FROM FAMA TO INFORMATION SOCIETY Of Prophets, Gods and the Nettime server demon Florian Cramer The concept of information society not only focuses new media prophecies, politics and business. It also seems central to "net criticism" and "net culture" as they are discussed in "Nettime." In the archives of the mailing list, "information society" is typically referred to as an either present or emerging reality: a reality to be reassessed with alternative, critical or at least non-corporate visions. As a social utopia, information society however predates the Internet and its prophets and critics. In the 17th century, the protestant scholars Johann Valentin Andreae, Jan Amos Comenius and Samuel Hartlib developed a general program to inform mankind. Their project was outlined in Andreae's 1619 pamphlet Turris Babel ("The Tower of Babel"), a dialogical satire on Rosicrucianism. The Rosicrucian reformation of mankind had first been proclaimed five years earlier in the Fama Fraternitatis among whose anonymous authors had been Andreae himself. He soon had to witness how his fiction took up a life of its own. More than 150 replies appeared until 1619 whose authors sought to get in touch with the hermetic brotherhood. With Turris Babel, Andreae joins the debate and mocks the craze he had created. But instead of declaring himself the author of the Fama, he brings up 75 allegorical protagonists who each pronounce their own opinion about the Rosicrucians. In chapter 16, three characters enter the scene, the "reformator", the "deformator" and the "informator". While the deformator wants to do away with all traditional ties and institutions including church and state, the reformator hopes for their restoration through the Rosicrucians. The informator finally supersedes their debate by demanding to "inform" mankind so that "the divine law will be saved from the deformator's corruption and the reformator's eagerness and become the constitution of this world". "Information" refers to its Latin root here; it reads as "impregnation", "shaping", or "instruction". The informist is an agent of a new Christiana Societas which the final chapter of Turris Babel and Andreae's subsequent writings proclaim. The Rosicrucians give way to the Christian Society, and fama is followed by information, or, education. In the ideal state of this information society, Andreae's utopian republic Christianopolis, all knowledge is denoted in public mural paintings. The information and impregnation of society follows, one could say, the logic of a push channel. Pedagogics becomes the master discipline of this project because it provides the programming tools. In 1620, Andreae writes his educational treatise Theophilus; but it were his disciples and confrères Comenius and Hartlib who succeeded in rewriting pedagogics into a new universal science. With the plans of the Christiana Societas failing last in England, Andreae's followers rescue the technologies of their information utopia into public education. Comenius turns the "view houses" of Christianopolis into an Orbis pictus ("The World in Pictures"), the first illustrated children's primer. Until the late 18th century, the Orbis pictus remains the canonical schoolbook in Europe. What does the post-Rosicrucian information society have in common with the postmodern information society net prophets and "net critics" describe? Defined against de-formation, re-formation and fama, Andreae's in-formation is not only loaded with pedagogics and theology; more than that, its definition is radically performative. It implies that information is only what has an impact, reaching and impregnating its recipients. This notion is surprisingly modern in its affinity to Shannon's definition of information as anti-redundance. Here, information is not a self-referential plaything. It implies a vertical power relation between informants and the informed, between source and receivers. Information comes from the source, it is radically original. To speak originally, the informant must avoid redundant overlapping with the knowledge of the informed; he must speak from a remote place and dwell outside society. Unlike other information societies, Andreae's Christiana Societas makes no attempt at concealing this place, but labels it "heaven" and calls the informant "God". Andreae's information society does not inform itself, it is being informed. But is this also the case in contemporary information societies? Can an information society be made a society of informants, instead of a society of the informed? According to the Latin etymology of the word, society is a body of companions ("socii") who follow ("sequi") each other. Society thus rests upon smoothed out paths. If smoothing out implies redundance whereas information translates, according to Andreae and Shannon, as anti-redundance, it follows that information and society are contradictions. Andreae's Christian information society resolves this contradiction by secluding the informant from itself. A society founded upon its self-information however - that is, a society founded upon radical originality instead of redundances or a remote informant - cannot communicate. It would not be a society. Perhaps those who speak of information society today don't use the word "information" in Shannon's or Andreae's rigorous sense, but identify "information" with "signs". As "signs", "information" would comprehend noise as well as signals, fuzziness as much as focus. But in this case, "information society" would no longer make a difference. It would not describe any departure from the habitual signal-noise-economics of "society"; it would exhaust itself in a buzzword. But perhaps the question is not whether "information society" is only a buzzword or whether a self-informing information society would be a contradiction in itself. If one acknowledges that the concept of "information society" has political impact nevertheless, then the more relevant conclusion is that no "information society" which is more than a buzzword can do without transcendental informants. When presupposing information society as a present or emerging reality, "net criticism" and "net culture" do not only operate with the same theoretical dispositive as net prophecy. They also participate, nilly-willy, in the political theology inscribed into its very concept. "Net critics" and net prophets coincide where they pretend to do without transcendental informants, but continue to employ them. When Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz presented their concept of "net culture" and "net criticism" in a panel speech for a congress that accompanied Documenta X in summer 1997, they defended "the net" against traditional academia all the while calling upon academics to go online. Given the academic surrounding and sponsorship of the event, the audience interpreted this as undeserved polemics. It failed to recognize that, instead of a university lecture, it had witnessed a perfect re-enactment of the Rosicrucian Fama, its bold rhetoric, its general critique of culture and its final appeal to the scholars of the world. The speakers had furthermore observed the Rosicrucian rules of curing everyone without charging money, wearing innocuous clothing and speaking the local idiom in each country they visit in order to keep their theological mission under the hood. The next logical step after the Fama is "Nettime" writing itself as a dialogical satire of its own discourse. When the discourse of "net criticism" generates the very critical "net culture" it reflects, and when the discourse of net prophecy generates the very affirmative "net culture" it reflects, and vice versa, it seems as if the "information societies" addressed both in "net prophecy" and "net criticism" are, first of all, self-descriptions. They emerge as romantic symbols: demonic and divine hieroglyphs, shining bright in the rigorous sun of Telechristianopolis.