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Title: AlieNation: The Map of Despair Author: CrimethInc. Date: September 11, 2000 Language: en Topics: space, alienation, Internet, technology Source: Retrieved on 6th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/alienation-the-map-of-despair
In the modern world, control is exerted over us automatically by the
spaces we live and move in. We go through certain rituals in our lives —
work, “leisure,” consumption, submission — because the world we live in
is designed for these alone. We all know malls are for shopping, offices
are for working, ironically-named “living” rooms are for watching
television, and schools are for obeying teachers. All the spaces we
travel in have pre-set meanings, and all it takes to keep us going
through the same motions is to keep us moving along the same paths. It’s
hard to find anything to do in Walmart but look at and purchase
merchandise; and, accustomed to doing this as we are, it’s hard to
conceive that there could be anything else we could do there anyway —
not to mention that doing anything but shopping there is pretty much
illegal, when you think about it. There are fewer and fewer free,
undeveloped spaces left in the world where we can let our bodies and
minds run free. Almost every place you can go belongs to some person or
group which has already designated a meaning and proscribed use for it:
private estate, shopping district, superhighway, classroom, national
park. And our very predictable routes through the world rarely take us
near the free areas that do remain. These spaces, where thought and
pleasure can be free in every sense, are being replaced with carefully
controlled environments like Disneyland — places in which our desires
are prefabricated and sold back to us at our financial and emotional
expense. Giving our own meaning to the world and creating our own ways
to play and act in it are fundamental parts of human life; today, when
we are never in spaces that encourage this, it should be no surprise
that so many of us feel desperate and unfulfilled. But because the world
has so little free space left in it, and the circuitry of our everyday
lives never takes us there, we’re forced to go to places like Disneyland
for any semblance of play and excitement at all. Thus the real adventure
our hearts crave has been largely replaced by fake adventure, and the
thrill of creation by the drill of spectatorship.
Our time is as thoroughly occupied and regulated as our space; indeed,
the subdivision of our space is a manifestation of what has already
happened to our time. The entire world moves and lives according to a
standardized time system, designed to synchronize our movements from one
side of the planet to the other. Inside of this larger system, we all
have our lives regimented by our work schedules and/or school hours, as
well as the hours that public transportation runs and businesses
operate, etc. This scheduling of our lives, which begins in childhood,
exerts a subtle but deep control over us all: we come to forget that the
time of our lives is ultimately ours to spend how we choose, and instead
think in terms of work days, lunch hours, and weekends. A truly
spontaneous life is unthinkable to most of us; and so-called “free” time
is usually just time that has been scheduled for something other than
work. How often do you get to see the sun rise? How many sunny afternoon
walks do you get to take? If you had the unexpected opportunity to take
an exciting trip this week, could you do it?
These restricting environments and schedules drastically limit the vast
potential of our lives. They also keep us isolated from each other. At
our jobs, we spend a great deal of time doing one particular kind of
labor with one particular group of people, in one set place (or at least
in one set environment, for construction workers and “temp” employees).
Such limited, repetitive experience gives us a very limited perspective
on the world, and keeps us from coming to know people from other
backgrounds. Our homes isolate us further: today we keep ourselves
locked apart in little boxes, partly out of fear of those capitalism has
treated even worse than ourselves, and partly because we believe the
paranoia propaganda of the companies that sell security systems. Today’s
suburbs are cemeteries of community, the people packed separately into
boxes… just like our supermarket products, sealed for “freshness.” With
thick walls between us and our neighbors, and our friends and families
scattered across cities and nations, it’s hard to have any kind of
community at all, let alone share community space in which people can
benefit from each other’s creativity. And both our homes and our jobs
keep us tied down to one place, stationary, unable to travel far through
the world except on hasty vacations.
Even our travel is restricted and restricting. Our modern methods of
transportation — cars, buses, subways, trains, airplanes — all keep us
locked onto fixed tracks, watching the outside world go by through a
screen, as if it were a particularly boring television show. Each of us
lives in a personal world that consists mostly of well-known
destinations (the workplace, the grocery store, a friend’s apartment,
the dance club) with a few links in between them (sitting in the car,
standing in the subway, walking up the staircase), and little chance to
encounter anything unexpected or discover any new places. A man could
travel the freeways of ten nations without seeing anything but asphalt
and gas stations, so long as he stayed in his car. Locked onto our
tracks, we can’t imagine truly free travel, voyages of discovery that
would bring us into direct contact with brand new people and things at
every turn.
Instead, we sit in traffic jams, surrounded by hundreds of people in the
same predicament as ourselves, but separated from them by the steel
cages of our cars — so they appear to us as objects in our way rather
than fellow human beings. We think we are reaching more of the world
with our modern transportation; but in fact we see less of it, if
anything. As our transportation capabilities increase, our cities sprawl
farther and farther across the landscape. Whenever travel distances
increase, more cars are needed; more cars demand more space, and thus
distances increase again… and again. At this rate highways and gas
stations will one day replace everything that was worth traveling to in
the first place.
A curious effect of the development of rapid transit systems is that as
the distance between communities closes, the distance between
individuals within those communities widens.
Some of us look at the internet as the “final frontier,” as a free,
undeveloped space still ripe for exploring. Cyberspace may or may not
offer some degree of freedom to those who can afford to use and explore
it; but whatever it might offer, it offers on the condition that we
check our bodies at the door: voluntary amputation. Remember, you are a
body at least as much as a mind: is it freedom to sit, stationary,
staring at glowing lights for hours, without using your senses of taste,
touch, or smell? Have you forgotten the sensations of wet grass or warm
sand under bare feet, of eucalyptus tree or hickory smoke in your
nostrils? Do you remember the scent of tomato stems? The glint of
candlelight, the thrill of running, swimming, touching?
Today we can turn to the internet for excitement without feeling like we
have been cheated because our modern lives are so constrained and
predictable that we have forgotten how joyous action and motion in the
real world can be. Why settle for the very limited freedom that
cyberspace can provide, when there is so much more experience and
sensation to be had out here in the real world? We should be running,
dancing, canoeing, drinking life to the dregs, exploring new worlds —
what new worlds? We must rediscover our bodies, our senses, the space
around us, and then we can transform this space into a new world to
which we can impart meanings of our own.
To this end, we need to invent new games — games that can take place in
the conquered spaces of this world, in the shopping malls and
restaurants and classrooms, that will break down their proscribed
meanings so that we can give them new meanings in our accordance with
our own dreams and desires. We need games that will bring us together,
out of the confinement and isolation of our private homes, and into
public spaces where we can benefit from each other’s company and
creativity. Just as natural disasters and power outages can bring people
together and be exciting for them (after all, they do make for a little
thrilling variety in an otherwise drearily predictable world), our games
will join us together in doing new and exciting things. We will have
poetry in the factories, concerts in the streets, sex in the fields and
libraries, free picnics in supermarkets, public fairs on freeways.
We need to invent new conceptions of time and new modes of travel, as
well. Try living without a clock, without synchronizing your life with
the rest of the busy, busy world. Try taking a long trip on foot or
bicycle, so that you will encounter everything that you pass between
your starting point and your destination firsthand, without a screen.
Try exploring in your own neighborhood, looking on rooftops and around
corners you never noticed before — you’ll be amazed how much adventure
is hidden there waiting for you!