Seeing Through The Debris


thejaymo cyberpunk
THIS ESSAY WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED TO MEDIUM.COM SEP 2016. AS OF JAN 2020 IT HAD RECEIVED 12.5K VIEWS.
JAY SPRINGETT IS A SOLARPUNK, THEORIST AND STRATEGIST FOR HYBRID ENVIRONMENTS. HIS CONCERNS ARE WITH CULTURE, HUMANS AND TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT. HE IS CURRENTLY WRITING HIS FIRST PUBLIC BOOK: LAND AS PLATFORM.
JAY WRITES ONLINE UNDER THE HANDLE @THEJAYMO


I was out drinking with Gordon White shortly before his personal #Brexit to the land down under. There was no booze or food left to raid at the Treadwells event when we got there — so more beers and even higher levels of street harassment we were receiving continued at another Fitzrovia location. We were discussing the state of the world and everything else that is happening right now on the outskirts of the mainstream’s peripheral vision.

Another thing people seem to have missed about the Federal Reserve’s recent decision not to hike interest rates was the justification was entirely global. Basically keeping rates where they are is better for China, even if it is worse for American retirees relying on pension funds. What was once an institution (however successful or not) designed to improve or safeguard the American economy now works for the world. And by ‘the world’ I mean ‘the people who would run it’. This means monetary policy is now openly set on a global level for the express benefit of the same giant companies and their interlocking boards of directorship.

Fusion technology. Total surveillance and the global ‘sharing’ of that surveillance data coming at the end of this year. Digital currencies. Supranational trade agreements. The private conquest of space. The criminalisation of independent food production. Add in whatever is going on behind the curtain of the recent volte-face in the AI and robotics industry.”

Gordon White — The very least we can say

Our conversation turned — as so many I’m having recently seem to do – to the idea of the Breakaway Civilisation.

If you are unfamiliar with the idea of the Secret Space Program and the Breakaway Civilisation you can either dive into the full fat Secret Space Program Conference videos here or check out the writing of AE colleague m1k3y on the Plutocratic Exit Strategy here.

Here’s the good Dr Farrell if you have a spare 2 hours:

The basic idea of the ‘Breakaway Civilization’ is simply that you have a secret group, a classified group of people, with access to radically advanced technology, radically advanced science, and they just don’t share it with the rest of the world. One scientific breakthrough leads to another, and that leads to another and so on. So the next thing you know, you’ve got a separate group of humanity that is vastly far beyond the rest of the world.

The Secret Space Program: Who Is Responsible? Tesla? The Nazi? NASA? Or A Breakaway Civilization?

During our chat Gordon paraphrased the good Dr Farrell from one of his vid chats last year — something to the effect of:

“I’m not interested in arguing about whether there is a breakaway fascist group. I’ve been doing this for a long time. There just is. Go and look for yourselves.”
Paraphrase : Joseph P. Farrell
All these worlds are yours screenshot 2001

As I’m sure you can appreciate, you can almost feel the exasperation in Farrell’s words. Outlandish or unpopular ideas like the Breakaway Civilization tend to get people’s backs up and annoy them deeply. The reason why IMO is 3 fold:

  1. The statement itself breaks with their internalised model of reality
  2. They are too lazy
  3. Don’t want to break down scaffolding that precariously supports the walls of the reality model in option 1.
  4. All of the above

So… do you find the idea of a breakaway fascist civilisation raises your hackles? Then first take a huge bong rip & come with me for an afternoon exploring statements 1+3.

Because Option 2 is irredeemable and I can attempt no landing there…

“To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Warning — Reality Models Ahead

This is the Red Button. It’s our starting assumption for the purposes of this discussion on how the world operates — ‘the state of play’ if you will. It’s a 3rd hand screen grab of a diagram by the indubitable Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF). I; unsurprisingly, saved it down from one of Gordon’s posts ages ago and it has been sitting on my desktop for over a year. I really think it helps to explain why there are so many things that skirt around just outside of mainstream culture’s peripheral vision. Indeed, the recent leaks of the Panama Papers, the Snowden docs, & the war crimes released by Chelsea Manning show there is a lot going at the edges of what we understand to be reality.

As interpreted, ‘Real’ Reality is something that sits outside of ‘Official Reality’. Official or ‘Red Reality’ is the reality of mainstream culture which is the preferred reality of ‘Power’ (substitute Power for Ruling Archon as is your prerogative). It is through the construction of this Official Reality that allows ‘Power’ to govern. Within the Red sphere of Reality ‘Power’ can be said to play by its own rules.

The diagram also suggests that there is an expanded ‘Reality’ within which you can play by different rules. It is at the the boundary between the official sphere of reality and the outside that ‘Power’ gets to choose which rules and which cards are in and out of play.

When we speak of Power in this context, we speak of it in a Foucauldian sense; an Official truth being produced by Power within the Red Dot.

Red Official Reality of course is not constant and has to be constantly reproduced and reinforced — this is why Foucault says that ‘truth discourse’ and ‘what counts as knowledge’ differs and changes across societies (even within the same society) across time.

The wizards among us should clearly see that Power is perpetuated and self-reinforcing by its ability to absolve itself of its own sins — it does this by creating and changing the dominant historical narrative(s) that are required to support its own needs.

A monopoly of violence capital-P Power is not.

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”
~ Marx, The German Ideology — 1845

We’ll explore the temporality of the red button across time in more detail later, but for now we should consider the diagram as being the current state of play in this moment in time. If the model is correct, first we must concede that the reality of our situation is far bigger than the one that is the preferred and perpetuated by Power.

This preference is supported by mechanisms like scaffolding or walls to dam up the wider Orange Reality and prevent it from bleeding into the Red. (I’m sure I don’t need to explain these scaffolds but I’m sure words like Deep State, cointelpro, information classification, Edward Bernays, or that very polite term ‘Advanced Social Engineering’ should be enough). See also this when considering social media. I’m hesitant to use the phrase Consensus Reality — as so many of my friends and colleagues do — as the mechanisms by which ‘Official Reality’ is constructed are anything but consensual.

Therefore, when you’re enjoying a nice fresh coffee outside a local Starbucks in the high street, catching up on the news, basking in the summer sun, you should look around at Official Reality and realise that the entire world really looks more like this….

The map then is most definitely not the territory.

Fortuitously a recent Breaking Smart newsletter from Venkatesh Rao was on Incorrect Maps and Broken Territories (subscribe here) and I’m going to quote some select points at length to draw out our future direction of thought.

1/ When you break a wall in your map, you have an incorrect map. If you navigate by that map with your eyes closed, you might run into a wall.

2/ When you break a wall in the real world, you make a new path, and render almost everybody else’s maps incorrect.

10/ There’s also a less dramatic, but more serious, cumulative cost to map addiction: an atrophying of sense-awareness. “Map blindness” turns mere known-unknowns into unknown-unknowns.

…..

21/ A pure map-based navigation strategy is what control theorists call open-loop. You assume the map is the territory, and navigate by it, eyes closed. It is very cheap: a decision to not pay attention.

…..

46/ One insight from that work was recognizing the value of multiple models — the fox way. When multiple models collide, phenomenology tends to win over all of them. You can see reality through the debris.

Venkat has speedily brought us along a thought path that I hope we can now recognise in the context of the topic at hand. For the majority of the population stuck inside Red Reality looking out we suffer from “map blindness” as imposed by the mechanisms of Power at the boundary of the Red Button.

As a result so many things will forever remain Rumsfeldian Unknown-Unknowns.

But as Dr Farrell says if you ‘go look’, or break down the-movie-set-wall-of-power in VGR’s point 2. Then the possibility of the Secret Space Program and/or a Breakaway Civilisation shifts into the realm of Known Unknowns. If you even have a passing familiarity with relevant logic you will know that Rumsfeldian epistemology is an example of First Degree Entailment (FDE). It is also the kind of quadrant theory that underlines the Jones diagram or, for the Buddhists, among you ‘Catuskoti’.

We know that a shift from one quadrant to another changes everything.

To reiterate: If you can accept – or just concede – that there is even the possibility of the Orange outside the Red Reality then this too changes everything.

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When multiple models collide

Let’s quickly remind ourselves of CAF’s Reality Button diagram again, but this time try to think about it with the dimension of Time added to the context of the diagram as it represents the present.

At some point in the past our present was someone else’s future and that present will be our own past very shortly.

Day by day, outside of the Red Button, Orange Reality is always expanding. Things are researched, built, and projects executed almost all of which go unreported or are unable to to break into the narrative of Official Reality either because of surrounding suppression of information or the researchers just can’t shout loud enough over the sound of faux nostalgic bullshit being pumped out of screens worldwide.

Occasionally however an object will manifest into the world of Official Reality and seem like a breakthrough. The media will bray and hail it as something that changes everything. The fact, more commonly than not, is that it is something thrown ‘over the wall’ and into Red Reality. Usually courtesy of the Military Industrial Complex. Sometimes this happens organically. Other times it is given a push.

Declassification is always another interesting way of looking at the question of things being thrown over the wall…

This is The Futures Cone and it is a model that can be used for thinking about the future. If you are unfamiliar with it, and this is the first time seeing it, I’ll let an academic explain:

“The “futures cone”, which expand from the present on the left into alternative futures on the right. Visible in the diagram are “scenarios”, depicted as regions in the Plausible realm. Also visible are “Wild Cards” — low-probability events or mini-scenarios (hence they are outside the Probable realm) which, if they occurred, would have very high impact. They can be either Possible or Plausible, according to the above definitions. Examples would include an asteroid or cometary impact with Early (plausible), or very-high-speed interstellar space travel (possible).

A Primer on Futures Studies, Foresight and the Use of Scenarios Dr Joseph Voros, Swinburne University of Technology 2001

Friend, and occasional co-conspirator, Sjef van Gaalen has been committing some serious Diagram-Butchery over on his blog recently and I’m going to direct you to straight his piece on Theory of Change and the Futures Cone.Go read it now, it’s really good.

It is also required reading to proceed further with this madness. Take another bong rip and dive in…

Once you’re back, come with me for a ride across time with the Blackbird Analogy. You’re going to need to pack the Theory of Change, The Futures Cone, and The Red Button. We’re going to attempt some Diagram Butchery ourselves and build a reality model of our own.

We can begin to remodel the present and think about the past in a way that allows for multiple histories just as the Futures Cone allows us to think of possible futures. The badly attached Red Button diagram on the end opens up narrative possibilities of the present but the reversed direction of the cone reveals its to be an important simplifying tool for fans of alternative historiography.

The denouement of Sjef van Gaalen’s essay Theory of Change and the Futures Coneis the Theory of Change mashed into the Futures Cone:

“So what a Theory of Change does is it maps out the steps that need to be taken in order to drag a Preferred Future out from the periphery of borderline Plausible/Possible Futures into the Probable.”

“As time passes, if your planned activities are successfully executed your outcomes should be moving closer & closer to the Probable Future. The victory condition for a Theory of Change is having the Long-term Vision locked in dead-center of the cone, as such having become inevitable.”

So in the context of the History Cone we should look at the quotes above in reverse. The appearance of something into “Official Reality” is the consequence of something or anything that has traveled through various iterations and branching events in the Actual Reality of history completely outside of the Official Historical Narrative.

“Just how, and how much,” I hear you say, “is kept from on the periphery of the Official Narrative?” Well… Let me point you towards this Wikipedia article on Classified information in the United States — in particular the graph on ‘Derivative Classification Activity’ FY 1996–2011.

Although this graph begins in 1996. We can extrapolate backwards to a further point back in the history cone. As an example lets look at an example of a classified object from before that graph even starts..

That is the Lockheed_SR-71 Blackbird and is in (not just) my opinion one of the most beautiful machines ever built by humans. The SR-71 served with the U.S. Air Force from 1964 to 1998. It was decommissioned in 1989 and Declassified in 1991. The official fastest record it holds is a top speed of 2,193.13 mph set in July of 1976. It could map terrain using a side-scanning sonar, aim a radar up to 45 degrees to the side, and interrupt enemy communication and radar signals. It was also built by Lockheed, who we’ll talk about again later and forever and ever into the future.

Between those two dates of 1964–1991 it was a cultural and material object that was birthed in Orange Reality and existed there for a long time flying classified missions and then emerged ex post facto into the Official Reality fully formed.

As an aside, there is an incredible hard cover book, Sled Driver: Flying the World’s Fastest Jet, published 3 years after the plane’s declassification — which, btw, is enormously expensive on the second hand market and if anyone wanted to buy it for me I’d love you forever. [UPDATE SOMEONE DID!]

Description is below:

No aircraft ever captured the curiosity & fascination of the public like the SR-71 Blackbird. Nicknamed “The Sled” by those few who flew it, the aircraft was shrouded in secrecy from its inception. Entering the U.S. Air Force inventory in 1966, the SR-71 was the fastest, highest flying jet aircraft in the world. Now for the first time, a Blackbird pilot shares his unique experience of what it was like to fly this legend of aviation history. Through the words & photographs of retired Major Brian Shul, we enter the world of the “Sled Driver.” Major Shul gives us insight on all phases of flying, including the humbling experience of simulator training, the physiological stresses of wearing a space suit for long hours, & the intensity & magic of flying 80,000 feet above the Earth’s surface at 2000 miles per hour. SLED DRIVER takes the reader through riveting accounts of the rigors of initial training, the gamut of emotions experienced while flying over hostile territory, & the sheer joy of displaying the jet at some of the world’s largest airshows. Illustrated with rare photographs, seen here for the first time, SLED DRIVER captures the mystique & magnificence of this most unique of all aircraft.

Sled Driver: Flying the World’s Fastest Jet

So then, we return once again to the History Cone but we’ll also reverse the idea from the Theory of Change and overlay that too.

At the top technologies are developed in Classified ‘Actual Reality’ and onboarded back into Unclassified ‘Official Reality’ some time after its creation. The bottom part of the diagram is, of course, the SR-71 Blackbird.

There is a dynamic and interplay between the two realities where developments and improvements get passed back and forth as capital-P Power finds it expedient to do so. Patent law is a stitch up to guarantee that any technology with national security implications is immediately hoovered into the classified world of the Deep State.

For example: overlay the process of technological development in the boxes above to the development of electronic mail and then let us remind ourselves of the ‘Actual Reality’ — that in 1966 the AUTODIN network, first operational in 1962, provided a message service between 1,350 terminals, handling 30 million messages per month. When exactly did you get to send your first E-Mail?

The Blackbird begins at the beginning of the cone, exists and operates outside of Official Reality whilst none-the-less being very real, only to be merged with Official Reality in 1990, at the end of its operating life.

After 1990 the SR-71 Blackbird has been ‘Git merged’, if you will, in to Official Reality. The plane – replete with a full backstory – is onboarded back into Official Reality with an official attitude of ‘No hay problema’, despite it resulting in a complete recontextualisation of the plane in late 20th Century history. It’s appearance at the 1989 EAA Oshkosh air show and books like the previously mentioned Sled Driver play no small part in this onboarding process, normalising the missing history.

Given what we know now about the SR-71, and its journey through Actual and into Official Reality, let’s consider for a moment this thought experiment:

Imagine being Joe Schmo on main street in 1964… Sitting outside a drug store (not a Starbucks) but the fake wooden streetscape of our earlier mental conjuration still remains the same. It’s a time before ‘real’ commercial airline travel — the first flight of a 747 is still 5 years away. The closest thing Joe has to the idea of air travel is a 1st generation airliner like a De Havilland Comet and only then because he heard about it on the radio (My Grandpa worked by the way on the De Havilland Comet decompression investigation), and Black and White TVs are still sold more than colour.

Meanwhile, you tell him this: there exists a separate world of classified technology and just one of those things is a Mach 3 Stealth Plane that can fly to the edge of space.

Do you think you could tell Ol’ Joe this without his hackles being raised? Do you think he’d believe you? There would be much shaking of heads and remonstration. I’m not sure Mr Schmo would accept it at all. It would just bounce off the carefully constructed bubble of Red Reality that he’s unknowingly internalised. At the time it would be indistinguishable to him from UFO reports.

It’s strange that whilst something is actually happening but hidden beyond the borders of the official narrative it’s unbelievable. But after the fact it’s just history. When discussing conspiratorial subjects I always approach them with this framework and like to call it ‘The Blackbird Analogy’.

What then for the Breakaway Civilization?

As with all the best types of synchronicities Gordon published a post with his thoughts on the TV show Stranger Things just as I started writing this up.It includes the Red Button and opens with the following statement:

The core piece of actual technology hidden in the Breakaway/Deep State is not all that complicated. It’s just that half of physics is missing. We’ve been sitting out here failing to get String Theory and Materialism to work because it’s the only part of it out in the open. I remind you of Catherine Austin Fitts’s front-on boob of truth:

Gordon White — Stranger Jacques

But Tesla was working in the early part of the twentieth century. (In a funny way, the ‘flying saucer’ is effectively Victorian technology.) The ether/Dirac Sea etc was declared untrue by fiat and that was the end of it. So the story of torsion/scalar/electrogravitic machinery -we’d have a better term for it if it had been out in the open for the past hundred years- which relies on this other half of physics has been a dark one.

 Gordon White — Stranger Jacques

He goes on to give a short summary of the chronology of the Deep State through the 20th Century.


Returning full circle then, by way of Foucault, Rumsfeld, The History Cone and the Blackbird Analogy we must reconsider that paraphrase from Dr Farrell:

“I’m not interested in arguing about whether there is a breakaway fascist group. I’ve been doing this for a long time. There just is. Go and look for yourselves.”
Paraphrase : Joseph P. Farrell

The hard part, I think, for people encountering the idea of a Breakaway Civilisation is not picturing space planes, space stations & weird sci-fi weapons… It is not the idea that they are all owned and run by a Breakaway fascist group, but being willing to consider the possibility that there is one.

It’s that crossing of the threshold of Possibility Space to venture outside of the Official Reality bubble that raises their hackles; because in the background Power demands that we don’t – It demands this in order to function. There is a big difference between the ‘possibility’ of, and the ‘actual believing’.

Paul Graham Raven noted over on the back channel as i was finishing this up (and i’m plagaphrasing here) that the border between Official Reality and Actual Reality can also be seen as a line of negotiation and of compromise. Even if consensus (or Official) Reality isn’t consensual for a lot of people, individuals have to nonetheless give limited consent to some of it, simply in order to operate within its hegemony. In order to mentally cross the border in either direction requires an ability to literally write oneself into the prevailing story in a way that appears consistent with the local meta-narrative — I Agree with Paul. I also think this true both for individuals and institutions that are attempting to cross, create or control the boundary. Both of these actors require themselves to be situated (in some way) within the dominant ontology.

So now we have Jane Doe sitting outside a Starbucks in Main St in late 2016. Having written herself in to the local meta-narrative in order to get her self out. What can they begin to catch the barest glimpses of? What is going to be the equivalent of today’s Blackbird reveal in 2040?

Is it Compact Fusion today? Jump Rooms on Mars tomorrow?

thejaymo cyberpunk
THIS ESSAY WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED TO MEDIUM.COM JULY 2014. AS OF JAN 2020 IT HAD RECEIVED 12.5K VIEWS.
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JAY WRITES ONLINE UNDER THE HANDLE @THEJAYMO

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