Autonomy
Technopolis
Welcome to the Machine
“The machine is all around us, omnipresent and omniscient. It’s the camera on the street corner, the chip in your debit card and the number allotted to your child at birth. The machine is without and within.
It’s in the way we have been trained and domesticated since birth to fit into a mechanical world dictated by capital and the tick, tick, tick of its clock.”
– From a Technopolis Flyer.
In a squatted nursery school in Leeds in the North of England, the eviction of the previous tenants the result of a frenzy of gentrification in the city, around 50 people gathered for a weekend in June 2005 to discuss the latest wave of enclosure by capital – new technologies of control. Despite criticisms that the gathering was (merely) an ‘academic conference for anarcho-primitivists’, it was attended by a very diverse range of people – from researchers at the Etc Group, to europunks on their way to the G8 Summit in Gleneagles.
The diverse mix elucidated both (unexpected) convergences and (more predictable) tensions in perspective, worldview, desired outcomes, and a critique not only of society and invasive and encroaching technologies but also of the role of activism in confronting these things.
Technopolis came out of a previous gathering in Oxford in February and a collective in Leeds, previously involved in the 6 month squatted project Maelstrom (which had also concentrated on exploring the theme of technology and repression), agreed to take it on.
In some ways it began to seem like a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.
We quickly wondered why we had taken it on – out of duty to an activist movement whose values and methods we are constantly questioning? Out of a desire to find ways of physically impacting these structures of control bearing in mind personal histories of anti-roads protests, summit-hopping, anti-GM actions, squatting and so on? Because we wanted the time and space to have discussions with people outside our immediate, daily scene about the implication of these technologies to our lives? Because we wanted to discuss the place of these technologies in our understanding of the state we live in and in our struggle?
Some of us feel quite strongly that in an activist scene characterized by a fetishising of the Other’s struggles (most predominantly those of the global south) that looking at technologies - a struggle very relevant here and one exemplified, historically, by Luddism - is vital to our understanding of how struggles change through the trajectory of capitalism and how we understand our own position in the global capitalist system.
In important ways, the repressive apparatus of the West is experienced differently here than it is ‘over there’ and our methods of resistance must be formed and expressed accordingly. Some of us also felt frustrated by ‘stock’ reactions and wondered if a gathering like this might produce some new ideas.
Aware that some people wanted discussion and that others wanted more concrete outcomes, we tried to create a mix of information and discursive workshops. Also we wanted to raise the question of how much research you really need to do. Isn’t it just a little diversionary? We can tell you right now how technology affects us – how much do you need to understand how a radio frequency works to know that you don’t want an RFID chip sewn into your hoodie tracking you everywhere you go?
With this in mind, the weekend included a discussion on nanotechnology, a discussion on surveillance technologies, a general discussion on critiques of technology, a discussion on architectures of control (which included a walk around Leeds city centre), a discussion on technology, capital, and class, a history of the Luddites (Leeds having been arguably the most militant third of the ‘Luddite triangle’) a showing of Das Net (a German film about the cybernetics movement, the Unabomber and the era that created them both), and a talk on sonic weapons (which included a practical session!) amongst other things.
Unfortunately, we tended to skirt around the idea of new actions that could be taken, nor was the question really explored as to why we should find new responses if the old responses are, in fact, working ‘perfectly well’ (despite the fact that most people present, including us, seemed to be of the opinion that they are not).
There is also the issue of security at these gatherings of course. Only so much can be discussed amongst strangers and acquaintances. The details must lie within the affinity group. The artifice of the formalized discussion also constrains discussion and the ability to break out of certain ways of thinking, particularly if people are hostile to either ‘non-productive’ discussion or to outcome-focused discussion. Discussion didn’t really extend outside of the workshops as we had hoped – over dinner in the garden, for example – indicating a separation of work and leisure.
One of the most revealing comments about Technopolis was made by a woman from Mexico who observed that our conversation was extremely abstract and in particular abstracted from our daily lives. It was different where she came from. Of course, it is no longer our land that is being enclosed; it is no longer possible to stand up to a concrete force to protect a concrete thing. It is our minds, it is our genes, it is our atoms, it is our psychology, it is our knowledge of who is watching us and why or our lack of it. Our ways of talking, thinking and relating reflect the technologies we have to live with.
It is difficult for us to assess the success of technopolis, as we never organized it with concrete aims and objectives in mind. We can say, however, that some people went away inspired, some people went away frustrated, and that the organising collective went away feeling, well, a bit confused really.
www.eco-action.org/technopolis
Selected Reading List:
Progress & Nuclear Power: The Destruction of the Continent and its Peoples - by Fredy Perlman
The Cybernet of Domination - by Feral Faun
Industrial Domestication: Industry as the Origins of Modern Domination - from Fifth Estate
The Tiniest Monstrosities: Nanotechnology and Social Control - from Willful Disobedience
Surveillance and Domestication - by John Connor
Industrialism Must Go! - by Derrick Jensen
Technology: Tool, Toy or Tyrant? - by John Zerzan
Against Technology - a talk by John Zerzan April 23, 1997.