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INFOWAR: Re: ARS Electronica Festival 98

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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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With all due respect, the premise of the ARS Electronica Festival 1998
is utter horseshit.

It's hard to imagine the self-absorption that could allow someone to
sit in Linz, Austria, a few hundred kilometres from a society recently
destroyed by real War, and write such rubbish.

To address one of the more coherent statements in a document
remarkable for its profusion of absurdities:

      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.

Tell that to the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Croatians, the Albanians.
Tell it to the Rwandans, the Burundians, the Azerbaijanis, the Sri
Lankans, the Iraqis, the Koreans, the Sierra Leonians, the Liberians,
the Somalis, the Timorians. Tell it to the Irish, the Basques, the
Kurds, the Karens. Tell it to those maimed by recent wars in Cambodia,
Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala, and those still to be maimed by the
millions of land mines still awaiting in the fields where they have no
choice but to work.

They might tell you, those who chose not to come directly to the point
by blowing your silly heads off with their AK-47s, that you use the
unholy name of War in vain. You attempt to cheapen it with facile
comparisons to the competitive practices of businesses and modern
networks of communication. Such attempts are doomed, if only because
the very medium of this conversation can only exist in those
comfortable corners of the world where humankind has managed to
substitute other forms of competition to the chaotically destructive
one known as War.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

--Jim Gasperini
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