While the rest of the net.art.activism gang was partying in Linz,
Austria at this year's Ars Electronica Festival, two members of the
Electronic Disturbance Theater hunkered down just a mile and half from
the core of the Pentagon to interact with .mil, .gov, and .com entities.

On September 8, Ricardo Dominguez and Stefan Wray delivered a multimedia
presentation complete with spoken word, video, and sound to an audience
of stern yet curious bureaucrats and hyperparanoics at InfoWar Con '99,
a conference in sterile Crystal City dedicated to Internet system
security and organized by none other than the guru of infowar.com, Winn
Schwartau.

A blend of pure chronology and analysis of EDT's own antics set off
against a series of interruptions and collages of Zapatista video mixed
with fast forwarded hacker shorts held a captive audience for over one
and a half hours.

The conference was strewn with top military brass, corporate leaders,
and top level law enforcement officials who were bent on framing the
debate about security in the direction of cyber-terrorism, equating
digital bodies with real bodies.

If there was a common ground - maybe a long shot - it was probably in
The area of simulation. While not on the agenda in an overt way, the
entire notion of a war on the Internet is predicated on some sort of
belief in the fake and the virtual, simulated warfare in the digital
realm.

It is difficult to say how we were reviewed. But minimally it seems
clear that we did grab people's attention, evidenced by few people
leaving the presentation once they were riveted in their seats. Winn
Schartau later said he was waiting for the "results" to come in, meaning
he wanted to see how people reacted to our "theater."

Most definitely it was worth the journey to Washington, a rare shot at
seeing how the other side thinks. Maybe some heads were turned. One
young man in uniform who said he worked for the Defense Information
Systems Agency made a point of telling us that the military was not a
monolithic block but rather a vast enterprise full of multiple and
diverging views. He, at least, was interested in what we had to say. An
outcome of the talk was an invitation by an editor at Covert Action
Quarterly for us to co-author a piece for their special millennium
issue. Plus we got a chance to chat with a few more journalists and make
connections with other marginal figures who appeared in the cracks
between the .mil and .gov entities.

Being at a conference of hyperparanoics hell-bent on demonizing the work
of many of our cohorts and comrades is not the way we'd like to spend
all our time, but for a brief glimpse at their mindset and worldview it
was certainly well worth it.

P.S. We spoke to 4 War College students, one who had studied EDT in
school, individually between presentations. They all wanted to know who
was in control of EDT, how were our actions and tactics decided, and
what were our plans in the future?

Of course this means that they failed to grasp that within soft_power
cells each individual has to the ability to move quickly and represent
the whole, without having the whole cell involved directly with each
gesture. Also, the importance of keeping each cell as small as possible
in order to allow the sub_divisions of knowledge to hyper_flow via
improvisations and invention. As with any good improvisation in the
theater-if the scene is playing well no one actor is in control and no
one actor can decide the outcome of the scene. Each cell member is also
open to a number of different flows beyond the cell that push the scene
beyond the constraints of the individuals cell members singular
trajectories. The scene_itself controls the ground of the actions,
tactics, and future actions. A scene which is itself is part of a
specific historicity of call and response networks that have converged
within and around the zapatista communities in resistance.

These War College students also when questioned about what they have
been reading-had little to no knowledge of the history of performance
theory, aesthetics, critical theory, or current network theory. Of
course one could say-why should they!-but not even to have read current
military discourse on chaos and simulation seems to show that indeed
they are already losing future wars now.