<nettime> Post Media Impossibilities

[ricardo dominguez <rdom@thing.net>]

Post Media Impossibilities
Or
Mayan Technologies for the People

We must be ready for the unexpected. Not just about the
emergence of new technologies-but how people will use them.
 --(From Protocols of the MESH)

All post media direct action cells must pursue the instabilities in
technologies--even before they become metaphors. We must move into areas
that seem like the impossible--before they even gain presence among the
protocols of the MESH.  It is within these chaotic sectors that actors
among civil societies in search of leverage anchors will find opportunity
for greater disturbances and force multiplication for voices without
power.  Once minor communities of autonomy have sensed these balance
shifters they must be harnessed. Those who wait for the decentralization
of these instabilities will lose the small windows available for the
development of micro-mass disturbance gestures. We must always already be
seeking out the flow of uncertainty beyond the over used scientific
discourse and technologies at hand: networks, bio-technologies and
nano-technologies. Let the MESH spend its time tweaking these
possibilities. Instead let us like the Zapatistas continue to break the
Mirrors of Power and move into the elsewhere. 

Post media cells should seek out unprocessed instabilities even as the
Army’s Force XXI and the Marine Corps’ Hunter Warriors attempt to retool
the left over war engines of the Cold War as interoperable cyborg systems.
Postmodern war still remains bound by paradigms of military science and
spectacle (note that most recent actions from the Gulf War, Part One, to
the Kosovo Crisis were made for TV and Internet presentation), the endless
objective theater of war discourse and the subjective NATO disposition of
one reality has been completely introjected into the system (even in the
case of Psy-0p actions) .  Their VR helmets can’t see the failure of
Reality before the new fundamentalism of the telematic-they continue to
believe that the lights they see from the midnight bombs they drop are
coming from something that still exists: nation, justice, and democracy.
These are now nothing more than the last signs of dead cultural stars. The
Military system, like the peasants of the Middle Ages, still kneel before
the holy corpse of the MESH and pray for a true state of trajectivity. 
Some even admit it among themselves: 

….there is little apparent interest in the wider effects of these
developments and their implications for national security. In fact,
attempts to foresee even the near-term future are remarkable for their
conservative approach and the general belief that the future will be very
much like today with a few advances in technology. Not surprisingly, there
have been even fewer attempts to anticipate basic change caused by
technologies whose practical applications are only now being discussed by
specialists. We are already losing future wars now.

--(From the Army’s Book of the Dead, Book II )


The MESH is busy mapping the human genome to create meme-gene weapons.
Enabling the targeting of specific genotypes and building self-replicating
fleets of computer controlled molecular weapons. Nano-technology first
emerged as a practice in 1990 when industry researchers at IBM were able
to arrange 35 individual xenon atoms to spell out "IBM." In 1991, the
Japanese government reportedly began budgeting an annual $185 million for
nano-tech research. Since that time three-dimensional structures have been
experimentally produced from DNA.  Researchers have demonstrated the
engineering of branched, non-biological protein with enzymatic activity as
a basic methodology for nano devices.  This nano_event will intermingle
with other MESHworks to produce the new aggregates for the power zones of
tomorrow. Post media cells must fight the future with gestures that have
no name in the present. 


(Play Tape)

Mayan Technologies For the People (Rewind and Start Now)

Pedrito (tojolabal, two and a half years old, born during the first
Intergalactic)  is playing with a little car with no wheels or body.  In
fact, it appears to me that what Pedrito is playing with is a piece of
that wood they call "cork", but he has told me very decisively that it is
a little car and that it is going to Margaritas to pick up passengers. 

It is a gray and cold January morning and we are passing through this
village which is today electing the delegates (one man and one woman) 
whom it will be sending to the March 21 consultation. 

The village is in assembly when a Commander-type plane, blue and yellow,
from the Army Rainbow Task Force and a pinto helicopter from the Mexican
Air Force, begin a series of low over flights above the community.  The
assembly is not interrupted, those who are speaking merely raise their
voices. 

Pedrito is fed up with having the artillery aircraft above him, and he
goes, fiercely, in search of a stick inside his hut.  Pedrito comes out of
his house with a piece of wood, and he angrily declares that "I'm going to
hit the airplane because it's bothering me a lot."  I smile to myself at
the child's ingenuousness. 

The plane makes a pass over Pedrito's hut, and he raises the stick and
waves it furiously at the war plane.  The plane then changes its course
and leaves in the direction of its base. 

Pedrito says "There now" and starts playing once more with his piece of
cork, pardon, with his little car. 

The Sea and I look at each other in silence.  We slowly move towards the
stick which Pedrito left behind, and we pick it up carefully.  We analyze
it in great detail. 

"It's a stick," I say. 

"It is," the Sea says. 

Without saying anything else, we take it with us.  We run into Tacho as
we're leaving.  "And that?" he asks, pointing to Pedrito's stick which
wehad taken.  "Mayan technology," the Sea responds. 

Above, a suddenly clear sky becomes golden next to clouds like marzipan. 

The Sup, trying to remember how Pedrito did what he did. 

(Above, the helicopter is a useless tin vulture). 

[Pause Tape]

For too long the specters of hyper-memetic cargo cults have flowed between
the bottom of the third world and the top of the virtual class. A circuit
that keeps the impossibilities of the fifth world[s] behind the
eschatology of designer future/s/.  Post media cells must travel among
strings of inventions that fall outside of technological instabilities. To
seek gestures that leap over the lines of flight that our current
collective realities, or imaginary conditions, of speed and
interconnectivity.  We must place the impossible and the unexpected as our
counter-gestures, as in the case of Hannibal and his elephants against the
Roman Empire.  Tensors that can create unprecedented instabilities in the
MESH beyond our today[s] and tomorrow[s]. These tensors are already
drifting among the intergalactic children outside the limits of our social
condition. Post media cells must create situations for mutation that can
interrupt and reroute the protocols of acceleration, improvement and
obsolesce that late capital is bound by. So that rational history will be
broken and remade by the tiny hands of the intergalactic ninos of the
fifth world. 

Post media cells must side step the Universal State of the Hybrid that
late capital now globalizes across all markets.  Our confrontations should
tactically release all the impossible singularities beyond the
homogenization of the New World Order’s Human Rights agenda that has now
been set as the foundational condition of hyper-violence and total social
control. Here the son (neo-liberalism) is devouring the father (national
capital) and, in the process, is destroying the lies of late capitalist
ideology: in the new world disorder there is neither democracy nor
freedom, neither equality nor fraternity. The planetary stage is
transformed into a phased battlefield, in which the chaotics of decayed
neural nets now reigns. Let us instead seek out those circuits of
perversity of the mother and child that reside outside of the luxury of
digital History. 

Now is the time for the fifth world to move deep into the virtual state of
the Forth World War and bite its head off with its own trajectories.  Each
post media pocket should heed El Sup’s smoke signals

The apparent infallibility of globalization comes up hard against the
stubborn disobedience of reality.  While neo liberalism is pursuing its
war, groups of protesters, kernels of rebels, are forming throughout the
planet. The empire of financiers with full pockets confronts the rebellion
of pockets of resistance.  Yes, pockets. Of all sizes, of different
colors, of varying shapes. Their sole common point is a desire to resist
the "new world order" and the crime against humanity that is represented
by this fourth world war. 

--(From the Book of Intergalactic Memories) 

(Play Tape) 

[A woman wearing a ski mask holding a few seeds in her hand]

She Speaks: 

We are networks without gravity, here the apple falls up.  -the zapatistas

Las Futuras

The zapatistas wrap the Mayan code of invention around the protocols of
the fourth world war. Each word retrofits the MESH of late capital, each
gesture displacing its dream of re-placing flesh with firmware, and memory
with a battlespace. Each note cuts into billions invested in synthesizing
hybrids of adaptable hierarchies and bound networks. Instead the
zapatistas ask us to build worlds outside of the disposable history of
speed—Las Futuras. Here the call of the dead are answered by the living
without wires, without ubiquitous infrastructures, without the need to
re-dial future wars. Here Las Futuras flood the present with the
possibilities of a better yesterday[s]. 


P.S. Secret Bunkers vs. Open Theaters

*(The Electronic Disturbance Theater are)...anarchistic proponents who
believe that theatrical technological strikes --"digital zapatismo"—should
lie at the heart of doctrine and strategy.*

--The Zapatistas "Social Netwar" in Mexico, Rand Corp. (1998) 

*Why do you only remember us only after the floods?*

--The Zapatistas

Zapatismo is an event horizon, which frames and reroutes the generic media
event. A deviation of mass distraction towards a specific point of the
total market equation with a single question: what is the position of the
Mayan communities in Chiapas, Mexico?  This question is a concrete
manifestation of an alien politics that no longer resides within the
society of secrecy—the perfect dictatorship of knowledge. The time of the
Guarded Society is at hand, everyone must leave the last remains of public
space- now. Only those who can scan the waves of history correctly,
understanding the true nature of code should define what gestures can be
made and when. Now the *Guarded Society* recommends that we move behind
our adaptable firewalls, leave plenty of air, and make sure your
bio-agents do not go astray. Only a society of secrecy will be able to
survive this stage of the electronic theater: 

*CAE continues to believe that all useful models of ECD (or for that
matter, nearly all political as opposed to consciousness raising and
pedagogical actions***)  within the current political conditions have in
common covert action and an abhorrence of mass media as a theater of
action.*

--Critical Art Ensemble

The *Guarded Society* maps the zapatistas floods from mega_networks
linking the West and East, where the south only functions at a distance,
where only the corpse[s] of technological instabilities speak, where only
a the few can govern the spaces of public engagement. The advent of
networks is now a struggle between the open gestures of network_theaters
and network_bunkers. Network_bunkers only speak the code of soft
conspiracies and top_sight control.  The zapatistas dream contests the
agenda of secrecy by speaking across whatever media spaces can be rerouted
into spaces of concern. Zapatismo is an untimely gesture within the house
the digitally correct.  The zapatistas network_theaters do not call for
cyberwar, netwar, or infowar but public acts of html activism.  Digital
zapatismo is simulation_as_it_could_be not simulation_as_it_has_been. A
gesture that underlines the disparity of those who seek interoperable
top-sight networks and those who link to forgotten phantoms, future forms
of life, and an impossible present. 

*To arrive at the intercontinental R/reality, each one has to make his
own, her own path.*

--2nd Declaration of La Realidad (1996) 

[Tape Ends]


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