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INFOWAR: does INFOWAR make sense?
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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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there does seem to be mixed feelings about the relevance of infowar
perhaps this is good because it could cause us to ask some critical
questions about the infowar concept and identify core issues.
at its very root, what is it, and what are the basic philosophical
principles?
it would be of benefit to articulate the basic principles that are
beyond any speculation, but to do this, we first need to define what
infowar is. is it info vandalism? info destruction?
another question to ask might then be "is infowar of some benefit to
society"?
for example, while there are many well-intentioned attacks against the
hegemony of large organizations, one could ask if these don't have an
effect opposite to that intended. perhaps mild attacks are like a
vaccination of "the system", that only make it stronger. thus if "the
system" is corrupt, then one might ask "why make it stronger?".
an example of this in real war is when the vanquished throw stones at
soldiers to show protest. the soldiers with their guns, bazookas,
tanks, aircraft carriers, etc., and heavy kevlar armour, are not
harmed by the stone throwing, but are in fact helped by it. in some
sense it absolves them of guilt for their actions. a soldier who is
attacked (ineffectively) by civilians may feel less guilt when returning
gunfire to these civilians. also the group of soldiers may use this
stone--throwing mob as a means of training new soldiers. by exposing
new recruits to this mob (e.g. making sure that all new soldiers
have stones thrown at them by the "enemy") they may be able to sustain
a hatred. moreover, mild attacks of this sort, against a much superior
enemy could serve, simply as a justification for increased weapons,
and increased imbalance. thus an army of 1000 soldiers with 1 assault
rifle each, against 100 civilians armed with small pebbles and crushed
stone, may use the stone throwing to justify the purchase of some
nuclear warheads. afterall, it becomes evidence that there is a war.
evidence of a war might justify large purchases of chemical weapons,
nuclear missiles, and recruiting of more soldiers.
just as pearls are made by sand, acting as an irritant, does it really
make sense to similarly, through mild irritation, strengthen "the system"
if and when it becomes corrupt? to do so merely incorrectly acknowledges
them as "pearls" to be irritated to perfection.
random acts of destruction may then merely result in increased security
and justifaction for fascism. war on drugs, war on rugs, war on hackers,
war on lazy costly employees, war on incompetence, war on illiteracy,
war on the homeless, war on pepsi drinkers, etc. --- do they really need
to be justified?
that's one of the reasons i started to think about a new kind of "infowar",
which might just as easily be called infopeace:
instead of mutually assured destruction, the idea was to consider
mutually assured accountability, or even reversed (bottom--up)
accountability where customers place shopkeepers under surveillance,
and shopkeepers place management under surveillance and management
places the CEO under surveillance and the CEO places the king under
surveillance.
if individuals could somehow place government and other large corporations
or organizations under surveillance, so that information gathering would
be bottom--up while physical coersion and force might remain top--down,
then at least there would be a situation where observability and
controllability would not both be in the hands of a single entity.
e.g. police would have the guns and citizens would have the cameras
(instead of police having both).
this might/could result in a kind of infopeace, in the sense that
information could be distributed rather than centralized. that's kind
of the spirit of the WWW, in the sense that if a large corporation
does something bad to an individual that individual can write about
it on a WWW page, so that it would turn up on a WWW search (so long
as it wasn't the search engine company that did the something bad).
thus when you do a WWW search for new products or services, you might
find out about bad experiences that would not have been published
in the past (before the days of the WWW). that assumes integrity
of search engines. on the other hand how does one know whether or
not pepsi or coke paid someone to falsely accuse the other of a
bad experience. data authenticity and accountability then also become
important. perhaps these are some of the important issues of infowar.
steve
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