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The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), established in 1997 by performance artist and writer Ricardo Dominguez, is an electronic company of cyber activists, critical theorists, and performance artists who engage in the development of both the theory and practice of non-violent acts of defiance across and between digital and non-digital spaces.
The Electronic Disturbance Theater was founded in 1997 by Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Stefan Wray and Carmin Karasic. [1] Taking the idea of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the EDT members used their real names. [2] As a collective, they organized and programmed computer software to show their views against anti-propagandist and military actions, mobilizing micronetworks to act in solidarity by staging virtual sit-ins online and allowing the emergence of a collective presence in direct digital actions.
A second iteration of the group, called Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, included Brett Stalbaum, Amy Sara Carroll, Elle Mehrmand, Micha Cárdenas, and Ricardo Dominguez. [3]
The group's objective was, with the use of digital media and internet based technology, to demonstrate nonviolent resistance in support of the Zapatista rebels residing in the state of Chiapas in Mexico. EDT uses both e-mail and the Internet to promote their work around the world, encouraging fellow supporters to download and run a tool based on HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and Java applet (an internet program used to help support interactive web-based features or programs that a HTML cannot provide alone) called FloodNet. FloodNet is a computer-based program, created by members of the Electronic Disturbance theater company Carmin Karasic and Brett Stalbaum. [4]
The FloodNet program would simply reload a URL for short several times, effectively slowing the website and network server down (a DDOS attack), [5] if a high number of protesters were to join in the sit-in at one time. The EDT would first execute the FloodNet software in what would be for them a dress rehearsal before attacking their main targets on April 10, 1998, and a month later, on both Mexican and American government websites, representing both the Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and American President Bill Clinton. [6]
FloodNet would work on this basic idea taken from street theater practices and political rallies and protest, but instead present it on a much larger and international stage, with the facilitation of macro-networks and non-digital forms of action. Ricardo Dominguez took up the idea of the Floodnet from the "netstrike" organized by the Florentine group Strano Network. On December 21, 1995, the first world Virtual sit-in, conceived by Tommaso Tozzi, was created by the Florentine group Strano Network against the French government to protest against the nuclear tests in Mururoa and was defined as a "Netstrike". [7]
The EDT's mission was to allow the voices of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation to be heard, after the attack on the small remote village of Acteal in Chiapas, Mexico. The Paramilitary, a government-funded military squad, surrounded a Catholic church during a Tsotsil Mayan (a spoken Mexican language from around the Chiapas area of Mexico). For the next several hours the Paramilitary shot everyone to death, those inside the church and any who tried to escape, resulting in the death of fifteen children, nine men, and twenty-one women, four of whom were pregnant, on December 22, 1997. This event became known as the Acteal Massacre. Those who were convicted of this crime were later released in the Supreme Court to the outrage of many, after ignoring eyewitness reports and allowing those who confessed to this crime on humanity. Instead, the Supreme Court focused on the mismanagement of the investigation and the fabrication of evidence.
The Electronic Disturbance Theater took notice of these actions when others did not and arranged their first act of electronic civil disobedience against the Mexican Government. In a subsequent version of FloodNet, those who had downloaded the FloodNet program in support of the Zapatistas were asked to repeatedly input the names of those that had lost their lives at the hands of the Mexican Army in military attacks. This would then target the servers to return an error message each time these URLs would be requested. This data request would be stored in a server's error log and in the eyes of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Electronic Disturbance Theater group, a symbolic list of those 45 Acteal civilians who had died straight to their murderers. If enough people used the FloodNet applet, this would cause the computer server running the website to overload, so that when a regular visitor or someone working within the site tried to access the website or send company based emails and files, the pages would either load extremely slowly or not at all. This worked on the same basis of a real sit-in demonstration, where the protesters block the entrance to a public building of their oppressors and preventing access to the building.
With around 25% of the world's population in one way or another connected to the World Wide Web, with the use of dial-up internet connection, wired or wireless internet broadband connection and even mobile internet technology, every one of these means of communication can allow the internet to be used as a means of non-violent action within human rights, and is viewable around the world, and can be translated into different languages but most importantly not controlled by the government. The EDT networked performances have already opened access and communication between three unlikely micro-networks: net.art, net.activism, and net.hackers. With technology always evolving there is no telling how these areas will grow.
However, on June 10, 1998, the EDT struck the Mexican Secretaria de Gobernacion (Secretary of Government), which is involved in immigration policies as well as Mexico's federal public security forces working in conjunction with the military Zapatista communities in Chiapas unsuccessfully. The Mexican government would have a programmed countermeasure in place. This is what the EDT believe took place. A countermeasure built into the operating JavaScript was placed in the Secretaria de Gobernacion's website that was designed to activate whenever FloodNet was directed toward its servers. Upon activation, the website would open window after window on the FloodNet user's Internet browser. If the FloodNet user remained connected long enough, their browser, whether it is Netscape or Internet Explorer, could crash the activist's computer, forcing the activist to reboot their system and stopping the FloodNet program at the source. The EDT has since dealt with both the Mexican government both online and offline and the United States Department of Defense, which has now inserted a counter attack system into their internet browser-based coding to prevent any more FloodNet-based attacks to the system and server.
The FloodNet system was used again against the World Trade Organization in 1999, where the group would release their online civil disobedience software to the public under the name "Disturbance Development's Kit".
The group received media attention for their 2007 project, the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), which sends experimental poetry to users in addition to helping them find water and safe routes when crossing the Mexican-American border. [8] EDT have described this project as the next step of electronic civil disobedience, or ECD 2.0. [9] The Transborder Immigrant Tool was shown in numerous museums and galleries in 2010, including the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco. [10] [11] [12] The project is maintained by California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. [8]
Electronic Disturbance Theater came under investigation for their virtual sit-in in support of the 2010 March 4 strikes and occupations in support of public education. [13]
Chiapas, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Chiapas, is one of the states that make up the 32 federal entities of Mexico. It comprises 124 municipalities as of September 2017 and its capital and largest city is Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Other important population centers in Chiapas include Ocosingo, Tapachula, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Comitán, and Arriaga. Chiapas is the southernmost state in Mexico, and it borders the states of Oaxaca to the west, Veracruz to the northwest, and Tabasco to the north, and the Petén, Quiché, Huehuetenango, and San Marcos departments of Guatemala to the east and southeast. Chiapas has a significant coastline on the Pacific Ocean to the southwest.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation, often referred to as the Zapatistas, is a far-left political and militant group that controls a substantial amount of territory in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico.
In Internet activism, hacktivism, or hactivism, is the use of computer-based techniques such as hacking as a form of civil disobedience to promote a political agenda or social change. With roots in hacker culture and hacker ethics, its ends are often related to free speech, human rights, or freedom of information movements.
Electronic civil disobedience can refer to any type of civil disobedience in which the participants use information technology to carry out their actions. Electronic civil disobedience often involves computers and the Internet and may also be known as hacktivism. The term "electronic civil disobedience" was coined in the critical writings of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a collective of tactical media artists and practitioners, in their seminal 1996 text, Electronic Civil Disobedience: And Other Unpopular Ideas. Electronic civil disobedience seeks to continue the practices of nonviolent-yet-disruptive protest originally pioneered by American poet Henry David Thoreau, who in 1848 published Civil Disobedience.
A virtual sit-in is a form of electronic civil disobedience deriving its name from the sit-ins popular during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The virtual sit-in attempts to recreate that same action digitally using a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS). During a virtual sit-in, hundreds of activists attempt to access a target website simultaneously and repetitively. If performed correctly, this will cause the target website to run slowly or even collapse entirely, preventing anyone from accessing it.
Locative media or location-based media (LBM) are media of communication functionally bound to a location. The physical implementation of locative media, however, is not bound to the same location to which the content refers.
Subcomandante Elisa is a Mexican activist from Monterrey, Nuevo León. In the 1980s and early 90s, she served as a subcomandante in the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). She was arrested in February 1995 in connection with the 1994 Zapatista uprising. In 1996, the Mexican government acknowledged it was a wrongful arrest and acquitted her of all charges. Today, she is a professor at the Autonomous University of Social Movements.
The Lacandon Jungle is an area of rainforest which stretches from Chiapas, Mexico, into Guatemala. The heart of this rainforest is located in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas near the border with Guatemala in the Montañas del Oriente region of the state. Although much of the jungle outside the reserve has been cleared, the Lacandon is still one of the largest montane rainforests in Mexico. It contains 1,500 tree species, 33% of all Mexican bird species, 25% of all Mexican animal species, 56% of all Mexican diurnal butterflies and 16% of all Mexico's fish species.
Las Abejas is a Christian pacifist civil society group of Tzotzil Maya formed in Chenalhó, Chiapas in 1992 following a familial property dispute that left one person killed. When members of the community took the injured man to the nearest town for medical attention, they were accused of attacking him themselves and jailed. When family members realized what had happened, they began a pilgrimage on foot to San Cristóbal de las Casas. Along the way, Christian pacifists in other villages joined the group, which is dedicated to peace, justice, and anti-neoliberalism. Las Abejas freed their companions and grew as an organization.
Fran Ilich Morales Muñoz is a Mexican writer and media artist who principally works on the theory and practice of narrative media. Since 2010 Ilich lives in New York City.
The Chiapas conflict comprises the 1994 Zapatista uprising, the 1995 Zapatista crisis and ensuing tension between the Mexican state and the indigenous peoples and subsistence farmers of Chiapas from the 1990s to the present day.
On January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) coordinated a 12-day Zapatista uprising in the state of Chiapas, Mexico in protest of NAFTA's enactment. The revolt gathered international attention.
The Fourth World is a science fiction novel by Dennis Danvers originally published in March, 2000 by HarperCollins Publishers. It takes place in 2013, primarily in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and suggests that, in the future, society has been divided by corporate greed into the upper and lower classes, with the middle class having been all but eliminated.
Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente is a Mexican insurgent, the former military leader and spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in the ongoing Chiapas conflict, and an anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal globalization icon. Widely known by his initial nom de guerreSubcomandante Insurgente Marcos, he has subsequently employed several other pseudonyms: he called himself Delegate Zero during the Other Campaign (2006–2007), and since May 2014 has gone by the name Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano, which he adopted in honor of his fallen comrade "Teacher Galeano". Marcos bears the title and rank of Subcomandante, as opposed to Comandante, because, he is subordinate to, and under the command of, the indigenous commanders who constitute the EZLN's Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee's General Command.
Micha Cárdenas, stylized as micha cárdenas, is an American visual and performance artist who is an assistant professor of art and design, specializing in game studies and playable media, at the University of California Santa Cruz. Cárdenas is an artist and theorist who works with the algorithms and poetics of trans people of color in digital media.
Ricardo Dominguez is an American artist and associate professor of visual arts at UC San Diego. He has been the subject of controversy over a number of acts of electronic civil disobedience on his own and with the Electronic Disturbance Theater, which he co-founded.
Radio Insurgente is the official voice of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).The radio station has been operating since August 2003 and it is independent from the Mexican government. Its broadcasting location is unknown. Radio Insurgente's content is focused on promoting the ideas and struggles of the Zapatista movement. Radio Insugente transmits programs in Spanish and in the indigenous languages Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Chol and Tojolabal. According to their website, they transmit "from various places in Chiapas directed to the Zapatista bases, the insurgentes and milicians, the commanders and local people in general". No new programs have been posted on the website since 2009, but CDs are on sale on the site and users can listen to previous content.
Zapatista Coffee Cooperatives primarily operate in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico following Zapatismo ideology.
Magonism is an anarchist, or more precisely anarcho-communist, school of thought precursor of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. It is mainly based on the ideas of Ricardo Flores Magón, his brothers Enrique and Jesús, and also other collaborators of the Mexican newspaper Regeneración, as Práxedis Guerrero, Librado Rivera and Anselmo L. Figueroa.
Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities are de facto autonomous territories controlled by the neo-Zapatista support bases in the Mexican state of Chiapas, founded following the Zapatista uprising which took place in 1994 and is part of the wider Chiapas conflict. Despite attempts at negotiation with the Mexican government which resulted in the San Andrés Accords in 1996, the region's autonomy remains unrecognized by it.
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