<nettime> A Prelude to a Theory of Resistance and Maps

[ricardo dominguez <rdom@thing.net>]

Mayan Hackers/The Inapropriate/d Resistance
without Nostalgia (A Note)

A note was hand delivered to me during a gathering of
Radical Media groups in New York City at The Thing
(a critical community server) by a network that has been
doing advance work on Zapatismo, digital activism,
and html democracies.

It was a note from the Lizard Queen:

(Message 445-Ixil /encrypted in the usual manner=97con amor.c)

hola cyber/compadre,

Fox is showing reruns of =93V=94, that old Si-fi flick, again. We
all sit in the cantina (and watch the only TV in the community:
the women, the children, the men, and the drunks).

The Lizard agents are trying to control the world and a few
small groups form a global resistance movement. The movie
shows the conflicts and tensions between the cells, the danger
of staying aboveground, the endless struggle against the growing
technoforce of the Lizard-Power structure. The Lizards are also
harvesting the humans for snacks. This not a movie says the one
of the kids.plenty of Lizards around here.

The children spend their mornings, after helping with work at
home, here at the Center for Mayan Code. Right now they are
hacking the past/future binary that has infected the system.
Cracking mega_mythologies has become the latest fun run
around here.

Each day the children are recovering more pages from the
=93stolen book=94  The cracked Past/Future binary is being
woven between tzotzil songs about the Man who "stole the book."
The book was produced from the coupling between Mayan and
a dog. A Man came and stole the written word, the symbolic
support of knowledge for the community.  As a consequence
of this theft, the Mayans are called ignorant, and the community
of the Man proclaim themselves to be "men of reason."
The Children laugh and hit the return button.

Each day the imagined community of promised monsters
grows, phantoms mix code up, reprogram the impossible,
then train others. The problem of temporal fragmentation is
getting smaller. A Shared sense of time is our priority now,
space is no longer the tool it once was. We must continue to
build networks of shared time. The Virtual Class expects
Mayan codes to stay in one place and attack from behind a tree,
they don't suspect the question of time to be use against them.
Who can know what grows in the seeds of time. How goes it
in your time?

I finally read that essay you sent about the new military theory
(Magen), they seem to have finally read the French. Fractal
infrastructures, holistic kill ratios, fatal strategies and the call
for a RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs). Question compadre:
why is it that only the military and the big companies are allowed
to speak of Revolution? While all we can hope for is a disturbance?
Perhaps it is time to speak of Zapatismo as a Revolution of Hope.
Or Perhaps we should do as the FBI suggested in Computerworld
Magazine On their "Back Page" section (page 114) of their April 20
Issue:

*A group allied with Mexico's Zapatista National Liberation Army
is seeking worldwide electronic insurrection on May 10, the FBI
said last week. The group urges those sympathetic with the
revolutionaries to swamp government and bank computer
systems in the U.S. and Mexico via the Internet on that day.*

World Wide Electronic Insurrection should be our next goal! All
we need to do is set a date. Ask all those hackers with heart if
they can help with this. Can you also get people to fill the streets
of the world? A HUELGA across the arc of realities! Remember
to call for a world that makes all worlds possible.

Well that is all. Make sure that you read this note backwards, it will
make more sense then.

con amor y rabia (From the mountains of the Mexican southeast),

The Lizard Queen

P.S. It is clear that in the arena of political action, only he who puts

the candle where the wind is blowing will triumph; never the one
who pretends the wind is blowing where he puts the candle.
Juan de Mairena wrote that bit.

P.S.S. 1998. Mexico. While the supreme government stays on
track towards war and tries desperately to join the winds from
Wall Street in order to push the heavy sails of the ship of death,
these Mexican Mayan, who add the name of Emiliano Zapata to
their history, prepare in silence the justice and the dignity that
will have to arrive in spite of their death (or perhaps because
of it).

In silence, these indigenous watch the skies and the ground
to predict the winds from below which run through the fields
of Mexico and of the world, through the dusty streets of tiny
villages and ranches, through the messy disorder of the popular
neighborhoods, through the places of the honest unions, through
the offices of the committed political parties, through the
theatres-movies-auditoriums-salons-of shows-art galleries,
through digital laboratories and centers of scientific investigation,
through the university cubicles, classrooms and halls, through
meetings and assemblies of political and social organizations,
through the churches of the poor, through the international
solidarity committees, through the national and foreign
non-governmental organizations, through the highways,
hrough the roads, through the neighborhood streets, through
the breaches, navigating the rivers, in the lakes and in the seas
of this country, today awash in wet, and of this world awakening,
late certainly, but awakening.

In silence the Zapatistas see and are seen.

The old nose and pipe wrote this bit. A very good bit. But the children
always want more stories about seahorses, mirrors, and lions who
eat themselves.

P.S.S.S. Just got an email from one of our friend across the sea.
He says we must let the world know that Digital Zapatismo is a
Myth. That no one in Chiapas has a T1 line, not one Autonomous
Community has a working LAN, or even a good ISP connection.
OK. The Zapatistas entered your Networks without any modems.
Sometimes we don=92t even have electricity. As Homer Simpson
said, 'We now live in a society where technology makes war
as easy as opening a can of Duff beer.'

I hope this helps.

P.S.S.S. (The kids say Hehe another mega_mythology cracked! ;-)

P.S.S.S.S.  Send more Laptops.

(End of Part 2 of A Prelude to a Theory of Resistance
and Maps)


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