[-empyre-] the city and the network

Wed Mar 28 01:25:32 EST 2012

I am old enough :) to remember the time we used modems to connect us to the
net. They were painful slow but they made the job done. At that time the
war in Europe raged, it was in the Balkans and the city of Sarajevo was
besieged, no food, no water, no fuel, no mail was allowed into the city.
Serbian snipers controlled every hill.
A French group called "Modems sans Frontieres" smuggled into Sarajevo in
the trucks of United Nations which were the only allowed into the city ten
or twelve modems and laptops (at that time the laptops were big and clumsy
things, not able to be carried by kids of skinny people :).
They set up public places in Sarajevo (coffeshops, churches, mosques,
squares protected from sniper fire) to allow people to send messages to the
outside.
It was moving and emotionally heavy to read all those messages in a bottle:
"Gisela, we are well but your brother was killed by a sniper last week. We
hope you reached the border well." "Marina, father and mother are well but
too old to go down to the cellar in our house. We covered all the windows
and live in the dark, any light can be a beacon for a sniper". And so on
and on and on.
The projected lasted for ten days, it was no batteries and the connections
were faulty every day. The people in Sarajevo resisted within the grid of
solidarity weaven by people in the whole world. The machines and the net
were used as a tool but no one relied on it to endure.
My point is if we rely too much in the machines and the technology we
forget the tales, the stories, how memes are passed from generation to
generation.
And when I mean machines I mean also books :) As I told before I spent four
years in jail without books, the military burned down the hundreds of books
our relatives sent to us.
They burned my editions of Proust, García Márquez, Viktor Frankl, Godot,
Neruda.
We started to tell books for each other and to make new tales. A new
narrative was born, without books we were due to rely on our own stories.

Ana

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 12:22 PM, Antonas Office <antonasoffice at gmail.com>wrote:

> Ana,
>
> Thank you for your remarks. I think we have to insist on community
> protocols and their formation. Internet may be a helping tool for such
> legislative micro-structures if we have the opportunity to use it; we think
> about its rules as a possible background. But it can only determine
> strategies for the societies that seem determined by it. The Internet seem
> to be a growing infrastructure in which people will live. This can be scary
> or interesting, depending to the way it will relate to the empirical,
> traditional understanding of space. Modernization today seem to be
> identified to a formula of entering in such a growing unified
> infrastructure that regulates together the network of water and electricity
> but also the community formations. Urgent situations would be determined or
> not by the Internet. In any case we cannot ignore it. In the situations you
> describe the community protocols will have to be conceived without the
> Internet. This is a different condition but I think that it does not change
> the general strategy. Constructive sociality is linked to common projects
> through commonly accepted legislative frameworks. I try to find again and
> reinvestigate the value of the common legislative force since the ideas of
> event and the occupy strategies seem empty of content. This can happen with
> or without the Internet, but the Internet imposes another level of
> investigation that we have to consider too in societies that operate
> through it.
>
> Aristide Antonas
>
> Sent from antonas iPhone
>
> On Mar 27, 2012, at 4:15, Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> "New community functions will be necessary in order to prescribe a
> protocol or to install it temporarily. The Internet can provide the
> grouping system in order that concrete communities of inhabitants decide to
> introduce and test a protocol. The municipalities may act as the legalizing
> power that could accept or refuse such protocols to run in the city.
> Protocols can be proposed through the net and be accepted from different
> interested communities; urban protocols organize independent autonomous
> communal structures; they can also regulate the relationship between the
> private sector and specific communities."
> Johannes quoted Aristides today in an earlier post and I wondered why we
> suppose in a situation of crisis the Internet is going to work and our
> network of serveces and computers are going to run ad perpetum.
> In a situation of war the first thing to be destroyed are the masts of
> mobile communication, the cables, the electronic hubs.
> And we are, again, speaking about cities in the developed part of the
> world with skilled communities running sophisticated protocols, with
> municipalities based on cooperation and transparency.
> What happen with the Indigenous communities organized by Zapatistas? The
> "caracoles", their hubs of liberated territory, are good working example of
> new protocols based on old memes and ancient uses. And in Africa maybe the
> communities want protocols which can be used when the electricity is faulty.
> I think every democratic change must be low key and not depend of advanced
> technology.
> Ana
>
>
> --
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>
>
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> — Leonardo da Vinci
>
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-- 
http://www.twitter.com/caravia158
http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/
http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/
http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/
http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0
http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/

mobil/cell +4670-3213370

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with
your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always
long to return.
— Leonardo da Vinci
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