“I have never been an optimist or a pessimist. I’m an apocalyptic only. Our only hope is apocalypse. Apocalypse is not gloom. Its salvation. —Marshall McLuhan MoM
Definition Apocalypse: any revelation or prophecy.
Paramedia Ecologist and McLuhan scholar Bob Neveritt speaks with Cold Fusion Now on the transformational environment of cold fusion in a one-and-one-half hour conversation with Ruby Carat.
Bob Neveritt on cold fusion and what’s happening 21-12-2012 [download .mp3]
Bob has been a regular guest on James Martinez‘s Ca$h Flow show often discussing the news of the day with the media ecology twist a la McLuhan. Now, you can listen to more Bob on his new Payday – I’m in Charge! radio show at Achieve Radio.
I asked Bob to describe his early encounter with cold fusion and what Fleischmann and Pons’ discovery meant with respect to media dynamics. Here is an excerpt from his response.
“We knew that by the time of the satellite, that the satellite extended not our bodies, but the whole planet.”
“Bucky Fuller said that the satellite, or the rocket ship, was the first time that a human being could live inside an apparatus that simulated the Earth, that had oxygen and necessities so you could live in a little Earth while outside of the atmosphere of this planet. So I considered the satellite as an extension of Earth, our habitat, and that was the final extension.”
“When digital media came in, the digital media didn’t extend our senses or the planet, it just extended the machines themselves, the analog electric machines or any digital machines that had been developed. You had this extension of technologies by itself with human beings sitting on the sidelines.”
“That might have partly been the situation at the time Pons and Fleischmann had their press conference. They didn’t know that the Android Meme isn’t interested in what human beings, or what I call Chemical Bodies, are saying about the media; the media is interacting for itself, and feeding on itself.”
“I developed this theory that that the satellite was an extension of First and Second Nature, cause you had the technical analog electrical media that went into making the satellite (Second Nature), but it was an extension of our physical habitat, what we would call First Nature.”
“When the digital technology took over, where it was extending its parts, and which I call the Android Meme, together with the fusion of First and Second Nature that the satellite represented, I decided this was cold fusion, in the sense that more energy goes out than goes in. That’s how Pons and Fleischmann talked about it in the beginning. You violate the laws of entropy and you have neg-entropy, so more energy is coming out than is going in.”
“As people began to go online in the mid-nineties, the Android Meme was trying to simulate the actual merger that cold fusion represents. Cold fusion was the merger of First and Second Nature with neg-entropic outcome.”
“But analog media and the digital extension of that in the software world, you know the Microsoft and Apple world, that was communication taking on the characteristics of neg-entropy that cold fusion had, where you have information 24-7, and you can’t stop it, and it’s almost neg-entropy. It’s still a world of friction, but people began to regard it as an endless utopia of information, almost too much.”
“The Android Meme, the second phase of technology extending itself, was miming in software terms what could only be done in hardware terms. And hardware terms is what Pons and Fleischmann did.”
“They developed this battery and the idea was it would give people energy so their physical chemical bodies would have endless support for our physical shelter, which had never happened before. We never had a situation where we had endless energy, keeping the fire going, the electrical requirements in our habitat continuously happening without any more input, never ran out of energy; that situation was anticipated by the implications of Pons and Fleischmann‘s breakthrough, but it was surrounded by the Android Meme which was giving us information software, information beliefs, information, information, information, perpetually 24-7, as if it was neg-entropy and didn’t die.”
“As I watched the Android Meme take over people’s interest and fascination, and people got very involved in extending their bodies and their beings through the Android Meme, the hardware issues of cold fusion and actual physical shelter seemed to be sidelined.”
“It wasn’t until the the Android Meme collapsed in 2008, that’s what we call the collapse of Wall Street, and even though technology kept being produced and refined in Web 2.0 towards Web 3.0, people realized that something had broken, and the sociological trust factor in the information environment collapsed, so that banks couldn’t trust each other in disseminating their funds and transfers and such. So a serious breach in the software hypnosis, the Android Meme hypnosis, happened a few years ago.”
“This left the world ripe for a new kind of attention to our physical bodies and whatever else we could find for our physical bodies. And I say that was what I was part of since 2009, is finding a new energy that supersedes the Android Meme’s software mimcry of Pons and Fleischmann‘s cold fusion, and actually provides something incredible for the physical body.”
“Now in 1996 I wrote an essay Up the Orphic Ante where I spelled out how the fusion of First and Second Nature was implied by the Android Meme, but in physical fact hardware terms, Pons and Fleischmann seemed to be pointing to that.” [read]
“And since Pons and Fleischmann, if you started reading Infinite Energy magazine, which I did, there was all kinds of technology offered and suggested, different avenues, different routes, different notions of alchemy, all kinds of different energies were floated, but nothing stuck, nothing held.”
“Also, in November 1998, Wired magazine belated did a catch up on the whole cold fusion world, and Martin Fleischmann said that he could understand why there was not much encouragement for their invention by military people, the Pentagon and that, and he said basically they would be worried that this battery would get out and some kids or somebody would start playing with it and make some bombs around it. So he resignedly said ‘yes, that’s the problem’. If you announce a new energy, that has a new power source that has this kind of consequence, you can expect the Pentagon to take it from you in the name of national security.”
“So in light of what my colleagues and I have developed, we are fully aware of that situation, we are being very cagey, and interesting how we are bringing it forth. Basically my stuff that I helped invent is not enhancing energy or heat, but is making it possible that you have endless electricity. That’s what we’re calling that an extension of power with unlimited environmental access.”
“So question away about it…..”
On the early days…
Bob Neveritt “The only one documenting the situation was Eugene Mallove.”
“Withing two years, I think there was around 600 labs that had validated it around the world.”
On Randy Kopang knowing it was real…
“I had been telling Randy, what I just told you, this mouthful, the metaphysics and all that; he had read my essay, but he didn’t believe it was real.”
“When he heard Eugene Mallove talking about cold fusion on KPFK, it was real! It was a real problem to them to listen to me without some media validation.”
“We live the cold fusion environment in the Android Meme, in software terms. Endless information, endless variety, endless everything, …for the mind. That’s endless energy – that’s negentropy. Yes, we live in a cold fusion simulation, but the the actual battery is such a huge huge shift, that I don’t think the cold fusion battery will every be allowed to be introduced into the public without the old hardware boys in charge of it.”
Ruby Carat Once the reaction is nailed down, won’t it be able to be reproduced fairly easy, as all the elements to make it work are common on Earth? We operate as if, when it’s figured out, it will be unstoppable.
Bob Neveritt “If its made in the United States, they’ll just take it away under the guise of national security.”
“Here’s what you’re missing – you’re missing the human fingernail. The fingernail is very important to this battery.”
“As absurd as that sounds, everyone who’s listening start saving your fingernails!”
“The actual technology will change the atmosphere, will change our physics.”
“Scientists are limited to hardware and visual space, that’s a literate Newtonian and old Einsteinian model based on working out the math visually.”
“The Android Meme is a very tactile environment. Tactility is what is being extended by cold fusion. Electricity is tactility. Cold Fusion is electricity squared.”
“Once you harness this stuff, it’s going to break up the whole constituents of matter and substance as science knows it.”
“We’re seeing the earthquakes … all these things changing physically and geographically around us are part of the bringing in of cold fusion.”
“Cold fusion is not some little thing that’s made in a little box and then you put it in your house. It’s a whole change to humanity’s being that comes with this … it affects a strata of conditioning that needs to be shaken up, and will be shaken up, to the degree humans can’t take it, or resist it.”
“It’s not a matter of a bunch of people making it in their garage. You need really high security and knowledgeable people being ready to, so to speak, ‘turn down the dials as you start triggering earthquakes.”
“I want you to envision that this is way bigger than anything that Rossi or Pons and Fleischmann were thinking of. This is a whole transformation of the core elements of the universe.”
“Because we think the universe is out there. Remember what I said about the fusion of First and Second Nature. If First Nature is seas and mountains and earth and air, and I fuse that with some technological nature, it’s going to effect First Nature.”
…
On how this paradigm shift retrieves the extension of tactility….
Bob Neveritt “It is true that cold fusion is part of a major change and it is interesting that it seems to come at at the end of of 13,000 year cycle, or half-way through a 26,000 year cycle. The timing of it is interesting. But I think we have to drop our concepts of time and space to understand the substance that is coming though.”
“One way is to think about that we’re remembering a power that we had once, or, that we’re having in another world, a parallel world or very close to ourselves. I include this kind of metaphysics in my thinking about this cause it is pretty amazing once you start working with it.”
“We may be retrieving something that’s been lurking around us a nanometer away, or a picometer away, and now it’s coming forth, and that’s why the rocks will cry out – while there’s problems in nature, potential calderas, and earthquakes and volcanoes and all that stuff.”
“Most people who have access to some kind of electronic media are aware that we’re in a weird, violent time on so many levels. I think that’s what you have to include in the discovery of the battery.”
“This is the bias of visual space, and visual space means built on the printing press and literacy, and Marshall McLuhan laid out the effects of literacy and he used the vocabulary of detachment, the illusion of detachment it created.
“So the scientists think they’re just observing. And they they started invent stuff during the Industrial Age, and they got into rapidly inventing whatever they could and ignoring the social effects. Now the social effects are so disturbing, that science even has to pretend that their giving a nod to concern like “We’re concerned about the effects of GMOs”…. but things are moving along so expansively, we may be moving into levels of changed matter that pollution is not even a problem, and Peal Oil will never happen.”
“So when you have in your History of Cold Fusion Calendar The Early Years, you have this quote from Sir Arthur C. Clarke saying “tons of hydrogen and tons of deuterium”. I agree that hydrogen and deuterium are a part of this situation, but the other parts are what humans have not expected. Fortunately, we did it, we developed it, and just to make people think it’s silly, the key part is the human fingernail!”
“Now McLuhan said we retrieve alot of primitive awareness, Terrance McKenna called it the ‘archaic revival’, you know electric media takes us back to pre-literate conditions of sensibility. It’s not completely that but it brings back some of that.”
“In the shaman traditions, they’d mix together their healing modalities and they’d have fingernails and human hair and body parts – it’s like they instinctively knew that all artmaking or science, all creativity that a human being produces seems to come from our bodies. That’s probably an idea that’s embedded in alot of aboriginal cultures, i mean, they make alot out of breathing and breath: our bodies contain incredible power.”
“Isn’t it interesting that if we look at the actual cold fusion breakthrough, this battery, that it would include all efforts of science and wisdom and security and invention, all throughout all the cultures in history; we’d find crumbs everywhere. Not only would we find crumbs in Newton, crumbs in Einstein, crumbs in Pons and Fleischmann, we would find crumbs in Medieval cultures, in Chinese culture, in aboriginal cultures, and even the most primitive stuff which involves shamanism, and fingernails, like voodoo.”
“Since I know what this battery is, I am impressed with how it is really an externalization of the book Finnegans Wake which has the residue of every language and culture possible, and every technology, embedded in that book. James Joyce may be one day considered one of the intellectual creators of cold fusion cause he actually presented in book form what the formula would involve, the merger of every system and every technological and culture thing that had been invented to come together in this one incredible convergence. So when you think of fingernails, think of voodoo, think of primitive shamanistic rites, and that they get the nod, too. They’re included.”
“Isn’t that an amazing idea?”
Bob Neveritt on cold fusion and what’s happening 21-12-2012 [download .mp3]
“I enjoyed your lecture, but would you mind telling us in a few well-chosen words what you had to say?” “Not at all,” replied McLuhan, “You choose the words.” —R.J. Schoeck MoM