Human Iterations

(#9: Freedom of information is necessary for free societies.)

An Anti-Primitivist Essay

Central to every interaction between individuals is the conveyance of information. Of course, in a certain sense, its impossible to transfer meaning from one individual to another. We each create that individually. But what we create stems from the informational structures we have at hand, the material reality between ourselves. The nature of connection to our environment, the channels by which we experience, by which we touch the rest of the world, are thus critical factors in the macroscopic behavior of a society.

Our interactions with each other are mediated through the physical realities of our environment and are wholly comprised of informational structures. We construct physical systems of contact, whether by movement of skin on skin, electrons in logic circuits, or common neural models and vibrating air. As a result, the nature of our interactions with one another is inherently dependent upon our relationship to our physical environment. In order to interact dynamically with one another we require strong channels of dynamic integration with the world around us.

Communication (although not necessarily through strict processes of symbolic logic or language) is the defining aspect of society. However you cut it, we interact through information.

If there are restrictions or limitations to our communication with one another those conditions will shape the total internal interactions of our society.

In the previous essay I glanced over some of the emergent methodologies by which societies heal the power psychosis. Central to all of these is the internal dynamic integration of the society at hand. In order to correct an injustice you have to first actually hear about it. When we make decisions pertaining to our associations with others we like to be informed. Free societies function because we're not all fumbling in the dark. We can make knowledgeable choices and respond quickly to changes. We don't lose sight of what the economists call the "externalities" of our interactions. Other people's lives are immediate and tactile to our own. As a result we don't marginalize others beyond a periphery.

Contact is the most vital component of society. We can only help or assist those we can touch. Those we can communicate with.

Resistance needs veins. Empathy needs arms.

Dictators know this altogether too well. Free information brings down tyrants and heals cancers. The tools, technologies and processes of communication are antithetical to control. Control can only take root through isolation and strangulation. Governments are critically dependent on keeping their actions quiet. Keeping their citizens distributed and incapable of communication past a certain degree.

In China the country's integration into the world economic standard has, as a byproduct, allowed its citizens to increasingly surpass physical impediments to communication. To fill the place of this physical limitation the government has found itself forced to wage an uphill battle of sociological domination. To survive the PRC has to expend increasingly vast amounts of energy on ingraining social psychoses to fill the restrictive roles of former technological limitations or absences.

But once the fiber-optic cable is laid (or better yet the mesh WiFi networks) the only thing ultimately keeping a Guangzhou school girl trading instant messages about fashion rather than insurrection is the cop/consumer in her head. At the end of the day it's just in her head. Deeper channels of communication do simultaneously open avenues for memetic control and vapidly suicidal mental structures. ...But why take chances? Outright tyrannies like Zimbabwe and Cuba know full well how reliant they are on the viscosity of their societies. They simply haven't the energy to keep up with the more complex and elaborate mechanisms of the world's surviving power structures. Opening the door to more dynamic interaction within and without would be akin to gutting themselves. So in many cases they've done the efficient thing and simply removed the technology.

Look closely and all social power systems stem from impediments to communication.

To return to an example in the previous essay, if there's injustice or oppression but those involved are removed or dis-integrated from the rest of humanity how can recourse take place? All the self-repairing mechanisms championed by free societies depend vitally upon the capacity to convey information (speedily, effectively and across great distance) within that society. In order for an even slightly free society to function, a strong degree of contact must be possible between all individuals.

It's the same old axiom of system dynamics: Rigid structures of interaction are bad. But so is isolation. Free societies function through the free conveyance of information. The rigid fermentation of this interaction is bad for the total dynamicism of a society, but so it the separation and isolation of it into parts. Fragmented or localized societies marginalize others (those who they are denied an intensity of material contact with) and in doing so alienate themselves, making oppression inevitable. The dissolution and regionalization of significant informational contact is an inherent and inescapable reality of hunter-gatherer life.

In practice this is blindingly obvious.

By the very nature of communication a society's freedom is dependent upon its physical relations with the material world. Inherent physical limitations makes for inherent social limitation, restraint and oppression.