@H+ :: Anarcho-Transhumanism

NEFAC recently (re)published a refreshing look at the ecological problem from a libertarian communist perspective. Though this is only a framework, and doesn’t take into account the accelerating pace of technological change, it does correctly pinpoint the solution as dismantling capitalism and establishing new models of production, distribution, and energy rather than opposing (the misuse of) technology.

* Open Source 3D Printer Copies Itself

The RepRap (Replicating Rapid-prototyper) printer can replicate and update itself. It can print its own parts, including updates

* Science 2.0 — Is Open Access Science the Future?

A small but growing number of researchers (and not just the younger ones) have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open tools of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement—yet—their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based “Science 2.0” is not only more collegial than traditional science but considerably more productive.

* Liberate and Disseminate

So, I’ve taken it upon myself to start an organisation called MLOP, the “Movement for the Liberation of Old Papers”. What I do is hack into restricted websites, download the documents I’m interested in, and then use my favourite open-source paint program to remove the copyright statements from each page. Next I assemble the pages into one single pdf file and upload it to the Internet Archive, where it will become universally available to both researchers and citizens.

* DIY Weapons

We can expect to see these weapons become dominant (in use) in the next decade as they branch out into new areas and begin to take advantage of newly emerging capabilities. For example: personal fabrication that can churn out rockets/UAVs with tight form factors and customized/integrated flight systems — or — bioengineered pathogens that use commonly available materials, university sequencing/design software, widely available skills, and labs on a chip. The only limiting factor are the imaginations of the world’s guerrilla entrepreneurs. In combination with systems disruption and increases in lethality, the sky’s the limit.

NOTE: In contrast, the big defense contractors will find themselves focused increasingly on developing anti-weapons to counter innovations in the DIY space. Not sure they will be flexible enough to pull it off.

See also: Tinkering Networks and DIY Rockets.

* Hackers Publish German Interior Minister’s Fingerprint

To demonstrate why using fingerprints to secure passports is a bad idea, the German hacker group Chaos Computer Club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s interior minister.

* How to Fake Fingerprints

Instructions from the Chaos Computer Club.

* Reward Offered for UK Minister and Home Secretary’s Fingerprints

Privacy International and the UK’s NO2ID are offering a reward for the first person to collect and submit the UK Prime Minister’s and Home Secretary’s fingerprints. Plus you can download and print your own Wanted Poster!

* The Myth of the Transparent Society

This article by Bruce Schneier does a good job of expressing one of the critiques I’ve held regarding calls for a transparent society or participatory panopticon:

Explained in books like David Brin’s The Transparent Society, the argument goes something like this: In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, you’ll know all about me, but I will also know all about you. The government will be watching us, but we’ll also be watching the government. This is different than before, but it’s not automatically worse. And because I know your secrets, you can’t use my secrets as a weapon against me… Except it doesn’t work, because it ignores the crucial dissimilarity of power. You cannot evaluate the value of privacy and disclosure unless you account for the relative power levels of the discloser and the disclosee.

See also: David Brin’s reply.

Had a great time this past weekend at the FOR conference, even though we didn’t do the workshop we ended up getting to discuss most of the issues in another workshop. For anyone visiting from that workshop the links to the programs we talked about are over to the right under #6.

But that’s not why I’m here today. I want to discuss the announcement from PETA about the fake meat challenge. Admittedly I’m not huge fan of PETA, they often have confusing and damaging media campaigns and a bit too much of the wild eyed fanatic in most of their rank and file. But still this is a big step in the right direction.

Even though they are using the logic of capitalism to foster innovation I think in some ways it short-circuits the larger flows of global capital. This isn’t going to be a prize that is chased after by big ag companies, but by smaller inventors and innovators, and it also boosts interest in biosciences among the lay public. So in that sense it’s a multiple good. I’d love to see more of these small Ansari X prizes for more scientific fields to spur innovation among garage inventors and basement chemists.

FYI to folks in the Midwest, the annual Finding Our Roots anarchist conference is going on in Chicago this weekend. This year’s focus is on anarchist organizing. The list of workshops can be found here.

Antisocialite and I may throw together an impromptu guerrilla workshop on Sunday to talk about issues relating to @ organizing and technology — stuff like:

– technology and security culture (surveillance, sousveillance, crypto, etc)

– internet organizing, open source models, new media, hacktivism

– organizing around tech issues, universal access to tech, subverting authoritarian tech for libertarian purposes

* Interview with Ursula LeGuin

My utopias are not blueprints. In fact, I distrust utopias that pretend to be blueprints. Fiction is not a good medium for preaching or for planning. It is really good, though, for what we used to call conscious-raising.

* Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional
Just as important for subversive minds.

* Build Your Own War Bot
A wiki resource for the hacktivists working on the future anarchist air force.

* How to Make Your Phone Untappable
Interview with Phil Zimmerman, the creator of PGP, about his new Zfone software for encrypting VOIP calls.

So unencrypted VoIP is vulnerable not just to government wiretapping but also to cyber-criminal spying.

With traditional telephony, our threat model was mostly government wiretapping. With VoIP, anyone can wiretap us: the Russian mafia, foreign governments, hackers, disgruntled former employees. Anyone.

Historically, there’s been an asymmetry between government wiretapping and everyone else wiretapping that’s been in the government’s favor. As we migrate to VoIP, that differential collapses. The government itself is just as vulnerable.

* Zfone Project Start/Download Page

* Fake Anarchist Sites
Details on how http://anarchy.net and related sites are not really anarchist at all.

In the off chance that you happen to be in the Chicago area, there’s going to be a transhumanist meetup this weekend:

Date: Saturday March 22nd
When: 3pm until ?
Location: Mercury Cafe, 1505 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago

It’s an open gathering, with the purpose of meeting each other, talking about H+-related issues, and possible setting this up as a monthly event.

As a quick follow-up to Antisocialite’s post about Anonymous vs. Scientology (he tells me part 2 is coming soon), this brief over at Global Guerrillas summarizes Project Chanology in the context of an open source insurgency. Even more interesting, however, is this reply from a member of Anonymous:

Firstly, Anonymous is an example of viral organisation - there is no centralised leadership, and although there are nodes of organisation, these are dynamic - if one goes down or is taken down, others compensate with little damage done to the utility of the network as a whole. Organisation and decisions are made through what I would term “viral consensus” - the facts, questions and opinions are disseminated throughout the network by it’s users, the most successful or popular of these possible courses of action are therefore repeated more often and gain traction - mutations to the idea occur and those that are popular flourish. As such, there are no leaders to attack - whilst there may be some individuals who are more visible (such as Mark Bunker) they are not essential-, no easily-accisble points of failure. Indeed, the only thing that would severely disrupt the insurgency as a whole is internal factional problems - which are near-impossible for an outsider to predict or cause due to the shibboleths John mentions; or a total disruption of the internet as a whole.

Secondly, the initial campaign of DDOS and internet insurgency can be seen as an example of the internet as an enabling force - most members of anonymous are not hackers or computer security experts, but the information available on how to conduct operations such as DDOS attacks etc is readily available on the internet, and can be spread concisely and practically throughout the group itself through other networking tools (IRC, message boards, forums, p2p). However, the interesting thing in particular about the methodology of anonymous is that it is intensely adaptable - when the opinions of Mark Bunker that the illegal aspects of anonymous actions (DDOS etc) were tactically efficient but strategically detrimental entered the viral consciousness, the methodology drastically changed - to real life protests organised over a number of countries, and to information dissemination tactics aimed at the public.

I’ve been telling Infomorph that I was going to write something about the planned 2/10 protests for something like three weeks now to the point where the protests have come and gone and I’m only now sitting down to hammer this out. At this point I think my thoughts fall into two separate entries so this is the first focusing on how what Anon has done and how it gives hope to radicals and anarchists of all types, but particularly those of us of a more pro-tech orientation. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth discussion on the anarchists LJ community lately concerning technology and urbanization. I don’t loiter on LJ enough to get involved in these threads (they seem to explode very rapidly into 100+ posts), but it’s nice to see the level of debate taking a step up. Of particular interest is this post on Land Mass, Crop Production, and Urbanization with some math worth thinking about.

Over at Open the Future, Jamais Cascio was recently talking about inevitable near-future events that have the capacity to radically transform our society:

You don’t have to believe in incipient singularities to recognize that 2028 — just twenty years from now — will bear very little resemblance to 2008.

A small cluster of rapidly-accelerating drivers promises to dominate the first quarter of this century. Each of these drivers, alone, has the potential to remake how we live; together, the likelihood of a fundamental transformation of our lives, our politics, our world, becomes over-determined. Moreover, these drivers are distinct but interdependent: each one exists and would be transformative on its own, but how it plays out — and the choices we’ll face when confronting it — will be contingent upon how the other drivers unfold. Twenty years isn’t a long time to make the needed changes to turn potential disaster into a new world; we have all of five US presidential terms — maximum — to completely transform, globally, every significant aspect of our material civilization.

The specific drivers he notes are:

• Climate Chaos
• Resource Collapse
• Catalytic Innovation (transformative technologies)
• Ubiquitous Transparency (surveillance state vs. sousveillance)
• New Models of Global Development
• The Rise of the Post-Hegemonic World (the weakening of American power)

As I’ve discussed in previous posts (see Will Robots Spark the Revolution?), the point behind anarcho-transhumanist projects shouldn’t be just to advocate and fight for open access to and liberatory uses of technology. One of our main priorities should be to evaluate futurist scenarios for transformative drivers like those mentioned above that have the capacity to not only shake up the world, but to create crisis points within capitalism — stages where capitalist hegemony is weakened and possibilities for revolutionary alternatives are increased. There is far too little discussion in anarchist scenarios about the future — and what is out there tends to be formulated as dire warnings of impending apocalypse or Big Brother scenarios. The primitivists, perhaps, discuss these matters, but only with a callous eye towards how they can exploit tragedy to achieve their fantasy tribal lifestyles.

What revolutionary-minded anarchists should be doing is evaluating these drivers noted above and creating a game plan. What outcomes are likely? How can we position ourselves to affect them, to strive towards outcomes we’d prefer? How can we take advantage of the weaknesses these changes will bring to the status quo? What political stances should we be making and clarifying now, in preparation for future ideological battles? What sort of movement infrastructure should we be seeking to establish, in order to create a counterpower best prepared to deal with these future scenarios? Where should we focus our organizing efforts? Our direct action?

Our movements spend far too much time trying to fight a monolithic capitalism system head-on right now, while glorifying the past, without realizing that both are going to have very little relevance on how the next 20-50 years play out. The world is going to be changing quite rapidly, and if we’re not prepared to deal with it, we’re going to have no chance in fighting for a better future. It’s adapt or die time. So let’s get to it.