[HacktionLab] Fwd: BTF event in Bristol and January Reading Group

[Mike Harris]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	BTF event in Bristol and January Reading Group
Date: 	Fri, 9 Jan 2015 12:45:52 +0000
From: 	Ned Ludd <luddites200 at btconnect.com>
To: 	luddites200 <luddites200 at btconnect.com>



1.*Breaking the Frame hosts speakers and discussion on*

***BORDERS AND TECHNOLOGY,**
*
A look at contemporary and historical surveillance and control over the
movement of people, plus resistance.

Speakers from:

  * Statewatch (statewatch.org),
  * Bristol Radical History (brh.org.uk)
  * and others to be confirmed.

Fri Feb 20th 7-9pm 2015

Hydrabooks.org
34 Old Market,
Bristol,
BS2 0EZ

Luddites200 at yahoo.co.uk www.breakingtheframe.org.uk

2.*The January 2015 BTF Reading Group* will be at LARC, 62 Fieldgate
Street, E1 1ES at 7pm on Monday 19th January. Nearest tube: Whitechapel.

We will be looking at Marxism and technology (particularly digital
technology) by looking at some sections of Nick Dyer-Witheford’s
Cyber-Marx. The most important sections to read if you can’t manage
everything, are pages 1-5, 38-42, 48-54, 62-72 and 76-79.

For those who think that digital technology and the whole world
structured according to it 'just happened' because of clever inventions
by scientists, here is a quote from an article by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a
key figure in right-wing US politics for the last fifty years, from
1968. Writing in the CIA-funded Encounter magazine in an article called
'America in the Technetronic Age', Brzezinski extols the potential of
electronics for social control: "Human conduct will become less
spontaneous and less mysterious - more predetermined and subject to
deliberate "programming." ... The same techniques could serve to impose
well-nigh total political surveillance on every citizen, putting into
much sharper relief than is the case today the question of privacy....
The achievement-oriented society might give way to the amusement-focused
society, with essentially spectator spectacles (mass sports, TV)
providing an opiate for increasingly purposeless masses.... In the
technetronic society, the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation
of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily
within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively
exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions
and control reason."




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