The Global Intelligence Files 

LONDON - Today, Monday 27 February, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files - more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods.

• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• wikileaks,
• surveillance

Crossfire - An Installation by Shahidul Alam on Extra Judicial Killings 

Drik Gallery, Dahka, March 22- 31, 2010.

The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) was set up on 26th March 2004 to curb corruption in Bangladesh. It consists of members of Bangladesh Police, Bangladesh Army, Bangladesh Navy and Bangladesh Air Force. RAB has increasingly been criticized for the extra judicial killings and torture that have taken place of people in custody.

• grassroot journalism,
• photography,
• Bangladesh

Social Media and the UK Riots: "Twitter Mobs", "Blackberry Mobs" and the Structural Violence of Neoliberalism 

"One formula [...] can be that of the mob: gullible, fickle, herdlike, low in taste and habit. [...] If [...] our purpsoe is manipulation - the persuasion of a large number of people to act, feel, think, known in certain ways - the convenient formula will be that of the masses". - Raymond Williams

• social justice,
• participatory media,
• street protest

Post-media Operators 

1.
The record industry is in the process of being outflanked by means of the very processes that it has come to rely upon. Since the 60's its continual efforts to create new needs has meant that it nurtured an everchanging musical soundscape that is now mutating at such a pace that it cannot keep track long enough to harness these musical evolutions in the direction of profit. That fact that it doesn't achieve this harnessing has the remarkable effect of making the 'new' last longer! A longevity that comes from our always being able to place ourselves amidst a continual re-definition of these sounds. Even in terms of format, the profit-orientated shift to a CD market which may have meant that back-catalogues could be re-sold has also worked to deliver an on-line tap of musical history at the same time that vinyl pressing has become cheaper. These and other factors feed into the accelerating mutation that in turn creates a dissatisfaction with what the industry can offer.

• media theory,
• media criticism

Whispering Spaces / Traces of Absence 

Curatorial Statements for the "Crossfire" exhibition, an Installation by Shahidul Alam on Extra Judicial Killings, Drik Gallery, Dhaka, March 22 - 31, 2010.

• photography,
• Bangladesh

When Thought Becomes Crime* 

March 17th, 2005

How did it come to this?

Only a perverse authoritarian logic can explain how Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) can at one moment be creating the project "Free Range Grain" for the Risk exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, reconfiguring it for The Interventionists exhibition at Mass MoCA in a second moment, and then suddenly have a CAE member in FBI detention.   The U.S. Justice Department has accused us of such shocking crimes as bioterrorism, health and safety violations, mail fraud, wire fraud, and even murder.   Now, as we retool "Free Range Grain" for the Risk exhibition at the Glasgow Center for Contemporary Art, the surreal farce of our legal nightmare continues unabated.

• campaign,
• state repression

The Californian Ideology 

"Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will"
- Naum Gabo [1]

The Power of Social Media - The Helplessness of Traditional Media and #direngeziparki #direnankara, #direnizmir 

Residents of Istanbul started a peaceful sit-in as a reaction to the city governments plans to demolish Taksim Square's Gezi Park on the May 29th 2013. The demolition was part of the plan to replace the park and construct a shopping mall on one of the only green areas left in the central cross road of Istanbul. The reaction was sparked by a decision making process that lacked any consultation with citizens. Inhabitants of the city initiated this on-site protest to raise their voices against the demolition plans, but also to exercise their right to freedom of speech and to freedom of assembly in a democratic society.

• urban intervention,
• public space,
• street protest,
• occupy,
• self-mediation

A Movement Without Demands? 

In this essay, we claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons. Before addressing the politics of the commons, however, we dispel three common objections that are raised against demands during general assemblies, meetings, and conversations people have about the Occupy movement.

• politics,
• public space,
• public domain,
• occupy

Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere 

What counts in the long run is the "use" one makes of a theory....We must start from existing practices in order to retrace the fundamental flaws.
--Felix Guattari, "Why Marx and Freud No Longer Disturb Anyone"

In 1994, when Critical Art Ensemble first introduced the idea and a possible model of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) as another option for digital resistance, the collective had no way of knowing what elements would be the most practical, nor did it know what elements would require additional explanation. After nearly five years of field testing of ECD by various groups and individuals, its information gaps have become a little more obvious and can finally be addressed.

• civil disobedience

Holograms for Freedom 

The Citizens’ Securities Law’s Reform is an attack on the right of freedom of assembly. This measure restricts citizens’ liberties, and criminalizes their right to protest. Turning a right into an offence for which you can be pursued, detained, and judged.
To respond to this injustice and to show the future will have to face if this bill continues its course, we saw the need to carry out a different kind of protest that would allow our demands to become unstoppable: the first hologram protest in history.
A massive protest, through which we will demonstrate, that despite the trammels imposed by the government, they will not silence our voices, and even if we have to turn ourselves into holograms, we will keep on protesting.
www.hologramasporlalibertad.org/en.html#project

• activism,
• democracy,
• street protest

Wikileaks Statement on the 9 Month Anniversary of Cablegate: Release of 133,887 Cables 

Over the past week, WikiLeaks has released 133,887 US diplomatic cables from around the world - more than half of the entire Cablegate material (251,287 cables). The new release was met with a sustained Denial of Service (DOS) attack during the first 36 hours. WikiLeaks had to rely on back-up servers for some hours. With supporters? help, WikiLeaks was able to bring in additional servers to stave off the attack.

• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• wikileaks

The dark side of Camping 

Camping can be so nice. Crawling out of dewy plastic in the early morning, with a pinch of sleep still in your eyes, braving the unbearably hot sun, yet invigorated and ready to take on the day with as much indifference as possible to the ongoing struggle with nature. Surely everybody knows that the secret of success is to fight the laws of petty bourgeois civilisation with minimal equipment and therefore gain a flexibility that is capable of suspending the otherwise ruling power relations for a clearly defined amount of time.

• campaign,
• activism,
• migration,
• no border,
• borders,
• tactical camping

Wide Open to the Web Warriors 

Activists are using the internet to fight large companies over ethical issues. Yet many major brand-owners lack a clear counter-strategy. Earlier this month a group of environmental activists staged a sit-in at Shell's London offices. Although Shell turned the power off and cut the phone lines, activist Roddy Mansfield  broadcast the protest live to the internet and e-mailed the press, using a digital camera, laptop computer and mobile phone.

• campaign,
• war,
• activism,
• net.activism

Postscript on the Societies of Control 

1. Historical

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."

Notes for a R-evolution 2 (version 2.0): Stage two: Vices vs. New Tactical Virtues 

What we've learnt from the Net and how we can extrapolate it to all spaces of struggle.

(Some thoughts geared towards action, compiled for the Radical Community Manager courses that we organise at X.net)

• politics,
• activism,
• post-governmental organisation,
• info-activism,
• free culture,
• occupy

Reading the Arab Image 

This debate in the frame of the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Power Cut Middle East programme, takes a look at the images, both moving and still, that have come from the Middle East like a huge wave in the past few months. Due to the increase of mobile phone films and photos, we have a great deal of material whose origin is uncertain. It seems authentic, but who is coming to blows with whom? And who has made the films and taken the photos? Regimes are also aware of this, and use it to their advantage. Are we seeing actors, paid demonstrators, real people? How do we read and interpret these images?

• grassroot journalism,
• media criticism,
• middle east,
• cinema

Crisis / Media 

Sarai-Waag Workshop at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi March 3-5, 2003

"The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who tried to stay neutral in times of crisis..."
- The Inferno, Dante Alighieri

• crisis

"V for Vendetta": The Other Face of Egypt's Youth Movement 

"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea [?] and ideas are bulletproof."
- From the film V for Vendetta

• middle east,
• anonymous