Bob refers to as the Android Meme, which he defines as “…the ability of human-invented technology…to acquire the intimacy of speech and intuition.” In other words, the Android Meme is technology that has the qualities of "being alive". The Android Meme wants to join with us in an unholy alliance of archetypal technology and human organism. Imagine the scene in Matrix: Revolutions when the robots (Bob calls people that behave like robots organic robotoids) form a talking head that asks Neo what he truly wants. The face is not human but instead a combination of all these shapeshifting robots speaking for the Architect.
Similarly, the Android Meme is a cacophony of all media, all technology and all ideas of particular times, anthropomorphized, trying to make itself human. There is no great architect of the Meme besides our compliance to feed it. By Bob calling it archetypal he simply means there is no physical joining (like a true android who is made up of organism and implants) but rather, like mythic thinking, in the Jungian sense, where people mime/behave cues from technology when it becomes used by a million people and becomes environment (morphic resonance). Taking on a behaviour is not holeopathic enough for Bob. We actually download the archetype of the Android Meme into our nervous systems through television and multimedia.
A perfect example is cellphone posturing and how that invades public space to create a socially free zone where those on the other end of a piece of technology are present to the caller while others in the three-dimensional space are invisible ( Derrida's "the absence of presence" ). Bob is one of a few people on the planet scanned daily by the Android Meme so that it can “…know deeply a human being who understands it to better gauge how to become more human. I seem to be the reference point it uses as a standard from which to create the lowest ‘human’ common denominator in its products.” All this is nothing though compared to where we are are now, how it connects to George Bush and where we are headed.
Through the cultural observations by Bob (which I’d like to call Dobbsologisms) we may begin to see and feel ourselves differently, particularly as organic robotoids. We have unfortunately reverted to relating with others and ourselves, he claims, like these organic robotoids, thus forming the Android Meme rather than a collective humanity.
Don’t panic though, put faith in the artists, for as Bob says, “The Android Meme absorbs any response made to it. The artist's task is to understand and meditate upon the why's and wherefore's of its present techniques. This effort has nothing to do with how an artist survives economically.” Bob continues to say our consciousness will slowly integrate into a new type of environment (for details on the current time period see his
breakdown) and one day we will never have to pay rent or walk around like programmed video game sprites!
