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INFOWAR: ZAPATISTA FLOODNET - distributed collective action 

Date sent:        Tue, 26 May 1998 11:21:09 -0400
From:             ricardo dominguez 
To:               "infowar@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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ZAPATISTA FLOODNET - distributed collective action

"Only art history still knows that the famed geniuses of the Renaissance
did not just create paintings and buildings, but calculated fortresses
and constructed war machines. If the phantasm of all Information Warfare, to
reduce war to software and its forms of death to operating system
crashes, were to come true, lonesome hackers would take the place of the
historic artist-engineers."
Frederich Kittler
http://www.aec.at/infowar/NETSYMPOSIUM/ARCH-EN/msg00001.html

Taking the place of "historic artist-engineers" only becomes possible if
we focus on genius as a emergent quality of human-machinic networks (the
cybernetic as distributed collective) . "Lonesome hackers", is somewhat
misleading in the context of fine artists working on software weapons,
if only because it unfortunately indexes all of modernism's notions of
troubled genius, without qualifying it in the context of the conflation
of biological life into the consciousness prosthetic of the network. The
Zapatista Floodnet hopefully serves as a counter example to this notion
of individualist genius, because, as media art, it has emerged from and
serves a community which genuinely requires the development of such
attention weapons as a matter survival.

Rather than the re-emergence of the artist as the lonely hacker, we seek
a new ontological status for artist and the defensive weapon in the
network era. The destructive implementation of  "Defense" as euphemism
for war (as in the name change in the United States from the "Department
of War" to the "Department of Defense"), long ago erased the distinction
between defensive and offensive capabilities evident in the various
designs of fortresses and war machines. The cryptanalytical foundation
secrecy, correctly identified as the foundation of contemporary
information processes, is simultaneously defensive and offensive under
this implosion.

Nevertheless, it seems that the reconstruction of the fortress as a
somehow useful defensive form is no less misguided and romantic than the
reinstantiation of the Renaissance artist figure as a cryptanalytical
war engineer. If anything, the cryptanalytical accomplishments of the past
two centuries have soundly defeated the wall as a defensive mechanism; not
only by blurring the distinction between defense and offence (as in
Ronald Reagan's star wars imaginary), but by simply rendering walls and
other manifestations of protection useless.

As such, secrecy is a kind of trap for information artists for many
reasons. Information is ephemeral, becoming stale quickly, leaving it as
one of
the most perishable tactical tools. Additionally, most artists do not have
the capital to compete with the information warfare apparatus of
corporations and governments. And of course, no one really cares about
an artist's secrets in any case! It is better to not have secrets,
because to do so is to pretend walls of comfort around us which no
longer exist. More importantly, it reduces the amount of friction the
info-artist must face: secrecy requires little work if we are little
concerned with it. It is better to take public actions which call
attention to dangerous situations for real people. Artists as
communications engineers, working in groups to design the next
generation of networked communications pulse-weapons, will allow still
larger groups to leverage their numbers in tactical performances of
presence; these are the goals of non-violent inforwar.

The Zapatista Floodnet represents just such a collective weapon of
presence. Designed as a collectively actuated weapon, inverting the
logic of wide open propaganda pipes by flooding network connections with
millions of hits from widely distributed, fully participatory nodes,
the  Floodnet enables a performance of presence which says to Mexico
(and its close ally the United States): we are numerous, alert, and
watching carefully. After the initial design, the roles played by
communications artists are best described as only the initial
low-dimensional attractors upon which the critical tertiary projection
of similarity in the dynamic net-system of cybernetics is articulated.
This is not only evident in user participation with the Floodnet
performances, but in other similarly directed mass actions. Instead of
the return of the Renaissance artist/engineer, we seek instead the
self-organization of human-machinic networks of good conscious,
visibility, and presence.

--Breet Stalbaum

THE ZAPATISTA FLOODNET
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/zapsTactical/zaps.html

Tactical Flood Net's automated features are used to:

1) Reload a targeted web page several times per minute.
2) Spam targeted server error logs.

Functionality is simple.

The web site of an institution or symbol of Mexican neo-liberalism is
targeted on a particular day.  A link to Zapatista Flood Net is then
posted in a public call for participation in the tactical strike.
Netsurfers follow this link; then simply leaving their browser open will
automatically reload the target web page every few seconds.  The intent
is to disrupt access to the targeted web site by flooding the host
server with requests for that web site.

As the Java applet performs automatic reloads in the background, the
Zapatista Flood Net also encourages interactive conceptual Internet
art.  Netsurfers may voice their political concerns on a targeted
server, via automated error log spamming.  A mouse click sends a
predefined message to the server error log of the targeted web site.
Alternatively, the "personal message" form will send the surfer's own
statement to the server error log of their choice.

Flood Net is conceptual art that empowers people through
activist/artistic expression.  By creatively selecting phases, for example
"human rights",
surfers can upload messages to server error logs, like "human_rights not
found on this server."  This works because of the way servers process
requests for web pages that do not exist. Flood Net's error log Java
applet asks the targeted server for a web page called, in this example,
"human rights", but that web page doesn't exist.  So the server returns
the familiar "File not Found" or "Error 404" message.  It also records
the request for "human rights" in the server's error log. This is a
unique way to leave a message on a server.

--Carmin Karasic



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