This is the second installment of an ongoing interview with famed lunatic, Sandy Stone. If you missed the first, go here.
Sandy Stone: In cyberspace, this unclean space in which the colonizers are already bringing down the dead hand of the church, or at least the dead hand of the cyber church, we' re already having to fight back. People are fighting back, in their strange ways. That fighting back began originally with the EFF and its weird demise and is moving on to grassroots organizations that still fight on, in their fragmented ways, but ultimately, the way this control works is invisible to most of the people who are worried about it. We're already getting bled by people like SprintNet.
Virginia Eubanks: And in many ways, we need to be suspicious from the start - it is an outshoot of the military-industrial complex - as to not be naive about where the technology comes from, and perhaps where it's going.
SS: But those origins can still be subverted for good. I don't think the military has any objections to something that they made so that they can kill people being used to enlighten, as long as that doesn't interfere with their ability to kill people.
VE: Let's hope not!
SS: You'd think that would be a reasonable trade-off for a gazillion dollars - I don't know - but what happens with people like Sprint and MCI, who control 90% of all this, is a lot more insidious. Because what happens is they just get fat and rich and you never even realize that they're there! In any cross-country internet connection that you make, more than likely pays, eventually, a couple of dollars to Sprint or MCI. They have gotten very sneaky about the ways in which they expand their domains. Here we are trying to get Mexican internet activity started and we figure out that Sprint and MCI are both already there, and laying fiber optic cable like crazy, in the land of the Zapatistas. In some sense, this is benign, because they really don' t give a fuck what you send down their wires.
VE: They' re just laying cable and collecting money.
SS: For now. And if it stays that way, that' s fine. It probably will stay that way. But on the other hand, power has a funny way of moving - power is a thing that very few of us understand. You never really know how those systems operate to constrain what it is that you send through them. We' re already getting noises like that. We have local ones from time to time that we just kind of laugh at - like the Mexican embassy, who tried to shut down our Zapatista node here.
Because the Zap node is within the University, UT just kind of chuckled. It's big enough and powerful enough that they can chuckle and invoke Americans' right to freedom of speech. But that' s because it was making fun of another country! If it were taking shots at our government, it might be different.
VE: One of the things I wanted to touch on briefly is chaos. The name of the magazine, Brillo, is sort of ironic - we have this tag theme "Cleaning Up the Web" - which we hope gets across some sense of the importance of taking responsibility for your actions and your voice, even in a disembodied medium. But at the same time, we think it' s really important to bring back some of the mess - especially the girl-mess - to these supposed clean white spaces. What do you think the future of the tension between chaos and cleanliness is?
You move towards placidity, you move toward order, because order implies control and control means that you can get the energy, or the money or the information to flow in precisely the way you want it to flow, which makes everything quiet and orderly. Whereas chaos, the thing that erupts, always, in those structures, is an agent for change, the agent for evolution. Because basically, we're talking about mutation, that' s the only way that evolution goes on. You can' t have productive change without dirt...
You can't really have productive change without dirt... SS: Well, it's the same question we were talking about before, really, just in a slightly different context. We' re talking about lame gods erupting into the smooth discourses of the colonizer, because basically, what colonization in its broadest sense is about is the suppression of chaos. Next time: Shaking the pumpkin...hard.
