Re: <eyebeam><blast> Declaration of INFOWAR.

[Jim Gasperini <jimg@well.com>]

With all due respect, the premise of the ARS Electronica Festival 1998
is utter horseshit.

It's hard to imagine the self-absorption that could allow someone to sit
in Linz, Austria, a few hundred kilometres from a society recently
destroyed by real War, and write such rubbish.

To address one of the more coherent statements in a document remarkable
for its profusion of absurdities:

      Whereas, in the past, war was concerned with the conquering of
      territory, and later with the control of production capacities,
      war in the 21st century is entirely concerned with the
      acquisition and exercise of power over knowledge.

Tell that to the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Croatians, the Albanians. Tell
it to the Rwandans, the Burundians, the Azerbaijanis, the Sri Lankans,
the Iraqis, the Koreans, the Sierra Leonians, the Liberians, the
Somalis, the Timorians. Tell it to the Irish, the Basques, the Kurds,
the Karens. Tell it to those maimed by recent wars in Cambodia, Vietnam,
El Salvador, Guatemala, and those still to be maimed by the millions of
land mines still awaiting in the fields where they have no choice but to
work.

They might tell you, those who chose not to come directly to the point
by blowing your silly heads off with their AK-47s, that you use the
unholy name of War in vain. You attempt to cheapen it with facile
comparisons to the competitive practices of businesses and modern
networks of communication. Such attempts are doomed, if only because the
very medium of this conversation can only exist in those comfortable
corners of the world where humankind has managed to substitute other
forms of competition to the chaotically destructive one known as War.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

--Jim Gasperini





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