| fran ilich on 16 Jan 2001 23:08:33 -0000 |
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| [nettime-lat] FW: <nettime> Root Festival- Hull Time Based Art goes mad forRDOM and Zapatismo |
[aunque un poco tarde, me parece interesante este texto de saul albert que habla de una presentacion de ricardo dominguez, uno de los moderadores de esta lista, dentro del root festival co-organizado por kathy rae huffman,. / i] ---------- From: "Saul Albert" <[email protected]> Reply-To: "Saul Albert" <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 21:36:42 +0100 To: <[email protected]> Subject: <nettime> Root Festival- Hull Time Based Art goes mad for RDOM and Zapatismo Last weekend was the end of the Root festival hosted by Hull Time Based Arts (UK). www.timebase.org The theme this year was "Tricks, Pranks and Interventions" and I was there helping my friends the Space Hijackers (www.twenteenthcentury.com/spacehijackers)cause some trouble. The general attitude of knowing cynicism I had expected from the crowd that turned up, hung-over for the Sunday session of presentations was completely shattered by Ricardo Dominguez's presentation about www.fakeshop.org and the Zapatismo inspired "floodnet" system (www.thing.net/~rdom). As he finished the audience erupted into a feverish applause and whooped and shouted for several minutes; almost unheard of enthusiasm at such events in my experience. There was something other than Dominguez's amazing voice and public speaking style (described by my swooning friend as 'Barry White with a brain') that sparked off this reaction . This post is an attempt to make some sense of that rapturous response (which I felt too) and to use it to think about the Electronic Disturbance Theatre's (EDT) brand of art "hacktivism". The day before the presentation Ricardo Dominguez had performed his "Stories of Mayan Technology" action on the street, chalking the Java code for the floodnet system onto the cobbles outside the Root meeting centre. He wore a balaclava with "EZLN" stitched into it and was leaping around frantically, engaging passers-by with impassioned story telling about Zapatismo and the history of Chiapas (www.ezln.org) and the Electronic Disturbance Theatre's flood net actions. (http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html) Initially I was slightly taken aback by the dramatic contrivance of the performance, having followed these stories as they unfolded through the more physically removed media of e-mail and browser. Seeing the workings of the applet written out in chalk it was easy to dismiss this as wrong-headed translation from the effective computerised practice of "hacktivism" to ineffectual street theatre. Didn't Dominguez himself declare that "the streets are dead" as a theatre of protest before putting Electronic Civil Disobedience into action? In any case I didn't realise the tactical significance of this performance until the talk he gave on Sunday. Prior to his presentation I had seen him sitting the cafe (unmasked) when he was approached by a 12 year old girl with a "PRESS" sticker on her T-shirt who had been interviewing people the day before. I overheard their conversation: PRESS GIRL: "I interviewed you yesterday...didn't I, it was you outside with the mask on..." RDOM: "No" P.G.: "Yes it was, you were telling stories" RDOM: "It must have been someone else". He wouldn't even give her a knowing wink. Many of the interventions at the festival gave me the feeling of being allowed "behind the scenes", and being shown the insecurities and fragility of the performers and their work. Dominguez gave no ground in that respect, but was maintaining the simulation of this masked character even when he was apparently off-duty. He wore his mask again during his talk on Sunday and the consummate skill of his stage presence was overwhelming, testament to his training as a classical actor. At first I was slightly suspicious of the way he had whipped the crowd into a frenzy. As we walked out, exhausted, a member of the ostentatiously cynical Molotov organisation (www.molotov.org.uk, whose motto is "whatever it is, we're against it") gurgled "I feel like I've been saved" with no hint of sarcasm whatsoever. This unquestioning acceptance of Dominguez's presentation reminded me of the way the international media reacted to the release of the floodnet. As was argued by derisive hackers after the media frenzy surrounding the initial floodnet strikes, the floodnet's code is not very effective. It worked a few times, and slowed the systems it attacked down, but was not very effective in terms of infrastructural damage and as a denial of service attack (DOS), was easily routed around. The servers were up again immediately afterwards, and when the Pentagon was attacked it responded, idiotically with military info-weapons that aggressively crashed civilian user's computers. This, of course, gave huge weight to the grievances of the protestors using the floodnet system as it contravened constitutional law (surprisingly enough, military attacks on civilians are illegal in the US). The effect of the floodnet attacks was not felt in the actual damage of the DOS attack, but in the hysterical response it elicited from the press and then the institutions against which the attacks were directed. In this way the EDT floodnet system can be seen as operating on several levels of "information warfare". The three forms of information warfare weaponry are defined by their effects, rather than by specific characteristics. They can be defined like so: "Information Warfare Weapons can be Physical, Syntactical, or Semantic. The use of a physical weapon will result in the permanent destruction of physical components and denial of service. A Syntactical weapon will focus on attacking the operating logic of the system and introduce delays or unpredictable behaviours. A Semantical weapon will focus its effects on destroying the trust and truth maintenance components of the system. " - R Garigue INFORMATION WARFARE - Developing a Conceptual Framework (http://all.net/books/iw/iwframe/top.html) The floodnet clearly works on both the syntactical and the semantic level, the semantic effect clearly being the most interesting and effective in this context. Although Dominguez could have encouraged hackers to help him by bringing these servers down destructively (physically or syntactically) he must have seen that in the wider informational context of an international media saturated with high-tech news and .com stock market madness, the semantic attack could be far more effective. There have been some recent incidents that show how devastating such attacks can be in a commercial context. Bruce Schneier describes a semantic attack in the recent case of Emulex Corp in "Semantic Attacks: The Third Wave of Network Attacks" in CRYPTO-GRAM, October 15, 2000 (posted to nettime last night and available from http://www.counterpane.com). Here is the part from his piece which describes how this "Semantic attack" worked: > On 25 August 2000, the press release distribution service Internet Wire > received a forged e-mail that appeared to come from Emulex Corp. and said > that the C.E.O. had resigned and the company's earnings would be > restated. Internet Wire posted the press release, not bothering to verify > either its origin or contents. Several financial news services and Web > sites further distributed the false information, and the stock dropped 61% > (from $113 to $43) before the hoax was exposed. > > This is a devastating network attack. Despite its amateurish execution > (the perpetrator, trying to make money on the stock movements, was caught > in less than 24 hours), $2.54 billion in market capitalisation disappeared, > only to reappear hours later. With better planning, a similar attack could > do more damage and be more difficult to detect. It's an illustration of > what I see as the third wave of network attacks -- which will be much more > serious and harder to defend against than the first two waves. This simple fraud is an old trick, but as the spread of stock-market relevant information has become the driving force behind so many internet services and companies, the simple forgery has become an increasingly powerful information weapon. The effectiveness of these tactics in a commercial context was further proved by etoy's toywar victory over toy-retailer etoys last Christmas, a better example than the above, really because it was far more imaginative and engaging (if not so dramatically effective in munitary terms). (see www.etoy.com) It was one of Dominguez's points in the talk, that his tactics of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD) would have increasing clout as more and more corporations, governments and organisations became reliant on flows of information that are susceptible to new and devastating semantic attacks. He didn't make the distinction between syntactic and semantic though, but it is a useful way to look at the relationship between his ECD practice and his stage presence and street actions. His performance as a Zapatista, his techniques of public speaking and the dramatic devices with which he peppered his speech, operate first as a syntactic intervention, then as a full-on semantic attack. The action itself (engaging with a member of the public at random, telling a story, chalking slogans on a wall) no longer has much of a syntactic impact. As the Critical Art Ensemble put it in "Tactical Media" (available from www.critical-art.net) the effectiveness of subversive, interventionist, tactics were completely undermined immediatly after May 68' when slogan scrawling and situationist reclamation of public space last seemed to hold some potential to unravel the power of "spectacular society". Many of the would-be interventionists at the festival didn't seem to have taken that on board. Ricardo Dominguez's street action, however, worked in parallel with the semantic effectiveness of the floodnet. Using dramatic techniques to semi-hypnotise and charm people and then hype them up into a reverent frenzy, Dominguez was able to get them extremely excited about going out and participating in or initiating electronic civil disobedience. The minor syntactic hacks of street intervention and the floodnet software both ride a wave of hype and excitement until they build up enough momentum to become a far more powerful semantic hack, and spread through diverse information networks. The people at that talk will be raving about it and (like me) telling everyone they can about how brilliant it is. The stories he told during the street performance came back to me as I finished writing this. He had told stories about people using "Mayan Technologies"; a little boy in Chiapas using a stick to make military and drug-war aircraft vanish from the sky, the sea as a speaking voice mediating information across time and distance... stories about imaginative semantic manipulation. What seems to be made possible by his use semantic information weapons is the production of powerful effects on major financial and govornmental institutions without resorting to physically or syntactically violent means. Download the Electronic Disturbance Theatre's DDK (Disturbance Developer's Kit) from: http://www.fakeshop.com/product_98/flood.html Saul Albert 24/10/2000 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] _______________________________________________ nettime-lat mailing list [email protected] http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-lat