Re: [iwar] FW: Zero News Datapool, PETER LAMBORN WILSON The Information War.htm


From: Fred Cohen
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Thu, 28 Dec 2000 17:45:16 -0800 (PST)


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Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2000 17:45:16 -0800 (PST)
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Subject: Re: [iwar] FW: Zero News Datapool, PETER LAMBORN WILSON The Information War.htm
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Per the message sent by Ozair:

>  http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/infowar.htm
...

This was an interesting piece, but I have some big problems with it.  It
basically ignores the real fundamental issue of war and the notion of
using an intensity of conflict measure to deal with the continuum of
conflict - from disagreement to total war (i.e., Clauswitzian war).

> THE INFORMATION WAR
> Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from
> the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest
...

While all of this may seem reasonable and may even be true, it avoids
the basic issue of wars being things that cause a lot of harm to people
and property.

I agree that ritualistic aspects exist and I agree the perception is a
lot of the issue in many conflicts, but it really becomes war, in my
view, when people start being seriously harmed.

The difference between science and religion is testability.  While we
have, as a global society, tended to embrace things as science that are
not science, the issue of testability is really at the heart of the
difference between science and religion and will ever remain so if
science and humanity are to prosper. 

> Meanwhile the excessive mediation of the Social, which is carried out
> through the machinery of the Media, increases the intensity of our
> alienation from the body by fixating the flow of attention on information
...

Again a cleaver argument but really a case of partial truths being used
to support conclusions that aren't really supportable.  It is true that
the media over does things and is causing a lot of the harm associated
with information attacks.  Indeed this perception management issue may
get so severe as to destroy the very things that free societies became
free to support.  I think it was Tomas Jefferson who indicated that a
bloody revolution every so many years would be a good thing.  I don't
like bloodshed myself, but I think the force of the peoples' will should
be heard - but that it is stifled by skewed presentations of content
such as much of what we get from some in the media today. 

> All science proposes a paradigmatic universalism: as in science, so in the
> social. Classical physics played midwife to Capitalism, Communism, Fascism
> and other Modem ideologies. Post-classical science also proposes a set of
> ideas meant to be applied to the social: Relativity, Quantum "unreality",
> cybernetics, information theory, etc. With some exceptions, the
> post-classical tendency is towards ever greater etherealization. Some
> proponents of Black Hole theory, for example, talk like pure Pauline
> theologians, while some of the information-theorists are beginning to sound
> like virtual Manichaeans. 1

What ridiculous tripe.  It is poetic, I will give it that, but physics
was not the thing that was related to capitolism - it was the economic
theory of survival of the fittest that led to Darwin's notions of
evolution.  Classical physics has nothing to do with capitolism at all
as far as I can tell.  The notion that science tries somehow to apply
its theories and experiments to sociology is ridiculous.  Rather, many
social 'scientists' (there are real ones, but not these) try to apply
something that makes scientific sense to create verbiage likely to
generate funding.  It works for a while but then fails for lack of real
scientific effort in the form of testable theories and experiments to
confirm or refute them.

> On the level of the social these paradigms give rise to a rhetoric of
> bodylessness quite worthy of a third century desert monk or a 17th century
...
> step toward "artificial intelligence", we also assume that buying a computer
> makes us more intelligent. In my own field I've met dozens of writers who
...

Two errors don't make a truth.  'AI' exists, but not "artificial
intelligence".  It's basically hype - bought by the uninformed to help
create their vision - and sold for more funding.

...
> But we must not forget that the nest is not the same as bird. The exoteric
> and esoteric traditions declare that earth is not the only home for human
> beings, that we did not grow like weeds from the soil. While our bodies
...

Then we see the mixing of religion with wrong notions of science...

> indeed may have originated on this earth, our inner essence did may have
> originated not. To think otherwise puts us outside of all of the known

to create new religion - or a re-interpretation of old religion.

...
> "The ultimate goal: Where is technology going? Its ultimate goal is to
> bridge mind and matter in realtime. That is, to have no interface, no
...

Then we claim that all of this stuff everyone else is doing exists to
forward our religion - so we were right all along and you should support
us because God is behind all of it - it's part of the plan.

> In effect we've had an "information economy" ever since we invented money.

Long before that...

I will skip over the twist of this rhetoric to support some political
goal, the use of unnecessarily big words to obfuscate the agenda, and
so forth.

...
> special/technical knowledge to the specialization of trivia. The INFORMATION
> WAR is a war we cannot afford to lose. The result is unimaginable. 8

Finally something I agree with - except that the question remains of who
the 'WE' is in this.  I find myself believing that the WE of the author
is not mine. 

> I find myself very much in sympathy with the author's critique of media
> here, yet I also feel that a demonization of "information" has been proposed
> which consists of nothing more than the mirror-image of information-as-salvation.

Lucid portions here and there...  but like so many such documents, the
intent seems to be to mix confusion with obfuscation with a few facts
and claim it as a universal truth.  My only hope is that the world will
ultimately listen to common sense over such ramblings. 

I am prepared for the backlash - please don't be too gentle...

FC
--
Fred Cohen at Sandia National Laboratories at tel:925-294-2087 fax:925-294-1225
  Fred Cohen & Associates: http://all.net - fc@all.net - tel/fax:925-454-0171
      Fred Cohen - Practitioner in Residence - The University of New Haven
   This communication is confidential to the parties it is intended to serve.
	PGP keys: https://all.net/pgpkeys.html - Have a great day!!!

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