Posts Tagged ‘Return Fire’
Bristol, Britain’s Flagship ‘Smart City’ (UK)
Thursday, June 9th, 2016
“We’re creating an environment where in a year or two, not five, the whole world will look at Bristol for the future of smart cities.”
– Dimitra Simeonidou, High Performance Networks Lab, Bristol University
The city of Bristol, south west U.K., has begun a multi-million pound experiment to create the ‘smart-city’ of the future, which would cement Bristol as a global leader in the telecommunications world. The wider area of Avon (mainly the ‘post-industrial’ estates of Bristol and Bath) already hosts the largest digital technology sector in the British Isles outside of London, and receives funding from the government as such.
City authorities and allied technological entrepreneurs are working to kit out Bristol with a city-wide ‘digital fabric’ of the very latest in sensor and connectivity technology, to make it the world’s first open ‘programmable city’. A high-speed fibre-optic network (making use of disused cable ducting owned by the council) is being combined with a new ‘city operating system’ that will power an experimental network. In the coming spring of 2016, 1,500 sensor-equipped lampposts are being launched around the city; the vast majority of Bristol will be covered in a Radio Frequency (RF) mesh. This is predicted to revolutionise the way that emergency response, traffic management and other municipal services are handled, and track certain vehicle locations, with eventual alleged trickle-down ‘benefits’ such as informing residents of parking spaces and air pollution (ahem, from those parking spaces) in an increasingly mechanised and technified environment. (more…)
Tags: Analysis, Anti-technology, Bristol, Bristol Is Open, Bristol University, CityOS, Dimitra Simeonidou, High Performance Networks Lab, IBM, Internet of Things, NEC, Paul Wilson (MD Bristol Is Open), Return Fire, Smart Cities, Technological Singularity, Toshiba, UK
Posted in Social Control
PDFs: 4 new releases from green anarchist zine Return Fire (UK)
Sunday, June 5th, 2016
Return Fire #3 : Contents (Winter 2015-2016)
Colonisation (Glossary, Return Fire #3)
Just now we’ve sent out the PDF versions of our recent releases, for downloading and printing. (For past issues, see here). To summarise, there’s the full length edition of Return Fire vol.3 (Winter 2015-2016), full of news, theory, poetry and antagonism; a companion piece consisting of our ‘glossary’ entry for the issue, on Colonisation; an imposed and print-ready version of ‘Smarter Prison?‘ as a supplement to vol.3, which we received from ‘Radical Interference’ and released for December of 2015; and lastly, we’ve uploaded one of the feature texts from vol.3, ‘The Veil Drops‘, to theanarchistlibrary.org as a separate file for reading and reproduction.
Return Fire vol.3
A continuation of our project to bring incisive anarchic content from around to world to an anglophone readership. New editorial content, reprints of things we’ve found useful, artwork, action listings, foraging information, the usual.
There’s a few previously-untranslated articles in this issue. For example, one is an extract from the latest cover story of Italy’s eco-insurrectionary periodical Terra Selvaggia, on ‘The Advance of Urbanisation’ and, simultaneously, cracks opening in the concrete which we could utilise… Annie Archet meanwhile tells a life-story of evading identity, in Portrait of the Invisible Woman in Front of Her Mirror. To name
some out of the texts we’ve assembled from selections of pre-existing ones, David King looks at the reductionist and patriarchal implications of modern reproductive technologies in “Into Her Inner Chambers”, and Nicola Gai speaks to acting within ‘The Maximum That Our Abilities Allow’ (from his contribution to the founding issue of the Croce Nera Anarchica).
(more…)
Tags: Analysis, PDF, Return Fire, UK, Zine
Posted in Library
“Smarter Prison? – Call for War on the Technology Multinationals” publication from Return Fire (UK)
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2016
Submitted to Return Fire in the last month of 2015, as part of the challenge to create diverse Black December activities. Return Fire take full responsibility for delaying publication while we awaited corrections, which we now amended into the text and formatted for release. Big love from our trench to the comrades standing proud in the Turin courts around this very time. Shouts to the fighters who carry on beyond the Black December timeframe and harry the dominators in all corners of our lives. Freedom. R.F.
– solidarity with Silvia, Costa & Billy
Note from Return Fire: We transcribed the following essay, submitted by ‘Radical Interference’, which unfortunately cannot fit into our upcoming Volume 3 (Winter 2015-2016). We are happy to see that the invitation from the Greek dungeons for a Black December campaign (to re-intensify our insurrectionary fervour while not forgetting to “exchange experiences and rationales around various topics of struggle”) was taken up in this form, so as to broaden and develop the offensive against modern domination. Solidarity and strength to Silvia, ‘Costa‘, ‘Billy‘, Marco, Adrián, Nicola and Alfredo, and to the rest of the comrades in our struggle. In the spirit of ‘Avalon’; always present in our memories and active hands. Let’s extend the energy of Black December beyond the New Year, through the trial that starts in January and the proposed week of mobilisation, and onwards on the path of total liberation. Winter Solstice, 2015
INTRODUCTION AND DEDICATION IN ANTICIPATION OF THE TRIAL ON 13th JANUARY 2016
At this time, as the wheels of this monstrous society continue to grind on, and the scattered insurgents make to throw what they can beneath the tracks to slow it down in whatever way, we are left with some questions. These are questions that, in our opinion, deserve more thought and provocation than they usually assume in the circles of anarchists, rebels and land-defenders. Namely; it is clear that mobilisations (independent of any timeframe), such as those for our imprisoned or fallen, are a practical necessity in order to constitute diverse forces that are ready to face and understand the consequences of any struggle that materially contests the ruling order; in other words, so that repression lessens in its power to stop us in our own tracks. (more…)
Tags: Analysis, Black December, Costantino Ragusa, Luca Bernasconi, Radical Interference, Return Fire, Silvia Guerini, UK
Posted in Library
PDF: Volume 2 of U.K. anarchist publication Return Fire
Thursday, January 1st, 2015
325 receives and transmits the electronic version of the latest issue of Return Fire. The zine, from Spring 2014, builds on the green anarchist themes from the last issue and compiles a diverse range of topics.
Here’s the online version of Return Fire vol.2, dated Spring 2014. [See 325.nostate.net/?p=8753 for vol.1] Many events have interfered with the PDF being released sooner, but we’re happy to present another collage of rebellion and anarchy for folks to pick through and hopefully discuss to aid in their struggles.
We’re considering bringing out a third volume in a smaller time frame to cover some of the events we’ve missed since the spring.
Inside these pages, there’s a mix of news, analysis, artwork, plant profiles and more; some of which are editorial, some other comrades’ recent work as well as our own translations, and some the usual reprints.
For example, ‘I Didn’t Want to be a Proud Worker’ is Gabriel Pombo Da Silva’s reminiscence on generous illegality, which appeared as an introduction to the French edition of Huye, Hombre, Huye by Xosé Tarrío González. ‘The Essence of Modern Schooling’ follows the development of the domesticating “education” principle in industrial society by Jan D. Matthews. Plan for Europe’s Biggest Children’s Prison is coverage from the U.K.’s latest counter-information page In The Belly of the Beast, while L’Amour Civilisé, exposing the impoverished social role of coupledom, is out of the journal La Mauvaise Herbe.
This time the Poems for Love, Loss & War are from such insurgents, iconoclasts and adventurers as Kelly Pflug-Back, ‘Eat’, Ron Sakolsky, and Biófilo Panclasta. Rebels Behind Bars features court case news, updates on police crackdowns, and prison letters on topics from psychiatric incarceration to animal liberation, from the Mayday tradition to State surveillance.
We compiled a smattering of Global Flash-Points in riots, sabotage and other direct action during the last part of 2013 and beginning of 2014, and some more or less recent historical legacies in Memory as a Weapon; the siege of Sidney Street in 1910’s London and the multi-lingual Dandelion news-sheet’s piece on migrant revolt in Europe following the so-called “Arab Spring”.
In ‘Gravediggers of Society’, some destructive queers review Lee Edelman’s theory next to that of Guy Hocquenghem (also passing by Jacques Camatte), found in the first issue of Bædan and transcribed.
You can see the full contents page as a PDF here, or go straight to the download of the whole publication here (cover) and here (return-fire-vol2). Feel free to copy and share.
Let this be our contribution to the multi-form front against civilisation and authority, and especially to the month-long mobilisation this December called by Chilean anarchists (to commemorate and agitate around the death of Sebastián Oversluij and capture of Tamara Sol Vergara).
Look out for the hard-copy version in the U.K.
(A)
Tags: PDF, Return Fire, UK, Zine
Posted in Library
PDF: 'Return Fire' anarchist publication electronic version released finally (UK)
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2013
325 hosts the electronic version of the first issue of the UK based anarchist zine ‘Return Fire’. This was first published on paper in Spring 2013. A second issue is in the pipeline.
Tags: PDF, Return Fire, UK, Zine
Posted in Library
"Return Fire" – Anarchist publication from UK
Friday, May 24th, 2013
325.nostate.net/library/return-fire-1-contents.pdf
325.nostate.net/library/return-fire-cover.pdf
325 receives and transmits:
Our new zine Return Fire is now available. It’s a diverse mix with liberatory aims, which we hope to be informative and inspiring for anyone who decides to make their life a weapon against the dominant order.
We present fresh content such as the new anti-psychiatry piece Fucked Off Not Fucked Up by V.Q., updates on modern surveillance and alienation (New Technologies, New Control), an article situating the ongoing Sealife Deformities from the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill within the industrial catastrophe everywhere, and ‘The State Always Has a Conspiracy… Have You?’ from some U.K. irreducibles on refusal, illegality and attack, and more. (more…)
Tags: Return Fire, UK, Venona Q., Zine
Posted in Library