<nettime> geertogram III

[geert lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

1. Elissa Jane Mastel
How Every Business Person Can Fight Back

2. Pieter
anti-war petition

3. George Gilder
Osama bin Luddite

4. Lawrence Freedman
A post-modern conflict

5. Digital Media Wire
Briefly Noted

6. Znet: Noam Chomsky
On the Bombings

7. Keith Dawson/Industry Standard
Exploiting It

---

1. From: "Elissa Jane Mastel" <ejm@ejmpr.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2001 3:43 AM

Terrorists want to do more than kill people and
destroy property.

They want to undermine our confidence.
They want to destroy our economy.

When the trauma and grieving begin to subside,
when the lost are accounted for, when the guilty
are punished, when the heroes are thanked -- it's
still not over.  These terrorists hope to drive
our nation into a recession or depression that
cripples our ability to fight back and threatens
our ability to lead and defend the world.

Each of us can fight back.  Each of us can work
to secure the economic foundation that supports
this country. Economics are about confidence as
much as they are about money.

Here are some of the things you can do to show
we are strong and will not be stopped:

1. OPEN YOUR DOORS AND GO TO WORK.  As soon as
possible, make it clear that you're still in
business and working hard.  The ice cream truck
drivers were back on their routes the morning
after the disaster.

2. SUPPORT YOUR EMPLOYEES.  Provide emotional and
economic assistance to those in need.  Provide
paid leave, emotional counseling, and a helping
hand to those who need it.  People may be
troubled inside even if they don't show it on the
outside.

3. SHOW PATRIOTISM IN THE WORKPLACE.  Fly the
American flag.

4. FIND A WAY TO HIRE ONE EXTRA PERSON.  Try
giving a steady job to a temporary worker, or a
full-time spot to a part-timer.

5. SUPPORT YOUR PEERS IN TROUBLE.  Many
businesses were severely hurt.  Do what you can
to help those you know.  Ideas:  Share offices or
storage space with those who lost it; be lenient
on collecting receivables; extend delivery time
on contracts.

6. REPORT THE PROFITEERS.  Watch for gas stations
and retailers who use this disaster for personal
profit.  Expose them -- then never do business
with them again.

7. USE WHAT YOU HAVE TO HELP.  Use advertising
space to promote charities.  Link your company's
home page to legitimate support organizations.
Donate goods and services to the rescue and
recovery effort.

8. STAY COOL.  Tensions and stress are running
high.  Remind everyone to be extra polite and
understanding.  Help your operators and customer
service reps deal with misdirected anger.

9. STAY POSITIVE.  Attitude is everything.

10. STAY STRONG.

---

2. "Pieter" <smallaxe@xs4all.nl>
anti-war petition

Friends,

There's an anti-war petition that you can sign on the net, to be sent to
president Bush & other world leaders. Find it at

http://home.uchicago.edu/~dhpicker/petition

Best,

PB

ps It probably doesn't make much sense to forward this after Monday 17
Sept. 2001, say.

(another one: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/224622495 /geert)

---

3. <fridaylettermail@gilder.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2001 3:09 AM

OSAMA BIN LUDDITE

Tragedy purges the mind of trivia. Perhaps the horror of a new Black
September can rescue our culture from its thrall of humorless TV Conditry.
>From gossip about the moral codes of mayors and actors. From the search
for the combination to the loony bin of politicians and economists who
believe in the lockbox for Social Security. Instead, we can focus on what
is truly important: the glass ceiling facing millionairettes at Morgan
Stanley. Having survived the vaporization of its 24-floor former World
Trade Center offices, the Wall Street power now faces a second wave from
the gender cops.

Purged too of trivia, perhaps some of the deeper minds of Silicon Valley
can let go of their obsession with the threat possibly posed by computers
to human dignity and supremacy, and get back to work. Computers pose no
threat to humans beyond Microsoft's blue screen of death and fatal-error
messages. Indeed, information tools alone can save us from the
depredations of desperate technophobes -- the Bin Luddites, for whom a mud-
brick New Jerusalem ("Afghanistan, Land of Nothing," The New York Times
headlined one dispatch) apparently harkens relief from the tribulations of
freedom and wealth. The Bin Luddites could no more build a 767 -- much
less a World Trade Center, or even a flashlight -- than they can feed
(never mind, free) the oppressed masses whose interests they claim to
advance. But armed with hijacked technologies and apocalyptic grudges,
they pose a devastating menace to all civilization.

The chief thing terrorists have going for them is the lack of usable
information about them. The U.S. commands the world's supreme information
technology. Neural networks -- already used to scan mortgage applications
and currency market turbulence -- integrate huge amounts of sparse data
and recognize crucial patterns (or countenances). New analog optical
processors sort through troves of information in real time. Bin Laden's
bands left bit trails through the airlines, car rental companies and
federal agencies. He put an infomercial video on the Net. Tom Clancy
provided his plan of attack. But there was no effective integration.

We cannot win by imitating our adversaries. In a rivalry focused on
secrecy and control, demonic cliques will always outperform democratic
bureaucracies. Freedom and openness are our chief enduring assets. As
Edward Teller points out, the U.S. nuclear and missile programs, shrouded
in secrecy, could not even keep their edge against the Soviet Union's
Sputnik and hydrogen bombs. But the U.S. triumphed through entrepreneurial
industries, whose innovations -- and the wealth they generate -- are the
real foundation of our security. Washington now needs to summon those and
the distributed resources of insurance firms, financial institutions,
security consultancies and commercial data farms -- together with the
factious teams of government intelligence -- to address fiendish threats
to open society. Without stifling it in the process.

We should stop using the word "cowards" to describe people who board a 757,
ruthlessly kill the pilots, take the controls and fly the plane into the
side of an office tower. They are brave and evil. Nor should we pay
attention to the pretense of their having some legitimate historic
grievance over the loss of territory. Bin Luddites do not care about
history or territory. They resent the Israeli demonstration that even a
semi-capitalist garrison state can grow flowers and sell them all over
Europe, build semiconductors in Herzlia, practice democracy under fire and
supply a third of Silicon Valley's key communications technologies.

Such envy of creative capitalists provoked all the horrors of the
Twentieth century, from the Holocaust, the liquidation of Russia's Kulaks
and the expulsion of white colonists from Africa, to the massacres of Ibos
in Nigeria, Indians in Uganda and the Chinese in Indonesia. Despots always
promise development, but their first acts are invariably to kill or banish
as many of the actual developers as they can. The Israelis are desperate
to help the Palestinians out of poverty; their own leaders prefer instead
that they die as suicide bombers.

In the light of the burning Trade towers, Democrats and liberals and
European tut-tutters should consider that opposition to missile defense is
tantamount to advocating the destruction of Israel. Without anti-missile
technology, Israel is simply not defensible. It is hard to believe that
Democrats are too stupid to see this. Israel has become as crucial to U.S.
defense as we are to Israel's. Israeli outposts in Silicon Valley
contribute indispensably to all the leading technologies that uphold the
U.S. economy. Unlike many American technologists -- wringing their hands
over the threat of global warming, "gray goo" and humanoid robotics --
Israelis are unembarrassed to work on the weapons that will save us all.

What the enemies of Israel -- and America -- really hate and fear is human
creativity. Flourishing only under capitalism, creativity is our key
endowment, in the image of our creator. Without the miracle of mind,
expressed in the art and enterprise of a free society, human beings become
mere meat. Without the word that breathes spirit into creation, nature is
brutal, deadly and Darwinian. Soulless butchers rule, and rush to bury
civilization under the rubble. Human creativity reflects divine creation.
And this arouses the unending abomination of nihilists everywhere. That is
the real evil in the Luddite urge -- the annihilation of the sapient
creativity that lifts humans beyond the beasts and the Bin Ladens.

---

4. Financial Times (London)
September 12, 2001, Wednesday London
COMMENT & ANALYSIS; Pg. 21

A post-modern conflict: The nature of yesterday's attack leaves the Bush
Administration unsure about how to react.

By LAWRENCE FREEDMAN

The events of September 11, 2001 will go down as one of the critical
strategic events of recent times. For the US, as many have already stated,
this is the equivalent of Pearl Harbor. It has been caught by surprise
with attacks on the important symbols of American power, both military and
economic, with what was clearly a well-planned and co-ordinated attack.

Unlike Pearl Harbor, however, the enemy responsible is by no means
obvious. We know that the group - more an informal network of terrorists -
led by Osama Bin Laden has sought to destroy the World Trade Centre
before, and we know that extremist groups, have been content to let their
members blow themselves up to ensure the maximum possible casualties. We
do not know much more. The mounting tension in the Middle East provides
one possible explanation for the events, but few could have anticipated
something of this scale and horror. Furthermore, this is clearly not an
impromptu response to some Israeli affront, but has been planned for some
time, certainly weeks, probably months.

This is a post-modern war - the attacks are not on raw military capability
but on symbols and identities - and the perpetrators are content to let
the symbolism of this destruction provide its own eloquence. Even those
who claim responsibility cannot necessarily be believed. It is also a
brutal war with a high human cost. As such, it challenges the western
military ethos, which is dominated by talk of precision strikes against
military targets and a determination to avoid collateral damage. True,
these claims have been challenged when missiles go astray and civilians
get killed, but the accusers and the accused in these debates are working
within the same ethical framework. Civilians are assumed to be innocent
unless they are personally involved.

To those who know that they can do nothing to cope with the overwhelming
might of the US and its allies, societies must be their targets because
they know they will lose on the conventional battlefield. This is not an
irrational strategy. The nature of the threat, at least in general terms,
has been well understood for years.

During the 1991 Gulf war there was a widespread expectation of Iraqi
terrorism - for many weeks aircraft flying across the Atlantic were
largely empty, with Americans deciding for themselves that the airlines
were obvious terrorist targets.

As it happens, the Iraqis were being watched so carefully that they could
mount very few attacks worldwide, relying instead on individual
enterprise. The attacks using Scud missiles caused very few casualties but
the confusion and panic they caused in Saudi Arabia and Israel provided a
good indication of the potential effectiveness of terror.

Since the Gulf war there has been much talk of asymmetric war as a
description of two sides fighting with quite different strategies: on the
one hand the US tries to hit specific targets with some alleged direct
relevance to the issues at stake and promising a decisive military effect;
and on the other, shadowy opponents try to strike sufficient fear into the
heart of the American body politic to cause it to pull back from political
involvement in the world's most intractable problems.

In fact the US has been backing off already from engaging as actively in
the past in the Middle East and even the Balkans, not so much because of
the threat to the homeland but because of the vulnerability of its forward
forces. After all, the last terrorist attack suffered by the US was
against a warship off Yemen. Moreover, the strategists, particularly those
influencing the Bush administration, have concentrated on the most extreme
versions of these threats - ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear or
chemical warheads. One wonders how much yesterday's events will lead the
American political elite to question whether national missile defence
really should be their highest priority - it is not necessary to use
long-range missiles to cause utter devastation.

As far as the US is concerned, yesterday's attacks are a declaration of
war. Washington will have no compunction about hitting back at those
responsible. After the attacks on its embassies in Africa in 1998, the US
mounted strikes against the presumed facilities of Mr bin Laden in the
Sudan and Afghanistan, in the first place almost certainly making a
mistake.

This time, they will need to be sure about responsibility - at first, the
Oklahoma Bomb was wrongly assumed to be the work of Middle Eastern
terrorists. They also need to work out exactly what any attacks are
supposed to achieve, other than to satisfy powerful feelings of revenge.
The very nature of the attack, the fact that those immediately responsible
all died in the process and the loose, informal nature of the groups
possibly involved hardly help in the search for appropriate forms of
retaliation.  After Pearl Harbor the US knew exactly what it had to do.
Today it is not so sure.

The writer is professor of war studies at Kings College, London

---

5. "Digital Media Wire" <comments@digitalmediawire.com>
Saturday, September 15, 2001 7:25 AM

Briefly Noted

(Redmond, Wash.) Reuters reported on Friday that Microsoft is removing
graphics of the World Trade Center from a flight simulation video game it
manufactures. The game lets players man the replicated control panels of a
commercial airliner and navigate the sky above cities that also include
Las Vegas and Seattle. Reuters also reported on the actions of other game
developers -- including Electronic Arts, Arush Entertainment, Sony and
Nintendo -- to remove potentially offensive or bad taste material from
games.
http://www.reuters.com/fullstory.jsp?type=technologynews&StoryID=221161
http://www.reuters.com/fullstory.jsp?type=technologynews&StoryID=219363

(Washington, D.C.) The O'Reilly Peer2Peer Conference, an event focused on
peer-to-peer networking technologies that was originally scheduled to take
place Sept. 18-21 in Washington, D.C. has been postponed. The organizers
said they are currently deciding on new dates and venues and should have
more information next week.
http://conferences.oreilly.com/p2p/

(New York) The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday on how advertisers
are pulling ads from newspapers and weekly magazines in the wake of
Tuesday's terrorist attacks in the U.S., further eroding the already slim
ad revenue for publishers. Among those pulling ads are airlines, rental
car companies, hotels and Coca-Cola, which said that it suspended all
broadcast advertising "out of respect" for victims and the rescue effort.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/628799.asp?0dm=T1EVB

---

6. Znet: Noam Chomsky
On the Bombings

The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach
the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan
with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies
and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the US
blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it). Not to
speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind. But that this was
a horrendous crime is not in doubt. The primary victims, as usual, were
working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to
prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed
people. It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many
possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal freedom.

The events reveal, dramatically, the foolishness of the project of
"missile defense." As has been obvious all along, and pointed out
repeatedly by strategic analysts, if anyone wants to cause immense
damage in the US, including weapons of mass destruction, they are highly
unlikely to launch a missile attack, thus guaranteeing their immediate
destruction. There are innumerable easier ways that are basically
unstoppable. But today's events will, very likely, be exploited to
increase the pressure to develop these systems and put them into place.
"Defense" is a thin cover for plans for militarization of space, and
with good PR, even the flimsiest arguments will carry some weight among
a frightened public.

In short, the crime is a gift to the hard jingoist right, those who hope
to use force to control their domains. That is even putting aside the
likely US actions, and what they will trigger -- possibly more attacks
like this one, or worse. The prospects ahead are even more ominous than
they appeared to be before the latest atrocities.

As to how to react, we have a choice. We can express justified horror;
we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means
making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators. If we
choose the latter course, we can do no better, I think, than to listen
to the words of Robert Fisk, whose direct knowledge and insight into
affairs of the region is unmatched after many years of distinguished
reporting. Describing "The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed
and humiliated people," he writes that "this is not the war of democracy
versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming
days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes
and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and
American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese
militia - paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally - hacking and
raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." And much more.
Again, we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so,
contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.

---

7. Keith Dawson/Industry Standard:

TOP GROKS
~~~~~~~~~

Exploiting It

Should we be surprised that some people moved quickly to exploit the
terrorist attacks for their own enrichment or to advance personal or
political agendas? Some reporters covering this unseemly aspect of the
aftermath of terror could barely avoid displaying a curled lip. Others
made effective use of satire or considered, measured prose to shame
the exploiters.

CNET and the Wall Street Journal covered the outbreak of exploitative
spams and scams mere hours after the crashes of the hijacked airliners
on Tuesday. CNET passed along a warning from the Coalition Against
Unsolicited Commercial Email not to fall for spammed appeals for
donations. "Virtually no bona fide relief agencies request funds by
sending e-mail to people who are not already involved in that agency,"
CNET quoted a CAUCE statement.

CNET also noted the rapid appearance of e-mailed teasers for porn
sites and phony Web sites soliciting donations. CNET's reporters
professed surprise at the quick rise of such sleazy exploitation,
alluding to unnamed academics who were "shocked at the volume and
immediacy of scams resulting from the terrorist attacks." The Wall
Street Journal found more worldly - or perhaps more cynical - sources.
"Fraud specialists say such activities are common following
disasters," the Journal reported.

Two early reactions to the tragedy, one on Newsforge and one on Salon,
inspired an online commentator known only as "jsm" to a brilliant
height of satire. Writing on Newsforge, Eric S. Raymond had argued
that "distributed problems require distributed solutions" - that is,
the arming of all airline passengers. (Raymond is known as an advocate
of Open Source software and, according to his Web site, "I am an armed
man, prepared to use deadly force to defend my life and my freedom.")
In Salon, conservative columnist David Horowitz wrote that "it's time
to spend the surplus on national security now."  (What surplus?)
Writing on Adequacy.org ("News for Grown-ups"), "jsm" skewered such
views this way: "Of course the World Trade Center bombings are a
uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the
human tragedy involved. However, we must also consider if this is not
also a lesson to us all; a lesson that my political views are
correct."

Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times struck a more dignified
rhetorical note. Ending a piece about the likely economic impacts of
the tragedy, Krugman inveighed against what he called the "disgraceful
opportunism" he saw in some members of Congress: "Politicians who wrap
themselves in the flag while relentlessly pursuing their usual
partisan agenda are not true patriots, and history will not forgive
them." - Keith Dawson

Spam, misinformation in wake of tragedy
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7150774.html

Unscrupulous E-Mail Marketers Solicit Donors for Fake Disaster-Relief Funds
http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB1000433930241803420.htm
(Paid subscription required.)

Decentralism against terrorism -- first lessons from the 9/11 attack
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/09/11/2048256

What does it all mean?
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/11/reacts/index.html

Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics
http://adequacy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/12/102423/271

After the Horror
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/14/opinion/14KRUG.html
(Registration required.)

Ann Coulter Calls Christian Soldiers to Arms
http://www.inside.com/product/product.asp?pf_ID=2FF92284-5641-473D-B13E-13D8
B634487F

God Gave U.S. 'What We Deserve,' Falwell Says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28620-2001Sep14.html

---





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