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01:30I don't know.
02:00Well, I didn't study.
02:01I'm a college dropper.
02:03I grew up in the academic world, and I thought I would be part of it, but I changed my
02:08mind
02:08in the 60s.
02:11LSD helped.
02:15And then in 1968, along with a lot of other people, I thought that we had tried to have
02:21a revolution, and we had failed.
02:24And so I went to India.
02:27I went to Morocco.
02:30India ended up in Iran, and I spent 10 years in the East.
02:35And basically, that was my education.
02:38As it turned out, it was my education.
02:40At the time, I thought that I was never going back to America, because I thought that America
02:45was too much of a problem.
02:48I couldn't deal with it.
02:53But after the Iranian Revolution, I had to leave Iran.
02:57So I spent a couple of years in England and Europe, and then I finally drifted back to
03:03America.
03:04What comes to mind as most characteristic is that I still think that we had a revolution
03:14and it failed.
03:15In other words, my reading back of that period is that genuine social revolution was proposed
03:27in an incoherent way.
03:29Yes.
03:29incoherent, but real.
03:34It was attempted in a lot of different ways, socially, politically, even militantly, if not
03:41militarily.
03:42Yes, even militarily, perhaps in some places.
03:46Actually, Italy in 1972 is almost a military situation.
03:53Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all that.
03:56You had contact to the F in Germany?
03:59No.
03:59No, me, no.
04:00No, I was more of a hippie than a new left person.
04:04I was sympathetic to the revolution, but not very knowledgeable about it at the time.
04:10And basically, my part of it was, you know, the hippie part, not the yippy part.
04:20Or, you know, the new left part.
04:22Right, right, right.
04:25There was also, however, this great tradition in America that started in 1913, mostly amongst
04:31black people, of Moorish science.
04:37Specifically, of course, it means Morocco, but in general it could mean any Muslim, and
04:41in fact, you know, they talk about the Moros in the Philippines.
04:46So, like, Turk was also a word that didn't necessarily mean somebody from Turkey, it meant
04:51any kind of Muslim, you know, so Moor in the same way.
04:54Interesting.
04:54But in some black people, it was sort of the beginnings of black Islam in America in 1913.
05:01Which leads to Malcolm X at the end?
05:03On one direction, yes, but in another direction, not.
05:07So there's many split-ups, many different sects and so forth.
05:10And one of these sects was much more friendly to white people if they were willing to declare
05:17themselves to be Celtic, okay, or Persian.
05:22In any case, it was a very fascinating black American, a lot of jazz musicians and that
05:29kind of people involved in it.
05:30So the hippies and the jazz musicians, you know, beatniks and black people and so forth,
05:36mixed together in Baltimore and Brooklyn and New York and places like that.
05:40It's Gnostic-based, like that's one deal?
05:44It's a, it's a, what can I say?
05:47It's a syncretistic sect, which is partly Islamic and partly other things.
05:53And it's certainly from an Islamic position, point of view, is pretty heretical.
05:58Certainly not Orthodox.
06:01But, um, some, you know, hippies got involved in this and then out of that, uh, came the
06:06Moorish Orthodox Church, which has, you know, been a small organization, but it's existed
06:11ever since.
06:12Mm-hmm.
06:12And there, there are people now doing it, you know, I have nothing to, I have very little
06:16to do with them.
06:16It's, they, they pick up the ball and play with it themselves, you know.
06:21It's a very loosely organized religious sentiment, you know.
06:26But is this a real taz?
06:30No, well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's a, it's a, it's a religion.
06:34It's, it's a cult, a sect, it's not a, it's not a place or a time.
06:39It's, it's, it's, and it's very similar to some of the psychedelic religions that were
06:44founded in the, in the sixties.
06:46We weren't specifically psychedelic, but we were part of that movement, very much so.
06:52Well, and that's, you know, when we went up to Millbrook to be with Leary, that's who
06:58we identified ourselves.
07:03All these different types in the sixties, the political type and the hippie type and the
07:08drug type and the art type and so forth, they all felt that they could work together.
07:12Now everyone is separated.
07:14Everyone, all these groups are atomized, split apart, distracted, separated.
07:19Why, it's, you know, it's just the spirit of the times, if, I mean, I could just say
07:25it's the spirit of the times or else we could.
07:26Is the logic of the machines, or is this machine based systems?
07:30Yes, that has something to do with it.
07:33That has something to do with it.
07:34I was thinking the other day about television and the automobile and how they co, how they
07:40coexist, correspond on different levels in history, they're both machines to separate people.
07:50Yeah?
07:51The car, and the car, the automobile starts to replace public transportation in around 1910
07:59and by 1950 it succeeded.
08:03So there's no more public, public, public transportation in America is, it was ruined.
08:09What is left is only for poor people, so it's crappy.
08:14The automobile separates each individual into an atom, a moving atom, it breaks up communities,
08:21it creates this highway suburb system that further breaks up communities actually physically,
08:27it breaks up communities economically, and it actually breaks up things physically just
08:33by separating.
08:34You can jump in your car and drive away.
08:36At the same time you have radio and television coming in, which are, instead of public entertainment,
08:43you now have also separate atomized modes of entertainment.
08:49The television and the triumph of the automobile in about 1950 corresponds with the appearance of
08:56the commercial appearance of television in about 1950.
09:00So it really works out very nicely.
09:04And, you know, I mean, there's just so much the human spirit can do when it's wrapped up
09:11from birth, from the moment of birth, in a technocratic sphere where meaning is transferred
09:19to the inorganic on a regular, you know, basis in education and culture and the home and in
09:29all aspects of what we used to call the social.
09:33And in this sense the internet is not a change, it's an intensification.
09:38You know, just as the internet and genetic manipulation, you know, the bio technology, this is the next
09:47pair, the next matched pair.
09:50Go inside.
09:51Yeah, yeah, yeah, that actually commodify life, the inner, yeah, the interior, if you like,
09:56or life itself.
09:59Commodify the imagination instead of just the, I don't know what, the attention.
10:05Commodify life itself rather than, you know, the body itself rather than just the so-called
10:10needs of the body.
10:12So each of these technocratic movements, you know, plunges us deeper and deeper into this
10:19state of alienation to, I don't know, to use an old Marxist word as loosely as possible,
10:28okay, into separation, might be a better term.
10:39And, you know, you can, you can, you can object to this as much as you like.
10:45You can weep and moan about this as much as you like, but it doesn't change the basic situation.
10:50You can go online and complain about the fact that you have to be online, you know what I
10:55mean? I, you know, I know very few people there in the 90s, there were, there were thousands
11:01of them. Now it's hard to find them. People who were, you know, politically enthusiastic
11:06about the internet and who still think of it as a somehow force of liberation. These people
11:14are getting fewer and fewer. Mostly I find when I talk to people, they're saying, oh, I
11:18hate this shit, but I have to do it. I have to do it. It's my job. Most people, most
11:22people
11:23are now working at this. It's their job. There's nothing liberating about that for fuck's
11:27sake, you know. It's over. The liberating part is over. And in 1995, I remember we all
11:32said, this is the year of the internet. This is it. The last year of the internet is what
11:38we meant. Because the experiment was over. And the returns were in. The corporate reality
11:44had taken over. And the fact that you can still use the internet to, you know, run an end game
11:53around the media, like happened with the torture stuff from Iraq, it doesn't seem all that significant
12:00to me. I mean, ultimately some British journalist or some, you know, European journalist would
12:07have blown the story anyway. Whether there was an internet or not might have made a difference
12:11of a few days. So, I don't see, this is people, you know, every time something like this happens
12:17on the internet, oh, it's a great triumph for electronic freedom. Very few people believe
12:21that anymore, I think. It's just, it's just another gadget by now.
12:34But, you know, the TAZ is also just a sociological observation.
12:38The TAZ, you call it the TAZ.
12:40The TAZ, whatever, you know. It's a sociological observation about the way human beings behave.
12:47It's not, it's not a purely utopian concept, okay. People act that way because it's the logical
12:58way to act. You know, if you, if a group, if a large enough group of people, it might only
13:04be two or it might be thousands. But we're talking about a group from two to a couple thousand.
13:12Well, not endless, but, you know, because too big would be impossible. That would be something
13:17else again. And we're in a different sociology. This is a sociology of the natural impulse of
13:25people when they're in a high spirit and have positive energy to remove themselves, perhaps
13:31even in, not even in a militant way, from authority. And to live, to live intensely, you
13:39know. And this intensity is sometimes politically hard to define. And in different ages, it might
13:48have different manifestations. But the basic sociology, the free group, and the time and
13:56place, you know, the time and place aspect, in other words, that it's not going to last very long
14:05because it depends on high spirits, you know. It's no real place. It is a real place. It
14:12must be a real place. Yeah. It has to have a, it has to have a, what I'm talking about
14:17is
14:17a physical time and place, not a mental, not cybernetic, not imaginary. It has all those
14:26aspects possibly, but if it doesn't have the physical space, then I don't call it a zone.
14:32It's not a zone. Okay. And the people who misinterpreted what I was saying to think that it had something
14:37to do with the internet were wrong. The TAZ is not on the internet. Time magazine said
14:44that actually. Because they, of course, they didn't bother to read a word I said. No, no,
14:52no, no, no, no, no, no. The most I ever said about the internet was that it should be a
14:59tool
15:00for maximizing the potential for the emergence of a TAZ. I never said that it was the TAZ.
15:10Personally, I don't get along with machines. I never have. I don't, you know, I'm not a gadget
15:15lover. I don't drive. And that's not entirely by choice. It's partly by choice, but it's not entirely
15:25by choice. I don't have a television. I managed to get rid of television about 10 or 15 years ago,
15:30and I never missed it. I don't have a computer, and I never had a computer. Well, I had a
15:37computer
15:38for a few weeks, and then I got rid of it, and I realized this was not for me. So,
15:43you know,
15:44physically and mentally, I'm very bad with machines. But on the other hand, I think this gives me a
15:48certain, this personal problem gives me a certain insight into a larger political, sociological
15:56situation where, basically, I decided that I would throw in my lot with the lost, hopeless, stupid
16:07people who would never be on the internet. I thought I would stay with them.
16:13As a gesture, you know, as a gesture of solidarity, a futile, stupid gesture, but a gesture. And
16:26maybe eventually I would discover a new network of people who were, you know, also rejecting certain
16:35aspects of what I now consider to be a technocracy, rather than just technology. That hasn't really
16:43happened. You know, I mean, I wish I could say, yes, and now there are, you know, a solidarity network
16:51of tens of thousands of people who, you know, refuse cars and refuse computers and, you know, but no,
16:57I don't. I'm completely isolated. I'm completely isolated because the other people, the other people
17:03who don't have computers, are poor peasants, you know, I'm not in touch with any poor peasants.
17:09But you are living also as a second part or a part of your personality is living on the internet.
17:18So you are an icon of the net, a meat of the net. How are you living with this?
17:25I know. Well, it's a strange little accident of history as part of it. When I brought out the book,
17:33and I had a few things to say in the book about the internet, very few really. And I put
17:39the book
17:39under an anti-copyright, you know, remember the anti-copyright. And somehow the book became a little
17:48mascot of the early hackers, you know, back in the BBS days of the internet, the crude early pioneer days
17:58of the internet. So for some reason, my work has always been there. And I guess it always will be
18:05there because there's no way to erase it. In fact, the original message was, this is anti-copyright,
18:12but if you use anything, please tell me. Well, of course, most people don't. Some people wrote
18:18fake material and put it on the internet under my name. I can't stop them. How am I supposed to
18:26stop
18:26them? There's nothing I can do about it. So I never tried to do anything about it. I hate this
18:34way in
18:35which the internet sucks you into these corpse-like, you know, like this corpse fight, you know, fight
18:46it and fighting with these cyber spirits, you know. I'm really, really sort of sick of symbolic
18:54discourse. I hate, I'm starting to hate it, you know, which is a very bad position for an artist
18:59and a writer to be in, since that's what we do, is symbolic discourse. But this whole, the whole idea
19:06of discourse has become poisonous, you know. You mean the discourse with a neo-primitivist,
19:11like John Satan and others? Well, yes, even that. I mean, the fact is that within the anarchist
19:18or anti-authoritarian or, I don't know, whatever this, you know, world is, there's nothing going
19:24on except symbolic discourse, you know. Nothing. Even if you want to talk about what the Unabomber
19:31did, basically it's just symbolism. You know, yes, he blew up a few computer shops and killed
19:38one or two pretty awful fucking people. But, you know, it wasn't real revolutionary action.
19:45It was symbolic, Lord. It was largely symbolic. And the rest of it is just blah, blah, blah
19:50on the internet, you know. A real good TAZ in America would be the Burning Man Festival.
19:56I wouldn't ask you for this.
19:58Yeah.
19:58Yeah.
19:59It's a, well, actually I call it a periodic autonomous zone because it happens every year.
20:06If it happened only once and lasted for like four weeks, three weeks or four weeks or something,
20:11I would say that was, you know, a really great temporary autonomous zone. Now it happens
20:16every year, so it's a periodic autonomous zone. You get the idea? But it has to be a place
20:24and it has to be a time. But the question is, could this room here be also a temporary autonomous
20:33zone? That would entirely depend on what happened in the room. I can't just say, you know, I now
20:41declare this. But you can't be alone in a room and it's a TAZ?
20:44No, you see, no, no. Again, again, I look on this as a sociological fact. That means more
20:50than one person.
20:51More than one person.
20:52And so the Unabomber couldn't be, create a temporary autonomous zone in this cabin?
20:59No. No. I mean, he could create something else. I don't know what it is, but, I mean,
21:05to me, we're talking about politics. So politics means at least one other person.
21:12And in fact, you know, there's no such thing as the isolated individual, really. You know,
21:17we know that. I mean, without...
21:18Is he trying to talk?
21:19I'm not being metaphysical here. I'm just saying this is obviously so. You know, not even,
21:24not even Shterner believed in the completely isolated individual.
21:28He, that guy tried to be...
21:31He tried, but even he had to talk about the union of egoists.
21:37I'm not against the man. I just think that what he did was futile and rather stupid.
21:42I don't agree with Zerzan and making him into a big hero. I sympathize with him, you know,
21:48but I don't agree.
21:50So wrong tactic?
21:51Wrong tactic, yeah.
21:53What did he should do?
21:57Well, that's a good question, of course. That's a very good question. And the fact that I can't
22:03answer it doesn't negate my critique, but it does weaken it, I admit. Okay? I wish I could say that
22:12I knew what to do. You know, I mean, it's a horrible thing to say, but if there was a
22:16hundred
22:17thousand Unabombers, maybe we would get somewhere. You know, it's the difference between terrorism and
22:24militant action. You know, we've seen that terror is a very ambiguous, double-edged sword.
22:33Ever since the 1890s and the failures of all the assassinations and attentats and so forth to bring
22:38on any kind of an anarchist revolution. And over and over again, you know, people like Emma Goldman
22:44had to say, well, you know, we love the sinner, but we hate the sin. You know, you know, yes,
22:50we have
22:50great sympathy for Leon Kolgosz, but it's really too bad that he shot the president. It was a stupid
22:55thing to do, you know. And this has been the anarchist position, or I should, the sensible
23:00anarchist position ever since then. That just, you know, it's like, supposing you went and,
23:05supposing you found out who the CEO of the big evil corporation was and you went and killed that
23:10person. Would it make one bit of difference in the world? No, they just come with a new CEO.
23:17No. I mean, there's lots of talented people in this universe, you know, there's no shortage
23:22of smart people who are willing to sell themselves to the devil.
23:25That's the traditional way by anarchism is this, to kill some of the leaders.
23:30Yeah, yeah. And to create...
23:32Well, we were wrong. We were wrong. And I think that we should have realized how wrong
23:36we were right from about 1890 onwards. But without some kind of spiritual push, I don't see how
23:43all of this resistance, all these millions of people who are angry but don't know how
23:49to do anything about it, how do they come together? What could make them into a movement, excuse
23:54me, would have to be something along the lines of esprit, you know, of kind of combination of
24:03intellect and heart, head and heart, you know. Because otherwise, you know, otherwise it's
24:13just, it's just sentimentality. It's just a sentiment for something that we've lost, some
24:18social, some memory of the social that disappeared around 1995, finally. So I would say that if you
24:28want me, if you want my anti-pessimistic point of view, it would have to be involved somehow
24:34with spirituality.
24:36But that would mean a chump in consciousness.
24:40Hmm. Well, I think that as far as that goes, we've been working on that at least since the
24:46sixties.
24:47Even longer.
24:48At least, as I say, since the sixties, if not since the beginning of Romanticism. It's always,
24:54you can always push things back and back and back. But if we want to talk about the modern
24:58moment, I think it's the sixties, when, when, with the psychedelic and the rediscovery, at
25:05least for us, you know, because we weren't Europeans, so we had to, suddenly we discovered
25:09surrealism and, you know.
25:14Just one thing, you were saying that enlightening, enlightenment is part of the problem. What do you mean by that?
25:22Well, I mean that the 18th century Aufklärung is part of the problem. It's like what Adorno,
25:29I think it was, who said about the cruel instrumentality of reason.
25:35But isn't Adorno also part of the problem?
25:37Well, at least he knew it though, apparently, if he coined a phrase like that, because that
25:42says it to me, it's the cruel instrumentality of reason. Rationalism, you know, rationality,
25:48rationalism. Rationality is fine. Rationality is good. Rationality is so rare, you might
25:55as well call it psychedelic. I mean, human beings are almost never rational, but rationalistic
26:01all the time, you know, especially since the 18th century. Rationalism, yes, we've got way
26:07too much rationalism, not enough rationality. And you look at who are the most rational people,
26:13for example, on the question of drugs, are the drug users. They're the ones who talk,
26:18you know, who see the complete irrationality of the war on drugs, for example. That this
26:24is economically, politically, psychologically, spiritually, in every way irrational. So it's
26:30the drug users who are rational. But they're supposed to be, or I should say we, we are supposed
26:37to be the irrational ones, or the surrational, or the surrealist ones, or something. No one
26:43ever gives us credit for being rational. That's because the Elfklarum caused this split between
26:49rationality and rationalism. And it's possible to be completely spiritual and romantic and still
26:55be rational. Be a rational human being, not frothing at the mouth, crazy. Yeah? So that's
27:02what I mean by the problem of enlightenment.
27:06But the Islamic societies, they stopped the way which leads to enlightenment or the Aufklärung
27:14in the 18th century. Why do you think…
27:16Well, they stopped even sooner than that, if you want to be specific about it. They had,
27:21as you pointed out before, there's no Islamic Renaissance. So we can't…
27:25obviously talk about, if there's an Aufklärung, it's only in the 19th century, and it's
27:29purely imitation of the West. It's people like Afghani, and Muhammad Abdu, and so forth.
27:37But there was never any Renaissance, either in Islam or China. And Joseph Needham, the great
27:43historian of Chinese science, already noticed this. That at a certain point, both China and
27:50Islam were way ahead of the West, technologically and scientifically. And why didn't they make
27:55the transition? Why couldn't they make the transition to modern science and Renaissance
28:00and Reformation and so forth and so on?
28:03But why did they stop? They had a knowledge about what is coming? A feeling?
28:10There are two ways you could look at this. One is to say that they stopped because their
28:14systems themselves were flawed. They were overdeveloped, hyperdeveloped, rather than developed.
28:21That's more or less Needham's position. The other position is that they didn't do that
28:27because that would have meant a break with spiritual tradition that they were not prepared to take.
28:32That the Renaissance and leading on to the Industrial Revolution is a radical break with
28:40human spirituality that was not possible for Islamic civilization or Chinese civilization.
28:47This is an interesting position. I wouldn't want to say that therefore Islam is good and the West is evil,
28:56or some stupid reduction of this idea. But nevertheless, there's some interesting aspects to that thought,
29:05that a culture which is rooted in some kind of a respect for the world as a divine manifestation,
29:16cannot make the step to a science which is essentially going to end up with an anti-human or an
29:26inhuman position.
29:29And the problem, as the Muslim critic would see it, is that in Christianity, in Christian culture,
29:37the split between the body and the spirit was too radical, too radical, almost dualist, almost dualistic.
29:46So that in the West, this movement towards the Industrial Revolution could come because the body was completely unimportant,
29:58and only the spirit was real.
30:01Whereas for China, especially, and for Islam, apparently to a certain extent at least this was not true.
30:07That the body was somehow divine enough that it had its own inalienable sphere.
30:17And that both on the conscious and the unconscious level, it would be impossible for an Islamic scientist or a
30:26Chinese scientist
30:27to make the step towards so denying the body, as, for example, Descartes denied the body.
30:38Or Minsky, or the Extropia, or David Gallant.
30:42They are all Cartesians. They are all Cartesians.
30:46Descartes focuses this for us, with the body as dead meat, and the mind as the only spark of the
30:53Divine.
30:54But the new machines and the systems, they are not interested for the body and the spirit.
31:02That's right. They are all Cartesians.
31:03They have one and zero. And it's a clear decision.
31:08That's right. It's still Descartes.
31:10But then, can we not work with these machines?
31:16The machines are representations of the wrong system.
31:21Possibly.
31:22Possibly. You know, just because a technology works doesn't mean that it's true.
31:26I have to maintain this in the face of any arguments about logical consistency.
31:40You know, just because the steam engine worked doesn't mean that it's God.
31:45The way Freud thought it was, you know, apparently Freud thought the steam engine was God,
31:49because he constructed the entire unconscious on an analogy with the steam engine.
31:54Apparently we think the computer is God, because all of our analogies about consciousness are now based on the computer.
32:00The brain is a computer.
32:01The brain is a computer.
32:02Or if it isn't, it soon will be.
32:04A meal machine.
32:05Yeah.
32:05That's right.
32:06A meat machine.
32:07L'homme machine.
32:10You know, so nothing very new about these ideas.
32:13They go back to La Maitrie and Descartes.
32:17If you look at Cousanes and Bruno and Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino and that whole crowd,
32:27they were attempting to dignify the body again, contra the church.
32:36It was Cousanes who said that the earth was sacred.
32:40Actually he said that the earth was a star and worthy of dignity and adulation.
32:47In other words, it was the gist of Pico's ideas were there in Cousanes.
32:52Now, to me, this is not the winning paradigm.
32:55These are the losers.
32:57The winners are the whole line of thought that led to Descartes.
33:05And to Newton.
33:06To Leibniz?
33:07Well, Leibniz is a funny figure, right?
33:10Is he a Hermeticist or is he the other one, you know?
33:12I know.
33:13Leibniz has these Hermetic...
33:14In fact, they all had Hermeticist interests.
33:18Newton was a tremendous alchemist.
33:21But, of course, he suppressed that.
33:25So it was in this quarrel between Hermeticism, Newtonianism, and Cartesianism.
33:30I think basically it was a three-way quarrel.
33:34And Hermeticism could have been modern science the way we would have liked to have seen it,
33:38with the sacred earth theory.
33:41You know?
33:41The theory of sacred earth.
33:43Even Newtonianism might have been that, but unfortunately it wasn't.
33:48And when it came down to it, Newtonian and Cartesian ideas joined together to defeat the Hermeticists.
33:56This is what Romanticism is all about.
33:59As soon as Hermeticism is crushed, it pops up again as Romanticism.
34:04But now it's not a scientific paradigm anymore.
34:07It's crazy.
34:08It's poetry.
34:09It's pseudoscience.
34:11It's natural philosophy here.
34:27Photos were taken of the site immediately.
34:29By the way.
34:30The dogs owner...
34:31...leader.
34:32Let me play.
34:35Go, this like the sport.
34:38Creationism.
34:38At two-three-hosting-the-sev��.com
34:41I used to know
34:56I told I was interested in you
35:11I was interested in you