LOCATION: somewhere in Leeds, June 9th - 12th 2005
Location details to be announced. Available from the web-site and on 07913 216260 from noon on Tues 7th June.


Out of Control

Welcome to the machine! The machine is all around us, omnipresent and omniscient. It’s the camera on the street corner, the chip in your debit card and the number allotted to your child at birth. The machine is without and within. It’s in the way we have been trained and domesticated since birth to fit into a mechanical world dictated by capital and the tick, tick, tick of it’s clock.

Those who want to increase control and domination over our lives have invented increasingly pervasive technologies. From biotech to nanotech, through RFID, gait analysis and new ‘non lethal’ weapons to aid crowd control: they are all further attempts to quantify and standardise our lives. We see these ‘new technologies of control’ as part of a wider project of a new wave of enclosure by capital.

We are calling this gathering in order to discuss and analyse the implications of these new technologies of control, alongside potential responses of resistance that do not merely fall into playing out stock responses, thus fulfilling the role of ‘loyal opposition’.

The location of the gathering will be given out closer to the time, but it will be somewhere in Leeds June 10th through to the 12th. it would be helpful to email us if you are definately coming.

for more info or to offer help email:  technopolis@hushmail.com

www.eco-action.org/technopolis



Reading List:



Welcome to the Machine, Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, Chelsea Green

Mumford, Lewis
-Technics and Civilization, London: Freedom press
-Myth Of the Machine: Pentagon of Power, New York: Harcourt, 1970.
-Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development, New York: Harcourt, 1967.

Watson, David -Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and Its Enemies, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1998.

Ellul, Jacques -The Technological Society, New York: Vintage, 1964.

Bob Black, Technophilia, An Infantile Disorder



Zerzan, John

Technology: Tool, Toy or Tyrant?

Against Technology, a talk by John Zerzan April 23, 1997.

Technology



Industrial Domestication; Industry as the means of modern domination - From Fifth Estate journal

The Tiniest Monstrosities: Nanotechnology and Social Control - From Willful Disobedience

Surveillance and Domestication - by John Connor

A Balanced Account of the World: A Critical Look at the Scientific Worldview - By Wolfi Landstreicher

The Luddites' War on Industry