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The Secret Art of Power - Part I

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 4/4/2006

An Epistolary Dialogue Between Roberto Calvo Macias and Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".

Dear RCM,

I liked the epistolary format. If you agree - shall we continue at least one more dialogue this way? I want to suggest the title (heavily borrowed from you): THE SECRET ART OF POWER. What sayeth you?

Here is a quote I found somewhere, I don't even recall where:

"Only art history still knows that the famed geniuses of the Renaissance did not just create paintings and buildings, but calculated fortresses and constructed war machines. If the phantasm of all Information Warfare, to reduce war to software and its forms of death to operating system crashes, were to come true, lonesome hackers would take the place of the historic artist-engineers."

This is a problematic statement because it ignores the emergent property of genius. The "famed geniuses of the Renaissance" did not interact with their calf hide and sharpened quills the same way an hacker interacts with the network or even with his computer. Hackers are, by definition, dependent on computing collectives. Galileo worked in the solitude of his rooms during his long inquisition-imposed house arrest. An hacker without vast and sprawling communications and computing (information) networks is dead, paralysed, a non-entity. Paradoxically, the hacker is by far the most social artist ever to have existed. The romantic view of the hacker (lonely, tortured genius, a-la Van Gogh) is the result of ignorance and fear. Genius today is a distributed, collective phenomenon and the medium of the hacker is the distributed, collective network. The internet is a mass phenomenon, a MOB phenomenon, in the derogatory sense that Jose Ortega y Gassett used - but it is also a chance to focus the actions of millions of individuals into a coherent, powerful, laser beam of awareness and activism.

I am dwelling on this point because it is very pertinent when discussing the loci of power and the possibilities of modern cyber-warfare. And I am dwelling on cyber-warfare for two reasons. First, it is in war or conflict that the true locus and magnitude of power is measured. Second, art and warfare have always been intimately connected and I see no reason that this should change anytime soon. Both art and warfare are community-mandated and, as such, will never disappear as long as there are human communities (man as "zoon politicon"). Additionally, both art and warfare involve inordinate amounts of cryptography, either in the form of private languages (poetry), or of hermetic hermeneutic conventions (as in modern painting), or in real life, "Alan Turing" style codes. Not to mention the inevitability and indispensability of codes in modern computer networks. No doubt, this is the age of codes, a crypto-age, when the more data is available to us, the less information, not to say knowledge, we have.

This century started as the great age of euphemism, the simplest form of code, a coarse way to secure power from scrutiny. Thus "War" became "Defence" (the Department of Defence, the Defence Forces), gas chambers became baths and the extermination of people became final solution or cleansing. It was a crude experimentation by the power elites with Man's propensity to deny and repress unpleasant information if provided with a half-plausible alternative. The age of political correctness started with the fin de siecle of the previous century not with the fin de siecle of this one.

It is by no mere chance or coincidence that modern computer systems - actually most modern technology - is a direct result of warfare, war budgets and the evolution or the attempted evolution of weaponry.

Thus, military and civil, offence and defence, war and peace, weapons and machinery, scientist and warrior, artist and warrior, codes and information, denotates and connotates, distant and near, here and there - were blurred beyond re-distinction in this century. An Orwellian newspeak emerged. The overt codes - the ones learned by every kid (language, totems, insignia, behaviour) were all but subsumed by covert codes (ones which require special learning or initiation). It is a stonewalling world, a source of frustration and alienation. It is a narcissistic world in that it harbours no empathy. People have to learn how to be themselves because if they don't - the world will not recognize them as distinct entities. Becoming became a process of tuition rather than an a-priori, evolutionary unfolding. We decode our lives today, slowly, meticulously, painfully. Power is obtained only by those who master their lives as well as the lives of others.

Part of the problem is the ephemeral nature of our raw materials. In the (near) past a leader, a businessman, an aristocrat - in short, the powers that be - would have likely used tangibles to assert and exert their power (land, clothes, status symbols, canons, even books). Today, we are all forced to use information that is being more and more digitized. This is a perishable commodity, a degradable weapon, an ethereal tool. It is unevenly distributed (corporations and governments have more computing power and raw data at their disposal). And it has no history or veracity. It can be easily manipulated. It often is. And there is too much of it - so much that we lose sight and track and are unable to tell the wheat from the chafe, the true from the false, the relevant from the irrelevant.

Thus, the real weapon of the individual, his way to fight back, is the dissemination of his preferred information - namely, the ABOLITION OF CODES AND SECRETS. This is a first in human history. In the past, both individuals and social structures aspired to maintaining secrecy and to gaining access to secrets (read Dumas). There was a general scramble to scramble and unscramble. The notion of privacy - still with us despite its utter anachronism in this age of the internet - springs from this old dependence on codes and secrets.

But now we are amidst a revolution. Individuals aspire to DE-code to DE-secretize what corporations and governments seek to EN-code and keep in secret. This is "power people" which threatens the Bastille of secrecy erected by numerous generations and enshrined in numerous legal codes. How ironic it is that it was the "defence" establishment, the most secretive of all, the most powerful by far - that unleashed upon us the internet, the guarantor of its very own and ultimate destruction. The technology is there. The will is forming. The most coded technology in the world - computer information networks - will foster a world free of codes and secrets.

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula a postero

Ciao,
Sam


Dear Sam,

As your letter proves, the concepts (figures) of our new dialogue are multi-layered, they apply to almost any human problem. But, to better position our concepts of secret/power we must first establish a description of our space-time board. First, we must know that the information field is n-dimensional. Secondly, that temporal connections are at the speed of light, that is to say, that there is simultaneity in information-space.

These new features change time-space in such a manner that all other concepts are affected (for instance: the transfer of information).

Only with these new features in mind can we make a strategic and tactical approach to secret/power relations.

For instance, your assertions on the disappearance of genius, on the new "middle-age-like" style of art-work are common nowadays (certainly, technological advances favour this kind of neo-corporative art). But, it is the opposite which really happens, for the technological process is, to put it with the fortunate _expression of E. Jünger, a kind of "canalization", a "channelling". At the end of this channelling is a non-linear "interconnected chaos":-). In n-dimensional space and simultaneity the centre disappears to re-appear in any-place (like in Kosovo - the centre of universe - this year).

Precisely such a "re-ligare" organization doles out a higher power to individuals, to the artist-tyrant (in fact, it gives too much power to individuals, a kind of super-Caesarism). It was no coincidence that Julius Caesar concentrated his efforts on the re-structuring of society after the civil war and on freeing the professions and the corporations (he saw the dangers of inertial masses).

This special configuration of center-everywhere is characteristic of a technology expanding. The latter works rather like a combustion engine. This "paradoxical" union of violent explosion and mathematically planned progression is one of the foremost symbols of technology. It gives technology that unique and extreme taste: cold and hot at the same time.

The problem gains complexity when we introduce secrecy into such a space (i.e., into simultaneity and n-d). For instance: what happens if I have an X-File, it just means that at the very same minute the whole internet is likely to have it. This changes the concept of a technological secret. This feature is interesting indeed because it implies that technology is opposed to having any secret. It "wants" to spread the dominion of the machine, to spread technological advantages and technological knowledge. Any attempt to "secretize" technical knowledge is condemned to fail for technology is opposed to secrecy (and, as we all know, technology is the boss).

The consequences of this no-secrecy way-of-life are yet unpredictable. One of them: the failure of the classical state ( and the inevitable question: what is is beyond the state?).

We must also re-define power in the virtual space. The organizational coverage provided by the use of technology (cybernetic, monitoring, feedback, etc.) improves the ability of the the "top-gun" to manipulate information. All weapons controls are being transferred to machines and codes. Fighting metamorphesized into a cryptic, Pythagorean version. The "front" disappears and currently reigning strategic concepts (such as the polarity of Fire versus Movement) lose validity, for the front is in everywhere and fire/movement are just complemented sides of a mathematically planned progression.

It remains to be asked if there is a higher "level" of information warfare, a higher use of the secret art of power.

We can discuss this hypothesis in the next letter, but let's think of the following:

Every art work (books, for instance) has many levels of content.

Every great book (Faust, for instance) has superior levels, accessible only to the to few.

How is it that secret knowledge is hidden in an open book?

What kind of encoding did Goethe use?

wishing you the best,

Roberto,

(continued)