Re: <nettime> Post-digital- Cyberclasm of the 1960s

["d.garcia" <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk>]

Browsing through the files of Amsterdam?s Institute for Social History (as 
you do) I found Tjebbe van Tijan?s excellent essay written in 1998.  Below 
is a short taster. Full essay to be found: 
http://socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/docs/digitial-ways-forgetting.pdf

Digital ways of Forgetting: Smashing Computers and new forms of cybeclasm

The recent phenomena of "cyberclasm" started with radical student actions in 
North America against university and military administration facilities. One 
of the earliest examples was in 1969 at Sir George William University in 
Montreal where, during a conflict about racism on the campus, students 
stormed the computer center of the university, threw out thousands of punch 
cards from the windows and smashed the computer equipment. At that time 
computers were mostly stand alone machines with limited storage capacity and 
data was either stored in punch cards, that needed to be processed 
mechanically, or on reels of magnetic tape. A year before a little book with 
the title The Beast of Business: A Record of Computer Atrocities was 
published in London, containing "a guerrilla warfare manual for striking 
back" at computers that, according to its author Harvey Matusow, were on 
their way to "grab power": "from now on it is them or us".... Read on

------------------------

d a v i d  g a r c i a
new-tactical-research.co.uk


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