Tsolife/Ultimatum
From Travelling School of Life
ULTIMATUM
Unless you grant our demands, from the close of the millennium at midnight, New Year’s Eve, the year 2000, onwards,
- happiness, self-esteem, and mental clarity will be held hostage from the populace by a ruthless elite of advertising executives and other psychologists, utilizing a constant barrage of propaganda upon all five senses to maintain their power;
- corporations will steal the most precious hours from the lives of millions of human beings, converting them into useless trinkets, pollution, tedium, and work-related injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome;
- those trapped within the frontiers of this ever-expanding hell will take their apathy and anger out on themselves and each other with firearms, addictive drugs, and abusive relationships;
- governments will lay claim to what lives remain, to destroy in more efficient ways;
- and all those who contest this will be mocked, starved, beaten, jailed... branded terrorists by the real terrorists.
These travesties will continue without mercy or quarter until all our demands are met. This is not negotiable. These are no idle threats. Hell, all these things are happening right now!
We have demands, which we make upon every human being:
- Each individual should seek a life that will constantly broaden her horizons, that will give her the experiences she needs to discern exactly what her greatest desires are. The important things cannot be taught or explained. Go search.
- Create ways of satisfying your individual needs that simultaneously provide for the needs of others. Otherwise, every time you take care of your own needs, you simply reinforce the system of scarcity that makes others suffer – and it is in no one’s best interest that we live in a world of mutual distrust and misery.
- Gift giving must replace exchange as the standard economic, social, and emotional transaction. Share your knowledge and resources. And while everything still belongs to the hoarding exchangers (the “possessed,” we call them, those would-be possessors), we demand that you use squatting, trash scavenging, theft etc. to begin this gift economy immediately.
- Take control over all the resources of this society, not just the fragments you receive as individual consolation prizes, and build up social arrangements in which this control can be shared to everyone’s advantage. It’s not just a question of being free to pursue your desires, but even more so of being able to participate in the shaping of them – and for that, you must share power over the world that does the shaping.
We have the guns for war. They are the simple, infectious pleasure of breaking rules – the loneliness shared by prom queens and executives on long business trips alike, both ready to abdicate their roles the instant someone offers them a world populated by people rather than chess pieces – the outrage rightly felt by anyone who has had to go fruitlessly in search of a restroom through the crowded streets of a city, who feels in his very gut just how out of place human beings are in these new metropolises.
What we need is a new radicalism, one that can offer both the opportunity to make a total revolution, and the courage to seize it, to those who today make their revolutions only by halves: the middle-aged adulterers and teenage elopers, the bank robbers and shoplifters, the Peace Corps volunteers and block-burning rioters, religious mystics and hikers of the Appalachian Trail, militiamen and members of Alcoholics Anonymous, free software advocates and fired construction workers, and everyone else who has everything at stake in the formation of a new world and no idea how to get there. A radicalism that can join the cause of the landless farmworkers in Brazil to the raw fury of the dilettante anarchist vandal of the West, without any implications of charity work or youth reform; one that can demand that we surpass the oppressive role of art in this society, without denying or demeaning the solace the solitary adolescent poet finds in it. One that can give real form to the false promises of adventure implicit in “rebellious” rock music and fashion... one that can integrate the needs of the violent young hoodlum with those of the single mother, the art-school intellectual, and the runaway child.
