💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anonymous-war-against-the-information-age.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:49:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: War Against the Information Age
Author: Anonymous
Date: 2017/09/07
Language: en
Topics: anarcho-nihilism, anti-technology, artificial intelligence, mass society, surveillance, Warzone Distro
Source: Retrieved on 4th March 2019 from https://warzonedistro.noblogs.org/files/2018/07/war-against-the-information-age.pdf
Notes: This essay was originally published in 325, an anarchic project of counter-information and armed critique issue #10, and turned into this zine, in solidarity with those waging an anarchist-nihilist war against all civilized, social control.

Anonymous

War Against the Information Age

As capitalist imperialism consolidates its economic borders through an

ongoing paramilitarisation process and harmonised internal policing

structure to cope with increased external war and social-ecological

collapse, there is an amplification of repression in response to the

manufactured ‘crisis’ of the bankers. Enough decentralisation in the

hegemony is maintained to allow internal security services to retain

sufficient self-rule to operate according to the local situations, but

generally speaking , the areas of amplification — ‘terrorism’ and

immigration (specifically mass incarceration and deportation) —

correspond with a rise in an encouraged nationalism and the

prison-society.

The legislature of the new authoritarianism is in fact not a new set of

laws, but rather the amplification and conjunction of existing laws that

carry themselves forward to meet “new threats”. The prison-society is

firstly an information-age authoritarian social model, as information

technology and the new sciences are the key to its infrastructural

progress and evolution. The prison-society is not just the regime of

‘intelligent’ surveillance cameras, databases, police-stations and

prisons, it is urban planning, biometrics, contactless smart chips,

electronic tagging and pattern recognition. It is satellite mapping,

private security armies, automated drones and unmanned border planes. It

is universalisation of social welfare systems, banking and corporate

services. It is telephone voice analysis, high-definition CCTV,

facial-recognition systems, “X-Ray” microwave scanners, covert units of

police for breaking and entry, bugging and tailing, and the global

surveillance network, Echelon. It is blacklists of ‘subversives’,

‘criminals’, ‘immigrants’ and ‘terrorists’. It is concepts and viral

messages from the powerful, beamed directly into your head 24 hours a

day, reprogramming your reality through television, newspapers,

advertising, radio and internet.

It is the strength of the marketing poll, the consumer survey and the

pressure group. It is the tax office, the exchange rate, the currencies

and their manipulation. It is the details of countless numbers of

individuals being processed by machines. It is statistics and their

virtualisation.

It is in the minutiae; it controls your existence without you even

seeing a prison-guard, it controls your routine, sets the clock, sets

the debt and spends the wage. It fits the lock and fills the cell. It is

an industry, a society, a way of living. It is the future you were born

for, and the life of regulatory servility it forms people to fulfil.

Embryonic, it is distributed and skeletal in form at present, but

already controls all important state structures in the post-industrial

centres of power. To a lesser extent in the peripheries, such as South

East Asia and Latin America, the prison-society is reconciling and

overcoming the contradictions inherent in the classical fascist and

dictatorial social control model through consumerism. The control

society being constructed gathers enough information to assess

individual activity and potential for deviation from top-down generated

norms. This includes monitoring physical features (eg: maintaining a

national computerised biometric and DNA database etc.) and location (eg:

GPS, mobile-phone location, financial services tracking, internet

tracking etc.), combined with behavioural patterns such as what is

consumed and accessed (eg: library books, food shopping , transport,

leisure etc.). The outcome is the dream of the cyberneticians of social

control – the perfectly ordered utopia where each polices the other and

the machine runs all.

Geotime, a security programme used by the US military, and now being

used by the London Metropolitan Police creates a graph of an

individual’s movements and communications with other people on a

three-dimensional graphic. It can be used to collate information

gathered from social networking sites, satellite navigation equipment,

mobile phones, financial transactions and IP network logs. Links between

entities can represent communications, relationships, transactions,

message logs, etc. and are visualised over time to reveal temporal

patterns and behaviours, and to highlight previously undetected links.

Once millions and millions of pieces of microdata are aggregated, you

end up with a very high-resolution picture of a targeted individual or

group of individuals. Curtis Garton, product management director for

Oculus, the company that markets the programme, is quoted as saying “...

in terms of commercial sales pretty much anybody can buy,”. Professor

Anthony Glees, director of the University of Buckingham’s Centre for

Security and Intelligence Studies, said he was aware of tracking

software such as Geotime, the use of which he described as “absolutely

right”. He is quoted as saying: “My feeling is: if it can be done, and

if its purpose is the protection of the ordinary citizen that wants to

go about their lawful business ... then it’s absolutely fine.”

These product developers and academics of social control are the

architects of structural hierarchy and injustice.

New technology is introduced in the following sequence: military

hardware/personnel (eg: internet; cybernetics, satellite technology,

microwaves etc.); prison & policing (eg: electronic tagging,

‘non-lethal’ weapons, ‘area of denial’ systems, ‘public disorder’

situations etc.); civil population (eg: home CCTV systems, personal

computers, new products, leisure time etc.). This sequence returns

military advances to entertainment, and conditions the population to be

dependent on the pieces imposed on it by the system of militarism.

Technology seeks to disappear, in an ongoing process of miniaturisation,

nanotechnology being the present expression of this tendency. This is to

become the invisible background and context of what we do and how we

live. Machines and the bureaucratic processes they initiate have come to

dominate human behaviour and damage the Earth. It has created a

situation where ordinary people are excluded from the processes of the

system around them and lack the ability to make any real decisions over

their lives. In the creation of ‘useful’ tools, human skills have

migrated to machines. Modern social control is now defined by growing

militarisation of the internal police force and transport

infrastructure, with development in the use of cutting-edge technologies

in the gathering and profiling of information that can be used and acted

on in a model of population management. All this requires networks,

servers, routers, transmission and conduit systems, admins, back-ups,

contingency exercises. Cybernetic modelling by multinational

corporations and information-age nation states already altered warfare

and civil planning decades ago. The management of a city is the

management of only so much information. The political and capitalist

functionaries understand this, that is why it is logical to them to

allow machines to become the city.

Technological convergence in fields such as artificial intelligence,

biotech, robotics, nanotech and information technology is the current

expression of hierarchical relationships that are based on a newly

defined poverty gap of understanding , knowledge and language.

Control of information is the defining factor in the control of modern

wars. As our lives take place in a social war for survival against the

techno-system, information warfare and information control/distribution

are two key factors in the new urban war which is taking place between

the system and the people of the world it wants to conquer. The social

clash is defined by access to information like any other resource or

commodity. Huge gulfs in access are simply a form of the division facing

excluded people, who have been cut from the means to secure their

survival.

Information technology has its basis in a purely productive,

quantitative sense: mass society requires it. Information technology is

what enabled the Third Reich to execute its final solution: the well

known machines of IBM completed a feat that would have taken civil

servants too long to do before the end of the war, and filed 6 million

people to their deaths. Efficiency and utilitarianism combine to form

the present.

In the capitalist economy, the flow of information is encountered as an

item to be processed with as much scrutiny as any other controlled item.

Information is as precious as, sometimes more than, the realities it

refers to. Accordingly truth has a value (economic), secrecy being

quantifiable.

The ‘intelligence agencies’ and units of secret police decreasingly rely

on so-called ‘human intelligence’: less people on the street, less

physical surveillance but more agents behind desks analysing ‘signal

intelligence’ instead. Presently machines can scan for keywords and

patterns, but it takes transcription and analysis by humans, which still

takes time. This means that often digital methods of monitoring can be

defeated by face-to-face informal meetings and being aware of the

operating environment. Despite the buggings, tailings and psy-war,

direct action and sabotage continues to spread, along with the

internationalist anarchic virus.

Information control is a state of war: internal borders, check points,

so-called ‘green zones’ and ‘total security’ environments. The important

questions are still: who knows what, where, when, how and why!

Information war is “impervious branding”, “negative briefings”, it is

the “spinning of facts”, black and grey propaganda, the fabrication of

“narratives” etc. It is a list of names, a list of materials or a list

of instructions.

Internet and social media are transforming the way people interact, and

what they demand. Information which was not widely spread 30, even 20

years ago now circulates freely, and there are more possibilities to

access previously ‘forbidden’ knowledge than ever before. From trade

secrets on methods of production, to government files on wartime

atrocities, it is easier to find out about several different shades of

truth than ever before, but it is absolutely meaningless without the

will to use this information to act. Through consumerism, a comfortable

liberalism has evolved in the post-industrial core. In the long term,

the failure of traditional supplies of resources (the situation of peak

oil production) will lead to shortages and conflict. The nation-states

cannot fulfil the demands of the people any more, and their only future

is to sell out to corporatism if they wish to hold their ranking

positions and maintain order. They are entering a period of

unprecedented ‘crisis’, with little hope of recovery unless the

development of new technologies for energy supply and production can

prevent an overwhelming collapse in industry due to the depletion of

resources and the fact of scarcity. Despite this, capitalism can and

will adapt to any phase of deprivation, as the plan of the banks is to

capture as much social wealth as is possible and eviscerate the ability

of the nation-state to resist their manipulation of the economy and

government.

Reconfigurement of power appears immanent, accompanied by a totalising

interlinked corporatist future. Corporations are networked entities that

have monolithic agendas, but because they are subject to the whims of

Capital and State, they constantly break apart and reconfigure. The

actually immutable nation-states cannot adapt to the new cybernetic,

networked, corporative future unless the ‘democratic’ relationship it

manages itself on is rejected for the adoption of the prison-society as

the social model. It already moves in this direction knowingly. The

nation-states will be superseded by the corporations and will come to

rely on them more, whilst the corporations rely on them less. If the

nation-states seek to dominate or subvert them, they’ll most likely

fail.

Now a point is reached where the strategic narratives which kept back

the unleashing of revolutionary libertarian violence are crumbling as

populations in revolt confront the plans of the rich. The

post-industrial nation-states are at risk, and are increasingly

revealing their own developed and connected prison-society projects; the

ascendant form of power relations backed by the multinational

corporations.

Some of these corporations have greater gross domestic product and

paramilitary capabilities than many countries and are responsible for

more injustice and exploitation than many small dictatorial states. In

the globalist modern society, attacks should be properly understood as

information. Rapidly moving image-narratives and violent models of urban

rebellion against the system have spread, moving amongst the disaffected

of the world. In the age of instantaneous data-exchange, the actual

technical rupture created by sabotage is often minor compared to the

impact it imparts as a signifier of collapse and refusal. The capitalist

system and civilisation itself can absorb the vast majority of sabotages

and attacks, but the new media which is based on self-production and

self-replication is creating international ‘communities’ of rebellion

with shared intersecting global histories. Highly symbolic content

exchange, theme-repetition, maximum-distribution and propulsive

coherence are the aim. The destructive violent attack or anarchist

sabotage, added to its method of communication — the powerful image or

communique — is the blood of the new anarchist direct action,

communicating a radicalised awareness based on methods of participatory

organisation and the proliferation of destructive and iconoclastic

ideas.

Anarchistic and nihilist ideas are anathema to the information-age, they

are the glitch in the database society which escapes classification and

control. The imagination walking; dangerous and capable of unforeseen

actions and moments of interconnection.

The future of civilisation is an increasing merger of state and

corporate power, with the new sciences as an essential ally. With war

and crisis always as a pretext, the elite have declared dominion over

every free individual, animal, plant and wilderness.

Emerging as the omnipresent machine intelligence that forms human beings

to its whims, it damages and manipulates entire continents of beings.

Reflecting our emptiness and our loss, the prison-society must be

fought, because the logic which it operates on is a system of closure of

parameters that work by exclusion of vast amounts of alternative

possibilities and potentials. It is self-referential and non-creative;

it pursues a model of progress that is the abolition of personal

individuality and freedom.

Our struggle pushes forward into the future, let’s strike against the

concepts and mechanisms of their control.