To be fair to Bey, one thing to remember is that he is by and large reacting to some of the more utopian claims that were being made for the internet a decade or more ago
it might be said that Bey is as much criticizing the internet of Neuromancer as much as he is of the real internet. he's talking about the role of the internet in the radical's imagination, the neo-Gnostic (he calls it CyberGnostic) fantasy of escaping the bounds of the body to live in some kind of virtual paradise on the personal level, or the political fantasy that the internet and technological development will magically fix every social ill and sweep away tyranny and all that.
And how can someone that isn't on the internet, has never been on the internet and never wants to be on the internet give any credible opinion on the quality of debate on the internet?
he looks at the world around him and notes that he doesn't see any evidence that people are living any better with the internet. they're still slaves of a system based on alienated labor, still working to serve an impersonal, inhuman abstraction called Money or Capital or Capitalism. from his perspective, people are still commuting to big boxes, slaving away at repetitive tasks they have no personal, authentic investment in, and then going home and staring at a screen until they go to bed. the fact that they're doing service jobs instead of industrial labor and the screen is attached to a computer instead of being a TV as being basically irrelevant. we're still slaves of the Spectacle because our patterns of life are the same.
in short, it's not about the quality of online debate. he would certainly argue vociferously that debate is just idle chatter unless you're living your life differently.
i find Bey's Luddite approach interesting in this respect: he's a sort of spiritual utilitarian, and demands uncompromisingly that any technology be judged solely by how much it improves people's everyday, ordinary lives.
he currently finds online technology wanting and feels like it has not delivered on the admittedly extravagant promises of its early evangelists, and so he has no use for it. i disagree with him on that assessment of technology, and i have a different take on his technological determinism, but i wholeheartedly agree that we must always, always, always frame our assessments of how well something is working or not working primarily in terms of its actual impact on the actual ability of actual people to live fulfilling, happy, and meaningful lives fruitfully with each other.
i would argue, strenuously, that there are definitely ways that online technology not only can be used, but is being used right now, to alow people to revolutionize their private lives and the lives of those around them. i also agree with Anna that the solution he seems to be proposing of some sort of fantasy version of agricultural life is not appealing as a solution, though i would note that he does acknowledge it somewhere or other in his writing (saying something about how he's not up for any revolution where everyone ends up with the life of some shit-kicking medieval peasant). however, i could not agree more that whether or not a given economic/technological system enhances or suppresses the real happiness of real people is the most important question to be considered.
This is interesting, a self-labelled anarchist who desires alternative economic institutions.
most anarchists i know do the same.
It's clear that he desires an actual system that works and his intentions are in that case very good. Unfortunately he fails to give any explanation of how he thinks this could come about.
bingo, and the hints that he has of the sort of solution he thinks would work are, as you point out, less than appealing. this, to me, is Bey's greatest failing, basically a failure of the imagination which causes him to retreat into some sort of pastoral Romanticism, which not only isn't appealing, it doesn't seem to suggest any kind of practical roadmap to get from Point A to Point B.
And it’s starkly unegalitarian—buying into the Nietzsche – DeSade notion that absolute freedom is the province only of those supermen (like Bey, of course) with the guts to seize it, and that it’s a meat too strong for the sheep-like masses...
...whereas Bey is interested in "freedom" for clued-in, illuminated riot-heroes to terrorize and belittle the sleepwalking indoctrinated masses. Matters of degree, I would argue: both impulses are rooted in an adolescent sense of superiority, and as such I would still argue that Bey is a fine one to criticize the blackness of DeSade's kettle.
Jack, i totally respect you, but you're talking out of your ass here. this is total bullshit.
Bey not only expressly criticizes that whole mentality very explicitly, as Flyboy points out, but he never, ever advocates terrorizing and belittling the "sleepwalking indoctrinated masses." he is strenuously and caustically critical of the type of mindset that priveleges the sort of petty pleasures of sadistically tormenting the victims of the Spectacle Society and the cheap veneer of smug intellectual/avant-gardist superiority as just another power-trip (see here for an essay which may help here). the sneering black-clad avant-gardist is just another petty fascist, gloating in the misery of others.
Bey's trip is not superiority but escape and subversion. one of his most important early points with the TAZ stuff is that we have to reject these politics of confrontation and the associated mindset which sees "revolution" as a process of triumphing over ones enemies and imposing some progressive new order on the masses, in favor of slipping free of the gaze of the panopticon and proactively building the society you and your willing companions want to live in in the cracks and shadows. he's rejecting the triumphalism of the political radicals which is the root of the whole "riot-heroes terroriz[ing] and belittl[ing] the sleepwalking indoctrinated masses" mindset you mistakenly think he's advertising. the whole thrust of the whole TAZ/PT/Amour Fou argument is that the revolution he has in mind is not about being better than other people, it's about escaping and taking control of your mind and your life. people who aren't into what you're doing should be recruited if you can, and avoided if you can't, but if you go back into the system to terrorize people you're simply getting recouped into the spectacular struggle. any action taken against the dominant culture should be aimed at waking people up, specifically in noncoercive ways. an example he gives that ahs always stuck with me is to try to convince someone that they're the lost heir to an amazing but useless fortune, like an aging circus elephant or a few square miles of Antarctica. the purpose of this is not to belittle the subject of your con or take advantage of them, but to get them to believe for a moment in something wondrous in hopes of inspiring them to see the world in a different way. that's not the same thing as people gloating over how stupid the herd is, at all.
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with regard to the internet and the interview, i find it interesting that he thinks that Burning Man is probably a good thing, a periodic AZ, but talks about how the internet doesn't help people live differently. um, hello, how on Earth do you think that those of us who are burners coordinate building a temporary city of 35,000 people in the middle of nowhere every year? carrier pigeon?
i think that a lot of what goes into Burning Man is the result of immediatist action. people spend nights throughout the year building their wacky art projects and tricking out their art cars and practicing (and sharing) their fire spinning tricks in local groups, with networks of friends sharing a common interest. we meet in people's garages and on the beach and wherever, and share the process of making art and merging that practice of art with our daily lives, largely outside of the context of capitalist production. people learn to spin fire, for instance, mostly to do it with their friends at house parties and not in hopes of any kind of commercial employment. there are people who learn to DJ who basically just spin records at local burner parties or in their basement for the hell of it and not because they're trying to build up a resume to get on the superstar DJ career path.
however, first of all, none of that kind of coordination would be possible without the internet. there are limits to word-of-mouth in local communities, and you can live in the same city with a dozen other people with similar interests for years without knowing it unless you find a mailing list or Meetup group or whatever. that doesn't just mean you find other people to play with, but other people to learn from, and then shared knowledge starts exploding exponentially.
second, as much as we'd like to live in some kind of fantasy world, immediatist collaboration for most of us still costs money for materials and space and so on. you can have a little anarchist immediatist knitting circle, but yarn and needles and whatnot cost money. we still live in the world. and, at least as far as Burning Man in particular goes, the primary source of funding for the bulk of the community comes from high-tech in the Bay Area. Burning Man as a phenomena has always lived off the surplus wealth of the dot.coms, in much the same way that the "pirate utopias" Bey romanticizes in his writing essentially lived off the surplus wealth they managed to pilfer from the colonial trade, and like the imaginary community of Port Watson feeds off the international banking system.
this is the very issue that other anarchist critics have of Bey and people like Bob Black. it can be argued that the TAZ dropouts are really only made possible by leeching wealth from capitalism, that it's really the ultimate form of consumerism: buying yourself a little island paradise commune with money you stole from some capitalist got from oppressing some worker, and convincing yourself that this makes you a revolutionary. critics have called Bey a "lifestyle anarachist" or "McAnarchist" for that reason. |
