The following is an interview I did with Clinton Ignatov, of Less Mad. Clinton hits on a number of topics relevant to this substack and applicable to modern warfare. Please check out his substack, new ideas like his are the reason I’m on substack to begin with. Clinton, thanks again for speaking with me, and now, on with our FIRST interview! Yo Joe
BLOWTORCH: Welcome to my substack, and congratulations, you are my first ever interview! First and foremost question to get out of the way, who is your favorite GI Joe and why?
CLINTON: Sgt. Slaughter! The most valuable asset for a teacher is to be the best—to demonstrate a regular ability to achieve what the students or trainees are aspiring to accomplish. Make it look easy. The notion of teachers as “co-learners” today is a very poor substitute for teachers proving that mastery is possible—shape up or ship out!
BLOWTORCH: Yeah, for sure. Also Sgt. Slaughter trained the joes to beat Serpentor, an enemy Cobra constructed through computer tech using DNA from Sgt. Slaughter himself. Interestingly, Sgt. Slaughter is the only GI Joe I can think of who was a real world person first, as a WWF pro-wrestler, before he moved into the cartoon world to train the joes. Many parallels here.
CLINTON: Yes, quite! Fictional universes which transcend individual media offer many interesting topologies for understanding the splices between the maps and terrains we traverse today. God bless Ronald Reagan for teaching this to children early with his deregulation of television advertisers.
BLOWTORCH: Tell me a bit about yourself.
CLINTON: I’m a long-time internet user and, more recently, writer and content creator working to illuminate the effects of technology upon society and ourselves. My approach is to teach the history and make-up of technology itself.
I got into this watching the public conversation about computers and the internet generally degenerate into completely nonsense over the past 25 years—the state of conversation became so calamitous that the only thing I could really do to stay sane was begin trying to teach what I already knew. And, also, to try and learn a lot, lot more.
How the hell are you supposed to run a modern society when nobody knows how anything works? And the people you think know how it works? I’m sorry to say most of them don’t know either; they’re just happy to get paid for acting like they do.
Otherwise I get by with part-time retail work and blow-off steam getting out to have fun with friends. When I’m engaged with media, I’m rather monomaniacally focused on my writing and studies and tweeting about my pet issues; I’m virtually never playing video-games or reading fiction or listening to music or watching TV or movies. Wasted too much of my twenties binging media—I’m done for life!
BLOWTORCH: Can you talk to me a bit about the thesis of your work?
CLINTON: It’s gradually dawned on me for the past decade—down to the month, actually—that the world behind the computer screen feels real to people’s bodies and brains. And the little voice of reason on top which says “I know it’s not real! It’s just pixels!” has no say whatsoever in what the body decides is going on—for the same reason parents have to actually check under a kid’s bed at night for monsters even when the kid knows monsters aren’t real.
Video game critics have whole-heartedly adopted the language of cybernetics to talk about this, drawing on a tradition of theory known as posthumanism, deriving largely from feminism in the ‘80s. Feminism has always offered the most robust explorations of embodiment and self-awareness about being subject to systems outside of one’s control. That’s why, to the chagrin of many, it has been the natural home for contemporary studies of the effects of cybernetics. An invaluable resource for summarizing this stuff is a recent book about feminist methodology in video-game criticism, A Play of Bodies by Brendan Keogh.
The prototypical example of being inside a cybernetic circuit is the World War II anti-aircraft artillery gunner who sits, like a part of the machine, between his gun and the computerized aiming system which tells him how far-ahead to lead the shot. The gunner is entering into a virtual rendition of the sky, rather than looking directly up. While his mind is consciously existing in that world, his body itself is spliced into the machine itself.
So my thesis is that if you don’t understand the actual technology that you’re surrounded by and using every day, then you are probably enthralled to it while your conscious mind is attending to its content. This is McLuhan 101. I started reading him in-depth around 2018, and quickly strived to read his work exhaustively—to spend the same amount of effort studying his work as super-fans spend nerding out about their favorite band or fiction franchise or director or whatever.
The hard won result? When people talk about flows of information or the spread of viral memes or social contagions, I hear completely delusional nonsense. There’s only physical boxes full of metal and glass and tiny semiconducting sand-sandwiches! Information isn’t real!
During the 2016 elections, memes like “This train has no brakes!” represented the visceral, embodied nature of feeling information-flows as tangible and real. People spliced into computers are living in a discarnate state, to use McLuhan’s term.
BLOWTORCH: There’s a lot of insight in what you just said. Your example of the WWII AA gunner as part of a cybernetic circuit has a lot to unpack, but I want to get that a little later. “Information isn’t real” is a statement that flies in the face of the general thrust of the data-driven society. Can you talk a little more about that? What are the implications of this? What kind of realities and illusions could this imply on an organizational level?
CLINTON: As a way of describing the substance of media which is created and handed off between people and between levels of an organization, the term “information” is absolutely invaluable. It is inescapable that we have a generic, abstract term to reify, or make concrete, the meaning we communicate with each other.
But—and I’m being totally pedantic here—information itself doesn’t exist. The memorandums and analyses and charts and photos do. The people flapping their lips at each other do. For my own reasons, I had to get really pedantic about this. What has happened—what always happens—is that we’ve taken a metaphor as literal in the common language. We did it a century ago when steam-engines were common, and psychology began talking about people “drives” and being “under pressure” and “blowing off steam.” We are not steam engines. Now we do it for computers and the science developed at Bell to make better telephones: information theory. We aren’t computers exchanging information as black-boxed input-output machines. It’s a fine metaphor—but we mustn’t take it for metaphysical truth.
I’m speaking generally, I suppose, when I say “we.” I mean that, personally, I’d like to be more conscious and aware of what’s going on and how it is our world and our thoughts are structured by language—and being more careful with language is essential for that.
If I were going to speak in a more Machiavellian voice, I’d advise that it’s important that subordinates ought not to be conscious of these metaphors, so as to be better cogs in the machine. But that’s just not sustainable where growth and upward mobility are a healthy and desired feature of a hierarchical system, like the military.
BLOWTORCH: I don’t think my audience is familiar with McLuhan. Can you briefly summarize what he said, and why he’s relevant today?
CLINTON: Marshall McLuhan was an English professor from the University of Toronto who, more or less, created our common definition of “media” today, most famous for coining the phrases, “the global village” and “the medium is the message.”
What he said when he was world-famous in the ‘60s was that books had “low-level formatted” (admittedly, my own computer metaphor) the Western mind to be very logical, and that the side-lining of books by radio and television was creating a whole different generation of Westerners who were, in many ways, more Eastern or holistic in their disposition to the world. Classic left-brain, right-brain stuff—except he was saying it long before that brain-hemisphere language came into vogue.
He had honed his perception on a long study of classical civilization, ancient and medieval religion, and art history. His media work applied techniques of literary criticism outside of the bounds of books, toward mass culture, advertisement, and the world at large.
His popular work is written in a very “cubist” sort of style, inspired by modern poets and writers like Ezra Pound and James Joyce—so it’s notoriously difficult to make sense of. Importantly, unlike many difficult books, the difficulty is not due to translation. Listening to his live lectures or interviews is a much better introduction than, say, reading his Wiki article. Most summaries and second-hand sources are reductive to the point of being deceptive and contradictory to what he was really saying.
BLOWTORCH: Let’s circle back to your example of the cybernetic air defender. When you say his mind is spliced into the machine itself, what do you mean? How “in the machine” is he? Relative to what?
CLINTON: I said his body was spliced into the machine, not his mind. His mind is fully in the machine. An essential part of cybernetic theory are feedback loops. The circular process of things adjusting other things in a closed-circuit, tending to move a system toward balance, like your home thermostat, or toward entropic decay or out-of-control growth.
The problem in conceptualizing this is just imagining where the circuit is. It’s easy when we stick to physical objects in sensible physical space—the same space our bodies exist and move in. In your toilet tank, the circuit is the water-level rising, lifting the float, which closes the valve to stop the water. This is simple mechanics—all physical parts in a balancing negative feedback loop.
When it comes to feeding pigeons, drawing in more pigeons, attracting more lonely retirees with stale bread, you’ve got a runaway loop on your hands which turns your local park into a slip-and-slide of geriatrics dredged with bird-shit. This system, though, entails a greater complexity of parts, each a system in its own right. You’ve got different levels of biology and social dynamics and psychology all spliced together in the circuit as moving parts. A splice, in this case, is like the tunnel Wile E. Coyote paints on a cliff-face to extend a fake road for the Road Runner—a joining to create a false whole which transcends domains.
The Western mind can’t shake being logical—all it’s done is create modern systems theory and then stammer and yammer endlessly in pseudo-spiritual, reverential awe about how complex systems can be. Terms like “emergence” appeal to the artless. Further, when individuals are conditioned to know themselves as part of an abstract, complex system which transcends psychology, society, biology, institutional hierarchy, machines, information flows, etc., then their body becomes a bit-character. The actual room they are in, and the warm bodies who surround them become less important than the abstract, intersectional space and roles they inhabit in “the system.”
When a system decides one of its loops travels through your mind, your left-over body is spliced into the machine embodying that system. In computers, this is called an interface, specifically an input-output interface.
This tangle of complex, spliced systems is relative to (and, I hope you’ll agree, inferior to) an imagined ideal state of, say, actually talking with people openly and socialably you are present with, with all the ups and downs that brings. Communing in a shared space. Mending the mind-body split. Such an ideal space requires all present to have subordinated the machines around them to their proper place as consciously used tools.
Instead of this, we have tried instead to use music and other media to engineer shared spaces to bring people together. When you’re surrounded by speakers, in seats or on a dance floor, you are inside a machine which is being operated by the DJ or band or speaker. We do this because our ability to actually commune is so hampered by our more abstracted roles and situations.
BLOWTORCH: I’d like to speculate that what you’re talking about explains the rapidly shrinking attention spans that are noticeable today; when your mind is immersed in a non-natural feedback loop it can be pulled around in non-natural directions at non-natural speeds (that we adapt to). But maybe it would be more useful to point out the time distorting effects of multiple people immersed in multiple non-natural feedback loops on the greater social organism?
CLINTON: Time distortion is an obvious effect of existing within environments of content instead of the material, physical environment itself. There is a term McLuhan picked up from some ‘30s-era psychology, “phatic communion.” It means the general feeling of being connected to someone else, or not alone. It’s the feeling of communication itself, rather than any actual information or content being communicated. Small-talk is the best example: if you say “it’s raining,” to a stranger who can see, quite clearly, that it is raining, then what you’re really doing is just opening a channel, a reciprocal, recursive feeling of interconnection.
When scaled up to feeling connected to a group or mass, it becomes the collective identity into which we melt. The poet W.B. Yeats called this the emotion of multitude. Internet happenings, reflected in streams of hyper-relevant viral memes, elicit this feeling of shared experience too—again the “runaway train” with “no brakes” is a perfect example. There is no friction in cyberspace to slow the “movement” of collective intelligence down.
Relative to that movement, the regular pace of the wake-a-day world, with breakfast in the morning and supper in the evening is positively glacial. McLuhan liked to cite a saying among jazz musicians that recorded jazz music was “as stale as yesterday’s newspaper.”
BLOWTORCH: Regarding that cybernetic feedback loop for our air defender, if the enemy in his sights was an autonomous drone, or even an enemy pilot flying under strict orders and procedures, could we consider the enemy a part of a larger circuit as well?
CLINTON: Absolutely. My friend Bob Dobbs, who has been riffing on McLuhan for longer than I’ve been alive, named this the “android meme” way back in the early ‘90s. When people are just doing exactly what a machine or rigid system is guiding or encouraging or paying them to do, then the people are secondary—we end up in a world of machines talking to machines through people. This potential is also hinted at in a short book by Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, titled God and Golem, Inc.
To change from the military metaphor, films are talking to magazines in the popular press through the readership. They’re saying “Hey, this leading actor is a hot property! Contact her publicist to get an interview with her!” and then television news listens in and does a story about the interview happening. The ostensible consumers of all of this—the movie audience and the people in the doctor’s waiting room flipping through pages or reading the closed-captions up on the TV—are really just the passive carriers of this communication between the “real” agents, the media themselves.
BLOWTORCH: The contours of that cybernetic circuit you describe strike me as analogous to terrain, and if that statement is remotely valid, a field of battle for warfare that is unique to our time. Cyber is a recognized domain in the multi domain operations operating concept, but in common usage it tends to be recognized as “the internet” whereas I understand our conversation to be describing the classical notion of cybernetics- the science of control. Any thoughts on this?
CLINTON: Astute observation. What I’m calling cyber may just have well applied to the world created by telegraph wires unspooled across the floor of the Atlantic in the 1850s. It’s about circular or more-complex systems of feedback—the most interesting of which transcend the mechanical world of Newtonian space, into realms human subjectivity and media-content.
It is no coincidence that Lewis Carroll was showing us such strange spaces in his Alice in Wonderland right-about the same time electricity was short-circuiting causality in the world our bodies evolved to exist within.
The internet is rather like an obvious embodiment of something that had long-existed in a more subtle, unacknowledged form long before. “Internet,” you should recall, is simply a contraction of “inter-networking.” Each institution had their own local, in-house computer network which was home-brewed and incompatible with any other—the inter-networking protocol was a super-set of standardized protocols allowing each institution's network to pass information to the others in a common language. Since each network at least shared in common the idea of personal accounts and usernames, email could be addressed and translated to others “@” different “domains” in spite of otherwise incompatible systems.
This surrounding meta-system, then, shaped the development of each institution's home-grown system, often leading to its abandonment in favour of UNIX or whatever off-the-shelf systems came along in the ‘70s and ‘80s. This meta-system acting upon the smaller ones it contains is a classic cybernetic conception.
BLOWTORCH: Are you familiar with the cognitive hierarchy? I’m interested in your thoughts on this, and the impacts of tech on it and decision making.
CLINTON: This is a standard cybernetic understanding of the mind, and of sense-making. It mirrors the economic progression from primary to secondary and tertiary industries—raw materials processed into goods sold at retail for the market to consider. We love turning abstractions into concrete forms—here information again is analogous to a commodity.
It is also a pattern which mirrors the individual human nervous system. Most of the work of our sense-making mind is actually suppressive, or enforced ignorance. To focus on what’s important is to ignore what is not. Effective people expend a great deal of energy ignoring things, and people with ADHD have great difficulty developing this crucial faculty. Disciplined ignorance is a super-power when developed correctly.
British cyberneticist Stafford Beer’s book The Brain of the Firm provides his analogy of organizing institutions as a model of the nervous system, which your military’s Cognitive Hierarchy model maps well to. In the 15th century, chartered “corporations” became the first major institutions outside of the Church to consider their organized assembly of people, bound by legal contracts, as a body divorced from the geography of a city or nation. The movement from the rank of Private to Corporal also reflects this pattern of envisioning greater, abstract bodies. Those “heading” such secular corps, or mass bodies, certainly must be provided with good sense-data for its steerage.
Isn’t it a funny mix of metaphors we’ve inherited that puts the word understanding at the top of a pyramid? Knowledge becomes understanding when analogy and metaphor contextualize it within one’s experience and memory, and within history. Metaphor provides proportions. It is not an isomorphic, or one-to-one analogy—the fact that this circumstance is in many ways different from the other provides most of the usefulness. “This battle is like that battle except…”
The stages of “cognition” which elevate “information” into “knowledge” would certainly entail this perception of metaphor and analogy—what we frequently refer to as “context” or “precedent.” But I think the literary terms do more to keep the living nature of thought and agency alive throughout the otherwise mechanical “processing” of data.
Machines which enter into the body at various levels are likely to need the whole picture to do their job well—and if the machine knows the whole picture, the people become redundant. Conversely, machines that don’t do their job well are just likely to introduce “noise” into the tenuous game of telephone which holds hierarchies together. The disciplined ignorance necessary for clear thought seems far less achievable when inscrutable machines are introduced piece-meal into the larger system to introduce their own shadows.
BLOWTORCH: You mention you had issues with applying math to human psychology. What exactly do you mean by this?
CLINTON: Numbers are wonderful, but they aren’t words. As an embodied human, I’d like my cognition to be based on the more powerful symbolic system, which I believe to be words, not numbers.
The world is more sensible to me when I take its measure against the faculties of my mind and body as the individual person I am, and as the member of the humanity we all belong to. Yet I recognize that the sword is mightier than the pen when the pen is only used for arithmetic and clichéd, automatic prose of a utilitarian and procedural sort.
All too often, the pursuit of scientific assurance or logical coherence exalts abstract mathematical models and metrics well above their station. Language suffers and grows clichéd as a result. It can only communicate concepts, not percepts. It limits itself to fitting the shape of the geometry some insecure minds have imposed onto our world.
Those who can think “outside the box” are then unduly praised as “lateral thinkers” or artists or gurus—or dismissed as sentimental, fantastic, unserious or mad. Let’s stop thinking about the world in a reductionist, oversimplified form and then marveling at those who exceed it in their own slip-shod, undisciplined or occulted ways. I’d much rather live in a culture which saw the complexity of the word as expressed through language as a given, and understood naturally the role which stricter, more limited forms of mathematical models play as subordinate tools. This is, I think, the hacker spirit—not one toward abstraction but out of it.
Of course it’d be easy to argue that the human mind is modellable as math, and so math is superior or more base than language. But the human brain is also the most complex thing known to humanity at the physical scale it exists at, and its job is taking in all the rest of everything known to humanity. I think that, at least in the secular domain, I’d advise against any leaps to reductionism in this domain.
Computers exist as physical objects within the terrain we exist in. It does not follow that we, recursively, live within the virtual, mathematical maps those computers are making of our terrain. At least, we ought not to be if we have any human dignity or regard for one another. I’d rather not, myself, have society insist incessantly on splicing my unconscious into too many abstract feedback loops if I can help it.
No doubt, in war, the urgency of the immediate situation lends itself to a great deal of equivocation on my humanitarian polemic. We want the enemy in our map—and we want to stay out of theirs. The “innovations” which came out of the World Wars have saturated the peacetime society in ways many are still trying to come to grips with. McLuhan stylized violence as “the quest for identity” in his book with Quentin Fiore War and Peace in the Global Village. There are no self-deceiving pretenses in war—you’ll find out just who you are in short order. Survival becomes you. This is true for individuals and for whole peoples alike.
BLOWTORCH: Yes, absolutely this. The first Titan was fielded this week and I think the lack of coverage draws out how imperceptible these earth moving changes can really be. The fact that a very new defense contractor that specializes in a software-oriented model of business rather than the old production-oriented models from a contractor like Lockheed also says a lot too. Titan is absolutely a landmark in warfare and I would encourage readers to check out the 4 minute video in that link. You really hit the nail on the head, pulling the enemy into our map and staying out of theirs is our new battlefield. It requires a shift in understanding that you have been making throughout this interview- you are not the map.
CLINTON: One time, while I was working my retail job at the Ottawa airport, a customer in the US departures area was buying a teddy bear and some magnets. Just some souvenirs for his children. We were making polite conversation and I took his credit card to swipe the magnetic stripe and held it up to the screen to confirm the numbers matched, as was regular procedure at the time before chip-and-pin.
As I confirmed the card was valid and processed the transaction, he said, “Oh damn! That was my company card.” Without missing a beat, I responded, “It’s okay, your employer has already noticed the mistake and is reversing the charges as we speak.”
The card was issued by Palantir. He gave me the meanest scowl—which made it all the funnier to me!
Being aware of one’s environment is always an advantage—the least of which is for making witty ripostes.
BLOWTORCH: You are very clear on your recommendation for individuals, education is the answer. What would you recommend for organizations? Or leaders? I feel like the answer goes a bit deeper than “think more outside the box.”
CLINTON: Secure one’s own oxygen mask before assisting other passengers, as the flight attendants always tell us. The reason I’m doing what I do is precisely because I find most language used in technological-discourse too muddled to be sensible. We commonly speak in metaphor as though we were speaking literally. And we speak in the marketers jargon instead of technicians. Even technicians can’t speak technically outside of their own very, very small part of the machine.
I recommend old books. It seems paradoxical, but I feel much more secure learning how to think and reason technically and humanly when exposed to writing which came from an age which isn’t my own. Not only is there a detachment, but there is also a need to draw parallels and find metaphors which bring new life, new perspectives, to the current scene. What was clichéd then is fresh and archetypal today—what is clichéd today ought to be buried and left to ferment a few decades.
My recommendation is to find more old things. New old things. Stop talking about George Orwell, for god’s sake, and read some Wyndham Lewis! His Art of Being Ruled was 100x the book that 1984 was—especially for being non-fiction!
If you do want to study computers today, have a telos of control and mastery. Figure out the big picture in rough terms, rather than specialize in one small-part. Be a generalist. Of course I’d say ditch Windows and MacOS and start using GNU/Linux, but do it for the reason of being able to rely on doing for yourself what you’ve been letting 3rd parties do for you. What are you letting some cloud-service do which your own computer is perfectly fast enough to do for you? How do you get control back?
Know what it is you want out of the organizations, and ask them for it. Know how to judge their offerings. I’m being vague, but I’d rather suggest the form of whatever it is you ultimately do might take, rather than tell you what to do.
BLOWTORCH: Clinton, this has been an absolutely fascinating interview, and I really appreciate you taking your time to talk here. There are few out there who see what you are seeing, and have the words to help the rest of us understand. Do you have any Public Service Announcements of your own you’d like to put out?
CLINTON: When you’re sure about something, it’s too easy to barrage people with the reasons as to why you’re right and they’re wrong. After all, if one undeniably true thing ought to change someone’s mind, then dumping twenty undeniably-true things onto someone ought to change their minds twenty-times more certainly!
I’d rather suggest, reader, that you draw on your sureness to give you the personal security to be more conservative in what you say and share. Listen more. If you are correct, then you can afford to get lost in someone else’s perception for a while. You can take on their vantage, lose yourself a while, trusting in your own capacity to swim back to reason. You can keep those other nineteen cards to your chest, and test the efficacy of laying just one of them on the table.
If you’re so sure that you’ve got them in your map, then there is lots of interesting potential in voluntarily entering into theirs—so long as you keep your wits up and your actions deliberate. It’s an opportunity for growth.
Because knowing how to communicate is more important than whatever issue of the day you’re trying to communicate. And the process of that learning engenders the state of mind which allows you to perceive and understand the environment as others experience it. Maps are as important as territories, and so the development of perception necessitates being the sort of individual who is welcomed into them.
Unlike the mechanisms of cybernetic control, good communication is collective perception among rational, self-possessed individuals—now you know!
BLOWTORCH: And knowing is half the battle! (the other half is violence)