Interlude
A man's a man, said Brecht. We say,
I'd let the matter drop.
But that is not the playwright's way,
He takes it from the top.
and dissassembles Gayly Gay,
then builds him up again.
I'm not sure what he means to say. -
Men aren't really men?
When served a second infancy,
We walk and then we crawl?
When heads-up heroes say they're free
They're heading for a fall?
Now this is Brecht. I you asked me,
I'd have to say, tough call.
But sometimes I've seen history
make monsters of us all.
Information Poisoning is a catch all description for the cognitive impairment resulting from Information Operations. Information Operations (IO)are the methods and tactics employed in advertising, in covert and overt social control systems and “unrestricted,” non-linear or Information War. Tactics employed in wartime against enemy civilian populations are the same employed in peacetime to sell consumer goods.
Information War, Non-Linear War, or as the Chinese call it Unrestricted War, is a perpetual conflict between nations and sovereign actors which employs every available means; economic, political, technological, to defeat an opponent. PLA Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui noted in “Unrestricted Warfare,” a study published in China in 1999: “As the arena of war has expanded, encompassing the political, diplomatic cultural and psychological spheres, in addition to the land, sea, air space and electronics spheres the interactions among all factors have made it difficult for the military sphere to serve as the automatic dominant sphere in every war.’
In addition to overt content, news and entertainment media contains implicit values, our unvoiced fears and unspoken hopes for the future. The potency of tactics employed in IO has been amplified by technological evolution which created enormous tightly networked populations and made increasing amounts of personal data available permitting individuals and groups to be precisely targeted with messaging engineered to exploit the target audience's belief systems.
Entertainment is not just entertainment, it is adult education, consumer conditioning and social engineering. It is the principal mechanism employed by nation states to reliably influence social behavior.
The content of entertainment exerts significant, predictable effects on human behavior and belief systems and over the course and direction of future scientific, economic and moral evolution.
Entertainment directs popular attention, lends support to or selectively subverts social issues, fosters unity or division and incrementally enhances or gradually constricts collective cognitive capacity.
“Entertainment” determines who we are, and who we will be.
Guffawed