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The struggle for industrial and economic domination takes on new frontiers and tactics. The outsourcing of industrial investments has long crippled the economies of NATO members, reducing their spending on defense. The offshoring of production has over the last decades effectively supported our adversaries with industrial capabilities, and they now wage high-impact trade wars against their former masters. Especially the rise of Chinese industry has long been an issue for the geopolitical developments of US power projection. The more production that goes overseas, the more we develop and support our adversaries, effectively feeding the hand that bites us.

The “reshoring” of economic activities has become a key strategic factor for US and NATO policy, but as reported by DoD, this may not be enough. New “soft” strategies within NATO have recently  been seeking the active undermining of production overseas, introducing such overarching strategy under the cultural label of “sustainability.” The “sustainability” strategy is as effective as it is transparent: by blaming our adversaries for producing our cheap goods in a way that causes pollution the US tries to undermine the economic progress of adversaries while boosting the US economy with “sustainable services,” such as “repair” and “craft.” As usual, the offensive is primarily outsourced to social practice artists operating under the umbrella of soft US power, such as “socially engaged” practices.

Taking the cue from the old straightforward war efforts on craft, such as the famous WWII home-front operations “make do and mend” and “knit your bit,” the aim is to mobilize craft under the total war effort. The strategy has recently been re-developed across NATO countries in recent years, and with the explicit aim of undermining the consumer economy which our adversaries are dependent on.

Examples range from Dutch art institutions promoting projects on Repair, to UK councils supporting research on mending explicitly for weaponized “post-growth” offensives on overseas power projections. In the US, DARPA sponsored Make Magazine has long promoted an explicitly politicized “Bill of Rights” with the “right” to oppose the industrial advantage of our enemies. Make Magazine has also long supported iFixit, with their explicit anti-consumerism aimed at Chinese tech-industries. Like many battle-cries across the ages, the language often takes on a very hostile tone, making sure the call for action in phrased as a “manifesto.

Leaks have reached us regarding a new operational black site run by CARPA in the Pacific Northwest. It is not clear if this is a move from some other of CARPA’s known black sites in New York City, whose craft scene has been infiltrated by agents for many years, or through the CARPA agents active in some of the left-wing underground Etsy cells.

An increase in reported activities on social media hashtags such as #contemporary crafts, #pork, and #indigo have set off nervous discussions in craft forums along the West Coast concerning the possibility of increased CARPA activities in regional craft circles. It seems the various arts and crafts programs in California and Oregon may be at risk of infiltration, not least with the new season of Portlandia taking off.

Stay tuned for more news on this alarming topic.

New black site in Origon

New black site in Oregon

Leaked documents:

BS-telex1

BS-telex2

7-shirtCode6b

The government is seeking to protect itself from its own spy apparatus and stymie the public service done by agencies like CARPAleaks by conceiving ways to keep records that are ‘eyes-only.’ This move to physical record keeping is an effective stop to CARPAleaks’s ongoing requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

CARPAleaks has discovered that Rob Mertens, a CARPA agent operating out of Eugene, OR, has been developing an encryption code based on pre-digital South American methods of record keeping. For centuries, Andean cultures relied on methods of tying knots or weaving information into cord or cloth. These fibrous codes confused the Spanish during colonial times and continue to prove difficult for contemporary translators.

The Quechua term khipu, which translates to English as ‘knot,’ is an example of this fiber code logic. Systems of knotted wool and cotton cords can represent numeric data as well as narrative information. The Andeans could represent quantities of food in storage for the dry season, calendar dates, or population tallies of local communities. Recently, it has been discovered that the knotted language included personal stories of the Capac Coya and cosmological myths. Although the Spanish imperialists could not translate the khipu, they understood that it was an information system ripe for use in subversive separatist activities and destroyed much of it. The Andean peoples also used textile design to represent personal or mythological information. Many of these records survived because they were dually concealed, first as functional/decorative objects and second as encrypted images.

Agent Mertens’s project, ‘Encryption Cloth,’ will be demonstrated during the CARPA recruitment event, Camp CARPA (to be held October 16-19 in Joshua Tree, CA). His presentation will display the process of weaving coded information into cloth. Demonstrating this technology for potential recruits, Agent Mertens emphasizes the innocuous uses of fiber code logic, such as weaving birthday dates and Facebook status updates. We must remember that the system has a dangerous flexibility that could also encompass data like bank account information, browser histories, and phone records. At Camp CARPA, agents and potential agents will learn to weave on light, collapsible backstrap looms that provide optimal field mobility for agents reconnoitering enemy territory.

Fiber codes are a return to an older definition of classified information, one that is controlled via a chain of custody. The craft insurgency, powered by services like CARPAleaks, cannot release information that is stored this way because, unlike digital documentation, corded and woven records cannot be infinitely replicated and released. The government co-opting of this kind of independent craft technology is cause for alarm.

To download the source files, click here: 7-plaidCode

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