Re: <nettime> Armor, Amour

[Pit Schultz <pit@klubradio.de>]

the absurdity in this missile defense shield is not only that it
just continues with a republican reaganite dream of space warfare
like nothing has happened over the last 12 years. the true novelty
is that the plan of an us-american evernet, the angelic endless supply
of bandwidth anywhere, anytime, can only economically exist with
an outside, of lower priviledged netizens. a territorialized,
protectionist 'good internet for good americans' consumer paradise,
surrounded by sinistre terrorist-states, competitors, script kidies
and mp3 hungry hackers.
the GDR called it the anti-imperialistic 'schutzwall', the roman
called it 'limes', according to fractal theory the chinese wall
was infinitly long, what this *wall* does in popular imagination
is to establish a *we and the rest* worldview which is contrary
to the one-world-view of the mansonic clinton administration.
it is an atavistic, nationalistic and pre-modern concept, to
try to fence-in the US cyberspace, and it is a mission impossible
because so much of the us economic activity is already spread all
over the planet. by territorializing the internet along national
borders, it will get literally split into parts and other states
will follow the example, a renationalization and reoccupation of
a space which is no space can only lead to serious misunderstandings.
but maybe its more like a media campaign, to americanize cyberspace,
side effect is lots of money to be spent. like an apollo program
for the recession ridden tech industry. government r&d programs, anti-
hacker technoloy, large scale realtime signal processing networks,
complex software tools with high reliablity, and of course the dream
of every control freak, laserbeams and non-lethal warware out of the
orbit.


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