<<>>Taken from thee Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey<<>> "...this time however I come as the victorious Diony- sus, who will turn the world into a holiday...Not that I have much time..." - Nietzsche (from his last "insane" letter to Cosima Wagner) Pirate Utopias THE SEA-ROVERS AND CORSAIRS of the 18th century cre- ated an "information network" that spanned the globe: primi- tive and devoted primarily to grim business, the net nevertheless functioned admirably. Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be wa- tered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessi- ties. 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. Some years ago I looked through a lot of secondary material on piracy hoping to find a study of these enclaves-but it ap- peared as if no historian has yet found them worthy of analy- sis. (William Burroughs has mentioned the subject, as did the late British anarchist Larry Law-but no systematic research has been carried out.) I retreated to primary sources and con- structed my own theory, some aspects of which will be dis- cussed in this essay. I called the settlements "Pirate Utopias." Recently Bruce Sterling, one of the leading exponents of Cy- berpunk 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 liv- ing: giant worker-owned corporations, independent enclaves devoted to "data piracy," Green-Social-Democrat enclaves, Ze- rowork enclaves, anarchist liberated zones, etc. The infoma- tion economy which supports this diversity is called the Net; the enclaves (and the book's title) are Islands in the Net. The medieval Assassins founded a "State" which consisted of a network of remote mountain valleys and castles, separated by thousands of miles, strategically invulnerable to invasion, connected by the information flow of secret agents, at war with all governments, and devoted only to knowledge. Modern technology, culminating in the spy satellite, makes this kind of autonomy a romantic dream. No more pirate islands! In the fu- ture the same technology-freed from all political control- could make possible an entire world of autonomous zones. But for now the concept remains precisely science fiction-pure speculation. Are we to live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom? Logic and emotion unite to con- demn such a supposition. Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not know; and the heart revolts at a universe so cruel as to visit such injustices on our generation alone of humankind. To say that "I will not be free till all humans (or all sentient creatures) are free" is simply to cave in to a kind of nirvana- stupor, to abdicate our humanity, to define ourselves as losers. 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 TAZ). Despite its synthesizing force for my own thinking, however, I don't intend the TAZ to be taken as more than an essay ("attempt"), a suggeston, almost a poetic fancy. Despite the occasional Ranterish enthusiasm of my language I am not trying to con- struct political dogma. In fact I have deliberately refrained from defining the TAZ-I circle around the subject, firing off exploratory beams. In the end the TAZ is almost self-explana- tory. If the phrase became current it would be understood without difficulty...understood in action. Waiting for the Revolution HOW IS IT THAT "the world turned upside-down" always manages to Right itself? Why does reaction always follow revo- lution, like seasons in Hell? Uprising, or the Latin form insurrection, are words used by historians to label failed revolutions-movements which do not match the expected curve, the concensus-approved trajectory: revolution, reaction, betrayal, the founding of a stronger and even more oppressive State-the turning of the wheel, the re- turn of history again and again to its highest form: jackboot on the face of humanity forever. By failing to follow this curve, the up-rising suggests the possibility of a movement outside and beyond the Hegelian spiral of that "progress" which is secretly nothing more than a vicious circle. Surgo-rise up, surge. Insurgo-rise up, raise oneself up. A bootstrap operation. A goodbye to that wretched parody of the karmic round, historical revolutionary futility. The slogan "Revolution!" has mutated from tocsin to toxin, a malign pseudo-Gnostic fate-trap, a nightmare where no matter how we struggle we never escape that evil Aeon, that incubus the State, one State after another, every "heaven" ruled by yet one more evil angel.