Tearing Asunder The Veil: Information Dissemination In The Modern Age. By Preston Copeland
“Our own Middle Age, it has been said, will be an age of
“permanent transition”, for which new methods of adjustment will have to be
employed…an immense work of bricolage, balanced among hope, nostalgia and
despair.” - Umberto Eco, “Living In The
New Middle Ages.”
There is a secret that only a small percentage of modern
society is privy to. It has been concealed from the public. Deliberately unsaid
or unaddressed, this discretion has kept the multitude grossly uninformed. The
occultists know what it is. They’ve been teaching this particular secret for
thousands of years. It is the irony of the Modern Age that what is considered
defunct, fringe or heretical is also one of the few platforms for uncovering
this truth. Clues to the nature of this great secret lay in reality itself. In
the narratives that shape our world-the interpretations of information and how
it is disseminated, reality is sculpted. In effect, the world is “made” through
knowledge exchange. The particular nuances of this worldmaking is lost on much
of the public. They exist with a veil
that covers up the true nature of reality. This secret may sound paranoid or an
exaggeration but much of the world’s population is blissfully unaware of the
mechanisms that shape their own
reality. They are like the neophyte still existing in the darkness of the
profane. The hope of this article is to initiate those ready to come to the
fore. Our goal is to slip the veil off of our initiate and clear the cataract
that clouds his version of reality.
INFORMATION IS A THREAT
Processing and distributing information has always been
wrought with complications. Those that produce the interpretations of
information have always had a preferred point of view based on socio-religious
and political associations. As Paul Feyerabend stated, “there are many ways to
silence people apart from forbidding them to speak-and all of them are being
used today. The process of knowledge production and knowledge distribution was
never the free, ‘objective’, and purely intellectual exchange rationalists make
it out to be.”[1] Information has always been the most
important economic commodity. More valuable than gold or silver, it is the
control of information that is truly bought, sold, and traded on the social
stock market. And this knowledge control begins at a young age. Children’s
minds are shaped from the moment they begin public schooling to fit into the
‘norm’. Children are fed-like their lunchroom meals- the information they are
to accept and/or believe. Some of
this is innocuous. Certain social cues and group bonding are essential in
childhood development. But as Neill remarked, “the publishing of textbooks have
always reflected the political and social values of the dominant groups in
their respective countries, leaving out variant, deviant, unacceptable, and
critical views of the culture’s norms.”[2]
This is no surprise to anyone. It’s clear that grade-school books from
different countries reflect a favorable light on that particular country. This
is just the beginning of the social conditioning that occurs when information
is manipulated to shape a certain viewpoint.
What the shapers of reality don’t seem to understand is that
information is a very peculiar commodity. It is not a thing or object but an
event or process. Information is a social conjuring-an entity that once
created- becomes something autonomous and fluidic. It moves and shapes of its
own accord as new information filters in. Because of this, information can
never really be controlled. If the revelations of Assange and Snowden are any
indication, information as a social entity will surface eventually .It is not
possible to control all or even nearly all social relations because with every
new control of social relations we create a host of new social relations to be
controlled. The impossibility is a logical impossibility.[3]
This is why debating the treason or merit of ‘leaking’ information is now
irrelevant. The cat is out of the bag so to speak. The revelations that accompanied
this information are part of the public domain. And more will come. Those
howling that the release ‘put people’s life in danger’ is beside the point. The
floodgates are open and the levee broke. These leaks will continue and hackers
will find their way into classified files. This is our new reality shaped by information itself. The entity
took on a life of its own and now our only recourse is to find a way to coexist
with the constant stream of information that is available at any given second.
Nowadays, the traditionally shaped narratives that were presented as ‘truth’
are being undermined by an underground society of erudites. Now there are
competing versions of reality and it’s in the raw data- the data not yet shaped
by narrative- that truth really lays. Welcome to the new paradigm.
THE POPULATION IS IN THE DARK
It’s not society’s fault. We’re only now venturing into the
digital age and even television is still a relatively new invention. And
because of the sheer amount of data coming from television and the web, much of
society is uninformed in the extreme. As Mitroff and Bennis succinctly state,
“when no 15 to 30 second blip need bear any logical or coherent relation to any
other blip, and when blips follow one another faster than anyone can make sense
of them, the inevitable result not only is a society that is uninformed about
anything, but one that has lost the even more fundamental ability to know that
it is uninformed. In short, it is ignorant of the fact that it is ignorant. It
doesn’t know that it doesn’t know.”[4]
There was a time when news was localized. It was a communal affair and it took
time to traverse vast distances. This is no longer the case. Now, the volume of
accessible data has made presenting opposing truth versions almost incongruent.
Aside from the obvious socio-political and corporate
tendencies to shape a narrative in a way as to favor the expedience of a
particular point of view, data is now so abundant that it’s easy to lose sight
of the shore. The amount of information and disinformation coming from every
possible angle has made it difficult to distinguish the subtleties and
different nuances between truth versions. Mainstream news outlets try to get on
the same page. They try to corroborate one another if only to present continuity
in the News institution. However, there are times-especially when including the
web-that networks contradict one another. This is a good thing! It shows the
plasticity of the information cycle. It’s actually possible to watch reality be
sculpted as a News event breaks, and anchors, and bloggers, and reporters, and
journalists dash around shaping the narrative that will eventually take form.
What blows your mind later is in ultimately identifying the unseen contributors
that help shape those truth versions.
WORLD 3 AND MEDIATORS OF THE PAST
Information has always been a valuable commodity. But there
have been times in history when knowledge has led to revolutionary changes in
the human psyche. Specifically, the symbolic power of books has always been a
catalyst for social and political change. As Wright details, “the violent
history of libraries is a mirror of empire building: hierarchal systems
emerging from violent political upheavals, only to collapse, disintegrate, and
give rise to new emergent systems.”[5]
We see this in countless civilizations through history. Immediately the Mayan
and Aztec libraries come to mind. Chinese Emperor Shi Huangdi in 213BC
destroyed every book in the kingdom when he took power. The Wei Dynasty did the
same. The reason is because documents hold the truth versions of their
respective creators. They are a symbolic record of reality. By destroying a
culture’s books, you try to erase the knowledge they presented as reality. It
is our documents that shape the versions of truth we hold. Karl Popper
understood this world of symbolic power. He called the physical world ‘World
1’, the world of our conscious experiences ‘World 2’, and the world of the
logical ‘contents’ of books, libraries, computer memories, and such, ‘World 3’.[6]
World 3 and everything that makes it up is a shared experience that is
necessary for both a culture’s and an individual’s body of knowledge. In our
day and age, like the empires of the past, World 3 is what is used to create
reality. As a society, we consider raw data and use it to form a consensus
reality. And as Popper stated, the “autonomy of World 3 leads to new creations
or constructions…and may thus add new objects to the third world. And every
such step will create new unintended facts; new unexpected problems; and often
also new refutations. The new emergent problems stimulate us to new creations.”[7]
Our new additions to World 3 lead us to new constructions of reality. In other
words, information that is disseminated into the public domain leads to
evaluate and re-evaluate the current truth version to which we adhere. Given
new data, we are then able to construct or modify a given reality. So clearly,
having as much data as possible is essential to the construction process.
Otherwise, we are either doing ourselves a disservice or remain grossly
uninformed to the true nature of our sculpted reality.
WHAT IS TRULY TRAITOROUS?
The tragedy in our reality versions is in the knowledge that
those in power often withhold, cover-up, or shape knowledge production in order
to shape a certain reality. This has always been the case. The Courts of the
Inquisition punished crimes concerning the production and the use of knowledge.
This can be explained by their origin: they were supposed to exterminate
‘heresy’, i.e. complexes consisting of actions, assumptions, and talk making
people inclined towards certain beliefs.[8]
These actions are still done today. It’s no secret that making people believe
certain things is the whole idea behind commercialization. But there are still
beliefs today that are considered ‘heresy’. The belief of government
‘full-disclosure’ being the prime example. To many in leadership, the idea of
full governmental transparency is repugnant. It’s supposedly in our national
interest to keep the population uninformed of their government’s actions. These
inquisitors howl that it puts other American lives in jeopardy to give the
public full access to raw data. And this might be the case in .01% of the
circumstances. However, the gross majority of information that is denied to the
public has nothing at all to do with overseas CIA agents or contacts. The
reality is that those in power can only keep their power if a certain reality
is presented and maintained. The blue-collar factory worker in Virginia cannot
know that his Senator voted to provide guns in Syria to perpetuate a regional
coup and now those same guns are being aimed at American interests in the
area…All at the cost of the tax-payer…while cities like Detroit are in
ruins…and families starve by the millions. It would be unacceptable in the
extreme.
What those in leadership don’t seem to understand is that
it’s too late to keep a choke hold on information dissemination. As I stated
before, the floodgates are open. The truth is that those who controlled the
flow of information got caught off guard. Information technology jumped forward
so sharply, and the status quo shifted so dramatically that it was a rude
awakening for many to realize that their prosaic mode of governing knowledge
got expertly out-maneuvered. Who’d have thought that sites like 4chan would
lead to a worldwide movement of peer to peer information sharing? And the response by the world’s leaders:
create martyrs of the Information Wars. Whether wrong or right, figures like
Assange, Snowden, and Manning have been made scapegoats by the powers that be.
They are the modern equivalent of Galileo or Giordano Bruno. They transgressed
the inquisitors and now, like the libraries of the past, are being burned at
the stake. The fact of the matter is if it hadn’t been them it would be
somebody else. Technology itself provided the means to enter into classified
territory and it was only a matter of time before human ingenuity finished the
process. The only solution now is to find a way forward in this new terrain.
THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
Interestingly, there are those who prophesied the emergence
of a vast digital network interconnecting every human being on the planet.
Mystic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin once described an “extraordinary network
of radio and television communication which already links us all in a sort of
‘etherised’ human consciousness that would metamorphize into a single,
organized, unbroken membrane over the earth.”[9]
And sci-fi legend H.G. Wells predicted in 1938 that “the whole memory can be,
and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual,
forming a so-called World Brain that would eventually give birth to a
widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.”[10]
This new age of information was glimpsed by great minds of the past. And it is
still evolving. We are now bearing witness to the greatest library in the
history of civilization. An infinite ever-changing entity birthed by the mind
of Man. So where do we go from here? How can we reconcile the fluidity and
accessibility of information with its dissemination? Clearly, building more
elaborate firewalls is an option for keeping some information restricted. But I
believe that this is really only a stop-gap. The wall will be broken. The
information will be made available. Perhaps the key lays in who is appointed to
disseminate information. Peter Drucker
elucidated the sentiment when he stated that “knowledge workers are rulers and
leaders that require ethos, values, and morality. They have to learn to take
responsibility.”[11]
This includes the homeland espionage programs the U.S. Government has
perpetuated on its own citizens. It’s no surprise that the general public
really isn’t losing much sleep concerning Julian Assange or Edward Snowden in
light of all their phone calls, emails, and internet usage being tracked by the
NSA. Moreover, we have yet to see a mainstream media outlet suggest that
perhaps Assange is the most qualified person in the world to discuss the intricacies
and nuances of information dissemination. As it is, knowledge creators and
reality makers have truly changed things. This revolution is taking place on
our PC’s, tablets, and phones. In the legions of bloggers, artists,
politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens taking advantage of the
Internet’s ease of communication, we are witnessing the rise of vast populist
networks threatening the power of old institutional hierarchies.[12]
The beauty of the information age is that everybody is contributing to the
construction of reality. Ironically, the News outlets are often the last to
receive the most accurate of News information. Now, News is reported faster and
more accurately on internet websites, youtube, and even twitter. And sure, the
News networks will try to spin a story in order to shape a version of reality.
And sure, in many cases, that construction will be accepted by the majority.
But there will always be an underground current that will be present. There
will always be a vessel just beneath the surface that could shape a truth
version the world will alternatively embrace. It is these nuances in reality
formation that make the spread of information so important in modern times.
[1]
Paul Feyerabend. Against Method. Verso Books. London. 2010. pp. 127.
[2]
S.D. Neill. Dilemmas In The Study Of Information. Praeger Publications. New
York. 1992. pp. 46.
[3]
John Gray. Liberalism: Essays in Political Philosophy. Routledge Publications.
London. 1989. pp. 16-17.
[4]
Ian I. Mitroff and Warren Bennis.”The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate
Manufacturing Of Falsehood And What It Is Doing To Our Lives. Birch Lane Press.
New York. 1989. pp. 178-79.
[5]
Alex Wright. Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages. Joseph Henry Press.
New York. 2007. pp. 57.
[6]
Karl Popper. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford Univ. Press.
London. 1972. pp. 74.
[7]
Ibid. pp. 118-119.
[8]
Paul Feyerabend. Ibid.
[9]
Teilhard de Chardin. The Future of Man. Trans. Norman Denny. Image Books. New
York. 2004. pp. 162.
[10]
H.G. Wells. “World Brain: The Idea Of A Permanent World Encyclopedia.” In
Encyclopedie Francaise. August 1937,
http://sherlock.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html
[11]
Peter Drucker. The New Realities. Harper & Row. New York. 1989. pp. 238.
[12]
Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages. Ibid. pp. 230.
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