Sunday, October 2, 2011

Occupy The Planet (Hack it too)

Occupy Movement is front page on CNN, spread nation-wide and growing.

Ah yes, looks like Occupy Wall Street is going asymptotic. I hate to say I called it but... I guess should go get some "I liked #Occupy Wall Street before it was cool" t-shirts and go apply for one of them new-fangled futurist jobs.


Well, at least someone's stripping the emperor.

Anonymous hit the CEO of JP Morgan Chase. Wouldn't want them to feel left out.

Oh hell, why not just start a whole arm dedicated to corporate securities fraud research hacktivism.

Digital warrior groups like Anonymous perhaps have the ability to hit the corporate world where it hurts the most: in their balance sheet. Also, they've got the highest leverage, return on investment: a small group of elite hackers surrounded by a miasma of spontaneously coalescing attackers from anywhere on the planet can with a few hours on their laptop strike serious blows at behemoth targets. Cyber-asymmetrical warfare waged by starfish-like decentralized cells, but rather than the violent suicide bombers of the radical Islamic groups who kamikaze physical planes into the physical epicenters of the global financial oligarchy, they're driving virtual connection requests by the billions into servers in distributed denial of service attacks, drilling trojans and worms into the cold machine heart of the largest banking megafauna. Eating them from the inside out using their own weapon of mass economic destruction; the computer network. The internet in particular and digital revolution in general is also a major differing factor between what's going on now and the Civil Rights movement. It's been acknowledged often enough as well that social media and other net-enabled communications tech were instrumental in at least enabling and accelerating the Arab Spring, lubricating the gears of revolution, and that phenomenon applies equally, if not more so to Occupy Wall Street, organized almost entirely, originally, online with Twitter et. al.. Half a century ago, those few hundred protesters laying around the park would likely have gotten perhaps a single odd mention after the obituary page in a major newspaper, and not even a nod from the 20th century TV news network empires whose cameras would've turned away, indifferently. Occupy Wall Street would've died before you could say, "dirty hippie." But the increasingly decentralized, multilateral, and "read-write" rather than just "read" nature of the internet has allowed a kind of trickle-up, democratic media saturation, via tweets, posts, livestream video footage of events (including voilence against the nonviolent), and is a knell of the change in the way we gain information about the world and how not merely the richest broadcasters but anyone with a phone (70% of the planet) can co-mediate reality. And after the digital grass-roots had spread the story wide enough, the mainstream was eventually forced to pay attention. We have perhaps what Baudrillard called hypermediation, but we also have co-mediation, and open-mediation from the entire population. It's a whole nother playing field, a whole new unmapped territory whose fog of war remains thick, and whether it tilts the odds in favor of the 99% or the richest 1 remains undecided.

Granted, these new uses for tech which the street has found are not going to bring about Shangrilah in and of itself, but we need as many prongs in the attack as possible, given that we're dealing with long-tentacled, evasive shadow-banking squid who reallocate funds, offices, and personnel at the speed of the internet. There needs to be an assault with similar post-geographical reach. Perhaps that is one of Occupy Wall Streets greatest contributions disguised as an incoherency weakness: the protest not just about negotiating a contract this month or ending this particular war or asking this particular CEO to resign or trying to kill the fed; none of these will actually affect the global ecology of mass underclass destruction. It's finally getting to the bottom of things. The movement's message is "The problem is endemic, global, at the very heart of our society, and every single one of you in the 99% are involved."

Bonus: Occupy K-Street

Bonus bonus AFL-CIO speaks out. Unions continue to step up. Let's do this.

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