Make a Vaccine! Stick a needle in a meme!

Joe Barrera (joebar@MICROSOFT.com)
Tue, 11 Aug 1998 07:43:00 -0700


A Nordquistian exploration of power, technology, and resistance.

- Joe

-----Original Message-----
From: ricardo dominguez <mailto:[mailto:rdom@thing.net]>
[mailto:rdom@thing.net]
Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 1998 9:51 AM
To: <mailto:infowar-en@aec.at> infowar-en@aec.at
Subject: INFOWAR: A Prelude to a Theory of Resistance and Maps (Part
1)

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 98
INFOWAR. information.macht.krieg
Linz, Austria, september 07 - 12
<http://www.aec.at/infowar> http://www.aec.at/infowar
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Ours is not the house of pain and misery.
That is how he who robs
and deceives us has painted us.
Ours is not the land of death and anguish.
Ours is not the treason nor does our way have room for the forgetting.
Ours are not the empty ground and the hollow sky.
Ours is the house of light and joy.
That is how we created it, that is how
we struggle for it, that is how we nurture it.
Ours is the land of life and hope.
Ours is the path of peace
which is planted with dignity and harvested
with justice and liberty.

* FIFTH DECLARATION OF THE LACANDON JUNGLE

The Ante-Chamber of Revolution:
A Prelude to a Theory of Resistance
and Maps

Zapatismo is not bound by the limits of interconnectivity or the raw
violence of neo-liberalism. It is a network embedded deep in the heart of a
community who oppose the loss of voice in its own home. A community who walk
with the ghost of history and the ghost of exchange. Zapatismo haunts the
big MASK with small masks that walk between code. They have sent us notes
about this virtual condition, some times they ask that we pass the notes on,
and sometimes they ask us to sing a tender song. They say they became an
intergalactic protocol by slipping under the electronic fabric one drunken
night. They say the man they woke up with the next day screamed he had been
tricked...then later came back screaming that this was his bed, his home,
and his kitchen...but the man is wrong, very wrong...this was our home...a
home for the homeless.

The Book of Mirrors, The Hybrid, and the MESH (a short essay):
Late Capital is caught by its own reflection, it wants to be both original
and copy, soft and hard, top and bottom, speed and inertia. The Rand
Corporation calls for hybrid hierarchies and networks, with both Top Sight
Command and Distributed Network Teams that function as an interconnected
MESH of total command and total autonomy, for power only. The Hybrid MESH
now has many names: flat power, soft power, liquid power, power ad
infinitum. Late Capital agrees with Mao on what this power must do:
centralize strategically, but decentralize tactically.
The Zapatistas say:
Ya basta! Break the Mirror! Do you really need Maps!*

*Maps (A Long Footnote):
Several different maps of information have been put on the block for our
inspection: frontier, castle, real estate, rhizome, hive, matrix, virus,
network, plug-in your own, etc., Each map creates a different line of
flight, a different form of security, and a different pocket of resistance.
Frontier:
A digiscape full of drifters, free roaming data cowboys, mail tribes, code
ranchers and bandwidth barons. ISP justice decides the laws for their
community. Those that go beyond the local enclave's limit are on their own
in a lawless infinity. On the frontier the only security one has is that of
a few trusted URL's, ones' faithful machine, and keeping the VirusScan
loaded and close at all times.
On the Frontier: *It's every link for itself and Microsoft
against all.*
* Resistance on the Frontier: Banditos! We don't need no Stinkin'
Badges!

Castles:
This is a space of bunkers and transcendental hierarchies, with
moats, high walls, and drawbridges. Movement between these bunkers is done
by Knights, bearing the latest war gear, protecting the flow of messages and
goods. The most important defense of A Castle is the amount of "Air" between
the outside and the castle's core. For Castles it is the roads between them
they fear. Anything could be lurking in the dark woods.
* Resistance between Castles: Robin Hood! Steal from the Rich and Give
to the Poor!

Real Estate:
This is similar to where you are now, as you read or hear these
words. Space is owned or rented by individuals transnational-companies, and
anything in between. Lot's of big signs selling things, gentrification,
homes for senior citizens, the endless streams of homeless. Everyone wants
laws to protect the welfare of exchange under the sign of social control.
They often say they want to protect the children. In this space, only the
commodity is protected.
* Resistance under the For Sale Sign: Squat the Future! Burn the sign
down!

Rhizome: Here Bodies without Organs's schizflux between roots,
pop-up flora, holes and machinic desire. Endless tendrils criss-cross space,
some spaces become hard and never move again, some spaces become smooth and
never crack, nothing escapes the virtual struggle between The State and The
War Machine. Here endless interconnectivity rules all possibility as an
either/or line of flight-territorialize or de-territorialize, you have no
choice.
* Resistance at the root: Become a body with organs and smell the
flowers.

The Hive: A wave-system so tightly bound that no difference resides
between each segment of the wave. Each segment is part of a wave-mass, A
SWARM. The Hive is able to absorb any change both within or without the
SWARM. Each segment-wave functions as a SWARM, alone or apart from the
other segments. Each element of a SWARM functions locally in parallel
interdependence with the rest of the wave mass. The Hive and the SWARM act
as one, but only in one direction. Each shift in the SWARM becomes a part of
the HIVE at the same moment. Each segment of the SWARM is a part of the
HIVE, but the HIVE is not a part of the SWARM. Each segment of SWARM needs
the HIVE to be a part of a SWARM, but the HIVE does not need the any
specific segment of the wave-mass to be a SWARM.
Resistance among the SWARM: Use the SWAT! Act Alone.

Matrix: Weaving symbionts creating, moving, offering the permanent
revolution of Pandora's code. The Matrix is disequilibrium as invention,
aphanisis as informatic-quanta, soft accidents, and action as care. An alien
politics of the body as hope. Still the Matrix is sweating in the labor
pools of speed production. The matrices are held hostage as the base
materialism of Late Captial. Wetware for the endless multi-tasking of
choatics. The Matrix is still looming.
* Resistance in The Matrix: Have a Party! Go on Strike!

Virus: bio-agents flow between complexity and containment, diversity
and control, self and other. Cellular circuits know the difference between
antigens and antibodies. Viral coagulation filters for non-self types in the
Host in order to assemble possible defensive patterns. Bioagents fail the
Host when it meets its other as self. It has no defense against itself, or
what mimics its own messages. Bioinformatics understand the self and not the
other as self.
* Resistance within the cell: Make a Vaccine! Stick a needle in a
meme!

Network: Borderless operables, hyper redundancy, massive aggregate
throughput built on endless backplanes bring bottlenecks down to
0.Decentralized bottom up architectures, mega-gigabit ethernets, and active
response firewalls are the multiple nexus of this space. Intelligent
infrastructures allow the emergence of total networks, micro-networks, and
weak links. Network security is being exploited by the demand for open
transnational e-commerce and intercontinental exchange routes. Exploit
scripts scan vulnerabilities, replacement files wrap packet filters, stealth
sniffers generate new holes: linsniff.c, sunkill.c, and latierra.c. Network
gaps created by military-intelligence systems, trans-corporate movement,
software developers, end users, providers, and the lack of centralized
management clog the possibility of an effective and total security solution.
* Resistance on the Network: Disconnect! Take the Streets!

End of Part 1.

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