Semaphore

DISEMBEDDING FROM PSYCHO-URBAN CONTAINMENT

published in In the Shade of the Commons (Waag, 2006) and World-Information journal, for World-Information.Org's special IP CITY EDITION for the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis 2005 and WIO Bangalore 2005.

To create a common element above the three dimensions of urban life (work, housing, public and gathering spaces), the terms "traffic" and "communication" imposed themselves in the urbanistic generalities about movement. With the explosion of electronics, realising the science-fiction of yesterday, we are now in scenarios of the virtual city, the online city, the city of bits, the cybertown and other metaphors of disembodiment. But the real function of cities is still to organise the proper cohabitation of centres, non-centres and outlying areas, like an accumulation of topographic powers (factories and offices, flats and houses, stadiums, theatres, squares, streets and public buildings).

UNITARY URBANISM

A significant number of utopian architects in the second half of the 20th century (1) wanted to find fundamentally new models for the organisation of urban space. Many of them experimented in search of an alternative to the failures of centralised rationalism in old Europe, and to the disgusting fascist holism of control. This broad movement was partly a reaction, in the 1950’s, to post-World War reconstruction models that appeared unsatisfactory (2). The Situationist International avant-garde movement, created in 1957 by artists including Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, Constant and others, proposed to study cities with new techniques: Psychogeography and Unitary Urbanism. Psychogeography is the "the study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual". Unitary Urbanism is "the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques as means contributing to the construction of a unified milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behaviour" (3). "The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places — these phenomena all seem to be neglected.… People are quite aware that some neighbourhoods are gloomy and others pleasant. But they generally simply assume that elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor streets are depressing, and let it go at that. (4)"

In the decade of the 60’s that followed, the utopian and political dimensions of urbanism were also extensively analysed, not only by the Situationists, but also by Marxist researchers such as Henri Lefebvre or later by Manuel Castells (5). As the development of the "new towns" continued in America and Europe, with historical events such as the Watts riots in the USA, urbanism was interpreted by them as an ideology that "organises silence" in the emerging Information City. This analysis drove the Situationist International to abandon utopian architecture, in order to concentrate on semiotics and the distribution of information in what they called the Society of the Spectacle (6).

Nevertheless, psychogeography has been co-opted along with advocacy planning and participation by think-tanks on space management. Today’s companies can easily quote Guy Debord if it justifies their business orientations. Spatial management is inserted in temporality and in a permanent process of semantisation. What was described as "intense life" by the leftist romanticism of the 50’s and 60’s is now integrated in life-style management. The dream for the cyber-citizens is to escape their physical location and its embedded situations. This is well known by mobile phone companies that finance "locative" artists to develop prototypes that will invade the Flexible Personality market very soon (7). "Disembedding", decentralising, are the romantic escapology dreams of today’s individualist urban life. An illusion of freedom that goes hand in hand with social containment in the physical city.

 

ZONING, SOFTWARE, UTOPIA AND INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY

The way towns and cities are set up now - wide streets, strip malls, cul-de-sacs, segregated functions (industry over here, offices there, housing at a safe distance) - is dictated by rules and regulations. When you look out across a sprawling suburb, you are looking at an expression of the free market combined with the consequences of arrangements arrived at by local politicians and real-estate agents scheming together. These zoning laws and regulations are often deeply flawed, they have been created haphazardly, largely to suit developers and politicians, and they too often lead to dull, dead living conditions. A set of laws and regulations for the commons would surely result in neighbourhoods that suit people better.

Governments and local administrations have always been among the major "consumers" of architectural commissions. In this area the modern state, either as charitable patron or direct overseer of the job, does no more than continue a centuries-old tradition of public works. Since the 60's and 70's, organisations operating under public law have become avid clients of intellectual services commissioned from outside suppliers, whether these services involve studies, contractualised research or computer program development. Thus we have seen a growing complexity in the production-lines of authoring and service provision, with a generalisation of outsourcing, an increasingly large percentage of "imported" elements in every given product (most commonly through the "cut-and-paste" function of computer software tools), and the spread of multiauthor and multiprofessional production modes which formerly were limited to the audiovisual field (8). The question of software patents thus becomes equally crucial in the realm of public construction. While in certain countries computer programs are treated as "art works" under the definition of Artistic and Literary Intellectual Property (ALIP), there is a strong pressure to simply consider them as Industrial Property. That would entail demonstrating a possible industrial application or an actual use. Thus a de facto relation emerges between utopian artist-architects (whose creations can remain under ALIP, whereas constructed architecture often falls under Industrial Property) and utopian artist-programmers - and if the latter lose the artistic and literary possibility, they will also lose the chance to develop open systems (9).

 

CITIES OF FEAR

Electronics wields increasing influence over today’s urbanism. Everything is liable to create more profit in the cities of world commerce, as soon as the exchange speed has been increased. What is called Electronic Urbanism is only the surge of acceleration, the spreading foam of nodes and pipes in the telematic networks between connected people. But for State planners, the most important thing remains the ability to monitor circulation and stop it in the physical space.

Zoning the physical landscape has become a tool for governance to keep control of counter-powers and their potential disobedience. In modern cities, increasingly fragmented into "export zones", special "safety zones", "no-go areas", it becomes almost impossible to structure an oppositional assault. Zoning can be contested but is usually approved by the citizens, in the name of their sovereign individual security.
Control over the physical landscape strives to be very strong, but can still be quite weak in its effects on the circulation patterns of everyday life. Only a totalitarian governance could imagine full control over the movements of individuals. On the global level, weakness also appears at the tensegrity nodes, under the strain of geo-economic conflicts. To illustrate this, we just need to think of today’s drama of global terrorism.

 

 

PSYCHO-HISTORY

If the Situationist utopia somehow failed, the psycho-history of locations is still a toolkit for social movements. Some places have a strong history. In Paris, demonstrations can easily shift to confrontation with the police when they pass by the Latin Quarter, Bastille and Charonne, as opposed to Invalides or Montparnasse. Past events psychologically influence a crowd, which can become uncontrollable. This is integrated in the tactics of unions when they organise demonstrations. Go here when you want to heat up the conflict, or there when you want to cool down and negotiate.

Another strong and long familiar model for bringing people together is the re-appropriation of architecture; not developing utopian models, but reclaiming old buildings or constructions, because of democratic necessity. This has been well known since the improvised gathering of the republicans in the royal building of the "Jeu de Paume" handball court, just a few days before the French Revolution. In our times, squats and temporary occupations are still an effective tactic for people to gather when they have no other possibilities: airports runways for teknivals, medieval fortresses in strategic areas (10), occupation of universities or train stations during social movements (11), obsolete spying stations or military infrastructures of former empires (12), etc. Anything that permits a group to gather and talk.

But somehow, this was much stronger in the mid-90’s. Before the rise of the world wide web and mobile phones. In ten years, the entire city has been invaded by information technologies: surveillance cameras, biometrics, wireless networks, mobile phones, automatic doors, identification cards or numbers for transports and buildings, etc. If it was still possible for social movements to occupy train stations ten years ago, it would be difficult now, because of mass terrorism. It was also the period of the illegal raves, sound systems were invading buildings all over European cities, it is now forbidden or controlled. The paradox is that people have more tools to communicate but live in a more controlled physical space. Is it possible that the Information decade simultaneously generated a Mass Terrorism decade? 9/11's unprecedented scale gives size to the enemy, but United Nations statistics show – although there is no valid definition of terror – that terrorist acts worldwide have been on the decline and not on the rise for a decade, despite all the media and political shuffling (the Irish Republican Army launched rockets at number 10 Downing Street in the 80's). The point is probably that the economy of fear is on the rise: mediated angst, media terrorism.

 

(1) With creators like Buckminster Fuller, Archigram, Yona Friedman, Paolo Soleri or Constant.
(2) To learn more about this, read " Spharen III" by Peter Sloterdijk.
(3) "Définitions", Internationale Situationniste 1, 1958.
(4) Guy Debord, "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography", "Les Lèvres Nues", 1956.
(5) From Henri Lefebvre in that period, read for instance "The Production of Space" and from Manuel Castells, "The Urban Question."
(6) " The Society of Spectacle ", Guy-Ernest Debord, 1967
(7) "The Flexible Personality", Brian Holmes, in "Hieroglyphs of the Future", 2002.
(8) " Marchés Publics et droits de la Propriété Intellectuelle ", Groupement Français de l’Industrie de l’Information, 2003.
(9) On today’s convergence between utopian architects and utopian programmers, see the Makrolab project : http://makrolab.ljudmila.org
(10) A good example is Fadaiat event in the Castle of Guzman El Bueno in Tarifa, the southern town of Spain, with an affirmed objective to develop a counter-surveillance observatory of the Gibraltar Straits between Africa and Fortress Europa (http://www.fadaiat.net).
(11) As in Paris in December 1995.
(12) Good examples are in Latvia with the ex-tsarist and ex-Soviet facilities of Karosta, or the former Cold War spy dish " Little Star ".

A TRANSPARENT WORLD

Text for Transmediale catalogue 2008, "Conspire !"

Today, the narrative that props up the thesis of the Internet as utopian ideology - as a form of contemporary utopia - is a fantasy shared by both socialists and liberals alike. The story includes the creation of a huge public space, in which we would all be transparent to each other, a space that would abolish mutual violence, a world that - in its ideal - would be open to the sharing of knowledge in a transparent manner and for the good all (1).

Throughout recent history, utopias have been obsessed with the idea of transparency: as observed by Dostoyevsky when he writes of the "crystal palace" in “Notes from Underground » in 1864 (2). To refuse the crystal palace is for Dostoyevsky an expression of radical distrust towards utopias and an affirmation of the necessity to commit oneself to warding off the effects of the crystal city on the imagination of the modern man, an attack on a "social form that manufactures emptiness from freedom." The famous crystal palace quoted by Dostoevsky is of course the Crystal Palace built in London in 1862 on the occasion of the World Fair. For Peter Sloterdijk, Dostoevsky is the first to have understood and felt this monument as an anticipation of the malls, domes, super-domes and other temples of our market economy that practice the "Stripping bare of it's inhabitants psyche"(3).

The widespread staging of transparency (on humans, objects, structures, animals…) is indeed a major contemporary ideology. In computing, just as the mainframe of the 1970's cedes its place to the personal computer in the 1980's and 90's, the new revolution has arrived; ambient computing. In thirty years, we went from a computer shared by many people to thousands of small computers per person. Here, the transparent society is characterized by creating an unusual relationship between the visible and invisible (4). Thus, technology tends to become invisible, embedded in everyday objects and in the urban fabric, causing (at the same time) permanent visibility. Microcontrollers and sensors invade clothing, furniture, apartments, buildings and the city as a whole and each one of us is likely to be observed, followed, and located. This visibility extends also into the past, thanks to the countless databases archiving traces of ourselves using invisible technologies that can collect and report. With this permanent memory of the past, it becomes possible to identify patterns, identify recurring structures: in a word to predict the future.

Pushed to its extreme, the transparent society would lead to the perfect economy since the behavior of each economic agent is traced so perfectly that prices could adapt in real time. The introduction of advertising and communication into the sphere of commerce profoundly transforms human activities: spontaneity, (cost) free, generosity and altruism replaces the more calculating tactics underlined by 'career moves' or marketing strategies. The conquest of hearts and minds is accompanied by the conquest of the market share, and it’s all made a little easier, since the industrial consortiums produce the media itself. The society of the spectacle masks the violence of our social relationships whilst alienating human action. The obliteration of the distinction between fantasy and reality abolishes any guides that could be used to construct reality with any certainty. Confusion between knowledge and information is deliberately maintained and renders uncertain the organisation of knowledge. Concepts drown under hazardous metaphors. Ultimately, this "perfect" society drives us to a psychological limit where the abundance of information available would take precedence over intuition and introspection. It inevitably leads to a democratic absolutism in the form of permanent control by all over all.

At the same time, there is an obsession with explaining the dark side of humanity: a refusal of secrecy, the need for transparency, a determination to reveal the unsaid rules, to detect the hidden. In today’s climate of control, blind spots and no-go zones are multiplying just as others are dazzled by overexposure. Prisoners are no longer hidden behind the walls of prisons but become visible in the city wearing their electronic bracelets. At the same time new types of mobile and invisible prisons (illegal and secret) withdraw those suspected of terrorism from the visible space. Biomedical laboratories practice sometimes dangerous and secret experiments in vitro, just next door without us knowing, whilst on the other hand, in vivo, scale one to one experiments are conducted in  "transparency"(5). The ideological vacuum of pure communication fragments society into countless autonomous individuals, rational, and interactive, yet all conspiratous office staff (6). The utopia of communication keeps alive an illusion of being able to understand the hidden strategies, but this appears in the end as symptomatic, a "valeur post-traumatique", a “post-trauma value”. And it is precisely because the world is arcane and because people behave irrationally that the theme of transparency has experienced success.

How can we live in such a society? How can one build an identity? What forms of resistance could counter the Permanent Observer of Everyone by Everyone? Today, resistance seems pointless and a large portion of the population, on the contrary, chooses to claim transparency as an established way of life (7). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of all modern struggles against the artificialisation of society and the oppression of the citizen, dreamed of establishing transparency as a virtue.  In the Confessions (8), the method he applied was to promise to tell the truth, to unmask himself, to become transparent.

Fortunately perhaps, new ways of hiding appear, new tactics of concealment emerge to counterbalance the dictatorship of widespread panoptican! (9) But for the moment, it must be said that communications transparency can only fully function in the context of a highly individualistic, liberal society. The media play an ambiguous role: both acting as transparent vectors of free information, and contributing - by subjecting themselves to constraints - to economic and political interests. Where too many private interests are at stake, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to realize the ideal of a rational, free, unbiased information. The problem simply grows when information itself becomes a commodity. From copying software to counterfeiting brands, through to industrial spying, "informational crimes" are on the rise, showing us that, global it may be, but the dream village has grown up with many pirates and few tycoons. Ultimately, the "socialist" side of the transparent utopia could only truly emerge after the complete abandonment of the feudal system controlled by Intellectual Property “ancien regimes”.

Ewen Chardronnet
Translated by Helen Evans

1. This utopia is apparent in the project of Marko Peljhan, Transparent World LADSAT, a nano-satellite to collect terrestrial image data, which will be made available to all by the Russian NGO, Transparent World. The ITASC (Interpolar Trans-National Art Science Constellation) positions his utopia at the convergence of digital formats and the sharing of terrestrial environmental data, without restrictive conditions and for the common good.
http://transparentworld.ru/
http://www.i-tasc.org
2. « Les Carnets du sous-sol », Fedor Dostoïevski, Actes Sud (1992)
« Le Palais de Cristal », Peter Sloterdijk, Maren Sell Editeurs (2006)
4. Hassan Kahn explores this situation in “The Hidden Location”,  when urban systems affect the individual emotionally and affectively.
5.  This situation is revealed by  Bureau d'études in their project "End of Secrecy", parallel to The Laboratory Planet journal.
6. That's what Matt O'Dell's “New Worship” points by the evocation of individuals and groups who attempt to forge their own net-belief systems.
7.  The choices available are often not so open, for example, when assigning a political profile to a "Face book" identity, the limits are bound by the politics of mainstream America: five possible choices "conservative", "liberal", "democrat", "libertarian" or a meager "other". Looking for an alternative?
http://myownspace.fr
8. « Les Confessions », Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Folio Gallimard
9. And so of the contemporary “virtualism” of nationalisms that breaks anyway any opportunities for transparency : with YKON ironic micronations summit and also Julieta Aranda's "Standing Room" sound sculpture that play together the national hymns of the 191 nations of UN.

DISSEMINATION AND THE BECOMING-WORLD OF THE LABORATORY

Text for Mutamorphosis Conference and catalogue, Prague, November 2007.
http://mutamorphosis.org

http://mutamorphosis.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/dissemination-and-the-becoming-world-of-the-laboratory/

Since the Second World War, the world has been progressively transformed into a full scale laboratory. The model of a "laboratory world" has been added to the model of a "factory world". This developing laboratory-world promotes the manipulation of the living according to the doctrine of “acceptable risk”. The radicalisation of competition and the “short-falls” in planned investments result in tests in "real-life conditions": pharmaceutical researchers carry out experiments on entire populations in Africa and elsewhere; the dissemination of Genetically Modified Organisms is encouraged by all possible means, before the advent of Atomically Modified Organisms; wireless technologies marketed without prior public studies turn their users into guinea-pigs in large-scale experiments in real time ; the development of convergent technologies (bio-, nano-, cogno-, info-, robo-, sociotech) as the magic circle in which biological and mechanical species emerge from the laboratory and from new periodic tables.
The laboratory-world test in scale 1 and disseminate all kind of new technologies, hidden behing the dubious laws of « acceptable risks », but in the meantime extend more and more the society of control and security because of the potentiality of dual-usage of those same technologies. How to test in « real conditions » pharmaceutical researches and GMOs, rfid tags, nanotechnologies, without disseminating hazardous results ? What are the deception methods to do such researches without alarming the public opinion ? How to use such technologies on large markets without losing control on their dissemination ?
The apocalyptic scenarios prophesising the end of our over-populated world justify the demiurgic experimentation of a world that has become a laboratory. The rational organisation of this laboratory-world thus becomes an irrational extropian organisation threatening those who have created it. What can be done with the immense, autonomous machine that has now taken on a momentum of its own? Can we redirect the fate and the orientation of a laboratory whose creation none of us, or so few, has agreed to? Can we take leave of a future traced by others? In other words, can we still act freely? Neither extropians, nor primitivists, few contemporary tactical media artists question today the antagonist position of the so-called « agent of dissemination ». We will discuss here some of their driving philosophies, strategies and positions.

We know since the Cold War that "for the respect and balance of democracy", the military have to convert certain technologies for civilian use (like the military precision of the GPS given to civilian use in the nineties). But the difficulty for the states then is more in the politics of control of the exportation of sensible goods and technologies. It's a big problem to actually know the use, civilian or military, of many of those items. It is then delicate to stop the dissemination of those technologies because they have this potential « dual-use ».
From 1985 onwards, the “Australia Group” has imposed a regime of security checks, attempting to keep watch on their exports of chemical and biological products as well as their factories and equipment which produce dual-use products, to ensure that they did not contribute to the proliferation of chemical and biological arms (CBA). By that time, it had been proved that chemical arms had been used in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq had notably obtained a large amount of the material for its chemical weapon programme from the international chemical industry.
In 1995, the Sarin gas bomb in the Tokyo metro showed the obsolete nature of the cold war proliferation regulations. It was at the same moment as the signature of the « Wassenaar Agreement », the successor of the Cold War CoCom. (Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls). The objective of the new agreement was to associate national controls for the exportation of conventional arms and technologies and goods of dual usage in order to contribute to the reinforcement of security and regional and international stability. The main instrument of the “Wassenaar Agreement” was a list of products or substances as well as directives concerning their exportation to non-member countries. But since the range of goods and technologies of so called dual-use has revealed itself to be too large, it has therefore been restricted to goods which are sensitive to particular political, strategic and security purposes: components, production or test equipment, software and know how, used or that could contribute to the development, production, manipulation, functioning, maintenance, storage, detection, identification or dissemination of chemical, biological, nuclear or other nuclear explosives, or the development, production, maintenance or storage of missiles which can be used as vectors for such arms.  In principal, this definition doesn’t include goods and technologies from the ‘public domain’, fundamental research, the provision of services or the movement of people. But the Abdul Qader Khan affair, the Pakistani agent accused to have disseminated the technology of the nuclear bomb (to North Korea, Lybia or Iran), encouraged the nation states that control access to such armaments to look for new security guarantees to close the loopholes.

Since 9/11 and under the Patriot Act, the US government, for example, are trying to exert greater control over this spin-off, as Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble have unfortunately learnt first hand. For those who do not know the story, one night in 2004, professor and artist Steve Kurtz member of the Critical Art Ensemble lost his wife by natural death. In the morning he called for assistance and when the rescue team arrived at his home, they found the body but also all his biological equipments, bacterial cultures and all the materials denouncing the patenting of the biosphere and the transgenic contamination of food products by corporations. They immediately decided to call the bio-terrorism FBI office and put the house area in quarantine. Kurtz was endited by the US government as a bio-terrorist, and is still now threatened with a twenty year prison sentence for having shipped very simple biological samples for so-called "non-peaceful purposes". Because they were used for contestational biology purposes, CAE are now seen as « agents of dissemination ». An art collective is put on a strange list of « NGOs of dissemination » that goes from the Aum sect to Al Quaida.

In their last book (CAE, 2007), “The Marching Plague”, CAE states (p.37) :
“Based on experience, as opposed to nightmare scenarios dreamed up by those who desire a fully militarized state, germ warfare is a waste, a burning excess that in the end does little more than terrorize a nation’s own citizenry. Is it surprising that even the U.S. declared “madman” Saddam Hussein did not use biological weapons (if indeed he had them) during either of the Gulf Wars? Obviously not. For nations and other territorialized groups, biological weapons are more of a burden and a sign of threat that is easily erased. "

Lynn Hershman Leeson has recently directed « Strange Culture », a documentary film on the case (Leeson, 2007).

By a quick look to standard dictionaries we can read that « dissemination » comes from latin word « disseminatio », or from the verb dis- seminare, to sow (from semen, semin-, seed; see  se- in Indo-European roots). We can also note that the english word seems to come from the french word « dissémination », a word coined in the 17 century. The Académie Française dictionary considere that the word does not really apply to information and recommands the use of « dissémination » for things that are spread around without being able to control them, the academia use the examples of rural habitats, army troops, nuclear weapons, seeds, germs, viruses or cancer cells. But we generally get 2 meanings :
1. To scatter widely, as in sowing seed.
2. To spread abroad; promulgate: disseminate information.
Jacques Derrida, in his book « Dissemination » published in 1972, writes that the word dissemination implies a link between the wasteful dispersal of semantic meaning, and semen. Dissemination 'is' a scattering of semen, seeds, but also semes, semantic features. We are playing on the fortuitous resemblance ... of seme and semen. There is no communication of meaning between them. And yet, by this floating, purely exterior collusion, accident produces a kind of semantic mirage. Dissemination refers then to a fertile dispersal of meanings, but also to the dissipation or the loss of meaning.

Dissemination is really a key to our times and the global politics in the laboratory-world becomes really a « virtualism » when it manifests itself in the mass medias as a strange trivial pursuit of deterence, deception and loss of meaning. To illustrate how media disseminations deal with biological dissemination we can examine the methodology of the English firm « Strategic Communications Laboratories » specialized in « operations of influences » of « psychological warfare » that went « mainstream » at the London 2005 Defence Systems & Equipment International Exhibition. Main attraction was a counterpart on scale 1 of one of its « ops center », presenting simulations going from the natural disasters, chemical catastrophes to the coups d'etat. What thus leads the firm to desinform the public for the account of any State, to deliberately supporting the dissemination of false information, handling the public and the history, for dubious « assumptions » on « acceptable risks ».
To illustrate their offer, the SCL develloped in the exhibition an interesting example of a possible scenario :
Let’s imagine that over the past 24 hours, seven people have checked into London hospitals with telltale symptoms. Rashes, vomiting, high temperature, and cramps: the classic signs of smallpox. Once thought wiped out, the disease is back and threatening a pandemic of epic proportions. The government faces a dilemma: It needs people to stay home, but if the news breaks, mass panic might ensue as people flee the city, carrying the virus with them.
What the shadowy media firm propose is to step in to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception. Rather than alert the public to the smallpox threat, the company sets up a high-tech "ops center" to convince the public that an accident at a chemical plant threatens London. As the fictitious toxic cloud approaches the city, TV news outlets are provided graphic visuals charting the path of the invisible toxins. Londoners stay indoors, glued to the telly, convinced that even a short walk into the streets could be fatal. While Londoners fret over fictitious toxins, the government works to contain the smallpox outbreak. The final result, according to SCL's calculations, is that only thousands perish, rather than the 10 million originally projected.
The company, which describes itself as the first private-sector provider of psychological operations (or « psyops »), has been around since 1993. But its previous work was limited to civil operations, and it now wants to expand to military customers. "If your definition of propaganda is framing communications to do something that's going to save lives, that's fine," says Mark Broughton, SCL's public affairs director. "That's not a word I would use for that." (Weinberger, 2005).

Propaganda dissemination has become as well the expertise of the art and activist collective « The Yes Men », known for their « identity corrections » actions at conferences, television or on the street. They « impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else ». Despite the fact that lot of people know them nowadays - there has even been a movie in cinemas – their actions are still not immediately demasked. And since this movie was released, they’ve engaged a series of action against Dow Chemical including one invasion in 2004 at BBC World as a false Dow chemical and Union Carbide representative that was declaring that the public company was taking full responsability for Bhopal (India) catastrophy. Later on, at a London banking conference to which they had accidentally been invited because of their satirical website, "Dow representative" "Erastus Hamm" unveiled "Acceptable Risk," a Dow industry standard for determining how many deaths are acceptable when achieving large profits. The bankers enthusiastically applauded the lecture, which described several industrial crimes, including IBM's sale of technology to the Nazis for use in identifying Jews, as "golden skeletons" - i.e. skeletons in the closet, but lucrative and therefore acceptable ones. Several of the bankers in attendance then signed up for licenses for the "Acceptable Risk Calculator" and even posed with Acceptable Risk mascot "Gilda, the golden skeleton in the closet," for photos (Figure-3). The exercise was intended to illustrate the absurdity of depending on "Corporate Social Responsibility" (CSR) to set limits to corporate behavior. If corporations were completely free to behave as the market demands - the logical extreme of CSR - then industrial catastrophes of huge magnitude, such as Bhopal, would not necessarily be disadvised.

To illustrate again the dual-use of the word « dissemination », just think of a farmer who shares his experience with other farmers, let’s say about a certain seeding, weeding or tilling practice, for instance, he engages in a dual dissemination question. So when we hear in mass media about dissemination of Genetically Modified Organisms, we undestrand that some of them can really be destabilised. 10 years ago in France, the Farmers Confederation took quickly the decision to adopt a strategy of destructions of fields, that could give them the ability to devellop conditions of big media campaigns behind a leader, José Bové. But after some years of actions and several periods in prison, the question is still not solved and the debate in the organisation turned about the ambiguous position of José Bové who became a big media character in France who was even lately competing for the presidential elections. Not so much cooperative, René Riesel, the second person to be enprisoned in this affair, has never reached the statut of Bové in the media. René Riesel used to be part of the artistic and activist avant-garde Situationist International in the late sixties. He moved then to a peasant life in the south of France. In the nineties he founded with José Bové the French Farmers' Confederation, and as Bové was put in jail several times for illegal destruction of GMO's fields. But, because of the media career of Bové and the "citizen" positions adopted consequently by the Confederation, Riesel left the organisation.
Riesel, as Bové, was for luddite direct action. Certain technologies hurt "the Commonality" (as they used to say in the early 19th century). The Luddites took their sledgehammers to machinery that they felt harmed to the common good. But Riesel refers also to Theodore Kazinski, the Unabomber who was sending postal bombs to deforestation industrials in the 90s and who forced a major newspaper to publish his pamphlet « the industrial society and its future ». For Riesel, the dominant phenomenon of the times is "the continuing artificialization of life, at work now for a century", a process in which science and the economy, each supporting the other, have invaded the entire social spectrum. The Industrial Society prevents other types of knowledge and social relations from finding expression, creating a technological system that has become autonomous to the detriment of life and liberty. This domination leads as much to the ruin of nature as it does to the alienation of human beings. For Riesel, the world where we live is furiously experimental. With the acceleration of the Market competition and the so-called "natural limits of the planet", new experimental technologies have now to be tested in "real conditions". Being ironic of how the arts help the R&D, he says "It's a world where everybody can be artist or creative, a world full of situationnists ideas that became crazy".  (Riesel, 2003)
After several sojourns in Prison, José Bové and its followers have embraced a new and less violent strategy, pointing even more clearly the dissemination in question. In july 2007, 500 anti-GMO activists organised an operation of « pollination » of a GMO corn field, meaning that they spread some pollen of traditionnal corn close to a GMO corn field, making then the GMO seeds unusable. By this action, they limitate their responsability, having found a « legal » strategy where they don't need to enter the field but just shake corn near it, giving the dissemination role to the wind and the insects. The company responsible for the field, Limagrain, is nevertheless pursuing the activits for this new form of « sabotage » (AFP, 2007). If shaking corn is sabotage, then we will have difficuties soon to blow flowers in the air...

Crop Circle by Greenpeace and Circlemakers.org

The arrival of convergent technologies or NBIC (Nano, Bio, Info, Cogno-technologies) into the military arsenal, opens new fields of operation for military supremacy and leaves little doubt as to the emergence of new forms of international destabilisation (Nordmann, 2004). The potential of NBIC is to create an unprecedented proficiency in surveillance whilst deliberately violating private life, to reinforce the capability of « biological » soldiers and to develop autonomous killing machines, and to remotely manipulate the cognitive activity of individuals. Already, one has a premonition of even more dangerous applications: nanoparticles could be disguised as substances pertaining to be medicines and cross the blood-brain barrier with disabling agents; technologies developed for individual treatment could be used for making chemical or biological arms that are selective (for example, according to genetic code); nano-composites open the way to firearms made entirely from plastic, undetectable, probably causing an intensification of security checks for material movement and knowledge dissemination; progress made in robotics and the electronic control of animals may lead to the remote manipulation of soldiers bodies. It could be, that the development of dual-use convergent technologies give rise to export regulations entirely based on digitisation, cryptography and universal traceability (of knowledge, resources and individuals) to control the technology at source of the process of manufacture. This sounds like bad news for the Open Source movement.

The vain attempts to control dissemination, uncontrollable by definition, add even more chaos to the immaterial war of today. A war full of contradictions where borders between civil and military are more and more hazy. A war where leading laboratory states impose hard Intellectual Property policies and strict controls of dual-use technologies, and where developing countries and civil society movements reclaim the shift towards a society of open knowledge and creative sharing, a society of dissemination of knowledges.

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http://www.20minutes.fr/article/172420/France-Nouvelle-action-de-Jose-Bove-et-de-militants-anti-OGM.php
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