:55] Cameron McEwen: that this gives us this enormous opportunity.

[08:58] Cameron McEwen: But then he sees that,

[09:00] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[09:00] Cameron McEwen: all things are twofold,

[09:02] Cameron McEwen: and this enormous opportunity is also the great danger.

[09:09] Cameron McEwen: So that's my idea of what he means by two-bit wisdom,

[09:12] Cameron McEwen: or two-bit wit.

[09:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[09:15] Bob Dobbs: I always took that as a put-down.

[09:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[09:18] Cameron McEwen: me too.

[09:18] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[09:18] Bob Dobbs: the computer is being used for alphabetic Gutenberg purposes,

[09:22] Bob Dobbs: whereas he wanted to...

[09:25] Bob Dobbs: use the computer as a thermostat for global environments.

[09:28] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[09:29] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[09:29] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[09:30] Bob Dobbs: sir.

[09:30] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[09:31] Bob Dobbs: So,

[09:36] Bob Dobbs: I think the first time I saw him say that digital media was in a newspaper article about 1970.

[09:42] Bob Dobbs: And so he's saying,

[09:43] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[09:43] Bob Dobbs: he's being negative about the computer.

[09:45] Bob Dobbs: So it's not being used the way he wants.

[09:48] Bob Dobbs: But

[09:49] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what kind of computer he was thinking of in 19...

[09:53] Bob Dobbs: 70.

[09:54] Bob Dobbs: Would there be digital computer?

[09:55] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[09:56] Bob Dobbs: you go into a bank in the 60s and they'd have the tapes.

[10:00] Bob Dobbs: In the background,

[10:00] Bob Dobbs: you could see the computer room with the reels of tape.

[10:03] Bob Dobbs: There's some kind of tape.

[10:05] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[10:05] Bob Dobbs: It's not audio tape,

[10:06] Bob Dobbs: I don't think,

[10:07] Bob Dobbs: but it was round things.

[10:09] Bob Dobbs: That's pre-digital,

[10:10] Bob Dobbs: wouldn't you say?

[10:12] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[10:12] Cameron McEwen: it's pre-digital in the sense that this was analog in those years.

[10:22] Bob Dobbs: You blipped out.

[10:23] Bob Dobbs: You said in the sense,

[10:24] Bob Dobbs: and then what did you say?

[10:25] Cameron McEwen: I said in the sense that the output of these devices...

[10:32] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[10:33] Cameron McEwen: so the underlying...

[10:33] Bob Dobbs: You didn't finish your sentence.

[10:35] Bob Dobbs: You said the output of these devices...

[10:37] Bob Dobbs: Did you say some more?

[10:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[10:39] Cameron McEwen: Why is this...

[10:41] Cameron McEwen: Can you hear me?

[10:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[10:42] Bob Dobbs: but half your sentence just disappears.

[10:45] Bob Dobbs: So say that again.

[10:46] Bob Dobbs: The output of your...

[10:50] Cameron McEwen: Just as with a record,

[10:52] Cameron McEwen: like an LP,

[10:55] Cameron McEwen: the output of...

[10:58] Cameron McEwen: an underlying digital technology can be analog.

[11:04] Cameron McEwen: And I think what McLuhan was probably thinking about was not computers,

[11:09] Cameron McEwen: but things like records,

[11:12] Cameron McEwen: where the record was an analog technology in the sense that it was,

[11:20] Cameron McEwen: by analog means it was producing the sound,

[11:24] Cameron McEwen: but the underlying technology was digital.

[11:27] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.

[11:28] Cameron McEwen: What

[11:30] Cameron McEwen: I take McLuhan to have been thinking is that although the possibility of digitality has been with us since the early

[11:44] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,

[11:46] Cameron McEwen: it has been developed in a way that is ultimately analog,

[11:51] Cameron McEwen: which is,

[11:52] Cameron McEwen: as you were just saying quite properly,

[11:54] Cameron McEwen: that is the great danger.

[11:58] Bob Dobbs: How was whatever they developed in 1840 digital?

[12:05] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[12:06] Cameron McEwen: electricity and magnetism are fundamentally digital.

[12:12] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,

[12:13] Cameron McEwen: they have north and south poles,

[12:15] Cameron McEwen: and they only exist as resonance.

[12:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[12:24] Bob Dobbs: so...

[12:27] Cameron McEwen: And that's what the digital is,

[12:28] Cameron McEwen: right?

[12:28] Cameron McEwen: The digital is the coding of information in terms of

[12:44] Cameron McEwen: 01 and the use of 01 gates to reformulate all things.

[12:55] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[12:55] Bob Dobbs: I remember in the

[12:56] Bob Dobbs: 60s or 70s,

[12:57] Bob Dobbs: early 70s,

[12:58] Bob Dobbs: hearing people say that it was the computer environment we were familiar with and

[13:06] Bob Dobbs: IBM land.

[13:08] Bob Dobbs: And the digital was sneaking up on us.

[13:12] Bob Dobbs: People hadn't thought about it,

[13:13] Bob Dobbs: didn't know about it.

[13:15] Bob Dobbs: So it couldn't have been what you're describing.

[13:18] Bob Dobbs: The new digital was something else coming out of MIT in that,

[13:21] Bob Dobbs: right?

[13:22] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[13:24] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[13:24] Bob Dobbs: That's...

[13:25] Bob Dobbs: what I understand is the two-bit WIT or the 0 and the 1.

[13:28] Bob Dobbs: And then that just took off.

[13:31] Bob Dobbs: And by the late 70s,

[13:32] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was saying,

[13:33] Bob Dobbs: this is not cool.

[13:34] Bob Dobbs: We've got to go to an analog computer.

[13:36] Bob Dobbs: But we never found out what he was talking about.

[13:38] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[13:38] Bob Dobbs: there might be something written somewhere in the late 70s where he goes into it,

[13:42] Bob Dobbs: right?

[13:43] Bob Dobbs: We just haven't found it yet.

[13:45] Bob Dobbs: Maybe.

[13:45] Cameron McEwen: Like,

[13:46] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[13:47] Cameron McEwen: you mentioned him talking at some sort of psychology association.

[13:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[13:51] Bob Dobbs: it was a psychology convention in downtown Toronto.

[13:55] Cameron McEwen: And do you have a text of that?

[13:58] Bob Dobbs: Nothing.

[13:59] Bob Dobbs: It never got done.

[14:02] Bob Dobbs: It was a hostile audience,

[14:03] Bob Dobbs: and there was a lot of funny repartee going on in it.

[14:07] Bob Dobbs: And what happened is right after the talk,

[14:10] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to talk to him,

[14:11] Bob Dobbs: so he took off,

[14:12] Bob Dobbs: and he started walking down the hall.

[14:14] Bob Dobbs: It was like at the Sheraton or something,

[14:15] Bob Dobbs: some big hotel.

[14:17] Bob Dobbs: And so I just followed him,

[14:18] Bob Dobbs: and I slowly would catch up to him.

[14:19] Bob Dobbs: All of a sudden,

[14:20] Bob Dobbs: he veered into the washroom.

[14:22] Bob Dobbs: So I went into the washroom.

[14:24] Bob Dobbs: And he's pissing,

[14:26] Bob Dobbs: and I said,

[14:28] Bob Dobbs: what did I say?

[14:30] Bob Dobbs: I think I said,

[14:31] Bob Dobbs: funnel vision.

[14:33] Bob Dobbs: And he said,

[14:34] Bob Dobbs: tunnel vision.

[14:37] Bob Dobbs: We had this little exchange,

[14:39] Bob Dobbs: and there was a reason I said funnel vision.

[14:40] Bob Dobbs: I just read something by him at that time,

[14:43] Bob Dobbs: and I don't know what he was saying about it,

[14:45] Bob Dobbs: but it prompted me to,

[14:46] Bob Dobbs: while he was pissing,

[14:47] Bob Dobbs: to say funnel vision,

[14:49] Bob Dobbs: and he went tunnel vision.

[14:51] Cameron McEwen: Funnel vision is a good phrase.

[14:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[14:54] Bob Dobbs: so what's tunnel?

[14:56] Bob Dobbs: Is that visual?

[15:00] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[15:00] Cameron McEwen: tunnel vision,

[15:02] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[15:02] Cameron McEwen: is analog.

[15:05] Cameron McEwen: It's chronological.

[15:09] Cameron McEwen: It separates out the light and the dark,

[15:12] Cameron McEwen: whereas digital is synchronic,

[15:15] Cameron McEwen: and it's the resonance between light and dark.

[15:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[15:19] Bob Dobbs: so

[15:21] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying what started coming out of MIT,

[15:27] Bob Dobbs: Negroponte and those guys,

[15:28] Bob Dobbs: and then it was going to lead to the Internet.

[15:31] Bob Dobbs: That was something different.

[15:32] Bob Dobbs: It was a surprise for most people.

[15:35] Bob Dobbs: I'm calling that the digital media,

[15:37] Bob Dobbs: the digital media.

[15:38] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[15:39] Bob Dobbs: And everything before that's analog.

[15:41] Bob Dobbs: But the digital media,

[15:42] Bob Dobbs: my extra term for that is the Android meme.

[15:45] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme is not analog because it's the machines extending themselves,

[15:52] Bob Dobbs: not our faculties.

[15:53] Bob Dobbs: So maybe analog media coming from our faculties.

[15:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[15:59] Cameron McEwen: I think that's true.

[16:01] Cameron McEwen: I would reformulate what you just said to say that the digital media had become semi-conscious in the early

[16:14] Cameron McEwen: 19th century and was enabling research into the electric and the magnetic and eventuated in the telegraph.

[16:27] Cameron McEwen: to begin with,

[16:28] Cameron McEwen: and then the telephone and the radio and all that.

[16:31] Cameron McEwen: So what happens at the end of the Second World War at places like MIT is that that underlying technology is

[16:48] Cameron McEwen: becoming more conscious,

[16:50] Cameron McEwen: and its applications are seen to new types of humans.

[16:57] Cameron McEwen: human awareness.

[16:58] Cameron McEwen: So for example,

[17:00] Cameron McEwen: at the end of the Second World War,

[17:01] Cameron McEwen: the MIT boys were applying digital technology to different types of radar.

[17:09] Cameron McEwen: And what that did was allow the extension of human awareness over the horizon,

[17:18] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[17:20] Cameron McEwen: So what you're calling the transition between analog and digital

[17:27] Cameron McEwen: I think of as the conscious application of digital technology that has been going on relatively unconsciously for over a century.

[17:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[17:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[17:42] Bob Dobbs: so that's what I'm saying is that the extension of the machines,

[17:46] Bob Dobbs: then you call that the Android meme,

[17:49] Bob Dobbs: it is because right when that's happening in the late 60s,

[17:53] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's saying technology is organic and conscious.

[17:56] Bob Dobbs: He has a couple of quotes here and there.

[17:58] Bob Dobbs: He's talking about technology coming alive.

[18:01] Bob Dobbs: I'm calling that the Android meme and the digital.

[18:04] Bob Dobbs: So

[18:05] Bob Dobbs: I guess that's what you're saying,

[18:06] Bob Dobbs: but you track it back beginning in the

[18:09] Bob Dobbs: 1840s or something.

[18:11] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[18:12] Cameron McEwen: So the argument could be made that human beings are fundamentally digital and that even language is not possible except...

[18:26] Cameron McEwen: with the underlying technology of the digital.

[18:30] Bob Dobbs: Doesn't he have that quote in the Gutenberg Galaxy from Leibniz?

[18:36] Bob Dobbs: Very amazing quote.

[18:39] Bob Dobbs: It implies the binary,

[18:41] Bob Dobbs: the digital,

[18:42] Bob Dobbs: or what you're just saying,

[18:43] Bob Dobbs: he saw in language.

[18:47] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[18:47] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[18:48] Cameron McEwen: So if you think of language as stuttering,

[18:51] Cameron McEwen: which he often took from Finnegans Wake,

[18:55] Cameron McEwen: stuttering

[18:56] Cameron McEwen: is on again,

[18:57] Cameron McEwen: off again.

[18:58] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[18:59] Cameron McEwen: And on again,

[19:00] Cameron McEwen: off again is the digital.

[19:03] Cameron McEwen: But what happens with technologies is that they get developed in non-digital ways because the underlying technology has remained unconscious.

[19:14] Cameron McEwen: So when McLuhan talks about the unconscious becoming...

[19:25] Cameron McEwen: revealed consciously and Take Today or human becoming both figure and ground.

[19:36] Cameron McEwen: What he's talking about there is that what has always been the case is only now emerging into our consciousness.

[19:46] Cameron McEwen: But the problem is it's a two-edged sword.

[19:49] Cameron McEwen: On the one hand,

[19:50] Cameron McEwen: we have the possibility of understanding.

[19:54] Cameron McEwen: all human mentation.

[19:57] Cameron McEwen: On the other hand,

[19:58] Cameron McEwen: we have the possibility of blowing ourselves into smithereens.

[20:04] Bob Dobbs: So what is happening with the telegraph,

[20:10] Bob Dobbs: the telephone,

[20:10] Bob Dobbs: the radio and television?

[20:12] Bob Dobbs: Is that digital?

[20:14] Bob Dobbs: Is that the continuing evolution of the digital?

[20:17] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[20:19] Cameron McEwen: But I wouldn't say continuing evolution because that brings in the analog continuity.

[20:28] Cameron McEwen: Whereas what's happening is that,

[20:32] Cameron McEwen: as always with humans,

[20:35] Cameron McEwen: we become conscious of things only when they're already past,

[20:40] Cameron McEwen: only when we've already done that.

[20:43] Cameron McEwen: So what happens with the development that you were just speaking about is that humans are increasingly becoming aware of what they're already doing.

[20:55] Cameron McEwen: And that then sort of explodes at the end of the Second World War with...

[21:05] Cameron McEwen: a new type of consciousness when the digital emerges sort of as such,

[21:17] Cameron McEwen: instead of being in technologies like telegraph and radio and television.

[21:26] Cameron McEwen: When it emerges as such,

[21:27] Cameron McEwen: it breaks down the wall between consciousness and unconsciousness.

[21:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[21:33] Bob Dobbs: that's what they realize,

[21:35] Bob Dobbs: Wiener and those guys,

[21:36] Bob Dobbs: with the Macy Conferences.

[21:37] Bob Dobbs: That's what they're wrestling with.

[21:38] Bob Dobbs: Something new had happened.

[21:40] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[21:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[21:41] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[21:42] Cameron McEwen: So the Macy Conference is very often focused on the difference between analog and digital.

[21:50] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[21:51] Bob Dobbs: So you could find quotes from those conferences on that.

[21:56] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[21:57] Cameron McEwen: I have posts at my blog where I...

[22:02] Cameron McEwen: take quotations from the Macy Conference specifically on analog versus digital and then try to show how that works for McLuhan.

[22:14] Cameron McEwen: But notice the interesting thing about that for me is that analog-digital is itself a digital perception.

[22:25] Bob Dobbs: Analog-hyphen-digital?

[22:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[22:28] Cameron McEwen: so when Mm.

[22:30] Cameron McEwen: the analog and the digital are seen as two poles,

[22:34] Cameron McEwen: then that's seen in a digital way.

[22:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[22:38] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[22:39] Bob Dobbs: so what was the difference in the Macy days between analog and digital?

[22:47] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[22:48] Cameron McEwen: they quite properly saw that analog is continuous and digital is discrete.

[22:56] Cameron McEwen: So the analog attempts...

[22:59] Cameron McEwen: to break down the gap,

[23:02] Cameron McEwen: whereas the digital resides in the gap.

[23:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[23:07] Bob Dobbs: so the digital is more tactile than analog electric.

[23:12] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[23:14] Cameron McEwen: The analog tries to get rid of the tactile.

[23:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[23:19] Bob Dobbs: And then it remains in the one way,

[23:22] Bob Dobbs: the one way strong,

[23:23] Bob Dobbs: to quote Lewis.

[23:24] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[23:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[23:25] Bob Dobbs: the digital interplay is...

[23:28] Bob Dobbs: the main thing of the digital

[23:30] Bob Dobbs: Android meme phase for the humans is that they can interact.

[23:35] Bob Dobbs: That's the big supposed breakthrough,

[23:37] Bob Dobbs: right?

[23:38] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[23:40] Cameron McEwen: Notice that as soon as language is a possibility for humans,

[23:45] Cameron McEwen: you have interaction.

[23:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[23:47] Cameron McEwen: But there's no understanding of the underlying technology or of the underlying form,

[23:55] Cameron McEwen: I guess I would say.

[23:56] Cameron McEwen: So it takes hundreds of thousands of years at a minimum for that form to become relatively conscious.

[24:05] Cameron McEwen: And when it does become relatively conscious,

[24:09] Cameron McEwen: you have the externalization both in computers and in the atomic bomb.

[24:16] Cameron McEwen: And it's that contrast,

[24:18] Cameron McEwen: it's that light-dark contrast between the consciousness and the bomb that...

[24:26] Cameron McEwen: is digital,

[24:27] Cameron McEwen: but is the danger of human being.

[24:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[24:32] Bob Dobbs: I guess the beginning of the word language speech world becoming conscious is the time of Plato and Socrates with the abstraction of the alphabet that displaced them and they could look back at speech and

[24:46] Bob Dobbs: then they started analyzing it,

[24:48] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[24:48] Bob Dobbs: in Socratic dialogues.

[24:50] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[24:50] Cameron McEwen: So

[24:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan takes two points of view on what Plato was up to.

[24:56] Cameron McEwen: to as regards the tradition.

[24:59] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes he says that

[25:00] Cameron McEwen: Plato represented an absolute break.

[25:05] Cameron McEwen: which itself implicates digitality.

[25:09] Cameron McEwen: And other times he said that Plato was attempting to reformulate the tradition and bring the oral tradition into a literary environment.

[25:21] Cameron McEwen: And he goes back and forth between those two notions of what Plato was doing.

[25:27] Bob Dobbs: So,

[25:27] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[25:27] Bob Dobbs: so if the digital is back then,

[25:30] Bob Dobbs: what is the digital,

[25:31] Bob Dobbs: on the basic

[25:32] Bob Dobbs: definition as opposed to the analog.

[25:34] Bob Dobbs: What are they,

[25:36] Bob Dobbs: why are these two threads going along?

[25:39] Bob Dobbs: What is the difference?

[25:41] Cameron McEwen: The difference has to do with continuity,

[25:45] Cameron McEwen: and continuity has to do with both space and time.

[25:48] Cameron McEwen: But the fundamental difference,

[25:50] Cameron McEwen: and this is brought out in a paper,

[25:53] Cameron McEwen: I believe by a man by the name of Gerard,

[25:55] Cameron McEwen: who was a biologist at the Macy conferences,

[25:59] Cameron McEwen: the fundamental difference has to do with the gap.

[26:03] Cameron McEwen: The analog works by ignoring the gap and attempting to obviate the gap,

[26:14] Cameron McEwen: whereas the digital works on the basis of the gap.

[26:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[26:18] Bob Dobbs: in my essay written in 99,

[26:21] Bob Dobbs: short essay called Cloning ESP,

[26:23] Bob Dobbs: I start off saying for human perception and interaction socially,

[26:27] Bob Dobbs: there's blocking and merging.

[26:30] Bob Dobbs: The merging would be analog.

[26:33] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[26:33] Bob Dobbs: And then that might tend toward empire,

[26:38] Bob Dobbs: clonalism or dictatorship.

[26:39] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[26:40] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[26:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[26:41] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.

[26:42] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to get out of the gap.

[26:45] Bob Dobbs: Then there is the blocking,

[26:48] Bob Dobbs: which is the gap,

[26:50] Bob Dobbs: and there's a trend in human consciousness or human extensions that is interactive in the gap.

[26:59] Bob Dobbs: So I'm applying my distinction of blocking and merging.

[27:03] Bob Dobbs: Merging is analog,

[27:04] Bob Dobbs: blocking is digital,

[27:06] Bob Dobbs: and those are two instincts in humans.

[27:10] Bob Dobbs: You're not going to totally merge with somebody in interacting with them,

[27:15] Bob Dobbs: but to get along,

[27:16] Bob Dobbs: you merge a little bit,

[27:17] Bob Dobbs: but you block.

[27:18] Bob Dobbs: And then in the literate age,

[27:20] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg age,

[27:21] Bob Dobbs: they said,

[27:22] Bob Dobbs: I'll defend the right for you to disagree with me.

[27:24] Bob Dobbs: That became a value,

[27:25] Bob Dobbs: right?

[27:26] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[27:27] Bob Dobbs: That cliche.

[27:28] Bob Dobbs: So there's two different aspects.

[27:32] Bob Dobbs: of tactility.

[27:36] Bob Dobbs: Since tactility is both,

[27:37] Bob Dobbs: and it's got to be both,

[27:38] Bob Dobbs: so the doubleness of things,

[27:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[27:41] Bob Dobbs: what Wyndham Lewis talked about,

[27:42] Bob Dobbs: the two-ness of things makes that split a problem,

[27:46] Bob Dobbs: or a split inevitable.

[27:49] Bob Dobbs: So technology...

[27:50] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[27:50] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[27:51] Cameron McEwen: but it turns out that the split is fundamental,

[27:56] Cameron McEwen: so that this type of thinking isn't...

[28:00] Cameron McEwen: a thinking that's attempting to get somewhere in the future.

[28:04] Cameron McEwen: It's a thinking that needs to go backwards and realize what's always been going on.

[28:09] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[28:10] Bob Dobbs: And what I just said,

[28:11] Bob Dobbs: what's going on,

[28:12] Bob Dobbs: that's what's going on,

[28:13] Bob Dobbs: the blocky emerging.

[28:15] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[28:16] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[28:16] Cameron McEwen: So that's what when we talked at

[28:20] Cameron McEwen: Mark's place in

[28:22] Cameron McEwen: 99 or so,

[28:23] Cameron McEwen: What I was saying is that all human expression...

[28:29] Cameron McEwen: takes place as some modulation of exactly that split between analog and digital.

[28:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:37] Bob Dobbs: and it never got monasteries,

[28:40] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[28:41] Bob Dobbs: try to get people to be quiet and look at their process to become aware of that simple interaction of creating technologies or sociality,

[28:50] Bob Dobbs: what I call social mortar,

[28:52] Bob Dobbs: and the solid citadel of consciousness.

[28:56] Bob Dobbs: So you're...

[28:58] Bob Dobbs: your integral awareness,

[29:00] Bob Dobbs: a sovereign process,

[29:04] Bob Dobbs: but you're also forced to deal with the other.

[29:07] Bob Dobbs: And that dialectic,

[29:11] Bob Dobbs: that paradox,

[29:15] Bob Dobbs: is what humans were always had a problem with.

[29:19] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[29:20] Bob Dobbs: So that's the common thing in philosophy.

[29:24] Bob Dobbs: In McLuhan and Plato,

[29:26] Bob Dobbs: this is the thing you point out,

[29:27] Bob Dobbs: the common problem.

[29:29] Bob Dobbs: And they didn't ever get that.

[29:32] Bob Dobbs: Maybe individuals,

[29:34] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[29:35] Bob Dobbs: they got it individually,

[29:36] Bob Dobbs: but they didn't know how to communicate it.

[29:38] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[29:38] Bob Dobbs: They get a lot of problems.

[29:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[29:41] Cameron McEwen: So look at what's going on with the first use of language,

[29:47] Cameron McEwen: the possibility of language use,

[29:51] Cameron McEwen: the possibility of sounds having a meaning.

[29:55] Cameron McEwen: was already there.

[29:57] Cameron McEwen: It wasn't,

[29:58] Cameron McEwen: humans didn't invent the possibility of meaning.

[30:02] Cameron McEwen: They were only able to realize the possibility of meaning because it was already there.

[30:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[30:09] Bob Dobbs: but then when a new technology came on and shifted the ratios,

[30:12] Bob Dobbs: and then the,

[30:13] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[30:13] Bob Dobbs: meaning seemed to shift,

[30:16] Bob Dobbs: the implications of the interplay.

[30:20] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[30:21] Cameron McEwen: So imagine that we're looking at human beings.

[30:28] Cameron McEwen: vertically between consciousness and unconscious.

[30:33] Cameron McEwen: The human being is constantly going back and forth between conscious awareness and unconscious possibilities.

[30:45] Cameron McEwen: And the unconscious possibilities are an enormous sea,

[30:52] Cameron McEwen: S-E-A,

[30:53] Cameron McEwen: enormous sea of potential meanings.

[30:57] Cameron McEwen: And the conscious utilization of those meanings is always very limited and momentary.

[31:08] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan himself talks about this in the late

[31:12] Cameron McEwen: 1960s in an unpublished manuscript on the

[31:17] Cameron McEwen: Little Epic.

[31:19] Cameron McEwen: He talks about the momentary activation of...

[31:27] Cameron McEwen: possibilities.

[31:28] Cameron McEwen: So what's going on?

[31:29] Bob Dobbs: With that being in Gilbert Galaxy,

[31:30] Bob Dobbs: he talks about momentary deities.

[31:35] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[31:35] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[31:37] Cameron McEwen: And he often talks about Joyce that way.

[31:40] Cameron McEwen: So early in 1954,

[31:43] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[31:44] Cameron McEwen: he talks about how for

[31:47] Cameron McEwen: Joyce, every word is an epiphany.

[31:52] Cameron McEwen: And so every word is a momentary deity.

[31:56] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[31:57] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[31:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[31:59] Cameron McEwen: So human beings exist between the synchronic activation of possibilities and the diachronic expression of some one of those possibilities.

[32:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[32:13] Cameron McEwen: So you have both analog and digital going on with human beings all the time.

[32:19] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[32:20] Bob Dobbs: And,

[32:20] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[32:20] Bob Dobbs: I simplify the blocking and merging.

[32:23] Bob Dobbs: So the drama of cognition.

[32:26] Bob Dobbs: is another phrase.

[32:27] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[32:28] Cameron McEwen: So it's the same as when McLuhan talks about the difference between making and matching.

[32:37] Cameron McEwen: The dialectic between making and matching is always going on.

[32:45] Cameron McEwen: Humans seem unable to exist only with making.

[32:52] Cameron McEwen: When

[32:54] Cameron McEwen: with Nietzsche and then with the men of 1914,

[32:58] Cameron McEwen: when humans become conscious of their own role in the making of meaning,

[33:04] Cameron McEwen: that makes them lose meaning.

[33:07] Cameron McEwen: Because they think,

[33:08] Cameron McEwen: well,

[33:08] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[33:09] Cameron McEwen: what use is a meaning to the universe that only

[33:14] Cameron McEwen: I or only we make,

[33:16] Cameron McEwen: right?

[33:17] Cameron McEwen: And we're still in the sort of jet stream of that problem.

[33:23] Cameron McEwen: How can it be that something that is made is true for us and can provide ground for us?

[33:32] Cameron McEwen: And

[33:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, at least as I read him,

[33:36] Cameron McEwen: takes up that problem from

[33:38] Cameron McEwen: Nietzsche and the Men of 1914 and attempts to show that making is not the end of meaning,

[33:46] Cameron McEwen: it's the birth of meaning.

[33:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[33:49] Bob Dobbs: now...

[33:54] Bob Dobbs: We were talking about me and my eccentric,

[33:58] Bob Dobbs: humorous way I deal with things that you've been noticing.

[34:02] Bob Dobbs: So that awareness I had,

[34:05] Bob Dobbs: I always thought everybody else should have it and did have it.

[34:09] Bob Dobbs: But in interacting with people all these years,

[34:14] Bob Dobbs: a certain kind of dullness or mentality or stridency or something

[34:22] Bob Dobbs: And then people get into,

[34:23] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[34:24] Bob Dobbs: it's caused by astrology or diet and all the different interpretations of the difference.

[34:28] Bob Dobbs: Because as you're interacting with someone,

[34:30] Bob Dobbs: one of you might be making and the other is matching.

[34:34] Bob Dobbs: Depending on how polite you are in your interaction with people and how much you are even interested in interacting with them.

[34:42] Bob Dobbs: That drama,

[34:44] Bob Dobbs: which leads to people being considered empathic or empathy or not.

[34:50] Bob Dobbs: And today it's empathy versus narcissism is the dialectic that people use today.

[34:55] Bob Dobbs: But this ongoing interaction...

[34:58] Bob Dobbs: which is always being adjusted,

[35:00] Bob Dobbs: and you always have to be aware of what the other person,

[35:03] Bob Dobbs: how they're reacting to you.

[35:04] Bob Dobbs: Even when you stop talking and they go away,

[35:06] Bob Dobbs: and then you see the next day and they're acting a little different,

[35:09] Bob Dobbs: you know that something happened there,

[35:11] Bob Dobbs: right?

[35:12] Bob Dobbs: And you want to see if it's going to be dealt with again.

[35:15] Bob Dobbs: So people wait,

[35:16] Bob Dobbs: and they lurk,

[35:17] Bob Dobbs: and they get an opportunity.

[35:20] Bob Dobbs: Maybe they go play basketball.

[35:21] Bob Dobbs: Then they go to the tavern and have a drink,

[35:23] Bob Dobbs: and during the drinking,

[35:24] Bob Dobbs: something that was bothering or...

[35:27] Bob Dobbs: didn't get resolved comes out in that sociality.

[35:30] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I mean?

[35:31] Bob Dobbs: So this ongoing thing,

[35:34] Bob Dobbs: it's slightly absurd that you're shifting from making and matching,

[35:38] Bob Dobbs: merging and blocking.

[35:40] Bob Dobbs: And there's a willfulness that gets in there where maybe people become aware of it and they want to fuck with it just because that'll make it different.

[35:49] Bob Dobbs: So there's a desire to have a new experience in that.

[35:55] Bob Dobbs: So people are talking.

[35:57] Bob Dobbs: in a tribe or something.

[35:58] Bob Dobbs: And after a while,

[36:01] Bob Dobbs: the talk is too much the same.

[36:02] Bob Dobbs: So somebody else do something,

[36:04] Bob Dobbs: make something verbally to stir it up.

[36:09] Bob Dobbs: And then a few people will go along with it,

[36:11] Bob Dobbs: and a few others won't depending on their mood.

[36:13] Bob Dobbs: So it's mood mud all the time.

[36:18] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan used mood mud for the 10th Thunder,

[36:21] Bob Dobbs: the television thunder.

[36:24] Bob Dobbs: I think maybe Joyce has something about mood.

[36:26] Bob Dobbs: in the page 424.

[36:30] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,

[36:31] Bob Dobbs: this interplay is,

[36:36] Bob Dobbs: if you're distracted and you've got to get some making done on your own sense of willfulness,

[36:44] Bob Dobbs: you become purposeful and you disconnect a bit from people,

[36:48] Bob Dobbs: don't engage in the tactile interplay,

[36:50] Bob Dobbs: and you start doing something,

[36:52] Bob Dobbs: then that affects everybody else or a few people.

[36:58] Bob Dobbs: So then that person has lost their interplay.

[37:02] Bob Dobbs: And that's the ongoing drama that novels are about,

[37:07] Bob Dobbs: or just comedy,

[37:07] Bob Dobbs: or any human artifact or replay,

[37:11] Bob Dobbs: art form,

[37:12] Bob Dobbs: is about this drama that we're talking about.

[37:15] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[37:17] Bob Dobbs: what's interesting about Joyce is he started to see that the machines were acting out that drama.

[37:22] Bob Dobbs: Television kills Telephone and Brothers' broil,

[37:25] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[37:25] Bob Dobbs: There was something about the machining that was adding a new level to confuse the making and matching.

[37:32] Bob Dobbs: And that might be your digital,

[37:35] Bob Dobbs: which is going to make people more conscious,

[37:37] Bob Dobbs: because the machines are doing it in front of them.

[37:41] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[37:42] Cameron McEwen: but being more conscious isn't necessarily good.

[37:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[37:45] Bob Dobbs: you have to be aware that you're going to flip out of consciousness.

[37:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[37:51] Bob Dobbs: you're constantly making a new unconscious.

[37:57] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[37:58] Cameron McEwen: you're constantly rearranging the unconscious.

[38:03] Cameron McEwen: You can't make a new unconscious.

[38:05] Cameron McEwen: You can make a new consciousness of the unconscious,

[38:09] Cameron McEwen: but you can't make a new unconscious.

[38:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[38:11] Bob Dobbs: I guess what I mean by that,

[38:12] Bob Dobbs: that you're creating unforeseen effects.

[38:15] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[38:16] Bob Dobbs: Like you never know how someone's going to react at some point,

[38:19] Bob Dobbs: or you thought you knew,

[38:20] Bob Dobbs: and then they become different.

[38:23] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[38:25] Bob Dobbs: It can become a problem.

[38:26] Bob Dobbs: So what's interesting,

[38:29] Bob Dobbs: being quote detached or relaxed about it,

[38:33] Bob Dobbs: is you don't get upset that you become the unknowing or the unconscious as an effect for a while,

[38:40] Bob Dobbs: knowing that you'll become conscious again.

[38:42] Bob Dobbs: Other people panic when they think they're losing something in unconscious because they got stuck in a certain way of making and they're numb by how that was signaled.

[38:53] Bob Dobbs: And then they forget,

[38:54] Bob Dobbs: well,

[38:54] Bob Dobbs: that's going to go away at some point.

[38:56] Bob Dobbs: And you're going to have a new thing you're going to have to become aware of.

[39:00] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[39:00] Bob Dobbs: And for the effects.

[39:02] Bob Dobbs: So what I'm describing,

[39:04] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[39:04] Bob Dobbs: is what Joyce was showing in Ulysses,

[39:07] Bob Dobbs: and then even more so in Finnegans Wake,

[39:09] Bob Dobbs: is constant dialogue,

[39:11] Bob Dobbs: constant mood shifting,

[39:12] Bob Dobbs: constant upsurges or something.

[39:16] Bob Dobbs: So that,

[39:17] Bob Dobbs: go ahead.

[39:20] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[39:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[39:21] Cameron McEwen: I'm following you exactly.

[39:23] Cameron McEwen: I think you're right in exactly what you're saying.

[39:26] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake is stuttering.

[39:28] Cameron McEwen: I was to say it's going back and forth between related poles all the time.

[39:36] Bob Dobbs: So what we're saying here,

[39:39] Bob Dobbs: how we're interacting,

[39:40] Bob Dobbs: where is that in the Gutenberg Galaxy or before in your awareness?

[39:45] Bob Dobbs: Is it in Nietzsche?

[39:46] Bob Dobbs: Does he do this?

[39:50] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[39:51] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[39:52] Cameron McEwen: I think the awareness of digitality emerges with Plato.

[40:00] Cameron McEwen: Plato in the Sophist sees that one of the possibilities of the unconscious,

[40:10] Cameron McEwen: or better put,

[40:12] Cameron McEwen: one of the possibilities in ontology,

[40:17] Cameron McEwen: in the real itself,

[40:19] Cameron McEwen: is the dialogue of the child,

[40:23] Cameron McEwen: the child playing.

[40:25] Cameron McEwen: So

[40:26] Cameron McEwen: Heraclitus had already said,

[40:29] Cameron McEwen: that human reality is like a child playing.

[40:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[40:39] Cameron McEwen: And what Plato saw is that when the child plays with possibilities,

[40:48] Cameron McEwen: the possibility of non-playing,

[40:53] Cameron McEwen: the possibility of war,

[40:55] Cameron McEwen: The possibility of...

[40:59] Cameron McEwen: empire cannot be excluded.

[41:03] Cameron McEwen: So

[41:04] Cameron McEwen: Plato tried to bring forth the application of the consciousness of interplay between the analog and the digital.

[41:21] Cameron McEwen: And over the 2,500 years since then,

[41:26] Cameron McEwen: we have

[41:28] Cameron McEwen: learned how to apply that insight in technology,

[41:36] Cameron McEwen: but we haven't learned how to apply it to wisdom.

[41:40] Cameron McEwen: So we've got this crazy situation where human beings now have enough power to control the world,

[41:48] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[41:50] Cameron McEwen: but they don't have enough wisdom to do that in a way that is peaceful.

[41:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[41:58] Bob Dobbs: and Barry's way of talking about the wisdom,

[42:00] Bob Dobbs: he called it process pattern recognition.

[42:02] Cameron McEwen: Uh-huh.

[42:04] Bob Dobbs: That phrase,

[42:04] Bob Dobbs: process pattern recognition.

[42:06] Bob Dobbs: And then he would say either via concepts or via percepts.

[42:10] Bob Dobbs: One would be italicized and one via percepts or concepts would not.

[42:15] Bob Dobbs: That was an interesting way he wrote in page 137 at the bottom in Take Today.

[42:21] Bob Dobbs: See,

[42:21] Bob Dobbs: it becomes very skillful when they italicize something,

[42:25] Bob Dobbs: when he and McLuhan are doing their jargon.

[42:27] Bob Dobbs: and playing with it,

[42:29] Bob Dobbs: you see this little nuance that happens,

[42:31] Bob Dobbs: where he says process pattern recognition via concepts,

[42:35] Bob Dobbs: that's via concepts,

[42:36] Bob Dobbs: and that sentence is italicized,

[42:38] Bob Dobbs: but not when he says it again,

[42:41] Bob Dobbs: emphasizing percepts,

[42:42] Bob Dobbs: and he says via percepts,

[42:43] Bob Dobbs: that's not italicized.

[42:45] Bob Dobbs: I guess the italicization is going into the conceptual.

[42:52] Bob Dobbs: It's a twist off to the side.

[42:55] Bob Dobbs: It's a digression,

[42:56] Bob Dobbs: maybe.

[42:58] Bob Dobbs: that leads to a distraction that you've lost attention to the perceptual part of what's going on.

[43:08] Bob Dobbs: You actually start writing a system.

[43:10] Bob Dobbs: You say,

[43:10] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[43:11] Bob Dobbs: I got something here.

[43:11] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to put this in order.

[43:13] Bob Dobbs: I'll make a chart.

[43:14] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[43:15] Cameron McEwen: So the difficulty that Plato had already seen can be formulated in McLuhan's terms by saying that human beings are always...

[43:27] Cameron McEwen: in the interplay of percept and concept.

[43:32] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[43:33] Cameron McEwen: How to talk about that interplay so that people come to see it in a making way,

[43:42] Cameron McEwen: not in a matching way.

[43:45] Cameron McEwen: How to communicate that so that humans can sort of relax in the dynamic interplay of those two.

[43:57] Cameron McEwen: to and can learn how to apply that to the society,

[44:05] Cameron McEwen: to the external society and to the internal society between consciousness and the unconscious.

[44:12] Cameron McEwen: How that application takes place is what

[44:16] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is trying to think about and what he's trying to communicate,

[44:20] Cameron McEwen: but he doesn't succeed in doing that.

[44:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[44:23] Bob Dobbs: So you've got...

[44:25] Bob Dobbs: Before literacy,

[44:26] Bob Dobbs: you've got ritual.

[44:28] Bob Dobbs: So this helps to relax people.

[44:30] Bob Dobbs: And then when you get into the literate environment,

[44:31] Bob Dobbs: it becomes theater.

[44:33] Bob Dobbs: And then somebody starts writing stuff.

[44:36] Bob Dobbs: It isolates themselves from the tribe,

[44:39] Bob Dobbs: disappears,

[44:40] Bob Dobbs: comes back and dumps a book on you or a manuscript.

[44:43] Bob Dobbs: That's quite wacky.

[44:45] Bob Dobbs: You've left the planet,

[44:47] Bob Dobbs: gone off and done something,

[44:49] Bob Dobbs: and then you're not engaging in the daily tactile interplay of speech and oral.

[44:55] Bob Dobbs: In ritual,

[44:56] Bob Dobbs: you are...

[44:57] Bob Dobbs: Trying to put a doorstop in there or something,

[45:00] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[45:00] Bob Dobbs: You're trying to stop the process.

[45:02] Bob Dobbs: So that was a new novelty,

[45:04] Bob Dobbs: an attempt.

[45:05] Bob Dobbs: And then that led to all the Gutenberg arts,

[45:08] Bob Dobbs: and then the electric ritual came back in.

[45:12] Bob Dobbs: And so these art forms are attempts to relax or show people this funny process,

[45:20] Bob Dobbs: process pattern recognition.

[45:23] Cameron McEwen: So let's just reformulate that.

[45:27] Cameron McEwen: in terms of what can be called two darks,

[45:30] Cameron McEwen: right?

[45:31] Cameron McEwen: D-A-R-K-S.

[45:35] Cameron McEwen: The underlying drama that is going on is the dynamic play of

[45:47] Cameron McEwen: tactility.

[45:51] Bob Dobbs: Which is interplay for people.

[45:53] Bob Dobbs: It's interplay and contrast,

[45:54] Bob Dobbs: so it's opposites.

[45:57] Bob Dobbs: that are not stuck in Cosmic Awareness.

[46:01] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[46:01] Cameron McEwen: but let's just back up for a minute.

[46:05] Cameron McEwen: All possibilities are digital in the sense that they're two-sided and every possibility,

[46:20] Cameron McEwen: when it is activated,

[46:22] Cameron McEwen: can be activated on the one side or the other side or both.

[46:28] Cameron McEwen: So let's just take the story that you just outlined.

[46:34] Cameron McEwen: You have people existing in ritual.

[46:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[46:38] Cameron McEwen: And they're existing in ritual 24 hours a day.

[46:41] Cameron McEwen: At least when McLuhan's thinking about this stuff,

[46:44] Cameron McEwen: the quote-unquote primitive mind is a mind that is existing in the digital inner...

[46:57] Cameron McEwen: play that does not allow individuation,

[47:04] Cameron McEwen: does not allow what we call consciousness.

[47:08] Cameron McEwen: It's a kind of swimming.

[47:10] Cameron McEwen: And it's very important for McLuhan that that kind of consciousness not be excluded from the attempt to understand what human beings are.

[47:25] Cameron McEwen: Oftentimes when...

[47:28] Cameron McEwen: As people are thinking about human consciousness,

[47:37] Cameron McEwen: they think about that in terms of some kind of lineal development away from an unconsciousness to our being conscious.

[47:47] Cameron McEwen: But McLuhan will have none of that.

[47:49] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,

[47:50] Cameron McEwen: in the

[47:51] Cameron McEwen: 1960s, saw that there was a tremendous problem.

[47:56] Cameron McEwen: with how people were thinking about the development of consciousness.

[48:02] Cameron McEwen: They were forgetting about its very basis,

[48:05] Cameron McEwen: so they were actually lying about themselves.

[48:08] Cameron McEwen: They were actually blind to what they were already doing.

[48:13] Cameron McEwen: So

[48:15] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's idea about what goes on in history is that when people become a little bit conscious of what's going on in a ritual life,

[48:27] Cameron McEwen: They are able to develop technologies like literacy and then like print and all of the media that come after print.

[48:36] Cameron McEwen: But each of those technologies represents a loss because what it represents is a particular application of what is going on at the basis of human being.

[48:52] Cameron McEwen: So

[48:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's thinking is an attempt.

[48:57] Cameron McEwen: to recapture what has been lost in all of this development.

[49:03] Cameron McEwen: So it's a going backwards,

[49:06] Cameron McEwen: a going down,

[49:08] Cameron McEwen: and a going back and forth.

[49:10] Cameron McEwen: And what he's trying to do is articulate how that movement works and what it might enable.

[49:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[49:21] Bob Dobbs: remember the great definition of the auditory imagination by Eliot?

[49:25] Bob Dobbs: It's talking about going back and getting something,

[49:28] Bob Dobbs: the beginning,

[49:29] Bob Dobbs: and blah,

[49:30] Bob Dobbs: You remember that quote?

[49:31] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[49:32] Cameron McEwen: definitely,

[49:32] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[49:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[49:33] Bob Dobbs: that's describing the process.

[49:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[49:36] Cameron McEwen: I have a post somewhere where I set out all the different times that McLuhan quotes that.

[49:43] Cameron McEwen: I think there's like 11 or 12 times that he quotes it verbatim,

[49:49] Cameron McEwen: and then there are other times beyond those 11 or 12 where he refers to it.

[49:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[49:54] Bob Dobbs: he says stuff like going back,

[49:56] Bob Dobbs: looking for origins,

[49:58] Bob Dobbs: seeking the something,

[50:00] Bob Dobbs: and then still being aware of the present.

[50:03] Bob Dobbs: So what Eliot defines nicely for...

[50:09] Bob Dobbs: Chemical body cognitions,

[50:11] Bob Dobbs: I think McLuhan started to see it happening in the environment,

[50:14] Bob Dobbs: which you're calling the technology of becoming conscious.

[50:17] Bob Dobbs: It starts doing that,

[50:19] Bob Dobbs: searching for origins while figuring out something going on right now.

[50:25] Bob Dobbs: And let me just see if I can bring it up,

[50:30] Bob Dobbs: because it's a good quote,

[50:31] Bob Dobbs: so we should tell people what it is.

[50:34] Bob Dobbs: I'll just,

[50:34] Bob Dobbs: it should be out there somewhere.

[50:39] Bob Dobbs: bringing up here because it's so rich.

[50:44] Bob Dobbs: It's like it explains everything,

[50:45] Bob Dobbs: but then you have to recognize that technologies are doing that,

[50:50] Bob Dobbs: and that's new.

[50:53] Bob Dobbs: So consciousness has to shift about where its interval is.

[50:57] Bob Dobbs: Where is the gap?

[50:59] Bob Dobbs: Maybe that's the issue.

[51:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[51:02] Cameron McEwen: it is the issue,

[51:04] Cameron McEwen: but it's not where is the gap,

[51:06] Cameron McEwen: it's how is the gap.

[51:07] Cameron McEwen: being articulated.

[51:10] Cameron McEwen: The gap is always there,

[51:12] Cameron McEwen: but the human being and human history is a kind of dancing on the gap.

[51:21] Bob Dobbs: Here's what Eliot says.

[51:23] Bob Dobbs: What I call the auditory imagination,

[51:26] Bob Dobbs: which I guess is retrieving speech in the oral,

[51:30] Bob Dobbs: getting out of the literate,

[51:31] Bob Dobbs: right?

[51:32] Bob Dobbs: Getting out of the rigidity of the literate.

[51:34] Bob Dobbs: So he says,

[51:35] Bob Dobbs: What I call the auditory imagination is the feeling for syllable and rhythm penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling,

[51:45] Bob Dobbs: invigorating every word,

[51:48] Bob Dobbs: sinking,

[51:48] Bob Dobbs: sinking to the most primitive and forgotten.

[51:51] Bob Dobbs: You're talking about how McLuhan was trying to trace back.

[51:54] Bob Dobbs: Sinking to the most primitive and forgotten,

[51:56] Bob Dobbs: returning to the origin and bringing something back,

[51:59] Bob Dobbs: seeking the beginning and the end.

[52:02] Bob Dobbs: It works through meaning,

[52:03] Bob Dobbs: certainly.

[52:04] Bob Dobbs: or not without meanings in the ordinary sense,

[52:06] Bob Dobbs: and fuses the old and obliterated,

[52:10] Bob Dobbs: and the trite,

[52:11] Bob Dobbs: the current,

[52:12] Bob Dobbs: and the new and surprising,

[52:14] Bob Dobbs: the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.

[52:17] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[52:18] Bob Dobbs: as I got to understand that,

[52:20] Bob Dobbs: more and more rereading it in the

[52:22] Bob Dobbs: 60s, it was quite a nice thing to get.

[52:27] Bob Dobbs: But then I started to realize,

[52:28] Bob Dobbs: well,

[52:29] Bob Dobbs: it's being mimed by technologies,

[52:31] Bob Dobbs: the new electric organicism.

[52:33] Bob Dobbs: So then that puts you in a new level of perception that nobody else really understood.

[52:42] Bob Dobbs: Nobody understood when you mastered Eliot and then realized,

[52:45] Bob Dobbs: well,

[52:45] Bob Dobbs: that's a rearview mirror bit.

[52:48] Bob Dobbs: Because remember,

[52:49] Bob Dobbs: he says in the letter to Playboy that that quote is talking about ordinary awareness by 1970.

[52:56] Bob Dobbs: The musical,

[52:56] Bob Dobbs: the acoustic content taken over.

[52:58] Bob Dobbs: But he says that Finnegans Wake reality has not been made conscious yet.

[53:03] Bob Dobbs: So once you realize that the machines are doing it,

[53:06] Bob Dobbs: or technologies,

[53:08] Bob Dobbs: that's when you move into the

[53:10] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake point,

[53:12] Bob Dobbs: and you're not stuck back with aesthetics or the auditory imagination or regular poetry and all the normal arts that people still think they get something out of.

[53:23] Bob Dobbs: To look at the drama of the interplay of the forms of technology,

[53:27] Bob Dobbs: that's the new

[53:31] Bob Dobbs: LSD trip without taking LSD.

[53:35] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[53:36] Cameron McEwen: So

[53:37] Cameron McEwen: I think what you were just saying is right on.

[53:43] Cameron McEwen: It's exactly right.

[53:45] Cameron McEwen: The machines learn the secret that energizes the unconscious.

[53:59] Cameron McEwen: And on the one hand,

[54:01] Cameron McEwen: that...

[54:01] Cameron McEwen: represents a tremendous opportunity for peace because peace is recognized as the fundamental reality of digitality and digitality is what is the ground of human being.

[54:23] Cameron McEwen: The problem is when machines learn this,

[54:29] Cameron McEwen: it is not used.

[54:30] Cameron McEwen: for peace,

[54:31] Cameron McEwen: it's used for war.

[54:33] Cameron McEwen: And that's this dialectic between peace and war is already in the unconscious.

[54:43] Cameron McEwen: It's already explicitly named by Plato in the Sophist,

[54:49] Cameron McEwen: but human beings for complicated reasons that I guess

[54:56] Cameron McEwen: Joyce was constantly thinking about,

[54:58] Cameron McEwen: human beings are

[55:00] Cameron McEwen: unable to let themselves go into the play of these things.

[55:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[55:08] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever...

[55:10] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember these terms in Plato,

[55:12] Bob Dobbs: or maybe someone after Plato,

[55:14] Bob Dobbs: the continuous manifold and the discrete manifold?

[55:17] Bob Dobbs: Have you heard of those terms?

[55:20] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[55:20] Cameron McEwen: of course I've heard of the terms.

[55:23] Cameron McEwen: I don't think Plato uses exactly those phrases,

[55:27] Cameron McEwen: but he names that difference in the Sophist.

[55:30] Cameron McEwen: It's what he calls the Gigantomachia peri etis usia,

[55:37] Cameron McEwen: that is to say,

[55:38] Cameron McEwen: the gigantic.

[55:40] Cameron McEwen: battle about the nature of reality.

[55:43] Cameron McEwen: And what

[55:44] Cameron McEwen: Plato says is that in human being and human history,

[55:50] Cameron McEwen: there's always a gigantic battle going on between the gods and the giants.

[55:56] Cameron McEwen: And he says the gods are in the heights of the unknown,

[56:00] Cameron McEwen: in the clouds,

[56:01] Cameron McEwen: and the giants are the sons of earth.

[56:06] Cameron McEwen: And between these two,

[56:08] Cameron McEwen: he says,

[56:08] Cameron McEwen: there's always this.

[56:09] Cameron McEwen: battle going on between the gods who say that reality is what cannot be seen and cannot be touched,

[56:18] Cameron McEwen: and the giants who say that reality is only what can be seen and can be touched.

[56:24] Cameron McEwen: And when the giants are talking about what can be touched,

[56:28] Cameron McEwen: they're talking about concrete touching.

[56:30] Cameron McEwen: They're not talking about tactility in

[56:35] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's sense.

[56:36] Cameron McEwen: So then Plato says,

[56:39] Cameron McEwen: but

[56:40] Cameron McEwen: The true philosopher must be like a child who begs for both.

[56:45] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[56:46] Cameron McEwen: if you say to the child,

[56:48] Cameron McEwen: would you like to have a piece of gum or would you like to have this popsicle?

[56:55] Cameron McEwen: And the child says,

[56:56] Cameron McEwen: well,

[56:56] Cameron McEwen: I'll take both,

[56:57] Cameron McEwen: right?

[56:57] Cameron McEwen: So

[56:58] Cameron McEwen: Plato says,

[56:59] Cameron McEwen: but a true philosopher must be like a child begging for both,

[57:04] Cameron McEwen: and that both is digitality.

[57:07] Cameron McEwen: So that's the description.

[57:08] Cameron McEwen: Discrete manifold is what the true philosopher sees and sees is always going on and tries to communicate this awareness of what is going on.

[57:21] Cameron McEwen: But a different...

[57:23] Bob Dobbs: What is continuous?

[57:24] Bob Dobbs: So you got the continuous manifold.

[57:25] Bob Dobbs: That's the analog?

[57:27] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[57:28] Bob Dobbs: The tension towards the analog and the discontinuous and the gap is the discrete manifold.

[57:34] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[57:35] Cameron McEwen: So the great insight...

[57:38] Cameron McEwen: that what McLuhan tries to bring to us is that the analog is not the absence of the gap,

[57:46] Cameron McEwen: it's a different modulation of the gap.

[57:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[57:50] Bob Dobbs: now there's a good point.

[57:52] Cameron McEwen: The different gaps.

[57:54] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[57:55] Cameron McEwen: and what is sort of going on in the

[58:02] Cameron McEwen: 19th and 20th centuries is humans gradually become...

[58:07] Cameron McEwen: conscious of this abysmal gap that cannot be got around and it terrifies them because it's a kind of death.

[58:21] Cameron McEwen: So human beings shy away from this consciousness and try to obviate it from human life.

[58:33] Cameron McEwen: They try to bring

[58:36] Cameron McEwen: a kind of empire of life into play against death.

[58:41] Cameron McEwen: But the very attempt at an empire of life is a complete disaster because it can't be done and it always involves war.

[58:56] Cameron McEwen: Because the gap is primitive,

[59:00] Cameron McEwen: any attempt to get rid of the gap or to bring the gap...

[59:04] Cameron McEwen: to be one-sided can only be done through violence.

[59:09] Cameron McEwen: So the whole attempt of somebody like

[59:14] Cameron McEwen: Eliot, and I would argue like Lewis,

[59:19] Cameron McEwen: is taken over by McLuhan to say,

[59:25] Cameron McEwen: these guys were right in what they were saying,

[59:28] Cameron McEwen: but they didn't bring enough focus on the gap,

[59:30] Cameron McEwen: on tactility.

[59:33] Cameron McEwen: And so what we need to do is concentrate more on the modulations of the gap and tactility and see if that can bring about the sort of communication that we need.

[59:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[59:47] Bob Dobbs: and that's what he would call the Aquinas doctrine of analogical proportionality,

[59:52] Bob Dobbs: right?

[59:53] Bob Dobbs: That shifting.

[59:54] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[59:57] Cameron McEwen: And Thomas,

[1:00:00] Cameron McEwen: this interplay.

[1:00:02] Cameron McEwen: is called love.

[1:00:04] Bob Dobbs: Or agape.

[1:00:06] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:00:07] Cameron McEwen: it's the love that's at the basis of things is very,

[1:00:15] Cameron McEwen: very difficult to articulate because it includes the possibility of the other.

[1:00:21] Cameron McEwen: And what is the other?

[1:00:22] Cameron McEwen: The other is the analog denial of the digital.

[1:00:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:00:28] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:00:28] Bob Dobbs: so all that,

[1:00:30] Bob Dobbs: that past hour was spinning off of the sentence.

[1:00:34] Bob Dobbs: The walls are knocked down for the chemical body and astral body via analog media,

[1:00:38] Bob Dobbs: and that's the 20th century.

[1:00:40] Bob Dobbs: But the digital and the Android meme is closer towards the

[1:00:43] Bob Dobbs: 21st century,

[1:00:45] Bob Dobbs: even though that starts in 1960,

[1:00:49] Bob Dobbs: just halfway through the 20th.

[1:00:51] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:00:51] Bob Dobbs: so then we come to this quote from Joyce,

[1:00:55] Bob Dobbs: and I'm trying to remember why I put it in there.

[1:00:58] Bob Dobbs: So there's this section where the duke,

[1:01:02] Bob Dobbs: the earl,

[1:01:04] Bob Dobbs: and it's sort of Danish,

[1:01:05] Bob Dobbs: the Jarl van Hoether,

[1:01:08] Bob Dobbs: the Earl van Hoether,

[1:01:09] Bob Dobbs: J-A-R-L,

[1:01:11] Bob Dobbs: he's in his castle,

[1:01:13] Bob Dobbs: and some woman,

[1:01:15] Bob Dobbs: a female pirate,

[1:01:17] Bob Dobbs: the prank queen,

[1:01:18] Bob Dobbs: comes up and knocks on his door and asks a question like three times,

[1:01:24] Bob Dobbs: or does it three times,

[1:01:26] Bob Dobbs: comes back three times.

[1:01:28] Bob Dobbs: So the first time the question is asked is,

[1:01:31] Bob Dobbs: Why do I am a lookalike,

[1:01:33] Bob Dobbs: a poss of porter piece?

[1:01:35] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:01:36] Bob Dobbs: I think in McLuhan's

[1:01:38] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake copies that I have,

[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: that's moving into visual space,

[1:01:44] Bob Dobbs: starting to become homogeneous.

[1:01:47] Bob Dobbs: And you're looking too much like everybody else,

[1:01:50] Bob Dobbs: you see?

[1:01:51] Bob Dobbs: Why do I am a lookalike,

[1:01:53] Bob Dobbs: a poss of porter piece?

[1:01:54] Bob Dobbs: So the first half of Finnegans Wake,

[1:01:56] Bob Dobbs: the first five Thunders,

[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: is moving from the tactile and acoustic towards the visual and the excessive matching.

[1:02:05] Bob Dobbs: That's the trend.

[1:02:06] Bob Dobbs: And then

[1:02:07] Bob Dobbs: Thunder 6 to 10,

[1:02:09] Bob Dobbs: it flips and starts going back to the acoustic and tactile.

[1:02:12] Bob Dobbs: So why do I look,

[1:02:15] Bob Dobbs: that's visual,

[1:02:16] Bob Dobbs: like a poss of porter peas?

[1:02:17] Bob Dobbs: That's like the mash of P-E-A-S in a dish.

[1:02:21] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:02:22] Bob Dobbs: You're all mashed together.

[1:02:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:02:26] Cameron McEwen: so...

[1:02:26] Cameron McEwen: But the pos is not only a mash,

[1:02:31] Cameron McEwen: it's also a possibility.

[1:02:32] Cameron McEwen: So the possibilities are discrete,

[1:02:37] Cameron McEwen: but in human use,

[1:02:39] Cameron McEwen: they become a mash.

[1:02:41] Bob Dobbs: A mash.

[1:02:43] Cameron McEwen: Mash.

[1:02:44] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:02:44] Bob Dobbs: mash.

[1:02:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:02:45] Bob Dobbs: mash.

[1:02:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:02:46] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:02:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:02:47] Bob Dobbs: in the second last chapter,

[1:02:51] Bob Dobbs: you're suddenly dealing with the Porter family.

[1:02:54] Bob Dobbs: And it's no longer Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker family.

[1:02:58] Bob Dobbs: Something has changed.

[1:02:59] Bob Dobbs: So why do I look like a passive porter piece?

[1:03:03] Bob Dobbs: Why am I changing?

[1:03:04] Bob Dobbs: Why am I turning into a porter family,

[1:03:06] Bob Dobbs: which is different?

[1:03:08] Bob Dobbs: And that's the question throughout the book.

[1:03:11] Bob Dobbs: There's these changes you're being put through,

[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: and you're going to end up in a different spot,

[1:03:16] Bob Dobbs: a different location of the gap.

[1:03:18] Bob Dobbs: So there is...

[1:03:20] Cameron McEwen: Let's look at...

[1:03:21] Cameron McEwen: Let's just...

[1:03:23] Cameron McEwen: quickly look at the phrase porter piece,

[1:03:27] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:03:28] Cameron McEwen: A port is a door,

[1:03:31] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:03:32] Cameron McEwen: Or a harbor.

[1:03:33] Cameron McEwen: And then porte in French is to carry,

[1:03:39] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:03:39] Cameron McEwen: So a possibility,

[1:03:42] Cameron McEwen: the pos as possibility is what carries a cross and thereby opens a new door.

[1:03:52] Cameron McEwen: And what is the new door?

[1:03:56] Cameron McEwen: It is a new look and a new look like something.

[1:04:05] Cameron McEwen: Every look is a looking like,

[1:04:08] Cameron McEwen: but it's a new one,

[1:04:10] Cameron McEwen: so it's a look,

[1:04:11] Cameron McEwen: a like,

[1:04:12] Cameron McEwen: in the sense of enervating a certain look or a certain like.

[1:04:18] Cameron McEwen: And then why

[1:04:20] Cameron McEwen: I am.

[1:04:21] Cameron McEwen: raises the question of why this one rather than that one,

[1:04:27] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:04:27] Cameron McEwen: How do I account for who I am or who we are in terms of possibilities that are inherently plural?

[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: and also port can be drink,

[1:04:40] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:04:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:04:40] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:04:41] Cameron McEwen: porter is a drink.

[1:04:43] Cameron McEwen: Porter is

[1:04:44] Cameron McEwen: Guinness. Oh,

[1:04:45] Bob Dobbs: is that what it's called,

[1:04:46] Bob Dobbs: porter?

[1:04:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:04:48] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:04:51] Bob Dobbs: My entry into American Consciousness was on KPFK,

[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: the station,

[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: you might know it,

[1:04:58] Bob Dobbs: in Los Angeles,

[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: KPFK,

[1:05:00] Bob Dobbs: do you know that station?

[1:05:02] Cameron McEwen: I've certainly heard the phrase,

[1:05:05] Cameron McEwen: and I've probably...

[1:05:08] Cameron McEwen: I've heard the station,

[1:05:09] Cameron McEwen: but I've never thought about it.

[1:05:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:05:11] Bob Dobbs: so this guy had a show called Genesis of a Music.

[1:05:15] Bob Dobbs: He focused on 20th century serious composition,

[1:05:18] Bob Dobbs: but he also liked Zappa and a lot of regular stuff and jazz.

[1:05:22] Bob Dobbs: So he had a show called Genesis of a Music,

[1:05:24] Bob Dobbs: so he's trying to figure out something,

[1:05:26] Bob Dobbs: and his name was Dave Porter.

[1:05:28] Bob Dobbs: So I began my radio career in the States in 1990 on

[1:05:35] Bob Dobbs: Dave Porter's show.

[1:05:37] Bob Dobbs: So I'll take this personally here.

[1:05:41] Bob Dobbs: Why am I looking like Porter?

[1:05:42] Bob Dobbs: His show is shaping me.

[1:05:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:05:45] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:05:46] Cameron McEwen: And for Joyce,

[1:05:48] Cameron McEwen: Genesis and Guinness belong together.

[1:05:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:05:51] Bob Dobbs: So Genesis of a music,

[1:05:53] Bob Dobbs: that's like the syllable and rhythm in the first clause of

[1:05:57] Bob Dobbs: Eliot's statement on auditory imagination.

[1:06:01] Bob Dobbs: So there's a change happening.

[1:06:03] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:06:03] Bob Dobbs: what happens?

[1:06:04] Bob Dobbs: The woman,

[1:06:05] Bob Dobbs: the...

[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: The prank queen,

[1:06:09] Bob Dobbs: the Earl is not responding properly.

[1:06:11] Bob Dobbs: He's like,

[1:06:12] Bob Dobbs: he's not aware there's a change happening.

[1:06:15] Bob Dobbs: So he screws up and she steals his kids.

[1:06:18] Bob Dobbs: Then she comes back,

[1:06:20] Bob Dobbs: she comes back and then she steals the kid and the other kid again.

[1:06:23] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:06:24] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember if they resolve it,

[1:06:26] Bob Dobbs: but I don't think they get resolved.

[1:06:27] Bob Dobbs: But it happens three times,

[1:06:28] Bob Dobbs: these encounters.

[1:06:30] Bob Dobbs: But it's about someone saying,

[1:06:31] Bob Dobbs: hey,

[1:06:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm being changed by something.

[1:06:33] Bob Dobbs: And are you involved with this?

[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: Did you cause this?

[1:06:37] Bob Dobbs: Where is this coming from?

[1:06:38] Bob Dobbs: And the arrow is forced to deal with it because it leads to discomfort when he loses his kids in that.

[1:06:45] Bob Dobbs: So that's the drama of the first technology,

[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: or at least the beginning of visual space in the alphabet,

[1:06:54] Bob Dobbs: if you take McLuhan's understanding of the technologies.

[1:06:57] Bob Dobbs: Sure.

[1:06:58] Cameron McEwen: I think children there could be understood as words.

[1:07:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:07:05] Cameron McEwen: the

[1:07:05] Cameron McEwen: words go out and they enable new types of individuality.

[1:07:13] Bob Dobbs: It allows the prank queen to adjust herself with these new words.

[1:07:20] Cameron McEwen: When the words go out,

[1:07:21] Cameron McEwen: they have their own life and can no longer be controlled.

[1:07:27] Cameron McEwen: So it's the

[1:07:32] Cameron McEwen: Android meme.

[1:07:34] Cameron McEwen: is already active in the first words of human language.

[1:07:39] Bob Dobbs: Yep,

[1:07:40] Bob Dobbs: almost everything is.

[1:07:42] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:07:43] Bob Dobbs: And so then,

[1:07:44] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:07:44] Bob Dobbs: Joyce tried to show that by having everything spinning out from a couple of words,

[1:07:49] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said.

[1:07:50] Bob Dobbs: Create a whole universe out of two words.

[1:07:53] Bob Dobbs: It could be any two words.

[1:07:56] Bob Dobbs: So this quote,

[1:07:58] Bob Dobbs: I want to see what I say in the...

[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: Bob is now in the saloon,

[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: Talking to people.

[1:08:04] Bob Dobbs: It's casual.

[1:08:05] Bob Dobbs: The blueprint.

[1:08:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay?

[1:08:08] Bob Dobbs: What do I say here?

[1:08:11] Cameron McEwen: And you're echoing Finnegans Wake and doing that,

[1:08:13] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:08:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:08:14] Cameron McEwen: Doesn't Finnegans Wake take place in a pub?

[1:08:18] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[1:08:21] Bob Dobbs: So the,

[1:08:25] Bob Dobbs: why do I look like a pasta porter piece?

[1:08:27] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:08:28] Bob Dobbs: So we've said enough with that.

[1:08:29] Bob Dobbs: So then I say.

[1:08:31] Bob Dobbs: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker,

[1:08:32] Bob Dobbs: or HCE,

[1:08:33] Bob Dobbs: pronounces variations in different languages of the sentence above.

[1:08:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:08:38] Bob Dobbs: so it's replayed throughout the book,

[1:08:40] Bob Dobbs: many different punning linguistics.

[1:08:43] Bob Dobbs: So he pronounces variations in different languages of the sentence above all the way through Finnegans Wake.

[1:08:49] Bob Dobbs: He's trying to figure out,

[1:08:50] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:08:51] Bob Dobbs: why have I changed?

[1:08:53] Bob Dobbs: Why do I look like this now?

[1:08:55] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:08:55] Bob Dobbs: I haven't read that,

[1:08:56] Bob Dobbs: but that's what I said the fucking thing meant five minutes ago.

[1:09:00] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:09:00] Bob Dobbs: I'm consistent.

[1:09:01] Bob Dobbs: That's what I wrote here.

[1:09:02] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:09:03] Bob Dobbs: I guess that's the main point to look at here of what the question is about.

[1:09:09] Bob Dobbs: So it's an identity problem in a way.

[1:09:13] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:09:13] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.

[1:09:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:09:15] Bob Dobbs: So I say he doesn't know the media changed him.

[1:09:17] Bob Dobbs: So a new unconscious has been recreated,

[1:09:20] Bob Dobbs: created in him.

[1:09:21] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't know the media changed him.

[1:09:23] Bob Dobbs: Or he's asking rhetorically,

[1:09:25] Bob Dobbs: he knows to see if you know.

[1:09:28] Bob Dobbs: So he might be asking.

[1:09:29] Bob Dobbs: Or she's asking.

[1:09:31] Bob Dobbs: But,

[1:09:31] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:09:32] Bob Dobbs: I think the woman is asking this.

[1:09:34] Bob Dobbs: We have to go back.

[1:09:35] Bob Dobbs: Maybe you can't tell who's asking the question.

[1:09:39] Bob Dobbs: But I think it's the woman.

[1:09:42] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:09:43] Bob Dobbs: I have the man asking the question here.

[1:09:45] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't know the media changed him.

[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: Or,

[1:09:48] Bob Dobbs: in the knowing part of himself,

[1:09:50] Bob Dobbs: he's asking rhetorically to see if you know.

[1:09:53] Bob Dobbs: But she might have been doing that to him.

[1:09:55] Bob Dobbs: The walls have been knocked down.

[1:09:57] Bob Dobbs: But then they're rebuilt by the digital technology.

[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: that's the...

[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: The Western use of digital technologies,

[1:10:08] Bob Dobbs: propping up the literate,

[1:10:10] Bob Dobbs: sovereign individual,

[1:10:12] Bob Dobbs: that ends up with everybody blogging their own reality,

[1:10:18] Bob Dobbs: their own personality,

[1:10:19] Bob Dobbs: their own extensions,

[1:10:20] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:10:21] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:10:21] Cameron McEwen: Extreme atomization.

[1:10:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:10:24] Bob Dobbs: go ahead.

[1:10:25] Cameron McEwen: We can,

[1:10:27] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:10:28] Cameron McEwen: we can take your words here in blue.

[1:10:31] Cameron McEwen: And we can apply it to what we were saying earlier about the trajectory of history from ritual through anti-ritual to a renewed ritual that would include the anti-ritual.

[1:10:48] Cameron McEwen: So the walls have been knocked down.

[1:10:51] Cameron McEwen: That's by literacy,

[1:10:53] Cameron McEwen: by analog consciousness of digital process.

[1:10:59] Bob Dobbs: Merging.

[1:10:59] Cameron McEwen: So then...

[1:11:01] Cameron McEwen: The rebuilt by digital technology is a recall of the gap that was lived and that actually always has been lived even in the analog extremes.

[1:11:17] Cameron McEwen: But now the digital technology is using the gap both to become more conscious of ourselves and

[1:11:30] Cameron McEwen: to be atomic and hydrogen bombs.

[1:11:34] Cameron McEwen: And so the dialectic that was always going on between the analog and the digital now is out there in the world as the world and is unfolding as we speak.

[1:11:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:11:50] Bob Dobbs: So what you were just saying there,

[1:11:55] Bob Dobbs: the rebuilt,

[1:11:57] Bob Dobbs: the walls have been knocked down.

[1:12:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:12:01] Bob Dobbs: the shifting of the...

[1:12:04] Bob Dobbs: Where is the gap?

[1:12:06] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan liked to point out that if you try to balance yourself,

[1:12:12] Bob Dobbs: don't use your eyes today to say,

[1:12:15] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:12:15] Bob Dobbs: I can see that and I can see this and I want to be balanced in relation to them.

[1:12:19] Bob Dobbs: That's visual bias balance.

[1:12:21] Bob Dobbs: That's a visual response to the gap,

[1:12:24] Bob Dobbs: to the involving rabbit hole that you have to watch out.

[1:12:29] Bob Dobbs: you don't get lost in.

[1:12:31] Bob Dobbs: So he pointed out there's a visual gap,

[1:12:34] Bob Dobbs: which people try to balance,

[1:12:35] Bob Dobbs: and then there's a non-visual gap,

[1:12:37] Bob Dobbs: multi-sensory,

[1:12:38] Bob Dobbs: which probably involves more awareness around yourself,

[1:12:42] Bob Dobbs: not just based on what you see,

[1:12:44] Bob Dobbs: and maybe that's acoustic.

[1:12:49] Bob Dobbs: It's important to understand there's a new way you have to balance yourself.

[1:12:55] Bob Dobbs: You can't orient yourself visually anymore.

[1:13:00] Bob Dobbs: And so that was an important insight when I got that years ago,

[1:13:04] Bob Dobbs: that

[1:13:05] Bob Dobbs: I could tell that everybody was trying to retrieve Gutenberg balance in various schools of thought or discipline or just opinions.

[1:13:15] Bob Dobbs: They were trying to reestablish a visual way of locating yourself.

[1:13:19] Bob Dobbs: And that's not what were the challenges.

[1:13:23] Bob Dobbs: We're now deaf,

[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: dumb,

[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: and blind.

[1:13:26] Bob Dobbs: What is it?

[1:13:27] Bob Dobbs: Deaf,

[1:13:27] Bob Dobbs: dumb,

[1:13:27] Bob Dobbs: and mute?

[1:13:30] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said,

[1:13:31] Bob Dobbs: and so you can't,

[1:13:34] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: he would say he operates through feeling,

[1:13:39] Bob Dobbs: like the blind man with the cane.

[1:13:41] Bob Dobbs: He would just grope around.

[1:13:43] Bob Dobbs: He knew he had to grope.

[1:13:44] Bob Dobbs: There's no way to see an answer or a solution to this.

[1:13:49] Bob Dobbs: So he would feel it,

[1:13:50] Bob Dobbs: and then that gets into,

[1:13:51] Bob Dobbs: he's saying he has ESP and other sensitivities,

[1:13:55] Bob Dobbs: and he called it the age of intuition.

[1:13:59] Bob Dobbs: So...

[1:13:59] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:14:00] Bob Dobbs: people talk about being intuitive,

[1:14:02] Bob Dobbs: but they're always probably talking from a Gutenberg bias.

[1:14:07] Bob Dobbs: Literary imagination,

[1:14:08] Bob Dobbs: intuition,

[1:14:10] Bob Dobbs: the old form of ESP,

[1:14:11] Bob Dobbs: not the discontinuous,

[1:14:15] Bob Dobbs: odd kind of involvement in the gap.

[1:14:19] Bob Dobbs: And probably surfing is a good image of that.

[1:14:23] Cameron McEwen: Notice how

[1:14:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was acutely aware of this.

[1:14:31] Cameron McEwen: in the middle

[1:14:33] Cameron McEwen: 1950s, let's say starting 53 and thinking about it until around 57,

[1:14:41] Cameron McEwen: when he differentiates between

[1:14:43] Cameron McEwen: ABC and absent-minded,

[1:14:47] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:14:48] Cameron McEwen: So what's the difference there?

[1:14:50] Cameron McEwen: The difference is that the absent-minded introduces the gap.

[1:14:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:14:57] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:14:58] Bob Dobbs: the gap shifts.

[1:14:59] Cameron McEwen: the gap shifts right so there there there is already a gap there yeah but there's an attempt to overcome it that's what literacy is so the abc is a way of

[1:15:13] Cameron McEwen: Instead of concentrating on the gaps between the A and the B and the B and the C,

[1:15:19] Cameron McEwen: what it tries to do is formulate meaning that is un-gapped.

[1:15:26] Cameron McEwen: And what the digital does is it focuses on the gap and uses the gap to formulate.

[1:15:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:15:36] Bob Dobbs: and that's what the French postmodernist guys in the 60s...

[1:15:41] Bob Dobbs: 70s were criticizing the enlightenment and the universal motive of the literate gutenberg era that was uh visually biased uh merging and not recognizing discontinuities around right

[1:15:57] Cameron McEwen: but the problem was that um in that type of uh post-modernism uh was almost like the first World War in that what it did was it

[1:16:10] Cameron McEwen: announced the return of the gap as a kind of disaster.

[1:16:16] Cameron McEwen: Whereas what McLuhan wants to say is that the return of the gap that he already announced in

[1:16:25] Cameron McEwen: Mechanical Bride,

[1:16:27] Cameron McEwen: the return of the gap is the great possibility that modernity offers to humans and it's something to be celebrated,

[1:16:37] Cameron McEwen: not to be feared and to be...

[1:16:40] Cameron McEwen: seen as a disaster.

[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: that would be his phrase,

[1:16:44] Bob Dobbs: exploring ignorance for discovery,

[1:16:47] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:16:48] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:16:48] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[1:16:49] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:16:49] Bob Dobbs: so then we come to this second quote.

[1:16:54] Bob Dobbs: Do I have a one in front of what's the one in front?

[1:17:00] Bob Dobbs: Why do I have a two in front of the negative?

[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:17:04] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:17:04] Cameron McEwen: Because I think you're talking about a series of quotations.

[1:17:09] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:17:10] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:17:10] Bob Dobbs: it's The Media Fit the Battle of Jericho,

[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: just the title.

[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:17:13] Bob Dobbs: that's number one.

[1:17:13] Bob Dobbs: So I'm just trying to find out what number two is.

[1:17:15] Bob Dobbs: So then now...

[1:17:16] Cameron McEwen: It's on 161.

[1:17:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:17:18] Cameron McEwen: Find your media,

[1:17:18] Cameron McEwen: man.

[1:17:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:17:20] Bob Dobbs: So it says...

[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: I flipped around.

[1:17:26] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:17:28] Bob Dobbs: So this is from Playboy magazine,

[1:17:29] Bob Dobbs: 1968,

[1:17:31] Bob Dobbs: December issue.

[1:17:34] Bob Dobbs: He has an article called...

[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: Mind your media men or you'll catch a cold environment.

[1:17:40] Bob Dobbs: But the subtitle is the reversal of the overheated media image.

[1:17:44] Bob Dobbs: The reversal of the overheated image.

[1:17:46] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure.

[1:17:47] Bob Dobbs: I might have got that backwards or they're meant not.

[1:17:50] Cameron McEwen: You have it right.

[1:17:52] Cameron McEwen: The first part is the subtitle of.

[1:17:55] Cameron McEwen: So the title of the text in the table of contents is reversal of the overheated image.

[1:18:02] Cameron McEwen: And mind your media is the subtitle.

[1:18:04] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:18:04] Bob Dobbs: so that's what I meant there.

[1:18:06] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:18:06] Bob Dobbs: oddly said.

[1:18:06] Bob Dobbs: The subtitle,

[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: all right.

[1:18:11] Bob Dobbs: So I say,

[1:18:12] Bob Dobbs: mind your media men,

[1:18:14] Bob Dobbs: these are the intelligence agency personnel.

[1:18:16] Bob Dobbs: That's who he's addressing,

[1:18:18] Bob Dobbs: a big brother that's gone inside.

[1:18:20] Bob Dobbs: He's not out in the streets anymore.

[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: That's left for the mafias.

[1:18:25] Bob Dobbs: So mind your media men.

[1:18:27] Bob Dobbs: He's addressing the intelligence agency,

[1:18:29] Bob Dobbs: the confused Tetrad managers,

[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: the clunky.

[1:18:35] Cameron McEwen: As always,

[1:18:36] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan uses language in a very complex way,

[1:18:40] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:18:40] Cameron McEwen: So mind your media doesn't only mean pay attention to in the sense of spy on.

[1:18:50] Cameron McEwen: It also means mind your media,

[1:18:52] Cameron McEwen: be conscious of what you're already doing.

[1:18:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:18:57] Bob Dobbs: So we did catch a very cold environment.

[1:19:01] Bob Dobbs: Nobody heated him and we caught the catch.

[1:19:04] Bob Dobbs: the cold environment,

[1:19:05] Bob Dobbs: what people call,

[1:19:06] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[1:19:06] Cameron McEwen: Notice the interplay between overheated and cold.

[1:19:10] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:19:10] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:19:10] Bob Dobbs: right,

[1:19:11] Bob Dobbs: the reversal of the overheated image,

[1:19:13] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: so now I come back to the walls.

[1:19:19] Bob Dobbs: The walls are then rebuilt for the TV body,

[1:19:22] Bob Dobbs: but not for the chemical body.

[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: And the astrobodies rebuilt via the chip body,

[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: the

[1:19:28] Bob Dobbs: 21st century.

[1:19:29] Bob Dobbs: The walls are then rebuilt for the TV body.

[1:19:33] Bob Dobbs: but not for the chemical body.

[1:19:36] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:19:36] Bob Dobbs: those would be walls of decentralized and tribalism,

[1:19:40] Bob Dobbs: I think.

[1:19:41] Bob Dobbs: The iconography in the media,

[1:19:43] Bob Dobbs: the culture wars,

[1:19:44] Bob Dobbs: they call it.

[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: The battle for an identity and political correctness.

[1:19:51] Bob Dobbs: New walls.

[1:19:52] Bob Dobbs: Because everybody was extremely merged homogeneously,

[1:19:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:19:56] Bob Dobbs: in the 20s,

[1:19:57] Bob Dobbs: 30s,

[1:19:58] Bob Dobbs: maybe even the

[1:19:59] Bob Dobbs: 40s. But it's going to flip in the 50s and 60s.

[1:20:02] Bob Dobbs: Go.

[1:20:04] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:20:04] Bob Dobbs: this is the TV body is part of the Android meme.

[1:20:08] Bob Dobbs: It's not the TV landscape of the

[1:20:10] Bob Dobbs: 50s.

[1:20:12] Bob Dobbs: It is.

[1:20:13] Bob Dobbs: part of a larger landscape,

[1:20:15] Bob Dobbs: the Android meme.

[1:20:17] Bob Dobbs: So it becomes a figure.

[1:20:19] Bob Dobbs: So the walls are rebuilt for the figure.

[1:20:22] Bob Dobbs: Very hard to make walls in the ground,

[1:20:25] Bob Dobbs: which is not even involving the chemical body.

[1:20:30] Bob Dobbs: It's involving the machines themselves breaking down their walls between themselves.

[1:20:35] Bob Dobbs: The digital implosion,

[1:20:37] Bob Dobbs: the increasing,

[1:20:39] Bob Dobbs: what would be a phrase they used in the computer industry in the

[1:20:42] Bob Dobbs: 90s.

[1:20:43] Bob Dobbs: They would try to implode things or merge things or just have everything,

[1:20:48] Bob Dobbs: maybe going toward getting one device does everything.

[1:20:54] Bob Dobbs: What's that called?

[1:20:57] Cameron McEwen: The smartphone.

[1:21:01] Bob Dobbs: The all-purpose app or something.

[1:21:04] Bob Dobbs: This has been the vision for a couple of decades of making something and people trying to get their company to provide everything on their app,

[1:21:12] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:21:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:21:13] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:21:14] Bob Dobbs: So...

[1:21:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:21:15] Cameron McEwen: I know where you're going,

[1:21:16] Cameron McEwen: but I can't think of the exact phrase.

[1:21:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:21:19] Bob Dobbs: there was a term for it.

[1:21:20] Bob Dobbs: They were merging towards it.

[1:21:23] Bob Dobbs: They had some phrase.

[1:21:24] Bob Dobbs: I forget.

[1:21:26] Bob Dobbs: So...

[1:21:26] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:21:27] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan used to point that out in terms of the...

[1:21:35] Cameron McEwen: In the 60s and 70s...

[1:21:43] Cameron McEwen: You had the birth of these mega corporations,

[1:21:46] Cameron McEwen: which were like General Electric,

[1:21:50] Cameron McEwen: that had insurance arms and pharmaceutical arms and engine building arms,

[1:22:01] Cameron McEwen: etc.

[1:22:01] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:22:07] Cameron McEwen: I can't think of the word in my old age.

[1:22:10] Cameron McEwen: But it goes.

[1:22:12] Cameron McEwen: to what you were just saying about having everything in a package.

[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: was that synchronization?

[1:22:19] Bob Dobbs: Is that getting close to it?

[1:22:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:22:24] Bob Dobbs: it's funny.

[1:22:24] Bob Dobbs: There is some word about that process,

[1:22:27] Bob Dobbs: that goal.

[1:22:28] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:22:29] Cameron McEwen: it's inherently empire building,

[1:22:33] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:22:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:22:39] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:22:39] Bob Dobbs: So the walls are then rebuilt for the TB body,

[1:22:42] Bob Dobbs: but not for the chemical body.

[1:22:44] Bob Dobbs: And the astral body is rebuilt by the chip body.

[1:22:47] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:22:47] Bob Dobbs: how do I translate that?

[1:22:49] Bob Dobbs: I say,

[1:22:50] Bob Dobbs: citing the cold,

[1:22:51] Bob Dobbs: so-called violent late 60s,

[1:22:53] Bob Dobbs: the Westerners sometimes like to say it was more violent back then than now.

[1:22:59] Bob Dobbs: It was violent because people wanted to be able to experience it from the safety of their home.

[1:23:03] Bob Dobbs: They didn't walk out there among the non-walls.

[1:23:08] Bob Dobbs: So they...

[1:23:09] Bob Dobbs: started to stay home and build their computer and entertainment room.

[1:23:16] Cameron McEwen: What do you mean by Westerners?

[1:23:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:23:18] Bob Dobbs: I don't think I mean cowboys.

[1:23:21] Bob Dobbs: It should just be Westerners,

[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: not the Westerners,

[1:23:24] Bob Dobbs: but maybe.

[1:23:26] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:23:26] Bob Dobbs: citing the cold,

[1:23:27] Bob Dobbs: so-called violent late 60s,

[1:23:29] Bob Dobbs: the

[1:23:30] Bob Dobbs: Westerners sometimes like to say it was more violent back then than now.

[1:23:34] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what the back then refers to.

[1:23:38] Bob Dobbs: Citing the cold so-called violent...

[1:23:41] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:23:41] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:23:42] Bob Dobbs: so this is people in now,

[1:23:45] Bob Dobbs: citing the turbulent

[1:23:46] Bob Dobbs: 60s, citing the cold so-called violent late 60s.

[1:23:50] Bob Dobbs: The Westerners sometimes like to say it was more violent back then than now.

[1:23:53] Bob Dobbs: It was violent back then because people wanted to be able to experience it from the safety of their home.

[1:24:01] Bob Dobbs: They didn't walk out there among the non-walls,

[1:24:03] Bob Dobbs: so they didn't have the digital...

[1:24:09] Bob Dobbs: isolation yet.

[1:24:10] Bob Dobbs: So people had to engage the streets.

[1:24:13] Bob Dobbs: And so there was a lot of running around and,

[1:24:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:24:18] Bob Dobbs: just think of images of news.

[1:24:19] Bob Dobbs: Think of Japan.

[1:24:20] Bob Dobbs: There'd be these students going after the military.

[1:24:24] Bob Dobbs: Or we go to Korea or Russia or all these news scenarios in the 70s and 80s.

[1:24:30] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that?

[1:24:31] Bob Dobbs: Showing a lot of these countries of people attacking the military,

[1:24:36] Bob Dobbs: which they didn't do in the West.

[1:24:38] Bob Dobbs: Nobody did that.

[1:24:41] Bob Dobbs: The military was on another level.

[1:24:44] Bob Dobbs: And then you have

[1:24:46] Bob Dobbs: Kent State,

[1:24:46] Bob Dobbs: they just shot the kids.

[1:24:49] Bob Dobbs: Either the

[1:24:50] Bob Dobbs: Asians were braver or something,

[1:24:53] Bob Dobbs: or just more fanatic about it.

[1:24:57] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[1:24:59] Bob Dobbs: I'm talking about the image of the

[1:25:01] Bob Dobbs: 60s, and why people think the 60s were more violent than now.

[1:25:08] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:25:09] Bob Dobbs: we've now come up to more violence again,

[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: supposedly.

[1:25:13] Bob Dobbs: But the image that...

[1:25:16] Bob Dobbs: The 60s was this turbulent decade that nobody wanted to remember.

[1:25:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying that your chemical body was vulnerable back then.

[1:25:28] Bob Dobbs: You couldn't go into the chip body landscape,

[1:25:32] Bob Dobbs: the chip landscape,

[1:25:33] Bob Dobbs: which then would become the chip body.

[1:25:35] Bob Dobbs: You had no walls.

[1:25:37] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying you're rebuilding walls at home.

[1:25:41] Bob Dobbs: You're a safe zone,

[1:25:42] Bob Dobbs: and maybe that's what's going on with the millennials and younger.

[1:25:46] Bob Dobbs: is that they've grown up in these safe zones in their home,

[1:25:50] Bob Dobbs: and they are very touchy about not being in a safe zone.

[1:25:58] Bob Dobbs: They're not as tough as the 60s people,

[1:26:01] Bob Dobbs: who had no problem bouncing off the authorities.

[1:26:08] Bob Dobbs: They could walk out there among the non-walls.

[1:26:13] Bob Dobbs: What the hell do I mean by that?

[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: They didn't walk out there...

[1:26:15] Bob Dobbs: Among the non-walls.

[1:26:16] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:26:17] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[1:26:17] Bob Dobbs: There's already a non-wall thing going on.

[1:26:20] Bob Dobbs: But people are trying to create chemical body walls,

[1:26:24] Bob Dobbs: which they call freedom,

[1:26:25] Bob Dobbs: freedom of mobility.

[1:26:26] Bob Dobbs: So that would be the non-walls.

[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: So that's,

[1:26:31] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:26:31] Bob Dobbs: so what do I do to get myself out of that?

[1:26:33] Bob Dobbs: I quote

[1:26:35] Bob Dobbs: Joyce using the word walls.

[1:26:37] Bob Dobbs: Now look what I did.

[1:26:40] Bob Dobbs: The next line,

[1:26:42] Bob Dobbs: page 27,

[1:26:43] Bob Dobbs: chalking ogres on walls.

[1:26:46] Bob Dobbs: It's like,

[1:26:47] Bob Dobbs: I remember finding that,

[1:26:48] Bob Dobbs: like,

[1:26:48] Bob Dobbs: it's ridiculous.

[1:26:49] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't tell you anything on the surface,

[1:26:52] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:26:53] Bob Dobbs: But it's got the word walls.

[1:26:55] Bob Dobbs: And then you think about graffiti and people chalking ugliness or ogres or boogers or something on walls.

[1:27:04] Bob Dobbs: That is the

[1:27:07] Bob Dobbs: 60s, the turbulent 60s.

[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: what happens starting in the 90s is that people become violent.

[1:27:14] Bob Dobbs: in the ESP of the tactile computer internet world.

[1:27:21] Bob Dobbs: Okay?

[1:27:23] Bob Dobbs: That's the big thing about the internet world is that people are,

[1:27:30] Bob Dobbs: in terms of opinions,

[1:27:31] Bob Dobbs: getting more and more extreme.

[1:27:34] Bob Dobbs: And people are losing their friends pretty quickly.

[1:27:38] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:27:40] Bob Dobbs: I might have...

[1:27:41] Cameron McEwen: They're also playing...

[1:27:43] Cameron McEwen: Extremely violent computer games,

[1:27:45] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:27:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:27:46] Bob Dobbs: that's the other thing,

[1:27:47] Bob Dobbs: right.

[1:27:50] Cameron McEwen: Let's just back up for a minute.

[1:27:52] Cameron McEwen: Chalking ogres on walls.

[1:27:55] Cameron McEwen: You rightly said that the word ogres there can be taken as ogre,

[1:28:04] Cameron McEwen: but aren't either ogres themselves or a closely related word uh

[1:28:13] Cameron McEwen: Isn't it a type of script?

[1:28:18] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[1:28:18] Cameron McEwen: I would have to look that up.

[1:28:20] Cameron McEwen: I think it is.

[1:28:21] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:28:21] Cameron McEwen: And so he would be saying here,

[1:28:24] Cameron McEwen: on the one hand,

[1:28:25] Cameron McEwen: you have ogre,

[1:28:27] Cameron McEwen: and on the other hand,

[1:28:28] Cameron McEwen: you have a language,

[1:28:31] Cameron McEwen: a communication.

[1:28:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:28:34] Cameron McEwen: And you have a dialectic between the possibility of the ogre.

[1:28:42] Cameron McEwen: and the possibility of communication.

[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:28:45] Cameron McEwen: And each can amplify the other,

[1:28:50] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:28:51] Cameron McEwen: So communication is used for warfare and increases the potential damage of warfare by infinity,

[1:29:04] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[1:29:06] Bob Dobbs: On the chemical body level.

[1:29:09] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:29:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:29:10] Cameron McEwen: so I was going to get...

[1:29:12] Cameron McEwen: I wanted to make the point about ogre,

[1:29:14] Cameron McEwen: but then coming back to your bodies here,

[1:29:17] Cameron McEwen: isn't it possible to take your different bodies and say that they are different markings of the gap so that the TV body is one kind of marking of

[1:29:33] Cameron McEwen: the gap,

[1:29:34] Cameron McEwen: chemical body another,

[1:29:35] Cameron McEwen: astral body another,

[1:29:36] Cameron McEwen: chip body another?

[1:29:38] Cameron McEwen: And so...

[1:29:40] Cameron McEwen: What's going on here is different kinds of dancing on the gap,

[1:29:46] Cameron McEwen: and oftentimes the intent is to get rid of the gap.

[1:29:56] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,

[1:29:56] Cameron McEwen: to get into the territory of the non-wall,

[1:30:01] Cameron McEwen: as you call it here.

[1:30:03] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:30:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:30:06] Cameron McEwen: What seems to be going on here is a...

[1:30:09] Cameron McEwen: You can imagine some sort of great battle going on,

[1:30:14] Cameron McEwen: like I guess this new

[1:30:16] Cameron McEwen: Napoleon movie is going to try to show,

[1:30:19] Cameron McEwen: where what's at stake,

[1:30:24] Cameron McEwen: the victory you could say,

[1:30:26] Cameron McEwen: is the nature of the wall.

[1:30:30] Cameron McEwen: The different bodies are contesting about whether or not the wall needs to be torn down or built up or both.

[1:30:40] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:30:40] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:30:41] Bob Dobbs: I keep thinking of paragraphs in Finnegans Wake where he's describing this gestural scratching and abstract painting almost,

[1:30:54] Bob Dobbs: or Jackson Pollock throwing paint at the wall.

[1:30:57] Bob Dobbs: There is a violence going on.

[1:30:59] Bob Dobbs: On the ESP level,

[1:31:00] Bob Dobbs: the intimate tactility,

[1:31:03] Bob Dobbs: so that people are sitting there and very intuitively and sensibly figuring out what the other person's about,

[1:31:11] Bob Dobbs: and then they respond or mock it or yell at it.

[1:31:15] Bob Dobbs: This incredible,

[1:31:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: violence on the chemical body level is crude and numb,

[1:31:22] Bob Dobbs: but on the chip body level,

[1:31:24] Bob Dobbs: it's very sensitive because it's got the electric ESP going on.

[1:31:28] Bob Dobbs: So.

[1:31:29] Bob Dobbs: There's a whole new level of weird scraping on the wall.

[1:31:36] Bob Dobbs: So you can't image the chip body or the chip body,

[1:31:41] Bob Dobbs: TV body.

[1:31:42] Bob Dobbs: It's hard to image what it is.

[1:31:43] Bob Dobbs: You can't visualize it because there's so much other non-visual dynamics involved.

[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: So there's scratchings on the wall,

[1:31:50] Bob Dobbs: and that's like graffiti.

[1:31:52] Bob Dobbs: So there's a graffiti battle going on.

[1:31:57] Bob Dobbs: in the circuitry of the chip body.

[1:32:00] Bob Dobbs: And that is the,

[1:32:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:32:03] Bob Dobbs: they go,

[1:32:04] Bob Dobbs: America's divided,

[1:32:06] Bob Dobbs: it's a violent world out there,

[1:32:08] Bob Dobbs: and they're just talking about people insulting each other and not being polite in their talk anymore on the Internet.

[1:32:17] Cameron McEwen: Notice how this recaptures cave art,

[1:32:21] Cameron McEwen: because cave art is a scraping of the walls,

[1:32:24] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:32:24] Bob Dobbs: That's right,

[1:32:24] Bob Dobbs: that's a good point.

[1:32:27] Bob Dobbs: You know what that is?

[1:32:28] Bob Dobbs: That's the memes that they talk about.

[1:32:30] Bob Dobbs: People making memes on Instagram.

[1:32:33] Bob Dobbs: That's the scratchings on the cave walls.

[1:32:36] Bob Dobbs: They take some pop culture item or they make a new one and then they fling that around for a few weeks.

[1:32:43] Bob Dobbs: You know about that?

[1:32:45] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:32:46] Cameron McEwen: I know in general about it,

[1:32:48] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[1:32:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:32:49] Bob Dobbs: you haven't done it.

[1:32:50] Cameron McEwen: I would just point out that for somebody like Joyce,

[1:32:54] Cameron McEwen: Scraping on a wall is both the birth of communication and the potential misuse of communication.

[1:33:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:33:07] Cameron McEwen: So the scraping on the wall,

[1:33:08] Cameron McEwen: as you can say,

[1:33:09] Cameron McEwen: is the egg of both harmony and disharmony.

[1:33:18] Bob Dobbs: The egg is the term he uses in page 614,

[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: egg blend and hatch can,

[1:33:24] Bob Dobbs: or hatch's can,

[1:33:25] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[1:33:25] Bob Dobbs: is in that section.

[1:33:27] Bob Dobbs: Page 614,

[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: going to 615.

[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:33:30] Cameron McEwen: that's a very interesting phrase because the word can recalls the pos in the quotation that we read earlier from page 24 or so,

[1:33:44] Cameron McEwen: or 21.

[1:33:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:33:46] Bob Dobbs: what word did you say?

[1:33:48] Cameron McEwen: I said,

[1:33:48] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:33:49] Cameron McEwen: in the 21 quotation,

[1:33:50] Cameron McEwen: he uses the word pos,

[1:33:54] Cameron McEwen: which recalls possibility.

[1:33:56] Cameron McEwen: And then the quotation you just made from later has the word can,

[1:34:01] Cameron McEwen: C-A-N.

[1:34:02] Cameron McEwen: And can is another word for possibility.

[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: right.

[1:34:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:34:07] Bob Dobbs: so let's see where it goes.

[1:34:11] Bob Dobbs: In Understanding Media,

[1:34:13] Bob Dobbs: there's a page where McLuhan talks about the photograph is the brothel without walls.

[1:34:18] Bob Dobbs: He uses the phrase without walls many times.

[1:34:21] Bob Dobbs: Different parts of the media are without walls.

[1:34:24] Bob Dobbs: It's the end of the fragmented,

[1:34:25] Bob Dobbs: isolated,

[1:34:26] Bob Dobbs: private self.

[1:34:28] Bob Dobbs: So that's something to say in the bar.

[1:34:32] Bob Dobbs: And then you come back to the technical,

[1:34:35] Bob Dobbs: what is this,

[1:34:36] Bob Dobbs: the engineering manual,

[1:34:38] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:34:39] Cameron McEwen: Yep.

[1:34:40] Bob Dobbs: I say,

[1:34:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying that McLuhan,

[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: whatever he said,

[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: has no anti-environmental impact anymore.

[1:34:46] Bob Dobbs: The digital phase of the Android meme aping us,

[1:34:48] Bob Dobbs: 1980 to 2000,

[1:34:51] Bob Dobbs: popularized by Twin Peaks,

[1:34:54] Bob Dobbs: the return series,

[1:34:55] Bob Dobbs: 2019.

[1:34:56] Bob Dobbs: So the digital phase of the Android meme aping us is a flip from the analog phase of the Android meme shaping us,

[1:35:06] Bob Dobbs: not aping,

[1:35:06] Bob Dobbs: shaping us,

[1:35:07] Bob Dobbs: 1960 to 1980,

[1:35:08] Bob Dobbs: popularized by the Matrix series.

[1:35:10] Bob Dobbs: The tools weren't shaping us anymore,

[1:35:12] Bob Dobbs: perhaps popularized by 2001,

[1:35:14] Bob Dobbs: a space odyssey from Stanley Kubrick.

[1:35:17] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:35:17] Bob Dobbs: so now I need to explain that.

[1:35:19] Bob Dobbs: So I say,

[1:35:20] Bob Dobbs: the Android meme is extending itself.

[1:35:22] Bob Dobbs: Its different parts are not extensions of human faculties.

[1:35:25] Bob Dobbs: We're witnessing this thing extending itself.

[1:35:28] Bob Dobbs: It's not influencing human beings other than they have a general depression because it's the end of technology,

[1:35:34] Bob Dobbs: and they're taking that as the end of World War III.

[1:35:36] Bob Dobbs: The shaping us is in the Matrix series.

[1:35:39] Bob Dobbs: The tools weren't shaping or massaging humans anymore.

[1:35:42] Bob Dobbs: That's what's funny.

[1:35:43] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme replays McLuhan,

[1:35:45] Bob Dobbs: creates a McLuhan revival.

[1:35:47] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:35:47] Bob Dobbs: what McLuhan says is not applicable anymore.

[1:35:49] Bob Dobbs: If you listen to me,

[1:35:51] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:35:51] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said it 50 years ago.

[1:35:53] Bob Dobbs: Quote,

[1:35:53] Bob Dobbs: you can't tell what's the medium and what's the message.

[1:35:58] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:36:00] Bob Dobbs: I didn't say the Android meme is aping us with more Jerry Springer type shows and the audiences think that the world is getting dumber and dumber.

[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: the Android meme is getting smarter and smarter and showing how humans can believe they are still humans.

[1:36:16] Bob Dobbs: This is all a fighting against the fact that everything has disappeared.

[1:36:19] Bob Dobbs: Every now and then,

[1:36:20] Bob Dobbs: somebody from way back then will shout to me,

[1:36:23] Bob Dobbs: Hey Bob,

[1:36:23] Bob Dobbs: everything's disappeared

[1:36:26] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm known about back in the East L.N.

[1:36:28] Bob Dobbs: days.

[1:36:29] Bob Dobbs: They remember.

[1:36:30] Bob Dobbs: It comes rushing back to them 30 years later.

[1:36:34] Bob Dobbs: So then shaping is the media massaging you and doing something to you.

[1:36:39] Bob Dobbs: But the media aren't doing anything to you now.

[1:36:42] Bob Dobbs: Most people would believe knowledge is doing something to us.

[1:36:45] Bob Dobbs: They take the conventional literate view,

[1:36:47] Bob Dobbs: but they don't notice that you can't figure out what it is,

[1:36:50] Bob Dobbs: who's doing it,

[1:36:50] Bob Dobbs: plus nobody can stop it.

[1:36:52] Bob Dobbs: You can't find the faucet to turn it off.

[1:36:56] Bob Dobbs: And then I say,

[1:36:57] Bob Dobbs: I know this is a difficult percept to get.

[1:37:00] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:37:01] Bob Dobbs: so this thing about shaping,

[1:37:03] Bob Dobbs: this is interesting,

[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: the idea that the media shape us.

[1:37:07] Bob Dobbs: That's the analog,

[1:37:08] Bob Dobbs: that's the pre-digital phase.

[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: That's the analog.

[1:37:15] Bob Dobbs: And once people,

[1:37:18] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan said,

[1:37:20] Bob Dobbs: are not,

[1:37:21] Bob Dobbs: and Kroker developed this too,

[1:37:23] Bob Dobbs: are not being,

[1:37:26] Bob Dobbs: they're not forming a new culture.

[1:37:29] Bob Dobbs: They're not being hypnotized by the medium to then create something new.

[1:37:34] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:37:35] Bob Dobbs: there's a contradiction there because

[1:37:38] Bob Dobbs: Web 2.0 has created a lot of a new scene for humans.

[1:37:42] Bob Dobbs: So what am I trying to say there?

[1:37:44] Bob Dobbs: it's not the shaping.

[1:37:47] Bob Dobbs: We are reacting to the Android meme ignoring us and not shaping us,

[1:37:51] Bob Dobbs: but aping us,

[1:37:53] Bob Dobbs: replaying everything that humans supposedly did so that we can believe the anthropomorphic is still there.

[1:38:00] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I'm trying to describe,

[1:38:02] Bob Dobbs: what the anthropomorphic is,

[1:38:04] Bob Dobbs: why it's projected into the new extensions beyond us,

[1:38:10] Bob Dobbs: the extensions of the machinic.

[1:38:13] Bob Dobbs: I guess

[1:38:14] Bob Dobbs: I say this is difficult.

[1:38:18] Cameron McEwen: Let me just ask a question here to try to get a better idea of what you're talking about.

[1:38:26] Cameron McEwen: Can we say that when a medium like television or like the car completely dominates society,

[1:38:42] Cameron McEwen: as it did in the

[1:38:44] Cameron McEwen: 1950s and

[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: 1960s.

[1:38:48] Cameron McEwen: People are shaped by what is going on.

[1:38:55] Cameron McEwen: That's enough.

[1:38:59] Bob Dobbs: That says it.

[1:39:06] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:39:06] Cameron McEwen: the problem is

[1:39:07] Cameron McEwen: I'm worried about using the word shape in a way that...

[1:39:10] Cameron McEwen: is not going to agree to where you're going.

[1:39:13] Cameron McEwen: But let's just say that when humans are dominated by one or two media,

[1:39:23] Cameron McEwen: they have some consciousness of being trapped,

[1:39:34] Cameron McEwen: of being...

[1:39:38] Bob Dobbs: In a cage,

[1:39:39] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:39:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:39:40] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[1:39:42] Cameron McEwen: They know that they're being manipulated in a certain way,

[1:39:48] Cameron McEwen: but they also feel at home in that manipulation.

[1:39:55] Cameron McEwen: But as humans become in the middle of a maelstrom of multiple media that are shaping them in a whole bunch of different ways,

[1:40:10] Cameron McEwen: then they lose the security of that cage.

[1:40:14] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:40:15] Cameron McEwen: And when they lose the security of the cage,

[1:40:21] Cameron McEwen: then what seems to be greater consciousness is at the same time greater fear.

[1:40:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:40:29] Cameron McEwen: And I think that's what

[1:40:30] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was talking about in that 1962 paper,

[1:40:36] Cameron McEwen: Project.

[1:40:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:40:40] Bob Dobbs: The Subliminal Project?

[1:40:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:40:43] Cameron McEwen: Isn't it called Project?

[1:40:45] Bob Dobbs: Project?

[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: There's something called Subliminal Project in the late

[1:40:49] Bob Dobbs: 50s. No,

[1:40:50] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:40:50] Cameron McEwen: but I'm talking about the paper he did for Arts Canada in 1962.

[1:40:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:40:56] Bob Dobbs: it was just called Project,

[1:40:58] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:40:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:40:59] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[1:41:00] Cameron McEwen: So he talks about how we have our nerves outside us.

[1:41:06] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:41:07] Cameron McEwen: I think what happens when you get into a multimedia environment is that the...

[1:41:21] Cameron McEwen: I want to use the phrase human being,

[1:41:23] Cameron McEwen: but it doesn't mean anything anymore.

[1:41:25] Cameron McEwen: So the consciousness develops of being at sea,

[1:41:31] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:41:32] Cameron McEwen: Of having no walls that give security.

[1:41:36] Cameron McEwen: So on the one hand,

[1:41:38] Cameron McEwen: getting rid of the walls seems like liberation,

[1:41:41] Cameron McEwen: seems like it has great potential.

[1:41:44] Cameron McEwen: On the other hand,

[1:41:46] Cameron McEwen: It destroys orientation.

[1:41:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: And what I think you're getting at with aping and shaping is this dialectic between single media and multimedia,

[1:42:00] Cameron McEwen: increasing consciousness,

[1:42:02] Cameron McEwen: increasing fear,

[1:42:04] Cameron McEwen: and this play that's going on between these things.

[1:42:10] Cameron McEwen: On the one hand,

[1:42:11] Cameron McEwen: it's digital,

[1:42:12] Cameron McEwen: but on the other hand,

[1:42:13] Cameron McEwen: it's analog because

[1:42:15] Cameron McEwen: People want to get rid of it.

[1:42:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:42:17] Bob Dobbs: So it's interesting how he used the word project.

[1:42:23] Bob Dobbs: So he says project or project.

[1:42:25] Bob Dobbs: Then he's talking to John Lennon in December 69 at the Coach House,

[1:42:29] Bob Dobbs: to John and Yoko.

[1:42:31] Bob Dobbs: And he says,

[1:42:31] Bob Dobbs: you're trying to create a mood and project it.

[1:42:37] Bob Dobbs: I never saw him talk about people projecting,

[1:42:41] Bob Dobbs: which was a cliche from Freud or something,

[1:42:44] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:42:45] Bob Dobbs: in psychoanalysis.

[1:42:47] Bob Dobbs: He didn't use that word very much,

[1:42:49] Bob Dobbs: but he said it there.

[1:42:50] Bob Dobbs: And I would say that what I think about the Anthropomorphic Physical is your projection into this Android meme that actually has nothing to do with you.

[1:43:00] Bob Dobbs: It's ignoring you.

[1:43:01] Bob Dobbs: So you project something there to make you think it's comforting and human.

[1:43:07] Bob Dobbs: That's the Anthropomorphic Physical.

[1:43:09] Bob Dobbs: So I'm taking project and projection and applying it to the AP.

[1:43:15] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan,

[1:43:16] Bob Dobbs: he's calling his whole enterprise a projection,

[1:43:19] Bob Dobbs: but he says project.

[1:43:21] Bob Dobbs: And he has a phrase in a 50s article,

[1:43:25] Bob Dobbs: subliminal projection or subliminal project.

[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember.

[1:43:32] Cameron McEwen: Notice that the word project or project is the same as extension.

[1:43:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:43:40] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:43:41] Cameron McEwen: A project is to throw before.

[1:43:45] Cameron McEwen: And extension is to take outside.

[1:43:50] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:43:50] Cameron McEwen: So when McLuhan says that Understanding Media is the same as understanding the extensions of man,

[1:44:00] Cameron McEwen: what he's saying is that all human being is some or other variety of extension.

[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:44:08] Cameron McEwen: And why is that?

[1:44:09] Cameron McEwen: It's because human beings cannot.

[1:44:14] Cameron McEwen: actualize anything that was not a possibility.

[1:44:19] Cameron McEwen: So human beings are the projection or the extension of some possibility and as humans become able to use

[1:44:35] Cameron McEwen: certain of those projections in literacy and then in print and then in other media

[1:44:43] Cameron McEwen: What happens is the inherent projection in the ground of human being becomes used outside of human beings.

[1:44:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:44:54] Cameron McEwen: So you have a double projection.

[1:44:57] Bob Dobbs: A double,

[1:44:57] Bob Dobbs: did you say?

[1:44:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:44:59] Cameron McEwen: a double projection.

[1:45:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:45:00] Cameron McEwen: And that double projection is the great danger.

[1:45:04] Cameron McEwen: And the double projection,

[1:45:06] Cameron McEwen: this is already in Innis,

[1:45:08] Cameron McEwen: by the way.

[1:45:10] Cameron McEwen: The double projection needs to be recalled to the enabling single projection behind it.

[1:45:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:45:20] Bob Dobbs: so...

[1:45:21] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme is extending itself and not humans,

[1:45:25] Bob Dobbs: but it's allowing humans to project more and more of themselves in it,

[1:45:31] Bob Dobbs: so they think they're more and more in charge.

[1:45:34] Bob Dobbs: And that's the ironic seduction,

[1:45:36] Bob Dobbs: is that the Android meme is leaving them behind,

[1:45:39] Bob Dobbs: but making them seem more involved,

[1:45:43] Bob Dobbs: that the media is something they can control now.

[1:45:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:45:47] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:45:47] Cameron McEwen: that's a very good insight.

[1:45:49] Cameron McEwen: That's a very good description.

[1:45:51] Cameron McEwen: what happened at the end of the Second World War and is continuing today.

[1:45:56] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:45:57] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:45:59] Bob Dobbs: I guess we should go to this Kroker quote.

[1:46:01] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:46:01] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to find,

[1:46:02] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:46:02] Bob Dobbs: I picked Kroker.

[1:46:04] Bob Dobbs: I'm glad I can find a quote that illustrates what I'm trying to get at.

[1:46:10] Bob Dobbs: And it's usually very complicated,

[1:46:13] Bob Dobbs: but it's extreme enough about the situation you were just describing.

[1:46:17] Bob Dobbs: It's very extreme where we are.

[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: And he does that.

[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: So let's see,

[1:46:22] Bob Dobbs: this is a quote from quite long.

[1:46:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:46:28] Cameron McEwen: it's on 164 is where you identify it.

[1:46:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:46:31] Bob Dobbs: Spasm,

[1:46:33] Bob Dobbs: subtitled Virtual Reality,

[1:46:34] Bob Dobbs: Android Music,

[1:46:35] Bob Dobbs: and Electric

[1:46:36] Bob Dobbs: Flesh, 1993.

[1:46:38] Bob Dobbs: So let's go back up,

[1:46:40] Bob Dobbs: and there's a blue part in between.

[1:46:46] Bob Dobbs: But so

[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: I've...

[1:46:50] Bob Dobbs: I've done in the blue part before about the shaping and the aping.

[1:46:54] Bob Dobbs: And so I'm saying since we just expressed it precisely,

[1:46:58] Bob Dobbs: let's see what I say in the last paragraph.

[1:47:00] Bob Dobbs: Shaping is the media massaging you and doing something to you.

[1:47:04] Bob Dobbs: But the media aren't doing anything to you now because you can project,

[1:47:07] Bob Dobbs: and I'm adding these words,

[1:47:08] Bob Dobbs: you can project into it your centrality.

[1:47:12] Bob Dobbs: Most people would believe knowledge is doing something to us.

[1:47:16] Bob Dobbs: They take the conventional literate view,

[1:47:18] Bob Dobbs: but they don't notice that you can't figure out what it is,

[1:47:20] Bob Dobbs: who's doing it,

[1:47:21] Bob Dobbs: plus nobody can stop it.

[1:47:23] Bob Dobbs: So knowledge or extensions,

[1:47:27] Bob Dobbs: massaging and shaping us,

[1:47:29] Bob Dobbs: has reached a confusing point about what's going on,

[1:47:34] Bob Dobbs: because your own projection and the Android meme aping of you is what's confusing the issue.

[1:47:42] Bob Dobbs: So I don't think I say enough there,

[1:47:44] Bob Dobbs: but...

[1:47:46] Cameron McEwen: I notice that's a pretty good description of World War I.

[1:47:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:47:51] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[1:47:54] Cameron McEwen: People believe that knowledge is doing something to us.

[1:47:56] Cameron McEwen: They take the conventional literary view,

[1:47:58] Cameron McEwen: but they don't notice that you can't figure out what it is,

[1:48:02] Cameron McEwen: who's doing it,

[1:48:03] Cameron McEwen: plus nobody can stop it.

[1:48:05] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:48:05] Cameron McEwen: That's exactly what happens.

[1:48:07] Cameron McEwen: They,

[1:48:07] Cameron McEwen: nobody wanted a war,

[1:48:09] Cameron McEwen: nobody wanted to get into a war.

[1:48:11] Cameron McEwen: Everybody thought the war would be over in two weeks or something.

[1:48:15] Cameron McEwen: And,

[1:48:16] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:48:17] Cameron McEwen: millions and millions and millions of people later,

[1:48:20] Cameron McEwen: and four years later,

[1:48:22] Cameron McEwen: it was still going on and nobody knew how to turn it on.

[1:48:25] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: So yeah,

[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: that's,

[1:48:27] Bob Dobbs: so that was the beginning of the electric disaster.

[1:48:30] Bob Dobbs: So that was the first time that feeling took over,

[1:48:33] Bob Dobbs: that you couldn't turn off.

[1:48:35] Bob Dobbs: Humans really were getting obsolesced.

[1:48:37] Bob Dobbs: in terms of management.

[1:48:39] Bob Dobbs: So then by the Second World War,

[1:48:42] Bob Dobbs: it's going to start ignoring humans.

[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: So then humans have to deal with their depression,

[1:48:48] Bob Dobbs: their uselessness,

[1:48:50] Bob Dobbs: the fact that what they would project their will into is not there anymore.

[1:48:54] Bob Dobbs: So they become fanatically crazy and projecting and trying to express their will,

[1:49:01] Bob Dobbs: while at the same time doing a lot of pharma drugs,

[1:49:05] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[1:49:05] Bob Dobbs: Big Pharma is servicing people's numbness about all this.

[1:49:09] Bob Dobbs: And basically,

[1:49:12] Bob Dobbs: people are ridiculous in the second half of the 20th century compared to what was saner lifestyles under simpler chemical body conditions.

[1:49:23] Bob Dobbs: And now what's interesting maybe is the

[1:49:27] Bob Dobbs: Android meme has become psychopathic as the tech body,

[1:49:31] Bob Dobbs: and it's cracking up.

[1:49:36] Bob Dobbs: So the humans cracked up in the second half of the 20th century,

[1:49:39] Bob Dobbs: but we're looking at the Android meme extended into the tech body is cracking up.

[1:49:48] Bob Dobbs: Something is being lost on its agenda,

[1:49:53] Bob Dobbs: the machine that became conscious.

[1:49:55] Bob Dobbs: Terminator ain't so tough anymore or not in charge anymore.

[1:50:00] Bob Dobbs: Let's see if I'm going to say something like that,

[1:50:03] Bob Dobbs: okay?

[1:50:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:50:05] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[1:50:06] Cameron McEwen: But now you start off on the Kroker quote.

[1:50:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:50:09] Bob Dobbs: I think he's going to say something like this.

[1:50:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:50:14] Bob Dobbs: So he says,

[1:50:18] Bob Dobbs: maybe we are already living in another dimension of space travel.

[1:50:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:50:24] Bob Dobbs: so that's,

[1:50:25] Bob Dobbs: we've gone somewheres.

[1:50:27] Bob Dobbs: In a subspace warp jump,

[1:50:30] Bob Dobbs: a virtual reality where we can finally recognize that we are destined to leave this planet because we have already exited this body.

[1:50:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:50:39] Bob Dobbs: see,

[1:50:40] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about the body's not being extended anymore.

[1:50:45] Bob Dobbs: So we've exited it.

[1:50:49] Bob Dobbs: It's not involved in the creativity anymore.

[1:50:52] Bob Dobbs: Now this...

[1:50:53] Bob Dobbs: does paradoxically make people think that they're really creative.

[1:50:56] Bob Dobbs: But what are they being creative?

[1:50:58] Bob Dobbs: They can just make the Synclavier or the automated digital computer make any kind of music,

[1:51:03] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:51:04] Bob Dobbs: They can do the arts,

[1:51:05] Bob Dobbs: the Goomba arts,

[1:51:06] Bob Dobbs: really simply with no effort.

[1:51:10] Bob Dobbs: But if you've never been creative,

[1:51:12] Bob Dobbs: you think,

[1:51:12] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:51:12] Bob Dobbs: look what I'm making.

[1:51:14] Bob Dobbs: So there's a delusion there of the end of what I mean,

[1:51:17] Bob Dobbs: making you think,

[1:51:18] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:51:18] Bob Dobbs: you really have arrived at your autonomy now,

[1:51:21] Bob Dobbs: and you can...

[1:51:23] Bob Dobbs: Create your own reality and project it and make people succumb to it.

[1:51:28] Bob Dobbs: That's the narcissism that's going on,

[1:51:30] Bob Dobbs: maybe.

[1:51:32] Cameron McEwen: But notice how that ties in with what we were saying earlier about making.

[1:51:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:51:37] Cameron McEwen: When people realize their potential for making,

[1:51:42] Cameron McEwen: then they say,

[1:51:44] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:51:45] Cameron McEwen: wait a minute.

[1:51:46] Cameron McEwen: If my orientation,

[1:51:47] Cameron McEwen: my meaning,

[1:51:48] Cameron McEwen: my whole who I am,

[1:51:50] Cameron McEwen: if that's only something made,

[1:51:52] Cameron McEwen: If it's artificial,

[1:51:54] Cameron McEwen: then what does it amount to?

[1:51:56] Cameron McEwen: Nothing.

[1:51:57] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:51:58] Bob Dobbs: and that's the idea that you can construct your genes or construct your social image biologically.

[1:52:09] Bob Dobbs: That's an expression of this making mania,

[1:52:12] Bob Dobbs: producer mania,

[1:52:14] Bob Dobbs: focused on the chemical body.

[1:52:16] Bob Dobbs: So it explains where...

[1:52:18] Bob Dobbs: As McLuhan would say,

[1:52:19] Bob Dobbs: you could have predicted this,

[1:52:20] Bob Dobbs: that we would get into this transgender craziness about kids not knowing what they want to construct,

[1:52:27] Bob Dobbs: if you understood the making mania of our present social media

[1:52:32] Bob Dobbs: Web 2.0.

[1:52:35] Bob Dobbs: You should have been able to predict this.

[1:52:38] Cameron McEwen: Lewis did predict it in 1926.

[1:52:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:52:43] Bob Dobbs: he was pretty close to it.

[1:52:46] Bob Dobbs: Not simply the violent experience.

[1:52:47] Bob Dobbs: expulsion of the body from the weight of earthly gravity into galactic space,

[1:52:54] Bob Dobbs: but the development of microscopic gene astronauts.

[1:52:59] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty good.

[1:52:59] Bob Dobbs: Colonies of genes which once might have fled the primeval soup of the ocean and taken refuge in the geological structure of crystals,

[1:53:08] Bob Dobbs: the chemistry of plants,

[1:53:10] Bob Dobbs: then animals,

[1:53:11] Bob Dobbs: and finally humans,

[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: but which now warp jump from the human body into the galaxy of virtual reality.

[1:53:17] Bob Dobbs: This is a time of primordial genetic rocketry,

[1:53:20] Bob Dobbs: in which genes suddenly are accelerated into orbit around their previous liquid station in plodding human bodies.

[1:53:27] Bob Dobbs: A new stellar history of TV genes,

[1:53:30] Bob Dobbs: recombinant shopping,

[1:53:32] Bob Dobbs: war meiosis,

[1:53:33] Bob Dobbs: gene nostalgia,

[1:53:35] Bob Dobbs: what molecular biologists call inversion,

[1:53:38] Bob Dobbs: and advertising mimesis.

[1:53:40] Bob Dobbs: All of that is at hand.

[1:53:44] Bob Dobbs: And why shouldn't genes go cybernetic?

[1:53:46] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:53:46] Bob Dobbs: I'm just going to jump into the blue and see if that says something.

[1:53:50] Bob Dobbs: So I'm back in the bar and I say,

[1:53:52] Bob Dobbs: you see the genes parasited in that novel,

[1:53:55] Bob Dobbs: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins.

[1:53:57] Bob Dobbs: That was in the

[1:53:58] Bob Dobbs: 70s. It shows the amoeba riding evolution from the beginning to the end.

[1:54:02] Bob Dobbs: Kroker's got the genes just riding along.

[1:54:05] Bob Dobbs: Finally,

[1:54:05] Bob Dobbs: they realize this chemical body is a dead end and they warp jump to another dimension and go right into the digital grids.

[1:54:12] Bob Dobbs: It's the warp jump from the Android meme to the tech body.

[1:54:15] Bob Dobbs: Ha ha ha Now we've got to the point of my book.

[1:54:20] Bob Dobbs: So all that talk for 150 fucking hours was to get to understand the Android meme and then how it leaps to the tech body.

[1:54:29] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty good.

[1:54:31] Bob Dobbs: So he is groping at that.

[1:54:34] Bob Dobbs: And he says,

[1:54:35] Bob Dobbs: why shouldn't genes go cybernetic?

[1:54:37] Bob Dobbs: They have always existed at the forefront of virtual reality.

[1:54:40] Bob Dobbs: Mutants,

[1:54:41] Bob Dobbs: replicators,

[1:54:41] Bob Dobbs: cloning,

[1:54:42] Bob Dobbs: viral genes.

[1:54:43] Bob Dobbs: Perhaps we have already moved beyond the first stage of the exteriorization of the human sensorium,

[1:54:48] Bob Dobbs: the externalization of the human nervous system,

[1:54:51] Bob Dobbs: and are now entering the second and more decisive phase,

[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: which consists of actually flipping the body inside out,

[1:54:56] Bob Dobbs: the exteriorization of human genetic history.

[1:54:59] Bob Dobbs: In this case,

[1:55:00] Bob Dobbs: technologies of communication would be the means by which genes escape their long evolutionary imprisonment in the body and inscribe themselves in the labyrinthian.

[1:55:10] Bob Dobbs: Electronic highways are recombinant culture.

[1:55:13] Bob Dobbs: The primal gene,

[1:55:14] Bob Dobbs: therefore,

[1:55:14] Bob Dobbs: finally prepared to abandon its evolutionary home in bodily chemistry there's your chemistry,

[1:55:19] Bob Dobbs: 200 years ago,

[1:55:20] Bob Dobbs: to fulfill its destiny by going virtual.

[1:55:24] Bob Dobbs: Wow,

[1:55:25] Bob Dobbs: what an amazing statement.

[1:55:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:55:29] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:55:29] Bob Dobbs: his exteriorization of the human sensorium may be a little off,

[1:55:34] Bob Dobbs: maybe too much of something that was always going on,

[1:55:38] Bob Dobbs: you would say.

[1:55:39] Bob Dobbs: So what is the next stage,

[1:55:42] Bob Dobbs: the externalization of the human nervous system?

[1:55:44] Bob Dobbs: I think that's still in the first phase.

[1:55:45] Bob Dobbs: What is happening is the externalization of the machines themselves,

[1:55:50] Bob Dobbs: and he's calling that the genes,

[1:55:52] Bob Dobbs: it seems.

[1:55:53] Bob Dobbs: Or the genes are responding to that with a new desire to get out of the cage they've been in,

[1:55:59] Bob Dobbs: the biological cage.

[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: isn't when you talk about the Android meme being a kind of non-human consciousness,

[1:56:11] Cameron McEwen: Rumpelstiltskin,

[1:56:13] Cameron McEwen: isn't that what he's talking about,

[1:56:15] Cameron McEwen: the genes leaping out of the body?

[1:56:17] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[1:56:17] Cameron McEwen: So the non-human consciousness.

[1:56:22] Cameron McEwen: of the Android meme which i guess is the tech body when it goes schizoid the that is itself a movement of the genes

[1:56:40] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:56:42] Cameron McEwen: the genes are this dialectic of the digital that we were talking about earlier,

[1:56:50] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:56:50] Cameron McEwen: The gene is the

[1:56:54] Cameron McEwen: DNA strand of digitality.

[1:57:00] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:57:00] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:57:01] Bob Dobbs: I'd say that's too chemical body to talk about the genes.

[1:57:05] Bob Dobbs: Let's read this as if it's the memes are doing this.

[1:57:09] Bob Dobbs: We live in a lot of meme exchange now.

[1:57:13] Cameron McEwen: But isn't that just,

[1:57:15] Cameron McEwen: it would be chemical body if the chemical genes were to make a jump.

[1:57:22] Cameron McEwen: But it's not the chemical genes that make a jump,

[1:57:25] Cameron McEwen: it's the form of the chemical genes.

[1:57:27] Bob Dobbs: That's the memes.

[1:57:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm calling that the memes.

[1:57:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:57:31] Cameron McEwen: So it's not the case that the chemical body makes this evolutionary flip.

[1:57:38] Cameron McEwen: Rather,

[1:57:39] Cameron McEwen: the form that was always there acquires a new type of liberation.

[1:57:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:57:46] Bob Dobbs: the digital acquires a new level of psychopathic release.

[1:57:50] Bob Dobbs: So that actually totally fits what I said.

[1:57:53] Bob Dobbs: We're now getting to the

[1:57:54] Bob Dobbs: Android meme.

[1:57:56] Bob Dobbs: And I never thought of making this paragraph be meme rather than genes before.

[1:58:01] Bob Dobbs: So now we're getting that insight.

[1:58:02] Bob Dobbs: But that's what I said.

[1:58:05] Bob Dobbs: Where is that?

[1:58:06] Bob Dobbs: I've got to go back up.

[1:58:09] Bob Dobbs: When I say the Android meme leaps into the tech body,

[1:58:12] Bob Dobbs: that is the meme becoming hyper.

[1:58:18] Bob Dobbs: The way he's describing the gene is doing that.

[1:58:21] Bob Dobbs: But the gene did that a while back.

[1:58:25] Bob Dobbs: So where do I say it?

[1:58:29] Bob Dobbs: I say the tech body.

[1:58:30] Bob Dobbs: I guess I just said it up there before the blue.

[1:58:38] Bob Dobbs: I can't find where I say the tech body manifests.

[1:58:44] Bob Dobbs: Maybe it's down.

[1:58:44] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:58:45] Cameron McEwen: That's in the last line of the blue text on 163 about the

[1:58:52] Cameron McEwen: Tom Robbins novel.

[1:58:57] Bob Dobbs: Where's that?

[1:58:58] Cameron McEwen: It's the warp jump from Android meme to the tech body.

[1:59:02] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:59:02] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:59:02] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[1:59:03] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:59:04] Bob Dobbs: there it is.

[1:59:05] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:59:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:59:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:59:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:59:07] Bob Dobbs: So.

[1:59:09] Bob Dobbs: The meme leaping about in the new tech body environment is what he's describing.

[1:59:16] Bob Dobbs: So I'm going to read it with the meme.

[1:59:19] Bob Dobbs: So maybe we're already living in another dimension of space.

[1:59:22] Bob Dobbs: Now that would be the tech body environment.

[1:59:25] Bob Dobbs: Maybe we're already living in another dimension of space travel,

[1:59:28] Bob Dobbs: in a subspace warp jump,

[1:59:30] Bob Dobbs: a virtual reality where we can finally recognize that we are destined to leave this planet because we have already exited this body.

[1:59:37] Bob Dobbs: So yeah,

[1:59:37] Bob Dobbs: we've gone into the memic.

[1:59:40] Cameron McEwen: But notice,

[1:59:41] Cameron McEwen: if he were writing this in a

[1:59:47] Cameron McEwen: Heideggerian way,

[1:59:50] Cameron McEwen: he would have to put a line through we here.

[1:59:57] Cameron McEwen: Finally recognize that we are destined to leave this planet because we have already exited this body.

[2:00:02] Cameron McEwen: The we there requires erasure.

[2:00:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:00:06] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:00:07] Cameron McEwen: It's not as if there is.

[2:00:08] Cameron McEwen: some we that's going through a transformation.

[2:00:13] Cameron McEwen: The we has disappeared.

[2:00:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:00:16] Bob Dobbs: in Mechanical Bride he talks about the usefulness of biology at the end of the

[2:00:22] Bob Dobbs: 19th century to unify knowledge.

[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: I think that's the last gasp of the we,

[2:00:28] Bob Dobbs: the image of the biological body and maybe the chemistry of it.

[2:00:33] Bob Dobbs: So not simply the violent expulsion of the body from the weight of earthly gravity.

[2:00:38] Bob Dobbs: into galactic space,

[2:00:39] Bob Dobbs: but the development of microscopic meme astronauts.

[2:00:43] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:00:43] Bob Dobbs: I say that the

[2:00:45] Bob Dobbs: Web 2.0 leads to nanocommunities and nanoblogging.

[2:00:51] Bob Dobbs: It's that tiny,

[2:00:52] Bob Dobbs: and people get tiny audiences.

[2:00:56] Bob Dobbs: But actually,

[2:00:56] Bob Dobbs: they could make a living on it.

[2:00:58] Bob Dobbs: They got a few thousand or something.

[2:01:00] Bob Dobbs: So that is the microscopic meme astronauts.

[2:01:06] Bob Dobbs: Colonies of memes,

[2:01:07] Bob Dobbs: which once might have...

[2:01:08] Bob Dobbs: fled the primeval soup of the ocean and taken refuge in the geological structure of crystals,

[2:01:14] Bob Dobbs: the chemistry of plants,

[2:01:16] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about the genes,

[2:01:17] Bob Dobbs: then the animals,

[2:01:18] Bob Dobbs: and finally humans,

[2:01:19] Bob Dobbs: but which now warp jump from the human body into the galaxy of virtual reality.

[2:01:22] Bob Dobbs: So genes...

[2:01:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:01:24] Cameron McEwen: Let's just go back for a minute.

[2:01:26] Cameron McEwen: If we say colonies of memes,

[2:01:29] Cameron McEwen: which might have fled the primeval soup of the ocean,

[2:01:34] Cameron McEwen: so that colony of memes which might

[2:01:38] Cameron McEwen: have fled the primeval soup.

[2:01:41] Cameron McEwen: of language and the unconscious.

[2:01:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:01:47] Bob Dobbs: I think maybe the colonies of genes,

[2:01:51] Bob Dobbs: it should be genes there because they're going to flip into the galaxy of virtual reality,

[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: which is the galaxy of memes.

[2:01:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:01:58] Cameron McEwen: but

[2:02:00] Cameron McEwen: I think your insight,

[2:02:04] Cameron McEwen: as I understand it,

[2:02:05] Cameron McEwen: is that genes were always memes.

[2:02:12] Cameron McEwen: And so what is told by Darwin in evolutionary history is actually a history of memes.

[2:02:24] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:02:25] Bob Dobbs: and that idea of,

[2:02:32] Bob Dobbs: before a speech there was,

[2:02:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:02:33] Bob Dobbs: page 23 of Counterblast,

[2:02:37] Bob Dobbs: mental gesture.

[2:02:39] Bob Dobbs: Non-verbal mental gesture is his definition of ESP.

[2:02:43] Bob Dobbs: Mental gesture is memes.

[2:02:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:02:48] Bob Dobbs: The earlier condition was a level of thought,

[2:02:53] Bob Dobbs: whatever thought was.

[2:02:55] Bob Dobbs: And I'm saying it's like people making memes.

[2:02:59] Bob Dobbs: So remember,

[2:02:59] Bob Dobbs: they're splashing memes all over the place now on Instagram.

[2:03:03] Bob Dobbs: And the kids talk about this,

[2:03:05] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[2:03:06] Bob Dobbs: They look for memes.

[2:03:06] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:03:08] Cameron McEwen: That's why...

[2:03:10] Cameron McEwen: earlier I said that you could replace ocean with language.

[2:03:15] Cameron McEwen: You just said they were splashing memes,

[2:03:18] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:03:19] Cameron McEwen: So that's the ocean of language.

[2:03:21] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:03:21] Bob Dobbs: So colonies of genes warp jump into the virtual reality.

[2:03:29] Bob Dobbs: That could be memes because

[2:03:32] Bob Dobbs: I'm also talking about the post-meme zone of the tech body.

[2:03:37] Bob Dobbs: So...

[2:03:38] Bob Dobbs: It could be both colonies of genes and then also colonies of memes.

[2:03:43] Bob Dobbs: This is a time of primordial genetic rocketry,

[2:03:46] Bob Dobbs: or memic rocketry,

[2:03:47] Bob Dobbs: in which memes suddenly accelerated into orbit around their previous liquid station in plotting human bodies.

[2:03:54] Bob Dobbs: So the liquid station was the environment of the plotting human bodies.

[2:04:00] Bob Dobbs: That's the past image,

[2:04:01] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:04:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:04:04] Bob Dobbs: It's not about today.

[2:04:06] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:04:07] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.

[2:04:07] Cameron McEwen: You see,

[2:04:08] Cameron McEwen: that's...

[2:04:08] Cameron McEwen: That's our traditional difference as regards time.

[2:04:12] Cameron McEwen: But what I see being said here is that this is a time,

[2:04:20] Cameron McEwen: right,

[2:04:20] Cameron McEwen: of primordial memetic rocketry in which memes suddenly are accelerated into orbit.

[2:04:29] Cameron McEwen: So what happens if memes are accelerated in this way is that you have the death of the word.

[2:04:38] Cameron McEwen: And the word considered as God on the cross is

[2:04:57] Cameron McEwen: the plotting human body is what dies in that circumstance.

[2:05:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:05:05] Bob Dobbs: now you said...

[2:05:07] Bob Dobbs: What were some words just before that last sentence?

[2:05:10] Bob Dobbs: You said plotting and before that.

[2:05:13] Cameron McEwen: The meme escaping language.

[2:05:16] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:05:18] Cameron McEwen: And by the way,

[2:05:19] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,

[2:05:19] Cameron McEwen: around 1968,

[2:05:26] Cameron McEwen: between 68 and maybe 72,

[2:05:28] Cameron McEwen: 73,

[2:05:29] Cameron McEwen: he talks all the time about going beyond language.

[2:05:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:05:34] Cameron McEwen: That's something that needs thought.

[2:05:37] Cameron McEwen: It's a very difficult part of his career,

[2:05:42] Cameron McEwen: I think.

[2:05:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:05:43] Bob Dobbs: and I remember what I wanted to say.

[2:05:46] Bob Dobbs: Joyce had the phrase,

[2:05:47] Bob Dobbs: abnihilisation of the etym.

[2:05:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:05:50] Bob Dobbs: exactly.

[2:05:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:05:52] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:05:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:05:55] Bob Dobbs: So that's what McLuhan was working on in the late

[2:05:57] Bob Dobbs: 60s, you're saying.

[2:05:59] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[2:05:59] Cameron McEwen: he talks about that a lot in the

[2:06:02] Cameron McEwen: Playboy interview.

[2:06:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:06:05] Bob Dobbs: This is a time of primordial genetic rocketry in which,

[2:06:08] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:06:08] Bob Dobbs: primordial memic rocketry in which memes suddenly accelerate into orbit around their previous liquid station,

[2:06:15] Bob Dobbs: imploding human bodies which had genes.

[2:06:18] Bob Dobbs: A new stellar history of TV memes,

[2:06:21] Bob Dobbs: recombinant shopping,

[2:06:23] Bob Dobbs: war meiosis,

[2:06:24] Bob Dobbs: meme nostalgia,

[2:06:26] Bob Dobbs: what molecular biologists call inversion,

[2:06:28] Bob Dobbs: and advertising mimesis is at hand.

[2:06:32] Bob Dobbs: So then

[2:06:33] Bob Dobbs: I say,

[2:06:34] Bob Dobbs: you see the genes parasited in that novel,

[2:06:37] Bob Dobbs: even cowgirls get the blues by Tom Robbins.

[2:06:39] Bob Dobbs: It shows the amoeba riding evolution from the beginning to the end.

[2:06:43] Bob Dobbs: Now I would make that memes.

[2:06:45] Bob Dobbs: Kroker's got the memes just riding along.

[2:06:48] Bob Dobbs: Finally they realize this chemical body's a dead end,

[2:06:50] Bob Dobbs: and they warp jump to another dimension and go right into the memic grids.

[2:06:54] Bob Dobbs: It's the warp jump from the Android meme to the tech body.

[2:06:58] Bob Dobbs: And why shouldn't memes go cybernetic?

[2:07:01] Bob Dobbs: They have always existed at the forefront of virtual,

[2:07:04] Bob Dobbs: of the memic.

[2:07:07] Bob Dobbs: But,

[2:07:07] Bob Dobbs: see,

[2:07:07] Bob Dobbs: you've got to include the genes sometimes in here.

[2:07:10] Bob Dobbs: They have always existed,

[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: the genes,

[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: at the forefront of memic reality.

[2:07:14] Bob Dobbs: Mutants,

[2:07:15] Bob Dobbs: replicators,

[2:07:15] Bob Dobbs: cloning,

[2:07:16] Bob Dobbs: viral genes or memes.

[2:07:18] Bob Dobbs: Perhaps we have already,

[2:07:19] Bob Dobbs: because I'm overlaying two steps here.

[2:07:23] Bob Dobbs: Perhaps we have already moved beyond the first stage of the exteriorization of the human sensorium.

[2:07:28] Bob Dobbs: So he's picking up on the two steps.

[2:07:31] Bob Dobbs: The externalization of the human nervous system,

[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: now that would be analog media,

[2:07:35] Bob Dobbs: and are now entering the second and more decisive phase,

[2:07:37] Bob Dobbs: which consists of actually flipping the body inside out,

[2:07:41] Bob Dobbs: that's going digital,

[2:07:42] Bob Dobbs: the exteriorization of human mimic history.

[2:07:45] Bob Dobbs: In this case,

[2:07:46] Bob Dobbs: technologies of communication would be the means by which memes escape their long evolutionary imprisonment in the body,

[2:07:52] Bob Dobbs: or in the gene,

[2:07:53] Bob Dobbs: and inscribe themselves in the labyrinthine electronic highways of recombinant culture.

[2:07:59] Bob Dobbs: The primal gene,

[2:08:00] Bob Dobbs: or meme,

[2:08:01] Bob Dobbs: therefore,

[2:08:02] Bob Dobbs: finally prepared to abandon its evolutionary home in bodily chemistry to fulfill its destiny by going virtual,

[2:08:09] Bob Dobbs: which is memic,

[2:08:10] Bob Dobbs: and then a quite psychopathic memic.

[2:08:14] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[2:08:14] Bob Dobbs: you have to look at...

[2:08:16] Cameron McEwen: I don't think genes need to be thought of there as a ground,

[2:08:23] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:08:23] Cameron McEwen: bodily chemistry.

[2:08:25] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:08:26] Cameron McEwen: the ground can be taken as language.

[2:08:29] Cameron McEwen: So the primal meme,

[2:08:31] Cameron McEwen: therefore,

[2:08:32] Cameron McEwen: finally prepared to abandon its evolutionary home in language to fulfill its destiny by going virtual.

[2:08:40] Cameron McEwen: So it's memes going beyond language.

[2:08:45] Cameron McEwen: Language gives birth to memes,

[2:08:47] Cameron McEwen: but memes then kill language.

[2:08:49] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:08:51] Cameron McEwen: And what happens at the end of that process,

[2:08:56] Cameron McEwen: we don't know.

[2:08:57] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:08:57] Bob Dobbs: Now...

[2:09:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:09:06] Bob Dobbs: so then I sum it up by saying,

[2:09:09] Bob Dobbs: as we move into the more extreme case of the present cloned ESP environment and the tech body,

[2:09:15] Bob Dobbs: perhaps Finnegans Wake will stay the course as the non-now echoes Frank Zappa's concept of xenochrony.

[2:09:23] Bob Dobbs: So that's new for you.

[2:09:25] Bob Dobbs: There are some new words.

[2:09:26] Bob Dobbs: Frank Zappa's,

[2:09:27] Bob Dobbs: well,

[2:09:27] Bob Dobbs: you know about the xenochrony,

[2:09:28] Bob Dobbs: but...

[2:09:29] Bob Dobbs: We're bringing in Zappa.

[2:09:30] Bob Dobbs: Then the early

[2:09:32] Bob Dobbs: 21st century can be perceived as a digital mobile phase,

[2:09:34] Bob Dobbs: a voluntary ESP,

[2:09:36] Bob Dobbs: a celebration of pinhead consciousness slash intelligence rather than simply disconnected tactile intelligence.

[2:09:44] Bob Dobbs: That's what de Kerckhove used to call it in the 90s,

[2:09:46] Bob Dobbs: connected intelligence.

[2:09:49] Bob Dobbs: But that's the analog merging.

[2:09:54] Bob Dobbs: So more and more disconnected.

[2:09:57] Bob Dobbs: It leads to pinhead consciousness.

[2:09:59] Bob Dobbs: That means very little chemical body willfulness.

[2:10:05] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:10:06] Bob Dobbs: the kids don't even want to work.

[2:10:09] Bob Dobbs: They can't work anymore.

[2:10:11] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:10:13] Bob Dobbs: I think we should end it there.

[2:10:17] Bob Dobbs: It's quite a big thing,

[2:10:18] Bob Dobbs: but I'm really glad we got to the tech body.

[2:10:22] Bob Dobbs: Getting out of the Android meme,

[2:10:24] Bob Dobbs: which is what I was trying to say.

[2:10:26] Bob Dobbs: Because I talked about the Android meme for 20 years before this,

[2:10:30] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to say we're beyond the Android meme,

[2:10:33] Bob Dobbs: somehow.

[2:10:35] Bob Dobbs: Now we're getting there.

[2:10:37] Bob Dobbs: So it's a very good,

[2:10:38] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[2:10:39] Bob Dobbs: I'm glad I read Kroker to have this quote to stick it in here to show how extreme it is.

[2:10:46] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[2:10:46] Bob Dobbs: anybody just reading this normally,

[2:10:48] Bob Dobbs: what,

[2:10:48] Bob Dobbs: our genes have left our bodies?

[2:10:50] Bob Dobbs: That's what he's basically saying,

[2:10:52] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:10:52] Bob Dobbs: What?

[2:10:53] Bob Dobbs: How could that happen?

[2:10:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:10:55] Bob Dobbs: He has another place,

[2:10:57] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I have a quote earlier,

[2:10:58] Bob Dobbs: where the genes,

[2:11:00] Bob Dobbs: they just dump the body and go into outer space or virtual reality.

[2:11:08] Bob Dobbs: They cast aside the body,

[2:11:11] Bob Dobbs: the chemical body.

[2:11:12] Cameron McEwen: We have to be careful about using words like they as if a gene were a kind of thing that the thing.

[2:11:25] Cameron McEwen: learns how to live sort of like in a satellite or something,

[2:11:32] Cameron McEwen: but remains the thing.

[2:11:36] Bob Dobbs: Did you say meme?

[2:11:38] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:11:38] Cameron McEwen: gene.

[2:11:39] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:11:40] Bob Dobbs: the gene.

[2:11:40] Cameron McEwen: A gene is not a quote-unquote physical bodily thing that learns how to live in a space capsule.

[2:11:49] Cameron McEwen: Rather,

[2:11:50] Cameron McEwen: what escapes is the form of the gene.

[2:11:55] Cameron McEwen: So the gene is an embodiment of a digital form.

[2:12:01] Cameron McEwen: And when the digital form becomes conscious of itself,

[2:12:07] Cameron McEwen: It then has the possibility of living in a completely different environment of its own.

[2:12:15] Cameron McEwen: It doesn't need the environment of the gene anymore.

[2:12:19] Cameron McEwen: So the escape of the gene is actually the escape of the form of the gene.

[2:12:25] Bob Dobbs: That would be the meme.

[2:12:27] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:12:29] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[2:12:30] Bob Dobbs: Very good.

[2:12:30] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:12:34] Bob Dobbs: if we read a little more.

[2:12:36] Bob Dobbs: I won't be able to think about it,

[2:12:38] Bob Dobbs: but just to read...

[2:12:39] Bob Dobbs: What do you think of me reading a little bit more?

[2:12:42] Bob Dobbs: Maybe

[2:12:43] Bob Dobbs: I will have...

[2:12:44] Cameron McEwen: I thought you were saying that maybe you had to leave to do something else or something.

[2:12:49] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:12:49] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:12:49] Bob Dobbs: soon,

[2:12:50] Bob Dobbs: but I still have time.

[2:12:51] Bob Dobbs: But I'm just wondering,

[2:12:52] Bob Dobbs: there's a lot of stuff here.

[2:12:54] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I want to go through it.

[2:12:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:12:57] Cameron McEwen: I understand.

[2:13:00] Cameron McEwen: We've reached a very good point.

[2:13:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:13:02] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:13:03] Cameron McEwen: I...

[2:13:05] Cameron McEwen: Personally,

[2:13:08] Cameron McEwen: I really was somewhat confused by the whole

[2:13:13] Cameron McEwen: AMAP dark tech body.

[2:13:21] Cameron McEwen: And

[2:13:22] Cameron McEwen: I'm beginning to understand how these things kind of flip together.

[2:13:29] Bob Dobbs: Great.

[2:13:31] Bob Dobbs: You know that Kroker in a recent book,

[2:13:33] Bob Dobbs: Well...

[2:13:34] Bob Dobbs: eight years ago or something he he created the dark tetrad did you hear about that yeah i know the phrase yeah yeah well we'll have to go over the dark i may have it at the end of this essay i can't remember um but we might have to go into that a little bit if even

[2:13:50] Bob Dobbs: if i didn't include it because it's interesting what he does uh we're describing like you said the two darks the dark squared um the gene leaving the body is like a darkness

[2:14:03] Bob Dobbs: It goes into another darkness,

[2:14:04] Bob Dobbs: the mimic.

[2:14:06] Bob Dobbs: So that's what we've done to ourselves.

[2:14:10] Bob Dobbs: So I just want to read a little bit more about,

[2:14:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm interested in how I bring Zappa in here.

[2:14:16] Bob Dobbs: As we move into the more,

[2:14:17] Bob Dobbs: this is the top of 164.

[2:14:20] Bob Dobbs: As we move into the more extreme,

[2:14:21] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:14:22] Bob Dobbs: and the Tiny Note chart is,

[2:14:24] Bob Dobbs: the ground of the Tiny Note chart,

[2:14:26] Bob Dobbs: a lot of it is Zappa's ideas,

[2:14:28] Bob Dobbs: okay?

[2:14:30] Bob Dobbs: Like the Grand Wazoo,

[2:14:31] Bob Dobbs: Xenochrony.

[2:14:32] Bob Dobbs: and the Tiny Note are Zappa terms.

[2:14:38] Bob Dobbs: So as we move into the more extreme case of the present cloned ESP environment and the tech body,

[2:14:44] Bob Dobbs: perhaps Finnegans Wake will stay the course as the non-now,

[2:14:47] Bob Dobbs: we don't have a now anymore,

[2:14:51] Bob Dobbs: echoes what's this?

[2:14:54] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:14:55] Bob Dobbs: perhaps Finnegans Wake will stay the course as the non-now echoes Zappa's concept of xenochrony.

[2:15:01] Bob Dobbs: The early

[2:15:02] Bob Dobbs: 21st century can be perceived as a digital mobile phase of voluntary ESP.

[2:15:07] Bob Dobbs: See,

[2:15:07] Bob Dobbs: there's more and more detachments,

[2:15:08] Bob Dobbs: not the beehive.

[2:15:10] Bob Dobbs: You can engage in the digital matrix at any time you want to and get out of it,

[2:15:18] Bob Dobbs: or the environment makes you think you can get out of it.

[2:15:21] Bob Dobbs: It didn't have that in

[2:15:22] Bob Dobbs: Web

[2:15:24] Bob Dobbs: 1.0.

[2:15:25] Bob Dobbs: You were stuck inside the conditioning of that.

[2:15:30] Bob Dobbs: simpler internet environment.

[2:15:33] Bob Dobbs: So the early 21st century can be perceived as the digital mobile phase of voluntary ESP,

[2:15:41] Bob Dobbs: a celebration of pinhead consciousness,

[2:15:44] Bob Dobbs: intelligence,

[2:15:45] Bob Dobbs: rather than simply disconnected tactile intelligence.

[2:15:50] Bob Dobbs: In this complex culture of tactility in extremists,

[2:15:55] Bob Dobbs: see Frank Zappa's musical concepts,

[2:15:57] Bob Dobbs: we've witnessed the phrase

[2:15:59] Bob Dobbs: Artificial slash virtual intelligence loses charisma.

[2:16:02] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty interesting.

[2:16:05] Bob Dobbs: Quite a mysterious and devastating implication that nobody was expecting from the global theater era,

[2:16:11] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.

[2:16:12] Bob Dobbs: The greatest disservice that was foreseen was the evocation of desperation and urgency in national,

[2:16:18] Bob Dobbs: tribal,

[2:16:18] Bob Dobbs: and personal identity quests that created a more violent mood in the 70s and 80s.

[2:16:22] Bob Dobbs: See,

[2:16:22] Bob Dobbs: mind your media,

[2:16:23] Bob Dobbs: man,

[2:16:23] Bob Dobbs: or you'll catch a cold environment.

[2:16:27] Bob Dobbs: Then I say...

[2:16:30] Bob Dobbs: Back at the bar,

[2:16:31] Bob Dobbs: to have a social identity,

[2:16:33] Bob Dobbs: it's almost like I'm pontificating in the bar,

[2:16:35] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:16:35] Bob Dobbs: I'm getting drunker and trying to dominate the conversation.

[2:16:41] Bob Dobbs: To have a social identity,

[2:16:42] Bob Dobbs: you have to have violence.

[2:16:44] Bob Dobbs: You are a fascist.

[2:16:45] Bob Dobbs: You impose it on society.

[2:16:46] Bob Dobbs: I'm taking the cliché idea that power is aggressive.

[2:16:50] Bob Dobbs: You maintain your socially aggressive power if you want to have an identity.

[2:16:54] Bob Dobbs: Establishing an identity is an act of violence.

[2:16:56] Bob Dobbs: Becoming literate is a violent act.

[2:16:58] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[2:16:59] Bob Dobbs: in one of his books From Cliché to Archetype,

[2:17:01] Bob Dobbs: quotes people fearing the literate back in the

[2:17:04] Bob Dobbs: 1400s. Quote,

[2:17:05] Bob Dobbs: Joseph Frank discusses Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead in terms which gives...

[2:17:10] Bob Dobbs: stark iconic force of the division between the literate and illiterate classes in a feudal society.

[2:17:15] Bob Dobbs: To the peasant,

[2:17:17] Bob Dobbs: the literate man is armored.

[2:17:18] Bob Dobbs: Quote,

[2:17:19] Bob Dobbs: you gentry,

[2:17:20] Bob Dobbs: iron beaks,

[2:17:21] Bob Dobbs: you devoured us.

[2:17:23] Bob Dobbs: So that's the billiard ball of visual space that the oral tactile peasant is pissed off about.

[2:17:31] Bob Dobbs: Now then,

[2:17:32] Bob Dobbs: I'm thinking of this quote,

[2:17:33] Bob Dobbs: so I include it.

[2:17:35] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said,

[2:17:36] Bob Dobbs: in Take Today,

[2:17:37] Bob Dobbs: the maintenance of social power is in fact you

[2:17:39] Bob Dobbs: the manifestation of social identity.

[2:17:43] Bob Dobbs: So that's another level.

[2:17:45] Bob Dobbs: See,

[2:17:45] Bob Dobbs: that's the violence of the chemical body in the

[2:17:50] Bob Dobbs: 60s, the culture wars of that level,

[2:17:56] Bob Dobbs: are one kind of identity quest.

[2:18:01] Bob Dobbs: But now you have the endless processing.

[2:18:04] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I got to say this.

[2:18:07] Bob Dobbs: In the TV body and chip body,

[2:18:08] Bob Dobbs: you have to endlessly stay in touch and process it and maybe participate,

[2:18:13] Bob Dobbs: but at least be aware of it because it doesn't stop.

[2:18:17] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[2:18:17] Cameron McEwen: and it can't stop because what is at issue is identity.

[2:18:24] Cameron McEwen: So the question of identity cannot be solved by the application of identity.

[2:18:35] Cameron McEwen: So the very...

[2:18:36] Cameron McEwen: the very thing that would say,

[2:18:40] Cameron McEwen: now I have it,

[2:18:42] Cameron McEwen: is destroyed because the now and the

[2:18:47] Cameron McEwen: I and the have and the it are all what's in question.

[2:18:53] Bob Dobbs: And the we.

[2:18:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:18:55] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:18:57] Cameron McEwen: when you say the maintenance,

[2:18:58] Cameron McEwen: or when you quote McLuhan,

[2:18:59] Cameron McEwen: the maintenance of social power is,

[2:19:01] Cameron McEwen: in fact,

[2:19:01] Cameron McEwen: the manifestation of social identity.

[2:19:04] Cameron McEwen: the individual human.

[2:19:06] Cameron McEwen: discovers himself,

[2:19:08] Cameron McEwen: especially in psychoanalysis in 1900,

[2:19:11] Cameron McEwen: discovers himself as a social being internally.

[2:19:16] Cameron McEwen: Every human being is many people at once.

[2:19:19] Cameron McEwen: And so the maintenance of social power,

[2:19:24] Cameron McEwen: that is to say the maintenance of a coherent social identity of the individual,

[2:19:30] Cameron McEwen: is in fact a manifestation of social identity,

[2:19:33] Cameron McEwen: is in fact a manifestation of...

[2:19:36] Cameron McEwen: of individual violence imposing that social identity.

[2:19:41] Cameron McEwen: So then human beings say,

[2:19:43] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:19:45] Cameron McEwen: if what

[2:19:46] Cameron McEwen: I am is a violent coagulation of identities,

[2:19:57] Cameron McEwen: how can I be an individual?

[2:20:01] Cameron McEwen: I can't be an individual anymore.

[2:20:03] Cameron McEwen: Therefore,

[2:20:03] Cameron McEwen: I can't be an I anymore.

[2:20:05] Cameron McEwen: Therefore,

[2:20:06] Cameron McEwen: I'm exploded.

[2:20:08] Cameron McEwen: And all of human life becomes either the manifestation of explosion or the futile attempt to cage the explosion.

[2:20:21] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:20:22] Bob Dobbs: And so I say the violence today is at a rapid,

[2:20:29] Bob Dobbs: constant perceptual consumption.

[2:20:32] Bob Dobbs: So it's just a meme.

[2:20:34] Bob Dobbs: People's identity are whatever the meme means to them and how people use it.

[2:20:39] Bob Dobbs: That's a temporary identity.

[2:20:41] Bob Dobbs: And it's just a meme.

[2:20:42] Bob Dobbs: It's not your age,

[2:20:43] Bob Dobbs: your religion and chemical body stuff.

[2:20:46] Bob Dobbs: It is this ethereal,

[2:20:48] Bob Dobbs: ephemeral,

[2:20:49] Bob Dobbs: ridiculous,

[2:20:51] Bob Dobbs: constant mutating situation that has,

[2:20:56] Bob Dobbs: there's no

[2:20:57] Bob Dobbs: I in it.

[2:20:58] Bob Dobbs: There's no we.

[2:20:59] Bob Dobbs: So that is the machine doing it itself.

[2:21:02] Bob Dobbs: And we're trying to bring it back to ourselves,

[2:21:04] Bob Dobbs: so we're bringing the idea of meme,

[2:21:06] Bob Dobbs: but the meme-ic is not involved with us.

[2:21:09] Bob Dobbs: We're engaged,

[2:21:10] Bob Dobbs: we are watching it have its identity crisis in which meme it's going to land on.

[2:21:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:21:18] Bob Dobbs: Did I go too far?

[2:21:19] Bob Dobbs: You got it?

[2:21:20] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:21:21] Cameron McEwen: I think that's absolutely right.

[2:21:23] Cameron McEwen: That's more or less what we've been talking about all morning.

[2:21:26] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[2:21:28] Cameron McEwen: there is an

[2:21:40] Cameron McEwen: that call into question the process of selecting possibilities and manifesting them,

[2:21:49] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:21:50] Cameron McEwen: So that's,

[2:21:52] Cameron McEwen: because human beings are a selection of possibilities and a manifestation of them,

[2:21:58] Cameron McEwen: when that becomes exploded,

[2:22:01] Cameron McEwen: human identity,

[2:22:02] Cameron McEwen: human history,

[2:22:03] Cameron McEwen: everything becomes exploded at the same time.

[2:22:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:22:07] Bob Dobbs: and you're talking,

[2:22:08] Bob Dobbs: what was the first?

[2:22:09] Bob Dobbs: part of what you were saying.

[2:22:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm stuck on the idea that the memic is a big part of the AP.

[2:22:22] Bob Dobbs: People temporarily project into the meme and do something with it,

[2:22:25] Bob Dobbs: and then that disappears,

[2:22:27] Bob Dobbs: and then the next meme shows up.

[2:22:29] Bob Dobbs: But it's this ethereal nothingness of abstract ideas or memes,

[2:22:35] Bob Dobbs: whatever they are,

[2:22:35] Bob Dobbs: they're images.

[2:22:37] Bob Dobbs: The rapidity of thought,

[2:22:39] Bob Dobbs: in a way,

[2:22:40] Bob Dobbs: that's going on.

[2:22:42] Bob Dobbs: That's where people are being super violent today.

[2:22:46] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[2:22:46] Cameron McEwen: So,

[2:22:47] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:22:48] Cameron McEwen: what you call these immaterial,

[2:22:53] Cameron McEwen: dynamic entities,

[2:22:54] Cameron McEwen: that's the unconscious,

[2:22:55] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:22:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:22:56] Cameron McEwen: So human beings are faced with their unconscious.

[2:23:05] Cameron McEwen: in a way that calls human being into question.

[2:23:10] Bob Dobbs: It might even be beyond that.

[2:23:12] Bob Dobbs: We are,

[2:23:14] Bob Dobbs: can't,

[2:23:15] Bob Dobbs: we,

[2:23:16] Bob Dobbs: the question is gone,

[2:23:17] Bob Dobbs: you've gone,

[2:23:18] Bob Dobbs: and now you participate in the Mimic,

[2:23:21] Bob Dobbs: which is processing news.

[2:23:26] Bob Dobbs: And we keep thinking of disastrous chemical body outcomes of that,

[2:23:32] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:23:32] Bob Dobbs: nuclear war or plagues and stuff.

[2:23:35] Bob Dobbs: And that seems to be secondary.

[2:23:39] Bob Dobbs: The battle and the

[2:23:41] Bob Dobbs: Armageddon is in the realm of thought and meme and seeing how much you can engage in it.

[2:23:48] Cameron McEwen: So that goes back to the Gigantomachia and the Sophist and Plato,

[2:23:54] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:23:55] Cameron McEwen: It's the battle of the gods and the giants.

[2:23:58] Cameron McEwen: It's far beyond humans.

[2:24:02] Bob Dobbs: Good point.

[2:24:03] Cameron McEwen: It's a battle that's autonomous.

[2:24:05] Cameron McEwen: Between forces that are greater than us.

[2:24:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:24:09] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:24:10] Bob Dobbs: so...

[2:24:12] Cameron McEwen: And you call that the Civil War of Media.

[2:24:14] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:24:15] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:24:15] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan did.

[2:24:17] Bob Dobbs: I quote him.

[2:24:18] Bob Dobbs: I parrot him.

[2:24:19] Bob Dobbs: But media and them are too solid now.

[2:24:22] Bob Dobbs: They're old landscapes.

[2:24:24] Bob Dobbs: It's the Civil War of

[2:24:25] Bob Dobbs: Thought.

[2:24:27] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[2:24:28] Bob Dobbs: just think of Julian Huxley and these guys in the 19th century that were...

[2:24:32] Bob Dobbs: They started saying,

[2:24:32] Bob Dobbs: we've got to educate the worker,

[2:24:34] Bob Dobbs: make the worker literate.

[2:24:35] Bob Dobbs: And their whole education in night classes they started to get into,

[2:24:40] Bob Dobbs: to get people thinking,

[2:24:41] Bob Dobbs: they thought.

[2:24:43] Bob Dobbs: And then maybe in the 20th century people started to think more,

[2:24:47] Bob Dobbs: they had more time.

[2:24:49] Bob Dobbs: They weren't hassled by labor all the time.

[2:24:52] Bob Dobbs: But no one saw that the thoughts would become a violent landscape of battle.

[2:24:58] Bob Dobbs: with the rapidity of turnover.

[2:25:00] Bob Dobbs: Maybe that's what Finnegans Wake is showing,

[2:25:02] Bob Dobbs: though.

[2:25:03] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.

[2:25:05] Cameron McEwen: You could think of the schools for

[2:25:08] Cameron McEwen: Native Americans in those terms.

[2:25:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:25:11] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:25:11] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:25:11] Cameron McEwen: They were going to be taught how to think,

[2:25:13] Cameron McEwen: which meant they were going to be ripped out of one type of thinking and put into another type.

[2:25:20] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:25:20] Cameron McEwen: Or maybe put into another type.

[2:25:23] Cameron McEwen: And now that process has come home to roost.

[2:25:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:25:28] Cameron McEwen: See you.

[2:25:29] Cameron McEwen: The inherent war has become explicit.

[2:25:33] Bob Dobbs: But they are subject,

[2:25:35] Bob Dobbs: like all cultures,

[2:25:36] Bob Dobbs: to the mimic battle,

[2:25:37] Bob Dobbs: the battle of thought,

[2:25:39] Cameron McEwen: where culture doesn't get solidified.

[2:25:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:25:44] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[2:25:44] Cameron McEwen: I think what you're calling mimic battle is nothing else but the unconscious.

[2:25:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:25:50] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:25:50] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:25:50] Bob Dobbs: that was another thing.

[2:25:51] Bob Dobbs: There's such a rapidity of thought.

[2:25:55] Bob Dobbs: That's the environment,

[2:25:56] Bob Dobbs: the ground.

[2:25:57] Bob Dobbs: that,

[2:25:58] Bob Dobbs: or maybe percepts,

[2:26:00] Bob Dobbs: that suddenly shows up as an image that expresses it.

[2:26:04] Bob Dobbs: Now we're conscious of it.

[2:26:05] Bob Dobbs: That's the meme,

[2:26:07] Bob Dobbs: the icon that starts sailing about.

[2:26:10] Bob Dobbs: Then we're going to be unconscious.

[2:26:13] Bob Dobbs: It will flip back into an unconscious,

[2:26:14] Bob Dobbs: and then we wait for that meme to show up.

[2:26:16] Bob Dobbs: But you go through this in a two-month period.

[2:26:19] Bob Dobbs: You go through five unconsciouses of dropping into it and then dropping out of it.

[2:26:26] Bob Dobbs: It was an amazing turnover of experience.

[2:26:29] Bob Dobbs: It's not even experience.

[2:26:30] Bob Dobbs: It's very not now.

[2:26:36] Bob Dobbs: There's no present to tune into.

[2:26:41] Bob Dobbs: Other than the meme of the moment,

[2:26:42] Bob Dobbs: but that disappears pretty quickly.

[2:26:44] Bob Dobbs: So the violence of expression that's going on is pretty incredible.

[2:26:51] Bob Dobbs: The violence of expression.

[2:26:54] Cameron McEwen: Notice the title,

[2:26:55] Cameron McEwen: Take Today.

[2:26:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:26:57] Cameron McEwen: So in what you were just describing as the disappearance of the present,

[2:27:03] Cameron McEwen: there's one reading of Take Today.

[2:27:05] Cameron McEwen: But another reading of Take Today is...

[2:27:09] Cameron McEwen: recapture the present.

[2:27:12] Cameron McEwen: So the question is,

[2:27:14] Cameron McEwen: how can the extreme violence and extreme dynamics of time into which we have been projected,

[2:27:25] Cameron McEwen: how can human beings in that find what Pound called the unwobbling pivot?

[2:27:32] Cameron McEwen: And

[2:27:35] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan represents one attempt.

[2:27:40] Cameron McEwen: to kind of achieve the required reorientation.

[2:27:46] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[2:27:47] Bob Dobbs: And then my upstart lateral experience is to create something practical,

[2:27:56] Bob Dobbs: as we discussed last week.

[2:27:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:28:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:28:00] Bob Dobbs: the new hardware.

[2:28:02] Bob Dobbs: Because it's software in extremis,

[2:28:06] Bob Dobbs: the Mimic world.

[2:28:08] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:28:09] Bob Dobbs: But,

[2:28:10] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:28:10] Bob Dobbs: it's like,

[2:28:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:28:13] Bob Dobbs: we'll talk,

[2:28:13] Bob Dobbs: maybe we won't talk next week,

[2:28:15] Bob Dobbs: it's Thanksgiving,

[2:28:15] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what will happen.

[2:28:17] Bob Dobbs: But just think of the rapidity,

[2:28:22] Bob Dobbs: when we meet again,

[2:28:23] Bob Dobbs: of what will have passed through.

[2:28:25] Bob Dobbs: There'll be a couple of,

[2:28:27] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[2:28:27] Bob Dobbs: fads or memes that have gotten attention and then dropped off.

[2:28:34] Bob Dobbs: Then another one will come up.

[2:28:36] Bob Dobbs: The rapidity of the turnover is amazing.

[2:28:38] Bob Dobbs: So that's...

[2:28:39] Bob Dobbs: you go back to page 31 yeah the rapid he talks about the environment as the unconscious the archetypes of the social unconscious and an ersatz anti-environment is a rapid series of innovations I think that's the phrase remember that the ersatz

[2:29:01] Bob Dobbs: anti-environment can't be an anti-environment anymore though we are trying to get our talk ourselves into one

[2:29:09] Bob Dobbs: some kind of involved attachment.

[2:29:15] Bob Dobbs: A rapid series of innovations is an ersatz anti-environment.

[2:29:20] Bob Dobbs: So it's not a rapid series of memes.

[2:29:24] Bob Dobbs: It's an ersatz.

[2:29:25] Bob Dobbs: It gives the impression of an anti-environment.

[2:29:29] Bob Dobbs: But it's ersatz.

[2:29:31] Bob Dobbs: The name is staying power.

[2:29:32] Bob Dobbs: Remember that quote?

[2:29:34] Bob Dobbs: I've quoted it before.

[2:29:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:29:36] Bob Dobbs: So.

[2:29:38] Bob Dobbs: The turnover is amazing.

[2:29:40] Bob Dobbs: So how to get a state of calm in the middle of that,

[2:29:45] Bob Dobbs: that's the new paramedic yoga.

[2:29:48] Bob Dobbs: How do you do that?

[2:29:50] Bob Dobbs: Where do you go to meditate?

[2:29:51] Bob Dobbs: Or what do you meditate on?

[2:29:54] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:29:54] Cameron McEwen: And who does it?

[2:29:56] Bob Dobbs: Who doesn't?

[2:29:58] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:29:58] Cameron McEwen: who does it?

[2:30:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:30:00] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:30:02] Cameron McEwen: The captain has left the ship.

[2:30:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:30:09] Bob Dobbs: It's a rather depressing prospect there,

[2:30:12] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.

[2:30:14] Bob Dobbs: That was a joke.

[2:30:16] Bob Dobbs: I don't get depressed.

[2:30:17] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:30:20] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:30:21] Bob Dobbs: remember that Robin Williams movie?

[2:30:24] Bob Dobbs: He was a poet.

[2:30:25] Bob Dobbs: The Poet Society,

[2:30:26] Bob Dobbs: I think it was called.

[2:30:27] Bob Dobbs: He was a teacher.

[2:30:29] Cameron McEwen: The Dead Poet Society.

[2:30:31] Bob Dobbs: The what?

[2:30:32] Cameron McEwen: Dead Poet.

[2:30:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:30:34] Bob Dobbs: And the kids would say,

[2:30:35] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[2:30:36] Bob Dobbs: Captain,

[2:30:36] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[2:30:36] Bob Dobbs: Captain.

[2:30:39] Cameron McEwen: I don't think I saw the movie.

[2:30:41] Cameron McEwen: I just know what you're talking about.

[2:30:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:30:44] Bob Dobbs: I'm just thinking,

[2:30:45] Bob Dobbs: if I saw it again,

[2:30:46] Bob Dobbs: do they deal with the captain disappearing?

[2:30:49] Bob Dobbs: Probably not.

[2:30:52] Bob Dobbs: And that's the

[2:30:53] Bob Dobbs: Norwegian captain in Finnegans Wake,

[2:30:55] Bob Dobbs: who's a variation probably on

[2:30:57] Bob Dobbs: Earl Van Hoother,

[2:30:59] Bob Dobbs: that the Frank Queen comes up.

[2:31:01] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:31:01] Bob Dobbs: here's something really secret.

[2:31:02] Bob Dobbs: In McLuhan's copy of Skelton Key to Finnegans Wake,

[2:31:06] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:31:08] Bob Dobbs: he's...

[2:31:08] Bob Dobbs: He's reading Joseph Campbell.

[2:31:10] Bob Dobbs: That book is like one of the first attempts to explain Finnegans Wake in detail in 1943 or so.

[2:31:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:31:19] Bob Dobbs: very early.

[2:31:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:31:19] Bob Dobbs: they had the time during World War II to do it.

[2:31:24] Bob Dobbs: He says that Joseph Campbell doesn't understand the role of the Prank Queen,

[2:31:28] Bob Dobbs: which is the role of the phonetic alphabet,

[2:31:30] Bob Dobbs: I guess.

[2:31:31] Bob Dobbs: I think that's what he says.

[2:31:33] Bob Dobbs: So he probably would apply that to all the Joycean scholars.

[2:31:38] Bob Dobbs: who wrote books.

[2:31:39] Bob Dobbs: They don't get the role of the prank queen.

[2:31:42] Bob Dobbs: And so we come back to that quote,

[2:31:43] Bob Dobbs: why do I look like a possum porter piece?

[2:31:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:31:48] Bob Dobbs: Cameron,

[2:31:48] Bob Dobbs: why do you look like that?

[2:31:54] Bob Dobbs: What did you do to yourself?

[2:31:55] Cameron McEwen: I must have lost my mind.

[2:31:59] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:32:02] Bob Dobbs: I think we're finished for today.

[2:32:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:32:04] Cameron McEwen: good.

[2:32:05] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[2:32:05] Bob Dobbs: Thank you very much.

[2:32:06] Bob Dobbs: That was another pretty interesting exploration.

[2:32:08] Bob Dobbs: Thank you.

[2:32:09] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:32:10] Cameron McEwen: I began to see some things I didn't see before,

[2:32:14] Cameron McEwen: so I appreciate that.

[2:32:15] Bob Dobbs: That's great.

[2:32:16] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:32:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:32:17] Bob Dobbs: Talk to you soon.

[2:32:18] Bob Dobbs: Good luck.

[2:32:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:32:19] Bob Dobbs: bye.

[2:32:20] Cameron McEwen: Bye.