Re: [-empyre-] Why US DAT is Virtual

["The pHarmanaut" <pharmanaut@pharmakopolis.com>]

election eve.
oh boy. scarier than halloween.

thanks to Mathieu for your extensive and informative response. also thanks
to Tobias for continuing to circulate these ideas and their various nuances.

Randall, your response about "consciousness explosions" dropped into yet
more ongoing SI reading, this time from Vienet's "The Situationists and the
New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art" (1967). The article talks
about urban guerrilla tactics in mass media, and singles out pirate radio.
Then, "The illegality of such actions makes a sustained engagement on this
terrain impossible for any organization that has not chosen to go
underground, because it would require the formation within it of a
specialized subgroup -- a division of tasks which cannot be effectual
without compartmentalization and thus hierarchy, etc. Without, in a word,
finding oneself on the slippery slope toward terrorism. We can more
appropriately recall the notion of propaganda by deed, which is a very
different matter.... This type of unconcerted action cannot be expected to
bring about any decisive upheaval, but it can usefully serve to accentuate
the coming awakening of consciousness."

I'm concerned that the USDAT project has dropped into a purely partisan mode
of behavior and has become more reactionary than it started out. Of course,
I think that we were all somewhat taken aback by just how ugly the current
election year became. And the stakes are highest they've been in my
lifetime. But I hope that once this election has turned out, hopefully for
the best, the USDAT project can return to its larger concerns of working to
awaken mass consciousness through telematic manipulations that get at the
larger issues. I was intrigued by the MDK when it promised to hallucinate
something beyond the corporate control of mass media and the commercial
underwriting of American experience. But now MDK, and perhaps the entirity
of the project, is diminished by becoming a unilateral respondent to the
Bush administration and the popular monitor of his success, Fox News. This
suggests that any single spectacular strand functions as a self-contained
system and its actually worthy of response/rejection. This tends to mimick
and therefore perpetuate the hierarchical organization of the mediated
society rather than foil it. Rather, only the "false" totality of
manufactured options reveals our objective target, not just this totality
that stands in for the whole. I'm flashing Lovecraftian images of Azathoth
here, the sprawling chaos.

"From the strategical perspective of social struggles it must first of all
be said that one should never PLAY WITH TERRORISM. But even serious
terrorism has never in history had any desirable effect except in situations
where complete repression made impossible any other form of revolutionary
activity and thereby caused a significant portion of the population to side
with the terrorists" (Internationale Situationniste #12).

In some ways, the USDAT project will fare better, perhaps, should Bush win
tomorrow (Banish the Thought!), but with less challenge to what seem to have
become its major assumptions and goals. More challenging, then, will be the
answer to this, non-rhetorical question:

Where is USDAT on November 3?

-=Trace