The temporary autonomous zone

 

11

(this has actually been tried, but all the hard-sex BBSs have been busted--and what use 

is an underground with lousy security?). In short, assume that I'm fed up with mere 

information, the ghost in the machine. According to you, computers should already be 

quite capable of facilitating my desires for food, drugs, sex, tax evasion. So what's the 

matter? Why isn't it happening? 

 

The TAZ has occurred, is occurring, and will occur with or without the computer. But for 

the TAZ to reach its full potential it must become less a matter of spontaneous 

combustion and more a matter of "islands in the Net." The Net, or rather the counter-Net, 

assumes the promise of an integral aspect of the TAZ, an addition that will multiply its 

potential, a "quantum jump" (odd how this expression has come to mean a big leap) in 

complexity and significance. The TAZ must now exist within a world of pure space, the 

world of the senses. Liminal, even evanescent, the TAZ must combine information and 

desire in order to fulfill its adventure (its "happening"), in order to fill itself to the borders 

of its destiny, to saturate itself with its own becoming. 

 

Perhaps the Neo-Paleolithic School are correct when they assert that all forms of 

alienation and mediation must be destroyed or abandoned before our goals can be 

realized--or perhaps true anarchy will be realized only in Outer Space, as some futuro-

libertarians assert. But the TAZ does not concern itself very much with "was" or "will be." 

The TAZ is interested in results, successful raids on consensus reality, breakthroughs 

into more intense and more abundant life. If the computer cannot be used in this project, 

then the computer will have to be overcome. My intuition however suggests that the 

counter-Net is already coming into being, perhaps already exists--but I cannot prove it. 

I've based the theory of the TAZ in large part on this intuition. Of course the Web also 

involves non-computerized networks of exchange such as samizdat, the black market, 

etc.--but the full potential of non-hierarchic information networking logically leads to the 

computer as the tool par excellence. Now I'm waiting for the hackers to prove I'm right, 

that my intuition is valid. Where are my turnips? 

 

 

"Gone to Croatan" 

WE HAVE NO DESIRE to define the TAZ or to elaborate dogmas about how it must be 

created. Our contention is rather that it has been created, will be created, and is being 

created. Therefore it would prove more valuable and interesting to look at some TAZs 

past and present, and to speculate about future manifestations; by evoking a few 

prototypes we may be able to gauge the potential scope of the complex, and perhaps 

even get a glimpse of an "archetype." Rather than attempt any sort of encyclopaedism 

we'll adopt a scatter-shot technique, a mosaic of glimpses, beginning quite arbitrarily with 

the 16th-17th centuries and the settlement of the New World. 

 

The opening of the "new" world was conceived from the start as an occultist operation. 

The magus John Dee, spiritual advisor to Elizabeth I, seems to have invented the 

concept of "magical imperialism" and infected an entire generation with it. Halkyut and 

Raleigh fell under his spell, and Raleigh used his connections with the "School of Night"--

a cabal of advanced thinkers, aristocrats, and adepts--to further the causes of 

exploration, colonization and mapmaking. The Tempest was a propaganda-piece for the 

new ideology, and the Roanoke Colony was its first showcase experiment. 

 

The alchemical view of the New World associated it with materia prima or hyle, the "state 

of Nature," innocence and all-possibility ("Virgin-ia"), a chaos or inchoateness which the 

adept would transmute into "gold," that is, into spiritual perfection as well as material 

 

12 

abundance. But this alchemical vision is also informed in part by an actual fascination 

with the inchoate, a sneaking sympathy for it, a feeling of yearning for its formless form 

which took the symbol of the "Indian" for its focus: "Man" in the state of nature, 

uncorrupted by "government." Caliban, the Wild Man, is lodged like a virus in the very 

machine of Occult Imperialism; the forest/animal/humans are invested from the very start 

with the magic power of the marginal, despised and outcaste. On the one hand Caliban 

is ugly, and Nature a "howling wilderness"--on the other, Caliban is noble and unchained, 

and Nature an Eden. This split in European consciousness predates the 

Romantic/Classical dichotomy; it's rooted in Renaissance High Magic. The discovery of 

America (Eldorado, the Fountain of Youth) crystallized it; and it precipitated in actual 

schemes for colonization. 

 

We were taught in elementary school that the first settlements in Roanoke failed; the 

colonists disappeared, leaving behind them only the cryptic message "Gone To Croatan." 

Later reports of "grey-eyed Indians" were dismissed as legend. What really happened, 

the textbook implied, was that the Indians massacred the defenseless settlers. However, 

"Croatan" was not some Eldorado; it was the name of a neighboring tribe of friendly 

Indians. Apparently the settlement was simply moved back from the coast into the Great 

Dismal Swamp and absorbed into the tribe. And the grey-eyed Indians were real--they're 

still there, and they still call themselves Croatans. 

 

So--the very first colony in the New World chose to renounce its contract with Prospero 

(Dee/Raleigh/Empire) and go over to the Wild Men with Caliban. They dropped out. They 

became "Indians," "went native," opted for chaos over the appalling miseries of serfing 

for the plutocrats and intellectuals of London. 

 

As America came into being where once there had been "Turtle Island," Croatan 

remained embedded in its collective psyche. Out beyond the frontier, the state of Nature 

(i.e. no State) still prevailed--and within the consciousness of the settlers the option of 

wildness always lurked, the temptation to give up on Church, farmwork, literacy, taxes-- 

all the burdens of civilization--and "go to Croatan" in some way or another. Moreover, as 

the Revolution in England was betrayed, first by Cromwell and then by Restoration, 

waves of Protestant radicals fled or were transported to the New World (which had now 

become a prison, a place of exile). Antinomians, Familists, rogue Quakers, Levellers, 

Diggers, and Ranters were now introduced to the occult shadow of wildness, and rushed 

to embrace it. 

 

Anne Hutchinson and her friends were only the best known (i.e. the most upper-class) of 

the Antinomians--having had the bad luck to be caught up in Bay Colony politics--but a 

much more radical wing of the movement clearly existed. The incidents Hawthorne 

relates in "The Maypole of Merry Mount" are thoroughly historical; apparently the 

extremists had decided to renounce Christianity altogether and revert to paganism. If 

they had succeeded in uniting with their Indian allies the result might have been an 

Antinomian/Celtic/Algonquin syncretic religion, a sort of 17th century North American 

Santeria. 

 

Sectarians were able to thrive better under the looser and more corrupt administrations in 

the Caribbean, where rival European interests had left many islands deserted or even 

unclaimed. Barbados and Jamaica in particular must have been settled by many 

extremists, and I believe that Levellerish and Ranterish influences contributed to the 

Buccaneer "utopia" on Tortuga. Here for the first time, thanks to Esquemelin, we can 

study a successful New World proto-TAZ in some depth. Fleeing from hideous "benefits" 

of Imperialism such as slavery, serfdom, racism and intolerance, from the tortures of 

impressment and the living death of the plantations, the Buccaneers adopted Indian 

---