http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005...7/19/how-to-fight-the-empire-and-win/

If a government agent dresses up and pretends to be a chaos magickian and befriends chaos magickians and discusses chaos magick, guess what! He’s become us! We’ve turned them into a mirror of us, rather than us becoming a mirror of them. To fight the Empire is to become infected by it’s insanity. But to trick the Empire into fighting us on our terms forces it to become infected by our sanity and our humanity.

What’s better, us becoming insane or them becoming sane, open-minded and awash in our love and energy? Forget about disinformation agents plaguing us with lies. Welcome them as magicians and mythographers of the new era. Forget about undercover cops posing as protestors. Look into their eyes, buy them a drink, get stoned and watch the Matrix together.

If they want to track me, great. It will take a team of experts to even know what I’m doing or why - because shit, usually I don’t even know myself. If they can figure it out for me, then I’d like to know. But more importantly, every one of them who is exposed to me becomes *like* me through the process of trying to understand. It’s simply how compassion and sympathy work in humans.

USE them. hell yeah i want them to know who the fuck i am !!! lol.

i believe in what i do. so fuck them. matter of fact, track every damn thing i do, try to arrest or harass me for something, and ill become even more popular than ever

one thing though, whatever the govt is doing as far as information gathering, private companies are already doing with alot more efficiancy. there arent the same kind of regulations or expectations with private companies, and all the data is worth WAY more to them than the govt… so id say they are probably quite a bit ahead of the govt at this point….

one
human?

My recent post on the “positive” side of goverbizness intrusion into individual privacy generated a pretty interesting discus [...]

Damn, that’s a wild quote.

If you think that’s wild, check out Muslim Saints and Mystics by Farid al-din Attar. The medieval sufi saints’ goal is total abandonment of the self.

Reading The Ascension of al-Bistami gives me vertigo.

There is no conflict between exhortations to self-enquiry and exhortations to self-annihilation. These are ways of speaking.

A quote from the “Muslim Saints”:

Thenceforward, whatever gratified my carnal soul,
that I went not about, but clutched something other.
For instance, if prayer or fasting or almsgiving was
agreeable to my carnal soul, or solitude or associating
with my fellows, I proceeded to do the contrary, till I
had cast out all those things and all gratification had
been cut away. Then mystic secrets began to manifest
in me.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I am the pearl of the mine of undesire,” came the
answer. “Now tell the disciples, My mine is the mine of
undesire, and my pearl is the pearl of the mine of
unpurpose.”
Then I walked down to the Tigris and stood between
two skiffs.
“I will not go,” I said, “until a fish falls into my net.”
At last a fish fell into my net. When I drew it up I
cried, “Praise be to God that my affairs have turned
out well!”

I went to Jonaid and told him, “A grace has been
vouchsafed to me!”
“Abu ‘l-Hosain,” Jonaid replied, “if it had been a
snake and not a fish that fell into your net, that would
truly have been a sign of grace. But since you yourself
intervened, it is a deception, not a grace. For the mark
of a grace is that you cease to be there at all.”

My recent post on the “positive” side of goverbizness intrusion into individual privacy generated a pretty interesting discus [...]

Live as if you did not exist.

Damn, that’s a wild quote. This whole conversation reminds me of some of the issues I raised with that Identity Theft Tarot card.

Suppose you are a healthy person who happens to have recently been treated for cancer. Suppose you are also looking for a new job. Do you really want a prospective employer to see that you’ve called such-and-such oncology clinic at least three times a week for the last year? See what I mean?

Slomo, that’s a great example and that definitely hits close to home for me, as somebody close to me has been in a similar situation. I wasn’t saying really that a totally non-private society was acceptable - so much as hoping to inspire people to raise the most meaningful issues around the subject.

As long as we look for some kind of pay for what we do, as long as we want to get something from God in some kind of exchange, we are like the merchants. If you want to be rid of the commercial spirit, then by all means do all you can in the way of good works, but do so solely for the praise of God. Live as if you did not exist. Expect and ask nothing in return. Then the merchant inside you will be driven out of the temple God has made. Then God alone dwells there. See! This is how the temple is cleared: when a person thinks only of God and honors him alone. Only such a person is free and genuine.

-Meister Eckhart

I think often of the future, in direct violation of the Christ’s teaching. This has yet to benefit me, I think, beyond the immediate pleasures of imagination.

M’eye suspicion at this point is that government and business are at this point so incestuous, there really is not much difference between the two. The revolving door between the two is ludicrous once you read up on it. In fact, with all the privatization of the last decade and a half, in the U.S. at least, one can make a very strong argument that the government we’re supposed to believe in is just an empty shell, a front for a multitude of corporations and private interests in communications and the ol’ military-industrial-media complex.

Eye finally buckled down and got a credit card last year and a cell phone in March and am ambivalent about both, though they’re convenient…

The idea that this shit is inevitable doesn’t feel quite right to kmee…certainly, that is the programming/ meme Big Biz/Gov puts out whenever there is some Brave New cultural engineering to be done. It is highly probable, given their level of funding, etc. that this stuff WILL come to pass, but there’s always a possibility that it won’t, based on the choices we make. It’s just a matter of how important it is to how many individuals to not play along, to give up their online checking/investing/buying, to give up their credit cards and cell phones, etc. And upon what principles?

It ain’t all bad, but it definitely ain’t all rosy. And there are likely to be lots of unforseen consequences ( especially for those uv us who aren’t paid to analyze, forecast and create this stuff and are generally too busy with daily living to devote to it–m’eyeself included). Definitely, there will always be creative ways to reimagine/define/utilize and subvert this stuff, but it’s still sort of playing within the game and giving energy to it.

This is what makes certain mystics (including the big JC) so astounding and admirable to kmee. What they were asking and what they seem to continue to ask uv us as individuals are to do what is simple…which is very difficult for us do to our attachments a lot of the time. (Whu? Leave behind m’eye job? m’eye family? stop sellin’ trinkets in the temple?–another tangent: if the temple also symbolizes the body…what does it mean to kick the money changers out of there?)
To live simply and feel and be simplified–to climb a tree or work on an old fishing boat, to sit in a circle and tell tales– is quite a challenge when there are always so many shiny, flashy new things to play with. But are they really improvements?

Eventually, eye’d like to hope, all uv the technological intergration and connection (including the surveilling) will lead to a greater human and spiritual connection and intergration which will supplant it and survive beyond the point that all this untenable progress leads to structural collapse.

And eye don’t even gno if eye believe that? But here’s to behaving like eye do!

Skidoo!

One more along the lines of Crypto Anarchy and/or Assassination Politics.

Accelerando, the future of life in the presence of limited liability companies. This is a pretty good techno-singularity book of fiction. It definitely has its moments.

Hierarchy giving way to Rhizome?

Suppose you are a healthy person who happens to have recently been treated for cancer. Suppose you are also looking for a new job. Do you really want a prospective employer to see that you’ve called such-and-such oncology clinic at least three times a week for the last year? See what I mean?

Excellent point. It’s also necessary to consider that so long as we have coercive governments, they will seek to increase their authority by siezing business records. Dammit, I don’t need my IP monitored, and while I don’t care if Bob’s Big Bidness Recording Inc. tracks me, I do when Bob cooperates with gov’t investigators, which he will, as it’s more economical…

It’s also interesting to see how government, which ought to by definition be “the rule of law”, keeps moving away from its own laws… I wonder at what point Thoughtcrime will literally hit the books, when viewing material becomes evidence of intent… after all, if the internet-singularity is like an exteriorized brain, then your brain leaves a paper trail, and the law is all about paper trails…?

Likewise, I hear people rave about Amazon’s suggestion function. Frankly, it sucks–it tries to sell me CDs I already own or stole–so my musical tastes are easy to pin down–but bookwise it usually wants me to buy either “Creative Visualization for Business Success” or “Mein Kampf.”

Suppose you are a healthy person who happens to have recently been treated for cancer. Suppose you are also looking for a new job. Do you really want a prospective employer to see that you’ve called such-and-such oncology clinic at least three times a week for the last year? See what I mean?

I really do think that in a just society (if there ever was such a thing) people really to have a right to expect a certain level of privacy.

so all the control measures are likley to provoke a furious resistance.

Agreed, I think encryption, scrambling, jamming and allied notions will become extremely popular as a reaction against increased control and surveillance. Specifically though, what do you think such a resistance would look like? What would be their guiding principles? Would you be a member, despite the great benefits that using tracking technology would give you?