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