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177 lines
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177 lines
25 KiB
HTML
6 years ago
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<title>Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare</title>
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<h1>Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare<br>Paul Ryan<br></h1>
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— <br>
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<p>First published in <em>Radical Software</em>, Vol.1, Issue 3, pp. 1-2, 1971
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<br>
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Klein worm illustrations by Claude Ponsot
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</p>
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<div class="indent">
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<p><em>To fight a hundred times and win a hundred times is not the blessing of blessings. The blessing of blessings is to beat the other man's army without getting into the fight yourself.</em></p>
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<p><em>The Art of War</em><br>
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— Sun Tzu</p>
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</div>
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<p>Part I <br>
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GUERILLA STRATEGY AND CYBERNETIC THEORY</p>
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<p>Traditional guerilla activity such as bombing, snipings, and kidnappings complete with printed manifestos seems like so many ecologically risky short change feedback devices compared with the real possibilities of portable video, maverick data banks, acid metaprogramming, Cable TV, satellites, cybernetic craft industries, and alternate life styles. Yet the guerilla tradition is highly relevant in the current information environment. Guerilla warfare is by nature irregular and non-repetitive. Like information theory, it recognizes that redundancy can easily become reactionary and result in entropy and defeat. The juxtaposition of cybernetics and guerilla strategy suggests a way of moving that is a genuine alternative to the film scenario of NYC urban guerilla warfare "Ice". Using machine guns to round up people in an apartment house for a revolutionary teach-in is not what the information environment is about. All power does not proceed from the end of a gun.</p>
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<p>We suffer the violence of the entropy of old forms; nuclear family, educational institutions, supermarketing, cities, the oil slick complex, etc., etc. They are running us down, running down on us and with us. How do we get out of the way? This ship of state continues to oscillate into runaway from its people and its planetary responsibilities, while efforts continue to seduce us into boarding this sinking ship; educational loans, fellowships, lowering the voting age. Where did Nixon come from anyway? How did that leftover from the old days of Elvis get to be Captain of our ship, Master of our fate?</p>
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<p>How many Americans once horrified by thermonuclear war are now thinking the unthinkable in ecological terms with a certain spiteful glee of relief at the prospect of a white hell for all?</p>
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<div class="indent">
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<p>
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<em>Psychedelic my ass: Children of A-Bomb.</em>
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<br>— Bob Lenox</p>
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</div>
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<p>Nobody with any wisdom is looking for a straight out fight. We have come to understand that in fighting you too easily become what you behold. Yet there is no way on this planet to get out of the way. Strategy and tactics need to be developed so the establishment in its entropy does not use up our budgets of flexibility. The efforts to enlist the young in the traditional parties by '72 will be gross. Relative to the establishment and its cultural automatons, we need to move from pure Weiner wise Augustinian Cybernetics into the realm of war game theory and practice in the information environment.</p>
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<p>The most elegant piece of earth technology remains the human biocomputer; the most important data banks are in our brain cells. Inherent in cybernetic warfare is the absolute necessity of having the people participate as fully as possible. This can be done in an information environment by insisting on ways of feeding back for human enhancement rather than feeding off people for the sake of concentration of power through captial, psuedo mythologies or withheld information. The information economy that begins in a guerilla mode accepts, cultivates and depends on living thinking flesh for its success. People are not information coolies rickashawing around the perceptions of the privileged, the well paid, or the past. People can and do process information according to the uniqueness of their perceptual systems. Uniqueness is premium in a noospheric culture that thrives on high variety. Information is here understood as a difference that makes a difference. The difficulties of a negentropic or information culture are in our transformations: how do we manage transformation of differences without exploitation, jam or corruption that sucks power from people.</p>
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<p>I am not talking about the cultivation of perceptual systems at the expense of emotional cadences. Faster is not always better. Doing it all ways sometimes means slowing down. Internal syncing of all facets is critical to the maintenance of a flexibiity and avoidance of a non-cybernetic "hang-up" and "drag".</p>
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<p>The bulk of the work done on cybernetics from Weiner's guided missiles through the work at IBM and Bell Labs along with the various academic spin-offs has been big budget establishment supported and conditioned by the relation of those intellectuals to the powers that be distinctly non-cybernetic and unresponsive to people. The concept of entropy itself may be so conditioned. Witness the parallel between Weiner's theoretical statements about enclaves and the enclave theory of withdrawal from Vietnam. One of the grosses results of this situation is the preoccupation of the phone company and others with making "foolproof teminals" since many potential users are assumed to be fools who can only give the most dumb-dumb answers. So fools are created.</p>
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<p>The Japanese, the people we dropped the A-Bomb on in '45, introduced the portable video system to this country in 1967, at a price low enough so that independent and semi-independent users could get their hands on it and begin to experiment. This experimentation, this experience, carries within it the logic of cybernetic guerilla warfare.</p>
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<p><em>Warfare</em> ... because having total control over the processing of video puts you in direct conflict with that system of perceptual imperialism called broadcast television that puts a terminal in your home and thereby controls your access to information. This situation of conflict also exists as a matter of fact between people using portable video for feedback and in situations such as schools that operate through withholding and controlling the flow of information.</p>
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<p><em>Guerilla warfare</em> ... because the portable video tool only enables you to fight on a small scale in an irregular way at this time. Running to the networks with portable video material seems rear view mirror at best, reactionary at worst. What is critical is to develop an infrastructure to cable in situations where feedback and relevant access routes can be set up as part of the process.</p>
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<p><em>Cybernetic guerilla warfare</em> ... because the tool of portable video is a cybernetic extension of man and because cybernetics is the only language of intelligence and power that is ecologically viable. Guerilla warfare as the Weathermen have been engaging in up to now and revolution as they have articulated it is simply play acting on the stage of history in an ahistoric context. Guerilla theatre, doing it for the hell of it on their stage doesn't make it either. We need to develop biologically viable information structures on a planetary scale. Nothing short of that will work. We move now inthis present information environment in a phase that finds its best analogue in those stages of human struggle called guerila warfare.</p>
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<p>Yet this is not China in the 1930's. Though there is much to learn from Mao and traditional guerilla warfare this is not the same. Critically, for instance, in an economy that operates on the transformation of differences a hundred flowers must bloom from the beginning. In order to "win" in cybernetic guerilla warfare, differences must be cherished, not temporarily suppressed for the sake of "victory". A la McLuhan, war is education. Conflict defines differences. We need to know <em>what not to be</em> enough to internally calculate our own becoming earth-alive noosphere. The more we are able to internally process differences among us the more we will be able to process "spoils" of conflict with the entropic establishment-i.e., understanding the significant differences between us and them in such a way as to avoid processing what is dangerous and death producing. Learn what you can from the Egyptians, the exodus is cybernetic.</p>
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<p>Traditional guerilla warfare is concerned with climate and weather. We must concern ourselves with decoding the information contours of the culture. How does power function here? How is this system of communications and control maintained? What information is habitually withheld and how? Ought it to be jammed? How do we jam it? How do we keep the action small enough so it is relevant to real people? How do we build up an indiginous data base? Where do we rove and strike next?</p>
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<p>Traditional guerilla warfare is concerned with knowing the terrain. We must expand this to a full understanding of the ecological thresholds within which we move. We must know ourselves in a cybernetic way, know the enemy in a cybernetic way, and know the ecology so that we can take and take care of the planet intact.</p>
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<p>The traditional concern is for good generals. What's desirable for us is adhoc heterarchies of power which have their logistics down. Cybernetics understands that power is distributed throughout the system. Relevant pathways shift and change with the conditions. The navy has developed war plans where the command is a fleet moves from ship to ship every fifteen minutes. It is near impossible to knock out the command vessel.</p>
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<div class="indent">
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<p><b>The traditional tricks of guerilla warfare are remarkably suited for cybernetic action in an information environment. To scan briefly:</b></p>
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<p><b>Mixing "straight" moves with "freak" moves. Using straight moves to engage the enemy, freak moves to beat him and not letting the enemy know which is which.</b></p>
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<p><b>Running away when it's just too heavy. Leave the enemy's strong places and seek the weak. Go where you can make a difference.</b></p>
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<p><b>Shaping the enemy's forces and keeping our own unshaped, thereby beating the many with the few.</b></p>
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<p><b>Faking the enemy out. Surprise attacks.</b></p>
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</div>
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<p>The business of deception in guerilla warfare is a turn off for most people in this relatively open culture. This is simply an area that need be better understood, if we are to be successful. People feel that concealing is unethical. Yet overexposure means underdevelopment. Many projects die of too much publicity. There is a sense in which we are information junkies feeding off each others unlived hopes. The media repeatedly stuns the growth of alternate culture in this country through saturation coverage. It is hard for an American to just keep his mouth shut and get something cooking. You are what you reveal. The start system renders impotent by overexposure and keeps others impotent through no exposure. Seeming different is more important that making a difference. Deception in guerilla tactics is an active way of avoiding control by an alien, alienating intelligence. When a policeman takes your name, he takes over. I know a guy who is inventing another identity for the computer. There is a virtue of mistrust and wisdom in knowing significantly more about yourself than you reveal. <em>Love Thy label as thyself.</em></p>
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<div class="indent">
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<p><em>We retreat in space, but we advance in time.</em>
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<br>— Mao</p>
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<p><b>Count the Cost. We need develop an information accounting system, a cultural calculus.</b>
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</p>
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<p><b>Use the enemies supply. With portable video one can take the Amerikan mythology right off the air and use it as part of a new perceptual collage.</b></p>
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<p><b>Be flexible. In cybernetics, flexibility, the maintenance of a good guessing way is critical.</b>
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</p>
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<p><b>Patience. Cybernetics is inherently concerned with timing and time design. It is a protracted war.</b>
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</p>
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<p><em>Do not repeat a tactic which has gained you victory, but shape your actions in an infinite variety. Water sets its flow according to the ground below; set your victories according to the enemy against you. War has no constant aspect as water has no constant shape.</em><br>— Sun Tzu</p>
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</div>
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<p>Part II<br>ATTEMPTING A CALCULUS OF INTENTION</p>
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<div class="indent">
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<p><em>Calculus of intention was a concept developed over many years by the cybernetic wizard, Warren McCulloch. He was in the business of brain circuits. McCulloch felt that dialogue breakdowns occured largely because we lacked a logic that could handle triadic relationships. Here is his description of the problem of the calculus of intention.</em></p>
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<p><em>The relations we need are triadic, not diadic. Once you give me triadic relations, I can make N-adic relations; but out of diadic relations I can't go anywhere. I can build strings and I can build circles, and there it ends.</em></p>
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<p><em>The great problem of the nervous system is the one concerning its core, the so-called reticular formation ... This reticular core is that things that decided whether you'd better run of whether you'd better fight, whether you should wait, whether you should sleep, whether you should make love. This is its business and it has never relinquished that business. It is a structure incredibly simple when you look at it, but the problem of organization of many components, each of which is a living thing, each of which in some sense, senses the world, each of which tells others what it has sensed, and somehow a couple million of these cells get themselves organised enough to commit the whole organism. We do not yet have any theory that is capable of handling such a structure.</em></p>
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<p><em>Communication: Theory and Research </em>ed Thayer, Lee, Thomas, Springfield, 1967. McCulloch's commentary on "Logical Structure of the Mind."</p>
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</div>
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<p>I have not made a thorough study of McCulloch. It would take years. I do not know if what follows satisfies that criterion he established for such a calculus. I have maintained a certain organization of ignorance relative to formal cybernetics and formal topology. In fact, what follow would not, it seems, satisfy the kind of discreteness, one-two-three, that McCulloch seemed to want. However, such discreteness may not be necessary.</p>
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<p>My approach stems from work with McLuhan that preoccpied me with the problem of how to maintain congruence between our intentions and our extensions. McLuhan talked of orchestration of media and sense ratios. Neither cut it. Orchestras just aren't around and sense ratios or <em>sensus communis </em>is a medieval model, essentially a simile of meta touch. Gibson's book on the senses considered as percetual systems is richer in description of the process. It includes McLuhan's personal probing ability as an active part of the perceptual system.</p>
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<p>While the following formulations may not in fact work as a calculus of intention I put them forth both because they have been exciting and useful for me and because the calculus itself seems a critical problem in terms of cybernetic guerilla warfare. Dialogue degenrates and moves to conflict without an understanding of mutual intent and non-intent. While it does not seem that we can work out such a common language of intent with the people pursuing the established entropic way of increasingly dedifferentiated ways of eating bullshit; it is critical we develop such a language with each other. The high variety of self organizing social systems we are working toward will be unable to co-cybernate re each other re the ecology without such a calculus of intent.</p>
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<p>This calculus of intention is done in mathematical topology.<b><a id="topology" name="topology">Topology is a non-metric elastic geometry. It is concerned with transformations of shapes and properties such as nearness, inside and outside.</a></b><p> Topologists have been able to describe the birth of a baby in terms of topological necessity. There is a feeling among some topologists that while fixed math has failed to describe the world quantitatively, it may be able to describe the world qualitatively. Work is being done on topological description of verbs that seem commmon to all languages. Piaget felt that topology was close to the core of the way children think. Truck drivers have been found to be the people who are most able to learn new jobs. While driving truck for Ballantine one summer, it became apparent to me why. Hand an experienced driver a stack of delivery tickets and he could route in five minutes what would take you an hour. It was a recurring problem of mapping topologically how to get through this network in the shortest amount of time given one way streets etc.</p>
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<p>I should say that my own topological explorations have a lot to do with a personal perspective system that never learned phonetics, can't spell or sing, and took to topology the way many people seem to take to music. The strangest explicit experience with toplogy I've had came via a painter friend, Claude Ponsot, whose handling of complex topological patterns on canvas convinced me that a non-verbal coherent graphic thing was possible. The following transformations on the klein bottle - klein worms, if you will - came in the context of working with Warren Brody on soft control systems using plastic membranes. Behind that are three years of experience infolding videotape. I checked these formulations with a Ph.D topologist. He had not seen them before, questioned whether they were strictly topological. As far as I know, they are original.</p>
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<img id="kleinWorms" name="kleinWorms" src="readings_images/klein_worm_01.jpg"><br>
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<img src="readings_images/klein_worm_02.jpg"><br>
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<img src="readings_images/klein_worm_03.jpg"><br>
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<img src="readings_images/klein_worm_04.jpg"><br>
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<img src="readings_images/klein_worm_05.jpg"><br>
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<img src="readings_images/klein_worm_06.jpg"><br>
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<p>There are three specific areas where I think this topological calculus of invention can be of use: acid metaprogramming, a grammar of video infolding and perceptual sharing, and in soft control structures using plastic membranes.</p>
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<p>Relative to acid metaprogramming I am not recommending LSD-25 to anyone nor am I endorsing Leary's approach. I am simply looking at some of the work John Lilly has done and suggesting that this calculus might be useful in that context. Both in <em>Programming and MetaProgramming in the Human Biosphere</em> and in <em>Mind of the Dolphin </em>Lilly uses the notion of interlock to describe communication between people and between species. In <em>Programming and MetaProgramming</em> he describes a personal experience with acid that in some way undercuts the metaphor of interlock, and to me suggests that the klein worms might be a better way to describe the process he calls "interlock". Here is Lilly's description of that experience he titles "the key is no key".</p>
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<div class="indent">
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<p><em>Mathematical transformations were next tried in the approach to the locked rooms. The concept of the key fitting into the lock and the necessity of finding the key were abandoned and the rooms were approached as "topological puzzles". In the multidimensional cognitional and visual space the rooms were now manipluated without the necessity of the key in the lock.</em></p>
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<p><em>Using the transitional concept that the lock is a hole in the door through which one can exert an effort for a topological transformation, one could turn the room into another topological form other than a closed box. The room in effect was turned inside out through the hole, through the lock leaving the contents outside and the room now a collapsed balloon placed farther from the self metaprogrammer. Room after room was thus defined as turned inside out with the contents spewed forth for use by the self-metaprogrammer. Once this control "key" worked, it continued automatically to its own limits.</em></p>
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<p><em>With this sort of an "intellectual crutch" as it were, entire new areas of basic beliefs were entered upon. Most of the rooms which before had appeared as strong rooms with big powerful walls, doors and locks now ended up as empty baloons. The greatly defended contents of the rooms in many cases turned out to be relatively trivial programs and episodes from childhood which had been over-generalized and over-valued by this particular human computer. The devaluation of the general purpose properties of the human biocomputer was one such room. In childhood the many episodes which led to the self-programmer not remaining general purpose but becoming more and more limited and "specialized" were entered upon. Several levels of the supra-self-metaprograms laid down in childhood were opened up.</em></p>
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<p><em>The mathematical operation which took place in the computer was the movement of energies and masses of data from the supra-self-metaprogram down to the self metaprogrammatic level and below. At the same time there was the knowledge that programmatic materials had been moved from the "supra-self position" to the "under self-control position" at the programmatic level. These operations were all filed in meta-program storage under the title "the key is no key".</em></p>
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<p><em>Programming and MetaProgramming</em>,
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<br>Lilly, pp. 42-43</p>
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</div>
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<p>Relative to video infolding it is near impossible to describe in words even using klein worm graphs what I'm talking about. The following will mean little to anyone except those who have had some experience of taping with themselves at different levels.</p>
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<div class="indent">
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<p><b>Taping something new with yourself is a part contained.</b></p>
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<p><b>To replay the tape for yourself is to contain it in your perceptual system.</b></p>
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<p><b>Taping yourself playing with the replay is to contain both on a new tape.</b></p>
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<p><b>To replay for oneself tape of self with tape of self is to contain the process in a new dimension.</b></p>
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<p><b>Parts left out of that process are parts uncontained.</b></p>
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<p><b>All of this is mapable on computer graphic terminals.</b></p>
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<p><b>At one level that of reality that is left off the tape is the part contained.</b></p>
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<p><b>Raw tape replayed is part contained in the head.</b></p>
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<p><b>If it is somebody else's tape you are watching you can to an extent share in this live perceptual system via the tape he took.</b></p>
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<p><b>To watch another's edited tape is to share in the way he thinks about the relation between his various perceptions in a real time mode. This enters the realm of his intention.</b></p>
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<p><b>If you are editing some of your tape along with tape somebody else shot and he is doing the same thing using some of your tape then it is possible to see how one's perceptions relate to another's intentions and vice versa.</b></p>
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</div>
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<p>Relative to sharing perceptual systems it is somewhat easier to talk about since there are parallels with photography and film.</p>
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<p>The most explicit experience of this mode of perceptual sharing came in the early days of Raindance when Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, Michael Shamberg and myself "shot" twelve rolls of tape on earth day. Both in replay that evening (we laughed our heads off digging each others tape while the old perceptual imperialist, Walter Cronkite, explained Earth Day for us) and in the edits that followed each of us got a good idea of how each saw and thought about the events vis-a-vis the others.</p>
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<p>Relative to soft control systems using plastic membranes I am thinking mostly of the soft cybernetic work being done by Warren Brody, Avery Johnson and Bill Carrigan. The sense of the sacred and the transcendental that surrounds some of the inflatable subculture is to me a kind of pseudomythology. Conciousness might be better invested in designing self-referencing structures where awareness is imminent in the structure and its relation to the users; not by being invested in a religious way to a "special" structure that does not relate intelligently to the users.</p>
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<p>A Klein Worm couch is a suggestion of a possible way of moving in that direction. It could be built of strong polyurethane, filled with air, perhaps by a constant flow from a pump. People might interrelate kinetically through the changes in the air pressure. Design of the actual couch could be arrived at experimentally by combinations and transformations of the structures described above.</p>
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