<nettime> 'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

bwo Tetalab List

Original to:
https://hackernoon.com/in-france-cyber-criticism-turns-violent-as-activists-burn-a-fablab-to-protest-the-diffusion-of-4ad378251c5b


In France, cyber criticism turns violent as “activists” burn a fablab to 
protest the diffusion of digital culture

What will be the consequences of big tech growing moral failures?
The fablab “La Casemate” after it was destroyed by the group of Grenoble

People don’t throw rocks on the Google buses anymore. Those were the 
good old times.

On Tuesday, La Casemate, a fablab based in Grenoble was vandalized and 
burned because it was described as “a notoriously harmful institution by 
its diffusion of digital culture”.

The public policy of supporting the digital transition was also 
criticized as “City Managers satisfy money-hungry start-ups and geeky 
geeks by opening Fablabs in trendy neighborhoods These seemingly 
extremely heterogeneous devices all aim to accelerate the acceptance and 
social use of the technologies of our disastrous time”.

It’s not the first time people turn to violent protests against 
automation and computers.

From 1979 to 1983, in France, the Committee for Liquidation or 
Subversion of Computers (CLODO) was active in the region of Toulouse, 
where they posed bombs and burned buildings (CII-Honeybull in 1980, 
International Computers Limited in 1980, Sperry-Univac in 1983, etc.) At 
the time, they explained to the French Media that they were “workers in 
the field of data processing and consequently well placed to know the 
current and future dangers of data processing and telecommunications.” 
And that in their view, “ The computer is the favorite tool of the 
dominant. It is used to exploit, to put on file, to control, and to 
repress.”

And there were others. In 1983, in West Germany, a computer center 
designing software used in Pershing missiles was destroyed by a group 
called Rotte Zellen. In 1984, a Belgium group called the Communist 
Combattant Cells (CCC) bombed and destroyed the headquarters of several 
companies in Belgium and Germany. In London, a group called the Angry 
Brigade tried to do the same. And there were similar actions in Asia, in 
South America and of course in the US.

It’s easy to dismiss the actions of these digital “protesters” as mere 
luddites fantasies. But their point was not that the computing industry 
would take jobs from people.

In August 1983, the CLODO gave a rare interview in English to Processed 
World, where they explain : “It’s neither retrograde nor novel. Looking 
at the past, we see only slavery and dehumanization, unless we go back 
to certain so-called primitive societies. And though we may not all 
share the same “social project,’’ we know that it’s stupid to try and 
turn back the clock.” It’s rather that these tools are “perverted at 
their very origin”, pointing for example “that the most computerized 
sector is the army, and that 94% of civilian computer-time is used for 
management and accounting”. To be clear, in their 1983 view, “if 
microprocessors create unemployment, instead of reducing everyone’s 
working-time, it’s because we live in a brutal society, and this is by 
no means a reason to destroy microprocessors.”

Since the 1983 movie “Wargames”, people have dissociated 
computer-related terrorism and violence. By insisting on hacking and 
hackers, it looks like digital politics, protests and violence only take 
place in some sort of virtual world, and that they belong to a grey zone 
where moral values are distant and fuzzy. Indeed, their vocabulary of 
“White Hat”- a good hacker, and “Black Hat”- a bad hacker, seems more 
related to the Lords of the Ring than to the Communist Manifesto. And 
since the seminal 1984 book of Steven Levy, “Hackers: Heroes of the 
Computer Revolution”,the digital world has been fascinated by this new 
storytelling, the claim to be able to break the rules of society. Its 
leaders always want to present themselves as revolutionaries. They 
always begun in a garage. They were always former hackers. They all 
wanted to change the world.

But it seems that this storytelling has come to an end.
The text posted by the group of Grenoble on Indymedia

In their text posted on Friday, the group of Grenoble share the same 
disappointment as the CLODO. They call the digital promises “a blatant 
lie”.

Echoing recent digital critics such as Douglas Rushkoff or even myself, 
they ask themselves what’s revolutionary or prophetic in an industry 
that relies on old-school capitalism, monopolies, micro-work, state 
regulations and money as a cardinal value. And as they reject the hacker 
myth, they end up calling a revered place such as the MIT… a “temple of 
technocracy”. But people surprised, offended or shocked by this 
qualification should remember the way Aaron Swartz has been driven to 
suicide after being mistreated by this institution.

Violence is to be condemned. I feel sad for the people of La Casemate. 
They are the victims of a discharge of hate and distress. But they are 
also the victims of the religion of progress and technology that is 
being sold as an inescapable future for everyone.

It’s not the truth, but there is indeed a need for disenchantment in the 
digital world.

In the end, the members of the CLODO were never caught. They were cast 
aside by the emergence of a new storytelling presenting the digital 
transition as a revolution in its own right. But there is no new story 
to tell. And as the promises of this so-called revolution now fail to 
realize, it was only predictable that people would go back to real 
protesting and real violence as a result. It’s no surprise that after 20 
years of obscurity, people are beginning to remember about them. As the 
negative impact of the digital industry is being felt harder and harder 
by citizens, actions will not be limited to nice ex-big tech employees 
speaking in elite conferences, or to smart social science researchers 
writing outraged papers as they are being financed by technology 
companies.

Technology is not neutral, and there is no virtual world.

Update : I should have mentioned “Industrial Society and its Future”, 
aka the Unabomber Manifesto, but that would need another post, or even 
probably a series of post… just go read it for yourself, if you’ve never 
done it before… the Wikipedia article on Ted Kaczynski can be a good 
entry to grasp what it’s about.

Update 2 : I had forgotten but this is actually the second time in a 
short time that a fablab is burned in France. Last time was last year 
when La Cantine burned in Nantes. There was no revendication at the 
time, but it was thought to be a criminal act.


Original communique on IndyMedia Grenoble (in French):
https://grenoble.indymedia.org/2017-11-24-Grenoble-technopole-apaisee
Rejoinders:
https://grenoble.indymedia.org/2017-11-24-Misere-technophobe
https://grenoble.indymedia.org/2017-11-25-La-stupidite-de-l-incendie-de-la
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: