Hakim Bey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3HyRtdu1o0

Our third-place communities - no social life in America - neither family nor work - 19th c. 3rd places were legion - communes and intentional communities more elaborated than today's, but also fraternal and sororal (Freemasons, Elks, athaneums in every town) why? BECAUSE THERE WAS NO TELEVISION - that was THEIR ENTERTAINMENT. These were intentional acts; society is structured to reproduce itself. 1989: there is something "natural" about communities & whatever it was, its not important and can be replaced by technology anyway. Today's an exaggerated caricature of these ideas.

Positive aspects far outweigh negative. Over half of Americans are on antidepressants? Besides medicalization of sadness, people are genuinely depressed and they don't know why - all they have is "family of divorce" and their jobs, their wage slave situation.

A dialectic of resistance is only possible through intentional community. We need to disengage from the techno-pathocracy - "dropping out", cf. Anabaptists (Amish live in community bc they refuse certain aspects of technology to preserve physical aspects of community - e.g. telephones draw people apart, cars make people live far from each other)

What can rational secular types find as a substitute for the level of religious fanaticism that allows you to forgo the advantages of civilization and progress to have something you find to be more valuable but much more difficult?





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Primitive societies were organized against hierarchy dangers (Society against the state : essays in political anthropology. and Archaeology of violence)

We can have technology (teche) if it's appropriate.

There are systems that are not as destructive as (Babylonian) agriculture.

Luddites: machinery hurtful to the commonality (the commons) is the machinery they wanted to smash; not all (they had hand looms - they werent smashing those, but the mechanical ones that took their jobs away and destroyed their society) - A green Luddite anarchist horticulturist - intelligent domestication we are not lords of creation but collaborators with nature. Real communities that are not starving to death that have somewhat solved the problem of wealth, by failing to join modern society and embrace modern technology - they're too poor to buy trucks or TVs and still use carts and horse drawn plows and have therefore preserved their community - they are still together (but of course aren't pure or innocent - this is a more nuanced reading of the past. you have permission not to be oppressed by neocons who say all these ideas are hippie bullshit (humans have always struggled, are not good, must be controlled) - youth should pull out of cyber-daze and begin to resist again.

Charles Fourier - criticism of agriculture, agriculture as helpful to rulers, we should revert to horticulture and agricultural goods should be treats (grains every once nad awhile) - emphasis on fruit and orchard based horticulture. It's not the domestication of plants that is the problem (but from social freedoms POV its a step down from picking) but its the hierarchy that is necessary to do it on a large scale and to reproduce a society based on virtual slavery of most of its inhabitants. If you have that kind of economy, you can't escape the horrors of civilization.