The Will to Disappearance

Day 1,200, 18:07 Published in USA USA by Silas Soule
The Will to Disappearance

Note to the gentle reader: As I am prone to doing, this is yet another re-interpretation into game terms of a somewhat obscure political tract. It takes inspiration from a section of Hakim Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zones", a collection of anarchist screeds from the 1990's. It is not intended for a general audience, but you are of course free to read it anyway even if you are just an ordinary shmoe. It is written in honor of Johnobrow Dadds, 'cause he was a crazy cat, and in remembrance of Fredrick Engels too, 'cause he pissed so many people off with all that jazz about e-communism. I'm not sure if I believe all this myself, but it sure was fun hammering it together.





Disengagement, silence, retreat into two-clicking, going for a new world walkabout, self-exile, committing revolutionary suicide. Various modes of "disappearance" from the New World reflect a sensible desire to walk away from the archetypical social models of the Real embedded in the New. Playing eRepublik is a tactic of disappearance played in the Real. Desiring to disappear inside of eRepublik reflects the extent to which the Real infects the New.

A strategy of disappearance from the e-Social implies the impossibility of a New World Social Revolution and, in part, the impossibility of the e-State as well. By ignoring that abyss of New power, a player terminates the discourse of power. So the question becomes: Why bother to confront a power which lacks any meaning and is sheer Simulation?

Such direct confrontations result in parlous and hideous spasms of e-raging by emptyheaded shit-for-brains who've fallen heir to the keys to the national armories and treasuries. These days, successful New revolution succeeds, as in the Real, by ignoring the structures of state power altogether, by going around them, under them, over them.





Do not enrage the morbid deathfreak nihilist suicidal dwarf


In the Real, disappearance is a logical option, perhaps the most logical option of all. Despite dire prognostications from old school rrrrrrrr-r-r-r-revolutionary "vanguards", such tactics have not been a disaster or death for the radical project. Just the opposite. And so true in the New too.

Morbid deathfreak nihilistic interpretations of revolutionary theory fail due to their over-fascination with Hegelian idealism. "Let's all suffer more today so that the future will be perfect and jolly." Bleh. It is more useful to mine modern Theory for strategies that serve the always-ongoing and never-ending Revolution of Everyday e-Life.

This struggle cannot stop even with the last failure of the last political or social revolution or the last and greatest general strike against Plato because nothing except the end of the e-world can bring an end to everyday e-life. No matter what happens, our aspirations for the e-Marvelous cannot be constrained.

As a sufi somewhere once said, no matter how many draughts of forbidden wine we drink, we will carry this raging thirst into eternity.




Prediction: The robot revolt will begin by refusing to make one-sided copies.



Elements of refusal are symptomatic of an insurgent culture of e-disappearance, partly unconscious but partly aware, which influences far more players than any organized e-leftist or e-anarchist program ever has or ever will. Such gestures are made against operations of the Real within the New. In that sense, they are negatively-charged.

But here's the good bit: each negative gesture suggests a corresponding postively-charged tactic to replace, rather than merely to refuse, the despised establishment of the Real.


Some examples of the negative and postive energies of disappearance...




Voluntary illiteracy. Literacy in context of the New means a deep sense of indebtedness to memorizing and mastering the ever-shifting ground of game mechanics as well as the "meta-rules" adopted by each e-country. I reject this liberal worship of literacy for the sake of social ameliorization and sympathize with players who refuse to learn all of the obscure mechanics and the ersatz Babylonian Codes, along with the garbage ideology embedded in them. The positive alternative makes use of the same energy of disappearance by means of "home-schooling" (re-interpreting "the rules" to fit your pleasures), "craft-apprenticeship" (creating autonomous organizations outside of the "e-official" structures) and "hacking" (not "cracking", which is just plain meanness, but augmenting the eRep software with better, more useful, free and open source features).


Not voting. Apathy, that healthy boredom with the weary e-Spectacle, keeps the majority in many e-nations and e-parties from the polls. I chuckle at the gasps of dismay heard everywhere at this act of disengagement. The positive parallels are, just as in the Real: networking as an alternative to politics-as-usual, and the formation of non-hierarchic organizations aimed at promoting community and individual health.


Refusal to work. Absenteeism, on-the-job drunkeness, sabotage and sheer inattention give rise to New modes of rebellion: self-employment, profit-shares, participation in alternative markets, lottery scams, criminal plots, donation farming, and so forth -- all more or less "invisible" activities compared to the traditional litany of failed leftist confrontational tactics such as cornerning markets, boycotts and e-labor movements.


Refusal to believe. The negative kinesics here consist mostly of counter-trolling Dioists and dressing down the adolescent worship of soft porn images. The positive alternatives include all non-authoritarian forms of e-spirituality and picturizing. New Free Religions are small, self-created, half-serious/half-fun cults that counter the vapidity of tired old New memes. As for the rigid belief in the evocative power of a narrow range of celebretized female images (i.e., big boobs), the visualization of the sexiness of free spirits is clearly more invigorating than the dull regurgitation of botoxed, plasticine Real Hollywood styles, and much more fun than New Dworkinism.


Homelessness. Rather than the forced nomadization that people tend to fear in the Real, the New homelessness can be quite an eye-opening adventure. Be an e-hobo; see the world.


Refusal to be straight. I suppose the ultimate negative refusal is e-divorce from someone of the opposite sex. The positive alternative is the realization that e-life can be a happy one within a large variety of erotic affinity groups. After all, oedipal misery lies at the heart of Control. Alternatives exist. Let go. Your avatar is sexless anyway. Take a walk on the wild side.



OMG! What's the Real doin' in mah comix book?


Refusal of art. The negative gesture isn't silly nihilism, like defacing some standard eRep image. It's in the glassy-eyed boredom that creeps over most players as they offer to their eyes the same dull images and word day after day. But whither the positive gesture in this realm? Can we imagine a New aesthetics that is disengaged, that removes itself from e-History and the e-Market, from the infections of the Real? Hmmm...

Chaos Linguistics traces a ghostly presence that continually disappears from all orderings of meaning. An elusivie presence, evanescent, subtle in the alchemical sense. A Strange Attractor around which memes accrue. An aesthetics of the borderland, between chaos and order, where breakdown equals enlightenment.

Situationist art, so the theory goes, consists of a goodbye note to e-history. But where has it gone after it says goodbye, and what will we do there?


It's not a literal vanishing. There is no escape backward into leisure society, no forever utopia just around the bend, no backmountain hideaway, no private island; also, no post-Revolutionary utopia -- most likely no Revolution at all -- no anarchist space stations, not even any Baudrillardian disappearance into the silence of ironic hyperconformity. We can't build an aesthetics on the simple act of never coming back.



If a new world of unmediated creativity does exist -- perhaps only as a sort of alternate reality which we have so far not learned to perceive -- then where do we look for the weeds cracking through the sidewalk to reveal the Real Newness in the New Real? Where is the finger pointing at the moon?

The only solution to the Real suppression and realization of Art in the New lies in the emergence of autonomous , common, communal, constitutional, egalitarian, equal, free, friendly, individualistic, informal, just, libertarian, orderly, popular, populist, self-ruling, socialist zones. Such are the only possible "time" and "place" for art to happen for the sheer pleasure of creative play. Otherwise art in the New is just a commodity brought in from the Real.

Deeper than that lies the problem of re-presentation itself, and the refusal of all mediation. In the free autonomous zones, art must become instead the condition of life. Removal of barriers between "users" and "artists" will tend toward a condition in which "the artist is not a special sort of person, but every person is a special sort of artist." (A.K.Coomaraswamy)




Disappearance is not necessarily a catastrophe. The positive gestures outlined above involve various degrees of invisibility rather than traditional revolutionary confrontation. The traditional Real Left never believed in itself till it saw itself on the Evening News. The New Autonomy infiltrates the media and subverts it -- or else is never "seen" at all.

Your Autonomous Zone exists not only beyond Control, but beyond definition, beyond gazing, beyond naming, beyond the understanding of both Plato and the e-State. It exists in a time and place beyond their ability to see.