One year of domestic peace and tranquility with a loving girlfriend has come to an end. I am officially moving back to the former meat-packing warehouse that has come to be known as “The Ox,” a space that 10 of us first conquered about two years ago.
My philosophy is shifting toward what I would like to term self-immiserative technomadism. The old Marxian hypothesis about the increasing immiseration of the working classes under capitalism has not fared well. The lowest classes apparently have more to lose than their chains, and thus one of the key revolutionary mechanisms theorized in the Marxist tradition is irrelevant in the advanced liberal democracies. I think an attractive solution is the self-immiseration of the disillusioned factions of the bourgeoisie. That is, I am increasingly convinced that to see the world clearly and to avoid all of the social investments that make us conservative and reactionary, we need to opt for a calculated kind of squalor. Not the demoralizing, unprovocative kind of squalor too often associated with traditional drifters, dropouts, and squatters, but an intellectually, artistically, politically radical kind of squalor. Technomadism is the name for just one component of this calculated squalor: it implies minimizing everything that keeps us anchored in the status quo (and thus blind to and invested in the status quo) in order to maximize the freedom, effectivity, and productivity of our connections to increasingly dominant technological desiring machines.
