“Memory Loss” presents a history of the French group CLODO, which attacked and sabotaged computers in the 1980s. The zine contains a timeline of action, two communiques, and an interview of the group. Along with these items, there is a helpful introduction which contextualizes the group and its activities and situations them in relation to other anti-technology groups. The zines comes at a good time, coinciding with the release of a new film titled Machines in Flames that documents the group.
From back cover:
“The state will use machine learning to filter surveillance footage for criminals and potential criminals; capitalism will use machine learning to identify ways to appropriate resources and maximize profits…This doesn’t mean, though, that anarchists could appropriate machine learning systems for our own goals. Quite the contrary! For machine learning systems are not only at the beck and call of the forces of order through their emergence from prompts, but far more importantly, remain tethered to these forces through the models they create. The sources on which machine learning systems feed are the troughs of ‘big data’: billions of statistical, lexicographical, literary, medicinal, military and civilian, surveillance-based and contractually obligated, creative or robotic, data points.
…To sabotage a machine learning system, then, it must be fed content that is in itself coherent, very likely meets evaluation criteria, and yet leads the system’s propagations into a feedback frenzy from which they can’t escape. The machine learning system must be fed text that coherently self-destructs. And the text must directly concern the concept(s) that the machine learning system is modelling, to meet its evaluation criteria.”
From back cover:
“This technology —controlling and out of control—cannot serve any truly human purpose and has no place in the development of a world of individuals free to create their lives as they desire. So the illusory utopias of the syndicalists and marxists are of no use to us now. But were they ever? The new technological developments specifically center around control, but all industrial development has taken the necessity of controlling the exploited into account. The factory was created in order to bring producers under one roof to better regulate their activities; the production line mechanized this regulation; every new technological advance in the workings of the factory brought the time and motions of the worker further under control. Thus, the idea that workers could liberate themselves by taking over the means of production has always been a delusion.”
From back cover:
“As an anarchist, I refuse to tranquilize the chaos of my jouissance with inebriation. I exalt life vehemently against the pacifying qualities of marijuana, the cancerous addiction of tobacco, and the “correctional” anesthesia of psychiatric medications. The intoxication-based realities of poverty, addiction, and death motivate my personal desire to remain sober and supportive of those struggling. As long as I exist, my sobriety remains a weapon against capitalism, a weapon which can not be confiscated by the social conformity essential to intoxication culture. Towards individualist revolt and a straight edge anarchist praxis, straight edge means attack.”
Weaponizing Sobriety_Feral Anarchy Against Intoxication Culture pdf
Text from back cover:
“In order to effectively perceive and confront the problem(s) of civilization we must be able to look at our relationship to it. This relationship is framed by domestication, through which our experiences therein are controlled and manipulated. In this essay, Chellis Glendinning tokes the psychological approach to major parts of our relationship with civilization, trauma and addiction.
Without question, this text provides a key understanding of just how deep the damage domestication has wrought is, and what kind of struggle must be employed against this culture of docility.”
Text from back cover:
“The Internet has often been compared to the Wild West: a largely unregulated space rich in opportunities, in which people may experiment with new relations. Most commentators miss the full implications of this metaphor. The Wild West was the final frontier of colonization, where the last zones of ungoverned territory were mapped, stripped of resources, and integrated into state control. Many who fled to the Wild West in search of freedom only accelerated this process of colonization. Similarly, those who champion the Internet as the new frontier of freedom may inadvertently hasten the enclosure of the last aspects of human life that remain outside the economy.”
Text from zine:
“If you define a cyborg society as one in which human relationships are mediated and shaped by technology, then our society certainly seems to meet this criterion, and our phones play a starring role. But our relationships and rituals have long been mediated by technology. The rise of massive urban centers — hubs of connectivity and innovation — would not have been possible without railroads and cars.
Machines, technology, networks, and information do not drive or organize society —people
do. We make things and use things according to the existing web of social, economic, and political relationships and the balance of power. The smartphone, and the way it shapes and reflects existing social relations, is no more meta-physical than the Ford Rangers that once rolled off the assembly line in Edison, New Jersey.
The smartphone is both a machine and a commodity. Its production is a map of global power, logistics, and exploitation. Its use shapes and reflects the perpetual confrontation between the totalizing drives of capital and the resistance of the rest of us.”
From back cover:
Anarchistic and nihilist ideas are anathema to the information-age, they are the glitch in the database society which escapes classification and control. The imagination walking; dangerous and capable of unforeseen actions and moments of interconnection.
The future of civilisation is an increasing merger of state and corporate power, with the new sciences as an essential ally. With war and crisis always as a pretext, the elite have declared dominion over every free individual, animal, plant and wilderness. Emerging as the omnipresent machine intelligence that forms human beings to its whims, it damages and manipulates entire continents of beings. Reflecting our emptiness and our loss, the prison-society must be fought, because the logic which it operates on is a system of closure of parameters that work by exclusion of vast amounts of alternative possibilities andpotentials. It is self-referential and non-creative; it pursues a model of progress that is the abolition of personal individuality and freedom.
Our struggle pushes forward into the future, let’s strike against the concepts and mechanisms of their control.
