no peanuts in church…

Remember Hakim Bey? Powerful 1990s techno-optimist essays about “Temporary Autonomous Zones”, “building upon the shifting sands”, and all that good Cyberpunk-era agitprop. Anarchist. Fluid moralities. Philosophy for the Future. Bey had a full working theory of dynamic, ephemeral power relations suited to a utopian, anarchist, post-State world. Any 1990s Chaote worth their salt had read him. “Cyberpunk, man! The State’s gonna wither away in the face of technology, man! Total Freedom, man… for those with the means to claim it!”

Also: Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) turned out to be a pedophile. All that Cyberpunk-ish, Postmodern anti-Statism turned out to be driven by a deep psychological recognition of the State as the chief obstacle to his… “predilections”. All that rousing text about “Let’s form a TAZ and change the world, man!” definitely changes its tone once you realize he’s describing how CSAM and a few, even uglier, networks worked, even back then.

Now, decades later, we get this Epstein docs release. Epstein, who transformed his private island into his very own TAZ for well-connected celebrities, billionaires and/or pedophiles. I see no need to link to any of it. But having watched the ‘Law and Order Party’ transform itself into whatever strange anarcho-authoritarian monster it has become over the past 15-20 years, that whole “Let’s Make the State Small enough to Drown it in a Bathtub” rhetoric sure has taken on a whole new sheen, hasn’t it?

At the time, Cyberpunk and Postmodernism scanned as vaguely ‘Left’, if only because there was no Jesus in either of them and neither were openly hostile to LGBT++… but if you read the actual texts, neither mindset was very concerned with things like “Liberty”, “Justice”, “Equality before the Law”, or anything else that recognizes the existence of a valid Civic Space. You know, the space where actual Politics is supposed to take place. In hindsight? These mindsets were always going to find their eventual home in the Right Wing. (I’m not going to link to Yarvin, either. But quite a bit of the so-called ‘NRx movement‘ basically cribbed its vocabulary, attitude and pose whole cloth, from Hakim Bey– they just reversed the political polarity, so to speak).

Grover just wanted to live tax-free off his daddy’s money, unmolested. But, as for the rest of them? “Law and Order” seems to have become an obstacle to their powers, and their pleasures, quite awhile ago. So It Simply Has to Go.

Epstein’s island. The Theil/Vance/Yarvin technocrats. ICE, out in the streets, with random killings. The whole right wing’s creed is now: “Impunity is our Birthright, dammit! Stop getting underfoot!”

Total Freedom, man… for those with the means to claim it…

(Be seeing you).