X-Evian - a Politically Antagonistic Operating System

hydrarchist writes:

What is X-Evian?


X-evian is a self-booting, self-installing distribution copy of Debian Gnu-Linux

X-evian is a Live-CD, a complete operating system which installs automatically from the CD-Rom in RAM memory by means of a process of automatic hardware detection. This makes it possible to "parasite" a PC without leaving any trace?without touching the hard disk and without interfering with the operating system or the files already installed on the PC. X-evian also includes a utility for installing the contents of the CD automatically onto the hard disk (without having to erase Windows).

Debian GNU/Linux is much more than an operating system: it is an entire system of program distribution, installation and management built around the Linux kernel (the core of the operating system). Debian GNU/Linux consists of about 10,000 different programs, nearly all of which are free software, bundled and classified for integrated operation. X-evian is a selection and compilation which has been carefully chosen and configured for activist users, for liberated cultural, technological and social production. But Debian is much more than "a complete operating system and an infinite number of programs". Debian is the largest independent free software community on the Net and one of the most firmly established and stable techno-political projects in cyberspace. X-evian is an easy preconfigured way of introducing the user to the best of the resources of this Debian.

• http://www.debian.org
• http://www.gnu.org
• http://www.kernel.org/

X-evian is copyleft: a product of free knowledges, a mix-and-match production from the self-organised cognitariat

The power of digital recombination, reproduction and transmission has enabled the cognitariat (the workers of the immaterial production networks) to organise its own production transversally. But this transverse self-organisation would not have been possible without a format that would protect the collective work. This is copyleft. "Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means of privatizing software, it becomes a means of keeping software free. The central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions?but not permission to add restrictions of their own.? Stallman, R. (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html).

Copyleft hacks into the legal system of copyright to champion the freedom of knowledges and techniques. X-evian is the product of the recombination, copying and transformation of these knowledges. X-evian can therefore be freely copied, distributed, modified, recombined and used (provided any modification is also free).

But it's not only the software that can be copylefted: the design, images, texts, technical documents, music and videos included in X-evian are also free. X-evian therefore forms part of the cycles of immaterial production, liberated from the info-capitalist restriction on the circulation of knowledges and techniques, and its devices of production and consumption (factories, companies, shopping centres, etc.). Liberated immaterial production does not operate along the lines of the development-production-sale-consumption sequence, but rather follows interactive cycles of development-use-development, looped in backfed hypercycles of projects, groups and individuals (X-evian, metabolik, hacklabs, sindominio, Debian, Linux, etc...). X-evian is therefore also a community of development and experimentation from free software towards a different technological, cultural and social model, in which production and use merge in cooperative horizontal communities working outside market interfaces, innovation restricted by patents and commercial interests and the consumerist use of technology.

This edition of X-evian seeks to explicitly support copyleft philosophy, motivations and practices, and therefore includes an organised selection of copyleft materials (chats, texts, manuals, etc.).

• http://www.gnu.org/copyleft
• http://copyleft.sindominio.net
• http://rekombinant.org
• http://creativecommons.org

X-evian is a hacktivist device for disobedience.

X-evian is a gesture of disobedience in a world that tattoos our bodies with the capitalist codes of conduct relating to restrictions on copying, competitive production and individualist consumption. X-evian seeks to broaden awareness to other possible ways of approaching technology and the social interactions that can be built on it. And because of its self-installation features, X-evian also becomes a tool of techno-political intervention, a device for direct disobedience; the X-evian CD can be installed on any public domain machine that imposes on the user the techno-capitalist interfaces of interaction (Microsoft Windows, Explorer, etc.). Through X-evian the public/institutional-use computer can be released in a process of techno-political disobedience that exposes the conflict underlying the alliance between public institutions and techno-capitalism: the (publicly subsidised) pillage of the general intellect (the collective sources of knowledge and communication) and the social communicative control that this capitalist domain imposes.

We call this form of disobedience (and others based on the alteration and tactical displacement of the technological codes for social reappropriation) "hacktivism": the disturbance of the technologically woven webs of power to open new spaces of action, communication and technologically mediated interaction.

• http://suburbia.sindominio.net
• http://www.critical-art.net
• http://hactivist.com/

X-evian is a toolbox for digital autonomy and an interface with cyberspace configured for social activism.

From a user perspective, X-evian is a toolbox for digital autonomy: with the free programs, recipes, ideas and materials required for digital edition of text (abiword), audio (audacity), video (cinelerra) and images (gimp). The idea is that X-evian offers a complete set of multimedia tools that allow users to edit and disseminate their creations and experiences in any medium: it opens the doors for liberated communication between intermediaries who accumulate configuration, filtering and dissemination privileges. But an isolated creation on a hard disk has no social, political or cultural value. X-evian also wants to encourage circulation of those creations and to do this it needs to become involved in broader networks of co-operation and circulation. Thanks to the pre-selection of bookmarks (links) in the browser, X-evian also takes its user to specific coordinates within cyberspace. X-evian thus becomes a complete interface (browsers, cryptography, links, manuals, references, etc.) with the mediactivist and hacktivist networks.

X-evian is also designed to connect automatically to metropolitan wireless networks (or wi-fi communities) that have sprung up in recent years thanks to experiments with wireless network technologies and by setting up community projects for creating and managing these networks. If you have a wireless network card, X-evian will allow you to easily search the electro-magnetic frequencies for these and other networks.

• http://euskalherria.indymedia.org
• http://www.hacklabs.org
• http://www.bilbowireless.net
• http://www.wirelessanarchy.com/

X-evian is techno-political: an alliance between the technical and the social.

The (now common) terms "Information Society", "Knowledge Society", "ICT (information and communication technology) society" are metaphors that reveal the cognitive and techno-informational society that construct society today. Technology has ceased to be a network of applied knowledge (techniques) evaluated on the basis of their rational adaptation to pre-established purposes which do not extend beyond their technical dimension. In our societies, technology is revealed as being techno-political: the communicative and interactive social substratum that weaves unpredictable relations of power in each of the technical assemblies that surround us. X-evian is a conscious alliance between the technical and the political/social. It is an alliance that has sprung out of the CSOAs (centros sociales okupados autogestionados or self-managed squat social centres) and the cycles of overall resistance. Specifically X-evian is a project designed by the hacker laboratory of the Undondo Gaztetxea CSOA, Metabolik BioHacklab, and was developed to meet the need to fit out machines and connect them up in a network for the G8 counter-summit in Evian in June 2003.

X-evian is not an end in itself. X-evian was not created to channel the efforts of the cognitariat (programmers, designers, writers, systems administrators, etc. into a sequence of zeros and ones and a few designs on a CD. X-evian is a medium which acts as a vehicle for those efforts to aim ever higher, towards those other possible worlds that wait beyond the permanent conflict with power crystallised in the market structures, the military institutions and the multinational corporations. In this sense, X-evian has not evolved from the technical for the technical, but from the social for the social: it is a tool for stitching spaces of autonomous social realities of resistance and construction.

• http://sindominio.net/udondogaztetxea/
• http://metabolik.hacklabs.org
• http://sindominio.net