293 - The Power of Art and the TAZ

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Peter Lamborn Wilson

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Peter Lamborn Wilson.]

“Why are artists still meddling, or mediating, between people and their desires?”

“All livelihoods are arts, from midwifery to war, nothing is mere labor.” [In reference to gift economies.]

“The artist sacrifices talent for money. The audience sacrifices money for talent.”

“One can no longer distinguish between cops and cop-culture, the media-induced hallucination of a society designed by its lawyers and police.”

“Ten minutes in a video store should convince any impartial observer that we live in a police state of consciousness, far more pervasive than the Nazis.”

“The first step in any real utopia is to look in the mirror and demand to know my true desires.”

“I will argue that illegality means more than mere law-breaking. Illegality as a positive attribute of the Temporary Autonomous Zone implies that the very structure, or deepest motivation of the TAZ-group necessitates the overcoming of consensus values, and that this is true when even no statute or regulation has been broken.”

“The Temporary Autonomous Zone should serve as the Matrix for the emergence of a Sorelian myth of uprising.”

“The Temporary Autonomous Zone cannot be realized solely as a hedonic exercise any more than the revolution can be realized without dancing, as Emma Goldman put it.”

“Today quilts. Tomorrow, perhaps, The Uprising!”

BrainMeats Podcast
Episode 1 Occupy BrainMeats
The inaugural episode of the BrainMeats podcast is devoted to the Occupy movement and what hackers and makers can do to support the protesters on the ground. Willow spoke over Skype to Ari Lacenski, Eleanor Saitta, Matthew Borgatti, Rubin Starset, and Smári McCarthy about the history of OWS, the meaning of illegibility within the movement, software tools for protesters, and more.

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292 - Makana the Mighty!

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Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And today is day 84 of Occupy Wall Street.

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And as virtual hosts today are some of our fellow salonners who either made a direct donation to the salon,

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or who bought a copy of my pay-what-you-can audiobook version of my novel, The Genesis Generation. And these kind souls are… So, hey, thank you all very much, because with your help,

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I’ve once again now been able to increase the memory and CPU allocations on our server,

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which hopefully will make downloads of these podcasts a bit faster.

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Also, I’d like to give a shout-out to fellow salonner Matt R.,

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who was on the ground at Occupy Wall Street from day one,

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and is still very much involved in spreading some of Terrence McKenna’s ideas to the larger movement.

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Now, about today’s program.

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Back on the 22nd of September of this year, I received a message from Joe Metheny offering

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to let me play some Robert Anton Wilson talks that he owned the copyright to.

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And, of course, thanks to Joe and the original Falcon Press that handles distribution for

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these talks in CD format, we’ve been able to enjoy a few of Bob Wilson’s talks in recent podcasts.

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And by the way, I think you’ll find a visit to Original Falcon,

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that’s O-R-I-G-I-N-A-L-F-A-L-C-O-L-N, originalfalcon.com.

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Well, you’ll find a trip there very interesting, I think,

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so check them out if you get a chance.

00:02:03 ► §

But today, instead of another

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Wilson talk, I’m going to play one of the other talks that were in the collection that Joe sent.

00:02:10 ► §

And it happens to be a talk that is even more rare than most of the Robert Anton Wilson talks,

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as it’s by a man who became a legend in the 1990s with the publication of his book,

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The Temporary Autonomous Zone. And the author, of course, is Hakam Bey.

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Now, when I previewed this recording a couple of days ago,

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I was struck at how timely these ideas are right now.

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Although the talk was actually recorded in 1993,

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when Bey speaks about the power of art and that we as the audience must now become our own artists,

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well, he could have

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been speaking at a recent General Assembly somewhere near you last night.

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It seems that the sentiments of the Occupy movement have been bubbling just under the

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radar of the establishment for a long time now.

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And wait till you hear him shout, Democratic Shamanism or nothing!

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Now there’s a chant that I can get behind. Now just to refresh

00:03:08 ► §

your memory of Hakeem Bey’s book, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, or the TAS as it is now known,

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I’m going to read a couple of paragraphs from that important book, and I think you’ll agree that

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this can also be said about the encampments that are now springing up all over the world under the Occupy banner.

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Hakeem Bey writes,

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In short, we’re not touting the TAS as an exclusive end in itself, replacing all other

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forms of organization, tactics, and goals.

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We recommend it because it can provide the quality of enhancement associated with the

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uprising without necessarily leading to violence and martyrdom.

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The TAS is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state,

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a guerrilla operation which liberates an area of land, of time, of imagination,

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and then dissolves itself to reform elsewhere, elsewhen, before the state can crush it.

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Because the state is concerned primarily with simulation rather than

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substance, the Taz can occupy these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes

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for quite a while in relative peace. Perhaps certain small Taz’s have lasted whole lifetimes

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because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves, because they never intersected with

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the spectacle, never appeared outside of that

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real life which is invisible to the agents of simulation. The TAS is an encampment of

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guerrilla ontologists. Strike and run away. Keep moving the entire tribe, even if it’s only data

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in the web. The TAS must be capable of defense. Both the strike and the defense should, if possible,

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evade the violence of the state,

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which is no longer a meaningful violence.

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The strike is made at structures of control,

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essentially at ideas.

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The defense is invisibility, a martial art,

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and invulnerability, an occult art within the martial arts.

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The nomadic war machine conquers without being noticed

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and moves on before the map can be adjusted.

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As to the future, only the autonomous can plant autonomy,

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organize for it, create it.

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It’s a bootstrap operation.

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The first step is somewhat akin to Satoré,

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the realization that the Taz begins with a simple act of realization.

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And as Alexis Madrigal recently said about the Occupy movements,

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So why Occupy? The point is not to hold a city park.

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The point is to dramatize the struggle of the weak against the strong,

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which is also the struggle of the poor against the rich.

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And, well, to me that sounds a lot like a Taz, and

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a lot like an Occupy encampment as well. Now, in order to be true to the spirit of the recording

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we’re about to listen to, I’m going to read part of the program notes that Joe Metheny wrote and

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came with this two-CD set. Imagine this. It’s 1993. The book Taz, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, is a hot, hot, hot commodity.

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It’s just been featured as the manual, that’s in quotes, as the manual of the movement in a cover

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story about cyberpunk. Its author, the notorious Hakeem Bay, has never appeared live anywhere

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before, and many people still did not know that Hakeem Bey was the nom de plume for none other than Peter Lamborn Wilson.

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Up until I asked him to do the show, he had tried to keep this fact mostly secret.

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This is the setting for the recording you have in your hand.

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A venue filled to the rafters with attendees, smoke-filled, hot, and buzzing with energy.

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And there’s a lot more in the program notes about how it came to happen, etc.

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But just a brief note is that there were about 1,500 people present,

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with another 1,500 outside hoping for a second show, which never happened.

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Now I’m going to play the talk that Hakeem Bey gave that evening.

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And first, however, I want to remind you that this talk was given before the

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World Wide Web was even one year old.

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And so references to the

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net and the web are actually terms

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that he used in his 1991 book.

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And since his book was

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so popular at almost the exact

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time the web, as we know it,

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was first being developed, well,

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maybe the originators of this tech

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had also read Hakeem Bey’s groundbreaking book.

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Procenium and Sacrifice.

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Goodbye to the audience.

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The whole question of the audience has become problematic.

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Why are artists still meddling or mediating between people

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and their desires? Why are artists still meddling or mediating between people and their desires

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or acting as desiring machines on behalf of others who, and for what reason delegate their authority, their power to various stars,

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performers, writers, experts or spokespersons?

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The most marginal art, not the avant-garde, the avant-garde has disappeared, hasn’t it?

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The most marginal art, the most alternative art,

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now often consists of nothing but an ironic take on the impossibility of the artist as mediator.

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After Dada, everyone was supposed to become an artist.

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After Duchamp, after situationism, after the art strike, which was itself nothing but irony,

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a parody of the social action

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jammed into the empty niche once occupied by the social the artist now

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accomplishes nothing more than TV ads holding out images to be admired to be

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desired to be purchased whether with money or with pieces of one’s soul.

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Images that are not the real goods, bites which never satisfy or cure,

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but simply create the thirst for more images, even images of utopia.

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Can we go so far as to say that the artist is more conscious than the ad exec or commodity

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designer.

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Haven’t they also read McLuhan and Baudrillard?

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It’s not that we’re all postmodernists, Allah forbid, nor have we all succumbed to the crypto-fascism

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of pomoorbidity. But, you see,

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we were trained up in all these

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art forms, which now seem

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so moribund.

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I frequently experience moments

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of nausea in bookstores

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at the thought of adding one more

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page to all that fucking print.

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No, it’s not that we’re post-modernists.

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It’s that there is no more modern. The breaking of forms has let us down because we have found that the forms of art do not coincide with

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the structures of art. The structures of art involve mediation or negative alienation and

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commodification. Any content can be contained within these structures.

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Babylon can use all art forms, no matter how revolutionary,

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to further its simulation of life and its mechanization of control.

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Content means nothing.

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Style means nothing because the deep structure does not shift or crack.

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Style means nothing because the deep structure does not shift or crack.

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Art has been given its reservations where artists can play at being Indians.

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The art world is thus insulated from the rest of everyday life.

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Every once in a while some redneck bigot notices these enclaves of privilege and starts a censorship scare.

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Jesse Helms and his ilk inject a bit of fresh blood into art, which for a moment can imagine

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itself an insurrectionary force.

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The sad irony is that Helms really believes art can change the world.

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The NEA liberals think that all art should be permitted because, after all,

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it’s only art. Helms and his Klansmen are the last Americans outside their art reservations

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who still believe that art is powerful. Most people find art boring, but Helms finds it exciting.

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I wish Helms were right, but I fear he isn’t.

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If he were, he would be our greatest enemy.

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As it is, he seems a rather sad clown.

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I wish I believed Art could spark off the revolt Helms seems to fear. I wish art had the power he hallucinates, but in my gloomiest moments…

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Meanwhile, however, I don’t intend to give up the art enclaves

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any more than Native Americans want to give up their reservations.

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These little quasi-Bohemians may be pathetic,

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but they’re the last vestiges of our autonomy,

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a room of one’s own.

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After all, we need peace and quiet

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in which to think, to think about the strategy

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for the next step,

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the dismantlement of the art machine,

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Spanner in the substructure,

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Sabo in the cloning device, resistance in

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the virtual reality arcades. I’m a bad prophet because I bet on anomalous events, pathophysical

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roulette. Ordinary punters may win more often but only at cheesy odds. I may never win, but if I do, what a payoff.

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Billions and billions and billions to one.

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The problem then is the audience.

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We are ready, or so we like to think,

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to break down the final proscenium,

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erase the last borders between art and life.

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But the audience, the audience is still there, suggesting slyly that even entertainment, after all, is holy too. Tell us a story,

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the sacred request. It’s in our blood, O College of Bards. But the bard’s curse is supposed to be able to blight crops

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and bowl over crooked politicians.

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The bard is not just another image monger.

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The bard, the shaman poet, wields power.

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When the bard pays attention,

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even wild animals come round to snuff at the psychic overflow.

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In Iran and the Soviet Union in the old days,

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they used to jail poets, even execute them for poems.

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Now that was censorship.

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Most of these Americans are not moaning about banned books

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or burned paintings, much less torture.

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They’re complaining because the state won’t support

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their particular little enclave anymore.

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Well, it’s true.

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I like it here on the reservation.

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It’s cozier than the outside.

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And I believe in taking the state for what I can get.

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But to complain about censorship, that’s too much loss of face.

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A touch of bushido, please.

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A sense of proportion.

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of face, a touch of bushido, please, a sense of proportion. To be blunt, let’s suppose that I live on a small stipend, which

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allows me the luxury of going daily to the library,

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absorbing poetic facts, and assembling them

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into various forms of entertainment.

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Other people have to work for a living,

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and they, let’s assume, need someone

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to provide them with precisely such entertainment.

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Theory as prose poetry or whatever.

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Fine. Occasionally I even make a bit of money at it. Fine.

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But that’s not my true desire.

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It’s nice, but it’s not satisfaction.

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It’s not evil, but it’s not utopia.

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Footnote. The disappearance of art does

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not mean the literal banishment of the artist, nor of those who appreciate the artist’s creations.

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Of course, the specialist in creative manifestations will exist in every society,

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including the most primitive or primordial known to ethno-history.

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The hunter-gatherer, shaman-bard is not, however, a professional.

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If the creative specialist in the tribe spends his or her time hunting or gathering

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a little bit less than the others of the tribe,

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this is due to what Marcel Mauss called the economy

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of the gift, not the economy of the commodity. In certain traditional societies, everyone

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is an artist with her or his own specialty. And this is possible because the economy of

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such societies has not yet conceived of work as alienation. All livelihoods are arts, from midwifery to war. Nothing is

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mere labor. I insist that this is no mere romantic distortion of the economy of the

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gift, nor am I advocating a return to the Stone Age. As I said, I want to bomb myself

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back to the Stone Age. As the economy of the commodity has ended by nauseating us, however, I believe

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it is important to emphasize the existence, past, present, or future, of other possibilities.

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Meanwhile, as long as the work-consume dichotomy defines life and creation for so many of us,

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the artist will, of course, not abandon the audience to withdraw into some private

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dream of a golden age.

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My point is exactly the opposite.

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The audience has begun to abandon the artist, and in this disappearance I see some reason

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for cheer.

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To return to the text.

00:17:19 ► §

Now, a utopian poetics has been proposed.

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Now, a utopian poetics has been proposed.

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In this game, we construct utopian minimums and use them to measure our true desires.

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For us, therefore, poetics comes inescapably to concern itself

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with changing the world and changing it closer to our heart’s desire,

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to quote Marx and Omar Khayyam.

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The image, though powerful, is no more than a talisman

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meant to invoke an occurrence in the real world.

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Pardon this loose terminology.

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Let’s say, rather, in everyday life.

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So, we want to accomplish more than just the ritual

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of holding up some icon of desire and mumbling a few prayers at it.

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We want effective prayers.

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Put that way, it sounds rather absurd.

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Let’s say rather that we want to refuse to allow our desire to be recuperated once again

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into the post-spectacular economy of virtual reality,

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the reality in which we can have whatever we wish for

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except without

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smell, without taste, and without touch. Let’s try to imagine ourselves proclaiming either

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democratic shamanism or nothing. Are we really prepared to face that nothing? Nietzsche founded his project on it. Are we too chicken even

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to discuss it? Give me the suppression and realization of art, or give me… Well, are

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we ready to face martyrdom for a goal even vaguer than freedom of speech? For art? Again,

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a reductio ad absurdum. Far be it from me to propose anything so 19th century.

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Perhaps it would make more sense to suggest that we live for art,

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that we begin at last to live as if our art were meant for something, some action.

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As for the nothing, we’ll face it when we have to.

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Meanwhile, dolce far niente, sweet do nothing, rather than nihilism.

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The harvest still ripens, the table is still laid.

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Let’s say that art would be for once and at last to enjoy it,

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the feast, the excessive generosity of being.

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Not the image, but the pleasure.

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Sweet do nothing, the ludic principle, jouissance,

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say yes to the world, and so on.

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This I fear would make the audience impossible.

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No one consumes the play I’m hypothesizing, either as image or as commodity.

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Either we all play or else we’re back to our starting point again,

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audience and artist divided by the proscenium, the medium, the sacrifice.

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I have a footnote here.

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The artist sacrifices talent for money.

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The audience sacrifices money for talent.

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But which is priest? Which is deity?

00:20:26 ► §

Who cuts whom? One way to visualize the work of art without an audience would be as a secret

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society, or as the Chinese call them, a tang. Tact and tactics, however, demand that no

00:20:41 ► §

more be printed, or perhaps spoken publicly, about the Tang

00:20:46 ► §

than the bare hint of its possible existence.

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The Tang demands mystery now, at once, immediately, and without mediation.

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Frankly, I think this is happening and will happen, whether anyone theorizes about it or not.

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and will happen, whether anyone theorizes about it or not.

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New structures are emerging which depend on reciprocity rather than production and consumption.

00:21:11 ► §

Synergetic, non-hierarchical experiments in mutuality and mutability.

00:21:18 ► §

Evanescent tongues.

00:21:20 ► §

Temporary autonomous zones.

00:21:22 ► §

Encrypted web works.

00:21:24 ► §

Pirate utopias.

00:21:26 ► §

The problem of work is being worked on.

00:21:30 ► §

The work-consume dichotomy, or work-consume-die, is being undermined and sabotaged.

00:21:39 ► §

This is happening at the level of everyday life, not in the media, not in the spectacle, not in the economy

00:21:46 ► §

of control, not in the realm of theory. We might go so far as to anticipate and to claim,

00:21:54 ► §

perhaps prematurely, that the media are void. The sacrifice is empty. The proscenium has evaporated. All we need to do is exercise the spooks

00:22:07 ► §

and say goodbye to the audience.

00:22:21 ► §

This is called the criminal bee, B-E-E, like a quilting bee.

00:22:27 ► §

Nietzsche says somewhere that the true free spirit

00:22:29 ► §

will not wish to see the laws of the herd abolished,

00:22:33 ► §

lest there exist nothing to struggle against and overcome.

00:22:37 ► §

Little danger of such an abolishment at this point, one might suppose.

00:22:43 ► §

Since Nietzsche’s time, law has perhaps mutated

00:22:46 ► §

from a complex but dimensional tool of the oppressor class

00:22:49 ► §

to the subtle, fractal, all-pervasive self-image of the spectacle.

00:22:55 ► §

Law simulates the dictatorship of the commodity,

00:22:59 ► §

forever promising and forever withdrawing the utopia of justice.

00:23:05 ► §

Our founding myths here in America,

00:23:08 ► §

which take the form of texts,

00:23:11 ► §

such as a declaration of independence or a bill of rights, etc.,

00:23:17 ► §

prove so infinitely flexible as to become, like all myths, their opposites.

00:23:24 ► §

The law no longer seems like some dialectical edge,

00:23:27 ► §

as it was for Nietzsche,

00:23:28 ► §

but rather a viral ooze

00:23:31 ► §

infecting the very fabric of language and thought.

00:23:35 ► §

One can no longer distinguish between cops and cop culture,

00:23:39 ► §

the media-induced hallucination of a society

00:23:42 ► §

defined by its lawyers and police.

00:23:46 ► §

Ten minutes in a video store should convince any impartial observer

00:23:49 ► §

that we live in a police state of consciousness,

00:23:52 ► §

far more pervasive than the Nazis,

00:23:54 ► §

those crude early pioneers of amphetamine television and ballistics.

00:24:00 ► §

What, for example, would a UFO alien visitor think of a planet

00:24:04 ► §

whose favorite icon appeared to consist of an angry law enforcement official pointing a gun at the observer?

00:24:12 ► §

Some few subjects may free their minds for brief moments from the flickering omnipresence of this one true axiomatic image of our moment in time, as Nixon used to call the present.

00:24:26 ► §

No doubt they will at once begin to wonder about the possibility of overcoming the law,

00:24:31 ► §

both as a social code which labels our desires forbidden,

00:24:36 ► §

and as an ectoplasmic superego, or cop of the inner landscape,

00:24:41 ► §

suffocating us with the fear of our own passions.

00:24:47 ► §

The first step in any real utopia is to look in the mirror and demand to know my true desires, an action which already

00:24:53 ► §

presupposes at least the temporary overcoming of conditioned anxiety, of the fear that a demon may appear in the glass, or a demonic cop.

00:25:08 ► §

Now what do I see?

00:25:15 ► §

The first image to float to the surface of the scry stone, the magic mirror, is the criminal.

00:25:20 ► §

My desires are illegal. My manias are forbidden in civilization.

00:25:27 ► §

The moral code embedded within the legal code defines my appetites as injury.

00:25:31 ► §

Fourier, Charles Fourier, and Nietzsche both defined the criminal as a natural insurrectionary spirit

00:25:35 ► §

in revolt against the stifling repression of the social consensus.

00:25:39 ► §

The criminal’s tragedy, however,

00:25:41 ► §

lies in being merely the opposite of the cop,

00:25:44 ► §

a mirror image, and therefore equally an image,

00:25:47 ► §

a trap, a definition imposed within the language of control.

00:25:53 ► §

And in any case, the deeper I look into the glass,

00:25:55 ► §

the less I see of any desires which I myself might label wrong,

00:26:00 ► §

according to my own personal code of ethics.

00:26:03 ► §

Wrong, for me, means counterproductive and ultimately self-immiserating.

00:26:08 ► §

I don’t want to realize my desires at the expense of other people’s misery,

00:26:13 ► §

not because such action would be immoral,

00:26:15 ► §

but because it would be psychically self-defeating.

00:26:18 ► §

Misery breeds misery.

00:26:22 ► §

Those who are caught in the trap of trying to realize desires by hurting others

00:26:27 ► §

are all, in my experience, themselves miserable and psychically poor.

00:26:36 ► §

Crime, in this sense of the word, pays, but it doesn’t pay enough.

00:26:41 ► §

I reject it for purely selfish reasons.

00:26:44 ► §

To realize my desires, I must overcome or even

00:26:47 ► §

break the law, but I do not need to do wrong according to my own light, nor will I accept

00:26:53 ► §

the consensus label of criminal. This explains why fascism is not an answer. Fascism is a desiring

00:27:02 ► §

machine, but only for an amoral elite

00:27:05 ► §

who achieve their goals through the creation and destruction

00:27:08 ► §

of enemies and victims

00:27:10 ► §

as in the Marquis de Sade

00:27:12 ► §

Fourier however, Charles Fourier

00:27:15 ► §

asserts that desire itself remains impossible

00:27:19 ► §

unless all desires are possible

00:27:21 ► §

that passion involves the other

00:27:24 ► §

and therefore defines the only possible or real society,

00:27:30 ► §

this realization draws the boundary between fascism and anarchism.

00:27:35 ► §

Gazing yet deeper into the mirror, in fact, I begin to see that I’m not alone there,

00:27:41 ► §

that the self implies others, that we are co are co implicated in each other’s

00:27:45 ► §

desires and here we come to a stage higher in Nietzsche’s view than mere

00:27:50 ► §

criminality the Society of free spirits or as Max Stirner called it the union of

00:27:57 ► §

self-owning ones a form of organization exists which evades the murderous

00:28:04 ► §

dialectic of institutions,

00:28:06 ► §

the paradoxical counter-productivity of institutions, as Ivan Illich calls it.

00:28:12 ► §

This different kind of group might be identified with Fourier’s passional series,

00:28:17 ► §

the psychically linked number of humans needed to express and realize a shared or common passional goal.

00:28:24 ► §

Such harmonial associations are prevented from coming into being needed to express and realize a shared or common passional goal.

00:28:29 ► §

Such harmonial associations are prevented from coming into being,

00:28:32 ► §

Fourier insisted, by civilization itself, which is founded on mass immiseration.

00:28:37 ► §

He believed that utopia would first have to be established

00:28:40 ► §

in order for true series to form spontaneously

00:28:43 ► §

out of the various passions for sensual and sexual fulfillment,

00:28:48 ► §

for attractive labor,

00:28:49 ► §

and for the total physical and psychic realization

00:28:52 ► §

of the individual in society.

00:28:55 ► §

In other words, Fourier made an absolute category of society

00:28:58 ► §

just as Nietzsche and Stirner made an absolute category of the individual.

00:29:02 ► §

Our task is not to follow either of these ideas,

00:29:06 ► §

but to deconstruct, synthesize, and reconstruct.

00:29:10 ► §

Out of this process we hope to see arise

00:29:12 ► §

not merely another ideology or another no-place place,

00:29:16 ► §

utopos, which is what utopia means,

00:29:19 ► §

however brilliant or imaginably stimulating,

00:29:22 ► §

but rather a praxis, a mode of action for realizing the

00:29:26 ► §

series and manifesting its passion, here and now, or so close to here and now we can taste

00:29:32 ► §

it.

00:29:34 ► §

Elsewhere, I have considered a number of possible forms for such groups, including the loosest,

00:29:40 ► §

most temporary, and ad hoc organizational agglomerations.

00:29:44 ► §

most temporary and ad hoc organizational agglomerations.

00:29:47 ► §

Here, however, I want to consider only one aspect of such groupings,

00:29:50 ► §

that is, their illegality.

00:29:55 ► §

I will argue that illegality means more than mere law-breaking.

00:29:59 ► §

Illegality as a positive attribute of the temporary autonomous zone implies that the very structure or deepest motivation of the TAS group

00:30:05 ► §

contravenes or necessitates the overcoming of consensus values,

00:30:11 ► §

and that this is true even when no statute or regulation has been broken.

00:30:16 ► §

But in order to avoid as much metaphysics as possible here,

00:30:20 ► §

we can discuss some actual existing groups or situations

00:30:24 ► §

which approximate the temporary autonomous zone concept to some degree.

00:30:29 ► §

And by criticizing their shortcomings,

00:30:31 ► §

perhaps we can arrive at a clearer view of possibilities for the immediate future.

00:30:36 ► §

One.

00:30:38 ► §

How am I doing?

00:30:39 ► §

Are you ready for more?

00:30:40 ► §

Do you want me to finish?

00:30:43 ► §

All right.

00:30:44 ► §

One.

00:30:46 ► §

The web of work.

00:30:48 ► §

Computer hacking has so far turned up nothing that has enhanced

00:30:50 ► §

my life.

00:30:52 ► §

Nor can I detect much

00:30:53 ► §

enhancement in the lives of the hackers

00:30:55 ► §

themselves.

00:30:57 ► §

The goal of liberating all information

00:30:59 ► §

is noble but ludicrously unobtainable.

00:31:02 ► §

This should by now be obvious

00:31:04 ► §

to all who watched while the

00:31:05 ► §

state smashed to a pulp a few hapless liberators of a few bits of useless information. The potential

00:31:13 ► §

for liberation inherent in the BBS as a tool for social projects has also not yet been realized.

00:31:20 ► §

The BBS mega net involves untold thousands of email enthusiasts who have so far not sent or received one real good.

00:31:30 ► §

Someone please tell me I’m wrong.

00:31:32 ► §

You’re wrong!

00:31:34 ► §

Okay, we can talk about that afterwards.

00:31:37 ► §

No, I would like to hear it. I really believe, I really want to be told I’m wrong.

00:31:42 ► §

But 99% idle chatter, 1% maybe interesting

00:31:46 ► §

information. But no chicken stew, no orgies, and no enlightenment. All right? Orgies where?

00:31:55 ► §

In the computer network? All right. Give me a break. Now at last, the hackers have begun

00:32:01 ► §

to experiment with cryptology, the cypherpunks, boast that soon secure networks will be available to email users.

00:32:10 ► §

One might issue the hackers a challenge here.

00:32:13 ► §

Deliver to me one thing which is illegal and which I want

00:32:16 ► §

and which I could not have obtained so easily or at all without a computer network.

00:32:22 ► §

I’d even accept a nice bit of high-resolution pornography.

00:32:29 ► §

Prove that computers can supply, or at least expedite,

00:32:33 ► §

something more than publishing programs

00:32:36 ► §

or creepy-sounding synthetic music.

00:32:40 ► §

I demand secrets,

00:32:43 ► §

and I’m getting bored with waiting thanks to a lifetime spent reading science fiction.

00:32:51 ► §

Two, another organizational possibility, the gathering.

00:32:56 ► §

Considered as a temporary autonomous zone, the gathering can be called and held without any computer assistance,

00:33:02 ► §

which is indeed fortunate, because the gathering is a vital necessity now, today,

00:33:07 ► §

and it is already evolving spontaneously out of this need.

00:33:12 ► §

A number of kinds of gatherings nowadays

00:33:14 ► §

aspire to manifest as temporary autonomous zones.

00:33:18 ► §

The neo-pagan festivals, the rainbow camps,

00:33:22 ► §

collaborative art events, open conspiracies

00:33:24 ► §

such as Queer Nation

00:33:25 ► §

or WAC,

00:33:28 ► §

raves, anarchist

00:33:30 ► §

collectives, hypercultural intentional

00:33:32 ► §

communities, secret

00:33:33 ► §

societies, meeting for risky or

00:33:35 ► §

illegal or insurrectionary

00:33:37 ► §

goals, etc.

00:33:39 ► §

Drug dealers. These groups or

00:33:41 ► §

gatherings constitute the only viable

00:33:43 ► §

immediate means of realizing

00:33:45 ► §

passional series in real time everyday life

00:33:49 ► §

in opposition to the forces of fissipation, alienation and suffocation

00:33:54 ► §

by which the consensus vitiates and dissolves all human aspiration to solidarity and festal values.

00:34:02 ► §

Any critique leveled at these existing groups or gatherings, therefore,

00:34:06 ► §

is meant as constructive in every sense of the word.

00:34:10 ► §

The problems lie in two areas, philosophical and organizational.

00:34:14 ► §

Some groups fail to realize the full implications of their reaction against the spectacle,

00:34:19 ► §

which remains instinctual and hence philosophically unsound.

00:34:23 ► §

For example, the 1960s delusion that we can use the media for our own ends

00:34:29 ► §

still persists so that many groups are ruined by the very publicity

00:34:33 ► §

they thought they needed in order to attain their goals.

00:34:37 ► §

Once such a group allows itself to become recuperated

00:34:41 ► §

as part of the spectacle of counter-cultural dissent,

00:34:44 ► §

the Punch and Judy show of the media state,

00:34:47 ► §

it will be compromised or even doomed.

00:34:50 ► §

But an understanding of the dialectics of media

00:34:53 ► §

should enable the group to devise a strategy of organization

00:34:56 ► §

and praxis based on evasive or nomadic models of resistance

00:35:02 ► §

rather than on the old, new left shibboleths of confrontation

00:35:06 ► §

and seizing the media.

00:35:09 ► §

On the level of tactics

00:35:11 ► §

of organizational detail

00:35:15 ► §

and specific projects,

00:35:17 ► §

this philosophical preparedness

00:35:19 ► §

should result in more effective means

00:35:21 ► §

for the expression, realization,

00:35:24 ► §

manifestation of desire on the level of everyday life.

00:35:32 ► §

Publicity is a bad tactic,

00:35:35 ► §

while tact and virtual clandestinity are good tactics.

00:35:40 ► §

By virtual clandestinity I mean not total secrecy,

00:35:44 ► §

but rather the skillful avoidance of counterproductive publicity and recuperation.

00:35:50 ► §

These are good tactics for the groups we are discussing here because, one must repeat, these groups need to engage in illegality, even to approximate their intended purpose.

00:36:06 ► §

intended purpose. The state deals with certain illegalities not in any systematic way but in spectacular spasms of violent repression, similar to public executions in 17th century London,

00:36:12 ► §

meant to terrorize and paralyze any potential rebels against the norms of order. The computer

00:36:20 ► §

hackers are treated this way, as are the sex and drug dissidents, black nationalists, and other proponents of forbidden passions.

00:36:28 ► §

In this climate of simulated justice, i.e. terror,

00:36:33 ► §

it makes no sense whatsoever to seek publicity for a group’s illegal or immoral activities.

00:36:39 ► §

Converts attracted by the media are usually summer soldiers and neurotics.

00:36:44 ► §

And if the wrong politician happens to catch your broadcast, Converts attracted by the media are usually summer soldiers and neurotics.

00:36:48 ► §

And if the wrong politician happens to catch your broadcast,

00:36:51 ► §

you may end up as the next bad example,

00:36:56 ► §

crushed beneath the boot of history for all to see, live on 5.

00:36:59 ► §

It’s your world. Get this close, as the ads for PBS so breathlessly express it.

00:37:05 ► §

Oh, yes, let Geraldo rattle your cage.

00:37:09 ► §

Maybe you haven’t heard that slogan out here yet.

00:37:13 ► §

To give an example of some organizations,

00:37:17 ► §

Nambla and Normal have both had their membership lists seized by police,

00:37:23 ► §

the price of 60s media idealism.

00:37:26 ► §

NAMLA and NORML have achieved absolutely nothing of their reformist goals

00:37:30 ► §

and may even have done damage to their own causes

00:37:34 ► §

through their misunderstanding of the media.

00:37:38 ► §

This is not the 1960s when the CIA could still lose control of LSD

00:37:44 ► §

to a bunch of hippie publicists,

00:37:46 ► §

where television inadvertently contributed to anti-war sentiment by neglecting to censor the body bag count.

00:37:54 ► §

We’ve had decades of Republican intelligence, late capitalist control conspiracy, power-mongering since then.

00:38:02 ► §

Communism is dead, and now you’re the enemy. Wake up.

00:38:07 ► §

Wise up.

00:38:08 ► §

Most of the world has sunk deep into media trance.

00:38:11 ► §

They can’t wake up and smell the coffee

00:38:13 ► §

because the coffee has no smell.

00:38:16 ► §

It’s become pure image.

00:38:18 ► §

Television is the real world,

00:38:20 ► §

the real thing now.

00:38:22 ► §

And if you don’t believe it, you are outside reality.

00:38:25 ► §

This is far worse than being a criminal. At least the criminal has some relationship with the

00:38:30 ► §

consensus. One must pity the radicals whose plan of battle always includes open boasting

00:38:37 ► §

about their intransigent opposition to all establishment values, alerting the enemy as

00:38:43 ► §

if only five seconds on the evening news or

00:38:45 ► §

the lifestyle report could possibly validate their revolutionary ideas and their pathetic

00:38:51 ► §

personalities.

00:38:53 ► §

Once and for all, the insurrection is not a commodity.

00:38:57 ► §

My desires are not commodities, and the media cannot reproduce them, much less satisfy them.

00:39:03 ► §

One doesn’t need to be a media ecologist

00:39:05 ► §

recommending a media fast to see that all the big media

00:39:09 ► §

must be understood, criticized, and overcome,

00:39:12 ► §

or at least evaded if we’re to get anywhere with our project.

00:39:18 ► §

Three, the insurrection.

00:39:22 ► §

I’d like to answer those critics who have accused

00:39:24 ► §

the temporary autonomous zone

00:39:26 ► §

of being an evasion or a postponement or a substitute for the insurrection

00:39:31 ► §

or even for the revolution.

00:39:33 ► §

In part, these criticisms come from some Latin American comrades

00:39:37 ► §

who seem to feel uneasy about the adventurous aspect of the TAZ

00:39:41 ► §

and from North Americans who called it an anarchist club med.

00:39:50 ► §

Tad Keplig said that.

00:39:53 ► §

Both critiques are important.

00:39:55 ► §

The TAZ is not an idea or an ideology, but something that is happening.

00:39:59 ► §

As such, it needs good criticism.

00:40:02 ► §

As such, it needs good criticism.

00:40:07 ► §

Okay.

00:40:11 ► §

On the contrary, I’ve tried to emphasize over and over again that the temporary autonomous zone is another way of building the kernel

00:40:14 ► §

of the new society within the shell of the old,

00:40:17 ► §

as the Wobblies used to say.

00:40:20 ► §

Yep.

00:40:20 ► §

And that the temporary autonomous zone should serve as the matrix

00:40:24 ► §

for the emergence of a Sorelian myth of uprising.

00:40:28 ► §

Georges Sorel, highly recommended.

00:40:31 ► §

However, it must also be repeated that the USA, at any rate,

00:40:35 ► §

can scarcely be described in 1993 as a pre-revolutionary society.

00:40:41 ► §

The election of a corrupt and venal pseudo-liberal regime, which

00:40:46 ► §

will smooth over a few rough

00:40:47 ► §

spots in the spectacle while the

00:40:50 ► §

Republicans reorganize to continue

00:40:52 ► §

building the new world order in 1996,

00:40:55 ► §

makes the possibility

00:40:56 ► §

of an American uprising even

00:40:58 ► §

less likely. Are we

00:41:00 ► §

then to postpone all liberatory

00:41:02 ► §

action until things get worse

00:41:04 ► §

again?

00:41:05 ► §

This would scarcely be logical or creditable.

00:41:09 ► §

Those of us who feel so irrationally unhappy with the wonderful world of commodities and

00:41:13 ► §

neo-Puritan reaction cannot justly be denied the chance of local and transient experiments

00:41:20 ► §

of utopian realization now or as soon as possible in our lifetimes, in our lives.

00:41:26 ► §

And this struggle is not without relevance for those people elsewhere in the world whom

00:41:30 ► §

we may consider our natural allies, such as indigenous and tribal groups or revolutionary

00:41:35 ► §

movements.

00:41:37 ► §

In this sense, the temporary autonomous zone is like a pre-echo of the insurrection, a

00:41:42 ► §

foretaste of its great liberatory energies, and can even be

00:41:46 ► §

seen as a necessary step toward the revolution which will realize utopia.

00:41:53 ► §

Thus it should be emphasized that the temporary autonomous zone has not only a festal, ludic,

00:41:58 ► §

or festaludic, celebratory or material bodily principle in view, but also, like yang to yin,

00:42:07 ► §

an inevitable measure of insurrectionary risk

00:42:10 ► §

and intention to remake the world.

00:42:14 ► §

The temporary autonomous zone cannot be realized solely as a hedonic exercise,

00:42:19 ► §

which would lead to just charges of club med-ism or even crypto-fascism.

00:42:25 ► §

The temporary autonomous zone goes beyond the merely hedonic

00:42:29 ► §

because it wants to expand and multiply

00:42:32 ► §

until it infects or even becomes the social.

00:42:36 ► §

And therefore, even though the temporary autonomous zone

00:42:38 ► §

may be secret and closed and intensely pleasurable for its members,

00:42:43 ► §

it must also be seen as a struggle

00:42:45 ► §

which opens itself potentially to all kindred spirits and fellow warriors.

00:42:52 ► §

To repeat the sentence that I just footnoted,

00:42:54 ► §

the temporary autonomous zone cannot be realized solely as a hedonic exercise

00:42:58 ► §

any more than the revolution can be realized without dancing,

00:43:02 ► §

as Emma Goldman put it.

00:43:04 ► §

Most of the temporary autonomous zone-like groups and gatherings known to me

00:43:10 ► §

fail to measure up in one or the other of these areas.

00:43:13 ► §

The political groups have still not mastered the pleasure principle,

00:43:17 ► §

while the lifestyle groups have still not mastered the politics.

00:43:21 ► §

Political praxis of some sort, of course, adds to the risk involved in the temporary

00:43:26 ► §

autonomous zone and therefore increases the need for tact. But it also increases the pleasure,

00:43:33 ► §

the group, the jouissance, the group coming within the temporary autonomous zone. This pleasure

00:43:40 ► §

results from the very sense of overcoming, first mentioned by Nietzsche when he spoke of the free spirit’s joy

00:43:49 ► §

at evading the law of the herd.

00:43:51 ► §

And if this sounds elitist, remember that from the anarchist point of view,

00:43:55 ► §

the herd consists precisely and only of those who agree to be herded.

00:44:00 ► §

After the revolution, no doubt,

00:44:04 ► §

free spirits would find some other source

00:44:06 ► §

for the pleasure of overcoming

00:44:07 ► §

however until then the law still exists

00:44:11 ► §

as an edge on which to sharpen our lives

00:44:14 ► §

but the revolution in a certain sense can be said not to exist

00:44:19 ► §

since it has not happened

00:44:20 ► §

within the history it wishes to claim as its field of activity

00:44:24 ► §

as for the law it wishes to claim as its field of activity.

00:44:28 ► §

As for the law, it exists only as spectacle and as a pattern of spasms of terror.

00:44:32 ► §

But the temporary autonomous zone is rooted, however evanescently,

00:44:36 ► §

within the life we live,

00:44:38 ► §

within the material and the imaginal world in which we have our genuine being,

00:44:43 ► §

however fragmentary and even tragic,

00:44:46 ► §

and within the celebratory mode of pleasure enhanced by doubling and redoubling, which

00:44:53 ► §

is the only excuse for society we know. Rather than crime, it might make more sense, or better

00:45:00 ► §

poetry, to speak of sorcery, which has all the connotations of secrecy and power we desire

00:45:06 ► §

for the emerging temporary autonomous zone,

00:45:09 ► §

an air of menace, of invisibility, and of the realization of desires.

00:45:15 ► §

As for illegality, well, a quilting bee is not illegal,

00:45:20 ► §

yet it can be a perfect temporary autonomous zone.

00:45:23 ► §

Sooner or later, however, even the quilting bee

00:45:26 ► §

runs the danger of becoming the object of tourism.

00:45:30 ► §

It will become a banal imitation of itself,

00:45:33 ► §

a pitiful spectacle,

00:45:34 ► §

unless it can create, at least for a moment,

00:45:37 ► §

an economy of life capable of persisting,

00:45:40 ► §

even if only briefly,

00:45:42 ► §

outside the prison of work, consume, die.

00:45:46 ► §

And that economy, by its very nature, threatens the spook world of control.

00:45:52 ► §

Eventually, the bee will be illegal, since it is already considered insane.

00:45:58 ► §

And so the immediatist quilting bee should begin now to act as if it were already illegal

00:46:04 ► §

and to embrace a philosophy

00:46:06 ► §

of illegalism. Today quilts, tomorrow perhaps the uprising. Our kind of bee or tongue might

00:46:16 ► §

be devoted to sex, info exchange, tax evasion, hashish farming, or even to orgies, credit

00:46:23 ► §

scams, or gun running running it will still have the structure

00:46:26 ► §

of the immediatist quilting bee

00:46:28 ► §

and so the immediatist bee

00:46:30 ► §

should already anticipate

00:46:32 ► §

a possible need to run guns

00:46:34 ► §

or stage orgies

00:46:35 ► §

it should be prepared to act

00:46:37 ► §

within the cracks of the monolith

00:46:39 ► §

of simulation like a true gang

00:46:42 ► §

of johnsons

00:46:43 ► §

like a swamp full of calicacs, like conspirators

00:46:47 ► §

whose purpose is really to breathe together, like criminals for the human race, like pirate

00:46:55 ► §

utopians for peace, like gorillas of harmony. Thank you.

00:47:12 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:47:16 ► §

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

00:47:22 ► §

Wow, what can I say about that talk by Hakeem Bey?

00:47:26 ► §

Didn’t you love it when he said that even if you are in a quilting bee,

00:47:29 ► §

that you should be prepared to run guns and stage orgies?

00:47:36 ► §

And then urging us to become pirate utopians for peace, guerrillas of harmony.

00:47:41 ► §

You know, one of the other things that struck me when he was speaking about the audience becoming their own artists, and with the power of tech that many of us now have in our hands,

00:47:47 ► §

well, that dream is becoming a reality.

00:47:50 ► §

However, I recently watched a movie that taught me a lot about some important artists

00:47:55 ► §

who didn’t have to wait for some high-tech to come along to help their art.

00:48:00 ► §

The name of the movie was Bomb It, and it was about graffiti writers,

00:48:04 ► §

particularly those who work in the wild style.

00:48:07 ► §

And if you haven’t seen that movie yet,

00:48:08 ► §

and particularly if you ever have been annoyed at some of the graffiti in your city,

00:48:13 ► §

well then I highly recommend you take a look at this documentary.

00:48:16 ► §

I think it will give you a new appreciation for their work

00:48:20 ► §

in helping us to notice the incredible visual pollution that we encounter each day

00:48:25 ► §

in the form of commercial advertising.

00:48:27 ► §

And, you know, it seems to be everywhere.

00:48:30 ► §

Basically, as a people, we seem to have completely accepted the fact that our public spaces are

00:48:35 ► §

blanketed with commercial messages in every direction.

00:48:38 ► §

But we don’t seem to like it when an individual tags a space to basically say, hey, I’m a

00:48:44 ► §

person, I live here too.

00:48:46 ► §

And also, so it goes with the places that formerly were places where citizens could gather and exchange ideas and opinions.

00:48:54 ► §

Now, for our non-U.S. slaunters, I should point out that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

00:49:01 ► §

states very clearly that, and I quote,

00:49:04 ► §

to the U.S. Constitution states very clearly that, and I quote,

00:49:08 ► §

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,

00:49:11 ► §

or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press,

00:49:15 ► §

or the right of the people to peaceably assemble

00:49:19 ► §

and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

00:49:23 ► §

And it is this right of the people to peaceably assemble

00:49:27 ► §

that is at the heart of the physical presences of the Occupy movement.

00:49:32 ► §

According to the establishment, public squares and civic plazas

00:49:36 ► §

are no longer appropriate for assembling to petition for a redress of grievances.

00:49:41 ► §

Instead, they insist on pushing demonstrators into pens that are

00:49:45 ► §

conveniently out of sight of the people who most need to be aware of the grievances being expressed.

00:49:51 ► §

The other night, which was I think the night after the San Francisco Police Department raided

00:49:56 ► §

the encampment, I was watching one of the live video streams of a standoff between several

00:50:02 ► §

hundred demonstrators who were surrounding a hundred or so cops, who in turn were surrounding and fiercely guarding four other demonstrators

00:50:10 ► §

who were sitting on the ground with their hands handcuffed behind their backs. And so they sat,

00:50:15 ► §

these peaceful demonstrators, on cold hard cement with their hands painfully bound behind their

00:50:21 ► §

backs, and this went on for what must have been several hours.

00:50:30 ► §

Then, without much ado, the police unbound their prisoners, set them free without charges,

00:50:31 ► §

and then disappeared.

00:50:37 ► §

And the demonstrators then immediately held a general assembly and began plans to rebuild their camp.

00:50:39 ► §

So, what was all that about, you ask?

00:50:41 ► §

And I’m still asking myself that question as well.

00:50:46 ► §

As far as I can tell,

00:50:51 ► §

it is mainly about intimidating people to the point where they are afraid to stand up and speak out about anything. But just to put things in San Francisco into better focus right now, I’m going

00:50:57 ► §

to play a brief interview from an Occupy San Francisco demonstrator that I recorded a week

00:51:02 ► §

earlier, on December 1st, 2011 to be exact,

00:51:06 ► §

which was about a week before they were first raided. And at that time, as you’re about to hear,

00:51:13 ► §

the police harassment had already begun. But as you will also hear, the occupiers are here to stay

00:51:19 ► §

and they’re doing it with good humor as well. Come talk to us. So tell everybody who you are.

00:51:25 ► §

My name is Christopher Wray.

00:51:27 ► §

Christopher Wray.

00:51:28 ► §

So what happened today?

00:51:29 ► §

What did you see go down?

00:51:30 ► §

What happened today?

00:51:31 ► §

Crazy.

00:51:32 ► §

So I showed up.

00:51:33 ► §

I heard there was some action taking place here

00:51:36 ► §

in Bradley Manning Plaza

00:51:38 ► §

about the cops taking the barricades

00:51:42 ► §

and trying to barricade us in

00:51:43 ► §

like they were going to raid at like 5 p.m. today, which was absurd.

00:51:48 ► §

And there was a huge outcry from the public in general about the actions being taken.

00:51:56 ► §

And, you know, I got down here and we were having general assembly.

00:52:01 ► §

And then the police started to converge on 101 market um where we held down a

00:52:07 ► §

presence again and um anyway so they started um taking they arrested one person um and they were

00:52:17 ► §

oh my god they were hitting people again and being crazy with nightsticks and everything, and just, like, being fucking retards as usual.

00:52:27 ► §

And anyways, we weren’t going to stand for it,

00:52:30 ► §

so we had an emergency direct action with our General Assembly,

00:52:34 ► §

and so we went all the way up to 101,

00:52:39 ► §

and we’re just like…

00:52:41 ► §

101 Market.

00:52:41 ► §

101 Market.

00:52:42 ► §

Federal Reserve Bank.

00:52:43 ► §

Yeah, Federal Reserve.

00:52:44 ► §

And we’re like, you ain’t doing this shit.

00:52:47 ► §

Fuck you.

00:52:48 ► §

So did you guys take the barricades from 101?

00:52:50 ► §

We took all the barricades.

00:52:51 ► §

Nice.

00:52:52 ► §

Yeah, we took all the barricades.

00:52:53 ► §

And we actually surrounded the police.

00:52:55 ► §

And they started panicking and freaking out a little bit.

00:52:57 ► §

And then, so then they started grabbing the barricades, though, and just, like, piling them together.

00:53:04 ► §

And then they started taking the barricades though and just like piling them together um and uh then they started taking

00:53:06 ► §

the barricades away um and then they while we were having general assembly just general discussion

00:53:11 ► §

like pep rally um right uh on market street in front of uh the federal reserve bank 101 market

00:53:18 ► §

street during rush hour yeah during rush hour um uh they start the police came down here with the trucks and started loading up more barricades and taking them away, etc., etc., etc.

00:53:32 ► §

I don’t believe there’s going to be a raid here at all.

00:53:37 ► §

In fact, my sources tell me that a couple police officers really messed up earlier, and that’s why they had to take down the barricades now.

00:53:49 ► §

Do we know who those police officers were?

00:53:51 ► §

I’m sure we will soon.

00:53:52 ► §

Right.

00:53:53 ► §

So other than tonight,

00:53:56 ► §

let’s talk about why you originally got involved with Occupy SF.

00:53:59 ► §

How long have you been here?

00:54:00 ► §

Damn.

00:54:01 ► §

I’ve been in the occupation since about the second or third week of the

00:54:09 ► §

entire occupation, so, I mean, my last count was 49 days, and that was almost a week ago.

00:54:16 ► §

Okay. And I came down here because I saw two really hot guys on the news that were down here and they’re all like

00:54:26 ► §

tatted up and were really cute and were like picketing against the federal reserve and like

00:54:32 ► §

I saw these signs about you know social economic injustices and so much else that was really going

00:54:38 ► §

on that I’ve always known about and I’ve always stood against and you know I’ve always been

00:54:43 ► §

waiting for an opportunity to like find like-minded people that just know that the world is fucked up and we need to do

00:54:50 ► §

something about it and um so it was really nice to like just come down and just find like-minded

00:54:58 ► §

people and I’ve been here uh just about every single day since um you camp out at all yeah

00:55:03 ► §

I’ve been camping out on the ground,

00:55:05 ► §

like on the concrete for, yeah, almost two months now.

00:55:09 ► §

I have an apartment up the street.

00:55:11 ► §

But it’s so much, I mean, I’m better utilized down here every day.

00:55:15 ► §

And I really, I feel like everyone needs to be utilized down here every day

00:55:21 ► §

because there’s a place for everyone here.

00:55:24 ► §

If you could if you

00:55:25 ► §

could see the movement yeah as a whole well let’s actually let’s start with san francisco oh yeah

00:55:29 ► §

if you could see san francisco accomplish one thing here oh yeah what would it be uh

00:55:34 ► §

just showing that we can be sustainable and uh that we can work with our city to come to solutions.

00:55:49 ► §

And, you know, we’ve been kind of like a martyr for a little bit,

00:55:50 ► §

and so has every other occupation.

00:55:56 ► §

You know, just putting up with, you know, being raided and harassed and the psychological warfare that goes on between, you know,

00:56:00 ► §

like threatening a raid and then not raiding and all this stuff

00:56:03 ► §

to keep people agitated and stressed out.

00:56:07 ► §

So there’s more fighting and all this stuff.

00:56:09 ► §

Anyways, the one thing that that has done is united us and has inspired so many other people.

00:56:19 ► §

And now today, them taking away the barricades, basically, they’re kind of, you know, it kind of shows that they’re giving up a little bit because they don’t really know what to do about us.

00:56:29 ► §

And hopefully they’re just going back right now and being like, look, these people aren’t going to go away and we can’t hurt them.

00:56:36 ► §

And, you know, maybe we should think about listening to them and, you know, hosting their general assemblies maybe in City Hall.

00:56:47 ► §

And, you know, I mean, that’s the whole point really anyway.

00:56:51 ► §

That would be a pretty crazy step.

00:56:52 ► §

You know, I think that if the city would just listen

00:56:57 ► §

and instead of wasting all their money on police action against us,

00:57:01 ► §

if they just provided us with, you you know better facilities so we would look more

00:57:06 ► §

respectable so more people would join us so we could keep it cleaner so we’d have more resources

00:57:10 ► §

to direct the homeless to uh you know health you know resources you know pertaining to addiction

00:57:17 ► §

etc etc you know if um if the city would just help us with the infrastructure a tiny bit,

00:57:30 ► §

then we would be able to take off on our own and probably pay back the city, actually,

00:57:33 ► §

for that help that they would give us. And that’s my hope for our encampment here is that we reach that point,

00:57:38 ► §

and I really think that it could be possible that it really could happen here soon.

00:57:43 ► §

And I’d really like to urge every single other

00:57:45 ► §

person out there that, you know, is occupying or thinking about, you know, joining an Occupy

00:57:51 ► §

movement that just use your voice and remember to listen to others as well. And on that note,

00:58:02 ► §

what, you know, on a more national level, what would you like to see the

00:58:05 ► §

Occupy movement as a whole be able to accomplish in the United States? Be able to accomplish,

00:58:11 ► §

you know, just the recognition that our money that we spend every day isn’t even federal money.

00:58:21 ► §

You know, it has nothing to do with the government. And it’s a private bank, specific

00:58:26 ► §

people’s things, and they can print as much as they want. Reagan made it so, or Nixon

00:58:31 ► §

made it so. And, you know, that we can come up with something better. Because all the

00:58:37 ► §

money that…

00:58:37 ► §

You’re talking about the Federal Reserve?

00:58:39 ► §

Yeah, the Federal Reserve. We need to end the Federal Reserve. Period.

00:58:42 ► §

So that would be your number one goal, to end the Fed?

00:58:44 ► §

Yeah, of course. If we end the Federal Reserve, period. So that would be your number one goal, to end the Fed? Of course.

00:58:45 ► §

If we end the Federal Reserve, then we end all of the cash that sponsors all of the war and tyranny around the world, literally around the world.

00:59:05 ► §

and how to come up with just a better system and a better way to live,

00:59:10 ► §

unchained to private interest banks.

00:59:15 ► §

Right on. Well, thanks for talking to us. I appreciate you.

00:59:15 ► §

Thank you.

00:59:17 ► §

We’ll see you again, of course. Right on.

00:59:29 ► §

You know, I’m always surprised when I hear somebody say that the Occupy people don’t have an agenda or any demands.

00:59:35 ► §

What those critics fail to realize is that ideas like that young man just expressed are going to be the basis of the going forward, but not forward into a rehash of the existing system.

00:59:41 ► §

No, there’s no longer any way to answer the demands of the Occupy

00:59:46 ► §

Movement simply by passing a few laws or electing another group of puppets for the rich to manage.

00:59:52 ► §

No, what is going to have to happen this time, and not just here in the States, but all over

00:59:57 ► §

the world, we the people are coming to our senses and beginning to realize that slavery

01:00:03 ► §

and feudalism have never gone away.

01:00:10 ► §

They simply morphed into wage and debt slavery, not to mention the fact that true human slavery is perhaps at its highest point ever. And so there’s a lot of work to do. Fortunately, there

01:00:16 ► §

is no lack of people who are willing to think about these things and then to add their ideas

01:00:21 ► §

into the mix. And one of those people is Michael, who is the

01:00:25 ► §

first of our fellow salonners to send me a brief audio commentary about his feelings about what is

01:00:30 ► §

going on right now. And so now let’s hear what he has to say. Hi Lorenzo, and hello to the salon.

01:00:41 ► §

My name is Michael, and I wanted to thank you for this opportunity to engage

01:00:50 ► §

and occupy the salon. I would also like to encourage others who I’m sure are thinking

01:01:00 ► §

long and hard about what’s going on in the country and the world, and have

01:01:08 ► §

their own thoughts and ideas about what all of this means and the way forward.

01:01:17 ► §

I have been studying for the past year the idea of civic intelligence and the idea that

01:01:28 ► §

collectives of people are more intelligent when they work together than that some of the

01:01:37 ► §

individuals and when people come together to harness this collective intelligence and address the collective problems that they face in communities and society at large, that is the only way that we’re going to get out of this mess that has become abundantly clear that we are in.

01:02:03 ► §

has become abundantly clear that we are in.

01:02:10 ► §

The perception of civics is that it’s all about city management,

01:02:14 ► §

and I don’t think that that is really true anymore.

01:02:21 ► §

Civics is the platform by which people engage the communities they live in, whether it’s talking in coffee shops or at local organized conferences

01:02:30 ► §

or events, world cafes.

01:02:35 ► §

However it is that people come together to talk about the problems they face collectively,

01:02:41 ► §

that’s the type of civics I’m talking about, an engagement in the

01:02:47 ► §

place where you live. Occupy Wall Street is an amazing example of people coming

01:02:54 ► §

together to engage the big problems that we’re facing. And it’s an amazing model

01:03:01 ► §

of collective intelligence. I understand that the General Assembly process came out of Spain and Greece in the collective actions.

01:03:15 ► §

They were staging against the austerity measures imposed by the government.

01:03:28 ► §

The basis of the General Assembly process in consensus versus just up and down win-lose voting is a very important piece that is harnessing this collective energy that we all share.

01:03:37 ► §

In the voting that passes for democracy today, there are always winners and losers.

01:03:45 ► §

democracy today, they’re always winners and losers. And the polarization over the past 10, 20 years of politics to amplify this win and loss ratio while never really accomplishing

01:03:55 ► §

anything is a big difference between this consensus model, which is based on listening to the hopes, dreams, and concerns of everyone

01:04:09 ► §

involved and finding a solution that meets all of those concerns.

01:04:15 ► §

So in the General Assembly, when someone submits a proposal, that proposal is commented on by all of the stakeholders.

01:04:29 ► §

Everyone who is a part of Occupy is a stakeholder,

01:04:33 ► §

and anyone who wants to be a part of Occupy is welcome.

01:04:38 ► §

This inclusive approach is what’s harnessing this collective intelligence.

01:04:46 ► §

And the focus on listening to all of the stakeholders involved is so important.

01:04:53 ► §

It’s the only way forward.

01:04:56 ► §

If anyone’s familiar with the work of Jim or James Fishkins on deliberative polling,

01:05:04 ► §

Jim or James Fishkins on deliberative polling.

01:05:15 ► §

He talks about how when people engage in active listening conversation about the topics that affect them, they move from a point of difference towards a place where their own understanding of their position is better

01:05:27 ► §

refined.

01:05:30 ► §

Consensus.

01:05:32 ► §

When you have to evaluate what other people are saying and fit that into the framework

01:05:40 ► §

of your proposal and see ways that you could address other people’s legitimate

01:05:46 ► §

concerns, it takes you another step towards embracing everyone.

01:05:56 ► §

In class today, we watched a TED Talk talking about collaborative processes.

01:06:05 ► §

It got into game theory, and it worked as a great model for our discussion later on

01:06:13 ► §

this sort of collaborative versus win-lose approach.

01:06:18 ► §

In the TED Talk, the speaker mentioned the prisoner’s dilemma, which is a classic thing from game theory, where two parties are isolated.

01:06:45 ► §

approach they could take to this, addressing this dilemma, is to rat on the other person,

01:06:53 ► §

thereby accomplishing gain for themselves and loss for the other party.

01:07:00 ► §

What this actually creates is a loss for both of them. The only way that they can actually get out of the dilemma is to both cooperate, but because the most intuitive

01:07:07 ► §

solution is to rat out your accomplice, it’s mutual destruction.

01:07:16 ► §

And what the speaker talked about was changing this sort of idea of win and lose to the assurance game,

01:07:27 ► §

which is also referred to as the stag hunt in game theory.

01:07:31 ► §

And what this stag hunt talks about is,

01:07:35 ► §

the example is a hunting scenario,

01:07:41 ► §

where you and another person are in an area,

01:07:44 ► §

and you can either both work individually

01:07:47 ► §

and hunt rabbits and both eat, or you can work together to hunt a large stag, thereby securing

01:07:55 ► §

more food for both of you. And what we talked about in our seminar discussion was, you know,

01:08:02 ► §

what does it mean to shift from this idea of the prisoner’s dilemma to an

01:08:06 ► §

assurance game? And in that context, we talked about this sort of changing perception of fairness

01:08:14 ► §

that I think is exemplified by the Occupy movement. When all of the cards were laid on the table and the financial collapsed and

01:08:29 ► §

the carpet was pulled back to reveal the gaping lies that the whole system had been built

01:08:35 ► §

on, and the consequent attempt to put the rug back over all the lies and go on with business as usual, it really evoked this widespread

01:08:47 ► §

sense of how much the game was rigged against us, how we’d all been put into

01:08:53 ► §

this sort of prisoner’s dilemma. And the Occupy response that came out of the Greece and the Spain movements and the Arab Spring

01:09:05 ► §

is based on this changing perception of fairness.

01:09:13 ► §

Business as usual model isn’t going to work for us anymore.

01:09:19 ► §

The world’s problems are too big to let the people who have rigged the system

01:09:23 ► §

from the beginning to continue to

01:09:25 ► §

hold all the cards. And so while the mainstream media can’t quite get their heads around what

01:09:34 ► §

the heck people are doing, anyone who is engaged and interested in this sense of fairness understands what’s going on at Occupy Wall Street

01:09:48 ► §

and all of the Occupy movements across the country

01:09:51 ► §

and across the world.

01:09:55 ► §

People are coming together, working together

01:09:59 ► §

in a totally different context.

01:10:03 ► §

The General Assembly and all the working groups

01:10:07 ► §

that are a part of the Assembly

01:10:09 ► §

look at the needs of the communities that they’re occupying

01:10:16 ► §

and the community of the occupiers

01:10:18 ► §

and work to use the skills they have to address those needs.

01:10:28 ► §

And as they address the needs of their community,

01:10:32 ► §

not only do they receive the benefit of feeling the accomplishment

01:10:38 ► §

of using their skills to benefit everyone,

01:10:41 ► §

it’s reinforcing the community and showing the power that the people have.

01:10:49 ► §

This is similar to asset-based community development developed by, I believe it’s Jim McKnight

01:10:59 ► §

at Northwestern University.

01:11:09 ► §

Northwestern University. And this approach kind of looks at the traditional social services model, where some outside agency determines the problems of a community and creates some

01:11:19 ► §

program to solve that need. And most of the time this results in the crappy system we have, where not much

01:11:27 ► §

change actually happens, and the social services sector gets a large percentage of the population

01:11:34 ► §

to depend on them. In the asset-based approach, a map is made of all of the resources in a particular community.

01:11:46 ► §

So that involves the people in the community,

01:11:48 ► §

the organizations based there, local businesses.

01:11:52 ► §

And when you look at all of those assets together,

01:11:56 ► §

the solution to problems emerges.

01:12:00 ► §

It’s this idea of civic or collective intelligence

01:12:04 ► §

that when we work together, we understand the problems and we understand the way forward.

01:12:11 ► §

This is so radically different to the top-down hierarchical structure that is prevalent through society, that encourages people to think of themselves

01:12:27 ► §

as individuals and only concerned for themselves.

01:12:34 ► §

In some sense, I see this as the actual moral degradation of America, is this lie that somehow

01:12:43 ► §

we are separate and should only care for ourselves.

01:12:48 ► §

Morality is, in a sense, a personal incentive to do the right thing.

01:12:56 ► §

And when you think about the work that the occupiers are doing

01:13:02 ► §

to support each other, to build community, to look at ways to solve the problems, and you think of what they’ve accomplished.

01:13:32 ► §

providing power to a massive information machine that speaks the truth in a way that the mainstream media never can.

01:13:42 ► §

Bringing thousands of people together in support when brass tacks is needed. I think of the occupation in Portland

01:13:47 ► §

which is close to where I live.

01:13:50 ► §

Watching

01:13:51 ► §

the night that the

01:13:53 ► §

eviction deadline passed where

01:13:55 ► §

6-7,000

01:13:57 ► §

people showed up in

01:13:59 ► §

solidarity

01:14:00 ► §

within two days notice

01:14:03 ► §

to stand peacefully against the police.

01:14:07 ► §

I just shiver every time I think of that image that played out

01:14:12 ► §

when one person had thrown a rock at one of the police officers

01:14:19 ► §

or whatever projectile it was.

01:14:22 ► §

And I’ve heard reports that the rest of the occupiers pushed this person out to the police,

01:14:29 ► §

and he wasn’t actually even a part of there. He had just come down and wanted to cause some

01:14:33 ► §

trouble. And this escalated tensions, and they brought in horses that tried to get through and

01:14:40 ► §

threatened to pepper spray everyone who was in the street. And the peaceful occupiers held together

01:14:48 ► §

and actually pushed 200 police officers in riot gear.

01:14:56 ► §

They forced them to peacefully withdraw down the street,

01:15:00 ► §

and the sea of people surrounded them and walked out into the street.

01:15:06 ► §

And I remember one of the police lieutenants who was being interviewed by the news media

01:15:11 ► §

actually sounded like he was kind of choking up a little bit talking about how this was like

01:15:17 ► §

nothing he had ever seen in his career and the people constantly thanking members of the police department for their service,

01:15:26 ► §

making that real connection with people,

01:15:30 ► §

even though they had opposing purposes,

01:15:34 ► §

reaching out across that line to say that we are one,

01:15:38 ► §

and together we have to move through this.

01:15:44 ► §

That type of responsibility to each other,

01:15:50 ► §

the responsibility to engage,

01:15:53 ► §

is something that people are realizing,

01:15:55 ► §

and that’s the power of this movement.

01:15:58 ► §

So thank you, Lorenzo, for all the work you’re doing to put this together,

01:16:03 ► §

and thanks for giving the opportunity to other people to voice their thoughts on the matter.

01:16:10 ► §

That was very well put, Michael.

01:16:12 ► §

I really appreciate you taking the time to record and share your thoughts with us.

01:16:16 ► §

And hopefully you will be the first in a very long line of fellow salonners who are raising their voices at this time.

01:16:25 ► §

salonners who are raising their voices at this time. And in case I forget to mention it later,

01:16:33 ► §

you can send your ideas and MP3 comments to lorenzo at occupysalon.us. Another recording that I received came in from longtime supporter E-Rock X1, who, by the way, is going to be at

01:16:39 ► §

the January 28th workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I are going to be leading. And I’ve also been told that Joe Metheny is going to be there. So I’m really psyched about a long last meeting the

01:16:49 ► §

two of them in person for the first time. And I guess I should mention that the event is now about

01:16:54 ► §

60% sold out. So if you want to be sure to get a seat, you may want to get a ticket now. And the

01:17:00 ► §

URL for that has all the information on it is matrixmasters.net slash beyond2012.

01:17:09 ► §

matrixmasters.net slash beyond2012.

01:17:13 ► §

Anyway, getting back to where I was,

01:17:16 ► §

E-Rock X1 sent me a short clip of a talk by Robert Anton Wilson in which,

01:17:20 ► §

well, I have to admit, it actually does sound as if he is predicting the Occupy Wall Street movement

01:17:25 ► §

during a conversation that he had sometime in 1997.

01:17:30 ► §

And here’s what he said.

01:17:33 ► §

Consider 1987. That was ten years ago.

01:17:37 ► §

What happened in the last ten years?

01:17:39 ► §

Nelson Mandela not only got out of jail, but he’s now president of the Union of South Africa.

01:17:44 ► §

Quarthe died.

01:17:46 ► §

Power sharing came in.

01:17:48 ► §

The Soviet Union collapsed, the biggest nonviolent revolution in human history.

01:17:53 ► §

The Palestinians got their own state.

01:17:55 ► §

The Internet grew much faster than anybody thought it would, and it’s growing faster all the time.

01:18:00 ► §

The IRA and the British are finally talking after years and years of the British saying we don’t talk to terrorists,

01:18:06 ► §

which by the way is a belief system.

01:18:10 ► §

I say belief system because if I say BS people will misunderstand me.

01:18:14 ► §

Basically rich people don’t do their own killing, they hire governments to do it.

01:18:19 ► §

Poor people have to do their own killing so they get called terrorists.

01:18:22 ► §

Rich people are just called rich people with governments and when they say we won’t negotiate with terrorists that means

01:18:28 ► §

rich people won’t negotiate with poor people that’s all that means but the poor people keep

01:18:33 ► §

up their terrorism their war or whatever their war of liberation their terrorism whatever they

01:18:38 ► §

keep it up long enough eventually all the rich people eventually decide we’ve got to negotiate

01:18:41 ► §

with them just like the white south afric Africans decided they had to negotiate with Mandela.

01:18:46 ► §

The British have decided they’ve got to negotiate with Jerry Adams.

01:18:50 ► §

The Israelis decided they had to negotiate with Yasser Arafat.

01:18:54 ► §

Eventually they do have to negotiate with the poor people.

01:18:58 ► §

And that’ll happen in this country too.

01:19:00 ► §

They’re going to have to negotiate with the poor people eventually.

01:19:03 ► §

Although this will be the last country in the world, probably.

01:19:05 ► §

Yeah, really.

01:19:05 ► §

What shape would you foresee those negotiations taking?

01:19:10 ► §

The reunion movement has to revive.

01:19:13 ► §

Reagan practically killed the labor union movement.

01:19:16 ► §

Now there are so many people unemployed, so many people shaky in their jobs.

01:19:20 ► §

Their purchasing power has gone way down.

01:19:23 ► §

The profits of the corporate owners have skyrocketed.

01:19:28 ► §

There’s going to be a response.

01:19:31 ► §

I don’t want to use the word revolution

01:19:32 ► §

because I don’t know what form it will take,

01:19:33 ► §

but there will be a response.

01:19:36 ► §

Might that take the form actually of becoming,

01:19:39 ► §

may it just take longer?

01:19:41 ► §

Because I always feel that the United States

01:19:44 ► §

is probably the most successful

01:19:46 ► §

empire so far in terms of being able to spread and occupy and transfer its cultural values

01:19:55 ► §

worldwide. Might it just be that it would take longer, but it would be a global four

01:20:00 ► §

people’s revolt against the new world order of the United States?

01:20:05 ► §

I think it will have to be because American workers now

01:20:07 ► §

are not competing with other American workers.

01:20:09 ► §

They’re competing with slave labor in Southeast Asia.

01:20:13 ► §

As a matter of fact, I think that’s the main reason

01:20:15 ► §

why we still got the entire pot was that helps fill the prisons.

01:20:19 ► §

Building prisons is our number one growth industry.

01:20:22 ► §

And if the Supreme Court has ruled,

01:20:24 ► §

convicts do not have to be paid the minimum wage.

01:20:27 ► §

So as they stuff the prisons with more and more people,

01:20:29 ► §

the United States is more and more capable of competing with slave labor and red sharing them.

01:20:33 ► §

So they’re going to keep filling the prisons.

01:20:35 ► §

That’s true.

01:20:36 ► §

Well, they make blue jeans are made by prisoners now and T-shirts and all sorts of consumer items.

01:20:41 ► §

There are airlines and lots of companies have have convicts doing their credit card

01:20:45 ► §

phone calls.

01:20:47 ► §

And of course,

01:20:47 ► §

they…

01:20:47 ► §

You’re not giving

01:20:48 ► §

your credit card number

01:20:49 ► §

to a convict?

01:20:49 ► §

That’s going on

01:20:50 ► §

all over the country.

01:20:51 ► §

16 Minutes

01:20:52 ► §

showed several prisons

01:20:53 ► §

where that’s going on.

01:20:54 ► §

And then you have

01:20:55 ► §

the people of Haiti,

01:20:56 ► §

for example,

01:20:57 ► §

who are basically now

01:20:58 ► §

slave labor for Disney.

01:21:00 ► §

Yeah.

01:21:01 ► §

So there are

01:21:02 ► §

different ways.

01:21:03 ► §

So that’s the way

01:21:04 ► §

it’s competing

01:21:04 ► §

is to find new forms of slave labor.

01:21:06 ► §

I see.

01:21:07 ► §

That’s interesting.

01:21:08 ► §

Yeah, but that can’t last, I mean.

01:21:10 ► §

It’s a stopgap measurement.

01:21:11 ► §

But on the other hand, there also seems to be, this is a very passive culture.

01:21:14 ► §

We were talking about this earlier.

01:21:15 ► §

I mean, so many people are satisfied to work for $5 an hour at a Starbucks, have cable

01:21:21 ► §

TV, have Gap jeans and prefab furniture from Ikea,

01:21:27 ► §

everything seems okay.

01:21:29 ► §

I mean, do you detect truly a revolutionary undertow bubbling up?

01:21:34 ► §

Yeah, it’s on the right wing as well as on the left.

01:21:37 ► §

There’s more and more an attitude of we don’t trust the corporations,

01:21:43 ► §

we don’t trust the governments, we don’t trust anybody with too much power,

01:21:46 ► §

we don’t trust our neighbors either, for that matter.

01:21:48 ► §

I mean, it’s gone too far.

01:21:50 ► §

But people know they’re getting screwed.

01:21:52 ► §

There’s no doubt about that.

01:21:53 ► §

They just disagree about who’s doing most of the screwing.

01:21:58 ► §

Talk about perceptive.

01:22:00 ► §

Did you hear what he just said about the discontent being on the right

01:22:03 ► §

as well as on the left?

01:22:09 ► §

And that people all know they’re getting screwed, they just disagree about who’s doing the screwing?

01:22:16 ► §

And you only have to think back a couple of years and remember the beginnings of the so-called Tea Party, which, like Occupy Wall Street, is more a state of consciousness than it is a party or a movement.

01:22:22 ► §

It is consciousness itself that is now on the move,

01:22:25 ► §

and even though there are some setbacks now and then,

01:22:28 ► §

like the raid in San Francisco that destroyed their camp the other morning,

01:22:32 ► §

it was on that very same day, but late at night,

01:22:35 ► §

that the General Assembly of Occupy San Francisco

01:22:38 ► §

reconvened in Bradley Manning Plaza to continue their business at hand.

01:22:43 ► §

And just to give you a small feeling of what it

01:22:45 ► §

was like at that moment in the city by the bay, I’d like to play this little soundbite for you.

01:22:54 ► §

Obviously we were evicted today and just to use the line from Occupy Wall Street,

01:23:00 ► §

you cannot evict an idea, right? You cannot evict this movement. And we are still here and we are

01:23:04 ► §

growing and we’re getting stronger and we are getting stronger,

01:23:05 ► §

and we are getting stronger every day.

01:23:06 ► §

New people are coming.

01:23:09 ► §

So the occupiers have reoccupied Justin Urban Plaza, and the cops have left.

01:23:18 ► §

Yeah, so we were continuing with introducing the working groups

01:23:22 ► §

that are working within Occupy San Francisco currently

01:23:25 ► §

to see where people that are new who would like to get plugged in with those working

01:23:30 ► §

groups, what you can do to be a part of them.

01:23:33 ► §

So we had introduced a few of them, so we can continue on doing that.

01:23:36 ► §

And then I think also maybe right now we should do a bit of a little go-around.

01:23:41 ► §

Give me like one word about how you’re feeling right now. Right. And we’re

01:23:45 ► §

going to mic check that word. So give me somebody raise their hand and tell me how you’re feeling.

01:23:48 ► §

One word. Jubilant. Jubilant. Mic check. Jubilant. Inspired. Inspired. Victorious. Fucking awesome!

01:24:07 ► §

United!

01:24:12 ► §

Proud!

01:24:17 ► §

Aware!

01:24:22 ► §

Free! Breathe.

01:24:26 ► §

Relieved.

01:24:27 ► §

Relieved.

01:24:31 ► §

Cosmic turnaround.

01:24:35 ► §

How about one last one?

01:24:36 ► §

Empowered.

01:24:41 ► §

Thank you, everybody.

01:24:42 ► §

That was awesome.

01:24:42 ► §

Fantastic.

01:24:48 ► §

And so how do we feel here in podcast land now?

01:24:49 ► §

That’s the question, huh?

01:24:54 ► §

Well, I think the good people of Occupy San Francisco summed it up quite well.

01:25:04 ► §

We feel jubilant, inspired, victorious, fucking awesome, united, proud, aware, freed, relieved, cosmic turnaround, and empowered.

01:25:06 ► §

I love it.

01:25:12 ► §

And so I’m going to close right now by giving you a little empowerment information.

01:25:18 ► §

And that is the information about online security that Leisha put together in her Brain Meets,

01:25:22 ► §

that’s B-R-A-I-N-M-E-A-T-S, Brain Meets podcast.

01:25:26 ► §

And while I’ve made it a point to not plug podcasts until at least their 11th episode, I’m going to recommend Brain Meets Podcast number one, because even if

01:25:32 ► §

this podcast doesn’t continue for years and years, that first program contains a wealth of very

01:25:37 ► §

valuable information, and I highly recommend it. And I’ll have to put a link to that podcast in the program notes for this

01:25:46 ► §

program today because it’s just a really, really long URL. But I’ll link to them in the program

01:25:52 ► §

notes, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.us. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from

01:25:59 ► §

cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.