Warriors and Their Media "Invisible warriors will turn out to have been a sign of the times." - Christian Unverzagt The ramboids The advent of the Rambo figure came with the disappearance of the locatable battle scene in favor of the virtual war of the disarmament race of the 1980's. In answer to the successful tactics of Ho Chi Minh's jungle commando, Rambo embodied the disintegration of the regular army. He declared war on the nineteenth-century command structure which survived into the twentieth century as electronics. He replaced the army (no longer able to wage war, since it existed purely as a deterrent) by becoming the war himself. After the combat soldier lost his corporeality in WW I's Materialschlacht and the primal electronics of the WW II Blitzkrieg, now he regained his image as a media consumer in the rippling anabolic steroids of the invincible Rambo-man. The Rambo outfit assumed museological forms and habits purloined from the tristes tropiques by the colonialism of anthropological conservation. The popularity of his attire was inspired by TV pundits and book clubs. The Rambo figure combined the outfit of the premedial warrior with the efficiency of the latest compact weapons, but his location was the consciousness of the bargain-deal video consumer. Bound to the imaginary reality of the empire of the image he had no option but to remain a media warrior. Unlike the guerrilla, his task was not the liberation of oppressed peoples. He was simply concerned with the coming-out of his own individuality in which the viewers might reflect themselves. In order to shape his subjective identity he had to return to the front each time, without political or aggressive motives, to be reborn as a full-fledged individual. In the invisibility of permanent war, he acted as the disruptive element that gave vent to a fighting spirit which had become purely folkloric. But within the context of total world peace, he could be no more than the viewers' nostalgic identification with the actors they no longer were. The sign masters In the universe of media networks, there exists no vertical relationship between signs and reality, only horizontal ones between the signs themselves which create their own reality. Metarealists seek the passwords to penetrate this matrix. On the one hand, there are data producers; on the other, data travellers. Both are media warriors. Data producers launch their signs from an extramedial standpoint, in order to realize a public reality on the screen. Their objective is to change the world through the belief that information affects the mind. They fight racism, sexism and pollution through data manipulation and image defacement, avoiding physical encounters with the police. They need the media for their blockades, raids, riots and pop concerts. But they go one step further than the critical generation, which tried to challenge media power by means of dicussion. Their oral culture has now been replaced by the spectacular images of media reality, and hence the activists have become the artists of signs. Data travellers also depend on the media. Like tourists cruising at the speed of light, hackers can drop in on other parts of the world like greased lightning. In this sixth continent without geographical limitations, physical exertion is replaced by the sensation of gate-crashing security programs. Just as Grand Tour tourists carved their names into Florentine frescoes, these pioneers of the electronic midnight toil leave their numbers in forbidden regions of the planetary network. The transition from name to virus is the beginning of the emigration to this land of unlimited possibilities. Their Trojan horses are signs that produce a reality. As effects, they owe their existence to the disruption of the arbitrary order of the electronic realm. The future will see cyberpunks living as outlaws in data land. They will have become signs themselves, surviving their physical death as flatlines stored in the form of hidden files. Future generations of activist actors and apocalyptic cyberpunks will abandon extramedial objectives and enter to realize the great beyond: a total delete. The black hand Everything is recorded. Events are documented as evidence and used as weapons in the information war. This happens both at long range, amidst military satellites and telezoom, and over short distances with amateurish photo- and video cameras. But even in this age of total transparency, there still exist clans which act as if they want to safeguard their privacy as some sacrosanct privilege: the Mafia, special forces, rioting autonomists, royal families and other secret societies. They surround themselves with bodyguards who act as antimedial warriors. Their function is that of black holes which suck up media matter so that the event may vanish altogether, although in reality they turn out to be press magnets who secretly enjoy having their privacy invaded while basking in the limelight. They put up a heroic fight in the no man's land between media and classical reality. We see them in the final reel where the hand pushes away the camera, the soldier takes aim at the viewer and fires or the order is given to stop filming. This apparent form of antipublicity fails, because forbidden images command the highest market price for the information distributors since they show that on a global scale, Glasnost is simply work in progress, thus demonstrating the viability of the media. As long as there are people who suggest that the camera's omnipotence may be curbed, its omnipresence can only increase. "Avoiding publicity is the best publicity"; that is the motto on every front where the media can still capture unrecorded events. Until, due to lack of authentic regions, the media are forced to censor their own revelations and employ warriors to withhold certain images from the viewers. The absentees There are rumors of a kind of blissful beings, who resort beyond the event-horizon and have hid themselves behind history, observing the media like we watch the screen. Among them are the extramedial warriors. Their space-time runs parallel to our own and seldom touches it. Like the classical warriors, they have mastered the art of emptiness, to emerge on unexpected planes of reality. Their ways are invisible to the media eye because they act in a dimension which no more than cuts through the horizontal sign exchange. It is at these points of incision that disasters in media sign communications occur, appearing as terrorist actions by the other circuit. The goal of the media, after having rendered the universe visible, is to make these interfaces speak up. But warriors only reply to unasked questions that silence the media. They present themselves as the snow that dissolves the iconographic order. The static image is their ultimate information. ??