From the first moment automation has never been ‘labour saving’. As the machines are faster, more efficient, more automatic, ‘smarter’, we are simply forced to work at the increased speed and intensity the machine is now capable of.
The first fully ‘automated supermarkets’ have begun appearing in the UK. Like many other invasions of the urban landscape, which in London particularly is already a fortress under constant surveillance, they are greeted with further indifference. Constant crisis has a wearying effect, every further incursion has a ready-made justification, for further ‘efficiencies’, ‘monitoring’, for a ‘smarter city’.
In fact these supermarkets ‘without checkouts’ are a clear image of things to come, of a hyper controlled, hyper-exploitative restructuing we are only in the beggining stages of. These places where the small illegalities- which become increasingly necessary as economic punishment and dicpline in the form of hyper-price rises in essentials, as well as normalised shortages- are made almost impossible to get away with.
Their appearance on the urban scene works to exhibit arificial intelligence, facial recognition, and to CAPTURE AND HUMILIATE, those who shop there, as much as those who ‘work’ there, now in conditions more competitive, and suveilled on camera all the time, optimising ‘productivity’: total policing of ‘workers’ and ‘consumers’ alike!
In the early hours of Monday the 28th of February, a decision was made to make a dent in the glittering spectacle these laboratories of social control use to advertise themselves. In Greenwich, a recently opened fully-automated Aldi supermarket, was targetted. With rocks, hammers and paint, the entire glass facade was smashed and defaced.
It is hoped that this presents an opening through which the next phase of government by technology can be revealed as something to be grasped with both hands, with easily reproducible methods, in an anarchist framework of attack.
