Context: Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is Bogus
I would usually just slide past this kind of topic without commenting. However, as an artefact in a vigorously-contested information environment – an observation to be made here is that even a document of dubious veracity serves a useful purpose above and beyond whatever truth value it may ever have wantonly aspired to.
The deeply dissonant partisan turbulence of the contemporary political environment is a fact. I guess you could call that a meta-truth above and beyond the arguments, counter-arguments and claims to truth and falsity currently being thrown around like so much confetti at a carnival parade.
It is uncertain at what point political culture may have crossed the threshold into this phase of communication system, or indeed if it may always and already have been a manifestation of this kind of adaptive complexity, but these kinds of artefacts and their associated tribal arguments possess an ascendant role in the cultivation and continuity of a political system that now depends upon difference and dissonance as the primary transmission medium of it’s own optimal self-propagation.
This is fundamentally not about attribution, it is about (political) information system self-replication through dissonance and disagreement.
Which political system? US National, Chinese, Global geostrategic? It doesn’t actually matter – there is in the end only one single and unitary information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system at work here and all of labels, categories nations and differential, dissociative taxonomies in use are (also and only) the adaptive, metastatic distribution and transmission of autonomously self-propagating information patterns, encodings – through us, as us and – foundationally – as our shared, diverse and discontinuously adversarial political and ideological systems.
