[ these notes have been extrapolated and expanded upon, the source is Hakim Bey's writings on the TAZ ]

“The New Autonomy will either infiltrate the media and subvert ‘it’ from within — or else never be “seen” at all. The TAZ exists not only beyond Control but also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond the understanding of the State, beyond the State’s ability to SEE.”

The TAZ must be understood in action.

Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It’s a bootstrap op. The first step is somewhat akin to satori - the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization.

TAZ rises up from insurrection, from within.

TAZ is a not a new frontier, because there is no more terra incognita. TAZ has to do with a 1:1 mapping, a level at which the state system has a hard time keeping an eye on.

The map is closed but the TAZ is open. It unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the carography of Control. It is psychotopographical (and psychotemporal.)

Psychotopology/Psychotopography as an alternative science to that of the State’s surveying, mapmaking, psychic imperialism. Psychotopography can draw 1:1 maps and carry out actions that cannot be an item of surveillance.

Psychotopology is the art of ‘dowsing’ for potential TAZs, for flowering zones, spaces, which for a time have escaped notice by the map makers, or has been neglected by the State.

Reaction alone cannot provide the energy needed to “manifest” a TAZ. An uprising must be for something as well.

The band is an affinity group sworn to a bond of love. Hakim Bey is not talking about a cult! He is suggesting a re-tribalization, no less than McLuhan was predicting that the world was becoming retribalized
as an inevitability.

The use of time by the state: psychotemporal oppression.

‘Science’ of psychotopology indicates “flows of forces” and “spots of power” (borrowed occultist metaphors) which localize the TAZ in space time.

Vital to shaping TAZ reality is the concept of psychic nomadism (rootless cosmopolitanism). Our minds are not grounded in any one belief or source, a consequence of our access to culture and lore from all parts of the world. We are able to see for the first time through eyes like some golden insect’s, each facet giving a view of an entirely other world.

Psychic nomadism as a tactic. They are apaches (”enemies”) of the old Consensus. There is a need and desire for TAZ.

Terms below do not define areas but suggest tendencies:

• Net: totality of all information and communication transfer.
• Web: the alternate horizontal open structure of info-exchange, non-hierarchic network
• Counter-Net: clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web.

The TAZ tends to ignore production altogether and simply picks up what it can use. (Collaborative, remix, piracy, bootstrapping)

The TAZ has a temporary but actual location in time and a temporary but actual location in space. The Web provides logistical support for the TAZ, it helps to bring it into being, but is not itself the TAZ.

The TAZ ‘exists’ in information-space as well as in the ‘real world’. The Web informs the TAZ, so as to compensate for its lack of duration.

The Web is a support system, capable of carrying information from one TAZ to another, of defending the TAZ, rendering it ‘invisible’ or giving it teeth, as the situation might demand. The web does not depend for its existence on any computer technology. The key is not the brand or level of tech involved but the openness and horizontality of the structure.

If the TAZ is a nomad camp, then the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies and legends of the tribe (sorely needed for restorative global action)

“Reality Hacking” plays a major role in the creation of TAZs.

Data-piracy, unauthorized transmissions and the free flow of information can never be frozen. Chaos theory predicts that any universal Control-system is impossible.

The TAZ desires above all to avoid mediation. It wants to experience its existence as immediate, not filtered through Simulation (see Immediatism). Breast-to-breast, face-to-face.

TAZ wants to live in this world, not just an idea of another world, or some visionary world.

TAZ lies at the intersection of many forces, like some pagan power-spot at the junction of mysterious ley-lines, visible to the adept in seemingly unrelated bits of terrain, landscape, flows of air, water, animals. (What I refer to as “The Weave“.)

The patterns of force which bring the TAZ into being have something in common with those chaotic “Strange Attractors” which exist, so to speak, between the dimensions.

Above all, TAZ will live, now, or as soon as possible, in however suspect or ramshackle a form, spontaneously, without regard for ideology or even anti-ideology.

TAZ is an intensification, a surplus, life spending itself in living rather than merely surviving.

The TAZ-hacker will work for the evolution of clandestine fractal connections. These connections and the different information that flows among and between them will form ‘power outlets’ for the coming into being of the TAZ itself.

The TAZ has occured, is occuring, and will occur with or without the computer.

Becoming ‘wild’ is always an erotic act, an act of nakedness, exposure, vulnerability.

Escapist communes become less possible the stronger the cartography of the state. Do cults qualify amongst these communes? Surely the state must frown deeply on it in any form.

TAZ can manifest as an interzone which opens up in the midst or wake of war and revolution. Meanwhile, keep on the move and live intensely.

Pirate economies: Living high off the surplus of social overproduction, a shared air of impermanence, of being ready to move on, shape-shift, re-locate to other places or planes of reality.

“The Will to Disappearance” - TAZ is in some sense a tactic of disappearance. Disappearance is not necessarily a ‘catastrophe’.

Why bother to confront a ‘power’ which has lost all meaning and become sheer Simulation? Such confrontations will only result in dangerous and ugly spasms of violence by the empty-headed shit-for-brains who’ve inherited the keys to all the armories and prisons.

Disappearance seems to be a very logical radical option for our time. Strategies in the always-ongoing “revolution of everyday life”: the struggle that cannot cease even with the last failure of political or social revolution because nothing except the end of the world can bring an end to everyday life, nor to our aspirations for the good things. Nietzsche said, if the world could come to an end, logically it would have done so; it has not, so it does not. (Concentrate much more on the day to day of the individual/community than on long term global circumstances, though clearly the planetary stage is forever contextual to all our efforts.)

Hacking is another form of “education” with certain features of “invisibility” (I am very interested in developing some understanding on reality hacking. What is it? How does one go about hacking reality?) (The Hacker Ethic)

Refusal of work as a new mode of rebellion: self-employment, emerges out of the Hacker Ethic.

The area of “catastrophe” where the breakdown of the system can equal enlightenment (does global communication breakdown promise some form of TAZ\enlightenment? The Web appears neutral to the activities of TAZ and Control, thus the constant flux.)

If the TAZ can exist, it does exist. But perhaps only as a sort of alternate reality which we so far have not learned to perceive clearly.

The New Autonomy will either infiltrate the media and subvert ‘it’ from within — or else never be “seen” at all. The TAZ exists not only beyond Control but also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond the understanding of the State, beyond the State’s ability to SEE.

Psychological Liberation:

• Create moments and spaces in which freedom is not only possible but actual.
• Know ways in which we are genuinely oppressed — also Shadow, self-repression and fantasy.
• Combat alienation. The TAZ must be the scene of our present autonomy but it can only exist on the condition that we already know ourselves as free beings.

We do not live in cyberspace; to dream that we do is to fall into CyberGnosis (McLuhan called it disincarnate existence), the false transcendence of the body.

The TAZ is a physical place and we are either in it or not. As power disappears, our will to power must be disappearance.

Liberation is realized struggle.

The TAZ offers a kind of ferality, a growth from tameness to wilderness, a return which is also a step forward. An acceptance of violence as actual and a release from the non-actual ideal of non-violence, of ‘peace’ may be essential (J. Krishnamurti)

The Yoga of Chaos

The TAZ is an art of life in continual rising up, wild but gentle — a seducer not a rapist, a smuggler rather than a bloody pirate, a dancer not an eschatologist.