Information Warfare

I think I first mentioned information warfare on this blog in January 2008 though if you scout around a bit I've been talking about it quite a bit longer than that. I was first alerted to the idea of it by Marshal McLuhan and subsequently learned that Churchill also predicted the third world war would be an information war too from his learnings about the Engima code cracking at Bletchey Park.

Talking with a friend of mine in Hong Kong last year she believed it had already commenced, and of course it makes perfect sense within the context of information war that nobody actually declares it. They just get on with it. That's quite an important point now that information is so easy to discredit. Judge people on what they do and not on what they say.

It's for this reason that as soon as America starts to talk about absolutely anything being against its interests, then by and large I assume it's in my interest to take a contrarian stance. I've long given up the assumption that the nation state is going to take care of our generation in any meaningful way when they prosecute illegal wars, manipulate mainstream media and generally mortgage off to the future, any value that can be extracted today. 


I see that smaller countries all over the world genuflect subserviently when asked to carry out the wishes of the auto aspyxiating American Empire. That includes Australia, "Special Needs" UK and now Spineless Sweden. Only the New Bolivarian Latin Americans  have drawn a line in the sand to IMF and World Bank cripple-loans coupled with Shock Doctrine  economic restructuring that pays for the subsidies on all aspects of our Northern Hemisphere consumption lifestyles. It's for this reason the parasitic adjective is by no means melodramatic, though of course you could enlighten yourself and listen to Susan George on this subject if your courage hasn't still utterly failed you.

By now we all know that Julian Assange is under arrest for the Wikileaks of State Department cables detailing; nothing of danger to human life, exposing cyber security issues within the United States and most importantly telling the truth that is largely a story of deception by our so called enlightened and liberal governments. A truth that has me shaking my head when I see otherwise grown up people applaud being treated like a child by the nanny state.


In principal the people who are most diligent about secrecy have the most to hide. I've no problem with the individuals right to privacy but the transparency being imposed on the State Department is a good thing. Particularly in light of a century of exploitation in countries I've noticed the same finger wagging people are bottom-line clueless on. People who demand and are unwavering on privacy yet don't mind using the courts to drag a man's privacy through the mud. Where's your gestalt? Is this how you define your weltanschuung? On CIA inspired charges of trivial post coital rape?

I'm disgusted that my instinct about Julia Gillard was bang on the money revealing her to be a drawling mutt of an Aussie woman with clear as daylight ugly ambitions. I'd like to think Kevin Rudd was different but I've watched as he lead the way for restricted internet freedoms in Australia as the Canary in the Western world digital coal mine. No he's just as transparent and superficial. A lightweight leader deservingly slapped into place by a woman with greedier power ambition than he. Serves him right..... No worries as they say in Australia.

However if you insist, then of course the due course of law must be pursued through normal channel,s though I claim that the persecution of Julian Assange is for false allegations of rape. The timing is odd, the filing of the case and the speed with which it has been processed is highly unusual and then there's the abnormality of the girl who claims to be exploiting this post coital rape legislation that is unique to Sweden on her blog when the matter is ostensibly an ambiguous (and private argument) of prophylactic use. 


I don't mind if the domestic law dramatises its international servility by following it's masters wishes for pursuing proxy revenge instead of justice, but the silence on the part of people about any other (and there are many) important political issues currently framing our complex and morally challenging daily lives is deafening (and insulting). It points towards a triviality and ignorance that is missing from the even handedness that righteous justice demands. So let's have our Kangaroo court case. 

And be done with it.

Extra Dimensional Advertising

In my mind, I'm obliged to write about the stark contrasts between video learning and the traditional education model. But as you don't know that I've been experimenting on my learning behaviour I can cut to the chase and come back to some really interesting revelations on learning modalities that I'm in the middle of.

OK so now you do know but let's stay on topic because I wrote this before my Quantum post and as I watched Inception two nights ago it's horrifying to me if people think I'm lifting ideas from movies, so now my policy is to get these posts out in a linear narrative fashion and as quickly possible.

Allow me to be a bit circumspect as it should, if I pull it off, cover my rear with the straights in the house, connect with the enlightened and curious, and also be generous for those in between. I will now adumbrate the connections between Aldous Huxley and Breakfast Cereal advertising.

Many people recognise that Special K is on the one hand banal and on the other deeply subversive. I'm going to exploit that subversive route by explaining that the dimensions  normally talked about in Special K are about an imaginary product with imaginary benefits that do more than watch your waistline. 

Imagine for example nobody informs you in your sleep that suddenly your right arm is two metres long and your left was the usual specifications. Imagine again, like me you're sprawled out on your bed, face down and both arms are touching the linen. You got that? Good, OK then the imaginary question is that if one were blind, there's no way of knowing through tactile sensory ability that the arm lengths are suddenly different. That is if you couldn't see your arms or were just waking up and alerted to their spatial pressure needed to push ourselves up you wouldn't know the difference. If the bed had mystically extended easily, then the feeling of having asymmetric arm lengths, wouldn't reveal itself. There would be no procrustean dissonance right? Ignore that link. I'm just pimping for Nicholas Talebs new book.

The point I'm trying to make is that tactile sensory experience doesn't involve or weigh largely on change of arm lengths.

That's the Special K breakfast experience messing with your head isn't it? That's one of the ways that Special K fools around with 4 dimensions while pretending to tackle the dimension it's advertising to do. Your girth for instance.

I've been thinking about how to explain this for a long time. But there's no way of making extra dimension references without being meaningless. That's because without the felt presence of immediate experience it's just abstract vocabulary.

So recently I've been trying to understand quantum physics' extra dimensions. The three dimensions are known to us quite well. The fourth is sometimes called time but not in the example below. As an aside I'd caution that time is the least understood. beginning, middle and end make a lot of sense to us but there's tonnes of evidence to suggest that it's the exception not the rule.

According to Quantum physics there are 11 dimensions. It's tough getting past the fifth dimension because the idea of meeting ourselves in folded dimensions is a bit heavy if not impossible. Unless Special K has done a scary on you at some point.

So while I was trawling through various explanations of extra dimensional space time (and neuro short circuiting too) I chanced across the most cheesy 70's style, but brilliant explanation of a way to observe that asymetric arm action outside of Special K space and time. 


I know it's Carl Sagan, don't be science snobby. I too was sniffy about indulging him at first, but this is bonkers clever at explaining extra dimensional understanding. He explains the Tesseract which is a four dimensional analog of a cube. I'll try to be creative here. It's like a 3D cube with it's insides sucked inside out to make sense in 4D.

The Tesseract is a shape impossible to illuminate fully in 3D. At best we could only glimpse it like those who believe in ghosts might envision spirits are lo fidelity spectrums in 3D. Here's Carl explaning it better than anyone.

Carl brilliantly uses the shadow of a perspex abstract of a Tesseract to explain how it would look in real life.

We clear?

Is this a good time to mention crop circles? I thought not. But let's face it. If the Tea Party can get away with racism, if the United States of America can get away with torture, if flying is still as cool as being a pimp then I'm damn sure I can go down this short cul de sac.

I don't really worry too much about individual definitions of crop circles. I'm inclined towards a Jungian analysis of what is the effect rather than the cause. So like y'all do on the quiet I've been tracking crop circles for the last two years. Mainly because the frequency is increasing year by year. The intensity of crop circles is only matched by the complete absence of farmer rage for people destroying their incomes.

2010 is no exception.

I've deliberately chosen this video for two reasons. I think it includes contributions from The Circle Makers who also go on to talk about some of the strange experiences they have had while recreating crop circles in England. It's because scepticism is almost preprogrammed into the crop circle phenomena that I've no interest in sharing my thoughts that are coalescing on this topic which if you've got this far, even if it's just one and half people (extra dimensional gag) then I'm doing well. The second reason for the video is the cutaway shot of a crop stalk with a bubble on it. Scientists have measured and recorded this in most crop circles. It's caused by heat swelling up the water on the joints of crop stalks. You should know this little discussed observation as it opens up possibilities a bit.

This isn't the time to go into crop circle trends but I'm disappointed so many planners aren't even curious about contemporary conundrums. Her Majesty's British government no less, legislated against dancing in fields through the 2004 anti rave legislation act, and yet to this day has no official line on trampling crops for geometric semioticians to get off on. I claim that to ignore this is to to be leading an unexamined life. Absence of theory is absence of creativity at the very least.

I should wrap up on this last one of the Tesseract because that's really the point of the post. A shape not possible in real life is now appearing in crop fields of England. What ever happened to a simple 'nonsense woz 'ere'? It's all very interesting.

1968 Awesomeness

One of the remarkable things about that fluffy bunch of overpaid and creatively cauterized group of advertising sheep is they're obession with bleating "awesomeness" (a value neutral contribution) at any opportunity. Could it be they've neglected to see how the world is changing before our eyes?

I was staggered some years back to read that planners (or that increasingly bloated class of notionally-superficial-intellect planning-charlatans) admit they didn't see the relevance of the internet when it emerged in the early 90's, for our business. This is beyond words for a category with the privilege of being able to think things through and when to my mind any sentient being could see it was the most cataclysmic disruption and challenge to the mainstream broadcast media business ever. As time progresses I put it to you that a normalization of human interaction is taking place such that if there is tipping point against monologue messaging, it will be irreversible. We've utterly blown any trust or credibility we may have had a chance to retain or even earn back.

Furthermore knowing the advertising group-think dynamics quite intimately, I confidently predict they will do an ideological about turn because their relationship with the truth is largely defined by a pampered and paunchy lifestyle expensed at the celebration of vacuous and immorally wasteful consumption, and as Arthur Schopenhauer elaborated:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident

I put it to you that the privileged and influential (information) classes will clamber over the bleeding bodies of the violently opposed, to claim that truth as if it were their own all along. That's how awesome advertising people are, by and large.

Maybe you think I'm overstating the case? Well I always like to invoke the observation that out of all the ethnographic studies, hanging out with cool peeps, endless focus groups and datanormous quantitative research that advertising does, it's the last to highlight when and where the revolutions or real change are emerging. An example?

Here in Bangkok a hundred were mown down by army snipers earlier this year and yet not one research company could point out that there existed a modicum of dissatisfaction with the existing regime? What an own goal. We spend endless amounts trying to connect with customers on a meaningful level yet why is that we neither ask the right questions or listen to the right answers?

The reason for this is that it's not in a remedial planners short-term best interest to point out that large cultural shifts are taking place. No, advertising is largely a sycophantic extension of the wealth creation machine for the wealthy. And for those who have studied their Marx the ability for the latest, fastest and most powerful version of Capitalism to emerge out of Singapore and take root in China is Authoritarian Capitalism. An unexpected strain that is not only more effective than the neo-liberal version championed in the West but and most sobering for anyone thinking things through right now, is largely disconnected from democratic representation. Below is just another sign of the times. A police officer who cowered in his car for three hours as the mobs outside clamoured for his blood. This isn't something I expect to see in the United States any time soon as the bread and circus distractions are way too awesome to connect the corn syrup classes with their own highly diminished and globally parasitic existence.

I put it to you that the crime isn't about joining in with the awesomeness group chant, in the hope it paints a picture of you as a warm and cuddly. But if there's no edge to anything else you've got to say, you're just another bloated corpse on the advertising gravy train. Part of the problem and blocking the solution. Time will tell. It always does.