Human social systems and technology are not capable and never will be capable of understanding land on a large scale in a sustainable fashion.
Where does the desire for understanding foreign lands come from? A desire to understand the other. To participate in, specifically to dominate, the exotic…By understanding the scale of foreign means taht understanding the local is immediately sacrificed. By dominating the other, it immediately follows that one is dominated. It ensues that the resulting mode necessarily be the exploitation and commodification of travel and understanding; that is cultural tourism.
This isn’t even going into the basic physical ramifications of movement. Travel isn’t sustainable for the masses. Environmentally, modes of travel like flying and driving are disastrous. Most travel experiences are alienating. The “Armchair Tourist” was a mainstream movie that addresses this. People don’t travel to connect with people, to live their lives, they travel to see things and buy crap. Most tourism is about visiting things that are set up specifically for tourists, not experiencing anything native or real to a local culture. At best, tourists participate in a nationalistic nostalgia.
Being Somewhere in the Geography of Nowhere
While the economic, communication and power systems that surround us and lead the masses in their daily lives continue to become more global and centralized, the most crucial form of resistance remains in being local. This resistance lies in the intimate networking of people within a geographically oriented community. This is the only scale on which we can realistically talk about empowerment, resisting consumption, and creating a living reality of liberation.
On the other hand, because of the global climate of our modern political economy, we must turn to non-local contacts for inspiration, information and solidarity. Some of the most stimulating events to other activists in the recent past have been actions which people have converged to fight global capitalist forces.
How community actualizes itself over space may be the most crucial element of community, in terms of its (dys)functionality and certainly sustainability. This is very different from how people currently and loosely use the term community. As far as I can tell, geographically oriented communities are termed as “neighborhoods” (it seems rare to find one that is really a community beyond block parties or neighborhood watching…gangs may be an exception to this), “intentional communities”, or “indigenous people”.
I often hear the term “community” to refer to a sense of community that may be appreciated by people sharing common projects, which it seems may or may not have common goals. For example, the “dance community” or vegetarian dining clubs…okay, probably even Amway meet this criteria. Although this is not necessarily a false sense of fulfillment, I would like to suggest that it may be an inappropriate or detrimental cooptation or evolution of how community is perceived.
The work of “community” implies an idealistic, long term, sustained and multifaceted support network. The needs that these loosely defined communities fulfill for the most part are social. Typically, the economic aspects of these communities are not separate agendas from an overarching capitalist system, in fact they are often complementary. I have rarely seen exchange of goods or services in any significant amounts that subverts dominant economic relationships or challenges status quo producer/consumer roles. These communities serve only to appease any vague dissatisfactions that participants may have.
Social needs in the US are mostly transitory. Kind of like plug and play. I work in the computer industry right now. Plug and play is a term that means you can take a disk drive, mouse or printer and just plug it into the computer to start using it. Social outlets such as bars, cafes, cycling clubs, are venues that can be found anywhere. Styles and interests are manufactured on a national and global scale. Some areas might have certain kinds of cultures in less density than others and some areas might be slower to get certain influences. I am not saying that thingsdon’t change at all, I am saying that mainstream American doesn’t change enough to draw lines. The only lines that are generally drawn are separatists’ lines, which are often attached to a localized community.
These interest oriented communities are an inevitable development of capitalist alienation. Specialization leads to special interest groups, which keeps individuals pacified by meeting their social needs. Rather than holistic education, myth, self-reliance and rites being the basis of interaction, alienated individuals boxed into sterile living quarters are compelled to find ways of relating to others with a limited knowledge base outside of alienated exchange.
So, this isn’t ideal, but why is it detrimental? Beyond the soical pacification and the perpetuation of specialization, I contend that this lie of community allows us to collectively forget the most fundamental factors of subsistence.
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
-Source Unknown
