Massive Attack is music, but it is also politics. Robert del Nadja, co-founder of the trip-hop group, has positioned himself throughout his career against authoritarianism, war, injustice, and climate vandalism. Now, in their new phase, Massive Attack has zoomed in and focused on Palantir, the company of oligarch Peter Thiel, the man who says that freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.
Read more The music industry demands licenses from AI
That’s what the group wanted to show at their Primavera Sound concert on Thursday, canceled due to wind. It’s a shame the storm ruined months of work. In a statement released on Friday, the band noted that their commitment to the Barcelona festival was especially relevant to them due to the diversity of the artistic proposal and the clear stance of the city and Catalonia in defense of the Palestinians.
Massive Attack’s cameras satirize Palantir’s aspiration to read our minds
The screens at their concert were not going to show shots of women aspiring to a Bad Bunny casting, nor a marriage proposal, nor couples caught in a secret kiss. All of that now belongs to the prehistory of privacy violation.
Massive Attack, as will be seen in their upcoming performances, now goes further: with their hidden cameras and perverse algorithms, they bring to light the inner miseries of individuals or groups of individuals in the audience randomly focused (“He hasn’t rested in eleven weeks and is burned out,” or “The couple didn’t tell him about the romantic part,” will be read next to a shot of their faces) and will present them as deserving of some unspecified treatment. Punitive, probably.
This is, obviously, a satirical exercise. Massive Attack hacks Palantir Gotham’s own digital environment to show, with a fictitious database, the extent to which the multi-headed monster that has its lair on the American west coast threatens us. A parody that anticipates a lethal form of control: moving from facial to mental recognition and, from there, to abolishing the right to think freely.
Read more World Cup in MAGAlandia
Adam Curtis and the United Visual Artists (who have already mapped Casa Batlló) collaborate in this incursion into the entrails of the beast that brings its sinister intentions to light. This artistic-political manifesto can be seen today at Zitadelle Spandau in Berlin. Hopefully, a concert in Barcelona could be rescheduled, a city that Massive Attack had in mind when they conceived their plea against technofascism.
The penetration of dark technological platforms into our daily present has reached a point of no return. It is urgent to act on several fronts. Institutions are already taking steps to aspire to European technological sovereignty that creates democratic digital infrastructures. But the path of activism should not be ignored. And, in the case at hand, artistic subversion using the enemy’s own tools.
Read also
Massive Attack follows the same satirical path as the memorable The Yes Men (who pretend to be powerful people to then expose the miseries of the system from within) or the Electronic Disturbance Theater, pioneers of digital subversion by amplifying theatrical guerrilla tactics in cyberspace. Or !Mediengruppe Bitnik, explorers of the dark internet. In Catalonia, proposals such as those by Joana Moll, Daniel G. Andújar, Mónica Rikic or Derivart share that same technocritical vocation, not forgetting the pioneer Marcel·lí Antúnez.
In conclusion: let’s be aware of the system’s unlimited capacity to capture our faces and label us accordingly, while we make fools of ourselves debating whether it is honest or not to go to a concert with a partner who is not the official one.
Read more Ebola cases in the DRC approach 500, with Ituri as the epicenter of the outbreak
