In his famous essay/book T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zones, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, Hakim Bey wrote, “Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of, say, the entire US Government?” The author was, in essence, recognizing a praxis that put his readers’ experiences at the center of the world, erasing any idealistic identification with nation-state or global collectivity, even in its institutional social welfare aspect that he no doubt depended on. He supplanted it with the viscerality of intensely lived moments (or years) and the imaginary potential for small-group collectivities of those who can make their own “republics of gratified joy.” Not inclined to completely abandon his anarchist political instincts, he does imagine a rise of liberated zones—“twentieth century pirate utopias”—becoming a force in the world.
Bey continued…“Is this something worth… fighting for? Let us study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism—and who knows what we may attain.”
At the first writing of his manifesto, Bey gingerly embraced what we then called cyberculture, limning from Bruce Sterling’s fictional Islands in the Net —a world of virtual autonomous zones, hidden in encrypted shadows from the intrusive powers of states and capital, but existing in self-selective, actual physical independent anarchist enclaves. These are imagined as networked together and occasionally performing piratical raids, data piracy, to cop tools or perhaps even weaken the hegemony of the titanic dominators of the world. Bey, (real name Pater Lamborn Wilson RIP) quite reasonably, soon decided that the internet was just “a mass surveillance machine” and for the last 25 years has avoided having anything to do with it.
This dropout imaginary and its fairly widespread popularity among 90s freaks was, in some ways, an expression of hopelessness: an exhaustion with ideologically-driven, programmatic, or even anarchistic activist revolution.
Subculture vs. Counterculture: What Was Lost?
While the countercultural energies in the west, particularly in the US and Great Britain, of the 1960s had been, largely, about spreading the hope and spirit of the moment via one form of activism or another, by the 1970s, culture was becoming tribalized—a tendency that was given expression via music subcultures. By the ‘90s, you had your goths, your riot grrls, your hardcore punks, your rastas, your deadheads, your hackers, your conscious rappers, ravers, modern primitives ad infinitum.
The splitting off of counterculture into identity tribes generated a different set of intentions. If you were trying to stop a war or overthrow Richard Nixon’ Amerika, your cry was “join us!” But if you were only trying to maintain a semi-original identity, popularization was (and is) a threat to the exclusivity and coolness of the tribe—the bridge-and-tunnel suburbanites or the stylistically unfit basics will be sneered back into isolation.
Back in 1995, in a celebratory mood, I wrote “the rise of the internet is a total victory for counterculture and subculture. The next generation, raised on the net as their primary medium, won’t even know what the consensus is. The panelists on the McLaughlin Group (American TV show) arguing over the Republicans and Democrats will be seen as a weirdo subculture, on a par with the followers of Reverend Moon. The net has successfully decentralized attention.”
It was the intention of counterculture warriors in the US during the Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and Bush I and II regimes to blow up the vague consensus around the warfare state (overseas interventions and drug wars) and let the pieces fall wherever they might. I mean, HOW could things get worse?
Decentralized Anarcho-Fascism
All of which brings us to our current situation.
Riding right alongside the countercultural idealization of autonomous zones and places (or at least moments) outside the structures imposed by nation states was a more politically powerful radical capitalist version of decentralization.
At first, this vision tended to be presented under the banner of libertarianism. And if counterculture tended to be anticapitalist or at least anti-greed, the primary form of libertarianism advocated for maximizing the liberation of the so-called free market from government. Life, in this view, should be organized around self-interest. And this would not only be intrinsically liberating (because of the absence of big government intrusion), but it was also believed to be the most beneficial way of having a world that would function for the benefit of the greatest number of people. This vision of how the world should work had started to take hold in the West with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US. Left-leaning analysts called the dominant new ideology neoliberalism. Already one could see the rhetoric of greater liberty being tied to the disciplinary harshness of policing and incarceration, aimed largely against racial minorities, particularly under Reagan’s escalation and militarization of Richard Nixon’s War On Drugs.
Within the technoculture of the 90s, tech enthusiasts who held anticapitalist views, those who held radical libertarian pro-capitalist views and individuals who were sort of apolitical or towards the center (mainly liberals) were more or less charging towards the future hand-in-hand. It was hoped that technologies themselves would distribute some version of people-power and some version of individualist empowerment simultaneously, by its very nature. We’d work out any complexities or differences after the internet nuked consensus reality politics.
It was during the rise of the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchism towards the middle of that decade that the ideological label anarcho-capitalism really began to rise to the surface.
Now, well into the 2020s, we’ve entered a peculiar moment of delirium that might be labeled anarcho-fascism. When I asked an early version of Chat-GPT about the existence of anarcho-fascism, it insisted that it was an impossibility, although it claimed that some neo-Nazi successionists in the US sometimes talk about themselves with that terminology.
Okay, chat-gpt, anarcho-authoritarianism might be a better terminology.
The 2023 book Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian digs deep into the peculiar rise of elements of the full-tilt libertarian right and even some self-described anarcho-capitalists as they have gained power and influence around the world, and as it has revealed itself to be a mad mixture of ever-more-extreme police state repression and ever-more-extreme deregulation. The global shift that began with the rise Thatcherite/Reaganism has become increasingly bizarre under the postmodern, digitized, exploded cultural and political narratives of the 21st Century.
Slobodian’s book takes on the bizarre ideological twists and turns of mega tech bros like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreesen and such political operatives as Nayib Bukele and JD Vance. It traces the rise of Free Trade Zones and how they have provoked a lust among the wealthy and among right wing ideologues for a world of such zones, as opposed to countries and territories that still have democratic elements which sometimes prevent tech capitalism from moving fast and breaking people, communities and environments.
To do justice to the complexity of his revelatory book, I will be interviewing Slobodian for Mindplex sometime in the coming months.