Temporary Autonomous Zone revisited

THE SEA-ROVERS AND CORSAIRS of the 18th century created an “information network” that spanned the globe: primitive and devoted primarily to grim business, the net nevertheless functioned admirably. Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessities. Some of these islands supported “intentional communities,” whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even if only for a short but merry life… I called the settlements “Pirate Utopias.”

I’ve been re-reading T.A.Z, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism) by Hakim Bey.

A.k.a Peter Lamborn Wilson, the author is an American anarchist/sufi/mystic with a lunatic perspicacity and I’ve been dumbfounded by the clarity with which T.A.Z reveals the landscape of possibility opened up by the web in the two decades since he wrote his essay in 1990. I saw Wilson speak at the second Doors of Perception conference in 1994 and must have been impressed enough to buy the book. Re-reading 15 years later it becomes immediately comprehensible as an analysis of transient freedoms (eg. Twitter as a T.A.Z, now being reeled in and controlled by Wilson’s seething megacorporate state) and ‘islands in the net’, where the shackles of redundant social and economic typologies are torn off. There’s a perfect parallel between his opening historical review of pirate utopias and the downfall of Pirate Bay last month – these guys set up their T.A.Z and stayed in one place too long, forgetting the central tenet of T.A.Z., which is:

The T.A.Z is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.

You can get the full text of T.A.Z. online at http://bit.ly/YB36r), but here’s an essential flavour:

Recently Bruce Sterling, one of the leading exponents of Cyberpunk science fiction, published a near-future romance based on the assumption that the decay of political systems will lead to a decentralized proliferation of experiments in living: giant worker-owned corporations, independent enclaves devoted to “data piracy,” Green-Social-Democrat enclaves, Zerowork enclaves, anarchist liberated zones, etc. The information economy which supports this diversity is called the Net; the enclaves (and the book’s title) are Islands in the Net.

I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about “islands in the net” we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of “free enclave” is not only possible in our time but also existent. All my research and speculation has crystallized around the concept of the TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE (hereafter abbreviated T.A.Z).

…The TAZ is an encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away. Keep moving the entire tribe, even if it’s only data in the Web. The TAZ must be capable of defense; but both the “strike” and the “defense” should, if possible, evade the violence of the State, which is no longer a meaningful violence. The strike is made at structures of control, essentially at ideas; the defense is “invisibility,” a martial art, and “invulnerability”–an “occult” art within the martial arts. The “nomadic war machine” conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted. As to the future–Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It’s a bootstrap operation. The first step is somewhat akin to satori–the realization that the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization…

We are looking for “spaces” (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones–and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason. Psychotopology is the art of dowsing for potential TAZs.

I love those last two paragraphs (especially the parts in italics – mine) the penultimate one because it’s very agile, very start-up, the last because, if you replace ‘State’ with Convention/Monopoly/Incumbant/Corporation/Old Media we have an apt description of what Made by Many sets out to do – dowsing for potential TAZs.

Re-reading T.A.Z. reminded me that we didn’t create the web because the technology was available but because we imagined it – the freedom it might create and the disruption it would cause – and wanted it. Wilson and the cyberpunks who preceded him (Gibson, Sterling, Rucker et al) were writing in the time of the bulletin board and list server, well before there was anything really web-like but when what narrow bandwidth did exist was purely social. The reason I guess that we need reminding of this is that the transformation of the web from bulletin board to Great Big Shop in the dotcom boom shattered the link between the imagined world of cyberpunk and the tawdry reality of the bust. Now the link might be worth revisiting, so I’m going to dust off my copies of Neuromancer and Mirrorshades.

One more word: in a preface to the second edition of T.A.Z Wilson rebutted a lot of his more literal ideas about the web (meaning internet), sometimes with good reason because quite a lot of it is faintly ludicrous – but also because 2003 was a profoundly counter-revolutionary period in the history of the internet. I’ll leave you with this – and especially the bit in bold – so suspend your disbelief and read on:

At this moment [1991] in the evolution of the Web, and considering our demands for the “face-to-face” and the sensual, we must consider the Web primarily as a support system, capable of carrying information from one TAZ to another, of defending the TAZ, rendering it “invisible” or giving it teeth, as the situation might demand. But more than that: If the TAZ is a nomad camp, then the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies and legends of the tribe; it provides the secret caravan routes and raiding trails which make up the flowlines of tribal economy; it even contains some of the very roads they will follow, some of the very dreams they will experience as signs and portents.

The Web does not depend for its existence on any computer technology. Word-of-mouth, mail, the marginal zine network, “phone trees,” and the like already suffice to construct an information webwork. The key is not the brand or level of tech involved, but the openness and horizontality of the structure. Nevertheless, the whole concept of the Net implies the use of computers. In the SciFi imagination the Net is headed for the condition of Cyberspace (as in Tron or Neuromancer) and the pseudo-telepathy of “virtual reality.” As a Cyberpunk fan I can’t help but envision “reality hacking” playing a major role in the creation of TAZs. Like Gibson and Sterling I am assuming that the official Net will never succeed in shutting down the Web or the counter-Net–that data-piracy, unauthorized transmissions and the free flow of information can never be frozen. (In fact, as I understand it, chaos theory predicts that any universal Control-system is impossible).