INFOWAR: Opening Statement

To: infowar-en@aec.at
Subject: INFOWAR: Opening Statement
From: Gerfried Stocker
Date: 16 Apr 1998 20:10:09 +0300
Reply-To: infowar@aec.at
Sender: owner-infowar-en@aec.at
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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 98
INFOWAR. information.macht.krieg
Linz, Austria, september 07 - 12
http://www.aec.at/infowar
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By Gerfried Stocker 
artistic director 
Ars Electronica Festival

The information society - no longer a vague promise of a better future, but a 
reality and a central challenge of the here-and-now - is founded upon the 
three key technologies of electricity, telecommunications and computers: 
Technologies developed for the purposes, and out of the logic, of war, 
technologies of simultaneity and coherence, keeping our civilian society in a 
state of permanent mobilisation driven by the battle for markets, resources 
and spheres of influence. A battle for supremacy in processes of economic 
concentration, in which the fronts, no longer drawn up along national 
boundaries and between political systems, are defined by technical standards. 
A battle in which the power of knowledge is managed as a profitable monopoly 
of its distribution and dissemination.
 The latest stock market upheavals have laid bare the power of a global 
market, such as only the digital revolution could have fathered, and which 
must be counted as the latter's most widely-felt direct outcome. The 
digitally-networked market of today wields more power than the politicians. 
Governments are losing their say in the international value of their 
currencies; they can no longer control, but only react. The massive expansion 
of freely-accessible communication networks, itself a global economic 
necessity, imposes severe constraints on the arbitrary restriction of 
information flows.
 
Any transgression of critical control functions into the cybertechnologies' 
sphere of responsibility and influence puts central power wielders in a 
previously unheard-of position of vulnerability and openness to attack. The 
geographic frontiers of the industrial age are increasingly losing their 
former significance in global politics, and giving way to vertical fronts 
along social stratifications.
 
Whereas, in the past, war was concerned with the conquering of territory, and 
later with the control of production capacities, war in the 21st century is 
entirely concerned with the acquisition and exercise of power over knowledge. 
The three fronts of land, sea and air battles have been joined by a fourth, 
being set up within the global information systems.
 Spurred on by the "successes" of the Gulf war, the development of information 
warfare is running at full speed. Increasingly, the attention of the military 
strategists is turning away from computer-aided warfare - from potentiation 
of the destructive efficiency of military operations through the application 
of information technology, virtual reality and high-tech weaponry - to 
cyberwar, whose ultimate target is nothing less than the global information 
infrastructure itself: annihilation of the enemy's computer and 
 








communication systems, obliteration of his databases, destruction of his 
command and control systems. Yet increasingly the vital significance of the 
 global information infrastructure for the functioning of the international 
finance markets compels the establishment of new strategic objectives: not 
obliteration, but manipulation, not destruction, but infiltration and 
assimilation. "Netwar"  as the tactical deployment of information and 
disinformation, targeted at the human mind.
 These new forms of post-territorial conflicts, however, have for some time 
now ceased to be preserve of governments and their ministers of war. NGOs, 
hackers, computer freaks in the service of organised crime, and terrorist 
organisations with high-tech expertise are now the chief actors in the 
cyberguerilla nightmares of national security services and defence 
ministries.
 
In 1998, under the banner of "INFOWAR", the Ars Electronica Festival of Art, 
Technology and Society, is appealing to artists, theoreticians and 
technologists for contributions relating to the social and political 
definition of the information society. The emphasis here will lie not on 
technological flights of fancy, but on the fronts drawn up in a society that 
is in a process of fundamental and violent upheaval.
 







INFOWAR in the Internet: http://www.aec.at/infowar


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