The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.

Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re- routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.

The technology for this revolution--and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution--has existed in theory for the past decade. The methods are based upon public-key encryption, zero-knowledge interactive proof systems, and various software protocols for interaction, authentication, and verification. The focus has until now been on academic conferences in Europe and the U.S., conferences monitored closely by the National Security Agency. But only recently have computer networks and personal computers attained sufficient speed to make the ideas practically realizable. And the next ten years will bring enough additional speed to make the ideas economically feasible and essentially unstoppable. High-speed networks, ISDN, tamper-proof boxes, smart cards, satellites, Ku-band transmitters, multi-MIPS personal computers, and encryption chips now under development will be some of the enabling technologies.

The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be trade freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.

Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

- Timothy C. May

The Underground Myth

The Security Industry
---------------------

Then in the U.S. music scene there was big changes made
Due to circumstances beyond our control... such as payola
The rock n roll scene died after two years of solid rock
- The Animals, circa 1964

There is little doubt that the explosion of the security industry has
directly coincided with the decline of the hacking scene. The hackers
of the eighties and nineties became the security professionals of the
new millennium, and the community suffered for it.

The fact is that hackers, mostly on an individual basis, decided to
use their passion as a source of income. Whether this is good, bad,
or just pragmatic is completely irrelevant. Nearly all the hackers that
could get jobs did. For the individuals that decision has been made (for
better or worse), and in general there's nothing that will change this.

This was a hacker exodus. What really mattered was not the loss of any
individuals, but the cumulative effect this had on the underground. The
more hackers that left the underground for a corporate life, the fewer
that came in. And those who stayed became entrenched, increasingly
disconnected.

Collaboration in this new age of career hackers has all but ceased to
exist. Individuals are now obsessed with credit. For their career, for
their standing in the community, it must be absolutely clear who this
research, this vulnerability, or even this opinion belongs to.

There is no trust in this corporate community; an underground issue
greatly amplified by corporate motivations. A single person can go months
or even years without telling anyone exactly what he is working on, and
whats more, will be genuinely worried about someone "publishing" their
results before him. There is no respect for the information he holds,
no belief that information should be free, no belief that research should
be open. All that matters is credit; all that matters is fame and money,
their career.

This is purely the fault of the security industry, who has exploited
and cultivated this culture, designed it for their needs. The truly sad
thing is that the corporate security world hasn't realized that they are
sitting on a gold mine, and as a result the mine is likely to collapse;
and likely to take their industry down with it.

The security industry uses information as its sole commodity, information
about insecurity. Who has the information, and who doesn't is what
makes this economy work. Whats more, the economy has been founded on
the continued output of a finite group of hackers. For the most part,
founded on those hackers that came out of the underground scene at their
technical prime.

But these hackers are not going to continue their production
indefinitely. They will lose their technical edge, move on to other
industries, perhaps climb the ladder up to management, and then
retire. The question is, then what? Then it will be up to the new wave
of young security professionals, whose motivation is as much financial
as it is passion for the technology and the thrill of the hacking game.

To imagine that these new wave office workers, university trained and
disinterested, can match the creative output of a genuine hacker is
laughable. The industry will stagnate under these conditions. The rapid
technical advancement we have seen will end, no more breakthroughs:
no more new security products or services. Just the same old techniques
being rehashed again and again until the rock has been bled dry.

I am trying to show you the symbiotic nature of the security industry
and the hacking scene. Industry needs insecurity to survive, there is
no doubt about this. A secure and stable Internet is not profitable for
long. Hackers provided instability, change, chaos. So the industry became
a parasite on the hacking scene, devouring the talent pool without giving
anything back, not thinking of what will happen when there are no more
hackers to consume.

For this reason, the security industry, much like the hacker underground,
is doomed, perhaps even destined for failure. But for now, all that
matters is that we have a thriving industry and...

A hacker underground proclaimed to be dead.

Black Hat, Two Faces
--------------------

It would be easy to lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of the
security industry. A lot of people have. Unfortunately, its not that
simple. Perhaps the underground could have survived without the lure of
a six figure job, but one thing should be made clear. The self-proclaimed
black hat movement does nothing to help.

Various black hat groups have claimed to be the voice of the underground,
but the black hat scene was only ever a pale imitation of the actual
underground. The underground wasn't at all interested in public
self-aggrandizement, but this is all the black hats ever did. All that
their various rants and escapades accomplished was to show how desperate
they actually were for fame and recognition.

But whats worse, while they often talk a big game, they very rarely have
the pedigree to back it up. This is mostly because these self-proclaimed
black hats are really just as self-serving as the white hats they pretend
to detest. With few exceptions, those black hats that aren't already
working in the security industry are those that don't have the skills
to cut it.

The entire anti-security theme was simply embarrassing. This was just the
black hat movement admitting that they couldn't step up and represent
in an increasingly technical world. Where once hacking skill commanded
respect, now the black hats were promoting misinformation in order to
make what few hacks they managed to pull off easier. They couldn't step
up to a challenge, they couldn't outsmart the white hats they so detest.

This ineptitude and misguided fervor of the black hat scene had a
massive negative impact on the hacking underground. The true voice of
the underground was lost behind the noise and drama, until the voice
became a whisper.

And then eventually fell silent.

Technology
----------

The very nature of technology, a dynamic and intractable force, had a lot
to say in the demise of the hacking world. In many cases, if a black hat
had been active 5 or 10 years earlier they would have been technically
competent and may well have contributed significantly. This is because
with the utmost respect, and despite all the nostalgia, hackers of the
past had it easy.

In the early years, the problems hackers faced were largely related to the
availability of information. Isolated groups of people had their tricks
and techniques, and sharing this information was problematic. This is
in direct contrast with the situation today, where there is an excess
of information but a void of quality.

As a result of many differing factors, the world is becoming aware of the
threats posed by lax security. When there is money at risk, steps will
be taken to protect those assets. We see now an increasing move towards
technical security mechanisms being employed as part of a defense in
depth strategy, and as a result, to be a hacker today requires immense
technical ability in a broad range of disciplines. It takes years of
individual study to reach this level.

But unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are willing, or indeed capable
of following this path, of pursuing that ever-unattainable goal of
technical perfection. Instead, the current trend is to pursue the lowest
common denominator, to do the least amount of work to gain the most fame,
respect or money.

There has also been an increasingly narrow range in what is published. In
part this is because of the lack of accessibility of certain systems
(through obscurity or price), but this is also increasingly dictated by
fashion. In a desire to fit in with the community, to be accepted in
to conferences, to be seen doing the right things in the right places
with the right people, researchers are all too happy to slot in to this
pattern of predictable and narrow progress.

And even then, the standards of what makes acceptable research, or for
what makes a vulnerability interesting, drops with every year. The gap
between offensive research and defensive implementations continues to
grow, to the point where public vulnerability research has become a
parody of what it once was, a type of inside joke.

There is no creativity, no sense of arcana anymore.

Criminals
---------

From Operation Sundevil to cyber terrorism. The criminalization of
computer hacking and, by association, computer hackers had a devastating
impact on the underground. Hacking was criminalized in two ways, both
of near equal importance: by legislation of computer crimes, and by the
new trend of genuine criminals using hacking as a method for fraud.

There should be a clear separation between these two things. The fact
that the underground collectively became criminals under the law for
what they had been doing for, in some cases, decades. And the fact that
in public perception, even among professionals that should know better,
there was very little distinction between a genuine hacker and those
criminals using hacking purely as a method for profit.

Indeed, little of what organized crime and terrorist/activist groups
are doing could justifiably be labeled hacking. It is simply convenient
to make this simplification, in media and in industry. The security
industry knows the difference, but they have no economic interest in
there being any clarity on this point. Any sort of hacking, anything
they can sensationalize enough to scare their profit margin up suits
them perfectly.

For the underground, these issues largely affected individuals, not the
broader structure of things. Each person had to make a personal decision
on whether it was worth 1) being seen as a criminal under the law and
2) being seen as a criminal in public perception. Why should the hacker
face this when such an easy, safe, respectable alternative is available
in the security industry?

Even the term black hat has been twisted into something more closely
aligned to organized crime. For all their faults, black hats were not
(in theory) motivated by this type of money.

It comes down to an aging hacking population deciding, on an individual
basis, to settle down with their families, their material possessions,
their careers. No one can argue that there is anything wrong with this. It
is just a fact that these hackers left the scene behind.

Leaving a void too large to be filled.

Forgotten Youth
---------------

The forgotten aspect of this whole story is, without doubt, the importance
of new talent entering the world of hacking. Historically, hacking has
belonged to the young. With every passing year, the average age of hackers
collectively increases. Some would claim this is a sign of a maturing
discipline. For surely, what could youth possibly contribute in this
technological landscape? They call them kids, dismiss them as irrelevant.

Despite all of the issues facing the underground, if hackers had managed
to get this one aspect right, if they had recognized the importance
of those who would come after them, if they had given them something
to aspire to be, if they had directly or indirectly taught them the
accumulated wisdom that so often separates a hacker from the crowd;
then perhaps there still would be a hacker underground.

Nearly all of the situations surrounding the disestablishment of the
underground were circumstantial, there was nobody to blame, and nothing
that could be done. But one point for which this was not true was the
underground's obligations to young hackers. An entire generation of
talented hackers have lost the opportunity to become a part of something
bigger than themselves by participating in a functioning hacking
community, simply because hackers were too self-absorbed to notice.

The decline of the underground scene happened relatively quickly, and
also relatively quietly. The hacker who left the underground behind
for his new life was unlikely to justify or explain his choices. In
fact it was more likely he would deny being changed at all. It's likely
he'd even continue to have contact with his fellow ex-hackers, in some
imitation of the underground scene. This only helped to obscure what
was actually happening.

Today's youth, for the most part, have no true understanding of hackers
or hacking. They have no knowledge of the history, no knowledge that
a history even exists. Their hacker is the media's hacker, the cyber
terrorist, the Russian mafia. This is unfortunate, but the real trouble
begins for those few that somehow become interested enough to look a
bit deeper.

The average person requires some form of role model, something to aspire
to, to imitate and to an extent, to idolize. At this time, the only
visible efforts were the white hat researchers, the black hat horde or
various other technically inept self-proclaimed 'experts'. There is so
little inspiring research, and even less inspiring hacking, that anyone
new to the world of hacking is almost invariably left with a skewed
impression of things.

Indeed, for a lot of the young people that managed to acquire the
necessary technical base, hacking was seen as simply an interesting career
path. There is no passion in these people, no motivation to extend and
create. A competent professional, valued employee.

But no longer a hacker.

The Forward Link
----------------

The hacker underground has been systematically dismantled, a victim of
circumstance. There was no reason for this, no conspiracy, no winner. A
conquered people, but with no conqueror, no enemy to fight. No chance
of rebellion. Conquered by circumstance, if not fate.

At first this would seem to be a bleak message. What is the point of
even trying anymore? Why practice a dead art? But the truth is that the
art is not dead, just the circle that brought the artists together. The
hacker underground is broken, but the hackers are not.

Casualties have been high; but there still exists a scattered,
marginalized, and misrepresented people who are the hackers. Hackers,
not black hat nor white, not professionals, not amateurs (surely none
of this matters), are still out there in this world today, still with
all the potential to be something great.

The question is not then how to artificially group these people into a
new underground movement. The question is not how to mourn the passing of
the golden days, how to keep the memories alive. There are no questions
of this sort, no problems that can be solved or corrected by individual
action.

All that remains is to relax, to do what you enjoy doing; to hack purely
for the enjoyment of doing so. The rest will come naturally, a new
scene, with its own traditions, culture and history. A new underground,
organically formed over time, just like the first, out of the hacker's
natural inclination to share and explore.

It will take time, and there will be difficulties. Some will not be able
to let go of the past, and some will fail for not remembering it. But
in the end, after everything has been said and done, the equilibrium
will be restored.

A new world, at the frontier of cyberspace, belonging to the hackers
by right.

Cryptanalysis of Contents Scrambling System

1 System overview.

Every DVD player is equipped with a small set of player keys. When presented with a new disc, the player will attempt to decrypt the contents with the set of keys it possesses. Every disk has a disk key data block that is organized as follows:
5 bytes hash of decrypted disk key ( hash )
disk key encrypted with player key 1 (dk1 )
disk key encrypted with player key 2 (dk2 )
...
disk key encrypted with player key 409 (dk409)
Suppose the player has a valid key for slot 213, it will calculate
(1) Kd = DA( dk213 , Kp213 )
To verify that Kd is correct, the following check is done, if the check fails, it will try the next player key.
(2) Kd = DA( hash , Kd )

An obvious weakness stems from this check, by trying all 240 possible Kd, disk key can be deduced without knowing any valid player key. As will be shown later, this attack can be carried out with a complexity of 225, making such an attack feasible in runtime applications. Another obvious attack is that by having 1 working player key, other player keys can be derived through a similar search. This can be done offline, also keys obtained from the former attack can be used as a starting point.

To decrypt the contents an additional key tk - the title key is decrypted with the now decrypted and verified disk key.

(3) Kt = DB( tk, Kd)

Each sector of the data files is the optionally encrypted by a key that is derived from Kt by exclusive or of specified bytes from the unencrypted first 128 bytes of the 2048 bytes sector. The decryption is done with the CSS stream cipher primitive described in section II.

2 CSS streamcipher primitive:
The CSS streamcipher is a very simplistic one, based on 2 LFSRs being added together to produce output bytes. There is no truncation, both LFSR are clocked 8 times for every byte output, and there are 4 ways of combining the output of the LFSRs to an output byte. These four modes are just settings on 2 inverter switches, and the modes operation are used for the following purposes.
Authentication to DVD drive ( not discussed )
Decryption of Disk key (DA)
Decryption of Title key (DB)
Decryption of data blocks.
LFSR1: 17 bits ? taps, and is initialized by the 2 first bytes of key, and setting the most significant bit to 1 to prevent null cycling.
LFSR2: 25 bits 4 taps, is initialized with byte 3,4,5 of the key shifting all but the 3 least significant bits up 1 position, and setting bit 4 to prevent null cycling.
As new bits are clocked into the LFSRs, the same bits are clocked in with reversed order to the two LFSRs output bytes. ( With optional inversion of bits. )

The output of LFSR1 is O1(1), O1(2), O1(3) ...
Likewise LFSR2 produces O2(1), O2(2), O2(3) ...

These two streams are combined through 8 bits addition with carry carried over to the next output. The carry bit is zero at start of stream.
(4) O(i) = O1(i) + O2(i) + c where c is carry bit from O(i-1)

This streamcipher is very weak, a trivial 216 attack is possible with output bytes known for i = {1,2,3,4,5,6}. Guess the initial state of LFSR1, and clock out 4 bytes. O2(1), O2(2), O2(3), O2(4) can then be uniquely determined, and from them the state at i=4 is fully known. The guess on LFSR1 can then be verified by clocking out 2 or more bytes of the cipher and comparing the result.

Another important attack is the case when only O(i) for i = {1,2,3,4,5} is known. Guess the initial state of LFSR1, and clock out 3 bytes. Now O2(1), O2(2) and O2(3) can be found as in the above attack. This will reveal all but the most significant bit of LFSR2s state at i=3. If both possible settings for MSB is tried, and LFSR2 is clocked backwards 24 steps, a state where bit 4 is set at i=1 can always be found. ( This is stated without proof ). Select the setting of the most significant bit for LFSR2 such that LFSR2 is in a legal state at i=1, and clock out two more bytes to verify the guess of LFSR1. For some values of O( i = {1,2,3,4,5} ) multiple start states can be found, and for others none. Selecting the correct start state is not a problem, as this attack is used in situations where only the first five output bytes are of significance ( encryption of keys ).


3 CSS mangling step:
When the CSS streamcipher is used to encrypt keys such as in DA(data,key) and DB(data,key), an additional mangling step is performed on the data. This cipher is best illustrated with the following block diagram:
A(1,2,3,4,5) are the input bytes (data)
C(1,2,3,4,5) are the output bytes (data)
ki = O(i) where O(i={1,2,3,4,5}) is streamcipher output from key
B(1,2,3,4,5) are temporary stages
The cipher is evaluated top down, with exceptions indicated by an arrow.



Examples of evaluating cipher:
B(j) = xor( F( A(j) ) , A(j-1) , kj ) for j = {2,3,4,5}
B(1) = xor ( F( A(1)) , B(5), k1 )
C(j) = xor( F( B(j) ) , B(j-1) , kj ) for j = {2,3,4,5}
C(1) = xor ( F( B(1)) , k1 )
F is a function, defined by a byte permutation table. With known cipher and plaintext, the whole cipher unravels with a minimal amount of work. Here is how:
Make a guess on k5
B(5) = xor( F( A(5) ) , A(4) , k5 )
B(4) = xor( F( B(5) ) , C(5), k5 )
k4 = xor( F( A(4) ) , A(3) , B(4) )
B(3) = xor( F( B(4) ) , C(4), k4 )
k3 = xor( F( A(3) ) , A(2) , B(3) )
B(2) = xor( F( B(3) ) , C(3), k3 )
k2 = xor( F( A(2) ) , A(1) , B(2) )
B(1) = xor( F( B(2) ) , C(2), k2 )
k1 = xor( F( A(1) ) , B(5) , B(1) )
verify by checking C(1) = xor ( F( B(1) , k1 )
Thus by trying 256 possibilities, we can recover 5 output bytes from the CSS streamcipher, and so recover the key by using the five known output bytes. This attack can be put to immediate use for recovering other player keys as in the notes to eqn. 2,3. Even if the player key is not recovered through the reversal of the stream cipher, the output of the streamcipher is known, and will still be usefull for decrypting disks that employ other player keys.
4 Attacking the hash of the disk key.
Reversing the hash at the start of the disc key block is somewhat more complicated. From (2) we see that only the hash value is known, the problem is finding a disk key such that the decrypted hash equals the disk key itself. An attack of complexity 225 proceeds as follows.
First some aspects on the value of k2 will have to be considered. A(1) and A(2) is known, and a table can be build by running through every possible combination of k2 and B(1) and calculate the resulting C(2). When trying to build a table of possible values k2 of indexed by C(2) and B(1) there will be many values that map to the same set of indices, so a the table must be able to hold several values of k2 in each location.

Guess the start state of LFSR1, calculate O1( i = {1,2,3,4,5} ) . Next guess B(1) and complete the following calculations:

k1 = xor( F( B( 1 ) ) , C(1) ) C(1,2) is known, they are the start state of LFSR1
B(5) = xor( F( A(1) ) , B(1), k1)
k5 = xor( F( A(5) ) , A(4), B(5) )
Through the table indexed by C(2) and B(1) all permissible k2 can be found, there can be from 0-8 , on average 1. For all permissible k2 calculate:
O2(1) , O2(2), and 2 possible O2(5). This is possible since k1,2,5 are found.
For every legal initial state of LFSR2 there exists a one to one mapping to O2(1,2,5) , by generating a table with 224 entries the start state of LFSR2 can be found. Thus C(1,2,3,4,5) is potentially known.
B(4) = xor( F( B(5) ) , C(5), k5 )
k4 = xor( F( A(4) ) , A(3) , B(4) )
B(3) = xor( F( B(4) ) , C(4), k4 )
k3 = xor( F( A(3) ) , A(2) , B(3) )
B(2) = xor( F( B(3) ) , C(3), k3 )
verify k2 = xor( F( A(2) ) , A(1) , B(2) ) , this holds for 1 / 256 tries ( 217 altogether ) and if the test holds, the key C(1,2,3,4,5) can be tested by eqn. (2). If eqn (2) holds, then a key has been found that will satisfy the hash. From experience it is possible to find from zero to a few such keys to any given hash value. When multiple disc keys are found trial decryption of the files will eliminate the false keys.
This attack when implemented on a Pentium III running 450 MHz, will recover a disk key from the hash alone in less than 18 seconds. This is clearly much less than what is to be expected of a 40 bits cipher.
5 Conclusion
The author has through email correspondence learned that attacks as described at (2) have indeed been carried out by brute force prior to this analysis. CSS was designed with a 40 bit keylength to comply with US government export regulation, and as such it easily compromised through brute force attacks ( such are the intentions of export control ). Moreover the 40 bits have not been put to good use, as the ciphers succumb to attacks with much lower computational work than which is permitted in the export control rules. Whether CSS is a serious cryptographic cipher is debatable. It has been clearly been demonstrated that its strength does not match the keylength. If the cipher was intended to get security by remaining secret, this is yet another testament to the fact that security through obscurity is an unworkable principle.


- Frank A. Stevenson

Der Massen-Eremit

Die erste Reaktion auf die Kritik, der Rundfunk und Fernsehen hier unterzogen werden, wird lauten: Eine solche Verallgemeinerung sei verboten; es komme ausschließlich darauf an, was wir aus diesen Einrichtungen machen; wie wir uns ihrer bedienen; für welche Zwecke wir sie als Mittel einsetzen: Ob für gute oder für schlecht, für humane oder für inhumane, für soziale oder für antisoziale.
Dieses, aus der Epoche der ersten industriellen Revolution stammende, optimistische Argument – sofern man eine Redensart so nennen kann – ist ja bekannt; und in allen Lagern lebt es mit der gleichen Unbedenklichkeit fort.
Seine Gültigkeit ist mehr als zweifelhaft. Die Freiheit der Verfügung über Technik, die es unterstellt; sein Glaube, dass es Stücke unserer Welt gebe, die nichts als „Mittel“ seien, denen ad lib. „gute Zwecke“ angehängt werden könnten, ist reine Illusion. Die Einrichtungen selbst sind Fakten; und zwar solche die uns prägen. Und diese Tatsache, dass sie uns, gleich welchem Zwecke wir sie dienstbar machen, prägen, wird nicht dadurch, dass wir sie verbal zu „Mitteln“ degradieren, aus der Welt geschafft. In der Tat hat die grobe Zerspaltung unseres Lebens in „Mittel“ und „Zwecke“, wie sie in diesem Argument vollzogen wird, mit der Wirklichkeit nichts zu tun. Unser von Technik erfülltes Dasein zerfällt nicht in einzelne, säuberlich gegeneinander abgegrenzte, Wegstücke, von denen sich die einen durch das Straßenschild „Mittel“, die anderen durch das „Zwecke“ ausweisen.
Legitim ist die Aufteilung nur bei Einzelhandlungen und isolierten maschinellen Prozeduren. Dort, wo es ums „Ganze“ geht, in der Politik oder in der Philosophie, nicht. Wer unser Leben als ganzes mit Hilfe dieser zwei Kategorien artikuliert, betrachtet es nach dem Modell der zweckbestimmten Handlung, ja bereits als technischen Vorgang: was Zeugnis gerade jener Barbarei ist, übt die man, namentlich wenn sie als Maxime „der Zweck heiligt die Mittel“ auftritt, so gerne empört ist. Die Abweisung dieser Formel bezeugt die gleiche Plumpheit wie deren (übrigens höchst selten ausdrückliche) Bejahung: denn auch der Abweisende bejaht ja, wenn auch ohne es auszusprechen, die Rechtmäßigkeit der zwei Kategorien; auch er konzediert ja, dass deren Anwendung auf das Leben als ganzes legitim sei. Eigentliche Humanität beginnt aber erst dort, wo diese Unterscheidung sinnlos wird: wo Mittel sowohl wie Zwecke von Lebensstil und Sitte derart imprägniert sind, dass angesichts von Einzelstücken des Lebens oder der Welt gar nicht mehr erkannt, ja gar nicht mehr gefragt werden kann, ob es sich ihnen um „Mittel“ handele oder um „Zwecke“; erst dort, „wo der Gang zum Brunnen so gut ist wie der Trunk.“
Was uns prägt und entprägt, was uns formt und entformt, sind eben nicht nur die durch die „Mittel“ vermittelten Gegenstände, sondern die Mittel selbst, die Geräte selbst: die nicht nur Objekte möglicher Verwendung sind, sondern durch ihre festliegende Struktur und Funktion ihre Verwendung bereits festlegen und damit auch den Stil unserer Beschäftigung und unseres Lebens, kurz: UNS.
Ehe man die Kulturwasserhähne der Radios in jeder ihrer Wohnungen installiert hatte, waren die Schmids und Müllers, die Smiths und Millers in die Kinos zusammengeströmt, um die für sie in Masse und stereotyp hergestellte Ware kollektiv, also auch als Masse, zu konsumieren. Es läge nahe, in dieser Situation eine gewisse Stileinheit: eben die Kongruenz von Massenproduktion und Massenkonsum, zu sehen; aber das wäre schief. Nichts widerspricht den Absichten der Massenproduktion schroffer als eine Konsumsituation, in der ein und dasselbe Exemplar einer Ware von mehreren oder gar zahlreichen Konsumenten zugleich genossen wird. Für das Interesse der Massenproduzenten bleibt es dabei gleichgültig, ob dieser gemeinsame Konsum ein „echtes Gemeinschaftserlebnis“ darstellt, oder nur die Summe vieler Individualerlebnisse. Worum es ihnen geht, ist nicht die massierte Masse als solche, sondern die in eine möglichst große Anzahl von Käufern aufgebrochene Masse; nicht die Chance, dass alle dasselbe konsumieren, sondern dass jedermann auf Grund gleichen Bedarfs das Gleiche kaufe. In zahllosen Industrien ist dieses Ideal vollständig, oder doch nahezu, erreicht. Dass es von der Filmindustrie optimal erreicht werden kann, scheint mir fraglich. Und zwar deshalb, weil diese, die Theatertradition fortsetzend, ihre Ware noch als eine Schau für Viel zugleich serviert. Das stellt zweifellos einen altertümlichen Restbestand dar. Kein Wunder, dass die Rundfunk- und TV-Industrie mit dem Film trotz dessen gigantischer Entwicklung, in Wettbewerb treten konnten: beide Industrien hatten eben die zusätzliche Chance, außer der zu konsumierenden Ware auch noch die für den Konsum erforderlichen Geräte als Waren abzusetzen; und zwar, im Unterschiede zum Film, an beinahe jedermann.
Und ebenso wenig erstaunlich, dass beinahe jedermann zugriff, da die Ware, im Unterschied zum Film, durch die Geräte ins Haus geliefert werden konnte. Bald saßen also die Schmids und die Smiths, die Müllers und die Millers an vielen jener Abende, die sie früher zusammen in Kinos verbracht hätten, zu Hause, um Hörspiele oder die Welt zu „empfangen“. Die im Kino selbstverständliche Situation: der Konsum der Massenware durch eine Masse, war hier also abgeschafft, was natürlich keine Minderung der Massenproduktion bedeutete; vielmehr lief die Massenproduktion für den Massenmenschen, ja die des Massenmenschen selbst, auf täglich höheren Touren. Jeder wurde durch dieses en masse Hergestellte als Massenmensch, als „unbestimmter Artikel“ behandelt; jeder in dieser seiner Eigenschaft, bzw. Eigenschaftslosigkeit, befestigt. Nur, dass eben, und zwar durch die Massenproduktion der Empfangsgeräte, der kollektive Konsum überflüssig geworden war. Die Schmids und Smiths konsumierten die Massenprodukte nun also en famille oder gar allein; je einsamer sie waren, um so ausgiebiger: der Typ des Massen-Eremiten war entstanden; und in Millionen von Exemplaren sitzen sie nun, jeder vom anderen abgeschnitten, dennoch jeder dem anderen gleich, einsiedlerisch im Gehäuse – nur eben nicht um der Welt zu entsagen, sondern um um Gottes willen keinen Brocken Welt in effigie zu versäumen.
Massenregie im Stile Hitlers erübrigt sich: Will man den Menschen zu einem Niemand machen (sogar stolz darauf ein Niemand zu sein), dann braucht man ihn nicht mehr in Massenfluten zu ertränken; nicht mehr in einen, aus Masse massiv hergestellten, Bau einzubetonieren. Keine Entprägung, keine Entmachtung des Menschen als Menschen ist erfolgreicher als diejenige, die die Freiheit der Persönlichkeit und das Recht der Individualität scheinbar wahrt. Findet die Prozedur des „conditioning“ bei jedermann gesondert statt: im Gehäuse des Einzelnen, in der Einsamkeit, in den Millionen Einsamkeiten, dann gelingt sie noch einmal so gut. Da die Behandlung sich als „fun“ gibt; da sie dem Opfer nicht verrät, dass sie ihm Opfer abfordert; da sie ihm den Wahn seiner Privatheit, mindestens seines Privatraums, belässt, bleibt sie vollkommen diskret. Wahrhaftig, das alte Wort, dass „eigner Herd Goldes wert“ sei, ist von neuem wahr geworden; wenn auch in einem völlig neuem Sinn. Denn Goldes wert ist nun nicht für den Eigentümer, der die conditioning Suppe auslöffelt; sondern für die Eigentümer der Herdeigentümer: die Köche und Lieferanten, die die Suppe den Essern als Hausmannskost vorsetzen.
Über die Tatsache, dass die Mehrzahl der Menschen in heutigen Massengesellschaften durch die Belieferung mit Massenerzeugnissen und durch den Druck der Massenmedien geprägt werden, gibt es keine Meinungsverschiedenheit. Diese Tatsache wird nicht etwas nur behauptet, sondern vor allem praktiziert: und zwar von den Lieferanten selbst, die, um in der Lage zu sein, die Übertölpelbarkeit und Modellierbarkeit des Menschen ausnutzen, also den „schlechten Kunden“ Mensch in einen guten Kunden zu verwandeln, Research - Unternehmungen aufs üppigste dotieren, und die Übertölpelbarkeit des Menschen aufs systematischste studieren lassen. Der Gedanke, dass der Herstellungsvorgang mit dem, was man gewöhnlich als den Produktionsprozess bezeichnet: also mit der Herstellung der dinglichen Produkte, sein Ende finde, ist kindlich.
Es ist zunächst plausibel, dass, wenn Entscheidungen als „gewünschte Entscheidungen“ geboten werden sollen, die Deutungen der getroffenen Entscheidungen genau so fertig geliefert werden müssen wie diese Entscheidungen selbst; dass zur Entscheidung also als integrierender Bestandteil gehört, wie diese gedeutet werden soll; dass auch die Deutung vor-entschieden und unmittelbar mit der Entscheidung mitgeliefert wird. Das bedeutet aber – und damit formulieren wir eine für die konformistische Situation wesentliche Neutralisierung: Einen Unterschied zwischen Fakten und deren Interpretation darf es nicht geben. Dieser Unterschied muss verwischt bzw. unterschlagen werden. Dieses Prinzip wird tatsächlich strikt durchgeführt. Niemals werden Interpretationen als Interpretationen präsentiert, niemals als Ansichten, sondern stets als Fakten.
Und wenn die gelieferte Meinung eo ipso assimiliert, eo ipso als eigene Meinung aufgefasst wird, dann gibt es natürlich auch keine andere, die geäußert werden könnte. Annulliert ist also außerdem der Unterschied zwischen Hören und Sprechen. Was erzielt werden soll, ist „höriges Reden“. Die Definition des Menschen als zoon logon echon wird nun entwertet. Denn ein Sprachwesen ist der Mensch nun nur noch deshalb, weil er ein Wesen ist, das hört.

- Günther Anders

Speed Health

Hello? Are you asked this too? "What!? No cell phone!?" It doesn't seem enough to reply, like Bartleby, "I would prefer not to." So I thought I'd enter my own testimony into the public record. Not necessarily as manifesto, polemic, or pledge-drive, and certainly with no new revelations. But just an impromptu survey to see what I think, and against which you might evaluate your own experience. This could just as easily be why I don't own a car. Or a tv. But cellphone it is, especially given a curious, recent true-life-event (recounted further along down this trail). For convenience, you can remember my points with three words: need, speed, and health.

Need is simple. I was talking with my neighbor Marc Bittner recently, author of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. I asked him if he finds himself having to justify his lack of a cellphone. For sure, he agreed. Just the other day, a stranger he was talking to at a party learned he didn't own one. He smiled to me and shrugged as he relayed her shocked reaction. "What!?" she'd exclaimed. "How can you do business!?"

Could she envision how writing a book means long continuous stretches of unbroken solitary concentration? Free of distractions tugging at one like the sound of some mouse scampering invisibly at hand nearby. No, writers are not most people. As poet e.e. cummings put it, in a world trying to make each of us into anyone but ourself, we write to be no one but ourselves. So I try to write from that place where I do not own a cellphone, which is how I came into this world, and how I will one day leave.

But a writer's work is a gift. I'm fully aware a cellphone is unavoidably implied in many a job description today. And if you're speculating with your savings, selling stocks and bonds at a moment's notice, it can be crucial.

Moreover, my absence of need reflects a conscious choice, a life of voluntary simplicity. I have no idea how much money I'm saving; that's not the only bottom line to my values. I try to define a middle path between the greatest good and the greatest goods.

Not only do I not need a cellphone, but I positively enjoy my life's basis in something other than need, with need's shadings of want, craving, and greed -- plus the opposite end of its spectrum, of avoidance and aversion. In relative freedom from uncontrollable need, I base my life on breath instead: this wonderful moment, in all its unique texture, shading, and nuance. (See for yourself: be here now.)

A word more about this dimension of, for want of a better word, the spiritual (or, if you prefer, soul). A recent survey found cellphone usage as being predominately about location, saying "I'm here (X) / headed there (Y)." In his book Digital Dharma, American Sufi writer Stephen Vedro cleverly superimposed our communications technology along the chakras, energy centers running along the spine, thus forming a natural hierarchy or ranking. At the base, he infers, is security, being safe; next up, at the pelvis, is relationships. So cellphones are somewhere between those two: fairly low-level. Phones in general have such a narrow bandwidth, compared to, say, video-teleconferences carrying facial expressions. Thus emphasis, subtlety, or nuance means only talking louder (and the Internet has its array of winky "emoticon" face glyphs) which brings me to my next point.

Sum up my lack of need as positive quality of life, but I know I'll still be branded an old fogey. In this generational difference comes a qualitative factor in my decision which could be summed up under the header of speed. The apt title of the classic documentary on the seminal punk rock phenomenon spells out a trinity of modes in which media moulds its users in ways I'm so not about: Louder, Shorter, Faster.

Louder? Who hasn't walked down the street and wondered, "Are you talking to me?" -- only to turn around and see someone behind, talking on their cell like a giddy drunk unaware how loud they are. Doing damage control, we might rank the portable music-player phenomenon ("iPod") as a defensive measure against such proliferation of noise. Being beside someone else's cellphone makes one hostage to half a conversation, reducing the public sphere into a cramped telephone booth without walls. (Quaint analogy, since cellphones have made landline payphones as antiquated as carrier pigeons.) Question: pitting iPod against iPhone, who wins? (I? or I?)

Shorter doesn't refer here to the miniaturization of information technology, but rather duration. It's joined at the ankle with faster. For instance, in our fast-forward pace, Andy Warhol's original dicta that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes has been abridged to fifteen seconds. Or five. Hence, Twitter, the minimalist media measure of cellphone social networking: 140 characters (spaces included).

So I'm taking a poll: how fast do you talk? (160 words-per-minute seems the maximum speed limit on the Oral Information Superhighway.) When I have to phone for information these days, I feel like a lumbering old highway patrolman pulling some innocent young lady over, having them roll down their window, and telling them, "Excuse me, I'm an old person! Could you please speak s-l-o-w-e-r-?!" Gosh, to the Younger Generation, I must sound like a drawling John Wayne; to me, they sound like a 33 rpm record played at 45 (Alvin and the Chipmunks, say).

Is it the electricity itself that speeds us up, like a subliminal jolt of caffeine? Back in distant memory, a rural New England town was getting hooked up to phone lines. Someone took the opportunity to record the pace of daily speech, before and after phones. After phones, people spoke faster, at the general store, in private conversation, all the time. The Earth resonates at a frequency of 8 hertz (7.83 ±0.50); the electricity running through my apartment walls right now is 60 Hz. You do the math. Watt, volt, and amp have pre-empted more elemental, essential fields of human vibration, such as intuition, imagination, spontaneity.

Of course to set down ideas on the ever-accelerating pace of everyday life within the quickly obsolete medium of print can be a set-up for irrelevance in today's discourse. (Blog! Twitter!) Readers who wish to further explore this phenomenon might consult James Gleick's mass-culture critique of the acceleration of just about everything in Faster (fasterbook.com), or even Paul Virilio's challenging studies of dromology, the logic of speed as basis of technological societies. (Under the latter rubric, I note the cellphone, like much modern technology, was incubated by the military.)

I realize I might sound, thus far, like the caterpillar who said to the other caterpillar, when the butterfly flew by overhead, "You'll never get me up in one of those!" Yet I haven't even begun to directly address the matter of health, which concerns us all. It's a contested field, but worth a sober moment.

These days, we hear talk about acceptable levels of electromagnetic fields (EMFs). But biophysicist Neil Cheery has warned there is no safe threshold level, saying EMFs "enhance cell death rates and therefore they are a ubiquitous, universal genotoxic carcinogen that enhances the rates of cancer, cardiac, reproductive, and neurological disease and mortality in human populations." Prof. Cherry and other scientist have noted that EMF pollution affects plants and animals as well. Indeed, this could well be more wide-reaching than global warming, but without a lone polar bear surfing by on a raft of ice to make the invisible pollution graphic. Lacking one such poster child, consider our children, in general.

It's two decades now since our own EPA deleted from a two-year study the finding that extremely low-frequency fields (EMF) be classified as "probable human carcinogens" alongside such notorious chemical toxins as PCBs, formaldehyde and dioxin (Time, July 30 1990). In that study, five of six case-control studies published in peer-reviewed medical literature showed children living near power lines giving off strong magnetic fields were developing cancer more readily than children who did not live near power lines.

The issue of children being more at risk is indeed graphic. Prof. Om P. Gandhi, Chair of Electrical Engineering at the University of Utah, measures brain penetration of radiation when adults use a cellphone as 30%; 50%, in a ten-year-old's brain; and 75% in a five-year-old. Dr. Michael Klieeison, of the Neuro Diagnostic Research Institute in Marbella, Spain, has shown a two-minute cellphone conversation disrupts brain activity in a child's brain for up to two hours. Is it any mystery that the ministries of health in Britain, Canada, Finland, Germany, India, Israel, and Russia warn against cellphone use by kids under 18? Yet back home Sprint has a two billion-dollar contract with Disney to market cellphones to kids under 12. (It's amusing to think how the hands of Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse just couldn't text, but scary to think at how adept are little human fingers.)

Adult or kid, cellphone radiation affects us all, whether we own one or not. Thus, we're involuntarily the biggest biological experiment in history. (Forget pre-market health tests: we are that test, now in-progress.) In that regard, worse than cellphones are their microwave towers, still signaling weird messages to our protein molecules even after we've flushed our cell down the toilet. It's like cigarettes, and passive inhalation. Cigarettes cause cancer, still they're legal. (Caveat emptor: buyer beware.) You pays your money, and takes your risk. But when a server farm of microwave dishes comes to pump more wireless waves into our neighborhood, where else do we go? Over ¾ of the planet has now gone wireless.

If there is indeed a cancer connection, it's not that cellphones implant cancer cells in the head, like a poison pellet insinuated into our supper. We're all born with cancer cells. It just that sometimes they proliferate far more rapidly than our natural immune system can cope with, often the result of some external stimulus. That simple fact might hold a truly sinister metaphor for cellphones as themselves a kind of cancer, ubiquitous and out of control.

But science is an art, not iron law. So you'll also hear that cellphones are as harmless as genetically modified food that carries its own pesticides. But in my book, health is more than what's told to me by a man wearing a white smock.

I'm a writer and look to the word health itself, where I find the same root as whole, and holy. (And "Hello!") So I wonder: how healthy is it to slip a sound-device against, or even into, the incredibly complex and sensitive human ear canal? Before sound reaches the drum, it's invited to resonate within an acoustic antechamber, the way perfume distills fragrance to the atmosphere.

Consider too the survival value of sound. We cannot see a saber-toothed tiger coming up from behind us in a dense thicket, but our ears can hear 360º. Stop and notice for yourself how sounds orient you in space, near middle and far. (Hint: near might be as close as your very breath.)

While the ear reminds us we are here, society encourages us to plug up our ear canal and be anywhere else, (aka "virtual reality"), an abstract but enveloping realm of comfort, be it talking with a virtual companion or monitoring a distant, now-defunct recording session.

As well as sound, the ear is an organ of balance. Are cellphones a manifestation of what the Hopi people call koyaanisqatsi, life out of balance? I'm not against technology, per se. But I note that technology's gone from being a tool of science, to vice-versa. I think it's really neat I can use a ladder to replace a burned-out light bulb, yet I can also get by just fine on candle light, and in fact do so at least one night a week. Just as there's a Slow Food Movement, so have I my slow life. I'm a writer, but you could just say "creative." The imagination, I've found, works slowly and quietly. I agree with Brenda Ueland, author of If You Want To Write (1933). If you want to write (or just be creative), she notes you need to go slow, and large, to be open to the consoling, noble, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that are the breath of life. Not brisk as waltzing mice. So, need and speed intertwine, as do all these themes.

Last, but not least, there's multitasking. Today, people drive, eat, talk on a cellphone, and more, all at the same time. Reminds me of the title of a poem by Allen Ginsberg, circa 1966, Consulting I Ching Smoking Pot Listening to the Fugs Sing Blake. Multitasking wasn't yet a word. Originally, it referred to what a computer could do ("parallel processing"): now, people do it too. So do we serve technology, or vice-versa?

Health for me is attending to what's in front of my face, at the moment. It means just eating when eating, not reading: doing both is just an inefficient use of reading and of eating. Watch people eat in public and I think you'll notice they usually spear the next bite on their fork while chewing what's currently in their mouth, without looking, while maybe reading a newspaper (and listening to an iPod). Never fully enjoying each mouthful. Each bite, containing the whole universe. True, maybe some advanced techno-adepts are mastering the art of one-pointed multitasking. But even though there's a migration from the use of hand-held mobile phones while driving to cordless, recent studies have shown they're both multitasking (traffic is one conversation, a phone call's another), both equally dangerous. A recent front-page New York Times study (Dismissing the Risks of a Deadly Habit, July 19 2009) by Matt Richtel, observes that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, and the likelihood they will crash is equal to that of someone with an .08% blood alcohol level, the point at which drivers are generally considered intoxicated. So just as cellphone use can be a twitching addiction, so too can it be toxic, and fatal.

That night, she left me a sincere voicemail, saying she was praying I'd be alright. I called back to thank her, and to say I pray she never use her cellphone while driving ever again. She fervently agreed yet quickly added, in the same breath, "But it rang!!"

(Hello?)


- Gary Gach

The State of Information

Preface

A concern with paradoxes is one of the hallmarks of the twentieth century. The transformation from a deterministic, clockwork universe in the nineteenth century to the probabilistic one of quantum physics marks a radical shift not only in the thinking about the physical world, but in how that thinking is modeled, conceptualized, and interpreted. Similar foundational changes spread through other disciplines as well: mathematics and psychology produced theories of paradox that resemble the way those in quantum physics describe our interpretation-encounters with the world around us. The interpretative model these fields present is one in which contingency and variability are inherent properties of reality and certainty is replaced by uncertainty and a probability set; the traditional, singular truth becomes one truth among many. However, it is important to acknowledge that the results of this paradoxical interpretive model are not relativistic in the typical sense employed in the non-specialist's claim that "truth is relative"; any confusion about this apparent "relativity" is resolved through a more detailed consideration of the paradoxical interpretive model. Conceptualizing the state of information suggests an epistemology not based on certainty.

The emergent conceptual space produced by fields such as physics, math, and psychology, has not only enabled the development of modern digital computers, the internet, networked communication, but has transformed all aspects of our society. This model suggests that social, political, and cultural meaning proceed from, in a sense are secondary effects derived from, a larger conceptual space that can be called the "state of information." Culturally produced meanings, precisely because they are interpretative effects of how we use information, depend on creating relationships within that "information space"; however, the state of information has a recursive relationship with these relationships--once created, they enter into that information space as further elaborations of the information space itself; they are easily (and often) confused with the information space. Nevertheless, the concept of this information space does pose questions about the state of information and its relationship to cultural theory. While these secondary meanings and the space they describe are linked in a recursive, totalizing formulation, they are also entirely an abstraction that serves a descriptive or intellectual purpose. The space should not be reified; the state of information becomes problematic precisely at the moment it is reified, as in the digital aspiration towards that state.

Understanding the state of information's abstract space proceeds from four concepts that occupy central positions in their fields: uncertainty, superposition, schizophrenia, and seriality. The first three describe different aspects of what can be considered a singular phenomenon (the emergence of paradox), while the final term identifies the ground for the figure that is paradox itself: multiple emergent, equally valid yet exclusive potentials within a delimited framework. Considering this figure-ground relationship has been an ongoing concern for a variety of distinct fields of empirical study. These considerations suggest an epistemological framework that requires inconsistency, inconsistency that is also implicit in the interpretative implications of Gödel's Theorem and in John Holland's concept of "complex adaptive systems." Understanding the state of information requires an explanation of how these four concepts interlock, since each term describes a specific aspect of how the state of information emerges from empirical observations; nevertheless, the state of information is an abstract construct that is most apparent in the concept of the digital itself.

By attempting to literalize information as instrumentality, the digital aspires to become the physical manifestation of a state of information beyond all considerations of validity, empirical reality, or dialectical opposition: an equivalency reified in the idea of information-as-data. It emerges naturally from this idea. The suggestion that the digital transcends physical form through its replacement of physicality with meaning embodied in that (denied) physicality is the aura of information in action. The aspiration to achieve the state of information as immanent instrumentality is fundamental to this would-be transcendence; it also becomes apparent in the attempts to create what mathematicians term "completeness," inherent in the various ways the digital is deployed in security.The digital aspiration towards the state of information is a direct effect of the immateriality assigned to the digital. The reification of the state of information in digital technology is a consequence of the immortality of digital information. The perpetual accumulation of digital information in databases produces the illusion that it is possible for this information collection to create the type of completeness only possible in the abstract framework of the state of information itself.

The aura of information reveals itself via the digital as a mystification that strips physical reality from consciousness. This transformation happens because the state of information suggests that all interpretations are equivalent--even contradictory, mutually exclusive, or empirically false ones--because there is no distinction between interpretation and information. This understanding relates to Ludwig Wittgenstein's comments about the empirical tests familiar from scientific procedures:

"An empirical proposition can be tested" (we say). But how? and through what? What counts as its test?--"But is this an adequate test? And, if so, must it not be recognizable as such in logic?"--As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting."

Given the framework of these questions, the a priori "forms of life" that inform both question and test become the grounding for the answer and provide the range of possible solutions. However, to ask the question that addresses that grounding, "What is it that provides the basis for that ground?," is to open up an infinite regression. It is a question that cannot be resolved without the assertion of an arbitrary factor--the forms of life. Such frameworks for thought emerge precisely because there is an assumption of sequence (as in the logical syllogism), while the state of information does not present sequence, but rather presents multiplicity and continuity that deny logical sequence (the state of information is alinear rather than nonlinear). Jean Baudrillard intuited this implicit feature of the uncertainty of quantum physics in Impossible Exchange:

The uncertainty of the world lies in the fact that it has no equivalent anywhere; it cannot be exchanged for anything. The uncertainty of thought lies in the fact that it cannot be exchanged either for truth or reality. [. . .] The uncertainty principle, which states that it is impossible to calculate the speed of a particle and its position simultaneously, is not confined to physics. [. . . ] Uncertainty has seeped into all areas of life. And this is not a product of the complexity of parameters (we can always cope with that); it is a definitive uncertainty linked to the irreconcilable character of the data.

Baudrillard is discussing, without naming or developing it, the empirical basis for the concept of superposition. The paradox which lies at the heart of the state of information proceeds from a different situation entirely than the one Wittgenstein investigates, and it is one which is not capable of producing answers and certainty--one in which the reality that information/interpretation describes is a feature of that information, rather than an independent value. This distinction of information from reality is the reason that the digital aspires to the state of information: this state, in reified form, appears as a superstructure beyond the concerns of physicality; denial of the physical is the defining feature of the aura of the digital.


1. Paradoxes of Interpretation

Central to understanding the state of information (and the triad of uncertainty, superposition, and schizophrenia), is the issue of paradox. When typically encountered, a paradox is a symptom of interpretative failure; paradox is understood as a point of logical/axiomatic incorrectness--a direct demonstration of inconsistency in a logical system. Mathematician Douglas Hofstadter explains the difference between consistency and inconsistency in his book on paradoxes, Gödel, Escher, Bach:

Let us now say exactly what is meant by consistency of a formal system ... that every theorem, when interpreted, becomes a true statement. And we will say that inconsistency occurs when there is at least one false statement among the interpreted theorems.

All parts of a formal (logical) system must be true for that system to be a valid interpretative construction; inconsistency means that the system is faulty and paradox means that there is a flaw in the construction of the entire system. While interpretation as a general concept is not identical to the constructed formal systems of logic (such as mathematics), the formal systems Hofstadter describes are a specialized subset of interpretations. Axioms and theorems are rigorously defined versions of past experience and future expectations; their role in a formal system is to render the information needed to construct the system (and any interpretations within that system) explicit. Inconsistent results demonstrate an inherent failure of interpretation; their resolution requires some type of external modification to resolve the incompatibility. Often this change comes from an empirical test against observable reality; however, inherent in resolving the paradox is a method for locating and improving interpretations. The inconsistency can also be understood as a liminal point of instability where multiple, equally valid interpretations converge--a nexus where alternatives coexist at the same time and with equal validity. It is this recognition of paradox as a nodal point that creates the state of information. Paradoxes define the indeterminate points of collision and overlap between different interpretations; the state of information is a construct that emerges from the ways these nodes can be related to one another in a probabilistic space. Quantum physics calls this indeterminate state of overlapping, mutually exclusive (yet valid) interpretations "superposition."


2. Superposition

In quantum physics the concept of superposition was developed because of an inconsistency between the formal, deterministic predictions of physics and the empirical results of experimentally testing those predictions. It is a term that describes an apparent, fundamental paradox of physical reality. Physicist David Albert explains that superposition is a paradoxical incompatibility of interpretation and observation. Knowing one observed value precludes being able to identify another:

We find that we can't ever put ourselves in a position to say, "The color of this electron is such-and-such and its hardness is now such-and-such." It isn't that our color and hardness [tests] are built (somehow) crudely... It's that any electron's even having any definite color apparently entails that it's neither hard nor soft, nor both, nor neither, and that any electron's even having any definite hardness entails that it's neither black nor white nor both nor neither.

Albert's observation is that one value, color, is apparently incompatible with the other value--only one of these values can exist at any given moment. It is not that the tests are flawed, nor is it that the phenomena examined act inconsistently; there is something else happening that appears to defy our expectations of a single, consistent result. The solution to this paradox is to describe our predictions as equally valid yet incompatible sets of probabilities--to abandon singular, absolute results. Viewing interpretation as ranges of potentials is a key feature of the state of information. The expression of any single interpretation is as one within a range (or set of distinct ranges) in which all interpretations are valid. Nevertheless, only one interpretation is immanent at any given moment. As Albert explains, "The rules for predicting the outcome of a measurement of (say) the hardness of a white electron turn out (if so far as we're now able to determine) to be probabilistic rules rather than deterministic ones."

In order to accommodate the paradox of superposition, quantum mechanics has been forced to describe the world based on probability. This kind of interpretation presents opposed potentials as equally possible; instead of there being a contradiction in this description, the extremes become liminal positions of mutual exclusion. This is a solution that does not solve the problem; it makes inconsistency into part of the rules. The variability defined by ranges of equally valid potential interpretations produces an information space that collectively defines the interpretant. The state of information derives from the full range of superposed potentials that identify the extremes of this information space.

Instead of being deterministic and singular, the state of information (following the model suggested by superposition), defines interpretations as multiple, overlapping, mutually exclusive, and explicitly contradictory. The state of information is a network or spectrum of possibilities, rather than monolithic. It is the existence of the range of potentials that is the guarantee of validity (i.e. all interpretations are valid, their validity being a function of presence within the larger range of equally valid potentials), even though only one particular interpretation will be empirically observable at any given time. The likelihood of empirical observation is simply another dimension of this multidimensional space. The state of information, while an abstraction, thus implies a specific type of (in)completeness unbounded from human knowledge in the same way that all the members in the set of rational numbers, while immanently describable, cannot be enumerated individually. This interpretative framework generates infinite regression at the same time as it is logically bounded. That the state of information originates within physically immanent observations and empirically describable processes does not negate its inherent nature as a construction. It is necessary to acknowledge that the state of information lies outside the frameworks of human conceptualization except indirectly; the process of naming "the state of information" creates the illusion that such a state is comprehensible, that it can be conceptualized; it is problematic precisely because it exceeds our conceptual capacity in the same way that the infinite does.


3. The Necker Cube

The visually ambiguous figure shown below is an optical illusion called a "Necker Cube," named after the nineteenth century Swiss crystallographer who discovered it, Louis Albert Necker. Necker noticed that salt crystals appeared to reverse their orientations when viewed with a microscope.Optical illusions provide a direct way to consider the interaction between different, incompatible (superposed) interpretations,and the choices that determine which interpretation we see at any given moment.

The indeterminate orientation of the salt crystals Necker observed is recreated in this optical illusion by a network of lines that we interpret as a cube oscillating between an up and down orientation. It presents two possible orientations using the same set of potentials. The interpretation of the Necker Cube's orientation we make depends on how we interpret the relationship of the constituent lines. Our understanding of the cube's orientation suggests a feedback loop between our visual perception and our interpretation of the figure's orientation;nterpretations and perceptions dynamically interact to resolve the visually ambiguous figure into one orientation or another.

The lines of the Necker Cube gain their meaning as a cube only from the relationship we choose for them, a decision that happens so easily and immediately that we may not be aware of making it. It is determined by our mental arrangement of the elements spatially, using our past experiences as a guide. Our visual interpretation of this figure remains constant only so long as the arrangement that we consider most probable remains constant. However, how we interpret this cube is a dynamic process of examination and engagement; when the interpretation of which orientation is most likely changes, the form correspondingly shifts, demonstrating that this figure's orientation is superposed between two distinct, yet incompatible, orientations. This figure, like all optical illusions, allows us to encounter the variable space of the state of information directly. Changes in our initial interpretations are what cause these visual shifts. These transformations are evidence for a superposition resolving into a particular outcome.The multiple interpretations of this singular figure reveals the contingent and interactively-determined nature of our selections from the range of potential interpretations.

Interpretive shifts suggest there are discrete, interactive levels to interpretation. The movement from one interpretation to another in optical illusions is a function of these different levels of interpretation checking against perceptions and failing to match what is being perceived as sense data. Depending on how the image is understood to be oriented, all other levels of interpretation are shaped by the expectations it establishes. However, as the Necker Cube shows, our sense perceptions are inconsistent and fully determined by our initial assessments of what we encounter. Our apparent (immanent) experience of the world is only one possibility, a potential understanding that undergoes constant comparison to new perceptions. The state of information is a construction for identifying this abstract realm of (un)realized possibilities.


4. Inconsistency and Paradox

Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman explain the foundation and form of Gödel's Inconsistency Theorem in their book Gödel's Proof. Their discussion demonstrates Gödel's claim that all systems of rules (axioms) will produce inconsistencies in the form of paradoxes that cannot be resolved. In epistemological terms, Gödel shows that formalized knowledge derived from logic is, in itself, an inconsistent, tentative proposition:

Gödel showed (i) how to construct an arithmetical formula G that represents the meta-mathematical statement: 'The formula G is not demonstrable.' This formula G thus ostensibly says of itself that it is not demonstrable. ... But (ii) Gödel also showed that G is demonstrable if, and only if, its formal negation ~ G is demonstrable.

The appearance of an infinite logical regression--a series of repeating logical contradictions whose resolution simply shifts the focus of the contradiction--happens precisely because the formula "G" is inconsistent. In the formal system of logic, Gödel's Theorem is both correct and invalid at the same moment: it is a true statement of logic that simultaneously cannot be true; its validity exists in superposition. Inconsistency is a defining feature in paradoxes of interpretation. Gödel's formula follows the rules for the logical system of symbolic mathematics, but by following the rules he shows that the system of mathematics is inconsistent:

Gödel's paper is proof of the impossibility of demonstrating certain postulates ... The traditional belief that the axioms of geometry (or, for that matter, the axioms of any discipline) can be established by their apparent self-evidence was thus radically undermined. ... For it became evident that mathematics is simply the discipline par excellence that draws the conclusions logically implied by any given set of axioms or postulates.

In general terms, Gödel demonstrates that the set of assumptions which provides the foundation for logical certainty has an arbitrary basis. This demonstration has consequences for justifying all interpretations since it identifies a fundamental failure of logical procedure: any set of rules can produce paradoxes in the form of unresolvable loops. Regression is the problem posed by questioning Wittgenstein's forms of life, and it shows that Gödel's demonstration extends beyond mathematics and formal logic, a point raised by Nagel and Newman in their introduction. Inconsistency is a fundamental component of our interpretations generally, although it only becomes apparent through a process of interpretative engagement or in atypical situations in which ambiguity dominates and singular interpretations reveal themselves as contingent.


5. Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is clinically described as a cognitive disease that develops from a mental state of superposition that psychologists call "ambivalence."In his original description of schizophrenia, Eugen Bleuler concluded that its basis is a pathological ambivalence that exaggerates typical situations into a conflict resembling superposition, a type of mental paradox:

(1) Ambitendency, which sets free with every tendency a counter-tendency.

(2) Ambivalency, which gives to the same idea two contrary feeling tones and invests the same thought simultaneously with a positive and a negative character.

These definitions repeat the inconsistency identified by Gödel; while the human mind is not a formal system like mathematics, it is the source of such systems. The demand that the world be ordered within a specific, a priori interpretative framework is schizophrenic; all interpretations have a schizoid component. The pathological varieties of schizophrenia emerge precisely because of a dysfunctional response to these superposed potentials.

Psychologist Mark Garrison views the indeterminate character of the ambiguous as the cause of schizophrenia; the difference between pathological and "normal" thought processes arises from the way that the ambiguity of superposition is handled by the interpreting mind; the kinds of variability Garrison's model requires are coincident with those proposed in quantum physics by the concept of superposition. In schizophrenia, ambiguity polarizes into ambivalence (superposition), blocking normal solutions. Garrison's retheorization of schizophrenia proposes a model for understanding how the mind solves the problems posed by superposition through opposition--the autonomous generation of negated interpretations:

Opposition solves not only ambivalence but also indecision, forcing an either/or decision or no decision at all. Ambivalence occludes multiple alternatives, ambiguity, and multiple meanings (polyvalence), forcing a dominating tension of opposites. Ambivalence--pathologized--both shrinks the world into oppositions and prevents (blocks) movement through it.

Faced with an array of equal potentials, the tendency to collapse variability into ambivalence is a method to force an interpretative selection. What makes schizophrenia different from normal thinking is not that the opposition is unresolved, it is that schizophrenia presents a pathological inability to cope with multiple (superposed) potentials or alternatives. A normal resolution is one that remains within the established parameters of Wittgenstein's forms of life. Garrison notes:

The psyche must cope with the configuration of ambiguous fragmented experience into contrary tendencies and oppositions, and it must find its way through the maze of resemblances it makes from these ambiguities. Overlay this myth-making process with the various demands from the environment for singular, rational actions--the myth of continuity and the fantasy of singularity--and the potential for ambivalence is great indeed.

This theory of consciousness has an element of essentialism to it, mediated by its limitations. It is not an account that proposes a complete explanation; instead, what Garrison advances is the thesis that the conditions of a superposed, uncertain reality--both in the physical and interpretative senses (i.e. the state of information)--has produced a set of coping mechanisms for dealing with the inconsistency of our interpretations.

There are two kinds of ambivalence acting on interpretation in this model of schizophrenia. The first is a natural feature of the physical world that all interpretations must address on multiple levels--not simply that of physical sense-data, but on subsequent elaborations of that sense-data into the lived experience we have in encountering reality. This ambivalence is inherent to the universe and exists independent of the observer. The second kind of ambivalence develops in the mind of the observer as a means of checking the interpretations of the ambivalent environment; both function in interpretation as a means of resolving superposed potentials through recourse to empirical observation and past experience. Mathematician John Holland's interdisciplinary "complex adaptive system" (CAS) models these past experiences as a bucket brigade that assumes successful interpretations will make future interpretations based on them more likely to be successful. Holland's CAS model builds on past success as a way to help ensure future success--the past acts as reference for the future. This procedure enables us to make sense of the world around us by using our past experience to shape future interpretations. The interpretative process that is pathological in schizophrenics begins with the same basic set of perceptual cues and processes that constrain and direct all other interpretations, even those more complex than simple perception.

All interpretations are necessarily subject to schizophrenia since they function as divisions and limitations of interpretative possibility a priori; Wittgenstein's forms of life describe these successful past experiences. They provide an apparent commonality for our ability to communicate about the world around us. Pathological ambivalence suggests the development of an unresolvable inconsistency that forces the mind to adopt other solutions than what normal minds employ. This possibility is consistent with Bleuler's observations of schizophrenia as a disease defined by symptoms with no apparent psychological cause the description of the schizophrenic pathology, which is a failure of adaptive interpretation, is distinct from that state's physiological basis in the mind. The schizophrenic mind chooses a potential response that is not as likely as those chosen by normal minds; this is a direct result of blocking created by unresolved ambivalence.


6. Seriality

The approach to interpretation suggested by the concept of superposition, and elaborated through consideration of the Necker Cube and Gödel's Theorem, creates a framework for understanding interpretation that is indeterminate; single interpretations resemble nodes in a network of intersecting probability scales--positions within a series of possibilities. The state of information emerges as a necessary abstraction produced by this approach.

The nodal approach to interpretation is an extension and elaboration of certain implications noted in my article "Serial Form as Entertainment and Interpretative Framework: Probability and the 'Black Box' of Past Experience." By employing Holland's CAS model as a means of resolving the logical black box of past experience in Umberto Eco's theory of serial form, the nodal model for interpretation emerges from the relationship between past experience and the immanent decision to chose one potential interpretation instead of another; the state of information is a logical consequence of this model.


6.1 The Concept of the Serial

Umberto Eco's conception of "serial" means, first and foremost, that the audience for the serial recognizes and acknowledges the ways the audience's knowledge is required to interpret a specific episode in a serial. It is a reciprocal connection between immanence and remembrance; it implies a model for interpretation that is centrally focused on the interpreter actively working to resolve indeterminate potentials--precisely those situations identified by the concept of superposition. The spectator's interpretations employ frameworks created through previous encounters with similar types to anticipate and recognize divergences from established norms.Selecting one interpretation from within a set of potential interpretations, a choice that is subject to later interpretative reversals, produces contradictions and oscillations between equally likely interpretations (as in the Necker Cube). It is the provisional nature of this interpretative choice that is significant; an expanded field of potential interpretations is produced when the possibility of interpretative inconsistency is admitted into the framework as a limiting factor that describes those positions of greatest incompatibility. This interpretative construct generates an expanded field of potential, valid interpretations.


6.2 The Complex Adaptive Systems Model

The inconsistency superposition represents provides the mechanism for adaptation in John Holland's CAS model. His description uses natural selection to choose the "best-working" example from a group of potential solutions. Best-working interpretations meet the needs of the interpreter who is encountering and examining an environment. The interpretative demands are constrained by the feedback loop which produces them, generating new interpretations based on earlier successes:

Evolution "remembers" combinations of building blocks [adaptive strategies] that increase fitness. The building blocks that recur generation after generation are those that have survived in the contexts in which they have been tested.
If we can, assume some kind of plausibility for the newly generated rules: they should not be obviously wrong when viewed in light of past experience. In most cases, plausibility arises from the use of tested building blocks. ... the building blocks at one level are combined to form the building blocks at the next level.

nconsistency is essential to this process; the ability to allow inconsistencies to exist simultaneously and to evaluate those inconsistencies for relative degrees of success is a logical necessity in this structure. This process requires ranking interpretations based on their fit to the situation. When modified by Eco's serial framework, these interpretations become ordered, like nodes in a network.

The concept of superposition suggests understanding interpretation as a probability set, presenting a range of tentative possibilities rather than a singular, deterministic result. While Holland's CAS does provide a method for addressing superposed potentials, it also tends to lock interpretation into a singular position, making the kinds of interpretative shift that are readily apparent in viewing the Necker Cube a problematic situation. The instant flip of the Cube between one orientation and another implies the coexistence of (at least two) mutually exclusive interpretations that are essentially interchangeable. The serial version of CAS justifies these competing interpretations without necessarily forcing us to choose between them.

Both orientations of the Cube are equally valid interpretations, defined and mutually supported as valid potentials by their relationship through variation. The probability set as a whole--the existence of a series of mutually exclusive (and intermediate) interpretations--is the site of validity rather than any singular interpretation. These alternatives do not undermine interpretation; the probability set authorizes alternative potentials at the same moment as any singular interpretation achieves apparent validity. The mutually assured validity of interpretations in the state of information emerges from the extension of superposition and optical illusions to other types of interpretation that are less obviously (apparently) in superposition.

Since it is through encountering and addressing these undecidables that interpretative success emerges, interpretation proceeds by employing inconsistency as a technique--seeking to create superposed potentials rather than avoiding them. Holland's CAS model requires that when there is no obvious contradiction one be created. In psychology, ambivalence is the creation of these contradictions; what emerges from ambivalence as pathological schizophrenia is the quantity, strength, and unresolvable nature of these contradictions. Its specific strengths, when confronting the variability of superposition, is suggestive when we consider the variety of mutually exclusive theories and interpretations that characterize broader fields of thought at the same time, Gödel's Theorem suggests that the appearance of inconsistencies within any interpretative schema is inevitable. Our ability to accept and evaluate (even employ) multiple, different (even contradictory) interpretations at the same time, suggests an empirical basis for the nodal approach to interpretation.

The role of past experience in interpretation serves to mask the inconsistent aspects of everyday experience. That the world appears neither uncanny nor inconsistent is a necessary result of how Holland's building blocks function; interpretation adopts the most likely potential that is consistent with what has already proven successful. Only in specific situations in which alternate and equally potential interpretations emerge does the underlying superposition visibly appear, as in the Necker Cube and other paradoxes.


6.3 Nodal Interpretation

The nodal view of interpretation identifies any singular, immanent interpretation as chosen from a probability set whose composition is serial--a collection of various, competing interpretations. This view opens possibilities for justifying interpretation in a flexible and open-ended fashion. The nodal model is one in which interpretations are nodes in a multidimensional space of potentials; collectively, these nodes describe the state of information--information space. Because the nodal model appears superficially quantifiable, it implies the potential to become instrumentalized through the application of technology--specifically via the digital. It is precisely the analogy of a nodal (or network) conception of interpretation that suggests the possibility of transition to instrumentality; however, this application is reification.

Describing a process in which expectations can arise, shape interpretation, and then evolve, provides a framework for justifying interpretation generally through recourse to a set of potential interpretations. Conceptualizing interpretation as nodal shifts the emphasis in supporting specific interpretations from an external foundation (immanent empirical correctness) to an internal one. Specific interpretations are justified by/through the existence of alternatives with common features--truth conceptualized as a spectrum of potentials. This process creates a state in which all potentials coexist as information. The momentary superiority of one interpretation does not invalidate the others because a shift to another possibility is always potentially immanent. Like Eco's serial forms, the nodal approach to meaning depends not on individual interpretations but on the relationship between interpretations and the system that creates them (and that they collectively define). The digital's ability to manipulate data leads to the general aspiration to manipulate and contain the information space; this is the aspiration of the digital to the state of information. This aspiration requires a limitation and reification of that space, collapsing its variability into a limited, a priori series of potentials. The illusion that this space, however large, is infinite is the aura of the digital in action.

Nodal interpretations are justified by the concept of mutually assured validity: the validity of one interpretation is established through its relationship to other potential interpretations. In this schema past experience is a method for choosing highly probable interpretations from within the range of potentials. But past experience does not eliminate the potential to shift from one interpretation to another; it is not a source of validity for any single interpretation. The abolition of a dialectical/dualistic basis for interpretation produces the apparent (but superficial) egalitarianism of the state of information in which all interpretations are valid potentials. This is not a relativistic construction because this entire information space exists in superposition; the nodes are abstractions that do not actually exist within that space, but rather are features of our interpretations that fall within the parameters of the space and are therefore useful in conceptualizing their relationships to each other.

Even though the nodal interpretative model proposed here is extremely schematic, it suggests possible strategies for justifying interpretations without precluding their rejection or revision at a later time. The nodal model is a means for selecting individual potentials from within the state of information. It is important to recognize that there is a distinction between the nodal approach to interpretation and the interpretative space that the nodal approach inherently suggests; the state of information is an abstraction implied by, but independent of, the nodal approach itself.


7. Authority / Authorship / Artwork

The instability of the Necker Cube becomes the instability between different levels of scale within a given construction. What we commonly call experience and expertise are forms of learned behavior. Faced with an array of equal potentials, the ambivalent nature of perception forces an interpretative decision; without making an initial choice about relationships and organization, there can be no evolution towards successful interpretations. Semiotician Roland Barthes' observations about the initial interpretative choices are true for all meaning-bearing constructions:

Distance and proximity are promoters of meaning. Is this not the great secret of every vital semantics? Everything proceeds from a spacing out or staggering of articulations. Meaning is born from a combination of non-signifying elements (phonemes, lines); but it does not suffice to combine these elements to a first degree in order to exhaust the creation of meaning: what has been combined forms aggregates which can combine again among themselves a second, a third time.

Past Experience

The crucial factor in these interpretations is successful past experiences--these correspond to the forms of life that Wittgenstein suggests are a priori to any encounter. The success of past experiences is dependent not on the interpreter, or on a particular interpretation, but on the ability of other interpreters to produce similar interpretations when confronted by the same material. Abbott and Costello's Who's on First? demonstrates this problem:

Costello: Well then who's on first?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: I mean the fellow's name.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The guy on first.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The first baseman.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The guy playing...

Abbott: Who is on first!

Costello: I'm asking you who's on first.

Abbott: That's the man's name.

Costello: That's whose name?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: Well go ahead and tell me.

Abbott: That's it.

Costello: That's who?

Abbott: Yes.

This comedy routine depends upon a recognition that "who's" and "whose" sound the same. We laugh at their predicament because we understand how easily it happens, and how frustrating it is when it does. Abbott does not explain the rules of substitution to Costello, and the simple explanation, that the first baseman is named Who, depends on our ability to recognize a shift in function for the word "who." The comedy in this routine is sadistic: it emerges from the semiotic torture of Costello, his inability to recognize the difference between "who's" and "whose," and his rising frustration with Abbott's refusal to answer his question. In reality, they are speaking entirely different languages.

Each of these instances involve a differential between the author and the reader; the staggering of articulations proceeds based on a set of rules which the reader either implicitly deploys in interpreting, or must discover through trial and error in order to render the alternative, declarative meaning of "who's on first." This is a dynamic process of engagement, not a passive one in which the interpreter simply receives the instruction from the author. The process requires the selection of appropriate interpretative engagements in order to arrive at a semblance of meaning.

Tracing the parameters of an interpretation reveals a shifting set of relationships not only between the elements that are being interpreted, but between the author (Abbott) and the reader (Costello). The shifting relationships between elements are a sign-post for the shifting nature of nodal interpretations. It reveals the authorial differential between Abbott, Costello, and the audience, who recognizes the dynamic and are complicit in the comedy being performed.

Our interpretative ability to back up and change our initial assumptions based upon their applicability to a given situation allows us to resolve paradoxes. It is this feedback process that is crucial to Holland's CAS model for adaptation (and interpretation). Language and communication are neither automatically functional nor necessarily unambiguous in meaning. The transition from the state of information to the reality of interpretation depends on how we apply our knowledge of the rules: appearance of meaning is determined by other interpreters' ability to recognize our interpretation--this is the distinction between the abstract state of information and its emergence within any specific interpretation. It is this initial decision that shapes the entire interpretative process that follows. The inability to communicate in Who's on First? results from the inconsistency between normal and specific uses. As the associative procedures of the rhetorical jumps evident in this dialogue demonstrate, superposition is a methodology for rule discovery that provides a means to test, and a technique for expanding, interpretative results.


7.2 Ambivalence

Meanings become pathological when they are unique to a singular interpreter. According to Garrison, the experience of superposition we encounter in Abbott and Costello's routine is an essential component of communication; without it there could not be creative thinking such as poetry or rhetoric. It enables communication of ideas not immediately apparent:

Jung characterized Bleuler's understanding of ambivalence [superposition] as the "fusion of one function with another." ... Rhetoric demonstrates that ambivalence is fundamental to language for it is in rhetoric that all aspects of ambivalence converge. ... In a metaphor taken literally, communication is blocked and meaning cannot move. ... Mediated by recognition and acceptance, it is therapeutic, imaginative, originating and joining. It is a phenomenon crucial to psychological experience.[29]

Rhetorical devices perform the transformation of normal speech into a poetic construction that encourages associative understanding. Persuasion in rhetoric works through the transposition of values without the use of logical structures; this is the effect of superposition collapsing. This transfer occurs because both the speaker and listener agree--implicitly--to accept the superposition of associative speech.

Without the agreement between speakers that meaning will proceed according to specific 'rules,' where the words used have clear roles, we cannot communicate; the interplay that creates the comedy in Who's on First? elides these roles and is both the confusion and the joke (as does the confusion of reality and metaphor Barthes describes below). There is an overlap between Garrison's ambivalence and Barthes' semiotic theory: both suggest a central role for inconsistency in a model of communication and miscommunication. Crucial to Barthes' explanation of his semiotic procedure is the metaphor that is taken literally:

One of the techniques of the poet Cyrano de Bergerac consists in taking a perfectly banal metaphor in the language and exploiting its literal meaning. If the language says "die of grief," Cyrano conceives the story of a condemned man whose executions sing him tunes so lugubrious that he finally dies of grief over his own death.

This narrative is absurd, comic in its implication. It proposes a relationship that recognizably distorts the role of language and the power of metaphor--songs do not kill people, no matter how depressing and sad they may be. Our interpretations perform this jump without thought; it is a tacit agreement based in our past experiences with the rules. This type of agreement is often called "transparent" because we do not become aware of our complicity in accepting its terms or our role in maintaining and deploying these conventions whose purpose is to contain ambiguity so that we can communicate. We are familiar with the rules for this kind of statement and the rhetorical connection it makes; it is this type of shift that the state of information describes.


7.3 Semiotic Disobedience

The concept of "semiotic disobedience," as developed by law professor Sonia K. Katyal, describes the ongoing conflict over intellectual property and is a function of political speech; however, she includes in her framework the

appropriation and occupation of intellectual, tangible, or even bodily property. I call these recent artistic practices examples of "semiotic disobedience" because they often involve the conscious and deliberate re-creation of property through appropriative and expressive acts that consciously risk violating the law that governs intellectual or tangible property. ([from a footnote] This article defines semiotic disobedience to include a number of approaches to visual, actual and verbal representation, including vandalizing, subverting and "recoding" certain kinds of intellectual, real government, and private property for public use and expression.)The emphasis on physical property in a discussion of intellectual property is only to be expected; however, this emphasis obscures the disruptive functions of recoding, which proceed by enabling superposition to emerge. What these transformations perform is a change of meaning through a systematic shift of rules that results in a changed resolution to the paradox of interpretation. This change reflects a differential between the potentials employed at any given moment and the possibilities contained by the information space.

The systematic reappearance throughout the twentieth century (under new nomenclature) of remix, appropriation, mash-up, montage, and collage--the reassembly and alteration of manufactured materials into new art objects, whatever the name used (Duchampian found objects, commodity sculpture, even the transformation of commonplace objects in Pop)--are all variations on this disruption of conventional engagements. Initially all these actions share a common shift in category from everyday object to artwork; in performing this shift, they violate an established semiotic system of organization in favor of other values that are implicit and valid but unexpressed. Through a shifting of potentials described within the state of information, these changes appear both natural and logical to us in retrospect; however, they all are examples of the superposition implicit in the state of information itself.

Katyal's conception of semiotic disobedience is addressed towards graffiti and other kinds of culture jamming that are deployed directly as political speech but which impose a shift in engagement between audience and object; however, all these depend on the transformation of established meaning and order and its replacement with an alternative. The validity of this transformation is established by the state of information's suspension of validity: interpretation is an ambivalent phenomenon which reveals that the authority of official statements are one political position among others. The superposition emergent in this work is deeply threatening to established orders--both of political domination and political resistance--because it subverts their messaging codes.

Conclusion

Superposition describes both the paradox and our inability to interpret a solution to the problem it presents by discussing how an observer interprets an experiment. Albert notes that superposition requires that we believe both possibilities simultaneously: "The standard way of thinking about what it means to be in a superposition somehow flatly contradicts what we unmistakably know to be true of our own mental lives."[33] The concept of superposition prepares for a new model of conceptualization. It appears as a means to resolve the contradiction by not resolving it. Instead of finding a way to reject the resulting inconsistency that our interpretations produce, superposition suggests these inconsistencies are the point of the theory; it produces a set of alternatives which suggest that any interpretation will eventually fall victim to its own immanent inconsistencies: Gödel's Theorem shows that all formal systems must be incomplete. The implication of these developments is that reality is in flux, continuously subject to investigation, transformation, and argument.

The variability and limits of interpretation that emerged during the twentieth century in quantum physics and mathematics lead to the emergence of the state of information; they were also preconditions for the invention of contemporary digital computer technology. The apparent naturalness of the interpretative framework that produces the state of information is closely related to the invention of these technologies, their widespread dissemination, and the current cultural aspirations towards the state of information exhibited by the digital generally. The consequences of this approach remain uncertain precisely because it presents an expanded field of interpretation. Although bounded by pairs of mutually exclusive potentials (as most obvious in the Necker Cube's orientations), the epistemology the state of information implicitly creates is not a system built from dialectics or dualities but from a range of potentials that include intermediate and hybrid interpretations. The traditional problematics of a knowledge system based on certainty and particular value dissolves into a nodal conception where these values persist, only as dimensions of the system. The consequences of such a construction exceed the parameters of this essay.

If dialectic thinking is essentially alchemical--a collision of opposing forces that creates a new, superior result--the expanded field of nodal interpretation is essentially superposed: the result is held in suspension awaiting a collapse into the specifics of a singular result (that remains fundamentally transient). At the same time, the expanded field of interpretation is one in which all interpretations--even those later disproved empirically--have validity within the range of potential interpretations as interpretations; this situation clearly describes the state of information. There is no distinction made between the empirical validity and non-validity of an interpretation because both exist within the range of potentials and their empirical validity is just one of the dimensions that define them as nodes within the interpretative range. The consequences of the emergence of the state of information as a conceptual apparatus have been implicitly played out within the realm of technical aspiration, critical application, and through the grappling with the paradoxes of competing and variable valuation within both philosophy and culture generally. The conflict between those espousing a singular, particular 'universal' set of values and those critiquing these claims dovetails with the emergence and ascent to dominance of the conceptual underpinnings of the information space that the state of information abstracts.




- Michael Betancourt