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- BLACK TRANSPARENCY
- METAHAVEN
- https://vimeo.com/80041817
- OPENING TITLE
- VISUAL: CURSOR BLINKING
- VISUAL: RIOTS IN GREECE
- NARRATOR:
- This is largely incoherent.
- This is the blinking cursor of our silence.
- Here's democracy.
- And then there's what protects democracy.
- An irredeemable machine of mental murder.
- A national security state-in-a-state. A Law of Silence.
- Leaders assure us that all is well. That we do have the values of democracy, and that its weaponized protection keeps everybody safe and free.
- But these protective operations are themselves secrets.
- The executive means accrued to carry them out can be used to different ends.
- The entities of weaponized protection care for their own survival before everything else.
- They are just like humans.
- Silence and invisibility are the principal currencies of our utopia.
- Soon, everything will be a secret.
- But what about ourselves? Aren't we silent ourselves?
- We haven't said anything in a long time.
- We battle.
- We throw Molotov cocktails, fight the police, and dance on the wings of a government airplane.
- We look into our phones which look into our lives.
- The bare possessions of a non-person living in a non-place.
- A laptop.
- A backpack.
- A night with friends.
- An on-and-off relationship.
- A temporary job.
- A trove of secrets.
- We have a non-plan.
- All we do is show that we still exist.
- We are the opposite of blind. We have absolutely nothing left but our vision.
- VISUAL: CUT to TELEPRESENCE MEETING, CORPORATE VIDEO
- NARRATOR:
- Economies liquified.
- It seemed as if their material basis dissolved.
- Wealth became an airplane routed around the world.
- Value became a global architecture of tax havens and hedge funds.
- The name of the perpetrator of this crime is technology, in the hands of someone.
- Politics and technology together create ideology: that which seems inevitable.
- That which is never followed by a question mark.
- That which comes first after the blinking cursor:
- VISUAL: CUT to MOLTEN LAVA
- NARRATOR:
- "I."
- The internet both disintegrated and rejoined the structures of daily life.
- The borders of the world gave in to shapelessness.
- The old world began to loose it’s structure and a new world covered it like a second skin.
- A network, a set of nodes that are equal.
- A simple fact of life.
- A new beginning. A public space.
- A secret pocket world.
- VISUAL: CUT to HORSES IN THE DESERT, RUNNING BACKWARDS
- NARRATOR:
- Together we fall.
- Together we fall deeper.
- Nothing is to end our ecstatic conquest.
- Undoing all that was said and done before we came.
- Unseeing everything with our eyes.
- We do not live in the same place.
- We weren't introduced.
- Please don't send us flowers. Send secrets.
- VISUAL: CUT TO GIRL ON THE SHORELINE, WAVING HER RED HAIR with DREADLOCKS
- NARRATOR:
- Once, governments were proud that they had secrets.
- Secrets were the preserve of privilege and glamour.
- The modern state claims to believe in transparency and openness.
- This obliges the state to hide the fact that it has secrets.
- Imagine what a whistleblower experiences, as she exposes the previously unseen interior of the state.
- VISUAL: CUT TO WHISTLEBLOWERS CHELSEA (BRADLEY) MANNING, EDWARD SNOWDEN
- NARRATOR:
- Whistleblowers reveal not the excesses and the crimes of the system, even if what is revealed are plainly crimes.
- Whistleblowers expose the system's normal operations; the way it works everyday, and the way it agrees with itself in doing so.
- As they expose the state's interior, leakers are pathologized by the media as narcissistic egomaniacs, seeking attention for themselves.
- Informing the public becomes aiding a foreign power.
- The world turns around its axis into playback.
- VISUAL: CUT to DATA CENTER
- NARRATOR:
- Plato's Cave is now classified.
- We shine light on the writings on the wall.
- Paranoia is historically cast as the out-of-control frame of mind of a madman dictator.
- The pathology of an individual authoritarian, imposing his ferocious will on subjects which must continuously be monitored for secret moves.
- But paranoia is infrastructure.
- It is logistics.
- It is software and hardware.
- It is uniformed guards.
- It is mouse clicks and coffee mugs.
- It is the framed photograph of a spouse.
- VISUAL: CUT to COLLATERAL MURDER FRAGMENT; BAGHDAD APACHE AIRSTRIKE, 2007
- NARRATOR:
- Paranoia is the systematic and robust application of sheer technological possibility, lubricated by a melting empathy.
- So that law indeed gets rewritten by those who oppose it.
- Law in the hands of those who oppose it is just a piece of paper that says something.
- A whistleblower in the eyes of those who oppose it is a mere stand-in-the-way of the inevitable.
- A traitor.
- Enthusiasm for the drone leads to enthusiasm for the drone that takes decisions.
- Pattern recognition and algorithms are replacing ethics.
- The capacity of our computers to store everything, makes us forget the question of whether anything should be stored at all.
- VISUAL: CUT to IDEAL TRANSPARENT FAMILY
- NARRATOR:
- The simplest question becomes the most daring vision.
- Paranoia prepares its own terrorist plots, which it then prevents.
- In scanning the entire internet for who connects to who, paranoia sweeps up everyone.
- Everyone is a suspect, and everyone is in everyone else's social graph.
- The internet’s cables are compliant with the infrastructure of paranoia.
- VISUAL: CUT BACK to COLLATERAL MURDER FRAGMENT; BAGHDAD APACHE AIRSTRIKE, 2007
- NARRATOR:
- The answer, encryption of all communications, will provoke another backlash.
- We will hear that those who encrypt are the terrorists.
- Paranoia's answer is always the same:
- VISUAL: CUT to YOUNG WOMAN ON HILLTOP UNDRESSING as GUY SWEEPS IPHONE
- NARRATOR:
- "More."
- VISUAL: CUT to NSA DATA CENTER UNDER CONSTRUCTION, BLUFFDALE, UTAH
- NARRATOR:
- No government, and no man indeed was ever seen voluntarily letting go of a technological possibility that was ready and available to him.
- VISUAL: CUT to IPHONE 5 UNBOXING VIDEO
- NARRATOR:
- Computers, handheld devices and information networks keep us company night and day.
- Paranoia wants to survive.
- Institutions to protect others, become institutions to protect themselves.
- VISUAL: CUT to KIM AND MONA DOTCOM CHILDREN on the BEACH CLAD in PIRATE T-SHIRTS
- NARRATOR:
- When cracks appear, alternatives to the dominant order can gain strength invisibly until they emerge onto the geopolitical stage with no apparent precedent.
- VISUAL: CUT to GLASSWING BUTTERFLY
- NARRATOR:
- There is no transparency without enlightenment.
- With the industrial revolution came the glass palaces.
- Life without secrets found its form in architecture.
- Under transparency the state looses the informational privilege that allows it to maintain itself.
- Black transparency is involuntary transparency.
- VISUAL: CUT to SABRE FENCERS
- NARRATOR:
- There is a curfew.
- The statues, squares and monuments are no longer ours.
- They are still as images.
- All memory has been seized.
- Our message is silence, our rage is mute.
- VISUAL: CUT to DESERT, TENTS, SATELLITE DISH
- NARRATOR:
- The idea of cyberspace posed a line of separation between the internet and the real world.
- Cyberspace would be a separate universe, created by people, enabled by technology and occupied by information.
- Geopolitically, it would be like the sea once was.
- An unregulated and fluid space where ordinary rules need not apply.
- The internet and life are one.
- A hot and dry desert wind.
- This is our failed state.
- All we do is show that we still exist.
- END TITLES, CREDITS, SOURCES
- Metahaven 2013
- http://www.metahaven.net
- twitter.com/mthvn
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