Situationist International Communication Colonised In 1965, a new technique for matching up prospective spouses was developed in the United

States. The tastes and aspirations of each individual are exhaustively defined by their responses to seventy questions, then a computer determines their maximum compatibility, representing it on a punch card. According to Le Monde (25-11-65): "As the years go by, tendencies as unavoidable as they are irreversable develop and affirm themselves: a computer's job to be good at everything . . . They've been introduced into education to give tenure to the function of repeaters. They participate in the development of elaborate "strategies," both military and commercial. As perfect performers in constant demand, they are expected to bear fruit . . . Each and every soul in search of another fills out a form describing what they are and to what they aspire. Their offers and wishes are then transformed by a perforator into a series of holes, judiciously arranged on a card. One could dare say that with the state of the market, thus defined, the discovery of what satisfies the one's desires lies but a systematic investigation away; all the better, of course, if the market is larger. . . The experience, as it happens, is not expensive: a mere three dollars. In less than three months, more than 7000 students from colleges and universities in New England entrusted their personal prospects and their leisure to the care of a computer . . . Are there not computers which, working "in real time," can follow the development of events progressively? Why not extend the idea to optimising matchmaking?" The society that has realised the optimum of separation between humans and their activity and between humans themselves unilaterally distributes images of their own world back to them as information monopolised by economic and State power. To reach a new stage of submission and equivalence to the machinery of progress, this society dreams of going beyond its fabrication of information as substitute for the deprivation of reality; it experiments with the positive fabrication of the reality of individual existence, as execution of existing information. Individuals must agree to recognise themselves and, in their relationship, each other, according to the inevitability of a supposedly free and objective code. But the programmers have themselves been programmed. The criteria of the questionnaires they create for matchmaking are the very social criteria that everywhere create separation. If one seeks another only to discover in this relationship the display of their own reality, the condom of electronic computation guarantees the reciprocal discovery of the same lie. The systematic expropriation of intersubjective communication, the colonisation of everyday life by authoritarian mediation, does not necessarily have to be the product of technical development. On the contrary, this autonomisation of social potential makes it necessary for all possible techniques to be deferred to specific outcome of a self-regulated existence. In the last ten years, all the world, the radio transmitters and receivers that were always permitted dialogue at all distances have been silenced by absolute judicial control. the over open Those

who use them, selected by this same obligation to be silent, do not have the right to exchange messages concerning their technique, or meteorological

conditions, or an SOS for any survival. This technique of basic communication is evidently forbidden on account of its possible wealth of subversive uses.