💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › moxie-marlinspike-the-promise-of-defeat.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:46:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Promise of Defeat Author: Moxie Marlinspike Language: en Topics: anti-capitalism, squatting, illegalism
Sometimes I think about my life as a series of schemes, plans, plots,
and experiments. Everything I've tried, every hare-brained scheme I've
hatched, every implausible thought I've run with up until this moment.
And if I'm really honest with myself, the trail of ideas that disappears
into the horizon behind me is completely and utterly mined over with
failures. Comic failures, tragic failures, dramatic failures — failures
of all types.
Anarchists are best known for their failures. They lost the Spanish
Civil War, the Soviets prevailed in Hungary '56, the Paris communards
were shot to death, and the status quo continued after May '68. And yet,
far from trying to suppress these histories, these are the stories that
anarchists recount. Even anarchist holidays tend to commemorate moments
of dazzling defeat: Haymarket, Sacco & Vanzetti, Berkman's botched
assassination, etc...
This is unusual. American Patriots do not speak, with a gleam in their
eyes, of the incredible number of battles that George Washington lost
(and he lost almost as much as anarchists do). Instead he's there, at
the bow of that boat, guiding the way through the expansive darkness, as
he crosses the Delaware river to victory. The prevailing holidays of the
various nation states, religions, and authoritarian movements that we've
grown up with do not generally harp on their failures. Instead, they
choose to celebrate Independence Days, Resurrections, and the Wars They
Won.
The difference between the ways Nationalists and Anarchists talk about
their histories seems critical. Of course, it's very possible that
anarchists talk about defeat simply because they have no other histories
to choose from. But I like to think that it's because Anarchists see
past the tendency towards quantifiability. That they know there are
moments in time, even preceding defeat, where people learn more about
themselves, and feel a greater sense of inspiration from what they're
experiencing, than from all the George Washingtons victoriously sailing
across all the Delaware rivers of the world.
Here's a story about defeat.
I live in a city that some people would call a "high pressure zone" — a
place with a thriving service sector and a centrality to the workings of
the global economy. Real estate values here have been exploding for
decades now, and the difficulty that this presents is something that I'm
almost constantly dealing with.
The ways that we choose to respond to difficulty are interesting.
Cultures of all types are constantly institutionalizing certain
responses, and to some extent the responses we choose often reflect
cultural rules as much as anything else. Anarchists are not immune to
this. If you're hungry, the anarchist answer is dumpster diving. If you
need space, the anarchist answer is squatting. But maybe it shouldn't be
as simple as this. We live complex lives in the midst of complex
situations, which to some degree will always defy recipes and
generalized responses. Besides, trying the same things over and over
again causes them to eventually lose their charm. Shouldn't the
anarchist response embody inspiration, dynamicism, and experimentation
in an unpredictable way?
At some point I started to think critically about my strategies for
dodging the high rents and impossible space constraints in the city
where I live. The anarchist recipe of trying to squat the few empty
buildings I could find didn't really work for me in a town where the
pressure is so high.
Instead I started to wonder about the possibilities of the ocean; where
the harsh lines of property ended, and an apparent sense of possibility
began. The idea seemed obvious: pirates. Here it was, the experiment
that I'd been looking for all along. The story I'd known about since the
naive Halloweens of my childhood. A floating piece of autonomy, off the
shores of capitalism, but still within cannon range.
I didn't know anything about boats, sailing, or what might lay beyond
the horizon. But I suspected that, like anything, the secret was to
begin.
And so with only a sense of inspiration under our belts, some
co-conspirators and I started to try and make this happen. We found a
very old, very derelict, 55' triple-masted schooner. Finding this boat
was like finding another world, and the shape of my time changed
completely. Suddenly I was fiberglassing, caulking, and epoxying. I was
sanding, painting, and scraping. I was cursing dry-rot as my sworn
enemy, and finding a friend in fungus-hunting epoxy. I was going to
sleep with sunburn on my face and waking up with sawdust in my hair. I
felt strong at the end of the day with engine grease on my hands and
soot on my neck.
I would question the whole ocean experiment when, in time, I would find
myself alone on a boat in the Pacific Ocean, with no land in sight,
trying to repair the rigging as I swung violently from the top of the
mast. Or in the Caribbean, when I finally saw Haiti emerge from the
horizon, only to spend two days completely becalmed before it under the
blazing hot sun. It was easy to start questioning where I was going, and
why I was traveling by the slowest means possible. But it felt right. I
learned about survival, isolation, and adversity. I came to know things
about the ocean, the wind, and the sky. I even learned a little about
insanity.
Years later, after being out of town for a few months, I once again
found myself without a place to live upon my return. Rather than pass
the time as a houseguest, I started sleeping on the roof of a large
building. It was just before an anarchist bookfair, though, and so I was
preparing zines and CDs to table there. As the inventory of my
possessions on-hand grew far beyond the size of my backpack, I found
myself in an increasingly absurd situation. Every night, as stealthily
as possible, I'd carry spools of three hundred CDRs, an external hard
drive, a desktop inkjet printer, and a bike up to the roof of this
building. It was the kind of situation where, rather than going to sleep
with the anxiety of being caught, I'd doze off while chuckling about the
image of what that would look like. There I would be, caught squatting a
rooftop, surrounded with the accouterments of a full CD pressing
operation.
Not to mention that I'd finally broken down and gotten an electric
toothbrush for my ever-depleting gum line. I mean, it's acceptable to
charge your cellphone in a cafe, but your toothbrush? People were
constantly looking at me like "Is that you're toothbrush you're
charging?" And I'd give them a look that says "Fuck yeah, that's my
toothbrush. Sonicare 2000."
It couldn't continue, though. The weather was preparing to change, and
there were things that I wanted to do which required more space
consistency than what my rooftop provided. Instead, as a part of all
that I'd discovered off-shore in my sailing experiments, I resolved to
try building a floating house along the derelict waterfront of my city.
Something that would provide a lot of room and remain more-or-less
stationary, but which I could dock more mobile boats to. The home base
for an emerging armada, with room for friends to build their own
adjacent floating islands.
I talked with some friends who were excited about trying the same thing.
We didn't know anything about building floating houses, but decided to
test a design and see if it worked. So we drew up a rough sketch that
was essentially a series of 12'x8' platforms, each floating on six
sealed 55-gallon barrels. The idea was that the 12x8 platforms could be
built and floated one at a time. Then they would be joined together once
they were in the water. From there, we could build structures on top of
them.
Scotch and I went out together on the late-night material scavenging
missions. We rode our bikes through unknown parts of the city,
discovering strange abandoned warehouses on collapsing piers that have
become islands in themselves, surreal concrete anomalies, and mazes of
unusual relics from a long-past shipping industry. Our shadows played
over the wreckage of the forgotten landscape under the late-night sodium
lamps, as we clambered over fences, crouched in the dark, and stared in
wonder through broken windows. It's amazing how something as simple as
scouting for active construction sites can shake up your sense of
geography so significantly, by forcing you to take the roads you don't
normally take, and to go slow enough to really look at the things around
you.
We'd have races up the hill to the bike cart while carrying sheets of
plywood, our lungs stinging with the cold night air. We'd do our best to
stifle laughter every time we'd drop something with a dramatic crash, or
every time the bike cart toppled the entire load into the street.
There's nothing quite as funny as watching your friend try to quietly
throw an empty 55-gallon steel drum over a razor-wire fence. And it's
hard not to smile when you realize that there's nothing quite as
conspicuous as towing a bike trailer down empty city streets at 3am,
with ten 16' lengths of 2x4 extending far into the road behind you.
Our days were spent down at the abandoned waterfront with a brace
(manual drill / screw driver) and hand saw, where we'd assemble the
platforms and attach the sealed barrels to them. The work was fun, we
were by the ocean, and we ended up meeting a number of interesting
characters. All the construction was happening on a giant piece of
concrete embedded into the shore, which had a number of small holes in
it. One day a guy suddenly appeared behind me out of nowhere, and when I
turned around he scared the daylights out of me. He explained that he
lived below the shore, and motioned to one of the holes in the concrete.
I looked down into the dark depths below, and he offered to take me in
and show me around.
We both barely fit through the hole, but it opened up into a large cave
that echoed with the lapping sounds of the ocean. My new friend liked to
drink gin, and he told me all kinds of stories about that section of the
waterfront, everything he's seen, and the various riff-raff (referring
to me) that he'd encountered over the years. I asked if my construction
project was disturbing him, and he assured me that he was interested in
seeing me carry the thing through.
So a few nights later, some friends and I floated the first section —
all alone on the derelict shore, with only the moonlight glinting off
the water to help us. It took five of us to flip it over and get it
poised above the rising tide. It went in with a splash, and rode high.
Seeing it actually float was amazing, and we all looked at each other
with huge grins. We jumped on it, danced on it, and eventually just sat
on it together as we talked and looked out over the bay. When it got
late, we rowed it a little ways off shore and anchored it, where it
would wait for other platforms to join it.
And so I spent the next week, gradually getting to know some of the
other strange characters who had made this wreckage their home. The
platforms slowly came together as we managed to find more and more
barrels.
One day I came down to the shore, ready to put the finishing touches on
another platform. But when I looked up, I noticed that the entire
floating apparatus was gone. All that remained was an empty patch of
water. With a shock, I searched up and down the shore, but didn't see
signs of it anywhere. Eventually I found some people fishing, who said
that they saw a boat full of people with orange vests arrive, unmoore
it, and tow it away.
I called the police and the coast guard, before eventually determining
that it had been done at the behest of a man named Hadley Prince, from
the Port Authority.
Hadley Prince.
The name alone conjured images of some robber baron industrialist,
twirling his handle-bar mustache with menace and condescendingly
adjusting his top-hat. In reality, he was your average looking
bureaucrat with a demeanor that embodied the typical lack of sympathy.
He admitted to having been the one who ordered the hit on my floating
house, and when I showed him the relevant sections of the state and city
code (which prohibited him from taking such an action), he was very
clear about his ability to do whatever he wanted — regardless of the
law. When I pressed the matter even further, he looked down at my
highlighted stack of paper, paused, then stood up abruptly and shouted
"Get the fuck out of my office!"
I wasn't entirely surprised, but it felt terrible.
Objectively, this was defeat. In one swift move, my whole project had
been destroyed by the Port Authority. There was not even any sign that
my floating island had ever rested amongst the odd pilings and concrete
slabs along that waterfront. And they had laughed in my face as they did
it. It made me incredibly angry, and I did my best to portray that
contempt.
But in a way I was prepared for it. Just like with the task of
destroying capitalism, there were dizzying odds against me that I
couldn't ignore.
For anarchists, I think that victory is a kind of anathema. Will there
ever be a night — one glorious evening — when the world is won? Where
suddenly civilization, the spectacle, class, racism, and patriarchy all
simultaneously topple and remain in ruins?
Will there ever be a day when my housing desires are sated? Where I
suddenly come into possession of a palace — under a maze of linked
treehouses and a large skylab telescope — with room for all my friends
and loved ones? Where property tax is on holiday, and all the building
inspectors are out on permanent leave? Where me and all my housemates
have finally overcome all our neuroses, mental anguish, and trauma to
live with perfectly fulfilling relationships?
It seems unlikely to happen in one moment.
The George Washingtons of the world offer success. This is based on
"realism" and the logic of quantifiability, where it is necessary to
make compromises, pass laws, and assert control. Because these are the
things that can be won; this is where success is found. According to
them, at the end of this experiment I was left with nothing, and so it
would have made more sense to sell my soul to a mortgage for a mediocre
house (that doesn't even float!) or pay rent as best I can for the rest
of my life.
Anarchy, by contrast, offers us defeat. This is a logic that transcends
quantifiability, emphasizes our desires, and focuses on the tensions we
feel. Anarchists are such failures because, really, there can be no
victory. Our desires are always changing with the the context of our
conditions and our surroundings. What we gain is what we manage to tease
out of the conflicts between what we want and where we are. What I "won"
were the wistful moon-light bike rides, the realization of hidden
geography, the time spent with friends, the dance parties, the nights of
discovery, the chance to be in control of my surroundings, and those
fleeting moments of elation. Not to mention the opportunity to give
Hadley Prince the contempt that he deserves.
I wish that they hadn't destroyed my project. Longevity by itself,
though, says very little. The state has been around longer than I can
remember, and capitalism has been around for quite a while as well. Not
to mention, how many anarchist infoshops or community centers have been
around for years, but have lost the spark they'd started with long ago?
This is to say that we should never cease, even if all the banks burn
and the dams of the world over come crashing down. It's what allows us
to resist the institutionalization of our desires, the creeping
bureaucracy, the language of patriarchy, or whatever we might find. My
wish is to always hold that tension with me.
This is not to say that we should all sacrifice ourselves by hurling our
bodies indiscriminately against the crushing walls of capitalism. Just
the opposite. That given the anathema of victory, it's important to
consider just how defeat should look.
Remember that success is a word used to measure. It describes dollars
made, people counted, votes cast. In other words, it's a swindle. The
rejection of quantification, the emphasis on the role of the individual,
is what makes anarchism unique. There is no one battle I can fight to
win this, even if I were to sail across the Delaware to fight it.