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Title: To our friends
Author: comité invisible
Date: January 2015
Language: en
Topics: France, Tarnac 9, technology
Source: Retrieved on January 21st, 2015 from https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/system/attachments/2530/original/fuckoffgoogleeng.pdf and March 31st, 2015 from http://bloom0101.org/?parution=to-our-friends
Notes: Two chapters that have been released in English of the book "To Our Friends". The rest of the book coming soon... perhaps.

comité invisible

To our friends

Chapter 5

1: A Strange Defeat

Anyone who lived through the days of December, 2008 in Athens knows what

the word “insurrection” signifies in a Western metropolis. The banks

were in pieces, the police stations under siege, the city in the hands

of the assailants. In the luxury shops, they were no longer repairing

the windows, which would need to be done every morning. Nothing that

embodied the police reign of normality was untouched by this wave of

fire and stones whose bearers were everywhere and representatives

nowhere—even the Syntagma Christmas tree was torched. At a certain point

the forces of order withdrew, after running out of tear-gas grenades.

Impossible to say who took over the streets then. They say it was the

“600 euros generation,” the “high schoolers,” the “anarchists,” the

“riffraff” from the Albanian immigration, they’ll say anything. As

usual, the press blamed the “koukoulofori,” the “hooded ones.” The truth

is that the anarchists were overrun by this faceless outpouring of rage.

Their monopoly on wild, masked action, inspired tags, and even Molotov

cocktails had been taken from them unceremoniously. The general uprising

they no longer dared to imagine was there, but it didn’t resemble the

idea of it they had in their minds. An unknown entity, an egregore, had

been born, a spirit that wouldn’t be appeased till everything was

reduced to cinders that deserved to be. Time was on fire. The present

was fractured as payment for all the future that had been stolen from

us.

The years that followed in Greece taught us the meaning of the word

“counter-insurgency” in a Western country. Once the wave had passed, the

hundreds of groups that had formed in the country, down to the smallest

villages, tried to stay faithful to the breach which the month of

December had opened. At one spot, people might empty the cash registers

of a supermarket, then film themselves burning the loot. At another, an

embassy might be attacked in broad daylight in solidarity with some

friend hounded by the police in his or her country. Some resolved, as in

Italy of the 1970’s, to carry the attack to a higher level and target,

using bombs or firearms, the Athens stock exchange, cops, ministries or

perhaps the Microsoft headquarters. As in the 1970’s, the left passed

new “antiterrorist” laws. The raids, arrests, and trials multiplied. For

a time, one was reduced to militating against “repression.” The European

Union, the World Bank, the IMF, in agreement with the Socialist

government, undertook to make Greece pay for the unpardonable revolt.

One should never underestimate the resentment of the wealthy towards the

insolence of the poor. They decided to bring the whole country to heel

through a string of “economic measures” more or less as violent,

although spread over time, as the revolt.

This was met by dozens of general strikes called by the unions. Workers

occupied ministries; inhabitants took possession of city halls;

university departments and hospitals that had been “sacrificed” decided

to self-organize. There was the “movement of the squares.” May 10, 2010,

five hundred thousand of us flooded into the center of Athens. There

were several attempts to burn the Parliament. February 12, 2012, an

umpteenth general strike was staged in desperate opposition to the

umpteenth austerity plan. That Sunday, all of Greece, its retirees, its

anarchists, its civil servants, its workers and its homeless

demonstrated in a state of near-insurrection. With downtown Athens again

in flames, that evening was a paroxysm of jubilation and weariness: the

movement perceived all its power, but also realized it didn’t know what

to do with it. Over the years, in spite of thousands of direct actions,

hundreds of occupations, millions of Greeks in the streets, the euphoria

of rebellion was dampened in the drop-box of “crisis.” The embers stayed

active under the ashes, certainly. The movement found other forms,

providing itself with cooperatives, social centers, “networks of

exchange without middlemen,” and even self-managed factories and health

clinics. It became more “constructive” in a sense. The fact remains that

we were defeated, that one the biggest offensives of our party during

the past few decades was repulsed through debt impositions, exaggerated

prison sentences, and generalized bankruptcy. The free used clothing

won’t make Greeks forget the counter-insurgency’s determination to

plunge them up to their necks in privation. Power may have tottered and

given the momentary impression of disappearing, but it was able to shift

the terrain of confrontation and catch the movement off balance. The

Greeks were blackmailed by this alternative: “government or chaos.” What

they got was government and chaos—plus immiseration as a bonus.

With its anarchist movement stronger than anywhere else, with its people

largely uneasy with the very fact of being governed, with its

always-already failed state, Greece stands as a textbook case of our

defeated insurrections. Jacking the police, smashing the banks and

temporarily routing a government is still not destituting it all. What

the Greek case shows us is that without a concrete idea of what a

victory would be, we can’t help but be defeated. Insurrectionary

determination is not enough; our confusion is still too thick.

Hopefully, studying our defeats will serve at least to dissipate it

somewhat.

2. Pacifists and Radicals - an infernal couple

Forty years of triumphant counterrevolution in the West have inflicted

two matching weaknesses on us: pacifism and radicalism. They’re both

harmful, but in combination they form a pitiless apparatus.

Pacifism lies, and lies to itself, by making public discussion and

general assembly the be-all and end-all of political practice. That

explains why the squares movement, for example, was incapable of

becoming anything more than a terminal starting point. To grasp what the

political means, there seems to be no choice but to take another detour

through Greece, but ancient Greece this time. After all, the political

was invented there. Pacifists are reluctant to remember this, but early

on the ancient Greeks invented democracy as a continuation of war by

other means. The assembly practice on the scale of the city-state came

directly from the assembly of warriors. Equality of speech stemmed from

equality in the face of death. Athenian democracy was a hoplitic

democracy. One was a citizen because one was a soldier—hence the

exclusion of women and slaves. In a culture as violently agonistic as

classical Greek culture, debate itself was understood as a moment of

warlike confrontation, between citizens this time, in the sphere of

speech, with the arms of persuasion. Moreover, “agon” signifies

“assembly” as much as “competition.” The complete Greek citizen was one

who was victorious both with arms and with discourse.

Above all, the ancient Greeks conceived assembly democracy in

combination with warfare as organized carnage, and the former as the

guarantor of the latter. It’s significant that the Greeks are credited

with the invention of democracy only on condition that its link with

that rather exceptional type of massacre based on the phalanx is glossed

over—that is, with the invention of a form of line warfare that replaces

skill, bravery, prowess, extraordinary strength, and genius with pure

and simple discipline, absolute submission of each to the whole. When

the Persians found themselves facing such an effective way of waging

war, but one that reduced the life of the foot soldier in the phalanx to

nothing, they rightly judged it to be perfectly barbaric, as did so many

of those enemies whom the Western armies were to crush subsequently. The

Athenian farmer getting himself heroically slaughtered in the front rank

of the phalanx in view of his friends and relatives was thus the flip

side of the active citizen taking part in the Boule. The lifeless arms

of the corpses strewn over the ancient battlefield were the necessary

counterparts of the arms raised to intervene in the deliberations of the

assembly. This Greek model of warfare is so firmly entrenched in the

Westerm imaginary it’s almost forgotten that at the very time when the

hoplites were awarding the victory to that phalanx of the two that would

accept the maximun number of deaths in the decisive clash rather than

yield ground, the Chinese were inventing an art of war that consisted

precisely in minimizing losses and avoiding battle as much as possible,

in trying to “win the battle before the battle”—even if this also meant

exterminating the defeated army once the victory was obtained. The

equation “war=confrontation army=carnage” extended from ancient Greece

down through the 20th century. It’s basically been the aberrant Western

definition of warfare for two thousand five hundred years. That

“irregular warfare,” “psychological warfare,” “little war” or “guerilla”

are the names given to what is elsewhere the norm of warfare is only one

aspect of that particular aberration.

The sincere pacifist, one who is not simply rationalizing his own

cowardice, performs the feat of being doubly mistaken about the nature

of the phenomenon he claims to be combating. Not only is war not

reducible to armed confrontation or carnage, it is the very matrix of

the assembly politics that the pacifist advocates. “A real warrior,”

said Sun Tzu, “is not bellicose. A real fighter is not violent. A victor

avoids combat.” Two world conflicts and a terrifying planetary fight

against “terrorism” have shown us that the bloodiest campaigns of

extermination are conducted in the name of peace. At bottom, the

rejection of war only expresses an infantile or senile refusal to

recognize the existence of otherness. War is not carnage, but the logic

that regulates the contact of heterogeneous powers. It is waged

everywhere, in countless forms, and more often than not by peaceful

means. If there’s multiplicity of worlds, if there’s an irreducible

plurality of forms of life, then war is the law of their co-existence on

this earth. For nothing allows us to foresee the outcome of their

encounter: contraries don’t dwell in separate worlds. If we are not

unified individuals endowed with a definitive identity as the social

policing of roles would have it, but the locus of a conflictual play of

forces whose successive configurations only form temporary equilibriums,

we have to recognize that war is in us—holy war, as Rene Daumal called

it. Peace is neither possible nor desirable. Conflict is the very stuff

of what exists. So the thing to do is to acquire an art of conducting

it, which is an art of living on a situational footing, and which

requires a finesse and an existential mobility instead of a readiness to

crush whatever is not us.

Pacifism attests therefore either to a deep stupidity or a complete lack

of good faith. Even our immune system depends on the distinction between

friend and enemy, without which we would die of cancer or some other

autoimmune disease. Actually, we do die of cancers and autoimmune

diseases. The tactical refusal of confrontation is itself only a

stratagem of warfare. It’s easy to understand, for example, why the

Oaxaca Commune immediately declared itself peaceful. It wasn’t a matter

of refuting war, but of refusing to be defeated in a confrontation with

the Mexican state and its henchmen. As some Cairo comrades explained it,

“One mustn’t mistake the tactic we employ when we chant ‘nonviolence’

for a fetishizing of non-violence.” It’s amazing, furthermore, how much

historical falsification it takes to find fore-bears who are presentable

to pacifism! Think of poor Thoreau who was barely deceased when they

made him into a theoretician of Civil Disobedience, by amputating the

title of his text, Resistance to Civil Government. This was the man who

wrote in longhand in his Plea for Captain John Brown: “ I think that for

once the Sharpe’s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous

cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them. The same

indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once will clear it

again. The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you

use it.” But the most farcical case of false genealogy has to be the way

Nelson Mandela, the founder of the armed-struggle organization of the

ANC, was turned into a global icon of peace. He lays it out himself: “I

said that the time for passive resistance had ended, that nonviolence

was a useless strategy and could never overturn a white minority regime

bent on retaining its power at any cost. At the end of the day, I said,

violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid and we must be

prepared, in the near future, to use that weapon. The crowd was excited;

the youth in particular were clapping and cheering. They were ready to

act on what I said right then and there. At that point I began to sing a

freedom song, the lyrics of which say, ‘There are the enemies, let us

take our weapons and attack them.’ I sang this song and the crowd joined

in, and when the song was finished, I pointed to the police and said,

‘There, there are our enemies!”'

Decades of pacification of the masses and mas-sification of fears have

made pacifism the spontaneous political consciousness of the citizen.

With every movement that develops now one has to grapple with this awful

state of affairs. One can cite the pacifists delivering black-clad

rioters over to the police at the Plaqa Cataluya in 2011, or the

harassment and verbal lynching of “Black Bloc” protesters by the same in

Genoa in 2001. In response to that, the revolutionary milieus secreted,

as a kind antibody, the figure of the radical— someone who always takes

the opposing view to the citizen. To the moral proscription of violence

by the one, the other always replies with his purely ideological apology

of violence. Where the pacifist always seeks to absolve himself of the

state of the world, to remain good by doing no evil, the radical seeks

to absolve himself of participation in the “existing state of things”

through minor illegalities embellished with hardcore “position

statements.” Both aspire to purity, one through violent action, the

other by abstaining from it. Each is the other’s nightmare. It’s not

certain that these two figures would go on existing for long if each one

didn’t have the other deep inside him. As if the radical only lived to

make the pacifist shudder inside, and vice versa. It’s fitting that the

bible of American citizen struggles since the 1970’s is titled Rules for

Radicals—by Saul Alinsky. Because pacifists and radicals are joined

together in the same refusal of the world. They take pleasure in their

disjunction from every situation. It gets them high, makes them feel

like they’re in touch with some sort of excellence. They prefer living

as extraterrestrials— such is the comfort that is authorized, for a

while still, by life in the metropolis, their privileged biotope.

Since the catastrophic defeat of the 1970’s, the moral question of

radicality has gradually replaced the strategic question of revolution.

That is, revolution has suffered the same fate as everything else in

those decades: it has been privatized. It has become an opportunity for

personal validation, with radicality as the standard of evaluation.

“Revolutionary” acts are no longer appraised in terms of the situation

in which they are embedded, the possibilities they open up or close.

What happens instead is that a form is extracted from each one of them.

A particular sabotage, occurring at a particular moment, for a

particular reason, becomes simply a sabotage. And the sabotage quietly

takes its place among certified revolutionary practices on a scale where

throwing a Molotov cocktail ranks higher than throwing rocks, but lower

than kneecapping, which itself is not worth as much as a bomb. The

problem is that no form of action is revolutionary in itself: sabotage

has also been practiced by reformists and by Nazis. A movement’s degree

of “violence” is not indicative of its revolutionary determination. The

“radicality” of a demonstration isn’t measured by the number of shop

windows broken. Or if it is, then the “radicality” criterion should be

left to those in the habit of measuring political phenomena and ranking

them on their skeletal moral scale. Anyone who begins to frequent

radical milieus is immediately struck by the gap between their discourse

and their practice, between their ambitions and their isolation. It

seems as if they were dedicated to a kind of constant

self-incapacitation. One soon understands that they’re not engaged in

constructing a real revolutionary force, but in a quest for radicality

that is sufficient in itself— and is played out equally well on the

terrain of direct action, feminism or ecology. The petty terror that

reigns there and makes everyone so stiff is not that of the Bolshevik

Party. It’s more like that of fashion, that terror which no one exerts

in person, but which affects everyone alike. In these milieus, one is

afraid of not being radical anymore, just as elsewhere one fears not

being fashionable, cool or hip. It doesn’t take much to spoil a

reputation. One avoids going to the root of things in favor of a

superficial consumption of theories, demos, and relations. The fierce

competition between groups and inside them causes them to periodically

implode. But there’s always fresh, young, and abused flesh to make up

for the departure of the exhausted, the damaged, the disgusted, and the

emptied-out. An a posteriori bewilderment overtakes the person who’s

deserted these circles: how can anyone submit to such a mutilating

pressure for such enigmatic stakes? It’s approximately the same kind

ofbewil-derment that must take hold of any overworked ex-manager turned

baker when he looks back on his previous life. The isolation of these

milieus is structural: between them and the world they’ve interposed

radicality as a standard. They don’t perceive phenomena anymore, just

their measure. At a certain point in the autophagy, some will compete

for most radical by critiquing the milieu itself, which won’t make the

slightest dent in its structure. “It seems to us that what really

reduces our freedom,” wrote Malatesta, “and makes intiative impossible,

is disempowering isolation.” This being the case, that a fraction of the

anarchists declare themselves “nihilists” is only logical: nihilism is

the incapacity to believe in what one does believe in—in our context,

revolution. Besides, there are no nihilists, there are only powerless

individuals.

The radical defining himself as a producer of actions and discourses has

ended up fabricating a purely quantitative idea of revolution—as a kind

of crisis of overproduction of acts of individual revolt. “Let’s not

lose sight of the fact,” wrote Emile Henry back then already, “that

revolution will not be the resultant of all these particular revolts.”

History is there to contradict that thesis: whether it’s the French,

Russian, or Tunisian revolution, in every instance revolution results

from the shock encounter between a particular act—the storming of a

prison, a military defeat, the suicide of a mobile fruit vendor—and the

general situation, and not the arithmetical addition of separate acts of

revolt. Meanwhile, that absurd definition of revolution is doing its

foreseeable damage: one wears oneself out in an activism that leads

nowhere, one devotes oneself to a dreadful cult of performance where

it’s a matter of actualizing one’s radical identity at every moment,

here and now— in a demo, in love, or in discourse. This lasts for a

time—the time of a burnout, depression, or repression. And one hasn’t

changed anything.

A gesture is revolutionary not by its own content but by the sequence of

effects it engenders. The situation is what determines the meaning of

the act, not the intention of its authors. Sun Tzu said that “victory

must be demanded of the situation.” Every situation is composite,

traversed by lines of force, tensions, explicit or latent conflicts.

Engaging with the war that is present, acting strategically, requires

that we start from an openness to the situation, that we undersand its

inner dynamic, the relations of force that configure it, the polarities

that give it its dynamism. An action is revolutionary or not depending

on the meaning it acquires from contact with the world. Throwing a rock

is never just “rock-throwing.” It can freeze a situation or set off an

intifada. The idea that a struggle can be “radicalized” by injecting a

whole passel of allegedly radical practices and discourses into it is

the politics of an extraterrestrial. A movement lives only through a

series of shifts that it effects over time. So at every moment there is

a certain distance between its present state and its potential. If it

stops developing, if it leaves its potential unrealized, it dies. A

decisive act is one that is a notch ahead of the movement’s state, and

which, breaking with the status quo, gives it access to its own

potential. This act can be that of occupying, smashing, attacking, or

simply speaking truthfully. The state of the movement is what decides. A

thing is revolutionary that actually causes revolutions. While this can

only be determined after the event, a certain sensitivity to the

situation plus a dose of historical knowledge helps one intuit the

matter.

Let’s leave the radicality worry to the depressives, the Young-Girls,

and the losers, then. The real question for revolutionaries is how to

make the lively powers in which one participates increase, how to

nurture the revolutionizing developments so as to arrive finally at a

revolutionary situation. All those who draw satisfaction from

dogmatically contrasting “radicals” with “citizens,” “active rebels”

with the passive population, place obstacles in the path of such

developments. On this point, they anticipate the work of the police. In

the current period, tact should be considered the cardinal revolutionary

virtue, and not abstract radicality—and by “tact” we mean the art of

nurturing revolutionizing developments.

Among the miracles of the Susa Valley struggle, one has to include the

way it succeeded in tearing a good number of radicals away from their

painfully constructed identity. It brought them back down to earth. In

contact again with a real situation, they were able to shed most of

their ideological spacesuit—not without incurring the inexhaustible

resentment of those still confined in their interstellar radicality

where breathing is such a problem. Undoubtedly, the happy outcome was

due to this struggle’s special art of avoiding capture in the image that

power holds out to it— whether it’s that of an ecology movement of

legalistic citizens or that of an armed-violence vanguard. Alternating

family-style demonstrations with attacks on the TAV construction site,

resorting to sabotage at one moment and partnership with the valley’s

mayors the next, associating anarchists and Catholic grandmas, this

struggle is revolutionary at least insofar as it has been able to

deactivate the infernal coupling of pacifism and radicalism. “Living in

a political manner,” reflected a Stalinist dandy shortly before dying,

“means acting instead of being acted upon, it means doing politics

instead of being done by it, remade by it. It’s to engage in combat, a

series of combats, to wage war, one’s own war with war objectives,

immediate and longterm perspectives, a strategy, a tactic.”

3. Government as counter-insurgency

“Civil war,” said Foucault, “is the matrix of all the power struggles,

of all the power strategies and, consequently, the matrix of all the

struggles over and against power.” He added, “Civil war not only brings

collective elements into play, but it constitutes them. Far from being

the process through which one comes down again from the republic to

individuality, from the sovereign to the state of nature, from the

collective order to the war of all against all, civil war is the process

through and by which a certain number of new collectivities that had not

seen the light of day constitute themselves.” It’s on this plane of

perception that basically every political existence deploys. Pacifism

that has already lost and radicalism that only intends to lose are two

ways of not seeing this. Of not seeing that war is not essentially

military in nature. That life is essentially strategic. The irony of our

epoch has it that the only ones who situate war where it is conducted,

and thus reveal the plane where all government operates, happen to be

the counter-revolutionaries themselves. It is striking to note that in

the last half-century the non-militaries began rejecting war in all its

forms, and at the very time when the militaries were developing a

non-military concept, a civil concept of war. A few examples, casually

excerpted from contemporary articles:

“The locus of collective armed conflict has gradually expanded the

battlefield to include the whole earth. In like manner, its duration may

now be indefinite, without there being a declaration of war or any

armistice (...) For this reason contemporary strategists emphasize that

modern victory results from conquering the hearts of the members of a

population rather than their territory. Submission must be gained

through adherence and adherence through esteem. Indeed, it’s a matter of

imposing one’s purpose on the inner individual, where the social contact

between human collectivities is established at present. Stripped bare by

world homogenization, contacted by globalisation, and penetrated by

telecommunication, henceforth the front will be situated in the inner

being of each of the members that make up the collectivities. (... )

This sort of fabrication of passive partisans can be summed up by the

catchphrase: ‘The front within every person, and no one on any front.’

(...) The whole politico-strategic challenge of a world that is neither

at war or at peace, which precludes all settlement of conflict by means

of the classic military juridical voices, consists in preventing passive

partisans on the verge of action, at the threshold of belligerence, from

becoming active partisans.” (Laurent Da-net, “La polemosphere”)

“At present, given that the terrain of warfare has extended beyond the

ground, sea, space, and electronic fields into those of society,

politics, economics, diplomacy, culture, and even psychology, the

interaction among the different factors makes it very difficult to

maintain the preponderance of the military domain as the dominant one in

every war. The idea that war can unfold in unwarlike domains is foreign

to reason and hard to accept, but events increasingly show this to be

the trend. (... ) In this sense, there no longer exists any area of life

that cannot serve war and there are almost no areas remaining that do

not present the offensive aspect of war.” (Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui,

La guerre hors li-mite)

“The probable war is not waged ‘between’ societies, but ‘within’

societies (...) Since the objective is human society, its governance,

its social contract, its institutions, and no longer this or that

province, river, or border, there is no longer any line or terrain to

conquer or protect. The only front that the engaged forces must hold is

that of the populations. (... ) To win the war is to control the milieu.

(... ) It’s no longer a question of perceiving a mass of tanks and of

pinpointing potential targets, but of understanding social milieus,

behaviors, psychologies. It’s a matter of influencing human intentions

through a selective and appropriate application of force. (...) Military

actions are truly ‘a manner of speaking’: henceforth, every major

operation is above all a communication operation whose every act, even a

minor act, speaks louder than words. (...) To wage war is first and

foremost to manage perceptions, those of the set of actors, whether

close by or far away, direct or indirect.” (General Vincent Desportes,

La guerre probable)

“The developed postmodern societies have become extremely complex and

hence very fragile. To prevent their collapse in the event of a

‘breakdown,’ it’s imperative that they decentralize (the salvation will

come from the margins and not the institutions) (... ) It will be

necessary to rely on local forces (self-defense militias, paramilitary

groups, private military associations), first from a practical

standpoint owing to their knowledge of the milieu and the populations,

second, because on the part of the State it will be a mark of confidence

that federates the different initiatives and reinforces them, and last

and most important, because they are more apt to find appropriate and

original (unconventional) solutions to delicate situations. In other

words, the response called for by unconventional warfare needs to be

citizen-based and paramilitary, rather than having a police and military

focus. (...) If Hezbollah has become a first-rate international actor,

if the neo-Zapatista movement manages to represent an alternative to

neoliberal globalization, then one has admit that the ‘local’ can

interact with the ‘global’ and that this interaction is truly one of the

major strategic characteristics of our time. (...) To put it briefly, a

local-global interaction must be answered by a different interaction of

the same type, supported not by the state apparatus (diplomacy, army),

but by the local element par excellence—the citizen.” (Bernard Wicht,

Vers l’ordre oblique : la contre-guerilla a l’age de l’infoguerre)

After reading that, one has a slightly different take on the role of the

militias of citizen sweepers and the appeals for snitching following the

riots of August 1011 in England, or the bringing in— then the opportune

elimination when “the pitbull got too big”—of the Golden Dawn fascists

as players in the Greek political game. To say nothing of the recent

arming of citizen militias by the Mexican federal state in Michoacan.

What is happening to us at present can be summed up more or less in this

way: from being a military doctrine, counterinsurgency has become a

principle of government. One of the cables of American diplomacy

revealed by Wikileaks confirms this, bluntly: “The program of

pacification of the favelas incorporates certain characteristics of the

doctrine and strategy of counterinsurgency of the United States in

Afghanistan and Iraq.” The era can be reduced ultimately to this

struggle, this race, between the possibility of insurrection and the

partisans of counter-insurrection. Moreover, this is what the rare

outburst of political chattering triggered in the West by the “Arab

revolutions” served to mask. To mask, for example, the fact that cutting

off all communication in the working-class areas, as Mubarak did at the

start of the uprising, was not just the impulsive act of an addled

dictator, but a strict application of the NATO report, Urban Operations

in the Year 2020.

There is no world government; what there is instead is a worldwide

network of local apparatuses of government, that is, a global,

reticular, counterinsurgency machinery. Snowden’s revelations show this

amply: secret services, multinationals, and political networks

collaborate shamelessly, even beyond a nation-state level that nobody

cares about now. In this regard, there is no center and periphery,

internal security and foreign operations. What is tried out on faraway

peoples will be the fate that is in store for one’s own people. The

troops that massacred the Parisian proletariat in June of 1848 had honed

their skills in the “street war,”with its torchings called enfumades, in

Algeria during colonization. The Italian mountain infantry batallions,

recently returned from Afghanistan, were redeployed in the Susa Valley.

In the West, using the armed forces on national territory in cases of

major disorder is longer even a taboo, it’s a standard scenario. From

health crisis to imminent terrorist attack, their minds have been

methodically prepared for it. They train everywhere for urban battles,

for “pacification,” for “post-conflict” stabilization. They maintain

their readiness for the coming insurrections.

The counter-insugency doctrines should be read, therefore, as theories

of the war being waged against us, doctrines that partly define, among

so many other things, our common situation in this era. They should be

read both as a qualitative leap in the concept of war, short of which we

cannot situate ourselves, and as a deceptive mirror. Although the

doctrines of counter-insurgency warfare are patterned after the

successive revolutionary doctrines, one cannot negatively deduce any

theory of insurrection from counter-insurgency theories. That is the

logical trap. It no longer suffices for us to wage the “little war,” to

attack by surprise, to deprive the adversary of any target. Even that

kind of asymmetry has been diminished. As far as war as strategy is

concerned, it’s not enough to catch up: we have to move into the lead.

We need a strategy that’s aimed not at the adversary but at his

strategy, that turns it back against itself, making it so that the more

he thinks he’s winning the more surely he’s heading towards his defeat.

The fact that counterinsurgency has made society itself its theater of

operations doesn’t at all indicate that the war to be waged is the

“social war” that some anarchists mouth off about. The main defect of

this notion is that by lumping the offensives carried out by “the State

and Capital” and those of our adversaries under the same rubric, it

places subversives in a relation of symmetrical warfare. The smashed

window of an Air France office in retaliation for the expulsion of

undocumented migrants is declared to be an “act of social war,” on a par

with a wave of arrests targeting people fighting against detention

centers. While we have to recognize an undeniable determination on the

part of many upholders of “social war,” they accept fighting the state

head-to-head, on a terrain that has always belonged to it and no one

else. Only the forces involved in this case are dysemmetrical. A

crushing defeat is inevitable.

The idea of social war is actually just an unsuccessful updating of

“class war,” maintaining that each one’s position in the relations of

production no longer has the formal clarity of the Fordist factory. It

sometimes seems as if revolutionaries are doomed to constitute

themselves on the same model as what they’re fighting. Thus, as a member

of the International Workingmen’s Association summarized it in 1871, the

bosses being organized worldwide around their interests as a class, the

proletariat must likewise organize itself worldwide, as a working class

and around its interests. As a member of the young Bolshevik Party

explained it, the tsarist regime was organized into a disciplined and

hierarchical politico-military machine, so the Party should also

organize itself into a disciplined and hierarchical politico-military

machine. One can multiply the historical cases, all equally tragic, of

this curse of symmetry. Take the Algerian FLN, which in its methods came

to closely resemble the colonial occupiers well before its victory. Or

the Red Brigades, who imagined that by taking out the fifty men who were

thought to constitute the “core of the State” they would be able to

appropriate the whole machine. Today, the most wrongheaded expression of

this tragedy of symmetry comes out of the mouths of the new left. What

they say is that set against the diffuse Empire, which is structured

into a network, but endowed with command centers all the same, there are

the multitudes, just as diffuse, structured into a network, but endowed

nonetheless with a bureaucracy capable of occupying the command centers

when the day comes.

Marked by this kind of symmetry, revolt is bound to fail—not only

because it presents an easy target, a recognizable face, but above all

because it eventually takes on the features of its adversary. To be

convinced of this, open Counter-insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice,

by David Galula, for example. One finds therein, methodically laid out

in detail, the steps to a definitive victory of a loyalist force over

generic insurgents. “The best cause for the insurgent is one that, by

definition, can attract the largest number of supporters and repel the

minimum of opponents... It is not absolutely necessary that the problem

be acute, although the insurgent’s work is facilitated if such is the

case. If the problem is merely latent, the first task of the insurgent

is to make it acute by ‘raising the political consciousness of the

masses’...The insurgent is not restricted to the choice of a single

cause. Unless he has found an overall cause, like anti-colonialism,

which is sufficient in itself because it combines all the political,

social, economic, racial, religious, and cultural causes described

above, he has much to gain by selecting an assortment of causes

especially tailored for the various groups in the society that he is

seeking to take over.”

Who is Galula’s “insurgent’? None other than the distorted reflection of

the Western politician, official, or publicist: cynical, external to

every situation, devoid of any genuine desire, except for an outsize

hunger for control. The insurgent that Galula knows how to combat is a

stranger to the world just as he’s a stranger to any belief. For that

officer, Galula, insurrection never emanates from the population, which

only aspires to security, basically, and tends to go with the party that

protects it the best or threatens it the least. The population is only a

pawn, an inert mass, a marsh, in the struggle between several elites. It

can seem astonishing that power’s notion of the insurgent wavers between

the figure of the fanatic and that of the crafty lobbyist—but this is

less surprising than the eagerness of so many revolutionaries to put on

those unpleasant masks. Always this same symmetrical understanding of

warfare, even the “asymmetrical” kind—grou-puscules competing for

control of the population, and always maintaining an outsider’s relation

with it. In the end, this is the monumental error of counterinsurgency:

despite its success absorbing the asymmetry introduced by guerilla

tactics, it still continues to produce the figure of the “terrorist”

based on what it is itself. And this is to our advantage, then, provided

we don’t allow ourselves to embody that figure. It’s what all effective

revolutionary strategy must accept as its point of departure. The

failure of the American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan bears witness.

Counterinsurgency did such a good job of turning “the population” around

that the Obama administration has to routinely and surgically

assassinate, via drone, anything that might resemble an insurgent.

4. Ontological asymmetry and happiness

If the insurgents’ war against the government needs to be asymmetrical,

it’s because there is an ontological asymmetry between them, and hence a

disagreement about the very definition of war, about its methods as well

as its objectives. We other revolutionaries are both the focus and the

target of the permanent offensive that government has become. We are the

“hearts and minds” that must be conquered. We are the “crowds” that are

to be controlled. We are the environment in which the governmental

agents evolve and which they mean to subdue, and not a rival entity in

the race for power. We don’t fight in the midst of the people “like fish

in water”; we’re the water itself, in which our enemies flounder—soluble

fish. We don’t hide in ambush among the plebs of this world, because

it’s also us that the plebs hide among. The vitality and the plundering,

the rage and the craftiness, the truth and the subterfuge all spring

from deep within us. There is no one to be organized. We are that

material which grows from within, which organizes itself and develops

itself. The true asymmetry lies there, and our real position of strength

is there. Those who make their belief into an article of export, through

terror or performance, instead of dealing with what exists where they

are, only cut themselves off from themselves and their base. It’s not a

matter of snatching the “support of the population,” nor even its

indulgent passivity, from the enemy: we must make it so there is no

longer a population. The population has never been the object of

government without first being its product. It ceases to exist once it

ceases to be governable. This is what’s involved in the muffled battle

that rages after every uprising: dissolving the power that had formed,

focused, and deployed in that event. Governing has never been anything

but denying the people all political capacity, that is, preventing

insurrection.

Separating those governed from their political power to act is what the

police are about whenever they try to “isolate the violent ones” at the

end of a righteous demonstration. Nothing is more effective for crushing

an insurrection than causing a split within the insurgent mass between

an innocent or vaguely consenting population and its vanguard, who are

militarized, hence minoritarian, usually clandestine, and soon to be

“terrorist.” We owe the most complete example of such a tactic to Frank

Kitson, the godfather of British counterinsurgency. In the years

following the extraordinary conflict that engulfed Northern Ireland in

August 1969, the great strength of the IRA was to stand together with

the Catholic districts that had declared themselves autonomous and

called for its assistance, at Belfast and Derry, during the riots. Free

Derry, Short Strand, Ardoyne: three of those no-go areas that one finds

so often in apartheid territories, and still encircled today by

kilometers of “peace lines.” The ghettoes had risen up, barricading

their entry points and closing them to the cops and the loyalists.

Fifteen-year-old kids alternated mornings at school with nights on the

barricades. The most repectable members of the community did the

shopping for ten and organized clandestine grocery outlets for those who

couldn’t safely go out on their own. Although caught unprepared by the

summer’s events, the Provisional IRA blended into the extremely dense

ethical fabric of those enclaves that were in a constant state of

insurrection. From that position of irreducible strength, everything

seemed possible. 1972 would be the year of victory.

Somewhat taken aback, the counterinsurgency deployed its major means. At

the end of a military operation with no equivalent for Great Britain

since the Suez crisis, the districts were emptied out, the enclaves were

broken, in this way effectively separating the “professional”

revolutionaries from the riotous populations that risen up in 1969,

tearing them away from the thousand complicities that had been woven.

Through this maneuver, the Provisional IRA was constrained to being

nothing more than an armed faction, a paramilitary group, impressive and

determined to be sure, but headed toward exhaustion, internment without

trial, and summary executions. The tactic of repression seems to have

consisted in bringing a radical revolutionary subject into existence,

and separating it from everything that made it a vital force of the

Catholic community: a territorial anchorage, an everyday life, a

youthfulness. And as if that wasn’t enough, false IRA attacks were

organized to finish turning a paralyzed population against it. From

counter gangs to false flag operations, nothing was ruled out for making

the IRA into a clandestine monster, territorially and politically

detached from what constituted the strength of the republican movement:

the districts, their sense of making-do and of organization, their

custom of rioting. Once the “paramilitaries” were isolated, and the

thousand exceptional procedures for annihilating them were routinized,

it was just a matter of waiting for the “troubles” to dissipate of their

own accord.

When the most indiscriminate repression comes down on us, we should be

careful, then, not to see it as the conclusive proof of our radicality.

We shouldn’t think they are out to destroy us. We should start rather

from the hypothesis that they’re out to produce us. Produce us as a

political subject, as “anarchists,” as “Black Bloc,” as “anti-system”

radicals, to extract us from the generic population by assigning us a

political identity. When repression strikes us, let’s begin by not

taking ourselves for ourselves. Let’s dissolve the fantastical terrorist

subject which the counterinsurgency theorists take such pains to

impersonate, a subject the representation of which serves mainly to

produce the “population” as a foil—the population as an apathetic and

apolitical heap, an immature mass just good enough for being governed,

for having its hunger pangs and consumer dreams satisfied.

Revolutionaries have no call to convert the “population” from the bogus

exteriority of who knows what “social project.” They should start

instead from their own presence, from the places they inhabit, the

territories they’re familiar with, the ties that link them to what is

going on around them. Identification of the enemy and effective

strategies and tactics are things that come from living and not from any

prior declaration of belief. The logic of increasing power is all that

can set against that of taking power. Fully inhabiting is all that can

be set against the paradigm of government. One can throw oneself onto

the state apparatus, but if the terrain that’s won is not immediately

filled with a new life, government will end up taking it back. Raul

Zibechi writes this about the Aymara insurrection in Bolivia in 2003:

“Actions of this magnitude cannot be consummated without the existence

of a dense network of relationships between persons—re-lationships that

are also forms of organization. The problem is that we are unwilling to

consider that in everyday life the relationships between neighbors,

between friends, between comrades, or between family, are as important

as those of the union, the party, or even the state itself. (...)

Established relationships, codified through formal agreements, are often

more important in Western culture than those loyalties woven by informal

ties” We need to give the same care to the smallest everyday details of

our shared life as we give to the revolution. For insurrection is the

displacement of this organization that is not one—not being detachable

from ordinary life— onto an offensive terrain. It is a qualitative leap

in the ethical dimension, not a break with the everyday, finally

consummated. Zibechi goes on to say: “The same bodies that sustain

everyday life sustain the uprising (the neighborhood assemblies in the

local councils of El Alto). The rotation of tasks and the obligatory

character ensures everyday community life, just as it guaranteed the

task of blocking roads and streets.” In this way the sterile distinction

between spontaneity and organization is dissolved. There’s not on one

hand a prepolitical, unreflected, “spontaneous” sphere of existence and

on the other a political, rational, organized sphere. Those with shitty

relationships can only have a shitty politics.

This doesn’t mean that in order to conduct a winning offensive we must

ban any inclination to conflict among us—conflict, not double dealinand

scheming. It’s largely because the Palestinian resistance has never

prevented differences from existing within it—even at the cost of open

confrontations—that it has been able to give the Israeli army a hard

time. Here as elsewhere, political fragmentation is just as much the

sign of an undeniable ethical vitality as it is the nightmare of the

intelligence agencies charged with mapping, then annihilating,

resistance. An Israeli architect writes as follows: “The Israeli and

Palestinian methods of fighting are fundamentally different.

The fractured Palestinian resistance is composed of a multiplicity of

organizations, each having a more or less independent armed wing—Iz Adin

al-Qassam for Hamas, Saraya al Quds (the Jerusalem Brigades) for Islamic

Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Force 17 and Tanzim al-Fatah for Fatah.

These are supplemented by the independent PRC (Popular Resistance

Committees) and imagined or real members of Hizbollah and/or Al-Qaeda.

The fact that these organizations shift between cooperation,

competition, and violent conflict increases the general complexity of

their interactions and with it their collective capacity, efficiency,

and resilience. The diffuse nature of Palestinian resistance and the

fact that knowledge, skills, and munitions are transferred within and

between these organizations—and that they sometimes stage joint attacks

and at others compete to outdo each other—substantially reduces the

effect that the Israeli occupation forces seek to achieve by attacking

them.” Accommodating internal conflict when it presents itself honestly,

doesn’t interfere at all with the concrete elaboration of an

insurrectionary strategy. On the contrary, it’s the best way for a

movement to stay vital, to keep the essential questions open, to make

the necessary shifts in a timely manner. But if we accept civil war,

including in our midst, it’s not only because in itself this constitutes

a good strategy for defeating imperial offensives. It’s also and above

all because it accords with the idea we have of life. Indeed, if being

revolutionary implies an attachment to certain truths, it follows from

the irreducible plurality of the latter that our party will never enjoy

a peaceful unity. As far as organization is concerned, then, there will

be no choosing between fraternal peace and fratricidal war. We will need

to choose between the forms of internal confrontations that strengthen

revolutions and those that hinder them.

To the question, “Your idea of happiness?” Marx replied, “To fight.” To

the question, “Why do you fight?” we reply that our idea of happiness

requires it.

We would have liked to be brief To forgo genealogies,

etymologies, quotations. That a poem, a song, would suffice.

We wished it would be enough to write “revolution” on a wall

for the street to catch fire. But it was necessary to untangle the

skein of the present, and in places to settle accounts with

ancient falsehoods. It was necessary to try and digest seven

years of historical convulsions. And decipher a world in which

confusion has blossomed on a tree of misunderstanding. We've

taken the time to write with the hope that others

would take the time to read. Writing is a vanity, unless it's for

the friend. Including

the friend one doesn’t know yet. In the coming years, we'll be

wherever the fires are lit. During the periods of respite, we're

not that hard to find. We’ll continue the effort of clarification

we've begun here. There will be dates and places where we can

mass our

forces against logical targets. There will be dates and places

for meeting up and

debating.

We don't know if the insurrection will have the look of a heroic

assault, or if it will be a planetary fit of crying, a sudden

expression offeeling after decades of

anesthesia, misery, and stupidity. Nothing guarantees that the

fascist option won't be

preferred to revolution. We'll do what there is to be done.

Thinking, attacking, building— such is our fabulous agenda. This

text is the beginning of a plan.

See you soon,

Invisible Committee, October 2014

Chapter ?

1. There are no “Facebook revolutions”, but there is a new science

of government, cybernetics

The genealogy is not well known, and it deserves to be. Twitter descends

from a program named TXTMob, invented by American activists as a way to

coordinate via cellphones during protests against the Republican

National Convention in 2004. The application was used by some 5000

people to share real-time information about the different actions and

movements of the police. Twitter, launched two years later, was used for

similar purposes, in Moldova for example, and the Iranian demonstrations

of 2009 popularized the idea that it was the tool for coordinating

insurgents, particularly against the dictatorships. In 2011, when

rioting reached an England thought to be definitively impassive, some

journalists were sure that tweeting had helped spread the disturbances

from their epicenter, Tottenham. Logical, but it turned out that for

their communication needs the rioters had gone with BlackBerry, whose

secure telephones had been designed for the upper management of banks

and multinationals, and the British secret service didn’t even have the

decryption keys for them. Moreover, a group of hackers hacked into

BlackBerry’s site to dissuade the company from cooperating with the

police in the aftermath. If Twitter enabled a self-organization on this

occasion it was more that of the citizen sweepers who volunteered to

sweep up and repair the damage caused by the confrontations and looting.

That effort was relayed and coordinated by Cri- sisCommons, a “global

network of volunteers working together to build and use tecnology tools

to help respond to disasters and improve resiliency and response before

a crisis.” At the time, a French left-wing rag compared this undertaking

to the organization of the Puerta del Sol during the Indignants

Movement, as it’s called. The comparison between an initiative aimed at

a quick return to order and the fact of several thousand people

organizing to live on an occupied plaza, in the face of repeated

assaults by the police, may look absurd. Unless we see in them just two

spontaneous, connectedcivic gestures. From 15-M on, the Spanish

“indignados,” a good number of them at least, called attention to their

faith in a citizens’ utopia. For them the digital social networks had

not only accelerated the spread of the 2011 movement, but also and more

importantly had set the terms of a new type of political organization,

for the struggle and for society: a connected, participatory,

transparent democracy. It’s bound to be upsetting for “revolutionaries”

to share such an idea with Jared Cohen, the American government’s

anti-terrorism adviser who contacted Twitter during the “Iranian

revolution” of 2009 and urged them to maintain it’s functioning despite

censorship. Jared Cohen has recently cowritten with Google’s former CEO,

Eric Schmidt, a creepy political book, The New Digital Age. On its first

page one reads this misleading sentence: “The Internet is the largest

experiment involving anarchy in history.”

“In Tripoli, Tottenham or Wall Street people have been protesting failed

policies and the meager possibilities afforded by the electoral

system... They have lost faith in government and other centralized

institutions of power. There is no viable justification for a democratic

system in which public participation is limited to voting. We live in a

world in which ordinary people write Wikipedia; spend their evenings

moving a telescope via the Internet and making discoveries half a world

away; get online to help organize a protest in cyberspace and in the

physical world, such as the revolutions in Egypt or Tunisia or the

demonstrations of the the ‘indignados’ throughout Spain; or pore over

the cables revealed by WikiLeaks. The same technologies enabling us to

work together at a distance are creating the expectation to do better at

governing ourselves.” This is not an “ indignada"speaking, or if so,

she’s one who camped for a long time in an office of the White House:

Beth Noveck directed the “Open Government Initiative” of the Obama

administration. That program starts from the premise that the

governmental function should consist in linking up citizens and making

available information that’s now held inside the bureaucratic machine.

Thus, according to New York’s city hall, “the hierarchical structure

based on the notion that the government knows what’s good for you is

outdated. The new model for this century depends on co-creation and

collaboration.”

Unsurprisingly, the concept of Open Government Data was formulated not

by politicians but by computer programmers - fervent defenders of open

source software development, moreover - who invoked the U.S. founding

fathers’ conviction that “every citizen should take part in government.”

Here the government is reduced to the role of team leader or

facilitator, ultimately to that of a “platform for coordinating citizen

action.” The parallel with social networks is fully embraced. “How can

the city think of itself in the same way Facebook has an API ecosystem

or Twitter does?” is the question on their minds at the New York mayor’s

office. “This can enable us to produce a more user-centric experience of

government. It’s not just the consumption but the co-production of

government services and democracy.” Even if these declarations are seen

as fanciful cogitations, as products of the somewhat overheated brains

of Silicon Valley, they still confirm that the practice of government is

less and less identified with state sovereignty. In the era of networks,

governing means ensuring the interconnection of people, objects, and

machines as well as the free - i.e., transparent and

controllable—circulation of information that is generated in this

manner. This is an activity already conducted largely outside the state

apparatuses, even if the latter try by every means to maintain control

of it. It’s becoming clear that Facebook is not so much the model of a

new form of government as its reality already in operation. The fact

that revolutionaries employed it and still employ it to link up in the

street en masse only proves that it’s possible, in some places, to use

Facebook against itself, against its essential function, which is

policing.

When computer scientists gain entry, as they’re doing, into the

presidential palaces and mayors’ offices of the world’s largest cities,

it’s not so much to set up shop as it is to explain the new rules of the

game: government administrations are now competing with alternative

providers of the same services who, unfortunately for them, are several

steps ahead. Suggesting their cloud as a way to shelter government

services from revolutions -services like the land registry, soon to be

available as a smartphone application- the authors of The New Digital

Age inform us and them: “In the future, people won’t just back up their

data; they’ll back up their government.” And in case it’s not quite

clear who the boss is now, it concludes: “Governments may collapse and

wars can destroy physical infrastructure but virtual institutions will

survive.” With Google, what is concealed beneath the exterior of an

innocent interface and a very effective search engine, is an explicitly

political project. An enterprise that maps the planet Earth, sending its

teams into every street of every one of its towns, cannot have purely

commercial aims. One never maps a territory that one doesn’t contemplate

appropriating. “Don’t be evil!”: let yourself go.

It’s a little troubling to note that under the tents that covered

Zucotti Park and in the offices of planning -a little higher in the New

York sky—the response to disaster is conceived in the same terms:

connection, networking, self-organization. This is a sign that at the

same time that the new communication technologies were put into place

that would not only weave their web over the Earth but form the very

texture of the world in which we live, a certain way of thinking and of

governing was in the process of winning. Now, the basic principles of

this new science of government were framed by the same ones, engineers

and scientists, who invented the technical means of its application. The

history is as follows. In the 1940’s, while he was finishing his work

for the American army, the mathematician Norbert Wiener undertook to

establish both a new science and a new definition of man, of his

relationship with the world and with himself. Claude Shannon, an

engineer at Bell and M.I.T., whose work on sampling theory contributed

to the development of telecommunications, took part in this project. As

did the amazing Gregory Bateson, a Harvard anthropologist, employed by

the American secret service in Southeast Asia during the Second World

War, a sophisticated fan of LSD and founder of the Palo Alto School. And

there was the truculent John von Neumann, writer of the First Draft of a

Report on the EDVAC, regarded as the founding text of computer science -

the inventor of game theory, a decisive contribution to neoliberal

economics - a proponent of a preventive nuclear strike against the

U.S.S.R., and who, after having determined the optimal points for

releasing the Bomb on Japan, never tired of rendering various services

to the American army and the budding C.I.A. Hence the very persons who

made substantial contributions to the new means of communication and to

data processing after the Second World War also laid the basis of that

“science” that Wiener called “cybernetics.” A term that Ampere, a

century before, had had the good idea of defining as the “science of

government.” So we’re talking about an art of governing whose formative

moments are almost forgotten but whose concepts branched their way

underground, feeding into information technology as much as biology,

artificial intelligence, management, or the cognitive sciences, at the

same time as the cables were strung one after the other over the whole

surface of the globe.

We’re not undergoing, since 2008, an abrupt and unexpected “economic

crisis,” we’re only witnessing the slow collapse of political economy as

an art of governing. Economics has never been a reality or a science;

from its inception in the 17th century, it’s never been anything but an

art of governing populations. Scarcity had to be avoided if riots were

to be avoided - hence the importance of “grains” - and wealth was to be

produced to increase the power of the sovereign. “The surest way for all

government is to rely on the interests of men,” said Hamilton. Once the

“natural” laws of economy were elucidated, governing meant letting its

harmonious mechanism operate freely and moving men by manipulating their

interests. Harmony, the predictability of behaviors, a radiant future,

an assumed rationality of the actors: all this implied a certain trust,

the ability to “give credit.” Now, it’s precisely these tenets of the

old governmental practice which management through permanent crisis is

pulverizing. We’re not experiencing a “crisis of trust” but the end of

trust, which has become superfluous to government. Where control and

transparency reign, where the subjects’ behavior is anticipated in real

time through the algorithmic processing of a mass of available data

about them, there’s no more need to trust them or for them to trust.

It’s sufficient that they be sufficiently monitored. As Lenin said,

“Trust is good, control is better.”

The West’s crisis of trust in itself, in its knowledge, in its language,

in its reason, in its liberalism, in its subject and the world, actually

dates back to the end of the 19th century; it breaks forth in every

domain with and around the First World War. Cybernetics developed on

that open wound of modernity. It asserted itself as a remedy for the

existential and thus governmental crisis of the West. As Norbert Wiener

saw it, “We are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a

shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish,

and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a

manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity”.

Cybernetic government is inherently apocalyptic. Its purpose is to

locally impede the spontaneously entropic, chaotic movement of the world

and to ensure “enclaves of order,” of stability, and - who knows? - the

perpetual self-regulation of systems, through the unrestrained,

transparent, and controllable circulation of information. “Communication

is the cement of society and those whose work consists in keeping the

channels of communication open are the ones on whom the continuance or

downfall of our civilization largely depends,” declared Wiener,

believing he knew. As in every period of transition, the changeover from

the old economic govern- mentality to cybernetics includes a phase of

instability, a historical opening where governmentality as such can be

put in check.

2. War against all things smart!

In the 1980’s, Terry Winograd, the mentor of Larry Page, one of the

founders of Google, and Fernando Flores, the former finance minister of

Salvador Allende, wrote concerning design in information technology that

“the most important designing is ontological. It constitutes an

intervention in the background of our heritage, growing out of our

already existent ways of being in the world, and deeply affecting the

kinds of beings that we are...It is necessarily reflective and

political.” The same can be said of cybernetics. Officially, we continue

to be governed by the old dualistic Western paradigm where there is the

subject and the world, the individual and society, men and machines, the

mind and the body, the living and the nonliving. These are distinctions

that are still generally taken to be valid. In reality, cybernetized

capitalism does practice an ontology, and hence an anthropology, whose

key elements are reserved for its initiates. The rational Western

subject, aspiring to master the world and governable thereby, gives way

to the cybernetic conception of a being without an interiority, of a

selfless self, an emergent, climatic being, constituted by its

exteriority, by its relations. A being which, armed with its Apple

Watch, comes to understand itself entirely on the basis of external

data, the statistics that each of its behaviors generates. A Quantified

Self that is willing to monitor, measure, and desperately optimize every

one of its gestures and each of its affects. For the most advanced

cybernetics, there’s already no longer man and his environment, but a

system-being which is itself part of an ensemble of complex information

systems, hubs of autonomic processes - a being that can be better

explained by starting from the middle way of Indian Buddhism than from

Descartes. “For man, being alive means the same thing as participating

in a broad global system of communication”, asserted Wiener in 1948.

Just as political economy produced a homo economicus manageable in the

framework of industrial States, cybernetics is producing its own

humanity. A transparent humanity, emptied out by the very flows that

traverse it, electrified by information, attached to the world by an

ever-growing quantity of apparatuses. A humanity that’s inseparable from

its technological environment because it is constituted, and thus

driven, by that. Such is the object of government now: no longer man or

his interests, but his “social environment”. An environment whose model

is the smart city. Smart because by means of its sensors it produces

information whose processing in real time makes self-management

possible. And smart because it produces and is produced by smart

inhabitants. Political economy reigned over beings by leaving them free

to pursue their interest; cybernetics controls them by leaving them free

to communicate. “We need to reinvent the social systems in a controlled

framework,” according to M.I.T. professor Alex Pentland, in an article

from 2011. The most petrifying and most realistic vision of the

metropolis to come is not found in the brochures that IBM distributes to

municipalities to sell them software for managing the flows of water,

electricity, or road traffic. It’s rather the one developed in principle

“against” that Orwellian vision of the city: “smarter cities” coproduced

by their residents themselves (in any case by the best connected among

them). Another M.I.T. professor traveling in Catalonia is pleased to see

its capital becoming little by little a “fab city”: “Sitting here right

in the heart of Barcelona I see a new city being invented where everyone

will have access to the tools to make it completely autonomous” The

citizens are thus no longer subalterns but smart people, “receivers and

generators of ideas, services, and solutions,” as one of them says. In

this vision, the metropolis doesn’t become smart through the

decision-making and action of a central government, but appears, as a

“spontaneous order”, when its inhabitants “find new ways of producing,

connecting, and giving meaning to their own data.” The resilient

metropolis thus emerges, one that can resist every disaster.

Behind the futuristic promise of a world of fully linked people and

objects, when cars, fridges, watches, vacuums, and dildos are directly

connected to each other and to the Internet, there is what is already

here: the fact that the most polyvalent of sensors is already in

operation: myself. “I” share my geolocation, my mood, my opinions, my

account of what I saw today that was awesome or awesomely banal. I ran,

so I immediately shared my route, my time, my performance numbers and

their self-evaluation. I always post photos of my vacations, my

evenings, my riots, my colleagues, of what I’m going to eat and who I’m

going to fuck. I appear not to do much and yet I produce a steady stream

of data. Whether I work or not, my everyday life, as a stock of

information, remains fully valuable.

“Thanks to the widespread networks of sensors, we will have a God’s eye

view of ourselves. For the first time, we can precisely map the behavior

of masses of people at the level of their daily lives,” enthuses one of

the professors. The great refrigerated storehouses of data are the

pantry of current government. In its rummaging through the databases

produced and continuously updated by the everyday life of connected

humans, it looks for the correlations it can use to establish not

universal laws nor even “whys,” but rather “whens” and “whats,” onetime,

situated predictions, not to say oracles. The stated ambition of

cybernetics is to manage the unforeseeable, and to govern the

ungovernable instead of trying to destroy it. The question of cybernetic

government is not only, as in the era of political economy, to

anticipate in order to plan the action to take, but also to act directly

upon the virtual, to structure the possibilities. A few years ago, the

LAPD bought itself a new software program called PredPol. Based on a

heap of crime statistics, it calculates the probabilities that a

particular crime will be committed, neighborhood by neighborhood, street

by street. Given these probabilities updated in real time, the program

itself organizes the police patrols in the city. A founder cybernetician

wrote in Le Monde in 1948: “We can dream of a time when the machine a

gouverner will - for good or evil, who knows? - compensate for the

shortcomings, obvious today, of the leaders and customary apparatuses of

politics.” Every epoch dreams the next one, even if the dream of the one

may become the daily nightmare of the other.

The object of the great harvest of personal information is not an

individualized tracking of the whole population. If the surveillants

insinuate themselves into the intimate lives of each and every person,

it’s not so much to construct individual files as to assemble massive

databases that make numerical sense. It is more efficient to correlate

the shared characteristics of individuals in a multitude of “profiles,”

with the probable developments they suggest. One is not interested in

the individual, present and entire, but only in what makes it possible

to determine their potential lines of flight. The advantage of applying

the surveillance to profiles, “events,” and virtualities is that

statistical entities don’t take offense, and individuals can still claim

they’re not being monitored, at least not personally. While cybernetic

governmentality already operates in terms of a completely new logic, its

subjects continue to think of themselves according to the old paradigm.

We believe that our “personal” data belong to us, like our car or our

shoes, and that we’re only exercising our “individual freedom” by

deciding to let Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon or the police have

access to them, without realizing that this has immediate effects on

those who refuse to, and who will be treated from then on as suspects,

as potential deviants. “To be sure,” predicts The New Digital Age,

“there will be people who resist adopting and using technology, people

who want nothing to do with virtual profiles, online data systems or

smart phones. Yet a government might suspect that people who opt out

completely have something to hide and thus are more likely to break

laws, and as a counterterrorism measure, that government will build the

kind of ‘hidden people’ registry we described earlier. If you don’t have

any registered social-networking profiles or mobile subscriptions, and

on-line references to you are unusually hard to find, you might be

considered a candidate for such a registry. You might also be subjected

to a strict set of new regulations that includes rigorous airport

screening or even travel restrictions.”

3. The Poverty of Cybernetics

So the security services are coming to consider a Facebook profile more

credible than the individual supposedly hiding behind it. This is some

indication of the porousness between what was still called the virtual

and the real. The accelerating datafication of the world does make it

less and less pertinent to think of the online world and the real world,

cyberspace and reality, as being separate. “Look at Android, Gmail,

Google Maps, Google Search. That’s what we do. We make products that

people can’t live without,” is how they put it in Mountain View. In the

past few years, however, the ubiquity of connected devices in the

everyday lives of human beings has triggered some survival reflexes.

Certain barkeepers decided to ban Google Glasses from their

establishments - which became truly hip as a result, it should be said.

Initiatives are blossoming that encourage people to disconnect

occasionally (one day per week, for a weekend, a month) in order to take

note of their dependence on technological objects and re-experience an

“authentic” contact with reality. The attempt proves to be futile of

course. The pleasant weekend at the seashore with one’s family and

without the smartphones is lived primarily as an experience of

disconnection; that is, as something immediately thrown forward to the

moment of reconnection, when it will be shared on the Internet.

Eventually, however, with Western man’s abstract relation to the world

becoming objectified in a whole complex of apparatuses, a whole universe

of virtual reproductions, the path towards presence paradoxically

reopens. By detaching ourselves from everything, we’ll end up detaching

ourselves even from our detachment. The technological beatdown will

ultimately restore our capacity to be moved by the bare, pixelless

existence of a honeysuckle vine. Every sort of screen coming between us

and reality will have been required before we could reclaim the singular

shimmer of the sensible world, and our amazement at what is there. It

will have taken hundreds of “friends” who have nothing to do with us,

“liking” us on Facebook the better to ridicule us afterwards, for us to

rediscover the ancient taste for friendship.

Having failed to create computers capable of equaling human beings,

they’ve set out to impoverish human experience to the point where life

can be confused with its digital modeling. Can one picture the human

desert that had to be created to make existence on the social media seem

desirable? Just as the traveler had to be replaced by the tourist for it

to be imagined that the latter might pay to go all over the world via

hologram while remaining in their living room. But the slightest real

experience will shatter the wretchedness of this kind of illusionism.

The poverty of cybernetics is what will bring it down in the end. For a

hyper-individualized generation whose primary sociality had been that of

the social media, the Quebec student strike of 2012 was first of all a

stunning revelation of the insurrectionary power of simply being

together and starting to move. Evidently, this was a meet-up like no

other before, such that the insurgent friendships were able to rush the

police lines. The control traps were useless against that; in fact, they

had become another way for people to test themselves, together. “The end

of the Self will be the genesis of presence,” envisioned Giorgio

Cesarano in his Survival Manual.

The virtue of the hackers has been to base themselves on the materiality

of the supposedly virtual world. In the words of a member of Telecomix,

a group of hackers famous for helping the Syrians get around the state

control of Internet communications, if the hacker is ahead of his time

it’s because he “didn’t think of this tool [the Internet] as a separate

virtual world but as an extension of physical reality.” This is all the

more obvious now that the hacker movement is extending itself outside

the screens by opening hackerspaces where people can analyze, tinker

with, and piece together digital software and tech objects. The

expansion and networking of Do It Yourself has produced a gamut of

purposes: it’s a matter of fooling with things, with the street, the

city, the society, life itself. Some pathological progressives have been

quick to see the beginnings of a new economy in it, even a new

civilization, based this time on “sharing.” Never mind that the present

capitalist economy already values “creation,” beyond the old industrial

constraints. Managers are urged to facilitate free initiative, to

encourage innovative projects, creativity, genius, even deviance - “the

company of the future must protect the deviant, for it’s the deviant who

will innovate and who is capable of creating rationality in the

unknown,” they say. Today value is not sought in the new features of a

product, nor even in its desirability or its meaning, but in the

experience it offers to the consumer. So why not offer that consumer the

ultimate experience of going over to the other side of the creation

process? From this perspective, the hackerspaces or “fablabs” become

spaces where the “projects” of “consumer-innovators” can be undertaken

and “new marketplaces” can emerge. In San Francisco, the TechShop firm

is developing a new type of fitness club where, for a yearly membership

fee, “one goes every week to make things, to create and develop one’s

projects.”

The fact that the American army finances similar places under the Cyber

Fast Track program of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency)

doesn’t discredit the hackerspaces as such. Any more than they’re

condemned to participate in yet another restructuring of the capitalist

production process when they’re captured in the “Maker” movement with

its spaces where people working together can build and repair industrial

objects or divert them from their original uses. Village construction

sets, like that of Open Source Ecology with its fifty modular machines -

tractor, milling machine, cement mixer, etc. - and DIY dwelling modules

could also have a different destiny than serving to found a “small

civilization with all the modern comforts,” or creating “entire new

economies” or a “financial system” or a “new governance,” as its current

guru fantasizes. Urban farming which is being established on building

roofs or vacant industrial lots, like the 1300 community gardens of

Detroit, could have other ambitions than participating in economic

recovery or bolstering the “resilience of disaster zones.” Attacks like

those conducted by Anonymous/LulzSec against banking firms, security

multinationals, or telecommunications could very well go beyond

cyberspace. As a Ukrainian hacker says, “When you have to attend to your

life, you stop printing stuff in 3D rather quickly. You find a different

plan.”

4. Techniques against Technology.

The famous “question concerning technology,” still a blind spot for

revolutionary movements, comes in here. A wit whose name can be

forgotten described the French tragedy thus: “a generally technophobic

country dominated by a generally technophilic elite.” While the

observation may not apply to the country, it does apply in any case to

the radical milieus. The majority of Marxists and post-Marxists

supplement their atavistic inclination to hegemony with a definite

attachment to technology-that- emancipates-man, whereas a large

percentage of anarchists and post-anarchists are down with being a

minority, even an oppressed minority, and adopt positions generally

hostile to “technology.” Each tendency even has its caricature:

corresponding to the Negriist devotees of the cyborg, the electronic

revolution by connected multitudes, there are the anti-industrials

who’ve turned the critique of progress and the “disaster of

technological civilization” into a profitable literary genre on the

whole, and a niche ideology where one can stay warm at least, having

envisaged no revolutionary possibility whatsoever. Technophilia and

technophobia form a diabolical pair joined together by a central

untruth: that such a thing as the technical exists. It would be

possible, apparently, to divide between what is technical and what is

not, in human existence. Well, no, in fact. One only has to look at the

state of incompletion in which the human offspring is born, and the time

it takes for it to move about in the world and to talk, to realize that

its relation to the world is not given in the least, but rather the

result of a whole elaboration. Since it’s not due to a natural

compatibility, man’s relation to the world is essentially artificial,

technical, to speak Greek. Each human world is a certain configuration

of techniques, of culinary, architectural, musical, spiritual,

informational, agricultural, erotic, martial, etc., techniques. And it’s

for this reason that there’s no generic human essence: because there are

only particular techniques, and because every technique configures a

world, materializing in this way a certain relationship with the latter,

a certain form of life. So one doesn’t “construct” a form of life; one

only incorporates techniques, through example, exercise, or

apprenticeship. This is also why our familiar world rarely appears to us

as “technical”: because the set of artifices that structure it are

already part of us. It’s rather those we’re not familiar with that seem

to have a strange artificiality. Hence the technical character of our

world only stands out in two circumstances: invention and “breakdown.”

It’s only when we’re present at a discovery or when a familiar element

is lacking, or breaks, or stops functioning, that the illusion of living

in a natural world gives way in the face of contrary evidence.

Techniques can’t be reduced to a collection of equivalent instruments

any one of which Man, that generic being, could take up and use without

his essence being affected. Every tool configures and embodies a

particular relation with the world, and the worlds formed in this way

are not equivalent, any more than the humans who inhabit them are. And

by the same token these worlds are not hierarchizable either. There is

nothing that would establish some as more “advanced” than others. They

are merely distinct, each one having its own potential and its own

history. In order to hierarchize worlds a criterion has to be

introduced, an implicit criterion making it possible to classify the

different techniques. In the case of progress, this criterion is simply

the quantifiable productivity of the techniques, considered apart from

what each technique might involve ethically, without regard to the

sensible world it engenders. This is why there’s no progress but

capitalist progress, and why capitalism is the uninterrupted destruction

of worlds. Moreover, the fact that techniques produce worlds and forms

of life doesn’t mean that man’s essence is production, as Marx believed.

So this is what technophiles and technophobes alike fail to grasp: the

ethical nature of every technique.

It should be added that the nightmare of this epoch is not in its being

the “age of technics” but in its being the age of technology. Technology

is not the consummation of technical development, but on the contrary

the expropriation of humans’ different constitutive techniques.

Technology is the systematizing of the most effective techniques, and

consequently the leveling of the worlds and the relations with the world

that everyone deploys. Techno-logy is a discourse about techniques that

is constantly being projected into material reality. Just as the

ideology of the festival is the death of the real festival, and the

ideology of the encounter is the actual impossibility of coming

together, technology is the neutralization of all the particular

techniques. In this sense capitalism is essentially technological; it is

the profitable organization of the most productive techniques into a

system. Its cardinal figure is not the economist but the engineer. The

engineer is the specialist in techniques and thus the chief expropriator

of them, one who doesn’t let himself be affected by any of them, and

spreads his own absence from the world everywhere he can. He’s a sad and

servile figure. The solidarity between capitalism and socialism is

confirmed there: in the cult of the engineer. It was engineers who drew

up most of the models of the neoclassical economy like pieces of

contemporary trading software. Recall in this regard that Brezhnev’s

claim to fame was to have been an engineer in the metallurgical industry

in Ukraine.

The figure of the hacker contrasts point by point with the figure of the

engineer, whatever the artistic, police-directed, or entrepreneurial

efforts to neutralize him may be. Whereas the engineer would capture

everything that functions, in such a way that everything functions

better in service to the system, the hacker asks himself “How does that

work?” in order to find its flaws, but also to invent other uses, to

experiment. Experimenting then means exploring what such and such a

technique implies ethically. The hacker pulls techniques out of the

technological system in order to free them. If we are slaves of

technology, this is precisely because there is a whole ensemble of

artifacts of our everyday existence that we take to be specifically

“technical” and that we will always regard simply as black boxes of

which we are the innocent users. The use of computers to attack the CIA

attests rather clearly that cybernetics is no more the science of

computers than astronomy is the science of telescopes. Understanding how

the devices around us work brings an immediate increase in power, giving

us a purchase on what will then no longer appear as an environment, but

as a world arranged in a certain way and one that we can shape. This is

the hacker’s perspective on the world.

These past few years, the hacker milieu has gained some sophistication

politically, managing to identify friends and enemies more clearly.

Several substantial obstacles stand in the way of its

becoming-revolutionary, however. In 1986, “Doctor Crash” wrote: “Whether

you know it or not, if you are a hacker you are a revolutionary. Don’t

worry, you’re on the right side.” It’s not certain that this sort of

innocence is still possible. In the hacker milieu there‘s an originary

illusion according to which “freedom of information,” “freedom of the

Internet,” or “freedom of the individual” can be set against those who

are bent on controlling them. This is a serious misunderstanding.

Freedom and surveillance, freedom and the panopticon belong to the same

paradigm of government. Historically, the endless expansion of control

procedures is the corollary of a form of power that is realized through

the freedom of individuals. Liberal government is not one that is

exercised directly on the bodies of its subjects or that expects a

filial obedience from them. It’s a background power, which prefers to

manage space and rule over interests rather than bodies. A power that

oversees, monitors, and acts minimally, intervening only where the

framework is threatened, against that which goes too far. Only free

subjects, taken en masse, are governed. Individual freedom is not

something that can be brandished against the government, for it is the

very mechanism on which government depends, the one it regulates as

closely as possible in order to obtain, from the amalgamation of all

these freedoms, the anticipated mass effect. Ordo ab chao. Government is

that order which one obeys “like one eats when hungry and covers oneself

when cold,” that servitude which I co-produce at the same time that I

pursue my happiness, that I exercise my “freedom of expression.” “Market

freedom requires an active and extremely vigilant politics,” explained

one of the founders of neoliberalism. For the individual, monitored

freedom is the only kind there is. This is what libertarians, in their

infantilism, will never understand, and it’s this incomprehension that

makes the libertarian idiocy attractive to some hackers. A genuinely

free being is not even said to be free. It simply is, it exists, deploys

its powers according to its being. We say of an animal that it is en

liberte, “roaming free,” only when it lives in an environment that’s

already completely controlled, fenced, civilized: in the park with human

rules, where one indulges in a safari. “Friend” and “free” in English,

and “Freund” and “frei” in German come from the same Indo-European root,

which conveys the idea of a shared power that grows. Being free and

having ties was one and the same thing. I am free because I have ties,

because I am linked to a reality greater than me. In ancient Rome, the

children of citizens were liberi : through them, it was Rome that was

growing. Which goes to show how ridiculous and what a scam the

individual freedom of “I do what I feel like doing” is. If they truly

want to fight the government, the hackers have to give up this fetish.

The cause of individual freedom is what prevents them from forming

strong groups capable of laying down a real strategy, beyond a series of

attacks; it’s also what explains their inability to form ties beyond

themselves, their incapacity for becoming a historical force. A member

of Telecomix alerts his colleagues in these terms: “What is certain is

that the territory you’re living in is defended by persons you would do

well to meet. Because they’re changing the world and they won’t wait for

you.”

Another obstacle for the hacker movement, as every new meeting of the

Chaos Computer Club demonstrates, is in managing to draw a front line in

its own ranks between those working for a better government, or even the

government, and those working for its destitution. The time has come for

taking sides. It’s this basic question that eludes Julian Assange when

he says: “We high-tech workers are a class and it’s time we recognize

ourselves as such.” France has recently exploited the defect to the

point of opening a university for molding “ethical hackers”. Under DCRI

supervision, it will train people to fight against the real hackers,

those who haven’t abandoned the hacker ethic.

These two problems merged in a case affecting us. After so many attacks

that so many of us applauded, Anonymous/LulzSec hackers found

themselves, like Jeremy Hammond, nearly alone facing repression upon

getting arrested. On Christmas day, 2011, LulzSec defaced the site of

Strafor, a “private intelligence” multinational. By way of a homepage,

there was now the scrolling text of The Coming Insurrection in English,

and $700,000 was transferred from the accounts of Stratfor customers to

a set of charitable associations - a Christmas present. And we weren’t

able to do anything, either before or after their arrest. Of course,

it’s safer to operate alone or in a small group - which obviously won’t

protect you from infiltrators - when one goes after such targets, but

it’s disastrous for attacks that are so political, and so clearly within

the purview of global action by our party, to be reduced by the police

to some private crime, punishable by decades of prison or used as a

lever for pressuring this or that “Internet pirate” to turn into a

government snitch.

Invisible Committee, October 2014