Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 19:45:41 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] Parigi: "The Undesireables"


Thats cool if it doesnt move you but I would not take
from this essay that they are primitivists at all,
rather that they want to critique the growing tendency
toward technology as the infrastructure of a totally
administered society, or technocracy. Recently I have
been getting into German / Eastern European philosophy
of technology / bureaucracy like Max Weber, Martin
Heidegger, Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman etc. and so I
liked this because it seemed to combine alot of those
kinds of critiques with an autonomist / no borders
kind of spirit. None of those people write off
technology entirely, they all more or loss agree with
Holderlin that "where the danger grows there too grows
the saving power" - which sound like what you are
saying. I agree that things like P2P, internet
coordination, etc. are important aspects of the
contemporary movements but at the same time so is a
ruthless critique of how these new technologies are
being developed in such a way as to create a
technocratic brave new world, as for instance with the
Pentagon's plan to link all the surveillance cameras
in the world's metropolitan centers into a single feed
that would be piped into Pentagon control centers,
using face recognition and other software (a perfect
compliment to Total Information Awareness for
instance). The No Borders movement it would seem,
would be very interested for instance in the massive
deployment of technology to track internally and
externally displaced peoples through "biopolitical
tatooing" and other biometrics, etc.  As far as
illegalized workers goes, the essay is after all
called "the undesirables" and seems to me to be
arguing that the tendency of the current era is to
make more and more of us "undesirable" or in other
words, illegalized, as our physical bodies become less
and less important to the functioning of an
increasingly well-oiled, cybernetic machine, so I
think there is room for the use of technology by
radical social movements but at the same time we need
to take a very critical stance to it as well, as
Virilio says, "to drive is also to be driven".

Jason

===="“It does not matter how many people chose moral duty over the rationality of self-preservation - what does matter is that some did. Evil is not all-powerful. It can be resisted. The testimony of the few who did resist shatters the authority of the logic of self-preservation. It shows it for what it is in the end - a choice." 

- Zygmunt Bauman, 'Modernity and the Holocaust'

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