from information control
to digital resistance
Digital technology and expansion of internet gave life, since when they started to
spread broadly, to a veritable revolution of power relationships in the informational and communicational realm.
That is, it has made possible for an huge amount of people linked together to access, thanks to the
language of the bits, to broad quantities of information, to publish them and share them without any mediation
at all, nor any filter and therefore any censorship in their diffusion and browsing.
Growing widespread use of these new technologies allowed the development of complex social networks and virtual
communities made up by real individuals that, under the banner of creative cooperation and free exchange of
knowledge valourized their subjectivity (with the needs and wishes it expressed), experimenting in a whole new lot
of practises: technical, political, artistical, novellistical, scientifical.
And everything about it takes place during a first phase much alien to state and governative control and market
influence, whose role first is reconsidered, then objected and finally well opposed.
P2P (systems for sharing and exchanging music, movies and any other kind of content inside a common network) little by
little is dissolving the system of intellectual property and the logic of culture mercification that comes with it.
Big corporations, which enjoy a monopoly in the entertainment industry, see threatened along with their
mediatory stance in content distribution (software, music and video) also their mainstream built on profit and
characterized by a dismal cultural misery. Musical labels and novellistic experiments are born and, adopting a
self-managed creation and distribution, decide to give value to the inner meaning and freedom of the intellectual
process of a work's creation, instead of its commercial implications.
Forms of telematical protest like Netstrikes begin to be employed: virtual parades where thousands of people occupy
targeted sites' bandwidth and prevent access to them, blocking their activities. The first one was organized by
ECN in 1996 against the French nuclear tests at Mururoa, and many other had followed.
Tactical media (Isole nella Rete, Tactical Media Crew, New Global Vision, web-radios, Indymedia) finds favourable
soil and multiply, being active protagonists in the struggles and conflicts of the last years, and in a totally
independent and horizontal way they can involve thousands of people by trying to break the monopoly of information
of the official and institutional media, that we know being one of the key elements of the rule of unique thought
and capitalism.
Free operative systems based on the Linux kernel boom, sons of the practical, libertarian, anti-authoritarian and
non-bureaucratical mentality of the hacking spirit. Free software, implemented and continually improved by
countless legions of programmers, testers, debuggers and simple users who can access the source code of which
it is made, grows more and more. The focal point that differentiates this creative effort with a background of
social experiment isn't that much gratuity but creation of programs free of any kind of intellectual or
economic monopoly.
This breakdown of the informational cycle, that comes with a communicative insurrection multiplied by the informatic
technology, made the peaks of the pyramids of power tremble, shaken in their basements. And Internet
has increasingly become a stage for conflicts and a net of unsolved tensions.
Governements, institutions and global corporations react against this with a blind and senseless fury (at first)
and with more subtle strategies (then) trying to normalize the net and leading it back inside the parameters
accounted for by the global market. Net frame must be changed, laws that regulate it must be changed, general
perception about it must be changed. The imperative is for Internet not being a field of free communication
and access to knowledge anymore , but becoming a big global super-market built in such a way to shape all its users
into possible consumers. The ultimate objective is the creation of a "secure" informational environment, that means
"protected" and purged by any form of dissent and opposition or to "risk factors" that could hindrace the flow
of capitals and the commercialization of the net.
In the last years we are witnesses of the development of a wide array of tools to control the net's information.
Tools of control that, let's highlight that, are effective when the range of their action is made possible and
distributed on multiple layers, thanks to the realization of powerful legal gimmicks, exploitation of existing
technical characteristics and introduction of new ones with clear functions of surveillance, conditioning and
repression.
From one side, network architectures and hardware that builds up computers and the software that we use on it are
more and more conceived and developed in such a way to result
0# in some cases (as for server logs, cookies, web filters) as clear and present tools of surveillance and
monitoring on our activities, attitudes, the way we move in the internet, which sites we visit, who we talk with,
which content we store on our HDD, what we do and when.
1# In other cases as devices of limitation to resources and knowledge otherwise available in the net's mare magnum.
Such an example is the DRM (Digital Rights Management). Employed for the first time by Sony in a musical cd, it is
a kind of technical limitation which aims to manage the whole life cycle of a digital object (a movie, a musical
record, a software, an e-book, an image) and that of its copies in such a way to enable perpetual collection of
property rights. These of which we are talking about are certainly technical topics that anyway implement clear
political choices, that in the end state about who, how, when and at what price can access the Net, and what kind
of Net.
Political choices that we find also in national and international legislations, more and more repressive and
blatantly arrogant. A frame of control of the system of intellectual property, as brutal as inefficient, is
started, with the promulgation of laws that criminalize P2P (like the Urbani decree), make possible a constant
monitoring of file exchange networks and lead to some repressive moments in which forced shutdown of various servers
of filesharing networks (such as Razorback2, e-donkey200, WinMX and earlier the progenitor Napster), due to
authorities' seizure or legal menaces by the majors, and prosecution of thousands people (even if no one ended
in some satisfying effect), takes place. Meanwhile, intellectual property rights are extended beyond any conceivable
period and accordingly, without any reasonable criterion (except for the odious one of exploitation of communal
knowledge), the ensemble of the targets of such rights is broadened, taking into account things that until yesterday
were considered common goods: from the most ordinary foods to vernacular music, from the most basic mathematics'
alghorytms that consitute the operative systems of our computers to universitary research, not to mention the
(human or else) DNA sequences.
And after semptember 11th the endless war unravels also in the global fabric of the net: in 2003 FBI seizes
illegally the Indymedia servers in London. The following year, Autistici/Inventati suffers seizures, first
of a satyrical site (in which the active role and participation of Trenitalia in the Iraqi killings was exposed)
and then of the content of the mailbox server's hard disks, that hosted the mailboxes of thousands users.
The Pisanu decree (approved in 2005) thanks to the artificially-constructed panic and the silent approval of
the majority of the Parliament's political forces, gives approval to a package of laws that enables a practically
endless data retention of Italy's internet users, therefore making social control on the net more and more
extended and pervasive.
Even the market plays its role in this match: many are nowadays the efforts to cooptate and fraudolently discipline
the practices of free communication and diffusion of information, trying to bring them back in the framework of
the production-consume cycle. The most visible and blatant tests are those involving creation of sites that on
behalf of the big discographical industry sell mp3 for few dimes (destroying every logic of sharing and exchange).
Other softer and subtler tools are linked to the open-source software (OPEN IS NOT FREE), that dumping the concept
of freedom proper of the free software and of the hacker culture propose themselves to the market as a suitable
commercial strategy, ready to expropriate without too many political and ethical dilemmas the knowledge and
experience of the net users, transforming even cooperative moments into a model for business and profit. Without
forgetting the role of search engines that, though being absolutely necessary to surf the ever-raging and bursting
sea of the net, are also commercial services that alter in totally arbitrarian ways (often due to commercial
interests and strong censorship pressures) the ranking of the websites.
As a background for this ensemble of tecno-control, market conditioning and authoritarian legislation, we find the
mediatic terrorism by the ufficial organs of television and press: more and more Internet is presented as an "hut"
notoriusly frequented by violent dissident subversives or reckless pedophiles. An evergreen is the old story of
the nefarious hacker that, thanks to his operative systems make dams explode and floods entire regions of eastern
China, practices black magic online with the Bestie di Satana through MSN, desecrates the holiness of the Vatican's
site by using the mouse to fornicate with the animated gif of the Saints Peter and Paul or melts the ice of the
poles if needed. The P2P is blamed as the epicenter of a fair share of the world's undoings: from vehicling violent
and uneducative contents to sorting centre for communiques by Al-Qaida or that month's other fashionable terrorist
organization.
So we see how constructing hierarchies and closing access to information (and presenting as a fiendish misdeed
the idea of share it) an effort to impose a behavioural censorship on the user's interaction with techonologies
is taking place, a forced normalization of the digital device use. An use that becomes limitant and limited and
that flattens one's ability to mold the matrix of reality in an autonomous way, altering the interaction with the
machines and converting them (well often without the subject knowing about that) into control devices or into mere
objects ready for consumption.
To avoid the shutdown (or the radical transformation) of the net, armored bit after bit by control architectures,
by lawsuits from the copyright's and patents' corporations, by oppressive bureaucracies and obscurantists law
formation processes, we must be able to trace some escape and opposition routes against knowledge mercification
and global control strategies.
A critical and creative attitude and the knowledge of the functioning mechanisms of the machines and digital
devices allows their liberatory and playful employment, useful to fulfill needs and wishes (communicational or else)
but also to disarray, circumvent and monkeywrench endlessly the closed systems based on profit created after control
and scarcity. In this way, a self-formation and a costant research for knowledge become necessary; they cannot be
just related to a merely individual intellectual process but are to be found into participation, exchange,
cooperation and moltiplication of the knowledge that unfolds in the many and chaotical social communities
driven by the same happy passions: the will of a free communication, the need to satisfy needs and give way to
one's wishes and his curiosity, putting firmly hands on the machines and enjoying total access to the information.
But if we do recognize the inherently capitalistic nature of the dynamics of surveillance and control of which we
have talked, then we do recognize the need to move in a much broader perspective, too. It is necessary to add to
the practices of the opening and re-appropriation of the socially-made knowledge also the creation of virtual and
non-virtual places, not having them just be neutral nodes of knowledge transmission - because this could turn out to be a
double-edged sword. If the P2P is just perceived as a tool to get the last christmas efforts of the Vanzina Bros,
the Hollywood trash, the conservative and trickily fascists videogames designed and realized with the Pentagon's
support, then it risks to become the next "weapon of mass distraction". If we are satisfied by just burning
proprietary programs with unknown code, then we do no such thing other than favour who retains their monopoly, contributing
to spread closed standards and formats, unchangeable and unaccessible to everyone (so risking in addition to stumble
upon gimmicks of surveillance on our actions). But even if we consider Linux just as a free (even if now it isn't
always like that) and more efficient substitute of Windows, then we risk to give way to new forms of open capitalism.
And in the same way, even if we manage to digitalize and make available every university text we do need (a very
demanding task indeed!) this wouldn't change at all the process of In/formation that storm us making us
precarious always ever.
The main point today isn't that much (or at least not only) in the opening, but in the framing of the alternative
dynamics that participate in production, re-elaboration and diffusion of knowledge.
It isn't enough to be able to use a computer and know the source code of the operative system, but is important
to self-grow a critical conscience about both working mechanisms of digital media and how these affect informational
flows that pervade the everyday of the net (and not only) and go to prime much wider political, economical and
social processes.
The keyword is making networks with different subjects with whose a critic of virtual tools could be done, and
with whose experiment against-knowledge and counter-knowledge to enable us to be (and be perceived as) active
and autonomous subjectives in the creation and upkeep of a free Internet.
Let's free knowledge and spread free standards, damage official networks and build some alternative ones, learn
about surveillance systems of the informational society to counter their effectiveness, breed a subversive stance
in the use of technology and use it to flank social struggles and magnify their impact.
Copy.Riot Project
B.A.Z. Crew |
