9
The unexpected is the best source for inspiration.
— Peter Drucker
Despite the commercial veneer and increasing degree of regulation it’s acquired in recent years, the Internet is still the best large-scale example of functional anarchy to come down the pipe in a long time. What’s more, it’s an anarchy that’s been built entirely on someone else’s property. Computers belonging to universities, big business and even the military have been hosting the digital equivalent of a squatter’s tent city for decades now. And, like absentee landlords, the institutions that own the machines have been largely indifferent to the activities of their tenants.
Those tenants have been busy redecorating and renovating, too. The last two decades of radically different technologies have been created by people with unapologetically unorthodox mindsets and belief systems, not corporate boffins ‘thinking outside the box.’ While they were adapting the Internet’s infrastructure to their own ends by creating everything from Coke machines connected to the Net (so that you could check if the machine downstairs had cold drinks in it without leaving your desk or going offline; the fact that a guy in Finland could also check the same machine was an amusing side-effect) to military-strength encryption software, these people also spent a large amount of time and energy writing vast amounts of material describing why they were bothering to do so. The result has been the widespread online circulation and adoption of ideas ranging from the revolutionary to the ridiculous.
If you really want to know what the next big thing will be, the next ‘killer app’ or billion-dollar company, you’re going to have to start paying closer attention to these ideas. The fringes of online culture are tomorrow’s mainstream Internet. Even when new ideas don’t originate in the fringe, there will probably be passionate discussion of them in fringe forums long before they reach the pages of any self-proclaimed ‘cutting edge’ print media. As Bruce Sterling writes of hisMirrorshades group on the Well, ‘If it’s in Mirrorshades, it’ll be science fiction in a year. In two years it will be in Wired magazine. In three years teenage girls will be wearing it. In four years it’ll be mentioned on CNN. In five years it’ll be “discovered.”’ The question is, do you want to wait five years, or do you want to know now?
The TAZ
‘TAZ’ stands for ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’. The phrase was coined by gay Islamic philosopher Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) in his book of the same name, published by Autonomedia in 1991. In brief, TAZ[1] outlines a theory that anarchistic temporary communities are a means of reclaiming a more intense, fulfilling, ‘immediate’ existence, not just online, but everywhere.
Though it sounds as if it had been custom-tailored for the Internet era, the theory of the TAZ isn’t just something that Bey pulled out of the ether. It’s based on the existence of actual ‘pirate utopias’ in the 18th century:
T