22 April 1992
For the past three years, cassette-culture guru Myke Dyer has been hosting bi-weekly fireside chats with Bob Dobbs. The program, “The Church Of The SubGenius,” can be heard around the Toronto vicinity on radio station CKLN 88.1 FM every other Wednesday at midnight.
In the past years, Bob has claimed everything from the death of JFK to direct contact with the Xists’ to being “the greatest artist alive today.” Whilst the claims are often wildly unfounded, the amount of information Bob has leaked into the media via the airwaves is tremendous. A re-broadcast of an interview done in Gerry Fialka’s backyard by David Porter for KPFK in October of 1988, featured Bob predicting the rise of Gorbachev, the decentralisation of the Soviet Empire and the subsequent reunification of the two Germanies. He also foretold the landing of alien spacecraft in Mongolia in June 89 as reported by Soviet news agency TASS, years before The Reverend Ivan Stang predicted it in his Book Of The Subgenius. That book, according to Bob, was written by Stang using the vast wealth of information that Bob had passed on in the late seventies. In 82, when Bob HAD to escape Dallas, Stang was forced to fake an assasination of Dobbs in order to explain Bob’s disappearance. The two of them even had a live Bob-off on CKLN where Stang refused to admit that this was the true Dobbs, tossing him off as just another ‘pink bobby’ so common on North American airwaves. Church matters aside, Bob knows how to wade through today’s swill of information overload to find the relevant and present it clearly and concisely every other week to a dedicated interacting audience. Among other things he’s been called a gifted con-man, a woman, a kook, but never anything ending with an ‘ism.’ Bob appeals to them all, the rights, the lefts, the fringe and the middle of the road. CSIS, Canada’s CIA, don’t know how to take him, and hopefully they never will.
Bob recently took time off from his busy schedule of running the Solar government twenty-two thousand miles off the planet, to speak with MONDO 2000 about media ecology, The Agenda, the 10 Holy Offices, and the Anti-Christ/Bob. The interview was conducted at Dobbstown headquarters and is the first interview to be published in an American magazine, and the third one done for the visual medium. Ready Pinks?
Bob-I want to show you the vault, just so you know what we’re dealing with. (we head downstairs)
MONDO 2000-Oh boy!
B-(laughter) giggles as he goes into the vault. The gold vault! (long and detailed tour through volumes of before and after Nazi Germany, Kennedy assasination, new left/counter culture, the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission, Mcluhan-the COMPLETE archive, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, Herbert W. Armstrong, Harold Innis, Cosmic Awareness, Zappa books and every clipping and Mother People magazine in existance, CIA-FBI corporate dirt, muck-raking, UFO fringe-kook, sixties underground comics, occult, shelves and shelves of Larouche literature, Art books, British and European Oligarchy, Mad Magazines, all the Dr. Beter transcripts and tapes, all the Mae Brussell tapes with indexes, twenty-first century science and technology and clippings, clippings, clippings…)
M-Oh boy. What is that? (pointing at a box marked glutamic acid)
B-That’s Connie’s medical stuff. (Connie is one of Canada’s leading medical researchers)
M- So you’re opening this up to the public?
B-Yeah, people can come in the backdoor, we’ll set up a little table where people can come in and listen to tapes, the five hundred Mae Brussels tapes, the eighty Dr. Beter tapes.
M-Somebody called up on the show last week about an article he read in a new age rag about the second coming, someone claiming to be the “World Teacher.”
B-Yeah, Yeah, Benjamin Creme and the Maitraya, The Messiah. He presented himself on April 22nd in London but the media didn’t cover it. He revealed himself on Earth Day.
M-Good timing.
B-Yeah but as the subgenius who called pointed out, its not important. His gig isn’t important compared to Bob, right? I mean the guy is still trying to act out anthropomorphic history.
M-What proof do you have that Gorbachev has all the Mcluhan archives?
B-(deleted for security reasons) has a personal letter from him. It says he’s been a fan for a long time. Don’t put that in the article, it’s not worth talking about. The important point is what I know, which is the tetrad knowledge and how its being used.
M-What are Bob’s goals?
B-To beat Gretzky one on one. To get more goals than he’s got.
M- yeah, yeah.
B-OK my goals are to explain the charts in the Perfect Pitch ((enclosed)) and to prove that they’re accurate.
M-How?
B-Through large mega-projects and using mixed corporate media (MCM) and various approaches and styles of use throughout my tenure on this planet. Mixed corporate media is the mass of technological environment that the secret council of ten, or the secret elites who manage the planet, move around to program the planet. Now it’s all subsumed in imagery, but the hardware of MCM has moved around so the only appropriate strategy of the artist is to mime the mixing of MCM and their sensory effects on populations. MCM as a technological artform is done by braintricks, skillfull people, trained technocrats, trained oligarchic agents who do this as a science. So the private individual role of the artist is subsumed and irrelevant to this. The only way a discarnate individual as an artist can mime what’s really going on in the techno-artform of the world is to play off MCM as a mirror-echo of what’s really going on. So that’s where you come to this thing. (points to chart) I have the major artists, Zappa, Mcluhan, Larouche and I throw in Burroughs and Beefheart but they’re not as major. Just to give you an example, Frank Zappa, he sculptures kinetic and accoustic space effects—kinetic being movie and car, accoustic you could say radio-via visual space bias. I’ve mixed up various modalities here, kinetic-visual, acoustic space modalities. Now the modern/real artist with perfect pitch has to sculpture his MCM echoes right? Sculpture is tactility which is the hidden ground of the electric age. Now Larouche, he sculptures kinetic and visual space (printed materials) via an accoustic space bias. His bias is his particular user as content tweezer-twitch on the sculpture effect. Now McLuhan, he sculptures kinetic, accoustic and visual space-all three effects via a tactile space bias. He’s the only one who has a real handle on the twentieth century.
M-How do you describe tactile space?
B-That’s the electric age. Tactile space is the space that interplays all the individual sensory inputs and creates a coherent sensation of consciousness. The sensory faculty in your central nervous system that interrelates all the data via those channels, you call that interplaying process tactility.
M- So you are applying that process to MCM.
B-Yeah, MCM is extensions of that. We have our privateness, we’ve extended all our private senses into corporate environments of the miming in our bodies. Electric age has extended the CNS which is a total sense, but it has various gradations, there’s different effects of radio, phone, computers, satellite and television. The bias of the electric is tactility, but that’s a hidden ground. Every culture filters through its particular cultural bias. The old tactile space effects were pre-literate, pre-tribal almost, but include the tribal world of esp, the Atlantian era or before caveman reality which was very primitive and occult filled and involved with esp.
M-With TV and radio, we’ve jumped over esp.
B-We’ve retrieved esp as a common thing again, retrieved pre-paleolithic sensibilities when you had solitary awareness.
M-The way I assumed esp to be was on a group level, mass-level interaction. This is what we’re finding with interactive media being at the forefront of new media experiences.
B- Esp collectively is what’s happening under electric conditions. People can think of esp as private communication between individuals or a small group. Esp implies a matching, you’re matching some data in your head with someone else and picking it up non-verbally, it’s through the central nervous system. That’s a matching. You’re trying to get into another person to experience what they’re experiencing. Since we’ve burst beyond any matchable situation under electric conditions and we live inside our brains collectively, we are hallucinating manically and fantastically and that’s the world of fantasy which is normal under this late stage of electric evolution. We now bring back the old new age, the aquarian stuff, psychic needs and the occult stuff that paple want to have. They want to bring it back as a mandate for group awareness to get a sort of gold standard or matchable plane that everyone can operate on. Whole populations are collectively making up new data that can’t be related to previous cultural frameworks or reference points, so that esp within that, in the sense of matching or anybody approximating someone else or communicating, seems like a miracle and takes on the charactaristics of esp. Any kind of matching is so important and archetypal to people they think it’s almost esp JUST because they have an agreement.
M-Like a shrimp plate, synchronicity.
B-It happens in peoples lives every day because it’s a way of saying “I’m here, and something else is very similiar to what I’m doing, therefore I can match with it, therefore there’s an esp going on.”
M-You can match with numbers, colour patterns.
B-Right, all these sensory data, visual or accoustic data. The synchronicity, and why everyone experiences that today is because that’s the need inside this collective fantasy that’s going on. It’s a way of getting out of yourself and that there is another thing you are interacting with.
M-This is why everyone’s a producer, everybody’s a networker. Who is interacting? Who is going to listen? Where is the audience?
B-Nobody is listening, nobody is watching-other than me, because I’ve got a handle on producermania and I can enjoy consumermania.
M-But I’m listening to you right now.
B-But you’re listening to me explain how one listens. Producermania is a fantastic need to fill this sensory data. Discarnate man is not here, he’s not involved in any visual framework or accoustic framework, he’s involved in the tactile electric extension. Everybody is trying to make sense by using their senses, They want to use their computers, they want to make a film, write a book, make a cd. They want to use all these mechanical extensions of their senses as a way of feeling that they’re participating in the electric tactility. Total mobility of all the different gadgets. That’s why the Eastern European countries couldn’t be contained anymore, those people wanted to participate in all the sensory extensions. What I claim is that it is an excessive need and demand on people, because they’re unaware that they’re living in the tactile electric water. They’re fish swimming around in it not aware how it’s creating a great stress on them. The reason there is electric solitude and autonomy is that you’ll match and network with people but it’s hard to maintain any long term thing because everybody is busy networking with everybody else. Just as they are wanting to get involved in all kinds of media, you do too and so everybody is promiscuous, metaphysically and gadget wise, going from one medium to another.
M-Techno-sex. Techno-people. ROBOTOIDS!
B-Techno-genetic robotoids and all this stuff will still be physical apparatus that will fill in the great gap they feel while being discarnate. Being discarnate is not here. You’re creating your own space and inflicting your own territory and your own special needs on other people.
M-Virtual reality.
B-This creates anarchy. This is anarchy. I deal with sociological, group oriented activities.
M-Media ecology.
B-I anticipate the effects. Media ecology started to become popular on the executive level in the early seventies. That’s when the corporate guys started studying the effects. They knew how to approximate what Mcluhan was doing though not very efficiently. Media ecology is anticipitory democracy, where an elite anticipates the effects and programs the Solar theatre. Whereas, participitory democracy is a tribal ritual which people share as equal partners. You can’t have equality under electric conditions, you have to have a secret elite that can manage the technological environment.
M-The secret elite is practicing media ecology, and if the rest of us do it, then who will be…
B-Then we can usurp the elites and that’s why I’m the whistleblower. I was part of the secret council of ten. I’ve done media ecology for twenty two years, but I’ve hijacked the secret council, and I’ve gone public with the knowledge of how the secret elites have been governing us and I explain it on my show, but it’s such a complex knowledge which takes years to explain. It takes much study and experience and transformations and hallucinations by my users—by my listeners. I’ve got to express it in different media in different styles to show the effect of Bob in different media.
M-Users is a good slip.
B-Yeah, they use me as I use them. That’s natural under electronic conditions where everybody is both producer and consumer.
M-If the producers were to practice media ecology…
B-Then you wouldn’t have the monopoly by the secret elites on it.
M-What’ll happen then? We’ll be stuck with mass producer anarchy.
B-No because then we get into real psychic modern behaviour. We get into anticipitory collective psychic reality. Bob wants people to get into multi-levelled complex clarevoyance using not only the interior spaces but the external spaces, our senses and their extensions. This would be everyone sharing media ecology.
M-Will there be a need for producers, audience?
B- Yeah, that’s when everybody retrieves a cliche, retrieves a modality and pushes it out as a probe and pushes at the envelope. That’s when people can have anarchy by allowing incredible diversity as well as harmony. Harmony would be the collective understanding of media ecology. That would be the true second coming.
M- Do you think the East Europeans are going through each extension of man at hyperspeed to overpass us in the quest for media ecology?
B- In the meantime there’s going to be an economic boom coming out of Europe. Then it gets biblical when the beast arises from Europe or the middle East. The point of the beast coming out of Europe is that you’re going to have various corporate secret societies trying to hoik up their particular ideology or image or history as the beast. This will be the battle of the beasts or the false prophets or Anti-Bobs.
M- Anti-Bob O’Rama.
B- We have that utopia second coming state in terms of Bob’s wisdom. The second coming of slack has happened, but people aren’t able to express it or understand it or perceive it. That’s why they veer off into fragmentation either through dedication to a cult or tribal group or to a corporate artifact or to a mythic stage.
M-Cassette revolution.
B-What’s interesting about that is it had an appeal for people because it was accesible, and the common denominator in cassette culture is collage of sound bites from other media. The cassette is the best medium to try and express acoustically, with an acoustic bias, the effect of being discarnate and interacting with all the various media. It’s useful as a temporary probe but it’s an expression, it doesn’t offer understanding. It just expresses one’s stress. It’s like a diary.
M-OK, Bob. How are we going to start media ecology on a collective basis?
B-Do what you’re doing. Get rid of my prophecy. Make me well known and give me more opportunity to explain this stuff.
M-But everyone wants to be hoiked up.
B-Remember it’s not just a matter of listening to me, it’s studying the holy offices. That’s why I quoted you the Zappa holy office, what he does and Larouche and McLuhan. We didn’t even go into Mae Brussell or Finnegans Wake or Club 22 or Dr. Peter Beter or Herbert W. Armstrong or Garrett Dean or Cosmic Awareness. If you consider Stang, since he’s the founder of the world’s first industrial church, then he is Bob’s old testament. Bob’s work is the new testament and the world’s first electric church. Stang deals with hardware cartoon comedy including the hardware visual bias, so his stuff falls short. People can like it for a while but it doesn’t have any staying power. Now I propped up Stang to get the initial publicity so that people would be interested in his cassettes that we would play on CKLN and that would allow me to move in. Bob never arrived and never left.
M-Isn’t being discarnate and on the media being Bob then?
B-Yeah but…
M-So, Barbara Frumm or Ted Koppel is Bob every night?
B-No, they’re unconcious Bob. They’re pink Bob, therefore the Anti-Bob. I am the focal point of Bob, at this point the visualisation of it because I’m the only one who understands it. As people more and more understand their Bobness and are able to express it in different form, and have slack while doing it, then this Bob evaporates. Bob is not a benevolent dictator, Bob is not a bureaucrat, Bob’s an experience. I’m the MC.
M- MC Bob and DJ Mass Media.
B-Bob is slack engendering.
M-Endangering. Is this a call for everyone to be Bob?
B-Yeah, but not to be ME, but to have MY understanding.
M-When are we going to turn it off and why?
B-We will turn it off because we will realise that the effects of tactility have gone on too long and that people cannot have slack unless they’re given the opportunity. It’s well beyond the conditions of Brave New World or creating clones or test-tube populations. We are inside the electric test-tube which is creating all kinds of preferences and biases in us that we’re not aware of. Since on the massive level no-one could get everybody to understand and match that, then the Bob level of media ecology will be that an elite will realise, and this is the secret council of ten, that they have to impose a dictatorship of turning off the electric environment temporarily, so that people can experience what it’s like without it, and remember what it is when it comes again.
M-It’s not even fathomable. Tell Madonna she’s out of a job, just try.
B-That’s why it has to be imposed on them. Now Bob can visualise it being done, he knows when it will be done, (Mondo hint-1992), and it will be done. In fact, it’s already happening.
M-Art Strike 1990-1993.
B-The electric environment is being turned off, and the effects are surfacing all over the fucking place. The end of the cold war. All that is bringing in media ecology and turning off the electric environment.
M-Nobody’s turning it off, and Art Strike is just admittal of defeat.
B-When an atomic bomb goes off you see the blast and the sound comes after it. Visually, the bomb HAS gone off, the bomb being a MEDIA FAST, the visual effects of that are the chaos in the world today.
M-But they won’t turn it off, the people in control of it, because their control of the media is the control of the massss.
B-The bomb went off, but you haven’t heard the sound yet. The sound will be the CLICK off. When you hear it, it’s the voice of Bob with unanimity, with understanding. I’ve shut off the electric environment, but you haven’t heard it done yet. You should practice turning it off privately to get ready for it when it is turned off. That’s the new yoga. The turn off is coming.
M-Tune in/out, turn on/off, drop in/out. Didn’t Marshall Mcluhan believe that the media was the Anti-Christ?
B-Yeah, in the negative effects of it, it will CREATE the Anti-Christ or the Anti-Bob. What’s needed is that you have Bob to balance that off which I’m doing homeopathically on CKLN. When I become an obvious world manager, it will seem that I’m a massive environment but it will still be the same effect as when I was at CKLN, being very tiny. That’s the paradox, the bigger the macro you become or the more micro you become, you’re not making any difference in your effect because both are space dimension. They’re both subsumed in the no-space of tactility. You can’t visualise the dimension, you can’t accousticise it or verbalise it, but you can know it in your daily grind and express it. Doubt will have to be mutated at the right time.
M-Oh shit, Bob. What will be the image of Bob? There will need to be a visual image, not Stang’s cartoon.
B-Well the user is the content. Did you ever read Tom Robbin’s book, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues? He talks about the original, first amoeba, the original parasite riding through all of evolution. That’s Bob, eh? Bob has slack. Bob was the original amoeba and he’s the new amoeba. He’s the one who gets the credit while riding on everyone else’s back. Not an Anti-Christ who tries to get the credit while breaking backs. Bob has such slack that he can ride everybody’s back and take nobody’s slack away. The techno-environments are taking your slack away. They did it all through history, so Bob’s here to loosen it up so that the real effect of them, which was to create slack, will be engendered. The echo effect of that will be all creation will say,”oh yeah, Bob did that.” What will Bob be? It certainly won’t be me. For some it will but Bob is more than me. It’s all the media environments I’m wearing. Like I said you are more now than you appear in the mirror, you’re wearing all these environments. Bob is everywhere in the effects of every mythic stage. People will think of it as me, those who need an anthropomorphic image will think of Bob and Connie. So Bob and Connie are the Adam and Eve of the New situation.
M-Shutup Bob. My brain hurts.
B-Want a plum?
“Gerry Belanger, owner of DOVentertainment Inc., interviewed me for the press kit for the 22 April 1992 release of BOB’S MEDIA ECOLOGY (of which I had nothing to do with the production, promotion, or distribution of said creation by David Newfeld).”
Bob Dobbs
