Re: <nettime> The Return of DRM

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>]

I'm skeptical about the ability of "us free from ..." to use imagination to hack into minds of zombies and provoke the Change.

The modern social engineering has become an exact science, and there are reliable methods that ensure sustained zombism through combination of high bandwidth distractions and low cost maintenance of social virtuality with minimal force, in which one's future is dependent on "money" and "economy", both of which are somehow always controlled by others.

While the invention of god+sex+guilt killer app in the middle ages, the invention of patriotism in 1840s and the invention of social justice in 1920s did wonders at the time, it is unlikely that any idea within similar categories would make any impact today. In those times sensory inputs were still used for seeking, it was the pull model (to use the messaging lingo), and today they are saturated with the overwhelmingly push model. Whoever does the pushing controls the target.

To put it bluntly, no one gives a flying fuck for your imagination. If you don't have an industrial strength media pump you are spitting into the river.

The technology caught up with human behavior, ideology and desires, and doing anything manually in the "changing things" business is like trying to grow food without tractors. It's a nice hobby, though.

You need that technology, and that's the choke point.

There is no such thing as digitally autonomous network. You don't know how to make transistors, chips, routers and computers in a sustainable way. They are made by contract manufacturing at the end of the long chain of capital, which you don't have. "Autonomous software" today is like graffiti on the wall, and dealt with in the similar fashion. Less people use PGP today than they did in early 1990s. P2P networks, champions of TAZes, are slowly being factored out. Graffiti artists are sexy, and sometimes can be commoditized and money made on them, but it's all entertainment. They don't matter.

You are wasting your time in symbolic hobby revolutions.

It used to be that any self-respecting revolution would first raze down the TV station. Remember "They Live"? Things were easy then. Today you would have to disrupt several of the dozen semi fabs and several major switching equipment manufacturers - and you probably don't even know where they are. Hint: in the countries operated by regimes where any thought of industrial action is fined by ingestion of own testicles.

Ideas and painting flowers on tanks did work when social engineering was primitive and needed expensive manual intervention. Today they don't work any more. Check the headlines. They are becoming less and less sophisticated, sounding more and more like Soviet propaganda - because there is no need for sophistication to compete with foreign ideas. All they need is volume, and they have it, and you don't.

The point being is that the long standing principle that ideas can change the world does not operate when one side has heavy machinery to saturate the idea receptors. Ad hoc efforts in the traditional information space do not appear effective these days - there are no more jungles to accommodate guerrilla warfare.

We need a new fucking jungle.

> you're right here, still those of us free from manufactured desires
> are already well able to act far beyond the imagination of those who
> are imposed and conditioned - that's quite something, considering
> the situation where we are and the fact that we are talking about
> a resilient and (digitally) autonomous network. The fact that "far
> beyond" in the previous sentence represents a source of inspiration
> for desires manufactured in future it's nothing we should worry about
> now, rather than exploit it if we'll ever learn how to do that.


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