Deserting the Digital Utopia: Computers Against Computing

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.”

deserting-the-digital-utopia pdf

The Smart Phone Society

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.”

The Smartphone Society pdf

War Against the Information Age: A Future of Mass Social Control

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.

war against the information age pdf