Cyberia: The New Colonialism

September 8th, 2005

CHAPTER 17
The New Colonialism

As we slouch farther toward the chaos attractor at the end of time, we find most of our networks, electronic or otherwise, working against their original aims or being diverted toward different ends. Subnetworks and metanetworks grow like mold over the original medium. Be it a symptom of social decay, cyberian genesis, or both, the growth of new colonialism around and within our old systems and structures brings a peculiar sort of darkness-before-dawnishness to the close of this millennium.

Compare our subculture of cyberians to Hogan’s Heroes carrying out rebellious acts under the noses of guards and through underground tunnels in the prison camp. Perhaps the most telling sign of our times is that the United States has a greater percentage of its population in jail than does any other country, and is breeding a criminal subculture further and further removed from accepted social scheme.

It was in prison that legendary phone phreaque Cap’n Crunch (who got his name for using a two-note whistle he found in a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal to make free long-distance phone calls) was forced to join the ranks of the criminal subculture. His real name is John Draper, and I find him at Toon Town operating with a computer-video interface.

After several meteoric climbs to the top of the programming profession, Draper is in the low phase of an endless rags-to-riches-to-rags curve that has defined the past twenty or so years of his life. It seems as though every time he develops a brilliant new program, an investigation links one of his friends, or friends of his friends, to something illegal, and then Draper’s equipment–along with his livelihood–gets confiscated, delaying his progress and costing him his contract. The large, gray-haired, bespectacled cyber veteran suggests that we duck into the brain-machine room to speak about his prison experience.

“In order for me to survive in jail, I had to make myself valuable enough so they wouldn’t harass me or molest me. So I had to tell everybody how to make calls, how to get in to the system, and what to do when they got in there. We’d have little classes. Out of pure survival I was forced to tell all and, believe me, I did.”

Draper believes that thousands of telephone and computer crimes resulted from his prison classes. When his technologies got in the hands of inmates serving time for embezzlement or fraud, they in turn developed some of the most advanced industrial hacking done today.

Draper’s experiences mirror the ways in which cyberian counterculture movements form in society at large. For intellectual, emotional, or even physical survival, clusters of people–not always linked by geography–form posses characterized by the specific networks holding them together. This, then, initiates a bottom-up iteration of cyberian ideals.

One startling example is the growing community of “Mole People,” who inhabit the forgotten tunnels of New York’s subway system. The New York City Transit Authority estimates that about five thousand people live on the first level, but that accounts for only one-third of the tunnel system. Other officials estimate that closer to twenty-five thousand people live in the entire system, which goes much farther down than police or transit workers dare trek, and consists of hundreds of miles of abandoned tunnels built in the 1890s. The ash-colored denizens of the subways elect their own mayors, furnish their underground apartments, find electricity, and in some cases install running water. Sounding more like an urban myth than a real population, mole people claim that their children, born in the tunnels, have never seen the light of day. Others speak of patrols, organized by mole leaders to prevent their detection by making sure that outsiders who stray into their campsites and villages never stray out again. Whether or not this is an exaggeration, we do know that numerous television news crews who have attempted to reach the lower tunnels were pelted with rocks and forced to retreat.

“It’s for security,” explains J.C., who was asked by the mayor of his Mole community to explain their philosophy of life to Jenny Toth, a New York journalist who befriended the Mole People in 1990. “Society lives up in a dome and locks all its doors so it’s safe from the outside. We’re locked out down here. They ignore us. They’ve forgotten what it is to survive. They value money, we value survival. We take care of each other.” Alienation, disorientation, and, most of all, necessity, form new bonds of community cooperation not experienced above ground.

A man who lives hundreds of feet under Grand Central Station explains: “You go down there, play with some wires, and you got light. And before you know it, there are twelve to fifteen people down there with you. They become like neighborhoods; you’re friends with everyone. You know the girls at the end and the family in the middle. When someone gets sick, we put our money together to get medicine. Most people team up. You can just about make it that way.”

This bottom-up networking is analogous to the formation of the Global Electronic Village, which also depends on bonds of mutual interest and like-minded politics. Each system is made up of people whose needs are not met or are even thwarted by established channels and each system exploits an existing network, using it for a purpose that was not intended. These kinds of communities make up an increasingly important component in the overall dynamical system of society. Programmer Marc de Groot compares this social landscape with the conclusions of systems math:

“The classic example of the feedback loop is the thermostat, which controls itself. I think we’re becoming aware of the fact that the most common type of causality is feedback, and not linear or top-down. The effect goes back and effects the cause, and the cause effects the effect. We have a society where power becomes decentralized, we get feedback loops, where change can come from below. People in power will try to eliminate those threats.”

The fears about cyberian evolution may stem from a partial awareness of these new channels of feedback and iteration. Those who believe they are currently in power attempt to squash the iterators, but find that their efforts are ineffectual. Like mutating bacteria or even cockroaches, feedback loops will foster adaptive changes faster than new antibiotics or bug sprays can be developed to combat them. Meanwhile, the formerly powerless who now see themselves as vitally influencing the course of history through feedback and iteration become obsessed with their causes and addicted to their techniques. But however obsessed or addicted they get, and however fearfully or violently society reacts, feedback and iteration slowly and inevitably turn the wheel of revolution, anyway.

Negative Feedback Iteration

Feedback loops are mathematics’ way of phrasing revolution and are as natural a part of existence as plankton, volcanoes, or thyroid glands. The negative feedback loops to a mechanistic, consumption-based culture are irate labor, ecoterrorists, and consciousness-expansion advocates, who conduct their iterations through cheap communications, printing, and video production.

Take Chris Carlsson, for example, editor of Processed World, a magazine that he says is “about the underside of the information age and the misery of daily life in a perverse society based on the buying and selling of human time.” Carlsson looks more like a college professor than an office worker; he’s a brilliant, ex-sixties radical who dropped out of the rat race to make his living as an office temp data processor in San Francisco.

On a lazy Sunday morning, Carlsson explains the intricacies of his historical-philosophical perspective as he changes the screen in his pipe and the grounds in his espresso pot. He believes that we are currently living in a “socially constructed perversion,” an unnatural reality that will be forced to change. According to Carlsson, our society is addicted to consumption, and this addiction leads us to do things and support systems that benefit only the dollar, not the individual. The systems themselves are constructed, like Muzak, to squash the notion of personal power.

“It’s hard to imagine how else it could be. The only questions you are asked in this society are, `What do you want to buy?’ and, `What are you going to do for money?’ You don’t get to say, `What do I want out of life and how can I contribute to the totality?’ There’s no mechanism at all in our society that promotes some sort of role for the individual.”

The “processed world” is a place where the bottom line is all that matters. Workers are paid as little as possible to produce goods that break as quickly as possible, or serve no function whatsoever other than to turn a buck. For this final phase in the era of credit and GNP expansion, there can never be enough stuff–if there were, the corporations would go out of business. The motivation is to sell; the standard of living, the environment, cultural growth, and meaning to life do not enter into the equation.

Chemical companies who want to sell chemicals, for example, thrive on weak crops and cattle; they hope to create a chemically dependent agriculture. “Thus, the first application of gene-splicing technology will be bovine growth hormone,” Carlsson says. “Not that we need more milk in this country; we have a surplus!” But the growth hormone will increase a cow’s output of milk. Farmer Jones will need to keep up with Farmer Smith, so he, too, will buy the hormone. Unfortunately, the hormone also weakens the cows’ knees, which requires that the farmers purchase more antibiotics as well as other drugs, bringing more dollars to the chemical companies. Another example: It is to the chemical company’s advantage to lobby against sterile fruit flies as a way of combating the medfly crisis in California. By “persuading” the government to allow the use of pesticides, chemical companies weaken the plants they are “saving,” and thus create further dependence on fertilizers and medications–more money, less effectiveness, greater pollution.

Carlsson does not blame the “people in charge” for our predicament. “The chairman of the board doesn’t feel like he has any power. He’s just as trapped in. Nothing matters to the stockholders but how the balance sheet looks.” Further, as the work environment increasingly dehumanizes, the system loses precious feedback channels with which it can correct itself. The dollar oversimplifies the complexities of a working society (and its needs–as we’ll see later in this chapter–have simplified the global ecology to disastrous levels). As the workplace gets more automated, workers become merely a part of the spreadsheet: their input and output are monitored, regulated, and controlled by computer. As jobs are replaced by machines (which do the work more efficiently), workers are demoted rather than promoted. Any special skills they developed over time now become obsolete.

The way out, according to Carlsson, is subversion and sabotage.

“When you sell your time, you are giving up your right to decide what’s worth doing. The goal of the working class should be to abolish what they do! Not being against technology, but being against the way it’s being used. Human beings can find subversive uses for things like computers and photocopy machines. They were not made to enhance our ability to communicate, and yet they do. They provide everybody with a chance to speak through the printed medium. The work experience tells the worker that he has no say, and that what he is doing is a complete waste of time. But this profound emptiness and discontent is not evident on TV. Everything in society erodes your self-esteem.”

Processed World magazine hopes to enhance the worker’s self-esteem by appealing to his intellect and giving him tips on how to subvert the workplace. It’s a homespun publication that articulates the experience of office workers so that they may realize they’re not going crazy and their situations are not unique. It serves also as a forum for workers to share their observations on consumer society, abuses at work and techniques for fighting back. Slogans like “sabotage … it’s as simple as pulling a plug” and joke ads for “cobalt-magnet data-zappers” for erasing office hard disks accompany the articles and testimonials written by reader/workers about ways in which to disable the workplace and thus disrupt the evil practices of big companies.

The computer is the primary instrument of sabotage in the workplace. The techniques that industrial hackers use against competitive companies are now being used by workers against their own companies. Usually–as throughout Cyberia–the routes to the greatest destruction have already been established unwittingly by the company bosses in the hope of better monitoring and controlling their employees.

On a tour of the data entry department at a major insurance firm, a computer serviceman and office saboteur explains the way things can get reversed. “Our office managers monitor the workers through a special intercom feature in the worker’s telephone,” he whispers as we stroll through the tract-deskscape. “I know this because I installed the phone system, and I taught the office managers how to use it, and I know that they do use it, because I monitor them!” We arrive at the desk of another worker, who plays video games on his computer. When he hits the escape key, a dummy spreadsheet covers the screen.

“Show him how the phone works,” my escort requests.

The worker punches some keys on his phone and hands me the receiver. Someone is dictating a memo about how to order paper.

“That’s the floor manager’s office,” the worker says, smiling proudly as he takes back the receiver and carefully hangs it up.

My guide boasts about the achievement. “You can repair a Rolm (a subsidiary of IBM) phone system through a modem to act like a bugging device–useful for bosses to spy on their workers. But if you modify the software–which is easy enough to do through the modem by remote control without ever entering the boss’s office–you can take advantage of the same feature in reverse!”

“He did it right from my desk with my computer!” adds the worker, thankfully.

As we walk, most of the workers smile knowingly at my guide. They all are in this together. In the lingo of office sabotage, he confides proudly, “We’ve got this place pretty well locked up.”

Sabotage, like computer hacking, can be seen as both a natural iteration and a destructive urge. True, it makes people feel more powerful and sends a warning signal–in the form of negative feedback–to the system as a whole. But it’s also an opportunity for people to vent their frustration in general. A child who feels powerless and unpopular suddenly gains strength and status with a computer modem. An anonymous worker who cannot see any purpose to his life gets an ego boost when his well-planned prank disables an entire company.

Whether the motives are cyberian idealism or masturbatory ego gratification, these actions still serve as iterative feedback. We cannot dismiss these efforts as neurotic impulse or childish power fantasy just because their perpetrators cannot justify themselves with cyberian rhetoric. Even the most obsessive or pathological urges of saboteurs, when viewed in a cyberian context, appear to be the natural reactions of an iterative system against the conditions threatening its existence.

The most pressing of these conditions, of course, are the ones currently destroying the biosphere. As James Lovelock observed, Gaia defends herself through iterative feedback loops like plankton, algae, trees, and insects, which help maintain a balanced earth environment and conditions suitable for biological life. One such iterative loop may be the radical environmental group Earth First! These self-proclaimed “ecoterrorists,” like their founder, the burly Arizonan Dave Foreman, have developed an extraordinarily virulent sociopolitical virus called “ecotage” or “ecodefense.”

Ecotage is a terrorist approach to the defense of the environment. Rather than conduct protests, stage blockades, or influence legislation through lobbying, ecoterrorists perform neat, quick, surgical maneuvers that thwart the aims of those who would violate the environment. These actions, called “monkeywrenching,” take the form of burying spikes in trees so that they may not be cut down; disabling vehicles; pulling down signs or electric wires; destroying heavy machinery or aircraft; spiking roads or woods to make them impassable; triggering animal traps; and, most important, getting away with it. Their acts are never random, but carefully planned to make the greatest impact with the least effort and risk. Cutting two cables on a helicopter rotor the evening before an insecticide spray, for example, does more damage than stealing the distributor caps out of forty jeeps in a company’s parking lot. A few low-cost, well-planned ecotage attacks can make an entire deforestation project unprofitable and lead to its cancellation.

As Foreman explains in his Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching–a kind of Anarchist’s Cookbook with a purpose–monkeywrenching is powerful because it is nonviolent (no forms of life are targeted, only machines), not organized (impossible to be infiltrated), individual, specifically targeted, timely, dispersed throughout the country, diverse, fun, essentially nonpolitical, simple, deliberate, and ethical. Of course the ethics are arguable. Businesses have a “legal” right to destroy the environment (especially if they’ve paid big bills lobbying or bribing for that right). The monkeywrenchers feel that the current political system is merely a gear in the destruction machine, and that the only tactic left is direct action.

Bob and Kali (yes, she’s a TOPY member) are ecoterrorists from the Northwest. They have limited their activities (or at least the ones they’re willing to talk about) to “billboard trashing and revision.” Their hope is to preserve national parks and reverse the propaganda campaigns of would-be environmental violators. Kali, who works as a waitress in an interstate highway rest stop, is an odd mix of American sweetheart blonde and ankle-braceleted Deadhead–on her way from the counter to the tables she can be heard humming “Sugar Magnolia” through her Colgate smile. Her unthreatening demeanor allows her to listen in on and even provoke truckers’ and construction workers’ conversations about ongoing projects. Her boyfriend, Bob, then gives this information to more serious monkeywrenchers in their area over his school’s computer network.

Bob is an art-studio assistant at the state university farther up the highway. He was motivated to take action against billboarding on his long drives down to the diner to pick Kali up from work each evening. “There’s more and more billboards every week. There was a law passed to limit the number of billboards, but every time we pass a good law like that, the opposite thing happens in reality.” Taking his pseudonym Bob from the “savior” of the Church of the Subgenius, a satirical cyberian cult, the young man has a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward his monkeywrenching and delights in the efficiency of his visual wit.

“One two-dollar can of spray paint can reverse a hundred-thousand dollar media campaign. You use their own words against them, expose their lies with humor.” Using his own version of a device diagramed in Foreman’s Field Guide, Bob puts a can of spray paint on top of a long metal rod with a string and trigger in the handle. From the ground, he can alter or add to a billboard many feet above his reach. Following Foreman’s advice, he keeps the tool dismantled and hidden in a locked compartment of his truck, and varies the locations and times of his “hits” so that he won’t get caught. “The book says answer the billboards. That’s what we do. It’s like they leave space for our comments.” Among Bob’s favorites are painting tombstones on the horizons of Marlboro Country and changing campaign slogans from “elect” to eRect.”

Both Bob and Kali support the activities of more aggressive monkeywrenchers, but fear keeps them from going on those missions. “Not everyone’s gotta risk their lives,” Kali explains. “They’ve gotten chased by guys with bats.”

“But what they’re doing is essential,” Bob adds. “It’s a completely natural response. When the body gets sick, it makes more white blood cells. These guys are like that. We’re like that, too, to an extent.”

From a cyberian perspective, ecoterrorists are natural generators of negative feedback in the great Gaian organism. Even Brendan O’Regan, the reserved and mild-mannered vice president for research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, acknowledges the place of ecotage as a valuable meme against the violation of the planet:

“Even if you disagree with the tactic, they’re pointing out that industry is generating a kind of anarchy toward the environment. Ecoterrorists generate an anarchy back. There is an extreme that is driving it. Ecotage is sabotage on behalf of the environment. It’s done rationalizing that due process of law and ethical concern is not being followed by the owners of the system, so `fuck them.’ And a lot of this stuff will be happening in concert with and through technologies like the fax, copiers, the computer network. It’s chaos against chaos.”

The systems set in place by the “establishment,” as long as we’re using blanket terminology, created a new series of feedback loops and iterators to replace or at least make us as aware of the natural ones destroyed by deforestation and environmental tyranny. Large organizations like Greenpeace depend on computer hackers and satellite experts both to set up their own communications networks and to intercept law enforcement communications about planned actions. Illegal television broadcasting vans, which have already been used in Germany, are currently under construction in the Bay Area; they will be capable of substituting scheduled programming with radical propaganda, or even superimposing text over regular transmissions.

Ecoterrorists are never antitechnology. They see high tech as a tool for faster and more effective feedback and iteration. For these and other reasons, the developers of the Gaia hypothesis do not predict doom for our planet–especially from the development of inventions that appear unnatural. They realize the place of technology in the bigger picture, and even its value in regulating the biosphere. As James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, assures us:

“In the end we may achieve a sensible and economic technology and be more in harmony with the rest of Gaia. There can be no voluntary resignation from technology. We are so inextricably part of the technosphere that giving it up is as unrealistic as jumping off a ship in mid-Atlantic to swim the rest of the journey in glorious independence.”

Howard Rheingold, a social theorist, editor of the Whole Earth Review and author of computer culture books including Virtual Reality, also admits: “It might be correct that technology was the wrong choice a long time ago and that it led to a really fucked up situation. But I don’t see a way of getting out of this–without most of the people on Earth dying–without learning how to manage technology.”

The danger here, of course, is in overestimating our potential to see our situation clearly and to implement technology toward the ends necessary. An oversimplification of the issues is as dangerous to our survival and, even more, our liberation, as is the reduction and simplification of our biosphere through the elimination of the millions of species upon which Gaia depends for feedback and iteration.

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