I have always spouted that in spite of the internet and social media, anarchists should be flooding the streets and our communities with paper. There is something special about being on the street and handing a complete strange a paper with your ideas. Social media tends to be a closed circle, the same people pushing around the same ideas, it has its place, but should always be complimented by that paper on the street, in the workplace. I have left my paper on public transport, stood outside bus and train stations, walk through the city centre handing it out. Every one that accepts it is a complete stranger I would probably never have contacted on social media, and who knows how many hands it will pass through after that.
So it is with delight that I read of a new anarchist magazine, Nega-zine, though it is not the sort of thing you might hand out on the streets, it is something that you can circulate among comrades, friends and associates, adding to the sum total of our ideas that are circulating on a permanent basis, it is available from Elephant Editions.
When reading the following pages it would be well to put everything that we already know about technology aside. Indeed, what knowledge or hypothesis passed off as certainty makes up the scientific aspect of technology? Not much.
Negazine is not an easy read. On the contrary, reading it requires a certain level of effort and the will to put oneself on the line. And it couldn’t be otherwise, given the subjects it goes into. Negazine offers neither certain answers nor slogans to write on the next wall.
The main theme (but not the only one) of this first issue is technology. The central point of the discussion is the difference between the various techniques (the single capitals and the techniques that they develop, often in conflict with each other) and technology as such, which is an anonymous process devoid of a centre, a process that is continually eroding reality and replacing it with virtual pre-confectioned surrogates.
Technology’s action goes deep. It is not simply the way that it supplies power with the means for more control. In fact, this is perhaps its least important aspect. The main point is the way in which technology is modelling and rendering inoffensive individuals, acting on their tastes, their desires and reducing their critical and cognitive capacities, uniforming them and flattening them through quite visible processes. All said and done, the technological utopia will be nothing other than a world of idiots where repression will simply be superfluous.
Other arguments are faced as well as technology: culture (and its significance for the individual and power), the role of drugs in anarchist circles, the future migratory surge – where will the anarchists be?, as well as aspects of anarchist ‘information’.
It should be clear that these questions are not being taken up for the love of discussion but to give one more weapon to individuals who want to attack. It is a question of acutening one’s vision in order to identify an enemy which often passes off as invisible, in fact which has in its invisibility its main point of strength.
Even if faced only in passing, the ‘when’ to attack is clearly now. ‘How’, although not gone into explicitly, remains affinity and informal organisation, small attacks spread throughout the territory in an insurrectionalist projectuality that has been experimented by many anarchist comrades in recent years. What has been lacking, leading to a generalised stagnation, has not been the methods of attack but what to attack: where and in what form does the enemy manifest itself today. These are the convictions that Negazine starts off from and which should be borne in mind to understand the sense of what is written.
The journal is coming out in both Italian and English, now the world lingua franca, with the explicit desire to address oneself to all comrades interested, in spite of the fact that the context in which they find themselves living and acting are very different.
Contents
Editorial
Technology
Two languages
Technological control
Sleeping
Drugs
Litanies
Seeing
How, when, why and if it still makes any sense
And now?
Negazine n.1 / 2017
68 pages 19-28cm
4.50 (5.00 including UK postage)
For distribution:
5 copies – 12.00 (15.00 including UK postage)
Contact: Elephant Editions
elephanteditions@riseup.net
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