Re: 'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists
On 12/17/2017 06:31 PM, Kein wrote: Hi Brian! Well I was slightly kidding but more seriously: History suggests it's not a one way street from direct to symbolic action, the traffic can flow both ways. Ben Yeah, that's what I think. Making it flow is pretty important though. Grenoble used to be good at that, I don't know these days... Brian On 12/17/2017 10:50 AM, Kein wrote: Quick pt: It's not 'symbolic' if you burn enough infrastructure. Right, then you can kick off a massive military/fascist reaction which isn't symbolic either! Direct action either becomes symbolic, allowing for politics, or it becomes a fight, allowing the stronger force to win. Just a few groups of determined fire-wielding saboteurs would be highly effective in building the police state of which they secretly dream... # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: 'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists
Hi Brian! Well I was slightly kidding but more seriously: History suggests it's not a one way street from direct to symbolic action, the traffic can flow both ways. Ben Sent from my iPhone > On 17 Dec 2017, at 18:23, Brian Holmes wrote: > >> On 12/17/2017 10:50 AM, Kein wrote: >> Quick pt: It's not 'symbolic' if you burn enough infrastructure. > > Right, then you can kick off a massive military/fascist reaction which isn't > symbolic either! > > Direct action either becomes symbolic, allowing for politics, or it becomes a > fight, allowing the stronger force to win. Just a few groups of determined > fire-wielding saboteurs would be highly effective in building the police > state of which they secretly dream... > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
The ideology of technology (Was Re: 'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists)
On 12/17/17, 01:07, e...@x80.org wrote:
For better or worse it seems to me that the only way to escape control
from computers is not rejection, but in-depth education about them.
Yes.
The following are my contributions to an e-mail exchange which I
resisted putting on nettime as it didn't offer any practical actions,
just talk talk talk. But it seems that's all we have these days, so here
goes (if the other side still wishes the whole thing can be published):
...
To get access to deep technology and infrastructure design you must play
ball. It takes huge efforts and money to build things that matter (one
way or another.) On average, "a thing that matters" costs $2-5MM to
develop, then many times more to productize (we are not talking apps
here, but silicon, devices, switches, radios.) Many startups founded by
people that want to make a difference burn such amounts, only to find
that the system does not want a change. It has nothing to do with
'consumers', but with gatekeepers (B & C round VCs, monopolies and their
industry associations, etc.)
Loners ('hackers') can't do shit, except leave some graffiti. There were
exceptions (RMS' gcc, P. Zimmerman's PGP), but it's not a sustainable
model, and the industry got mature in the meantime.
Whether something can be done from the inside is hard to say. Perhaps,
if you are persistent, lucky, pay your tithes, and gatekeepers get careless.
It is frustrating that people with energy for change and action are
mostly unaware of the real playing (or battle-) field.
...
What is to be done? I cringe at this question, as the answer sounds
depressing.
If we agree, for the sake of discussion, that most people 'will never
get to this level' regarding understanding the technology, how can these
same people exert democratic pressure on institutions? What it is that
they want these institutions to do?
The 'technology' is not just key escrow, backdoors, surveillance etc. It
is also modulating mass behavior with instruments below the noise level,
using amassed data and inferred patterns. It is also long-term
conditioning humans whose eyes are consuming handset output for many
waking hours.
What are 'most people' supposed to request from their democratic
institutions, and how they assert that their requests have been
executed, if they don't understand these technologies? Better life?
This is the known concept of trusting experts employed by the elected
government. For example, in medicine, most of us don't know the details,
but the government regulates the field and there are vaccinations,
public health, etc. etc., for all to benefit. In medicine, in the end,
people do figure out who lives and who dies, and everyone benefits from
being alive.
But in the case we are considering, this is the technology of power (ie.
how can few of us control many of you, without much fuss), and we are
supposed to ask those we elect to power to contain it? Sounds like a
conflict of interest to me. I think that the concept of delegation is
breaking down due to the cognitive gap, and that we are experiencing the
consequences of that.
Back to the depressing answer, I see no other way than narrowing the
cognitive gap. This is what many open source activists and 'hackers'
instinctively do, the Prometheus gig (and some do get liver problems.)
I do not agree that "focusing on the technology in terms of how it is
engineered and what it's technical capacities are (aka the hacker
perspective)" is "politically a bit of a dead end", by its 'nature'.
I think that this position, widely adopted, is product of the ideology
in its purest form. It is very hard to see through it, as we've been
saturated with it in the past decades. The concepts of abstraction
layers and 'need to know' have been twisted and corrupted to create
artificial barriers. It's an easy sell: user-friendly, idiot-proof,
easy, etc. Everyone loves it. Experts get to enjoy the rarefied air.
Hackers also compete who is going to deliver more user-friendly tools
(privacy etc.) to the unwashed masses, thus guaranteeing the failure.
The adoption of this ideology is fantastic - I'd say five nines.
It's not even new - it's ancient: Socrates condemned literacy because
"it destroys memory and weakens the mind, relieving it of work that
makes it strong. It is an inhuman thing." Today it's fully developed,
and the US anti-intellectualism ('nerds') has been successfully
transplanted to Europe.
But it is ideology and nothing more, and the fixing must start at the
ideological level, like all real fixing, and not within the cosmetic
action space bounded by the same ideology.
That is the heresy I can offer: many can understand the technology of
power to the level required to take action, really understand, without
being patronized. Many. This is going to be uphill, hard work, against
the expert ecosystem and its beneficiaries, against the professional
intermediaries, and
Re: 'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists
On 12/17/2017 10:50 AM, Kein wrote: Quick pt: It's not 'symbolic' if you burn enough infrastructure. Right, then you can kick off a massive military/fascist reaction which isn't symbolic either! Direct action either becomes symbolic, allowing for politics, or it becomes a fight, allowing the stronger force to win. Just a few groups of determined fire-wielding saboteurs would be highly effective in building the police state of which they secretly dream... # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: 'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists
Quick pt: It's not 'symbolic' if you burn enough infrastructure.
Sent from my iPhone
> On 17 Dec 2017, at 13:27, Vincent Van Uffelen wrote:
>
>> On 17/12/2017 10:07, e...@x80.org wrote:
>> Morlock Elloi writes:
>>
Echoing recent digital critics such as Douglas Rushkoff or even myself,
they ask themselves what’s revolutionary or prophetic in an industry
that relies on old-school capitalism, monopolies, micro-work, state
regulations and money as a cardinal value. And as they reject the hacker
myth, they end up calling a revered
>>> "Hacker spaces" and similar are simply recruitment centers for the new
>>> cognitive class that will facilitate the machine-mediated control of
>>> the rest. People instinctively understand this, despite the deluge of
>>> propaganda to the contrary.
>>>
>>> Computing machines are all about control. While there is a number of
>>> positive side effects for those on the receiving side, ultimately it's
>>> about control of the many by the few. Tending to computing machines
>>> ('programming') has immediate gratification: you see many hapless
>>> 'users' being controlled by your 'interface', following instructions
>>> you embedded once into the machine, millions and millions of
>>> times. You don't have to be there, they still obey you and your 'flow
>>> design'. You created f*cking 15 ... 10 commandments! (nod to
>>> Mr. Brooks.) You are god. This is the only reason why everyone and
>>> their mother wants to 'learn' computing 'science'.
>> I guess ignoring both the history and ample social contributions of the
>> hacker and digital activism movements turns out to be very convenient to
>> support that kind of victimised point of view. Oh, look! The machines
>> made us slaves!
>>
>> You are correct about what the new cognitive class means for those not
>> it in. Those who belong, they will be the rulers of tomorrow, and those
>> who are left out, they will be the ones easy to control.
>>
>> The ruling class acts on a rational basis here, and a great war against
>> knowledge and education is currently underway, fully supported by the
>> capitalist elites. For them, restricting access to the cognitive class
>> is a key point as low education levels are a critical factor for the
>> survival of their status.
>>
>> For better or worse it seems to me that the only way to escape control
>> from computers is not rejection, but in-depth education about them.
>>
>> E.
> I agree, the world is as fucked as we allow it to (seem to) be, and, in my
> eyes it is actually important to keep on revealing the opportunities that are
> hiding in the gray scales.
>
> However, while some "hacker spaces" or "maker spaces" are founded and run by
> members of the critical hacker/digital activist cultures the vast majority
> are often run by way less politically engaged teams of technology enthusiasts
> or even worse by larger institutions. Those spaces then primarily cultivate
> the deep engagement with the numbing joys of learning and teaching of the
> skillful mastery of technology and often fall totally flat on becoming a
> fertile ground for critical capacity building.
>
> The question for me is though if burning the institution is actually the way
> to challenge this? Isn't pure critique in damning words or symbolic acts (and
> what else is the act of burning infrastructure) a bit too easy and actually
> quite ineffective? Hacker spaces are means of amplifying certain individual
> and societal habits, to change these it needs to make the institutions learn
> new tricks. Many of these spaces are actually based on some DIY, DITO,
> co-created, and co-organised visions and quite often run by well meaning
> people that are open for active (as in willing and capable to spend the
> needed time and energy to demonstrate the viability, validity, and utility of
> change) critique. I believe that those spaces can be nudged to change, that
> it is worth to try to claim influence over these valuable infrastructures,
> and the potential actualized by trying to meddle with the organisational
> structures of these places is effort way better spent than energetically,
> conceptually, relationally, and culturally cheap one-off (ok, two-off so far)
> interventions.
>
> \\vincent
>
>
>
>
>
>
> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
> # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
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#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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# @net
Re: 'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists
On 17/12/2017 10:07, e...@x80.org wrote:
Morlock Elloi writes:
Echoing recent digital critics such as Douglas Rushkoff or even myself,
they ask themselves what’s revolutionary or prophetic in an industry
that relies on old-school capitalism, monopolies, micro-work, state
regulations and money as a cardinal value. And as they reject the hacker
myth, they end up calling a revered
"Hacker spaces" and similar are simply recruitment centers for the new
cognitive class that will facilitate the machine-mediated control of
the rest. People instinctively understand this, despite the deluge of
propaganda to the contrary.
Computing machines are all about control. While there is a number of
positive side effects for those on the receiving side, ultimately it's
about control of the many by the few. Tending to computing machines
('programming') has immediate gratification: you see many hapless
'users' being controlled by your 'interface', following instructions
you embedded once into the machine, millions and millions of
times. You don't have to be there, they still obey you and your 'flow
design'. You created f*cking 15 ... 10 commandments! (nod to
Mr. Brooks.) You are god. This is the only reason why everyone and
their mother wants to 'learn' computing 'science'.
I guess ignoring both the history and ample social contributions of the
hacker and digital activism movements turns out to be very convenient to
support that kind of victimised point of view. Oh, look! The machines
made us slaves!
You are correct about what the new cognitive class means for those not
it in. Those who belong, they will be the rulers of tomorrow, and those
who are left out, they will be the ones easy to control.
The ruling class acts on a rational basis here, and a great war against
knowledge and education is currently underway, fully supported by the
capitalist elites. For them, restricting access to the cognitive class
is a key point as low education levels are a critical factor for the
survival of their status.
For better or worse it seems to me that the only way to escape control
from computers is not rejection, but in-depth education about them.
E.
I agree, the world is as fucked as we allow it to (seem to) be, and, in
my eyes it is actually important to keep on revealing the opportunities
that are hiding in the gray scales.
However, while some "hacker spaces" or "maker spaces" are founded and
run by members of the critical hacker/digital activist cultures the vast
majority are often run by way less politically engaged teams of
technology enthusiasts or even worse by larger institutions. Those
spaces then primarily cultivate the deep engagement with the numbing
joys of learning and teaching of the skillful mastery of technology and
often fall totally flat on becoming a fertile ground for critical
capacity building.
The question for me is though if burning the institution is actually the
way to challenge this? Isn't pure critique in damning words or symbolic
acts (and what else is the act of burning infrastructure) a bit too easy
and actually quite ineffective? Hacker spaces are means of amplifying
certain individual and societal habits, to change these it needs to make
the institutions learn new tricks. Many of these spaces are actually
based on some DIY, DITO, co-created, and co-organised visions and quite
often run by well meaning people that are open for active (as in willing
and capable to spend the needed time and energy to demonstrate the
viability, validity, and utility of change) critique. I believe that
those spaces can be nudged to change, that it is worth to try to claim
influence over these valuable infrastructures, and the potential
actualized by trying to meddle with the organisational structures of
these places is effort way better spent than energetically,
conceptually, relationally, and culturally cheap one-off (ok, two-off so
far) interventions.
\\vincent
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: 'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists
Morlock Elloi writes:
>> Echoing recent digital critics such as Douglas Rushkoff or even myself,
>> they ask themselves what’s revolutionary or prophetic in an industry
>> that relies on old-school capitalism, monopolies, micro-work, state
>> regulations and money as a cardinal value. And as they reject the hacker
>> myth, they end up calling a revered
>
> "Hacker spaces" and similar are simply recruitment centers for the new
> cognitive class that will facilitate the machine-mediated control of
> the rest. People instinctively understand this, despite the deluge of
> propaganda to the contrary.
>
> Computing machines are all about control. While there is a number of
> positive side effects for those on the receiving side, ultimately it's
> about control of the many by the few. Tending to computing machines
> ('programming') has immediate gratification: you see many hapless
> 'users' being controlled by your 'interface', following instructions
> you embedded once into the machine, millions and millions of
> times. You don't have to be there, they still obey you and your 'flow
> design'. You created f*cking 15 ... 10 commandments! (nod to
> Mr. Brooks.) You are god. This is the only reason why everyone and
> their mother wants to 'learn' computing 'science'.
I guess ignoring both the history and ample social contributions of the
hacker and digital activism movements turns out to be very convenient to
support that kind of victimised point of view. Oh, look! The machines
made us slaves!
You are correct about what the new cognitive class means for those not
it in. Those who belong, they will be the rulers of tomorrow, and those
who are left out, they will be the ones easy to control.
The ruling class acts on a rational basis here, and a great war against
knowledge and education is currently underway, fully supported by the
capitalist elites. For them, restricting access to the cognitive class
is a key point as low education levels are a critical factor for the
survival of their status.
For better or worse it seems to me that the only way to escape control
from computers is not rejection, but in-depth education about them.
E.
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: 'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists
This is correct observation.
"Hacker spaces" and similar are simply recruitment centers for the new
cognitive class that will facilitate the machine-mediated control of the
rest. People instinctively understand this, despite the deluge of
propaganda to the contrary.
Computing machines are all about control. While there is a number of
positive side effects for those on the receiving side, ultimately it's
about control of the many by the few. Tending to computing machines
('programming') has immediate gratification: you see many hapless
'users' being controlled by your 'interface', following instructions
you embedded once into the machine, millions and millions of times. You
don't have to be there, they still obey you and your 'flow design'. You
created f*cking 15 ... 10 commandments! (nod to Mr. Brooks.) You are
god. This is the only reason why everyone and their mother wants to
'learn' computing 'science'.
On 12/14/17, 06:05, Patrice Riemens wrote:
Echoing recent digital critics such as Douglas Rushkoff or even myself,
they ask themselves what’s revolutionary or prophetic in an industry
that relies on old-school capitalism, monopolies, micro-work, state
regulations and money as a cardinal value. And as they reject the hacker
myth, they end up calling a revered
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists
bwo Tetalab List Original to: https://hackernoon.com/in-france-cyber-criticism-turns-violent-as-activists-burn-a-fablab-to-protest-the-diffusion-of-4ad378251c5b In France, cyber criticism turns violent as “activists” burn a fablab to protest the diffusion of digital culture What will be the consequences of big tech growing moral failures? The fablab “La Casemate” after it was destroyed by the group of Grenoble People don’t throw rocks on the Google buses anymore. Those were the good old times. On Tuesday, La Casemate, a fablab based in Grenoble was vandalized and burned because it was described as “a notoriously harmful institution by its diffusion of digital culture”. The public policy of supporting the digital transition was also criticized as “City Managers satisfy money-hungry start-ups and geeky geeks by opening Fablabs in trendy neighborhoods These seemingly extremely heterogeneous devices all aim to accelerate the acceptance and social use of the technologies of our disastrous time”. It’s not the first time people turn to violent protests against automation and computers. From 1979 to 1983, in France, the Committee for Liquidation or Subversion of Computers (CLODO) was active in the region of Toulouse, where they posed bombs and burned buildings (CII-Honeybull in 1980, International Computers Limited in 1980, Sperry-Univac in 1983, etc.) At the time, they explained to the French Media that they were “workers in the field of data processing and consequently well placed to know the current and future dangers of data processing and telecommunications.” And that in their view, “ The computer is the favorite tool of the dominant. It is used to exploit, to put on file, to control, and to repress.” And there were others. In 1983, in West Germany, a computer center designing software used in Pershing missiles was destroyed by a group called Rotte Zellen. In 1984, a Belgium group called the Communist Combattant Cells (CCC) bombed and destroyed the headquarters of several companies in Belgium and Germany. In London, a group called the Angry Brigade tried to do the same. And there were similar actions in Asia, in South America and of course in the US. It’s easy to dismiss the actions of these digital “protesters” as mere luddites fantasies. But their point was not that the computing industry would take jobs from people. In August 1983, the CLODO gave a rare interview in English to Processed World, where they explain : “It’s neither retrograde nor novel. Looking at the past, we see only slavery and dehumanization, unless we go back to certain so-called primitive societies. And though we may not all share the same “social project,’’ we know that it’s stupid to try and turn back the clock.” It’s rather that these tools are “perverted at their very origin”, pointing for example “that the most computerized sector is the army, and that 94% of civilian computer-time is used for management and accounting”. To be clear, in their 1983 view, “if microprocessors create unemployment, instead of reducing everyone’s working-time, it’s because we live in a brutal society, and this is by no means a reason to destroy microprocessors.” Since the 1983 movie “Wargames”, people have dissociated computer-related terrorism and violence. By insisting on hacking and hackers, it looks like digital politics, protests and violence only take place in some sort of virtual world, and that they belong to a grey zone where moral values are distant and fuzzy. Indeed, their vocabulary of “White Hat”- a good hacker, and “Black Hat”- a bad hacker, seems more related to the Lords of the Ring than to the Communist Manifesto. And since the seminal 1984 book of Steven Levy, “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”,the digital world has been fascinated by this new storytelling, the claim to be able to break the rules of society. Its leaders always want to present themselves as revolutionaries. They always begun in a garage. They were always former hackers. They all wanted to change the world. But it seems that this storytelling has come to an end. The text posted by the group of Grenoble on Indymedia In their text posted on Friday, the group of Grenoble share the same disappointment as the CLODO. They call the digital promises “a blatant lie”. Echoing recent digital critics such as Douglas Rushkoff or even myself, they ask themselves what’s revolutionary or prophetic in an industry that relies on old-school capitalism, monopolies, micro-work, state regulations and money as a cardinal value. And as they reject the hacker myth, they end up calling a revered place such as the MIT… a “temple of technocracy”. But people surprised, offended or shocked by this qualification should remember the way Aaron Swartz has been driven to suicide after being mistreated by this institution. Violence is to be condemned. I feel sad for the people of La Casemate. They are the victi
