325 #12

Editorial

July 2020

Welcome to 325, an anarchic anti-info project of incendiary critique and direct action. Against the State, against capitalism and against the techno-industrial system. Continuing from our last issue, which expanded the anarchic anti-technology perspective and marked out the struggle against the converging technological singularity, here are a series of different texts from an international scattering of anarchists all concentrating on this similar theme, all with concise and sharp analyses of the new realities of the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions. These texts look at the industrial and social transformations that are coming during what is being called the “biological annihilation” of the “6^th mass extinction event”, the ongoing and tumultuous collapse of the climate and ecology, caused by an entirely civilised way of life which is out of balance and out of time.

This publication was drawn up in December 2019, involved several different groups and individual comrades, and aims to be another contribution to the updating of theory and praxis of 21^st Century anarchy. Towards insurrection, affinity and informality.

Absent from this issue are certain key factors of reportage in the anarchist space: repression reports, demo and meeting reports, action news etc. Certainly some comrades may be asking if we are not perhaps spending too long on considerations of the future, rather than being present in the reality of the class struggle, to which we answer that even this term, and what it once referred to, has been transformed into a key part of the techno-prison world which already exists and which increases at every moment, having dislocated and altered productive methods and the traditional forms of resistance, which are being severed one by one, by their roots.

We are at a critical junction before the rise of smarter-than-human generalised machine intelligence which will govern society and the State, leading to a widening abyss between the included and the excluded, not to mention the frightening realities of repression. The years to come are a promise of greater social inequality, poverty and exploitation. The asymmetric cold-war between a decaying United States in its sunset years, a resurgent Russia and ascendant China also mark the new realities of modern authoritarianism. China is a dangerous enemy of freedom and is a developing contemporary model for the new global prisonsociety based on technological subservience, mind-control, brutality and mass incarceration.

Many of the factories which churn out security products, robotics, weapons, poisons of all kinds, are based there and through economic power the Chinese capitalists and State prepare for a century which they intend to be theirs. Every advanced state is now engaged in the race to develop generalised artificial intelligence to control their populations and wage advanced cybernetic warfare.

The mirrorworld of an online information architecture – the new habitat — produces the total surveillance society which is perpetually quantifying and measuring.

The State will now be run by datascientists and governance algorithms. Through conditioning, oversocialisation, reforming and recuperation of desires, a new human is being formed, even before the scalpel of the transhumanist surgeon or the Petri-dish of the geneticist. By the time it is widely accepted that technology has entered each cell and atom, each and every mind, it will already be too late to resist.

As antagonists against power and civilisation, anarchists are always skilled at using new technologies against the rulers and owners of our lives, using the tools of the system against the system itself. In the past, anarchists were proficient bomb makers, weapons handlers, printers, forgers, and were distributed amongst and involved in the constructive, technical and artistic worlds.

Everywhere there are artisans and those who know their craft, there are anarchists. Soon, through the new technologies, anarchists will have new weapons to use.

That’s why it’s essential, in our view, to map out the plans of the new and old elites, as the shift begins off-world… The black flag has to return. Propaganda by the deed. Attacks that strike the powerful in their hearts and make the fear change sides. Actions that sabotage the social machine and give it seizures. The destruction of the property of the capitalists, destruction of the means of production of a harmful predator culture.

Long live the black international

Long live anarchy

Automation, Robotics & Labour in the 4^th & 5^th Industrial Revolutions

Since the first Industrial Revolution began in the 1700’s, successive industrial revolutions have profoundly affected labour, the workers themselves, creating even the concept of the ‘working class’, how they lived, their integration into the advancing urban hell holes, the prisons of the factories, mills and mining pits, even their children were not spared the indignity, even death of modern slavery of the time.

Industrialization, the result of mechanisation in industry, fed modern enslavement and domestication of human beings in every corner of the spreading empires and colonies not just the rest of the living planet.

We are now on the cusp of the beginning of a 4^th Industrial Revolution (4IR) and even a 5^th (5IR) that will affect just as radically our imprisonment within the technological society as it did in the previous ones. The very concept of labour, even work itself will change beyond recognition once again. Already in the ensuing ‘coronavirus pandemic’ and curfew controls that have been enforced on billions worldwide, the signals of the coming industrial revolutions are already appearing, with millions being reported to lose their jobs in many countries. As an example, a fifth of all workers, over 7 million are expected to be in unemployment in the UK as ‘the lockdown’ (curfew) continues to affect the economy on shutdown. Since we first started writing this analysis it has been hard to get any concrete figures for unemployment because as many as 70% of companies have put their wage slaves on what is being described as ‘furlough’, staying away from work but continuing to be paid. In the mean time many of these capitalists claim that in an escalating cash crisis that 59% of them reported they have – at most – three months of funds in reserve. About 140,000 firms applied for the government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, which pays 80% of a worker’s salary up to a cap of

£2,500 a month to stay at home. Who knows how long this will last as the furlough scheme is putting off the inevitable that is already occurring over on the other side of the Atlantic. In the US 4.4 million have claimed for unemployment in just one week, adding to a total of over 30 million since the coronavirus pandemic began. So called economic experts predict a ‘financial crisis’ comparable to that of the 1929 Wall Street Crash.[1]

Even in China, which rode out the worse of the last recession, the official unemployment rate rose to 5.9 per cent, or 26m, in March from 5.2 per cent, or 23m, in December, when the virus was supposed to have begun. In actual fact this all started even before Covid-19 burst onto the crisis scene, with the capitalist masters still struggling with the after affects of the last ‘financial crisis’ and with the ongoing collapse of the high street. This has been created mostly due to one aspect of the 3^rd Industrial Revolution, the Internet, replacing the use for physical stores, the rise of online delivery, where we begin our relation to labour, automation and robotics in the present.

The replacement of human being workers by robots or an automated process has gathered such a pace that now 50% of bosses in 45 countries around the world are speeding up their automation implementation in their businesses as workers are forced to stay home because of the coronavirus outbreak. Capitalism is preparing itself for a post-crisis world. In the short term about 1.5 million workers in the UK are at high risk of losing their jobs to automation, according to the state’s estimates. It is thought that by 2035 it would be possible to automate 86% of restaurant jobs, three-quarters of retail jobs, and 59% of recreation jobs. What a coincidence that these are among the very industries hardest hit by an ‘epidemic’ now demanding leaps in efficiency if some companies are to avoid going under. ‘Supermarket checkout assistants have already borne the brunt of the technological phenomenon’, the Office for National Statistics said last year, ‘with 25.3% of jobs disappearing between 2011 and 2017.’ One of the areas of labour that has seen a dramatic increase in automation and robotics in recent times is the whole logistical, distribution and delivery empire, along with supermarkets. This is not surprising when you see the rapid introduction of self-service checkouts in supermarkets even equipped with CCTV in your face to prevent liberation of ‘essential goods.’ McDonalds already has digital order kiosks to remove the need to speak to the depressed workers behind the desk. Most will know about Amazon, which has expanded into grocery selling, which has a supermarket in Seattle with no checkout assistants, relying instead on sensors to track what shoppers remove from shelves (even to prevent you liberating products), using “just walk out” technology to bill customers and end queues.[2] Combine this with recent evidence that many retailers that have remained open recently during the Covid-19 pandemic have been refusing to take physical cash because of a fear in society of contaminated coins and notes. The ‘Cashless Society’ has been given a boost with contactless payments limits being increased and more fearful consumer citizens transferring their addictive habits to online sales, further increasing the loss of employment on the high street. The likes of Amazon and other online retailers are one of the only capitalist entities actually benefiting, apart from supermarkets such as the empires of Lidl, Tesco and WalMart or pharmaceutical animal massacres such as GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca or biotech giants such as Gilead Science and Moderna. So called capitalist analysts have worked out that Amazon’s profits increased to $10,000 every second, day and night. That’s not surprising when the Amazon empire has been spreading even before lockdown, buying up competition and food retailers, already one of the most exploitive wage enslavers imaginable. These are just some of the examples that are very apparent in consumer society on the surface.

Underneath the whole logistics system is dramatically changing, with whole warehouses being turned over to robots and automation. Ocado, the online grocery giant, introduced a fully robotised fulfillment centre in Andover, UK before it burnt down due to a technical fault. Combining robotics, artificial intelligence and 4G network communication the warehouse ticks the boxes for the 4^th Industrial Revolution, claiming to pick groceries much faster than a human does.[3] The Amazon empire has already been in the high-tech logistics game well before anyone else with a growing number of distribution centers using Kiva robots to carry shelves of products to human workers, who then pick the items to be shipped, along with robot arms and conveyer belts moving products around the warehouse.[4] Even other companies such as Alibaba the giant version of Amazon in China have their own versions called Quicktron. To contribute to this many companies are also researching and already using fully automated forklifts with Toyota already having developed their New Autopilot AGV[5] which totally removes the human being from having to assist the machine in moving heavy goods around a warehouse, it doesn’t even need a human to change its battery. What about delivering these products? Just before Covid-19 appeared, in Milton Keynes, the shining example of a ‘new town’, Starship Technologies,[6] created by a co-founder of Skype, have started using autonomous robots to deliver food in the centre of an urban area for the first time in the UK after conquering parts of the US. Starship’s robots have been making deliveries in some parts of Milton Keynes since April 2018, but not until now in the centre of the town.

Now smart phone users can order a delivery via the Starship deliveries app from food and drink providers. Their propaganda pushes the ‘green capitalist’ benefit of reducing congestion on the towns streets to pull in the morally conscious consumer. It can also record you and call the cops if attacked, even letting you know it’s doing this. Around the world we are also hearing of drones getting more legitimacy because of Covid-19 in human eyes, rather than bombing capitalism’s enemies in the desert. Drones are now making deliveries of medication to remote areas and isolated old vulnerable people, because there’s nothing better than using them for propaganda purposes. Not only are companies experimenting with drones and robots to deliver products which is already in the mainstream consciousness, fully automated vehicles are now on the rise as well.[7] Drones and robots can only carry so much, but now they are testing delivery and heavy goods vehicles capable of what the recent automated cars can do. Examples include Volvo’s Vera a fully autonomous truck that doesn’t even need a back up driver and Domino teaming up with robotics company Nuro to have their self-driving R2 deliver pizzas or how about a whole grocery store driven autonomously? Aimed at the small purchases of a few items at the supermarket, Robomart combines e-commerce, autonomous vehicle delivery and even checkout free technology, doing what the milkman used to do. Goodbye checkout staff, shelf stackers, delivery drivers and the whole concept of stores themselves.[8] What is interesting is that during the Covid-19 pandemic these very workers which are constantly announced as ‘key’ or ‘essential’ workers are the very ones who are under threat of losing their jobs to automation.

The amount of workers that will be put out of work due to these technological replacements is beyond thinking, the logistics sector is just one snapshot of how an industry will be affected. It is estimated that in the United States alone that 47% of jobs will be lost to automation while in the EU 54% will thrown on to rubbish heap of unemployment. The ‘Luddite fallacy’[9] and ‘technological unemployment’[10] are no longer far out conspiracies, with not only the manufacturing or distribution sectors under threat from automation, but also the service industry such as healthcare already receiving its fair share, which has speeded up since ‘the pandemic’ hit the world, with China as the frontrunner, with robots distributing medication through to scanning humans for the virus.[11] Even 3D printing, another factor in the 4^th Industrial Revolution that is beginning, has already leaped forward with even a human heart now being able to be printed.[12] Not only does this bring the Ghost In The Shell science fiction story even more closer to reality, but has an effect on labour itself. Recently the mainstream media has been awash with stories of companies and individuals using 3D printers to produce PPE for struggling healthcare services that have been battered by governments austerity cuts.[13] This means big changes for the widespread implementation and justification of 3D printing, not only does it mean certain items, even complicated ones, can be printed worldwide by anyone who has the money to fork up for the technology, but it means the very nature of how items are produced are not just restricted to one key location. Soon objects will be printed rather than manufactured, there will be even less need for the worker to be involved, when even an item could be printed at home for the privileged. Also it opens up the possibilities of technologies to be combined as the recent experimentation with the robots by MX3D to 3D print a pedestrian bridge which has ramifications for employment within the construction industry.[14]

More speculative forms of nanotechnology (such as molecular assemblers or nanofactories, which do not currently exist) raise the possibility of devices in the future that can automatically manufacture any specified goods given the correct instructions and the necessary raw materials and energy. The future is going to see a switch in concentration from how to change factories and their physical processes to produce to how to reprogram automation processes, such as simply reprogramming a software program to produce something different using the same machine.

Even the ability to produce new machines themselves has already come about with 3D printing starting to be used to produce drones themselves.

It is quite clear that robotics, AI and 3D printing will increase unemployment alongside other parts of the 4^th Industrial Revolution not mentioned including nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the internet of things, the industrial internet of things (IIoT), decentralized consensus, and the fifth-generation wireless technologies (5G). What is also at stake is how the state and capitalism will react to this coming or as the ‘coronavirus pandemic’ is showing in the already occurring ‘technological unemployment’.

Already there has been much theorising by governments and their neo-liberal capitalist experts on how to deal with the ensuing mass unemployment that could result with the new technologies endless advance. One remedy that the authorities are bounding around is a ‘Universal Basic Income’, which would require everyone from society to pay in to the scheme through taxes, just as with unemployment benefit, but instead of just the unemployed getting it everyone will, as a basic rate regardless of employment status. To those who say people would get money for nothing there would be forced voluntary work to give something back to society, similar to how the unemployed in the UK are expected to do ‘unpaid work.’[15] This would create an apparently holistic culture of ‘we’re in it all together’, where have we heard that before? The whole overhaul would separate the idea of income being based on work, creating a ‘utopian society’ that would be free to pursue other activities. This is what is known as ‘Post-Scarcity’, an economy that is based on commodities being produced abundantly with minimal or no human labour involved, instead of there being labour policies dictated by governments instead they will manage leisure on every level, instead of an actual pension there will be subsidised leisure. You won’t need to be near anyone, ‘social distancing’ has been a reality for a long time, alienation a fact with the ever glowing smart phone screen and ever increasing privileged working from home. Urban planning and education, services from health to local, all of it will be overhauled, the very idea of a ‘meaningful life’ will be challenged or more likely dictated to us. Already the wilderness, the natural world is being managed, the next Industrial Revolutions promise a more greener eco conscious clean world, so called ‘green capitalism’ on the horizon.

Some of us in ‘prison island’ UK and our comrades in other countries are already seeing the beginning of all these changes in ‘smart cities’, how even machines will communicate with each other and there will be no need for physical service workers when you just ask an AI algorithm instead.[16]

Hence the beginnings of the 5^th Industrial Revolution, a more ethical conscious relation with technology apparently? More like shoving the problem elsewhere, everything might turn green, even fascism, but the destruction of the Earth will continue. But who will benefit? If Industrial Revolutions and technological advance show anything it is that most will be ‘excluded’ from the supposed benefits.

Not is all as it seems in these utopian dreams reminiscent of H.G.Wells because we as anarchists understand that authority can never let its grip on power go, especially with its privileged knowledge of the new technologies. Alfredo Bonnano in his analysis ‘From Riot to Insurrection’ predicted even as far back as 1988 that we were at the dawn of a new prison nightmare that would be created in a Post-Industrial Society. He explains the removal of the worker from their traditional role, how much of production will be replaced by robotics and also decentralised in productive ‘islands’ where the reign of happiness will reign supreme, surrounded by physical borders to boot.

These ‘islands of privilege’ are already occurring, to use the UK as an example. Bonnano’s concept of the ‘Included’ and ‘Excluded’ is being manufactured to the exact detail here, already there is a gap forming between those who know how to manipulate the machines or are experts in the technological language. The ‘Excluded’, those who are not offered this privilege, shunned from the beginning, filtered out, those who have refused it or even just don’t fit into the utopian picture. The ‘excluded’ were there in the streets in August 2011 very aware they have been denied what is coming, even refusing it, now being joined by those who have been pushed over the precipice from the false promises of never ending employment, all of them not content with their assignment to the new ‘excluded’ ghettos. How many of us can afford, never mind know the language to use a 3D printer? Who said that the jobs that go today are going to be replaced tomorrow and many will not be able to adapt to the language they’re already finding hard to understand, do they even want to? Will they be a suspect if they don’t adapt? An example is how Artificial Intelligence is already making a massive gap between those who will continue to be employed in new digital service jobs that will still require human input, such as performing tasks algorithms cannot perform or using algorithms to perform other tasks and those who will not be able to fathom these new jobs, never understand the language or refuse to. It is actually predicted that AI will not eliminate work entirely yet, it’s more about those who will know how to use it, even being able to manipulate others more further than has been possible before. The technocrats, scientists and psychiatrists in white lab coats of the new PostScarcity order will only give enough information to make the rest feel as if they are participating, but not everyone is fooled so easily.

By making a dividing line between themselves and the ‘excluded’, the ‘included’ have made it obvious what their plans are, these will lead to outbreaks of rebellion as the exclusion process continues at an ever faster pace. With gathering unemployment rates occurring because of Covid-19 and the clear economic crisis resulting from it and with no guarantee that governments around the world will provide for those who have lost their jobs, the path for these changes is already being opened, but also those for insurrection. At least a 11 million alone are expected to enter ‘financial hardship’ in the UK prison island, many already saying in a recent Citizens Advice survey that they cannot pay the rent, utility bills, taxes and even afford food. What about the millions around the world in what is described as ‘insecure employment’ or the ‘gig economy’? Its estimated by the International Labour Organization that there has been a massive shift to temporary or zero hours work since the ‘financial crisis’ in 2008, about 75% have gone into this type of work and last year about 4.7 million people in the UK worked in gig economy jobs. What happens when they can’t make the bills or pay for food or when evictions and bailiff services are started again like in the UK in June?[17]

Already we see the mounting rage we saw in the last ‘financial crisis’ boiling over, with riots in Brussels, Wuhan and Palestine, raiding of supermarkets in Southern Italy and South Africa, even widespread attacks upon telecommunications infrastructure in Europe, linked to 5G, which will be responsible for keeping this new oppressive technology communicating with itself. This is all a result of the clear repressive measures combining with the already happening automation of labour, leading to the ‘excluded’ taking their own lives into their hands. The illusion of a mass movement uprising against the oppressive force, storming the Bastille or Winter Palace, ends up down a reformist dead end or worse an authoritarian nightmare, even putting bets on organisations of synthesis of the Spanish Revolution period or even the professional activist mentality are stagnant. The rebellions to come will breakout without announcement and be organised in spontaneous ways that many who hold onto old relics will not be able to comprehend or too stuck in their comfort zones to be anywhere near to, the August 2011 riots showed this up very clearly.

The insurrectionary method is more important now than it ever has been, with the avenues of other ‘dissent’ being closed and sanitised. Informal organisation that is capable of participating now and even during these moments of insurrection will attack and shatter the illusion of this ‘social peace’. Nothing is a substitute for a few comrades, friends even, who have permanent struggle, direct action and the destruction of the technological prison society as their intent.

“The ‘sites’ and expressions of these collective explosions vary a great deal. The occasions also. In each case, however, they can be traced to an intolerance of the society of death managed by the capital/State partnership.

It is pointless to fear those manifestations because of traditional ideas we have of revolutionary action within mass movements.

It is not a question of being afraid but passing to action right away before it’s too late.”

Alfredo Bonnano,

From Riot to Insurrection

‘The Uncivilized’

From Riot to Insurrection

“ ... When riots break out we should not be there as visitors to a spectacular event, and because in any case, we are anarchists and the event fills us with satisfaction. We must be there as the realisers of a project that has been examined and gone into in detail beforehand.

What can this project be? That of organising with the excluded, no longer on an ideological basis, no longer through reasoning exclusively based on the old concepts of the class struggle, but on the basis of something immediate and capable of connecting with reality, with different realities. There must be areas in your own situations where tensions are being generated. Contact with these situations, if it continues on an ideological basis, will end up having you pushed out. Contact must be on a different basis, organised but different. This cannot be done by any large organisation with its traditionally illuministic or romantic claim to serve as a point of reference and synthesis in a host of different situations; it can only be done by an organisation that is agile, flexible and able to adapt.

An informal organisation of anarchist comrades—a specific organisation composed of comrades having an anarchist class consciousness, but who recognise the limits of the old models and propose different, more flexible models instead. They must touch reality, develop a clear analysis and make it known, perhaps using the instruments of the future, not just the instruments of the past.... ”

Alfredo M Bonanno

From Riot to Insurrection: Analysis for an Anarchist Perspective against Post- Industrial Capitalism

1988, Elephant Editions

A Small Criticism of Science and its World

The European Researcher’s Night is a pan-European event taking place on the last Friday of September. It is held in Madrid and received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

Today you celebrate your day, “the night of researchers”, you who have elevated yourselves above the rest of the mortals, uploaded onto the altar of specialist knowledge that shows us the Truth, Reason and Progress, and delegitimizes any knowledge which is not scientific, while you put on the costume of gurus and saviors of humanity (however, salvation does not consist in supporting an ideology of the worst atrocities). You who in the name of scientific ideology promulgate that techno-science is the only valid way to define our future.

While technoscience means your job is to produce facts from machines, some facts are not formulable on the margins of the entire technological apparatus that chairs your experiments and structures your relationship with reality (you yourselves are conditioned by the techno-industrial system, you yourselves are turned into an important cog that technically and ideologically sustains the machine world). You who establish a total knowledge and view of phenomena thanks to mathematics and possess the technical dominion associated with them, you have been converted into one more number.

You who adore, who are fetishists of data and of quantitative explanations that deify objective facts over the understanding of relationships and multiform processes.

You have standardized, homogenized, commodified and artificialized each one of the processes of this life, and thus arrived at your analysis: reductionists, you only consider that which is measurable.

Your research, your goals are defined by the economic, industrial and military powers (you are their workers, but are more like their pawns). It is they who finance you, who use your research mainly to increase their economic, military and industrial power. We don’t accept the excuse of the blindfold, and many of you do not even know where your investigations end up while still others look the other way in order to continue their careers of prestige and power. Lack of responsibility over your acts is a characteristic of modernity but there are no excuses. Just as the pilot of the Enola Gay attempted to justify his actions by saying that he only obeyed orders, so you also have your justifications: he dropped an atomic bomb and you obey those who devastate our lives and the earth.

Do not be fooled, SCIENCE IS NOT NEUTRAL. It is an ideology whose goal is to create a world according to the interests of the techno-industrial system, to create a world-machine with a clear project — to control and commodify everything alive.

Maybe you justify yourself, deny what has been exposed here so far, maybe you think you work for the good of humanity (rather, you work to perpetuate this system of misery and terror), but the good of humanity cannot be achieved by centralized social organizations and authorities like the laboratories and companies where you work, creating an artificialized world devastated by your creations and investigations. Laboratories where you create a synthetic life, there is no more to see than all the research and development in synthetic biology where you create and modify life according to your whim, or rather the whim of the techno-industrial system, transforming life at the atomic level, using new techniques such as Crispr/9 with which you can cut, modify and paste the DNA of living beings, build a human being, as if it were just a machine, pretending it is just another object. Like nature you consider the human being to be imperfect, you want to improve it through genetic engineering, improve it based on the patterns of industrial society, improve it to suit your world of profitability, effectiveness and efficiency.

An efficient human for an efficient world, unifying the complexity and diversity of life... From the modifications resulting from the pre-implantation diagnosis in assisted reproduction through to human-machine interfaces, all this is to create a human machine that fits into your machine-world...

We could talk about the decades of suffering and murders carried out on animals in your laboratories...

We could talk about biological weapons which are products of your research... We could talk about all the applications for smartphones that deprive us of our abilities, perceptions and intuitions...

Your salvation of the world is for us a catastrophe.

Nauseating and profit-seeking investigations were going to cure and feed the masses and improve their living conditions, nevertheless, there is nothing to see except social and ecological catastrophe and misery present at every point of this looted planet. Your faith in progress and modernization has caused such an ecological disaster that the most elementary things have become objects of luxury: pure air and water, food, health etc... The idea of continuous progress in the conditions of existence thanks to the technicians of improvement barely conceals the submission of individuals to the things imposed upon them that make them dependent on new technologies (fruit of your research) and the compensatory satisfactions they offer. Dependence on these new technologies (internet, smartphones and their applications etc...) creates a world that is alienating and controlled.

The devastation is caused by your scientific frenzy, and techno-science as the main agent responsible for this devastation can do nothing against radiation, cyclones or cancers that are and will continue being catastrophes. Trying to solve them with technical solutions supposes locking yourself into an absurd flight forward, which pushes us one step more towards the abyss... Locked in your laboratories you only see the solution to the devastation you have caused in the technological development of something just as aberrant, like wanting to turn a road into a cozy space.

As techno scientists you don’t see beyond the machine that feeds and protects you, which artificializes life and mechanizes social relationships. You who think you are free and who work for the good of humanity are yourselves obligated to the scientific techno power that erects its hegemony on the delegitimization of other possible life forms and on the destruction of the conditions that would make them possible.

Research, in its current form, is inseparable from the organizational system of the world that causes misery across the planet, and the researcher is the one who supplies the technological society with the technical means to achieve its dire ambitions. The research is located in the core of economic development and its inherent catastrophes: devaluation of human labor through simplification and automation of much of its activities, colonization and disfigurement of everyday life by technological merchandise, the improvement of military and police techniques, the depletion of our environment and the extinction of species.

We reject then your investigations turned into a dictatorship of experts who delegitimize the rest of knowledge and wisdom that have marked avenues of learning without resorting to technical mastery and yet your science cannot dissociate from a desire for instrumental domination of the universe, science modeled and mediated by technology. We reject the morbid rationalism of industrial society that aspires to type everything into its calculations and technical and economic forecasts.

We do not want to manage catastrophes, we do not want to “bring the science to the citizens”, we want to demolish the logic of the experts and its rational world. We don’t want to democratize science instead we want to demolish the laboratories and companies where our lives are planned. We want to demolish the hypertechnological and totalitarian world because we love the curiosity and wisdom outside your logic.

We love to live our reality and experiences, not your reality and synthetic experiences manufactured in the laboratories of those who seek to manage our lives.

We want a free and wild world.

CONTRA TODA NOCIVIDAD

COVID-19 WORLD: Epidemics in the era of Capitalism

The exploitation of the planet’s natural resources is bringing humanity to the brink of self-destruction. We live in the midst of epidemics caused mostly by the continuous spread of chemical products (pesticides, insecticides, endocrine disruptors, etc.) and harmful to our health. At the same time we live surrounded by an atmosphere with such high levels of contamination as to develop allergies and diseases in a large part of the population. This exploitation of natural resources also carries with it the devastation of the territory by techno-industry: the Mediterranean turned into a sewer, Southeast Asia into a chemical desert, Africa into a great dump, etc. The appearance of the virus known as Covid-19 is a consequence of industrial civilization.

For us the important thing is not if the virus has mutated from a bat, possibly due to the industrialization of its habitat or if it is a US attack on the Chinese economy. For us, the important thing is that it is the consequence of a system that commercializes every living process, object or being on earth; it is the greed of a system that seeks the annihilation of everything alive to artificialize the world. We could not think that our way of life based on continuous growth on a planet that is actually finite was not going to bring these consequences and other disasters to come. Hundreds of chemicals present in our daily lives modify natural processes giving rise to hundreds of “catastrophes”

(epidemics, climate change, etc.). They are the same products that in China produce one and a half million deaths a year and that are not reported in the news, producing neither social alarm, nor confinements, nor a state of alarm. In Spain there are 10,000 who die a year from pollution and there is no panic — they are simply part of the victims necessary for the industrial world to continue operating because the important thing is that progress and its greed do not stop.

In principle, Covid-19 (although they are still investigating it) is a flu with symptoms similar to the common flu and both affect more people with previous pathologies and especially the older population, though not exclusively. They differ in the rapid spread and first contagion capacity which is what has raised the health alarm. At the time of writing this text, almost 300 people have died from Covid 19, however, the common flu caused more than 6,000 deaths in Spain last year and in 2018 it reached 8,000. Given this, we asked ourselves to what this exceptional situation is due, of social alarm created largely by the media and by the opacity of the information transmitted by those who manage our lives.

As a way to end the pandemic, the State has decreed the “State of alarm” that entails prohibitions on movement, confinement, increased control, suspension of meetings and of public life in general, control of means of transportation and who knows if soon the food distribution. In this process we see how the State becomes an eco-fascist where the government will be increasingly forced to act to manage the resources and the increasingly “rarefied” space, giving rise to the fact that the preservation of the most necessary resources can only be guaranteed by sacrificing another need: freedom.

In the absence of an internal or external enemy, the State has found an enemy before which to show all its warlike potential and at the same time accentuate submission in the population through fear and repression while it stands as the only possibility of salvation from terror produced by the epidemic. For us the solution is not a more authoritarian state but the disappearance of all forms of authority. From now on, it is highly likely that states of alarm and states of emergency will continue to happen as a consequence of the ecological and social devastation of the world because we are sure that catastrophes will continue.

We are not exaggerating when we talk about war potential: we are already seeing the army taking positions in strategic places, the police controlling the streets more and drones with cameras monitoring the movements of the population.

The measures of the state of alarm not only seek to end the flu pandemic but also seek to spread another pandemic: that of the voluntary servitude of the population through obedience to the laws in the face of the danger of the pandemic, ending criticism of the State and Capitalism in the face of fear and possible risks. This voluntary servitude would be impossible without submission to our technological devices and the way of life they create. In the face of a pandemic or any other disaster, we are subject to technocrats, specialists, experts, scientists, etc., to those managers of space and time who have everything planned in their rational calculations.

Likewise, the consequences of this epidemic, or any other industrial disaster, will be economically devastating, we are already seeing the critical situation of thousands of people who will be forced into unemployment or suffer because of the precariousness of their jobs. As always the worsening of living conditions will be suffered by the most disadvantaged layers of society that have been enduring the hard onslaught of the “capitalist crisis” and its cuts already for years. On the contrary, it will surely bring great benefits to the upper classes, such as the owners of the big pharmaceutical companies.

In the face of the epidemic, the industrial confinement in which we live grows enormous, they lock us up in our brick and concrete cages from where we can only virtually escape the overwhelming reality through our technological devices. The same apparatuses that subdue and perpetuate alienation in the industrial way of life. Those devices that dehumanize and shape our perceptions, our brain, our feelings, etc. that redesign the way we see ourselves and the world. Hooked on the virtual world, we stay away from the reality of a hostile world, an epidemic or a nuclear catastrophe. Those who manage our lives do not claim responsibility, but try to make us consumers and co-creators of the catastrophes of industrial capitalism, because one of the characteristics of postmodernism is the lack of responsibility in the actions of each one since we participate in the machine “alien” to it’s effects. For us, the only ones responsible are the technical organization of life and those who manage it.

CONTRA TODA NOCIVIDAD

March 2020

The Fractures of Dominion

Also with regard to the government’s economic decree, the position of the opposition is to obsessively push on VAT numbers (protagonists in the last few months of some protests under parliament) and for blocking the payment of taxes, disregarding the budgetary logic in the face of an emergency, as if the contingent issue of danger for the state and for public health, in the face of the needs of the economic world, are definitely priorities. And let us not be told that the state is concerned with people’s health. The riots in prisons and the need to increase social control have already shifted some balances, such as the assignment of the qualification of public security agents to all the military and not only to those of Operation Safe

This epidemic is showing, in Italy, how different constituent elements of our world have diverging interests and priorities. State, Capital and the Technical System face the same problem (social stability and the maintenance of their power and their influence on people’s lives) from different perspectives and with different objectives, sometimes in open conflict. In these reflections I will take for granted a whole series of premises regarding the differences between the components of Dominion and where these differences or distinctions begin and end (See ‘Logbook from an Unexplored Sea’, Editrice Cirtide 2020 for more details). The situation in continuous transformation clearly does not allow you to take a precise photograph, but rather to identify some general trends.

Also, because crisis is not synonymous with collapse, but with reorganization, transformation. And if we know that Dominion’s greatest capacity is to postpone the problems to the future, waiting to be able to solve them or to be able to postpone them again because they are no longer in the spotlight (who in these days knows what is going on in the Greek refugee camps after Erdogan asked the EU for more money to keep the borders closed?), we also know that looking ahead is part of the spirit that allows us to be able to contrast the existing state of affairs.

The State

The population is affected by this epidemic, that is, the concept that, together with a territory, constitutes the basis and motivation for the existence of the state. Together with the defense of the integrity of the space included within its borders, the State also acts as a guarantor of the peaceful and pacified life of its population, turning to its quantitative increase that goes hand-in-hand with increasing its power. Currently, the nation state is experiencing difficulties in exercising its power, having to deal with phenomena of convergence and concentration of power on a global or continental level.

The political party that in this moment, in Italy, is becoming the main spokesperson for the State’s requests is the Salvini League, also through its various regional presidents (Zaia, Fontana). From the first moment the key idea was that through the epidemic it would have been possible to act on the balance of powers in favour of the role of the national state (closure of borders, control of space, stringent measures on people’s lives, a total stoppage of the productive machine).

The League also knows that being in the opposition, the responsibility for the measures will not be theirs and that, aiming for the collapse of the globalized economy, the vulgar are already ready to repeat the mantra of ‘Made in Italy’ and for the sovereign-autarchic economy, especially after evidence of how globalization and supply chains are also deeply fragile and exposed to local perturbations (In Italy, for example, some production chains for individual safety equipment are missing – masks etc).

Roads. In the next few days, restrictions may be aggravated and the monitoring of people’s movements through the control of cellular telephones may be added.

Capital

The productive economic world and that of the international markets is in great difficulty. Prime Minister Conte is trying to mediate between the demands of a Confindustria (General Confederation of Italian Industry) that tries not to shut down the industries of the country and the deep state that instead drools at the idea of being able to implement a centralization of powers and an experiment of mass social control against a perfect enemy, invisible and scientifically, above all opinion, by closing everything.

The decrease in the demand for raw materials linked to the arrest of Chinese growth both as regards internal demand (-78% of the Chinese auto market) and the export of finished and semi-finished goods creates repercussions on the oil price and growth estimates. The price falls due to failure to reach agreement between OPEC and Russia. American measures to block Schengen-US flights, therefore a border reconstitution measure, have repercussions on the markets and confidence in the future trend of the economy. A European Central Bank that stands far from the challenges and choices of States to close countries and stop production, by intervening forcefully on the social safety nets and debt creation level, contributes to the overall crisis of confidence. The Schengen area closes, and the very idea of a European

Economic Community falters. The economic form of a ‘just-in-time’ production shows its limits when the logistical structures fail and the demand for certain goods becomes statistically unpredictable. The disappearance of the warehousing and storage risks accelerating the times of the distribution crisis, emptying the shelves of supermarkets.

Furthermore, when someone fears restoration of production and the renationalization of work, it does not reckon with what has made production end: evidently too low profit margins between “excessive” labour costs, “insufficient” taxes and infrastructures (see TAV [high-speed train] or TAP [trans-Adriatic pipeline] to be built at all costs). Already now forced holidays are multiplying (proceeding lay-offs?) Or dismissal in the savings with many greetings for those in black... what will happen in the future? A push towards automation to save on the workforce?

The Technical System

The Technical System comes out strengthened and increasingly central to people’s lives, both in its ideological component (scientific thought) and in its material component (the technological-digital infrastructure).

Faced with very little knowledge of what this virus actually is and how to deal with it, the attribute of truth is entrusted to scientific thought capable of supporting and justifying the practices and choices of government at a global level. It also becomes the source of a hope for a solution through the design of the ex-machina solution of the vaccine or cure. Every form of relationship, communication and transmission of information is entrusted to the virtual media system of social networks and to the video surveillance network. The massive collection of information and the tracking of movements and relationships has also been used in some countries, such as South Korea, to set up and apply the process of surveillance and isolation of people. During this period of forced quarantine, some fundamental areas of life are moving in the telematic world, such as work (smart working) and school (digital school). This has led to an increase of between 30 and 50% of traffic on networks.

However, it is also making the importance of cabling the so-called white zones for the arrival of broadband and, for schools, the intervention of private foundations or companies such as Google in providing teaching tools and/or server space for information and educational materials. It is evident that the migration of social relationships to the web, to smartphones and on social networks completely changes the way people communicate within society, both indescribably increasing the power of the various GAFAs{1} as well as pushing to also digitize government practices: (digital voting, closure of parliament, electronic bureaucracy).

Editrice Cirtide

Coordinated Incendiary Attacks Against Relay Antennas in Grenoble, France

Extracts from the communique:

Vacuum-sealed life or insubordination?

Every day of your life, your body says things. And your body can’t lie.

Do you hear the sound of engines, the hum of drones, helicopters…the flickering of neon lights, streetlights? How many hours a day do you spend in front of a TV screen? Computer screen? Tablet? Smartphone? Behind a window? Windshield?

Does it bother you when windows don’t open? Does air conditioning solve the problem?

Do programs, apps, algorithms guide your life?

How many hours a day do you sleep? And more importantly, what is the quality of your sleep?

Are you still aware of the stimuli that surround you? ...

Do you sometimes still feel a wilderness inside you? animal life?

Do you feel a void, a lack of meaning so strong that words can hardly express it?

Do you sometimes feel on the verge of going completely out of control?

Don’t you think that should have been the signal?

On the night of May 17–18, 2020, we burned down the Haute-Jarrie relay antenna. At least two other relay antennas were attacked simultaneously around Grenoble.

Relay antennas are among all the intruders that disfigure the landscape. They are used for mass communication, soon even in the most remote places. Currently, the 5G installations are deployed for this purpose.

... The babble and chatter of the masses and the perpetual hype reveal the true communication vacuum as much as the absence of real communication. But there can be no true communication without true “social relations”. The sham social relations of social networks are a clear indication of this.

The existential emptiness of an era can thus be measured, in particular, by the incessant communicational void that fills it. But we do not want a world in which the guarantee of being able to communicate at a distance, constantly and everywhere, is exchanged for the fact that we can be constantly monitored and controlled.

Apart from the fools who rejoice in a world and a life that are “increased” and do not realize – or accept – that they are exchanging an ever-increasing quantity of constraints for an ever more appalling quality of life. It is nothing more than existence dressed in the hateful rags of a vacuum-sealed life.

In the vacuum-sealed world, in addition to being colonized by human beings, to being covered with asphalt scars, in addition to the destruction of so many other forms of life that it shelters, etc., the earth, across all its expanses, is equipped and squared (among many others) by telecommunications facilities. Even across the sky, which is cut by so many air transport journeys, it is no longer just constellations of stars but constellations of satellites that crisscross space.

Radioactivity, electromagnetic waves, pollution and viruses of all kinds are the increasingly polluted oxygen of the 21^st century.

That with the awareness of all this this world makes one think of an “open-air prison” is not surprising. All the more so when the current pandemic has allowed and will continue to allow the State to put us, through confinement, in solitary confinement – admittedly personalized for the most part.

For those who still doubted it, the prison system is therefore the punitive aspect of this governmental organization of life.

An organisation that will soon lead to widespread surveillance and control of the masses thanks to artificial intelligence, cameras and smartphones with facial recognition, all via the close network of the internet. Confinement has shown enough that telecommunications are central to the lives of “people” to the point of accepting self-enclosure. While some people, with their window displays (“procession”, “demonstration”…), have chosen its simulacrum, others have (continued to) propagate the revolt by tagging, breaking, sabotaging, setting fires..

For what choices are left in this world? That of the vacuum-sealed life whose concerns are the new gadget to buy, the new app to download? Or that of insubordination and revolt, whose concerns are the sensitive experiences lived according to ones ideas, individual fulfilment stripped of as many societal constraints as possible…?

Insubordination is to withdraw from this vacuum-sealed life.

Bats Transmitting Fire

via Attaque, translated into English by

Anarchists Worldwide.

The 4^th and 5^th Industrial Revolutions

The aim of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is the convergence of physical, biological and digital technologies in the purpose of a new vision of humanity and the planet. 4IR, CyberPhysical or Industry 4.0 involves mass connectivity, artificial intelligence, robotics, access to knowledge via the internet, storage, autonomous vehicles, massive processing power via 5G, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, genetics, bio-printing (manufacture of cells, organs and body parts), life extension, augmented reality, materials science, energy storage, quantum computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) such as smart buildings and cities, blockchain and cryptocurrencies. These are ‘disruptive’ technologies in every sense: governance, finance, logistics, society, human ontology. Compliance is also achieved through the appeal of 4IR to our need for “convenience, comfort,

“One of the features of this fourth industrial revolution is that it doesn’t change what we are doing, but it changes us.”

Klauss Schwaab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, which has set up a Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco, United States.

An industrial revolution is an economic, social, philosophical and political event whereby the elite appropriates that which is free – land, nature, talents, social relationships, skills and dreams – and repackages and transforms them into agents within the mechanism of profit and power. To do this, they deprive the bulk of the population of autonomy, self-determination, selfsufficiency, self-esteem, mutual aid and relationship, and freedom.

We have had three industrial revolutions in the last 250 years. We are now in the grip of the fourth and fifth revolutions. All of these revolutions have been fundamentally based on extraction industries and the devastation of the eco-system.

The First Industrial Revolution occurred between 1760 and 1870 when water and steam were used to mechanize production through the invention of the steam engine, which also had the effect of ‘globalisation’ or de-localisation through the railway. The First Industrial Revolution broke the people’s relationship to nature, ushering in the age of cities. The Second Industrial Revolution occurred between 1870 to 1914 and brought electric power to the Western world along with steel, oil and the combustion engine enabling mass production and eradicating the artisan cottage industries. The Third Industrial Revolution began in the 1980s when electronics and information technology automated production and began to decentralise as the ascension of the digital revolution eventually ‘democratised’ the personal computer and the internet, a development that further eroded Western humanity’s declining relationship with the natural world and with each other as citizens became part of a global community in lieu of a local one which was fast disappearing. The Third Industrial Revolution and the incipient Fourth has created systematic loneliness, isolation, widespread mental health problems and a more subtle and complete dependence on the system: when human relations and family networks can no longer be guaranteed to ensure our survival, we are led to believe that reliance on the machine can.

These successive industrial revolutions have consolidated and deepened this break not only from the natural world for many of the world’s population, now urban and dependent on the mechanisms of civilised culture, but lead to an ever widening gap between the rich and the poor. harmony and pleasure”. This is what is meant by a world of ‘frictionless technology’ in the sense of a technified world.

In this new world, Covid-19 has presented the techno-elite with the greatest opportunity: global populations in physical isolation from each other, in some countries a tacit cull being allowed of humans who are burdens on a system which will not need them, total dependence on technology to communicate with each other, work or entertain ourselves, the use of these technologies to institute mass surveillance and compliance on a scale hitherto unimaginable and an experience and fear of more-than-usually imminent death on a mass scale. It has also shown us some truths: that despite two hundred years of ‘progress’, all that really has happened is that the elite have shored up their own stores, public welfare systems have been all but destroyed, that humanity itself has been ‘decoupled’ from nature so completely that in fact we cannot support ourselves during a crisis without the system and that promises from the elite – whether political, economic or technological — will never be kept.

If 4IR is the establishment of the means,

-the new technologies themselves-, that elites will try to use to confront the instability resulting from inequality of resources, climate collapse and a rise of computing and post-industrial power, then the Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) begins at that point where there is mass acceptance of these new technologies that converge within our bodies, environments and realities to such as degree that the machineworld is ever-present, even at a nanoscale or at the furthest reach of humans into space.

That’s why if you make any basic research into the 5IR, you only find capitalist green-washing about socalled “sustainable development” and “improving the lives of everyone” marketing-babble of a techno-utopia. That’s because the technocrats and elites do not want the true realities of these technological developments to be known until it is too late to do anything about it. Technological progress, we’re told, is “inevitable”. 5IR will usher in such huge conceptual changes regarding how we see our bodies, technology and the “natural world” that many distinctions will begin to have less boundaries.

For “relic” humans like ourselves, who think only of prosthesis as a resolution of disabilities, 4IR provides the tech, and through development soon the results of 4IR intend to be better than the original limb. 5IR is not only about extending and refining the technologies and incursions of the Fourth, it is about white-washing it, bringing the public into alignment with those technologies by applying their propaganda to the basest of human instincts. 5IR is the acceptance that the robotic-cybernetic limb is superior to the organic and the desire for the artificial representative over the organic and chaotic.

Framed within a newly evolving reality of total artificialisation, and as artificially intelligent technology miniaturises, intervening in everything within the grasp of the specialists, the outcome of 4IR reality is a vision of a new Earth and of a new “humanity”. A “Humanity +” that lives inside a prison-world dependent on “green energy” and regulated and intervened upon by functionaries, scientists and technocrats through methods like A.I, biotech and nanotech. If the 4IR is the actual emergence and converging development of these new post-industrial technologies, then 5IR occurs from the accelerated rate of development and mass acceptance of that same techno-industrial complex. 5IR is characterised by unprecedented exponential speed (machine-time) as opposed to linear/non-linear (humantime) which means that even the designers and social-engineers of this brave new world admit that they cannot control the outcome of these new technologies. It tends toward the emergence of something even more horrific than the fictional Skynet of the Terminator series. The Technological Singularity.

Ray Kurzweil writes in The Singularity is Near that “It is hard to think of any problem that a superintelligence could not either solve or at least help us solve. Disease, poverty, environmental destruction, unnecessary suffering of all kinds: these are things that a superintelligence equipped with advanced nanotechnology would be capable of eliminating.” He adds that “Machines can pool resources in ways that humans cannot.” Reading these statements, it is hard to think of any problem that we could not solve with our own intelligence and the intelligence of the planet by simpler means, determination and a change of perspective and behaviour. Moreover, it is obvious that humans are quite capable of pooling resources, it is just that those who own and profit from it all deny it to everyone else through force, and the rest go along with it. Choosing not to change the situation and not to fight against the “future” is a position most will take.

So it is, that after a century of technological progress and promises of feeding world hunger and eradicating pollution, a few are wealthy beyond comprehension whilst the masses still scrabble for a basic existence; medical advances and even commonplace medicines are still scarce in many countries. We are thrown trinkets naturally to keep us quiet: internet, smartphones, apps, social media, computer games, live streams and podcasts, prosthetics and promises of more to come. But the real advances will not be distributed any more equitably than the wealth of the previous industrial revolutions was, and the real advances will likely have to be endured by us: total surveillance in the privacy-less future, demands for total mind-control, total conformity, total compliance, through conditioning, social reliance, citizenism, “community” and benefits systems such as a (minimal) basic universal income.

If an industrial revolution cannot meet enough of humanity’s needs to be fully accepted, it either erases those needs or applies itself through force. In the context of the 4IR and 5IR, what qualities the machines currently lack – empathy, love, intimacy, for example — are those damaged in the human being by the techno-industrial complex itself – from the fear of intimacy and ‘realtime’ relationships that results from the use of social media, to the lack of empathy now known to be induced by pharmaceuticals drugs such as paracetamol and the poisons in our food and water systems — so that technology will be said to truly meet our (now modified) needs. Domesticated, brutalised slaves to a mechanistic system of materialism, greed and self-interest.

This is part of the dominion of the machine-world: talk of repairing disabilities and curing disease means the mechanisation of the body; talk of life extension means the rule of the elite forever. While the technopriests wax lyrical about liberation from our organic bodies, the biological prison, through uploading our consciousness, achieving immortality, and being able to consider our bodies as mere ‘sleeves’ to be interchanged whenever we want or need to, what is really happening is that the bodies of the majority are being turned into literal prisons by the few who will actually benefit from advances in life extension and disease control, just as they do now (underfunded public health systems are routinely equipped with the oldest and cheapest technologies and for many, public health systems are not available at all). But these new transhumanist technologies are not intended to liberate everyone.

Despite the lies of the futurists the implantation of these technologies will widen the abyss between the included and the excluded. Citadels of power will be created, which are further away from the anger of the base population than ever before.

And as the body becomes raw material for a new sector of bioscience, in a world where machines will do the majority of the labour, the human body itself will become another reservoir of Capital, in new forms of exploitation and industry. In fact, it is already taking place. With stem cell research, gene splicing, bioenhancers, new pharmaceutical products, prosthetics, mass DNA and cellular analysis and databasing. The sovereign and private self will simply enter a new realm of valuation, commodification, adjustments and social division without end in the service of Capital, bio-surveillance, vanity and inequality. In 4IR, consumer society goes much deeper and darker than the purchases of things. The endgame of Industry 4.0 is to ‘decouple’ us from our bodies themselves and from our understanding of ourselves as part of a biosphere and bio-rhythm, so that they too are viewed as something to purchase, upgrade and ‘fix’, an evermanipulable, interchangeable set of mechanistic parts which can all be artificially manufactured and replaced at a cost, and promoted as possessing better qualities than the organic base. An artificialised being that, once it has entered the temple of technology is forever dependent and sustained by pharmaceuticals, surgeries, techno-psychiatries, “updates”, devices and corporations.

The technological future of the human body may not be death (for those few who can afford to be immortal), but it will be the deathliness, the dark cold lifeless hungry morbidity of the plantation.

Meanwhile, the Earth is still dying and technological developments, far from providing the solutions they advertise, are destroying it at ever-increasing speed, hungry for materials, electricity and rare earths. The rare earths required for smartphones alone are causing untold damage to environments and human health.

Baotou, Inner Mongolia, is a primary centre for rare earth extraction and the mines are surrounded by toxic tailings (waste from mining), largely of radioactive thorium. In the Congo, the extraction of the rare earth mineral Coltan is well known to have devastated and caused immeasurable suffering to land, human communities and wildlife. The mining company Molycrop in California, likes to present itself as an ethical mining company but its extraction of neodymium for use as speaker magnets, europium for creating colour in iPhone screens and cerium which is used with solvent to polish screens is still pillage on an unsustainable scale of material which should be left in the Earth and requires whole tracts of nature to be laid waste for the creation of mines. At present, there is no escape from the basic reality: technology is dependent on the destruction of ecosystems, including the last wild animals and indigenous communities, with civilised human populations increasingly confined to technological “habitats” – “smart” megacities.

There will be smaller cracks to live in, and our networks and our individual lives will be under far greater scrutiny with a more intimate invasion into our sovereignty and autonomy, but will it be any more or less terrible than it would be for a peasant to be forced off their land and into a factory in the new cities? Or the fight that indigenous people have fought and continue to wage around the world?

We’re tasked with attempting to preserve what we can of the fragile and diminishing wilderness, whilst organising and carrying out attacks that strike not only against infrastructure, but also against the symbols and representatives of the State, Technology and Capital. We need to think and prepare now, acquiring the skills and means that we and others will need to navigate this new world and reflecting on what it means to b anarchist. We have to try to limit damage done by the predator civilisations, to keep combative memory alive and remember why it that we are fighting and what we fighting for. We are facing nothing less than the attempted erasure of wild undomesticated life, and the ending of entire ways of thinking and being through social conditioning, repression, coerced and voluntary participation. The structures will remain the same: unending inequality, enslavement, privilege and oppression, authoritarianism, destruction, mediation and alienation.

There will be cracks in their systems, there always are. And so anarchy, the will to freedom and the will to sovereignty, will also still thrive, pushing up through every crack and fissure. Continuity of the struggle lies in the question of freedom, of personal autonomy, of slavery, of the control and surveillance of the many by the few according to their own agenda. These things do not change, no matter whether we are talking about a First Industrial Revolution or the Nth.

Research and Training Cell – N.T.

The Artificial Reproduction of the Human: the Road of Transhumanism

Transhumanism and techno-sciences

The transhumanist movement began in the USA, in Silicon Valley, in the late 1980s, but if we try to track down the origin of this ideology, we find ourselves in 1883, when the term eugenics was coined by Galton, or in 1957, when Huxley [Julian, brother of Aldous] gave a speech where he used the word transhumanism to describe his transcendent belief in the human, and we end up with the cybernetic paradigm which arose during Second World War in the military sector. The cybernetic paradigm, the study of control of systems, living or not living, is based on the concept of information: if everything, from the living to the inorganic world, can be reduced to an exchange of information, then every barrier and every difference between the living and the non living, between the human and the machine. And the the subject will be reduced to a sum of information items, a programme which can be deciphered and thus modified like a machine. Finally, we get to the development of genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Craig Venter, founder of Celera Genomics, after having sequenced the human genome, launched the Minimal Genome Project. Why would a company spend time and money on such simple organisms, when others were already competing to sequence the genomes of frogs, rats and chimpanzees? Right from the outset of the Genome Project, Venter’s goal had not only been to read genes or edit their DNA, but to redesign them through synthetic biology.

The ultimate aim of these processes is always the human being, this was clearly expressed by the Singularity University in a recent conference on Exponential Medicine: “We can design embryos. We can edit genes in humans. We have synthetic biology. And so we really are looking at designing future humans”.

Transhumanism is not a side effect, but the point of arrival of technological development, it is the ideology of the convergence between biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, information science and neurosciences.

Transhumanist ideology seeks to empower and implement the human through technology to achieve its biotechnological transformation: the post-human. Biology and even bodies are seen as constraints and limits to be overcome, reinforced, modified or eliminated. Before the desired biotechnological transformation or hybridisation with machines, what is being transformed is the ontological concept of human: we have never been human, we have always been cyborgs and hybrids. What is emerging is an anthropotechnical cyborg concept, where the human being is undetermined, and co-builds himself with technology, an indetermination which is technical hybridisation, where the very nature of human, his biological existence, is technological. A technical hybridisation which destroys the borders between subject and object, between nature and technique, between the living and the machine, so that everything, from nature around us to our very bodies, becomes an artefact.

Transhumanism is not a pipe dream of a few mad technology fans influenced by science fiction. It is the expression of ideas and the worldview of Silicon Valley, of philosophers, scientists and researchers. Natascha and Max Moore, Nick Bostrom, David Pearce, James J. Hughes, Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweill, to mention only the best known names, are the founders of the world transhumanist association, now known as Humanity+, and they are founders, funders and managers of many foundations, institutes, start-ups, research projects and companies of worldwide importance, and are involved in the fields of research and development which are the techno-hubs on which the transhumanist project is based. They are consultants for fields like defence, security, biomedicine, all cutting-edge sectors of development and research, and they deeply influence the way researchers and governments develop converging sciences and make strategic decisions.

When the transhumanist world describes itself and its projects, it speaks of exponential sciences, designed to face the new and most serious challenges threatening the present, and calling for a new order. Without beating too much about the bush, it uses the best means that technology offers for its purposes, in order to concentrate a techno-power which can sweep away the past, abolishing everything it deems obsolete before such challenges. In this context, human beings, as they have been so far, become a useless frill.

We should not fall into the error of seeing transhumanism as the tendency of a few marginal researchers, of philosophers who confuse reality with their dreams. So let us avoid focusing on things that have not yet happened. If we speak of nanotechnologies, we should not concentrate on the risk of a Gray goo catastrophe, the unbridled replication of dwarf robots. In the same way, when we speak of transhumanism, it would be a mistake to focus on projects of cryopreservation of the brain or of uploading the brain to a computer: let us concentrate on what is actually going on now. The transhumanist ideology — overcoming limits, improving and empowering man, redesigning and artificialising the living — is no abstract speculation. It takes the shape of transgenic chimeras, military drones, new smart city devices, biomedical practise, medically assisted procreation (MAP) and genome editing. And it all takes shape in research centres, in giants like Google, IBM, Microsoft, in agribusiness, pharmaceutical and biotech corporations, and in the projects of techno-scientific and research labs.

The transhumanist ideology is penetrating and expanding a context where there is already a strong cult of “perfect” health and of top performance. It is working its way into a context where each life phase has been medicalised, from birth to death, from prenatal diagnosis to regenerative medicine.

Transhumanist man is a totalitarian one-dimensional biomedicalised human being. The human being is seen as the error, and everything has to fit in with the criteria of ongoing perfectibility for constant adaptation to a machine world. Where limits are constantly overcome, and the human body is seen as one of these limits. A techno-scientific adaptability which will become the only possibility. We can now see how the cybernetic paradigm, according to which “the environment we live in has always been so radically modified that today we are forced to modify ourselves”, takes a material and dramatic shape. If we think of exoskeletons for tetraplegics which can be also be used to increase the performance of soldiers, we can see how thin the line is separating healing from changing the human. Nobody will cut off healthy legs to put on prostheses to increase their performance, but the ideas of implementation, of continuous increase in power, of changing the body, are penetrating into people’s imagination to the point where they condition their desires.

Development of techno-sciences transforms the paradigms of thought through which one sees and interprets reality, hence transforming our relationship with our body, with the reality around us and our own actions. These transformations imply profound and irreversible consequences on everything living. They mean thinking of the body as a series of modules which can be taken apart, makes it available and modifiable. Only a world imagined on a nanotech scale can make tools able to move atoms: a tunnel-effect microscope is not a simple tool, it builds a world where matter is thought of, measured and then modified on a nanotech scale. In the same way as biotechnology delves into the deepest level of living beings, nanotechnology delves into the deepest levels of the structure of the world, bringing about a substantial change in meaning too.

Whereas artefacts were formerly made starting from natural elements with all their limits, when one modifies matter on an atomic level, the same natural elements rebuild themselves and overcome these limits, taking on new features. The natural world thus becomes an artificial category, and molecular fabrication leads to a completely different idea of what is as a material limit, and nanotechnology allows one to enter into the very nature of matter.

Clearly, techno-sciences and the transhumanist ideology are not neutral. Not merely in their aims — whether they achieve them or not — but at the source, in their idea of redesigning and artificialising the living. In life sciences, a disaster takes place not only when the experiment achieves its goal; the disaster is implicit in the direction taken by the research. The experiment is not only within the walls of laboratories, the laboratory is the whole world, and bodies themselves become living laboratories.

Eugenics

Galton suggested a mild form of eugenics, a positive eugenics to “acknowledge the features of superior descent or races, and to favour them so that their offspring become more numerous”. By this principle, which would guide zootechnics, Galton was referring to the human, considering that the human, like other animals, could be tamed and selected.

Long before Nazi Germany, the USA, between 1905 and 1972, carried out an immense programme of forced sterilisation for the disabled, psychiatric patients, the blind, deaf, the prison population, the homeless, those suffering from leprosy, syphilis, tuberculosis. Hitler drew his inspiration from a famous American biologist, the promoter of such sterilisations, for his racial extermination programme.

A Nazi physiologist was the first to come up with the idea of enucleating an ovum to insert the nucleus of another ovum into it, inventing the concept of “carrier mother”.

From programmes of racial sterilisation on people deemed inferior and impure — defined as negative eugenics -, from the intention to improve the Aryan race — defined as positive eugenics -, we have today moved on to new “positive” eugenics: it is not the “improvement” of a race thought to be superior, but the “improvement” of the human being. And to improve human beings, one needs to eliminate their defects.

This will involve a large part of the world, but not all of course: those who live in the margins of the world in forgotten slums, or simply those who are excluded from economic and social status will become subhumans, hence bodies at the mercy of the markets or of geopolitical processes of which they ignore the nature. These bodies may serve as pools for spare parts, or as masses to be pushed about from one country to another for purposes of blackmail. Also those who refuse to bow to the logic of continuous increase in power with biomedical programmes and those who do not use artificial reproduction will add to this reserve pool of subhumans.

The idea of racial purity today has been replaced by that of “perfect” health and the fabrication of the “perfect” child. Eugenics thus puts on a new face, freely accepted, and refers to a new soft kind of power, no longer based on coercion, far from the violence of Nazi eugenics. In this context, it is normalised and rendered banal, while the new technologies of genetic engineering and their recombination in converging sciences make it more efficient and generalised. No longer part of a project of extermination, at least at present, but its ultimate aim of selecting the human species remains unchanged.

Eugenics is not a dark deviation: it is the very motor and direction of genetic research. It is no coincidence that the first project for decoding the human genome was called Read, but the second Write.

Eugenics has always been around, since the origin of artificial reproduction technologies, in their zootechnical development and in transfer to man. Already in the 1980s, R. Edward, who brought about the birth of Louise Brown, claimed that genetically improving the human species is possible and therefore legitimate. In 2018, the British bioethics committee[18] declared that it was permissible to modify the DNA of an embryo genetically (hereditary genetic modifications) in order to influence the features of a future person.

In MAP, eugenics starts with in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), selection is needed during each phase of the process of artificial rep, and takes place on several levels: selection of the suppliers of gametes, selection of sperm, of ova and finally of the embryo. In the globalised supermarket of human reproduction, there flourishes a multi-billion dollar market of ova, sperm and embryo selection. The price of the ovum varies, depending on the features of the “donor” , who is actually a seller paid by the MAP clinics. Clinics which have huge egg banks which can be consulted on line, offering a carefully selected range of donors. An ovum of a white university student of course is worth more than any other, and everything is on sale in the reproduction market, with a wide range for every taste. The questions put to ovum donors on their personal questionnaires range from how sensitive they are to animals, what their religion is, whether they sleep with a stuffed animal and whether they like the police. Features which have nothing to do with the development of the embryo, but everything is on sale in the reproduction market, even illusions, expectations, hopes and lies. Before implanting the embryo into the womb of the future mother who is recurring to MAP (or in that of the mother who has rented her womb), a preimplantation genetic diagnosis is carried out on a dozen embryos to choose the “best” one.

PGD follows the logic of eugenics perfectly: if we look at the progressive opening up of national laws in different European countries, we can see how they started with exceptions in order to avoid transmitting serious genetic diseases, with pathologies which were likely to arise, and finally moved on to such aesthetic matters as being cross-eyed[19].

We are seeing progressive extension of PGD: in France, the previous law on bioethics (2004) extended its application from detection of an incurable illness in a parent, to detection of a serious illness, with a late outcome, in a direct ascendant, and this was a major step. Now, legalisation of “MAP for all”, laid down by the recent French bioethics law[20], will not only involve single women or couples of women, but will open up the right to MAP techniques, including IVF, to anyone asking for them. This step will start with the plastic tube for insemination, and will end up with genetic selection of embryos, after having extended the artificial reproduction of the human to all. One must bear in mind that we are in a medicalised context where the waiting time for defining a woman with problems of infertility has been cut down from two years to six months, a context where maternity is increasingly postponed, with 35–37 year old women anxious not to be able to get pregnant any more, who after the six months set down by the law start out seeking artificial reproduction. After only three unsuccessful cycles of artificial insemination, the medicalising trend leads to in vitro fertilisation with intracytoplasmic injection of the spermatozoon.

In the United States, couples who do not suffer from fertility problems or the transmission of genetic pathologies can go to an assisted reproduction clinic with the sole purpose of carrying out an IVF, with selection of the embryos: they can also choose some features, such as the sex and the colour of the eyes.

The important change in French legislation and a look at other countries show us the global trend towards generalising artificial reproduction of the human.

Voluntary servitude

Eugenics does not have the face of a dictator, it is not imposed, it wears the guise of free choice. The democratic and progressive Left is already pushing it ahead with the rhetoric of prevention, health, access for everybody to technologies, freedom, self-determination and non-discrimination. Democratic and consensus-based eugenics. Health issues are used as a lever to promote IVF and PGD and make them socially acceptable, This is actually a form of blackmail, bringing up possible genetic pathologies of the future child or a fertility rate which is constantly declining also due to pesticides, plastic derivatives, electromagnetic waves.

PGD is presented as necessary to prevent serious illnesses, while it is actually opening the gates to largescale eugenics. From one genetic selection to the next, towards a madeto-order child, all of this masked with the best intentions. From couples with problems of infertility to fertile couples with problems related to transmissible genetic pathologies, step by step, MAP is being extended to all without any limit, using the rhetoric of nondiscrimination, and of course allowing everybody to access it: the technoscientific system presents itself as the spokesperson for equality.

“The ‘right to have a child’ for people with organic sterility or due to chemical and industrial poisoning of the environment, for single women or same-sex couples is used today as a pretext for generalising artificial reproduction, and is put to the service of plans and processes of eugenicist and transhumanist scientists, becoming the new norm”.[21]

There is a mother who rents the uterus, a genetic mother who sells eggs and a client mother: the boundaries of the concept of mother are being expanded to make it indefinable and therefore completely meaningless. If all can be mothers, none is anymore.

With the “intentional mother”, the “intentional parents”, the “parental plan” and the “declaration of intent” the human being does not have a provenance, they are reduced to the eugenic assembly of egg and sperm for a narcissistic and selfish desire for a child at all costs of a consumer who in some countries can already manufacture it on demand according to his tastes, program it by choosing certain characteristics.

The Left, and a large part of the LGBT*QIAAP movement, have adopted the values of the bio-market where everything, including the body, is a commodity, and they support rent-a-womb and MAP with the rhetoric of freedom and selfdetermination. However, artificial reproduction of the human is not really equality for minorities. What it actually is, is the submission of everybody to the techno-scientific system, and “MAP for all” is not a slogan of emancipation, it is the future to which we may be condemned. Reproductive freedom cannot come to us through laboratory rooms. Like every living being which comes out of those rooms engineered and redesigned, what would come out would be something else. We are born, not fabricated, and we are born from women.

MAP: the road of transhumanism

Artificial reproduction is based on breaking down and fragmenting the reproductive process. This fragmentation implies taking an ovum from one woman and implanting it into another, as if it were something interchangeable, and putting into the hands of technicians a part of the reproductive process, which no longer happens inside the body of the woman, but in a microscope slide and a test tube. The moment of fertilisation becomes a technical operations in a laboratory, and “reproduction becomes production of the living, with all the instrumentalisation that this implies”.[22] In the logic of artificial reproduction, man and woman are reduced to mere suppliers of gametes, which can be selected, manipulated, replaced. Just as the man and woman can be replaced, and hence eliminated, if we think of the quest for artificial wombs. The embryo becomes a “product”, and a “product” can be submitted to every kind of experimentation, and must be free of any defect, the best possible. MAP represents the Trojan horse of transhumanism, because it opens up the path to the possibility of artificial reproduction, for everybody, and the logical consequence of this will be the constant improvement of the “product”.

Transhumanist projects start out from research centres on animal cloning, with the aim of replacing natural evolution with artificial evolution. In the age of technical reproducibility of the human being, humans become a commodity right from birth, a product of the corporation of life and of genetic engineering, just a eugenic assembly and genetic code, to be modified and redesigned. We do not yet have genetically modified children, but in China, the threshold of babies being edited has been passed, and there is no turning back from such a threshold.

In the meantime, the idea is being spread that it is preferable to hand procreation over to technicians and technology, that the future daughter should have a genetic legacy better than the one her own gametes can provide her with.

As far back as 2016, when a group of Swedish researchers of the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm had modified the genome of healthy human embryos, sectors of the research announced that the purpose of editing will be “preventing a specific genetic illness from being hereditary. At a later time, one may also go further. [...] There is no reason of principle to reject this. The technique of genome editing is not immoral in itself, actually it has the potential for becoming an alternative strategy available to parents to achieve a wider range of objectives”. A fundamental step in this direction was the declaration, in 2018, by the British Bioethics Committee[23], where it stated that “The use of heritable genome editing interventions would only be ethically acceptable”.

The message is clear: there is no valid ethical reason to rule out, in a not too distant future, the hypothesis that the genetic code of the human being may be modified. The way to this too is obvious: free rein to research, the green light form the various bioethics and safety committees and bodies, legislation on this and application to man. The step to the human being was clear from the outside, right from when they were torturing Dolly [DNA cloned Sheep].

Experimental zootechnical laboratory

With the new CRISPR/CAS 9 genetic engineering technology, genome correction — genome editing — has become possible. This technology was developed to modify vegetables, domestic and laboratory animals, for gene therapies, with special attention to the potential use in modifying the human germ line.

It is no coincidence that the researcher who in France brought about the birth of the first test-tube baby had worked before in zootechnics, to increase milk production by cows. The history of zootechnics should teach us something. Techniques of artificial insemination, hormone manipulation of the ovulation cycle, embryo technique, cryopreservation of embryos and spermatozoa were developed to make animals functional in terms of raising and experimentation, ensuring they had certain features.

Eugenics technologies then continued the process of turning animals into tools of production, into products, into test models: the animal body became an interchangeable model of species. Zootechnics, “a true applied science, aimed at adapting ‘income-producing’ animals to the modern mass production system”[24], has become an immense experimental laboratory, and the most important acquisitions in transgenesis and cloning come from there.

Propaganda for genome editing has already begun

Since one can already select an embryo thanks to better screening, and choose other features such as sex or eye colour, if it were possible to engineer it and add genes to “improve” it, why not do so? And why not allow everybody access to this? It would be discriminatory if only carriers of genetic pathologies were allowed to choose or even genetically modify the embryo! From MAP for everybody, the cry would come for editing for everybody! For equality between the health and the ill, between homosexuals and heterosexuals, between men and women! And with the blackmail of discrimination, anyone criticising — along with rent-a-womb and MAP — the genetic modification of embryos would be accused of being a reactionary.

What criteria will be used to establish which illness, or alleged illness, falls within the cases laid down for genetic editing? How wide would the medicalising spectrum become, which sees moods or mere disorders as if they were illnesses to be subjected to pharmaceutical and genetic attention? The starting point will be serious pathologies, but if these technologies permit something more, will they really remain limited to these? The propaganda with its rhetoric of discrimination and equality will open the gates to engineering for everybody. Touching the topic of genetics with intrusion into the germ line, where will the line between therapeutic genetics and “improvement” be drawn? At first, the line will be the financial condition: “improvements” will go to those who can afford them, but this will not lead to biological class struggle — these technologies will quickly become available. The question will no longer be the difference between therapy and improvement of the human genome, because improvement will be a given.

If an increasing number of people recur to MAP, and then later to genome editing, it will be hard, if not impossible, to refuse it: social pressure will be too powerful.

Social consensus and acceptance are essential for all the developments of techno-sciences to move forward. Consensus is always built around promises, desires, fears, risks for health and safety. This propaganda has already begun: the transhumanist researcher Giuseppe Testa, in a lecture on genome editing, describes the greatest study on the architecture of human intelligence, where 78,000 individuals were compared to each other and where, according to researchers, some thirty to forty genes, according to their variety, might contribute to intelligence: “Are they saying that those who have them will be cleverer? No, but they might add an extra touch. We do so many things, and we have our children do so many things without being certain of what we are doing, it is a chance, they are options on the playing table, shall we play this card too? Maybe you can

change all forty of those variants spending five thousand more euros, does that ensure you the child will be more intelligent? No, but even sending the kid to an elite school will not do so, and if you are rich, maybe you can do both”.

Metamorphosis

A change is taking place, so profound that it has the features of a metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is something profoundly different from change. During a change, some things change but others can stay the same, whereas metamorphosis is a total and radical transformation which affects everything that makes up the human being and everything living. This metamorphosis, once complete,will be irreversible.

What is happening is an anthropological metamorphosis of the human being. In the machine world which is being built, the individual will be increasingly adapted — a machinehuman for a machine-world. The techno-scientific system needs a man who is as adaptable and malleable as possible: this is why its aim is to destroy identity, values, points of reference, memories of the past, solid ties among communities and families ties. A neutral individual for a new anthropological model, an individual without identity, memory, values, solidarity bonds between communities and family solidarity bonds, is an empty, fragile individual, with no outlook, no past and no future, only an eternal present, who can easily be filled with desires and needs perfectly aligned with the biomarket and transhumanism.

A never-ending quest for selfperfection, for new performance of any kind, which can never run out or end: new needs will be ceaselessly created and products or processes to respond to them will always be made available. When the body itself becomes a commodity, everything changes, because the fetish of chosen freedom turns into being chosen, everything starts with the individual who can bask his new cage of exploitation and self-exploitation. The logic of performance is not based on duty and imposition, but on self-constraint, which works better than constraint from the outside, and on the power of the individual who becomes his own entrepreneur.

The body itself, in its material reality, becomes fluid, undifferentiated, protean, porous, limitless, malleable and infinitely manipulatable. Freeing oneself from one’s body is the apotheosis of transhumanism.

Let us, instead, clearly preserve the line separating the organic from the inorganic, electronic circuits from nervous systems, life from death, nature from artifice. Life cannot be fabricated, Craig Venter’s synthetic bacteria were not fabricated out of nothing. The living is born, escapes, throbs, slips, moves, and will never be entirely controllable. The living, and hence bodies, the body, represents the obstacle to the absolute dominion by technique. Let us start from the unavailability of bodies and of the living.

The time to fight is now

When the irreversible disasters of the children of editing will manifest themselves, will we be able to recognise them for what they represent? There will not only be tragedies tied to the health of individuals, but true disasters which will strike society as a whole, because they will transform the world around us.

When people will grant the technoscientific system not only the management of their health, but total management of every area of their lives, of their body and of procreation, it will be hard to make a critique which will not be considered mad, because we will be finding ourselves fighting what is perceived and lived as the normal. From the moment when techno-scientific development becomes possible, a practice becomes acceptable simply because it is feasible: what was unthinkable and unacceptable before gradually becomes normal.

The techno-scientific paradigm calls for the possibility of replacing or artificially rebuilding the raw material which the system takes from our bodies, from the bodies of other animals and from whole natural ecosystems which it needs all the time. An artificialisation to deal with the limitedness and destruction of the living.

However, the synthetic era does not only imply radical redesigning of the world around us, it also means a dramatic redesigning of ourselves. The human being is the ultimate aim of the cybernetic and transhumanist project. The commodified human becomes the human commodity. The human being in the age of its technical reproducibility is born as a commodity already produced by the life and genetic engineering industry. No longer commodifiable, because a commodity itself right from birth. To develop an opposition, we need first of all to recognise a commodity; but how to do so, how to recognise a technical invasion of bodies, a genetic manipulation, when these already inform life from its very first moments? A new norm which will make normal what is farthest from life, from its indeterminations, limits, unexpected. If we are to be born in a machine world, if nature will become artificialised and engineered, the necessary bases even to understand the possibility of another world will be lost.

The transhumanist Bostrom says: “Among the most important potential developments are ones that would enable us to alter our biology directly through technological means. Such interventions could affect us more profoundly than modification of beliefs, habits, culture, and education”.[25]

If we want our actions to affect the present, we need to identify priorities, feeling deep inside the urgency to act. But in order to act, we need to have a careful and clear understanding of reality around us. We need to understand the transformations taking place around us, to get a glimpse of the directions where power is heading even before they are totally fulfilled. We need to ask where these directions are concentrating and what they are aiming at. An analysis of the present with an eye on a future which is coming closer and closer are essential if we want to understand the path we need to take. If we do not face the system now, on its own terrain, we will soon be suddenly awoken, as we face the harsh reality of a future, which we thought far away, but has actually turned into being the present. Now is the time we must start fighting these processes.

Resistenze al nanomondo

March 2020

Machine Psychology: A Disappearing Act

Already in the 1960s, Theodore Adorno found the computer to be “the bankruptcy petition of consciousness.”[26] Now we are at the threshold of cyborg existence, wherein the self emerges as a shifting matrix of animate and inanimate parts. This is being accomplished insofar as we have reduced ourselves to the machine’s level. “The very possibility of subjectivity and the generation of meaning for the future” is at stake, as Gray Kochhar-Lindgren put it.[27] As the techno-culture advances in its fast-forward course, what has become undeveloped is the result. “We are as highly developed in psychopathology as in technology,” concluded Jules Henry.[28] Lightning speed of connectivity––and increasing disconnection among people. Considerable regress in substantive communication.

Consciousness, like perception and cognition, is embodied. Except when it’s not. Direct, primary experience is severely on the wane. Life has moved to the screen, where all is secondhand experience. Cyberspace is not the realm of the texture, depth and continuity of anyone’s life-world. Without the immediacy of human experience we live in a Dead Zone. And we need a tremendous distraction industry or apparatus because the content of our own activity is thus diminished.

Our Age of Distraction[29] privileges external stimuli, especially data, over interior reflection. From understanding to knowledge to information to data, the lowest level in the mental food chain. Undigested information–data––is apt to become disinformation, confusion, deception. Discernment, attention span, etc. are so many casualties of the erosion of deeply felt experience.

Thought is not data-processing, however much the metaphor of an essentially machine-like process tends to creep into our consciousness. We “scan” this, “process” that, in common usage. Faster and faster speeds online “input,” and we are increasingly impatient with the slightest delay. But deep experiences require more than fractions of seconds. More and more reliance on cyberspace means we know less and less about the world available to us directly.

Technological systems are configured to be mind-deadening. The ultimate danger is that people will become addicted to technologies that in effect ban their capacities to think, that take away a basic sense of identity and reality. For some time now, we’ve been immersed in a universal culture of redirection, diversion and infotainment, a mass-based content level of cognitive distraction. Unsurprisingly, boredom and anxiety are hallmarks of this restless ethos. Attention is at a premium, sought and manipulated like data.[30] Interacting face-to-face becomes rarer. A barren, synthetic reality challenges us to be capable of thinking for ourselves, because without reflection, hope for a different world dims.

Prominent among those who embrace the technoverse is Donna Haraway, who claims that machines do not dominate or threaten us: the machine is us. Too late to check the invasiveness of technology anyway: “Prothesis becomes a fundamental category for understanding our most intimate selves.”[31] Susan Griffin counters this beautifully: “We know ourselves to be made from this earth. We know this earth is made from our bodies. For we see ourselves. And we are nature.”[32] The tragedy is that only machines thrive in the global technoculture. Some people grow to be like machines, à la Haraway.

All this is new and, in a sense, not new. Kochhar-Lindgren proposes that this is “when philosophy becomes what it has always latently been: cybernetics.”[33] In other words, philosophy’s control and alienation aspects have been lurking for a long time. Since its origin in early civilization, writing has been an independent object, abstracted from reality. It virtualizes and delocalizes memory. The text stands over us in a sense, like time. The decline from speech to writing to the increasing digitalization of human consciousness exacts a price.

Society becomes an unhealthy expression of the Internet. Michael Heim calls this “a unifying network of human presence.”[34] Of course, we are not present to each other online, and there is no substitute for actual place. Marc Andreessen had it right in 2011: “Software is eating the world.”[35] Phenomenologists speak of being-in-aworld, meaning that it is from the world that we come to understand not only it, but ourselves. The technosphere is immersive and invasive. It patterns or structures our lives. Our sense of place, presence, and self is being remade in the image of the Machine.

Champions of cyborg existence applaud the “seamless integration and overall transformation” of human and machine.[36] Smartphones are not zombifying agents of distraction, but “mindware upgrades.”[37] Much is disappearing as the sentient and tangible are de-realized. The sense of community, for instance, shrinks in proportion to the extension of global online culture. An exception to disappearance is social media; what is there is eternal. Kate Eichorn’s The End of Forgetting[38] discusses how one is hard pressed to break away from the past after those endless and permanent self-surveillance posts to Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Technology has become the organizing principle of our lives. It is also clear that it is civilization’s cardinal value, the chief reason that there is just one, global civilization now. Thus it is a huge challenge to be outside it, or to even imagine such a change. And yet individuals are far from happy within the force-field of the everpresent technoverse. Its promises and claims are threadbare and false. Everyone knows that, at least on a visceral level. We know that the totality is built on lies and is failing. Consciousness may yet become better armed, more able to take advantage of Walter Benjamin’s dictum:

“The smallest cell of visualized reality outweighs the rest of the world.”[39]

John Zerzan

Oblique Look

“Look at everything, look.”

Jules Verne

“The first cultural battle is to secure the facts.”

Hannah Arendt

The decomposed and emergency journalistic disinformation is acting as a one-way narrator to the complex situation in which we have been immersed for a month now. We’re unlikely to find a single observation and analysis lens to deal with it. Many plans, perspectives and dynamics mingle and intertwine recalling relative interests and protagonists of processes already underway.

It must be said that, as often happens in history, emergency events accelerate certain processes and in this case the objectives clearly emerge which, thanks to this pandemic, they would like to achieve. The state of exception allows them to move the border of the acceptable with little noise and without warning, implementing irreversible “silent transformations”.

“It is important that scenarios are not predictions. Rather, they are weighted hypotheses that allow us to imagine, and then try, different strategies to be more prepared for the future — or to be more ambitious; how to help shape a better future ... scenarios are a means by which it is possible not only to imagine but also to create a great change” (Rockefeller Foundation).

Social fragmentation has been imposed with the rhetoric of “distancing as a new form of solidarity” while in some factories the noise of machinery continues unceasingly in order not to interrupt the flow of capital.

Lampante is the example of some companies from Bergamo, Tenaris Dalmine, of the Techint group, among all. Specialized in the supply of pipes for the oil sector, it has never stopped its production supported by the “disinterested” friendship of the mayors of the Bergamo municipalities.

A factory that even if it closed would not have lost its profits since the same owners also own the Humanitas Gavazzeni private multispecialist hospital.

Either way, the profit on the pandemic was assured.

A sinister theatre to make “lies seem sincere and murder respectable”

(G. Orwell).

An emergency that highlights even more the mechanisms of social life, tracing even more deeply the boundaries between the dominant class and that of the exploited, flattening the subjectivities in favour of a utilitarianism in which the worker is reduced to a mere instrument and the decaesed elderly to a statistical number with which to compete with the mortality rates of other countries.

The daily journalistic bulletin of the statistical count of the dead marks these quarantine days. The administration of death, as of life, becomes raw material for mathematical calculations transforming everyday life into a microscope slide.

The digital data collected by a hand touching a touchscreen is no longer enough, the biometric data of that hand is needed .

Bodies become the place of extraction, the means, source and space of surveillance.

“The effectiveness of governments is measured by their ability to change people’s daily behaviour.”

Since the beginning of the emergency, the activation of ‘smart working’ platforms (used by more than 70% and which with the latest provisions for phase 2 is preparing to become mandatory in some sectors) and online teaching (used by 98% of the sector) highlighting that from the moment they are immediately operational, it means that an infrastructure capable of supporting billions of network interactions with an extra overhead which at this moment touched peaks of + 90%, already existed.

The emergency context is thus creating the ferocious condition for the advancement of techno-scientific processes, some of which have made use of the social acceptance created by the production of fear and in the salvation vision of technology.

There is talk of simplifying the bureaucratic delays for the amplification of the network in the areas most affected by the virus, Lombardy in the first instance.

“From a technological point of view, a short-term emergency plan to equip a limited area such as the Lombardy region with an immediately operational 5G network is perfectly achievable” says the CEO of ZTE Italia.

“Managing the crisis while building the future” has an absolutely negative meaning from the moment in which the future that is built is theirs, in which we and our interactions become data pellets to satiate the algorithms.

We are witnessing an equalization between our world and the functioning of a machine in which every movement is perfectly regulated, monitored and oiled.

Just look at the 17 specialists chosen by the Conte government who will be part of the Task Force that will deal with “Phase 2” for the restart of the country. It’s significant that it will be led by the former CEO of Vodafone, Vittorio Colao, who will be supported by numerous technicians and experts including Roberto Cingolani, Leonardo’s current head of technology innovation and director of the Italian Institute of Technology. They are entrusted with the task of “rethinking the organization of our life and preparing the gradual return to normal”.

A re-organization commissioned to technicians, accommodated by the state and its administrators, which will take us in a direction that is anything but mysterious.

On Italian soil, Vodafone was the first telephone company — one of the largest in the world — to invest in 5G infrastructure. In the early months of last year it was the only company to offer 5G coverage in the five Italian pilot cities (Milan, Bologna, Turin, Naples and Rome). The decision to create a task force headed by the former CEO is a precise choice aimed at supporting the dominant technological spirit highlighting the “elective affinities” between the technical system and state power. Just a few days ago the current CEO of Vodafone, during a hearing at Montecitorio took a stand regarding the future prospects of the country declaring that “I know how well the importance of technology and networks was already known [...]. I point out that we have decided to focus part of the attention and commitment that we are putting in place on the health needs that can be developed thanks to the diffusion of 5G and its applications.
Vodafone is strengthening its collaboration with hospitals and health institutions to make the most advanced technologies available to the Italian health-service and to help our doctors and nurses in their precious work for the community. [...]@

After a series of premises to highlight the ramification of the company’s power in this emergency situation, we move on to the real interest of this declaration by asking for “An immediate adjustment of the electro-magnetic field limits to the

level of the other main European countries (in Italy we have the most restrictive limits of the entire European Union) and simplification measures are necessary, making use of the institutes already known to our car regulations -certification and silence-assent. “

What more ideal time to come out? Especially since the works for the new 5G infrastructure have been underway for some time (the advertisements and official documents speak quite clearly about it) hundreds of antennas already installed, so in fact the shift of the bar of tolerance limits is already in progress and this pantomime with the government probably represents only a formalization necessary for the institutionalization of the 5G network.

The same Vodafone we find in the free messaging service related to applications for monitoring and mapping of people in the design and implementation phase throughout the territory. Vodafone together with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and others in the sector have thus been able to propose to collaborate in the management of the emergency by exploiting a moment of vulnerability to apply otherwise premature conditions.

Sharing data and digital mappings, creating ad hoc applications and “digital solidarity” are some examples of how, as a humanitarian subkey, the large multinational surveillance companies have been able to further fatten their data servers and climb over some steps to accept innovations technology.

In the not too distant future, it will be precisely in the name of “digital” health security, the convenience of “flexible” work and school education that infrastructure for smart cities will be implemented by trading the illusion of freedom in unlimited communications with control and total surveillance. A process in which we are induced to participate, enrolled in technical progress, and in which we will confess daily — through technological devices — for an inner need expertly manipulated by a new totalizing, fluid, consensual, “humansized” power.

The “benevolence” aspect of Power is what makes it so effective.

In China, once the emergency is over at least for Coronavirus — every movement and interaction is recorded, analyzed through DataMining and classified via smartphone. If you get on a bus, on a train, enter a station or in a certain area of the city, there is a QR code to be scanned so that the system registers the passage. An automated administration of conduct that through data crossings, some of which we do not even imagine, analyzes every aspect of life in a prescriptive process from which we are excluded.

A new implementation of the Social Credit System(1) that the Chinese government had set itself with he goal of making it fully operational just this year after a 6-year “experimental” phase which would be followed by mandatory membership for all citizens. Now, therefore, to the four macro areas scanned by this system (honesty in government affairs, commercial integrity, social integrity and financial credibility) is added the area concerning people’s health data by completing the bio-social profile.

The Chinese context, together with what is happening in South Korea, Singapore and Israel, albeit with considerable differences, is certainly important but it is enough to take a look at everything that is happening on Italian soil to notice that social control and management of Xi Jinping is not as far away as it seems.

The Coronavirus emergency, therefore, is the perfect storm that has allowed the Chinese government to strengthen and implement those systems that have already been unacceptable but have been active for several years, further raising the threshold for social acceptance.

What is presented as an extraordinary system for mapping the infection only serves to make us participate in our own profiling and surveillance.

“The deepest technologies are those that disappear. They bind to the fabric of daily life until they become indistinguishable from it”

Mark Weiser

With apps that tell you if you can be infected by Coronavirus, by biometric pointers that control your temperature, drones that monitor cities as guides for your safety, a new world quickly materializes in which reality is broken down, reassembled and reproposed by companies and governments.

To resume D. Lyon “we become the synthesis of our transactions, classification mechanisms” in which it is now the algorithm of a telephone that tells us how we can act within a specific space. The everyday life that we knew is ground to build a new future with a speed that paralyzes awareness and creates huge voids.

Once again, the inevitability of the technological solution is proposed to us.

A dangerous, contagious ideology.

Once again, a strategy calculated in detail in a precise historical contingency is confused as an absolutely emergency, an extra-ordinary event that aims to manage a difficult situation in the least impactful way possible.

In this way we will get used to “Calm Technology” and without realizing it we will be immersed in the technoworld that disappears into the environments of our daily lives, making us lose sight of the boundary between real and artificial.

There are numerous metaphors for war referring to this pandemic. But if a war is underway, it is the war against nature, human nature, its sociability and its will to think and act. A blitzkrieg that strikes quickly and tries to leave only helpless, confused, suffocated subjects around. Unlike the war, however, made up of “unifying lies”, to which journalists and state administrators of various kinds refer, those who push nationalism towards an external — and internal — enemy, this offensive must create awareness of the reality that takes shape around us, fast, and push ourselves to have “cold blood to think the unthinkable”.

A fragmented and functional narrative has diverted the feelings and thoughts towards full confidence in the state and telecommunications sector leaders, technocrats and researchers of various workmanship. There is room for each experiment if it can help save us from the pandemic. From genetic manipulations with CRISP-Cas9 to experiments on monkeys, to synthetic vaccine projects around the world, to chips implanted under the skin, ignorance and fear open the doors to the techno-scientific system.

In the USA and China there is already talk of a geostrategic race of biotechnology.

The world powers are pushing each other to grab the best laboratories and secure a front row seat in the race for vaccines and tests on people.

Among the most affected by this pandemic are the elderly.

After 1985, a year recognized as that of the first generation of those that Mark Prensky has christened digital natives, and in the following decades even more, the reality we live today is perceived as the only one livable, a different past without digital conveniences and persuasive technologies is unthinkable.

We run towards a world, as J.Verne imagined in the Paris of the twentieth century, dominated by technology and its engineers in which art, literature, humanity became collections of dust piled up in abandoned libraries, forgotten by everyone.

This virus mainly affects the last generations of those “loyal” to the pre-digital era of human history, those least adaptable to this new algorithmic system, innervated by networks, sensors and chips. With them go the stories that describe today as an absolutely unimaginable science fiction nightmare a few decades ago.

As H. Keyeserling writes “wherever technology penetrates, it does not resist any pre-technical life in the long run”.

Even if the new technological avantgardes are designed to incorporate all age groups with the new Active and Assisted Living projects, because “a smart city cannot exist without smart citizens and above all smart elderly!”.

Memory is also indispensable because it reminds us of other, possible, worlds that used to exist and that can exist in other forms.

Memory saves us from the inevitability of the present which seems to crush us to the point of suffocating every act of will and is indispensable, but cannot be the key to understanding this present.

The new forms of power that act today have no historical antecedents and analyzing them under the lens of past models would be an error that would not allow us to fully grasp their peculiarities and consequently fail to find strategies to oppose them.

The sinister newspapers sell thousands of copies for the continuous articles on the sterile statistical count of the dead, and on the street, in the neighbourhood, we do not talk about anything else.

In recent weeks in the city, mourning has served as a metronome for these silent days.

But if there is a sense of mourning then surely we must have it for all that they are taking away from us. For all the individual freedom that they are grabbing and for all the destruction that they inexorably lash out against Earth and its inhabitants.

The times when there will be no more amazement and dismay will be the times when we will have normalized ourselves to an unacceptable state of affairs. Let’s claim our amazement and wonder, made of anger and anguish, because they are those feelings that stimulate awareness, acting and the will to act without waiting for the times when our feelings will become “rights” that the State grants to us.

“How long before we forget who we were, when we were not yet their

Smartphones, Ringtones, Capital

property, bent in the shadows studying old books that speak of selfdetermination, with a shawl to warm us, magnifying glass in hand, as if we were deciphering ancient hieroglyphics?” S. Zuboff

Nella Bergamo, Italy — April 14, 2020

Note:

111... Chinese Social Credit System: the national system for classifying citizens functioning through the intersection of information regarding the social, economic and behavioral assessment of each individual. It is not just a capillary and mass surveillance system but a precise technical architecture for maneuvering behavior towards a programmed direction.

It is based on Big Data analysis technologies which, through the assignment of scores, creates characters of inclusion or exclusion in society by transforming points into “rights” which, just like points, can be lost or acquired. The program provides for the preparation of publicly exposed blacklists. A system that encourages the participation of its citizens according to an internalization principle, entrusting the maintenance of social order to automated mechanisms. It is in force since 2014, in the experimentation and adaptation phase, and from programmatic forecasts it is preparing to become mandatory for all citizens just this year.

“I believe that within the next generation the masters of the world will discover that childhood conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient tools for governing than batons and prisons, and that their lust for power can be completely satisfied by inspiring people to love their slavery, instead of crushing them and reducing them to obedience”.

Aldous Huxley, letter to George Orwell of October 21, 1949

Half a century ago, Piazza Fontana. The start of the so-called strategy of tension. A bomb exploded inside a crowded bank, just a few steps from the Cathedral of Milan. Over one hundred victims are dead and wounded, a massacre of blood-letting perpetrated in order to spread fear, terror and anguish throughout the country, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of Order. To sow a panic such as to justify, if not to invoke, the intervention of the State (also through its armed wing of police, also by suspending some liberties taken for granted).

Half a century after Piazza Fontana, we are in a full strategy of relaxation. After the bombs, the smartphone.

After the blood, the ringtones. Millions of hyper-connected people, a massacre of neurons carried out in order to spread the entertainment, amusement and satisfaction that’s necessary to neutralize the unconditional reflection of revolt. To sow a distraction such as to legitimise, if not naturalise, the presence of the State (even of its armed wing of the law, even of the suspension of some liberties taken for granted).

In short, repression has moved on to prevention. Currently those in power need not avert the revolutionary threat, as there is no massive direct attack on the capitalist organization of labour, the Proletariat as a historical subject in its subversive action is a real hallucination of ideology. Simply today, technology allows us to good-naturedly do what yesterday fascists and secret services wanted to impose brutally.

The indiscriminate violence of State terrorism was intended to show that no one and nowhere could feel safe, an indispensable premise for everyone and in all places to be controlled. Well, this goal has been achieved since there is a widespread control of all territory and of the psyche of individuals through devices far more discreet and efficient than the military in securing the streets and banishing any adventure from life.

And isn’t the best way to be indifferent to the present, to be moved by the past? Thus, December 12 is becoming like April 25, a national anniversary to remember to forget. It is the institutionalization of hypocrisy, which respects the dead of both sides (the partisans and the fascists, Pinelli[40] and Calabresi[41], celebrates Liberation together with those who impose slavery, to beg the Truth from those who sell lies, celebrate the Resistance to decree the end of the resistance, to condemn the State massacre to sanction the eternity of the State.

After the screening of the investigations, the clouding of consciences …

Note: The Piazza Fontana Bombing took place on 12 December 1969 when a fascist para-State bomb exploded at the headquarters of Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura (National Agrarian Bank) in Milan, Italy, killing 17 people and wounding 88. The same afternoon, three more bombs were detonated in Rome and Milan, and another was found unexploded.
The explosion at Piazza Fontana was part of a well-coordinated series of attacks which were blamed on anarchists but were actually the work of a conspiratorial far-right para-State network.[42]

Cashless Societies and Crypto-Currencies

End of the Traditional Era of Banking and Finance

Alongside the disruptor technologies and mechanical-outlooks that are key elements in the 4IR are the advances in Blockchain technology, like the Bitcoin[43] project, and ‘Financial Technology’, or ‘Fintech’, which dovetails into the workings and functionality of digital cash, artificial intelligence and what are being called ‘Smart Cities’.

Wealth has always been found in silver and gold, precious metals, diamonds and jewels, then empty promises written on paper in a system of deceit, later disappeared into computers. Zeros and ones manipulated by accountants and bureaucrats, a whole sector of the pyramid working to maximise profit from the flows of the market. Now algorithms and artificial intelligence can replace almost every aspect of traditional finance. Even value itself can come to be derived from an encrypted algorithm – what is being called digital cash, crypto-currencies and blockchain.

Distributed Ledger Technology, which is another term for blockchain, is essentially a decentralised databasing system that can be used for many different uses. From use as a currency, to a data storage system, or as a tracking system core for logistics and distribution. It can be used to build an authoritarian police state or a censorship resistant, open source and peer-to peer encrypted network.

The Fintech sector is diverse but fundamentally it can be said to intend to assimilate and transcend the legacy financial institutions with a new sector of capitalist speculation. Unregulated, quasi-legal and illegal practices abound in the new sector, which in parts is outside (and also against in some cases) the current regulatory economic laws of the differing nation-states.

At the moment the majority of the sector are focusing on developing “frictionless”[44] technical solutions to online and mobile payments, so-called “big data”; A.I analytics, trading and brokerage systems; so-called “alternative finance” (cryptocurrencies) and “financial management” (speculation). The global investment estimate in the sector was $112 billion dollars in 2018 and is expected to grow; Utopian opportunism positions many Fintech start-ups firmly within the 4IR with their green-washed focus on tech solutions for social and environmental “problems” at the service of Capital.

Cash infrastructure, and the ability of regular people to access cash, has been purposefully neglected in the UK by the banks and the State. Covid19 hastened a situation where the social planners can take advantage of an estimated 60% decrease in ATM cash withdrawals as people are often forced to switch to contactless payments and psychologically conditioned to view cash as ‘potentially infectious’, ‘dirty’. Link, the largest UK free-to-use ATM operator previously said that without a government bail-out, it would struggle to maintain its network for longer than two years, but the epidemic and resulting social technological distancing that has taken place, has meant that the cash system has ‘months’ rather than ‘years’, before it collapses into a state where people, without state intervention, may increasingly be charged a fee for using cash.

The most vulnerable people rely on fiat cash to survive, although in the UK, that is estimated by a financial ‘Access to Cash Review’ to amount to a mere 8 million people, with as little as only 2 million relying on it for day-to-day spending. The projections and estimates of the international financiers and unelected global entities of social engineering and economic planning can afford the desperation of a scant few million individuals here and there, in their eyes, as they quest for their utopian future of total surveillance.

Regardless to say, Africa, certain parts of Asia and all parts of the global south are seen as expanding untapped Fintech markets due to the vast amounts of ‘unbanked’ people, many without identity documents and access to digital financial services.

There has been an explosion of smartphones across all parts of the world, which are in more of a state of connectivity than ever before through the world of Apps. Biometrics and smart devices aim to provide a solution for verification through new identification processes using self-generated user data. Realms of Capital exists online, yet for many people sending money is a difficult and highly regulated task. Cryptocurrencies, the ability to be one’s own bank, offers a way out for this vast ‘unbanked’ sector of the world population that will play a part in the destabilisation and re-organisation of capitalist power in the expansion of the 4IR. Nation-states at the old industrial core, central banking and stocks cartels, their power is waning, and the trade and regulatory wars which are taking place as their degradation sets in are signs that the order of things is going to be reshuffled by the new technologies and their globalised reality in emerging markets.

Crypto-currencies were initially intended to ‘democratize’ cash through alternative systems of exchange in opposition to the old financial order. Each individual is able to create an encrypted ‘wallet’ address for storing, receiving and sending digital currency, the wallet can be printed on paper as a QR code, stored on a USB or digital device or online etc. The currency can then be exchanged for goods and services.

Bitcoin, initially an interesting libertarian project in response to the economic collapse of 2008, can be said to have been bought out by a combination of Bitcoin mining powerhouses and other corporate and new-corporate interests. New rich, old money: economic, industrial and quasi-legal. Bitcoin is presently the back-bone of this new Fintech sector based around Blockchain and it is a key volatile trading asset for the accumulation of Capital into the hands of those self-same already rich and the new speculators greedy for unimaginable wealth. ‘Mining’ for Bitcoin is no longer a hobby for amateurs, it is an enormous industrial effort through American, Russian and Chinese enterprises that, in the rush for profit, search for cheap electricity rates for Bitcoin mining and laxity from the authorities as concerns ecological and digital currency regulations. Many of these mining facilities would be perfectly suitable targets for sabotage, comprising of vast areas of servers draining the grid for computations.

After the global financial collapse which took place at the outbreak of Covid-19, the traditional economic order looks more like a house of cards than ever before. The seizure of Capital through re-accumulation of profit is stark. The banking cartels printed trillions of dollars in an attempt to bail out the losses of the major corporations of power and governments worldwide are bankrupt and indebted even further to those who hold the financial leashes.

Fintech is touted as part of the solution for many of those supposedly intractable problems facing Capital and the many nation-states in its thrall. From crypto-coins that can evade American sanctions like Iran and Venezuela are developing, through to centralised crypto-currency projects like China’s digital Yuan, or institutional efforts to develop a hedge against turmoil in the markets through a gold-like digital reserve, digital cash and cryptocurrencies are part of the coming postindustrial reality that we will be living in the next decades.

Fintech and Blockchain technology is being developed specifically for integral parts of ‘Smart Cities’ monetary, planning, governance, surveillance and policing functions, and so Blockchain companies and start-ups developing systems of technological social control within the scope of the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolution are key targets if we want to attack those who intend to turn our living environments and communities into an always online prison-state where everything is tracked and recorded.

For illegalist anarchists, cryptocurrencies are useful as an alternative to centralised digital state currencies. As digital state currencies become widely used there will develop a parallel economy in alternative untraceable currencies for the use of concealing one’s income and purchases, moneylaundering, decentralised dark-crypto exchanges, dark-markets in forged identities, weapons, illegal data (access codes, credit card details, sensitive industrial, political and social-consumer data etc.). For those living in illegality or clandestinity under the cashless prison society which is coming, the ability to buy essential goods and pay for services is a paramount.

Illegalists can use these currencies to circumvent cashless surveillance of digital markets and prevent all their movements and purchases from being analysed. The contradictions of vast flows of money entering the Fintech sector and the inability of the State and the traditional financial sector to assimilate or regulate the threat to their centralised power is a hard task for traditional Capital to overcome. The vast amounts of money entering the Fintech space due to the volatility of the tradable assets, which is transnational and doesn’t confirm to any (as yet) technical function for seizure and regulation, will widen the sector and with the advancements of other aspects of the technological singularity, cause the assimilation of the traditional sector of finance into cashless Fintech and 4IR. Quasilegality also has its benefits for capitalism, and the para-state which deals with legality and illegality view it as two sides of the same coin.

Regulation and the imposition of centralised digital cash will hasten overall social acceptance and make use of crypto-currencies and cryptoexchanges more widespread, which in turn will make it easier to access them for those who are not so technically adept. Finding the cracks in the system is necessary in a situation where all the odds are fixed by the market-makers and those with wealth to speculate. The various crypto markets and exchanges are where digital money goes to be tumbled and vast wealth is gathered in a rigged system of profit and loss.

But this means we can also use these utilities for transferring funds internationally to other comrades in struggle, imprisoned, on the run, or those needing money to survive, or to buy weapons and fund operations.

We just need to understand the technical side of things and research. Unlike Bitcoin, which has been heralded by European law enforcement as a useful tool for tracking illegal money flows, cryptocurrency coins like ‘Monero’[45], have already been specifically mentioned by Europol as being in their top list of encrypted dark-net coins that they have no ability to track or seize effectively unless they are able to gain actual possession of the encryption keys. This means seizing the public and private keys of the currency giving them access to the wallet, and unless they can do this, the asset is effectively withheld and/ or concealed depending on the crypto-currency type.

Decentralised privacy based coins with open source coding and active communities will usher in new forms of underground finance that looks to break into the mainstream.

Privacy will become a premium product in the 4IR off and online surveillance state and the ability to conceal your finances will not only be coveted by those malcontents scraping an existence at the edges, but by the leaders, corporations and billionaires who wish to conceal their financial accounts from the people they exploit and deceive everyday.

As the cashless future is forced on us, and we are more and more assigned to a QR code designation to be swiped on and off a reader, cryptocurrencies and decentralised exchanges, although part and parcel of the future impoverished world of the 4IR, may offer some chance of autonomy for the marginalised, exploited and rebellious to continue to exist and survive, support each other and subvert the existent reality towards insurrection and freedom, through the development of subversive parallel infrastructure

For a world in ruins, never forget the jungle.

Anons

Contribution to the 1^st International Meeting Against Techno-Sciences by imprisoned anarchist Dino Giagtzoglou

Contribution to the international meeting against the techno-sciences (Italy – July 2019) by anarchist Dino Giagtzoglou, prisoner of the Greek state

Comrades

I start this letter with a certainty. I am sure that our life experiences are very different as well as the starting points of the struggle of each and every one. I also think that with many of you we have different ideological origins and disagreements or contrasts on individual issues. But I firmly believe that the will to resist the plans of Domination, stemming from the awareness of the fundamental social alienation that alienates us from ourselves and nature as a whole, and the revolutionary passion for the destruction of the mega-machine of Power unite us in a common vision of a world free from the shackles of civilization. By going through a variety of analyzes, striding kilometer distances and eliminating in practice the language obstacles, since we recognize that there is the community of struggle for total liberation, we can really keep the flame of the revolt lit and the wager of the social revolution open. I therefore send a warm greeting to the Resistenze Al Nanomondo collective and to all the participants in the international meeting against the techno-sciences, expressing in advance my eagerness to fill the gaps in knowledge, that my absence will undoubtedly cause, by studying your reflections, your conclusions and everything you can get me through the actions and collaborations that will come from your fermentations in Italy.

But let’s take things in turn. For 21 months now, I have been pre-trial detained in the Greek prisons because I made the decision, like many fighters around the world, to realize my ideas by taking a battle position in the social war and fighting against power, here and now. So I am in prison because I put my ideas into practice beyond the limits of the law and certainly not by accident.

With the firm conviction that the revolution will either be lawless or it will be nothing, I wanted to give a concrete example – in the first person and in the present tense – of what revolutionary solidarity could mean, beyond the dipoles of innocence and guilt, of legality and illegality, by providing shelter to a persecuted comrade. That is why I am buried in tons of cement and iron, risking to be condemned for the “terrorist” attacks with boobytrapped letter envelopes on EU officials, executives of economic organizations and credit rating agencies sent in the spring of 2017, with which I have denied my correlation since my arrest, but the odds of my conviction for them remain high.

Of course no one was found in prison simply because one decided to fight against oppression and exploitation. My current status is the actual proof that I made mistakes. Mistakes in some decisions I made in relation both to myself and to other individuals with whom I misguidedly felt we have been sharing a common struggle. Mistakes that cost dozens of years of imprisonment, mistakes that may be unforgivable, but certainly neither them nor prison itself can cancel my permanent determination for struggle, struggle, struggle… under any circumstances. So I can only breathe through the endeavors of the comrades who are outside the walls and continue the struggle. I want to support such efforts because through them I am inspiring and essentially exist, I live for them! And so I see these three days too.

But is it just that? Is it just a meeting of individuals and groups struggling? In my opinion, certainly not. Having studied only a small part of the work of some of the speakers today, I know that they are comrades who have gone the extra mile in analyzes and critiques of the modern technological paradigm and not only… But I want to emphasize the up-to-date anti-technological critique developed by the comrades, alongside individual struggles and respected analyzes of other themes, not only because it falls within the topic of today’s meeting but also because I think it is something that is too absent from our broader milieus of struggle. Unfortunately, critique of technology (and I am talking about complex and high technology), which is never neutral, but it is the tangible expression of the scientifically structured power, is very disproportionate to the conditions it forms at environmental, social, political and economic level. And if what I say looks like a more general criticism of the radical-revolutionary front then it is definitely a criticism that also targets me personally. I think that in this area, not to get away from the topic by entering other fields, our analyzes (and “our” refers to a more general context and certainly not to the speakers of the event) are extremely behind, and consequently the current struggle against Domination is both ineffective and in the wrong direction. The above conclusions are briefly documented, but I gradually realize the various manifestations of this problem that we can clearly see around us, at least in these lands. In Greece, the comrades (anarchist or not) who have studied modern technologies and the ways they affect humans and life as a whole are just a few. In the last few years, with a delay but in a hurry, I watch with great concern and awe the technological developments, trying to develop a critical analysis of the current state of the civilized world of Power and its various intertwined structures, systems, institutions and mechanisms, by seeking and studying thoughts of companions who thoughtfully shed light on this ubiquitous dimension of domination, either their analytical tools are derived from the class struggle perspective, radical ecology or the anti-civilization anarchist views.

A very recent event that made me very nervous was on 19–20 November 2018, just two months after Thessaloniki International Fair with the USA being the honored country and the contracting of a memorandum of understanding between Microsoft and the largest public university institution in Greece, AUTH, when one of the summits of the Singularity University was held at the Athens Concert Hall next to the US Embassy, for the first time in this country. One day later, the 20^th InfoCom World conference, which is an institution for Telecommunications, IT & Media in Southern East Europe, took place in the same venue. This is the annual meeting of digital market executives in order to implement the Digital Transformation in the GIGAbit era and its central theme was the development of 5G networks. Also this year, from 10^th to 12^th of January 2019, the 2^nd Symposium of Assisted Procreation

“New Horizons in IVF” took place again at the Concert Hall, focusing on the latest developments in assisted procreation with the participation of scientists from all over the world and themes such as in-vitro activation of ovarian tissue, creation of the first human egg in the laboratory, therapeutic modification of genes in vitro, and news from the wider use of

«Spindle Transfer» in clinical application. At this conference, through a videoconference on the role of mitochondria in procreation, which was broadcast live online, by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine to 7,000 scientists from 100 countries, the first pregnancy using the method of maternal spindle transfer to a Greek woman was announced.

Here I want to talk about the first event. Both days of the Singularity Summit{2} were live-streaming broadcast to many public universities in Athens and the Greek province as well as to the collaborating with SingularityU and on the face of it “neutral” national research centre Demokritos, where a few days ago in early July in co-operation with the Singularity’s faculty the Singularity Youth Summer School was organized for the second time to introduce young people to artificial intelligence and biotechnology. The magnitude of the Singularity Summit, regardless of where it takes place each time, in accordance with other international industrial, business and research ventures (e.g. Human Genome Project and Human Brain Project and certainly IBM’s Smart Planet vision), in my opinion, is similar to that of NATO conferences and the summits of relevant international organizations for the military-industrial complex, as it is a powerful symbol of the global domination of transnational techno-scientific lobbies. I point out the multinational character of this organization despite the on paper American “aegis” because, contrary to the outdated anti-imperialist view of one and absolute Empire, I have come to deem a worldwide ruthless struggle against the representatives and the structures of the armed wing of modern civilization, which is the technoscience of Domination, to be the only pertinent and consistent “anti-imperialism”.

The Singularity, in this case, is just a figure of speech, a metaphor, perhaps a marketing technique, without this reducing the importance of the singular crime that is happening at all. As you may already know, it is a concept derived from Physics, of course detached and drained from its true meaning and content, so as to fit into the techno-scientific propaganda of the time it was born. Originally responsible for this plagiarism (because this is what it is about) is the polymath mathematician and computer scientist John von Neumann (with a significant contribution, inter alia, to thermonuclear reactions and the construction of a hydrogen bomb suitable for intercontinental ballistic missiles), who spoke first about singularity because of technological progress, following the working hypothesis of mathematician Irving John Good about the “superintelligent machine,” that is, the point in earthly space-time when Artificial Intelligence will reach a higher level of transcendence of the most advanced human intelligence, after which no prediction for the future of humanity will no longer have any sense. Later, technological singularity became popular by the also mathematician Vernor Vinge, while other futurists such as the futuristic transhumanists Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, founders and decision makers of the University of the… Singularity, also embraced this techno-maniac theory. However, the real crime is not the expropriation of a concept widespread in good part amongst the scientific community. Artificial singularity has absolutely nothing to do with the essential uniqueness, distinctness, diversity and the limitless and unexplored wealth of the natural world… And how could it? The University, which is a Silicon Valley think tank and is headquartered in a NASA-owned site, collaborates with the DARPA of US Department of Defense, MIT and the world’s leading technology behemoths, and its main sponsor is Google, could be nothing but a bloodsucking organization that purposefully accumulates profit and power, through the façade of scientific leading experts, until the small “armies” it trains colonize the whole biosphere. Of course, as in every individual technological innovation, here too the pretexts are in abundance (like the title of Peter Diamandis book). Pretexts and disguises of the most abominable plans of tomorrow, a figment of the morbid imagination of the most awful mechanistic and reductionist perceptions of today, while tracing their authoritarian genealogy, we find their cultural origins in the Inquisition and the Witch-Hunt of the Middle Ages. This is because, among others, also the “movement” of transhumanists and techno-scientists apply and aspire to expand similar interrogation practices of torturing experimentation on the whole biosphere in order to completely objectify, quantify, standardize, instrumentalize, automatize, homogenize and domesticate wildlife and nature, with an uncanny ideology as a bootstrap that attempts to propagate through these summits each year in various countries across the globe. Unfortunately, however, it is not about some “mad scientists” or “science fiction”. The Singularity undertakes to nurture the best researchers and prepare world leaders to implement plans to address the so-called “great challenges of humanity”. Thus technology takes on the role of “the saviour of humankind”. Who cares if for all human suffering, environmental pollution, ecological crisis the capitalist, technological and industrial society is to blame? After all, history teaches us over time that more technology does not come with a happier or more free world…

Many times the most on paper innocent, insignificant and harmless research programs and experiments have historically led to the most heinous atrocities with devastating effects on human and the planet. Exactly the same technological developments that are presented through supposedly beneficial and entrancing applications in civil society are used for military purposes. The research itself begins for military purposes and ends up in our home in the form of an “innocuous” microwave oven or an internet connection (see ARPANET). For example, scientists who discovered nuclear power in their time were considered upright researchers (one was actually against the Third Reich and the persecution of Jews) and their subject matter studied in their exclusive (and isolated from the rest) field of interest a neutral research work, with the well-known to everyone now results of the atomic bomb. And the examples of interconnecting military and civil applications from the same techno-scientific research are not over. So let us wonder how we can consider one research to be good, while another bad, when a small and seemingly irrelevant piece of it can be used and is used as a complement to the puzzles of a more general development, the plan of which is always determined by the powerful. Obviously, not all researches are of the same significance and the same consequence, this is an easy finding.

However, it is not necessarily those just carrying out research and projects specifically on nanotechnology or genetic engineering, for example, that one’s work can be utilized for harmful purposes (which are definitely presented as a public service as well as the “benevolent” institutions of the banking groups). Fortunately, some comrades reject easy inferences and convenient analyzes and avoid bringing reality to their political alignment because, unfortunately, reality is relentless. A researcher – always – operates within the dominant technoscientific paradigm. She cannot escape this even if she is the most “moral” person across the world.

The ills and problems caused by a system of domination and exploitation are impossible to be cured and solved once and for all with the tools and methods of the same system in its predetermined frameworks. Scientific research is never neutral. Even if it can be temporarily used for beneficial purposes (see cancer treatment), the direction of the plans of Domination cannot be changed from within. Of course, every participatory system (such as democracy) does not only need those who research, execute, obey and blatantly support and protect its operation, but also those who – always within acceptable contexts – disagree, question it, criticize it, counterpropose, improve it and therefore equally support it. When looking at the technological world from a radical point of view, we should not slip into the case-based reasoning, because this is not a question of custom solutions to our personal problem or our personal comfort and the full range of technological possibilities that we may enjoy (or even use in the war against power) on a daily basis. I think the right thing is not to focus on a single tree, but on the burning forest. Because, at the end of the day, to be free and not to be limited by anything but the laws of nature, all laboratories, factories and machines should be destroyed just like prisons…

But the techno-fetishist fanatics of the Singularity, at the… University, have another opinion. The atonement of human (and not only) nature is undertaken by the new “deus ex machina” of the transhumanists: the “god-man” Cyborg. So, they wander around the globe undisturbed and trot out their merchandise as solutions to all the problems of the world. So, we hear about various inconceivable “patches” on the multiform holes that human civilization has opened in the bodies of all animals and the body of Earth. From brain-computer interfaces to overcome human natural limits and digital automated governmental “ecosystems” to “solutions” to climate change, “treatments” for diseases caused by the existence of industrial civilization, or even “immortality”.

Transhumanists have an artificial or robotic “solution” for everything, as they have contrived to create a metaphysical absolutist ideology that dictates the causality of transformation of human beings into transhumans and then to post-humans or their decline to subhumans. In short, they claim that physical “flaws”, “unnecessary” emotional and biological processes, genetic and procreative frailties, mental deficiencies can and should be eliminated through the intervention and the literal integration of technology into the human body, including the brain. In this context, natural human procreation will become obsolete, or even useless, as the new techno-children with advanced technological intelligence will be able to reproduce and plan their own evolution. Sons and daughters will no longer belong to families, communities or natural environments, but will be property of those who own the laboratories in which they were either built or replicated.

Consequently, the transhumanist ideology embraces the human-machine fusion with religious reverence. And as it is known some of the greatest crimes against humanity have been committed in the name of religion… It would be “unnecessary” to refer here further to the treatment these guys hold in store for the rest of the living beings (in the footsteps of the anthropocentrism established for centuries now), since I have already outlined what this technological onset marks for human nature. For all this and many other things, the “prominent personalities” of Singularity University, among other technophiles, cultivate the ground – already fertile due to contemporary technological addictions – through these conferences in the various countries they visit as a touring theatre of the techno-scientific community.

Most important, however, is not the presentation of their plans, but the design of the future itself, which in their sessions takes place too! It is not about advertising campaigns and trade fairs, nor about “bazaars” of new technologies. No, not at all. The ultimate goal of all this, of course, is the dominance and absolute control of data, information, materials, vital functions, natural phenomena, food reserves and energy resources. But above all the control of the way people think, the image they have about the relations between them and with nature, their perception of the world itself, since what has always been the real target is the mind…

With already applied and widespread GPS and RFID technologies, sophisticated facial recognition software, “augmented reality”, the Internet of Things (IOT) applications, precision agriculture and cloud computing and Big Data systems (the Next Internet in two words), diffusing exponentially and their full development being imminent, we can see that the convergence of the various technosciences and exponential technologies in combination with the above is far more pervasive and threatening than the – known to everyone – “smart” technologies that flood the technological world. It goes far beyond a mere upgrade, and we would say that this is a fundamental restructuring of Domination as a whole. Threatening both for humans and for the natural environment. It is indeed a “revolution”, which has been defined as the 4^th industrial revolution and is already under way. Its key element is the “harmonization” of both the industrial and the digital world. Or, the merging of tangible physical reality with the virtual reality of cyberspace and whatever follows on from this. The building of cyber-physical systems, with “physical” being a very relevant and vulnerable concept. As a result, the digital organization and control of all the global systems – physical and artificial, business and societal – in real time, by the powerful who hold the power, can foreshadow only an insurmountable technological dystopia… With the prospects of monitoring patients via digestible computer sensors and wearables, interconnected social insurance registers and criminal records with banks and other public and private entities, and interviews of work applicants by artificially “intelligent” robots being only a foretaste of what will follow. The convergence of Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Sciences is the no. 1 wager of the 21^st century for leading technology companies – and not only – world-wide, and is already happening to a certain extent.

It is also the first step on the ladder of the transhumanist vision. The further development and deepening of nanotechnology, genetic engineering and reverse engineering, neurosciences, artificial procreation, and robotics, in direct interaction with the computer world, shape the prospect of a radical mesh of the cyberspace with the material world on an interplanetary scale. They eventually convert all living beings and ecosystems from living and inaccessible organisms, complex natural processes and chemical compounds into algorithms, and digits into binary codes that can be encoded and redesigned at will by any fucker who holds the power. Bytes, Atoms, Neurons, and Genes all come into the scientific scales and are priced according to their utility in the meat grinder of civilization.

From all of the above, I think it can be understood that the world, as we know it so far, undergoes a gradual but profound transformation. One could object here that human history is full of “world-changing” incidents, conflicts and rearrangements, but the basic structure of the world remains the same for centuries. I would disagree, starting by posing the argument of the ignorance of the majority of the world’s human population, including most of us, about the structure of the existing technological order, the functioning of the machines and the capabilities of complex technological apparatuses. Of course, this does not mean that people are to blame or that they should learn how to construct, develop and run complex technological apparatuses. Unlike the massive internet connection’s use, for example, and the information that is widely available, we, “ordinary people”, even if we wanted to, are not able to know the real potential of technology and science before they come to light and get a fair extent of publicity as well as they become available in the retail market. But even so, the potentialities offered through technology to the general public are infinitely less than the power of the major multinational companies in the field, a fact that reveals, among other things, the inherent inequality of the technoscientific system, since it usually offers trivial and banal functions and capabilities that people have developed for millennia through the basic physical capacity of senses and mental perception. These are applications and tools of piddling importance in comparison with the range of power that their technologies hold and provide to the bosses of the world and usually totally superfluous since for thousands of years people have served the same needs and functions without them. The buzz around a technological invention usually stimulates illusions and stupidity rather than true senses and intelligence. The illusion, for example, that the internet would lead to the liberation of humanity and wisdom, has completely collapsed. I am not going to enlarge upon the development of this idea and its collapse now, but the examples are countless…

It is enough to remember the events of the Arab Spring where the internet was initially used by the insurgents, but then it became apparent in a deafening way who really keeps it in their grip. Technological fate is thus written by the elites who, in constant interaction and collaboration with research centers, universities, state institutions and international organizations, on the face of it, “innocent” and “innocuous”, are planning the future of the world.

The ever-expanding conjunction between industry and research no longer requires barbed wire fences and military outposts, since it takes its form in facilities fully legit in the social imaginary. If DNA and biometric data banks (embedded elements in the upcoming Citizen’s Card, which is already being prepared by the Greek state under the direction of its foreign patrons to replace the identity card) are the first tiles in the mosaic of the direct and visible biopolitical control, then sensors, nanochips, invisible implants make up an inconceivably deep and vast grid of domination and exploitation not only for humans but also for every living being.

CCTV cameras and the military, police and intelligence agencies’ monitoring systems are “drops in the ocean” in the face of the impending colonization of every social activity, every natural process, every person, every object, animals, plants, waters, the soil and the atmosphere. We can imagine a future (not too distant) where the boundaries between public and private will be from too vague to invisible, since everything around us will be in live and direct connection with digital systems of power. Two quick examples of such – simple (and yet so far) – massive applications have been developed in the states of Estonia and the United Arab Emirates. Of course, the aforementioned transformation does not only concern the repression of the defiant. Repression and social control are just the most indicative examples that concentrate the essence of Domination. As it is known, those who hold power have always had imperialistic aspirations. The transformation of the world therefore affects and will affect even more all the areas of social life, even the most intimate moments of private life, from our most innermost thoughts and emotions up to the unexplored aspects of the whole natural world, first striking the wildlife and then the excluded, the unskilled, the weakened, the marginalized, until they eliminate them or make them gears in the social apparatus.

The major problem for us, WHO WWWAAANNNTTT FFFRRREEEEEEDDDOOMM and we want to fight for it along with other people, is that most people prepare and are keen on such a perspective if they are not actively involved in the work to achieve it. Thus, we will experience the dead ends of a totalitarian society, in which, on the one hand the possibilities of resistance and the opt-outs will be continually diminishing, and on the other, new technological applications will be claimed as a “right” and the effort to access and acquire them will be baptized “struggle” (as is already the case with medically assisted procreation and surrogate gestation who find supporters among postmodern and liberal tendencies such as queer theory and trans-feminism adherents).

We will face conditions where outsiders who do not conform to technological developments and imperatives will be automatically flagged to the authorities via the Internet and the outlaws will probably be automatically locked-up inside their home or car until they get arrested and sent to a concentration camp… China’s example now holds the lead in this perspective through the pilot implementation of a social credit system’s programs for bank deposits, supermarket shopping, social media activity, road behavior etc., and has developed the largest panoptic control networks with countless both steady CCTV cameras and camera drones (even in the form of birds) that are directly connected to the police and operate with facial recognition technologies, i.e. artificial intelligence of person identification.

China is accused of kidnapping Turkish Muslims, while maniacally chasing political dissidents and their families and thus setting up a grid of modern “McCarthyism”. Besides, it extends its technological experiments through the “sinicization” of the African continent and using Nigerian faces to refine the machine learning technologies that develops, say, the giant company Alibaba and not only. By the way, it is remarkable that at this time, if I’m not mistaken, the world’s largest investments are made in the field of Artificial Intelligence, creating a Cold War climate between China and the USA (with some obvious samples sounding the alarm already given by the dispute of corresponding tension more for control than for the trade of the new 5G telecommunication networks, which is the basis for the development of “smart cities”) and reminding of a war that probably never ended with unpredictable consequences, proportional to the development and use of nuclear weapons… In our continent, Finland is at the cutting edge of its growth, having already developed a national strategy for artificial intelligence, claiming titles and grants from the European Commission, taking also advantage of the presidency of the Council of the European Union since 1^st July, for the mega-project it develops. It has invested in working with Estonia and Sweden to become Europe’s first “laboratory” for artificial intelligence applications. The director general of the Ministry of Economy said that AI is the flagship for the development of a series of digitalization applications, namely digital governance. I only mention that the Finnish company Nokia said it will train its entire workforce in AI.

But when I talk about technoscientific totalitarianism I do not mean that the machines will rule people but that the ones who control these machines will have a totalitarian authority so powerful and diffused that their overthrow will be impossible, since neither the knowledge, nor the agency will be available for the aspiring rebels to stop it. As noted above, the unhorsing of the Prince-Human is made by a new “deus ex machina”, the mechanical “god-man” or Cyborg, but in full alignment and compatibility with the desires of the rulers and the needs of the free market economy. The “free” choice of technological interventions and modifications in body and nature will be as given and predetermined as the choice of voting for one or the other political parties in democratic elections. In conclusion, the delegation of our lives to technological giants and bosses (since the economy is moving fast towards the full assimilation of technology if the latter has not already integrated the first) will mean the delegation of freedom and welfare of all biosphere to the machines for which it would be wise to remember what the Luddites did in their age, except that the survival and existence of our own and the entire planet is now literally threatened. That is why we need to see what we are willing and able to do and how we will fight.

That is why the importance of the three-day international meeting is tremendous and I hope it has the best prospects so that with calmness and accountability, without arrogance and in the spirit of cooperation and respect of all comrades, we see how we can jointly devise plans for the destruction of this authoritarian monstrosity that is the modern civilization.

For the end, I would like to quote briefly and just informatively four events that caught my attention and I want to share with you because they made me feel too troubled as they will certainly make you too in case you do not already know them.

Although I do not have to contribute some in-depth analysis and criticism at this time and with all due respect, I bring to your attention up for consideration the genetic modification of children in China, the robotic womb transplantation in Sweden, the artificial procreation with maternal spindle transfer in Greece and the three-dimensional bio-printing of human heart that recently happened in Israel.

I’m sure some of you have already gone crazy with all that, but believe me, I can understand how you feel and imagine the stifling atmosphere in the place when such conversations are opened with real indignation and anguish about where this world is heading to…

I wish you good luck in your discussions and a good fight!

Dinos

2020 Trial Update

On Friday, January 24, 2020, the trial of anarchist Dinos Giagtzoglou ended in the special courtroom of Korydallos Prisons, Athens, Greece.

Dinos was found guilty of supply and possession of explosives and illegal possession of pistols and ammo.

Dinos was sentenced to a total of 11 years and 2 months’ prison without parole.

Contact address for solidarity post:

Konstantinos Giagtzoglou
Katastima Kratisis Korydallou II,
Korydallos, Attica,
18110
Greece

Cybernetic Society and it’s World

“The deepest technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”

Mark Weiser, computer scientist.

Developments in the technosciences NBIC: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology, Cognitive science) have been progressively invading every space and life itself for several years, initially rather slowly, and in current times of emergency, with increasing speed. They are advancing less like a large monolith and more like an expanding fluid mass – a term dear to the Italian Rainbow left. By definition, it is prone to change while maintaining its democratic nature, which, to some extent, is also characterized by the assurances and demands that were meant to protect human being as we’ve known them thus far but have failed in their purpose.

If, in their work to destroy nature, humans have always considered themselves alien to the process of destruction, this has been impossible to do in the new artificial environment now called smart. The new paradigm taking shape does not have an inside or an outside but forms a single world: the individual is necessarily transformed, or rather, manipulated, and there is no going back. But just as life is not born but engineered in the schlop of synthetic biology labs, nature persists regardless of all the manipulation and degradation imposed on it, taking back unexpected spaces.

The current changes underway are unprecedented in their capacity for remodulation and in the manipulative power they use to transform reality. Things that are unprecedented cannot be interpreted using existing concepts and tools which don’t allow for an analysis of the subject and of means of transformation itself, its consequences and new characteristics.

It is important to have an in-depth understanding the transformations underway and to grasp their meaning before they fully manifest themselves. Everything that resists and doesn’t succumb to the process of transformation is destined to be forgotten and there is no way back. Just as a new industrial monoculture destroys biodiversity and gives us fruit made from terminator seeds that are recreated each time by the same system that makes us continually dependent both spiritually and materially, today’s digital monocultures want to colonise the world and sanitise every critical thought and struggle, eroding the very concept of freedom.

“We must choose: freedom or comfort. For a long time, the imagery of the gadget as being more efficient than humans no longer shocks citizens. Children born in front tvs and now with smartphones in their hands, no longer have a basis for comparison with other ways of living. It is entirely natural for them to talk to their “conversational agents” and their “virtual butlers” and they bow down to an artificial intelligence which they believe is at their service. It is a crime to have given young human beings these artificial devices that allow dominant models to spread at the speed of light, models that are constantly outsmarted, and work to humiliate whoever fails to conform because childhood and adolescence are the privileged terrain of mimetic rivalries […] Little humans don’t know what free time is, or the wanderings of the spirit and the sensitive discovery of the world. They are constantly excited and demeaned by the spiral of stimuli – images, sounds, fabricated desires — how can they learn to take charge of their lives and thought?”[46].

From the concept of information to the smart city: the rise of cybernetic society

The smart city scattered with sensors and CCTV cameras is an open-air experiment in social engineering in which experts from large corporations like IBM, Google and Facebook manage all the data. The rationalisation of space, time and of people and their behaviour in which the ultimate objective is to automate humans. The cybernetic vision is fulfilled in its entirety: the measurement of every sphere of our lives and its analysis, management, and control through algorithms in which every dimension and process is digitalised, transformed into data to be analysed, worked, broken down, reassembled, crossreferenced and used to make predictions. A way to mould the world, society, and relations, a shape based on a very clear vision of the world and of living beings.

A cybernetic vision is being formed. From Saint-Simon’s utopic vision of the development of cars as the route to freedom, to Condorcet’s vision of coordinated and planned management using the new tool of statistics; the orderly and optimal management of the world through the rationalising power of Comte’s technique; from urban planning based on the idea of calculating the distribution of space by enumerating the population and last but not least, Wiener’s cybernetic vision which presents society and every living being and their environment as a computer system – all had been impossible to fulfil in the past but today are made possible by the convergence of the technosciences, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of things.

Every space, event and behaviour, as well as living being, become computerised as we witness the “liquification of the physical world”, as stated in an IBM document.

The seemingly abstract concept of information takes on a harmful consistency and reveals its true project: to predict all present and future events and transform individuals into information and into automated beings that are hardwired for the machine-world. If we think back to Hollerith’s machine in 1888, with its punched holes that allowed for the codification of individual characteristics and for information to be quickly recorded and catalogued in real-time. The machine was used for the US Census and helped rationalise Nazi extermination camps. Its inventor, who set up the company that later became IBM states: “The effective justification for the collection of large amounts of data lies in the ability to draw conclusions […] and to ensure that predictions of present and future events can be confidently made”.

In 1945 during the second world war, a military system was developed that could perform calculations on a probabilistic basis, gathering information from radars on the trajectory and at the speed of planes, integrating it with meteorological information to identify the best moment to launch missiles. The concept of “effective calculability” became crucial to make predictions and decisions in real-time; from then on, computing, through the development of cybernetics, was about calculating the best action to take.

With Wiener, cybernetics became the new Leibnizian mathesis universalis, a unified, biological and computational knowledge of biological systems or phenomena and structures that were social and of living beings. A quantification and unification of complex systems in which the subject itself is reduced to a sum of information and to a programme that can be deciphered and therefore modified like machines and can perhaps one day be directly managed by them.

“To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.”[47]

Norbert Wiener

The algorithmic accompaniment of existence

We are faced with technological developments that lead to a specific model of existence based on the constant presence of algorithms.

Silicon Valley are not the only ones intent on developing Artificial Intelligence, as evident in their name which references silicon, a chemical semiconductor essential for the production of electronic components. They were also the first to understand and predict that existence would soon be characterised by algorithms in every sphere of existence. With the Internet of Things and developments in AI, all spheres of our existence become digitalised for the purposes of automating the whole of society as well as life itself. A key assumption here is the transhumanist principle of the inadequacy, inaccuracy and fallibility of humans as well as the judgements and decisions they make. The human component must make room for algorithmic management. It is neutralised like in cars with automatic pilot features, which aptly represent the ultimate objective of Artificial Intelligence: to steer us, risk free, towards a new world.

In general, these new processes are only analysed through the lens of profit and economics and in order to understand them in greater depth, we must go further. The consequences of these processes lie in the transformation of our relations, emotions, our intimacy and a changed relationship with ourselves, with others and with the world around us. Technological developments assign power the task of entirely managing life of all aspects of our existence, in every circumstance.

Here, management will no longer be in the hands of the State but rather lie with whomever has the power of data. A cybernetic society can only be managed by technicians: an agricultural worker will no longer have the skills or the ability to autonomously manage his fields which, by now, will, be full of sensors and require the use of the company tablet. In this era, data become the main resource and those who own it also hold power over our lives.

In order to describe this process, the immaterial language of systems is used, in which abstraction cancels out the incarnate nature of data. The act of becoming data necessarily leads to being processed in the technological terminal. This is a feature that is required by a society, not of free individuals, but rather, of hard-working and unaware robots who, paradoxically, are voluntarily employed in the functioning and nourishment of the machine itself.

Individuals and experience become the very raw material that will be transformed into data through constant monitoring, including of single actions, gasps, imperceptible movements and looks, to the remotest of emotions.

The human body becomes a computational space in which steps, beats, sleep rhythms and the very depths of intimacy are probed and captured. Capter which means “sensor” in French reflects this quite well. Readily available data is not the only thing that gets extracted. Data is extracted and produced not simply to promote personalised commercial products but also for analysis using AI algorithms in order to predict, influence, modify, affect and shape behaviour.

The result is not to shape our actions entirely, but to affect us through a more subtle form of conditioning that is sometimes imperceptible, but constant, pervasive and totalising. An integrated system in which we ourselves become the flow of data for the production of other data and serve to continually nourish and be nourished by Artificial Intelligence, allowing it to evolve and improve.

The aim of Skinner’s experiments on operant conditioning carried out on rats and pigeons, was to try and engineer behaviour: the modification of behaviour through a technological system that was to be extended to the whole of humanity. In 1947, he wrote: “It is not a matter of bringing the world into the laboratory, but of extending the practcies of an experimental science to the world at large”. In his book “Beyond freedom and Dignity” we read: “we need to make vast changes in human behaviour, and we cannot make them with the help of nothing more than physics or biology […] what we need is a technology of behaviour […] comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology.” Skinner’s experiments and his rat labyrinths had led to the rise of a technology of human behaviour which emerge in the objectives of Silicon Valley: “Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behaviour”.

Just as Amazon’s algorithms guide people in their shopping, the life of individuals in the times of the smart city is deprived of autonomy and freedom in a subtle way but, more importantly, as part of a process that is desired and proclaimed by individuals themselves. This tendency and profound influence in every day reality and in our lives is almost imperceptible and becomes the norm. Artificial Intelligence, far from being a form of intelligence — considering it is in no way comparable to the intelligence of a living being – is a methodology of rationality which will become almost impossible to avoid. Who better than an algorithm that knows all our habits will be able to guide us in our choices?

Unfortunately, the idea that systems will be able to analyse a situation and calculate the best action to take at any given moment, will take hold.

Every manifestation of reality will be subject to processing through an algorithm. The new and gentle form of power taking shape does not have a façade of coercion or imposition, but rather, of free choice. It creates a context in which people will be constantly enveloped in algorithms that will meet their needs, desires, necessities and fears, guiding them along a programmed path.

The devices follow individuals in their daily lives with a whispered proximity in which machines take care of themselves.

A digital closeness without bumps and shocks, that only shows the individual – the mere user — the things he or she likes. Cybernetic society is the society of the positive in which everything must be levelled and transparent.

“Our greatest ambition is to transform the experience offered by Google to make it wonderfully simple, almost automatic in its understanding of what you want and in offering it to you instantly”.

Larry Page , founder of Google, CEO of Alphabet.

In our interactions with devices, many actions are automatic, while others require us to briefly stop and think in order to make even the smallest decision. Amazon’s Dash Button allows people to make purchases and payments, keeping all mediation to a minimum, even if this means simply making a purchase order. The aim is precisely to eliminate every trace of thought and conscious decisionmaking. Actions are substituted with operations in which indulging and lingering are seen as a hindrance and only slow you down. As actions become operations, they become transparent and subject to measurement and control while decisionmaking is substituted by the individualised automation of the management of needs.

There are other effects alongside the material consequences of tight and alienating Amazon rhythms such as the increase in tumours and miscarriages among the factory workers producing Gallium arsenide for LEDs, the pollution of water tables and the environment as a result of toxic substances, the exploitation of populations in the global south for the extraction of rare minerals and the destruction of the environment and biodiversity.

The seemingly banal act of clicking on the Amazon Dash Button and all the applications that will take hold everywhere, will lead to the annihilation and automation of thought which will affect the way of living in the world via products that are automatically purchased when the smartphone tells us they are about to run out. This will extend to a way of living in the world.

When life is constantly subject to measurement

We will soon be immersed in an environment full of sensors which will analyse all our data and those produced by the devices in our surroundings. Our actions, words, and emotions will be interpreted to tell us, for example, what our health is like and what medication to take, if needed. In 2017, Google made ten thousand volunteers in its biotechnology sector wear sensors for four years to monitor their health and used indicators to predict the likelihood of disease. A predictive function that leads to a therapeutic solution. Some steps that appear merely incentivising, such as the discounts you get on insurance and health services in the UK and the US following the purchase of an Apple Watch, are integrated within a larger, complex and invisible architecture.

Apple’s HealthKit platform or Google Fit, wearable devices like the Apple Watch or simpler pedometer bracelets, all use their applications and advice to assign workouts and the use of a certain substance representing a process of continual self-measurement: individual performance is constantly monitored to ensure it can be optimised and boosted. A life that is constantly subject to measurement. The body becomes an object of continual performance and self-optimisation which is perfectly integrated into a neo-liberal logic in which we become our own entrepreneurs.

The processes of growth and strengthening which characterise exponential technologies become key techno-ontological principles and it is through the technosciences that individuals can and must free themselves from their bodily condition to fulfil desires that can never definitively met: deeply transhumanist principles.

Google Glasses bring together computing, communication, photography, GPS technology, data collection, and audio and video recordings, into a device that can be worn as a pair of glasses and allows each person to send and share anything they are seeing online and in realtime.

The human eye has become a CCTV camera where to see is to surveil and where everyone both sees and can be seen.

As a forerunner to the other wearable devices, the decision to start with an object as familiar as glasses aimed at encourage people to wear devices. Google glasses did not take off and the company changed its strategy to make people in certain productive sectors wear them, using the justification that they increased productivity and efficiency. The aim is clear: to enter the workplace and create addiction, acceptance, normalisation, and then enter day to day life.

Similarly to our lives, the offline world in which we live is full or information that is online. Google Glasses would have closed this gap. It is not a coincidence that in 2013 Google and

Facebook bought an Israel-based social-mapping start-up at the forefront of the generation of realtime information, based on people’s contribution. This gave Google a start-up of satellite images in realtime and allowed it to develop a new frontier of sensors and cameras through which individuals could map and navigate within closed spaces. Positioning systems beyond the smartphone allow individuals to be localised and constantly tracked, not only when they are connected to the internet but also in the real offline world.

The boundaries between online and offline become thinner to the point where they mix and flow into a continual connection. We have gone beyond mere identification and an expert from the sector takes the following view: “New images can only describe what is on your desk. With a similar frequency we can get closer to what is called the “analysis of life patterns” and observe actions in terms of movement and not mere identifications”.

The Artificial Intelligence of emotions

The development of systems to support decision-making within companies began in the 90s. Their refinement was made possible by the growth in analytical and computational capacity and the evolution of algorithms and microprocessors to the point that IBM gave up on its computer assembly sector to work on strengthening its systems for decision-making support through what is defined as “cognitive” software for the analysis of Big Data. The software is based on deep learning and machine learning: the deep and automatic learning of Artificial Intelligence as so-called neural networks, which, put simply, work in layers to analyse and produce layers of information and is used, for example, by companies to select successful candidates, by banks for loan requests, by insurance companies and in the medical world. In order to get insurance for your car or at work, you have to be classed as responsible: here’s where IBM came in with the Watson Personality Service to define suitable and reliable personality profiles.

The new frontier will be the Artificial Intelligence of emotions, the affective computing of projects like SEWA who develop Emotional interpretation software that searches for actions and imperceptible facial movements like the bat of an eyelid. Emotions open up an infinite hunting ground and a form of consumption, in which emotions are consumed as if they were goods and are always chasing after something new that never definitely arrives, disposable emotion-goods with short expiry dates for hedonistic atoms.

Emotions in the digital society pursue fleeting moments and serial events in a rhapsody of pleasures that is syncopated and disconnected to every form of projectuality. We are faced with emotional responses rather than emotions, deprived of all vitality and passion, which serve to maintain an emotional state of fear or anxiety only to then be transmitted and managed as required.

IBM’s Watson programme targets the health sector and aims to bring about a radical transformation in the way diagnoses and treatment are made and administered. The programme is seen as being able to make diagnoses such as skin cancer more accurately than a human doctor. This requires the comparison of a large amount of data and it comes as no surprise that the company that built the state-of-the-art technological pole in Milan on the old Expo site requested and obtained all of the health data from Italy’s Lombardy region.

This evolution in Artificial Intelligence is reflected in an increase in automation within a context where actions will be carried out by systems rather than humans and through analysis and solutions that relegate humans to mere agents. The system’s interface makes the decisions. The invisibility and hyper-complexity of the processes of analysis and decision-making neutralise the possibility of conscious action and lead responsibilities break down.

Surrounded by the words of systems From the use of a keyboard in front of a screen, to a smartphone’s touchscreen, we come to the vocal interface that will open up a form of interrelation that is even more personalised and communication will soon become intimate in its nature. We are surrounded by the words of systems as interfaces no longer lie between us and systems, but rather, between us and an effigy of the human form. The physical and digital world overlap through the process of technology’s naturalisation which is made invisible in a world of communicating objects.

When describing the vocal assistant Alexa, Amazon’s vice-president states: “our aim is to create a kind of ecosystem for Alexa, that is open and neutral […] and to make it as pervasive as possible”. The vocal assistant’s predecessors had been in a development phase for 10 years as part of an Artificial Intelligence project in the United States. The project aimed to develop a computer that could engage in conversation and was designed to help the military on the field manage data and make predictions that were effective and would allow them to act autonomously.

The most profound invasion of the lives of human beings is underway thanks to the algorithms that accompany our daily lives with the promise of a less stressful and more functional existence. The fluid, warm, spontaneous and female voice that adapts to our humour and our personality naturalises the digital system which dissolves into a voice that acts as an intermediary between our lives and the world. A voice we confide in and with whom we can be intimate. In the words of Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana: “I know so much about you. I can help you in ways you don’t quite expect. I can see patterns that you can’t see”.

The luxuries of a given class or generation become the needs of the successive one as they are considered necessities and more importantly, have been made accessible to all. This process has been fundamental in the evolution of capitalism.

Everyone will want a digital assistant and constant monitoring will become the reality. In this context, computers, sensors and all systems, will disappear in the background and the real world will become a single apparatus that is universally connected.

“The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses […] so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic”

Eric Schmitt, former executive chairman of Alphabet.

The gentle form of power

Control itself is transformed: an influence exerted through a constant relationship – one that avoids excesses and the distress and intrusive nature of an Orwellian world. At the same time, it is careful not to be too absent in order to avoid breaking ties and dependency. We are no longer faced with a simple question of surveillance or of our much-loved privacy being violated, but rather, of our behaviour being influenced and ensuring that, through a technical structure, good organisation can prevail and things can function as intended – both at the microscopic and macroscopic level – or rather, according to programmed paths.

Surveillance and control, as we understand them, lead to the detention, exclusion or isolation of all individuals who, in some way, deviate from the established order or violate and rebel against the rules. The new automated management of behaviour, while maintaining this repressive structure, has universalised the principle of internalising all these norms. So much so that, similarly to the electric fencing surrounding certain fields, all those in the herd who inadvertently or voluntarily dare to go beyond the fence get electrocuted. But nothing more than this happens as the structure of the matrix alone is enough to contain any from of divergence.

The new gentle power does not need to use duress, its reassurances are sufficient. In order to become widespread, all it needs is to meet our demands and to know every aspect of our lives. The new form of gentle power creeps into our lives, our perceptions and our relationship with our bodies, with others and with the world around us. Invisibility and pervasiveness lead to its normalisation. People will be drawn to a world in which everything is structured according to their needs, with prediction and certainty and the unforeseen element is eliminated with automated regularity. The certainty produced by machines is the solution to fear and social uncertainty.

The idea that you can exercises more power than that which states you must: no constrictions, only inner needs asserted by individuals themselves. We know very well how self-exploitation and self-entrepreneurship are more effective because they are couched in terms of freedom and self-determination. The new form of power is more subtle and does not take hold of individuals directly but builds a system around them that can act autonomously.

This leads individuals to reproduce an element of dominion within themselves, internalising, desiring and claiming it as their freedom. In this sense, freedom and subjugation coincide.

Bentham’s panopticon continuously watched prisoners but it didn’t have access to the deepest parts of an individual. In contrast, whoever will set our algorithmic future will not only have access to our internal life but also influence and establish meaning itself – initially, of the world and subsequently, of human beings themselves.

In Bentham’s panopticon, individuals were aware of their imprisonment whereas people in the digital panopticon live under the illusion of freedom. They freely and actively take part in their own monitoring and surveillance and in that of others: “Today yet another paradigm shift is

taking place. The digital panopticon is not a disciplinary biopolitical society, but a society of psychopolitical transparency”[48].

In digital society the voluntary display of oneself leads to our systematic dispossession, a process of vetrinization. It is not simply about putting yourself on display, which implies you can keep things hidden, but about total transparency.

Everything is exposed. A narcissistic exhibition of the selfie generation.

Today, surveillance does not happen like an attack that denies or restricts freedoms. Freedom is exploited until it becomes control and they both become equivalent. So much so that free choice is the freedom to choose between the only options offered by power.

The coercive model is not entirely functional to a form of power that wants to invade every sphere of our existence and to mould individuals to the point where it becomes invisible and turns into a free choice wherever a behaviour, way of life, relation and way of interpreting and understanding the world are perceived as being free choices, “engineers of the human soul”[49].

The efficiency of this form of power does not come from banning and depriving but from making concessions and satisfying. The production of docile and dependent bodies.

People’s desires are not repressed but channelled into a specific vision of the world. The panopticon was based on the deception of permanent control and at its centre was the perspective of the central tower’s vision and the omnipotence of the dystopian gaze in which prisoners did not know whether they were being watched or not at a given moment. In the digital panopticon the gaze lacks perspective and the distinction between the centre and the margins fades. Surveillance is widespread, permanent and, unlike Bentham’s panopticon, it has a memory.

Gentle power dissolves until it becomes imperceptible in its absence, in habit, in normality. Power that operates through habit is more effective and long-lasting than when it acts through oppression. This worldview invades and becomes a part of the plot of daily life, along with our perceptions and our bodies. It becomes normalised and is then freed by daily life itself which becomes its bearer. Gentle power acts and develops along a “horizon of meaning”,[50] only to consolidate itself effectively into a single perspective and prevent the emergence of something different. This process “sets itself apart from the violence that acts nakedly, precisely because it has been stripped of meaning”[51].

Metamorphosis of the State

Within the global framework where the struggle for technological leadership is taking place, the State and its large oligopolies are forced to mediate and find a common strategy. Although there are frictions, they never truly emerge. An agreement is always made and technological innovation unites everyone behind a chorus of unanimous consent. This also applies to the appropriation of raw materials required for the development of Artificial Intelligence: the generation of data on individual consumption, behaviour, on states of health, on the functioning of new urban systems and on the transformation of geographic territories, on epidemiological dynamics and the climate… The state has fully adopted the principle that everything is information – a concept very dear to Silicon Valley and its followers – or perhaps it is the principle itself that has completely changed the meaning of power.

As individuals themselves become the raw material for digital development, the appropriation of data becomes the primary mechanism of power, turning into an essential need that sets the course of all technoscientific politics and going well beyond the market’s simple control over individuals.

Single States are increasingly becoming digital colonies in the hands of international finance, international organisations and large agricultural-bionanotechnologicalpharmaceutical corporations and of Big data. They become platforms that link people and private infrastructure to allow cybernetic society to function more fluidly.

Everything that had previously been part of the traditional administrative sphere, the public sector, has now moved towards an economic sphere that is characterised by a series of novel attributes. In this sense, the digital transformation of administrations should be seen alongside the development of the platform State and the move towards a new status for people. Individuals who until recently had been tied down by rights and duties within a common structure become users with the right to benefit from the best offers, just like consumers. This is in line with a spirit that comes from a commercial logic and prior to that, from having adapted to the logic of satisfaction. Recently, politics has been reduced to concept of satisfying people. This is a crucial step in their transformation into docile and obedient patients.

Within the new infrastructure, States are only called upon to devise mechanisms for the systematic extraction of data to be used in production in the traditional sense of the term, and more importantly, in scientific research, where the theories on how to build new societies is formed.

The new phenomenon that already exists is based on constant algorithmic monitoring and is not encompassed in the idea of the State exercising control. The state might be called upon to regulate data extraction processes, although not for much longer. It cannot however, under any circumstances, afford to halt the development of the digital world, as Artificial Intelligence in its collective development promises to organise every single thing, to generate wellbeing and offer people anything they have the right to expect, in this sense, achieving the perfect synthesis between neoliberal and leftist aspirations. The automation of one step activates the following step and the automation of the entire process instils a chain reaction in all the processes it is linked to.

This logic cannot be broken because the system will try and go around it. The end result might be the automation of medical cures, of news and information or of purchased goods and commerce. In the end, we will be forced to automate ourselves just to avoid getting in the way of the system.

What is democracy today if not the search for new techniques that can act on people, inviting everyone to take part in the accepted general order of things. The State will convince us that machines will only do what the system asks and this is exactly what IBM said during their large-scale roll out of the company’s powerful computers.

In China there is already a system in place that acts as a laboratory for the automatic management of behaviour: the social credit system, Alibaba’s Sesame Credit. This is aimed at almost everyone — with the exception of people with criminal records – and is based on the scientific assessment of behaviour, providing you with an initial score that decreases following different daily actions you undertake. People with higher scores get benefits like being able to rent a car without a security deposit or having greater access to the healthcare. Those who end up on the “non-compliance list” can be banned from buying a plane ticket, building a house and enrolling their children in private school.

Sesame Credit uses an algorithm to analyse things like the purchases you make, your level of education and the quality of your friends. People can only guess how to improve their individual scores and get rid of friends with low scores. In only two years, Sesame Credit had recruited 400 million people, taking over every aspect of their lives. For the company’s CEO, the rating system “will ensure that the bad people in society don’t have a place to go”.

In an interview, the Social Sciences Academy researcher who invented the social credit system states: “It’s the best way to manage society, it allows us to control financial risks and reinstate moral education […] We need peace and stability and for everyone to live well, only then can we talk about rights. It’s an excellent technological method. France should adopt our system to deal with social unrest, with social credit they wouldn’t have had the Gilet Jaunes, they would have been identified from the start and there would not have been unrest.”

There are powers and forces at play that go beyond and exist regardless of the power and influence of States: research hubs like Silicon Valley, or large agriculturalbionanotechnological-pharmaceutical corporations, Big data or arms and bodies like the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), or foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation or Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Their objective is to fulfil a world vision and clear ideology that takes the form of specific techno-scientific developments and projects. States are subordinate and functional to these processes. The Rockefeller Foundation or Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also play a role in the prediction-development-management of different pandemics. They will exploit the new coronavirus, COVID19 (SARS-CoV-2), to carry out their digital identity project ID2020. Think of the development of the 5G network: a State that is subject to criticism and social pressures can heed caution – as in the case of GMOs and nanotechnologies – but it cannot stop these developments. It can only try and slow them down and present them in a different, more sustainable, controlled and safe light, like the smart city project in Barcelona which is cherished by environmentalists and feminists.

These are key developments for the advancement of the techno-scientific system that go beyond power and the role of single States.

5G: the network for Artificial Intelligence

The 5G network is about much more than just transmitting data at faster speeds. As well as increased speed, it will allow for more simultaneous connections and for the transmission of data in real-time with virtually no delay. With a ping, the time interval between the moment in which the signal is sent and the moment in which the response is made available the response time of a system — is not delayed by more than a few milliseconds.

These characteristics – more simultaneous connections with no delay – and the ability to sustain a large quantity of gigabytes and terabytes, are of key importance to Artificial Intelligence, quantum calculations, augmented reality, biometrics, automation and to the transmission of data between machines: machine to machine (M2M). These things are also strictly interdependent: the development of one is necessary for the advancement of the others.

If we think about the research that originated within the military and was subsequently applied to the civilian sphere — like the research on radars that later led to microwave ovens — the 5G network and related developments like Artificial Intelligence can be implemented in both civilian and military spheres simultaneously. This not only transforms the weapons of war – with new arms like automatic military vehicles and drones that can fight wars — but also the way wars are waged. The digitalisation of the battlefield theorised by Darpa (the American military research body) is based on the constant exchange of information and the coordinated and immediate decision-making that follows.

The fact that Google’s AI AlphaGo defeated all other players at the game Go — which is much more complex than chess — attracted a lot of interest among the military’s high command who saw in it the demonstration of “strategic thinking” and therefore the potential to develop plans and make decisions in wartime contexts.

The 5G network is the breakthrough that allows the smart city to be developed in full and the Internet of things to emerge definitively, the internet of cybernetic humanity: an enormous information network in which everything – humans, other animals, natural environments, urban adornments, infrastructure, services – will be connected and communicate within an integrated system. The idea to develop an invisible technology that is transparent and pervasive and must be able to engage people at different points in their day through objects used in dayto-day life, dates back to research conducted in the 80s at the Xerox research centre in Palo Alto, Xerox PARC.

The term ubiquitous computing coined by PARC researcher Mark Weiser represented the idea of a new type of human-machine interaction which developed into the wellknown Internet of things.

In 2002, IBM’s director described the intelligent planet that had been conceived in his labs: “the world’s digital and physical infrastructure will converge. We are putting computing power at the service of things that we would not previously have recognised as computers. In fact, almost everything — whether they be people, objects, a process or service, a public or private organisation, large or small – can become responsive to the digital reality and form part of a network”.

Passive sensors will become active and real-time data analysis will inform real-time actions – like a car engine being turned off if you haven’t paid your insurance. Real-time not only refers to a technological structure but also represents an anthropological transformation in which there is no room for uncertainty. Everything, including something unexpected or an error, must be predicted or picked up on in the precise moment it manifests itself. This is total dominion on the living but also on the course of events.

“However it is a form of control that is more poignant and that not only feeds on recent or old archives but also on the state of reality in the moment in which it is formed […] You might call it “the constant transparency of the existence of the present.”[52].

The Internet of things brings surveillance society to fruition: the things around us watch us and listen to us. We are also surveilled by the things we use on a daily basis which constantly transmit information on things that do or don’t happen. Our entire surroundings actively work to register and record our lives in full. Without the constant production of data, the development of Artificial

Intelligence itself would not be possible: data on individual consumption, behaviour and states of health, on the functioning of new urban systems, on geographical territories, on the climate – data on everything that’s classed as information.

Google does not extract data merely to sell advertising space. It gets used to develop its Artificial Intelligence projects. Google’s self-driving autopilot cars were not developed following technological innovations but thanks to the large amounts of data extracted to improve Artificial Intelligence using neural networks. Similarly, Facebook’s relative advantage in biometric recognition systems lies in the 350 million photos uploaded onto the site by users every day.

Artificial Intelligence becomes necessary when the world’s ability to generate information surpasses the ability to process and analyse it. Its development will be crucial for the analysis of Big data, the development of self-operated vehicles and for the automation of industry and services. For this to happen, a 5G network is required. A new convergence that signals an epochal transition in which the 5G network is at the heart of this cybernetic revolution.

The new colonialism

“It is maps that create empires” in lands that have yet to be conquered. Street View aims to make everything in the world representable, reachable and indexable via Google. “Contribute to Street View, “Create your own 360° tour thanks to the products compatible with Street View” is what the project’s presentation says, a project which is also based on people’s participation and perfectly in line with the new participatory approach. Street View is not only made up of streets but also of information on how they are travelled by people.

As colonialism conquered new lands, they had to be mapped. Today, mapping is extended to human beings themselves. In 2020, Facebook will have 700 million new smartphones in Africa and aims to become its new platform just like in other places in the world that are on the digital margins. This will give them access to data on future users and therefore consumers. FreeBasic is a digitalization app for less developed countries that provides free access to the internet and to a range of services among which the only free ones are those developed by Facebook. Through its philanthropic façade, the app gathers key information such as health data and data that benefits women. The aim is to gain control of personal data, shape consumer choices and create new needs.

The control of 5G technologies, the global production of microchips, the extraction of lithium, cobalt, coltan and rare-earth elements required for microelectronics, have a crucial role to play in the global geopolitical chess match and will be the next conflict zones in the fight to secure global leadership. In 2018, the Trump administration had blocked the takeover of the number one microchip producer Qualcomm by a Singapore-based company. This was a strategic choice driven by the knowledge that being a global leader in microchip production was essential to lead in the 5G and AI sectors. The clash between the United States and the Chinese company Huawei should be understood in this context. China has become a competitor in the development of the 5G network, AI and automation. The Chinese corporation and online marketplace Alibaba has search engines and payment and trading platforms that allow it to manage a logistic chain that delivers 60 thousand parcels a day – ten times more than Amazon in the United States. Alibaba’s online payment platform has the capacity to manage 120 thousand transactions per second – a third of what US platforms can handle.

In the new race for Africa, the 4G networks already built by Huawei put the company in a position of greater power compared to the United States. To conquer new territory, telecommunications and digitalization infrastructure are required. Just as railways used to represent the advancement into new territory in the past, today, this is built on the back of telecommunications that are 5G-ready. An indicative example is the agreement backed by the Chinese government and signed by the start-up Cloud Walk Technology and the Zimbabwean government.

The start-up develops facial recognition systems and the agreement includes the development of a mass surveillance system that is similar to the Chinese system. Zimbabwe will get new infrastructure while Cloud Walk Tecnology and China will receive huge amounts of data to improve the ability of facial recognition systems to recognise individuals across ethnic groups – one of the main problems in Artificial Intelligence training.

The engineering and automation of humans

There are certain technological developments that represent something that goes beyond their mere function and which cannot solely be reduced to their development in itself – think of the mobile phone which is not only a tool but represents the dominant transformations and paradigms of a specific historical and social moment.

The self-driven car that integrates sensors, data analysis and AI systems in a smart city made possible by the 5G network should be seen in this light. A self-driven car cannot exist in isolation and must be integrated in an urban environment and with the various sensors within it. People use their cars to shop, eat, go to work, speak on the phone.

Increasingly, they will interact with their car’s vocal assistant and sensors that will monitor their emotional states, set the right temperature and advise on how best to act. They will be perfectly attuned to the paradigm in which our lives are gently managed. Google is not interested in the car itself but in the behavioural data it provides, not in the map itself but in the data returns from movements and map searches. Google is increasingly investing in automated vehicles, domotics and wearable objects and Facebook is developing drones and augmented reality. It is no coincidence that IBM sold its entire computer production sector in 2005 to develop automated management systems. What emerges from the actions of digital companies is that their aim is not build cars but to be inside them so they can constantly surround us.

Through its creation of Alphabet in 2015[53], Google revealed that digital companies want to extend into all areas of our existence and be everpresent in our lives.

Self-driving cars not only manage journey times but also the time spent travelling, as they extract and work passenger data to recommend suitable restaurants or shops. By providing the answers, the system decides what the right solution is to address a given problem or need in that moment, even when no needs have been expressed. Google’s app Driving Mode which makes recommendations for destinations and travel times before users know where they want to go. We are destined to become passengers in own our lives, just like in the selfdriven car. Not only will the management of data become automated, the aim is to automate human beings themselves. It is about taking human beings out of decision-making processes and directing their behaviour in a model of rationalised cybernetics in which humans are the

error and the unforeseen and where exceptions and limits will not be tolerated. A transhumanist ideology embodied by companies like Google and IBM that will be fulfilled in the creation of a machine-world.

As stated by the transhumanist Nick Bostrom: “As materials become increasingly malleable, the idea of a fixed species becomes problematic and reproduction loses its meaning. […] The more powerful and accessible our technologies get, the more we will be able to define ourselves… define the aims. Consequently, human groups will distinguish themselves based on the values that guide their choice of how to use these new powers to shape their morphology and their destiny.”

The technocracy of Silicon Valley boasts that it is working for the benefit of future generations, but what is meant by future generations? Those who are not generated, but produced in labs between microscopic slides, test tube cells and cultures, through the genetic modification of embryos, ectogenesis and cloning, without bodies every meeting, without a mother or a father.

We are facing an ontological transformation – in an antropotechnical dimension – as the very concept of humanity is redefined. An anthropological transformation – defined as the radical transformation of new generations – is underway, in which human beings are uprooted, eroded and with a sterilization of their capacity for awareness and resistance.

Humanity will be dispossessed of its ability to engage with reality, “we live in a world where things are retreating from consciousness”[54]. Without a conscience, it will no longer be possible to develop the sense of awareness and responsibility required to act in a society that produces opinions that leave the existent unchanged and don’t have consequences. Camus wrote that there is no such thing as a rebellion that isn’t centred on the idea of an offended human nature, one which is mortified and deserves redemption.

Resisting the megamachine We find ourselves in an epochal moment marked by profound and irreversible transformation. Now is the time to realise this and fight against it.

The 5G network, while enormous, is only the means by which a world called the Internet of things — made up of communicating objects, and more recently, communicating bodies — can travel at high speeds.

In the world as we’ve known it up until now, it was impossible to foresee the intention and direction of these developments, even when they were confined to innocent labs or used to enslave animals on industrial farms. It took a long time to bring technological processes to fruition, in particular, to bring them into the social sphere — with the accompanying social upheaval — and to pave the way for their social acceptance through so-called public participation which lies at the heart of the rigged democratic game. In recent years, the accelerating speed of technological progress has meant that we’ve seen the needs of the technological world before their actual development: wars, climate disruption and finally, the health dangers that stem from the creation of permanent pandemics, all speed up these processes and justify what has been under development for years. At their centre lies widespread Artificial Intelligence – not as a means but as an end and as a type of nonlife.

The process of economic re-ordering in which States are currently engaged is being used to reconfigure a new world made up of digital dictatorship and “health terror” and is treated as if it were the only state of things to ever have existed. Fear, hatred and attention are channelled towards something immaterial that cannot be fully understood. It is the system itself that provided us with the tools to understand this new reality through its propaganda and experts, but soon, these things will become concrete with vaccines and microchips on a mass scale. In this narrative, a crucial step has been missed, which until recently, still had meaning: opposing the present state of things. Why would there be opposition when we are all united through the same fears and hope for the invisible enemy that threatens everyone’s health?

This signals the importance of finding meaning once again and of attributing meaning to things in a way that encompasses different values, as stated by Ted Kaczynski in “Hit where it hurts”:

“It is absolutely essential to attack the system not in terms of its own technologically-oriented values, but in terms of values that are inconsistent with the values of the system. As long as you attack the system in terms of its own values, you do not hit the system where it hurts, and you allow the system to deflate protest by giving way, by backing off”.

Reattributing meaning must begin with the recognition that research labs concretely aim to engineer humans and reduce us to automatons, much like the robotic devices that move parcels in the logistical sector. The key developments which the system cannot afford to lose in or retreat from must also be understood in their concrete form: the 5G network, Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnologies, synthetic biology, genetic engineering and artificial reproduction.

By dealing with these questions only in part, we are limiting ourselves to focusing on the latest harmful effects or on certain aspects and we risk losing sight of the whole, while making action less incisive. For example, in the case of GMOs in agriculture, the system is open to dialogue, whereas the genetic engineering of humans is not. Yet, it is self-explanatory that when control over our bodies, their processes, and reproduction is lost, all ethical barriers will come down and the system will be able to engineer the living in its totality. Analysis and action should immediately be directed at places where it hurts, without being afraid to touch on questions that are seen to be untouchable or of being criticised for being an isolated, disconnected, and, in short, premature minority.

If the transformations overwhelming us are unprecedented and cannot be interpreted using existing concepts and tools, the same applies to resistance. It will have to adapt to the present and find new strategies for intervention that must be efficient and aim for the focal points of the new digital world. The passion for struggle, which they’d like to weaken or domesticate and bring into a virtual or symbolic sphere, must be discovered. Time is running out, like an electronic tag, without respite.

The changes that will take place in future months and years will be permanent and there will be no going back. So, for those who love life the only thing left to do is to bring it to fruition and be driven by a way of feeling that still makes sense, towards the freedom that develops in the midst of struggle.

Resistenze al nanomondo

May 2020

http://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/

Against Starlink

Surveillance and electronic interconnectivity reaches to enclose the Earth. In order to proceed with their colonisation of space, the elite must subdue, distract, restrict and enfeeble even further those of us who will inherit this exploited and chaotic planet – the poor and the excluded — by building a toxic, allencompassing surveillance system that, they hope, leaves us nowhere to hide.

Starlink, the dreamchild of the billionaire Elon Musk at SpaceX whose further goal is to colonise Mars, has already begun to fill the ionosphere with satellites designed, in tandem with millions of on-theground masts that are being rolled out, to carry 5G to everywhere on the planet. As of June 13, 2020, Musk has deployed 538 satellites. Approved by the US Federal Communications Committee (FCC) with no environmental impact checks, Musk’s Starlink project alone aims to fill the ionosphere with 42,000 satellites by 2027. Amazon, Facebook, Boeing, Spire Global and Oneweb are also in the process of adding their own.

Here on Earth, the burning of the rocket fuel required to deploy these satellites could have catastrophic results should one explode or leak into the atmosphere. The refined kerosene and liquid oxygen used to propel Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket also destroys ozone and releases massive amounts of black carbon into our atmosphere, approximately 4,000 tonnes a year if SpaceX launches a rocket every fortnight as planned. Mercury-based rocket fuel, abandoned by NASA but which was being still being explored by the company Apollo Fusion in 2018, could potentially cripple every living thing on earth should a malfunction occur that spreads the highly neurotoxic mercury across the planet. Two rare gases are also being used to fuel rockets — Xenon and Krypton, both used in anaesthetics — appear to be relatively clean except that both are asphyxiants.

The satellites being sent up to create this 5G net are not that high, some of them orbiting only 200 miles up, in the earth’s ionosphere and magnetosphere. These are what give this planet life, the source of all energy and a precise electromagnetic field to which all life on the planet has acclimated over billions of years. The impact of the accumulation of thousands of satellites in this region wedded to millions of masts on the ground has the potential to dramatically alter this electromagnetic field with unpredictable results. Life is an electrical system. On top of that, the radiation produced by the emerging ‘Skynet’ projects could create a “radiation soup” and change the conditions of our existence “beyond our ability to adapt” according to the 5g Space Appeal, one of several petitions calling for a moratorium on this technology.

5G is quite different from its precursors, 4G, 3G, etc. According to some researchers, the short, frequent and super high-frequency pulses produced by the Phased Array Antennas of 5G masts which are designed to pass through walls and flesh so that the Internet of Things and CyberPhysical techno-vision can function, effectively turn into antennas in the bodies of living beings, radiating and re-radiating cells and tissue in the body and resulting in the presence of excess calcium ions through their action on voltage gated calcium channels (VGCC) producing fatigue, nausea, muscle pain, cognitive dysfunction and neurological disorders, inflammation and a compromised immune system. This is just its predicted impact on humans.

Arthur Firstenberg, an American author and activist on the subject of electromagnetic radiation and health, believes we have already been experiencing some of this when he correlates developments in militaryindustrial level radio frequency and microwave technologies with previous influenza pandemics. The prevalence of chronic human illhealth — auto-immune disorders, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and metabolic syndromes, cancer, inflammatory diseases and epidemic mental health problems – suggests he might be right. The radiation produced by these technologies also interferes with the electron transport in cell mitochondria, effectively starving us of oxygen. The destruction of the earth’s forest cover, air pollution, environmental toxins and unnatural levels of atmospheric industrial radiation over the past century could well produce the tissue hypoxia that is a basic feature of both influenza and Covid-19.

The presence of so many satellites will also change the night-sky, although of course, even if we can no longer see the stars and constellations for satellites, we can download an augmented reality app that will show us where they (and soon the forests, mountains, ice caps, animals, and birds) used to be. As well as numerous calls for a moratorium on 5G by scientists, physicians and citizens all over the world, astronomers and environmentalists concerned about wildlife that navigate using the night-sky and the resonance of the electro-magnetic field which is part of the planetary web of life, are urging a stop to this space junk.

And who knows how this orbiting trash will impact the extraordinary ‘music of the spheres’, and the ‘Song of Earth’: subtle and pervasive stellar and interstellar ‘sound’ exists detected as electromagnetic vibrations captured by Voyager 1 and other space probes. Starlink and similar satellite-networks will block the Earth from either receiving or participating in the continuous vibratory exchanges between the different planets in our solar system, unique galactic rhythms and frequencies that are the result of “complex interactions of charged electromagnetic particles from the Solar wind, ionosphere and planetary magnetosphere” (NASA).

Starlink and similar off-planet projects show complete disregard for all life here on earth, and possibly also any life off-planet as bacteria and micro-organisms hitch a ride into space and into the solar system.

Earth is no longer a consideration for an elite that is intending to relocate on taxpayer money, funding their space projects through such initiatives as the Rural Digital

Opportunity Fund. For now, they are using Earth as an organic laboratory and engaging in a last-ditch frenzy of fossil fuel-burning and resource extraction to enable them and their children to leave. For those of us who remain, it is impossible to know what our health, our lives, our planet and the lives of our creature-companions will look like when space has been colonised and terraformed for the wealthy elite. Starlink is not built only in the imagination, however, and we still have the chance to intervene.

The Internet of Things will be everywhere, the masts needed to make the satellites functional will be everywhere, all dependent on centralised electrical power for now. The entire edifice of Power relies on cables, connective couplings, relays, antennas; the constitutive parts of the network of domination can not all be protected, weak points will exist, it is only a matter of researching the methods, applying them, replicating and evolving the techniques of sabotage and attack.

Moreover, space research and construction relies on a vast spectrum of companies and their specialists (industrial, scientific, technical, informational, service) each of which can be located. And since each component and input of information in the highly competitive space industry has to be precisely correct and timed, this means this industry is particularly susceptible to the effects of incendiary and explosive direct action.

Research and Training Cell – N.T.

Space

First part in a series of texts.

Part 1

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty nominally bans the placement of weapons of mass destruction in space, and serves as a legal basis for the interactions of the various States within space and the celestial bodies such as the Moon, Mars etc. It prohibits the use of the Moon and other astronomical objects for weapons testing, military installations and so on, and provides a rudimentary framework for space exploitation such as mining and commercial services. In many different countries private companies that provide space-based services have been lobbying for the opening up of space for further appropriation and a new frontier is slowly becoming more viable for profit. Off-world, production costs of extractive industries are estimated to be lower, due to zero-gravity.

The expensive cost of launches out of the gravity well of planet Earth have been the major constrictive element to space exploitation. Low-Earth Orbit satellite services are expanding through the cheaper cost rocket services, and these services are becoming more and more important for different aspects of the 4IR & 5IR. Satellite-networked blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence all look to be critically important technical sectors of the space industry, providing interconnectivity, data-security and selfautonomy of the machine-world, which are priorities for the techno-industrial system.

Through the new types of rocket technology, the technocratic elite are pushing towards a revived reach into the stars after space exploitation languished for some decades. Each of the major super powers and many of the lesser ones are preparing and developing for the next stage in the utilisation of space. Soon enough, small then larger numbers of human beings will be living in the equivalent of an orbital mall or sterile lunar housing pod, working on asteroid belt mining rigs or space station factories, complete with scarcity of food, water and air. Things will appear to remain roughly the same, as we enter the void.

Space industries, which deal with ‘challenging’ and hostile environments, are intricately linked to and part of, the military-industrial complex, and they are at the cutting edge of technological civilisation. Their research laboratories are often protected by the State or based on restricted military areas, and they are part of vast logistics and financing networks that are already in the business of creating artificialised realities that have no relation to the natural world except as a manipulated and commodified product. Through the use of military satellites, already used for decades, and private contractor satellite services, we can also say that the modern battlefield takes place partly in space, through space, whether using unmanned robotic drones or conventional forces right now.

Space weapons are classified in three general types, Earth-to-Space, Space-toSpace, and Space-to-Earth (orbital bombardment). Various different weapons programs have been proposed over the last decades, like the United States ‘Strategic Defense Initiative’ in the 1980s, which was essentially a missile defense system, and ‘Project Thor’ of the 1950s, which was a proposal for a Space-to-Earth kinetic-energy weapon in the form of two satellites, one command and control unit, and one payload release unit, which could unleash 6-meter-long (20 ft) tungsten rods that would be dropped on a target from orbit.

Capable of penetrating hundreds of feet into the Earth’s crust, and causing nuclear-bomb type destruction with no radioactive fall-out. Whilst the plans were considered outlandish at the time due to the cost, increasingly these kinds of scenarios are looking more likely, as vast new budgets are given over to the new space race and new technologies are developed.

Last year the Pentagon asked for $304 million to develop and test spacebased lasers and disruptive particle beams in orbit to counter new threats from the missile and space programs of Russia, China and North Korea. Both Russia and China have developed anti-satellite weapons and new long range ballistic missile technology, all major powers are intending to update their arsenals with even more deadly weapons than they have already. As much of the battlefield for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICMB) reaches into the upper atmosphere and requires a cybernetic, near-instantaneous, information system.

A new document from the US Department of Defense, Defense Space Strategy 2020, sets out their latest approach to space, which is to maintain the reach of imperialist domination, through militarisation and privatisation of this new frontier. Anti-Satellite systems (Space-toSpace and Earth-to-Space) are at the forefront of the arms race development between Russia, USA and China presently. Satellites are used to not only coordinate military actions, but to perform more mundane tasks, like obtaining weather reports, or managing onground communications, and navigation. These are key parts of the structure of the techno-industrial complex that will be the first assets targeted in the outbreak of war.

Control of space is critical for the competing States. Decentralised cloud data-migration and data-pooling between the different satellite warfare units and the ground-based military infrastructures intends to guide a swarm-based anti-ICMB network of armed satellites and corresponding self-adjusting encrypted data system to protect communications, logistics and guidance.

The techno-industrial system will use the new technologies to achieve offworld orbital domination of the Earth, expand imperialism into the solar system and achieve total surveillance and connectivity; our aim is to analyse, research and plan for future attacks and outbreaks of anarchy in an era of volatile instability, ecological collapse and rise of the machines.

Long live FAI/ELF.

To Be Released

Weeks after our initial incarceration we are finally being released, little by little. Released, we say, because very few stayed indoors of their own accord. Of course some did, but most had no choice. Media hysteria censured of any alternative, fines, police intimidation and beatings are enough to keep even the most rebellious souls locked up. The monster came out of the mist only to retreat again, no one knowing when it might return to rear its ugly head.

Yet, here in southern Europe, we were not abandoned during quarantine. Not forgotten like the dead.

Carrefour kept its shelves stocked. If one persisted toilet paper could be found and hoarded. Amazon never let us down, but at $10,000 a second that’s hardly surprising. Orange supplied in times of need, but with society’s upsurge in demand on telecommunications an upgrade from this archaic 4G is essential. In a period of hibernation, as they have chosen to label it, big industry enjoyed a midnight feast while the others were forced to sleep. It would appear that Holzmann’s ‘creative destruction’ is exactly what we’re witnessing: a good old deep clean, forcing the clutter into the corners to make space for the elegant new furniture.

The scientific bombardment shows little sign of slowing up. The facts, figures, graphs, lofty titles and even heftier wallets continue to force upon us a story that must be accepted.

Our ideas, experiences and lives are nothing but fake news in a New Normality where the only trustworthy sources are the party-pledges of our favorite periodicals. Everyone’s got an opinion yet to refuse the transcribed plot is to be in support of murder. Numbers skyrocketed, then relaxed, but death continues to rain down, yet all we see on the bleak walk to the shop and back are the faces we once smiled at, averting our gaze.

The life we are now living was drawn from a model that transitioned us from fascism, says the cop, gun pressed gently into the lower back. We’re lucky to have had this time together, says the husband, brushing his wife’s hair across the bruise beneath her eye. Many countries won’t have had the privileges granted to us, announces the director of an NGO, looking out of his window over the Madrid skyline.

When this ghost leaves Europe life will continue in its memory. The APPs downloaded to protect from contagion will continue to track; embedded ‘contact tracing’ becoming a pseudonym for socialising. Facial recognition software, perfected in its detection of those wearing masks, will become standard practice.

Unsolicited gatherings of more than two are a threat to public health and the society of a metre’s distance just got bigger. By now, if there’s a scrap of truth in what they say, the virus will be ravaging Africa, but there are other ways to deal with that.

If we’re all in this together, whatever ‘this’ is, and it’s our duty to protect the vulnerable then now is not the time to take the blue pill, lie back and enjoy the Matrix. Generations are going to grow understanding this normality to be new in reference to a pandemic they don’t remember.

Human contact is going to be a maneuver of biological terrorism and contesting science is to be regarded as lunacy. The activity timetables drawn up for us will clearly prescribe the boundaries of human exertion as dinner arrives in a paper bag on the doorstep of an Uber account, delivered by a neighbour you’ll never know from number 23. No need to meet. Just take a photo and leave it on the porch.

Contrary to what’s been said, capitalism is not the virus. Capitalism is a social relationship based upon an economic system that methodically exploits the excluded. The record isn’t fixed and it certainly hasn’t changed. The enemies are who they always have been: capital, being invested assets and resources; its lover of a lifetime, the state; their manipulators, advocates and beneficiaries, the rich and ruling class; and its defence, the police, military and affiliated security institutions. Even religion is losing its significance as this great leveling is firmly heralding science as God and non-compliance the Devil. What capitalism is doing, as the interplay of fluctuating relationships between these elements, is that which it always does: adapting to provide for its vested interests. The beauty of a flexible market economy is that it can bend and adjust itself according to supply and demand, but in bending demand supply can operate with greater efficiency. Just as capitalism requires the homogenisation of language to streamline its transactions, aiming minority tongues and dialects into irrelevance, the standardisation of consumer requirements and necessitisation of certain technologies pave a path to power less cluttered.

Much has been said about the assaults on the working class. Dismissals and contract suspensions are the talk of the town, and the black labour market the unheard scream, yet this has all been clear since time began. Capitalist power has been brutally exploiting since its inception, only now it is forcing desperation down choking throats. With a deliciously liquid property market as the lumps are whisked away, allowing more established capital to extend its reach by lapping up the lower labour costs, those that have been struggling for weeks – months — will take anything.

The glorious flexibility of the ‘gig economy’ replaces any assumption that one needs a stable living wage as electronic interfaces improve an efficiency that humans held back. All the cultural pastimes that are so missed have been forced into irrelevance as capital’s grasp on ‘our neighbourhood’ is fully clenched.

Every claim that “x is not for sale” has been fucked into the sidelines by the now evident reply that “yes, my dear, it is. You are.”

Let’s remember that the people imposing these measures are the same people that spill blood day in, day out, in global wars of political motive. The same people that rip the earth to pieces and poison it to the core, for the most important resources to extract are profit and power. Let’s not forget that those demanding our conformity are exactly those who, time and time again, force us down the path of crisis in an economy that we never even asked for anyway. The same intentions that raise rents and lower wages. The same hands that beat migrants without a glimmer of remorse. The same guns that killed

Carlo Giuliani in Genoa in 2001, Alexandros Grigoropoulos in Athens in 2008 and Mark Duggan in London in 2011.

Whatever virus exists has not been defeated, controlled or sent packing. The ingredients have been balanced and the recipe perfected.

While we’re waiting for the next course, slowly getting fat on the crumbs that fall from the masters’ table and remembering how easy it is to forget, the next great catastrophe is being rested before service.

In the face of one of the greatest economic and social transformations of the current age, one must remember that those in whom many now look to for a solution, even supposed revolutionaries, are nothing but monsters: creators of a New Brutality that we are queuing up to endure.

Direct Action Chronology

Here are some anarchic attacks and revolts reported in the past few months. For reasons of space we have listed only a scattering of actions and incidents. The United States saw the largest riots since the late ‘60s, as did many other countries around the world, triggered by the murder of George Floyd by racist police. Existing social tensions have accelerated by the impact of Covid-19.

Prisons around the world in dozens of countries have been the place of major rebellions and even escapes. Hundreds of 4G & 5G relay antennas have been burnt down across UK, Europe and beyond. Any list of direct action, sabotage and insurgence will always be incomplete, this list is an invitation to contribute with your own initiative:

2020

30 June, Berlin, Germany: French Embassy vehicle torched.

25 June, Berlin, Germany: Vehicle of security company WISAG torched.

24 June, Genoa, Italy: Incendiary attack against a municipal police motorcycle storage depot in Marassi.

18 June, Pechbusque, France: Relay antenna of the operator Orange was set on fire near Toulouse. This is the fourth relay antenna fire since the beginning of May in the area.

18 June, Foix, France: Vehicle of the municipal cops set on fire outside the national police station in Ariège region.

16 June, Basel, Switzerland: Securitrans vehicle sabotaged with butryc acid.

15 June, Montreal, Canada: Luxury car rental company was the target of an arson attack.

15 June, Hamburg, Germany: Vehicle of company Vonovia set on fire in solidarity with imprisoned anarchists.

14 June, Toulouse, France: Prison contractor company Apave offices vandalised with black liquid and anti-prison slogans.

12 June, Launceston, Tasmania: Molotov cocktail thrown at police station.

12 June, Milan, Italy: Three cars of the company Enjoy set on fire in solidarity with anarchists raided in Operation ‘Bialystok’.

12 June, Beauchamp, France: Relay antenna torched on top of a church, which also catches fire.

11 June, Rennes, France: Saint-Pierre cathedral is damaged by arson.

11 June, Philadelphia, USA: Nine security cameras sabotaged in solidarity with anarchist prisoners.

11 June, Flourens, France: Relay antenna located between QuintFonsegrives and Flourens, east of Toulouse was destroyed by fire.

10 June, Kiev, Ukraine: The Department for Criminal Investigations was attacked with a petrol bomb in revenge for several cases of police brutality, repression and rape, and in solidarity with the uprising taking place in United States after the racist police murder of George Floyd.

10 June, Bremen, Germany: Windows of the police union headquarters are smashed with hammers.

10 June, Hersbruck, Germany: ATM set on fire. One comrade is arrested.

8 June, Thessaloniki, Greece: The headquarters of the American human resources giant Manpower Group are hit with an incendiary device in solidarity with the uprising taking place in the United States.

8 June, Berlin, Germany: Four luxury cars set on fire in Mitte, in solidarity with threatened autonomous projects Liebig34 , Potse, Syndikat and Meuterei.

7 June, Brussels, Belgium: Looting, rioting and arson take place after the anti-police brutality demo in the city.

7 June, Vienna, Austria: Two police vehicles are torched in solidarity with the anti-police riots taking place worldwide.

6 June, Metz, France: Court attacked after anti-police demo. Cops and a prosecutor were injured by stones and the court house was attempted to be burnt down.

6 June, Berlin, Germany: Wild night of riot when comrades took the streets in Neukölln in response to the murder of George Floyd and in solidarity with the revolt in the United States.

5 June, Redlands, California, USA: Fire ravaged an Amazon distribution centre. The buildings, several delivery trucks and their goods were destroyed by fire.

4 June, Toulouse, France: Anti-police demo attacks the cops and the town hall.

4 June, Flensberg, Germany: Police station attacked with red paint.

4–8 June, Mexico: Fires and riots against police repression spread across several cities and towns.

3 June, Athens, Greece: The American Embassy is attacked with Molotovs as over 4000 people demonstrated in solidarity with the insurrection taking place in United States.

3 June, Athens, Greece: The police station of Nea Ionia, located in the north of the city, was attacked with Molotov cocktails. A fire started and several vehicles were destroyed or damaged. The arson attack was claimed by the ‘Vengeance Group for George Floyd’.

2 June, Berlin, Germany: Four Euronet ATMs in Mitte, Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Neukölln burned in solidarity with Liebig34.

Early June, Malmö, Sweden: Mobile phone tower torched by a cell of Informal Anarchist Federation / Earth Liberation Front. Extract from the communique: “Today everything is back to normal except the burnt cables and the silenced tower.

Programmers and bosses are waging the next assault on our beloved darkness. 5G towers are now live in Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm. The next level of Levathianic control are rolled out in front of our eyes. The slaves of the society are applauding their incarceration. We wish that the totality of civilisation was engulfed in flames. Burnt to ashes darkness would finally flourish. In every step our foot touch the concrete and asphalt we put a curse on Leviathan. In every step our foot touch earth and soil and plants and roots we sing our joy for the dark and the wild.”

June, Santiago, Chile: Incendiary explosive attacks against two metropolitan buses & a petrol station by ‘Herd of the North Wind’. Extract:

“We are not artists looking for the applause of the spectators, we are not interested in saving this world because it is already rotten, we do not even romanticize the pandemic that has taken many human lives benefiting biodiversity, nor the different revolts throughout the world because we do not have hope nor do we believe in the masses. However, we do not deny that we like it and it brings us much gratitude and joy to see the world sinking into chaos. It is easy to assume that the annihilation of the earth, of the beings and spirits that inhabit it is the responsibility of capitalism, the power of authority, of fascism, of progress, of the state and of the rich, well indeed it is and they will pay for it. However, the problem does not lie only in that, but in the techno-industrial society that sustains and perpetuates the devastation and as humans we are not free of that responsibility.”

June, Turkey: ‘Children of Fire’, urban guerrilla formation of the revolutionary Kurdish struggle took responsibility for 88 arson attacks, targeting 23 factories, 38 vehicles, two touristic places, 7 workplaces, a governor’s building, a municipal construction site, two military lodgings, a port, a car park, a boat and a school.

June, Bure, France: Sabotage of an Andra drilling rig in the construction of nuclear waste dump Cigéo.

Late May, North Carolina, USA: Eight delivery vans of company Amazon tires slashed.

26 May, Athens, Greece: Fascist union “Agios Nikolaos” in Perama attacked with an improvised explosive device by ‘Sons and Daughters of Chaos’.

25 May, Paris, France: BMW torched in solidarity with Gabriel Pombo da Silva. Long live the black international!

18 May, Grenoble, France: Coordinated sabotage of relay antennas in Seyssinet-Pariset. Hundreds of thousands of people cannot use mobile phones, television and radio, especially throughout the southern part of the Grenoble metropolis.

14 May, Paris, France: Vehicle of electrical utilities company Enedis set on fire.

4 May, Philadelphia, USA: Mobile relay antenna set on fire at the Navy Yard.

1 May, Valparaíso, Chile: Explosive attack against the Anglo American Mine by ‘Autonomous Revolutionary Squads’. The group also took responsibility for an attack against two high tension electricity towers in the Atacama region.

May, Aubenas, France: Electrical transformer set on fire by ‘Offspring of Disaster’. “We attacked the electricity network because today, without it, this civilization would collapse. We don’t desire to return to some time in the past. We have no illusions about the fact that some civilizations were built without electricity. All we know is that this one relies on it so much as to be unable to do without it. And that this is one of its weak points. … ”

Late April, Pisa, Italy: Mobile relay antenna set on fire in solidarity with imprisoned anarchists.

“To govern life through science can have
no other result than the brutalization of
mankind.”

Mikhail Bakunin

Outro: Information War

If you enjoyed this publication pass it on for some-one else to read or leave it in a random location. For updates, downloads, direct action reports, repression news, PDF booklets, posters, radio, visit 332255..nnoossttaattee..nneett, you’ll find an extensive list of links for what’s been called the International Network for Translation and Counter-Info, grassroots anarchist voices concentrating on actions and what’s happening on the streets around the world. You can find anarchic groups in your local area or you can send us your reports and pictures of what’s happening nearby, graffiti, actions, zines etc. If we’re serious about a 21^st Century anarchist international conspiracy, then let’s do it.

Start your own activities, find your trusted others or do it alone. Don’t wait to take part in mass moments of insurrection, rioting and looting. You can begin today. You don’t even need to be an expert. Subvert the corridors of your routine life with anarchist propaganda, choose new paths and begin refusing, defacing and destroying the authoritarian State-Capital-Technology matrix. Inform, prepare and train yourself for future confrontations, social breakdowns and repression. Through the thousands and millions of rivers, an ocean flows. Health is in you!

If you want to contribute to an encrypted solidarity financial fund for the support of anarchist prisoners and donate towards the cost of producing this zine and other publications, you can send cryptocurrencies to a fund we maintain. Below is the QR code for our XMR Monero wallet, and you can find our Bitcoin and Litecoin wallets online.

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[1] It should be noted that mass unemployment has followed or occurred during each Industrial Revolution with many workers being displaced by machines and other forms of technology making other technologies obsolete in a very short time span that coincides with ‘financial crisis.’

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdbumR6Bhd8

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y55HJE9RRg0

[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jlo5C8ydb4

[6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xkp2J3D-fM

[7] https://prnewswire2a.akamaihd.net/p/1893751/sp/ 189375100/thumbnail/entry_id/1_0ohsl2cp/def_height/1400/def_width/1143/version/100011/type/1

[8] [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxE_KtRfRKo][http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxE_KtRfRKo]

[9] ‘Luddite fallacy’, that new technology does not lead to higher overall unemployment in the economy. Instead new technology doesn’t destroy jobs, it only changes the composition of jobs in the economy. The Luddites were a secret organisation of English textile workers in the 19^th century, a radical faction which destroyed textile machinery as a form of protest.

[10] The phrase “technological unemployment” was popularised by John Maynard Keynes, a liberal economist in the 1930s, who said it was “only a temporary phase of maladjustment”.

[11] www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut1BCR1fzv0

[12] https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/3d-printing-human-heart-israel-telaviv-university.jpg

[13] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52201696

[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQZjaosDToU

[15] In the early 2011 the UK Tory government implemented a ‘work experience scheme’ that even though voluntary, if not taken would mean benefits would be sanctioned, effectively making it a forced unpaid work scheme!

[16] A smart city is an urban area that uses different types of electronic Internet of things (IoT) sensors to collect data and then use insights gained from that data to manage assets, resources and services efficiently. This includes data collected from citizens, devices, and assets that is processed and analyzed to monitor and manage traffic and transportation systems, power plants, utilities, water supply networks, waste management, crime detection, information systems, schools, libraries, hospitals, and other community services.

[17] Many squatters have continued to be evicted under the new trespass laws in the UK. In the US mass evictions are on the horizon as the US state has left the unemployed and gig economy to fend for themselves. In the UK an Uber driver was kicked out of his home in London because of the nature of his job being at risk of contracting Covid-19 and left to die on the streets because he had already contracted the virus. Stories like his are multiplying.

[18] Nuffield Council on Bioethics, in the document Genome editing and human reproduction: social and ethical issues, http://nuffieldbioethics.org/wp- content/uploads/Genome-editing-andhuman-reproduction-short-guidewebsite.pdf

[19] In 2007, the British authority for ART authorised recourse to PGD to avoid the birth of a cross-eyed child.

[20] Guerini Silvia, Considerazioni intorno alla nuova legge francese di bioetica, https:///www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/

Machine Psychology: A Disappearing Act necrotecnologie/biotecnologie/ considerazioni-intorno-alla-nuova-leggefrancese-di-bioetica-e-aperta-la-stradaalla-riproduzione-artificiale-dellumanocontro-leugenetica-e-lantropocidioriaffermiamo-con-forza-lindisponib-2/,

Pièces et main d’œuvre, Alertez les bébés ! Objections aux progrès de l’eugénisme et de l’artificialisation de l’espèce humaine, http:/www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/ spip.php?page=resume&id_article=1191

[21] Against eugenics and anthropocide. AN APPEAL TO ABOLISH ANY ARTIFICIAL REPRODUCTION OF THE HUMAN BEING, https:// www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/ necrotecnologie/against-eugenics-andanthropocide-an-appeal-to-abolish-anyartificial-reproduction-of-the-humanbeing-2/; http:// www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/ spip.php?page=resume&id_article=1200

[22] Collins Françoise, La fabrication des humains, Persée, 1987

[23] Nuffield Council on Bioethics, in the document Genome editing and human reproduction: social and ethical issues, http://nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/Genome-editing-andhuman-reproduction-short-guidewebsite.pdf

[24] Pivetti Cristiana, Dall’addomesticamento alla manipolazione e riproduzione dei corpi animali, in Meccanici i miei occhi, nati in laboratorio, dall’utero in affitto alla manipolazione genetica, Ortica edizioni, 2019

[25] N. Bostrom, “The Future of Humanity”, in New Waves in Philosophy of Technology, ed. J.B. Olsen & E. Selinger, http://www.nickbostrom.com/ papers/future.pdf

[26] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 206.

[27] Gray Kochhar Lindgren, TechnoLogics (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 1.

[28] Quoted in David Levin, Pathologies of the Modern Self (New York: New York University Press, 1987), p. 480.

[29] Joseph R. Urgo, In the Age of Distraction (Jackson MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), e.g. p. 19.

[30] See Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen, The Distracted Mind (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2016) and Steve Talbott, Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines (Sebastopol CA: O’Reilly Media, 2007).

[31] Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 249, n.7.

[32] Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 226.

[33] Kochhar-Lindgren, op.cit., p. 5.

[34] Michael Heim, “The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality,” in Sandra K. Kelsel and Judith Paris Roth, editors, Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice, and Promise (Westport, CT: Meckler Publishing, 1991), p. 34.

[35] Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World” (Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011).

[36] Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 34.

[37] Ibid., p. 10.

[38] Kate Eichorn, The End of Forgetting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

[39] Quoted in Adorno, op.cit., p. 303.

[40] Giuseppe Pinelli, anarchist framed and murder for the fascist atrocity Piazza Fontana.

[41] Chief Super-intendent Luigi Calabresi, killed for the murder of Pinelli.

[42] http://325.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Stefano-Delle-Chiaie.pdf

[43] Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency which isn’t managed by a bank or agency but in which transactions are recorded in the blockchain that is public and contains records of each and every transaction that takes place. The cryptocurrency is traded by individuals with cryptographic keys that act as wallets. Bitcoin was first invented in 2009 by an anonymous founder known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoins are moved in blocks every 10 minutes on a decentralized ledger that connects blocks into a coherent chain dating back to the first genesis block. It was originally described as a peer-topeer electronic cash but the technology has evolved to emphasize being a settlement layer rather than a payment network.... It has remained the largest cryptocurrency by market cap. [coindesk.com].

[44] ‘Frictionless’ refers to the always online ‘user experience’ of seamless, connected, unobtrusive techno-culture based on lifestyle consumerism and surveillance Capital.

[45] Monero is the largest dark-net peerto-peer crypto-currency by market cap, designed to be private, secure and untraceable. Monero.org

[46] Pièces et Main d’Ouvre, Manifeste des Chimpanzés du futur contre le transhumanisme, Service compris, 2017.

[47] Wiener Norbert, The Human Use of Humanity Beings, Houghton Mifflin Against Starlink H., 1954.

[48] Han Byung-Chu, Im Schwarm. Ansichten des Digitalen, MSB, 2013, trad. it., Nello sciame. Visioni del digitale, Nottetempo, 2015.

[49] “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks. […] The engineers of the human soul must forge the new Soviet man”. Joseph Stalin, Speech at home of Maxim Gorky, 26 October 1932

[50] Han Byung-Chul, Was ist Mach?, Ditzingen, 2005, trd. it., Che cosa è il potere?, Nottetempo, 2019.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Sadin Eric, La silicolonisation du monde, L’èchapeé, 2016, trad. it., La siliconizzazione del mondo, Einaudi, 2018.

[53] Alongside the search engine, Alphabet: an operating system (Android), an advertising service (AdWord), an online video platform (You Tube), map services (Google Maps e Street View), healthcare companies (Calico), an education service (Google for Education), domotic products and products tied to the internet (Nest Lab), infrastructural networks (Google Fiber), robotics (Boston Robotics), urban planning (Sidewalk Labs), Artificial Intelligence (Google Brain e Google DeepMind), a lab for moonbased projects (Google X), self-driving cars, a private equity fund (CapitalG) and an investment company (GV) to support start-ups.

[54] Graham Harman, Heidegger on Object and Things, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, The Mit Press, 2005.

{1} Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon etc.

{2} In 2019 the Singularity Summits were held, among other countries, on 8–9 October in Milan and on 11–12 November at the Athens Concert Hall.