Mega Machine – Dark Nights

Berlin, Germany: Claim for arson attack on Micro Resist Technology company, which specializes in the production of microchips

Posted on 2025/07/15 by darknights

Shutting down the heart of the megamachine – Fire of microchip production

Last night, we set fire to fuse boxes, supply cables and a ventilation system belonging to Micro Resist Technology on the grounds of the Wuhlheide Innovation Park. While Germany is once again unrestrainedly mobilizing for military strength and war capability with a turnaround, special funds and compulsory military service, we are targeting the heart of the technological mega-machine with our sabotage and, with microchip production, are also hitting one of the most sensitive points of civil-military cooperation. This attack is intended as a contribution to the protests against National Veterans Day next Sunday – fire and flame instead of glory and honor for militarism, soldiering and fatherland!

Tiny giants at the intersection of technology and war

The web of capitalist domination is tightening ever tighter around us. Technological progress is the engine that drives the destructive mega-machine and allows it to penetrate ever further into the most intimate areas of our existence. Inanimate objects made of plastic and metal, which, equipped with sensors, microphones, lenses, microchips etc., are increasingly becoming prostheses for social interaction, replacing genuine, empathetic relationships and causing our cognitive abilities to atrophy. At the same time, we are being tracked at every turn by social media, voice assistants, artificial intelligence, “smart” devices, facial recognition and many other surveillance tools, whereby everything we do is being increasingly incorporated into the capitalist value chain. Big data becomes big money. The implementation of such technologies in our everyday lives shapes our existence and the algorithmic calculations derived from them increasingly decide and determine our future. Once we have become accustomed to them, these mechanisms have such an all-encompassing effect that it is almost inconceivable for most people today to escape their digital grasp. For many, even the thought of it triggers anxiety. What remains is an army of slaves to the machine, dependent, controlled, externally determined and not even aware of this relationship.

However, this is only one side of the technological attack. Technology can and should not only manipulate our thoughts and actions, it should also kill. Almost all relevant technologies can be traced back to military research and development in order to gain advantages on the battlefield. Not only against hostile nations, but also in the social war against the exploited, superfluous and precarious of the population. From nuclear power to the internet, from cybernetics to artificial intelligence – our everyday lives are permeated by things that have a military logic at their core. In extreme cases, this can mean that apps that playfully accompany us through the day today feed and train the same machines on the basis of which an AI-controlled drone will determine and destroy its target tomorrow. A practice that is sometimes used by the Israeli military in particular through AI programs such as “Lavender” in their unleashed campaign of destruction against the Palestinian population of Gaza and with the friendly support of their Western accomplices. What seems like an episode from a dystopian science fiction movie is the gruesome reality of technological “achievements”, which are summarized under the term “dual-use” and are inherent in most technologies. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Siemens, Telekom and Tesla are just some of the best-known players operating at the interface between civil and military applications. Companies that produce highly specialized key technologies such as microchips/semiconductors, without which none of the modern technical devices would work, are far less well known. Smartphones, computers or cars just as little as tanks, guided missiles or war drones. Continue reading “Berlin, Germany: Claim for arson attack on Micro Resist Technology company, which specializes in the production of microchips” →

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 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” →