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Title: Old habits die hard Author: Anonymous Date: 2019, December Language: en Topics: anti-civ, attack Source: Retrieved on December 18th, 2019 from https://anarchistnews.org/content/old-habits-die-hard
You put your left foot in
You take your left foot out
You put your left foot in
And you shake it all about
You do the hokey pokey
And you turn yourself around
That's what it's all about
-Inhabit
In habit, daily routine thinks in place of us.
From work to âfree timeâ, everything comes about within the continuity
of survival.
We always have something to cling to. The most stupefying characteristic
of todayâs society is the ability for âcomfortâ to exist a hairâs
breadth from catastrophe. The mass is usually fond of the mediocre, the
immobility of habit, the rigidity of prudence and afraid of the new, the
radical, the unknown of insurrection. Old habits die hard.
In a website smeared in washed-out shades of nauseating orange which are
the visual equivalent of an air raid siren coupled with the sound of
retching, "Inhabit" prophesizes parochial dreams of bucolic vigor. As
you scroll down, a demanding cadre sets about an interminable list of
impossible tasks, the reader thus incurs in a great debt from the
outset. Their 1-short-of-10 commandments begin with "Find each other".
This is because they begin their journey as shepherds without a sheeple.
If it was just a matter of disagreeing with the order of steps, then one
could propose an easy fix as simple as changing the order of their
9-step program. But each step merely serves to give a sense of urgency
to the act of delaying becoming ungovernable. Itâs the path to anarchy,
by way of Zenon's paradox. Not content with delaying the immediate
ninefold, they delay the delay by prefacing it with 5 headers weâll
deface as follows:
While de jure governments fail, the autonomous territories emplace a de
facto government with a new sense that to be free, we must be bound to
this society and its management of life. Enclaves of techno-feudalism
are diligently tilled for their resources by its peons who are
increasingly under the delusion that theyâre getting the upper hand by
putting in the work in all these crowdsourced and âfreeâ schemes in
which they themselves are the product. They fall into the gambit of
counter-revolution with the option: to hell or utopia? Either answer
satisfies them, so naturally they retroactively fashion a utopia out of
the living hell they resign to endure. They embrace the banality of
impoverishment and precarity and bolster it as a revolutionary
alternative, or envision it as latent or emergent insurrection.
Here, as in many of the subsections, they present a mishmash of strained
causal links between events and places far apart. A remanent of
discredited progressivist narratives. They mention Twitter, which
explains the speed and duration their attention spans. Attention deficit
manifest in their incapacity to be present in the moment. Which leads to
a fetishization of dwelling as a concept, but they eviscerate it by
elementary Cartesian divisions of space and time.
âTimeâ is a lesion on your brain, a scar on your soul.
Perception is muddled by the teleology of timeâs arrow.
If the concept of time inhabits your mind, youâll suffer life mutilated
as self-management.
You become hostage to future.
Lost in a topology of nihilism, their notions of truth and space prove
to be Kantian and Euclidian.
They seek escape, running laps around a Mobius strip, ignoring the void
in the middle. They go deeper into Klein bottle of their misconceptions.
âSpaceâ is a gaping wound, bleeding the living world in the form of
resources. âInhabitâ delineates a project of civilizing the remaining,
re-emerging (due to catastrophes), or imagined pockets of "wilderness"
in a contrived pseudo-periphery; "uninhabited land" ripe for the taking.
So much "empty space" to carry out activities in your "free time".
They see society as a broken machine, running on the power of the
peopleâs labor.
They spring from a habit of digital cybernetic politics and crave a
low-tech analog cybernetic politics.
They think that the machine can be fixed, running on the power of
peopleâs labor.
This plentiful renewable resource is a dirty fuel and highly
unsustainable.
People farming for a new tomorrow. Time severed from place. There is not
a new world to replace this one. Our Earth is dying from life extracted
into power; biofuels and biopolitics. Power breaks us irreversibly. The
seduction towards shared power is the death drive.
Everything is encumbered by sites of assembly and disassembly of new and
old Leviathans.
Calls to inhabit the vacant husks of mega-machines, populating its fuel
tanks, charging its energy cells.
Compulsive jittering actions to fill each void, instead of widening
them. Quickly spackling over every crack that opens, snuffing out every
flame that spontaneously ignites.
Nothing is missing. Letâs make room for it.
Without further delay, or rather to get to the crux of their delay, here
are their 9 steps, and why theyâre wrong:
If we're already isolated, let's not ruin it.
To say we are the only rebels in a sea of submission is reassuring
because it puts an end to the game in advance. We are simply saying that
we do not know who our accomplices may be and that in the middle of a
social tempest this becomes harder to discern.
Likewise, the choice of refusal doesnât need to be taken only by people
who were isolated beforehand, but also by people who were included in
the community but choose a total break with their defined role. The
issue is which principles, values and desires someone chooses to follow.
A rebel is one who wishes to be. Know yourselves â be infertile and let
the earth be silent after ye.
Relations of affinity do not exist on the basis of ideology or quantity,
but start off from reciprocal knowledge, from feeling and sharing
projectual passions. But projectual affinity and autonomous individual
action are dead letters if they cannot spread without being sacrificed
in the name of some claimed higher necessity.
To place the burden of your own liberation on another is to oppress them
with cruel fantasies stemming from your own submissiveness. Encounters
may happen along the way, but:
How will you find fellow travelers if you delay the attack?
To begin by aspiring to build hubs is to begin with a demand for a
concession: armistice.
Begging to be allowed the time to concentrate into camps. Donât occupy
strongholds.
The troops will always be able to take them or simply destroy them with
their artillery.
Police will always be able to evict them with a series of raids. Instead
of building encampments,
become proficient at the far ambush. Find places that are easy to strike
from and leave easily.
While itâs viable for them to raid every hub, they cannot safeguard from
all random attacks from a distance by unknown individuals.
In an age where wildfires and floods abruptly reshape the contours of
the inhabitable, they place their bets on sticking to a place. In an age
when the names of la ZAD, Rojava, and Exarchia are more often in the
mouths of those who speak of their ongoing eviction, they place their
bets on holding on to a shifting terrain. Theyâll end up falling between
the cracks of shifting terrain as tectonic plates snap into new
configurations.
Their sequel of âBack to the Landâ manifests itself as enclaves of
prefiguration for the denizens of succumbed cities. We forget we are all
living in a ghetto, even if we donât pay rent and every day is a Sunday.
If we are not capable of destroying this ghetto, the freedom to
experiment will be a poor thing indeed. Housing estates and land
availability are a consequence of the displacement and concentration of
the population according to the needs of the economy and social control.
Establishing hubs plays into this game, confusing subletting for
sublevating.
Organizations that set themselves up as vanguard of the exploited must
conceal the fact that domination is a social relation, not simply a
general headquarters to be conquered in order to justify their role. An
organization that bolsters the creation of hubs to centralize power is
barefaced. The writers of âInhabitâ resolve this by setting loose some
commandments and delegating the self-management of their franchises of
power.
They speak of collective power; no power can support itself without the
voluntary servitude of those it dominates. Power is a social
relationship, a social hierarchical organization model, a way of
life-management. Reformism acts on detail, quantitatively. It mobilizes
vast numbers of people in order to change a few isolated aspects of
power. âInhabitâ is the sugarcoating of decentralized D.I.Y.
biopolitics.
Security, territory, population. They encourage the reader to target an
area with the logic of occupation.
Building hubs is an act of bordering, delimiting a zone of exclusion. An
intimate act of social cohesion producing productive subjectivities, set
apart from external superfluous strangers. The opposite of rewilding;
re-civilizing pockets of wildness.
There are those who sacrifice themselves through action and those who do
so through passivity. Those who sacrifice themselves through armed
struggle, and those who do so through plowshares. During Occupy, the
inauspicious ideology of hubs transformed the need for coherence of the
few into the gregariousness of the many. May arms finally turn
themselves against the ideology of hubs!
They need skilled laborers to build their still
workerist-but-no-longer-waged communism.
They call for reskilling for a functionalist insertion into the
alternative labor pool of intentional communities. Their resilience
keeps social peace by producing an alternative normality that coexists
with the ongoing states of exception, crisis, and disaster recovery
periods. The bare necessities for subsistence, plus the meager niceties
and comforts of living in the wake of disaster, become the vague
insinuations of the program for the coming insurrection.
Without wanting to revive the myth that the general strike is the
unshackling of insurrection, it is clear enough that the interruption of
all social activity is still decisive. Subversive action must tend
towards the paralysis of normality, no matter what originally caused the
clash. An institution of alternative normality that can withstand cyclic
upheavals of mainstream normality is an active means of
counter-insurgence. This is the domain NGOs, their wide deployment and
heavy investment corresponds with the effectiveness of these measures to
prevent revolt.
No future. Abandon this world of social obligations, the first among
which is to save it. Let go.
They make a call for collective forms of care. In other words, to pick
up the human mess that civilization has made of people. Take care of the
old, take care of the children, in the interim, deny yourself of life,
until you become a product of care once again. The externalized costs of
the status quo are to be borne by the labor force of hubs. The
overworked and malnourished emotional wrecks are to giddy-up and
double-down on the work of repairing this world. The interminable work
of being a perennial volunteer of ongoing disaster response.
They say the time of isolation is over, so come on over to be cogs for a
different machine. From the assembly line, to the bucket brigade to put
out fires, or to hand out packs of bottled water from trucks.
Surviving is already a full-time job, now they ask you work overtime as
life-support for this system.
Attack!
We slander those who stand for society!
The hands of our clock have stopped in the moment of attack.
Towards an informal disaggregation of anarchists that will
continuously attack authority and society.
Spontaneity, individuality and desires will kill organization.
The effectiveness of our strategy
will not be measured by the figures of participation.
Exploring possibilities of acting alone,
rebelling against stifling social cages.
Our joy is great whether we meet accomplices.
People are in the habit of asking and waiting for ready solutions
rather than seeking their own responses themselves.
Everywhere they replicate current governmentality.
Hastily they seek to jump from finding each other, to hubs, to the
network, because itâs all the same tired ploy to reach âcritical massâ.
When you havenât even had the chance to get to know a unique individual
and explore a few moments of life with them, youâre already neck deep in
the anonymizing morass of a crowd. Hubs and networks seek to make
legible the chaotic variables. Organic relating fitting into neat
network diagrams easily analyzed with algorithms by computers.
Do not act en masse. Carry out solitary actions. Learn to attack and
disappear quickly. The police attempt to crush a crowd of thousands with
one single group of a hundred cops. It is easier to defeat a hundred men
than one alone, especially if they strike suddenly and disappear
mysteriously. The police and army will be powerless if everywhere is
crawling by these small unseizable detachments. A single cell, a lone
wolf. Instead of a network, we suggest the formation of small, versatile
cells, which map the metropolis, make plans, choose the targets and
attack.
Death to the world-builders!
In a forced crescendo, they hurry up to scale their network of hubs into
a full-blown mass scale society.
Their proposal is ultimately the rustic version of FALC (Fully Automated
Luxury Communism): Manual Labor Austere Communism. Crypto-communist
pseudo-anarchists unironically stand for barracks communism. They
resolve to bridge Bookchinâs unbridgeable chasm by turning lifestylism
into a new platformism.
For its part, the State has every interest in reducing the revolutionary
threat to a few bustling hubs in order to transform subversion into a
clash between two armies: the institutions with their extractivism,
agribusiness and just-in-time supply chains on the one hand, the
invisible party with their chicken coops on the other. What power fears
most is anonymous, generalized rebellion. The organization of autonomous
subsistenceâwith a program and a monogramâspecific to revolutionaries,
can certainly have libertarian characteristics, just as the insurrection
desired by many anarchists is undoubtedly also an âarmed struggleâ. But
is that enough?
Amidst submerged cities, the seemingly floundering capitalists throw out
buoys to those gasping to stay alive in the deadly seas of economic
turmoil. How many anarchists would be among the first to reach out to
grab one? What better than a bunch of D.I.Y. obsessed
anti-authoritarians to self-manage disaster capitalismâs swindle of
âfixing thingsâ?
Make total destroy!
Redundant parallel replication of infrastructure constitutes an
intensification of anthropocentric extraction and extinction of
biodiversity. No longer just the centralized hubs of agribusiness and
water treatment plants, but now any and all available plot of land,
streams, and reservoir of ground water are to be instrumentalized as
resources for human subsistence.
How do they intend to commandeer supply lines without oppressive
hierarchies? Is it full automation, robot slaves to do your bidding? How
do you seize power without governing? The page can bear all
contradictions. How does one turn a phrase meaning âextreme povertyâ
into a command to appropriate the corpse of Leviathan? We find
infrastructure is lacking something desired or needed.
Here they manifest an avocation for the management of techno-industrial
systems, as if it would acquire a benign quality were it only run by
enthusiastic doe eyed volunteers.
The exploited have nothing to self-manage but their own negation as
such. That is the only way that their bosses, leaders and apologists in
various guises will disappear along with them. In this âimmense task of
urgent demolitionâ we must find joy, immediately. No ideology of
dialogue and participation will ever be able to completely mask
exclusion and internal colonies (as their hubs ultimately are). If they
do not wish to deceive themselves and others, those struggling for the
demolition of the present social edifice must face the fact that
subversion is a game of wild, barbarous forces.
Begin and end here. This is step zero. This is the true path.
Everything that constitutes this step should happen now or it wonât
happen.
And this is just a necessary, but not sufficient, minimal prerequisite
for anarchy.
They say revolution is a line they trace on the present, yet their list
consists of 9 steps which could each take lifetime to come to fruition,
and none guarantee a revolution, in fact itâs highly unlikely.
Moreover, revolutions are not what we desire. An insurrection is not a
more modest attempt at a revolution, but the delusion that revolutions
are good, and that a fraction of one is still worthwhile. Whoever makes
half a revolution digs their own grave. Whoever makes half an
insurrection lies dead in a ditch. You canât make sure that anyone will
follow you, much less everyone.
So, make haste and attack at will! Wait for no one!
The time to attack is now.
There is nothing and no one to wait for.
To act now, with determined projectuality where our destructive tension
is the defining factor in our lives, not something that is built upon by
following a 9-step program, or a 5-year plan.
They conceptualized revolt as delayed indemnification from
disaster-as-usual.
The present social organization is not just delaying, it is also
preventing and corrupting any practice of freedom. The only way to learn
what freedom is, is to experiment it. The schema of politics reappears
as one starts flying in a straight line. To say what the enemy does not
expect and be where they are not waiting for us; that is our predilected
form of poetry.
An individual with a passion for social upheaval and a âpersonalâ vision
of the class clash wants to do something immediately. If he or she
analyses the transformation of capital and the State, it is in order to
attack them, certainly not to be able to go to sleep with clearer ideas.
Contrary to the writer, the soldier, or the farmer for whom these are
professional affairs so have a mercantile identity, the subversive
remains subversive even without pen, gun or egg laying chicken, so long
as he possesses the weapon that contains all the others: his own
resoluteness. These farmers of inhabitants seek to centralize activity,
to put all eggs in one basket. By what mechanism other than
metamorphosis via false homophones do they intend to turn coops in
coups?
Reveling in messianic thought, like inverted Christs, they want us to
sacrifice ourselves first by becoming the carpenters that will build the
manger where we will languish with our friends in wait of the coming
insurrection. We will not be confounded by this ancillary appelery. Then
why waste time on this ornery tiqqunery?
Our arms aim at the center mass of the managers of power and their
uniformed mercenaries,
our words seek to blow up the social relationships that give rise to
power.
Because unless slaves, even when they revolt, deeply renounce the
mindset of submission, they will
give way to renewed flexible projects of social control.
These pages are for the deranged, individuals not submerged in habit,
regimented by protocol or banalized by identity, who refuse to be
controlled, âfacilitatedâ or herded into numerically oriented deadlines.
They want to encounter those who can still raise their voices and howl
with joy in a subdued world!
Our aim is to disassemble the small and large representations of
informal power!
Freedom has no prescription; it is conquered day by day, while youâre
experiencing it!
Black anarchy will never be mass-friendly!
Instead of measuring our lives in flat-mates, hubs, acres, and eggs;
we chose to live without measure!