INFORMATION IS NOT POWER. INFORMATION IS PACIFICATION.

We’ve been duped into believing a false and dangerous idea — an idea that’s driving us all insane and trapping us.

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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. You 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?

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The thing about information and power is that if you don’t 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.

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Wikileaks released secrets. People became aware of the extent of American crimes in the War on Terror…the horrible crimes the military was committing in Afghanistan. Documentaries were made. Thousands of articles were written. Countless TV segments were broadcast. And nothing happened. The people did not rise up because they were not organized. They did not rise up because they were angry atomized individuals spread out around the world. The secretive imperial status quo continued.

Information did not lead to power for the people. America’s military technology did not crumble. It didn’t even reform.

Sure it may have turned some against militarism and the disastrous war on terror that had been initiated by President George Bush, but this anti-militarism didn’t lead to any change. In fact you could say that the militarism only increased and has gotten more reckless and meaner and more cynical.

In the end, Julian Assange rotted in jail. And he came out into a world that was worse — not better. He came out of prison to a US/EU proxy war with Russia…the world skirting on the edge of an expanded war with a nuclear power just because the empire does not like to be constrained. And he came out to a US/EU backed genocide in Gaza. And Gaza really does offer a perfect illustration that information is not power.

How else can you look at the terabytes of genocide videos coming out of Gaza daily for nearly two years…just the most horrific things you can imagine posted by real people going through it live…things that only used to be witnessed by survivors of wars and then mostly suppressed and kept inside because of how traumatizing these experiences were to them…are now beamed into our feeds like they’re NFL highlights or something, interspersed with ads and selfies and Marvel movie trailers…with running commentary and outrage reaction clips on podcasts and newsletters and TikToks and quote tweets. All of it in the end gets ground down into spectacle — genocide as spectacle. Genocide drives engagement. It’s gnarly and depressing. And it’s clearly changing nothing in Gaza, no matter how much more evidence is uploaded into our streams of children being ripped to shreds by American bombs that Israel launched. This isn’t deep or particularly insightful. I’ve seen people in Gaza describing this feeling, clearly aware that they’ve been made into entertainment as they struggle to survive and watching people around them killed everyday.

Don’t tell me while you’re sitting on your couch, "Stay safe, fight for your life, take care of yourself," and then turn the page and watch a nice movie. We are not content; we are souls, souls that are taken every day.

Julian was wrong. Free communication does not lead to change…it doesn’t even threaten power. That’s because free communication is at core of the Spectacle now. And the Spectacle continues. The genocide, after two years, is just one more feature of the show…a thing that lives along all the other scandals and distractions and outrage bate that’s funneled into our minds. And yet we still think information is power. The curse really is a powerful one. It’s gonna take some equally powerful magic to counteract it.

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I’m thinking about Vladimir Lenin here. How much information did he and the Bolsheviks, who were masters of organization, need to collect about the debauchery of the monarchy and the capitalist system? Not much. Not much at all. The people knew what their problems were. They didn’t need a constant information feed about the crimes of Romanovs. What was central was the organization and getting people on your side, convincing them that your party had the answers to their problems. Information played a role but it wasn’t given the cultish centrality that we give it today — a cultish centrality that has been pushed on us by the entities that feed of our attention…entities that want to keep us distracted and pacified. I guess the information that was central was the political text that informed their worldview. Marxism, which became a religion for them. But that was a theory and a political text. It was’t facts and news items — it wasn’t the torrent of random trivia that we’re all drowning in today.

I wrote a book about how the internet emerged out of a Pentagon counterinsurgency project. It was built in the 1960s and 1970s — when America’s technocrats dreamed of building computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements — with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. In a word: the internet was built to do pacification. And today, as the technology that underlies the Spectacle, the internet is still doing its job. It’s on autopilot now, too. There is no one at the controls. This technological curse has on a life of its own…operates with its own life force. And the influencer class — the people who benefit most from this system — are perhaps the most spellbound of them all. They are at the top of the Spectacle…their livelihoods and their identities and social positions are tied to it…and so they are more cursed than anyone else. I sympathize because I’m one of them. For them — for us — the lifting of the curse isn’t liberation…it’s an attack.

END TRANSMISSION.

—Yasha