Family Resemblances in digital activism : close cousins or false brothers ?
►http://colloquium.hiig.de/index.php/esrc/2013/paper/view/30
So, how is crypto anarchy anarchist? Analysing the two Manifestos and the Cyphernomi- cons statement, we can argue that they are, globally, right-wing supporters of markets’ liberty more than supporters of people’s freedom.
(pas tout lu, pas sûr que ça soit intéressant ni que j’adhère aux conclusions, mais l’un des deux auteurs, Vivien Garcia, participe à la revue anarchiste de réflexions Réfractions. Vu le peu d’écrits anars sur le sujet ça mérite l’attention :).
The “smart rats” has absolutely nothing in common with the “oppressed crowds or masses” to whom it is addressed, a message in the socialist tradition, nor, we argue, with the masses gathering and revolting in a variety of popular movements as diverse as OWS (we are the 99%), Indignados, M5S, and so on. On the contrary, it is an elitist mark of what the liberal hacker Jaron Lanier has called “Nerd Supremacy” (Lanier 2010) It seems quite essential and urgent to address in detail how truelite nerd supremacists are tinkering with the hacker ethics to mould present day movements. Do nowadays political movements share with cypherpunks a similar vision of politics? Are hackers a major threat, concealing under the veil of real-time participation, of fierce opposition to “secrets” through hierarchical, hard-encrypted organi- sations, a technocratic attitude far from the claimed leaderless? Could the tools designed for a cypherpunk purpose be subverted? Some scholars begin to investigate, and for some of them hacker’s ethic sounds still very promising (Coleman 2012). We see, for our part, a relation between the figure of the hacker as a knight in shining armor and the priest-founder of a new kind of religion. At the bottom, hacker’s Gnosis has always joked with the fire of mysticism and trance (see Davis 2004). The knight in shining armour could be seen also as a scapegoat in the Datagate era: Brenda Manning and Edward Snowden, together with Assange, are maybe its first incarnations. Mark Anspach has explicitly applied René Girard’s theory of “scapegoat” to Assange in Julian Assange’s Double Trouble, analysing the relationship of love- identification and hate-rivalry between him and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a german technology activist and a former Wikileaks’ spokesperson. Their vicissitude clearly shows reversals and transformations of trust into suspicion and of secrecy into transparency, and vice versa (see Anspach 2013). Not surprisingly, this article has been published on Imitatio.org, a brand of the Peter Thiel Foundation, the cutting edge of the most radical anarcho-capitalist galaxy. A galaxy rapidly expanding (Ippolita 2013).
