Sabah Electricity Sdn Bhd (SESB) has stepped up efforts to curb Non-Revenue Electricity (NRE) by dismantling illegal connections from squatter colonies here.
Its enforcement unit saw hundreds of metres of illegal wires being seized during a three-day operation from Tuesday.

Daily Express: Power thefts in 12 KK squatter areas

Via Robert Neuwirth, who writes:

If the point is to get people to pay, to turn non-revenue into revenue, then why not work with the squatters to create a solution. It’s such a simple thing, really. Just a slight change in mindset. The South African group Abahlali baseMjondolo has demonstrated in a series of reports that ripping out electrical lines in shantytowns causes deaths, as people return to using candles and lighting fires. There’s a cost in lost revenue and a cost in human lives.

Residents of Copenhagen’s famed Christiania neighbourhood have no right to use the land they have occupied for four decades, a Danish court has ruled.

The 900-odd residents had expected the ruling from the Eastern High Court and planned to appeal, a spokesman said.

The court dismissed a lawsuit by them that they had the right to use the former naval base in the Danish capital even if they did not own it.

Tension has risen in recent years over drug crackdowns and regeneration plans.

BBC: ‘No land rights’ for hippy Danes

This article does at least mention that Christiania DOES pay property taxes and pays city utility bills. They were formally recognized by the Danish government in 1995.

For more information about Christiania, here’s their official site. Previous RF/Technoccult coverage here.

(Apparently Denmark doesn’t have adverse possession laws?)

Although it is small consolation in the face of overwhelming economic strife in Detroit and elsewhere as the foreclosure crisis continues, this story gave me a real feeling of hope and renewal. To me, this example and other corresponding cases – like the artist-driven re-imaginings of shopping malls and big box stores seems symbolic of an even larger cultural shift. The arts community isn’t just moving into one downtrodden urban neighborhood; rather, they’re taking on the ruins of the unsustainable. They’re taking on big box stores, shopping malls, and grid-connected homes in the car capitol of North America. And they’re not just creating new art. They’re seizing the opportunity to turn old shells of buildings into independent, renewable energy-powered, 21st century-ready spaces.

What I’m most eager to hear next is that creative pioneers are conquering McMansions in the suburban hintersprawl. As Bryan Walsh wrote recently for Time Magazine, “The Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech predicts that by 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (on one-sixth of an acre [675 sq m] or more) in the U.S.”

Will subdivisions be turned into workshops and performance spaces? Or possibly into small-scale agricultural communities, or enclaves for artisan food-production? At the very least, will they become denser, transit-connected and less car-dependent … and what will drive that?

Full Story: WorldChanging

See also:

The Sudden Stardom of the 3rd World

At last a game with a future we can pursue: a new world with new qualities. A world without daily work routines, traffic jams, bureaucracy, deforestation, and hunger problems. A world with more exchanges, more experiences, and more human interaction. Better improvements can not be hoped for: more money and more consumption, yet more renunciation. Improvements today which are more friendly to life will produce more cultural riches, and more exchanges between all. This is all with a minimal burden on the environment and a maximum amount of self-determination. Put an end to the monopoly!

You choose a new homeland, a new Bolo. Every Bolo has a special way of life and is nearby. The organization of your chosen community needs you to bring it goods. You obtain distinct items during the course of the game. Any surplus produced in your own Bolo is trade able with other players. Every exchange offers a new experience. Also, every visit to another Bolo brings new knowledge.

Which Bolo should be judged to be first? Last can quickly become first, as when someone has attained a new innovation, it can quickly be shared with the rest of the collective through visits and the cultural exchanges that result!

—

bolo’ bolo is game designer / Anarchist P.M.’s second foray into political board games, with his first being the cult tile laying favourite Demono. bolo’ bolo is based upon the book of the same name which lays out P.M.’s ideal society based upon sub-communities, each autonomous, with an economy fueled by trade.

Game components are in both German and French, and are rather archaic with the ‘cards’ being coloured paper with black ink style drawings, absolutely nothing like Demono’s more lush visuals.

The basic idea of the title is that each player represents one of the “bolos” on the board, each of which specialises in the production of certain things, and which needs certain others, which is accomplished via trade.t

More info and pics: BoardGameGeek

(via OVO)

Looks like #d09 is already under way:

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.

Now, three homes and a garden may not sound like much, but others have been quick to see the potential. A group of architects and city planners in Amsterdam started a project called the “Detroit Unreal Estate Agency” and, with Mitch’s help, found a property around the corner. The director of a Dutch museum, Van Abbemuseum, has called it “a new way of shaping the urban environment.” He’s particularly intrigued by the luxury of artists having little to no housing costs. Like the unemployed Chinese factory workers flowing en masse back to their villages, artists in today’s economy need somewhere to flee. [...]

But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends.

In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline. The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up. Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive. Mitch thinks he knows just the spot for it.

Full Story: New York Times

From Esozone.com

Announcing…

EsoZone 2009: Power

October 9-11, 2009
Portland, OR

Logistics Director: Vin Al Ken
Stage Director: Nolon Ashley
Operations Director: Johnny Brainwash

Watch this space for more infos.

Plus: Esozone coverage in High Times (Maybe Rolling Stone next year?)

Friedman and his followers are not the first band of wide-eyed dreamers to want to build floating utopias. For decades, an assortment of romantics and whack jobs have fantasized about fleeing the oppressive strictures of modern government and creating a laissez-faire society on the high seas. Over the decades, they’ve tried everything from fortified sandbars to mammoth cruise ships. Nearly all have been disasters. But the would-be nation builders assembled here are not intimidated by that record of failure. After all, their plans are inspired by the ethos of the modern tech industry, where grand quixotic visions are as common as BlackBerrys, and they see their task not as a holy mission but as something like a startup. A couple of software engineers came up with an innovative concept, then outsourced it to a community and let the wisdom of the crowd improve on it. They scored financing from a top-tier venture capitalist and assembled a board of directors. They will be transparent, blogging their progress. If they fail—which, let’s face it, is the most likely outcome—they will do so quickly, in time-honored Valley fashion. But if they succeed, they have one hell of an exit strategy.

Full Story: Wired

Esozone stage manager Nolon Ashley writes:

for the time being, i’m only going to say that’s going to have to remain a mystery until we flesh it out more. but at this point, we have a team of 3 individuals committed and clear about the context of the means of operating, ready to go forward.

yes, we are insisting it will be as large as the previous years (the definition for ‘large’ remains flexible). in other words, we’re not going to slap together a half-assed scaled back version of the previous attempts and call it the same thing.

that is all i’m going to say for now, except that if you have an interesting idea for a presentation, activity, or performance, we’d sure like to hear about it.

/me contemplates the need to build a second computer so that his girlfriend can still get her work done. probably a phone and a car needed, too. damn.

lots of work to do, delicious!

stay tuned!

Full Story: The Corner of Mystery

(Thanks Mac!)

Justin Boland’s latest mad scheme:

The City of Detroit has such an absurdly bad depression on home prices that you can currently buy an apartment building for less than $1000. To begin with, hop on Realtor.com and take a look around Detroit.

Rather than abandoning Detroit, should we be embracing this opportunity to start over? Is there a proven track record of using sustainable development and ecosystem design to raise property values? Are there factories that could be transformed into carbon sinks, community supported farms, bioremediation projects and public parks? Are there blocks that could benefit from permaculture installations?

Full Story: Pizza SEO.

I disagree with comment about first collecting standards and practices then starting franchises. The way to make these things work isn’t to get everyone to sign-on to one single experiment in one location. It’s to get a lot of concurrent experiments going and sharing information. Not everyone can move to Detroit or is willing to. Other alternatives suggested include Baffalo, NY and St. Louis, MO. I’d have to add Yakima, WA to the list as well.

Also, there’s no reason to re-invent the wheel. Here are people to learn from or team up with:

Bolozone and CAMP in St. Louis. (More on Bolozone)

Free State Wyoming

Free State New Hampshire

Ithica Hours, a starting point for looking at Ithica in general.

Willing Workers Network.

And of course Justin’s other project Vermontistan, which has some overlap with Second Vermont Republic.

Lord Whimsy discusses the temporary autonomous zone, the United Shires of America:

Like our Founding Fathers before us, We The People must summon the will to shed our bovine deference to The Powers That Be, boldly proclaim our sovereignty over ourselves, and then continue to reinvent American-ness to suit our own ends - and not just meekly accept what we are told it is. After all, what could possibly be more American? According to Thomas Jefferson, “Each generation is as independent as the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before. It has then, like them, a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness…” I intend to take Mr. Jefferson at his word, for this is a muster - a Call to Charms!

I’m disturbed by our current mechanistic harshness, aesthetic brutalism, and the tendency towards monolithic, absolutist belief systems and methodologies. I propose a more humane way of life, and believe in the constant generation of modest, provisional notions that work within a limited sphere for a limited time - and then dissipate, much like living things. Through Affected Provincialism and a concept I call the “Lark-State,” I propose a means to implement this vaguely Jeffersonian/Franklinian sensibility. I believe that it is time for America to become new and weird again.

Imagine an archipelago of Arcadian enclaves sprouting through the dead, grey slab of the status quo. “Stars and Stripes,” meet the “Luna and Lightning Bugs!” “Old Glory,” may we present “Old Glamor!” The United Shires of America are a network of “pataphyical provinces” - mischievous aesthetic refuges. The United Shires exist in both the physical and non-physical realms, and can shift between the two very well. Finally, a country you can imagine, download, pack up, or wear on your back! It keeps down costs, and avoids legal and/or military entanglements.

[...] My grievances against our current day should not be seen as a plea to return to the past, but rather as a call to adopt what has worked well in the past, and create for ourselves a richer vision of the future than is currently offered us.

Full Story: OVO

Trevor Blake points out that pm’s “Liberating Wednesday” is 52 times more radical than “Buy Nothing Day”

On Wednesdays friends get together, every house is an open house, conflicts are talked about, neighborhood problems are discussed. The Machine can only be dismantled if new, noneconomic social forms emerge. People with the same ideas about life must get together, develop common visions and practical plans. It is not necessarily so, that your actual neighbors are the people you would try to live a new life with. The accidents of the real estate market are not the best basis for new communities. So you eventually gather from across the city or a whole region.

On Wednesdays you can also do practical work. Communal gardens, neighborhood lounges, workshops, soft energy systems, house repairs, communal baths, restaurants, swimming-pools, require work. You can also call it “learning”, social activity, creating independent communities, being together or just fun. Ultimately only relatively large (500 people) communities, that are semi-autarcic on food, energy and health-care can safely get us off the hooks of the Machine. To create such communities (bolos) we need some time now, we need some training, a strong cultural identity.

Wednesday will be our think-day, social day, cultural day, ecological day, community-day, bolo-day, land-day (each bolo needs about 250 acres some place outside the city), planet-day, exchange-day (barter-markets), health-day (work some, but not too much), squatting-day, anti-car-day, anti-work-day etc. On Wednesdays everything that is now repressed, forgotten, divided, being neglected will find time and space.

Full Story: OVO

PDX Occulture has its meetups on Thursdays, so we kinda miss the mark, but I find it in the same spirit.

Justin Boland has an interesting Wednesday habit - World Design Wednesday.

More from pm: bolo’bolo

“There were only two rules for construction: electricity had to be provided to avoid fire, and the buildings could be no more than fourteen stories high, because of the nearby airport.”

When I was 17, I started constantly re-reading Hakim Bey’s TAZ, or as I like to call it, “His Only Good Book.” I had no problem with Jonathan Kozol, but Peter Lamborn Wilson builds a sentence like Turkish Muslims build a shrine. Before I discovered the playground of “Academic Critical Theory,” from Marshall McLuhan to Manuel de Landa, TAZ was the most dense language artifact I’d ever seen.

Even then, though, I wondered why Hakim Bey didn’t discuss the only real “TAZ” I could think of - the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. “Kowloon” means “Nine Dragons,” and you can only visit the ruins today.  After an eviction process that took years and cost billions of Hong Kong dollars, the city was destroyed in 1993 and only a park remains.  While it lasted, though, it was the closest thing to Pure Anarchy the world has seen outside of a war zone.

At it’s most overgrown peak in early 1987, Kowloon Walled City was home to 50,000 inhabitants.  From 1899, these tenacious squatters had repelled the British, the Japanese and every would-be landlord and “property owner” in the history of Hong Kong.  So why not make them the centerpiece of the book?

I’ve since come to realize it’s because he was writing a personal historical fantasy, not a tactical or practical guide. Although Kowloon truly was a Temporary Autonomous Zone, and it’s a cool idea to read and think about, it truly sucked to live there. This is best summed up by Coilhouse’s conclusion:

Yes, the anarchistic types out there are correct when they say that the Walled City is evidence that humans can co-exist, and even thrive, without laws constantly piled on them. But it’s not that simple. After all, without massive police raids (government incarnate), the place would have probably become a mob-run tyranny. Its residents had a degree of freedom that anyone who comes home to piles of bills or endless forms can’t help but envy. They also had darkness, a lower life expectancy, filthy living conditions and huge numbers of drug addicts.

But if the Walled City is a reminder that lawlessness isn’t quite as cleanly romantic as some might think, it also reminds us that a staggering number of societies are possible “‘ and that every one of them has a price.

It’s also worth meditating on how Kowloon came to achieve their “hands-off” status: by kicking up such a profound shit-storm of noise and problems, every single time someone tried to exert their authority, that everyone in power simply gave up. As David Robinson puts it in his great Tofu Magazine piece, “British policy came to regard Walled City as something of a hornets nest “‘ best not to be kicked unless absolutely necessary.”

Perhaps the lesson here is that there are no little things when it comes to defending your freedom. If either of those words are supposed to mean something, there are no acceptable tradeoffs or reasonable comprimises.

FURTHER READING: The best narrative summary is from Coilhouse, and the Wiki is surprisingly dense.  My Father Lived in Kowloon City, and the hilariously mis-translated but quite interesting story of a Japanese expedition into the city the week before it was demolished in 1993. If you’re interesting in more photos, more information, and more pages to scroll through, then say hello the Skyscraper Forum, who have collected pretty much all there is to know in one thread.

Residents of a counterculture oasis in the Danish capital challenged government moves to regain control of their community Monday, petitioning a court to guarantee their right to use the former navy base they took over three decades ago.

The case is expected to determine the future of Christiania, a partially self-governing neighborhood of more than 900 residents that was created in 1971 when hippies began squatting at a derelict 18th-century navy fort on state-owned land.

Christiania became an enclave with psychedelic-colored buildings, open trade of hashish and limited interference from the government. But when authorities started cracking down on the drug trade in 2004 and later announced plans to tear down buildings to build new apartment blocks, the squatters fought back.

They sued the government in 2006, claiming they have the right to use the land, even if they don’t own it. The center-right government rejects that claim.

Full Story: McCall

(via Dose Nation)

I’ve been collecting a history of Temporary Autonomous Zones. I’m grateful to Hakim Bey for the conceptual phrase, but his history was more romantic than tactically useful…and after all, he is something of a pedo. So in honor of the TAZ going down right now in PDX — YOU KNOW ABOUT ESOZONE, YES?? — I’ll be sharing some of the best stories this weekend.

One of my favorite corners of Southern History was an all-black community hidden in Northern Mississippi. The story of Mound Bayou stretches across centuries and winds through everything from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. Sadly, Mound Bayou exists almost nowhere online. The Wikipedia is shallow filler, and most of the online histories are short and sloppy.

Isaiah Montgomery and Ben Green founded Mound Bayou in 1887, but the story begins with Montgomery’s father, Ben, who was a slave on the David Bend plantation. For most folks alive today, our images of a plantation are based on Roots, but things were very different at Davis Bend. It was owned by Joeseph Davis (the brother of Confederate president Jefferson Davis) and he was heavily inspired by the “socialist utopianism” of an obscure thinker named Robert Owen.

As a side note, Technoccult readers might be interested to know that “Owen insisted he could communicate with great minds of the past by means of electricity.” The precise details are lost to history, but it should be noted Owens was unusually blunt after death, telling Spritualist mediums who summoned him “Oh! How you have misunderstood the laws which connect spirit with spirit…you will never understand these things…”

David Bend was an experiment in education and empowerment, and yes, I do realize how absurd that sounds when I’m still talking about white people owning slaves. Rather than draconian dormitory conditions, though, Joeseph Davis encouraged his slaves to educate themselves and even own businesses. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Davis sold his land holdings to Ben Montgomery, who had run the plantation store. The price was $300,000 in gold, and with that David Bend became one of the first autonomous black communities in the South.

The Owen-inspired focus on learning and skills carried into Mound Bayou, especially when Booker T. Washington got involved later on. This isn’t just a look into the past, though: I think that Mound Bayou has a signifigant lesson to offer us here in 2008. During the many “exodus” movements which happened throughout the history of both Davis Bend and Mound Bayou, the Montgomery family was adamant about building a strong foundation instead of leaving for the mere promise of something better. Most importantly, the education they focused on was agricultural tech and self-sufficiency techniques:

Through outlets like the town’s newspaper, The Demonstrator (1900), Mound Bayou promoted education as an essential path to community survival, in particular vocational education in scientific agriculture through the Mound Bayou Normal and Industrial Institute.

Here in 2008, John Robb, one of my favorite Big Thinkers and the author of Brave New War, has been doing an amazing series of short, potent articles revolving around global systems collapse and the concept of the Resilient Community. Although fairy tales like Gabriele D’Annunzio taking over Fiume are beautiful, they’re not realistic or sustainable solutions. Mound Bayou is a model that lasted, and it was based on smart design and hard work, not poetry and wine.

So far I’ve been blown away by pretty much every single bit of content on AfriGadget. It’s a guided tour of low-tech (and no-tech) solutions to basic life necessities in a total poverty environment.� It’s a serious education, from converting dumpsites into farms, to greywater recycling gardens, electronics projects like DIY stage lights and fundamental skills like handmaking tools when you’re 20,000 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart. There’s even coverage of digital media entrepreneurs in Bamako, Mali (which is home to some of the world’s greatest musicians, by the way). I was also keenly interested in the DIY car security system…using a mobile phone.

It’s an amazing window into another way of life full of vibrant photography, but knowing how to build an evaporation-powered cooler is a skill that transcends the pretty pictures, right?� I know that Technoccult reaches a global audience of empowered future mutants, so if anyone in or near the Mother Continent wants to get involved, here’s how to get started.

An alternative but not necessarily parallel universe is forming in Southeast Portland this weekend.

They call “Esozone: the other tomorrow” a festival, but don’t expect corn dogs and Ferris wheels. Fringe thinkers, visionary artists and occult musicians from around the world will gather at Watershed, a rambling, ramshackle building near Sellwood for a weekend of … well … the inexplicable.

Noah Mickens, who will take part in the festivities, defines it this way: “Esozone is an exhibition of scientists, philosophers, magicians and performance artists, gathered together by a subculture of young radicals who don’t recognize the distinction between the four.”

Of course, you still may be a little fuzzy about exactly what goes on. You’re not alone.

Full Story: the Oregonian

For five happy years they enjoyed simple lives in their straw and mud huts.

Generating their own power and growing their own food, they strived for self-sufficiency and thrived in homes that looked more suited to the hobbits from The Lord of the Rings.

Then a survey plane chanced upon the ‘lost tribe’… and they were plunged into a decade-long battle with officialdom. [...]

With green issues now getting a more sympathetic hearing, the commune has been given planning approval for its roundhouses along with lavatories, agricultural buildings and workshops.

Full Story: Daily Mail

(via Cryptogon)

Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with the launch of its own ‘computer navy’.

The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km) offshore.

The ‘water-based data centres’ would use wave energy to power and cool their computers, reducing Google’s costs. Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres, which are sited across the world, including in Britain.

Full Story: The Telegraph

(via Cryptogon)

Making your own outrageous outfit can be time-consuming, so Prepare for the Playa events make it easy to load up on eye-catching gear you won’t find on the shelves at Old Navy. These flea-markets-on-acid are a chance for burner-based businesses to connect, says Nikki Doran, one of the three Prepare for the Playa organizers, but they’re also educational: Playa U how-to workshops put seasoned burners in touch with newbies to go over everything from shower construction and bike lighting to poi-twirling.

Full Story: Wired

U.S. Forest Service officers pointed weapons at children and fired rubber bullets and pepper spray balls at Rainbow Family members while making arrests Thursday evening, according to witnesses.

“They were so violent, like dogs,” Robert Parker told reporter Deborah Stevens of the libertarian-oriented, Round Rock, Texas-based We the People Radio Network [www.wtprn.com] after the incident.

“People yelled at them, ‘You’re shooting children,’” Parker said during an interview on the network’s “Rule of Law Show.”

About 7,000 people have arrived at the gathering near Big Sandy in the Wind River Mountains for the annual Gathering of the Tribes, a seven-day event of fellowship, partying including illicit drug use, praying, and living on the land.

They camp on Forest Service land around the country every year, but the Rainbow family’s nonhierarchical methods — no one can speak for the Rainbows, much less sign a land use permit — often have stymied their relationships.

But rarely do the tensions escalate into violence.

Full Story: Jackson Hole Star Tribune

(Thanks Wes!)

Whereas the Netherlands and the United Arabic Emirates � fatten � their beach with billion of euros to build their short-living polders and their protective dams for a decade, the project �Lilypad� deals with a tenable solution to the water rising! Actually, facing the worldwide ecological crisis, this floating Ecopolis has the double objective not only to widen sustainabely in offshore the territories of the most developed countries such as the Monaco principality but above all to grant the housing of future climatic refugees of he next submerged ultra-marine territories such as the Polynesian atolls. New biotechnological prototype of ecologic resilience dedicated to the nomadism and the urban ecology in the sea, Lilypad travels on the water line of the oceans, from the equator to the poles following the marine streams warm ascending of the Gulf Stream or cold descending of the Labrador.

More images and info: Vincent Callebaut

(via Grinding, via Posthuman Blues, where I missed it the first time ’round)

There are many reasons to doubt that the Seasteading Institute will realize its vision of floating cities in the sea; but there are at least two reasons to think that seasteading may prove to be more successful than past efforts to escape the grasp of the world’s governments. First, the project’s planners are pragmatic-at least by the standards of their predecessors-pursuing an incrementalist strategy and focusing primarily on solving short-term engineering problems. Second, they recently announced a half-million dollar pledge from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, giving them the resources to begin serious engineering and design work. While there are many obstacles to be overcome before they will have even a functioning prototype-to say nothing of a floating metropolis-their project doesn’t seem as obviously hopeless as most of the efforts that have preceded it.

Full Story: Ars Technica

(via GPOD)

Previously on Technoccult

(The founders of the Seasteading Institute would do well to study the problems of Pitcairn)

Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth?

If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.

With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities “with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”

“Decades from now, those looking back at the start of the century will understand that Seasteading was an obvious step towards encouraging the development of more efficient, practical public-sector models around the world,” Thiel said in a statement.

Full Story: Wired