I cite

Austrian Cultural Forum New York: WOCHENKLAUSUR FEATURES | PANEL DISCUSSION | NOT AN ALTERNATIVE | OCCUPY THEIR DESIRE

NOT AN ALTERNATIVE | OCCUPY THEIR DESIRE

TUESDAY AUG 21, 06:30 PM

OUR HAUS focuses on contemporary positions and practices on the topic of housing and public space.

For the duration of the exhibition (which runs through August 26), nine New York-based organizations, associations, interest groups, and activists who deal with issues of housing and the urban built environment were chosen to use the ACFNY Gallery space for one week each. From August 20 to August 26, Not An Alternative will be the WochenKlausur "NPO-in-residence"at the ACFNY.

For this event, the art/activism collective Not an Alternative will be hosting a research discussion centering on Occupy Wall Street, the movement that occupied mainstream media headlines via a question: what do they want, what are their demands? Philosopher Slavoj Zizek, pushed the question further when he enjoined occupiers not to be afraid to want what they desire - suggesting a gap between conscious want and unconscious desire. In effect, his injunction was for occupiers to occupy their desire; for us to occupy our desire.

Inspired by this, Occupy Their Desire is a research discussion with art/activism collective Not An Alternative, political theorist Jodi Dean, and OWS organizer Matthew Smucker that investigates and inquires into the desires expressed by and repressed in Occupy Wall Street.

The discussion will explore questions such as:

How is the expression of desire a necessary element in building a movement?

Where has Occupy succeeded and failed in this task?

How might we contrast the movement’s expression of desire with that of the 2004 Obama campaign (Hope!), or traditional Left / progressive politics?

What role does representation play in the expression of desire -- and relatedly, how do the disciplines of art, advertising and psychoanalysis inform this inquiry?

ABOUT

Not An Alternative is a hybrid arts collective and non-profit organization with a mission to affect popular understandings of events, symbols, and history. The group curates and produces interventions on immaterial and material space, leveraging the tools of architecture, exhibit design, branding, and public relations.

via www.acfny.org

Sanford Schram: Now Time for Neoliberalism: Resisting Plan B From Below

Excerpted from an essay available here. Read the whole thing.

Neoliberalism is the corporate Plan B for the state. Neoliberalism is, for me and my collaborators,

 not simply an ideology that prizes market fundamentalism and seeks a return to laissez-faire economics. 

That would be plan A. Yet, Plan A has run afoul of Keynesian Economics and its insistence that only 

the state is big enough to counteract market failure. Though often repudiated by the right, Keynesianism 

has remained a point of contention since the Great Depression of the 1930s until now in the time of the 

Great Recession. As result, there remains a belief in the welfare state to counter the capriciousness of the 

market and the adversity it creates for those who get marginalized. As a result, the proponents of neoliberalism 

cannot just sweep the welfare state away and return to a system of laissez-faire economics such as that which 

reigned in the 19th Century and the age of the robber barons. Instead, the right must resort to Plan B: If you 

cannot eradicate the welfare state, the next best thing is to marketize it. Plan B involves remaking welfare state 

programs operate consonant with market principles in service of more efficiently buttressing the market. From 

education vouchers to medical insurance vouchers, from welfareto-work programs grounded in incentivizing 

taking low-wage work to the penalties  and rewards in drug treatment programs, the programs of the welfare

 state are increasingly run like business operations so as to get clients to be more market compliant actors 

themselves. The state contracts with for-profit providers who are incentivized to discipline their clients so that 

they become more disciplined and more docile, internalizing market logic so they will more willing 

accept the verdict of the globalizing market and accept whatever low-wage jobs, if any, as their main 

source of economic salvation.

 

Guest post by Paul Passavant: Ryan’s Market Libertarianism and Obama

When Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate, progressive groups immediately began to message their networks.  They said Romney had committed “political suicide,” and openly asked, “Did Romney just give away the election,” to quote some of the hyperbole from MoveOn.org.  I disagree.  I think Romney made the smartest choice he could have made.

Let’s cover the basics first.  Ryan comes from Wisconsin, a swing state with 11 electoral votes.  Wisconsin went for President Obama in 2008, but recently refused to recall Republican Governor Scott Walker after Walker pushed through a measure to crush public sector unions.  Romney has just made an important play for Wisconsin. 

Ryan also excites the conservative base, but isn’t a moron like Sarah Palin, John McCain’s infamous pick.  This avoids alienating older, long time Republican voters who are not idiots and who vote their economic interests.

Ryan is an acolyte of notorious libertarian and market celebrant Ayn Rand.  This could appeal to the youngest voter demographic – those who have grown up with the Internet and cell phones.  These college-aged students, or those in their early 20s, get excited by the libertarianism of Ron Paul.  These  Net-libertarians have grown up in a historical period without meaningful ideological opposition to neoliberalism, which means they cannot tell the difference between a pyramid scheme and Social Security.  

They have also experienced a generation of attacks on government, of cuts to government programs and agencies, and of Republicans who tell them not to trust government.  They have experienced Republicans who tell them that government screws up anything it tries to do, and then once elected, these Republicans prove their point by actively trying to screw up government.  Not trusting government, these Net-libertarians gravitate to the Internet, that is to say, the market.  

Of course, problems predictably occur. Government’s regulatory bodies (and public schools) have been systematically incapacitated, so their failures are preordained by policies designed so that they will “fail.” Market actors behave exactly as micro-economics predicts – in a self-interested, profit maximizing way. This means that people who are not profitable to insure will not receive healthcare.  This means that environmental damage is an “externality” and an attractive place to have the costs associated with certain businesses “socialized” rather than born by the corporation itself so the corporation can keep up with its competition (which is doing the exact same thing).  For market actors, the public interest or the common good is simply not the rule according to which one makes one’s decisions.  But when weakened public institutions and profit seeking behavior on the part of market actors produce their predictable, socially damaging consequences, Net-libertarians blame government for “failures” that are not “failures” from the perspective of market actors, while cynically shrugging off self interested behavior that leads to socially disastrous consequences: after all, they seem to reason, I would act in a self interested manner if I were in that position too.  If there is a reform they can get on board with, it is more “consumer choice,” that is to say, more of the same that neoliberalism – Ryan’s market libertarianism – has to offer.

Does Romney’s choosing the market libertarian Ryan as a running mate exploit a vulnerability of Obama’s or does it play to his strengths?  At this point, it is hard to say.  There are three issues to consider. 

First, Obama was very popular with the youngest voter demographic in 2008 – that is, the Net libertarians.  But the 20-something Net libertarians clicked ‘like” on “hope” and “change,” but our political, economic, and social welfare problems remain.  In other words, the 20-something Net libertarians like the pseudo-inclusivity of consumer choice more than doing the hard work (and the resulting divisiveness) of exerting political force.  This means that the political force necessary to re-shaping the economic and social welfare aspects of our lives continues to be lacking, and so these problems persist four years later, hanging over us like a dark cloud auguring another economic calamity on the horizon.  As Obama’s campaign has found it necessary to air “negative” or critical ads of Romney, Obama now appears to this generation like just another politician, even though he is fluent in their language of Net-libertarianism and its pseudo-inclusivity.  In this scenario, Obama and Romney-Ryan split the 20-something Net-libertarian vote, which is a loss for the Obama camp and a victory for the Republican ticket that needs to overcome a “geriatric,” or “my crank grandfather,” image.

Second, Obama’s center of gravity may have more in common with Ryan’s than Democrats, liberals, and leftists like to admit.  As Ron Suskind has described in Confidence Men, Obama was the candidate in 2008 who seemed to grasp most astutely the financial calamity as it was happening.  But the economic advisors who helped candidate Obama understand and criticize the wreaking ball of Wall Street on the nation’s wellbeing, like Paul Volcker, were marginalized in the Obama administration.  Meanwhile, those who had inspired and overseen the disastrous financial policies that caused the nation so much devastation, like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, received key appointments to oversee economic policy in the Obama administration.

In terms of Obama’s policies, we can see how much Obama shares with Ryan’s market libertarianism.  When Medicare was established, Democrats hoped that it would provide the foundation for a future system of universal health care.  Rather than building on this foundation, Obama abandoned it in favor of Romney’s model for health care that he had established in Massachusetts while governor (which had, in turn, been a policy model proposed by right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation in 1993): require everyone to purchase health insurance.  That is, instead of doubling down on the principle of universal health care and strengthening Medicare (by bringing younger, healthier people into its “pool” in addition to the elderly who require a lot of healthcare), Obama played into the hands of market libertarianism by forcing everyone to be a consumer of health insurance.

But nowhere do we see a shared gravitational pull between Obama and Ryan more than in Obama’s proposals during the debt ceiling negotiations of summer, 2011.  As reported by the Washington Post, in negotiations with Speaker of the House John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Obama proposed cuts to Medicare and Social Security.  (Mercifully, the senators known as the “Gang of Six” were moving to a compromise that, almost incomprehensibly, was more progressive, and this torpedoed the unfortunate efforts underway between the Obama administration and the Republican House leaders.)  If Obama were committed to the principles of Social Security as a universal program of social solidarity, then it wouldn’t be a bargaining chip in budget negotiations.  The difference, then, between Ryan’s well-known proposals to privatize Social Security while ending Medicare by substituting for it a policy of vouchers for consumers, is less a qualitative, principled distinction, and more a matter of marketized degree.  In this scenario, Ryan’s forthright advocacy of market libertarianism seems more honest, and therefore more appealing, than Obama’s furtive efforts to have Boehner return his phone calls during the summer of 2011 while simultaneously trying to persuade the public that he really still has our wellbeing at heart.  Who wants to be conned that way and taken for a fool?

There remains a third possibility.  A principled attack on the premises of twentieth century domestic policy and its attempts to make good — or at least make better — on the promise of “justice” and the promotion of the “general welfare” might force Obama to make the contrary case.  To do so, he would have to re-learn how to articulate why supporting programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the ever-evanescent aspiration of universal healthcare – to say nothing of improving the working and non-working lives of those who earn their livings from labor rather than from capital gains -- is the right thing to do.  Democrats are rusty at making those arguments, though, so it won’t come easy.  But addressing Ryan’s market libertarianism head on could refocus public discourse on the class war that the one percent has made on the rest of us in a way that we have not seen since Occupy Wall Street a year ago.  What are the prospects for this scenario?  They are not bright. 

On the one had, Romney is trying to walk back from Ryan’s aggressive advocacy of market libertarianism in order not to alienate the Eisenhower/ Rockefeller Republicans still among us.  Romney’s position seems to be that Ryan is on the right track, but perhaps he is overly enthusiastic and goes too far.  On the other, Obama is banking on existing deep public support for Medicare and merely reminds us that Ryan would destroy it.  But the voter is left with the nagging question, after having witnessed the Obama administration in action: does Obama think Ryan is on the right track as well, but just “goes too far”?  If so, we will all be stuck in the same neoliberal, market libertarian place regardless, whether Romney or Obama wins.  If this is the case, voters may elect to go with the market libertarian who admits as much –what Ryan adds to the Romney ticket – over the guy we can’t be too sure about after the last four years.

This post is featured on Counterpunch.

Bound books: The Communist Horizon (Verso)

"Time-wars" by Mark Fisher

From Gonzo Circus (English version circulating on nettime).

 Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are given only a year more to live. To survive any longer, they must earn extra time. The decadent rich have centuries of empty time available to fritter away, while the poor are always only days or hours away from death. In Time is, in effect, the first science fiction film about precarity – a condition that describes an existential precidament as much as it refers to a particular way of organising work.

At the most simple level, precarity is one consequence of the “post-Fordist” restructuring of work that began in the late 1970s: the turn away from fixed, permanent jobs to ways of working that are increasingly casualised. Yet even those within relatively stable forms of employment are not immune from precarity. Many workers now have to periodically revalidate their status via systems of “continuous professional development”; almost all work, no matter how menial, involves self-surveillance systems in which the worker is required to assess their own performance. Pay is increasingly correlated to output, albeit an output that is no longer easily measurable in material terms.

For most workers, there is no such thing as the long term. As sociologist Richard Sennett put it in his book The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, the post-Fordist worker “lives in a world marked … by short-term flexibility and flux … Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connection.” (30) Throughout history, humans have learned to come to terms with the traumatic upheavals caused by war or natural disasters, but “[w]hat’s peculiar about uncertainty today,” Sennett points out, “is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism.”

It isn’t only work that has become more tenuous. The neoliberal attacks on public services, welfare programmes and trade unions mean that we are increasingly living in a world deprived of security or solidarity. The consequence of the normalisation of uncertainty is a permanent state of low-level panic. Fear, which attaches to particular objects, is replaced by a more generalised anxiety, a constant twitching, an inability to settle. The uncertainty of work is intensified by digital communication  technology. As soon as there is email, there are no longer working hours nor a workplace. What characterises the present moment more than our anxious checking – of our messages, which may bring opportunities or demands (often both at the same time), or, more abstractly, of our status, which, like the stock market is constantly under review, never finally resolved? 

Zizek on Pussy Riot: The True Blasphemy

(circulated on FB by Chto Delat)

THE TRUE BLASPHEMY 

Pussy Riot members accused of blasphemy and hatred of religion? The answer is easy: the true blasphemy is the state accusation itself, formulating as a crime of religious hatred something which was clearly a political act of protest against the ruling clique. Recall Brecht’s old quip from his Beggars’ Opera: “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?” In 2008, Wall Street gave us the new version: what is the stealing of a couple of thousand of dollars, for which one goes to prison, compared to financial speculations that deprive tens of millions of their homes and savings, and are then rewarded by state help of sublime grandeur? Now, we got another version from Russia, from the power of the state: What is a modest Pussy Riot obscene provocation in a church compared to the accusation against Pussy Riot, this gigantic obscene provocation of the state apparatus which mocks any notion of decent law and order? 

Was the act of Pussy Riot cynical? There are two kinds of cynicism: the bitter cynicism of the oppressed which unmasks the hypocrisy of those in power, and the cynicism of the oppressors themselves who openly violate their own proclaimed principles. The cynicism of Pussy Riot is of the first kind, while the cynicism of those in power – why not call their authoritarian brutality a Prick Riot - is of the much more ominous second kind. 

Back in 1905, Leon Trotsky characterized tsarist Russia as “a vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market.” Does this designation not hold more and more also for the Russia of today? Does it not announce the rise of the new phase of capitalism, capitalism with Asian values (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia and everything to do with the anti-democratic tendencies in today's global capitalism).

If we understand cynicism as ruthless pragmatism of power which secretly laughs at its own principles, then Pussy Riot are anti-cynicism embodied. Their message is: IDEAS MATTER. They are conceptual artists in the noblest sense of the word: artists who embody an Idea. This is why they wear balaclavas: masks of de-individualization, of liberating anonymity. The message of their balaclavas is that it doesn't matter which of them got arrested – they're not individuals, they're an Idea. And this is why they are such a threat: it is easy to imprison individuals, but try to imprison an Idea! 

The panic of those in power – displayed by their ridiculously excessive brutal reaction - is thus fully justified. The more brutally they act, the more important symbol Pussy Riot will become. Already now the result of the oppressive measures is that Pussy Riot are a household name literally all around the world. It is the sacred duty of all of us to prevent that the courageous individuals who compose Pussy Riot will not pay in their flesh the price for their becoming a global symbol.

Slavoj Žižek

Art of Angry (interview in Austrian art magazine, Springerin)

Download Jodi Dean springerin art of angry 3 2012 p 24-28 (1)

Journal link

The Californian Ideology (1995)

Cyborg Masters and Robot Slaves

The fear of the rebellious 'underclass' has now corrupted the most fundamental tenet of the Californian Ideology: its belief in the emancipatory potentiality of the new information technologies. While the proponents of the electronic agora and the electronic marketplace promise to liberate individuals from the hierarchies of the state and private monopolies, the social polarisation of American society is bringing forth a more oppressive vision of the digital future. The technologies of freedom are turning into the machines of dominance.

At his estate at Monticello, Jefferson invented many clever gadgets for his house, such as a 'dumb waiter' to deliver food from the kitchen into the dining room. By mediating his contacts with his slaves through technology, this revolutionary individualist spared himself from facing the reality of his dependence upon the forced labour of his fellow human beings. [36] In the late-twentieth century, technology is once again being used to reinforce the difference between the masters and the slaves.

According to some visionaries, the search for the perfection of mind, body and spirit will inevitably lead to the emergence of the 'post-human': a bio-technological manifestation of the social privileges of the 'virtual class'. While the hippies saw self-development as part of social liberation, the hi-tech artisans of contemporary California are more likely to seek individual self-fulfillment through therapy, spiritualism, exercise or other narcissistic pursuits. Their desire to escape into the gated suburb of the hyper-real is only one aspect of this deep self-obsession. [37] Emboldened by supposed advances in 'Artificial Intelligence' and medical science, the Extropian cult fantasises of abandoning the 'wetware' of the human state altogether to become living machines. [38] Just like Virek and the Tessier-Ashpools in Gibson's 'Sprawl' novels, they believe that social privilege will eventually endow them with immortality. [39] Instead of predicting the emancipation of humanity, this form of technological determinism can only envisage a deepening of social segregation.

Despite these fantasies, white people in California remain dependent on their darker-skinned fellow humans to work in their factories, pick their crops, look after their children and tend their gardens. Following the L.A. riots, they increasingly fear that this 'underclass' will someday demand its liberation. If human slaves are ultimately unreliable, then mechanical ones will have to be invented. The search for the holy grail of 'Artificial Intelligence' reveals this desire for the Golem - a strong and loyal slave whose skin is the colour of the earth and whose innards are made of sand. As in Asimov's 'Robot' novels, the techno-utopians imagine that it is possible to obtain slave[florin]like labour from inanimate machines. [40] Yet, although technology can store or amplify labour, it can never remove the necessity for humans to invent, build and maintain these machines in the first place. Slave labour cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved.

Across the world, the Californian Ideology has been embraced as an optimistic and emancipatory form of technological determinism. Yet, this utopian fantasy of the West Coast depends upon its blindness towards - and dependence on - the social and racial polarisation of the society from which it was born. Despite its radical rhetoric, the Californian Ideology is ultimately pessimistic about real social change. Unlike the hippies, its advocates are not struggling to build 'ecotopia' or even to help revive the New Deal. Instead, the social liberalism of New Left and the economic liberalism of New Right have converged into an ambiguous dream of a hi-tech 'Jeffersonian democracy'. Interpreted generously, this retro-futurism could be a vision of a cybernetic frontier where hi-tech artisans discover their individual self-fulfillment in either the electronic agora or the electronic marketplace. However, as the zeitgeist of the 'virtual class', the Californian Ideology is at the same time an exclusive faith. If only some people have access to the new information technologies, 'Jeffersonian democracy' can become a hi-tech version of the plantation economy of the Old South. Reflecting its deep ambiguity, the Californian Ideology's technological determinism is not simply optimistic and emancipatory. It is simultaneously a deeply pessimistic and repressive vision of the future.

via www.alamut.com

Why I disagree with Kalle Lasn

In These Times ran an interview with Adbusters'Kalle Lasn a few days ago. Here are some excerpts from the interview with my responses.

Lasn's primary engine runs on an opposition between the old left and the new left. Most of the time it isn't completely clear what this means. In the interview, he presents Occupy as a continuation of 1968, so the new left looks pretty much like the new left that has been around since the late 60s. The interviewer positions Lasn as a kind of Situationist (cue Bookchin criticism of neo-Situationism), which may be inaccurate insofar as Lasn's views seems an amalgam of various trends, particularly embrace of digital media, leaderlessness, horizontalism, multitudes, swarms, mystical thinking (cue Bookchin again--I was too quick yesterday to say that mysticism wasn't a problem), and insurrection.

Lasn's response to a question about Occupy:

A power struggle is going on in the movement, between the old vertical type of a Left and a new young Left that has social media at its finger tips and isn’t so enamored with the old wolf pack mentality but is ready to do things in a much more horizontal way without leaders – sometimes even without demands. The question is: In this tussle between the old Left and the new Left, who will win? And if temporarily the old Left triumphs then we’re in for a hard year this year and possibly even next, but bit by bit this movement does herald a new Left. This movement has made the Left cool again.

I agree that there is a power struggle going on (which is always the case in movements and parties and can be a source of energy and innovation). I find the opposition between a wolf pack and social media pretty interesting in that nature looks bad and technology looks good or, attacking and eating other animals is bad and connecting on social media is good. Back to the interview (interviewer question in bold):

How does one build counter-hegemonic power and get beyond “crowd sourcing,” which is really what the Occupy general assemblies are?

In the next few years there will be what I call a “meme war” – a war of really big ideas within economics. Will we be able to pull off a paradigm shift from neoclassical economics to this new ecological or bionomic or psychonomic discipline that is bubbling underneath the surface? Will we be able to change our current dysfunctional marketplace into one in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth? Will we be able to impose Robin Hood taxes and dismantle this global casino with more than $1 trillion a day flushing around the system in derivatives and credit default swaps and other financial instruments?

If we on the Left try to figure out what these meta memes are and start fighting for them, then we will get somewhere. If we fall back on the old ways of doing things, then capitalism is going to swallow us whole.

First problem: arguments are more than memes. They are ideas backed by reason and evidence. Lasn diminishes the challenge and the sort of significant work involved. Second problem: Lasn misrepresents the economic problem of neoliberal capitalism as a division between neoclassical economics and the "new ecological or bionomic or psychonomic discipline that is bubbling underneath the surface." Now maybe I just don't know what he's talking about, but it looks to me like the sort of stuff that is usually wrapped up as complexity theory, with all its talk about emergence and swarms and self-organization and criticality (I talk about this in the first chapter of Blog Theory). It's the same set of ideas part of New Economy thinking, which isn't opposed to neoliberalism at all but was a primary carry of it, especially insofar as regulation is bad and free flow is good. Thomas Friedman, after all, is like the poster boy of horizontality--The World is Flat.

Where does power over the distribution of societal resources fit into this equation? How is the Occupy movement going to redistribute wealth from the 1% to the 99%?

Quite frankly, the question you ask betrays the fact that you are quoting the old Left. The way to fix the problem may not actually be a straightforward approach of passing some laws and taking some money from the 1% and giving it to the 99%. Maybe we have to have a more sophisticated approach where we don’t play out this kind of class warfare idea. The change has to be deeper. If we can finally ram through this Robin Hood tax, which a lot of people are for in Europe, and make it very high, not just a .01% but a 1% tax on all financial transactions, then that will be a deep-down transformation of casino capitalism, and all of a sudden the Robin Hood tax would collect trillions of dollars every year and then we the people of the world could start arguing over how to spend that money.

Lasn is too sophisticated for class warfare, which is just another way of saying that he is on the side of the sophisticated (or as Corey Robin has called them, the "fancies"). That is, he is denying that our current economic situation is the product of class war, capitalist attempts (largely successful) to roll back the gains made by the working class from the 30s through the 60s. The thing is, Lasn's answer here seems inconsistent--wouldn't "ramming through" a 1% tax on all financial transactions be a tool of class warfare? On the other hand, why is that tax a "deeper change" than the abolition of private property?

Isn’t the legislative process needed to enact or “ram through” redistributive policies like the Robin Hood tax?

Once you do that, you’re accepting the status quo. Maybe the real job is to launch a third political party in America that is initiated on the Internet, gets million of signatures, and then has a convention. Maybe the task of changing the political landscape of America with a third party is a way smarter move than what the Tea Party did with the Republicans, and what so many people are saying we should do with the Democrats. The trick for the political Left is to think deeper. Instead of thinking, “Hey, let’s pass a law that legislates the Robin Hood tax,” let’s change the political landscape.

Take, for example, the idea we launched last year. In the general assemblies we have a microcosm of a democratic process that’s magical and beautiful. It works and this is a metaphor for how America should work.

Love the idea of a third party--The Common Party or The Party of the Commons. Why on the internet? Lasn is using the model of the Pirate Party (Sweden, Germany). I need to learn more about what they've done. I'm skeptical that "initiating it on the internet" is the key or the most fundamental question for creating a new party; that seems to me to place means way before ends (which is a problem with process-oriented approaches over all). Lasn is right to say "change the political landscape." But this change isn't magical (whether it's beautiful seems to me to be an aesthetic question that gets us off track). That we can't fully determine or predict outcomes doesn't mean that they are the products of magic. I'm also not convinced that GAs are a metaphor for how American should work--it depends on what the tasks at hand are, on what we want to do.

. . . Change finds its bed within a culture with big ideas that resonate with people. There has to be a sort of mystery and magic to the whole thing and so far the Occupy movement has been very good at operating on that deeper level. Somewhere along the line we will have to pass laws  . . .  But there are a lot of meta memes that we have to conjure up . . . 

I'm starting to wonder about the "deeper level" Lasn so persistently invokes--is it magical? Conjuring memes doesn't strike me as democratic--it strikes me as a kind of manipulation that wants to avoid reason, argument, exchange, critique. I worry about the magicians of culture who want to create a big affective charge. The sorts of political organizations that rely on mystery and magic are generally either fascistic or secret societies.

The Occupy movement has been committed to developing actions and strategies through consensus. How do the “tactical briefings” issued by Adbusters fit into that process?

This tussle over what we should do next is something we should all get involved in. When we put out that call [in the January 25 “Tactical Briefing #25”] for 50,000 people to descend on Chicago [on May 1, ahead of the NATO summit], people in Chicago said, “You haven’t been talking to us. How dare you do this. You haven’t been part of our meetings.” I say, “To hell with them.” We want to put out a tactical briefing, and you can take it or leave it.

Horizontalism looks like the assertion of will. Anyone can say whatever they, issues calls for whatever they want. Cooperation and coordination, are possible through social media, but not necessary. To hell with those who don't want what we want. At this point, it's hard to see the difference between the new left and a wolf pack.

Anarchy: "naughty, rebellious, insouciant, but deliciously safe"

Murray Bookchin's 1995 book, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism is remarkably prescient. 

Like it or not, thousands of self-styled anarchists have slowly surrendered the social core of anarchist ideas to the all-pervasive Yuppie and New Age personalism that marks this decadent, bourgeoisified era. In a very real sense, they are no longer socialists--the advocates of a communally oriented libertarian society--and they eschew any serious commitment to an organized, programmatically coherent social confrontation with the existing order. In growing numbers, they have followed the largely middle-class trend of the time into a decadent personalism in the name of their sovereign "autonomy," a queasy mysticism in the name of "intuitionism," and a prelapsarian vision of history in the name of "primitivism."

Today, intuitionism seems to take the form of emotionalism and experientialism, that is, an emphasis on the feelings and experiences of each as uncriticizable grounds for political positions. Similarly, primitivism seems to have become localism, a localism that privileges do-it-yourself and "small" as necessarily better than anything mass or large. What's interesting here is that emotionalism and localism characterize the campaign language of George W. Bush's compassionate conservativism, the way he depicted himself as speaking from his gut, the dominant culture's critique of intellectuals and rejection of science, the marketing language of organic, natural, and whole, the Chamber of Commerce's campaign on behalf of small business, and the racist anti-federalist politics of southern states  who don't want the government telling them what to do. Back to Bookchin:

Indeed, capitalism itself has been mystified by many self-styled anarchists into an abstractly conceived "industrial society," and the various oppressions that it inflicts upon society have been grossly imputed to the impact of "technology," not the underlying social relationships between capital and labor, structured around an all-pervasive marketplace economy that has penetrated into very sphere of life, from culture to friendships and the family. The tendency of many anarchists to root the ills of society in "civilization" rather than in capital and hierarchy, in the "megamachine" rather than in the commodification of life, and in shadowy "simulations" rather than in the very tangible tyranny of material want and exploitation is not unlike bourgeois apologias for "downsizing" in modern corporations today as the product of "technological advances" rather than of the bourgeoisie's insatiable taste for profit.

I appreciate the connection Bookchin makes to downsizing; it seems to me that the language of downsizing amplifies ideas that small is better and then connects with ideological elements of leaner, faster, fitter, and flexible, all of which describe guerrilla warfare, ideal new economy corporations, and the healthy bodies of the active-lifestyle class of tri-atheletes and pink ribbon marathons.

I don't think the rejection of technology applies, though (and I don't think it applied even in 1995 when Bookchin wrote this). Rather, personally networked communication devices are now part of lifestyle anarchism, crucial to the critique of institutions and bigness insofar as they enable connections that can be fantasized as fluid, horizontal, and voluntary. So rather than construing the enemy as industrial society, the enemy is "the state" as that which threatens networked communications. Danger comes from big government, but this danger can only be met by being small and lean, basically by running and hiding. Insurrection replaces revolution and seizing the state and making a better one is replaced by the momentary ecstasies of temporary autonomous zones (Bookchin has a scathing critique of Hakim Bey). 

A last bit, for now, from Bookchin:

The bourgeoisie has nothing whatever to fear from such lifestyle declamations. With its aversion for institutions, mass-based organizations, its largely subcultural orientation, its moral decadence, its celebration of transcience, and its rejection of programs, this kind of narcissistic anarchism is socially innocuous, often merely a safety valve for discontent toward the prevailing social order. With the Bey, lifestyle anarchism takes flight from meaningful social activism and a steadfast commitment to lasting and creative projects by dissolving itself into kicks, postmodernist nihilism, and a dizzying Nietzschean sense of elitist superiority.