combatting
normality

 

The tourist and the terrorist - those twin ghosts of the airports of abstraction - suffer an identical hunger for the authentic . But the authentic recedes as they in their inauthenticity approach it. ... To their secret misery, all they can do is destroy. The tourist destroys meaning and the terrorist destroys the tourist.

Tourism is the quintessence of Commodity Fetishism. It is the ultimate Cargo Cult - the worship of goods that never arrive, because they have been exalted beyond the stench of mortality - or morality.

You buy tourism and you get nothing but images. Tourism, like Virtual Reaity, is a form of Gnosis, of body-hatred . The ultimate tourist "trip" will take place in Cyberspace...

 

 

 

 

In his other persona of Peter Lamborn Wilson , he writes:

"In America and Europe "activism" has retreated - to such an extent that people equate an appearance on the World Wide Web with political action - just as the activists of the 1960s were seduced by their "fifteen seconds of fame" on television. Out of 600 channels - the bright promise of the near future - surely one or two can be devoted to "revolution", and a few more to "alternate life-styles".

The old Internet of techno-anarchy and "free information" will become just another channel of WWWTV, a kind of slum where the poor old original hackers can still congregate and fritter away the empty hours, while the great virtual city of Cyberspace grows up around them, dwarfing their pitiful huts and making a mockery of their "culture".

The anthropologists are probably already lining up for grants to study this quaint survival: affairs move quickly when both space and time have been abolished."

from Escape from The Nineteenth Century , Autonomedia, N.Y., 1998,
pp.132-133.