COUNTDOWN.

As we are racing/ plodding/ moving towards the millenium (another year of the countdown has passed, blahblah), every religious nut and every fascist under the sun are preparing the final battle. There is a mania with the End of the World and with purification that could turn to an exterminism with the worst consequences, while the secret establishment is slowly re-instating the Holy Roman Empire, a.k.a.EC with a political system that becomes more and more totalitarian: the two-party systems in western europe hardly differ from one party systems of the old east if both parties stand for the same system etc.- are we expected to be stupid or cybical or both to go and vote in this ridiculous scenario? Only the economy remains liberal, but if that applies to the cultural economy of ideas is questionable, with the UK on the forefront of repression through censorship.

In the meantime the west is going security-crazy, not just airports, in the schools, in the street, but more than anything in the minds of people: This is how terror works, by instilling fear and the militarisation of society, of which not just the physical presence of troops/police on the street is part, but also computer-readable ID and databanks. Violence is used not just directly but as a threat, and as a tool to tighten control. Some children die, and then no one is allowed guns. The consequence is not that less children will die as a result, but that only the State has guns.

But the control of the territory is only one thing, the other is the control of the map, i.e. the expanding databases just mentioned, the development of so called "cyberspace" as a map that is supposed to become more important than the territory of the "real" world. That is where culture is supposed to take place alongside total identification and transparency. Liberation is virtual and can be as complete as it wants to be (or as capitalism dictates), and you can think and say what you want as long as it has no effect on the world. Some cynics say this process has already reached a point of no return, that the end of the world has already happened.- This point of view is mislead and confused, taking symptoms as the disease, and a totalitarian stranglehold as an unchangeble reality, breeding either cynicism and apathy or a desire for death in an apocalyptic showdown. In this context popular culture can only go through the motions, recycling images of desire and turning them into cash, liberating anything from sex to the unconscious for the sake of profit.

This is a society of surveillance as well as a society of the spectacle. You are watched, and you are supposed to watch.

Any sort of Underground Resistance will have to bear these sort of contradictions in mind, especially if we don't want to refrain from putting out ideas (making records, writing newsletters etc.) rather than just disappearing. There are no clear solutions: autistic or artistic, armed with a loudspeaker or with a gun, there are innumberable strategies of resistance against control, and probably all of them are right, but being anarchic we have to be careful that they don't remain on the level of sarcasm and blasphemy as much better than cynicism, apathy and conformism that may be, but there is a chance to go a step further. But organisation, propaganda, spokespersons etc. are not what intersts us here: this becomes too easily part of the game of the old world. Visibility is a trap. We are talking about the invisible insurrection of a million minds.

PS. If you can't figure out what all this is supposed to have to do with underground parties, nameless white labels, mysterious frequencies, connecting levels of sounds and ideas, games of identity, losing oneself in dingy basements, realising and forgetting the meaning of everything, conspiring to become one with noise, etc. then we can't help you.

Originally published in Praxis Newsletter 11, January 1997