Category: Technologies of Control

by DGR News Ser­vice

Civ­i­liza­tion is not a sta­t­ic force. It has metas­ta­sized across the world by accel­er­at­ing its own devel­op­ment, by trans­form­ing the blood and corpses of its vic­tims into new weapons with which to wage its relent­less war against all life

Grass­lands become grain mono­cul­tures feed­ing armies, con­quer­ing forests and moun­tains that become ships and swords that kill oth­er cul­tures, con­quer­ing more forests and moun­tains, whose trees and min­er­als are turned into tim­ber mills and trains, going forth to damn rivers, turn­ing the relent­less flu­id­i­ty of their being to elec­tric­i­ty to smelt iron and steel and alu­minum, which in turn become guns and ocean tankers, which expand this super­struc­ture ever fur­ther, tire­less­ly tak­ing in what lit­tle wild remains, absorb­ing every­thing and every­one into this accel­er­at­ing death march.

And yet, as the world is tied and bound tighter into this bru­tal arrange­ment, civ­i­liza­tion (and espe­cial­ly indus­tri­al­ism) becomes more and more vul­ner­a­ble, more open and frag­ile to dis­rup­tion and destruc­tion.

This brit­tle­ness is exem­pli­fied by the near-total depen­dence of the indus­tri­al econ­o­my on “advanced” tech­nol­o­gy, and the inter­net. This depen­den­cy upon a decen­tral­ized and acces­si­ble sys­tem that is poor­ly reg­u­lat­ed and controlled—at least com­pared to oth­er phys­i­cal struc­tures, like the offices of the same cor­po­ra­tions— presents a poten­tial point of pow­er­ful lever­age against the oper­a­tion of civ­i­liza­tion.

Activists and resisters around the world are begin­ning to real­ize this, and seize the oppor­tu­ni­ty it presents to groups engaged in asym­met­ric forces against destruc­tion.

Such as in Sau­di Ara­bia; from a recent arti­cle in the New York Times;

“On Aug. 15, more than 55,000 Sau­di Aram­co [described as the world’s most valu­able com­pa­ny] employ­ees stayed home from work to pre­pare for one of Islam’s holi­est nights of the year — Lailat al Qadr, or the Night of Pow­er — cel­e­brat­ing the rev­e­la­tion of the Koran to Muham­mad.

That morn­ing, at 11:08, a per­son with priv­i­leged access to the Sau­di state-owned oil company’s com­put­ers, unleashed a com­put­er virus to ini­ti­ate what is regard­ed as among the most destruc­tive acts of com­put­er sab­o­tage on a com­pa­ny to date. The virus erased data on three-quar­ters of Aramco’s cor­po­rate PCs — doc­u­ments, spread­sheets, e‑mails, files — replac­ing all of it with an image of a burn­ing Amer­i­can flag.”

This attack presents a good exam­ple of tar­get­ing a sys­temic weak point with­in the infra­struc­ture of Sau­di Aram­co and max­i­miz­ing impact through effec­tive use of sys­tems dis­rup­tion: destroy­ing three-fourths of cor­po­rate data will have impacts that last for weeks, and inhib­it the company’s oper­a­tion for some time. In fact, the attacked lever­aged the company’s response against itself:

“Imme­di­ate­ly after the attack, Aram­co was forced to shut down the company’s inter­nal cor­po­rate net­work, dis­abling employ­ees’ e‑mail and Inter­net access, to stop the virus from spread­ing.”

The cyber-sab­o­tage also high­lights the impor­tance of care­ful plan­ning and tim­ing.

“The hack­ers picked the one day of the year they knew they could inflict the most dam­age…”

This smart and strate­gic approach to action plan­ning is some­thing that is too often over­looked, ignored, or dis­missed entire­ly. Yet for resis­tance to be effec­tive, it must fol­low the same prin­ci­ples. Rather than strik­ing at weak points to crip­ple the oper­a­tion or func­tion of indus­tri­al activ­i­ty, attacks are typ­i­cal­ly made against sym­bol­ic or super­fi­cial tar­gets, leav­ing the oper­a­tion of the bru­tal indus­tri­al machine unscathed. We can­not con­tin­ue to stum­ble with strate­gic blind­ness, lash­ing out all but ran­dom­ly, and no more than hop­ing to hit the mark.

Again, civ­i­liza­tion is not a sta­t­ic force: every hour, more forests, prairies, moun­tains and species are destroyed and extir­pat­ed. Every hour, civ­i­liza­tion is pulled fur­ther into biot­ic col­lapse. We are out of time. With every­thing at stake, we are not only jus­ti­fied in using any means nec­es­sary to bring down civ­i­liza­tion; it is our moral man­date as liv­ing beings to do so. But for that resis­tance to tru­ly be mean­ing­ful and effec­tive, it must also be smart. It can­not be reac­tive and spo­radic, but strate­gic and coor­di­nat­ed; designed not just to inflict dam­age or dent prof­it mar­gins, but to dis­able the fun­da­men­tal sup­port-sys­tems that sus­tain indus­tri­al civ­i­liza­tion and bring it all to a screech­ing halt.

This is one rea­son why cyber-sab­o­tage has such poten­tial as a tac­tic to be used in dis­man­tling indus­tri­al civ­i­liza­tion. Most, if not all, of the crit­i­cal sys­tems that sus­tain it are by now reliant upon com­put­er net­works, which as the Sau­di Aram­co attack demon­strates, are very vul­ner­a­ble to dis­rup­tion.

Online attacks also lend them­selves as a tac­tic to asym­met­ric forces, and allow a very small group of peo­ple to car­ry out deci­sive, coor­di­nat­ed strikes from a dis­tance, rather than requir­ing peo­ple on the ground to coor­di­nate across the coun­try to achieve a sim­i­lar effect.

Civilization’s relent­less growth and accel­er­at­ing tech­nol­o­gy-spi­ral has ren­dered mur­der and death across the plan­et on a scale that would be unimag­in­able if it weren’t the hor­rif­ic real­i­ty we now find our­selves in. But this process of unceas­ing cen­tral­iza­tion and con­trol has also become its weak­ness, and for all its impos­ing gigan­tism, the tow­er of civ­i­liza­tion is incred­i­bly unsta­ble, and now begins to sway pre­car­i­ous­ly. It’s time to push with all our might, and top­ple it once and for all.

Learn­ing to lever­age key sys­tems against them­selves is cru­cial to the suc­cess of a mil­i­tant resis­tance move­ment, and ulti­mate­ly is at the core of any effec­tive strat­e­gy to dis­able the func­tion of indus­tri­al civ­i­liza­tion and ulti­mate­ly to dis­man­tle it. Cyber-sab­o­tage presents a vital oppor­tu­ni­ty to use the dynam­ics of indus­tri­al operations—such as the com­plete depen­den­cy of the elec­tric grid or oil refiner­ies upon com­plex com­put­er systems—to accom­plish that most fun­da­men­tal and nec­es­sary goal.