On The Electronic Disturbance Theater

The Critical Art Ensemble is a group of five network activists/artists working together to advance the theory and implementation of Electronic Civil Disobedience. One of their publications "The Electronic Disturbance Theater" which is available online with instructions to freely pirate and quote, just let them know you are doing it -yeah right, I wouldn't feel very much like a pirate now would I?

It is a great read and I plan to blog all 142 pages ;) -it is that good. However as blogs are not supposed to be all that long I will probably tackle this in chunks and do this in multiple parts. I might even turn the blogosphere upside down (literally) by publishing these in CHRONOLOGICAL order. Here goes...

On the Virtual Condition (chapter 1): Wake up people, the world is no longer analog. Our culture's grand quest for world domination and power through technology have reduced its people to data. More so everyday, everything we do and everywhere we go we are leaving a trail of data like a snail leaves a trail of slime. Bad analogy I will edit later. Case in point, I am leaving a data trail right now, as soon as I hit publish. Even if I delete this post at a later day there is a chance someone made a copy to read later, or a robot crawler found it and added it to a permenent archive. I went to a silicon-flatirons conference on how "old" media is transitioning/dealing with new media and one of the speakers speculated that some day we would read a presidential candidate's blog from when s/he was a teenager. Wow, I said a lot of stupid shit when I was a teenager. I say a lot of stupid shit now. But I am typing it anyway.

I like the idea that there has always been a "virtual" -it was just called mysticism, abstract analytical thinking, and romantic fantasy. We are living in exciting new time, our imaginations have now taken form through technological manifestations and our virtual is now real... or at least visual which is at least 20% real. No matter how bad this bullshit seems to get, we have to have some sense of pride and awe that we are alive to experience this pivotal era in our sorted history of humankind. Bow down, bend over, get out of the way, or turn off the machine, it's your choice.