Cyber Disobedience: Re://Presenting Online Anarchy

by Jeff Shantz

  This marks cyber anarchism as distinct from previously dominant revolutionary formations of the political Left in contexts such as Britain and North America, particularly Leninism and its variants. These new movements are decentralized, horizontalist, and non-determinist. At the same time these are attributes that characterize many of the movements of the period of resistance to globalization, including indigenous movements and poor peoples’ movements, North and South, and the occupied factories movements of the global South. Clearly the forms of the networks are resonating throughout social contexts.

  Cyber anarchists see networks and decentralized technology as offering possibilities for pluralistic and autonomous decision making and social planning. Autonomous assemblies networked in a federative relationship can plan as well as providing an active and participatory practice to guard against and fend off bureaucratic manifestations Diversity is represented in the autonomous assemblies while multiple DIY connections encourage innovation. As Dyer-Witheford notes:

  Commonism scales. That is, it can and must be fought for at micro and macro, molecular and molar levels; in initiatives of individual practice, community projects and very large scale movements. If the concept is at all meaningful, it is only because millions of people are already in myriad ways working to defend and create commons of different sorts, from community gardens to peer-to-peer networks. (2010, 112)

  The communications commons opens opportunities for a new system based on connections of affinity—much like the early web, and like the historic movements of anarchy itself. For this approach production is cooperative and self-determined rather than based on private command. For Summer and Halpin: “Production and decisions about production are made via direct democracy—which maximises connectivity. Moreover, this highly flexible system of autonomy, collectivity and commons may well allow us to confront the ecological crisis” (2010, 119–120). These relations have a high degree of intensity, activity, and feedback.

  For cyber anarchists the free flow of knowledge and cooperative production will be asserted in responding to current and coming ecological and social and economic crises, as many are today. Yet new opening will emerge and be developed for additional and improved initiatives. Those systems that allow for quick and mobile solutions to problems will have some real, pressing, necessity.

  Rethinking Democracy

  Anarchists in general recognize, with philosopher Slavoj Žižek, that “representation always acts as a violent intervention into what it represents” (1998, n.p.). Democracy has consistently, and conservatively, been conflated with representative parliamentarism. As Corcoran (2011) notes, representation is not a form of government necessary to technologically and socially complex societies.

  As Corcoran suggests, the capitalist context “is structurally incapable of recognizing the capacity for proletarian innovation which inhabits everyone” (2011, xii). Innovation is always presented as the purview, and more importantly the property, of capital. Corcoran notes that there is no necessary link between states of society and forms of politics as is often claimed by the oligarchy that enjoys, and benefits from, the current arrangement of things (2011, xxi). For Corcoran: “‘Representative democracy’ is the political form that has come to prevail more or less unimpeded thanks to the weakening of egalitarian inventiveness and a general submission to the blind power of the economy” (2011, xxi). This is in many regards an effect of power that has excluded and marginalized or denigrated alternatives.

  Following Alain Badiou, we might suggest that the struggles of cyber disobedients over the communications commons, in the end, reveal the incommensurablity between power and thought. The distance between the state and truths. Of the distance between power and truths (between state and creative thought) Alain Badiou states: “In the end, power is violence, whereas creative thought knows no constraint other than its own immanent rules” (2011, 6). Democracy, despite its own claims, is violence.

  Immediatism: Theorizing Resistance to Enclosure and the “One World” of Capitalism

  The publication, in 1985, of T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism signaled the arrival of Peter Lamborn Wilson’s mystic alter ego Hakim Bey as an influential voice in the recent renewal of anarchist theory. In the years since the publication of T.A.Z., Bey’s work has proved both immensely influential and controversial. Indeed, the debates it inspired in the pages of major anarchist magazines, including Anarchy and the Fifth Estate, as well as in various zines (do-it-yourself publications) within the anarchist milieu were among the most lively in anarchist circles in decades. Younger anarchists, and those new to anarchism, took Bey’s call for “poetic terrorism” as inspiration for the waves of “@-zones” (anarchist infoshops, community centers, art and music spaces) which emerged especially in urban neighborhoods across North America in the 1990s. Others (most notably Murray Bookchin) condemned Bey for supposedly offering up apolitical “postmodern” bohemianism in the guise of anarchism. Wherever one stands vis à vis Bey’s vision of anarchy, however, there is no question that his work continues to pose a creative and intelligent challenge to traditional notions of what constitutes critical theory and radical politics in the new millennium. In particular his thinking on the web, and networks within the web, and his notion of pirate utopias, has influenced cyber activists of various stripes. Indeed collections have been devoted to discussion of some of Bey’s notions in the context of web practices (see Ludlow 2001).

  For Bey, the future of radical political ideas and practices (and the future, or non-future, of what used to be called the political Left) remains at the forefront of concerns for contemporary anarchism in the context of neoliberal globality. In a number of publications that have been widely read and influential within anarchist circles Bey discusses the prospects for resistance to what he terms “too-late capitalism,” the mono-culture of global capitalism. Among his consistent preoccupations is “the revolutionary potential of everyday life” (1996, 7). Rather than focus on a revolutionary or post-revolutionary future “after the revolution” his call is the act as if the revolution is already underway—to be revolutionary immediately. His primary concern rests with the possibilities for multiplying the secret or clandestine spaces in which enclosure and commodification might be avoided and the creative powers of everyday life (re)affirmed.

  Much of Bey’s writings, especially his book Millenium, revolve around his view that capitalism, with the collapse and discrediting of socialism, has finally conquered the world. From his vantage point: “Capitalism is now at liberty to declare war & deal directly as enemies with all former ‘alternatives’ (including ‘democracy’)” (1996, 52). For Bey, there is no longer a “third path,” (or third way or Third World) since the second (Communism) has disappeared. According to Bey, the newly enthroned “one-world” (of money and finance capital) obliterates space and presence reducing complexity to sameness. Almost everything enters into representation in the late capitalist “empire of the image” (of which money is the exemplar). For Bey, this leaves us with a simple choice: “either we accept ourselves as the ‘last humans’, or else we accept ourselves as the opposition. (Either automonotony or autonomy)” (1996, 30). Neutrality is no option and for Bey the only way out is anarchy.

  While, on the surface, seeming to echo neoliberal “end of history theorists” such as Francis Fukuyama and Daniel Bell, Bey is not yet ready to yield to their hubris. The one world’s claims are, after all, spurious. There is always possibility for escape, opposition, rupture. Every enclosure has an outside, “not to mention a liminality around every border, an area of ambiguity” (1996, 35). It is here that the uprising, the opposition, finds its “heartland.”

  In a short essay in Millennium, “For and Against Interpretation,” Bey decries capital’s monopoly of interpretation in the one world. This monopoly results in a “scarcity of interpretation” (1996, 60) for the rest of us which renders us as objects within the interpretations of (capital’s) authority.
Not only does it mediate our material transactions, capital stands between us and awareness. Everything must be mediated by money; nothing (“not even air, water, or dirt”) is to be experienced outside of this mediation (“the exacerbated mediation of a power that can only grow by creating scarcity and separation,” 1996, 64). Against capital’s monopoly, Bey renews classical anarchist calls for self-creativity, and convivial meaning production. No interpreters (revolutionary or otherwise), only companions in networks of reciprocity. This is, once again, a call for self-production of a commons.

  For Bey, and this is a point taken up by subsequent anarchist writers such as Heidi Rimke and Richard Day, only lived experience (affinity, self-produced desire) can present another world beyond the enclosures of money. In Bey’s view: “The ‘spirituality of pleasure’ lies precisely in a presence that cannot be represented without disappearing” (1996, 32). Bey rejects the claims of advertisers that capital can satisfy desire. Instead he follows Walter Benjamin in arguing that capital, rather than liberating desire, only exacerbates longing. According to Bey: “Capital liberates itself by enslaving desire” (1996, 32).) Against the hermetism of the one-world “risk society,” its management of desire and imagination, its dread of carnality, Bey advocates “a reenchantment of the forbidden” and a return to the senses (taste, touch, and smell against odorless mass industrial civilization). Eros must escape the enclosures, or we must rescue it!

  Fortunately, resistance to “the Market” of capital persists in gift economies of reciprocity, mutuality, and redistribution (in do-it-yourself, DIY, cultures and underground economies). Drawing upon the economic work of Karl Polanyi and the anthropology of Pierre Clastres, Bey highlights the resistance that has met every threat of “the Market’s” emergence. In keeping with an anarchist perspective Bey looks to the “self-made aspect of the social,” DIY, a spontaneous ordering of reciprocity, as expressing a “non-predatory expansiveness,” a “convivial connectivity,” an “eros of the social” (1996, 42–43). The one world is never alone; the archaic presence of revolution still stands as its Other.

  The hegemonism of the one world leads Bey to retreat from his earlier postmodern enthusiasm for aesthetic withdrawal (“disappearance as will to power”) as a mode of resistance, however. In the new millennium there is only capitulation or opposition and Bey is now clear that flight, far from offering an instance of resistance, is now marked primarily as an instance of capitulation. This does not diminish the tactical importance of clandestinity, however; the secret remains revolutionary in its escape from absorption into the totality.

  Of great, if often overlooked, significance for a rethinking of contemporary commonist approaches are the under-appreciated and largely misunderstood writings of Max Stirner and Gustav Landauer. One detects a uniquely Stirnerite presence in Bey’s work in particular. Like Stirner’s self-confident, unconventional “egoist” the anarchist of the TAZ awaits no salvation by abstractions such as “the future” or “the revolution.” It waits for no Idea (whether anarchism, socialism, or some other) to free it. The immediatist strategy of creating alternative futures in the present or autonomous zones is reminiscent of Stirner’s appeal to insurrection rather than Revolution. As Peter Marshall suggests:

  The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions.’ It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only the working forth of men [sic] out of the established. (Marshall 1993, 638)

  As for many anarchists at the turn of the millennium, Bey locates the most (indeed at the time the only) interesting beginning of this rethinking, once more, in the EZLN, the Zapatistas, in Chiapas. The EZLN is interesting both because it found its inspiration beyond the “Internationale” (because it appeared at the same moment the USSR disappeared), and because it was the first revolutionary movement to define itself against “global neoliberalism.” Chiapas was, according to Bey, the first revolution of the new millennium. Others have, of course, followed, from the post-Seattle alternative globalization uprisings, to the factory recuperations of Latin America, to the Arab Spring, to Idle No More. Yet each of these has drawn from and expanded upon practices and perspectives, strategies and tactics, developed by the Zapatistas, including the use of cyber disobedience and spread through the networked commons.

  Anarchism is composed of, and constructs, networks of autonomous communications. Bey refers to these autonomous networks as “the Web.” Despite his use of the conventional terminology of “the Web,” Bey is at pains to make clear that what he is speaking of does not refer solely to cyber technology. The information webwork of anarchy, the current forms of the Web, consist of the networks of zines and alternative publications, pirate radios, web sites, listservers, blogs, and hacking. Bey argues (1991, 110) that at this point the Web is primarily a support system capable of sharing information from one autonomous zone to another.

  The networks make up a distinct material infrastructure of communication that uses the technology of mass commercial society—computers, copy machines, mail system—but steers the use of these technologies toward nonprofit, communitarian ends. (Duncombe 1997, 178—179)

  The Web provides logistical support for the autonomous zones, but, even more essentially, it also helps bring the autonomous zone into being. In Bey’s view the autonomous zone “exists in information-space as well as in the ‘real world’” (1991, 109). The Web, in part, makes up for the lack of durability and stability experienced by many autonomous zones. These networks make up the anarchist underground of what Shantz (2008) calls the “future in the present.” Its significance rests not in the specifics of technology, but in “the openness and horizontality of the structure” (Bey 1991, 11).

  Among anarchists Hakim Bey is at the forefront of efforts recently to develop the political implications of the writings of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and to bring the insights of these analyses to bear on socio-political practice. Along with critics such as Ronaldo Perez and the Critical Art Ensemble, Bey has attempted a conjoining of Deleuzian analysis with anarchism. One exciting outcome of his adventurous forays into theory is to re-read Proudhonian federalism as Deleuzian rhizome. Here the “non-hegemonic particularities” of federalism express a “nomadological mutuality of synergistic solidarities,” the revolutionary structure of opposition to the “one world” of capitalism (1996, 43). For Bey, and other anarchists who have drawn from postmodern theories, this is the structure of revolution and resistance in the contemporary context.

  The most exciting result is a provocative and challenging “neo-Proudhonian” rendering of the Zapatista rebellion—one which, unfortunately, is not sufficiently developed. A note of hope is certainly struck: “The goal of ‘neo-Proudhonian federalism’ would be the recognition of freedom at every point of organization in the rhizome, no matter how small A even to a single individual, or any tiny group of ‘secessionists’” (1996, 101–102).) Aspects are provided in the understanding of activist nodes in the internet as rhizomatic organizing, of federated cooperation. Several anarchist writers have since attempted to pursue Bey’s lead in developing this Deleuzian reading of anarchy and federation.

  Despite the best intentions Bey’s enthusiasm for revolutionary potentialities (irrespective of sources), as is the case for those who have followed his approach, gets in the way of a searching analysis of the political conditions which make a non-hegemonized difference possible (or which encourage instead the transformation of difference into the atavistic or xenophobic particularisms of ethnic nationalism or religious fundamentalism). His primary response is to hold out the possibility of federation and affinity. Likewise, he overstates the case that these approaches are clearly opposed to capital.

  For too long, perhaps, political theorists and activists have been satisfied with dated and worn categories and definitions having as their sole recommendation fa
miliarity. Certainly a critical and extensive re-thinking is overdue. Some (especially Marxists) will feel uneasy with Bey’s invitation “to re-read Proudhon, Marx, Nietzsche, Landauer, Fourier, Benjamin, Bakhtin, the IWW, etc. A the way the EZLN re-reads Zapata!” (1996, 45). While expressing a distaste for “hyper-intellectual, pyrotechnical writing” and the contemporary vogue of pessimism among cultural theorists, Bey decries what he sees as a reactionary “seduction into inactivity and political despair” (1996, 13). He seeks another way, preferring an “anti-pessimistic” (though not optimistic) politics which seeks the revolutionary potential of humor.

  In the end, Bey’s discussion itself, like much of the postmodern anarchism that has followed, remains esoteric, of greater interest (and significance) at this point to cultural theorists than to activists seeking strategic assistance in their daily battles against the one world. While such effusions have generally held greater appeal for academic anarchists than for community activists or revolutionaries, Hakim Bey has taken a worthwhile step in renewing socio-political thought by bringing the insights of Deleuzian theory to social action. It appears the journey still has several more miles to go.

  While Bey offers an original and innovative, if somewhat esoteric, articulation of anarchy and recent poststructuralist theory, we might suggest that his work continues and extends a thread of everyday anarchism that is a recurrent, if overlooked, presence in earlier waves of anarchist thinking ranging from Kropotkin in the nineteenth century through Gustav Landauer in the early twentieth century to the recent writings of Colin Ward.