4th Industrial Revolution

Transhumanism: the ideology of the techno-world

Posted on 2025/02/08 - 2025/02/08 by darknights

Transhumanism: the ideology of the techno-world
Silvia Guerini and Costantino Ragusa – Resistenze al nanomondo

A chapter from the book: Silvia Guerini and Costantino Ragusa, The ideology of the techno-world. Resisting the megamachine, acro-pólis, 2024.
We will soon publish an English translation of the entire book on our website: Resistenze al nanomondo, www.resistenzealnanomondo.org

“The goal of transhumanism is precisely to replace the natural with the planned”¹.
James Hughes

From the First Industrial Revolution, we have come to define technological developments since the 21st century as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments made possible by information technology that characterised the Third Industrial Revolution. In our view, defining the developments of the converging techno-sciences as a Fourth Industrial Revolution is somewhat reductive. First of all, this definition refers to a purely industrial process when the current transformations concern life itself. We do not have a transformation of a factory system that then has consequences for society as a whole, but we have from the very beginning a process that insinuates itself into society and into people’s existence. We are not confronted with developments that simply result from previous technical innovations, but we are confronted with a precise idea of the human being that can be realised thanks to the techno-sciences that can now extend into every dimension, penetrating right into bodies and life processes. Even advances in Artificial Intelligence, for example, do not stem from some new technological innovation, but from more powerful computers, more efficient algorithms and above all more available data.

Techno-sciences become a system, they become a horizon of meaning, they become the context of people’s existence, they become inevitable. They cannot be considered as technologies that fit into every sphere of society, leaving the possibility of using them or not, allowing a dimension of autonomy with respect to them. Once inserted, they become the environment itself, merging with it, shaping and transforming it according to their characteristics and according to the transhumanist ideology they carry. In doing so they become the new normal by shaping and transforming being-in-the-world, perceiving themselves in the world, being in the world and acting in the world. Ultimately transforming the human being.

It can be understood how in itself techno-sciences are not neutral: ‘what we consider the neutrality of technology is only our neutrality with respect to it’².

The endless debate around their neutrality and their positive or negative use could end around the simple consideration that the harmful consequences cannot be considered as side effects: as far as genetic engineering technologies and nanotechnology are concerned, these are always announced disasters that among other things serve to speed up and normalise other steps.

Just as the atomic scientists observing the results of their tests on the inhabitants of the Bikini atolls did not have before their eyes side effects, but the very manifestation of nuclear research, the researchers developing gene editing with CRISPR/Cas9 do not have before their eyes the disappearance of DNA fragments and transmissible genetic modifications as undesirable effects, but the very possibility of intervening in the evolution of living beings.

Just as a tunnel effect microscope is not a simple instrument, but presupposes a world in which matter is manipulated at the nanoscale, techno-sciences presuppose a world in which the living becomes mere matter to be engineered and redesigned, in which every phenomenon is controlled in order to direct its direction and evolution. Human beings included.

The issue is much more radical than a debate reduced and flattened to utilities, advantages, disadvantages, risks, dangers, the reflection should be taken a little further, out of their realm of quantity, out of their mechanism, out of calculations and predictions to arrive at the radical questioning of the conception that sees the living as a machine. In this conception, only what can be measured and analysed has value, and it is this that becomes the real. But what will come out of tables, diagrams, models, enclosures, laboratories, test tubes and slides will be a minced, simplified, impoverished, degraded real. Nothing compared to the love with which Alfred Russel Wallace observed the bird of paradise in the forest of New Guinea or with which Jean-Henry Fabre spied the comings and goings of a beetle in Provence. That kind of science has disappeared, precisely because a Fabre behind the flattery of the academic world and the great scientific institutions made Victor Hugo’s words his own: ”I hate the stench of death from laboratories”, referring to vivisection on animals practised as profusely in his time as still today.

If a living being is conceived as a machine, one cannot get to know it through simple observation in its environment, it becomes necessary to break it down into its parts. ”It is in this light that one can understand why scientists think it is possible to learn more about life by cutting a frog open in a laboratory than by sitting by a pond observing frogs and fish, mosquitoes and water lilies living together”³. Modern science with its quantitative and utilitarian approach already had in its assumptions the dissection and manipulation laboratory. Continue reading “Transhumanism: the ideology of the techno-world” →

The Final Straw Radio Podcast Interview With Imprisoned Anarchist Toby Shone + A Request By Solidarity Group For Toby Shone

Posted on 2024/03/05 by darknights

The Final Straw Radio Podcast Interview With Imprisoned Anarchist Toby Shone

US web-based The Final Straw Radio Podcast has a new interview with imprisoned anarchist Toby Shone in which he gives a background to Operation Adream, his arrest and trial and his recent recall to prisons plus the involvement of the security services in his case and the ongoing harrassment that he has suffered in HMP Garth.

https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/03/…

A Request By Solidarity Group For Toby Shone

The solidarity group for Toby Shone would like to ask that anyone writing to him could also take a moment to let us know that you have sent him a letter by dropping an email to forestcase@riseup.net

HMP Garth are telling him – as have other prisons he has been in – that he has no mail. The State and the pigs are desperate to isolate Toby and to make him believe that he has no support. This is stated in his probation paperwork as a goal of his probation team and the National Security Division.

Let’s not let them win! We have no control over whether the prison gives Toby his mail and books. We do however have control over writing to him and letting his support group know that you have so that even if he doesn’t receive it, he knows it was sent to him. A letter sent by recorded delivery so that we can tell Toby that yes, this letter arrived on such and such a date is even better.

Toby is very resilient and is always in good spirits. However, he has been very unwell, has lost a considerable amount of weight as a result of the lack of food and calorie count typical of Britain’s jails and now faces a month of no visits due to confusion over bookings. So now would be a really really good time to send Toby a postcard, a letter or an email (and then let us know that you have).

Thanks a million.
The State is the Terrorist.
No one is Alone!

Forest Case Folks
forestcase@riseup.net

Toby Shone A7645EP
HMP Garth
Ulnes Walton Lane
Leyland
Preston
PR26 8NE

Source: Brighton Anarchist Black Cross

Constant Surveillance: Israeli drones over Gaza

Posted on 2024/02/11 - 2024/02/11 by darknights

‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza

Posted on 2024/02/06 - 2024/02/06 by darknights

DN Note: We are posting this article from +972 magazine & Local Call, knowing very well that it is a mainstream media article, but feel the technology it is describing being used by the IDF as important to understand, alongside their use of swarm drone technology to kill terror supects in Gaza and also an AI gun powered by facial recognition used to kill an Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November 2020, all of this even before the recent conflict. Israel’s use of this technology is a further advance of artificial intelligence which now is starting to permeate societies worldwide, whether it is to identify ‘terrorist’ supects through facial recognition software enhanced camera systems, infiltrating health care systems or even analyzing whether you are allowed to receive state welfare ot not. Warfare has always been the accelerator of technological and scientific adavances that are being pushed by all states worldwide, be it Russia, USA, China, UK and Iran, the 4th Industrial Revolution will not be any different. It is time to realise that there is a monumental shift arriving already now, that identifying technology and science as a progressive, even benevolent forces that will not harm, imprison or destroy us is dellusional. There is no other better time than the present to fight back against the technological and scientific prison, to break out and destroy it before it is too late.

As an extra note we would like to point out that there has been no solid evidence produced of the sexual violence and rape or that the deaths of civilians were commited by the militants that crossed from Gaza. Much of this so called evidence has been shown to be Israeli state propaganda, that the sources such as the one that claimed babies were burned to death have quickly dissapeared from the internet as quickly as they appeared. Plenty of information has been coming to light that the IDF panicked in the initial stages of the 7th October attacks and in a frenzied attmept to contain it, ended up killing the civilians themselves, either in the crossfire or indiscriminately bombing areas. This is the same IDF that has massacred countless civilians in bombing campaigns, targetted raids in peoples homes, incarcerates thousands upon thousands, drops chemical weapons upon urban populations, even has covered up its own involvement in massacres in Lebanon and even lied to cover up the Lod Airport attack, another example of zealous security forces doing their honourable job. Apparently we are supposed to believe the lie generator that is the Israeli propoganda machine most likely already programmed by AI?

The Israeli army’s expanded authorisation for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have probably played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.

The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions.

Compared to previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the current war — which Israel has named “Operation Iron Swords,” and which began in the wake of the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on 7 Oct — has seen the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (matarot otzem).

The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it.

Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source. Continue reading “‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza” →

The Internet of bodies: the body as a technological platform

Posted on 2023/05/15 - 2023/05/15 by darknights

The Internet of bodies: the body as a technological platform

Introduction

It has not even been ten years since the Internet of Things made headlines and fueled the dreams of technologists around the world. Smart clothes that can measure your mood and update your cell phone, smart glasses with which you can overlay reality with a second layer of your own, e.g., with personalized realities, smart and inexpensive light bulbs charged with carrying the burden of your eco-consciousness by turning on only when you are in the room or when you give the command from the controller of your life aka smartphone, smart coffee makers, ingenious mugs, wi-fi-enabled sinks, and the list goes on. All this new “smart” and illusory life promised by the universal interconnection of everything on the Internet has turned out to be, at least so far, a mere fantasy. But is this proof of the failure of the Internet of Things? In a sense, the answer should be yes (again, at least for now), at least if one is to take such promises at face value. On the other hand, the Internet of Things can be considered as much of a “failure” as any new model of an automobile-based society is a “failure” because its drivers end up spending most of their time moving at the pace of a sloth on Alexandra rather than with feline grace on open roads, vast expanses of open country, or meandering, scenic roads perched on green mountains, as they should, given the commercials. The crucial difference in the case of the Internet of Things, which will provide the measure of any failure or success, is that it was not simply an attempt to promote a product or even a range of products. What was widely promoted or even mandated was not so much and not only the lures of smart devices, but the very idea of universal connectivity, the notion that information can be drawn from anything and that this information can be valued, exploited and enhanced.

There have been many, too many, probably the vast majority of individuals in Western societies, who have seemed all too willing to take the bait of all kinds of smart devices. Finding themselves with the hook of universal interconnectivity stuck in them, perhaps not yet sufficiently aware of the consequences of the position they have found themselves in. The oceans of psycho-intellectual novocaine in which they swim daily (courtesy of social media and subscription lobotomy platforms) do not leave them much room to maneuver. The extent of this retreat of conscience and panicked concession of battlefield positions that would once have been considered non-negotiable has become evident, if nothing else, with the recent issuance of health certificates. The docile readiness with which the subjects display the symbols of their unworthy conformity to a paranoid regime (even for unnecessary movements, such as those related to work or studies) is a low point but not the nadir of political and aesthetic-moral decline; at the other end of the sewer are those who assume the role of controllers, not infrequently enjoying their role, even if they do not openly admit it, perhaps not even to themselves (their tone of voice and body language are, however, irrefutable witnesses). A marvelous social condition that allows microclimates and alveolus to be created everywhere, within which the mushrooms of petty authoritarian attitudes acquire the status of the self-evident: the teacher checks the pupils (a mischievous person might say, “this is not a new role for teachers”), the clerk checks the teacher when he shows up as a customer, the waiter checks the clerk when he goes to buy coffee, etc. Everyone is given the opportunity to assume the role of the examiner; but no one is spared the role of the examined: in other words, the definition of the cannibal condition.

A nontrivial reminder: all these things owe their “success” in large part to the fact that they are mechanically mediated. The smartphones that promised the blossoming of a life in which everything would be available at (or even before) the push of a button seem to have first spread the manure of social barbarism in the form of mutual surveillance. It is obvious that without the ability to instantly scan and identify a certificate, the entire “medical” surveillance regime would be unstable and to such an extent that it might eventually collapse. But who would dare to oppose such practices among those who, for the sake of any free “convenience,” have become spineless data bleeders through their interconnected devices of all kinds? Continue reading “The Internet of bodies: the body as a technological platform” →

UK: London’s secretive “smart stations” roll-out

Posted on 2023/03/25 by darknights

The digital slave-system of the Fourth Industrial Repression is being imposed on us by stealth.

Various aspects of the sinister technology have gradually crept in over the years under the excuse of fighting crime or terrorism or, more recently, of combating the spread of a so-called pandemic.

As we saw in our recent article on “15 Minute Cities”, we are now being told that it is all about urban planning and making life generally more pleasant for everyone by reducing traffic congestion and pollution.

Anyone who sees through this greenwashing attempt is dismissed as a paranoid fool or as a dangerous conspiracy theorist spreading fear and disinformation.

And yet the whole premise of this official spin is blown out of the water by the fact that smart infrastructure (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is being rolled out in contexts that have nothing to do with private vehicle use.

We have got hold of a very interesting document from Transport for London on the current testing of smart surveillance at Willesden Green tube station, which is due to continue until March 31, 2023.

If this project were really about “providing the best possible service” to passengers on the British capital’s underground railway network, as claimed, then you would think that it would be loudly and proudly announced and discussed, with information widely available in a democratic public consultation.

But the fact that the document, entitled “Smart Station Proof Concept”, is marked “restricted” for internal TfL use reveals the secrecy being deployed to sneak through this new stage of the incremental theft of our freedom.

In the public interest, we have decided to publicise its contents.

The “exciting” project for the Jubilee Line station combines existing CCTV cameras with “visual analytics technology” to provide 24-hour real-time monitoring, via a “Smart Stations Dashboard”.

As well as counting everyone entering and leaving the station, the smart spies will be issuing “notifications” for a range of “triggers” including not just gate-jumping or smoking, but also “loitering” or a “person sat on a bench (Excessive Time)”, which turns out to be anything more than ten minutes! Continue reading “UK: London’s secretive “smart stations” roll-out” →

Resisting Techno-Tyranny: A Dialogue

Posted on 2022/12/06 by darknights

This conversation between Paul Cudenec and the Italian group Resistenze al nanomondo was first published in the July 2022 issue of the printed journal L’urlo della Terra and has recently also been made available online, again in Italian.

1. Resistenze al nanomondo: Can you can tell us about your story, your path, when you started developing a critique of techno-scientific developments and what thinkers you learned from?

Paul Cudenec: I don’t think I could separate my critique of techno-scientific developments from the rest of my opinions and analysis. I have been an anarchist for 30 years now, but even before then, in my youth, I felt a strong instinctive aversion to high-tech consumer society. On the one hand it was associated with everything that I most disliked – big business, the state, the military, authority and control in general. On the other hand it stood against everything that I most appreciated – nature, freedom, community, a sense of historical and cultural continuity. The arrival of CCTV cameras in England was a wake-up moment for me. I worked at the time as a journalist with a local newspaper in one of the first towns to have cameras installed and, since I knew for a fact that there was very little crime there, it was clear to me that this project was nothing to do with fighting crime, as was claimed, but was the roll-out of something much more sinister. I wrote a punk song about this in the mid-1990s (which I put online last year), warning about “the cameras that steal our liberty” and the techno-tyrants who were going to scan our DNA, put microchips in our brains and turn us into robots. With the local anarchist group, which I subsequently helped to create, we used to hold annual protests against the cameras, marking the anniversary of their installation as “Big Brother’s Birthday”.

As you will gather from the above, George Orwell was, unsurprisingly, an influence on me. The history of the Luddites was another inspiration (via Kirkpatrick Sale among others), along with anarcho-publications like Green Anarchist, SchNEWS, Do or Die, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and various EF! publications. I also read David Watson’s Against the Megamachine, Fredy Perlman’s Against His-story, Against Leviathan, the Unabomber Manifesto plus a lot by John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen. I have more recently been influenced by reading the likes of Miguel Amorós, Jacques Ellul, Theodore Roszak, Charlene Spretnak, Renaud Garcia… But intertwined with that thread of my self-education have been other inspirations. The English nature mystic Richard Jefferies has been very important to me, as has René Guénon, who combined his metaphysics with a strong critique of modernity. I have also read elsewhere about sufism, Taoism, comparative mythology, English folklore, Indian philosophy, German idealism, Jewish anti-capitalist romanticism, Jungian psychology… What interests me, above all, are the connections between these accounts and traditions, or rather, perhaps, the new space that is opened up for our reflection when we consider them together, in the same conceptual context. Continue reading “Resisting Techno-Tyranny: A Dialogue” →

325 #12 Indonesian Edition

Posted on 2022/10/30 - 2022/10/30 by darknights

We present here for the first time 325 magazine in Indonesian, translated by our Indonesian comrades & Semerdekazine.

For the Black International & conflict with the Techno Prison World.

ANTI-COPYRIGHT NETWORK

PDF: Jurnal-325-x-Semerdekazine

PDF: Against the Technology of Control – EN/FR

Posted on 2022/08/03 by darknights

A4 PDF to download and print out, photocopy and flypost, leave in places, hand out etc.

PDF: Against the Technology of Control

PDF: Contre la technologie du contrôle

Against the Technology of Control

Face the Fear – Fight the Future

The COVID-19 pandemic is part of the techno-prison world known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The lockdowns and the quarantine laws are designed to intimidate people into obeying, Let’s break the rules, riot in the streets and attack the Technocratic State that will use 5G to build this matrix.
Fascism as a political project has always looked like this:

‘State of Emergency’ laws suspending any granted ‘rights’
Control of the media and censorship
Personal relationships recorded and controlled
Protests banned
Local and international movement restricted
Snitching encouraged
Police control of everyday life
Necessities dictated and controlled
Behaviour modification on mass scale
Sudden, arbitrary and ambiguous legislation to wear down population
Using the fear of endangering others to control individuals (collective punishment)
Party members immune from rule of law
Technological innovation

Our enslavement relies on our compliance.

ORGANISE / RESISTANCE
INSURRECTION

Continue reading “PDF: Against the Technology of Control – EN/FR” →

Italy: THREE DAYS AGAINST TECHNO-SCIENCES 29-30-31 July 2022 4th International meeting

Posted on 2022/06/03 - 2022/06/11 by darknights

THREE DAYS AGAINST TECHNO-SCIENCES
29-30-31 July 2022
4th International meeting
at Altradimora, strada Caranzano 72, Alessandria (AL), Italy

FRIDAY 29

13.00 lunch
15.30 Presentation of the meeting by Resistenze al nanomondo – Bergamo
16.00
Presentation of FINAARGIT
International Feminist Network Against all Artificial Reproduction, Gender Ideology and Transhumanism (www.finaargit.org)

17.00
Out of hypnosis.
Mass manipulation theories and techniques.
The recent years of techno-sanitary propaganda, now flanked by new warmongering mystifications, have shown how the military-industrial and political complex has further refined and strengthened mass mental conditioning techniques: with strategies borrowed from psychiatry and depth psychology, perfected in an era of infodemic and electromagnetic control, have shown that they know how to mould public opinion with unprecedented effectiveness and precision, reaching new frontiers of neurophysiological and social domestication. The need to trace a critical profile of the linguistic and psychological strategies of domestication and manipulation currently at work is proposed, with historical and practical examples taken from psychological warfare of yesterday and today, from the exploitation of emotions to annihilate the critical spirit to mental conditioning. through subliminal messages and electronic stimuli.
Dario Stefanoni
20.00 dinner

21.00

Documentaries on the Target Malaria project in Africa
– A Question of Consent: Exterminator Mosquitoes in Burkina Faso
– Gene Drives in Africa: Civil Society Speaks Out
The Target Malaria project, also promoted and financed by the Gates Foundation, has since 2019 started the release of mosquitoes genetically modified with the Gene Drive genetic engineering technique in some villages in Burkina Faso. The first GMO insect released into the environment. The aim is to extinguish the entire population of mosquitoes, but what do these genetic experiments want to go?
Two documentaries (in English with Italian subtitles) by ETC Group (www.etcgroup.org) denounce the experiments in Africa and give voice to the opposition of the populations.
Remote interventions by local groups fighting the release of GMO mosquitoes are being prepared. Continue reading “Italy: THREE DAYS AGAINST TECHNO-SCIENCES 29-30-31 July 2022 4th International meeting” →