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We fell in love in the wreckage, shouted out songs in the uproar, danced joyfully in the heaviest shackles they could forge; we smuggled our stories through the gauntlets of silence, starvation, and subjugation, to bring them back to life again and again as bombs and beating hearts; we built castles in the sky from the ruins of hell on earth. Accepting no constraints from without, we countenanced none within ourselves, either, and found that the world opened before us like the petals of a rose. Greetings, dissident. History is not something that happens to peopleit is the activity of people. In every moment, in every decision and gesture, we make our culture, our life stories, our world, whether we take responsibility for this ourselves or ascribe this power to executives, politicians, pop stars, economic systems, or deities. In a society which glorifies their power and our passivity, all thought which challenges this passivity is thoughtcrime. Crimethink is the transgression without which freedom and self-determination are impossibleit is the skeleton key that unlocks the prisons of our age. CrimethInc. is the black market where we trade in this precious contraband. Here, the secret worlds of shoplifters, rioters, dropouts, deserters, adulterers, vandals, daydreamersthat is to say, of all of us, in those moments when, wanting more, we indulge in little revoltsconverge to form gateways to new worlds where theft, cheating, warfare, boredom, and so on are simply obsolete. This webpage is one of many manifestations of the underground network through which we work to realize these daydreams, to take the reigns of our lives and make our history rather than using the same energy to insist we are being made by it. If you have illicit ideas and intentions of your own to share, you're invited to join us here. Now Entering Cyberia (Population: Zero) A Note on the Medium Due to your vague interest in these matters which have been deemed antisocial by the new thought police, you have been exiled to Cyberia. You may believe your visit to be voluntary, but ask yourself: if you could livein real time, in full color, without a 'net'the revolt and transformation you fantasize about, would you be here, contemplating and trading in mere representations of such things? The new isolation chambers and interrogation rooms largely need no judicial procedures or law enforcement to fill themwe confine ourselves to these office cubicles, internet cafes, and lonely bedrooms willingly, even believing ourselves to have found access to our dreams and desires here. Not to criticize you, of coursesince obviously I am in the same situation as you, similarly self-exiled. But let's use this time in the wilderness as the political prisoners of old did: not to get accustomed to it, not to build new lives around this voluntary amputation, but to educate ourselves, increase our powers and connections, so when we can return to society we will be armed with new tools for dismantling and reconceiving it. Let us take the world itself back, rather than the "information superhighways" upon which we are being herded so quickly away from it, so one day there will be no need for anyone to return here besides misguided historians and other archeologists of the cursed graveyards of the past. See you on the other side of the screen, if you make it, earnest cyberspace cadet. -CrimethInc. Workers' Collective. |