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THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE
Critical Art Ensemble
Part 6 of 7
Published by Autonomedia
ISBN 1-57027-006-6
Cultural workers have recently become increasingly attracted to
technology as a means to examine the symbolic order. Video,
interactive computer projects, and all sorts of electronic
noise have made a solid appearance in the museums and
galleries, and have gained curatorial acceptance. There are
electronic salons and virtual museums, and yet something is
missing. It is not simply because much of the work tends to
have a "gee whiz" element to it, reducing it to a product
demonstration offering technology as an end in itself; nor is
it because technology is often used primarily as a design
accessory to postmodern fashion, for these are the uses that
are to be expected when new exploitable media are identified.
Rather, an absence is most acutely felt when the technology is
used for an intelligent purpose. Electronic technology has
not attracted resistant cultural workers to other time zones,
situations, or even bunkers that yield new sets of questions,
but instead has been used to express the same narratives and
questions typically examined in activist art. This, of
course, is not a totally negative development, as the
electronic voice is potentially the most powerful in the
exercise of free speech; however, it is disappointing that the
technology is monopolized by interrogation of the imperialist
narrative. An overwhelming amount of electronic work
addresses questions of identity, environmental catastrophe,
war and peace, and all the other issues generally associated
with activist representation. In other words, concerns from
another time zone have been successfully and practically
imported into electronic media, but without addressing the
questions inherent to the media itself. Again, this is a case
of over-deployment and over-investment in a single
spatial/temporal sector. An interrogation of technoculture
has yet to occur, except when such investigation fits with
more traditional activist narratives. As to be expected, a
large amount of work is on media disinformation--the
electronic invention of reality--but it is always tied to a
persuasive argument about why the viewer should follow an
alternative interpretation of a given "real world" phenomenon.
Activists show no particular interest in questioning the
cybernetics of everyday life, the phenomenology of screenal
space, the construction of electronic identity, and so on.
And why should they? In the abstract sense, if power has gone
nomadic, then ideology will eventually follow the same course.
As speculative as it might be, with the rapid change in
technology, the flowing shift of the locus of reality from
simulated time/space to virtual time/space, and the
undetermined speed with which this is happening, those
concerned with the development of the symbolic order must ask:
What are nomadic values now and what will they become?
Because of cultural lag, asking questions about the fate of
sedentary culture is still useful, but only if other time
zones are kept in mind. Even to formulate questions relevant
to electronic nomadology is difficult, since there are no
theories to exploit, no histories to draw upon, and no solid
issues. It is so much easier to stay in the familiar bunker,
where the issues (and the parameters of their interpretation)
have solidified. Here the pain of leftist authoritarianism is
most intensely felt. Even though addressing issues of
nomadology is clearly urgent, one fears to invoke the wrath of
sedentary liberal activists by making an "insensitive" error;
that fear diminishes exploration into this topic, or any other
outside the traditional activist time zone. Who is willing to
venture on a high-risk endeavor, knowing that the result of
failure is punishment from the alleged support group?
On the practical level, this problem becomes even more
complex. The hardware of everyday life cybernetics is
beginning to merge, and in the most advanced time zone, that
of the cyberelite, it already has. The telephone,
television/video, the computer and its network structure--all
these are blending into a single unit. Each of these pieces
of hardware is from a different time zone, and each is thus
surrounded by different sensibilities. The oldest piece is
the most utopian in terms of its practical consequences in
society: The telephone represents the technology closest to
a decentralized open-access communication net. In the West,
almost everyone knows how to use a phone and has access to
one. There are even indicators that the process of
decentralization that determined access to the telephone was
framed as a free speech issue(*). During this process, the
telephone was the best hardware for information relay
available. While it clearly still had a military function,
the movement to decentralize it recognized that the need for
open access surpassed the need for control. It is this type
of sensibility and process that must be replicated as new
technologies begin to merge.
(*) See Bruce Sterling, _The Hacker Crackdown_. NY: Bantam
Books, 1992, pp. 8-12
Just the opposite process occurred in the development of
video/television. Although the hardware for viewing is
relatively decentralized, and the hardware for production is
beginning to be decentralized, the network for distribution is
almost completely centralized, with little indication of
change. This state of affairs must be resisted: The ideology
that sanctions control of the airwaves by an elite capitalist
class cannot be allowed to dominate all technology, and yet
this is precisely what will happen if more cultural resources
are not deployed to disturb this ideology. Cultural workers
must insist on making access to electronic nets decentralized.
To lose on this front is to concede to censorship in the worst
way. Whether or not an artist loses h/er NEA grant because a
given project is antithetical to sanctioned imperialist
ideology is insignificant, compared to the consequences of
merging systems of communication. This struggle will be more
difficult than the opening of the phone network, since the
airwaves are perceived as a means for mass persuasion. In the
time of telephone decentralization, radio and film suffered
defeats (access to the airwaves was perceived not as a right,
but a business), causing repercussions which are still being
felt. Television took the centralized form that it did partly
because of these defeats.
There is a wild card in this situation. The computer could go
either way. Access to hardware, education, and networks is
currently being centralized. Unlike the telephone or
television, computers have not entered the everyday life of
almost every class. This primarily elite technology has sunk
a deep taproot down through the bureaucratic class. The
electronic service is growing, but is far from pervasive.
Hence those in lagging time zones already realize that
computers are not democratic technology, nor are they
considered an essential technology. This sensibility damages
resistance to centralization of communication systems, since
such indifference allows the capitalist elite to impose
principles of self-regulation and exclusion on the technology
without having to go before the public. The technology is
lost before the public is even aware of its ramifications.
One of the key critical functions of cultural workers is to
invent aesthetic and intellectual means for communicating and
distributing ideas. If the nomadic elite completely controls
the lines of communication, resistant cultural workers have no
voice, no function, nothing. If they are to speak at all,
cultural workers must perpetuate and increase their current
degree of autonomy in electronic space.
There is a more optimistic side. The computer's linkage to
the telephone is much greater than to the television. In
fact, the computer and telephone will probably consume cable
systems. If the sensibility of decentralization can be
maintained, fiber optic networks will provide the democratic
electronic space that has for so long been a dream. Each home
could become its own broadcasting studio. This does not mean
that network broadcast will collapse, or that there will be
open access to data bases; but it does mean that there could
be a cost-effective method to globally distribute complex
grass-roots productions and alternative information nets
containing time-based images, texts, and sounds--all
accessible without bureaucratic permission. It will be as
easy as making a phone call.
Thus, developing systems of communication may provide another
utopian opportunity. However, maintaining technological
decentralization is crucial to exploiting this chance.
Considering the history of utopia in ruins, the probability
that this opportunity will be successfully used looks
discouraging. None can predict how the technology will
evolve, nor by what means the nomadic elite will defend the
electronic rhizome from a slave revolt. Those snagged in
electronic resistance may well be on a fool's errand, since
the battle may already be lost. There are no assurances;
there are no politically correct actions. Again, there is
only the wager. If cynical power has withdrawn from the
spectacle into the electronic net, then that is also where
pockets of resistance must emerge. Although the resistant
technocratic class can provide the imagination for the
hardware and programming, resistant cultural workers are
responsible for providing the sensibility necessary for
popular support. This class must provide the imagination to
intersect time zones, and to do so using whatever venues and
media are available. This class must attempt to disturb the
paternal spectacle of electronic centralization. We must
challenge and recapture the electronic body, our electronic
body! Roll the dice.
Chapter 7 ]]> Paradoxes and Contradictions
No matter which side of the political spectrum is examined, a
generalized consensus exists on the role of the individual
in the formation of society, although it is phrased
oppositely by each side. According to the political right,
the individual must surrender h/er sovereignty to state
power. From the point of view of the left, the individual
must submit to enriched repression. In each case the
individual loss of sovereignty is crucial. The
authoritarians regard this loss as positive--the beneficent
state provides the individual with security and order in
exchange for h/er obedience, while radical elements see this
loss as negative, since the individual is forced to live an
alienating existence of fragmented consciousness.
Consequently the differences between the two stem from their
opposite interpretations of this act of surrender. To
determine where contingent elements fall along the political
continuum, one must examine the degree to which the
individual is deprived of h/er personal volition and desire.
Unfortunately, no presocial moment free of state power ever
existed outside the imagination, so no experiential
knowledge can be used to identify or to measure the
qualities of liberty. For this reason, certain arbitrary
assumptions must be made to fix the location of liberty
anywhere on the continuum between the noble savage and the
war of all against all. This either/or decision cannot be
reasoned without logical error (Goedel's paradox), nor is
there a history (other than %state% history) from which to
make an inductive judgment. One must just decide, or act in
an ad hoc or random fashion. The decision to follow any
certain idea is itself a wager.
Throughout this book, the assumption is that extraction of
power from the individual by the state is to be resisted.
Resistance itself is the action which recovers or expands
individual sovereignty, or conversely, it is those actions
which weaken the state. Therefore, resistance can be viewed
as a matter of degree; a total system crash is not the only
option, nor may it even be a viable one. This is not to
soften the argument by opening the door a crack for liberal
reform, since that means relinquishing sovereignty in the
name of social justice, rather than for the sake of social
order. Liberal action is too often a matter of equal
repression for all, in order to resist the conservative
practice of repression for the marginalized and modest
liberty for the privileged. Under the liberal rubric, the
people united will always be defeated. The practice being
advocated here is to recover what the state has taken, as
well as what the reformers have so generously given (and are
continuing to give).
The issue of sovereignty brings up the first contradiction
to be faced here. Throughout this work, two seemingly
exclusive points have been voiced: While the current
situation is partly defined by information overload, it is
also defined by insufficient access to information. How can
it be both ways? This is a problem of absence and presence-
-the presence of an overload of information in the form of
spectacle (presence) that steals sovereignty, and an absence
of information that returns sovereignty to the individual.
To be sure, information on good consumerism and government
ideology is abundant. Data banks are filled with useless
facts, but how can access be gained to information that
directly affects everyday life? An individual's data body
is completely out of h/er control. Information on spending
patterns, political associations, credit histories, bank
records, education, lifestyles, and so on is collected and
cross-referenced by political-economic institutions, to
control our own destinies, desires, and needs. This
information cannot be accessed, nor can we really know which
institutions have it, nor can we be sure how it is being
used (although it is safe to assume that it is not for
benevolent purposes). This is strategic data that must be
claimed. We should be protected from the creation of
electronic doubles by the right to privacy, but we are not.
The right to privacy is yet another welfare state illusion
in the service of the economy of desire. Specific facts
about the policies and laws that promote information-
gathering are not readily available, since such facts are
carefully guarded by legions of bureaucrats. One needs
extensive special training just to research such problems,
when this knowledge could be readily available. Finally,
where is the network that allows problems to be voiced on a
mass scale? It does not exist.
This is a peculiar case of censorship. Rather than stopping
the flow of information, far more is generated than can be
digested. The strategy is to classify or privatize all
information that could be used by the individual for self-
empowerment, and to bury the useful information under the
reams of useless junk data offered to the public. Instead
of the traditional information blackout, we face an
information blizzard--a whiteout. This forces the
individual to depend on an authority to help prioritize the
information to be selected. This is the foundation for the
information catastrophe, an endless recycling of sovereignty
back to the state under the pretense of informational
freedom.
Dilemmas involved in the decentralization of hardware are also
worth consideration. Where does Luddite technophobia stop
and retrograde techno-dependence begin? This is very much a
problem of finding the ever-elusive golden mean.
Decentralization of the hardware invites the hazard of a
techno-addiction that benefits only the merchants of
technology, while centralization guarantees that electronic
manipulation of individuals at both the macro and micro
levels will proceed uncontested in any significant way.
While the utopian claims made by the developers and
distributors of new technology seem woefully transparent
(after all, they are the ones who benefit the most
economically), those claims are, at the same time, very
seductive. The chance to be freed from the algorithms of
everyday life in order to concentrate on the metaphysics of
ideas is a wish worth entertaining, and has very often been
vital to modern utopian theory; yet there are very
discomforting elements in this vision. The economic
prospects for creating such an environment are extremely
bleak. If the technology were cheap enough to construct
(less than labor costs), what would happen to those in the
labor force? They might have plenty of free time, but no
way to support themselves. To indulge the assumption that
the future will be similar to the past suggests they would
not fare well, since they would become an excess population.
At best there would be a completely homogenized labor force,
with the service sector and manufacturing sector sharing the
same squalor. This scenario seems to be a return to
classical Marxism in which a process of pauperization leads
to two homogenized classes, with the bottom class unable to
purchase the goods manufactured. The system crashes? Who
can say; yet it does seem reasonable to assume that
technology will not provide the utopia that corporate
futurologists predict. Such predictions seem to function
more in the short term, to convince people to buy technology
that they do not really need, as well as to prepare future
markets.
Continued reflection on the more intelligible short-term
prospects of the technology of desire makes it easier to see
what is immediately bothersome about technocratic promises.
Take the notion of the smart house. It sounds seductive.
Here is a home that runs as efficiently as its construction
allows. The computer monitors household activity, and acts
in accordance with these activity patterns. Energy is never
wasted; it is deployed only when and where it is needed.
Security systems monitor the perimeter, to alert the
authorities if the property is threatened. The home is
efficient and secure; it is the manifestation of bourgeois
value itself. But what is surrendered when all household
activities are monitored and recorded? We know that if
information can enter the house, it can also leave the
house, so that the price of bourgeois utopia is privacy
itself. With such data available, ways for outside forces
to control the household more efficiently will also develop.
Due to its surveillance components, this type of technology
is another contractual trade of sovereignty for order. What
is suspect about this techno-world is that it values
consumer passivity and technological mediation in the most
totalizing sense.
This problem conjures the image of decentralization gone
awry. Decentralization does not always favor resistant
action; it can have a state function. For instance, it may
be feasible for the corporate grid to provide most of the
population with affordable smart machines as a marketing
strategy. The more technology available to people, and the
more it can insinuate itself into the algorithms of everyday
life, the greater the chance that it will become a market of
dependency. Addiction mania and hyperconsumerism are the
basis for market maintenance and expansion. The addict
always needs more. This is in part why there are such
strong punishments for addictions that do not feed corporate
bank accounts. It is intolerable to allow potential
consumer populations to focus singularly on addictions of
pleasure (food, sex, drugs). The empassioned consumer
becomes inert, rather than wandering the grid of enriched
privation. The inert consumer represents only one market of
fixed consumption--for example, a singular desire for
heroin. This kind of market is antithetical to one that
remains in flux, oscillating between accumulation and
obsolescence. The market of flux is one of entwinement--one
product inevitably leads to another, necessitating constant
upgrades and accessory purchases. One product line is
interdependent with other product lines, and hence
consumption and accumulation never stop. The final goal is
a diversified addiction, as opposed to one that monopolizes
its consumers.
This discussion has not come full circle as it might seem at
first glance. It has not gone from an apology for
technology to an attack upon it. Rather, the problem being
investigated is: How can technological decentralization
return sovereignty to the individual rather than taking it
away? Much of the answer lies in whether the technology is
accepted as a means of passive consumption or as a means for
active production. Passive addiction mania must be
resisted; when corporate technocrats offer products or
systems that seem to ride on the promises of a utopian dawn,
one should scrutinize these offerings with the utmost
suspicion. That which functions only "to make life easier
(it all happens with the touch of a button)" is generally
unnecessary. In the smart house, the computerized kitchen
offers a data base on the recipes of the world. This is
probably a con. Is a kitchen computer terminal really
necessary? Does the service require a subscription? How
often would it be used? Is it desirable to have information
on daily life (cooking in this case) floating around the
electronic net? Would it not be more efficient, cheaper,
and private to simply purchase some cookbooks? This last
question is very telling. When technology is trying to
replace something that is not obsolete, one can be fairly
certain that a strategy of dependence is at work. Further,
continue using any technology that confounds the
surveillance tactics of political economy. (In this case it
is as simple as supporting book technology). Avoid using
any technology that records data facts unless it is
essential. For example, try not to use credit cards. An
electronic record of a consumer's purchases is very precious
data to the institutions of political economy. Do not let
these institutions have it.
The technological artifacts and systems worthy of support
are geared more toward sending out information, rather than
receiving it. Desktop publishing technology is an excellent
example of a system in the process of decentralization, one
designed to foster active production rather than passive
reception. When the technology is skewed toward reception,
avoid it. (It should be noted that the strategy of
entwinement is always a problem regardless of the technology
chosen. Barring the total rejection of technology, the
power of addiction will always be present). In the case of
interactive technology, it is wise to ask, is it centralized
or decentralized? If it is like the phone, and allows
access to people and the information of your choice, use it-
-but always remember that the electronic tape could be
recording. If it is centralized and spectacular, it is
better to avoid it. The ability to choose an ending for a
network TV show is not interaction; it is a device to keep
the viewer watching. In this case, all the inventive
choices have already been made. This is an example of a
device designed to keep the viewer passively engaged.
To help direct technology toward increased individual
autonomy, hackers ought to continue developing personal
hardware and software; however, since most technology
emerges from the military complex and the rest comes from
the corporate world, the situation is rather bleak.
Although much of the hope for continued resistance in the techno-
world rests with hackers, a contingent of resistant
technocrats guided by the concerns of the radical left has
yet to emerge. As mentioned in a previous chapter, this
group is generally apolitical. While they must be credited
for liberating the hardware and software that represent the
first moments of sovereignty in techno-culture, thereby
lifting the techno-situation out of hopelessness, care must
be taken not to over-valorize them. Their motivations for
producing technology oscillate between compulsion and
ethical imperative. It is a type of addiction mania that
carries its own peculiar contradictions. Since such
production is extremely labor-intensive, requiring permanent
focus, a specialized fixation emerges that is beneficial
within the immediate realm of techno-production, but is
extremely questionable outside its spatial-temporal zone.
the hacker is generally obsessed with efficiency and order.
In producing decentralized technology, a fetish for the
algorithmic is understandable and even laudable; however,
when it approaches a totalizing aesthetic, it has the
potential to become damaging to the point of complicity with
the state. As an aesthetic, rather than a means of
production, it can be a reflection of the obscenity of
bourgeois capitalism. Efficiency alone cannot be the
measure of value. This is one demand that the
contestational voice has been making for two centuries. The
aesthetic of efficiency is one of exclusion; it seeks to
eliminate its predecessors. Since perfect efficiency is not
attainable, and it has yet to be shown how an ascendant
system can incorporate all of the usefulness of past
systems, obscene sacrifice becomes an ever-present
companion. Not only does excess efficiency sacrifice
elements of understanding and explanation, but it also
subtracts from humanity itself. Ideas, art, and passion can
thrive as well, if not better, in an environment of
disorder. The aesthetics of inefficiency, of desperate
gambles, of incommensurable imaginings, of insufferable
interruptions, are all a part of individual sovereignty.
These are situations in which invention occurs.
Here one stumbles upon the paradox of hacking: If hackers
must singularly commit to algorithmic thinking to be
productive, can this technocratic class be convinced to act
in a manner that, at times, will be antithetical to such
thinking? Perhaps the more utopian results of hacking--the
decentralization of hardware and information--are in fact
merely contingent elements in hacker discourse. What then
is to be done? If the hackers are dissuaded from focusing
on the aesthetics of efficiency, and thereby politicized,
production could go down; this could in turn restrict the
availability of decentralized hardware and software needed
by the contestational voice. If the hackers remain focused
on efficiency, that is more likely to strengthen the
totalizing operations of bourgeois discourse. Treating this
problem is partly a matter of redeployment. The hacker
occupies a very specialized time zone, and is involved in a
specialized labor. Anti-company technocrats must be
persuaded, by whatever available means, to enter other time
zones and address the particular situations found there.
Relocating hackers in other time zones should not be
understood literally; instead it should lead to recombinant
collaboration. That is, the characteristic of the hacker
and the cultural worker should blend and thereby form a link
between time zones, opening the possibilities for discourse
and action across the social time continuum.
It is quite likely that decentralizing hardware (technocratic
resistance) and redistributing labor (worker resistance) are
not enough in themselves to intersect time zones. As
already indicated, without frames of interpretation to
encourage the individual's capacity for autonomous action,
decentralization and redistribution could well have the
opposite effect--i.e., addiction mania. The best chance to
keep interpretation of cultural phenomena fluid lies in
manipulating, recombining, and recontextualizing signs; when
accompanied by other types of resistance, this allows the
maximum degree of autonomy. Sign manipulation with the
purpose of keeping the interpretive field open is the
primary critical function of the cultural worker. This
function separates the cultural worker from the
propagandist, whose task is to stop interpretation, and to
rigidify the readings of the culture-text. The cultural
worker's secondary function is to cross-fertilize separate
time and/or spatial sectors, but this task has met with less
success (the problem of over-deployment). The cultural
worker is obligated to ferret out the signs of freedom in as
many sectors as possible, and transport them by way of
image/text to other locations. This transference
constitutes the temporary anti-spectacle. For example,
hackers have always said that the computer can grant the
individual the ability to understand and to use real power.
Whatever the agent commands, the computer will do. Although
this may seem to be a statement of the obvious, it is
questionable whether the meaning of this observation is
really recognized outside the technocratic sector. If this
assertion is truly understood, the possibilities for
resistance dramatically increase. Populist strategies of
resistance deprived from reactions to the problems of early
capital are only an option.
Consider the following: an activist organization decides
that insurance agencies which keep records about uninsured
HIV+ people contribute to discriminatory practices, and that
such information-gathering must be stopped. This is not a
problem of early capital imperialism, but one of late
capital information codes. All the picket lines, affinity
groups, and drum corps that can be mustered will have little
effect in this situation. The information will not be
deleted from the data banks. But to covertly spoil the
information banks, or destroy them, would have the desired
effect. This is a matter of meeting information authority
with information disturbance; it is direct autonomous
action, suitable to the situation. One electronic affinity
group could do instantly what the many could not over time.
this is postmodern civil disobedience; it requires
democratic interpretation of a problem, but without large-
scale action. In early capital, the only power base for
marginal groups was defined by their numbers. This is no
longer true. Now there is a technological power base, and
it is up to cultural and political activists to think it
through. As time fragments, populist movements and
specialized forces can work successfully in tandem. It is a
matter of choosing the strategy that best fits the
situation, and of keeping the techniques of resistance open.
Although breaks in communication lines within and between
authoritarian institutions are reasonable focal points for
resistance, and it is even possible that the concrete shell
of some institutions could be completely crashed, it will
still be difficult, if not impossible, to erase all the
traces of the institution left in the rubble. Institutions,
like ideas, do not die easily. In fact, how could complex
society exist without bureaucracies? How would
communication exist without language? Irredeemable power is
ongoing. Macro institutions have autonomous existence,
independent of individual action. So what is the point of
resistance--why attack that which is undefeatable? Herein
lies the problem of agency. To what degree does freedom
exist for the individual? This is a site of continuous
turmoil with no satisfactory answer. Over the past century,
ideas on the degree of entrapment have wildly proliferated.
People are caught in the routinized pathways of work, and
are slaves to the demands of production; people are caught
in the iron cage of bureaucracy, and are slaves to the
process of rationalization; people are caught in the domain
of the code, and are slaves to the empire of signs. So much
is immediately taken, from the moment the individual is
thrown into the world. Even so, it is a worthy wager to
assume that the individual possesses a degree of autonomy
valuable enough to defend, and that it is possible to expand
it. It is also reasonable to gamble that social aggregates
similar in philosophical consensus can reconfigure social
structures.
Of these two wagers, the former is of the most immediate
concern. As the division of labor grows in complexity,
individual sovereignty fades under increasing erasure,
becoming a transparent transistor for social currents.
Agency dwindles down to mundane choices entrapped in the
economy of desire. To achieve any sense of free expression,
the individual is increasingly dependent upon the latter
wager. Power through numbers, though somewhat effective
within the situation of early capital, is less important in
late capital, as the praxis of quantity/power has hit its
critical mass. Globally, an internet of unity is needed
that at present is just not feasible. Even within national
borders, activist organizations are encountering points of
critical mass. It is a paradox; to be effective, the
organization must be so large that it requires bureaucratic
hierarchy. But due to its functional principle of
rationalization, this rigid order cannot accommodate
multiple perspectives among its members. Splintering
occurs, and the organization is consumed in its own process.
Perhaps it is time to reassess the idea of quantity as
power. Even with the best of intentions, large groups
inevitably subordinate the individual to the group,
consistently running the risk of dehumanization and
alienation. It should now be asked, can the model used by
the nomadic elite be appropriated for the cause of
resistance?
Although the nomadic elite may be a unified power, it is
more likely that this class exists as interrelated and
interdependent cells powerful enough to control segments of
social organization. The interrelationship between the
power cells develops not by choice, but by nonrational
process. These cells are often in conflict, continually
moving through a process of strengthening and weakening, but
the transcendent social current of late capital blindly
proceeds, untouched by the contingencies of conflict.
Repression and exploitation continue unabated. The
individual agents that labor within the cells enjoy greater
autonomy (freedom from repression) than those below them;
however, they are also caught in the social current. They
do not have the choice to stop the machinations of late
capital's process. The genetic code of these individuals is
also contingent; it is not essential to the process. They
could be replaced by any genetic sequence, and the results
would remain the same, since the power is located in the
cells, not in the individual. An individual may access
power only so long as s/he resides in the cell.
Technology is the foundation for the nomadic elite's ability
to maintain absence, acquire speed, and consolidate power in
a global system. Enough technology has fallen between the
cracks of the corporate-military hierarchy that
experimentation with cell structure among resistant culture
can begin. New tactics and strategies of civil disobedience
are now possible, ones that aim to disturb the virtual
order, rather than the spectacular order. With these new
tactics, many problems could be avoided that occur when
resistors use older tactics not suitable to a global
context. The cell allows greater probability for
establishing a nonhierarchical group based on consensus.
Because of its small size (arbitrarily speaking, 4-8
members), this group allows the personal voice to maintain
itself. There is no splintering, only healthy debate in an
environment of trust. The cell can act quickly and more
often without bureaucracy. Supported by the power of
technology, this action has the potential to be more
disturbing and more wide-ranging than any subelectronic
action. With enough of these cells acting--even if their
viewpoints conflict--it may be wagered that a resistant
social current will emerge... one that is not easy to turn
off, to find, or to monitor. In this manner, people with
different points of view and different specialized skills
can work in unison, without compromise and without surrender
of individuality to a centralized aggregate.
*****
The rules of the game have changed. Civil disobedience is not
what it used to be. Who is willing to explore the new
paradigm? It is so easy to stay in the bunker of
assurances. No conclusions, no certainty; only theoretical
frames, performative matrices, and practical wagers. What
more can be said? Roll the dice. End program. Fade out.