Fighting the hopelessness machine: Drones have dead-angles too

From Institute for the Study of Insurgent Warfare

Surveillance // Panopticon // Security Culture // Paranoia

Why hammer out concepts–be it speculative, critical, or pragmatist–if there is a meta-authority overseeing it all? Why conspire in the light?….We need to develop dissident knowledge of how to bring down drones, detect sensors, hack servers, distort GPS signals, and disrupt Google by fooling its algorithms. Forget the next innovation cycle. If the common hacker’s paranoia informs us correctly, we lost the war years ago and are surrounded. Soon we will be called to surrender, one by one.

–Geert Lovink “Hermes on the Hudson: Notes on Media Theory after Snowden.

A culture of security is one which enhances an organization’s capacity to determine its interests and act on them in spite of another organization’s opposed interests. Corporate workforces and law enforcement agencies both cultivate cultures of security, as do management teams, investment rings, smugglers, unions, militia men, and academic researchers. All of these cultures are supposed to control flows of information (trade secrets, exclusive suppliers, price indexes, strategic plans, etc.) and restrict communication in furtherance of an organization’s interests.