Faithfulness in design & infidelity at war.

Informational naivety & the cybernetics of misdirection.

So let us begin with a simple name change. We shall rid ourselves of the self conscious, almost “embarrassed” concept of “psychological operations”. In its place we shall create MindWar. The term is harsh and fear-inspiring, and so it should be: It is a term of attack and victory - not one of the rationalization and coaxing and conciliation. The enemy may be offended by it; that is quite all right as long as he is defeated by it. A definition is offered:

MindWar is the deliberate, aggressive convincing of all participants in a war that we will win that war.

(Psyop to Mindwar: the psychology of victory, Aquino & Valley, 1980 [emphasis in original])

Information: an aid or a weapon?

Like many with an interest in Stafford Beer and Project Cybersyn, I’ve recently been listening to Evgeny Morozov’s podcast The Santiago Boys. It’s a fascinating historical account which I’ve learned an enormous amount from, but it’s also a piece of dramatised theatre which has left me with conflicting feelings. In particular, Morozov’s caricatured portrayal of Beer as little more than a rich, out-of-touch eccentric toying with politics for the benefit of his career¹ has left me (and many of those who knew Beer both personally and professionally) confounded. These misleading aspects aside, there’s a lot to learn from the series, including the apparent naivety of Beer, Allende and others involved in the Chilean government regarding the scale of the propaganda, conspiracy and informational warfare being waged against them.

This, I think, can tell us a lot about the understanding of information and its use within cybernetics, as well as, for the most part, common cybernetics (which is to say cybernetics for/by/with the people at large). More importantly, from the point of view of learning from the failures of experiments like those in Chile, we might bring into focus another view of information and its uses in the social domain. This view has remained obscured from cyberneticians like Beer, and approaches information not as a tool for liberation, but as a weapon of war. This approach to information as weapon is not in essence within the domain of machinism (which is to say cybernetics in the interest of the existing hegemony), but it is from this machine that we have everything to learn regarding its cynical utilisation.²  

Information as fidelity.

Cybernetics has always had information at its centre. Both in a strictly scientific sense and more heuristically: as a way of understanding the paradigm of cybernetics at large; as a way of understanding the flows and relations within and between systems; as a logic for understanding the nature of both communication and control; as a way of understanding the means by which a difference makes a difference. Such approaches to information are diverse but also have a particular character. The cybernetic outlook approaches information as a tool to aid and clarify, often through the minimisation of noise. This is information as fidelity.

This is all well and good when designing a system, collaborating with others, channelling knowledge throughout a network, participating in a shared project, or establishing lines of communication. It is far less useful, however, within an antagonistic context; within a situation of war, manipulation and propaganda, and it is such a conflictual context which Allende and Beer found themselves in during the early 1970s, despite their apparent underestimation of the callousness of their opponents. In some sense, the naivety of these practitioners’ conception of information contributed to the failure of Project Cybersyn, not in how they implemented the design of the project itself, but in how they conceived of that project within its environment: an informational environment which was more cynical, heartless and prone to infidelity than they acknowledged.

Information as infidelity

It is evident, especially during Morozov’s podcast, that the US and their allies completely outmatched Chile’s political use of information as a tool of war; as an instrument for preventing the kind of change that systems like Cybersyn threaten to bring (and that are brought by any systems which are designed to work for the benefit of the commons). To catch sight of this alternate conception of information, which is to say information as weapon, one is better off ignoring the likes of Beer and learning from far shadier characters: Edward Bernays, Walter Lipmann, Roger Stone, John B. Alexander, Steve Bannon, David Miscavage, or Michael Aquino.³

These black propagandists have a radically different understanding of information, seeing it as a means by which society can be controlled, particularly society’s perceptions, through the use of strategic communications. ‘Control and communication’ is practically unrecognisable from its cybernetic meaning from the perspectives of these vile figures, but they can nonetheless teach us a great deal about the use of information in the context of war.⁴ When cybernetics for the commons (as well as their tools, strategies and movements) become sufficiently powerful to threaten to disturb the turning cogs of the machine, common tools are bound to be disrupted and their founders demonised unless some mastery of information in its antagonistic mode can be gleaned. Agents of machinism are masters of information at war - and the machine is always at war with all who might disturb it.

Information at war has less to do with signal than with noise. It is not simply lying or misrepresenting but a myriad of techniques of informational management, every bit as complex as the cybernetics of information. It is made up of weaving an impenetrable web of distractions; lies; false leads; mud in the water; misrepresentations; bad faith incarnations; red herrings; astroturfing; the manufacturing of a convenient history; the rewriting of inconvenient history; the invocation of paranoia, ambivalence or apathy; the amplification of what isn’t or the minimisation of what is. This is the study and practice of information as an instrument of war; as a weapon of misdirection; as the management of noise; and as the mastery of infidelity.

Beer’s retreat from mass media.

Beer’s approach to promoting Project Cybersyn in the British media had little in common with this Machiavellian approach to communications. He seemed to simply approach the media as providing opportunities to sing the praises of cybernetics and Allende’s government. When he found that this was a losing battle, interacting with a media system with pre-established alliances and little pretence of commitment to the truth, he understandably responded by retreating from interaction with media altogether:

“I am perfectly clear about my own purpose, which is not to watch (still less appear any longer on) television. ” (Laws of Anarchy, 1975)

His talk in Brighton appears to have been a turning point, where he met with harsh hostilities and found himself struggling to manage public perceptions of cybernetics, especially as they pertained to (often inaccurate) accusations of technocracy or worse. A certain naivety is revealed by Beer’s shock at the negative coverage of Cybersyn in the British media of the 1970s. He had little sense that those viewpoints may have emerged from dishonest sources, seeming to respond with frustration and eventual abandonment.⁵

Beer’s error was not with his cybernetic outlook, but with something which lay outside of it. His outlook led him to conceive of information with an assumption of fidelity, quite appropriate when designing a system to aid the commons, but detrimental within an environment at war. The design of cybernetics for the social good tends to take a faithful view of information relatively for granted (this, we broadly classify as synergism), but such an assumption certainly cannot be assumed outright, especially not while at war against a machinic hegemon.

The cybernetics of fidelity and infidelity

Both these broad conceptions of information differ immensely, but interestingly share the same basic form: the control of information in pursuing a specific aim/goal/purpose. Cybernetics concerns the design of a system with the effective pursuit of its goal(s) in mind. In c/cyb goals are presumed to be in the interests of the commons, and are pursued with and by means of the commons. This is information as fidelity.

The alternate conception of information, identified with information at war, concerns the use of information within the social and/or media environment in the pursuit of tactical or strategic political interests. Nothing necessitates that the content of information at war correlates with ‘truth’, information is merely a material used in order to mould an environment around one’s interests.

The first relates to the construction of an informational system, and the purpose in question is that of the system concerned (think POSIWID); the second refers to the manipulation of an informational space, and the purpose in question is that of some actor(s) within it who wishes to influence that environment’s future state.⁶ The first we name information as fidelity, and the second information as infidelity.

The second, which has been the focus of this text, is the speciality of machinism - as is indicated by the list of detestable figures above - but it is not theirs in essence, because synergistic experiments too are forced into contexts of war by the machine, as Project Cybersyn so clearly shows. In fact, some reckoning with information at war is required if future experiments in c/cyb are not to fall to the same fate. This doesn’t mean playing the same despicable game as those repulsive figures, but finding our own way of remaining viable when war is declared (or, more likely, remains covert) on tools in the interests of the common.⁷

Cybersyn was designed with the aim of bringing greater clarity to Chile’s economic information but failed to sufficiently account for the greatest cause of disruptions to that information’s fidelity: the machine of empire which was engaged in all-out war against it from the outset.⁸

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1. This is at least how he is presented for the first half of the series.

2. 'Everything’ here, is something of an exaggeration, since several important texts have been published regarding this subject from the side of the commons. They will not, however, be the focus of this text, as I want to highlight the harsh way in which information as war has been conceived of by existing power structures. This article is more focused on how we might ‘know our enemy’ than make strategies of our own.

3. This is a fairly arbitrary list of figures who have been heavily involved in the kind of ‘information control’ I am discussing here. They serve more as a selection of examples of the kind of attitude to information taken up by the hegemony than as pedagogues in the art of manipulation to actually learn from (though several of them are certainly worth reading).

4. For a stark example of this take Michael Aquino’s Mindwar, which presents information manipulation as the key means by which war should be fought and the pursuit of global domination by the US (so-called ‘national interests’) can be achieved most effectively. There is both an essay and a book by him with the same name.

5. This is not to suggest that the negative media reactions came from disinformation sources exclusively or explicitly (although it is likely that it was a contributing factor) but at the very least many of those critics had vested political and class interests which rendered them disinterested in taking the project seriously from the outset.

6. Perhaps such an approach can be best summarised by the quote from Aquino’s essay quoted at the outset of this article.

7. See note 2 for guidance regarding how war against the machine might be waged.

8. Images used in this article are taken from Beer’s Designing Freedom.