CYBERNETIC+RAW+SOURCE

"In the coming weeks, we'll be running posts about the articles included in the bOING bOING: History of the Future anthology. Last week, [|I wrote about bOING bOING's interview with author William Gibson]. This week, I'd like to introduce the interview Carla and I conducted with author and stand-up philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, who was (and still is) one of my favorite people. His blend of optimism and skepticism shaped the way I look at the world more than any other writer. (For a good introduction to Wilson's work, check out one of his lesser-known books, "Right Where You Are Sitting Now: Further Tales of the Illuminati.") The interview with Wilson ran in the first issue of bOING bOING came out in 1989.-- [|From bOING bOING Issue 1: Robert Anton Wilson interview] [|Mark Frauenfelder] at 7:00 AM Wednesday, May 25, 2011



//Amsterdam, December 22, 2010.//
 * RAW TRIBAL LEAKS by Steve 'Fly Agaric 23' Pratt.**

“In this broader framework of what we do it is to try and build an historical record, an intellectual record, of how civilization actually works in practice.”—Julian Assange.

Dr Robert Anton Wilson lived a life dedicated to sharing information. Useful, balanced, new and RAWs shared wisdom and info-packed writings seem to me, to present a special methodology and an illuminating example of comprehensive critical thinking, good journalism (scientific journalism) relative to our current 2011 cybernetic renaissance, and critical in my opinion for grasping a handle on 'what the hell is going on'.

RAW had his hands on the handle or tool we know as 'language' since an early age, reading James Joyce, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats and Semanticist Alfred Korzybski while still in his teens. His early adoption of various linguistic, mathematical and semantic 'systems' together with his fresh experimental and practical approach to sex, drugs and meditation put him in a unique position during the 1960's consciousness revolution, literally 'on the same page' as the founding fathers of the 'free' or 'underground press' in the United States, appearing in Paul Krassner's mother ship of 'hip' scholastic insight [|'the Realist]' back in 1958.

The Realist provides us with RAWs performances by example, evidence of his early adoption of principles and methodologies such as 'cybernetics' as defined by Norbert Weiner; 'Synergetics' as defined by Buckminster Fuller, and 'hologrammic Prose' as defined and refined by W.B Yeats, James Joyce and to some extent Ezra Pound who considered together maybe summarized in Dr. Wilson's multiverse of quality critters shared in his own 'ideogrammic method' or globalist collage of textual exhibits. Please read them.

Together with Dr. Wilson's 'lightening wit' and his broad experiential knowledge I detect his 'scientific' and 'operationalist' methodology in his first, up to his last writings and shared communications. Approximately 50 years of consistent 'critical' thinking expressed through delightful prose and 'balanced' 'fair' and funny feedback; RAW in my opinion stands out as an exemplary 21st century figure who represents the open spirit of our new 'information activism revolution' kicking our heads into gear and pulling us through the 'global eye/ear' perspectives of the emerging pluralistic 'digital global village ' of 2011.

“…by using every trick in the book that multinational companies use to route money through tax havens--instead we route information.”—Julian Assange.

RAW has given us an illuminated history of 'information activism' reaching back to the European Renaissance that includes some of the greatest minds of the 20th century; a History of 'revolutionary information activism' can be distilled from his unfinished project: 'the tale of the tribe'.

RAWs 'tale of the tribe' TOTT has been the subject of my own on-going studies since I first read the introduction to TTOTT printed at the back of his book ‘TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution’ and ever since studying alongside Dr. Wilson during an eight week class hosted by the Maybe Logic Academy titled 'tale of the tribe'.

My studies into TTOTT have more recently culminated in my own six week class held at the Maybe Logic Academy: Email to the Tribe, where I reviewed the main characters and their methodologies with the goal of providing a useful resource for others who may discover RAWs 'tale of the tribe' and also wonder 'what the hell it’s all about?' I found that the best metaphor I could find for what 'the tale of the tribe is about, in one word, is to invoke the theory of 'holograms' the rough idea that each part of something contains a miniature 'copy' of the whole.

Holographic theory is of particular interest and use to me as it corresponds, generally, to each TTOTT characters innovation; from Giordano Bruno through to Orson Welles, and of course RAW himself, who used many flux of other terms to describe what I view as the generally holographic, generally hermetic and generally cybernetic' nature of 'revolutionary information activism'.

“It is the media that controls the boundaries of what is politically permissible, so better to change the media.”—Julian Assange

Revolutionary information explosions and leaks reflect the nature of information entropy versus information negentropy, and the dance between 'order' and 'disorder' in any system whatsoever, the fumble to measure and interpret the heart and marrow of Daoism that can often result in bias, ignorance and exploitation by the rich and the global centralized power elite.

RAW noted Daoism and Quantum Mechanics as two main interests, and I think that this combination captures the flavour of RAW information activism or his unique Guerrilla Ontology. In his capable hands these forms take on the feel of 'timeless evidence' and historical scientific support for the 'multiplistic' and 'infinite flux' at play in the Universe. Call it 'chaos theory' or 'the multiple worlds model' or 'quantum psychology' if you like, but RAW may refer back to Joyce and Einstein at the critical moments where many other a scientific philosopher would sign off and collect the cheque.

RAW takes us through post-absurdum where logic and reason fly out the window like rolling papers in a hurricane and your left floating near the beginning of reading. Surprise equals information encoded into each and every sentence, each paragraph and upon each page. RAW knew how to surprise and how to share information.

“Korzybski also popularized the idea that most sentences, especially the sentences that people quarrel over or even go to war over, do not rank as propositions in the logical sense, but belong to the category that [|Bertrand Russell] called propositional functions. They do not have one meaning, as a proposition in logic should have; they have several meanings, like an algebraic function.”—Robert Anton Wilson, Language as Conspiracy.

“You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism".—Julian Assange.

I feel that RAW was trying to make we the readers smarter by constantly peppering us with references and source after source in hope that some may get through, and inspire us to get our feet wet and take a dip into the territory he inhabited, down in the sewers and up among the stars. RAW, above his brilliant prose and wit, consistently aimed his critique and gaze at the heart of the matter, striking blows to pivotal points of western dogma and 'taboo' where most writers fear to sketch. He had a special knack for defending the vulnerable, the poor and the oppressed peoples, taking them into consideration and careful balanced thinking.

This brevity and unwillingness to water down his often 'shocking' truths and observations helped define RAW, for me, as a true Godfather of the 'information activism revolution' and with the additional practical steps all-around-the-world-humanity can take to influence the co-operation and connection of all peoples and life support 'systems' that favour 'evolution' 'information' and 'perpetual questions' in contrast to 'predictable' 'noisy' and 'secretive' closed systems of abuse.

There seems to me to be no sides in this 'Information activist revolution' due to the fact that information permeates every bit of any proposed enemy, has non-Euclidean properties, information, it seems, permeates each and every part. To fight information and the decent into novelty is like fighting a mirror, so, today's news seems out-dated, and always has been to me since reading RAW, and his contemporaries when compared with tomorrows news, leaked through a superior 'hyper intelligence' publishing platform working upon 'hermetic' decentralized principles that simply 'out-mode' and obsolete what came before it--secret communications between a few private individuals with purely 'fiscal company business' interest.

“If we don’t have Western countries as a beacon on the hill for enlightenment values what countries are left to hold that value?”—Julian Assange.

But still the question of 'interpretation' lingers like a fart after twelve scotch eggs, the match and the sulphur spread the idea to 'Think for yourself, and question authority', this often requires a certain level of critical judgement and attention to detail found most balanced in artists and philosophers, I have found, but usually absent from the limited 'programs' of Governmental representatives and major corporate bodies. As I.F stone stated 'Governments Lie'.

Like with the excellent case in point of 'Wikileaks decentralized hyper intelligence', it often takes an underground minority maverick (hacker) to introduce the silver bullet to the chamber of a gun that will fire the shot that starts a new race, rolling on and out towards an avalanche, something like 'paradigm shift' or something else we could not have imagined before, something resembling the idea that everything will change so fast and so drastically that our concept of 'revolution' will once more rise through the murk of 'Che' T-shirts, and with luck gain a positive 'information rich' meaning connected to 'cyclical' processes, gaining the agency for change with the 'wheels' of Buddhist 'Samsara' or the 'recorso of the ages' developed by the Italian philosopher Gimabattista Vico, or the 'Gyres' innovated by W.B Yeats.

The revolutionary process and the infinite flux of consciousness is now applied to information routing. The content and the medium have been innovated and evolved incredibly fast by Wikileaks, somewhat beyond measure, the entire planet has been caught sleeping, except for a handful of Hackers, science fiction writers, activists and tech-nerds, I can hear RAW chuckling to himself sometimes.

The recently released 'information activist' cables are like cables of the tribe, or 'the common speech of the tribe and its leaders' around 2008-2010, devoid of much poetic insight or artistic merit but a leak that illuminates the speech of the henchmen and women of each nation, nonetheless, and open a new chapter in any 21st century poem including history. There’s a hell of a lot of new material for constructing such a ‘tale of the tribe’ since the Wiki-cables. Let’s hope some of our best can juxtapose and suspend judgement while delivering the truth and weight of massive secret intelligence, banking and government leaks. Lets hope we can coagulate and put the world back together again in a sensible and meaningful way.

I think that in some sense Wikileaks, among other things it does, brings us a new kind of 'tale' and a new global concept of 'the tribe' together with the novel 'hyper intelligent process' of distribution, marketing, editing and presentation--what I would call 'decentralized, shared and rotational concepts--at the Pivotal area of Robert Anton Wilson's broad history of 'revolutionary information networking' and attention to the critters who helped 'translate' the holographic reality of things into a somewhat orderly and defined set of messages, palpable by the public through novels, poems, geometries, histories, equations, movies, methodologies, communicating seeds of future trends, and usually in his unique way RAW liked to point out how most 'innovators' and 'geniuses' are completely misunderstood, under-acknowledged, actively pursued, charged unfairly, tried, jailed, executed (as in the case of Giordano Bruno), and so proving to his readers that it can indeed be hazardous to have 'new ideas' when surrounded by morons and barbarians.

“That’s arguably what spy agencies do — high-tech investigative journalism. It’s time that the media upgraded its capabilities along those lines.—Julian Assange.

Some of my decentralized thinking has been orbiting the contention that RAW created a master conspiracy theory, the 'most probable' conspiracy of all time known as the conspiracy of the stupid or roughly that people in power are so dumb and stupid that they don’t realize what they're doing; walking blind in a land of thieves and imitators unaware of the damage and suffering and pain they inflict due to their orders, and due to the upholding strict inhuman laws, the trade embargos and the general warfare on sanity and blockage to co-operative 'open source' hyper intelligence.

“Political reforms are driven by fresh information.”—Julian Assange

I have always liked the connotations to the term 'conspiracy' that imply connection, and in a somewhat Burroughsian fashion, and by extended metaphor we can imagine 'conspiracy' as a virus, a 'language' virus that consumes as it connects, a language 'virus' that assimilates everything and anything in its path, a hyper intelligent 'language' agent driven by human minds and the appetite for unity of knowledge. Conspiracy theory seems to me to be unfairly associated with mighty global events and historical events between powerful people when in effect the 'force' of conspiracy must also have an equal and opposite 'prospiracy' component. Wikileaks has made this apparent and explicit in its all-around-the-world total communication and distribution of 'once secret' documents, reversing the private and secret network upon which so much 'power' hinges, in these times, I think.

“Conspiracy is just another name for coalition.”-- Luigi Duccio //, The Historical Illuminatus.//

The speeds at which people receive their feedback based upon the actions and orders they give has sped up to near instantaneous, reports about reports are released before the original 'reports' due to some trickery or other, who knows what the 'original' report was? I find it interesting that the mainstream press obtained its scoops and dirty-secrets through conventional, tried and tested methods probably passed on by the spy-agencies that include simple payment or blackmail in effect, and if necessary a little physical threat of violence for good measure and to keep the old war boys happy. In contrast to this 'trading in secrets' that goes on behind the scenes of almost every corporate controlled 'secret cabal' and 'intelligence agency' we have Wikileaks: a different decentralized 'process' oriented ad-hoc publishing house committed to sharing information and seemingly run based entirely upon donations and voluntary contributions.

“Everybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows that corporations conspire all the time. Politicians conspire all the time, pot-dealers conspire not to get caught by the narcs, the world is full of conspiracies. Conspiracy is natural primate behaviour.” –Robert Anton Wilson, //The I in the Triangle//, speech held at a bookstore in Santa Cruz, California (1990).

--Steven 'fly agaric 23' Pratt. Amsterdam, December 22, 2010. Greenhouse Effect. 7-8 P.M.

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