First International Gathering of Anarchist and Antiauthoritarian Practices to take place January 25, 26 and 27 2024, in the borderlands of Tijuana, Mexico.

Caught in the Net: Breaking Free from the Digital Enclosure

Saturday 27th  2:30 pm

Most of us will remember when cell towers first started popping up and tech companies tried to make them look like trees. Only ten or so years later, they’ve abandoned even this pathetic effort to mask the expansion of the techno-world, as society has become accustomed to accepting and even welcoming each new technological innovation that is handed to us. Even when one gadget fails to capture consumers (remember Google Glass?) the technologies behind the product (augmented reality, AI, etc.) find use in the military and industry, allowing techies to advance their product while simultaneously molding social acceptance through a combination of propaganda and coercion (hello Apple Vision).

In anarchist circles in the US, critiques of the role that technology
plays in our relationships and struggles have fallen out of style; the
presence of phones and use of social media in spaces of struggle is
largely taken for granted. The immense violence, death, and devastation to the earth that is required to bring phones and computers into our hands has become grotesquely normalized as our ability to interrogate our own dependency on and attachment to these technologies has eroded.

This presentation will look at the process of technological advancement and how it functions on the individual, relational, and societal levels, and the impact this has on struggles against domination. In particular, we will focus on the technologies used to construct borders and surveil non-citizens, tying this to the ways that these technologies occupy our own lives and struggles as well as the dangers it poses to our networks in terms of security. After, we’ll have a group discussion in which we will attempt to break out of the artificial constraints that prevent us from putting this world into question.

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