Attack on the Smart City. Fire to an Amazon van
Thoughts are free …
Thoughts are free…
Much has been said about technological attack on the individual beginning with the huge development of various factors and the destructive spreading over the only populated planet so far. Our Era has been hit by a form of happy slavery to which humanity wants to give itself without scruples.
Let’s consider Facebook. The network connection of all people. Anyone can contact anyone else. All by itself Facebook finds old school friends, and even better Facebook also finds me autonomously in photos I knew nothing about. Online groups are created on all possible and imaginable topics and anyone can belong to them. We share news on the entire planet and assess it as bad or good. Then Google. Visited 1, 2, 3, 4 times, and at the second letter Google already knows what I’m looking for already. Magic.
Then Amazon. A company meant to facilitate insatiable consumerism. Every price range, every category, every country. Really there’s something for everyone… it could go on smoothly if there weren’t some voices which have suddenly started saying how shit and inhuman it is to work there. Those who work there tell about training in proper military-style and very sophisticated surveillance measures. About work teams that are punished or rewarded collectively. Not giving a damn is a virtue of Amazon.
And in the US, Amazon prefers to employ ex-middle class people who have ended up living in their cars, to make use of a class of disinherited work nomads. But this company is obviously, from every point of view, only a paradigmatic example among many others. Coercion to work in order to have the basic needs of survival is a paradox. After all the inhuman conditions that many are exposed to every day are well known.
Even if in the current anarchist discourse Marx’s class contradictions seem absolutely obsolete and no mention whatsoever is made of class struggle in the usual sense, the structure of dominion can however be always defined according to power relations, economic coercion and social positions.
A protest against Google is being formed. Against the redevelopment of cities in the Start-up model of residential and work communities, against Factories and against a Google Campus in Kreuzberg. And also Amazon is no longer a gentle portal of online sales. Many people in solidarity have carried out actions in recent years and spread analysis to draw attention to the struggle of those who work there and to identify Amazon as one of the Players of digital domination.
The entity of sabotage is not easily assessed; they tried to deny the political importance of the Amazon trucks in flames at the beginning of May in Philadelphia. Of course, it was not by chance that near Birmingham/UK, at the beginning of November 2017, an Amazon warehouse went up in flames and another warehouse in Rugeley, Staffordshire, was the target of arson already in November 2016. And both fires dramatically disturbed the christmas business.
Whether this resistance can be defined class struggle or not is not as important as is the real oppression of those who have to work for Amazon and the surveillance on those who use Amazon. For more precise analysis further observation is needed and this should be looked for also outside the more restricted circles of the scene, even if in some areas like Atlanta unfortunately there is only Twitter left as a source.
About the rest, already in November 2017 some played with fire against Amazon in Berlin, and damaged a parcel sorting spot in Munich, but unfortunately the campaign ignored militant resistance.
…who can guess it…
In the meantime social changes appear normal above all to young people. Access to people’s most intimate needs has created possibilities for multinationals such as Google and Amazon to control and pilot them. Isolation and the incapacity to have social interaction with real people are its consequences. Inter-personal exchanges lost influence, and all in all, Internet knows more about you than your friends do.
It would be desirable that society opened up on taboo topics like psychic problems, coercion and poverty. No one should be convinced of being ill only because they don’t adapt to the social norm. A capitalist system can’t function if everybody is not into it. So controls and sanctions are necessary in order to subdue people. The State can subdue those with free thoughts only with brutality. Digital domination has the goal of making people equal, being present everywhere in life, striving cleverly to make itself useful and finally to become indispensable. However small it might be, any piece of information is important to understand our thoughts with the purpose of changing them.
Meantime some companies and countries have been using smart technology, for example under social classification, so as to act against the population in a repressive way. Other companies managed to analyse the buying behaviour of customers, to manipulate them and even offer them goods to be purchased.
From us, on 4th May there were two small parcels for Amazon in Kissingenplatz, Berlin-Pankow. Unfortunately only one could be delivered. The other disappeared in Big Data. We used instructions distributed in the web that we thought were secure, but obviously they’re not precise enough to avoid causalities among passers-by faithful to power.