
THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE

  Critical Art Ensemble

 Part 6 of 7

Published by Autonomedia

ISBN 1-57027-006-6

Cultural workers have recently become increasingly attracted to
     technology as a means to examine the symbolic order.  Video,
     interactive computer projects, and all sorts of electronic
     noise have made a solid appearance in the museums and
     galleries, and have gained curatorial acceptance.  There are
     electronic salons and virtual museums, and yet something is
     missing.  It is not simply because much of the work tends to
     have a "gee whiz" element to it, reducing it to a product
     demonstration offering technology as an end in itself; nor is
     it because technology is often used primarily as a design
     accessory to postmodern fashion, for these are the uses that
     are to be expected when new exploitable media are identified. 
     Rather, an absence is most acutely felt when the technology is
     used for an intelligent purpose.  Electronic technology has
     not attracted resistant cultural workers to other time zones,
     situations, or even bunkers that yield new sets of questions,
     but instead has been used to express the same narratives and
     questions typically examined in activist art.  This, of
     course, is not a totally negative development, as the
     electronic voice is potentially the most powerful in the
     exercise of free speech; however, it is disappointing that the
     technology is monopolized by interrogation of the imperialist
     narrative.  An overwhelming amount of electronic work
     addresses questions of identity, environmental catastrophe,
     war and peace, and all the other issues generally associated
     with activist representation.  In other words, concerns from
     another time zone have been successfully and practically
     imported into electronic media, but without addressing the
     questions inherent to the media itself.  Again, this is a case
     of over-deployment and over-investment in a single
     spatial/temporal sector.  An interrogation of technoculture
     has yet to occur, except when such investigation fits with
     more traditional activist narratives.  As to be expected, a
     large amount of work is on media disinformation--the
     electronic invention of reality--but it is always tied to a
     persuasive argument about why the viewer should follow an
     alternative interpretation of a given "real world" phenomenon. 
     Activists show no particular interest in questioning the
     cybernetics of everyday life, the phenomenology of screenal
     space, the construction of electronic identity, and so on.

     And why should they?  In the abstract sense, if power has gone
     nomadic, then ideology will eventually follow the same course. 
     As speculative as it might be, with the rapid change in
     technology, the flowing shift of the locus of reality from
     simulated time/space to virtual time/space, and the
     undetermined speed with which this is happening, those
     concerned with the development of the symbolic order must ask: 
     What are nomadic values now and what will they become? 
     Because of cultural lag, asking questions about the fate of
     sedentary culture is still useful, but only if other time
     zones are kept in mind.  Even to formulate questions relevant
     to electronic nomadology is difficult, since there are no
     theories to exploit, no histories to draw upon, and no solid
     issues.  It is so much easier to stay in the familiar bunker,
     where the issues (and the parameters of their interpretation)
     have solidified.  Here the pain of leftist authoritarianism is
     most intensely felt.  Even though addressing issues of
     nomadology is clearly urgent, one fears to invoke the wrath of
     sedentary liberal activists by making an "insensitive" error;
     that fear diminishes exploration into this topic, or any other
     outside the traditional activist time zone.  Who is willing to
     venture on a high-risk endeavor, knowing that the result of
     failure is punishment from the alleged support group?

     On the practical level, this problem becomes even more
     complex.  The hardware of everyday life cybernetics is
     beginning to merge, and in the most advanced time zone, that
     of the cyberelite, it already has.  The telephone,
     television/video, the computer and its network structure--all
     these are blending into a single unit.  Each of these pieces
     of hardware is from a different time zone, and each is thus
     surrounded by different sensibilities.  The oldest piece is
     the most utopian in terms of its practical consequences in
     society:  The telephone represents the technology closest to
     a decentralized open-access communication net.  In the West,
     almost everyone knows how to use a phone and has access to
     one.  There are even indicators that the process of
     decentralization that determined access to the telephone was
     framed as a free speech issue(*).  During this process, the
     telephone was the best hardware for information relay
     available.  While it clearly still had a military function,
     the movement to decentralize it recognized that the need for
     open access surpassed the need for control.  It is this type
     of sensibility and process that must be replicated as new
     technologies begin to merge.

     (*) See Bruce Sterling, _The Hacker Crackdown_.  NY: Bantam
     Books, 1992, pp. 8-12

     Just the opposite process occurred in the development of
     video/television.  Although the hardware for viewing is
     relatively decentralized, and the hardware for production is
     beginning to be decentralized, the network for distribution is
     almost completely centralized, with little indication of
     change.  This state of affairs must be resisted:  The ideology
     that sanctions control of the airwaves by an elite capitalist
     class cannot be allowed to dominate all technology, and yet
     this is precisely what will happen if more cultural resources
     are not deployed to disturb this ideology.  Cultural workers
     must insist on making access to electronic nets decentralized. 
     To lose on this front is to concede to censorship in the worst
     way.  Whether or not an artist loses h/er NEA grant because a
     given project is antithetical to sanctioned imperialist
     ideology is insignificant, compared to the consequences of
     merging systems of communication.  This struggle will be more
     difficult than the opening of the phone network, since the
     airwaves are perceived as a means for mass persuasion.  In the
     time of telephone decentralization, radio and film suffered
     defeats (access to the airwaves was perceived not as a right,
     but a business), causing repercussions which are still being
     felt.  Television took the centralized form that it did partly
     because of these defeats.

     There is a wild card in this situation.  The computer could go
     either way.  Access to hardware, education, and networks is
     currently being centralized.  Unlike the telephone or
     television, computers have not entered the everyday life of
     almost every class.  This primarily elite technology has sunk
     a deep taproot down through the bureaucratic class.  The
     electronic service is growing, but is far from pervasive. 
     Hence those in lagging time zones already realize that
     computers are not democratic technology, nor are they
     considered an essential technology.  This sensibility damages
     resistance to centralization of communication systems, since
     such indifference allows the capitalist elite to impose
     principles of self-regulation and exclusion on the technology
     without having to go before the public.  The technology is
     lost before the public is even aware of its ramifications. 
     One of the key critical functions of cultural workers is to
     invent aesthetic and intellectual means for communicating and
     distributing ideas.  If the nomadic elite completely controls
     the lines of communication, resistant cultural workers have no
     voice, no function, nothing.  If they are to speak at all,
     cultural workers must perpetuate and increase their current
     degree of autonomy in electronic space.

     There is a more optimistic side.  The computer's linkage to
     the telephone is much greater than to the television.  In
     fact, the computer and telephone will probably consume cable
     systems.  If the sensibility of decentralization can be
     maintained, fiber optic networks will provide the democratic
     electronic space that has for so long been a dream.  Each home
     could become its own broadcasting studio.  This does not mean
     that network broadcast will collapse, or that there will be
     open access to data bases; but it does mean that there could
     be a cost-effective method to globally distribute complex
     grass-roots productions and alternative information nets
     containing time-based images, texts, and sounds--all
     accessible without bureaucratic permission.  It will be as
     easy as making a phone call.

Thus, developing systems of communication may provide another
     utopian opportunity.  However, maintaining technological
     decentralization is crucial to exploiting this chance. 
     Considering the history of utopia in ruins, the probability
     that this opportunity will be successfully used looks
     discouraging.  None can predict how the technology will
     evolve, nor by what means the nomadic elite will defend the
     electronic rhizome from a slave revolt.  Those snagged in
     electronic resistance may well be on a fool's errand, since
     the battle may already be lost.  There are no assurances;
     there are no politically correct actions.  Again, there is
     only the wager.  If cynical power has withdrawn from the
     spectacle into the electronic net, then that is also where
     pockets of resistance must emerge.  Although the resistant
     technocratic class can provide the imagination for the
     hardware and programming, resistant cultural workers are
     responsible for providing the sensibility necessary for
     popular support.  This class must provide the imagination to
     intersect time zones, and to do so using whatever venues and
     media are available.  This class must attempt to disturb the
     paternal spectacle of electronic centralization.  We must
     challenge and recapture the electronic body, our electronic
     body!  Roll the dice.


Chapter 7  ]]>  Paradoxes and Contradictions


No matter which side of the political spectrum is examined, a
     generalized consensus exists on the role of the individual
     in the formation of society, although it is phrased
     oppositely by each side.  According to the political right,
     the individual must surrender h/er sovereignty to state
     power.  From the point of view of the left, the individual
     must submit to enriched repression.  In each case the
     individual loss of sovereignty is crucial.  The
     authoritarians regard this loss as positive--the beneficent
     state provides the individual with security and order in
     exchange for h/er obedience, while radical elements see this
     loss as negative, since the individual is forced to live an
     alienating existence of fragmented consciousness. 
     Consequently the differences between the two stem from their
     opposite interpretations of this act of surrender.  To
     determine where contingent elements fall along the political
     continuum, one must examine the degree to which the
     individual is deprived of h/er personal volition and desire. 
     Unfortunately, no presocial moment free of state power ever
     existed outside the imagination, so no experiential
     knowledge can be used to identify or to measure the
     qualities of liberty.  For this reason, certain arbitrary
     assumptions must be made to fix the location of liberty
     anywhere on the continuum between the noble savage and the
     war of all against all.  This either/or decision cannot be
     reasoned without logical error (Goedel's paradox), nor is
     there a history (other than %state% history) from which to
     make an inductive judgment.  One must just decide, or act in
     an ad hoc or random fashion.  The decision to follow any
     certain idea is itself a wager.

     Throughout this book, the assumption is that extraction of
     power from the individual by the state is to be resisted. 
     Resistance itself is the action which recovers or expands
     individual sovereignty, or conversely, it is those actions
     which weaken the state.  Therefore, resistance can be viewed
     as a matter of degree; a total system crash is not the only
     option, nor may it even be a viable one.  This is not to
     soften the argument by opening the door a crack for liberal
     reform, since that means relinquishing sovereignty in the
     name of social justice, rather than for the sake of social
     order.  Liberal action is too often a matter of equal
     repression for all, in order to resist the conservative
     practice of repression for the marginalized and modest
     liberty for the privileged.  Under the liberal rubric, the
     people united will always be defeated.  The practice being
     advocated here is to recover what the state has taken, as
     well as what the reformers have so generously given (and are
     continuing to give).

     The issue of sovereignty brings up the first contradiction
     to be faced here.  Throughout this work, two seemingly
     exclusive points have been voiced:  While the current
     situation is partly defined by information overload, it is
     also defined by insufficient access to information.  How can
     it be both ways?  This is a problem of absence and presence-
     -the presence of an overload of information in the form of
     spectacle (presence) that steals sovereignty, and an absence
     of information that returns sovereignty to the individual. 
     To be sure, information on good consumerism and government
     ideology is abundant.  Data banks are filled with useless
     facts, but how can access be gained to information that
     directly affects everyday life?  An individual's data body
     is completely out of h/er control.  Information on spending
     patterns, political associations, credit histories, bank
     records, education, lifestyles, and so on is collected and
     cross-referenced by political-economic institutions, to
     control our own destinies, desires, and needs.  This
     information cannot be accessed, nor can we really know which
     institutions have it, nor can we be sure how it is being
     used (although it is safe to assume that it is not for
     benevolent purposes).  This is strategic data that must be
     claimed.  We should be protected from the creation of
     electronic doubles by the right to privacy, but we are not. 
     The right to privacy is yet another welfare state illusion
     in the service of the economy of desire.  Specific facts
     about the policies and laws that promote information-
     gathering are not readily available, since such facts are
     carefully guarded by legions of bureaucrats.  One needs
     extensive special training just to research such problems,
     when this knowledge could be readily available.  Finally,
     where is the network that allows problems to be voiced on a
     mass scale?  It does not exist.

     This is a peculiar case of censorship.  Rather than stopping
     the flow of information, far more is generated than can be
     digested.  The strategy is to classify or privatize all
     information that could be used by the individual for self-
     empowerment, and to bury the useful information under the
     reams of useless junk data offered to the public.  Instead
     of the traditional information blackout, we face an
     information blizzard--a whiteout.  This forces the
     individual to depend on an authority to help prioritize the
     information to be selected.  This is the foundation for the
     information catastrophe, an endless recycling of sovereignty
     back to the state under the pretense of informational
     freedom.

Dilemmas involved in the decentralization of hardware are also
     worth consideration.  Where does Luddite technophobia stop
     and retrograde techno-dependence begin?  This is very much a
     problem of finding the ever-elusive golden mean. 
     Decentralization of the hardware invites the hazard of a
     techno-addiction that benefits only the merchants of
     technology, while centralization guarantees that electronic
     manipulation of individuals at both the macro and micro
     levels will proceed uncontested in any significant way. 
     While the utopian claims made by the developers and
     distributors of new technology seem woefully transparent
     (after all, they are the ones who benefit the most
     economically), those claims are, at the same time, very
     seductive.  The chance to be freed from the algorithms of
     everyday life in order to concentrate on the metaphysics of
     ideas is a wish worth entertaining, and has very often been
     vital to modern utopian theory; yet there are very
     discomforting elements in this vision.  The economic
     prospects for creating such an environment are extremely
     bleak.  If the technology were cheap enough to construct
     (less than labor costs), what would happen to those in the
     labor force?  They might have plenty of free time, but no
     way to support themselves.  To indulge the assumption that
     the future will be similar to the past suggests they would
     not fare well, since they would become an excess population. 
     At best there would be a completely homogenized labor force,
     with the service sector and manufacturing sector sharing the
     same squalor.  This scenario seems to be a return to
     classical Marxism in which a process of pauperization leads
     to two homogenized classes, with the bottom class unable to
     purchase the goods manufactured.  The system crashes?  Who
     can say; yet it does seem reasonable to assume that
     technology will not provide the utopia that corporate
     futurologists predict.  Such predictions seem to function
     more in the short term, to convince people to buy technology
     that they do not really need, as well as to prepare future
     markets.

     Continued reflection on the more intelligible short-term
     prospects of the technology of desire makes it easier to see
     what is immediately bothersome about technocratic promises. 
     Take the notion of the smart house.  It sounds seductive. 
     Here is a home that runs as efficiently as its construction
     allows.  The computer monitors household activity, and acts
     in accordance with these activity patterns.  Energy is never
     wasted; it is deployed only when and where it is needed. 
     Security systems monitor the perimeter, to alert the
     authorities if the property is threatened.  The home is
     efficient and secure; it is the manifestation of bourgeois
     value itself.  But what is surrendered when all household
     activities are monitored and recorded?  We know that if
     information can enter the house, it can also leave the
     house, so that the price of bourgeois utopia is privacy
     itself.  With such data available, ways for outside forces
     to control the household more efficiently will also develop. 
     Due to its surveillance components, this type of technology
     is another contractual trade of sovereignty for order.  What
     is suspect about this techno-world is that it values
     consumer passivity and technological mediation in the most
     totalizing sense.

     This problem conjures the image of decentralization gone
     awry.  Decentralization does not always favor resistant
     action; it can have a state function.  For instance, it may
     be feasible for the corporate grid to provide most of the
     population with affordable smart machines as a marketing
     strategy.  The more technology available to people, and the
     more it can insinuate itself into the algorithms of everyday
     life, the greater the chance that it will become a market of
     dependency.  Addiction mania and hyperconsumerism are the
     basis for market maintenance and expansion.  The addict
     always needs more.  This is in part why there are such
     strong punishments for addictions that do not feed corporate
     bank accounts.  It is intolerable to allow potential
     consumer populations to focus singularly on addictions of
     pleasure (food, sex, drugs).  The empassioned consumer
     becomes inert, rather than wandering the grid of enriched
     privation.  The inert consumer represents only one market of
     fixed consumption--for example, a singular desire for
     heroin.  This kind of market is antithetical to one that
     remains in flux, oscillating between accumulation and
     obsolescence.  The market of flux is one of entwinement--one
     product inevitably leads to another, necessitating constant
     upgrades and accessory purchases.  One product line is
     interdependent with other product lines, and hence
     consumption and accumulation never stop.  The final goal is
     a diversified addiction, as opposed to one that monopolizes
     its consumers.

     This discussion has not come full circle as it might seem at
     first glance.  It has not gone from an apology for
     technology to an attack upon it.  Rather, the problem being
     investigated is:  How can technological decentralization
     return sovereignty to the individual rather than taking it
     away?  Much of the answer lies in whether the technology is
     accepted as a means of passive consumption or as a means for
     active production.  Passive addiction mania must be
     resisted; when corporate technocrats offer products or
     systems that seem to ride on the promises of a utopian dawn,
     one should scrutinize these offerings with the utmost
     suspicion.  That which functions only "to make life easier
     (it all happens with the touch of a button)" is generally
     unnecessary.  In the smart house, the computerized kitchen
     offers a data base on the recipes of the world.  This is
     probably a con.  Is a kitchen computer terminal really
     necessary?  Does the service require a subscription?  How
     often would it be used?  Is it desirable to have information
     on daily life (cooking in this case) floating around the
     electronic net?  Would it not be more efficient, cheaper,
     and private to simply purchase some cookbooks?  This last
     question is very telling.  When technology is trying to
     replace something that is not obsolete, one can be fairly
     certain that a strategy of dependence is at work.  Further,
     continue using any technology that confounds the
     surveillance tactics of political economy.  (In this case it
     is as simple as supporting book technology).  Avoid using
     any technology that records data facts unless it is
     essential.  For example, try not to use credit cards.  An
     electronic record of a consumer's purchases is very precious
     data to the institutions of political economy.  Do not let
     these institutions have it.

     The technological artifacts and systems worthy of support
     are geared more toward sending out information, rather than
     receiving it.  Desktop publishing technology is an excellent
     example of a system in the process of decentralization, one
     designed to foster active production rather than passive
     reception.  When the technology is skewed toward reception,
     avoid it.  (It should be noted that the strategy of
     entwinement is always a problem regardless of the technology
     chosen.  Barring the total rejection of technology, the
     power of addiction will always be present).  In the case of
     interactive technology, it is wise to ask, is it centralized
     or decentralized?  If it is like the phone, and allows
     access to people and the information of your choice, use it-
     -but always remember that the electronic tape could be
     recording.  If it is centralized and spectacular, it is
     better to avoid it.  The ability to choose an ending for a
     network TV show is not interaction; it is a device to keep
     the viewer watching.  In this case, all the inventive
     choices have already been made.  This is an example of a
     device designed to keep the viewer passively engaged.

     To help direct technology toward increased individual
     autonomy, hackers ought to continue developing personal
     hardware and software; however, since most technology
     emerges from the military complex and the rest comes from
     the corporate world, the situation is rather bleak.

Although much of the hope for continued resistance in the techno-
     world rests with hackers, a contingent of resistant
     technocrats guided by the concerns of the radical left has
     yet to emerge.  As mentioned in a previous chapter, this
     group is generally apolitical.  While they must be credited
     for liberating the hardware and software that represent the
     first moments of sovereignty in techno-culture, thereby
     lifting the techno-situation out of hopelessness, care must
     be taken not to over-valorize them.  Their motivations for
     producing technology oscillate between compulsion and
     ethical imperative.  It is a type of addiction mania that
     carries its own peculiar contradictions.  Since such
     production is extremely labor-intensive, requiring permanent
     focus, a specialized fixation emerges that is beneficial
     within the immediate realm of techno-production, but is
     extremely questionable outside its spatial-temporal zone. 
     the hacker is generally obsessed with efficiency and order. 
     In producing decentralized technology, a fetish for the
     algorithmic is understandable and even laudable; however,
     when it approaches a totalizing aesthetic, it has the
     potential to become damaging to the point of complicity with
     the state.  As an aesthetic, rather than a means of
     production, it can be a reflection of the obscenity of
     bourgeois capitalism.  Efficiency alone cannot be the
     measure of value.  This is one demand that the
     contestational voice has been making for two centuries.  The
     aesthetic of efficiency is one of exclusion; it seeks to
     eliminate its predecessors.  Since perfect efficiency is not
     attainable, and it has yet to be shown how an ascendant
     system can incorporate all of the usefulness of past
     systems, obscene sacrifice becomes an ever-present
     companion.  Not only does excess efficiency sacrifice
     elements of understanding and explanation, but it also
     subtracts from humanity itself.  Ideas, art, and passion can
     thrive as well, if not better, in an environment of
     disorder.  The aesthetics of inefficiency, of desperate
     gambles, of incommensurable imaginings, of insufferable
     interruptions, are all a part of individual sovereignty. 
     These are situations in which invention occurs.

     Here one stumbles upon the paradox of hacking:  If hackers
     must singularly commit to algorithmic thinking to be
     productive, can this technocratic class be convinced to act
     in a manner that, at times, will be antithetical to such
     thinking?  Perhaps the more utopian results of hacking--the
     decentralization of hardware and information--are in fact
     merely contingent elements in hacker discourse.  What then
     is to be done?  If the hackers are dissuaded from focusing
     on the aesthetics of efficiency, and thereby politicized,
     production could go down; this could in turn restrict the
     availability of decentralized hardware and software needed
     by the contestational voice.  If the hackers remain focused
     on efficiency, that is more likely to strengthen the
     totalizing operations of bourgeois discourse.  Treating this
     problem is partly a matter of redeployment.  The hacker
     occupies a very specialized time zone, and is involved in a
     specialized labor.  Anti-company technocrats must be
     persuaded, by whatever available means, to enter other time
     zones and address the particular situations found there. 
     Relocating hackers in other time zones should not be
     understood literally; instead it should lead to recombinant
     collaboration.  That is, the characteristic of the hacker
     and the cultural worker should blend and thereby form a link
     between time zones, opening the possibilities for discourse
     and action across the social time continuum.

It is quite likely that decentralizing hardware (technocratic
     resistance) and redistributing labor (worker resistance) are
     not enough in themselves to intersect time zones.  As
     already indicated, without frames of interpretation to
     encourage the individual's capacity for autonomous action,
     decentralization and redistribution could well have the
     opposite effect--i.e., addiction mania.  The best chance to
     keep interpretation of cultural phenomena fluid lies in
     manipulating, recombining, and recontextualizing signs; when
     accompanied by other types of resistance, this allows the
     maximum degree of autonomy.  Sign manipulation with the
     purpose of keeping the interpretive field open is the
     primary critical function of the cultural worker.  This
     function separates the cultural worker from the
     propagandist, whose task is to stop interpretation, and to
     rigidify the readings of the culture-text.  The cultural
     worker's secondary function is to cross-fertilize separate
     time and/or spatial sectors, but this task has met with less
     success (the problem of over-deployment).  The cultural
     worker is obligated to ferret out the signs of freedom in as
     many sectors as possible, and transport them by way of
     image/text to other locations.  This transference
     constitutes the temporary anti-spectacle.  For example,
     hackers have always said that the computer can grant the
     individual the ability to understand and to use real power. 
     Whatever the agent commands, the computer will do.  Although
     this may seem to be a statement of the obvious, it is
     questionable whether the meaning of this observation is
     really recognized outside the technocratic sector.  If this
     assertion is truly understood, the possibilities for
     resistance dramatically increase.  Populist strategies of
     resistance deprived from reactions to the problems of early
     capital are only an option.

     Consider the following:  an activist organization decides
     that insurance agencies which keep records about uninsured
     HIV+ people contribute to discriminatory practices, and that
     such information-gathering must be stopped.  This is not a
     problem of early capital imperialism, but one of late
     capital information codes.  All the picket lines, affinity
     groups, and drum corps that can be mustered will have little
     effect in this situation.  The information will not be
     deleted from the data banks.  But to covertly spoil the
     information banks, or destroy them, would have the desired
     effect.  This is a matter of meeting information authority
     with information disturbance; it is direct autonomous
     action, suitable to the situation.  One electronic affinity
     group could do instantly what the many could not over time. 
     this is postmodern civil disobedience; it requires
     democratic interpretation of a problem, but without large-
     scale action.  In early capital, the only power base for
     marginal groups was defined by their numbers.  This is no
     longer true.  Now there is a technological power base, and
     it is up to cultural and political activists to think it
     through.  As time fragments, populist movements and
     specialized forces can work successfully in tandem.  It is a
     matter of choosing the strategy that best fits the
     situation, and of keeping the techniques of resistance open.

Although breaks in communication lines within and between
     authoritarian institutions are reasonable focal points for
     resistance, and it is even possible that the concrete shell
     of some institutions could be completely crashed, it will
     still be difficult, if not impossible, to erase all the
     traces of the institution left in the rubble.  Institutions,
     like ideas, do not die easily.  In fact, how could complex
     society exist without bureaucracies?  How would
     communication exist without language?  Irredeemable power is
     ongoing.  Macro institutions have autonomous existence,
     independent of individual action.  So what is the point of
     resistance--why attack that which is undefeatable?  Herein
     lies the problem of agency.  To what degree does freedom
     exist for the individual?  This is a site of continuous
     turmoil with no satisfactory answer.  Over the past century,
     ideas on the degree of entrapment have wildly proliferated. 
     People are caught in the routinized pathways of work, and
     are slaves to the demands of production; people are caught
     in the iron cage of bureaucracy, and are slaves to the
     process of rationalization; people are caught in the domain
     of the code, and are slaves to the empire of signs.  So much
     is immediately taken, from the moment the individual is
     thrown into the world.  Even so, it is a worthy wager to
     assume that the individual possesses a degree of autonomy
     valuable enough to defend, and that it is possible to expand
     it.  It is also reasonable to gamble that social aggregates
     similar in philosophical consensus can reconfigure social
     structures.

     Of these two wagers, the former is of the most immediate
     concern.  As the division of labor grows in complexity,
     individual sovereignty fades under increasing erasure,
     becoming a transparent transistor for social currents. 
     Agency dwindles down to mundane choices entrapped in the
     economy of desire.  To achieve any sense of free expression,
     the individual is increasingly dependent upon the latter
     wager.  Power through numbers, though somewhat effective
     within the situation of early capital, is less important in
     late capital, as the praxis of quantity/power has hit its
     critical mass.  Globally, an internet of unity is needed
     that at present is just not feasible.  Even within national
     borders, activist organizations are encountering points of
     critical mass.  It is a paradox; to be effective, the
     organization must be so large that it requires bureaucratic
     hierarchy.  But due to its functional principle of
     rationalization, this rigid order cannot accommodate
     multiple perspectives among its members.  Splintering
     occurs, and the organization is consumed in its own process. 
     Perhaps it is time to reassess the idea of quantity as
     power.  Even with the best of intentions, large groups
     inevitably subordinate the individual to the group,
     consistently running the risk of dehumanization and
     alienation.  It should now be asked, can the model used by
     the nomadic elite be appropriated for the cause of
     resistance?

     Although the nomadic elite may be a unified power, it is
     more likely that this class exists as interrelated and
     interdependent cells powerful enough to control segments of
     social organization.  The interrelationship between the
     power cells develops not by choice, but by nonrational
     process.  These cells are often in conflict, continually
     moving through a process of strengthening and weakening, but
     the transcendent social current of late capital blindly
     proceeds, untouched by the contingencies of conflict. 
     Repression and exploitation continue unabated.  The
     individual agents that labor within the cells enjoy greater
     autonomy (freedom from repression) than those below them;
     however, they are also caught in the social current.  They
     do not have the choice to stop the machinations of late
     capital's process.  The genetic code of these individuals is
     also contingent; it is not essential to the process.  They
     could be replaced by any genetic sequence, and the results
     would remain the same, since the power is located in the
     cells, not in the individual.  An individual may access
     power only so long as s/he resides in the cell.

     Technology is the foundation for the nomadic elite's ability
     to maintain absence, acquire speed, and consolidate power in
     a global system.  Enough technology has fallen between the
     cracks of the corporate-military hierarchy that
     experimentation with cell structure among resistant culture
     can begin.  New tactics and strategies of civil disobedience
     are now possible, ones that aim to disturb the virtual
     order, rather than the spectacular order.  With these new
     tactics, many problems could be avoided that occur when
     resistors use older tactics not suitable to a global
     context.  The cell allows greater probability for
     establishing a nonhierarchical group based on consensus. 
     Because of its small size (arbitrarily speaking, 4-8
     members), this group allows the personal voice to maintain
     itself.  There is no splintering, only healthy debate in an
     environment of trust.  The cell can act quickly and more
     often without bureaucracy.  Supported by the power of
     technology, this action has the potential to be more
     disturbing and more wide-ranging than any subelectronic
     action.  With enough of these cells acting--even if their
     viewpoints conflict--it may be wagered that a resistant
     social current will emerge... one that is not easy to turn
     off, to find, or to monitor.  In this manner, people with
     different points of view and different specialized skills
     can work in unison, without compromise and without surrender
     of individuality to a centralized aggregate.

                              *****

The rules of the game have changed.  Civil disobedience is not
     what it used to be.  Who is willing to explore the new
     paradigm?  It is so easy to stay in the bunker of
     assurances.  No conclusions, no certainty; only theoretical
     frames, performative matrices, and practical wagers.  What
     more can be said?  Roll the dice.  End program.  Fade out.


