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Harvey - The People's Republic
Of Information
By Diane Harvey
merak@sedona.net
3-2-1


Boot up, and be instantly swept away down the data stream. Poor mind, paddling hard at the keyboard to stay afloat in the flood of fact and fiction. A truism to say, the Internet always did present a serious test of self-control. Forget the unintelligent usage department- the addiction to inane games and to the far worse subhuman zones. Even the most serious information is a highly problematical commodity, needing careful scrutinizing. How do we ever know what is true in these levels, and even more, what will still be true next year? In the realm of assessing the meaning of data, facts and figures, even our best conclusions inevitably undergo unexpected and uncomfortable metamorphosis. Today's new information frequently and unceremoniously tramples right over yesterday's assumptions.
 
Truth always was a moving target, from the strictly human perspective of facts, and on the Internet it moves much faster than ever. Yet through this high-speed process of continually accepting and discarding information, we are developing new forms of perceptual survival skills. This compulsory refining of the discriminative faculty constitutes one of the greatest underlying values of the net. Naturally, there is wariness and weariness in the realization that the world of Internet information is a sea of uncertainty, and that there will be no end to the necessity for applied perception. Nevertheless, there's no need for discernment s steep learning curve to give information itself a bad name.
 
Throughout history there has never been a substitute for developing one's own mental acuity. This is just learning, and the process has always called for sifting through information thoughtfully, the hard way. The most dangerous so-called 'authorities', in any field, are always those who try to prevent others from undergoing the process of learning to think. Whoever overtly or covertly demands unquestioning belief in their version of information and truth does not want others to exercise personal judgment. Because the first rule for maintaining control over other human beings is to powerfully discourage individual mental development through impressing the notion of superior external authority .
 
The Internet is accelerating the evolution of intellectual know-how and conscious discrimination in the best sense of the word. We don't have much choice but to hone evaluative skills when the alternative is being perpetually fooled. This becomes a process that one can learn to thoroughly enjoy. Anyone who can remain in high good humor as a pet belief is challenged or unexpectedly exploded can thrive in this mental maelstrom. After all, turning raw information into wisdom has always been the grand human necessity. All that has changed is the suddenly abundant quantity and quality of the available raw material.
 
Undigested information is obviously not wisdom, love, understanding, revelation, realization, or the power to transform oneself or the world. But neither is any other food of much use until the human body converts it into the energy to act, feel, think and plan. Information is the basic fuel of all mental development. Without a nourishing diet of tasty information, the intellectual processes have nothing to chew on, digest, assimilate and convert to higher forms of energy and consciousness. Even the most exalted states of consciousness, of wordless direct communion with sublime spiritual levels, have their roots below, in the preparatory stages of the discerning mind.
 
There are many these days that fancy they can skip right over the difficulties of self-development in mental realms. It is a common fallacy of those who wish to be more spiritual to imagine it is possible to live from the heart without bothering to refine intellectual skills. But this has never really worked in the long run: the fact that we have minds at all points to the natural requirement to develop this capacity to its fullest extent. The mindless heart and the heartless mind are both equally useless to the soul. We are obliged to use both heart and mind to the utmost when traveling through this vast new territory of ours, The People's Republic of Information.
 
The observation that accurate information on the Internet is hard to come by is true enough from the perspective of the hard work of developing personal inner acumen. Yet it is also true that the Internet is a wondrous source of accurate and vitally important information. What we are capable of perceiving as accurate and important will certainly change, and this is the very point of the exercise. As little as we may like to keep this in mind at all times, none of us are infallible in terms of assessing data at any level. We have not in the least uncovered the last level of truth. Awareness expands as we exercise it, and the whole world- let alone mere items of information- will continue to be subject to being seen in an entirely new light.
 
Aside from individual opportunity to sharpen and deepen perception, the potential benefits of the Internet for larger segments of humanity are incalculable. At this point in history it is even more critical than many fervent advocates realize. We clearly live in extremely dangerous times, in every imaginable way. The power to manipulate minds is becoming so sophisticated that only the most circumspect are surviving as reasonably free thinkers. As increasingly diabolical power consolidates in fewer and fewer hands, access to alternative information becomes a determining factor in human life. The world of information is assuming a new significance. Access to alternative information, in one form or another, is now a matter of life and death.
 
That Thing out there still referred to as a civilization- the Corporate/Military/Government Mind- has been methodically laying waste to reality in every respect. And its main technique is through incessantly feeding the public an entire world-view made out of toxic substitutes for information and truth. The 360-degree, surround-sound World Lie most people are walking around believing is built and sustained by the nonstop flow of highly purposeful, integrated and carefully directed fabrications. This body-and-soul-devouring Ersatz Earth life is constructed by astronomically large number of unrealities that have no beginning or end. As a whole, they form what most people think of, if they think of this at all, as the real world . But reality, in any meaningful degree, has been carefully excised from the world of common national life. The spirit of truth has departed, the virtue has gone out of it, and all that is left are the suffocating fumes of the decomposing corpse of a dead culture. And underneath this noxious decaying body of the old culture, an upgraded version of global totalitarianism has been coalescing into a new world-encompassing death-grip on human freedom.
 
The People's Republic of Information, although requiring a selective eye, offers instantly available alternatives to the tender mercies of Big Brother Behemoth. Mass media, shoveling its daily ration of mind-mess, with its minions feeding us a line of larceny on every wavelength, is little but a fatal consensus stupor. The world has effectively split into two divergent versions, based on two quite different states of awareness. Large numbers of individuals, wide-awake, in a heightened state of observation, are no longer buying into Drone-World. The sheer momentum of unstoppable degeneration currently energizes the United Trance States of America. The mammoth structures of this manipulated version of reality are already very shaky, inevitably undergoing erosion from within by the corrosive substance of the lies they are built with. Yet the very dark shadow of what is being built to replace it, ready to step into the inevitable rubble, falls on us all in the here and now. When the last pretences of the viability of the current accepted version of the 'real world' fall away, as they will, what will smoothly step in to 'correct and fix' the problems we will face will be worse than before.
 
In every respect, on every level, our present civilization has devolved beyond being merely unhealthy. By any sane definition, it is in a condition of putrefaction. Diseased and disease-enhancing substances are deliberately peddled for profit as food and water and medicine. Nature has been polluted to the point of wide-scale transformation into eerie unknown forms of itself. All natural systems are saturated with mankind s waste products, and therefore can no longer be filtered out of the chain of life. What has gone around is now coming around, inescapably, to everyone. Alternative ways of living are no longer optional. To keep pace with the rapidly changing facts of life here, and to be in a position to discover a way through increasing chaos, the most accurate information is the key to survival. Therefore it is crucial to support, in every way we can, those who are making the effort to supply us with informational choices. In our corners of scattered stubborn resistance we are living in a separate yet interconnected world where basic sanity still rules. We inhabit a separate parallel nation alongside Thing World because this is all we can do. And the bedrock of this new healthy common ground is not a contiguous physical land, but The People's Republic of Information.
 
 
 
Comment
 
A New Cyber-Constitution?
 
By Brenda Livingston
living@airmail.net
3-8-1
 
As Diane Harvey recently stated in "The People's Republic of Information" on Rense.com this week:
 
"...We clearly live in extremely dangerous times, in every imaginable way. The power to manipulate minds is becoming so sophisticated that only the most circumspect are surviving as reasonably free thinkers... We inhabit a separate parallel nation alongside Thing World because this is all we can do. And the bedrock of this new healthy common ground is not a contiguous physical land, but The People's Republic of Information."
 
I celebrate everyday the opportunity of trying to meet the challenge of diciphering and incorporating information on the InterNet...but I have great concerns...
 
How Will We The People of this Republic Protect Our Rights To Information To Digest, Interpret and Exchange?
 
The Big Brother Behemoth...continues to drive onward to repress... particularly those who have somewhat secured their brains and heart from the Divide and Conquer Propaganda Machinery (which has many believing one political party or the other is its brain-child).
 
The power to suppress is secretively located in that adrenalin rush of surfing the media we all know so well...the staccato of packaged "news", the veiled messages of relig-politico self-righteousness, the upsurge of 'acceptable' violence (even by our caretaker police) followed by that obscuring numbing separation and haze...
 
Even as we sift through the plethora of information on the net.. we see...
 
~Clipped, snipped, censored, rearranged, forbidden unaccessed, suddenly disappearing bits of data preventing the re-access and substantiation of information necessary for sanity and sound research of any topic --
 
Books (remember them?) had to be both burned and erased from publisher's and library file in the Tangible Kingdom of Old to fully censure the transgressions of 'free-thinkers'. Tis no longer so with electronic info, data, books, magazines...all can drift off the screen unnoticed in the obscurity of air and numbers.
 
~Monitoring through data-mining techniques and The Thing, Carnivore now Omnivore? clearly watching every move of many citizen's keystrokes and mouse moves. This domestic spy technology grows exponentially as we speak (or type I should say...)
 
~Interference with email communication and locking up browsers periodically (some of us attempting research/communication over the net are experiencing unnerving Interference)--firewalls protection be damned
 
~Big Bro 'setting up' all internet users as potential ter-orists (even feel I have to use a hyphen!) Stories in the "news" of well-known websites being used to encrypt ter-orist messages and hackers deemed 'ter-orists' of the cyberworld in UK law and threatened with treachery's death end
 
~V chips pre-installed in every new computer soon becoming X chips roving through our information wonderland continually signaling the Information Police to falsely arrest net junkies during the night
 
This Republic of Information has no Constitution or organ of law or even enough social integration to keep the information free or flowing. What we are seeing is university...research and development...corporate advertising/sales...government overt/covert communication being overrun by those fiesty independents taking advantage of the last vestiges of free speech in this totalitarian wasteland!
 
It seems the Great Machine Of Scattered Perceptions is ever having to stretch its tendrals to control and separate the "large numbers of individuals, wide-awake, in a heightened state of observation, [who] are no longer buying into Drone-World..."
 
We are seeing our freedom of speech and press continuously manipulated for the benefit of an oligarchic few... and our abilities to find out facts and share information is caught up in a continuous quagmire... "White Walled" into oblivion.
 
Where are the true investigative reporters of the past--those that actually risk life and limb to ferret out the facts to inform the citizens? Does this cyberland encourage or discourage the sharing of in-depth political information about repression of the freedom to connect and associate?
 
Of course, even during the 60's and 70's these brave reporters were pressured and directed by the boys upstairs -- used to discredit wayward Presidents so they did not have to meet with yet another kind of violence (and do note that assasinations are covered as accidents these days). At least this great abuse of power did get exposed to the public... the smell of which quickly faded with a simple re-direction of the Prop Machine to bright days and economic bliss.
 
If the investigatives are another urban legend then what can we do as denizens of this infoworld do to protect our freedom to connect?
 
Let us at least not just accept the superficial drivel and pablum drueled upon us everyday.... Might we at least dig a little deeper...a little quicker to the scene before even the idea of "facts and evidence and truth" are some distant memory?
 
I do applaud those of us who are willing to resound our sacred Thoughts and Spirit Communication via any connectivity and be willing to sacrifice what is left of our individual freedom to challenge those who try so hard to suppress our communication Links -- through pen, air or electronics!
 
As always, the first large step is to become of this New World around us -- though changing faster than we can speak, exploring fully what we do have and sharing what we can is our only hope to regaining our expression rights that are being incrementally 'chipped' away...
 
As we continue trying to connect and connect to pieces of information and fleetingly to one another with little continuity or depth of understanding of the speed-of-light world around us... we do wish some history of our passage.
 
What will be our new historical record -- our means of learning from the past -- our building on our present understandings? Does expression require a hard copy for existence?
 
How Do We Preserve The Ultimate Freedom -- The Freedom To Connect?
 
No doubt that there are forces out there -- technology without forethought, clandestine censorship tactics, pressures to accept the latest "poli-talk" as fact, high or low tech mind control, obsession w/one's own naval to name a few -- that effect our ability to speak our minds and hearts and share in depth and meaning.
 
Freedom to make mistakes or play the fool and thus grow -- requires that we have alternative thoughts, actions and ideologies that we can freely choose from... and that takes their protection and an awareness that these exist. Once we start forgetting alternate ways of being, seeing, sharing and living -- we can only stay within the line that those with this memory/knowledge (who have found ways to erase it) have drawn for us.
 
I hope through the coming foggy freedom of choosing to breathe deep the Soma drifting in the air as we sleep at night and in our freely flicking from one short superficial clip of Big Brother propaganda to another as we surf the web, radio or TV -- that we know something more...something beyond this material plane of living...that will move us to evolve in the eternal. As there is a universe beyond this planet...there are streams of awareness that connect us if we choose to explore them.
 
It always seems that it is in the intangible we carry the torch onward through the nights we create for ourselves... and perhaps it is through our striving for compassion and connection through these nights... we grow in the ways that matter...
 
Besides influencing law-making regarding spy or privacy-invading technology of our homes and computers and keeping the net in private hands -- we do still have power in numbers and in the amount of sheer information sharing.
 
But it is not only the quanity that matters here...it is the quality of what we share that can be a cornerstone to a new kind of freedom expressed through this ever evolving brain prosthesus and spirit connector. This media is our creation -- perhaps we should give some real thought and soul to its protection...
 
And perhaps a new Cyber-Constitution is in order...one that is as free and growing and changing as the next keystroke. We are --ready or not-- moving into a new era of the mind where structures and systems of the past no longer fit or can keep up to control.
 
We just might be moving into a new type of freedom whose protection is not only found in its usefulness to the corporate state but in the very fabric of its massive connectivity and our boundless participation...

 

 
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