Josephine Bosma
no more rights to privacy for corporations, says RTMark
interview at OpenX, last day
This interview was transcribed in the last minutes of OpenX. At this moment
there are no members of RTMark in the building. As the space here closes
in half an hour I have to put the text online with mistakes and all. Some
words were difficult or impossible for me to understand, but on the whole
the interview is very clear. It should be on the Ars Electronica webmagazine,
and therefore I present it to you in this rather rough way. My appologies.
JB: When was RTMark founded?
Ernesto Lucha: In 1991 it was founded by a small group of people who were
concerned with the power that corporations had errogated over the years,
and thought they had gotten way to far in getting rights as citizens. In
the United States corporations became people, became citizens in the equal
of people in 1886, when they used the fourteenth amendment of the constitution
to gain rights. Now the fourteenth amendment was written to ensure that
freed slaves became people and had the full rights of citizens. Corporations
quickly moved in and got the supreme court to decide that corporations
could benefit under the fourteenth amendment. They got the rights of freed
slaves, they got the rights of people. That has enabled them to own land,
to sue in court, to do all kinds of things that people have the right to
do.. to bear armsÉ With these powers corporations have simply emassed more
and more power over the years, until finally they are what we know them
as today. What that is, is simply trying to rework the entire world into
a mechanism that will feed the corporations.
We wanted to attack that, criticize that. What we are criticizing is the
actual system, and the people involved that have allowed this to happen.
We want this to stop. Nobody can criticize corporations themselves because
corporations are not people. Corporations do not have brains. They are
simply organic entities, as has been repeatedly pointed out, but they are
organic insofar as say blobs of acid plasma that eats through anything
in its path can be considered organic. I don´t know much about organic
chemistry, but I think it is a pretty broad field. There is a lot they
could be called, anything from sharks to amoeba, to carnovorous plants.
Corporations are basically just these big blobs, these big stomachs, that
have only the imperative to grow, eat more, to improve their mechanisms
of intake and to just devastate anything in their paths in the interest
of growing. If that means they can´t do it immediately, they figure out
mechanisms to do it in the long term.
JB: How many people is RTMark?
Ernesto Lucha: About five at the moment, it is a fluid entity, as corporations
are. We have a varying membership. We hide behind the name Rtmark, we
avoid personal liability for things that RTMark might be doing.
JB: Is that so you can fight them on the same level?
Ernesto Lucha: Exactly. We hide behind the corporate entity that is RTMark.
We avoid liability that way, so as people we are not responsible. We can
simply say: RTMark did it. If RTMark gets sued, then RTMark dissolves and
the people behind it are not responsible. It does not matter wether we
have devastated rainforests or ruined villages in Mexico or simply have
simply attempted to further subversion of policies like devastating rainforests
or destroying villages in Mexico.
JB: What are your methods?
Ernesto Lucha: We operate at present by means of a worldwideweb list of
projects that involve the sabotage of commercial items, of mass produced
products. We have traditionally operated from the inside. These projects
suggest to workers in companies ways to sabotage projects and they offer
monetary rewards which are also posted by visitors to the internet. So
a project usually begins it life by being suggested by a visitor to RTMark.
It is posted on the RTMark list, one or the other RTMark lists, we have
several and we call them mutual funds. This project which has been posted
by a visitor is then funded by another visitor or perhaps by the same visitor
or somebody offers funds for its accomplishment.
JB: So people actually earn money while doing this?
Ernesto Lucha: Very minor money relatively. It amounts to a few thousand
dollars perhaps for any given project. We can´t give a social safety net
or anything like that. It is just that there are honorariums to indicate
popular interest in actions of this sort.
JB: I have a horrible question: is this art or politics?
Ernesto Lucha: We don´t really want to define it. Which ever context it
works in will define it appropriately. For example at Ars Electronica Manual
DeLanda said:"It works as art, but not as politics." If it is impossible
for somebody like that to stomach as politics because for whatever reasons,
then we are happy to be absorbed as art. Although art is much less powerful
usually. If that is the only way it can be absorbed, that is fine. It is
not. It is whatever context. When we present ourselves to the media of
course art is not in the picture at all. If we present ourselves at a conference
like this, art is one acceptable way of perceiving us if somebody is incapable
of perceiving us as anything else.
Somebody like Manuel DeLanda for instance is incapable of perceiving anything
outside of his very narrow definition of leftist critique as politics.
That is sort of paradoxical, because eventhough people like him have this
narrow definition of what constitutes a valid leftist critique (if in fact
we want to bother calling ourselves leftists, that is another issue), their
definition is incredibly lacks when it comes to what is valid corporate
behavior. In fact what their philosophy ends up becoming is an embrace
of the corporate system, equal to that of the right. The new leftist, or
whatever you want to call it, I don´t think they even have a very solid
name, they are trying to be fluid and corporate actually, what their approach
amounts to is simply an embrace of corporate culture, corporate politics,
the corporate system as it is today.
JB: And yours is not? You are a corporation.
Ernesto Lucha: We are using corporate effects on the outside to tell a
story that attacks corporations. It is kind of Jiujitsu or a judo move.
We are using the effects and strength of corporations, the strength they
have errogated over the years, to unseat them and to attack them. This
much is possible.
JB: Have you had problems with the law?
Ernesto Lucha: A little bit. We have gotten a few cease and desist letters,
but they quickly realised that it´s not really worth persuing. For example
the last cease and desist letter we got from the BMG music company which
owns Gaffin, who actually both issued cease and desist letters at different
times, and we took this letter and spun it into more news items. We took
that letter and it quickly became ten more articles in various newspapers.
They stopped at that point. They realised anything they do with us is going
to result in publicity, and that there is a lot of interest in the sort
of attack on corporations that deconstruct the enback (?) representing
the attack on copyright law, the attack on corporate use of the law.. and
they did not want to risk further erosion of their respectibility.
JB: How is the attention for your work in the United States?
Ernesto Lucha: It is much better in Europe. The US has been colonised to
an incredible degree by American bussiness, much more then Europe has.
It looks like about the same as in the US: everything is corporate, everything
is sponsored, you have Sunica, you have Sun, you have the ICA in London
instead of Packbell Stadium. Like say in the US everything that is popular
is basically run by a corporation, but people still have a tradition of
thinking for themselves for some reason here. In the US it has been much
more thoroughed/furrow. It is a much younger country. Corporations have
been in control for longer, socialism has been gone for a longer time,
and people are simply through and through completely the tools of corporations.
I am speaking in general terms and in terms which somebody like Manuel
DeLanda who has got a specific kind of leftist critique who call irresponsible,
but in fact that is just castrating and it reflects his own impotence.
JB: Would RTMark go as far as to do illegal actions that would be called
a more ´dangerous´ form of infowar?
Ernesto Lucha: Certainly we would, we don´t generally. We are basically
like corporations: if we do illegal things we are not going to advertise
it. Whether or not we do them is a mater of privacy. It is our privat matter.
It is not a public matter, we have a right toprivacy like any corporation.
We have a right to computersecurity. We exist behind a firewall and you
can´t look behind it. You can´t see what we are doing.
The case of Chiquita Banana recently, a wellknown case in the United States:
a reporter for a Cincinatti newspaper I believe. He got some very incriminating
information by tapping into the voicemailsystem of Chiquita. They were
bribing governement officials. The journalist exposed some incredible information
and published it. The next day he was fired and the newspaper payed ten
million dollars to Chiquita and issued a fullpage appology. That is the
sort of thing we are dealing with. What we are doing that is illegal is
our bussiness. People have no right to invade eachothers privacy, that
is the dominant thing, and they don´t have the right to invade a corporation´s
privacy, because corporations are people. This is the situation we are
dealing with. Hackers often think that privacy is the most important issue.
Security. We think that is bullshit unless a very strong distiction is
made between corporations and people. At this point it isn´t. Corporations
don´t have a right to privacy. If they do, it is a false right and it should
be changed. They should not have a right to privacy. What they do should
be in the public eye, you should be able to see what corporations are doing,
their public face as well as their private face. They should be completely
transparent.
I for one would give up privacy if corporations would.
The fear that seems to drive hackerbehavior, the fear of an orwellian governement
system that peers into everything is not really up to date, that is not
the situation we are faced with today. The danger we are faced with today
is corporate power by and large. Sure governements do terrible things,
they are forces to be feared.
JB: But aren´t they ´brothers in crime´?
Ernesto Lucha: They are not exactly brothers.
JB: Corporations own the government maybe. But then of course we can still
of paranoia for the governement. Then the hackers are still right. It is
just that then in the end behind the government are the corporationsÉ
Ernesto Lucha: The governement is still an autonomous entity to a certain
degree. It is just important to see the issues as corporate issues. In
the case of privacy for example: why is Wired magazine, which is totally
the tool of corporations, blatantly, why are they so concerned about privacy?
Wired magazine is so concerned about security and not allowing the governemnt
to possess encryption keys to pgp and so on. So concerned about privacy
rights for individuals. Why? Because corporations are individuals! And
corporations need these rights to keep doing their dirty work, to keep
perpetrating their criminal acts without public knowledge, without being
seen by the public or the governement, because sometimes the governement
actually -does- respond to the people. The governement is not entirely
owned by corporations. We still do vote, you know, however flimsy that
is. There is the potential at least for people to influence the government,
and there is no potential for people to influence corporations. There used
to be, When corporations were chartered very limited entities, then people
had full rights to ban together and dissolve. We do have sometimes theoretical
and sometimes actual control of governement.
JB: This makes me very curious for the role of the unions. Are they corporations?
Fransisco Ferrero: Unions are a very important part of the political process.
Increasingly we want to see more globalisation of unions. I think it is
the only way . With the global economy we can have some accountability
for corporate actions against labor and against labor organising. There
have been some heartening moves in the last two years or so in the US.
Labor has been re-envigorated and the unions are showing more political
power then they have in the previous ten or fifteen years, certainly throughout
the eigthies and late seventies. We at RTMark would like to support unions
as much as possible, allthough we are not directly involved with union
politics.
JB: Unions ofcurse work within the ´individuals´ which corporations are.
Fransisco Ferrero: There is a big debate right now in the US about union
political donations. There are in fact these large incorporated bodies
so to speak. They function in some ways like corporations do, but we do
feel like they function in the collective interest of labor, rather then
in the interest of capital. That is why we feel that they, even as these
so called larger bodies, are more effective in delivering a more humane
system, a more humane way of living and working.
*
09/10/1998