At lunchtime today, a meeting of companies involved in nanotechnology industries was invaded and disrupted by a group of people opposed to technologies of social control.
The protest took 3 main parts. Firstly, an information gathering exercise to gain further details of who is involved in what, for future actions. Secondly, the hall was visited and made extremely unplesant by a well-known substance for stinking out conferences: comfrey in water left to rot for a couple of months, and fish bait. visitors to the hall an hr after said people were holding their noses and not staying, and the smell was hideous. Leaflets were also given out. The third aspect was the seizing of the tannoy and a communique being read out. This coincided with a talk on nanotech which drowned it out, and was heard in every room through the museum. Leaflets were also scattered down. Two of these people were held by security until the police arrived, took down the name and address and date of birth that the two claimed were theirs, quick check to make sure there was no warrant on the names given, and then released.
Nanotechnology is the newest weapon against diversity, rebellion, difference, autonomy and freedom. The US military is, of course, the biggest investor as it tries to ensure total domination of all life on the planet. The British government has also invested £90 million in nanotechnology and most industries and universities* are developing interests in the field.
Genetic engineering was recognised as having massive social and ecological implications and this ensured worldwide resistance against it. Nanotechnology, which has the ability to transform all matter, has far more dramatic effects and needs drastic action to confront this new assault on diversity of life.
Nanotech, and its links to biotechnological, informational and cognitive sciences, provides the state with yet more tools with which to control all dissent and iron out all life into a homogeneous, manipulable mass. Be it advances in surveillance technologies, the ability to disable neural transmitters and break apart DNA strands by remote control, artificially create ‘workaholism’ in labourers, or ‘stamp out’ physical and mental difference, nanotechnology puts mind control, body control, social control and control of the natural world more firmly in the hands of the state, the corporations and the ruling elite.
Just as biotechnology was sold to us as a green technology that would feed the world, so nanotech is being heralded. Both instinct and reason tell us to take action against these new technologies before we lose our last liberties to them.
Leeds action is a UK first!
However, we were beaten by North Americans taking their clothes off in October — Action in Chicago by THONG at nanocommerce 2004 — (Topless Humans Organised for Natural Genetics) — see
http://www.chicagothong.org/nanocommerce.php?photo=061 for amusing photos and also
http://nanobot.blogspot.com/2004/10/nano-industry-hits-bottom.html for industry reaction
and before that, a 30 Jan 2004 protest of the groundbreaking of the Molecular Foundry, a new Dept of Energy nanochemistry facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, CA USA;
and those pesky Continental-types:
actions/protest against nanotech/converging technologies in Grenoble by piecesetmaindoeuvre (anti tech activists — disrupting nano-conferences) — seewww.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com
* These are easy targets
* Get scared, then get active!
FURTHER INFO ON NANOTECH:
For those who, like many of us, have buried our heads in the sand about this new technology, but have decided it is time to learn and to act, the following information should assist:
http://www.etcgroup.org — campaigning but non-radical group with info on nanotech; see ‘The Big Down’ report
http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/NBIC_frontmatter.pdf- info from the “other side”
http://www.leedsef.org.uk/atomtech.htm — earth first! website with an 8 page nanotech article somewhere on it!