The Ante-Chamber of Revolution: A Prelude to
a Theory of Resistance and Maps

Ricardo Dominguez

Ours is not the house of pain and misery.

That is how he who robs
and deceives us has painted us.
Ours is not the land of death and anguish.
Ours is not the treason nor does our way have room for the forgetting.
Ours are not the empty ground and the hollow sky.
Ours is the house of light and joy.
That is how we created it, that is how we struggle for it, that is how
we nurture
it.
Ours is the land of life and hope.
Ours is the path of peace which is planted with dignity and harvested
with justice and liberty.

–FIFTH DECLARATION OF THE LACANDON JUNGLE

The Ante-Chamber of Revolution

Zapatismo is not bound by the limits of interconnectivity or the raw violence
of neo-liberalism. It is a network of hope embedded deep in the heart of a
community who oppose the loss of voice in its own home. A community who
walk with the ghost of history and the ghost of exchange. Zapatismo haunts
the big MASK with small masks that walk between code. They have sent us
notes about this virtual condition, some times they ask that we pass the
notes on, and sometimes they ask us to sing a tender song. They say they
became an intergalactic protocol by slipping under the electronic fabric one
drunken night. They say the man they woke up with the next day screamed
he had been trickedSthen later came back screaming that this was his bed,
his home, and his kitchenSbut the man is wrong, very wrongSthis was our
homeSa home for the homeless.

The Book of Mirrors, The Hybrid, and the MESH (a short essay):

Late Capital is caught by its own reflection, it wants to be both
original and copy, soft and hard, top and bottom, speed and inertia. The
Rand Corporation calls for hybrid hierarchies and networks, with both
Top Sight Command and Distributed Network Teams that function as an
interconnected MESH of total command and total autonomy, for power only.
The Hybrid MESH now has many names: flat power, soft power, liquid
power, power ad infinitum. Late Capital agrees with Mao on what this
power must do: centralize strategically, but decentralize tactically.

The Zapatistas say:
Ya basta! Break the Mirror! Do you really need Maps!*

*Maps (A Long Footnote):

Several different maps of information have been put on the block for our
inspection: frontier, castle, real estate, rhizome, hive, matrix, virus,
network, plug-in your own, etc., Each map creates a different line of
flight, a different form of security, and a different pocket of
resistance.

Frontier:
A digiscape full of drifters, free roaming data cowboys, mail tribes,
code ranchers and bandwidth barons. ISP justice decides the laws for
their community. Those that go beyond the local enclave's limit are on
their own in a lawless infinity. On the frontier the only security one
has is that of a few trusted URL's, ones' faithful machine, and keeping
the VirusScan loaded and close at all times. On the Frontier: *It's
every link for itself and Microsoft against all.*

Resistance on the Frontier: Banditos! We don't need no Stinkin' Badges!

Castles:
This is a space of bunkers and transcendental hierarchies, with moats,
high walls, and drawbridges. Movement between these bunkers is done by
Knights, bearing the latest war gear, protecting the flow of messages
and goods. The most important defense of A Castle is the amount of "Air"
between the outside and the castle's core. For Castles it is the roads
between them they fear. Anything could be lurking in the dark woods.

Resistance between Castles: Robin Hood! Steal from the Rich and Give to
the Poor!

Real Estate:
This is similar to where you are now, as you read or hear these words.
Space is owned or rented by individuals transnational-companies, and
anything in between. Lot's of big signs selling things, gentrification,
homes for senior citizens, the endless streams of homeless. Everyone
wants laws to protect the welfare of exchange under the sign of social
control. They often say they want to protect the children. In this
space, only the commodity is protected.

Resistance under the For Sale Sign: Squat the Future! Burn the sign
down!

Rhizome:
Here Bodies without Organs's schizflux between roots, pop-up flora,
holes and machinic desire. Endless tendrils criss-cross space, some
spaces become hard and never move again, some spaces become smooth and
never crack, nothing escapes the virtual struggle between The State and
The War Machine. Here endless interconnectivity rules all possibility as
an either/or line of flight-territorialize or de-territorialize, you
have no choice.

Resistance at the root: Become a body with organs and smell the flowers.

The Hive:
A wave-system so tightly bound that no difference resides between each
segment of the wave. Each segment is part of a wave-mass, A SWARM. The
Hive is able to absorb any change both within or without the SWARM. Each
segment-wave functions as a SWARM, alone or apart from the other
segments. Each element of a SWARM functions locally in parallel
interdependence with the rest of the wave mass. The Hive and the SWARM
act as one, but only in one direction. Each shift in the SWARM becomes a
part of the HIVE at the same moment. Each segment of the SWARM is a part
of the HIVE, but the HIVE is not a part of the SWARM. Each segment of
SWARM needs the HIVE to be a part of a SWARM, but the HIVE does not need
the any specific segment of the wave-mass to be a SWARM.

Resistance among the SWARM: Use the SWAT! Act Alone.

Matrix:
Weaving symbionts creating, moving, offering the permanent revolution of
Pandora's code. The Matrix is disequilibrium as invention, aphanisis as
informatic-quanta, soft accidents, and action as care. An alien politics
of the body as hope. Still the Matrix is sweating in the labor pools of
speed production. The matrices are held hostage as the base materialism
of Late Captial. Wetware for the endless multi-tasking of choatics. The
Matrix is still looming.

Resistance in The Matrix: Have a Party! Go on Strike!

Virus:
bio-agents flow between complexity and containment, diversity and
control, self and other. Cellular circuits know the difference between
antigens and antibodies. Viral coagulation filters for non-self types in
the Host in order to assemble possible defensive patterns. Bioagents
fail the Host when it meets its other as self. It has no defense against
itself, or what mimics its own messages. Bioinformatics understand the
self and not the other as self.

Resistance within the cell: Make a Vaccine! Stick a needle in a meme!

Network:
Borderless operables, hyper redundancy, massive aggregate throughput
built on endless backplanes bring bottlenecks down to 0.Decentralized
bottom up architectures, mega-gigabit ethernets, and active response
firewalls are the multiple nexus of this space. Intelligent
infrastructures allow the emergence of total networks, micro-networks,
and weak links. Network security is being exploited by the demand for
open transnational e-commerce and intercontinental exchange routes.
Exploit scripts scan vulnerabilities, replacement files wrap packet
filters, stealth sniffers generate new holes: linsniff.c, sunkill.c, and
latierra.c. Network gaps created by military-intelligence systems,
trans-corporate movement, software developers, end users, providers, and
the lack of centralized management clog the possibility of an effective
and total security solution.

Resistance on the Network: Disconnect! Take the Streets!

Mayan Hackers/The Inapropriate/d Resistance without Nostalgia (A Note)

A note was hand delivered to me during a gathering of Radical Media
groups in New York City at The Thing (a critical community server) by a
network that has been doing advance work on Zapatismo, digital activism,
and html democracies.

It was a note from the Lizard Queen:

(Message 445-Ixil /encrypted in the usual manner-con amor.c)

hola cyber/compadre,

Fox is showing reruns of "V", that old Si-fi flick, again. We all sit in
the cantina (and watch the only TV in the community: the women, the
children, the men, and the drunks).

The Lizard agents are trying to control the world and a few small groups
form a global resistance movement. The movie shows the conflicts and
tensions between the cells, the danger of staying aboveground, the
endless struggle against the growing technoforce of the Lizard-Power
structure. The Lizards are also harvesting the humans for snacks. This
not a movie says the one of the kidsSplenty of Lizards around here.

The children spend their mornings, after helping with work at home, here
at the Center for Mayan Code. Right now they are hacking the past/future
binary that has infected the system. Cracking mega_mythologies has
become the latest fun run around here.

Each day the imagined community of promised monsters grows, phantoms mix
code up, reprogram the impossible, then train others. The problem of
temporal fragmentation is getting smaller. A Shared sense of time is our
priority now, space is no longer the tool it once was. We must continue
to build networks of shared time. The Virtual Class expects Mayan codes
to stay in one place and attack from behind a tree, they don't suspect
the question of time to be use against them. Who can know what grows in
the seeds of time. How goes it in your time?

I finally read that essay you sent about the new military theory
(Magen), they seem to have finally read the French. Fractal
infrastructures, holistic kill ratios, fatal strategies and the call for
a RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs). Question compadre: why is it
that only the military and the big companies are allowed to speak of
Revolution? While all we can hope for is a disturbance? Perhaps it is
time to speak of Zapatismo as a Revolution of Hope. Or Perhaps we should
do as the FBI suggested in Computerworld Magazine On their "Back Page"
section (page 114) of their April 20 Issue:

*A group allied with Mexico