From: dmandl@panix.com (David Mandl)
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 95 19:57:18 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Hakim Bey URL, etc.
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The URL for the Hakim Bey web site (someone might have already posted this) is:
http://www.uio.no:80/~mwatz/bey/


Except from the Hakim Bey interview in "Axcess" magazine (conducted last
summer):

"I have to admit I felt a certain intense interest, perhaps even amounting
to a potential enthusiasm, when this tech was first being discussed," Bey
told me.  I'd read William Gibson like the rest of us, and I certainly
understood his dystopian point, but nevertheless, when Tim Leary and people
like that began to get enthusiastic, I had to investigate on that level.  I
haven't seen much evidence that what Uncle Tim thought was going to happen
is really happening.  Once again, any technology could be democratic if it
were distributed, you know what I mean?  It's a simple Marxist thing about
means of production.  There's nothing inherently authoritarian--at least at
first glance--to any technology, although one could argue about how
technology then shapes the society that has already shaped the technology
in a kind of feedback loop that can move towards greater and greater
authoritarianism or lack of autonomy.  The potential for what, back in the
50's and 60's, people were calling electronic democracy, is obviously still
there as a potential structure.  You can see certain elements of it in the
Net, but when you're talking about the high tech involved in virtual
reality you're really talking about something that is not accesible to most
people.  And I think it probably never will be.  There's never going to be
any cheap VR kit that's going to allow a dock worker in Manila to get on
some kind of cyberspace Internet, much less a dock worker in Atlanta--or
me, for example."

Bey was equally gloomy about the future of the Internet.  "My impression is
that 90 per cent of what goes out over it is completely unrelated to any
kind of freedom interests, autonomy proposals or projects, or struggles for
genuine non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian group dynamic.  Most of it is
just chit-chat--banal chit-chat that could just as easily be carried out
over an old-fashioned party line phone."

Unabashed in my online addiction, I couldn't help but ask if he saw _any_
way to realize the internet as a T.A.Z.

"I'm led to believe, through conversations with people who are much more
techie and active than I am, that cypher--unbreakable code--is the key.  So
the cypherpunks are the people to keep an eye on at this moment.  They tend
to be the ones who are most active around freedom of speech
issues...whether legal or extra-legal.  Even so, Bey felt that the powers
that be will never allow the "Information Superhighway" to develop
unchecked.

"I think Clipper was a declaration of war on the Net.  The fact that the
egg is on their face, because within ten minutes some hacker figured out
how to beat the Clipper, is an indication of--oh, let's call it an area of
chaos.  Within areas of chaos, either horrible destruction and disease and
death occur.  Or, if you're flowing the right way, and if all hearts are
beating in unison to a certain degree, then that area of chaos can become
the T.A.Z.  Now I've said over and over again that there's no such thing as
a T.A.Z. that's only on the Net, and I maintain that that's true.  In order
to have autonomy, you have to have physicality.  Autonomy is not something
that can only exist in the imagination or in the world of images.  I think
that it involves the entirety, the whole axial being, and that is rooted in
the earth and concerns physicality, materiality, the body--mortality, if
you like--as contrasted to the spurious immortality of cyberspace.  But I
still maintain that, at least in theory, the Net could be an adjunct to the
T.A.Z., could be a tool or a weapon, even, if you want to look at it that
way, for the construction of the T.A.Z."

--
Dave Mandl
dmandl@panix.com