April 1980, Toulouse. As the workplaces of international innovation companies Philips Data Systems and CII-Honeywell-Bull sit burning, French authorities desperately look for the offenders of the thought arson and battle attacks.
While there was some confusion in the instant wake of the damage over who was accountable, with militant left-wing group Action Directe at first declaring obligation, a communique released by a private group of IT employees cleaned up the matter by detailing the specific contents of the Philips Data Systems director's workplace desk.
Referred to as the Committee for Liquidation or Subversion of Computers (or Clodo, a play on French slang for homeless), the exact same communique likewise described the group's inspirations for performing the attack.
“As you will have believed, we are IT employees, and are for that reason well-placed to comprehend the existing and future risks of IT and telematics. The computer system is the favored tool of the dominant. It is utilized to make use of, to submit, to manage, to quelch,” they composed.
“This is what we are assaulting, and will continue to attack. Our sabotage is just a more incredible variation of those attacks carried out daily by us or by others … We do not wish to be secured the ghetto of programs and organisational platforms. Battling versus all supremacies is our only objective.”
While Clodo is not extensively remembered in the very same method as other extreme groups from the time– which tended to be far more violent and less concentrated on IT as a tool of injustice– a 2022 documentary entitled Device in Flames has actually triggered considerable interest in the group, along with their methods and inspirations.
Talking With Computer Weekly, Maker in Flames co-director Thomas Dekeyser– who is likewise the author of an approaching book on the politics of “techno-refusal”– stated he ended up being thinking about Clodo since they represented a considerably various technique to the suppressing administration these days's digital politics.
“We think about technological politics as maybe promoting particular legal guidelines of especially damaging components of specific innovations. We might think about union organising within big tech business, we think about prosecuting Zuckerberg for personal privacy offenses, and so on,” he states.
“For the longest time, I've seemed like those things are necessary aspects of any political or social battle, however at the very same time company does continue as normal, in spite of those set of actions by well-meaning people, collectives and organizations, we still wind up with various variations of the exact same issues.”
Dekeyser's interest in Clodo, for that reason, originates from not seeing their activities as the supreme option to society's issues, or something to be especially glorified, however from their “much more powerful sense of rejection” around innovation as a beginning point for political action.
He includes that provided the present social and political environment, there is something “appealing” about the immediacy and privacy of Clodo's actions, which triggered him to “check out kinds of digital politics that do not return every time to the standard political topic that we think about– whether it's the employee,
