Via: Bruce Sterling
(((My, this extensive document certainly rewards close study by the
digital-media and graphic-design scholar.)))
" RFE/RL has released a book-length study entitled 'Iraqi Insurgent
Media: The War Of Images And Ideas.' The study documents the media
efforts of the Iraqi insurgency and how global jihadists are using
those efforts to spread their destructive message."
http://www.rferl.org/insurgentmediareport
(((A few choice excerpts:)))
Biographies of the best-known martyrs are sometimes lavish affairs,
Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, the most famous jihadist to have died in
Iraq, was the subject of a downloadable "encyclopedia" that includes
not on numerous materials on the Jordanian militant's life, but
also a complete collection of his statements, essays on his beliefs
and influence, and statements on the jihad in Iraq by Osama bin
Laden. Formatted as a 7.7-megabyte self-contained mini-browser,
the "encyclopedia" provides users with a table of contents and a
conventient graphics interface.
The development of martyr biographies illustrates the growing
professionailism of the insurgent media network. In May 2005, a
participant in a jihadist Internet forum posted a collection of 430
biographies of martyrs in Iraq culled from newspaper accounts, forum
posts, and transcribed "wills" recorded by suicide bombers before
their final attacks. Formatted simply as a Microsoft Word document,
the biographies are uneven in length and tone, and the overall
impression of the collection is somewhat chaotic.
A collection titled *Stories of the Martyrs of Mesopotamia,* though
undated, appears to have been published later. Produced by the
Mujahidin Shura Council, it is formatted more elaborately, with a
full-cover cover, graphic logos, and a background for each page.
Moreover, some of the martyrs who appeared in the collection in May
2005 as single-line entries, such as Abu Ahmad al-Karbuli, are the
subjects of multi-page texts in the Mujahidin Shura Council collection
(...)
A number of insurgent groups and sympathetic media units produce
monthly and weekly publications. These are usually posted to forums
through free upload/download services as both Microsoft Word and
Adobe Acrobat documents. The more sophisticated periodicals are
professionally laid out and feature lavishly formatted covers, full-
color photographs, and charts and graphs. (...)
Just as the operational press release is the basic unit of insurgent
textual production, visual records of attacks are the basic units of
insurgent video production. The two genres are closely related, and
insurgent groups sometimes issue operational press releases along with
links to download a video record of the attack. (...) Most insurgent
groups take care to "brand" themselves, placing their logos in a
corner of the screen for the duration of the video...
Films cover a variety of subjects but break down into a number of
established genres. The most common of these are:
*Compilations of attack videos, frequently organized as a "greatest
hits" collection.(...)
*Profiles of martyrs and insurgents(...)
*Detailed overviews of individual operations and campaigns(...)
*Motivational films on the outrages and excesses committed by
insurgents' enemies.
(...)
The impressive array of products Sunni-Iraq insurgents and their
supporters create suggests the existence of a veritable multimedia
empire. But this impression is misleading. The insurgent media network
has no identifiable brick-and-mortar presence, no headquarters, and
no bureaucracy. It relies instead on a decentralized, collaborative
production model that utilizes the skills of a community of
like-minded individuals. (...)
Via: "Jordan Crandall"
In our cultural landscape of blogs, webcams, profiles, live journals, and
videosharing sites, the intimate lives of everyday people are on parade
for all to see. One could say that a new culture of erotic exposure and
display is on the ascendance, fueled by the impulse to reveal the self,
and streamlined by DIY media technologies. In many ways this culture
would seem to be less a representational than a presentational one, where
we are compelled to solicit the attention of others, act for unseen eyes,
and develop new forms of connective intensity -- as if this were somehow
the very condition of our continued existence, the marker of our worth.
Within this new culture of self-exposure, one could say that the dream of
panoptic power has vanished, or reversed course. Does the drive to
willingly display the self constitute a surrender to the controlling gaze,
or simply a shift in the dynamic of the game? For within these
presentational environments, performance and role-playing reign supreme,
and new forms of subjectivity and identity emerge.
These new cultures of self-display challenge us to rethink foundational
concepts in film and media theory and, consequently, to rethink the very
conditions of our approach. For clearly these cultures are not
necessarily those of mastery and visual pleasure. They do not resolve
easily to questions of perception, power, and language. They are cultures
of showing as much as those of watching. Instead of a reliance on
questions of spectatorship, language, and scopic power, we are challenged
to foreground issues of performance, affect, and display. Instead of a
privileging of reception, we are challenged to incorporate authorial
intent or originary motivation. For these new media phenomena are not
only texts to be read: they are solicitations, conductive excitations,
embedded within networks of erotic exchange. There are pleasures and
affective stimulations that motivate these new acts of production,
sharing, and erotic display, for all players on the circuits of production
and reception, including both displayer and watcher. Their texts must not
only be decoded but their circuits traversed, in implicated ways that
destabilize any one-way analysis and its deflections of libidinous
investment.
There is much to be gained in rethinking the dynamic between voyeurism and
exhibitionism, compensating for the under-theorization of the latter. In
film theory, concepts of "attraction" have provided useful tools in
thinking forms of exhibitionistic address that counter the voyeuristic
orientation of film analysis. In contrast to the mechanisms of
maintaining a coherent narrative world, transporting the viewer into
another time and space, attractions are those phenomena that directly
solicit the viewer's attention in the here-and-now. They can take the
form of narrative asides, spoken in confidence to the viewer outside of
the diegetic space; as spectacles for their own sake; or as shots which
exist purely to titillate the viewer, having no function in the furthering
of the narrative. They prompt modes of apprehension that rely less on
discursive flow than on direct transmissions that arouse or tease the
viewer, engaging the immediacy of the bodily sensorium. In this way they
are similar to the way that affects can counter meanings.
In the case of new media of self-exposure, sharing, and erotic display,
one could suggest that the emblematic pose functions as such an attractor.
The pose is a form of exhibitionistic spectacle -- direct address,
performative display, or bodily stimulus -- that stands in contrast to the
narrative or conversational flow of a social world, whether real or
imaginary. It bypasses demands for narrative coherency and instead
conducts transversal operations at the level of both the semiotic and the
sensational, the reflective and the transmissive. It solicits attention
while at the same time functions as portal or conduit for a reciprocal
flow: a conductive excitation geared to develop a degree of connective
intensity.
Since the pose feeds on reciprocality, it can prompt the changing of roles
and positions. In this way it can be seen as a catalyst for
identity-formations. Especially as witnessed in the database-driven
format of the online profile within which the pose is often embedded,
identity is performed through the adoption of specific codes (whether
gender or otherwise). One is called upon to play roles in order to assume
symbolic mandates, to the extent that "impersonation" becomes a core act
of self-identification. Yet the pose does not only operate extensively
but intensively, and such "impersonations" arise equally through the
internalized transmission of affects. Emergent forms of identity arise
through flows of affective resonance that are themselves a powerful social
and subjectifying force.
Such impersonations and internalizations can be understood to be driven by
lack or by abundance. As a performative player, we are driven by a
primary lack at the core of the psychic apparatus. It compels us to seek
fulfillment through the gaze of the other: the elementary fantasmatic
scene of being looked at (validated) by an unseen presence. The imagined
gaze observing us becomes a kind of ontological guarantee of our being.
It serves to put us in our place -- to subject us. In this way, erotic
cultures of exposure and display can be seen as driven by the need to
perform for the gaze -- the Big Other, the symbolic order -- and therefore
to write themselves into existence. Yet at the same time, these
insertions of the self into the symbolic order can be regarded as a way of
channeling or dissipating surplus energy. From such a viewpoint, the
connective intensities that drive these new forms of self-exposure and
display are those of expending excess, and the allure of showing could
parallel that of sacrificing. The pose, as event-portal, becomes a
double-edged solicitor.
Jordan Crandall
Via: "martin hardie"
*The Solemn Promise of the New Captain Cooks.*
"*When the old Captain Cook died, other people started thinking they
could make Captain Cook another way. New people. Maybe all his sons
... Too many Captain Cooks. They started shooting people then. New
Captain Cook people. That was new. New people did that. .... they
didn't care, they didn't know, ... They are the ones who have been
stealing all the women and killing people. They have made war. War
makers, those New Captain Cooks."*
*Paddy Wainburranga, 1987*
Bob Gosford and Martin Hardie ....
If Howard and Brough can follow through on their Solemn Promise to
the Australian People they will go down in history as either heroes,
or as the instigators of our age's most cynical government-mandated
abuse of children. >From what we could gather from Aboriginal families
in the days following the making of the Promise, these families were
not in any way inclined to allow their children to be subjected to any
Canberra Mandated Compulsory Corporal Examination.
Whether Howard & Brough can follow through on their Promise might
depend on whether they can find enough doctors to do their dirty
work? Doctors who will be willing to perform Compulsory Corporal
Examinations which, as they and every first year law student knows,
will constitute assaults on the very sovereignty of each and every
Aboriginal child in the Northern Territory. Compulsory Corporal
Examinations mandated from Canberra, that nevertheless amount to
criminal assault.
Whether Howard & Brough can follow through on their Promise might
well depend upon obtaining parental consent to these assaults? Crikey
spent three days this week driving from the deep south to the tropical
north of the N.T. and visited families along the way to gauge early
reaction to Howard and Brough's Promise to their children. From what
we saw parents are drawing their own lines in the sand and that
line is firmly set at their front gates. To a man and woman they say
that if Howard, Brough or anyone else mandated by Canberra turn up at
their houses to take their children away for a Compulsory Corporal
Examination they will resist to protect their children. And, if Howard
and Brough think they are just dumb blackfellas they've got another
think comin' - as they say around Katherine way, we've seen too many
of these Captain Cooks before .
In last weekend's Northern Territory News, Associate Professor Helen
Milroy commented on the nature of the checks that Howard & Brough
propose to subject upon each and every Aboriginal child in the NT.
Milroy is a child psychiatrist with the Australian Indigenous Doctors'
Association and told the NT News: "Forcing children to submit to an
intrusive examination without good evidence or parental consent is
akin to abuse."
Is there any "good evidence" sufficient to warrant the serial assault
of several generations of Aboriginal children? Manifestly not - there
is no material in the Wild/Anderson report (link) that warrants
the outrageous extremes in the Howard/Brough plan and, even taking
Howard & Brough's oft-repeated anecdotal evidence (which has not been
released for closer scrutiny) at its worst it cannot justify the
serial assaults they are planning.
These parents don't mind their kids having general health check-ups
they think it's a great idea and this could be done at their local
Aboriginal-run & owned clinics and health centres staffed by people
that they and their children know and respect. But they point out
what these cenre's need is real and sustainable resources and a plan
which includes them as part of the solution - and not a part of some
greater game. But they are firm in saying NO to Compulsory Corporal
Examinations by doctors that don't know their kids, that they and
their kids don't know, have never seen before, and in four months
time they might never see again. They worry what will happen to their
kid's medical reports and most of all, they worry about their kids
being subjected to these unnecessary and intrusive examinations by
strangers.
Whether Howard and Brough can follow through on the Solemn Promise
might also depend not only on how they meet the resistance of
Australian families at their front gates? Aand maybe on the fact of
whether there is anyone home at all. Mutitjulu's Vince Forrester has
already today suggested that, in the face of these new Captain Cooks,
Aboriginal people might just take off into the bush. Or, heathen's
forbid, flee across the border to the safe havens of the Unoccupied
Aboriginal Lands of South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia.
http://iafrica.com/news/worldnews/142448.htm AUSTRALIA Aussie govt
stealing Aboriginal land?
Tue, 26 Jun 2007
Aborigines on Tuesday said the government was trying to steal their
land under the guise of responding to a crisis that Prime Minister
John Howard has labelled Australia's own Hurricane Katrina.
Canberra began deploying police and soldiers to the Northern Territory
outback this week under a controversial plan to combat widespread
child sex abuse in Aboriginal communities.
Indigenous leaders presented a letter bearing more than 90 signatures
to Aboriginal Affairs Minister Mal Brough on Tuesday condemning the
plan, which involves Canberra taking control of leases on Aboriginal
land for five years.
Pat Turner, who was once Australia's most senior Aboriginal
bureaucrat, said Howard's conservative government was trying to
reverse hard-fought indigenous land rights.
"We believe that this government is using child sexual abuse as the
Trojan horse to resume total control of our land," she told reporters.
"No compensation will ever, ever replace our land ownership rights."
The crackdown including bans on alcohol and pornography, as well as
medical check-ups for all children under the age of 16 follows a
damning government report into child abuse in indigenous communities.
*Strong action was needed*
While critics have branded it a paternalistic return to the past,
Howard said strong action was needed to address a national failure
comparable to Washington's botched response when Hurricane Katrina hit
New Orleans in 2005.
"Many Australians, myself included, looked aghast at the failure of
the American federal system of government to cope adequately with
Hurricane Katrina and the human misery and lawlessness that engulfed
New Orleans in 2005," Howard said in a speech late on Monday.
"We should have been more humble. We have our Katrina, here and now.
"That it has unfolded more slowly and absent the hand of God should
make us humbler still."
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2007/06/26/2003366917
Australian army, police move into Aboriginal zones CONTROVERSIAL:
Police and the military seized control of villages in the Northern
Territory, where they will enforce bans on alcohol and pornography
AFP, SYDNEY Tuesday, Jun 26, 2007, Page 5
Police and soldiers began deploying to outback Australia yesterday
as part of a radical plan to end child sex abuse in Aboriginal
communities, a move that has been criticized as a return to the
nation's paternalistic past.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard last week announced he would use
police backed by military logistics to seize control of indigenous
camps in the Northern Territory to protect women and children.
The controversial decision, which includes bans on alcohol and
pornography and medical check-ups for all children under the age of
16, was taken following a damning government report into child abuse
in indigenous communities.
Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough said 20 Australian Defence
Force personnel were already on the ground and their number would
be boosted in coming days as they prepared to deploy to remote
communities.
"Right now I'm trying to stabilize in the order of 70-odd towns in the
territory -- that is a massive undertaking," Brough said.
Federal police also began arriving in the Northern Territory capital,
Darwin, yesterday, along with those from several states, each of which
has been asked to contribute 10 officers.
But one of the most troubled communities, Mutitjulu, near Uluru, has
questioned what some of its leaders termed a military occupation.
"The fact that we hold this community together with no money, no help,
no doctor and no government support is a miracle," community leaders
Bob and Dorothea Randall said in a statement released by their lawyer.
"Police and the military are fine for logistics and coordination,
but healthcare, youth services, education and basic housing are more
essential," she said.
They also questioned whether children should undergo medical checks.
"Of course, any child that is vulnerable or at risk should be
immediately protected, but a wholesale intrusion into our women and
children's privacy is a violation of our human and sacred rights," the
Randalls said.
Former conservative prime minister Malcolm Fraser also criticized the
plan as a throwback to paternalistic practices of the past, such as
the removal of Aboriginal children from their families.
"People must be treated with respect, and in relation to this point
they have not been," Fraser told ABC.
"In relation to that, I said it was a throwback to past paternalism
because it clearly this time has been put in place, announced without
any consultation with the communities," he said.
Howard dismissed accusations of high-handedness over the plan, which
was devised without consultation with Northern Territory leaders.
"I have no doubt that the women and children of indigenous communities
will warmly welcome the federal government's actions," he said.
Via: Brian Holmes
NEOLIB GOES NEOCON:
Adam Curtis, or Cultural Critique in the 21st Century
Brian Holmes
For those entranced by the essay-films of, say, Chris Marker, the
documentaries of Adam Curtis may seem rather vulgar. The insistent
visual trope of a flashlight probing erratically into a dark,
abandoned space full of conduits and wires returns one too many
times. Where Marker offers you the idiosyncratic memoirs of unique
travels and existential encounters with human beings in all their
depth and intensity, Curtis constructs a broad, abstracted picture
by splicing together bits of tape from talk-show interviews, promo
films or the odd reel of government-service footage. Where Marker
clears his throat and plunges into a poetically unfolding phrase
that releases a lifetime of historical experience into a singular
moment of visual consciousness, Curtis clips off his dramatic,
generalizing pronouncements with a chilling diction that rarely
varies--a functional replacement for the suspense-building bass
line that you end up hearing anyway, through sheer force of past
manipulations. The point is that despite the intellectual depth and
visual complexity of Curtis's work, there is no comparison with the
aesthetic subtlety of the essay-film, and cinephiles can go back to
their darkened theaters. This is TV, made for the anxious postmoderns
with their zapper and their 36-inch screen. But what great TV!
The story Curtis has to tell is always fundamentally the same, except
for the fantastic attention to details. He obsessively retraces the
intellectual history of the 20th century to find out how arcane ideas
became widespread psychiatric and managerial techniques, which in
turn produced what we call our private selves and what we feel as
our shared predicament. He has clearly read a lot of Foucault; but
not only. He is attached to social reality more than philosophical
theory. What interests him are specific thinkers and inventors, but
also commercial, political and military decisions that retrospectively
place the breakthroughs of those forgotten thinkers and inventors
at the origin of everything that currently functions and controls.
He never hesitates to follow the paths of control into contemporary
parties and governments. Political engagement, incisive theory,
historical research and the use of the televisual medium have made
Curtis into one of the most broadly influential cultural critics of
this decade.
His own technique is to isolate privileged figures and to interview
them personally, or if they are no longer alive, to unearth the
historical footage and professorial commentaries that will sum up
their discovery in a nutshell, along with its consequences for society
at large. After that he delivers an unsourced barrage of information
about social change at a given period and in a given country--usually
Britain or the USA--while gradually introducing other privileged
thinkers or inventors, and other professorial commentators on them,
either as relays or dialectical rivals of the first. Accompanying
this discourse are both standard documentary clips of whatever is
being discussed, and complex, non-linear edits from an extremely
well-researched trove of images: bits of newsreels, excerpts of film
classics, commercials, scientific, professional or military documents,
TV outtakes, experimental cinema, stills, freeze frames, all threaded
through each other in a rapid montage, agile and unpredictable
like thought itself. Through the montage approach, the audiovisual
experience comes very close to reproducing the uncanny gap one often
feels between the steady flow of inner discursivity and the startling
movements of one's own imagination.
What the filmmaker achieves with his technique are hour-long bursts of
awareness that what we are living through today has been constructed,
that behind common knowledge there are hidden sciences, and that
government is basically the choice of a ruling epistemology, about
which the public is never sufficiently informed. Curtis, like
Foucault, consistently asks: "Do you want to be governed like that?"
And he asks it with respect to the most contemporary forms of
psychological manipulation, of military and security rhetoric, of
economic doctrine and workplace organization. These are alarm-clock
films, wake-up calls for passive populations whose only recourse would
be to think sociologically: but not as their masters do.
Genealogies of Power
Like other people who live out of BBC range and don't watch TV anyway,
I discovered Curtis on the net in late 2004, when references started
cropping up to "The Power of Nightmares." The 3-part series looks
into the genealogy of the War on Terror, beginning with a double
portrait in an American frame: the Egyptian writer Sayeed Qutb, who
would become the major spiritual force of the Muslim Brotherhood,
and the German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, who inspired the
neoconservatives. Both, according to Curtis, were revolted by the
commercial ignorance and tawdry sexuality of popular democracy in
the USA, as they experienced it during during the country's rise to
hegemony in the Forties. In the light of Qutb's contributions to
radical Islam, the epic political convictions of the neocons appear as
just another way of recoiling in horror from the consumerist void. But
the ambiguity of the film is that you never know whether the director
shares that sense of disgust, or what alternative he would offer.
Most of the politically scandalous material here is probably familiar
now, thanks to the efforts of people like Curtis himself. But the
series is still worth seeing for a dozen reasons, not least the
documents of Qutb and other Muslim Brothers being tortured in Egyptian
jails, or the tale of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board's "Team
B," formed under Ford's presidency to investigate the supposed missile
gap between the US and the Soviets. Team B reads as a nearly complete
list of those whom we call the necons: the operation was demanded by
Albert Wohlstetter, promoted by Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld, and
staffed by vampires like Wolfowitz, Richard Pipes and Paul Nitzan, the
latter having already been the founder of the Cold-War era "Committee
on the Present Danger" that came back to haunt us in 2004. Who could
escape being obsessed by the eternal return of the politically undead?
To claim that Bush and Blair have exploited the Al Qaeda threat for
geopolitical power agendas is restating the obvious. But it has to
be done. It's absurd that "The Power of Nightmares" was never shown
on American TV, and remains largely unknown in the land of Infinite
Justice. The same holds for "Century of the Self," a 2002 series on
psychiatry's dubious contributions to who we think we are and what
can be done with us. The evil-twin relation plays out here between
uncle and nephew: the pessimistic Sigmund Freud and the cynical Edward
Bernays, inventor of "public relations."
To understand Bernays, all you have to do is read his essay, "The
Engineering of Consent," still the unsurpassed bible of the PR
profession; or check out his "Torches of Freedom" campaign to liberate
women smokers in the Twenties. But Curtis's film becomes genuinely
fascinating as it portrays the degree of authority that Freud's
iconoclastic thought could bring to the bureaucratically standardized
moralities of mid-century America. Even more compelling is the story
of Freud's rejection by the public in the late Sixties, in favor
of new injunctions to openly express and explore not only your
sexuality, as Wilhelm Reich proposed, but also your most aggressive
and competitive drives--as Werner Erhard taught in the confrontational
group encounters of his Erhard Seminars Training (EST), the psychic
crucible of a new managerial elite.
Erhard appears as the dialectical rival of Freud, less an evil
twin than a hip Californian sublation of the austere Austrian
thinker. The corporate Eighties, complete with Yippie Jerry Rubin's
timely reincarnation as a PR exec, come off in Curtis's film as
the world-that-Erhard-made. Beyond the manipulative psychology of
focus-group politics that Curtis describes in part 4, the political
point of all this seems to be that if the Right has effectively
analyzed all the negative consequences of Sixties' experimentalism and
the quest for liberation, the Left has not done so in any way that
can compete for public legitimacy, while still saving what we find
positive about those latter-day Nietzschean adventures. Curtis hasn't
done that either, but at least he's asked the question, which is what
the self-satisfied generations of the Eighties and Nineties failed to
do, leading to one of the big dead-ends of the present.
Fatal Equilibrium
Curtis takes on that impasse in his latest series, "The Trap--What
Happened to Our Dream of Freedom?" Cultural critique, as you find
out here, has become damnably complex in the 21st century. The
Frankfurt School in the Thirties had to face the socialization of
family authority, taken over by the Fascist state dressed up as your
dad or your preacher. The kind of social power that we now have to
face involves the mathematical reduction of all conceivable behavior
into probability scenarios, which allow for the computer-assisted
prediction of minority and majority trends by big businessmen and
politicians (or whoever can draw effective conclusions from the vast,
meticulous and expensive data-gathering processes--i.e. those same
two groups). On the one hand, the scientific story of an extremely
influential epistemology is begging to be told; but on the other, the
political reasons for its massive deployment remain the key to its
effective power. This is where thinking sociologically can bring you
to the heart of the civilizational predicament that we share in the
present. That is, if you're willing to tease out a few more threads
from the history of ideas...
"The Trap" begins with imagery that's familiar to anyone who has read
Paul N. Edwards' great book on Cold-War cybernetics, "The Closed
World." What you see are American military personnel operating the
Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE early warning system--the
sprawling, Pynchonesque white elephant of US nuclear paranoia that
drove the industrial development of digital computers, despite its
functional uselessness. Edwards can tell you everything about the way
that SAGE developed into both the automated SABRE airline ticketing
network and the Worldwide Military Command and Control System, out
of which came Operation Igloo White, headquartered in Nakhom Phanom
in Thailand. This was the US Air Force surveillance operation that
directed high-altitude bombing of gridded sectors of the Ho Chi Minh
Trail, inaugurating the perpetually faked American claims to pinpoint
accuracy. But Curtis doesn't even go into all that, because he's after
more rarefied game: namely, the atomic-era game theory developed under
RAND corporation auspices, by a literally crazy mathematician named
John Nash.
Everyone remembers the Cold-War premise of Mutually Assured
Destruction (MAD), and the elaborate system of reciprocal signaling
that emerged, whereby the construction of new weapons only served to
prove that one had recognized the opponent's firm expectation that
any rise in the stakes would be matched by the other side, in the
most deliberate and rational fashion. This was Cold-War game theory.
But the psychotic Nash (who according to Curtis was hardly the gentle
hero portrayed in "A Beautiful Mind") took the theory much further:
"He made the fundamental assumption that all human behavior was
exactly like that involved in the hostile, competitive world of the
nuclear standoff, that human beings constantly watched and monitored
each other, and to get what they wanted, they would adjust their
strategies to each other. In a series of equations for which he would
win the Nobel prize, Nash showed that a system driven by suspicion and
selfishness did not have to lead to chaos. He proved that there could
always be a point of equilibrium, in which everyone's self-interest
was perfectly balanced against each other."
In classic Curtis fashion, the last sentence, defining the crucial
concept of the Nash equilibrium, unfolds against three views of the same
busy, four-lane city street: the first, close up and agitated, from a
skewed diagonal vantage that emphasizes erratic movement; the second,
still off-center, at a middle distance that accentuates the globular
flow of the automobiles; and the third, a stable, orthogonal shot from
above, revealing a single straight line of cars and a perfect grid of
intersections, with traffic crossing first from one direction, then from
the other, and so on in infinite binary regress.
The German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle famously remarked that
19th-century liberalism had reduced the state to the status of a night
watchman. But in the original sentence he adds: "or a traffic
policeman." Classical liberalism was already about regulating economic
flows, ordering the business of the city. But modern-day neoliberalism,
as it evolved theoretically in the tumultuous Sixties and Seventies, had
to develop an abstract calculus of conflict resolution that could be
applied via technological systems to vast populations. What the image of
the city streets suggests is that the realization of a Nash equilibrium
on a 20th-century scale requires the work of a traffic engineer steeped
in the political-economic strategies of game theory.
It was in response to this requirement that economics gradually merged
with cybernetics, to form what Philip Mirowski calls a "cyborg
science."[1] The feedback diagram of an economically governed society
should be completely transparent, reduced to the justice of sheer
efficiency. But for that, an infinity of zero-sum competitions would
have to be mapped out and integrated into the self-canceling synthesis
of the whole. Ultimately, the only information system finely grained
enough to permit all this coding would be the price signals of the
market, conceived by Friedrich von Hayek as the perfectly neutral
informational basis of society's self-organization.
"We will benefit our fellow men most if we are guided solely by the
striving for gain," claims Hayek in the first archival interview of the
series. "For this purpose we have to return to an automatic system which
brings this about, a self-directing automatic system which alone can
restore the liberty and prosperity," he continues in a Strangelovian
accent. "What about altruism, where does that come in?" asks the British
interviewer. "Ah... it doesn't come in," Hayek replies after a brief
hesitation. For a moment his face, equipped with a hearing aid, seems
also to hesitate in time, caught in a freeze frame, staring out from the
ghostly archives of television.
Negative Freedom
The first installment of the series is largely concerned with
political-economic theory. The second part of "The Trap" explores the
social destinies of this market-based coding of competitive
self-interest, whereby everyone is conceived as a little
information-processor elaborating strategies of monetary gain within a
rule-governed system.[2] In the British civil service under Blair, and
more broadly, under the Nineties paradigm of "the new public
management," game-theory models gave rise to systems of continuous
statistical monitoring, where section chiefs were given salary
incentives to meet improvement targets expressed by means of bar graphs;
while the methods they should use to move the graphs were left up to
their own initiative. As Curtis insists, this statistical reification of
responsibilities not only alienates the new managers, but also spreads
through society the normative model of a calculating individual, bereft
of fellow-feeling, cooperative spirit, ideals of the public good or any
other sense of solidarity. The result, in Britain as elsewhere, has been
a dramatic rise in social inequality. And this whole pattern was
introduced, we are told, in the late Eighties under the government of
Mrs. Thatcher, who confided the reform of the National Health Service to
an American economist, Alain Enthoven--a man who had studied game theory
at RAND in the Fifties, and then worked in the Sixties for the Secretary
of the Defense as the primary strategist of nuclear deterrence.
To evoke the genesis of government by statistics (the word means
literally "the mathematics of the state"), Curtis could have focused
on the aggressive mathematical genius John von Neumann, who not only
developed the basic architecture of the computers used in systems
like SAGE, but was also the author, with Oskar Morgenstern, of "The
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior" (1944). But the model of the
Nash equilibrium fits into a larger analysis, developed throughout
the series but only made explicit in the final part. This has to do
with the adherence of the Cold-War democracies to a political concept
that Isaiah Berlin described as "negative freedom." For Berlin this is
freedom from governmental constraint, the freedom to decide privately
on a private destiny--at antipodes from the revolutionary notion of a
positive freedom that would remake society and all its members in the
image of a higher ideal, even at the price of totalitarianism.
>From the liberal viewpoint, this amounts to a radical skepticism
towards the state: "I hate government. I hate power. I think that
man's existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power,
to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is
the least exerted," insists the grotesquely conservative pundit
Malcolm Muggeridge. James Buchanan's "public choice theory" would
justify that skepticism, pointing to the many ways that officials
personally profited from their positions. By these paths, the logic
of negative freedom ultimately led to the disavowal of any genuine
commitment to public service. And in Curtis's reading of the Sixties
and Seventies, radical critiques of institutional authority came
to dovetail with this anti-revolutionary position, and thus gave
an absolute legitimacy to the supposedly objective, depersonalized
equilibrium of a game-theoretical world.
Developing an historical irony, Curtis points to the way that
renegade psychiatrist R.D. Laing used game theory to analyze the
internalization by families of the political struggle for power and
control ("People induced their children to adjust to life by poisoning
themselves to a level of subsistence existence," the psychiatrist
explains in an interview). Laing then used his bleak portrait of
intimate relations to attack all claims of morality and disinterested
public service, as held up by psychiatric institutions in particular.
The fallibility of institutional judgment was criticized to the core.
But the result, for Curtis, is yet another aspect of depersonalized
society: the introduction of purely objective criteria for the
diagnosis of mental illness (the Diagnostic Symptoms Manual), and the
almost universal recourse to drugs like Prozac to help people adapt
to difficult situations in life, rather than confronting and solving
them. The dead-end of negative freedom and its private destinies would
be a life without meaning or purpose--which, for the filmmaker, is
exactly what the winners of the Cold War have sought to impose on the
rest of the world.
The assessment of Laing misses a lot of what's involved in a depth
psychologist's appropriation of game theory.[3] Similarly, Curtis
is quick to insinuate that the counter-cultural critique of empty
moral sentiments and abusive institutional authority can be blamed
for ruining the foundations of social trust, even though his own film
shows how that critique was motivated by the very real problems of
Cold-War society. The condemnation of Leftist nihilism harks back to a
Golden Age that never was. But what remains despite these ambiguities
is another sharp reminder of the way that the critique of alienation
in the Sixties helped to justify the installation of a scientifically
robust calculus of individual motivations, built over the course of
the Eighties into a powerfully normative techno-economic framework.
This is the operational framework of what is generally known as
neoliberal society--even if Curtis, in his concern to stress the
influence of game theory, prefers to avoid that blanket concept.
The strong point of the film is to reveal in the final section how
the pretense to democratic objectivity and axiomatic neutrality is
gradually shattered from within. First Reagan, then Blair and Bush
begin to seek a wider meaning for politics, attempting to export the
Western system of self-regulating equilibrium by force of arms if
necessary--attempting, in other words, to remake the world in the
image of an idealized negative freedom. In so doing, Curtis claims,
they unwittingly go down the same path that leads from the French
revolutionary Terror to the more recent calls for violent liberation
espoused by Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Pol Pot or the Iranian revolutionary
Ali Shariati.
There are two examples of this contradiction at the heart of
neoconservatism. The first concerns the disastrous restructuring of
the Russian economy after the end of the Soviet Union according to
the shock therapy dictates of Jeffrey Sachs. For Curtis this is a
radically impoverished version of democracy, in which the electoral
facade covers a predatory economic system. The result, in Russia,
was the economic collapse of 1998, then the ascension of Putin to
power, documented by impressive sequences in which the Russian leader
describes the many breakdowns of society that make firm authority
more relevant than the pretense of democracy. The second has to do
with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then the extremely summary
imposition by the Americans of electoral democracies that do not
even include the right to unionized labor, and the concomitant rise
of Islamic fundamentalism as an increasingly legitimate response to
invasion on all levels. Curtis shows forcefully what most politicians,
commentators and common people in the West still refuse to accept:
that worldwide opposition to the democratic program arises not just
from fear of modernity and atavistic regression, but above all in
reaction to the intense exploitation, oppression and domination put
into effect by that same "democratic" program.
Curtis tries to clinch all this by referring to a letter written by
Blair to Isaiah Berlin shortly before the philosopher's death in 1997,
in which the Labour-party leader evokes an existential void and a need
to overcome it: "You seem to be saying... that because traditional
socialism no longer exists, there is no Left. But surely the Left
over the last 200 years has been based on a value system, predating
the Soviet model and living on beyond it. As you say, the origins of
the Left lie in opposition to arbitrary authority, intolerance and
hierarchy. The values remain as strong as ever, but no longer have
a ready made vehicle to take them forward. That seems to me to be
today's challenge." Blair is portrayed as an idealist without a cause,
or who is incapable of a having a cause because of the very content
of his ideals. But was the "just war" of Kosovo, followed by the
anti-terrorism crusades in Afghanistan and Iraq, really the symptom of
an intrinsically contradictory and necessarily self-defeating desire
to fill an existential void, by proposing and imposing a positive
ideal of negative liberty?
As in "The Power of Nightmares," the suggestion here is that the
democratic ideologues share something with the authoritarians and
the Islamic fundamentalists, namely a kind of horror vacui before
the failings of market hegemony. But much has been added. Despite an
incomplete analysis of Blair's motivations (Curtis tends to focus on
political and governmental dimensions of the state, while neglecting
corporate influence), the filmmaker is now able to identify the causes
of the revulsion he feels, as well as the sequence of reactions that
those first causes are producing in different regions and at different
class levels of world society. "The Trap" is a largely successful
effort to come to grips with one of the great enigmas of the present:
how neolib goes neocon.
Last Look
One of the things I find intriguing about this sweeping critical
fresco is the total absence of all the filigree of second-order
cybernetics, whereby Leftist theorists in the Eighties and Nineties
tried to complexify the crude feedback systems and miserable ego
psychology of the information engineers, suggesting that games were
only interesting, in a human sense, when you could change the rules in
the course of play. The absence of those theoretical embellishments
has the advantage of revealing the banal persistence in society of
highly alienating mechanisms, for which there has as yet been devised
no practical alternative (one that would be able, for instance, to
reconcile the demand of equal treatment for all with the need for
personalized attention to singular situations). But by the same token,
Curtis ignores the decidedly minority, but extremely important work
on the ethics and technics of free cooperation, which grows from the
second-order theories and is carried out in the new counter-cultural
worlds of computer hacking and transnational solidarity movements.
Therefore he has to resort to a moralizing language that recalls
Etzioni and the communitarians at best, or at worst, the mumblings of
Prince Charles about the failures of modern architecture.
What the new alternative movements seem to lack, in their turn, is
the breadth of the political, economic and technical vocabulary
developed here, which allows one to name every aspect of the real
problems, and to analyze the solidified foundations of consensus that
would have to be dissolved before any social change could ruffle the
technocratic equilibrium of society. It is not enough to say that
capitalism inevitably destroys the very social ties that gurantee its
own reproduction; because the processes of self-destruction, installed
at the very sources of the self, have to confronted and transformed.
In particular, the more technologically enthusiastic adepts of the
new movements would have to analyze their own ideas of spontaneous
self-organization, in order to distinguish them from the extensive
treatment that Hayek has given to the same theme.[4] But what everyone
seems to lack today are credible and effective responses to the
fundamentalist ideologies and authoritarian figures that have arisen
in the face of the economic, cultural and psychic decay brought on by
predatory neoliberalism.
In his final remarks, Curtis makes a rhetorical effort to insist on
the need for such responses: "Our government relies on a simplistic
economic model of human beings, that allows inequality to grow and
offers nothing positive in the face of the reactionary forces they
have helped to awake around the world. If we ever want to escape from
this limited world view, we will have to rediscover the progressive,
positive ideas of freedom, and realize that Isaiah Berlin was wrong:
not all attempts to change the world for the better lead to tyranny."
But as the contorted visage of Hayek recedes into the backdrops of
memory, what lingers in your mind is not any new positive idea,
but the image of Putin slowly raising his eyes, then deliberately
staring at you. Cultural critique has much left to achieve in the 21st
century.
[This was written for free distribution on the net; take the corrected
version, brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/06/25/neolib-goes-neocon. If
anyone wants to do the honors of paper publication, please get in
touch. -BH]
See the films:
"The Century of the Self" and "The Power of Nightmares" can be
downloaded at http://www.archive.org (search for the titles).
Torrent files for "BBC The Trap" are available at www.mininova.org. Or
search at http://video.google.com (low-res versions).
NOTES
???1. In Curtis's documentaries, one can often pick out the scholar whose
book, more than any other, has provided the red thread along which the
narrative unfolds. Here the book is Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams:
Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
2. Compare again Hayek: "Much of the opposition to a system of freedom
under general laws arises from the inability to conceive of an effective
co-ordination of human activities without deliberate organization by a
commanding intelligence. One of the achievements of economic theory has
been to explain how such a mutual adjustment of the spontaneous
activities of individuals is brought about by the market, provided that
there is a known delimitation of the sphere of control of each
individual." The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press,
1960), p. 159.
3. Here is Gerald Alper's assessment of Laing's encoding practice: "We
can not help but note the striking similarity of the stark regularity of
Laing's pattern and the behavioral strategies which game theorists love
to postulate. Yet, there is a huge difference. Despite the beauty of
near precision, there is nothing quantitative, mathematical, logical, or
even cognitive about Laing's patterns. As a matter of fact, especially
in Knots, Laing appears to derive mischievous pleasure, in the
self-defeating, schizoid entanglements he is at pains to unfold. This is
understandable once it is recognized that Laing's patterns are
psychodynamic to the core, shot through with meaning, intrapsychic as
well as interpersonal, and have little if anything to do with
hypothesized costs and benefits or cognitive, adaptive strategies." From
"The Theory of Games and Psychoanalysis," in Journal of Contemporary
Psychotherapy, 23/1, 1993, pp. 54-55.
4. Cf. "The Use of Knowledge in Society," published in The American
Economic Review 35/4, 1945. Here, Hayek describes the price mechanism as
"a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to
watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch
the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes
of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price
movement" (p. 527).
Via: Jakob Jakobsen
A bit late but anyways, here is a flyer text that circulated in
Copenhagen at MayDay reflecting a political consequence of the unrest
in March in the city of the Little Mermaid.
We are Negative
1. Stop. Stop. Stop. It is time to say stop. It is time to become
negative. A break has occurred that forces us to refuse. We know very
well that there are no half solutions: We have to refuse and dismiss
the development occurring in Denmark right now. Stop, stop, stop.
Racism, cultural homogenization and criminalisation of alternative
lifestyles are official government policy. Stop this fucking madness.
In the current situation it is important to express our dissent in
the streets, but marching in Copenhagen is not enough and must not be
confused with the long dangerous fight where we challenge the basic
machinery of the state. The state is continuously shaping our lives
and our bodies though its biopolitical offensive. But it is possible
to discourage the state and break its will. This has happened many
times throughout history, it is happening in Iraq today and it can
happen here.
2. The state is a fragile mechanism, that's one of the lessons
learned during the March events in Copenhagen. The confusion was
evident: dark rubber skinned elephants ran galloping through the
blacked out streets searching for their own shadows. They were not
able to locate any kind of frontline where they could mirror their
crushing and destructive power. We were not there. We had gone before
the heavy movement of their machinery eventually came to a halt.
There was nothing else to do for the police than to arrest
coincidental bystanders; the need to catch someone, just anyone, was
evident. Going back empty handed was not an option. Now we know it:
the state suffers from a serious case of sclerosis when reacting like
this. It is desperately trying to hold a divided and dissolved
society together by creating images of deviant subjects wearing
veils, being pierced, throwing bricks or just saying 'no'. If they
don't exist they are created. Stop, stop, stop.
3. It is necessary to act against the increased repression sweeping
across Denmark right now. With the eviction at the Youth House the
fight against alternative life forms was once more intensified. The
state is no longer covering its repressive nature; it was visible for
everybody who participated in the protests following March 1. The
brutal militarised face of power manifested itself in front of us
during these days. Heavily armed anti-terror units used against
groups throwing the occasional brick; demonstrations dissolved with
enormous amounts of dangerous teargas; plain clothes cops mixing with
protesters attacking selected activists; helicopters hovering
constantly above the roofs of the city; houses and homes raided and
searched by the police; preventive arrests and several hundreds of
people imprisoned in closed jails. Normalisation has shown its real
face: repression.
4. The Youth House was torn down on the pretext of private property
and principles of the law. Being steeped in tear gas, being raided
and searched, being jailed without any reason given, we experienced
these principles of the law, principles that make it hard to discern
democracy from a totalitarian state. Private property is the most
sacred value in a postmodern democracy, much more important than our
safety or the civil right to express discontent. They say we live in
a constitutional democracy but whose interests does the state
represent if selected areas of Copenhagen were declared in a state of
exception and the people living there had to refrain from going into
the street in fear of being harassed by the long arm of the law? Even
our most personal communication and text messages were all of a
sudden open for investigation by the cops. No explanations. When the
state has to act like this it is a sign of the state's fear of its
own population. The state is on the defensive. Following the
dismantling of the welfare state it is only the law and its police we
meet when we face the state: We are confronted with a state in panic.
5. The police staged a street battle creating images of flying bricks
and cars on fire, images that could justify their brutal conduct. The
fusion of physical power and spectacle was striking during the course
of events following the eviction and the confrontations, with the
police hunting people through the city while filming them. The
violent and spectacular action where special forces stormed the
social centre at Jagtvej 69 inaugurates a new phase in the current
cultural battle where no one can be safe. Terrorising is now the
behaviour of the state. At Nrrebro and Christianshavn people got a
taste of this new regime with declaration of a state of exception
between the March 10 and 19: body searches and identity checks could
hit you anywhere. That there had been no confrontations and protests
for more than a week revealed the true purpose: to create fear.
6. The events in Copenhagen are connected to a broader global
development. The repression sweeping across Copenhagen is just the
latest step in a much more extensive campaign. Since the early 1970's
we have been confronted with a conscious counter offensive against
the last great working class resistance manifesting itself in the
1960's. The period after 1973 has been characterised by the emergence
of neo-liberalism and it took almost 30 years before a new resistance
was able to manifest itself again and challenge neo-liberalism. In
the late 1990s it was no longer just one class fighting. The UPS
strike in the States in 1997 and the protests of the counter
globalisation movement in London and Seattle in 1999 opened a new
frontline that was broadened with the wave of strikes spreading
across Western Europe and the United States. The 'state of war' that
the American president declared after 9/11 is an attempt to counter
this development and as such it represents yet another turning point.
With 'the war on terror' the repression that is organised in
accordance with the needs of the economy is permanent everywhere
through peacekeeping missions, police actions and humanitarian aid.
In this world there is no difference between peace and war. We now
live in a permanent state of exception, a kind of generalised civil war.
7. We expect nothing from the representation in the media. No matter
what is being uttered; when passed on it will be a distortion. For
the media it is of pivotal importance who says what: has-been artists
or opportunistic academics cannot represent the plurality of voices
that are slowly making themselves audible. We are many and our
cacophonic voices all of a sudden shatter what is called the public
sphere but which is in reality nothing but a closed circuit of spin,
advertising and detached political phrases. Remember: We are more
than they say and we say something they don't understand. We are
negative.
Imaginary Fraction, MayDay 2007
Via: Jakob Jakobsen
A bit late but anyways, here is a flyer text that circulated in
Copenhagen at MayDay reflecting a political consequence of the unrest
in March in the city of the Little Mermaid.
We are Negative
1. Stop. Stop. Stop. It is time to say stop. It is time to become
negative. A break has occurred that forces us to refuse. We know very
well that there are no half solutions: We have to refuse and dismiss
the development occurring in Denmark right now. Stop, stop, stop.
Racism, cultural homogenization and criminalisation of alternative
lifestyles are official government policy. Stop this fucking madness.
In the current situation it is important to express our dissent in
the streets, but marching in Copenhagen is not enough and must not be
confused with the long dangerous fight where we challenge the basic
machinery of the state. The state is continuously shaping our lives
and our bodies though its biopolitical offensive. But it is possible
to discourage the state and break its will. This has happened many
times throughout history, it is happening in Iraq today and it can
happen here.
2. The state is a fragile mechanism, thats one of the lessons learned
during the March events in Copenhagen. The confusion was evident: dark
rubber skinned elephants ran galloping through the blacked out streets
searching for their own shadows. They were not able to locate any kind
of frontline where they could mirror their crushing and destructive
power. We were not there. We had gone before the heavy movement of
their machinery eventually came to a halt. There was nothing else to
do for the police than to arrest coincidental bystanders; the need to
catch someone, just anyone, was evident. Going back empty handed was
not an option. Now we know it: the state suffers from a serious case
of sclerosis when reacting like this. It is desperately trying to hold
a divided and dissolved society together by creating images of deviant
subjects wearing veils, being pierced, throwing bricks or just saying
no. If they dont exist they are created. Stop, stop, stop.
3. It is necessary to act against the increased repression sweeping
across Denmark right now. With the eviction at the Youth House the
fight against alternative life forms was once more intensified. The
state is no longer covering its repressive nature; it was visible
for everybody who participated in the protests following March 1.
The brutal militarised face of power manifested itself in front of
us during these days. Heavily armed anti-terror units used against
groups throwing the occasional brick; demonstrations dissolved with
enormous amounts of dangerous teargas; plain clothes cops mixing
with protesters attacking selected activists; helicopters hovering
constantly above the roofs of the city; houses and homes raided and
searched by the police; preventive arrests and several hundreds of
people imprisoned in closed jails. Normalisation has shown its real
face: repression.
4. The Youth House was torn down on the pretext of private property
and principles of the law. Being steeped in tear gas, being raided
and searched, being jailed without any reason given, we experienced
these principles of the law, principles that make it hard to discern
democracy from a totalitarian state. Private property is the most
sacred value in a postmodern democracy, much more important than our
safety or the civil right to express discontent. They say we live in a
constitutional democracy but whose interests does the state represent
if selected areas of Copenhagen were declared in a state of exception
and the people living there had to refrain from going into the street
in fear of being harassed by the long arm of the law? Even our most
personal communication and text messages were all of a sudden open for
investigation by the cops. No explanations. When the state has to act
like this it is a sign of the states fear of its own population. The
state is on the defensive. Following the dismantling of the welfare
state it is only the law and its police we meet when we face the
state: We are confronted with a state in panic.
5. The police staged a street battle creating images of flying bricks
and cars on fire, images that could justify their brutal conduct. The
fusion of physical power and spectacle was striking during the course
of events following the eviction and the confrontations, with the
police hunting people through the city while filming them. The violent
and spectacular action where special forces stormed the social centre
at Jagtvej 69 inaugurates a new phase in the current cultural battle
where no one can be safe. Terrorising is now the behaviour of the
state. At Nrrebro and Christianshavn people got a taste of this new
regime with declaration of a state of exception between the March 10
and 19: body searches and identity checks could hit you anywhere. That
there had been no confrontations and protests for more than a week
revealed the true purpose: to create fear.
6. The events in Copenhagen are connected to a broader global
development. The repression sweeping across Copenhagen is just the
latest step in a much more extensive campaign. Since the early 1970s
we have been confronted with a conscious counter offensive against
the last great working class resistance manifesting itself in the
1960s. The period after 1973 has been characterised by the emergence
of neo-liberalism and it took almost 30 years before a new resistance
was able to manifest itself again and challenge neo-liberalism. In the
late 1990s it was no longer just one class fighting. The UPS strike
in the States in 1997 and the protests of the counter globalisation
movement in London and Seattle in 1999 opened a new frontline that was
broadened with the wave of strikes spreading across Western Europe
and the United States. The state of war that the American president
declared after 9/11 is an attempt to counter this development and as
such it represents yet another turning point. With the war on terror
the repression that is organised in accordance with the needs of the
economy is permanent everywhere through peacekeeping missions, police
actions and humanitarian aid. In this world there is no difference
between peace and war. We now live in a permanent state of exception,
a kind of generalised civil war.
7. We expect nothing from the representation in the media. No matter
what is being uttered; when passed on it will be a distortion. For the
media it is of pivotal importance who says what: has-been artists or
opportunistic academics cannot represent the plurality of voices that
are slowly making themselves audible. We are many and our cacophonic
voices all of a sudden shatter what is called the public sphere but
which is in reality nothing but a closed circuit of spin, advertising
and detached political phrases. Remember: We are more than they say
and we say something they dont understand. We are negative.
Imaginary Fraction, MayDay 2007
Via: "Benjamin Geer"
This is an English translation of the transcript of a meeting entitled
"Bloggers in Prison, Too", which took place on 18 March 2007 at the
Centre for Socialist Studies in Cairo, Egypt:
http://www.political-explorations.info/en/wiki/Bloggers_in_Prison%2C_Too
The background for the meeting was the case of Abd Al-Karim Nabil
Sulaiman, an Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years in prison for
'contempt of religion'[1]. The discussion touched on many subjects,
including the worldwide battle against freedom of expression, the
state of Egypt's opposition groups, young people's participation in
protests, the political role of blogs, the loss of privacy and the
spread of wireless Internet technology.
Some excerpts from Alaa Seif's talk:
"Most of those tools [for protecting privacy on the Internet] have
been designed on the basis of the assumption that kidnapping and
torture have a very high financial and social cost.... So if they got
a copy of that encrypted email and wanted to decrypt it, the cost of
breaking the code would be ten thousand times more than the cost of
kidnapping you and torturing you and saying: 'Tell us what you said in
that email.' [laughter] But that's based on the cost of kidnapping
and torturing you where? In Switzerland. [laughter] Great! OK,
what's the cost of kidnapping and torturing you in Egypt? About 5
Egyptian pounds [i.e. next to nothing]. [laughter] See what I mean?
I'm totally serious."
"Today if you go to my home town... you'll find wireless Internet
antennas on the towers in which pigeons are raised. That's a local
area network. They can block web sites so that when I'm sitting in
Egypt I can't see what's out there, but as soon as something gets into
our local area network, it will spread. This wireless technology is
very cheap, very easy to use, and it's the sort of thing Egyptians are
good at. You know, just like we've got car mechanics who know how do
things that nobody else knows how to do, just wait until you see what
will happen with wireless technology in Egypt."
"One important thing is that we have to get in early as creators and
inventors. What's happened now is that we reuse technology that was
designed for us elsewhere, and we're very good at putting things to
new uses. But for some things... that might not be good enough in
some cases, so we need to come up with solutions ourselves."
Ben
[1] http://www.freekareem.org/
