Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone

In the preface to the second edition (written on May Day 2003), Hakim Bey looks back on the history of the infamous text written at the time of what he calls the dialectic of the cold war: the 'tweedledum/tweedledee clash of Capitalism and Stalinism' (2003: xi). This is 1985, and TAZ was naively seen to be a third way, a 'hippy/punk anarchism' alternative to this dialectic. He is somewhat embarrassed by the media reception of the essay and its imposed visionary status - for instance, the Net was envisioned as an adjunct to TAZ to help facilitate its emergence but ended up as an adjunct to Global Capital. In the essay TAZ, he says: 
'Thus within the Net there has begun to emerge a shadowy sort of counter-Net, which we will call the Web [...] to refer to the alternate horizontal open structure of info-exchange, the non-hierarchic network, and reserve the term counter-Net to indicate clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web, including actual data-piracy and other forms of leeching off the Net itself' (2003: 106). 
In this scenario, the net is imagined as a mixed reality space of 'real world' and 'information-space'. Sadly, its anarchic potential, what he calls 'reality-hacking', has all but disappeared into an image of recuperation.

He provides examples: 'Nevertheless, certain doctrines of "Futurology" remain problematic. For example, even if we accept the liberatory potential of such new technologies as TV, computers, robotics, Space exploration, etc., we still see a gap between potentiality & actualization. The banalization of TV, the yuppification of computers & the militarization of Space suggest that these technologies in themselves provide no "determined" guarantee of their liberatory use.' He sees two options available to the 'Ontological Anarchist' - the weapon of sabotage or of seizing the means of production or communication, reminding the reader that: 'there is no humanity without techne - but there is no techne worth more than my humanity. [...] What is "natural" is what we imagine & create.' (2003: 44)

Even resistance is recuperated. In the essay 'Chaos: the Broadsheets of Ontological Anarachism', Hakim Bey suspects that: 'Even the guerrilla Situationist tactics of street theatre are perhaps too well known & expected now.' (2003: 5) Perhaps rather: 'Is it possible to create a SECRET THEATER in which both artist & audience have completely disappeared - only to reappear on another plane, where life & art have become the same thing, the pure giving of gifts?' (2003: 40; art that is open source, free software theatre such as the Electronic Disturbance Theatre' perhaps) The 'derive' was conceived as an exercise in the revolution of everyday life, as unmediated perception. Bey takes this further in his conception of the 'Temporary Autonomous Zone' within invisible networks - a territory without the usual mechanisms of control - also referred to as a 'tactic of disappearance' (2003: 126; evoking more contemporary theorists such as Baudrillard and his essay 'Simulations' where the map is the territory; or even Virilio's 'The Aesthetics of Disappearance'). For Bey, the Nation/States have 'hogged the entire map. Who can invent for us a cartography of autonomy, who can draw a map that includes our desires?' (2003: 63). The problem is that if power has disappeared how do you resist it?

In this connection, here are positive examples of 'tactical media' such as the Electronic Disturbance Theatre's 'Floodnet' tool for 'electronic civil disobedience enabled protestors to effectively shut down web servers of target institutions through simply flooding it with requests. This 'distributed-denial-of-service' was used by the Zapatistas against the Mexican government and against the WTO at the time of Seattle in 1999 (Medosch, 2003: 17). Here the 'situationist-like' theatre extends not merely to the streets but to the electronic networks, and further evoking Artaud's theatre of cruelty - and somewhat reclaims it as public space. 

In the essay 'The Temporary Autonomous Zone', first published in 1985, Hakim Bey makes a link to what he calls 'pirate utopias' as a way of introducing the fanciful concept. Significantly, the text is published as anti-copyright, and 'may be freely pirated and quoted' combining the historical understanding of piracy as an 'information network'. Bey refrains from defining the term, preferring instead that the meaning is understood through action (2003: 97).
'The Kingdom of Piracy' was a project conceived by Armin Medosch, Shu Lea Cheang and Yukiko Shikata to explore the world of free software and copyleft culture. The term and metaphor 'piracy' is used, not to characterise illegal activity on the high seas, but in opposition to 'hegemonic power that asserts itself by establishing a trade monopoly' (2003: 9). The historical parallel to the days of early capitalism is a useful one (where slave ships also sailed), and points to some of the underlying antagonisms that open code and free culture present. 

The copyright industries or 'data lords', protected by the legal apparatus are opposed to 'piracy' on an industrial scale but also anyone using a peer-to-peer file-sharing network on an individual basis. Property in this sense is both material and intellectual. As Benjamin pointed out, technical reproducibility threatens property rights and the logic of digital technology is inherently reproducible and distributable over decentralised networks. Vested interests around property are made evident in the operations of big business and the legal apparatus in attempting to police these operations. 

[look up notes on property and copyright here - 'all property is theft']

Certainly there is now a critical mass around the open source and free software movements (together often called open code) that challenge the hegemonic power of proprietary software - many high quality applications, operating systems and platforms have been developed utilising collaborative programming and development environments. Medosch points out that this extends to principles of 'openness' in the wider culture: from training to activism; and to the development of alternative licenses such as the creative commons initiative providing different models over rights for creative work in the public domain; to 'commons-based peer production,' the 'production of goods and services based on resources that are held in a commons and organised by peers'. Referring to Felix Stalder's 'Culture without Commodities: From Dada to open Source and Beyond', this challenge is significant in that it comes from within the system, as a hybrid of the 'gift-based and service economy' and within the most advanced areas of production. It is therefore distinctly unlike past underground or avant-garde activities (Medosch 2003: 15). Whether this is tied to the project of social transformation remains in question.

The pirate metaphor works well for Bey in that the idea of an uprising or insurrection is seen not as a failed revolution but as something outside of the oppressive State under whatever ideological description and Hegelian dialectics. For him: 
'If History IS "Time," as it claims to be, then the uprising is a moment that springs up and out of Time, violates the "law" of History'. If the State IS History, as it claims to be, then the insurrection is the forbidden moment, an unforgivable denial of the dialectic[...] History says the Revolution attains "permanence," or at least duration, while the uprising is "temporary." [...] What of the anarchist dream, the Stateless state, the Commune, the autonomous zone with duration, a free society, a free culture.' (2003: 98).

This is Bey's answer at that time to the seemingly inevitability of recuperation. TAZs resist the spectacle by their relative invisibility, also by their agility and ability to 'be an uprising which does that engage directly with the State, a guerrilla 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.' (2003: 99) Here 'tactical media' and many other contemporary forms of resistance are evoked. A TAZ must not be named or mediated, and in itself is a 'poetic fancy'. 

Here all permanent solutions are rejected but what about a concept like permanent revolution - that itself rejects the Hegelian trajectory that Bey seems to focus on? For him, revolutions and dialectics bring closure. This articulation of dialectics is a rather limited and limiting one. Instead, Bey is drawing upon tribal myths, cyberpunk fiction as well as Deleuze and Guattari's concept 'nomadology', what he calls 'rootless cosmopolitanism' or 'psychic nomadism' (2003: 104). He sees pirates, gypsies, refugees, the homeless and other mobile groups as disloyal to centralised and fixed loyalties to the dogmas of Capitalism, Fascism and Communism (furthermore the 'no borders' movement is evoked too). Unfortunately, the theory has become well publicised and quoted much against its basic principles and proved to be not-so temporary or autonomous after all. In fact, one could go further and say that its definition has become substantially recuperated into the project of globalisalised capital - described in terms of free, multiple, temporary, mobile networks. Clearly it has to be read in the context of the time in which it was written and in recognition of its anarchist tendencies.       

Chaos:

Drawing upon Taoist thinking, Hakim Bey resists the negativity associated with Chaos theory, or its link to new ageism or science that sees it as a force of destruction or for enforcing order. He sees in TAZ something in common with 'strange attractors' and 'creative evolution' using Prigogine's term (2003: 110), insisting: 
'The battle lines are drawn. Chaos is not entropy, Chaos is not death, Chaos is not a commodity. Chaos is continual creation. Chaos never died.' (2003: 60)

Here the historical link of Chaos to Anarchist principles is evident as a 'political system' that is neither political nor systemic. He is advocating a critique from within, and to 'experiment with new tactics to replace the outdated baggage of leftism' in 'radical networking' - 'The Art World in particular deserves a dose of "Poetic Terrorism".' (2003 63) To Bey, anarchy is chaos, and chaos is the principle of continual creation, of 'all-potentiality' (2003: 70). It is both play and poesis (2003: 80). In Bey's imagination:
'Whether through simple data-piracy, or else by a more complex development of actual rapport with chaos, the Web-hacker, the cybernetician of the TAZ, will find ways to take advantage of perturbations, crashes, and breakdowns in the Net (ways to make information out of "entropy"). As a bricoleur, a scavenger of information shards, smuggler, blackmailer, perhaps even cyberterrorist, the TAZ-hacker will work for the evolution of clandestine fractal connections. These connections, and the different information that flows among and between them, will form "power outlets" for the coming-into-being of the TAZ itself - as if one were to steal electricity  from the energy-monopoly to light an abandoned house for squatters.' (2003: 111)

He defines his 'post-anarchism anarchy' more closely in terms of the general understanding of anarchism (as traditionally the struggle against crown and state): 
'Our brand of anti-authoritarianism, however, thrives on baroque paradox; it favors states of consciousness, emotion & aesthetics over all petrified ideologies & dogma; it embraces multitudes & relishes contradictions. Ontological Anarchy is a hobgoblin for BIG minds' (2003: 67; as opposed to the 'hobgoblin' of communism - the opening line of the communist manifesto, usually translated as 'spectre'. This outmoded approach, he would see as 'ideological purity', and the preserve of 'horrible old men' rather than the 'wild children' of ontological anarchism. There is a hilarious list of recommendations on pages 62-3). He says he defines his terms by making them more vague, to avoid 'ideologico-semantic traps', 'broken-down language machines' instead proposing to ravage them for parts as 'an act of cultural bricolage' (2003: 80). 

This is all very contradictory and many of the examples seem to make reference to dialectical principles - for instance, in the refusal to work (without making explicit reference to Negri) in contrast to the general strike and the refusal to make art (dismissing the 'silly nihilism' of the artstrike for a more positive sense of refusal). The point is to reject negative refusal for positive refusal but again the dialectical play is not explained in any detail. His suggestion is that work and art should disappear, not altogether but from the spheres of representation and mediation (2003: 130). It is very contradictory: 'As power "disappears," our will to power must be disappearance' (2003: 131). It is a full of positive energy and hopelessly 'utopian', as he says: 'a suggestion, almost a poetic fancy' (2003: 97) an invitation to: 'study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism - and who knows what we might attain' (2003: 132) and 'if we're dreaming, why not dream big?' (2003: xii).