On the outskirts of Chambery, on the night of October 6, 2023.
This world is full of cars and machines of all kinds. Some are used to move the techno-bourgeois, like the Tesla cars produced by one of the richest people in the world. There are machines for modern warfare, where humans hidden in an office use intelligent drones to massacre other humans hidden in a trench. And for the techno-bourgeois to get around peacefully, tapping away all day on their smartphones, the others have to massacre each other, because technology doesn’t just fall from the sky: wars are fought for it, and with it. Behind their ideological or ethnic character, the decisive stakes in the coming conflicts are also access to and control of energy resources and infrastructures.
And the shocks provoked by this already globalized war will boost the markets for electricity, technological convergence and nuclear power, while maintaining those for oil. Tell that to a techno-bourgeois in his Tesla, and he’ll probably grimace and say that he’s got nothing to do with it, that he’s just an environmentalist, and that you’re a conspiracy theorist. However, behind an ordinary electric car, and the electronic chips inside, this is the reality that’s hiding (i.e. that everyone pretends not to see). Behind every new technology, there are new slaves, new wars, and the ravaging of our world.
This world is full of cars and machines of all kinds, but that night, fifteen Tesla cars went up in smoke. It’s not much, but it’s still something the techno-bourgeois won’t have.
This world is full of cameras. For twenty years they’ve been popping up like mushrooms in the streets, in houses, on phones, in cars, and even on the heads of moronic hikers. In the streets alone, there are over a billion of them, and 9 on a Tesla. Our life is now a cold movie set in a nest of snitches. And yet: in European cities, there are 4 cameras per 100 inhabitants, in China it’s 37. Ah well, that’s all right then. Directional cameras, 360-degree cameras, on-board cameras, connected cameras, biometric cameras, algorithmic cameras, infra-red cameras: under the pretext of the war on terror, from outside or inside, surveillance cameras have become a guarantee of freedom. Because totalitarian measures often come with the label of democracy. And when they are embodied in ubiquitous technological devices, they accustom us to the idea that there is no room to manoeuvre, that nothing can be done under the eye of the cameras.
This world is full of cameras, but on this particular night, we broke through the enclosure of a building under video surveillance, hiding our features under hoods and umbrellas. And it took a good while for the first firemen and cops to arrive on the scene. It’s not much, but it was more than enough.
This world leads us to believe that there’s no hope of change. The ties between people are so artificial, so distended, the possibilities of freedom so slim. We’ve been condemned to die of boredom and solitude, on the pretext of not starving to death, but it’s not out of the question that in this day and age the three are compatible. Caught up in a present that repeats itself, life no longer has any meaning other than those we choose for ourselves by default: family, homeland, work, religion. These illusions produce solid, renewable cages. These days, there’s not much hope of change.
And yet, it was with the certainty that we could still shake up this world, encouraged by the continuing wave of anti-tech sabotage in Europe, and carried by the love for our companions that always fuels our little conspiracies, that we chose to take action that night.
a band of musk elks
Translated by Act for freedom now!
