From Ungrateful Hyenas Editions
“Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think.” — Solitude by Ursula LeGuin
As technological expansion hurtles forward at an increasingly dizzying pace, the presence of smartphones threatens to become normalized across the anarchist space; in many places, this presence has already been normalized for a long time. Among anarchists in the US, critiques of adopting smartphones, or any other new tech gadget, have generally failed to escape the dead-end binaristic logic of moralistic lifestyle politics. Choosing to live without technology is reduced to a form of consumer activism — an arbitrary personal code that is irrelevant to the struggle, or even harmful in terms of redirecting hostility against the state into judgments of individual consumer choices.
The concept of ‘there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism’ has, predictably, become a banner of the ‘radical’ social media consumption frenzy that has engulfed anarchist milieus in these territories and paved the way for the current state of things. Today it is nearly unheard of to live without a smartphone; when attending a meeting or event, one must assume there is a smartphone in each and every pocket, and any critique of this reality is largely viewed as the squawking of old-timer, out of touch wingnuts.
In some places anarchists have resisted this process of normalization and maintained a clear and consistent critique of the impact of smartphone adoption, warding off the incursion from taking hold in the first place. Everywhere that this is not the case however, including but not limited to the US, where any such critique has long since faded, is there any going back? What would it look like to propose that anarchists ditch the technologies we have become increasingly dependent on and addicted to for over a decade, that have come to mediate so much of our lives, relationships, and forms of struggle? Continue reading Beyond the Screen, the Stars
Among the tedious publications that the French state releases every year to offer a semblance of democratic veneer is the annual report of the Commission Nationale de Contrôle des Techniques de Renseignement (CNCTR), the body created in 2015 to monitor the proper use of spying measures deployed by these agencies. The release of its 2022 Annual Report on June 15 may have passed somewhat unnoticed, but it’s still worth extracting a few bits of information. All the more so since the report details the official array of surveillance measures carried out on their own initiative, upstream and as a preventive measure, by all the intelligence agencies, leaving us to imagine how this expansion can then be translated into additional prolonged surveillance in a judicial rather than administrative framework (in the form of opening a preliminary investigation or inquiry, which the person who is targeted will not immediately be aware of).