Join the new world

In this the latest of communiqués from beyond the rapture I'm looking to discuss a debate I've touched on before but hope to answer conclusively - a task I'm not sure I will achieve since in the starting of writing this I am still not certain of the answer. It is the question of eRepublik and revolution, and whether we crack or negate. Please remember this is a part of a series and must be treated as such. If I say something without explaining or backing it up it will be (hopefully) because I have already done so previously (if you think I haven't then definitely call me up on it).

This may seem tediously obvious but I feel the necessary starting point is to state that we exist within eRep. We have accounts on eRep and whether we log in to them several times a day or once a year, we are here (wherever here is). Indeed, it is our being here, or perhaps rather our doing here, (along with the labour, the doing of Alexis Bonte's employees) that allows eRepublik to exist and to continue to exist. eRep doesn't simply exist, but is rather under a constant process of being created, maintained and recreated. If that process of doing stops then so does eRepublik.

So we are here. We all to varying degrees act within the eRep framework, to varying degrees participate in the creation and re-creation of eRepublik, part of the process of eRep creation and constitution. We log in, read and write articles, work, train, vote, participate. But we don't like it, eRep. We constantly complain about it, hate the lack of control and self-determination, bemoan the apparently incompetent admins, long for a satisfying experience, demand it even. We are denied satisfaction, a fulfilling lived experience and offered only its representation, the cruel promise of satisfaction. Where is the authenticity we crave? In our efforts for fun we further only the enrichment of RL capitalists who treat us as objects, as commodities. "eRep (much like RL) forces us into a constant state of alienation" (Phoenix Quinn, How to Survive and Thrive, an Intro). And the cruel reality is we create this eRep we dislike so much by being and, more importantly, doing here.

It is almost as if we, eRep citizens and eRep workers (and within that I include the actual direct employees of Bonte) have created a Frakenstein's monster bent on destroying us, its creator - a hopeless situation where we wield powers (potenza) that have spiralled out of our control. The monster attacks us through alienation, both spectacular and labourious. However, unlike Dr. Frakenstein's, our creation only exists because we continue to create and re-create it. It is rather, to borrow another literary analogy, the wizard's creation of Jorge Luis Borges' The Circular Ruins - the monster only lives as long as we dream, as long as we continue to create.

We exist in-and-against eRepublik. But we also exist beyond eRepublik. From time to time we awake from the eRep dream, jerked conscious by boredom, exasperation or despair. Sometimes it is literally a quit of rage, the "ragequit" against the eRepublik we are in-and-against. Of course, most often it is the demands of RL that pulls us away; work, school, other media, perhaps even activism - the spectacular and alienating social relations replicated (in part by our own volition, but primarily by the design of ideology, spectacle, capital and its servants) within eRep. And so in RL we find the same lack of control and self-determination, the same apparently incompetent bureaucrats and politicians, the same longing for a satisfying experience, the same demand. In RL too we are denied satisfaction, a fulfilling lived experience and offered only its representation, the same cruel promise of satisfaction. Where is the authenticity we crave? As everything changes in the transition between eRep and RL, everything stays the same.

We exist (for all its worth) in-against-and-beyond eRep - do we exist in-against-and-beyond RL too? Much like eRepublik, the spectacles, dominations and alienations of RL are created and re-created by our own doing and participation - perhaps even more so than in eRep this is the case. Social relations can of course only function if both parties participate. Domination, power, hierarchy; all these are forms of the appropriation of the doing of others. So we see that our doing, our creative activity is the key to understanding what we are against, for it is our doing that systems of domination depend on.

The importance of disobedience has always been obvious in struggles against oppression, but what has been all too often lacking is an emphasis on alternative practice. It is alternative practice that creates a beyond - beyond RL, spectacle, capitalism. When we break capitalistic social relations we create different forms of social relations (communistic forms, perhaps). When we relate to each other through a form that isn't based on capital, we crack capitalism. We can describe this in spacial terms, temporary or permanent autonomous zones (Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone) etc., times, moments and situations (Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life), communes (The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection) or, as John Holloway does, as cracks (Crack Capitalism). What we have is a process of communisation that takes us beyond capitalism.

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." - Karl Marx, The German Ideology Vol. I, Part 1

Part 2, Crack eRepublik?, will be published once I've written it (and hell knows when that will be).