‘As a means of media manipulation, CD worked in the case of the civil rights movement because the historical dynamic of
capitalism acted as the foundation for its success. History was still heterogeneous and the normative manifestation of cap-
italist ideology was still a striated space at both national and international levels. But what do we do now, having reached
the point where visible, diversified ideologies in the West no longer exist, and history is nothing more than a homogeneous
construct that continuously replays capitalist victories? From where will public outrage originate? What army, government,
corporation, or any other power base will support the disempowered when exploitive endocolonial relationships are pre-
cisely what allow these agencies to flourish? This is why CAE has argued for direct confrontation, by using financial lever-
age obtained through blocking privatized information (since this form of information is the gold of late capital).
Appropriating media gains nothing in undermining an authoritarian semiotic regime because no power base benefits from
listening to an alternative message; however, appropriating profit through blocking information sends a clear message to
any chosen capitalist insti -for them, it may be cheaper to change policy than to defend militarily a semiotic regime
under pressure. Accomplishing this task is possible in the virtual realm, and it takes only the most modest of investments
to act (compared to forming an army); however, for such resistance to endure requires clandestine activity.

Currently, the one weak exception to rejecting (E)CD as a means to manipulate mass media is in cases where history and
ideology have not been homogenized. These tend to be situations in which a resistance movement is in conflict with a
dominant power that is still viewed by pancapitalism as being in some form different from itself. For instance, the democ-
racy movement in China used CD and media manipulation with a degree of success. Outrage was generated; however, rigid
national boundaries kept it from manifesting in any way useful for the movement other than the granting of asylum by west-
ern countries for those who had to flee the Chinese authorities, and in generating a modest amount of diplomatic pressure
on China. Even in this best case scenario (and in a way very similar manner to what occurred during the civil rights move-
ment), while the ideological order of pancapitalism was offended, the western economic order perceived China to have
more similarities than differences, and hence little was done by the ~outraged~ west to support the democracy movement
or to materially undermine the Chinese infrastructure.

ECD AND SIMULATION**

Very early on in the development of electronic media, Orson Welles demonstrated (perhaps accidentally) that simulation
has material effects. The simulation of a news broadcast reporting that aliens had invaded earth had the effect of causing
‘a minor panic among those caught in the hall of mirrors that emerged out of the implosion of fiction and nonfiction creat-
ed by the broadcast. Only varying degrees of plausibility existed as to the truth of the story. Simultaneously, all information
was true and all information was false in that historic moment of an erupting hyperreal. We have seen a replay of this nar-
rative in the 1990s with regard to resistant electronic culture, but with some

peculiar differences.

In an addendum written in 1995 for ECD and Other Unpopular Ideas_, CAE noted that there was growing paranoia among
U.S. security agencies about controlling the electronic resistance. Oddly enough, these agencies scared themselves with
their own constructions of electronic criminality. It was much like Welles being scared of his own broadcast. In that comic
moment, CAE ironically suggested that ECD was successful without ever having been tried, and that merely announcing
that some form of digital resistance could occur could have the effect of creating a panic in security agencies to such a
degree that their primary focus would become locked in the hyperreality of criminal constructions and virtual catastrophe.
This is a comment that CAE wishes it had never made, as some activists have come to take it seriously and are trying to
act on it, primarily by using the Web to produce hyperreal activist threats to fan the flames of corporate-state paranoia.
Again, this is a media battle that will be lost. State panic and paranoia will be transformed through mass media into pub-
lic paranoia, which in turn will only reinforce state power. In the U.S., the voting public consistently supports harsher sen-
tencing for ~criminals,~ more jails, and more police, and it is this hyperreal paranoia that gets law-and-order politicians
the votes needed to turn these directives into legislation or government order. How many times must we see this happen?
From McCarthyism to Reagan~s fear of the Evil Empire to the War on Drugs, the result in each case has been more funds
for military, security, and disciplinary agencies (fully mandated by an already fearful and paranoid voting public), and this

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