Notes
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Went on a four mile walk today on the Seward Park Loop to get out of the house with adequate distance from other people. Looks like the blackberries are coming in nicely.
Lots of blackberry bushes, thriving amidst patches of poison oak.
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In a weird state for creative projects given an impending move (I’ve packed up nearly all of my physical music gear, for instance), but it’s given me the opportunity to start messing around with VCV Rack. Treating this as an exercise in constraint rather than frustration.
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eking out the last bits of performance by adding pagination to notes and posts list pages
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created a now page: https://matienzo.org/now
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🔖 This Is Peru. We Can't Breathe. –
The regime simply cannot bring itself to understand why or how this is happening — as representatives of old-school ways of doing politics, they keep looking for responsibility across political parties and groups, and they keep chasing shadows and denouncing some non-existent left-wing conspiracy of some sort. But the protests are already completely somewhere else: they’re self-organizing through social networks like Twitter, Instagram, and increasingly TikTok. Groups are quickly coming together and sharing information and resources without any sort of central coordination. Merino, Flores-Aráoz and their cabinet have no idea what’s going on, and they’re befuddled by how much energy is brewing up so quickly.
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🔖 Rodrigo Ochigame, "Informatics of the Oppressed" –
[F]rom the very beginnings of informatics—the science of information—as an institutionalized field in the 1960s, anti-capitalists have tried to imagine less oppressive, perhaps even liberatory, ways of indexing and searching information. Two Latin American social movements in particular—Cuban socialism and liberation theology—inspired experiments with different approaches to informatics from the 1960s to the 1980s. Taken together, these two historical moments can help us imagine new ways to organize information that threaten the capitalist status quo—above all, by facilitating the wide circulation of the ideas of the oppressed.
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🔖 Skills for Revolutionary Survival: 5. Communications Equipment for Rebels –
Face the facts. We are tied to our devices in ways that are incredibly useful for organizing, but that also expose us to isolation should the state and companies take away these technologies. Cell phones and the internet rely on corporate infrastructure and is subject to both government surveillance and service denial. What do we do when social media bans anti-capitalists and anti-colonialists? What do we do when our cell phones fully become monitoring devices we willingly keep by our side, all to the benefit of state intelligence services? What happens when our cell phone numbers are blocked from service? How will the revolutionaries continue to communicate locally, regionally, and internationally?
These are the questions that have been left in the dust, forgotten or ignored in favor of more romantic visions of armed struggle. People forget; no struggle has ever been successful without robust communication networks that are not subject to state control. From the French resistance in WWII to the Zapatistas in the Lacandon Jungle, communications matter!