[This piece was published as A Fistful of DOS in the final issue of the Australian magazine 21C.]

Zapspace
by Jon Lebkowsky

Computers have … made possible a new kind of organizing very much in keeping with the spirit of Zapatista organizing in Chiapas. Computer networks allow the creation of a rapid and free flowing fabric of democratic communication and cooperation. Unlike traditional organizations which have tended to have rigid, top-down hierarchical structures --including revolutionary organizations-- this electronic fabric of organization is a horizontal networking with infinite cross-linking. Efforts to IMPOSE hierarchical structures in cyberspace are very difficult because participants can easily abandon such a terrain and create their own new contacts, lists, conferences or newsgroups. – from Neoliberalism: Zapatismo In Cyberspace

Saturday afternoon July 12 in Austin, Texas and it's hotter than a bygod, air conditioners blasting inside while outside sunburned vendors sell items of arguable value, like at the corner of Ben White Blvd and Interstate 35, barely seen in the summer sun as I screeeeech 'round that corner… at first I think I'm seeing tombstones or like those white cross memorials you see where someone's had a fatal wreck, flowers, maybe a photo. But it's like there's a zillion of them, and they look like…uh, not the Blessed Virgin but…Tweety…and Sylvester…and Bugs! Plastic diminutive figurines, Mexican imports. Further round the corner going west, I see someone selling tacky paintings on black velvet, and I think, NAFTA this!

My meditation on St. Taz is broken as the light changes and I cruise east, looking for a street called Todd Lane. I'm digging an interesting piece of Austin real estate, South Park…an ambitious office park, plus state of the art movie theatre, first THX theatre in town, long closed now and gone to seed, a victim of the rude, complicated recession in Texas during the late 1980s. Despite the closing of the theatre and some of the retail spaces (Vacancy!), the surrounding industrial/office rocked on, and today appears to have plenty of occupants, as Austin rides the neoliberal high-tech wave to prosperity once again….

So I'm listening to a roundtable discussion which includes University of Texas history professor Harry Cleaver ("I teach Marxism…") as participant, and there's nothing new under the hot Texas sun…they're talking 'bout the impact of computers, how training for high tech no-brainer jobs has replaced real education, how computers are "only tools, like the automobile…" That's as much as I got, before a pleasant woman of 18 or so sidled up and asked me whether I was participating. "I'm a journalist, I'm reporting." "Well, we've agreed that we don't want journalists reporting on the discussions themselves. There'll be reports from the discussion groups tomorrow, that's what you can report on." "Oh, but I was going to report on the process…" "We're concerned that participants in the discussion will be hesitant if they know that a journalist is present." Argh. I'm out the door, wondering what kinda democracy this is…

Closed meetings, yow! And that woman who waved me away when I drew my trusty Canon: I'm thinking about Subcommandante Marcos and his ski mask. The anonymity thing... but he's got a reason to wear that mask, no? He's protecting himself from the very real risk of positive identification as a rebel leader in a third (or thirdish) world country…

What the hell, this ain't Mexico…I'm pissed. I send email to the acción-zapatista list:

"I have just returned from a 20 minute observation of Encuentro. I left after I was advised that journalists were not allowed to take notes on the discussions "because it might make the participants uncomfortable."

"I think you guys have missed the boat here...that, or I've misunderstood what this process is about. I was hearing a lot of stuff from Harry Cleaver and Tamara Ford about "closer to pure democracy" and working from consensus, but this doesn't impress me if you're going to tell me that, in practice, the consensus process is concealed from the rest of the world.

"I was told that I could hear the results of the meetings after the fact, but I'm actually more interested in how those results are reached.

"You'll appreciate how much better my story would read if I could say something positive about consensus-building, rather than reporting that the participants in Encuentro were too paranoid to reveal the internal dynamics of their work.

"(And to the lady who waved me off when I raised my camera, I can only say 'Get over it.' If you're ashamed to be doing this work, maybe you're in the wrong place, no?)"

Last few years, I've been on the online-activist beat; it's a long time since I've done revolution. Online activism is all about transferring established information rights to net-based electronic media in First World quasi-democracies where starvation's unusual and people rarely disappear into police dungeons. My memories of marches and solidarities has gone a little hazy…do I remember being a tad paranoid in the sixties and early seventies, when my head was full of smash-the-state and ho-ho-ho-chi-minh? I dunno, but free speech activism seems so, so…decadent when you compare it to the politics of feeding the hungry, and ensuring that ordinary citizens are not sliced and diced in the dead of night by right wing death squads…the sort of thing that happens in the U.S. only when surreal teenagers copy Wes Craven blood fantasies in real, or what passes for real, life.

Or could it be that Subcommandante Marcos just digs the way he looks in that mask? Or that his lips were bitten off by a feral dawg with teeth as sharp as a high-tech, teflon-encrusted safety razor….?

In fact, the woman who chose anonymity contacted me later. She'd read my email. "When you're talking to people on the Internet," she said, "you have to remember that there's a person on the other side." And there was this response from Tamara Ford, who along with Harry Cleaver has been guiding me through the Zapnet world:

"Jon,

"Thank you very much for coming to the Encuentro. It's extremely unfortunate that it was a bad experience for you. As a member of the media committee, and one of the people who encouraged you to attend, I must take responsibility for the fact that the Encuentro did not set-up enough of a structure for dealing with the press. There should have been a press registration process to give you guidelines of how the meetings were run and someone appointed o deal with any conflicts that may have occurred.

"I'd like to point out that the Encuentros used a process called coyuntura (conjuncture) to bring together divergent groups of the left -- from more established traditional liberal groups to more radical, sometimes criminalized groups such as Earth First!, who may justifiably come from an activist culture of mistrusting the media. However, your presence was solicited and welcome by the group as a whole and, again, I'm very sorry that we didn't have the proper structures in place to mediate these interests.

"Throughout the process the moderators asked for feedback as to what could have been done better and press coverage is clearly something we need to work on. Despite this and other problems, the event was highly energizing for so many in the Austin community and the final plenary brought forth many critiques such as the "isolation" culture you allude to, but also many positive suggestions to move us forward. There seemed to be a great consensus around broadening the meetings to include factions that weren't in attendance, such as elders and youth, and to build our struggles around events with more dancing, laughter and joyous resistance!

"Someone pointed out that it was a great achievement that a meeting like this could be pulled off in just two months of planning, and having witnessed first hand all the hard work that went into it by many dedicated activists, I heartily agree. The goal of coming together to speak and listen was in many ways facilitated by the coyuntura process which included creating a "safe space" for people to talk without fear of being misrepresented. However, there should have been ways to facilitate the presence of the press in these meetings.

"As regards the Internet and mass-media, I would refer to the Zapatista proposal for the creation of RICA (the Spanish acronym for an intercontinental network of alternative communication) which recognizes that mainstream corporate media is structured to marginalize and/or demonize social movements, in order to protect the interests of those in power. RICA seeks to link alternative (or marginalized) communication using the Internet, but also to make that material available to all sectors of society in the media most accessible to them.

"As some Encuentro participants noted, the increasing gap between classes is also increasing the gap between information haves and have-nots. We want to break down that barrier, and so I would disagree with your statement that Internet activists can just continue doing what they've been doing because that isolates their work from many of the communities they seek most to reach. While there is public access in libraries, structures such as a 30-minute time limits and software that screens for objectionable content are barriers to making this an equal access site. People brought forth some extremely positive and easily implemented suggestions for connecting the net to the greater community, such as the creation of bulletin boards with printouts from the net in public spaces like grocery stores, bookstores and coffee shops. In the case of the Zapatistas, many solidarity groups or progressive media have published reports from the net on a regular basis. This is a rhizomatic function that's repeated on many levels. Accion Zapatista, for example, recently got an enthusiastic message from some people in Oklahoma who were reading the reports we send out via email lists on pirate radio. These are exciting extensions of the possibilities of the net!

"In closing, I would add that another critique that was delivered was the question of language and communications styles, in particular between grassroots activists and intellectuals and between liberal and radical leftists groups. Cyberspace, too, has it's own culture of "flaming" as evidenced in your last two posts, which has some positive outcomes, but is alienating to many outside of the culture. However, at the Encuentro, we were asked to look at things which were "openings", and I see your posts as a way to learn about dealing with the press. Your work with the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF-Austin) is important and is a vital link for us to reach out to other progressive people, and I sincerely hope that we can continue to dialogue with you. I must say, however, that I surprised by your objection to our statement on the media's commercialization and co-optation of revolution, i.e. Nike's buying out Gil Scot-Heron. As a veteran of the 60's counterculture I thought you'd be inclined to agree with this critique.

"Lastly, we do not want to live in our own "small" little world, but instead, to create a larger world of alternative communication which includes a space for all of our voices. Intervening in mass media (critiquing and sharing information) is part of that effort.

"Thanks again for your participation in this process.

"Tamara"

Tamara is a driving force behind Zapnet, " a critical art ensemble performing the electronic disturbance from the world infamous ACTLab, the nerve center of cyberspace." ACTlab (Advanced Communications Technology Laboratory) is a digital revolution within the otherwise sedate University of Texas Communications Department. University campuses in general seem eerily quiet these days, nothing like the rock n roll drug laden march 'n bitch playgrounds of the 60s and early 70s. I was tear gassed in 1969 a stone's throw from the rusty Communications Building where the ACTlab's instantiated. Bold move, the University hired transgendered performance academic Sandy Stone to direct the ACTlab, and there she's sewed her seeds of revolt against linear theorists and smug, surreal transcorporate academic mutations. It's Sandy, and not the English department's literary critimojos, that's examined and assimilated the opaque prose of postmodern theorists like Deleuze and Guattari, whose figurative application of the rhizome metaphor informs the Zapnet page:

"Our rhizomes are interwoven between activist, academic, and alternative media domains. Formed of media and academic specialists interested in the free and lively transformation of information to knowledge, Zapnet explores the cutting edge of technology and communications, theory and praxis, transversing the striated arena of cyberspace, mediaspace, community space, and academic space."

I try not to confuse all this stuff in my mind: Zapnet, a product of nascent postmodern scholarship at the University of Texas, is NOT the Zapatista revolution, the one that, so far, has not been televised. And Zapnet is not the Encuentro thing, though Zapnet instigators are participating. These are all tied together by a cool colorful Mexican rope, but they are distinctly different, I think.

So this is what I think I am hearing from the scholarly Zaps: Corporations of the highly-developed First World oppress and exploit whole nations that are underdeveloped in myriad ways. They trash the environment: sustainable development is bad because, though it is "sustainable," it is still development, still part of this rank capitalist exploitation of the indigenous people and their places, I-extract-profit-from-you, where "I" is powerful and "you" is weak…dom-sub stuff.

Well. Let me think about this.

I'm suspicious of the good-bad thing, and I'm especially suspicious of utopian rants…the thing about utopians is that, once they get a little Real Power, they become…democrats, republicans, whatever. The problem with pure democracy is that it too readily facilitates mobocracy. And it worries me that some on the acción-zapatista email list tend to call each other comrade, as though they were refugees from the 1950s television series I Led Three Lives, in which Richard Carlson portrayed communist infiltrator Herbert Philbrick.

But I do love Subcommandante Marcos' act.

***

Harry Cleaver said "To have a system means to have domination," and he's clearly opposed to the system. I suppose that's a kind of anarchy, but Harry's anarchy, insofar as it's modeled on the Zapatista view of democracy, strikes me as a kind of chaos politics: you don't need a system in the sense that "you don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows." More sixties nostalgia, I'm going nuts. I wrote briefly for The Rag, and underground newspaper based in Austin, run as a kind of floating collective, meaning that if you wandered in often enough and brought stuff to print, you became part of the scene. Folks would gather in the basement of the University YMCA in Austin (no longer standing…the Church of Scientology's block monolith now occupies that spot) and bring their writings, pass 'em around for critique, and ultimately vote which pieces made it in. The writing was full of revolutionary jargon and we were all fucking crazy most of the time. We did a lot of drugs. I was stoned out of my gourd at somebody's apartment one night when my friend Doug, a TA in the English dept, looked around the room, his eyes growing wide, focusing on the books in the bookshelf, Marx (not Groucho) and Fanon and Marcuse, and he said in apparent wonder, "These people are communists!" The idea that a bunch of Texas boys who're drinking beer and smoking dope and having a good time in their tiny box of a student apartment could be leading the revolution was just more than he could bear.

What are those guys doing now? Are they selling insurance, brokering stocks? Jerry Rubin on Wall Street, too fucking much. I thought Guerilla Television and Radical Software were way cool back in the late sixties, where are those guys now? Michael Shamberg's in Hollywood, making films, making money. Meanwhile Subcommandante Marcos and his Mayan friends 'round Chiapas are too broke to fund the revolution, but they're winning anyway. I'm not sure what planet I'm on, quite yet.

The Zapatistas and the folks who are participating in the encuentro experiences are not like the political activists of the sixties. They're similar, in that they mount a kind of jargonistic critique that contains buzzwords like global inflation, sustainable development, instrumentalization, international debt crisis, multinational corporations, plunder, toxic waste, co-optation, utopian speculation, resistance, neoliberal, indigenous peoples, free market, repressive political machine, and low intensity conflict (which I saw pop up several times as the acronym LIC before I could figure it out). I have mixed feelings about this language…sometimes it seems alienating, other times it seems like a kind of poetic representation of what's left of the human soul, a set of convenient pegs on which to hang that shred of humanity that hasn't quite been bought.

As for the Zapatistas' ongoing war in Mexico, the politics it informs, the encuentro gatherings that have followed, these are what Baudrillard calls 'superconductive events,' "the kind of untimely intercontinental whirlwinds which no longer affect just states, individuals, or institutions, but rather entire transversal structures: sex, money, information, communications, etc." All roads lead to (and from) Chiapas.

In the global village there is a mediated virtual town square, the intersection of all television and radio and networked communications, and we are, so many of us, standing in the middle of it, some aware where we are, others not. Subcommandante Marcos' voice is one of the many that we hear coming from somewhere near the center of it all…San Cristobal is every town, every city in the world. Everywhere there are folks who are marginalized, who have nothing, and who stand outside the economy of attention…Marcos speaks for them, and when he speaks, it's with a self-deprecating chuckle. This Marcos does not even have a face..

***

For the last five years I've been immersed in the world of net.activism, focusing on free speech and privacy. I participated in a brief that was presented to the Supreme Court when they were reviewing the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act. The successful challenge to the CDA in the United States was supported by several large corporations including Microsoft, and by vocal net-based civil libertarians adamantly opposed to government interference in … well, in much of anything.

In the 60s a bunch of us were marching in the streets protesting the war against North Vietnam, a country that posed no clear threat that we could see, yet we were being asked to put our asses on the line to prevent its domination of South Vietnam, clearly a puppet dictatorship supportive of the imperial interests of the U.S. … interests that were linked to that comfortable standard of living taken so much for granted in Mayberry R.F.D. That's the rap, at least: the U.S. is an empire that exploits third world countries, and the U.S. will fight to preserve it imperial design. If not the U.S., then it's the First World, or the corporate state…the haves, that is, exploiting the have-nots, just short of enslavement. Nothin' new…I find myself thinking about Fritz Lang's 1926 film Metropolis, by some considered the greatest film ever made…its themes of a class society wherein the decadent rich are served by machines to the service of which the poor are practically enslaved. An sf fan and avid reader of Forry Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland, I'd internalized this theme of Metropolis by the time I was ten years old…yet my thinking was, is still muddled … I've been fed so much information I can't quite decide… the cyberlibertarian movement in which I've been so active, what's it really about? Are we just a bunch of neoliberal hacks, supporting freedom for the few while the many are enslaved by poverty?

In 1993 I was moderating an email list where this message appeared:

"Subject: Communiqué from the Zapatista National Liberation Army

"The following is the full text of the declaration from the Lacandon jungle by the Zapatista National Liberation Army:

"TODAY WE SAY ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! TO THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO:

MEXICAN BROTHERS AND SISTERS:

"We are a product of 500 years of struggle: first against slavery, then during the War of Independence against Spain led by insurgents, then to avoid being absorbed by North American imperialism, then to promulgate our constitution and expel the French empire from our soil, and later the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz denied us the just application of the Reform laws and the people rebelled and leaders like Villa and Zapata emerged, poor men just like us. We have been denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don't care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health care, no food nor education. Nor are we able to freely and democratically elect our political representatives, nor is there independence from foreigners, nor is there peace nor justice for ourselves and our children.

"But today, we say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH…."

The communiqué goes on for another dozen paragraphs or so, including a declaration of war on the Mexican government, and ending with

"….We declare that we will not stop fighting until the basic demands of our people have been met by forming a government of our country that is free and democratic.

"JOIN THE INSURGENT FORCES OF THE ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY."

"General Command of the EZLN 1993"

It's four years later, and the Zapatistas are still standing. Presumably Subcommandante Marcos is still standing, too, though it's hard to tell, since he always wears a mask, and since he seems to have a bit of coyote, trickster spirit, in his blood. Whether he's real or not is immaterial, he represents an ideal, the leader who does not wish to lead. Story is that Marcos, a mestizo, not pure Indian, was one of several former students who moved from Mexico City to Chiapas to work with the Mayans. The way I heard it, they thought they would teach the Mayans a thing or two about organizing, but they found the Indians were superior organizers, so the teachers became the students. The Zapatistas formalized a direct democracy representing the indigenous peoples of Chiapas and thereabouts. The various leaders of the movement are actually followers, in that they follow the will of the people.

The Zapatistas fought with the Mexican government until a cease-fire was established, but there has been this "low intensity conflict" since then, what we might term cold war, bordering on warm.

The Zapatistas could theoretically have been crushed by the Mexican Army, but they're wired: they know the world media, and they know how to use it. With help from a coalition of supporters based in Austin, Texas and elsewhere, the Zaps have maintained an Internet presence so that instantaneous news of their status spreads across the globe. When Johns Hopkins University scholar Riordan Roett allegedly wrote a memo saying that the Mexican government, to maintain investor confidence, "will have to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and security policy," the memo was leaked, distributed far and wide over the net. The memo, obtained by the political newsletter Counterpunch, was written on Chase-Manhattan Bank's official stationery and distributed to Chase's business partners. Though supposedly an independent scholarly analysis of Mexico's economic status, the Chase association made the memo look … kinda dirty, like it should have a -gate suffix. In fact there was no Zapgate, but the word did get around. If the Army did a scorch-and-burn dance around Chiapas behind the distribution of this memo, Chase-Manhattan would take the heat for meddling in the affairs of a first-world wannabe, and pissed off, they'd call all their loans. And, of course, it'd scare the tourists.

The proposed Zap fry, then, was replaced by this low-intensity thing, a freeze-out rather than a burn. Meanwhile the Zaps have facilitated the organization of Encuentros, global meetings the purpose of which is to analyze test the political waters for poison and an antidote modeled on the Zapatista's vision of direct democracy. In the U.S., though we're, ha ha, a democratic republic, we tend to diss that 'democratic' part…doesn't work, too collective, too much the sense of the mob. The Zaps make it work, though, in Chiapas, and it's gotta hurt. They get consensus from all the villagers in all the villages, which means a LOT of meetings, a lot of communication…very slow process. Through my ongoing exposure to the yammering of libertarian cybertwits, I hear a lot of complaints about democratic process, and one of the most common is that you can't make a decision of every voice must be heard and considered.

You can make a decision, of course, but it takes a long time…longer, still, if some members of the conversation simply don't understand the issue(s). I'm told that the Zaps tend to put the folks who would best understand in the lead, and let 'em bring the others up to speed. Nobody's at the TOP in this arrangement, they're all equals…the leader is the leader because he's in front, and not because he's exalted. Capitalizing on that natural tendency to follow the guy who seems to know his way out of the forest…he stinks of competence, you take a big whiff, but you both ignore the king-of-the-mountain stuff.

When you're thinking about bottom-up decision making, see, the thing is that it's VERY TOUGH for the guys at the top, the guys who're used to making the decisions and who stand to loose the most, to give decision-making capability to folks they wouldn't even hire to wash and buff their Lamborghinis. But it's not just bourgeoisie vs the proletariat, that very basic class warfare. There is within the bourgeoisie layers of class and they're all subtly at war, it seems. We see it in cyberspace everyday…flame wars. But what does this have to do with the Zaps? Says Harry Cleaver, "The Zaps raise questions about democracy we need to answer. It has been quite a while since we have had an intelligent, critical discussion of democracy here in the U.S. They have challenged representative government, for example, called for direct democracy in most things." Thing is, direct democracy won't necessarily scale… so how do you have direct democracy in, say, the U.S., where social and cultural fragmentation are so pronounced? Is the Internet, a global meeting of minds, the solution?

No way, man; denizens of the Internet flame each other to a wispy cinder every day…

Can we work from a different scale? Create many smaller groups and derive governance at appropriate level? So that we're working as tribes, and when we make decisions that affect many tribes, we build coalitions?

Maybe the answer is in the references to indigenous peoples. We need this sense that we belong to a place, and once those roots are established, we can work from there. Thing is, we are so rootless, there is so little physical sense of place. We go to 'cyberspace,' and create a virtual sense of place, and perhaps the answer is there, in the vast digital mulch from which we grow rhizome-style a consensus reality for the next millennium.

// jonl