[This interview, between RTMARK and David Kushner
(dkushner@mindspring.com) for Wired Magazine, addresses the recent
InfoWeapon prize given to the people of Popotla, Mexico. The original
press release for the prize was sent to RAW on tuesday. I've also
included it at the bottom of this message. -ag]

David Kushner: I am writing an article for Wired News (Wired magazine's
online news service) in the USA and would like to ask you a few
questions about the InfoWeapon prize. My deadline is tomorrow, so please
respond immediately.

RTMARK: We can answer some of your questions on behalf of the InfoWeapon
jury. (We're the ones who sent out the press release about Popotla.)

DK: Why did you award the people of Popotla with the InfoWeapon
award?

RTMARK: They displayed, with their work, the best use of technology
possible. The Popotla wall directly and beautifully serves the people
who made it, and delights and satisfies many others as well. So much
technology does the opposite–oppressing instead of delighting,
horrifying instead of uplifting, discouraging instead of aiding. The
story of the Titanic, as related in the movie, is a story of class
struggle, overcoming economic and technological barriers placed in the
way of the poor–and we find the counterpart of this in the Popotla
wall, paradoxically.

DK: Who else did you consider for the award?

RTMARK: The Zapatista Floodnet
(http://www.thing.net/~rdom/zapsTactical/zaps.html), the lucent
personalised web assistant (http://lpwa.com:8000/) which serves as an
anonymous proxy service, muffin (a java-based proxy server, at
http://muffin.doit.org/), and about a dozen others were finalists; we
had about five hundred entries.

DK: How much is the cash prize?

RTMARK: The prize includes $1,000 and travel to and accommodation in
Linz for the winner (in this case, two representatives of Popotla) for
the awards ceremony and the Infowar festival.

DK: Do you feel that it is ironic to also present an award to the
Titanic movie itself?

RTMARK: Yes, it really highlights some important issues. Fox made
Titanic at a cost of $200 million (the price of 200,000 typical Popotla
fishing boats), and utilized the techniques of Nike and other companies
to keep costs low–establishing a maquiladora, most notably. The movie
is about overcoming class barriers–and a real-world example, much more
real and immediate than any such examples in the movie itself, is the
Popotla wall. The movie Titanic presents to the viewers–including the
legions in the Third World who will see it–a picture of hope,
resistance, and possibility. The people of Popotla, by decorating the
Popotla wall, express their hope and resistance, and explore
possibilities.

DK: Do you have any contact information for a representative from
Popotla or Titanic?

RTMARK: Contact info for Popotla at top of this note; please contact
info@aec.at for Titanic contact info.

DK: What is infowar?

RTMARK: Please see http://www.aec.at/, or write to info@aec.at.

http://www.thing.net/~rdom/zapsTactical/zaps.html
http://lpwa.com:8000/
http://muffin.doit.org/

+ + +

Date: 8.4.98
From: rtmark (announce@rtmark.com)
Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: Mexican village resists high technology

FISHING VILLAGE WINS PRIZE FOR TECHNOLOGICAL WARFARE

Ars Electronica, the foremost new media technology festival in the
world, has awarded its prestigious InfoWeapon cash prize to the people
of Popotla, a tiny Mexican fishing village, for resisting unwanted
technologies by means of trash and recycled materials.

To film the movie Titanic, Twentieth Century Fox built a movie
maquiladora in Popotla, and surrounded it with a giant cement wall to
keep the villagers out. ("Maquiladora" is the term for US factories
operating in Mexico because of the low wages.) The people of Popotla
reacted to the unsightly wall first in humiliation and anger, and then
by covering it with a mural constructed from garbage they amassed and
collected. The Ars Electronica InfoWeapon jury is rewarding Popotla for
this remarkable low-tech gesture against an unpleasant high-tech
situation.

Ars Electronica is also awarding the movie Titanic itself, which cost
US$200 million to make, its Golden Nica cash prize for computer
animation. Ars Electronica is thus in the cutting-edge position of
rewarding both parties in a cultural and economic impasse, thus perhaps
furthering discussion between them.

RTMARK will present the InfoWeapon cash prize to a representative of
Popotla at the Ars Electronica award ceremony in Linz, Austria, this
September.

For a fuller story of the Popotla wall, see
http://rtmark.com/popotla.html.

For a description of the InfoWeapon prize, see
http://www.aec.at/infowar/NETSYMPOSIUM/ARCH-EN/msg00000.html

To learn about Ars Electronica, see http://www.aec.at/.

RTMARK was established in 1991 to further anti-corporate activism, in
some cases by channelling funds from donors to workers for sabotage of
corporate products. Recent and upcoming acts of RTMARK-aided subversion
are documented on RTMARK's web site, http://rtmark.com/.