INFORMATION FOR EVERYONE!

Information is free,
open to all.
So.. FUCK YOU and your intellectual property!

Freedom of information is a human right! So why not READABOOKSON? Or visit V£R$O or the EBOOKCOLLECTIVE.
Seize what is yours
and stay informed!

The Archive.org hosts a huge collection of all kinds of literature such as the zine collection of Solidarity! Revolutionary Center and Radical Library or Make Projects, a collection of DIY project from MAKE magazine. The Archive.org library also includes audio, video, software and archived websites. Great media such as a live production of George Orwell's "1984" by BBC Television or you might fancy a good conspiracy theory? The Capitalist Conspiracy (1969) awaits you!

TIP: The Anarchist Library is open 24/24!

Radical Books has a healthy collection of radical literature. It lacks updates but the distribution of information continues.

Not looking for a suggestion? Knock yourself out!

Project Gutenberg  - Library Genesis  - LibriVox  - BookOS  - World Public Library  - Feedbooks  - ManyBooks  - Classic Reader - Bookyards -
... 

While you are at it.. feel free to share your sources with others. Public access to information is one of the best ways to guard our freedoms and limits the government power. The best government is an open government. Secrecy breeds mistrust, while transparency fosters trust. A successful community is built on trust. So to all politicians out there.. take note. Give access, make friends.

HAKIM BEY: REPOPULATING THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE

Hakim Bey: Repopulating the Temporary Autonomous Zone
Author: Simon Sellars

From: Journal for the Study of Radicalism
Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 2010
pp. 83-108 | 10.1353/jsr.2010.0007

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Project MUSE - Journal for the Study of Radicalism - Hakim Bey: Repopulating the Temporary Autonomous Zone Browse > History > Journal for the Study of Radicalism > Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 2010 Download PDF Hakim Bey:Repopulating the Temporary Autonomous Zone Simon SellarsRMIT University, Melbourne, Australia The poet and essayist Peter Lamborn Wilson is widely known for his anarchist manifesto "The Temporary Autonomous Zone" (TAZ), developed across a series of essays written from 1981 to 1988 and published in collected form in 1991 as T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. The essays were attributed to "Hakim Bey," Wilson's infamous pseudonym, and the writing itself was a potent brew of mysticism, historical narratives, autonomous Marxist politics, and French critical theory. The overall aim was to highlight indeterminate zones within late capitalism, everyday occurrences that refuse, whether by accident or design, to be incorporated into dominant narratives. This enabled The TAZ to become an extraordinarily influential (and divisive) text in anarchist circles, and in various pop cultural movements. But has that moment passed? Can the concept hold any meaning for observers in the early twenty-first century? This essay will argue that, although the cultural capital of the TAZ has undoubtedly become degraded through overuse, the circumstances of its cultural reception are indeed worth returning to and remembering. Repopulating the TAZ can reward us now (as it did at inception) with valuable insight into the perceived role of critically engaged literature and philosophy as an activator of political potential, illumining a debate regarding the supposed (in)compatibility of leftist theory and politics that continues today. The TAZ and cyberculture: "Life in the trenches" The TAZ may have remained a fringe work if it wasn't for cyberculture, where it proved to be among the more resilient memes in alternative art and culture from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. The original electronic networks that became the prototype for today's commercial Internet were developed in the 1980s, a development of the first interconnected computer channels produced in the 1960s for U.S. military purposes. As François Cusset summarizes: "These networks embodied, for some, a space for resistance, a social dead zone, a territory that was still imperceptible, in whose shelter they could build a new community and undermine the ruling powers . . . the first groups of hackers emerged [and formed,] in Bruce Sterling's words, a veritable 'digital underground.'" In cyberculture's incandescent popcult moment, the gritty noir futures of cyberpunk science fiction, built upon the template forged by the ascending reputations of novelists William Gibson and Sterling, and extrapolated from present-day technological developments, were cited as metaphoric portrayals of a real world in thrall to the nascent Internet and to the implications for mediated life it held. Cyberphile magazines like Mondo 2000 (and later, Wired and 21C) spliced cyberpunk attitude with digital culture's bleeding edge, carrying advertisements for dial-up modems, cd-roms, and pixel art software in between articles and interviews exploring every facet of cyberculture: from body modification to the emergent politics of the net, from new strains of cyberpunk fiction and rave music to the "bumper sticker libertarianism" leaking from cyberculture's startling new cachet. Fermented within this heady "frontier" atmosphere, manifestos were abundant. John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation drew up "A Declaration for the Independence of Cyberspace," demanding that the net—"the new home of Mind"—be forever self-governing, forever free from corporate and governmental restriction. Douglas Rushkoff produced a book-length vérité document of "life in the trenches of cyberspace" (or "Cyberia"), where "cyberians" "believe the age upon...

READ IT HERE

ZONING OUT (TEMPORARILY)

Zoning Out, Temporarily with Hakim Bey and Genesis P-Orridgeby John Perry Barlow, Mondo 2000 No. 9 1993





It was Queen Mu who made this happen - her conspiratorial whisper suggesting that I get myself together with Hakim Bey, Genesis P-Orridge, and a MONDO tape recorder. I wasn't too sure what she had in mind.

I mean, aside from the fact that all three of us are white, male acid-altered, old enough to know better, and crazy enough to do it anyway... Our resumes just didn't hook up and I wondered if we would.

Mr. Orridge, for example, is one singular fellow. He's got hardware dangling all over a body which sports more ritual scars and tattoos than Melville's Queequeg (with whom he shares other characteristics, most notably a nightmarish appearance cloaking a sweet and reasonable mind). He also happens to be the father of modern primitivism, the post-industrial tribes, the Rave Movement, the avant-garde band Psychic TV, and a couple of beautiful young daughters.

Orridge has been willfully causing such grave offense to British proprietary for the last twenty years that they've finally seen no alternative but to seize all his works and archives and pass laws which, though tailored to outlaw him, also make it a crime to give any other British subject so much as a hickey. (Or cause any physical harm to oneself or another consenting adult in the pursuit of dark pleasures.)

Finally, agents of the Crown have sent him packing into exile in California - a place so much more congenial to abominations that Mr. Orridge is having to scratch around for something to sink his sharpened teeth into.

Hakim Bey is another whose deviances have forced him to hide behind another name. Spending much of his life disguised as a mild-mannered comparative religion scholar, he emerges in print as an anarcho-gay drug fiend and Sufi pirate, compared to whom Salmon Rushdie is as orthodox as an ayatollah. Hakim's the guy who put the Temporary Autonomous Zone on the map.

However similar they might seem in their jointly unspeakable practices, their unabashedly unnatural acts, Bey and Orridge are quite different. Bey is reclusive and ascetic, a closeted natural philosopher, whereas Orridge is a performer, indeed something of a rock star.

And there's my own staid self, known to MONDO readers as a retired cattle rancher, rural gentlemen of such probity that, a couple years ago, I came within one vote of a Republican state senate seat in Wyoming, the most conservative part of the non-Islamic world. I'm a Freemason, a jack-Mormon, and a problem if I've been drinking. In short, just about everything these two are not.

And yet...

When, by virtue of a couple minor miracles, I was able to horse all three of us into my borrowed apartment in San Francisco's Potero Hill, a curiously complete zone of shared understanding arose between us. It felt as if we'd been opining around the same cracker barrel for years. During the hour and a half this field remained intact, we covered a vast stretch of philosophical country which the hacked and decimated thing below can only hint at.

-John Barlow

JOHN PERRY BARLOW: I want to talk with you guys about the Shadow. There is a way we have of concealing, projecting or wearing - in a peculiar fashion - that which we don't want to admit about ourselves. The thing that's interesting to me about you, Genesis, is that you look like an evil sonuvubitch from a distance. You look like a goddamn cannibal. And yet you are an extremely pleasant, polite, decent fellow.

GENESIS P-ORRIDGE: I think I look really West Coast.

HKIM BEY: I'm reading Hermes by Michel Sarres. And he brought up an interesting idea. He was talking precisely about this duality in Western culture... that there's always the on/off, dark/light, good/bad, up/down. He says that the third person is lost in Western discourse. Where any two are, there's a the third who has to be ignored. Apparently, he's going to suggest ways in which the third person can be re-integrated. Perhaps that's what we need, instead of paradox. He even calls it "the parasite" - the guest who gives words for food instead of food for food. The interlocutor... the third interlocutor.

GEN: Have you read The Third Mind by Brion Gysin? When he and William Burroughs came together and applied the cut-up method to their text, they produced a third mind.

HAKIM: ...as a parasite on that interaction! That's what Sarres is talking about.

GEN: I always found The Third Mind one of the most interesting subversive manuals. I never recommend the novels and stories of Burroughs or Gysin, I just say read The Third Mind and try some of those exercises. A lot of implications concerning inherited perception are revealed.

Scotland Yard has now got lots of videotapes that I made of Brion in Paris talking about psychic hygiene, the alchemical variations in the temperatures of boiling water, through the Master Musicians of Jajouka, all the events in Morocco that led him to many of his most intimate theories, even explaining how to make a good cup of tea by detailed observation of the bubbles, each of which he had named to denote each step. There's a lot of unique stuff there.

JOHN: I think they suppress that stuff mainly because they're afraid its reality could disturb what they wish to project about it. The image of Burroughs or you is so much easier to abuse. That's the scary thing about the information society - mythology completely detached from any reality but the one it's in the business of manufacturing. Pure simulation.

HAKIM: You know, the big difference between shamanic cultures and religious cultures is that dualistic shadow/anti-shadow thing is missing from shamanic culture. It was pre-Manichean, and now we're looking for something which is post-Manichean. Urban shamanism.

JOHN: I saw a very old Tantric Buddhist shrine near Kyoto. And the central icon of this place was a large sculpture of two dragons- one on the top with his tail coming up, and the other on the top, with his tail going down, entwining with the first dragon's tail around the middle. It reminded me of the Caduceus and its snakes, except that implied no value judgment between the upper and lower chakras. The point was the even interaction of the tails in the middle. So there was a duality, but it wasn't a weighted duality. It was more like a Yin/Yang.

HAKIM: No. The Yin/Yang theory is not Gnostic dualism. It's not the same thing. Eliade called it "dyadic." It's not the same as good and evil. It becomes so later in neo-Confucian thinking.

JOHN: Right, Taoism has no truck with good and evil at all.

HAKIM: Taoism seems to be the one religion that doesn't have the Gnostic trace.

JOHN: In our culture, the problem arose with the Romans.

HAKIM: I think it goes further back. It's Babylon. It's just like the Rastas say, "It happened in Babylon." It's Marduk and Tiamat. It's Mr. Hard-on God up against Sloppy Mom. In China, chaos is a benevolent property. Huntun is the gourd or the egg out of which everything comes. He's a wonton. Huntun and wonton are the same words. He's like this little dumpling and everything good comes out of him. In Babylon, chaos is the disgusting monster vagina that has to be ripped up by Marduk into myriad blobs of shit and slime. And we are those globs of slime. That's how the human race came into being. What is the purpose of the human race? To serve Marduk, to serve the masculine principle, to store up grain in the granary for the priests, to pay for the priests for their sacrifice so they get the free hamburgers. That's the whole Western myth. It's St. George and the Dragon. St. George pins the dragon down.

In China, the dragon is the free expression of creativity. He's the mixture of Yin and Yang, the principle of power. But here's evil, plain and simple. This is why chaos has kicked off, for me, for Ralph Abraham, and others, an interest in making a critique of this Western mythology, and saying, "Let's put Humpty Dumpty back together."

JOHN: There's been an interesting co-evolution lately of a lot of apparently disconnected things, like chaos mathematics and neo-tribalism, a sudden interest in Taoism and what I perceive to be a deep feminization of Western culture.

GEN: Some philosophers feel that there's a risk in absolute unconditional surrender of that male-God power, even though it's obviously failed miserably. Should we seek out every possible male trait and subordinate it to a female principle?

HAKIM: I didn't like the rule of Dad, but I don't think I'm going to like the rule of Mom either.

GEN: I'm involved with raves and live events because they're celebrations of an autonomous tribal unit. I think that was one of the real reasons for the attack on Psychic TV. It was the fact that we were doing unannounced, unadvertised, private parties where three thousand young people would aways turn up and bring one more friend next time. We were building this entire, separate, parallel vision - what Alaura calls "The Lost Tribe." We would discuss taboos, body modifications, self-empowerment, women's rights, animal rights, and all these different things as a spin-off. They weren't any of them essential in themselves. But what people always kept saying, over and over again, was that they felt they could relax and be themselves. The most obvious, ordinary condition that so very rarely happens.

JOHN: That's also why they go to Grateful Dead concerts. It's a sense of belonging which makes it possible for you to be yourself. When you're part of somethign on an organic level, then the self has some meaning. If you're only...

HAKIM: What about the problem of mediation? It sounds to me like you're less interested in media and more interested in the immediate, the un-mediated. A street concert is participator. It's got to be something you experience.

JOHN: Until McDonald's finds out about it and turns it into an ad.

GEN: Basically, the way you set your events up is the key to whether or not they're absorbed. And so far we haven't been absorbed. That's why we're being spat out. If your tension is not to sell yourself and your imagination, then there's a real problem with people in authority, because their normal debilitiser is the money carrot. They have a really patronizing view of the creative mind, that it really want to whore itself to them.

JOHN: Most commerce in this country is based on the unfulfilled psychic needs. The media have one message: "Eat this, drink that, wear this, put this on your body, do something about the horrible loathsome disconnected thing that you are."

HAKIM: The trick is that none of it works. It's what Walter Benjamin calls the "Utopian trace," which is built into those commodities that make you dream of the perfection that's being sold to you. But it's only a trace, like a trace element. It's like homeopathic; it's hardly even there. So, of course, it doesn't work.

JOHN: Recently I was on an NBC show about LSD. And they also had a self-described "recovering LSD addict." It was a real set-up. But I noticed that almost every ad was either for a drug or for something that would make everything somehow different. So the LSD which actually can make you different in a fundamental and satisfying way, represented the Demonic. LSD was the Shadow.

HAKIM: I read a quote from Malcom McLaren, where he said, "Why are drugs popular? I'll tell you. Because only drugs can make you feel like people in TV ads look like they're feeling." Drugs are the only commodity that's actually more than just a trace. It is - in some ways - the thing.

JOHN: It's close. And that makes it an enormous threat to the culture, which is base don unfulfillable need.

HAKIM: The best way to impose stability is through violence. Within every rational system is terror and death, unless you admit the third mind... the parasite. As long as linear reason calls the shots, it's always death and terror.

GEN: There's a great tape of Gyson, Gregory Corso, and Burroughs in Paris during the 50's. A letter arrives from some businessman in London, and you can actually hear Burroughs as he snips it with his scissors saying, "Now let's see what it really says." And then he reads it aloud and it basically goes, "... money... money ... money." I took that very much to heart. When in doubt, be extreme and see what it really says. There's a need for people to smash the shop windows because that debris can be reassembled into amazing things.

JOHN: There's a particular need when you've got a culture which has placed such an inordinate value on stability. We'll have to go some distance to re-assert the dynamic.

HAKIM: That's what's so useful about chaos and complex dynamical system analysis, which is now cutting edge. It's going to take a while. The popular discourse is still Cartesian.

So what's the social anti-spasmodic for the spasms we've been talking about? Again, what about... tactics?

JOHN: The best anti-spasmodic is a joke. Take a leaf from Catastrophe Theory, which is really the science of the punch line. IT's the thing that suddenly takes you out of the locks system and helps you go meta.

There's a great Neal Cassady story about this. The PRanksters all went into a bar in Oakland after a rally in Berkeley, and everybody was high on acid. It turned out to be the wrong kind of bar. Basically, there was a group of guys about to pretty much disembowel someone. But it was a perfectly symmetrical situation with nowhere for things to go but bad. Cassady strutted over to the assailant group, and said, "Hey, anybody want some gum?" And this was the catastrophe that caused the whole thing to dematerialize. For these locked symmetries, the most powerful cure is the prank.

HAKIM: That's an interesting way of looking at it. Poetic terrorism. Pirate humor.

GEN: That's why Dada and surrealism and happenings and acid and cut-ups are actually tools of survival.

HAKIM: They're anti-spasmodics.

GEN: It's really empowering when you break up or collage stuff together, bring in the unexpected or the inappropriate. Those who are trying to impose the status quo and a linear view can't read that language.

JOHN: It's too ambiguous for neurotics.

GEN: They're unable to deal with the anarchic, confused, colliding, or absolutely illogical combinations. Tim Leary believes that's what is really behind the attacks on us. What SCotland Yard is actually attacking is my archive. For over 25 years I've collected things that don't fit together. I've got Dada stuff, Fluxus stuff, Brion Gysin's stuff, Burroughs' stuff, Leary's stuff... psychedelic, tragic, radical, trivial, random, and mathematical stuff. And we have no "agenda," as they like to say these days.

We've followed the logical path. One day we just sold a spare Austin Osman painting to Chris Stein [of Blondie] and left. We spent time in Thailand, then we went to Nepal. Nepal was an amplifier and the confirmation of so many threads we have been unraveling and following for so much of our lives. The basic premise being AGORI... the path of no distinction. In this, everything is equal. There is on Shadow. All aspects of life and death, the minute to grandiose scales are fully integrated. Thus, no comment upon this amazing state of affairs is necessary. The most fabulous is commonplace. Devotion is as ordinary as taking a breath... and, of course, as extraordinary. We'd leave the hotel and cross the river, and there'd be dead dogs floating in sacks, or lodged in the mud banks with huge pigs eating their remains. There'd be children's corpses being cremated on the burning chats, their ashes swept into the same river while, further downstream, women were washing their cooking pots. Next to the burning children, there'd be workers eating breakfast, lepers begging, tourists taking pictures, Hindus prostrate... all in devotion , all simply living...

That's where we were just as we were being attacked in England. And thus we were better able to deal with the attack and its ramifications. We were able to say, "So what?" I mean, here were the Tibetans dealing with genocide. They've lost everything and yet they were embracing us without asking "Who are you, what do you believe, what do you do...?" There was a deeper sense of connection and recognition that instantly allowed us all to converse and be together. No justification was necessary. Ah, blessed relief! In the same way, the Shiva saddhus, the Nagas and the Agoria Baba... all highly evolved, threshold pushing, ascetic strands of Hinduism that believe in the "Path of No Distinction" ... they welcomed us too. We were on a bridge at Pashapati, near the main burning ghats, when suddenly the most revered holy man of the Agori was standing by us in his dreadlocks, and took us into his chamber where Europeans are not ordinarily allowed. There we sat around a fire which hasn't gone out once in over a thousand years. We exchanged spontaneous gifts, suspended Western categories of thought, and absorbed the peace of primal vision. To be trusted is such a fabulous gift, even greater when one is given that trust under no obligation. The Agori Baba gave us a white ash form the thousand-year-old-fire, "to take with you to bless America" he said.

Strength. We've kept that strength through everything that's happened since then. It's very reassuring, an embrace in a realm beyond thought or sense. It is this momentary experience of "belonging" that is carrying us through; this basic task of navigating through the unexpected conjoining and juxtaposition, grappling with the grinding together of things is like learning a martial art. To bend, flow, parry, using the strengths and rushes as our own muscles.

That's the first step, getting these survival tools. Then the game is: do we finally evolve, or not? I talk about a human(e) race where the extra "e" is added to suggest ecstasy, eager, evolutionary, evil, experiential, egolessness, etc. In other words, whatever happens next. Above all else, a risk-taking explosion with the eeego tacked onto this story. We are each there within this mystery. We're at a point where there's going to be an evolution away from the previous static system into the embracing of chaos.

HAKIM: I don't think that we're evolving towards anything, in the Teilhard de Chardin sense of evolution being directed toward the collective organism of human mind. I have a lot of problems with that. But if you start to look at the way the world is going: political - you have a fragmentation of structure that is devolving down to smaller and smaller discrete communities at the same time that there's a globalization going on, then you can start to think of the paradoxical interaction of the global mind, the "all mind," becoming an increasingly coherent unity, even as individuation is becoming more profound. That seems hopeful, to me.

The problem is looking at it as an Omega Point. It's still teleological. And not only that, it's unjust. Because if Paleolithic human and medieval human and modern human are excluded from that Omega Point, then God is even a worse sonuvabith than we suspected. That's what I've always objected to in Teilhard, and that's the problem I have with the idea of an evolution. I can't see it as an evolution. I see it as an infolding. Change. This is why I've tried to develop the idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. Because I'm sick and fucking tired of waiting for the revolution or the evolution. A certain degree of selfishness is required. And that selfifshness also involves an altruism, because what I want for myself obviously must be available to the other.

I want to get away from the Newtonian force and talk about the power in a fractal design. It's not teleological, nor vitalistic. It's not pointing to the future. It's not pointing to the past. Ilya Prigogine talks about "creative evolution," which to me is an infolding. It doesn't fold itself out towards the future, but it infolds itself towards desire.

JOHN: The basin of attraction.

HAKIM: The basin of attraction is the infolding of desire.

GEN: Basically, if what you're doing is dragging people across the line of what they'll accept, then it's endorseable. It was actually Tim Poston, my catastrophe theory friend, who gave me direction in this area. We did a magazine together called Delusions of Grandeur in the 60's. The original slogan was "The Possibilities Alone are Endless." As he pointed out, the "The Impossibilities are Endless" too, as are all those phenomena which are neither possible nor impossible. The addenda are implied, not necessarily alluded to. There is a geological term I was made aware of later by a kinetic artist named Gerald Fitzgerald. (He was a prime mover in the Exploding Galaxy fluxus and happening group at the time, along with Derek Jarman and myself.) The term is quaquaversal, which means "pointing in every direction simultaneously."

JOHN: The challenge, at this point, is learning to read the tea leaves in such a fashion that your interpretive assumptions bear some relationship to the next person's. So your society doesn't just dissolve into babble; so you're not isolated by everybody's unique magical universe. One approach might be the ritualization and the re-tribalization of society. The point isn't that we agree. The point is that we all dance.

HAKIM: Nietzche said that if we want to be a dancing star, we must have chaos within us. So, already in the 1880's, this concept was out there.

JOHN: Well, it was out there long before Nietzsche. Don't forget Shiva.

GEN: That's one of the most rejuvenating things about traveling in the Far East. There's a deep sense of continuity, a time-depth to the exploration.

HAKIM: It's only a very small time we've had history. It's useful to think of history as this thin layer of slime over a huge sea of the Paleolithic. It's not a question of a return to the Paleolithic but a return of the Paleolithic.

GEN: Now we really don't even belong to Her Majesty. We were subject. Theoretically, we were actually owned by Her Majesty.

HAKIM: Along with the swans and Scottish Deerhounds.

GEN: I'm basically on the run and feeling good about it. The Global Village definitely seems to be forming. We're commuting to Japan. The Japanese are commuting here. Computer terminals and modems are linking people up. In all this action forms the wraith-like Global Village. There seem to be a lot more doors and windows left open than there were a few years ago.

On the good days - which are many - we think about sending postcards to D.C. Yeoull at Scotland Yard. Pictures of us on the beach in Thailand or giving rice and dal to lepers in Kathmandu, or onstage with Timothy Leary, or sitting by a fire here in California with our creek in the background. We think of saying, "D.C. Yeoull! Thank you very much for your interest in our work, and more importantly, for letting us go free so we can finally travel this world and do so much more of it!"

HAKIM: Jesse Helms deserves a few letters like that too.

GEN: Did I tell you what Yeoull said when some friends of mine went and tried to demand our archive back? He said, "My job, as I see it, is to rid the world once and for all of this art scum." [laughter]

There's a lot to be said for the fanatic on your tail.

HAKIM: A good enemy is hard to find in this wishy-washy world of ours.

SYMZONIA : VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY

SYMZONIA;
VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
BY CAPTAIN ADAM SEABORN

This is among the first and rarest of the Hollow Earth books. In the early 19th century, John Cleves Symmes proposed that the earth was actually a set of five nested spheres, each with polar openings. He unsuccessfully lobbied congress to fund an expedition to the poles to investigate this theory. This novel, based on Symmes' theories, was published in 1820. Some believe that Symmes was the author, but this has not been established beyond a shadow of doubt.

Probably the first US utopian science fiction novel, Symzonia is also a classic sea yarn. The narrator, Mr. Seaborn, initiates just such an expedition as Symmes dreamed of. With a special high-tech paddle boat, built with no metal to avoid magnetic effects, Seaborn sets out on a voyage into uncharted southern waters. Conflict is provided by a mutinous Mr. Slim, who proves to be Seaborn's nemesis. Eventually the ship penetrates into the Antarctic hole, and voyages deep into the inner surface of the earth, which Seaborn claims for the US and calls 'Symzonia'. They encounter a utopian society, run by a benevolent aristocracy, which has long since banished all of their misfits to a distant colony, and possibly the outside Earth. The Symzonians have advanced airships, boats with jet propulsion, flame-proof cloth woven from spiderwebs, and a mysterious weapon of mass destruction. Eventually, they expel Seaborn and his crew back to the exterior world. Due to a series of accidents, all material evidence of Symzonia is lost on the return voyage, and Seaborn is swindled out of his profits.

Continue reading.. or grab it here

THE MAN WHO WANTED TO CLASSIFY THE WORLD

Paul Otlet, a Belgian Utopian little known in America. Otlet invented an international classification scheme called Universal Decimal Classification used for books, photographs and other documents. He invented microfilm. He invented the ubiquitous index card catalog used in most libraries. But as he says in the film, "I think in terms of the universal" and his ambitions were much larger. Otlet began organizing existing international organizations into one grand inter-organization -- the Union of International Organizations -- which inspired the League of Nations. His one failure was to build an ultimate World City in Europe, but it was not for a lack of trying.

But his most amazing invention (in retrospect) was his invention of hypertext, multi-media, and the web. He didn't use these words of course. He called it the International Network for Universal Documentation.

More information can be found here..

http://rapidshare.com/files/178323220/The.Man.Who.Wanted.to.Classify.the.World.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/801391737/The.Man.Who.Wanted.to.Classify.the.World.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/4287501714/The.Man.Who.Wanted.to.Classify.the.World.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/12433260/The.Man.Who.Wanted.to.Classify.the.World.part4.rar

MEN LIKE GODS

A novel by H.G. Wells (1923)

Mr Barnstaple was ever such a careful driver, careful to indicate before every man-oeuvre and very much in favor of slowing down at the slightest hint of difficulty. So however could he have got the car into a skid on a bend on the Maidenhead road? When he recovered himself he was more than a little relieved to see the two cars that he had been following still merrily motoring along in front of him. It seemed that all was well - except that the scenery had changed, rather a lot. It was then that the awful truth dawned: Mr Barnstaple had been hurled into another world altogether. How would he ever survive in this supposed Utopia, and more importantly, how would he ever get back?

Read it here (via Project Gutenberg)

If you don't know who H.G. Wells is, then maybe the picture below will ring a bell. It is from another famous story by him.. take a guess.

 

THE LEVEL ABOVE

Truly amazing how humans find a way to build themselves some kind of home in the most unbearable conditions. This reminds me of the pirate utopia of Kowloon. Masterpieces regarding to alternative architecture..

Article from Dailytonic.com

In South America the slums are attached to the outskirts of mega-cities such as Caracas and Mexico City like wasps’ nests on a cliff face. In a hilly island city like Hong Kong, however, living space is limited. Here you only see the laboriously constructed huts made of corrugated iron and planks of wood in which the poorest of the poor live if you look upwards – they occupy, to put it in cynical terms, a penthouse location.

Some of these rooftop shacks, which in the year 2006 after the government’s first slum clearance programme still housed 3962 people in 1554 households, are up to three storeys high. Improvised structures made of ladders and bits of furniture create connections between the individual parts of the buildings and join these impoverished dwellings into complete rooftop settlements – sociologists even talk of a “self-organising niche architecture” and point to the utopian aspects of this urban way of life.

Continue here..

1984

"Nineteen Eighty-Four"

From my top 5 book list,

In 1984, George Orwell warns of the terrifying dangers that man may create for himself in his quest for a utopian society. It warns that people might believe that everyone must become slaves to the government in order to have an orderly society, but at the expense of the freedom of the people. It is a dystopian novel about the totalitarian regime of the Party, mind control and the struggle of Winston Smith against the elite figure called Big Brother.

Since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the term "Big Brother" has entered the lexicon as a synonym for abuse of government power, particularly in respect to civil liberties.

"WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"

- a slogan of the Party (Quote from 1984)

GRAB IT HERE

THINK.

I was born as a thinker. I’ve spent much of my life thinking about things. Thinking about myself, thinking about others, even thinking about thinking. This is not to say I always think the right things, or that what I think about is always of any use to anyone. My brain isn’t the best brain, and I don’t have a great deal of conventional education.

Nonetheless, I sit and I think. Since an early age, my thoughts led me to believe that there was something funny about the world in which I was living. I started out as a child, interacting with my family, learning from their behavior, thinking about the things they do, the things they say. Garnering from it my basic beliefs about love, kinship, respect, and the value of life.

As my world grew beyond the borders of my immediate family, I began to learn about selfishness, greed, hate. I recognized these things as alien to what I believed “humanity” represented. I had theorized that the only reason human beings had grown beyond the animal world was because of our capacity for great things - Community, peace, love, tolerance. I still firmly believe that these are the foundations for a solid community, and a happy, prosperous life within that group.

When you are born, you are helpless. Unable to perceive the world around you, unable to rectify the situation you’re in. You have fear, but it is mitigated by the fact that you have a loving family to nurture and protect you. Fear and Love. These are the basic emotions we are born with. To simplify it further, even though you don’t understand the feelings you have, the only thing you have the capacity to be afraid of is NOT being loved. You do not KNOW this, but your biology has hardwired you this way. Had you not been loved and cared for, you would have died. When you cry, you are calling out to the ones who love you. What I’m saying is that we are designed to love each other. Without this basic, primal desire for love, we would not have humanity. We would not have a culture at all.

From love comes empathy - The ability to see and feel the emotions of other human beings around you. From empathy sprouts understanding and tolerance. From these, a community can foster peace and tranquility. This, in my humble opinion, is how humanity has achieved great things. How we, as a whole, have risen up to be the stewards of our world. Not mere beasts roaming the plains, but the overseers who work the fields, care for God’s creatures, and nurture all life on this small planet. It is the peace that allowed us to take time to think. With our thoughts, we discover new ways to improve our lives and the lives of those we share our space with.

A child does not know hatred. When you were born, you did not hate. You did not discriminate based on skin colour, class, religion, or culture. You weren’t selfish, as you were not even self-aware. These are unnatural feelings, things you did not consider. That is, until you were taught by someone how to hate. We are born with the capacity for great things, and unfortunately that capacity includes the potential for these negative emotions. They are counter-intuitive to the things that make us great. Selfishness breeds ego. Ego gives us the capacity for materialism and hatred. Materialism because our ego desires the false admiration of others. Hatred comes from the fear that someone else has threatened our ego. These are things you did not know as a child.

I’ve spent my life being confused and conflicted. With all these things planted firmly in my mind - Things I believe to be obvious Truths - I watch the world around me in total chaos. Chaos that seems to be accelerating. This is not to say I live as a Saint, but as I said before, I spend a lot of time thinking. Most of these thoughts are dedicated to how I can raise up the ones I love. To making their lives better, thereby improving my own life with theirs. With that statement, I would also like to clarify that I’m not trying to be selfish, but simply that being part of and nurturing a peaceful, loving community will give you a more peaceful and loving life. This is inevitable.

This, unfortunately, also works with the negative, learned emotions and actions. Even more unfortunately, it seems as though there is a trend in our world pushing us towards these negative, unnatural ways. It seems popular to have the nicest car, the most sexual partners, the biggest house. These things do not provide love or peace. The desire to achieve these things displaces the natural, pushes away love and fosters selfishness. For if you are to HAVE, others must NOT. This creates an imbalance, causes others suffering, creates social classes, distrust, hatred.

There is a great inequality that pervades our society. Instead of caring for one another, we are taught one-upmanship and greed. This allows for us to be taken advantage of. As we grow and are taught, indoctrinated to believe in inequality, in distrust, in competition rather than cooperation, we cry out for someone to care for us. We beg, like children, for someone to give us stability. Those who teach us greed and hatred are the ones who come forward, offering us a solution. “Be with us,” they say. “We will take care of you.” In exchange, we give our labor, loyalty, and servitude. Yet, I know I still feel as though I’m not safe. I’m not living a life of peace by being a member of this invented culture of hate.

Now, after several generations, the “protections” provided to us and the exchange of servitude are enacted upon us when we are born, by default. Do we not get a choice? Could we not solve our problems by being loving and peaceful?

I think we can and will. What do you think?
Extracted from Hack This Zine issue #9.

COMMON SENSE

"We fight neither for revenge nor conquest; neither from pride nor passion; we are not insulting the world with our fleets and armies, nor ravaging the globe for plunder. Beneath the shade of our own vines are we attacked; in our own houses, and on our own lands, is the violence committed against us. We view our enemies in the characters of Highwaymen and Housebreakers, and having no defense for ourselves in the civil law; are obliged to punish them by the military one, and apply the sword, in the very case, where you have before now, applied the halter. Perhaps we feel for the ruined and insulted sufferers in all and every part of the continent, and with a degree of tenderness which hath not yet made its way into some of your bosoms. But be ye sure that ye mistake not the cause and ground of your Testimony. Call not coldness of soul, religion; nor put the Bigot in the place of the Christian."

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) - Common Sense, Jan, 1776

DYSTOPIAN NIGHTMARE

I spoke about the Utopian novel Island by Aldous Huxley in my post Make The TAZ a PAZ a long while ago and mentioned the dystopian counterpart written 30 years earlier called Brave New World. Both novels form the cornerstone of Huxley's damning indictment of commercialism based upon goods generally manufactured from other countries. Indeed also, Brave New World (along with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Yevgeni Zamyatin's We) helped form the anti-utopian or dystopian tradition in literature and has become synonymous with a future world in which the human spirit is subject to conditioning and control. Island acts as an antonym to Brave New World; it is described as "one of the truly great philosophical novels". While Brave New World is one of the most bewitching and insidious works of literature ever written. This dystopian world is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place. This is because Huxley endows his "ideal" society with features calculated to alienate his audience. Aldous Huxley was a humanist and pacifist, and he was latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. He is also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank, and highly regarded as one of the most prominent explorers of visual communication and sight-related theories as well.

 GRAB IT HERE

ABANDONED CASTLE ON ABANDONED ISLAND

 Pollepel Island is about 50 miles (80 km) north of New York City and about 1,000 feet (300 m) from the Hudson River's eastern shore. It contains about 6.5 acres (26,000 m2) — most of it rock.

The principal feature on the island is Bannerman's Castle, an abandoned military surplus warehouse.

It was built in the style of a castle by businessman Francis Bannerman VI (1851–1918). It remains one of a very small number of structures in the United States which can properly be called a castle. Pollepel Island is sometimes referred to as Bannerman's Island. One side of the castle carries the words "Bannerman's Island Arsenal".

Beautiful place for a free party!

 Where's my boat?

LET'S SAIL OUT

Kowloon Walled City: The Modern Pirate Utopia

Kowloon Walled City was a tiny Chinese enclave (1899 - 1993) that was located in the middle of British Hongkong for decades. Originally a military fort , it developed into an extremely dense , largely ungoverned urban settlement during the mid to late 20th century. From 1899, these tenacious squatters had repelled the British, the Japanese and every would-be landlord and “property owner” in the history of Hong Kong.

“Kowloon” means “Nine Dragons ”. After an eviction process that took years and cost billions of hongkong-dollars, the city was destroyed in 1993. Only a park remains. While it lasted, though, it was the closest thing to Pure Anarchy the world has seen outside of a war zone.

At it’s most overgrown peak in early 1987, Kowloon Walled City was home to 50,000 inhabitants. Although the Walled City was for many years a hotbed of criminal activity, most residents were not involved in any crime and lived peacefully within its walls. Numerous small factories and businesses thrived inside the Walled City, and some residents formed groups to organize and improve daily life there.


It’s also worth meditating on how Kowloon came to achieve their “hands-off” status: by kicking up such a profound shit-storm of noise and problems, every single time someone tried to exert their authority, that everyone in power simply gave up. British policy came to regard Walled City as something of a hornets nest “‘ best not to be kicked unless absolutely necessary.”

Perhaps the lesson here is that there are no little things when it comes to defending your freedom. ..

COMMUNE

In the late 1960s, a few free thinkers cobbled together donations, primarily from Hollywood, to buy 80 acres at the end of a dirt road in Siskiyou County, California: Big Bear Ranch, a commune with the motto "free land for free people." Archival footage, photographs, documents and news articles, and interviews with people who lived or still live there tell the commune's history: the cold first winter, women and men doing the same work, communal decision making, emerging environmental politics, free love and family formation, child rearing and memories of growing up there, a late 70's crisis with a cult-like group that moved in, and assessment by those grown old of what Big Bear meant.

http://rapidshare.com/files/174676131/Commune_-_2005.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/174689116/Commune_-_2005.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/174700647/Commune_-_2005.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/174712024/Commune_-_2005.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/174832810/Commune_-_2005.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/174845705/Commune_-_2005.part6.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/174858844/Commune_-_2005.part7.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/174872554/Commune_-_2005.part8.rar

MAKE THE TAZ A PAZ

"Raves are as Hakim Bay calls them, Temporary Autonomous Zones. They are places
that when every thing works out right the old cultural models and stereotypes
break down and we get a glimpse of what it would be like to live in a culture in
which people are high on ecstasy, and open to life and each other. They are
temporary because they have a short duration in time. They are set up by
entrapenurs to make cash basicly just like a grateful dead concert.

What we really want is a Permanent Autonomous Zone, in which we create not a
counter-culture but a real new culture free from violence and fear. Island Group
 is dedicated to the creation of such a psychedelic culture.

By the way, the search for community, for utopia, for a break out of the
adolence of our species is not new. Aldous Huxley wrote about it in Island and
Plato tried to create a rational PAZ in The Republic. What we need to do is go
somewhere away from the dominant culture and experiment. It will take
responsiblity and work. But in the end, we can party without the hangover of a
sick culture."
Bruce Eisner - exstasym@aol.com (Exstasy M) - 13 May 1994






Island is the final book by English writer Aldous Huxley, published in 1962. It is the account of Will Farnaby, a cynical journalist who is shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala. Island is Huxley's utopian counterpart to his most famous work, the 1932 novel Brave New World, itself often paired with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ideas that would become Island can be seen in a foreword he wrote in 1952 to the 20th anniversary edition of BNW:
If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"
Quoted from Wikipedia
Aldous Huxley's Island (1962) - PDF
Aldous Huxley's Island (1962) - HTML