This reminds me of the time when Colin Powell made the speech at the UN concerning the war in Iraq. Picasso’s Guernica, which was displayed behind the podium, was covered. The official stand was that it distracted from the frame; however, as many commentators said, this was done to remove the possible interpretation of how the US bombing of Iraq was similar to the Nazi bombing of Spanish Villages from viewers (and history’s) minds. In covering it, the US made this reading - which would have probably been ignored if it had been uncovered - possible.
Do we not see something similar in the Burmese Junta’s shutting down of Internet communications? The little fragments of information that did manage to get through got elevated to a level of ennunciative power that would not have existed had the internet not been shut down. The poor Japanese journalist with his clicks clicking away as the soldier shoots him in the head, the floating monk through the water, Ko Hitkes smuggled statements, the very drought of images and statements elevated the existing ones to global, metaphysical, political, poetic proportions.
So, in the end, the Burmese Junta’s act of shutting down the Internet was a way of self sabotaging their own absolute exercise of control over international opinion. And the international media is such that it says ‘how can you not let us in? what are you hiding?’. If the channels of communication had been left open, the situation would have been different. It would have been - from the activists - my god! why is the international community ignoring Burma/Darfur whatever? We have cataloged images of horror and you pay no attention to us!
Anyway, here is the time line and analysis of the internet shutdown - in other words, how the Burmese Junta elevated a simple totalitarian exercise of power that needed to domestic surplus energy into something so much bigger.
Okay, basically you are talking about entropical phenomenon. If someone creates a vacuum of information in a global flow, the flows around it sense the vacuum, an area of “low pressure” and get sucked into it. I wrote a small piece for the funny chaps at RSF and they rejected it. For whatever it’s worth, I bring it to you slightly reshaped:
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Silence as Anger: Violent Starategies for Peace-loving
Buddhist Monks
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by DJ Fadereu
Until now the new rules of warfare are unknown to mainstream media, but they will learn sooner or later. What I’m going to prescribe below are strategies you can use to get your story out into the masses. That is, a situation where the masses are already saturated with mind-numbing informational noise created by regimes and corporations.
1. Distribute The Message: Authorities are able to target you and find you because just like your intended audience, they too understand what you’re saying. So a method of avoiding this is distributing fragments of the message over geographical or cyber space, while leaving careful trails, like scent. Let your audience find you, following these trails like pheromones in ant colonies. Encourage them to leave their own trails that lead to the anthill where you all can gather.
An example of this is warchalking(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warchalking), a system inspired by symbols used among squatters and hobos. Curious people, or people who understand that symbol, will follow it till they reconstruct your story and your journey.
Try not to think of the internet and cellphones as a space removed from physical reality. Leave these fragments of your message, the clues to a puzzle, all over the place - on walls and lamp-posts, on currency notes and bulletin boards, on restaurant bills and railways tickets. Leave nothing unmarked with the scent of your own shit. Leave a symbol that will help people to discover your revolution for themselves. Your message must be a puzzle, a jigsaw, a game.
Do not spell out the message, ever.
2. Distribute Yourself: Authorities are able to target you and find you because just like your intended audience, they too know where and who you are. Just like you have distributed the message, you must distribute it’s origins. Your trusted mates and inner circle can all assume the same identity as you. Better still, your core network should know each other only anonymously, by codenames. You must behave as if you are role-playing like children, spreading odd rumours. If the source of the message is distributed thus, they will never be able to find you, and your message will be louder. You must dissolve your original identity and you have two methods for achieveing this:
A) Appear as different avatars of yourself at different places and times. This way you can remain a chaste monk, while being able to have sexual contact with anonymous female energies floating in the telluric aether.
B) Allow your trusted friends to wear that avatar so that you cannot be pin-pointed. Make your identity “open source”. You must become an urban legend, a myth. Out of your mythology, people will reconstruct your original message sooner or later. As an example, read more about the legend of Comte de St. Germain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comte_de_Saint-Germain)
3. Be the mystery: The whole world became curious about Nepal (insert:Burma), for a few days, when the King (insert:junta) decided to blackout all outgoing information.
You must be able to create such vaccums of information by using silence artistically. For instance, encourage your friends and followers to take a vow of silence, cut off their own throats, and communicate only through symbols and gestures. Behave in a pre-planned manner, poke sweing pins in your own eyes. Identically, as a distributed crowd, visit many places in your city or country like troubadours without a song, but not together. Let the myth grow as it travels from town to town.
As an experiment, I took such a vow for three days, and walked around Bombay city like a computer program (http://algomantra.blogspot.com/2005/01/algoyatra.html) and I noticed many interesting things. People enjoyed making fun of me, but their entire attention was focussed on understanding me. Some even believed that I had no voice. I had turned myself into a vacuum of information that everyone wanted to prod and test and comprehend. When I played a corpse lying in the dirt, they kicked me in the head like a stone. I love people.
For this silence to be widely felt, you must add a periodicity to it. Like bursts of noise, your silence must explode in a rhythmic pattern. Ping….ping….ping…..like the submarine beep of a computer sending an SOS. A swarm of hammerheads approaches, pummeling the Pacific floor..
END
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