What does it mean to put information to work? Information is put to work in computer models so that it might be used to predict events. The ability to predict is central to the concept of security. Analysis of information then becomes the production of security. The worldview of security, or making-predictable, recognizes that the movement of life, resources, and information is chaotic, yet it seeks to anticipate the movement of the noise by analyzing noise and patterns in a joint effort to win wars and make profits.

However, there is only so much value one can place on predictive models, and eventually, information bubbles burst.

“Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows.” — Page 5, The Anti-Œdipus

Speed
The Net
The Matrix
The Lake House

Think about it. The chapter on Speed could be all about Paul Virilio’s theories on the integral accident and dromology.

The Net is about the problem of Google’s monolithic control over all information and the threat of being disappeared.

The Matrix — well that one’s been done to death in philosophy and could be easily plagiarized from Slavoj Zizek.

The Lake House — it’s got Keanu and Sandra Bullock again, so I had to include it, but I’m sure something could be said about time, communication, and information being less constrained by time in the same way that Speed has our bodies being less constrained by space because of transportation but then resulting the potential for accidents and hijacking.

And I bet if I started writing a book on it, I’d find all of these other weird connections with Keanu and Sandra Bullock and I’d eventually go insane and drill a hole in my head. Needless to say, it would be the most ridiculous shit ever.

What is striking about this list is how many of them are really active today in the modern world. We have heavily militarized police forces in American, the EU, China, Russia and Japan [Cop]. We have mega-national corporations who attempt to control the flow of resources. One could specifically reference Monsanto and their attempt to bio-engineer seeds that produce plants with no new seeds, forcing the farming community to purchase all their seeds from Monsanto [Corporate]. With the creation of the blogosphere and less credibility seen in “old media,” bloggers like Alex Jones have brought themselves more credibility and truly do go to great lengths to spread their message [Media]. While we are still only beginning to get the hang of Cybernetics, (we have a few solid experiments.) we definitely have a huge community of “hackers” who constantly produce new tactics to destroy internet barriers [Netrunner]. When it comes to the Solo, the first thing that pops into mind is, of course, Blackwater.

Now we have yet to have any Fixers, Techies, or Nomads in their Cyberpunk defined sense (we have similar things, but not quite close enough.). I think than more than half the list defines us as being in the future. Also, when the book of the game can cause a government raid due to its “dangerous” nature, it shows how far the censorship society has come (from Wikipedia):

“In 1990, in an odd convergence of cyberpunk art and reality, the U.S. Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games’s headquarters and confiscated all their computers. This was allegedly because the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook could be used to perpetrate computer crime. That was, in fact, not the main reason for the raid, but after the event it was too late to correct the public’s impression. Steve Jackson Games later won a lawsuit against the Secret Service, aided by the freshly minted Electronic Frontier Foundation. This event has achieved a sort of notoriety, which has extended to the book itself as well. All published editions of GURPS Cyberpunk have a tagline on the front cover, which reads “The book that was seized by the U.S. Secret Service!” Inside, the book provides a summary of the raid and its aftermath.”

Oh, and one more thing.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if Rock and Roll was actually rebellious and revolutionary?

The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, in which capitalism “con­stantly overcom[es] its own limitations,” has shown itself to be accurate in describing capitalism’s adaptation to and emergence of an information society.

Their concepts of the “rhizome” and the “tree” have even been popularized in variety of popular books on network theory. Notable among these is a book that, although may not reference Deleuze and Guattari directly, surely makes use of similar concepts. Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, in their book The Starfish And the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, under the influence of thinkers in the field of management, perhaps unwittingly, tout the advantages of rhizome-tree-hybrid business organizations. The point of this is not to get into a chicken or the egg debate, but to show that Deleuze and Guattari’s toolbox of theories and strategies, like capitalism itself, can be used in a variety of contexts.

Deleuze’s concept of a control society is based on the strategies of constant communication and extracting market research from self-organizing groups. It is no wonder then that those in the field of marketing are familiar with concept of decentralized organization. Business strategists would have to be aware of these concepts, as they are features of capitalism that Deleuze noticed the emergence of almost twenty years ago. “Viral marketing” and “crowdsourcing” are the new buzzwords for the profiteering of decentralization.

Web 2.0 almost seems to go beyond societies of control, by not only creating a system in which marketing data can constantly be gathered by a decentralized group of consumers, but by turning that activity into a game. Public self-expression becomes less about exercising free speech and more about creating valuable data. With “microblogging,” we willingly publicize our movements in self-generated surveillance. The “challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions” that Deleuze locates within the corporate work environment have dissolved even further into our leisure time, which follows from the permeation of the barriers between work-time, education-time, and leisure time that he describes. Furthermore, these games and jokes are more and more culled from the decentralized culture of the internet and placed into a system in which ads can be customized and delivered to target markets on both group and individual levels.

These concepts are not necessarily restricted to the private sector. If the increasing diffusion of these strategies is immanent, then it should not surprise us that they have been picked up by the state. Military transformation and Network-centric warfare have been attempted in the U.S. after network theory caught on in the RAND Institute and the Department of Defense. Furthermore, Israeli military strategists have directly referenced Deleuze and Guattari (as well as Debord) as an influence. Slavoj Zizek has picked up on this,

So what does it follow from all this? Not, of course, the nonsensical accusation of Deleuze and Guattari as theorists of militaristic colonization - but the conclusion that the conceptual machine articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, far from being simply “subversive,” also fits the (military, economic, and ideologico-political) operational mode of today’s capitalism. - How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant self-revolutionizing?

In another article, Zizek rejects the idea that Deleuze should be held accountable for the spread of Deleuzianism as a philosophical justification for the 21st century style of capitalism.

At this point, one should introduce the difference between the works of Deleuze himself and the popular field of Deleuzianism: which of the two is the true target of our critique? The primary target is the popular version of “Deleuzianism” because it goes without saying that Deleuze’s thought is ridiculously simplified in its popular acceptance, so that it is easy to play the game of “things are much more complex in Deleuze”; however, if there is something to be learned from the history of thought, from Christianity to Marx and Heidegger, it is that the roots of misappropriations are to be sought in the “original” thinker himself.

What is now emerging is an even tighter marriage of capitalism, the state, and decentralized control, as Rod Beckstrom, co-author of The Starfish and the Spider has been touched by the Department of Homeland Security to head its cyber-security interagency group. The rhetoric behind this move suggests that cyberterrorism is a real threat, just as real as physical terrorism.

This collaboration marks an erasure of boundaries that has not yet been seen in control society. To make a rough periodization, the 20th century saw the formation of a military-industrial complex, the dangers of which we have already seen, and the 21st century features the birth of a security-information complex, the outcome of which we can barely imagine. As Brafman and Beckstrom, themselves, aptly write, “The rules of the game have changed.”

Online Bibliography

Postscript on the Societies of Control

Control and Becoming: Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri

The Art of War: Deleuze, Guattari, Debord and the Israeli Defense Force

The Ongoing “Soft Revolution”

Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule

The Starfish and the Spider

Cyber risk ‘equals 9/11 impact’

New Interagency Group to Oversee Cyberattack Defense

Can small businesses help win the war?

Who trumps bin Laden as a cyberthreat? Look in the mirror

Why We’re Here

Boycott-RIAA was founded because we love music. We cannot stand by silently while the recording industry continues its decades-long effort to lock up our culture and heritage by misrepresenting the facts to the public, to artists, the fans and to our government. Our mission is to represent the position of the consumers and of the independent music artists against this nearly completely foreign-owned cartel which exhibits behaviors indicative of deliberate and outright contempt for the law, and of those whose job is to enforce it. (Simultaneously, they implore the government to persecute grandmothers and children on their behalf!!!)

We endeavor to counter misinformation with facts, and to make the public aware of the implications and dire long term consequences that our culture suffers when Congress bows to every demand that this illegal and immoral recording industry presents.

Our Goals

We really have only one true goal, that being the ‘take-down’ of the RIAA monopoly. Over the decades, it has become increasingly obvious that the industry cares nothing about our culture, the music, nor the artists that make it. To achieve our goal, several paths are available.

* Ongoing boycott of all RIAA products, including the free samples on radio, peer-to-peer and television. (The giant is very large and very hungry. This is the simplest path, which merely involves starving the giant.)
* Appeal to the media to report the facts surrounding this controversy, and to not merely echo the RIAA’s lie filled propaganda and press releases. We need to get them to discuss how our constitution requires limits, how Congress has changed laws for the sole benefit of the RIAA member labels in regards to their contracts with artists, etc., and to convey other facts which WE know …but that most people buying music today never consider.
* Reform of copyright laws to make them more fair to consumers and artists alike. (At the very least, we would like to see an affirmation that consumers have the same rights for private, non-commercial use of digital song files that they do with analog files under the 1992 Home Audio Recording Act AND an end to the record labels being able to contractually demand ownership of copyrights from the artists.

(Copyright reform will undoubtedly be extremely difficult to achieve due to the fact that the RIAA’s entire purpose is to lobby our government to change the law in their favor. Perversion of copyright law should not be allowed as a solution for the recording industry’s poor management, …but that is precisely why the RIAA lobby group exists!)

DRM and copy-protected CDs lock up the music forever, even after the work in question returns to public domain. Such was NOT part of the copyright bargain our forefathers struck, providing specific rights to the authors for a LIMITED TIME. These copyright protections were intended for the artist and creator, not the corporations. Also, copyright was never intended to provide income for the heirs of the copyright holder in perpetuity. Today, the major labels OWN virtually all of the sound recording copyrights that should belong to their artists. In its present form, copyright law has ceased to fulfill its true purpose for being.
* Achieve a level playing field where independents can compete with major artists and are not excluded from distribution or broadcast simply because they did not offer Clear Channel (and the like) a large enough payola check.
* Support for aspiring musicians, warning them of the dangers to their financial future and creative integrity should they ever succumb and sign a Faustian major-label contract.
* Aggressively urge the music-buying public to put their dollars into independent support where they will get more for their money. The major label monopoly continually puts out fewer and fewer increasingly homogenized offerings. Those who refuse to sign are free to create and express. You want more bang for your buck?

…Support Local and Independent Music!

(Our “mission statement” is “open source” in nature and shall continue to be revised in accordance with YOUR input. Please hit the contact button or post in the “Open Thread” with any updates/corrections/improvements that you would like to have implemented.)

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (”you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (”you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ‘51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.”

Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure–prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors–scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. “Control” is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

II. Logic

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it’s because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything–the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it’s because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest–the flock and each of its animals–but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay “priest.”) In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society–not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines–levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker’s familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner–state or private power–but coded figures–deformable and transformable–of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

III. Program

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position–licit or illicit–and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of “substitution,” at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine “without doctor or patient” that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation–as they say–but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a “dividual” material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

L’autre journal, Nr. I, Mai 1990.

defcon has been happening for 14 years. i mean, that mainstream media is on top of things.

now, every year, defcon founder jeff moss plays a game called “spot the fed” to out the federal agents in the crowd there to learn about current security strategy. well, this year he changed it to “spot the undercover reporter.”

watch the video to see it play out.

an article on this in wired.

One of the things I hate most about digital projects — and there’s a lot to hate about new media — is that it encourages people to spend money.

nomediakings.org is useful for many reasons. it artfully and skillfully helps you understand some of the best DIY ways to bind books, animate, manage sound, and run your own server.

beyond its obvious usefulness, whats also interesting to note is the underlying philosophy behind the lessons taught.
one doesnt need to give in to the urge to spend money on a project. the more hard physical labor youre willing to put into a project, the less money youll have to spend. if you use your networking skills, you can get access to equipment you need to accomplish your project (whatever it may be) without spending money on that equipment.

in a way, this seems like something basic that we should all be aware of as it is. but often we are still pulled in by the idea that we need money to do projects which require jobs but those jobs take up the time we would have spent on our projects….

reminds me of this conversation in flight of the conchords.