Information Technology Reference
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Hakim Bey, he published
T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone,
Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
.
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In this work he proclaimed
the existence and necessity of temporary nomadic zones, which act
as enclaves against the powers that be, and are dissolved before they
can be repressed or co-opted. Bey/Wilson took his inspiration from
Deleuze and Guattari and from his knowledge of early-modern
pirate utopias, and from cyberpunk science fiction, in particular
the work of Bruce Sterling, and his notion of 'Islands in the Net'.
The concept of the TAZ has been invoked in the many kinds of
alternative spaces that emerged in the
s, such as raves,
festivals, and interventions such as those practised by Reclaim the
Streets. It has also been seen as a strategy for using the Internet
and the Web, which for some acts, oxymoronically, as a kind of
permanent TAZ. Yet it has also incited a large amount of hostile
comment from others on the left who might be expected to be
sympathetic. Venerable anarchism commentator Murray Bookchin
dismisses Bey's ideas as 'lifestyle anarchism', while autonomist acti-
vists in Italy have gone so far as to publish a topic of fake Hakim
Bey essays as a form of critique.
Hacking as a form of symbolic and aesthetic resistance found
another kind of expression in the '
1980
s and '
90
s when artists started to exploit
computer networks as the locus of new forms of avant-garde art
practice and political activism. As the World Wide Web came to
notice in the early to mid-'
90
s, it foregrounded the potential of
electronic networks as public spaces in which identity and gender
can remain fluid and indeterminate. One recent result of this was
the emergence of so-called 'Cyberfeminism', the name under which
the work of a number of critical theorists and practitioners was
corralled, and which denoted a shared concern with the utopian
possibilities of new electronic media in relation to gender. Like
Feminism, Cyberfeminism evades easy definition. It takes a number
of different forms and encompasses disparate points of view. It is
possible, however, to discern three distinct areas of cyberfeminist
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