From: nesta@MCS.COM (Nesta Stubbs) Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk,alt.postmodern,alt.wired,alt.cyberspace Subject: The Hypertext Body, Cunt an Cock Online, Jihad Date: 29 Jan 1995 12:54:35 -0600 Organization: Cyberspace Hashishim Advanced Hype Infantry Lines: 188 Message-ID: <3ggo9b$6gm@Mars.mcs.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: mars.mcs.com
"We declare a Jihad, Holy War, against those who
call for the regulation of the net by government
occupational forces. We will cut off there heads
and fill their dead, open mouths with shit, and
impale their skull on a pike, lighting the whole
thing ablaze with flaming torches."
-Mahmud Abd Al-Shakir
Cyberspace Hashishim
Your 'self' is not confined directly to your physcial body, rather it is the interface between your mind, your PSY in cybernetic theory, and the otuside world, the PHI. It's an morphing intersection, the points at which you process information from the outside world. For instance, thru telepresence your 'self' can be moved ouside of your body and into a robotic apparatus, your senses are located and extended thru wires, cameras, and the inteface is no longer tied down to the meat. Cyberspace becomes yet another sensory organ, or rather an entirely new sensorium, an array of input into your mind, extending your "presence" beyond your body, even beyond your terminal.
But this isn't all talk about the future, about things to come, this is NOW. Even now thru textual interfaces and the rudimentary visual adiou interface of WWW browsers your body is bieng extended. It is important to realize that this isn't about the future, about things that may be, this is how things are now. I am no longer simply a young man sitting on his floor in front of his terminal, but instead my 'self' is shifted, enlarged. Imagine a transparent sphere with tentacles and psuedopods like a jelly-fish, extending from you and reaching towards all the boundaries of the net, and data points on it. This is the new hypertext body, no longer held into the rough shape of a body, but now growing, shifting, morphing into a presence engulfing the wired world. And this body exists now, making this war in cyberspace all the more pertinent.
You may not physically bleed form the attacks of those seeking to regulate the net, but you will have blinders put on your new eyes, bars put up to keep out your new fingers. They are talking about putting us in prisons and straightjackets, cutting off our tounges, chopping off our hands, hobbling us, when they intend to control the Net, to control our new bodies.
This fight is made easy by the inherent structure of the networks we will ride upon. The Internet is not so much wires, as it is protocol, a protocol that was designed for military use to withstand a nuclear attack (by now this is almost becoming a part of the nets folklore, the deep military roots) and is thus strucutred so that there is no central control to be easily knocked out and thus destroy the network. This works in our favor, because just as there is no central target for attack, there is also no central point of control. And as the net expands, with more interconnections and paths to travel on, it becomes even more horizontal still, until there is a myriad of different paths your data coud travel along from your computer, to the pornography FTP site your downloading from, or to the anon remailer that will forward your post to a newsgroup alt.abuse.recovery where you would like to remain anonymous.
Each of these paths is another way around the regulations they will attempt to put upon our hypertext bodies. the net is so humungous as far as space to transfer data goes, you have a couple thousand Unix machines, with a couple thousand ports each. Millions of users and accounts to work from. It's guerilla warfare in cyberspace, hit and run tactics made easy thru encryption and smart use of network technology. Make it another Vietnam for the US government, there is no way they can really win, there are too many of us, disguised, unseen, and striking behind the scenes, creating havoc, forging paths thru the jungle of bits to connect our villages, or zones of Autonomy. Imagine traveling thru the Net, all of it a wasteland of censored data pasteurized and homogenized till it contains nothing of interest, it's dead and grey. Then a freind gives you an address, or a client program that connects to a hidden server, all transactions crypto strong and hidden. You run the client, or telnet to that address, and your greeted by a hidden oasis of data, vibrant, alive, people talking, secret parties, like a 1920's speakeasy. The whole thing protected from the net-cops by strong crypto, and the sheer size of cyberspace.
The TAZ is cyberspace can serve many needs, some of which are: connecting people in distant places, serving as a starting platform for a realspace TAZ, augmenting a present realspace TAZ, connecting realspace zones allowing them to build with each other a web of zones. This last one is the most promising in my opinion. Immediacy requires physcial proximity, and this is not possible for everyone, maybe your soem lonely wild one in a suburban hell, or perhaps you have moved recently and haven't connected with fellow hashishim yet, perhaps other obligation require you to stay at home, unable to paticipate in teh creation of a realspace TAZ at the moment. To live these people out is to not only leave out valuable resources for a revolution, but to also alienate people further. In my opinion, any connection, even a mediated one such as presented by cyberspace, is better than no connection at all.
The interconnection of existing TAZ's and also rendering them mobile, mutable and undetectable is perhaps one of the egreatest possibilities in the establishing of cyberspace TAZs. Informational resources can then be shared, the forces are united, but not molested by these connections. The seperate entities involved don't lose their sense of identity, they merely augment each others. Perhaps sometime you will come across a TAZ in cyberspace, a glittering jewel on the Indra's web of hidden network. A dozen or so realspace TAZs with cyberspace presence, their members exhanging letters, pictures, sounds, music, texts, formulas, propaganda. These realspace TAZs would not have been able to connect physically, but now they can thru their hidden Web on the Net. Maybe their members can jam together musically over the net using M-Bone protocol, or write collaborative hypertext fictions, propaganda. Exchange music bytes. Anything that can be digitalized can be shared between the autonomous zones. And even better, once a connection like that is established, coming together physically is easier.
Cyberspace autonomous zones are easier to find, more abundant and also more flexable then physical ones. Some hints on where to find them: small BBS run from a normal users shell (maybe written in Perl) capturing a high number Unix Port to allow connection, a electronic mailing list on a site owned by one of it's members, or by sympathetic people, an IRC channel that is used regularly (in the case of a crackdown is can be run from an underground IRC server with the client and server encrypting transmissions between them), a WWW page with CGI scripts that allow a browser to interact with the page (html BBSs are around already and they can be put on a WWW server that uses encryption to protet it in case of a crackdown), and a underground usenet, with servers accepting connections to different port numbers that standard usenet protocol (once again the client server idea can easily implement encryption to protect the server an client).
-- Cut word lines. --WSB-- | /-/ a s t e shitzine Cut music lines. | http://www.mcs.com/~nesta/haste.html Smash the control images. | "A prank a day keeps fascism away" Smash the control machine. | - Jesse Helms -
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|---|
Questions or comments about these Web pages? Send e-mail to
dave@reststop.net