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Title: The Information War
Author: Hakim Bey
Language: en
Topics: Religion, information
Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://hermetic.com/bey/infowar

Hakim Bey

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 “religious” artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials,

already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e.

post-paleolithic) religions contain the “Gnostic trace” of distrust or

even outright hostility to the body and the “created” world.

Contemporary “primitive” tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept

of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without

necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace

accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it

turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of

this disgust by shifting all value from body to “spirit”. This idea

characterizes what we call “civilization”. A similar trajectory can be

traced through the phenomenon of “war”. Hunter/gatherers practised (and

still practise, as amongst the Yanomamo) a kind of ritualized brawl

(think of the Plains Indian custom of “counting coup”). “Real” war is a

continuation of religion and economics (i.e. politics) by other means,

and thus only begins historically with the priestly invention of

“scarcity” in the Neolithic, and the emergence of a “warrior caste”. (I

categorically reject the theory that “war” is a prolongation of

“hunting”.) WWII seems to have been the last “real” war. Hyperreal war

began in Vietnam, with the involvement of television, and recently

reached full obscene revelation in the “Gulf War” of 1991. Hyperreal war

is no longer “economic”, no longer “the health of the state”. The Ritual

Brawl is voluntary and hon-hierarchic (war chiefs are always temporary);

real war is compulsory and hierarchic; hyperreal war is imagistic and

psychologically interiorized (“Pure War”). In the first the body is

risked; in the second, the body is sacrificed; in the third, the body

has disappeared. (See P. Clastres on War, in Archaeology of Violence.)

Modern science also incorporates an anti-materialist bias, the

dialectical outcome of its war against Religion — it has in some sense

become Religion. Science as knowledge of material reality paradoxically

decomposes the materiality of the real. Science has always been a

species of priestcraft, a branch of cosmology; and an ideology, a

justification of “the way things are.” The deconstruction of the “real”

in post-classical physics mirrors the vacuum of irreality which

constitutes “the state”. Once the image of Heaven on Earth, the state

now consists of no more than the management of images. It is no longer a

“force” but a disembodied patterning of information. But just as

Babylonian cosmology justified Babylonian power, so too does the

“finality” of modern science serve the ends of the Terminal State, the

post-nuclear state, the “information state”. Or so the New Paradigm

would have it. And “everyone” accepts the axiomatic premises of the new

paradigm. The new paradigm is very spiritual.

Even the New Age with its gnostic tendencies embraces the New Science

and its increasing etherealization as a source of proof-texts for its

spiritualist world view. Meditation and cybernetics go hand in hand. Of

course the “information state” somehow requires the support of a police

force and prison system that would have stunned Nebuchadnezzar and

reduced all the priests of Moloch to paroxysms of awe. And “modern

science” still can’t weasel out of its complicity in the

very-nearly-successful “conquest of Nature”. Civilization’s greatest

triumph over the body.

But who cares? It’s all “relative” isn’t it? I guess we’ll just have to

“evolve” beyond the body. Maybe we can do it in a “quantum leap.”

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 rather than direct experience. In this sense the Media

serves a religious or priestly role, appearing to offer us a way out of

the body by re-defining spirit as information. The essence of

information is the Image, the sacral and iconic data-complex which

usurps the primacy of the “material bodily principle” as the vehicle of

incarnation, replacing it with a fleshless ecstasis beyond corruption.

Consciousness becomes something which can be “down-loaded”, excized from

the matrix of animality and immortalized as information. No longer

“ghost-in-the-machine”, but machine-as-ghost, machine as Holy Ghost,

ultimate mediator, which will translate us from our mayfly-corpses to a

pleroma of Light. Virtual Reality as CyberGnosis. Jack in, leave Mother

Earth behind forever. All science proposes a paradigmatic universalism —

as in science, so in the social. Classical physics played midwife to

Capitalism, Communism, Fascism and other Modern 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] 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 17^(th) century New England Puritan — but expressed in a language

of post-Industrial post-Modern feel-good consumer frenzy. Our every

conversation is infected with certain paradigmatic assumptions which are

really no more than bald assertions, but which we take for the very

fabric or urgrund of Reality itself. For instance, since we now assume

that computers represent a real 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 sincerely believe that owning a

PC has made them better (not “more efficient”, but better) writers. This

is amusing — but the same feeling about computers when applied to a

trillion dollar military budget, churns out Star Wars, killer robots,

etc. (See Manuel de Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines on AI

in modern weaponry). An important part of this rhetoric involves the

concept of an “information economy”. The post-Industrial world is now

thought to be giving birth to this new economy. One of the clearest

examples of the concept can be found in a recent book by a man who is a

Libertarian, the Bishop of a Gnostic Dualist Church in California, and a

learned and respected writer for Gnosis magazine:

The industry of the past phase of civilization (sometimes called “low

technology”) was big industry, and bigness always implies

oppressiveness. The new high technology, however, is not big in the same

way. While the old technology produced and distributed material

resources, the new technology produces and disseminates information. The

resources marketed in high technology are less about matter and more

about mind. Under the impact of high technology, the world is moving

increasingly from a physical economy into what might be called a

“metaphysical economy.” We are in the process of recognizing that

consciousness rather than raw materials or physical resources

constitutes wealth.[2]

Modern neo-Gnosticism usually plays down the old Manichaean attack on

the body for a gentler greener rhetoric. Bishop Hoeller for instance

stresses the importance of ecology and environment (because we don’t

want to “foul our nest”, the Earth) — but in his chapter on Native

American spirituality he implies that a cult of the Earth is clearly

inferior to the pure Gnostic spirit of bodylessness:

But we must not forget that the nest is not the same as the 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 indeed may have originated on this earth, our inner essence

did not. To think otherwise puts us outside of all of the known

spiritual traditions and separates us from the wisdom of the seers and

sages of every age. Though wise in their own ways, Native Americans have

small connection with this rich spiritual heritage.[3]

In such terms, (the body = the “savage”), the Bishop’s hatred and

disdain for the flesh illuminate every page of his book. In his

enthusiasm for a truly religious economy, he forgets that one cannot eat

“information”. “Real wealth” can never become immaterial until humanity

achieves the final etherealization of downloaded consciousness.

Information in the form of culture can be called wealth metaphorically

because it is useful and desirable — but it can never be wealth in

precisely the same basic way that oysters and cream, or wheat and water,

are wealth in themselves. Information is always only information about

some thing. Like money, information is not the thing itself. Over time

we can come to think of money as wealth (as in a delightful Taoist

ritual which refers to “Water and Money” as the two most vital

principles in the universe), but in truth this is sloppy abstract

thinking. It has allowed its focus of attention to wander from the bun

to the penny which symbolizes the bun.[4] In effect we’ve had an

“information economy” ever since we invented money. But we still haven’t

learned to digest copper. The Aesopian crudity of these truisms

embarrasses me, but I must perforce play the stupid lazy yokel plowing a

crooked furrow when all the straight thinkers around me appear to be

hallucinating.

Americans and other “First World” types seem particularly susceptible to

the rhetoric of a “metaphysical economy” because we can no longer see

(or feel or smell) around us very much evidence of a physical world. Our

architecture has become symbolic, we have enclosed ourselves in the

manifestations of abstract thought (cars, apartments, offices, schools),

we work at “service” or information-related jobs, helping in our little

way to move disembodied symbols of wealth around an abstract grid of

Capital, and we spend our leisure largely engrossed in Media rather than

in direct experience of material reality. The material world for us has

come to symbolize catastrophe, as in our amazingly hysterical reaction

to storms and hurricanes (proof that we’ve failed to “conquer Nature”

entirely), or our neo-Puritan fear of sexual otherness, or our taste for

bland and denatured (almost abstract) food. And yet, this “First World”

economy is not self-sufficient. It depends for its position (top of the

pyramid) on a vast substructure of old-fashioned material production.

Mexican farm-workers grow and package all that “Natural” food for us so

we can devote our time to stocks, insurance, law, computers, video

games. Peons in Taiwan make silicon chips for our PCs. Towel-heads in

the Middle East suffer and die for our sins. Life? Oh, our servants do

that for us. We have no life, only “lifestyle” — an abstraction of life,

based on the sacred symbolism of the Commodity, mediated by the

priesthood of the stars, those “larger than life” abstractions who rule

our values and people our dreams — the mediarchetypes; or perhaps

mediarchs would be a better term. Of course this Baudrillardian dystopia

doesn’t really exist — yet.[5] It’s surprising hovever to note how many

social radicals consider it a desirable goal, at least as long as it’s

called the “Information Revolution” or something equally inspiring.

Leftists talk about seizing the means of information-production from the

data-monopolists.[6] In truth, information is everywhere — even atom

bombs can be constructed on plans available in public libraries. As Noam

Chomsky points out, one can always access information — provided one has

a private income and a fanaticism bordering on insanity. Universities

and “think tanks” make pathetic attempts to monopolize information —

they too are dazzled by the notion of an information economy — but their

conspiracies are laughable. Information may not always be “free”, but

there’s a great deal more of it available than any one person could ever

possibly use. Books on every conceivable subject can actually still be

found through inter-library loan.[7] Meanwhile someone still has to grow

pears and cobble shoes. Or, even if these “industries” can be completely

mechanized, someone still has to eat pears and wear shoes. The body is

still the basis of wealth. The idea of Images as wealth is a

“spectacular delusion”. Even a radical critique of “information” can

still give rise to an over-valuation of abstraction and data. In a

pro-situ zine from England called NO, the following message was scrawled

messily across the back cover of a recent issue:

As you read these words, the Information Age explodes … inside and

around you — with the Misinformation Missiles and Propaganda bombs of

outright Information Warfare.

Traditionally, war has been fought for territory/economic gain.

Information Wars are fought for the acquisition of territory indigenous

to the Information Age, i.e. the human mind itself … In particular, it

is the faculty of the imagination that is under the direct threat of

extinction from the onslaughts of multi-media overload … DANGER — YOUR

IMAGINATION MAY NOT BE YOUR OWN … As a culture sophisticates, it deepens

its reliance on its images, icons and symbols as a way of defining

itself and communicating with other cultures. As the accumulating mix of

a culture’s images floats around in its collective psyche, certain

isomorphic icons coalesce to produce and to project an “illusion” of

reality. Fads, fashions, artistic trends. U KNOW THE SCORE. “I can take

their images for reality because I believe in the reality of their

images (their image of reality).” WHOEVER CONTROLS THE METAPHOR GOVERNS

THE MIND. The conditions of total saturation are slowly being realized —

a creeping paralysis — from the trivialisation of special/technical

knowledge to the specialization of trivia. The INFORMATION WAR is a war

we cannot afford to lose. The result is unimaginable.[8]

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. Again Baudrillard’s vision of the Commtech

Universe is evoked, but this time as Hell rather than as the Gnostic

Hereafter. Bishop Hoeller wants everybody jacked-in and down-loaded —

the anonymous post-situationist ranter wants you to smash your telly —

but both of them believe in the mystic power of information. One

proposes the pax technologica, the other declares “war”. Both exude a

kind of Manichaean view of Good and Evil, but can’t agree on which is

which. The critical theorist swims in a sea of facts. We like to imagine

it also as our maquis, with ourselves as the “guerilla ontologists” of

its datascape. Since the 19^(th) century the ever-mutating “social

sciences” have unearthed a vast hoard of information on everything from

shamanism to semiotics. Each “discovery” feeds back into “social

science” and changes it. We drift. We fish for poetic facts, data which

will intensify and mutate our experience of the real. We invent new

hybrid “sciences” as tools for this process: ethnopharmacology,

ethnohistory, cognitive studies, history of ideas, subjective

anthropology (anthropological poetics or ethno-poetics), “dada

epistemology”, etc. We look on all this knowledge not as “good” in

itself, but valuable only inasmuch as it helps us to seize or to

construct our own happiness. In this sense we do know of “information as

wealth”; nevertheless we continue to desire wealth itself and not merely

its abstract representation as information. At the same time we also

know of “information as war;”[9] nevertheless, we have not decided to

embrace ignorance just because “facts” can be used like a poison gas.

Ignorance is not even an adequate defense, much less a useful weapon in

this war. We attempt neither to fetishize nor demonize “information”.

Instead we try to establish a set of values by which information can be

measured and assessed. Our standard in this process can only be the

body. According to certain mystics, spirit and body are “one”. Certainly

spirit has lost its ontological solidity (since Nietzsche, anyway),

while body’s claim to “reality” has been undermined by modern science to

the point of vanishing in a cloud of “pure energy”. So why not assume

that spirit and body are one, after all, and that they are twin (or

dyadic) aspects of the same underlying and inexpressible real? No body

without spirit, no spirit without body. The Gnostic Dualists are wrong,

as are the vulgar “dialectical materialists”. Body and spirit together

make life. If either pole is missing, the result is death. This

constitutes a fairly simple set of values, assuming we prefer life to

death. Obviously I’m avoiding any strict definitions of either body or

spirit. I’m speaking of “empirical” everyday experiences. We experience

“spirit” when we dream or create; we experience “body” when we eat or

shit (or maybe vice versa); we experience both at once when we make

love. I’m not proposing metaphysical categories here. We’re still

drifting and these are ad-hoc points of reference, nothing more. We

needn’t be mystics to propose this version of “one reality”. We need

only point out that no other reality has yet appeared within the context

of our knowable experience. For all practical purposes, the “world” is

“one”.[10] Historically however, the “body” half of this unity has

always received the insults, bad press, scriptural condemnation, and

economic persecution of the “spirit”-half. The self-appointed

representatives of the spirit have called almost all the tunes in known

history, leaving the body only a pre-history of primitive disappearance,

and a few spasms of failed insurrectionary futility.

Spirit has ruled — hence we scarcely even know how to speak the language

of the body. When we use the word “information” we reify it because we

have always reified abstractions — ever since God appeared as a burning

bush. (Information as the catastrophic decorporealization of “brute”

matter). We would now like to propose the identification of self with

body. We’re not denying that “the body is also spirit”, but we wish to

restore some balance to the historical equation. We calculate all

body-hatred and world-slander as our “evil”. We insist on the revival

(and mutation) of “pagan” values concerning the relation of body and

spirit. We fail to feel any great enthusiasm for the “information

economy” because we see it as yet another mask for body-hatred. We can’t

quite believe in the “information war”, since it also hypostatizes

information but labels it “evil”. In this sense, “information” would

appear to be neutral. But we also distrust this third position as a

lukewarm cop-out and a failure of theoretical vision. Every “fact” takes

different meanings as we run it through our dialectical prism[11] and

study its gleam and shadows. The “fact” is never inert or “neutral”, but

it can be both “good” and “evil” (or beyond them) in countless

variations and combinations. We, finally, are the artists of this

immeasurable discourse. We create values. We do this because we are

alive. Information is as big a “mess” as the material world it reflects

and transforms. We embrace the mess, all of it. It’s all life. But

within the vast chaos of the alive, certain information and certain

material things begin to coalesce into a poetics or a way-of-knowing or

a way-of-acting. We can draw certain pro-tem “conclusions,” as long as

we don’t plaster them over and set them up on altars. Neither

“information” nor indeed any one “fact” constitutes a thing-in-itself.

The very word “information” implies an ideology, or rather a paradigm,

rooted in unconscious fear of the “silence” of matter and of the

universe. “Information” is a substitute for certainty, a left-over

fetish of dogmatics, a super-stitio, a spook. “Poetic facts” are not

assimilable to the doctrine of “information”. “Knowledge is freedom” is

true only when freedom is understood as a psycho-kinetic skill.

“Information” is a chaos; knowledge is the spontaneous ordering of that

chaos; freedom is the surfing of the wave of that spontaneity. These

tentative conclusions constitute the shifting and marshy ground of our

“theory”. The TAZ wants all information and all bodily pleasure in a

great complex confusion of sweet data and sweet dates — facts and feasts

— wisdom and wealth. This is our economy — and our war.

[1] The new “life” sciences offer some dialectical opposition here, or

could do so if they worked and through certain paradigms. Chaos theory

seems to deal with the material world in positive ways, as does Gaia

theory, morphogenetic theory, and various other “soft” and

“neo-hermetic” disciplines. Elsewhere I’ve attempted to incorporate

these philosophical implications into a “festal” synthesis. The point is

not to abandon all thought about the material world, but to realize that

all science has philosophical and political implications, and that

science is a way of thinking, not a dogmatic structure of

incontrovertible Truth. Of course quantum, relativity, and information

theory are all “true” in some way and can be given a positive

interpretation. I’ve already done that in several essays. Now I want to

explore the negative aspects.

[2] Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society, Stephan A. Hoeller

(Wheaton,IL: Quest, 1992), 229–230.

[3] Ibid., p. 164.

[4] Like Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the dinner bell rather than the

dinner — a perfect illustration of what I mean by “abstraction”.

[5] Although some might say that it already “virtually” exists. I just

heard from a friend in California of a new scheme for “universal

prisons” — offenders will be allowed to live at home and go to work but

will be electronically monitored at all times, like Winston Smith in

1984. The universal panopticon now potentially coincide one-to-one with

the whole of reality; life and work will take the place of outdated

physical incarceration — the Prison Society will merge with “electronic

democracy” to form a Surveillance State or information totality, with

all time and space compacted beneath the unsleeping gaze of RoboCop. On

the level of pure tech, at least, it would seem that we have at last

arrived at “the future”. “Honest citizens” of course will have nothing

to fear; hence terror will reign unchallenged and Order will triumph

like the Universal Ice. Our only hope may lie in the “chaotic

perturbation” of massively-linked computers, and in the venal stupidity

or boredom of those who program and monitor the system.

[6] I will always remember with pleasure being addressed, by a Bulgarian

delegate to a conference I once attended, as a “fellow worker in

philosophy”. Perhaps the capitalist version would be “entrepreneur in

philosophy”, as if one bought ideas like apples at roadside stands.

[7] Of course information may sometimes be “occult”, as in Conspiracy

Theory. Information may be “disinformation”. Spies and propagandists

make up a kind of shadow “information economy”, to be sure. Hackers who

believe in “freedom of information” have my sympathy, especially since

they’ve been picked as the latest enemies of the Spectacular State, and

subjected to its spasms of control-by-terror. But hackers have yet to

“liberate” a single bit of information useful in our struggle. Their

impotence, and their fascination with Imagery, make them ideal victims

of the “Information State”, which itself is based on pure simulation.

One needn’t steal data from the post-military- industrial complex to

know, in general, what it’s up to. We understand enough to form our

critique. More information by itself will never take the place of the

actions we have failed to carry out; data by itself will never reach

critical mass. Despite my loving debt to thinkers like Robert Anton

Wilson and T. Leary I cannot agree with their optimistic analysis of the

cognitive function of information technology. It is not the neural

system alone which will achieve autonomy, but the entire body.

[8] Issue #6, Nothing is True, Box 175, Liverpool L69 8DX, UK

[9] Indeed, the whole “poetic terrorism” project has been proposed only

as a strategy in this very war.

[10] “The ‘World’ is ‘one’” can be and has been used to justify a

totality, a metaphysical ordering of “reality” with a “center” or “apex”

: one God, one King, etc., etc. This is the monism of orthodoxy, which

naturally opposes Dualism and its other source of power (“evil”) —

orthodoxy also presupposes that the One occupies a higher ontological

position than the Many, that transcendence takes precedence over

immanence. What I call radical (or heretical) monism demands unity of

one and Many on the level of immanence; hence it is seen by Orthodoxy as

a turning-upside-down or saturnalia which proposes that every “one” is

equally “divine”. Radical monism is “on the side of” the Many — which

explains why it seems to lie at the heart of pagan polytheism and

shamanism, as well as extreme forms of monotheism such as Ismailism or

Ranterism, based on “inner light” teachings. “All is one”, therefore,

can be spoken by any kind of monist or anti-dualist and can mean many

different things.

[11] A proposal: the new theory of taoist dialectics. Think of the

yin/yang disc, with a spot of black in the white lozenge, and vice versa

— separated not by a straight line but an S-curve. Amiri Baraka says

that dialectics is just “separating out the good from the bad” — but the

taoist is “beyond good and evil”. The dialectic is supple, but the

taoist dialectic is downright sinuous. For example, making use of the

taoist dialectic, we can re-evaluate Gnosis once again. True, it

presents a negative view of the body and of becoming. But also true that

it has played the role of the eternal rebel against all orthodoxy, and

this makes it interesting. In its libertine and revolutionary

manifestations the Gnosis possesses many secrets, some of which are

actually worth knowing. The organizational forms of Gnosis — the

crackpot cult, the secret society — seem pregnant with possibilities for

the TAZ/Immediatist project. Of course, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere,

not all gnosis is Dualistic. There also exists a monist gnostic

tradition, which sometimes borrows heavily from Dualism and is often

confused with it. Monist gnosis is anti-eschatological, using religious

language to describe this world, not Heaven or the Gnostic Pleroma.

Shamanism, certain “crazy” forms of Taoism and Tantra and Zen, heterodox

sufism and Ismailism, Christian antinomians such as the Ranters, etc. —

share a conviction of the holiness of the “inner spirit”, and of the

actually real, the “world”. These are our “spiritual ancestors.”