Pandemic – Dark Nights

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” →

Italy: ‘To burning hearts’ Statement of the anarchists accused at the trial for Operation Renata

Posted on 2023/02/21 - 2023/02/21 by darknights

Four years after the repressive operation Renata on February 19, 2019, we publish – not for an aseptic “exhumation” of recent history, but because these are texts that address the profound social and individual reasons for the anarchists’ thought and action – the statement of the seven comrades accused during the first-degree trial (“To Burning Hearts”) and a second statement distributed during the appeal trial. In addition, we believe it is important and necessary to find and disseminate the statements of comrades who, during the trials, take the floor continuing to support the ideas and practices of attack against the state and capital.

To burning hearts

Statement of the anarchists accused at the trial for Operation Renata

The anarchist does not look to success, to victory, to competition. He fights, because it is right. And in any struggle loss is part of life. He does not change his mind because he loses, much less give up the next struggle. The System is self-feeding because of the people who do not fight, not because they are invincible. The anarchist’s job is to instill in the people revolt, not in segments but continuous. Like a wave that recedes and then returns. You ask me if we will win? You ask me the wrong question. Ask me if we will fight and I will answer yes.
Luigi Galleani

Today we decided to have our say on the “Renata” operation. In other writings, the investigation has been analyzed, both in its general repressive aspects of the state and with regard to the technological, inquisitorial and legal tools used to hit those who still dare to fight for something different and still blow on the wings of freedom.

We have decided not to turn to the court that will try us nor to the diligence of our repressors. A courtroom is not the place where we choose to speak today.

We want to speak in those places where there is struggle, where there is still critical spirit, wherever there are women and men who are aware that so many things must be changed now, that this state of affairs must be revolutionized.

So we are going to talk about the actions that we are accused of or that are included in the investigation.

These actions-night or day, individual or collective-are part of a conflict that goes far beyond the specific facts or the territory in which they are located. They are the result of a broader clash, that between the exploited, the exploiters and those who defend them.

Of these actions we share the spirit, the ethics, the method, the goals, regardless of who carried them out. They speak for themselves, they are understandable to most, they point to a path – that of liberation. They point the finger at those who live by exploitation and war, hatred and violence, they wish for something more, something that will put an end to the worst atrocities and barbarities, but above all they aim to destroy the wall of resignation, in times so poor in human solidarity, rebellion, critical thinking.

Those who in recent years have said and still say that such actions serve no purpose, that the game is not worth the candle, that nothing will change, that human beings have permanently lost their wits by reducing life to a constant fratricidal war, have stopped dreaming, have stopped questioning those responsible for injustice and the causes that have brought society to a moral, environmental and material level that is disturbing to say the least. Continue reading “Italy: ‘To burning hearts’ Statement of the anarchists accused at the trial for Operation Renata” →

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” →

In Search of the Powder Keg

Posted on 2021/12/06 - 2021/12/06 by darknights

“Does lived experience only tell you where the slave reclines and resigns himself to the yoke, are the master’s arrogance and greed beyond all restraint?”

How long has this been going on? We have almost lost memory of it, overwhelmed as it is by nausea and disgust.
They have caused a pandemic, indirectly or directly. They have worsened its deadliness with completely senseless political-sanitary measures. They have left those affected and worn out to die deprived of the affection of their loved ones. They have banned autopsies that could have contributed to clarifying reality. They have lied about the causes and effects of what’s been happening. They’ve intentionally sowed fear and terror with both hands for the purpose of paralyzing us. They have forced us to stay closed up at home. They’ve put a gag on our mouth to prevent us from breathing and speaking. They’ve forbidden us from moving about, meeting, touching. They’ve killed the outcasts of society who were the first to protest. They created and spread a mass psychosis, putting us against each other. They have made the heart willing to be suspicious, the tongue willing to snitch, the arm willing to lynch. They have made millions of people lose their source of livelihood, throwing them into desperation. They have insulted, humiliated, slandered, sometimes arrested, those who criticized them. They have unleashed a hunt for plague-spreaders against those who have not respected their prohibitions. They have used the Constitution they swore on as toilet paper, still demanding that we respect it on command. They’ve elected a notorious loan shark as head of the government, hailing him as the supreme savior. They have blackmailed first one category, and then all workers, so that they were made unsuspecting guinea pigs of a vaccine. They have praised the virtue of the resilience that adapts, denigrating the vice of resistance that opposes. They have dramatically increased the price of raw materials now essential to survival. They have allowed those nostalgic for the Duce to attack a union’s headquarters so that they can now accuse of fascism anyone who shows opposition to their policies. They now demand that healthy people who go to work demonstrate daily, at their own expense, that they are healthy in order to go to work. Now reduced to being free only to obey, we even have to pay to be exploited…
In short, in less than two years they have trampled down every freedom, humiliated any intelligence, raped any dignity. They disguised their political urgency as a health emergency to achieve a total control of bodies and the territory. And they have done it with attentive candor, without encountering any major difficulties, brazenly, between the tremulous consent of the majority and the well-mannered dissent of the minority. Decades of social peace – occasionally annoyed by some citizenist agitation – has allowed this. Human blood, increasingly artificial, no longer flows with exciting passions, but rather with powerful anesthetics that inhibit action. And where “political responsibility”, “civic sense” or “respect for legality” are not the things crushing the human spirit, there come to be “assembly decisions”, “strategic considerations” or “respect for collective dynamics”.
Stunned and speechless, we find no more words. We don’t even want to find them, the words. Least of all some new social subject willing to repeat them in chorus. There’s something else we need to search for. With stubborness, with fury, with impatience, with ferocity.

[15 October 2021]

Source: Finimondo