Hactivism, X-Evian
While having a look at GnuConcept today I followed a few links and ended up at X-Evian, a live cd based on Debian GNU/Linux. I immediately fell in love with the rhetoric.
The power of digital recombination, reproduction and transmission has enabled the cognitariat (the workers of the immaterial production networks) to organise its own production transversally. But this transverse self-organisation would not have been possible without a format that would protect the collective work. This is copyleft. “Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means of privatizing software, it becomes a means of keeping software free. The central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions, but not permission to add restrictions of their own.” Stallman, R. (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html). …
X-evian is a gesture of disobedience in a world that tattoos our bodies with the capitalist codes of conduct relating to restrictions on copying, competitive production and individualist consumption. X-evian seeks to broaden awareness to other possible ways of approaching technology and the social interactions that can be built on it. And because of its self-installation features, X-evian also becomes a tool of techno-political intervention, a device for direct disobedience; the X-evian CD can be installed on any public domain machine that imposes on the user the techno-capitalist interfaces of interaction (Microsoft Windows, Explorer, etc.). Through X-evian the public/institutional-use computer can be released in a process of techno-political disobedience that exposes the conflict underlying the alliance between public institutions and techno-capitalism: the (publicly subsidised) pillage of the general intellect (the collective sources of knowledge and communication) and the social communicative control that this capitalist domain imposes.
We call this form of disobedience (and others based on the alteration and tactical displacement of the technological codes for social reappropriation) “hacktivism”: the disturbance of the technologically woven webs of power to open new spaces of action, communication and technologically mediated interaction.
The last release was 13 June 2005.
