Re: [ox-en] Interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2004 20:49:39 +0200
Hi Niall!
3 days ago Niall Douglas wrote:
Seemed it might be of interest to the list.
Hmm...
Autonomy
exists in time, he said, rather than space. It?s in times of
wildness, revelry, abandon and revolution that for even just one
brief jail-breaking moment, as sweet as honey to the tongue, one is
freed of all political and social control.
Freed of all political and social control? Sometimes I think this is
what describes capitalism best - the more the more it becomes
neo-liberal...
Or if read for an individual: Only an isolated but almighty individual
is freed of all political and social control. Indeed the liberal
dream...
Isn't autonomy a liberal fiction - especially if thought this way.
Cooperation is not thinkable with that sort of autonomy where you
always have some sort of social and/or political control. Free
Software would not be thinkable with that sort of autonomy.
We have all these knee-jerk phrases that in the sixties sounded like
communist revolution, and now are just corpses in the mouths of real
estate developers. "Sustainable development"?that means very
expensive houses for vaguely ecologically conscious idiots from New
York.
In other words the phrases from the sixties were integratable - and
thus no germ form. Indeed this is what I think since Oekonux.
It has nothing to do with a sustainable economy or
permaculture.
Oh wow permaculture. But this guy still believes in these phrases...
Wilson: I think that a radical life is not something that depends on
Internet connections or websites or demos or even on politics, like
having Green mayors. This may sound dull to people who think that
having a really hot website is a revolutionary act. Or that getting a
million people to come out and wave symbolic signs at a symbolic
march is a political act. If it doesn?t involve alternative economic
institution building, it?s not.
"Alternative" he said - and then hails LETS. Where is the alternative
there?
Bleyer: You mentioned hot websites. I?m curious about your thoughts
on the web now, because ten years ago you seemed optimistic about its
potential.
Wilson: Well, I wouldn?t say I was an optimist. I was curious and
attempted an anti-pessimist view. I went to about 25 conferences in
Europe in seven years, and in all that time, I never had a computer
or was on the Internet myself. I never have been. So I went to these
conferences as the voice of caution, the one guy who doesn?t own a
computer.
So he proudly admits that he does not know...
Little by little, my talks at these conferences would
become more and more Luddite, sounding the knell of warning about
mechanization of consciousness and alienation and separation.
...what he talks about.
This is someone who others should listen to? Ignorance with a firm "I
know how to do better!"? This is arrogant - to say the least.
Wilson: Yes. You?re slumped in front of a screen, in the same
physical situation as a TV watcher, you?ve just added a typewriter.
Of course there is not much of a difference. I mean a human with ears
*and* mouth is exactly the same as an human with only ears...
And you?re "interactive." What does that mean? It does not mean
community.
It's not the community by the standards of this guy. Others may think
differently...
[...more ignorant stuff deleted...]
So what exactly is the message for this list? There are still people
out there who hail the concepts which failed twenty, thirty, forty
years ago? Actually I knew that before. Conservative people probably
never disappear.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
--
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