Tactical Media

Abstract

The world communicates. Contemporary physics and chemistry instruct us in the nature of an information universe and reveal the microdimensional infolding of space and time upon themselves in such ways that, in the fundamental laboratory demonstration of quantum effects, subatomic entities “communicate.” The trees communicate with the sun, the seas with the moon, our eyes with ancient light from dead galaxies, our skins with the cosmic background radiation. The inhabitants of this planet have evolved to receive the communications of their environment, migratory birds to sense magnetic fields, anchovies to follow the ocean currents, and humans to communicate. Among and between people, communication has taken on a special form. Like many animals, we externalize communication in acts of nest building and giving and receiving food. Unlike our cousins, we have also found complex ways of storing and retrieving communications. Storage is the origin of economics. Giving and withholding communication, or otherwise interrupting and redirecting the cosmic flow, is the basis on which we humans undertake our job of making futurity. It is also a favored way to acquire honor, divinity, a papacy, a throne, a Nobel prize, wealth, sex, notoriety, or whatever else in any period of history has become the name and icon of satisfaction. The tactic developed by the ancient priesthoods and perfected in the rise of finance capital is to become a node through which the maximum of communication passes and to secrete a tithe of that flow for personal, familial, clan, or caste monopoly.