[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 2]

[FRAUD]

Some small notes - on building network infrastructure which I agree to 
be a real (and performative) necessity.

Inspiration from Danja Vasiliev's netless (http://k0a1a.net/netless/)
"netless. a digital network that is using city public transport as its 
information carrier. permission-less, distributed and friend-2-friend, 
netless is an independent communication tactic; invisible digital 
network that does not need wires or dedicated radio frequencies."

A note on Moore's carbon law. The green economy is institutionalised 
fraud. Carbon credits are given to companies at 'risk' of carbon leakage 
- so much so that they do not use them all and sell them for a profit. 
This small detail accounts for billions of $/£ per year (transfer from 
taxpayer to companies). The EU has just put out its new targets for 
2023. Until 2020 it will give away even more free credits - for the 
so-called adjustment period. Deforestation and landgrabbing are 
*rewarded* under the carbon credits model, it is a lucrative business. 
Also, the minerals mined for the 'green energy wind propeller' and the 
like are often in indigenous land for example the Sami in the 
Fenoscandian shield. Moore's law is already applicable to the amount of 
exponential speculation and investment into the 'green economy'. Also, 
regarding the target of 50$ per tonne stated in the article - currently 
(today - the EU market closed at 14.54EUR) - it is essentially cheaper 
to pollute. Since the amount is governed solely by the laws of the 
market, any target of raising the value is non-sensical unless 
regulations would be implemented. In case anyone would want a quick 
sight as to the (de)value of carbon we have it here: 
http://carbonderivation.space (the salvaged wood mention is part of an 
installation - unrelated). Carbon credits and the green economy are not, 
/not helping fast enough/, they are damaging faster than can be 
comprehended.

On complexity, and engaging with the invisible, we appreciate very much 
and are inspired by work of so many people on this list, namely Elaine 
Gan's work with High Yield Variety rice, the Electronic Disturbance 
Theater, and so many more.

Bon vendredi! Saludos.

aud of fraud






On 15/06/2018 10:35, BStalbaum wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
> I am surprised by all of this gun play. There is potent semiology to 
> contend with, sure, much as there is with "network", and some 
> rehearsal that assumes resistance or escape to some outside. But 
> potential rehearsals for either guns or networks are not much more 
> than planning to plan. Representing, and it may be forgotten in this 
> rehearsal, from inside of the DARPA net, pinging and acking and 
> linking (and it's latter honorific, liking) at each other, 
> representing is exactly how the internet was designed to interface us. 
> And I am not saying communication of understanding is necessary. Of 
> course these are necessary, but context.
>
> There are ways to exit if you want to go past making something "about" 
> something. As Ricardo points out through his index of Zapatista 
> wisdom, it is not through our demands or waiting for it to grow like a 
> fungi (or for us to understand how it may grow by theorizing the 
> fungi...) that what people deserve can be achieved. "We do not need 
> your support", the EZLN says. Why not? Well, some people have long ago 
> had to pick up guns (and networks and a hundred other tools that can 
> be mastered through wielding them...) Even swinging a hammer, there is 
> continuous operation between literal and hallucinatory, something I 
> think artists actually know very well without recourse to Heidegger. 
> These gestures have always been a little of each, with the actual 
> grounding the phantoms, yet those imps fueling the real. Did you know? 
> Shrooms actually stimulate neuronal rewiring, getting some parts of 
> the wet nets between our ears talking to other parts that they have 
> not spoken with for a good while. Increasingly, we understand that 
> this is REAL medicine. In San Cristóbal 1994, nobody knew if the guns 
> where loaded or even if they were real guns and not props. The truth 
> was of course a little of each, some real guns and some props. And 
> some serious rewiring took place! Enough to keep EZLN communities 
> alive to continue organizing. And they are still there, still not 
> needing us. We need them, in fact. The problem for this particular 
> moment is for us to get up and learn to walk so that maybe we can find 
> our stride along their side. Fingers are not what we walk on, although 
> as I have said this is not to say that communication or knowledge 
> production are not needed. (Got to repeat that, know your audience.)
>
> In a more succinct way, I once saw a great example of Zapatista video 
> via the Chiapas Media Project initiative. This was well before 
> youtube, and prior to the genre of amazing "how to" videos that now 
> teach us affordable, cheap hacks to everything from fixing your roof 
> to turning a digital TV dongle into a broad spectrum SDR receiver. The 
> Zapatista video was on how to build a gravity fed water system, 
> because in their context, fresh water infrastructure IS resistance. 
> And just this last Monday Trump's FCC took net neutrality away, and 
> ATT got the blessing to merge with Time-Warner. I'd say "get ready" 
> for your cable TV style "internet", but like many an activist's 
> nightmare, the cable-tv-internet was fait accompli even before the 
> warning signs. As most of us had settled into our own 5 to 20 channel 
> "packages" such as Facebook and Amazon and etc, a long time before 
> Ajit Pai got the reigns of the FCC.
>
> So are we going to build our own networks? I don't mean only 
> metaphorically or for consult, or to leave a bread crumb trail of 
> correspondences for history. I mean our own infrastructure, for our 
> communities.
>
> If you want to resist, keep focused on the possibilities for making 
> something that might actually work dangerously. No shame in failing. 
> Trust us, the Transborder Immigrant Tool (as big a fail as there ever 
> was) actually and really worked as a last mile, short distance 
> navigation system for dehydrated bodies. I could put any of you in a 
> blindfold, drive you out and set you lose in my desert, within a few 
> miles of a water station (where you could take the blindfold off), and 
> you would find the water. But trust us again when we say, that is not 
> how it actually worked. Great poetry nevertheless gave the project 
> some bad trip hallucinations, and those hallucinations fueled its 
> actual so much so that eventually Fox News transformed our project 
> into a iPhone GPS app (is was not for that platform, nor was it for 
> Android because it was pre these) that would ultimately be used by 
> terrorists. (My own congressperson wrote that it would be used by 
> terrorists in an OpEd!) And poetry would dissolve the Union, etc, and 
> many trans-hatred death threats later, sickeningly directed at Micha 
> Cardenas in particular for no reason other than transitivity... (I was 
> going to write something about Glenn Beck here... but forget it.) In 
> retrospect is was an early sounding of the gamergate and pizzagate 
> kind of stuff that would come later.
>
> As a result, Ricardo Domingez and Amy Sara Carroll took a lot of 
> bullets. Big career bullets. I'm lucky to be a white man, so our 
> University system(s) (Ric and I are both at UCSD, Amy was at a 
> neoliberal-zombie-reputation mess of a U that makes UCSD look very 
> progressive), did not come after me legally or threaten my job. I 
> still find this comical in a racist, sexist, keystone cops sort of way 
> that does not involve any actual laughter. I did try in vain to turn 
> myself into the police, but after less than an hour in the 
> interrogation room, totally giving myself up as a co-conspirator in a 
> signed statement, police were left unenthused and if I am honest, they 
> treated me as if I wasted their time. You can't write this stuff, but 
> the performative matrix can. My point is, it got very real in multiple 
> bad ways that hurt my friends and collaborators, really a lot. I can't 
> really speak for everyone who was part of that project, but I feel all 
> of them would probably play it out exactly the same way again, 
> regardless of the consequences. And I personally know that number of 
> artists in this conversation are that way too, bearing lots of real 
> scars for their activism.
>
> While I am at it, I'd also write about the need for community self 
> defense here too, in a way that transposes from Chiapas to here, even 
> if you can't speak of these things among the U.S. left. Because, there 
> is an equally serious need for effected communities in my country. 
> Authorities are actually disappearing people from our streets. And 
> btw, self defense is not all about guns, on the contrary, community 
> self defense it is very rarely about guns, even as I do take a lot of 
> inspiration from Bobby Seale and Huey Newton; how they peacefully 
> co-opted open carry, which is better performance in the matrix than 
> most. You don't have to pull triggers to defend, and while violence 
> should never be received, some may decide that it should be returned 
> as self defense requires it. That is not an endorsement of anything 
> more than the general principle of self defense, and of the 
> uncertainty of simulation. But my post about these very issues - the 
> impending need for community self-defense in the U.S., and the left's 
> blindness to the dangers of unilateral disarmament - these are things 
> I tried to bring up here the morning after Trump's electoral victory. 
> My post was in fact censored from this list, and as I recall someone 
> blamed it on an intern. We will see if this one gets through, as I 
> have been quiet here since then, out of disgust. I know I should let 
> that go... but I'm in an asshole mood tonight:-) Probably I need some 
> shrooms for my health, but I have some infrastructure projects to work 
> on, though which I find some hope!
>
>
> Brett
>
>
> On 06/14/2018 09:06 PM, Shu Lea Cheang wrote:
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>>
>> Oh, dearest
>>
>> Hold the gun!
>>
>> To Ricardo, speaking of reaching to the gun, I am quite fascinated  
>> by your phrasing of 'gestures' (not even poetic)
>>
>>
>> " Some gesture must be of complete refusal. Some for invisible work. 
>> Some for non-relational-relational collaboration. Some as a part of 
>> the system.
>>
>> Gestures built on strange shrooms and in between the ruins. As the 
>> Zapatistas say, we do not need your support-but if you would like to 
>> walk beside us that can be done. "
>>
>>
>> The walking, the march,  side by side.... down the boulevard, across 
>> the bridge, the barricade, the borders, down streams, deep in the 
>> jungles.....
>>
>> So, when the bullets hit, who take the shot?
>>
>> sl
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>>
>>
>> >From Minerva to MAVEN and back again or (What is to be Done)
>>
>> Hola Tod at xs,
>>
>> These are all excellent questions in the face of navigating the ruins 
>> behind us, around us now and those yet to come.
>>
>> >>How do we create forms of life that no longer reproduce the machines
>>
>> >of capital. How do we desert the system that has no outside. How do we
>>
>> >refuse to become the fools in the palace, providing the progressive
>>
>> >masks to the institutions whose very life blood is in the corporate
>>
>> >military industrial realm…
>>
>> Exit cultures or escape routes are now and perhaps always have been 
>> useful to have available and build. With the dream of a great outside 
>> as a possibility. Certainly Capitalist Realism always like plays with 
>> the “no outside” gambit as its ontological certainty-but it works 
>> constantly to maintain this manufactured state. The Zapatistas 
>> ecology starting in 1994 created an outside that is nested within the 
>> post NAFTA state and its multiple ruins with the force of having 
>> fought back during the last 500 years plus.
>>
>> > 
>>
>> > >>How do we not separate our ethics and aesthetics ( as wittgenstein
>>
>> >urged us not to do )
>>
>> The Zapatistas do not separate their ethics from the aesthetic-no 
>> Wittgenstein silence from them.
>>
>> http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/dancing-with-the-zapatistas/table-of-contents
>>
>> > >>Do we refuse to collaborates ?
>>
>> We have to work fractally to some degree. Some gesture must be of 
>> complete refusal. Some for invisible work. Some for 
>> non-relational-relational collaboration. Some as a part of the system.
>>
>> Gestures built on strange shrooms and in between the ruins. As the 
>> Zapatistas say, we do not need your support-but if you would like to 
>> walk beside us that can be done.
>>
>> > >>Can we hack from the inside ?
>>
>> Yes, it can be done to some degree. Electronic Disturbance Theater’s 
>> Transborder Immigrant Tool navigated the Minerva institutional 
>> condition. (In good, bad and ugly ways):
>>
>> http://tbt.tome.press/
>>
>> https://anthology.rhizome.org/transborder-immigrant-tool
>>
>> Description: 
>> https://anthology.rhizome.org/user/pages/transborder-immigrant-tool/mobiles.jpg
>>
>> 	
>>
>> NET ART ANTHOLOGY: Transborder Immigrant Tool 
>> <https://anthology.rhizome.org/transborder-immigrant-tool>
>>
>> anthology.rhizome.org
>>
>> The Transborder Immigrant Tool, devised by Electronic Disturbance 
>> Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, was a mobile phone application intended to 
>> guide individuals who were making their way to the United States 
>> through the deserts of the U.S./Mexico borderlands to water. The 
>> application delivered poetry to i...
>>
>> > >>Do we desert and build counter powers ?
>>
>> Yes.
>>
>> >Or do we just cook up the poison mushrooms and feed them to those making money from death ?
>>
>> Yes.
>>
>> P.S. The MAVEN Tale of Reversing #TheRuinsYetToCome
>>
>> In early May 2018 I received an email request from Prof. Lilly Irani, 
>> a colleague of mine at University of San Diego (UCSD) and Prof. Peter 
>> Asaro, who participated in a #DronesAtHome project that I did at 
>> Gallery at CALIT2 in 2012 on UCSD’s deep entanglement in developing 
>> these remote controlled killing machines and spreading them around 
>> the world.
>>
>> The e-mail concerned signing a letter to support Google A.I. division 
>> workers shutting the DOD’s MAVEN funding to develop a weaponized use 
>> of A.I. imaging systems that were be developed:
>>
>> “Project Maven is a United States military program aimed at using 
>> machine learning to analyze massive amounts of drone surveillance 
>> footage and to label objects of interest for human analysts. Google 
>> is supplying not only the open source ‘deep learning’ technology, but 
>> also engineering expertise and assistance to the Department of Defense.”
>>
>> The letter the ended with these demands:
>>
>>   * Terminate its Project Maven contract with the DoD.
>>   * Commit not to develop military technologies, nor to allow the
>>     personal data it has collected to be used for military operations.
>>   * Pledge to neither participate in nor support the development,
>>     manufacture, trade or use of autonomous weapons; and to support
>>     efforts to ban autonomous weapons.
>>
>> The letter got a total of signatures by academics: 1171
>>
>> https://www.icrac.net/open-letter-in-support-of-google-employees-and-tech-workers/
>>
>> Description: https://s0.wp.com/i/blank.jpg
>>
>> 	
>>
>> Open Letter in Support of Google Employees and Tech ... 
>> <https://www.icrac.net/open-letter-in-support-of-google-employees-and-tech-workers/>
>>
>> www.icrac.net
>>
>> Researchers in Support of Google Employees: Google should withdraw 
>> from Project Maven and commit to not weaponizing its technology.. An 
>> Open Letter To:
>>
>> The above letter expanded the networks of support for the Google 
>> employees protesting any weaponization of Google A.I and beyond:
>>
>> The internal debate over Maven, viewed by both supporters and 
>> opponents as opening the door to much bigger defense contracts, 
>> generated a petition signed by about 4,000 employees 
>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html> 
>> who demanded “a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its 
>> contractors will ever build warfare technology.”
>>
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html
>>
>> Description: 
>> https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/05/31/business/31GOOGLE/merlin_138827160_6293d3a2-9bb3-49cb-84e8-3a186ce45a71-facebookJumbo.jpg 
>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html>
>>
>> 	
>>
>> How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for ... 
>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html>
>>
>> www.nytimes.com
>>
>> A $9 million deal for the use of artificial intelligence technology 
>> has fractured the internet giant’s work force and risks driving away 
>> top engineering talent.
>>
>> >From these series of gestures among the ruins yet to come. Google was forced to end the contracts with DOD:
>>
>> “Google will not seek to extend its contract next year with the 
>> Defense Department for artificial intelligence used to analyze drone 
>> video, squashing a controversial alliance that had raised alarms over 
>> the technological buildup between Silicon Valley and the military.
>>
>> The tech giant will stop working on its piece of the military’s AI 
>> endeavor known as Project Maven when its 18-month contract expires in 
>> March, a person familiar with Google’s thinking told The Washington 
>> Post.”
>>
>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/01/google-to-drop-pentagon-ai-contract-after-employees-called-it-the-business-of-war/? 
>>
>>
>> #FractalNetworks
>>
>> So here is a case of rapid fractal gestures that gather multiple 
>> inside and outside communities that can at least for a moment A.I. 
>> weponization. So that the question of growing living forms inside the 
>> poison atmospherics of the institutions towards living forms networks 
>> that can create tunnels and wings to Zapatistas from the roots-we at 
>> EDT 1.0 and 2.0 do believe to be more than possible.
>>
>> #SoEndthThisTale
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> *From:*empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
>> <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of patrick 
>> lichty <p at voyd.com>
>> *Sent:* Thursday, June 14, 2018 8:35:18 AM
>> *To:* 'soft_skinned_space'; 'shu lea cheang'
>> *Subject:* Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 2]
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> I am fascinated byt the notion of the invasive species. Perhaps for me
>> the notion of invasiveness at one point or another in a closed system 
>> like
>> the biosphere is to be assumed.  What is more interesting to me is the
>> insertion of the species into the new environment, the method in which it
>> does it, and the rate of
>> spread/invasion/assimilation/integration/homeostasis.  For example, we
>> could consider the Indigenous American's introductionjn across the
>> Beringian land Bridge as form of invasive introduction, which led 
>> arguably
>> to the elimination of much of the meggfauna on  the continent save the
>> Bison - That would take the invasion of H.Sapiens Europensis (sic).
>>
>> But the cooperative introduction of invasives may be more interesting,
>> such ad the Zebra Mussel's hooking to human vessels to get to the Great
>> Lakes, the Us Navy's intridcution of caribou onto Adak Island in the
>> 1950's for an alternate food source for the base, only to let them
>> multiply out of control with only hunters as predatoprs when the land was
>> ceded baclk to the Unangans in the early 2000's.  Of the fact that spores
>> can go halfway around the world, or even the theory in testing that 
>> DNA on
>> Earth may have originated on Mars, and was placed here by asteroidal
>> panspermia....
>>
>> This spinning set of relations constructs in my mind a series of 
>> tectonics
>> of relation - speed, temporal expansion, location, and cooperation.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________ empyre forum 
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
>> <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> 
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

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