<nettime> A Prelude to a Theory of Resistance and Maps

[ricardo dominguez <rdom@thing.net>]

Ours is not the house of pain and misery.
That is how he who robs
and deceives us has painted us.
Ours is not the land of death and anguish.
Ours is not the treason nor does our way have room for the forgetting.
Ours are not the empty ground and the hollow sky.
Ours is the house of light and joy.
That is how we created it, that is how
we struggle for it, that is how we nurture it.
Ours is the land of life and hope.
Ours is the path of peace
which is planted with dignity and harvested
with justice and liberty.

--FIFTH DECLARATION OF THE LACANDON JUNGLE

The Ante-Chamber of Revolution:
A Prelude to a Theory of Resistance
and Maps

Zapatismo is not bound by the limits of interconnectivity
or the raw violence of neo-liberalism. It is a network of hope
embedded deep in the heart of a community who oppose
the loss of voice in its own home. A community who walk
with the ghost of history and the ghost of exchange.
Zapatismo haunts the big MASK with small masks that
walk between code. They have sent us notes about this
virtual condition, some times they ask that we pass the
notes on, and sometimes they ask us to sing a tender song.
They say they became an intergalactic protocol by slipping
under the electronic fabric one drunken night. They say
the man they woke up with the next day screamed he had
been tricked…then later came back screaming that this
was his bed, his home, and his kitchen…but the man
is wrong, very wrong…this was our home…a home
for the homeless.


The Book of Mirrors, The Hybrid, and the MESH
(a short essay):

Late Capital is caught by its own reflection, it wants to
be both original and copy, soft and hard, top and bottom,
speed and inertia. The Rand Corporation calls for hybrid
hierarchies and networks, with both Top Sight Command
and Distributed Network Teams that function as an
interconnected MESH of total command and total
autonomy, for power only. The Hybrid MESH now
has many names: flat power, soft power, liquid power,
power ad infinitum. Late Capital agrees with Mao on
what this power must do: centralize strategically,
but decentralize tactically.

The Zapatistas say:
Ya basta!  Break the Mirror! Do you really need Maps!*


*Maps (A Long Footnote):

Several different maps of information have been put on
the block for our inspection: frontier, castle, real estate,
rhizome, hive, matrix, virus, network, plug-in your own, etc.,
Each map creates a different line of flight, a different form
of security, and a different pocket of resistance.

Frontier:
A digiscape full of drifters, free roaming data cowboys, mail
tribes, code ranchers and bandwidth barons. ISP justice
decides the laws for their community. Those that go
beyond the local enclave’s limit are on their own in a
lawless infinity. On the frontier the only security one has
is that of a few trusted URL’s, ones’ faithful machine,
and keeping the VirusScan loaded and close at all times.
On the Frontier: *It’s every link for itself and Microsoft
against all.*

--Resistance on the Frontier: Banditos! We don’t need no Stinkin’
Badges!

Castles:
This is a space of bunkers and transcendental hierarchies,
with moats, high walls, and drawbridges. Movement
between these bunkers is done by Knights, bearing the
latest war gear, protecting the flow of messages and
goods. The most important defense of A Castle is the
amount of “Air” between the outside and the castle’s
core. For Castles it is the roads between them they fear.
Anything could be lurking in the dark woods.

--Resistance between Castles: Robin Hood! Steal from the Rich and Give
to the Poor!

Real Estate:
This is similar to where you are now, as you read or hear
these words. Space is owned or rented by individuals
transnational-companies, and anything in between. Lot’s
of big signs selling things, gentrification, homes for senior
citizens, the endless streams of homeless. Everyone wants
laws to protect the welfare of exchange under the sign of
social control. They often say they want to protect the children.
In this space, only the commodity is protected.

--Resistance under the For Sale Sign: Squat the Future! Burn the sign
down!

Rhizome: Here Bodies without Organs’s schizflux between
roots, pop-up flora, holes and machinic desire. Endless
tendrils criss-cross space, some spaces become hard and
never move again, some spaces become smooth and never
crack, nothing escapes the virtual struggle between The
State and The War Machine. Here endless interconnectivity
rules all possibility as an either/or line of flight—territorialize
or de-territorialize, you have no choice.

--Resistance at the root: Become a body with organs and smell the
flowers.

The Hive: A wave-system so tightly bound that no difference
resides between each segment of the wave. Each segment
is part of a wave-mass, A SWARM. The Hive is able to
absorb any change both within or without the SWARM.
Each segment-wave functions as a SWARM, alone or
apart from the other segments. Each element of a
SWARM functions locally in parallel interdependence
with the rest of the wave mass. The Hive and the SWARM
act as one, but only in one direction. Each shift in the
SWARM becomes a part of the HIVE at the same moment.
Each segment of the SWARM is a part of the HIVE, but
the HIVE is not a part of the SWARM. Each segment of
SWARM needs the HIVE to be a part of a SWARM, but
the HIVE does not need the any specific segment of the
wave-mass to be a SWARM.

Resistance among the SWARM: Use the SWAT! Act Alone.


Matrix: Weaving symbionts creating, moving, offering the
permanent revolution of Pandora’s code. The Matrix is
disequilibrium as invention, aphanisis as informatic-quanta,
soft accidents, and action as care. An alien politics of the
body as hope. Still the Matrix is sweating in the labor pools
of speed production. The matrices are held hostage as the
base materialism of Late Captial. Wetware for the endless
multi-tasking of choatics. The Matrix is still looming.

--Resistance in The Matrix: Have a Party! Go on Strike!

Virus: bio-agents flow between complexity and containment,
diversity and control, self and other. Cellular circuits know
the difference between antigens and antibodies. Viral coagulation
filters for non-self types in the Host in order to assemble possible
defensive patterns. Bioagents fail the Host when it meets its other
as self. It has no defense against itself, or what mimics its own
messages. Bioinformatics understand the self and not the other
as self.

--Resistance within the cell: Make a Vaccine! Stick a needle in a meme!

Network: Borderless operables, hyper redundancy, massive
aggregate throughput built on endless backplanes bring
bottlenecks down to 0.Decentralized bottom up architectures,
mega-gigabit ethernets, and active response firewalls are
the multiple nexus of this space. Intelligent infrastructures
allow the emergence of total networks, micro-networks,
and weak links. Network security is being exploited by
the demand for open transnational e-commerce and
intercontinental exchange routes. Exploit scripts scan
vulnerabilities, replacement files wrap packet filters, stealth
sniffers generate new holes: linsniff.c, sunkill.c, and latierra.c.
Network gaps created by military-intelligence systems,
trans-corporate movement,  software developers, end users,
providers, and the lack of centralized management clog
the possibility of an effective and total security solution.

--Resistance on the Network: Disconnect! Take the Streets!

End of Part 1.
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