<nettime> Infobody Subpropaganda

[Konrad Becker <konrad@netbase.t0.or.at>]

INFOBODY SUBPROPAGANDA                                 Konrad Becker

Senso - Linguistic Infiltration Programs (SLIP), Telepresent Contagious
Postures (TCP), Propaganda Propulsion Project  (PPP), Mac Believe,
Cybercratic Conspiracy Command Control Intelligence (C4I), Intelligent
Pandemonium (IP), Infobody Biofeedback Modulation (IBM), Vast Active Living
Intelligence System (VALIS), Meme Slaves  (MS), Leviathan Supersystems


Information Age communication-technologies ring the bell of Propaganda Age
in an attack on the infobody, the shared presuppositions and myths of the
rival and conflicting parts of the social system.

The growth of communication tools, the dramatically accelerated flow of
persuasive communication through the manipulation of symbols and basic
human emotions is not only a system to entertain, and inform but to inject
individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior. Integration
through Psychological Media into the social body.

Information is flowing faster than most people feel they can absorb or
acquire the additional information needed to make decisions and to be able
to control the outcome. This situation is fertilizing the ground for
Electronic Warfare, tactical deception and Psychological Operations.[0]

To distinguish between information and propaganda becomes virtually
impossible. Information, a myth filled with the landmarks of consensual
hallucination. [1]


Senso - Linguistic Infiltration Programs (SLIP)

A believe commonly accepted is that if you are reasonably well informed and
educated it is easy to fend off propaganda-attacks.
On the contrary, it seems that if you cannot read you are less vulnerable
to propaganda and intellectuals are the best targets of perception
management, not only for their predictable worldviews but due to their
implanted feeling of being immune. To read means to decode, to be infected
by a virus.

Classic terminology distinguishes two fronts for the battle for human
minds: the First Front of mass indoctrination through censorship and
propaganda and a Second Front of individual mind control.

Huge interest is placed on creating an in-formed opinion, to form public
opinion as a whole by a hypnotic web of "facts" with no apparent
correspondence to reality. The routine of illusionists and perception
management cognitive engineers.

Psychological Consolidation Activities by Committees on Public Information
target the population in order to achieve a desired behavior which supports
their objectives.

In covert or Subversive Propaganda and Black Operations the message is made
believable by the fact that it appears to be coming from within the target
population itself.
Deep Propaganda and Subpropaganda are aimed at habits, customs, the
definition of good and bad and the standards and norms of life.

Normative-Empathetic Warfare involves parsing value schemata of the target
and creating situations where the value schemata are biased in favor of an
action leading to the control of the victim or placeing it in a restricted
position. Similarly a trap is a device that by design hides its function. [2]

The non-lethal weapon industry focuses on low intensity conflict/war on
nations and population segments in PSYCOP  (Military Psychological
Operation Unit) experiments of behavior modification.

The transcendence of the human condition in stylized relations, creates a
desire to happily sacrifice for work, war and enforced leisure in exchange
for a Weltanschauung, luring the bedazzled into the graceful existence of
slavery, the self-centered freedom of marionettes, the eloquence of
automatons. [3]


Telepresent Contagious Postures (TCP)

The infiltration of contagious beliefs as attitude into the body of
information is the pro-vision of a gesture, a posture to assume. A posture
to put the enemy at disadvantage (known from the martial arts and ritual
gestures) and to ease feelings of 'angst' (which, afterall, might be
appropriate for unknown reasons). 

Appeals to fear are likely to succeed in changing behavior if they contain
recommendations the target believes to be effective and doable. 
Deterrence is as much a function of one's cyber posture and presence as of
one's strength. MUTES (MUltiple Threat Emitter Simulators) with high CFAR
(Constant False Alarm Rates) are at the heart  of a TAFIM (Technical
Architecture Framework for Information) in TMB (Theater Battle Management).

Infocalypse manipulation is social engineering of psychocybernetic
coordinates through the subliminal power of definition through
intermediation and interpretation. Control-artists, telefacturing
conventionalized hallucinations of synreal systems, mesmerize the dataflux.

The existing formative stereotypes/demons are awakened by symbols of
demand, identification and expectation in formalized participation in
sacredness and taboo. Bonding and group solidarity is strengthened through
ritualized crime, human sacrifice and blood in theatrical moves and figures.


Propaganda Propulsion Project  (PPP)

The News are the waves and ripples generated by fundamental currents in the
deep sea of unconscious agreements, reinforcing myths and conditioned
reflexes. As is generally true of a myth, the story contains elements of
truth.

Social myths, necessary for harmony with the environment and reduce the
stress of the unknown. Consuming your newsmedia of choice is satisfaction
in the desire to reduce tension and find a soothing remedy for cosmic
loneliness in cognitive-ritual participation. 

A Leviathan scenario in which humans are induced to give up the right to
themselves in exchange for personal safety, exploiting the human tendency
to be subsumed by social organisms via self- and reality-alienating
tendencies of language. (Leviathan being the name of the US Merchant Marine
vessel that laid the first trans-Atlantic telephone cables.) [4]

The Sumerians believed in Seas of Knowledge, the Akkadian creation myth
features the primordial sea-serpent Mummu-Tiamat, the dark empress ruling
the Chaos of the Sea. [5]

The dramas of mythological soap operas and their strange attractors
generate self-sustaining patterns, while the enforcement of an attention
focus on the spectaculum drowns everything that does not fit the myth (in a
factually most exclusive world). [6]

The objective is to create a focus of interest. Psychological Themes or
POETs, (Primed Oscillator Expendable Transponders) evoke one aspect, while
leaving out another. A structure of pure sounds, pure letters, pure signals
conjures feelings and reflexes in an autopilot, chain-thinking hidden
guidance system.

Technology has been used at all times for an apotheosis of power and the
preparation of war, from the ancient temples to the contemporary centers of
influence, and has preserved all the characteristics of a magic craft,
practiced by a male dominated elite of wizards.


Mac Believe

Warfare needs myths particularly for internal integration and motivational
propaganda. Unit cohesion and the 'moral' of the soldiers is still the
major asset of any military confrontation and workforce. [7] 

All technological structures and man/machine interactions have inherently
emergent propaganda effects.
Socio-tech interaction, is more than the sum of its parts. Non-linear
dynamic systems that have an attractor have emerging properties. Synergetic
properties that you won't find by studying it's parts only. [8]

Behind machines there is a technology of know-how, a way of looking at the
world and coping with it. Integrated Definition for Information Modeling.
Cybercrats always emphasize the efficiency of technologies and veil the
potential social effects.

Massconsumption requires identical ways of life and a technical workforce
breeds conformity. Adjustment to normality is the aim. Psychological
warfare attacks the mind to reach the will and is always personally
addressed to me, myself. Desire is the control mechanism of the economy of
imagination. 
Mac Believe is the biggest industry on the planet.


Cybercratic Conspiracy Command Control Intelligence (C4I)

This is not longer about the individual looking at the media, but the media
staring back. The walls have become alive with distributed computational
intelligence, topsight telecommunication of remote viewing and control. [9]

Overwhelming dominance of electronic information systems, digitized
footprints of social transactions allow to process information over long
sequences of widely dispersed activities, a perpetual, pervasive surveillance.

The game is to monitor everything, everywhere, all the time. Unintentional
modulation along with unintentional emission constitute examples of lesser
known forms of signal and electronic intelligence. An edition of the DOD
Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms explains signal intelligence
(SIGINT) as a category comprising all communications intelligence (COMINT),
electronics and telemetry intelligence and involves the reception and
characterization of electromagnetic radiation.

SIGINT effectiveness is at a point where virtually all electromagnetic
communication is highly vulnerable.
Many Agencies owe their existence to the secretive continuous absorption of
electromagnetic emissions, you might say they are harvesting and feeding on
it.

Confronted with omnipresent, all-seeing data-mining banks, passivity and
compliance is the safest route for any citizen, avoiding anything a
computer would find interesting.


Intelligent Pandemonium (IP)

Decentralized Automated Information Systems with EEI (External Environment
Interfaces) allow tactical initiatives, yet provide central symbol analysts
with intelligence for strategic purposes using people, databases and
processors as easily retrievable resources in a network.

Autonomous software application systems are called "Agents" or "Demons".
The term "demon" is appropriate as digital demons are not directly
controlled by a masterprogram but rather invoked into actions by changes in
their environment. Demons can form computational societies with autopoietic
lifelike behaviors similar to insect colonies or other social systems.

Just as in the traditional form, the digital demons are at once independent
and programmed to respond to certain cues in specific situations and
environments. Like their stellar counterparts they can serve or control. 
(Classic demonology lists an endless series of divisions where demons
mediate the complexity of supercelestial information. )


Infobody Biofeedback Modulation (IBM)

Collective phase entrainment by social force; the tactical formation of the
social organism through the control of the economy of imagination and
individualized, inner control by local peer pressure. An auto-calibrating
distributed believesystem management allowing for necessary agitation and
integration on the basis of horizontal conspiracies, co-dependent limited
autonomous intelligence. [10]

Most individual social entities are less than well equipped to complete
complex tasks, but are functioning well in the context of a social body as
a macro-organismic insect population. Individuals might not be able to
follow a coherent thought but they are perfectly able to make highly
complex calculations regarding social status in respect to dress-codes,
facial expression or nuances in language, by using their instinct and being
imbedded in an supraintelligent biosystem. 
This model is in widespread use, although a part of the game is to pretend
it is not. The whole being more than the sum of its parts. 

The hypothesis of conscious macrobes or social macro-organisms in which
individual humans are cells and sub-organisms the organs, seems attractive
once a naive belief in solid objects is abandoned. Social organisms are not
any less solid than matter itself.


Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS)

Information has often been considered as both space and being. A living
holographic information system, a Vast Active Living Intelligence System
crossbanding with human hosts. [11]

The idea of a living info-space is analogous to an understanding of music
as a complex spatial dynamic structure. Sound space is created through
impulse patterns, rhythm, within which interactions spatially expand and
interact. This harmonically structured code is then sometimes seen as
triggering the influx of entities, similar to invoking demons.
(Numerically structured cosmology was understood in relation to canonical
proportions.) [12]

The human concept structure, based on 3D survival in time, will easily
dismiss other concepts beyond the particular implementation of
"flatlandish" structures. The science of complexity builds a bridge between
technology and hyperdimensionality. It requires mountains of madness to
consider further research into hyperdimensionality, for species that is in
crisis when the earth cools or warms by just a few degrees. The human 3D
world is imbedded in 'n' dimensions, but what is out there feeding from our
dimensional subdomains? [13]

To avoid the narrowed down perspective of the anthropocentric human
survival machine scenario it has been suggested to look at evolution as the
story of bacteria. People only acting as the agents for a successful
bacterial colonization of space.


Meme Slaves  (MS)

The concept of memes is that of self-replicating entities of human culture,
the same way genes replicate through a biological organism. As materialist
reductionism says "Cultures are survival machines blindly programmed to
preserve the selfish entities known as memes."

Memes are thought-chains that propagate and compete in the cultural
environment. Parasitizing the brain, the way a virus parasitizes the
genetic mechanism of the host cell, they are described not just
metaphorically but technically as living structures. We are talking about
living entities living off humans, eating brain when they do not battle
themselves in memetic cannibalism, preying on each other like flip-flop
cellular automatons.

Memes eating brains, but who harvests memes? Where in the foodchain are memes?
Maybe they are milked and used to produce cheese. And if it is not the
milk, meat or wool, but some body fluid of memetic cultures?  Could it be a
sexual secretion which is used as an aphrodisiac, like musk or amber - when
it costs the life of a whale to gain its expensive perfume? Is it not a
classic theme of paranoids, psychotics and UFO abductees to report surgical
manipulation of bodyparts related to sexual reproduction?


Leviathan Supersystems

The science of complexity presages the understanding of social organisms.
The Hypothesis of Formative Causation provides a background for the 
concept of conspiracy as part of a social organism.

It makes no difference whether conspirators are seen as agents of blind
forces as long as the conspiracies of the blind gods feedback into reality.
The scales of formation, the foodchains of conspiracies are in motion....
Subpropaganda, the dance of the info-zombies, non-local effects clouding
the view, is not steamengineering steam-engine-time. 

Conspiracy threads, narrative hypertext storylines and deus ex machina
subtexts are real-life fairy tales for grown ups. Suggestive, addictive,
players choose the fittest outfit by default. Facts and fashion
interchangeably unified in a stream of trends and rumors. Multiple
timebased dresscodes, flickering colorcodes and texture-recognition signals
in high-speed computation, from subunderground to the top 10. All engines
running, all agents busy to keep their worlds alive.

A multicultural, hegemonic particularism of conspiracies in a stable and
dynamic, complex cybernetic system with multiple feedback loops.
Hyperconspiracy as a structure where most diverse local conspiracies weave
a worldwide metaconspirative holistic propaganda system.
Symbiotic co-conspiracies and predatory, parasitic socio-bionic life-forms
in synreferential behavior modification. 

Propaganda, the sexual secretion of the Leviathan ?


NOTES:

[0]
Cyberwar, Information Warfare and Psychological Operations
http://www.t0.or.at/msguide/cyberwar.htm
A collection of references and articles on the net. Glossary of Military
And Associated Terms

[1]
Peter Lamborn Wilson:
http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/plw.htm

The information War
"...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 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...."

[2] 
Trap

Webster Definition for "trap"
A trap is a device for taking game or other animals; esp : one that holds
by springing shut suddenly; something by which one is caught or stopped
unawares, any of various devices for preventing passage of something often
while allowing other matter to proceed;
to catch or take in or as if in a trap : ensnare : to place in a restricted
position : confine

[3]
Doro Franck:
http://www.t0.or.at/franck/d_franck.htm

The second bite eating from the tree of knowledge; 
considering style, selfconsciousness and grace in man and machine.
"...In his literary-philosophical essay "On the theatre of Marionettes",
Heinrich von Kleist talks about the devastating effects of
(self-)consciousness on the natural grace of a human being. What
distinguishes humankind from animals and automats as well as from gods, is
a dubious feature: i.e. affectation and artifice in our way of acting. The
physical metaphors for this loss or lack of grace is that our movements can
issue from other places than the gravitational centre of our body, in
which, according to Kleist, the "vis motrix" or soul is located.
In contrast to this, the movements of a marionette can never start from
anywhere else. This accounts, Kleist explains, for their unfailing
gracefulness. In terms of a single polarity, the animal, the machine and
the god are all on the positive side of the scale of grace, and we humans
on the other, the gods having infinite consciousness and the machine and
the animal none. Erring is our privilege....."

[4]
Leviathan

Leviathan, the Hebrew name of a gigantic animal, appearently the seawater
equivalent of Behemoth. Apart from its scriptural usage the word is applied
to any gigantic marine animal. Hobbes aopted the name as the title of his
principal work, applying it to  "the multitude so united in our persons
..... called a commonwealth....."
Enciclopedia Britannica, 1960

leviathan , n. [ME, fr.LL, fr. Heb liwyathan ] 1 a often cap : a sea
monster represented as an adversarydefeated by Yahweh in various scriptural
accounts. b (1) : a large sea animal (2) : a large oceangoing ship 2 cap :
the political state; esp : a totalitarian state having a vast beauracracy 3
: something large or formidable -- leviathan adj . 
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1973.

LEVIATHAN by Thomas Hobbes1651 
gopher://gopher.vt.edu:10010/02/98/1 
http://www.cpm.ll.ehime-u.ac.jp/AkamacHomePage/Hobbes.html

"Nets, internets and ethernets are growing in rapid spurts like
the brain of an infant leviathan." (DeKerckhove "The Skin of Culture" pp. 54)

[5]
Mummu Tiamat / Chaos of the Sea
The Enuma Elish
http://www.sju.edu/~dcarpent/1141/Reader/Enuma.html

The Akkadian Creation Epic based on the translation of E. A. Speiser,
Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, 1969),
pp. 60-72; 501-503, 
This work, the ancient Mesopotamian creation epic consisting of seven
tablets, tells of the struggle between cosmic order and chaos. It is named
after its opening words. It was recited on the fourth day of the ancient
Babylonian New Year's festival. The text probably dates from the Old
Babylonian period, i.e., the early part of the second millennium B.C.E. 

When on high the heaven had not been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by name,
Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter,
And Mummu-Tiamat, she who bore them all,
Their waters commingling as a single body;

[6]
El Iblis Shah
http://w2.t0.or.at/t0/scl/0021.html

Ocean of the Unpredictable
The whole seeming system, or entity, of modern science is only quasi-system,
or quasi-entity, wrought by the same rules. 
Whereas intuition has these surprising encounters in manifest forms 
such as in art, where I realize: oh, I'm not alone in the ocean of the 
damned. 
The whole area of quantum physics shows that there are many phenomena that
cannot be predicted. The whole seeming system, or entity, of modern science
is only a small island in the world, in the ocean of the data.

[7]
Manuel De Landa:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda

The Geology Of Morals 
"..My main point can then be stated as follows: sedimentary rocks, species
and social classes (and other institutionalized hierarchies) are all
historical constructions, the product of definite structure-generating
processes which take as their starting point a heterogeneous collection of
raw materials (pebbles, genes, roles), homogenize them through a sorting
operation and then give the resulting uniform groupings a more permanent
state through some form of consolidation. Hence, while some elements remain
different (e.g. only human institutions, and perhaps, biological species,
involve a hierarchy of command) others stay the same: the articulation of
homogenous components into higher-scale entities. (And all this, without
metaphor )..."

[8]
The Emergence Of Synthetic Reason 
"...When the ideas of Darwin on the role of natural selection and those of
Mendel on the dynamics of genetic inheritance were brought together six
decades ago, the domination of the Aristotelian paradigm came to an end. It
became clear, for instance, that there was no such thing as a preexistent
collection of traits defining "zebrahood"......
.... In short, for population thinkers, only the variation is real, and the
ideal type (e.g. the average zebra) is a mere shadow. Thus we have a
complete inversion of the classical paradigm...."

[9]
Jack Sarffati 
http://www.hia.com/hia/pcr/z.html

Notes from Tucson II Conference on Consciousness
"....Many of the papers at this conference in neuro and cognitive science
presented amazingly effective techniques for manipulating and
controlling states of consciousness. The potentials for these techniques of
mind-control to be used in the field on unsuspecting naive
populations in "nonlethal warfare" are awesome to behold and contemplate.
They can be and will be easily misused by authoritarian
immoral power structures. These techniques not only involve manipulation by
drugs and ordinary electromagnetic, sound and
kinaesthetic signals as in subliminal television broadcasting and virtual
reality transmission via the World Wide Web of the Internet, but
also purport to involve quantum action at a distance in the reports on
psychokinesis, telepathy and remote viewing.
Nonlethal psychic warfare using the distant manipulation of the
consciousness of the "enemy" will be an important factor in the 21st
century.

[10]
Hakim Bey
http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/hakimbey.htm

The Ontological Status of Conspiracy Theory
"...One useful way in which we can, so to speak, see into the chaos that is
history, is to look through the lens provided by the conspiracies. We may
or may not believe that conspiracies are mere simulations of power, mere
symptoms of the spectacle-but we cannot dismiss them as empty of all
significance. 

Rather than speak of conspiracy theory we might instead try to construct a
poetics of conspiracy. A conspiracy would be treated like an aesthetic
construct, or a language-construct, and could be analyzed like a text...."

[11] 
Valis (Vast Active Living Intelligence System)
by Philip K. Dick 
Published by Vintage Books N.Y. ISBN: 0679734465
Paperback Republished 1991

[12] 
Z'ev
http://www.t0.or.at/zev/fold.htm

The Three-Fold Ear
"........ For Pythagoras numbers were the principles and elements of all
things and composed the proportions of the whole world." In respect to
this, the beats composing rhythm patterns gain their power through the
value of their proportions, seen in the quantity of beats separated by
rests in the phrasing comprising a particular rhythm. Proportion literally
translates as 'for one's portion' and portion includes the meaning of
destiny. When sounding a proportion/rhythm " then, one is invoking a course
of events, the intention of which varies with the particulars of the
'timing in action'...."

[13] 
Ms. Guidance to Xtra Dimensions, Hypermedia and Hyperspace
http://www.t0.or.at/msguide/hyper.htm
A collection of references and articles on the net.

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott (1884)
gopher://wiretap.spies.com:70/00/Library/Classic/flatland.txt





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