John Brinker

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) is a collective of artists and academics who illustrate problems with science and technology through writing, performance, and installations. Their objective is to demystify high-tech tools so that the public can make informed decisions about the new technologies that are already impacting our lives in many ways.

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reviewed in this article

The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet by Lutz Dammbeck

Other Cinema, San Francisco, 2003

www.othercinemadvd.com/net.html

“Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”

--Werner Herzog, filmmaker.

“Truth is the invention of a liar.”

--Heinz von Foerster, cybernetician.

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a review of

Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs by the Curious George Brigade, Mosinee, WI, 2003, 154 pp, $6. See pages 63–64 to order.

For a few years, the CrimethInc. collective has been willfully monkeying around with our assumptions about anarchism. Most recently, the CrimethInc. mantle has been taken up by a collective calling itself the Curious George Brigade. With Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs (AAD), the Brigade romps on the jungle gym of anarchism with an innocence both inspiring and exasperating.

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Today, the concept of a free school has many connotations. It can mean the freedom to choose what to learn or whether to learn at all. But whatever we mean by free, we can’t really discuss the free schools of today without some background in the Modern School movement that began more than a century ago.

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a review of

We Want Freedom: A life in the Black Panther Party by Mumia Abu-Jamal. South End Press: Cambridge, 2004

In his new book We Want Freedom, acclaimed activist Mumia Abu-Jamal has re-examined the history of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and has situated them in a broader history of Black resistance for a new generation to learn from their successes and failures.

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a review of

Recipes For Disaster, CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, Olympia WA 624 pages $12.00. Available from the Barn: see page 98

It seemed that every time we dropped by Bound Together Books in San Francisco, the same situation unfolded. Some teenager getting the punk rock starter kit together (first mohawk, chain wallet, and Doc Marten’s bought with the parents’ credit card) would show up looking for The Anarchist Cookbook. The counterperson, with a weary sigh, would place on the counter a worn copy of the dubious classic and open to a dog-eared page. “See this bomb recipe?” she/he would say. “You’ll blow yourself up if you do what this book says. That’s not what anarchism is about.” The kid would leave clutching a couple of cheap pamphlets on Kropotkin, never to be seen again.

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Oystercatcher #5 Review by J.L. Dale

I’m young, but I still had grade-school fantasies about bathing my neighborhood in a heavy wave of pirate radio--my voice and my songs out into the world.

So, I respect a man that can keep that way of thinking alive. The Oystercatcher #5, edited by Ron Sakolsky, though rather diverse in content and forms, keeps a strong, unified voice. Each piece is well edited and laid out nicely, taking advantage of The Oystercather’s full-size format.

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a review of

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization, By John Zerzan, Feral House, Los Angeles, 2002, 214 pp., $12

John Zerzan hardly needs an introduction here; few modern anarchist writers are as well-known, controversial, and divisive. Zerzan is the founder and leading philosopher of what he calls anarcho-primitivism.

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a review of

The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy by Murray Bookchin. AK Press. 2005. 491 pp. $23.

An influential theorist with a background in anarcho-syndicalism and Marxian theory, Murray Bookchin has spent the past thirty-five years developing and promoting social ecology, one of the few anarchist schools of thought to have its own school, the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont. The latter part of his career has been devoted to curmudgeonly crusades to “save” anarchism and ecology from what he sees as its pitfalls: mysticism, biocentrism, and something called “lifestylism.”

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Back in the salad days of the 1990s, the North American anarchist scene adopted play, not just as a personal tactic of freedom, but as a revolutionary strategy. Play was thought to be a way out of the dead-ends of civilization: work, hierarchical relationships, commodity culture, and even the old ways of making revolution that had failed again and again. It’s tempting to say that we were naive, living in the calm before the storm. But even if the past forecloses some possibilities, a critical look back at our experiences can open up others.

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