Illuminating Discord: An interview with Robert Anton Wilson

 
"Voting wouldn’t excite me unless it included electing the directors of the big banks and corporations, who make the real decisions that affect our lives." Robert Anton Wilson.


CRNLA: What is your present involvement in “movement” activities?

RAW: I’m more involved in space migration, intelligence increase and life extension which seems to me more important than any mammalian politics. What energy I have for terrestrial brawling goes into Wavy Gravy’s Nobody for President campaign, the Firesign Theatre’s Papoon for President campaign, and the Linda Lovelace for President (which I invented myself, since we ought to have a good-looking cocksucker in the White House for once.) I think these campaigns have some satirical-educational function, and, at minimum, they relieve the tedium of contemplating the “real” candidates, a more-than-usual uninspiring lot this year. Voting wouldn’t excite me unless it included electing the directors of the big banks and corporations, who make the real decisions that affect our lives. It’s hard to get excited about the trained seals in Washington. Of course, if voting could change the system, it would be illegal. Teachers would be handling out pamphlets for children to take home proving that voting machines cause chromosome damage, and Art Linkletter would claim that a ballot box drove his daughter to suicide.

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Various_Authors__Illuminating_Discord__An_interview_with_Robert_Anton_Wilson.html

Excerpts from HYPERPOLITICS by Mark Pesce

Introduction by way of a poem:

Good Catch In A Lonely Network

Keep your heart near the music
You, and yours fill up the definition: muse
Make cupids touch your favourite
wrapped up in speaker cables
with a mouse mat under your hat

All my great whispers to
your heart and your voice
Defined by a USB stick
Data drive to the movies
Together, upstairs.

To be alone on the web of Billions
Seems impossible
nothing can fall
through this net.

HYPERPOLITICS BY MARK PESCE

EXCERPTS BY STEVE FLY AGARIC 23

"All actions generate equal and opposing forces, rising to meet

them. This is the essence of Taoism, as well as Newton’s Second

Law of Motion. Politics is the art of opposition, hence why von

Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by other

means.—pg 7

 The level of direct human addressability of the species in toto can

be calculated as the ratio of total number of subscribers versus the

total world population: 5,400,000,000 / 6,900,000,000 or 0.7826.

As we move deeper into the 21st century, this figure will approach

1.0: all individuals, rich or poor, young or old, post-graduate or

illiterate, will be directly connected through the network. This

type of connectivity is not simply unprecedented, nor just a unique

feature in human history, this is the kind of qualitative change that

leads to a fundamental reorganization in human culture. This, the

logical culmination in the growth in human connectivity from the

aural tribe to the landline telephone, can be termed

hyperconnectivity, because it represents the absolute amplification of

all the pre-extant characteristics in human communication,

extending them to ubiquity and speed-of-light instantaneity.—pg 15

A group of hyperconnected individuals choosing to

hyperdistribute their knowledge around an identified domain can

engender hyperintelligence. That hyperintelligence is not a static

actor. To be in relation to a hyperintelligence necessarily means

using the knowledge provided by that hyperintelligence where,

when and as needed. The more comprehensive the

hyperintelligence, the greater the range of possible uses and

potential effects.—pg 21.

Page numbers to PDF article (not printed page numbers).

“The desire to conserve that power led the guilds to

become increasingly zealous in the defense of their knowledge

domains, their ‘secrets of the craft’.

The advent of Gutenberg’s moveable-type printing press made it

effectively impossible to keep secrets in perpetuity. One

individual could pen a single, revealing text, and within a few

months all of Europe would learn what they knew. Secrets were

no longer enough to preserve the sanctity knowledge domains.

Ritual cast a longer shadow, and in this guise, as the modern

protector of the mysteries, the university becomes the companion

to the professional association, indoctrinating then licensing

candidates for entry into the professions. The professions of

medicine, law, engineering, architecture, etc., emerged from this

transition from the guilds into modernity. These professional

associations exist for one reason: they assign place, either within

the boundaries of the organization, or outside of it. An unlicensed

doctor, a lawyer who has not ‘passed the bar’, an uncredentialed

architect all represent modern instances of violations of ritual

structures that have been with us for at least fifty thousand years.

--Hyperpolitics pg.19

Hyperconnectivity, hyperdistribution, hyperintelligence and

hyperempowerment have propelled human culture to the midst of

a psychosocial phase transition, similar to a crystallization phase in

a supersaturated solution, a ‘revolution’ making the agricultural,

urban and industrial revolutions seem, in comparison, lazy and

incomplete. Twenty years ago none of this toolkit existed nor was

even intimated. Twenty years from now it will be pervasively and

ubiquitously distributed, inextricably bound up in our selfdefinition

as human beings. We have always been the product of

our relationships, and now our relationships are redefining us.—Pg. 22

They don’t need fancy services – and wouldn’t use them.

They only need to be connected to other people. That in itself is

entirely sufficient. People come fully equipped to provide all the

services they need. Nothing else is required. Five thousand years

of civilization have seen to that. We know how to organize our

own affairs – and can do so without any assistance. But now we

can do so globally and instantaneously. That’s not a power

restricted to the billion richest of us; it’s now within reach of half

of us, and improves the lives of the poor far more than it helps us.

Our innate capacity for self-organization, now extended and

amplified almost infinitely, has itself produced some unpredicted

and unexpected effects.—Pg 29.


“The net regards censorship as a failure, and routes

around it.”

At the time Gilmore made this statement, he was talking politics.

Gilmore is a political animal – many of you probably know of his

long-running tangle with US Homeland Security over the free

right to travel within the States without having to display ID.

And, for many years this aphorism was interpreted as a political

maxim – that political censorship of the net was essentially

impossible.—pg. 30

In a future which looks increasingly like the present, there is no

center anywhere, no locus of authority, no controlling power

ordering our daily lives. There are no governments, no

institutions, no businesses that look anything like the limited

liability enterprises born in the Netherlands five hundred years

ago. Instead, there are groupings, networks within the network,

that come together around a project or ideology, a shared sense of

salience (meaning) for that group. The product of that network

could be Wikipedia – or it could be al Qaeda. Buy the ticket, take

the ride. And it’s not over yet. The network hasn’t finished changing, and it

hasn’t finished changing us.—Pg. 33.

But what does the Meraki Mini have to do with the end of the

telcos? Just this: a mesh network is a network that’s been subject

to the corrosive effects of a network. There is no center anywhere.

There’s no hierarcy or preferred route. There’s no gatekeeper

anywhere. You can have one gateway, or twenty. You can have

one mesh node or a thousand. Just throw another mesh node into

the mix, and it’ll all work seamlessly. And mesh networks scale:

the dynamics of a network of a thousand mesh repeaters aren’t

substantially different from a network with ten. Packets still find

their way, with minimal delay.—pg. 34.

But for the past thirty five minutes, you’ve all been bathing in

WiFi, which I’m providing to all of you, free of charge. You’ve all

got good signal, and (I hope) plenty of bandwidth to blog, or

check email, or whatever you might want to do when I get boring.

And here’s the kicker – it’s all running off batteries. The whole

thing is good for at least four hours of fun before someone needs to

30

go find the mains. And, because it’s both entirely battery powered

and entirely wireless, I can drop it anywhere in I like, whether in

Australia or America or Namibia.—Pg. 36

You need to reach into that bucket of dreams and

ambitions and pull something out to share with us mob, something

that will dazzle and excite us. It might only do so for a moment,

but, in that moment, your social stock will rise so high that you’ll

never have to worry about putting food on the table or paying the

mortgage. You may not retire a millionaire, but you’ll certainly

never go hungry. The mob is a meritocracy – admittedly a very

perverse and bizarre meritocracy – but it is the one place where

“quality will out”. Quality only comes from the marriage of craft

and obsession. You have the craft. Embrace your obsessions.

You will be rewarded.—Pg. 39

 I need to leave you with one concrete example of how this is all

going to work, and for this example I’ve selected the last bastion of

authority and hierarchy – after everything else has dissolved into

the gray goo of the network, one thing will remain. It won’t be

government – that’s half gone already. It’s medicine. Medicine is

very nearly the oldest of the professions, and has been a closely

held monopoly for half a thousand years – closer to a guild than

anything resembling a modern profession. Why? Medicine is

guarded by the twin bulwarks of complexity and mortality:

medicine is rich and deep body of knowledge, and, if you screw it

up, you’ll kill yourself or somebody else. While the pursuit of

medical knowledge is conducted within the peer-review

frameworks of science, that knowledge is closely held. That leaves

all of us – as patients – in a distinctly disempowered position when

it comes to medicine. But that is all going to change.—Pg. 39

But the mob won’t wait forever. Remember: it is smarter and faster and stronger than

you. You can try to get in front of it, and get picked up by it –

I’ve given you more than enough clues to do that – or you can get

run down. That choice is yours. But if I’ve learned anything from

my study of mob rules, it’s that the future lies in making networks

happen. If you do that, there’s a place for you with us mob. – Pg. 41

The lovely thing about science is that the truth eventually

triumphs. Just this year a number of papers – including a few by

E. O. Wilson – describe what biologists are now calling “multilevel”

selection; that is, a process of natural selection which

includes both the individual and groups of individuals. Within the

individual, selfish behaviors are selected for, but with social

groups, altruistic behaviors can be just as strongly selected for.

Consider two prides of lions, one of which has a number of females

who have opted-out of breeding, while another has an assemblage

of selfish individuals, all of whom are breeding. When each pride

is threatened, or needs food, the pride with the altruistic

individuals will tend to succeed, while the pride with only selfish

individuals will tend to fail. The pressures of natural selection will

tend to select altruism over selfishness when selecting between

groups, but tends to select selfish individuals within either group.—Pg 46.

Occupy Guy Fawkes Carnival With a 'V' Mask

The world is being shaken by protests against the excesses of finance, but this is not a revolution – it is a carnival. That does not make it false, but wise. Real revolution is bloody and cruel and mad. A carnival is entertaining and opens up questions that cannot usually be asked. Guy Fawkes has become the king of a carnival of questions. Far from being sinister, his mask is a jokey icon of festive citizenship.

--http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/04/occupy-movement-guy-fawkes-mask

The Rise of the New Global Hacktivists ...

New America Media, News Analysis, Justine Sharrock, Posted: Jun 28, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO—When the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s John Perry Barlow tweeted last December, “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops,” many in the mainstream media rolled their eyes and dismissed his words as hacker hyperbole.

But the events of the past few days, in which the hacktivst “group” Anonymous launched a major campaign called Operation Anti-Security, show that many more Julian Assanges are indeed waiting in the wings—ready, willing and able to continue what the embattled WikiLeaks founder started when he released a trove of classified State Department cables on the Internet last year. And governments and corporations will find these leakers far more difficult than Assange to capture or control.

The first new batch of classified documents leaked last Thursday came from Arizona law enforcement and Border Patrol, in protest of Arizona’s anti-immigration policies. The next day, Operation Anti-Security released massive amounts of information from NATO, the U.S. Navy, the FBI, and AOL.

Anonymous has successfully leaked information before, including more than 10,000 “top secret” emails from Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on June 3 and emails from Bank of America in March, but the new campaign will be exponentially larger.
http://newamericamedia.org/2011/06/from-wikileaks-to-sb-1070the-rise-of-the-new-global-hacktivists.php

"What do MasterCard, Visa, Bank of America, Paypal and Western Union all have in common?

"What do MasterCard, Visa, Bank of America, Paypal and Western Union all have in common? They help you pay for what you want? Well, yes... that is unless you want to help WikiLeaks make the world a better place. To see the shocking details, please go to wikileaks.org/​

What Does it Cost to Change the World? from WikiLeaks on Vimeo.

But, of course, "Watching the world change as a result of your work: Priceless."

Bush's War on the Sick and Dying: 13 Hephaistis 82 p.s.U.

Bush's War on the Sick and Dying
13 Hephaistis 82 p.s.U.

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
nor prohibited by it to the States,
are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
United States Constitution, 10th Amendment

As most of you know by now, my photo went all over the country as the first patient to receive medical cannabis from the city officials of Santa Cruz on September 17; I assume the organizers pushed me up front because of my age, my white beard, my wheelchair and my general resemblence to a colorful Gothic ruin.

I've had a lot of experence with civil disobedience, dating back to Vietnam War days, but this occasion seems unique, in that the mayor, the former mayor, the city council and various other local officials participated [not as patients, but as supporters.] In fact, we all acted perfectly in accord with local and state law: Californians voted to legalize medical cannabis by a 55% majority, and Santa Cruz County by a 75% majority. The TSOG [Tsarist Occupation Government], however, has thrown the tenth amendment into the same garbage heap with the first nine. The Bill of Rights exists now only as a historical curiosity, although you can still find it in the back of a good fat dictionary.

I suggest that you check this out by looking into your own dictionary before His Royal Fraudulency George II has this subversive document removed and thrown down the memory hole.

What will Tsarism in America engulf and devour next? Having invaded medicine -- not only in the present case, but in banning stem cell research-- will the TSOG move on physics next and allow the pointy-headed bureaucrats to decide which of the eight theories of quantum mechanics professors may discuss in class? Will they issue dogmas about mathematical set theory? Will they raid Chinese neighborhoods, indefinetly "detaining" those who prefer herbal meds to allopathic ones? Nothing seems impossible: Tsarist governments use a special logic with deuces, eights and one-eyed jacks wild.

I wonder how many of the serfs even remember that the founders intended to create a free country here.

http://www.rawilson.com/thoughts.html

Information flow, Quantum Mechanics and Assange

Maybe, along with the Nobel Prize for peace, Assange could be put forward for a 'information technology' prize for the radical review of Quantum Mechanics and Information theory, known to the world as 'wikileaks'? and what I now like to call a proto hyperintelligence. --Steve fly.


"The other intriguing reason was the way Assange had arrived at his conclusion, which seemed more scientific than journalistic. He asked me to bear in mind that his background was as a computer hacker and specialist in quantum mechanics. He was fascinated by the "media information flow economy".

People forget Assange is as interested in physics as he is in ideology, and that much of his work has been motivated by an application of the laws of mechanics to information. At that first meeting, he pulled a book off the shelf and talked at length about the many propulsions and interests that had got it there – "multiple reasons why the book has arrived on that shelf". There was also "a miasma of interests behind the spread of information," he said, "and the reasons why a piece of information reaches you."And the conversation went on for seven hours in that compelling vein.--http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/30/julian-assange-interview

THE ILLUMINATI PAPERS: ROBERT ANTON WILSON.

Lee Perry ~ no peace dub~

Tragedies cover up financial apocalypse of Federal Reserve and Austerity

Twitter Is Hero as Feds Attempt to Trample WikiLeaks' Free Speech | News & Politics | AlterNet

Twitter Is Hero as Feds Attempt to Trample WikiLeaks' Free Speech | News & Politics | AlterNet