INFORMATION IS NOT POWER. INFORMATION IS PACIFICATION.
I sympathize because I’m one of them. For them — for us — the lifting of the curse isn’t liberation…it’s an attack.
Procrastinating while I’m supposed to be working on Episode Zero of Vampire Valley…so I wrote this to add to the general theme. Gather around everyone because I’m going to talk about something that’s taboo among the political influencer class. I see myself as a whistleblower…a traitor to my own class. Who knows…in this environment…talking about this openly might get me killed. Still, I think the people deserve to know the truth.
For as long as the internet has existed, we’ve all lived believing INFORMATION IS POWER.
We take it as a given that we need to ingest as much information as possible. We think that information comes first. That without being informed and appraised, we got nothing — that we are nothing. And now glued to our phones and our platforms and our feeds, we have developed an OCD relationship with information. We can’t not check the news. We can’t not scroll.
But we’ve all been lied to. We’ve been duped into believing a false and dangerous idea — an idea that’s driving us all insane and trapping us. The reality these days is that information is not power. INFORMATION IS PACIFICATION.
If you take a step back and look examine our belief in the power of information, it seems rational but there’s actually a magical quality to it. First comes the information. The information is a kind of incantation. Year read words on a page or hear words spoken…and these words then cause a transformation. It’s a sort of spell. And there is truth to it. There is something mysterious and otherworldly about it all. How does anything happen in the world? Why do we act…?
But if information is a spell…then how do we know the spell isn’t a malicious one. And what if our belief that information is power is itself a bewitchment? What if the insatiable hunger we have for information…what if our need to constantly consume trivia and facts and current events, trusting with all our hearts that it will lead to something transcendent…that if just learn this one thing…what if this is itself a psychic trap that’s been laid for us? What if we’re all being played, pawns in someone else’s diabolical plan?
The thing about information and power is that if you already have power — if you’re not organized, if you haven’t band together with other people, if you don’t control institutions, if you don’t have your hands on levers tied into the real world — information is not power, information is just information. And in our consumerist-entertainment-spectacle society, information is just that: a product.
I’m thinking now of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. He was a libertarian hacker fully under the spell of the information age. He believed that information had a power of its own…and that what was truly standing in the way of global liberation were powerful institutions keeping secrets…keeping people ignorant and uninformed. He believed that if we actually knew the evil shit that our governments and our corporations were doing…we’d rise up and change the world for the better.
It didn’t work out that way.