8 STEPS TO KEEPING AHEAD IN THE INFORMATION WAR!!

The Internet is well past its best and with the increase of traffic on it, technicians are struggling to keep it from falling on its knees. It only takes one false move to bring it all down. Witness that little e-mail incident last month when one mistake on one computer crashed half the internet. All this ‘indestructable’ and ‘self re-routing’ hype is bollocks. In the late nineties, all we’re left with is an increasingly controlled medium taking on the form of an exclusive pay-per-view channel, the World Wide Web. The media moguls are setting about ensuring that what we are left with is a one way ‘interactive’ (we watch their programmes, they watch us watching) home info-tainment channel where some programmer decides what buttons we can click on and some government decides what information we have access to. Yeah! Interactive my arse...

The information war is being fought by a teeming underground of small groups whot have been able to utilise emerging technologies, waiting for the fall in price and the secondhand markets to develop to communicate and network with each other.The meagre photocopier kickstarted the fanzine and pamphlet movement which, through the ever-worsening mail system, mobilised teenagers, activists and diy freaks everywhere. As digital technologies such as PCs and modems gradually fall in price, grass roots activists, students, teenagers and anyone with enough resourcefulness, ideas and money (the same requirements needed for small press and self publishing) can network with each other both globally, rapidly and easily, pooling their knowledge and resources in such quantities that they can use digital against the state better than any previous generations of hardware have allowed. This brings up one good point about technologies like the web: it offers instant access to archived material on your chosen subject, usually with links for related material that lies only seconds away. A few pounds spent down your local cybercafe / library on a computer can be an important introduction to new pastimes.

The sluggish, bureaucratic and dull system maintained by the state means that citizens can learn to utilise technology much faster than the enemy. In this way, digital networking has well and truly helped put the BOOM! into the dance scene, which is based around expanding networks of communication. Dance culture grew from home use of technology, whereby common people seized the medium for their own ends. It was the younger population who knew how to use it and what to do with it. Like rock and roll in the fifties, or punk in the late seventies, the older population didn’t understand, they felt uneasy and insecure.

When the UK government tried to stop people partying with restrictions on land use, travelling to raves, sound systems, etc, the youth fought back harder than ever, and pooled resources with all kinds of groups who were affected by the Criminal Justice Act: travellers, hunt sabs, protesters, grannies, the lot. Such a well organised movement was the biggest in decades, and even though the bill succeeded, it’s no secret we’re still a major thorn in their side and have cost them billions.

Certain clauses in the CJA outlawed sections of our society and in a similar way the American clipper chip proposals would have effectively outlawed fringe groups who rely on online secrecy, sending messages in ‘sealed’ electronic envelopes. The NSA, CIA and FBI ganged up to ensure that they had a key to snoop on everybody’s email by inserting the clipper chip in all US manufactured computer hardware, in the ‘fight against terrorism’. The bill failed at first, but they eventually hitched it through on the back of the internal US terrorism case. Of course, they know all too well that terrorists and criminals would just go and buy non-US hardware, which brings their whole reasoning into question. Ironically these very methods of secrecy, or encryption, have been plundered by the corporate world to enable financial transactions to be legally carried out online, while the inventor of the ‘electronic envelope’ awaits trial in America on some kind of ‘anti-constitutional’ charge. Yeah, right.....

The way people have reacted against these issues using digital networking, fanzine/pamphlet distribution and telephone information lines are what keeps the momentum in this ongoing ‘revolution’ swinging. Communication means strength. When a consignment of high speed modems mysteriously turned up on Czeckoslovakian campuses at a time when small scale uprisings were dotted around the country, student activists were able to distribute manifestos and up to the minute information all over the country, when the police didn’t even know what a modem looked like, let alone were able to snoop on one. Being one step ahead changed their country’s history, and communication was the key.

As Ed from Black Dog put it in a Wire Magazine interview:

"computers definitely don’t have intelligence; they communicate with maths, which is a really pure form of communication that doesn’t have personality or ego. So in a way that’s a reflection of the human soul: pure communication. That’s what you aim for. So maybe they have what we ourselves most want."