Genetic Engineering

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” →

Silvaticus

Posted on 2022/10/18 - 2022/10/18 by darknights

In front of the steamrollers of industrial civilization and progress, one of the last sensible worlds populated by terrifying imagery and enchanted fantasies is disappearing before our eyes: that of the forests. Those that were a fiefdom of the lords who lined the hanged there, or a shelter to escape persecution. Those that represented the darkness where one could abandon one’s hungry offspring or the dense shelter from which to set out on the assault of the existent. Those that harbored mysteries populated by dryads and werewolves or that saw the warship builders and other master forgers come through to strip them en masse. Those that saw in Sherwood daring bandits plundering the rich, in Ariège Demoiselles (*) with soot-covered faces burning and plundering castles, in Courlande of revolutionaries continuing to strike fierce blows against tsarist tyranny, but also witnessing in the Alps or Poland the death by frostbite of migrants driven out by European border guards.

Fundamentally, forests are also ambiguous because of their very etymology, since forest stood for first and foremost the outdoor space not used by villagers-the word savage itself comes from silvaticus, meaning sylvan-before designating vast wooded areas reserved for the nobility and monasteries protected from peasant uses. By a singular inversion of meaning, the word forest, the perilous unknown that Roman civilization could not subjugate, ended up qualifying in a few centuries the territory par excellence of religious and feudal rule, before finally becoming a generic and rather vague term. Continue reading “Silvaticus” →

A Contribution to the Fourth International Meeting Against Techno-Sciences – Dino Giagtzoglou

Posted on 2022/09/28 - 2022/09/28 by darknights

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
MEETING AGAINST TECHNO-SCIENCES

Hi everyone!

Three years ago, when Resistenze al nanomondo took on the initiative to organize this annual and international meeting for the first time, I couldn’t have imagined what would follow in the years to come. In that very first meeting I tried to describe my thoughts and concerns on the ongoing fourth industrial revolution by focusing on the futuristic and technomaniac (gentrified) neo-theory of Singularity and what follows on from the transhumanist ideology and the practices of its priests.

Today, after more than two years of continuous health terror full of scaremongering propaganda, informational carpet bombing and psychological manipulation via humongous and humdrum lies, nefarious threats, blackmailing, curfews, lockdowns, punishment, hypocritical calls for “solidarity”, promises and “rewards”, we can clearly see what for many comrades – although they always seem to be just a few – was evident and foreseeable since decades or centuries: how the ruling class creates and/or exploits various successive “crises” under the guise of “states of emergency” to apply, impose or make desirable (by the populace) “new” technologies and techniques, but also to extend old and identical-to-the-core forms of psycho-social control and capitalist accumulation, lately going even up to the cellular and molecular levels of the human species by making our bodies living foundries and factories of protein production owned by the biotech pharmaceutical industry.

One thing is sure, two things are certain: a “new”, “green” and, of course, “safe and effective” nuclear power will be suggested to address the “energy crisis” as well as the “climate crisis”, while a huge push for the approval of “gene-edited” food passed off as non-GMO is underway supposedly to become the solution to a “food crisis” of some vague, obscure and undefined cause, or even the treatment of modern civilization diseases such as obesity, in the same way that “new” and – let’s repeat it with one voice – “safe and effective” gene therapies, in the form of injections that were deceitfully labeled and falsely accepted as vaccines, were introduced to deal with an alleged “health crisis”.

It should come as no surprise if the proposed solution to a possible surge of auto-immune or genetically inherited diseases, resulted from these incapacitating or deadly injections of genetic engineering and the generalized biotechnological omniviolence (spanning from genome editing of various species to bioweapons), would come from her majesty the “queen of all (pseudo-)sciences” Eugenics and the “safe and effective” way to come into the world would be growing GM embryos of medically assisted “procreation” and surrogate “gestation” in artificial wombs, i.e ex-vivo plastic bagssimulating the living functions of the maternal body. Let alone the scenario of artificial reproduction mandates, such like the “vaccine” mandates, becoming the “socially responsible” choice to have a child passed off as a “free and conscious” choice for the health of the social body, which eventually is about the health of the Machine. Continue reading “A Contribution to the Fourth International Meeting Against Techno-Sciences – Dino Giagtzoglou” →

Spain: V Encuentro Contra el Sistema Tecno Industrial y su Mundo. 27,28 y 29 de mayo. Madrid / V Meeting Against the Techno Industrial System and its World. May 27,28 and 29. Madrid

Posted on 2022/04/28 - 2022/04/28 by darknights

V ENCUENTRO ANARQUISTA CONTRA EL SISTEMA

TECNOINDUSTRIAL Y SU MUNDO

Durante los días 27, 28 y 29 de Mayo tendrá lugar el «V Encuentro Anarquista contra el Sistema Tecnoindustrial y su mundo». Un lugar donde encontrarnos, conocernos, debatir, difundir y afilar nuestras ideas contra la organización técnica del mundo. Pretendemos que el encuentro sea una herramienta más para combatir el sistema tecno-científico-industrial, porque pensamos que el terreno del enfrentamiento se debe concentrar en el campo del progreso tecnológico, puesto que es y será lo que trace las presentes y futuras dinámicas de la dominación sobre todos y cada uno de los aspectos de nuestra vida: sociales, políticos, económicos y ambientales. Durante la duración de las jornadas habrá un espacio para distribuidoras (aquellas que quieran montar la distribuidora en el espacio les pedimos que confirmen su presencia con antelación) y comedores 100% vegetariano.. En los próximos días difundiremos el programa completo del Encuentro, que este año se realizará en el PVA Sputnik (C/Gonzalez soto, 21, Vallecas, Madrid)

Históricamente, los sistemas de dominación han aprovechado los momentos de crisis o catástrofes para transformar el mundo, para realizar una metamorfosis del mismo. En otros tiempos esta metamorfosis fue llevada a cabo cuando el capitalismo se vio amenazado por el avance de la lucha de clases o por la necesidad de cambios económicos y productivos con los que maximizar beneficios. En nuestro tiempo vemos como la tecnocracia aprovecha las emergencias ya sean energéticas, sanitarias, económicas, climáticas… para acelerar el tecno totalitarismo que supone el mundo-máquina. Se está llevando a cabo una nueva “gran transformación”, impulsada por las élites tecno-financieras, un Gran Reinicio. Reiniciar la vida en todas sus dimensiones para imponer una nueva forma de vida y un nuevo mundo bajo los imperativo de la 4º Revolución Industrial, es decir, reiniciar la vida para someterla al mundo-máquina que persigue optimizar al ser humano y todo lo vivo para convertirlo en un engranaje más de dicho mundo. Una vez artificializada y controlada la naturaleza el objetivo ahora es el ser humano. Continue reading “Spain: V Encuentro Contra el Sistema Tecno Industrial y su Mundo. 27,28 y 29 de mayo. Madrid / V Meeting Against the Techno Industrial System and its World. May 27,28 and 29. Madrid” →

A world without mothers? by Silvia Guerini

Posted on 2021/09/06 - 2021/09/06 by darknights

A world without mothers?

The term ectogenesis was coined in the 1920s by geneticist and biologist researcher J.B.S. Haldaine to refer to the development of a new being outside the maternal body. Haldaine considered ectogenesis “an important opportunity for social engineering” inscribed in a eugenic society where a complete separation of procreation from sex would lead to a “liberation of humanity in an entirely new sense.”
Haldain was interested in understanding the origin of life in order to direct and control the development of life itself. His goal was to synthesize living creatures in biochemistry laboratories, an aspiration that, in later years, would take shape in synthetic biology and genetic engineering laboratories.
Haldaine believed that ectogenesis would allow for eugenic selection in which only the best gametes would be used for the next generation. Selection that today has become the practice in the field of MAP techniques. Haldaine and Julian Huxley strongly promoted a “positive eugenics” that in those years resulted – well before Nazi Germany – in sterilization programs regulated by legislation in favor of them in the United States, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and widely funded by philanthropic associations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, issues that we have explored in our previous texts.
Huxley believed that ectogenesis could accelerate, facilitate, and make more flexible eugenic selection. Eugenic thinking is the foundation of ectogenesis and more generally of genetic research and any artificial reproduction of the human and is one of the cornerstones of the transhumanist vision.
The obsession with the creation of life shines through from the very beginning of this research, in the words of the research biologist Jacques Loeb: “I wanted to take life in my hands and play with it. I wanted to manipulate it in my laboratory like any other chemical reaction, to initiate it, to stop it, to study it under any conditions, to direct it at my will”. All this is not just an expression of crazy aspirations of some isolated researcher, but are the transhumanist principles of control and domination over the living.
With the artificial womb, the laboratory of life, which has become a system, wants to disregard the reality of the woman’s body, the reality of procreation, and therefore disregard reality in order to dominate and modify it.
It is in this original meaning and in this horizon that we must insert the research related to the realization of the artificial womb and the latest important developments in this regard. MAP, embryo selection, experiments on embryos, genetic modification, artificial womb are all deeply interconnected aspects of the same transhumanist world. Saving even one of these aspects implies that this transhumanist world proceeds in its direction that, sooner or later, will extend to every dimension of our life and of the whole living being.
We have been writing for some time about the re-signification of birth, mother, and woman, the material consequences on bodies, and the profound ontological and anthropological transformation of the human being that this re-signification entails. Techno-scientific developments are speeding up and every ethical barrier is falling, we are going towards a new neutral and infinitely modifiable humanity, in a post-human and post-nature world. A world without mothers, in order to achieve a definitive and total expropriation of women’s bodies and the dimension of procreation, a definitive and total control over the processes that create life, an engineering of the living and the control of the evolution of the human species itself. Continue reading “A world without mothers? by Silvia Guerini” →

The Artificial Reproduction of the Human: The Road of Transhumanism

Posted on 2021/07/15 - 2021/07/15 by darknights

Transhumanism and techno-sciences

The transhumanist movement began in the USA, in Silicon Valley, in the late 1980s, but if we try to track down the origin of this ideology, we find ourselves in 1883, when the term eugenics was coined by Galton, or in 1957, when Huxley gave a speech where he used the word transhumanism to describe his transcendent belief in the human, and we end up with the cybernetic paradigm which arose during Second World War in the military sector. The cybernetic paradigm, the study of control of systems, living or not living, is based on the concept of information: if everything, from the living to the inorganic world, can be reduced to an exchange of information, then every barrier and every difference between the living and the non living, between the human and the machine. And the the subject will be reduced to a sum of information items, a programme which can be deciphered and thus modified like a machine. Finally, we get to the development of genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Craig Venter, founder of Celera Genomics, after having sequenced the human genome, launched the Minimal Genome Project. Why would a company spend time and money on such simple organisms, when others were already competing to sequence the genomes of frogs, rats and chimpanzees? Right from the outset of the Genome Project, Venter’s goal had not only been to read genes or edit their DNA, but to redesign them through synthetic biology.

The ultimate aim of these processes is always the human being, this was clearly expressed by the Singularity University in a recent conference on Exponential Medicine: “We can design embryos. We can edit genes in humans. We have synthetic biology. And so we really are looking at designing future humans”.

Transhumanism is not a side effect, but the point of arrival of technological development, it is the ideology of the convergence between biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, information science and neurosciences.

Transhumanist ideology seeks to empower and implement the human through technology to achieve its biotechnological transformation: the post-human. Biology and even bodies are seen as constraints and limits to be overcome, reinforced, modified or eliminated. Before the desired biotechnological transformation or hybridisation with machines, what is being transformed is the ontological concept of human: we have never been human, we have always been cyborgs and hybrids. What is emerging is an anthropotechnical cyborg concept, where the human being is undetermined, and co-builds himself with technology, an indetermination which is technical hybridisation, where the very nature of human, his biological existence, is technological. A technical hybridisation which destroys the borders between subject and object, between nature and technique, between the living and the machine, so that everything, from nature around us to our very bodies, becomes an artefact. Continue reading “The Artificial Reproduction of the Human: The Road of Transhumanism” →

Italy: 3rd International Meeting: Three Days Against Techno-Sciences. July 23-24-25, 2021

Posted on 2021/06/19 - 2021/06/19 by darknights

Source: Resistenze al Nanomondo

Third International Meeting:

23 – 24 – 25 July 2021.
THREE DAYS AGAINST TECHNO-SCIENCES
in Altradimora, Strada Caranzano 72, Alessandria (AL), Italy

The program of the meeting will be published in the next days

Again this year we propose a moment of discussion and reflection between individuals and their realities engaged in the construction of critical analysis and paths of opposition to this techno world.
We will focus on the techno-scientific processes and developments that are accelerating under the pretext of this pandemic, the 5G network, the Great Reset, the cybernetic and transhumanist society, the need for resistance.

More than a year after the WHO declaration of pandemic and state of emergency, the planetary situation becomes clearer. One thing is certain, this “state of emergency” is made to last for a long time, the time necessary to accelerate certain processes, provided that in the meantime they have not decided to give another name to this “emergency” to continue. the process is even faster. A bit like the continuous variants of the Coronavirus, necessary to keep the general attention under pressure and, consequently, to force every decision on the agenda of the future from the new techno-medical paradigm.
In addition to the pandemic times that want to be long-lasting and above all permanent, becoming the new normal, other aspects of this program are now increasingly evident, which is being carried out internationally in very different ways depending on the countries and the various geopolitical blocs. Surely, in the first place, an unprecedented experimentation of genetic engineering (“vaccines” of recombinant DNA and mRNA) is being carried out on very large sectors of the population: a gene therapy of cellular reprogramming and modification that allows, in addition to the control of bodies, the grafting of many other techno-medical practices for each individual from birth to death.
The digital society is invading all dimensions and social aspects: from the way of working, studying, living spaces, to the way of conceiving health, one’s own body and the world. We will no longer be surrounded by the elements and emotions that make up all bodies, but by artificial elements that will irremediably project us into the world of mechanical automatisms.
The race towards the world of machines is enabled by the new 5G network, which besides being harmful by its very nature will be precisely that first fundamental step that will give way to the internet of communicating bodies, where objects will be so omnipresent with our bodies as to make it part of them in a single communicating whole, giving way to that cybernetic organism so dear to the transhumanists. These first aspects are allowing the innervation of much more, think of the new digital passes to travel between countries without having to go through the various medical-medical security oppressions and the microchips that will be implanted in the bodies. Continue reading “Italy: 3rd International Meeting: Three Days Against Techno-Sciences. July 23-24-25, 2021” →