Temporary Autonomous Zones

One of the documents found in Benny Pristine's apartment by Crysta Bella after he disappeared.

Fragments from THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE (TAZ)
By Hakim Bey
...this time however I come as the victorious Dionysus, who will turn the world into a holiday...not that I have much time...
Nietzsche (from his last "insane" letter to Cosima Wagner)

Pirate Utopias
THE SEA-ROVERS AND CORSAIRS of the 18th century created an "information network" that spanned the globe: primitive and devoted primarily to grim business, the net nevertheless functioned admirably.

Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessities. Some of these islands supported "intentional communities," whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even if only for a short but merry life...to express their genius for creating living myth.

The first step is somewhat akin to satori...the realization that the TAZ begins with a simple act of recognition.

The TAZ as festival. Stephen Pearl Andrews once offered, as an image of creatively authentic society, the dinner party, in which all structure of authority dissolves in conviviality and celebration.

Vital in shaping TAZ reality is the concept of psychic nomadism (or as we jokingly call it, "rootless cosmopolitanism"). The drift.

The TAZ desires above all to avoid mediation, to experience its existence as immediate. The very essence of the affair is "breast-to-breast" as the sufis say, or face-to-face. But, BUT: the very essence of the Web is mediation. Machines here are our ambassadors--the flesh is irrelevant except as a terminal, with all the sinister connotations of the term.