Re: [-empyre-] disrupting the right-right ...

[bstalbau@ucsd.edu]

I'm not going to disagree with you. Tactical media must be tactical at all
times. Hacktivism served a purpose at a time, and may again sometime, (and
thankfully, it was not an art movement...) Maybe as an extension of your
thoughts, (given the network that we are), the question today is how do we
put people into contexts where they feel welcome and make something
interesting and healthy happen, when they distrust one another. Actually,
maybe that is a question of the ages...

Also, perhaps I should have regionalized my question a bit, because how we
break the death embrace *is* the question here in the United States... we
are one of the two lovers. The only other option I see is to turn toward
strategies intended to minimize the harm that our fascist phase of history
inflicts - acts of survival. Send financial support Steve Kurtz, for
example.


> hi,
>
>> The question seems to me today to
>> be "How do activists disrupt two lovers (the western militarist right
>> wing and the Islamist militarist right wing), who are so mutually
>> committed and supportive of one another?"
>
> mmm - this is a question - but not the question. in fact, there's really
> no
> 'the' question in my opinion. what would be best for media-activists to do
> is
> create images of a new ;coallition of the willing; - put the images of
> bush,
> rumsy, howard, blair, sharon with saddam, bin ladan, and the masked
> executioners... and maybe throw in the image of che in to the mix as well
> ;-)
>
> 'jumping on the bandwagon' is an interesting idea. there was a time when
> the
> denial of service attacks were all the rage. i am sure many of us have
> received those emails from ricardo dominguez and others (perhaps me
> even!).
>
> the problem i have with much of art/net/activism is that these tactics are
> often effective in getting 'media' attention but that's about all. rtmark
> do
> this very well. stunts are their business. cnn reports them. so what? at
> the
> end of the day, they are providers of entertainment or cheap content for
> the
> big media channels.
>
> we know that media attention doesn't necessarily raise awareness and cause
> change. where's the weapons of mass destruction? why no follow-up? what
> about
> howard's lies? etc... media attention can definitely help - but it is not
> an
> automatic given that it will have a positive impact in raising awareness
> and
> causing some kind of change.
>
> often the problems are much more complex and cannot be dealt within the
> 1minute and 30seconds allocated to the story.
>
> there are interesting projects, and maybe some others on the list can
> comment,
> on the way the the net geeks and artists and activists have worked
> together
> on a subject without actually attempting to collaborate.
>
> some times, when space is created where 'anything is possible' and
> 'everyone
> is (genuinely) welcome' - that seems to be when interesting stuff happens.
> when you reflect back - you can see there was an interesting connection
> going
> on between people who come from different backgrounds and interests but
> have
> a passion about a specific issue.
>
> i think it often doesn't work as well when you create a 'lab' where you
> bring
> an activist, an artist and a geek together to do something or make
> something
> happen.
>
> in terms of 'the question' - i reckon its more about disrupting our
> relationships with sitting in cafes, sipping lattes or disrupting the
> comfort
> of experiencing the world through a networked computer :-)
>
> someone once said to me that the best form of tactical media was knocking
> on
> your neighbours door and having a conversation with them about the issue
> you
> are passionate about. it may even involve a coffee!
>
> see ya, sam :-)
>
>
>
>
> On Friday 04 June 2004 08:09, you wrote:
>> I feel a bit apprehensive about this post, but that is normally a good
>> sign so I will cry/hype between clicking and releasing.
>>
>> Sam-de-silva's critique of the art world politics of tactical media-
>> "tactical media gets you invited to conferences around world", "tactical
>> media gets you guest lecturer spots", " tactical media helps sell books"
>> - is true enough - of course those are systems that are implicated in
>> public culture and so on... but I'm not going there now. The work of
>> activist/artists is embedded in two worlds, the former of the pairing
>> where the really important work is performed and the later (the
>> artworld), a very different embedding and one that has always left me
>> feeling a little ambivalent re activist work I have been involved in.
>>
>> Earlier this year I dropped out of the Yale CyberCrime conference... a
>> decision which frankly I still feel horrible and conflicted about. I am
>> looking back now at my squirming letter to Eddan Katz. It was half
>> apology/half me trying to figure out what happened since my country
>> decided that the best response to a terrible terrorist act was to fully
>> embrace (and more recently coming to celebrate) the terrible death
>> embrace that we were already to some degree involved in before 9/11. I
>> still feel that tactical media is in a morass not of its own making, and
>> I am still trying to see around the corner, but can't. It is better said
>> probably in the boat-people opening post:
>>
>> "The boat-people crew rack our collective brains for ways to talk
>> back to the miasma of mendacity characterising public life here in
>> australia; how to be antidotes to amnesia, how to illuminate the
>> lies & what they obscure, how to mobilise wit, passion & creativity
>> to undermine the empires' rule over us... and everything we come
>> up with is gestural, symbolic, frail at best.  It blows away."
>>
>> I did not say it any better below... The question seems to me today to
>> be "How do activists disrupt two lovers (the western militarist right
>> wing and the Islamist militarist right wing), who are so mutually
>> committed and supportive of one another?"
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Brett Stalbaum [mailto:stalbaum@ucsd.edu]
>> Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2004 2:56 PM
>> To: 'Eddan Katz'
>> Cc: 'bnoveck@nyls.edu'
>> Subject: RE: Yale Cybercrime Conference
>>
>> Dear Eddan,
>>
>> I have been hard at work on the formulation of a paper that I feel
>> confident would function as a positive and sufficiently critical
>> contribution to the Cybercrime and digital Law Enforcement conference,
>> both in terms of the Hactivism panel and the conference at large.
>> However enthused I am about the conference, what I am discovering about
>> the state of my current expertise is that it is out of date. Though I
>> was intimately involved in theory and practice of hacktivism between
>> 1998 and 2000, my research and production as an artist during the past
>> three years has been on a significantly different trajectory. In my
>> attempts to reconnect with the relevant current issues - particularly
>> the post 911 legal context, and examine how artists might evaluate
>> tactical and strategic opportunities for constructive political
>> engagement in that context, I am finding that I have nothing of
>> significance to offer. At best, I could characterize early hacktivism as
>> a brief moment of hope inspired in part by a somewhat utopian surge of
>> interest by artists in the internet as a specific medium (roughly 1995
>> to 2000, sometimes identified as the net art movement in new media arts
>> discourses), and remain silent about the present situation. Not terribly
>> exciting, nor a particularly interesting contribution to a conference of
>> such significance.
>>
>> I characterize the hacktivist environment now as one muddled both by
>> post-911 paranoia and the mostly non-political exploits of
>> script-kiddies and virus writers, which in combination have resulted in
>> a mutually self-supporting context of criminalization, and the
>> maintenance of an alternatively libertarian fringed
>> cyberpunk/hacker/phreaker identity complex often used by script-kiddies
>> in their identity play. (Not to mention the
>> wrestle-for-the-most-radical-activist identity complex, often used by
>> activists/artists in their identity play.) In a domain contextualized by
>> this mutually self-supporting monster of cybercops and post-Gibson
>> identity play, the natural result is that anyone who might be interested
>> in exploring alternatives to meaning generation using the internet as a
>> public-space in any way beyond communications based issue advocacy or
>> interactive contexts for facilitating communication, (such as in
>> art-conceptual, aesthetic, provocative or activist strategies dealing
>> with lower level network protocols and recognition that the internet is
>> a social environment connecting machines to machines and data to data as
>> much as people to people), is working in a completely chilling domain
>> today in which neither radical transparency (Electronic Disturbance
>> Theater) or electronic anonymity can now successfully function as either
>> tactical or strategic models for political gain. The window, at least
>> from an artist/hacktivist perspective is closed for now. The system can
>> be provoked and disturbed, but only in a manner that is dull and counter
>> productive (because it either assists in an ecology of hardening the
>> system technically or encourages criminalization of experimental forms
>> of speech). 2K4 is not 1998. Perhaps conditions will change in the
>> future, but in the mean time I have nothing interesting to add to
>> hacktivism.
>>
>> I think of artists as people who have the cultural mandate to play with
>> systems in order to emerge new models (or functions of systems that were
>> unintended by their designers) that may be politically useful for the
>> broader and more equitable distribution of knowledge, power, experience
>> and (in my own somewhat naïve, idealistic American way), the rights
>> guaranteed by our Constitution. I think that this holds true even if the
>> models and techniques happen to be only of ephemeral or tactical value -
>> of which hacktivism may be an example. As an artist, I don't have new
>> ideas at this time as specifically go to hacktivism in light of the
>> dramatic shift in history (both 911 and script-kiddies), and as such I
>> am uncertain if I am able to bring to the table anything of significance
>> to your conference. I'm simply playing with systems in different ways
>> now. !--clip a little bit of practical business --
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> [mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of sam-de-silva
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2004 11:49 PM
>> To: soft_skinned_space
>> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] opening statement from boat-people.org
>>
>> hi also,
>>
>> i too am honoured to be invited :-) though i am not sure what
>> contribution i
>> can make here.
>>
>> maybe the following:
>>
>> * tactical media is the cry/hype that occurs between the clicking and
>> releasing of a mouse click
>>
>> * tactical media gets you invited to conferences around world
>>
>> * tactical media gets you guest lecturer spots
>>
>> * tactical media helps your career path
>>
>> * tactical media helps sell books
>>
>> * clap for tactical media. cluck for activism. clop for boredom.
>>
>> see ya, sam :-)
>>
>> ps. i started up and continue to run the myspinach server (which is very
>> very
>> different to the spinach7 magazine) ... click for background:
>> http://www.myspinach.org/sam/spinhistory.html
>
> --
>
>
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