disinformation | borderhack: no one is illegal

Welcome to Disinformation | July 06, 2003

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U.S. Weighs Military Intervention in Liberia
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What The European Papers Say
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Violence Mars Nigerian Strikes
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Religion in the News: June 2003
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borderhack: no one is illegal
by Alex Burns (alex@disinfo.com) - December 16, 2000

This is the border. Our border. A place where we earn pesos and consume in dollars. Where we almost live in the US. Where we can smell the future coming from the freeways, from Silicon Valley, from Hollywood, yet we are trapped in a muddy hill with unpaved streets. To reach the freeway we need a car, something that we could never afford. The only way for us to cross the border is by foot, without a penny in our pockets.
~ ~ The BorderHack Manifesto!

Post-Cold War international relations metaphors are very revealing about changing worldviews: Jihad versus McWorld, the Lexus versus the Olive Tree, the Clash of Civilizations. Geo-economic strategists who are redrawing boundary lines at will to suit political expediency and global capital flows express these dubiously triumphant phrases. In turn, strategists become Culture Jamming targets. Now cyberculture activists and digital artists have a new objective: monitoring the treatment of illegal immigrants.

A coalition formed during the mid-1990s to monitor camps along the Germany/Poland border, tracking the migration of diasporas and the status of hot-spots. European media activists like Geert Lovink, and organizations such as the Soros Foundation and De Waag (Society for Old & New Media) used portable computer and video equipment to prevent the ongoing harassment of ethnic minorities by German neo-Nazi cadres. Lovink and his colleagues documented human rights abuses, camp living conditions, and bureaucratic incompetence. Similar initiatives helped dismantle South Africa's apartheid regime, and now drive Peter Gabriel's Witness project.

During the Documenta X festival (June 21st - September 28th, 1997), activists and artists decided to create a border festival - a Temporary Autonomous Zone - to express their indignation regarding the immigrants trapped in a nowhere-land. The festival became a reality in 1988 under the banner Kein Mensch Ist Illegal ("No One Is Illegal").

Within several years, the festival had expanded along the faultline of the European Union and former Comintern members. Now multimedia group Laboratorios Cinematik are bringing the festival (September 1st - 3rd, 2000)to Playes de Tijuana (Tijuana Beach).

Long-trapped in subsistence mode living, Tijuana and other devastated regions are ignored by neo-liberal Final State prophets. Tijuana signifies the North-South divide: a vast gulf between rich/poor, educated/uneducated, and developed/under-developed.

Will Mexicans be condemned forever by geography and circumstance to be unfree in a purportedly free world? BorderHack participants, global voices for the voiceless, seek to penetrate, explore, and understand an inequitable world system. Then to change the feedforward outcomes, forever.

Research by Alex Burns
alex.burns@disinfo.net

BorderHack
Weird web art that data-hacks your mind.

PinPonPapas
This Mexican lifestyle site has nothing whatsoever to do with BorderHack, but features fun 'retro' versions of the games QuiebraMuros and Pac-Man for you to play while you plot overthrowing the California Ideology.

mx.loquesea.com
More online culture, Mexican style, and not an illegal border camp or Best of Moog CD in sight!

TJ Discussion List
Join the TJ discussion list and network with cyberculture activists who are working on global conflict monitoring issues.

net.net.net
The California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles) brought together net activists, artists, and collectives for a series of discussions and workshops (November 1999 - May 2000). Learn more here about Natalie Bookchin's projects.

eGroups: Cinematik
Join the Cinematik discussion group and dialogue with savvy artists and activists worldwide.

net.soul
This New Times Los Angeles Online article (December 2nd, 2000) by Dan Reines explores the pranks of (r)TMmark, the net.net.net festival, and other avant-garde projects that counter the Internet becoming an online shopping mall.

My Boyfriend Came Back From The War
Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back From The War was one of the first successful attempts at nonlinear online fiction.

Documenta X
This Web site archives the Documenta X festival (1997) where the provocative idea for a Germany/Poland border festival was first put forward. Learn about the European cyberculture luminaries who attended, and alternatives to the California Ideology.

Copyleft Attitude: Free Art Licence
Copyleft Attitude are guerilla activists seeking to overhaul archaic intellectual copyright laws for the postmodern condition. Read their manifesto here, and learn more about their ongoing projects.

Sputnik
Digital culture Mexican style: in a globalized era, just like everything else, only a little different.

AltaVista Babelfish
Can't read Spanish fluently? Altavista's Babelfish service can roughly translate Spanish to English text on-the-fly, and features many other options. Expand the Internet's scope today.

DropLift.org
An intriguing culture jamming project, featuring some great resources and links on repetitive beat warfare.

The Idiosyntactix Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia
An indepth Culture Jamming resource lovingly assembled by Dave Gross. Features extensive profiles of icons and collectives, this is a very highly recommended site!

Rabidly Anti-Copyright: The Moral Minority
An incredible site on Culture Jamming and Anti-Copyright issues, The Moral Minority also data-mines the Internet daily to keep you informed about political actions and news. Highly recommended!

nettime
Founded by European agent provocateur Geert Lovink, the nettime discussion list is at the cutting-edge of digital art and online activism today.

Digital City
The Netherlands-based freenet Digital City (in Danish) was co-founded by Geert Lovink, is an invaluable case-study of the BorderHack philosophy supplanted to cyberspace.

De Waag: Society For Old & New Media
De Waag is a media collective at the forefront of monitoring European Community mistreatment of illegal immigrants. A predecessor to the BorderHack philosophy. Dutch and English language versions available.

Hybrid Media Lounge
De Waag (Society For Old & New Media) have created the Hybrid Media Lounge: an online boutique for media activists and artists.

The Border
This Atlantic Monthly article (May 1992) by William Langewiesche is excellent background reading about the US-Mexican border, the target of BorderHack study: "Instead of trying to dissolve the border, the goal of the camp is to apply to it a little reverse engineering, in other words, to try to understand its structure and to discover its workings."

The California Ideology
This seminal essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron pinpointed the psychosocial source of the Internet elite's global orthodoxy. Worth contrasting with European analysts such as Geert Lovink, and BorderHack philosophy.

Arlington Institute: Vital Signs Monitor
Learn about the Arlington Institute's Vital Signs Monitor: a high-tech and high-touch tool for studying geopolitical flashpoints. Now, if only BorderHack could deploy something like this!

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