Post-Media Impossibilities (Part One)

Or Mayan Technologies For The People

Ricardo Dominguez

We must be ready for the unexpected. Not just about the emergence of new technologies - but how people will use them.
- (From Protocols of the MESH)

All post-media direct action cells must pursue the instabilities in Technologies--even before they become metaphors. We must move into areas that seem like the impossible - before they even gain presence among the protocols of the MESH. It is within these chaotic sectors that opportunities for greater disturbances and force multiplication will be found by actors among civil societies in search of leverage anchors for voices without power. Once these balance shifters have been sensed by minor communities of autonomy they must be harnessed. Those who wait for the decentralization of these instabilities will lose the small window available for the development of micro-mass disturbance gestures. We must always be seeking out the flow of uncertainty beyond the overused scientific discourse and technologies at hand: networks, bio-technologies and nano-technologies. Let the MESH spend its time tweaking these possibilities. Instead let us like the Zapatistas continue to break the Mirrors of Power and move into the elsewhere.

Post-media cells should seek out unprocessed instabilities even as the Army's Force XXI and the Marine Corps' Hunter Warriors attempt to retool the left-over war engines of the Cold War as interoperable cyborg systems. Postmodern war still remains bound by paradigms of military science and spectacle (note that most recent actions from the Gulf War, Part One, to the Kosovo Crisis were made for TV and Internet presentation), the endless objective theater of war discourse and the subjective NATO disposition of one reality has been completely introjected into the system (even in the case of Psy-0p actions). Their VR helmets can't see the failure of Reality before the new fundamentalism of the telematic - they continue to believe that the lights they see from the midnight bombs they drop are coming from something that still exists: nation, justice, and democracy. These are now nothing more than the last signs of dead cultural stars. The Military system, like the peasants of the Middle Ages, still kneel before the holy corpse of the MESH and pray for a true state of trajectivity. Some even admit it among themselves:

...there is little apparent interest in the wider effects of these developments and their implications for national security. In fact, attempts to foresee even the near-term future are remarkable for their conservative approach and the general belief that the future will be very much like today with a few advances in technology. Not surprisingly, there have been even fewer attempts to anticipate basic change caused by technologies whose practical applications are only now being discussed by specialists. We are already losing future wars now.
- (From the Army's Book of the Dead, Book II)

The MESH is busy mapping the human genome to create meme-gene weapons to target specific genotypes and building self-replicating fleets of computer controlled molecular weapons. Again, these are not fantasies, molecular nano-technology first emerged as a practice in 1990 when industry researchers at IBM were able to arrange 35 individual xenon atoms to spell out "IBM". In 1991, the Japanese government reportedly began budgeting an annual $185 million for nano-tech research. Since that time three-dimensional structures have been experimentally produced from DNA, and researchers have demonstrated the engineering of branched, non-biological protein with enzymatic activity as a basic methodology for nano devices. This nano-event will intermingle with other MESHworks to produce the new aggregates for the power zones of tomorrow. Post-media cells must fight the future with gestures that have no name in the present.

(Play Tape)

Mayan Technologies For the People (Rewind and Start Now)

Pedrito (tojolabal, two and a half years old, born during the first Intergalactic) is playing with a little car with no wheels or body. In fact, it appears to me that what Pedrito is playing with is a piece of that wood that they call "cork" here, but he has told me very decisively that it is a little car and that it is going to Margaritas to pick up passengers.

It is a gray and cold January morning and we are passing through this village which is today electing the delegates (one man and one woman) whom it will be sending to the March 21 consultation.

The village is in assembly when a Commander-type plane, blue and yellow, from the Army Rainbow Task Force and a pinto helicopter from the Mexican Air Force, begin a series of low over flights above the community. The assembly is not interrupted, those who are speaking merely raise their voices.

Pedrito is fed up with having the artillery aircraft above him, and he goes, fiercely, in search of a stick inside his hut. Pedrito comes out of his house with a piece of wood, and he angrily declares that "I'm going to hit the airplane because it's bothering me a lot." I smile to myself at the child's ingenuousness.

The plane makes a pass over Pedrito's hut, and he raises the stick and waves it furiously at the war plane. The plane then changes its course and leaves in the direction of its base.

Pedrito says "There now" and starts playing once more with his piece of cork, with his little car.

The Sea and I look at each other in silence. We slowly move towards the stick which Pedrito left behind, and we pick it up carefully. We analyze it in great detail.

"It's a stick," I say.

"It is," the Sea says.

Without saying anything else, we take it with us. We run into Tacho as we're leaving. "And that?" he asks, pointing to Pedrito's stick which we had taken. "Mayan technology," the Sea responds.

Above, a suddenly clear sky becomes golden next to clouds like marzipan.

The Sup, trying to remember how Pedrito did what he did.

(Above, the helicopter is a useless tin vulture).

Pause Tape.

For too long the specters of hyper-memetic cargo cults have flowed between the bottom of the third world and the top of the virtual class. A circuit that keeps the impossibilities of the fifth worlds behind the eschatology of designer futures for the first world. Post-media cells must travel among strings of inventions that fall outside of the logomass. To seek gestures that leap over the lines of flight that our current collective realities or imaginary conditions of speed and interconnectivity. We must place the impossible and the unexpected as our counter-dialectics, as in the case of Hannibal and his elephants against the Roman Empire. Tensors that can create unprecedented instabilities in the MESH beyond our todays and tomorrows. These tensors are already drifting among the intergalactic children outside the limits of our social condition. Post-media cells must create situations for mutation that can interrupt and reroute the protocols of acceleration, improvement and obsolesce that late capital is bound by. So that rational history will be broken and remade by the tiny hands of the intergalactic ninos of the fifth world.

Post-media cells must sidestep the Universal State of the Hybrid that late capital now globalizes across all markets. Our confrontations should tactically release all the impossible singularities beyond the homogenization of the New World Order's Human Rights agenda that has now been sent as the foundational condition of hyper-violence and total social control. Here the son (neo-liberalism) is devouring the father (national capital) and, in the process, is destroying the lies of late capitalist ideology: in the new world disorder there is neither democracy nor freedom, neither equality nor fraternity. The planetary stage is transformed into a phased battlefield, in which the chaotics of decayed neural nets now reign. Let us instead seek out those circuits of perversity of the mother and child that reside outside of the luxury of digital History.

Now is the time for the fifth world to move deeply into the virtual state of the Fourth World War and bite its head off with its own trajectories. Each post-media pocket should heed El Sup's smoke signals:

The apparent infallibility of globalization comes up hard against the stubborn disobedience of reality. While neo-liberalism is pursuing its war, groups of protesters, kernels of rebels, are forming throughout the planet. The empire of financiers with full pockets confronts the rebellion of pockets of resistance. Yes, pockets. Of all sizes, of different colors, of varying shapes. Their sole common point is a desire to resist the "new world order" and the crime against humanity that is represented by this fourth world war.
- (From the Book of Intergalactic Memories)

The End of Part One.

Coming Soon to a Screen near You: Part Two
Or
How to Splice Your Own Post-Media Cells