Context Into Cyberspace

Cyberspace manifesto

• Technological utopians rising up in California reinvented cyberspace as a new safe world where radical dreams could come true
• ‘Computer utopians saw in cyberspace an alternative reality, A place they could retreat to, away from the harsh right-wing politics that now dominated Reagans America’
• Liberated from hierarchies, cyberspace was real, a parallel dimension to the real world not chemically induced but a space that actually existed
• A magical free place – ‘The Internet’
• Convenient camouflage hiding the emergence of a new power way beyond politics
• Phibre-Optik & Acid Freak demonstrated the hierarchy in cyberspace by hacking computers of giant corporations to demonstrate the growing power of finance, and how the systems of credit knew more and more about you and increasingly used that information to control your destiny

• ‘I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us’ such a statement juxtaposes this manmade entity with organic freedoms
• The naivety of the manifesto exemplifies the tehno-utopian desires of the unregulated tyranny-free technosphere; ‘cyberspace does not lie within your borders…it is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions…our world is different…[it] is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live’. Here we see how the importance of understanding design implication – that which comes after – consequentialism
• The manifesto presents an interesting contextual retrospective of Cyberspace; ‘We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.’ They essentially threaten this space to be their safe-haven however just ignorantly give motive to the opposition to pursue its counter revolt
• Contest the pathology of domination hierarchies with smaller, globally linked, bioregionally based institutions operating out of rational vision logic. Decentralisation, when combined with effective communication, readily accessible information and a democratic sensibility (precisely what computer technology and the internet offer) seems preferable (Desser 2007) 

Alternative network options



Tree Antenna

Natalie D. Kane

[wires that can go around trees (without harming them now) and see the interconnected networkings and radio-waves sent between them using fungi - offering a possible alternative to the internet in the future if it becomes over-surveilled]

• in 1997, Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, revealed the secret conversations between trees and the fungi that live between their roots.’
• once considered parasitic, such fungi are in fact a symbiotic ecology, mutually dependant on this process for their own survival
• each tree is connected to many others, bridged by the fungi which forms a complex communications network. One tree affects the lives of others
• Jalila Essaïdi’s Tree Antenna speaks to that which we cannot see, tapping into the existing system of the tree, transforming it into a communications network that humans can use. By wrapping a coil of insulated wire around a tree trunk, hook up to a toroid conductor, it enables the broadcast and reception of longwave radio signals across seas and territories, amplified by the tree. Alone is it an antenna, while many together become a living communications network. 
• This network is a parallel system, independent of the one network we have come to depend on today, the internet.

The project quietly propels us towards a future in which covert, undercover communications are necessary or preferred.

'...already a hugely contested space, the internet sometimes feels more like a battleground than the paradise we were promised, with the presence or corporate chokeholds and government restrictions a consistent backdrop to daily use.

Not everyone uses the internet in the same way, and any still benefit from its positive and affirmative effects, yet all encounter the signals of something darker lying just beneath the surface. The internet, once a California dream of freedom, has become an arm of control, and incendiary tool of capitalism.'

To imagine the end of the internet or the end of an internet in which we are able to operate with some freedom, forces us to consider the extent of possible consequences of such an event. It forces us to admit our dependency on the internet and consider alternatives to it. We only have to look to China to speculate on what this might be life, where extreme censorship and state run services already restrict, monitor and control users. 

Although it is not quite right to compare the internet to a forest, the analogy can help to understand the nature of complex systems. Both are vast, both have level beyond what the naked eye can see, and both can, and perhaps inevitably will, break. 

With this new infrastructure comes a new way to talk to one another, to send information that could be silenced in a future where the internet is no longer an option for free communication. The inventor is an artist without military aspirations for her experiments - instead she explores the intersection between art and biology.