George Dafermos' Weblog

Friday, July 30, 2004

Hakim Bey speaks forth

From a disturbing interview with Hakim Bey of TAZ fame, in which he calls out for a Luddite repsonse to the anarcho-capitalist development of telematic technologies, primarily the Internet, and urges us to imagine and propose new economic models, rather than consuming ourselves with building plasticly enhanced virtual technotopias or taking it to the streets.

There was a time when everything was so confused and chaotic that it was easy to believe that this technology would be an exception to all the other technologies, and instead of enslaving us, it would liberate us. I never actually believed that, but I was willing to talk to people who did. Now I’m not willing to talk to them anymore. I have no interest in this dialogue. It’s finished. The Internet revealed itself as the perfect mirror image of global capital. It has no borders? Neither does global capital. Governments can’t control it? Neither can they control global capital. Nor do they want to. They’ve given up trying, and now they basically serve as the mercenary armed forces for the corporate interstate—the 200 or 300 megacorporations that actually run the world. Fine. But let’s not call this radical politics, and let’s not call this liberation, and let’s not talk about cyberfeminism or virtual community. Basically, I’m a Luddite. Certain technologies hurt the commonality, as they used to say in the early 19th century. Any machinery that was hurtful to the commonality, they took their sledgehammers out and tried to smash. Direct action. That’s the Luddite critique—you do it with a sledgehammer. What it means now to live as a Luddite seems to me to involve a strict attention to what technologies one allows into one’s life.

We need no more symbolic acts of civil disobediance, no more delusions of revolutionary art, says Bey. What we're now in need of, according to Bey, is to take the sledgehammer and start breaking down the newly erected castles of cybernetic alienation. I dunno, maybe he's got it, can't really tell. Personally, there are times in space when my experience of the digital condition is almost hyperspatial, yet constained in many aspects, and it is then that i can't help but thinking about debord's assertion that the spectacle integrates, but integrates as separates.

4:57:03 PM

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