THE GENESIS OF INFOTOXIN*
The myriad and improbable diversity of
water-based life has been constantly evolving and experimenting with new forms
of biological expression for at least two billion years on our planet the
Earth. Mankind, homo sapiens, "man,the wise", came to be only
a few million years ago, and has always existed as one integral but miniscule
element within the larger nurturing context of the envelope of inter-connecting
ecosystems comprising the planetary biosphere: our natural environment.
Throughout our evolution we have
experienced the mystery of the unknown, always pressing against the limits of
our perception and knowledge in an attempt to see beyond the horizons of space
and time; to navigate more effectively the complexities of life as a land-based
primate; to increase the resolution of our collective "big picture",
our species weltanschauung. Our facilities of symbolic communication, or
language, and shared model-building have been extremely important tools in
helping us to be more biologically competent, more flexible and adaptive, and
have lain the foundation for our ability to experience anything resembling a
"consensus reality."
In recent history, with the advent of
external technologies of writing, recording, and electronic signal processing
and transmission, we have undergone profound transformative accelerations in
our cultural processes, scientific methods, technological innovations, and
global industrialization. We have experienced an "information
revolution", an unimaginable proliferation of diverse forms of knowledge,
creativity, and the exchange of messages and images. This matrix of amplified
mass-communication, or (m.c.)2, has expanded exponentially in
complexity so that we now experience a new environment, or context, of existence
within the larger and more ancient living planetary biosphere. This new shared
context is known as our information environment.
The information environment is a complex
holistic system of both the hardware or media, and the software,
or content, of communication (what astronomer Carl Sagan calls our
"extrasomatic cultural information.") We ourselves are embedded
within this context; we are the mind/brain of the information
environment. We have constructed a sort of typographic/electronic cocoon around
ourselves; the sum total of our languages and codes; the semiotic and
psychological processes by means of which these symbols and images are shared
and understood; and the complex synergic…and little
understood…inter-relationships between these dimensions.
You, the reader, and I, the writer, are
at this moment using the wonders of symbolic language and modern information
technology to share meaningful and relevant ideas across time and space.
Indeed, the purpose and focus of this message concerns nothing less than our
role in the long-term health of life as we know it here on Earth.
The original evolutionary driving force
behind our urge to communicate more effectively is the need to inform and
assist fellow beings and to facilitate and coordinate cooperative actions which
could not be accomplished by individuals acting alone. The adaptive gains of
high-quality communication in homo sapiens are self-evident.
Joseph Wood Krutch says that "man is
one of those animals which is in danger from its too successul participation in
the struggle for existence…from the standpoint of nature as a whole, he is both
a threat to every other living thing, and therefore, a threat to himself
also…he has become the tyrant of the Earth, the waster of its resources, the
creator of the most prodigious imbalance in the natural order which has ever
existed…" Our wisdom has not kept pace with our so-called
"intelligence." The human enterprise is indisputably wreaking havoc,
committing irreversible extinctions, pollutions and degradations on our fellow
beings and natural environment.
Before the advent of modern
mass-communication, or (m.c.)2, our information environment
essentially was our natural environment. We had books, but we lived on the
land, climbed the mountains, farmed the valleys, fished in the rivers, took our
children for hikes and told them stories, looked to the heavens for
inspiration, felt the warmth of the sun, the pull of the moon, the splendor of
the Milky Way. Now we watch television.
The ubiquity and pervasiveness of our
information environment has tremendously influenced each of us, for better or
worse. Our lives and minds have been broadened and enriched; we have learned of
things long ago and far away that we could never experience directly. We have
been informed, educated and inspired. We have also been exposed to the
virulence of politics and the mucus of celebrity. Does seeing Dan Quayle or
O.J. Simpson really make a difference in our lives? We know what car to drive,
what beer to swill; we know how to look stylish, how to act cool. We think we
are tuned into what is happening. We are media-literate, and therefore hip.
The map, however, is not the territory;
and cartographers sometimes make mistakes, especially when exploring uncharted
regions. The information environment is an actual, or real system of
media, images, and symbols, often conveying understandable meaning; but, unlike
our natural environment, our information environment is of human creation: a
second-order reality. Our natural environment has been functioning in
intelligent harmony far longer than has man; the information environment is
artificial and unalive. Moreover, the information environment may convey
codifications of things which really exist, but these images are only simulations
of the real world; it is in fact a media-based virtual reality.
At all levels of existence and
manifestation, from the atomic/molecular to the cellular/organismic to the
planetary/galactic, the communication and exchange of energy/information is a
fundamental process of physical reality. The universe is patterns of
information on various levels, probability aggregates vibrating in mathematical
harmony, the "music of the spheres." Living organisms are functions
of the information contained within the genetic codes which specify their
development and control their health and growth. The flow and balance of this
cosmic dance is constant, dynamic, homeostatic and self-regulating.
When the natural harmony of
energy/information is disrupted in a living organism or system, a state or
condition of unhealth, or disease, occurs. As our information
environment has expanded, as more and more people are sending more and more
messages for increasingly less life-oriented purposes, human and planetary
health has declined.
Are we really communicating? Do limits
exist as to how much information we can handle? And how much of the information
is truly useful, meaningful or relevant? Is it possible for information to
become unhealthful or harmful? Are we being inundated with mega-bytes of information
which is of no possible value, that we would be better off not knowing or
experiencing? Is the navigational function of our information environment being
subverted by unconscious power ploys, naked ape control games, and id-driven
marketing imperatives? The answer seems to be in the affirmative.
In biochemistry a toxin is a substance
which impedes the proper function or degrades the health of an organism or
living system: a poison. Many of the hundreds of thousand of chemicals
utilized in medicine and industry are toxic to some degree. Moreover, many
substances which at certain levels of concentration are useful or essential for
health may become toxic at higher levels of concentration.
At current levels of (m.c.)2 we
seem to have entered a state or condition of toxicity in our information
environment, or infotoxin. The genesis of infotoxin is both
quantitative and qualitative; we have unprecedented numbers of people putting
out unprecedented numbers of messages which overall are neither true nor false
but wholly irrelevant. And the toxicity and degradation of our natural
environment is increasing in direct proportion to the toxicity of our
information environment. Infotoxin is driving the forces of ecocide.
Infotoxin is a form of informaion disorder at the
level of human mass-communication; cancer is an information disorder at
the cellular/genetic level in the human body; a virus becomes an
information disorder when its nucleic acids subvert the proper, healthy
functions of its host organism’s genetic code.
The parallels are striking. In many ways
the human enterprise has become so widespread and so malignantly destructive to
itself and to other life-forms that it could be termed the homo sapiens
macro virus, or HSMV.
Has our information environment become
infected with some kind of alien consumer virus? Is Gaia herself sending
invisible invaders like something out of Koyaanisqatsi of The
Andromeda Strain to assist the naked ape in thinning himself out? Or are we
generating the virus-effect ourselves…"internally arising metabiological
and sociometabiological pathogenic influences", in the words of biologist
Jonas Salk…through the summation of non-health oriented messages, images and
information? Can we somehow seize the reins of this amplifying feedback loop
and redirect the impulse-momentum being created by existing tendencies in (m.c.)2
towards more holistic, cooperative and life-sustaining ways of living?
This may well be the question of the millenium; from an extraterrestrial
perspective, a true measure of the overall intelligence of a sentient species
may be the quality and coherence of its highest orders of communication and
information transfer,
Interestingly, the Greek root of toxin
is "toxon" which means a "bow and arrow." Etymologically, a
toxin is both poison and weapon; this reflects both the alpha,
or active/intentional, and beta, or unintended/systemic, dimensions of
infotoxin.
Infotoxin is not a label or category for
specific artifacts of (m.c.)2 but is both an attitude or
orientation towards the use of these systems for purposes which run counter to
the positive evolutionary forces which led us to develop symbolic communication,
as well as a state or condition of disease in the information environment. Censors in totalitarian regimes would label
"dangerous" or "disturbing" or "subversive"
"left-wing" facts or ideas as "infotoxin.; au contraire, to
value, protect, implement and enhance total freedom and quality of
communication and expression is paramount in our salient and strategic agenda as
passengers/crew of Spaceship Earth.
The perception of truth and the
experience of meaning are of course relative across the expanses of cultural
diversity and individual uniqueness. Our ability to communicate is based on a
common ground of sharing and agreement; at this critical point in our role as
the dominant species of Earth we need desperately to analyze and reevaluate the
fundamental, implicit and unconscious values and beliefs which are driving
present trends in the control and utilization of mass-communication; we must
strive for an enhanced understanding of the complex inter-relationships between
ourselves, our information environment, and the long-term health and well-being
of all the life-forms who share our planet.
For the purposes at hand, information is
defined as the meaning or understandable content of communication.
Communication is generally construed to convey useful, valid, or true
information. Although we may use a variety of external hardware/technologies,
in the words of Dr. John C. Lilly, "communication is between minds."
Because of the centralized nature of mass-communication we have a relatively
small number of minds speaking to a vastly larger number of minds who function
more or less as passive receivers of messages and images. The fundamental
questions to ask about assimilating any artifact of (m.c.)2
are "Why is someone taking the trouble to send this particular
message?" and "What difference will this message (artifact, image,
program) make in how I think or live?"
Historically our motivations for
communication were adaptive and oriented towards helping and educating each
other. The inner wisdom of this is that "two heads are better than
one." Recently, with the advent of (m.c.)2 ,
the primary motivations for communication have shifted to reflect the values
and requirements of a fully-developed capitalistic economy, a sort of
high-tech predator-prey relationship; the majority of messages in our
information environment are messages of manipulation of persuasion, overt or
disguised, designed to sell a product, service, or belief and to voice the
needs of the largest corporate and bureaucratic entities who control the media.
Corporations consist of people; and nobody is forcing us to watch television or
to buy their products. It’s a free world, right? Well, not exactly…
The structure and dynamics of infotoxin
are complex, and are inextricably interwoven with the very nature of the human
brain/mind and planetary ecology; but several trends or tendencies in (m.c.)2
can be identified which interact to create a field effect of negative
synergisms in our information environment. These include
In a series of future articles I plan to
share an interdisciplinary exposition and synthesis of the work of several
leading minds in the fields of ecology, linguistics, psychology, media analysis
and communications theory. The study of the pollution of the information
environment could properly be called information toxicology; the larger
endeavor this relates to could be called biomedical noo-ecology
(pronounced "NO-oh-ecology"): the science of healing and
understanding the living and mental systems of man and the Earth and their
complex and dynamic inter-relationships (including how our mind/brains
work, how and why we create and are susceptible to infotoxin, how we can
improve our cognitional immune response, more fully actualize our potential as
spiritual beings, and take more responsibility in our role as guardians of the
the Earth). Such an endeavor is of urgent necessity here on the brink of…the
unknown!
In the immediate present
("im-media-te" could mean that you don’t know what’s on TV!) the
major constructive differences that make a difference are going to be made by
critically-thinking minds making conscious decisions to be fully responsible
for what enters their heads, to seek out and to share the most relevant and
highest quality knowledge and information, to boldy create a new harmonious and
synergic paradigm of thinking and relating which reflects a horizon of identity
expanded to include all living beings, and most importantly, actually to
implement, to live these ideas.
One of the most powerful images of modern
times is that of the Earth rising over the moon as photographed by Apollo
astronauts. This surreal vision of cosmic beauty…from a perspective never
before attained by homo sapiens…was experienced by millions of people
through the wonders of modern mass-communication. Let us hold this image in our
minds, a symbol of the singular awesomeness of life on Earth and the unknowable
immensity of the cosmic context we live within. We are not alone. In the words
of R. Buckminster Fuller, "On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers:
everyone is crew."
JEFF PHILLIPS
BOULDER COLORADO
Ó 1996
contact: therockist@yahoo.com
REFERENCES
*INFOTOXIN: "Misinformation,
negative propaganda, most forms of advertising, as well as the sheer abundance
of mediocrity and consumption persuasion which assault the mind from the face
of the tube or the glossy pages of the high-glam magazine. It is not
necessarily a conspiracy to subvert or enslave the global mind, but a systemic
effect resulting from the net actions of many groups of like-minded people
motivated by the same sets of values, and attempting to proliferate these
values/beliefs through a vast array of modern mass-communication techniques."
Infotoxin is the reciprocal of quality, meaning, clarity, and relevance,
and is not intended as a category or label but as a conceptual onto-noonic
("ON-toe no-ON-ic") bio-psychiatric instrument for psychological and
ecological healing.
NOTE: This article is the sequel to the
introduction to infotoxin published in Adbusters (Winter 1995);
see www.adbusters.org/oldwebsite/Articles/ageinfotoxin.html for
"The Age of Infotoxin" by Jeff Phillips
*** see also the Media
Foundation website at www.adbusters.org and
"the ultimate
technology"
at www.geocities.com/tutbrains
(a spacecraft control
panel/mandala for your brain!)
"Ignorance
isn't bliss...ignorance is stupid." J. Paul Serengeti