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Subject: <nettime> THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE THEATER NEWS. ISSUE #1 From: ricardo dominguez <rdom@thing.net> Date: 5 Jun 1998 19:31:38 +0200 * * * * * Sender: owner-nettime-l@basis.Desk.nl Precedence: bulk THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE THEATER NEWS. ISSUE #1 Below is an article on Electronic Civil Disobedience by San Francisco journalist Jeanne Carstensen, entertainment editor for The Gate, the SF Chronicle and Examiner's web site. The article, with good links, is found at http://www.sfgate.com/technology/beat/ **Remember that Wednesday, JUNE 10, is Act Two of The Electronic Disturbance Theater. For updates as JUNE 10 approaches click here** http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/ecd.html The Electronic Disturbance Theater proprosal for SWARM has been accepted as one of the featured projects for the Ars Electronica 98 Festival (a group based in Linz, Austria). An Ars Electronica web page already links to the JUNE 10 action. http://web.aec.at/infowar/index.html "Ars Electronica - a Festival for Art,Technology and Society - was initiated in 1979 and focuses on electronic art and media theory. This year's theme of the Festival is "INFOWAR". The Festival '98 takes place from the 7th - 12th of September." http://web.aec.at/fest/feste.html Opening these connections in Europe is a clear sign that The Electronic Disturbance Theater is acting on the global stage. We are making inroads into the computer/arts communities across international borders. People skilled in computers and the arts are becoming more aware of the Zapatistas, Chiapas, and the Mexican government's counter insurgency war. While at the same time computerized activists within the world wide pro-Zapatista movement are becoming more aware of uses for the Net beyond merely a communication device for transmitting email. The Net is becoming a site for non-violent direct action. We are only witnessing its early forms. Ideally, hopefully soon, maybe by this fall, The Electronic Disturbance Theater will become one of many small "affinity groups" that periodically (regularly) act in concert, at the same time, against the same site, but maintain autonomy and independence as their own group. In this sense, we again want to copy the earlier civil disobedience movements that relied on an affinity group structure for carrying out mass nonviolent direct action. In effect, this is what is meant by SWARM. As an analogy, think of us and our actions as those of a just a handful of bees or wasps. Our stingers, are, so far, the FloodNet devices that send out a little sting, or automated electronic pulse. As just a handful of bees, with just a handful of stingers, stinging our opponents, we may be a nuisance and a pest, but we clearly are a force that can be dealt with or even ignored (perhaps so far). But if we become a SWARM of bees and wasps that go after a site, or a series of related sites, all at the same time, but from many different directions, using different types of stingers with varying degrees of potency, then we become a more powerful force that sends a surge of energy across the Net, as opposed to sending out a handful of pulses. For those postmodernists in the crowd, consider Deleuze and Guattari's "plateaus" or "assemblages" that occur when certain "lines of flight" converge. (1) A SWARM is a massive convergence of a multiplicity of lines of flight arising momentarily to send a powerful surge (i.e., message) to then quickly disperse and disappear. Appearing and disappearing and reappearing. Moving nomadically as need be. So we need a thousand plateaus. We need an array of FloodNet devices. We need the FloodNet electronic pulse device to be just one tool, one machine, one computerized act within a spectrum of tools, machines, and acts. Like the tinkerers who meddled with metal and formed the first swords and shields, like the Mongols and other early nomadic warriors who wandered and roamed, we need more electronic tinkerers to meddle with today's electronic metal, to create new tools, new machines, that enable new acts for today's nomadic warriors who wander on the Net. Below is the article. - Stefan Wray Finally, the article. . . Hey, Ho, We Won't Go Civil Disobedience Comes to the Web Jeanne Carstensen When I think of civil disobedience I think of an environmentalist chained to a redwood or anti-war activists stretched out on the tracks in front of trains loaded with weapons headed for Central America. There are bodies on the line. And although most acts of civil disobedience are nonviolent, there is always the possibility that blood will be spilled. So when I read a message on a Bay Area events e-mail list I subscribe to announcing a "virtual sit-in" at the website of Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo on April 10 to protest repression against the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the idea sounded strange. Civil disobedience in cyberspace? Will it work without the breath and bulk of angry bodies? The concept "electronic civil disobedience" emerged from the sophisticated global internet activism of the Zapatistas and their supporters. Since their uprising in 1994, the Zapatistas have taken advantage of the web to circulate rapid-fire e-mail from the charismatic Commandante Marcos about conditions inside Chiapas. And Zapatista supporters have flooded web sites and discussion groups with human rights reports and articles that are updated on a daily basis. The web has been so influential in the Zapatista struggle, that the conflict is often referred to as a kind of information war. "This is a war of public opinion, a war of declarations and political positions..." a top national security officer in Mexico said in a recent New York Times article ("Mexico Sees Both Carrot and Stick Fail in Chiapas," 5/17/98). And on the web, the Zapatistas are winning. Every day a community of savvy cyber-activists helps spread the message of the largely indigenous movement in southern Mexico to the entire world. Two of those activists, Stefan Wray and Ricardo Dominguez, are the main proponents of "electronic civil disobedience" and the organizers of the recent "virtual sit-ins" supporting the Zapatista cause. Wray hosts a web site dedicated to the theory and practice of electronic civil disobedience and Dominguez is the editor of The Thing, a small ISP for an artists virtual community. Ricardo Dominguez, 39, is a former actor and long-time political activist. He talks about electronic civil disobedience in terms of "theater." In fact, the series of ECD actions Wray and Dominguez have planned are referred to as "Electronic Disturbance Theater." Like the Yippies, Greenpeace, Act Up and other activists who have used the media to draw attention to their causes, Dominguez appreciates the power of narrative to capture the public attention. "We began to notice that 80s activist tactics were getting less media attention," Dominguez explained. "Power had shifted from the streets to the information highway so we started thinking about how to create political gestures on the web equivalent to lying down in the street and refusing to move." The idea of conducting "virtual sit-ins" actually originated in Italy with the Autonomous Digital Coalition, which suggested that Zapatista supporters on the internet connect their browsers to a pre-selected site at a certain hour and manually hit the reload button over and over again as a form of protest. The intention was to temporarily overload the capacity of the server, thus disrupting service and effectively "blockading" the entrance to the targeted website. But Dominguez and some other activists decided to take the virtual sit-in process a step further by automating it. They created a website called Flood Net that uses a Java applet to automatically reload the web page of the targeted site every three seconds. When the first virtual sit-in was held on April 10 at Zedillo's web site, all the cyber-protesters had to do was connect their browsers to Flood Net at the appointed hour. Because a stats program is installed on the Flood Net site, Wray and Dominguez know that 8141 surfers hit their site that day and participated in the sit-in. Some disruption in Zedillo's site was noted by the activists, and the New York Times Cyber Law Journal on May 1 quoted a Mexican Embassy official who acknowledged that there had been some disturbance to Zedillo's site on April 10. Another virtual sit-in was held on May 10, this time targeting the White House website. Wray and Dominguez didn't notice any significant disruption to the White House site, which Dominguez assumes "has a more robust infrastructure" than Zedillo's site. "This is experimental," Stefan Wray explained about the sit-in process. "We don't know what critical mass is for a site to be blocked." The interesting thing about the virtual sit-in tactic is that it makes use of a public function available to any internet user. Reloading a page again and again, while capable of causing disruption, isn't hacking into the system. "We're interested in creating public gestures in the public sphere of the internet," Dominguez emphasized. Civil disobedience is defined in Robert Seeley's Handbook of Non-Violence as "the refusal on principle to obey an unjust law." One of its main goals "is to influence public opinion to change an unjust law or abolish unjust policy." Mike Godwin, staff counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that a virtual sit-in is "no more or less illegal than tying up the White House switchboard." The law makes a distinction between harrassing content and actions. "It's legal when calling in to voice a complaint and illegal when you're purposefully trying to jam the switchboard." In the May 1 New York Times Cyber Law Journal article, however, internet consultant Mark D. Rasch said that "participants in electronic sit-ins run a risk of violating a federal law... [that] makes it a crime to intentionally distribute a program...with the intent to cause damage to another's web site." "Is it illegal to refresh a web site over and over?" Wray answered when I asked him about the legality of virtual sit-ins. "I don't see any clear directive that says this is illegal. We're walking into territory that hasn't been clearly regulated or controlled so it's hard for us or the government to know where we stand." Although the Electronic Disturbance Theater sit-ins are designed to pressure the Mexican government to respect the human rights of the indigenous communities in Chiapas that the Zapatistas represent, some people see risks in restricting free speech on the web to achieve that goal: "Why do you need to shut out anyone from speaking out on the web when you can use the same medium to express your own views?" Mike Godwin said. Maureen Mason, program director of the Institute for Global Communications (IGC), an ISP for progressive organizations and individuals based in San Francisco, drew distinctions between different kinds of possible civil disobedience actions. Last July, IGC was the target of a "mail-bombing" campaign against one of the websites they host, the Basque Euskal Herria Journal. The huge volume of repetitive e-mail overwhelmed their server, and they were forced to suspend the Basque web site in order to continue to serve their other clients. IGC has issued a statement condemning mail-bombing, but Mason believes that political speech itself should be protected. "The expression of a political opinion should be allowed, but if technology is used to shut down a communication service all together, then it's like burning the bookstore to protest one book," she said. It's too early to predict how electronic civil disobedience will evolve on the web, and whether it will ever have the same impact as a group of anti-war activists smearing human blood on a missle, as they did last week at Andrews Air Force Base. There's something so powerful about people using their own bodies to protest injustice, and that will never happen on the net. But in our increasingly virtual world, electronic civil disobedience is a timely tactic. Jeanne Carstensen is Entertainment Editor of the Gate. When not trying to escape to Costa Rica, where she worked as a shortwave radio producer for six years, she likes to eat arroz con pollo, read Jeanette Winterson, and occasionally live out her fantasy of being a nurse. jeannec@sfgate.com --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl