OVO

Since the colonial period, the United States has been fighting to control currency. In fact, this battle was part of the foundation of the country. Prior to 1764, colonists issued “Bills of Credit” to deal with a shortage of hard currency. Some were issued by “land banks” and backed by the value of land. Others were merely promises of credit. [1] In 1764 the British Parliment passed the Currency Act, which prohibited the use of these Bills of Credit. This caused significant economic hardship for the colonies, and helped set the stage for the Revolution. [2]

In an 1883 paper called “Ideas for a Science of Good Government,” Peter Cooper wrote (emphasis mine):

After Franklin had explained this [the use of paper money] to the British Government as the real cause of prosperity, they immediately passed laws, forbidding the payment of taxes in that money. This produced such great inconvenience and misery to the people, that it was the principal cause of the Revolution. A far greater reason for a general uprising, than the Tea and Stamp Act, was the taking away of the paper money. [3]

Although Cooper was in favor of government issued currency, he saw the British outlawing of the Bills of Credit as a problem. He opposed the use of these local currencies, but saw them arising out of a failure of the government: “Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, raised his voice against the curse of the local banks, which were allowed to come into being by the neglect of the Government in the performance of its duty.” [3]

Today, a host of independent currencies are available: from small and local to big and global, and they are all issued to solve perceived problems with government issued currency. But it appears that the government is none too pleased with this competition.

Indie currency

Activists on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum work to create government independent currency solutions, but it seems that the left tend to prefer local currencies. “Community currency is a tool that can help revitalize local economies by encouraging wealth to stay within a community rather than flowing out,” Susan Meeker-Lowry wrote for Z Magazine. “In many communities around the country people are taking control by creating their own currency. This is completely legal and, as organizers are finding, often very empowering.” [4]

The Local Exchange Trading System (LETS), developed in British Columbia in the 80s, is one widely used system. LETS does away with the need for a printed money, acting instead as an interest free credit system. Michael Linton, a computer programmer, created LETS to solve a simple problem: community members “had valuable skills they could offer each other yet had no money. He also saw the limitations of a one-on-one barter system. If a plumber wanted the services of an electrician, but the electrician didn’t need plumbing help, the transaction couldn’t take place.” [4]

LETS solves the problem by issuing credit within the system. In the above example, the plumber would owe a debt to the LETS system, and electrician would be issued credit from the system. The electrician would be able to redeem the credit from another LETS member who is either in debt or wanted credit, and the plumber would be required to make his services available to other LETS members. [4] Many variations of Linton’s original system have been created, and several “how to” kits and manuals are available for purchase, or to download for free from the internet. [5]

Shifting the focus away from the US for a moment: during the Argentine financial crisis, the national currency of Argentina became practically worthless. [6] To help meet their needs and keep the economy working, many people turned to barter or to local currencies such as the “credito.”  [7] The credito was based, amongst other things, on LETS materials translated into Spanish. Transactions were originally recorded in a notebook, as in LETS, but eventually paper certificates were needed. By 2000, circulation of this currency had reached the equivalent of about $5 million a year. [8]

Argentina illustrates the usefulness of independent currencies when central banks fail. Local currencies, which tend not to cross state lines, seem not to get much attention from the government. I don’t know of any cases of local currencies being shut down by the government.

Towards a more perfect capitalism

Right wing proponents of alternative currencies, however, tend to favor more global forms of exchange. Advocates of “free banking” propose the dissolution of central banks like the Federal Reserve in favor of private banks issuing competing currencies. [9]

The founder of the internet payment solution PayPal, Peter Thiel, envisioned PayPal as a way to create a more free exchange of currency globally. Thiel hoped people in foreign countries with restrictive money export laws could use PayPal to hold their currency in dollars or other more stable foreign currencies, such as the US dollar [10]. But the proprietors of precious metal backed digital currencies like e-Gold and the Liberty Dollar are more even more ambitious.

Thinkers ranging from Ron Paul [11] to Alan Greenspan [12] advocate a return to the gold standard. But some entrepreneurs act directly by issuing digital currency backed by gold, silver, or other precious metals.

Dr. Douglas Jackson founded e-gold, the first internet currency backed 100% by precious metals, in 1996. Jackson cites gold’s stability as a currency and the internet’s natural openness as the reasons for creating an internet based gold currency. He believes e-gold is currency perfected: stable and market driven. In an interview in Wired in 2002 he called e-gold “probably the greatest benefit to humanity that’s ever been thought of.” [13]

The Liberty Dollar, backed mostly by silver but also by other precious metals, is sold by National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and the Internal Revenue Code (NORFED). Founder, and former mint master of the Royal Hawaiian Mint Company, Bernard von NotHaus conceived of the currency to compete head-on with the Federal Reserve:

For years America was saddled with a slow, poor postal service. Finally, Federal Express brought competition to this heavily subsidized government agency that no one though could change. And it responded and improved noticeably. NORFED emulates this model by bringing a superior product to America’s monetary system, its currency. [14]

NORFED offers coins, certificates that look like something like dollar bills, and an internet backed currency. Coins and certificates are available through “Regional Currency Offices,” and NORFED actively encourages Liberty Dollar enthusiasts to open their own RCOs and recruit others. [15]

Financial Jihad

Outside the western left / right political spectrum is the another global cultural force: Islam. While the founders of Pay Pal, e-gold, and NORFED believe themselves to be perfecting capitalism with their digital services, the Islamic founders of e-dinar, who formed a partnership with e-gold and at one point hosted 50% of e-gold’s reserve at their vaults in Dubai, believe they are destroying it. [13]

The founders of e-dinar are members of the Murabitun movement, a peculiur form of Sufism. Murabitun followers believe that paper money is haram, unlawful, according to Islamic faith. The founder of the Murabitun movement, Sheikh Abdalqadir, says: “A true study of the Qur’an and the Sunna shows us that capitalism will not be abolished on the battlefield but in the marketplace where it is practiced.” [13]

“Fatwa Concerning the Islamic Prohibition of Using Paper-Money as a Medium of Exchange,” a Murabitun text by Umar Vadillo, states: “After examining all the aspects of paper money, in the Light of the Qur’an and the Sunna, we declare that the use of paper money in any form of exchange is usury and therefore haram” because paper money (and, by extension, credit and debit cards) is “nothing but a pure symbol with no reality attached except the imposition of law.” [13]

Vidillo says: “You want to be radical? You don’t need to blow up the bank, just burn your bank account. For that you need an alternative. What is the alternative? E-dinar.” [13]

The current status of e-dinar is a bit mysterious. e-gold used be partners with e-dinar [13], but according to e-dinar’s web site e-dinar officially split with e-gold in 2004 after being acquired by an unnamed “Large International Corporation” in 2003. [16]

The state responds

It would seem, though, that the larger reach of global alternatives lead to larger interventions by the government. Of all the major players in independent currency game, e-gold has probably had the worst legal trouble. “In December 2005, the Secret Service and FBI raided the company’s headquarters and seized roughly $800,000 in assets,” according to the Washington Post. [17] This lead e-gold to beef up their security measures, even creating new software designed to detect e-gold customers committing crimes. [18] The new security measures didn’t stop a federal indictment from being leveled against the company in April of 2007. The company was served with four indictments, including operating an illegal money transfer operation and money laundering. [17]

Then, on Wednesday May 9th, 2007 the United States government seized the holdings of 58 e-gold accounts, forcing 48 bars of gold to be redeemed for approximately $77 million dollars. As of this writing, all the funds are still in in the US government’s control pending the outcome of lawsuit filed against e-gold’s parent company. [19] However, e-gold and its subsidiary Omnipay maintain business.

In 2006 The United States Mint issued a press release stating that circulating Liberty Dollars is a federal crime. The press release implies that Liberty Dollars are deceptively similar to US currency, and that NORFED intends them to be used as legal tender. [20] As of this writing, I am unaware of any case against any persons in the United States for using the Liberty Dollar.

NORFED responded with a civil lawsuit. On March 20, 2007 von NotHaus filed against the US Mint, asking “the court to declare that the use of the Liberty Dollar is not a ‘federal crime,’ as claimed by the U.S. Mint. And the organization further asked the court to enter a permanent injunction against the U.S. Mint requiring it to remove any reference that the use of Liberty Dollars is a federal crime from its website.” [21 As of this writing, the case remains unsettled. But on November 14th, 2007 the situation took another turn: the FBI raided Liberty Dollar on charges of circulating illegal currency, mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. The affidavit also described Liberty Dollar as a "multi-level marketing scheme."  [22]

Von NotHaus has described the raid as “a direct assault against the US Constitution and your right to own and use gold and silver in any way you chose” and dismissed the mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering charges as fantasy. [23]

Pay Pal, eventually burdened with legal problems, banned the use of PayPal for gambling, pornography, and several other uses in 2004. [24]

Conclusion

It is important to note that e-gold and NORFED may well be guilty of the crimes it has been charged with.  It remains to be seen how they will come out in court. NORFED and e-gold have many competitors, so the international, gold back internet currency business continues. However, the struggles of these companies, and the fact that they are being held liable for what their customers use their services for, is illustrative of the control the US government exerts over currency. If the Federal Reserve were held accountable every time legal tender were used in criminal transactions, surely the Fed would have been shut down by now. Why are companies like e-gold held to a different standard? Why are they asked to act as de facto law enforcement?

And all of this raises the question: why is there such a demand for alternative currencies? Shouldn’t the state be spending its time trying to correct the problems the Fed (or shutting it down), instead of trying to shut down those who are trying to solve problems the government is not?

References:
1. ushistory.org “Currency Act,”  http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/related/currencyact.htm Retrieved 10/30/07.
2. u-s-history.com “Currency Act,”  http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1212.html Retrieved 10/30/07.
3. Cooper, Peter. “Ideas for a Science of Good Government,”  http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1212.html Retrieved 10/30/07.
4. Meeker-Lowry, Susan. “The Potential of Local Currency,”  Z Magazine, July 1995. http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/july95lowry.htm Retrieved 10/30/07.
5. Wikipedia. “Local Exchange Trading System,”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Exchange_Trading_System Retrieved 10/30/07.
6. Ballvé, Marcello. “Silent Revolution,”  Orion Magazine, July 2006. http://thetake.org/media/The%20Silent%20Revolution.pdf Retrieved 10/30/07.
7. Katel, Peter. “Argentina: the Post Money Economy,”  Time, February 2002. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,199474,00.html Retrieved 10/30/07.
8. DeMeulenaere, Stephen. “Reinventing the Market: Alternative Currencies and Community Development in Argentina,”  International Journal of Community Currency Research, 2000. http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/ijccr/pdfs/IJCCR%20Vol%204%20(2000)%203%20DeMeulenaere.pdf Retrieved 10/30/07.
9. Greaves, Bettina Bien. “Market Money and Free Banking,”  The Freeman, October 1999. http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=4946 Retrieved 10/30/07.
10. Bodow, Steve. “The Money Shot,”  Wired, September 2001. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.09/paypal_pr.html Retrieved 10/30/07.
11. Ludwig von Mises Institute. “The Case for Gold.”  http://www.mises.org/store/Case-for-Gold-The-P386C0.aspx?AFID=1 Retrieved 10/30/07.
12. Greenspan, Alan. “Gold and Economic Freedom.”  The Objectivist, 1966. http://www.321gold.com/fed/greenspan/1966.html Retrieved 10/30/07.
13. Dibbell, Julien. Wired, January 2002. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.01/egold.html Retrieved 10/30/07.
14. Orzano, Michele. Coin World Magazine, October 1998. http://www.libertydollar.org/news-stories/pdfs/1164902714.pdf Retrieved 10/30/07.
15. Liberty Dollar web site. “Regional Currency Office.”  http://www.libertydollar.org/ld/rco/index.htm Retrieved 10/30/07.
16. e-dinar web site. “History.”  http://www.e-dinar.com/html/3_4.html Retrieved 10/30/07.
17. Krebs, Brian. washingtonpost.com, “U.S.: Online Payment Network Abetted Fraud, Child Pornography,”  May 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/01/AR2007050101291.html Retrieved 10/30/07.
18. Zetter, Kim. Wired News, “E-Gold Gets Tough on Crime,”  December 2006. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/12/72278 Retrieved 10/30/07.
19. “US Government Forces E-gold Redemptions – Seizes Gold,”  Money Net News, May 2007. http://www.moneynetnews.com/articles/54/1/US-Government-Forces-E-gold-Redemp Retrieved 10/30/07.
20.US Mint web site. “Liberty Dollars Not Legal Tender, United States Mint Warns Consumers.”  http://www.usmint.gov/pressroom/index.cfm?flash=yes&action=press_release&id=710 Retrieved 10/30/07.
21. Liberty Dollar web site. “Legal Updates.”  http://www.libertydollar.org/ld/legal/updates.htm Retrieved 10/30/07.
22. Taylor, Jeff. Reason Magazine web site,”Your Liberty Dollar Raid Update.”  November 2007. http://www.reason.com/blog/show/123553.html Retrieved 7/24/07.
23. Liberty Dollar web site. “FBI Raid on the Liberty Dollar.”  November 2007. http://www.libertydollar.org/ld/legal/raid.htm Retrieved 7/24/07.
24. Balko, Radley. Reason Magazine,”Who Killed Pay Pal?”  August 2005. http://www.reason.com/news/show/33114.html Retrieved 10/30/07.

from OVO 18 MONEY (April 2008).  Revised for technoccult (November 2008).  Reprinted in Digital Gold Currency Magazine (January 2009).

“Time is money” is a rather common proverb generally heard as one explains why they are so wrapped up in their scheduling software or why they buy at wall-mart. To a degree this is a truism, in a capitalist economy time is money and money is the arbiter of all value. However the speaker of this proverb is rarely aware that if time is money and money is valuable then their time is valuable… even if they are not exchanging it for money. Time, not money, is the most valuable thing that anyone has. This is because it is a truly finite variable that so many other things depend upon. Instead people allow their schedules to rule their time telling them where they have to be when and what they have to do when they get there. It seems to me that people are exchanging a most precious commodity, their time to experience existence, for something much more common, little coloured rectangles of paper. Even after you have bought things with your coloured paper you still need your time to make use of the shiny things you have purchased. Its a cruel dynamic the more you work to make money to buy things the less time you have to enjoy the things you have been working for.

You trade your time for money and trade money for things. This is in some ways overly complicated and there are people who spend their time making those things that they want, cutting out all the middle men. The do-it-yourself movement is an example of this, as is subsistence level farming. Considering how wasteful consumer capitalism actually is, it is entirely possible to survive in a urban environment without engaging in wage labour. You can spend your time getting food by dumpstering. Food, of course, is far from the only thing thrown away while it is still usable.

Out of the discards of a wasteful culture you can pull the raw materials with which to construct objects of desire and engage in enjoyable activities. The simpler your needs are in terms of objects the more time you can spend on experiences, on living. Buckminster Fuller was an inventor who spent his time designing things to more efficiently meet the needs of people in order to free them up to live. He called this branch of technology livingry to put it in distinction to the other motor of innovation, weaponry.

Marx developed the Labour-time theory of value where the value of an object was determined by the amount of labour time that was put into its production. Of course this theory was partially a work of propaganda or myth-making to build up the claim of the workers to the rewards of the early capitalist economy but it still one of the better theories on what actually makes a commodity valuable. Perhaps another way of looking at this is that value is produced by the energy put into the object over time, Value as Kilowatt Hours. With the increasing mechanization of industrial production it is foreseeble that items will be stamped out that had so minimal an input by humans that they would be valueless in terms of labour. However, these objects will still take work in a physical sense to produce them. Whether this shift to inhuman production will be a liberatory experience for mankind or the creation of a destitute no-longer-working class is an open question as yet. In part the answer has been to push people into service and administrative roles but even these have begun to be mechanized with information technology such as recommendation systems and complicated telephony arrangements.

from OVO 18 MONEY (April 2008)

Edward Wilson is a freelance writer living in Vancouver, Canada; Portland, Oregon and Cyberspace. If not found writing in one of Vancouver’s coffee shops, Edward is likely drinking in one of Portland’s Bars. Edward, known online as Fenris23, specializes in rediscovering magical techniques in the fields of psychology and sociology. He is Co-Author of The Art of Memetics with Wes Unruh and his next project will be space/ time/ punctuation, an exploration of the experience of space and time.
http://fenris23.wordpress.com
fenris23@gmail.com

a close-up of a word
losing meaning
where money is water

“we were broke. The town cold.
With four dollars a day
streets were wet. Jobs hard spending that last four dollars
few options for food would
have wiped us out.” Money

it no longer signifies. there’s a silence,
the loss of coin to paper,
the paper to credit

“rich white people
like me, they fund
my art” and sold

to the color of more
with each transaction
cash burning;
a memory of wealth:
bank enough money
to be saved. Ourselves…

money lies, you smear
money across the counter
It’s manifest destiny, the first
dollar bill framed dribbles
above the register does
make money
make value
make meaning

“you fold the bills
right you can see
the towers fall”

she’s got the video
online we’ve spent
all the loose change

the more you have
the less it means
and exchange rates,
memories, shadows,
a handful of dust
and great white guilt

from OVO 18 MONEY (April 2008)

wesunruh.info

Tabletop gaming is a niche hobby at best. A selection of relatively simple board games is marketed for children and families by big toy companies. The granddaddy of all role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons, is a major product line for its publisher, Wizards of the Coast, but the company still relies on card games and miniatures to keep itself afloat. And Wizards is just a small division of the toy giant Hasbro.

Only a handful of other games can compete with D&D for profitability. Many are lucky if they can even make it onto the shelves. Major book retailers like Borders prefer to deal only with established and well-supported games. Local gaming stores, meanwhile, are usually shoestring operations with limited shelf space and a bewildering array of options. Again, an established line is usually a safer bet.

Selling directly to fans seemed to become easier with the internet – anyone who could find your game online could order it, regardless of whether their local gaming store stocked it or not. But the costs of printing a large enough run were still prohibitive. Some publishers tried selling digital copies, starting with various e-book formats but quickly settling for the basic .pdf.

Unfortunately, anything sold as a .pdf is quickly shared, and stops selling as free copies become available. Sharing music isn’t catastrophic for independent artists, because they can make their money on live performances. Game publishers have no such option, however – the book or manual itself is their primary source of income. They don’t sell concert tickets or t-shirts. And independent game writers, without the resources of a bigger company to back them up, can’t subsidize their game books with collectible cards or miniatures.

If they can’t get paid to create games, they can’t keep doing it. At least they can’t give it the time and attention that it deserves. One game writer, however, is trying a new model, one that’s off to a promising start.

In 2004, Greg Stolze and Daniel Solis created a fun little game called Meatbot Massacre. It’s a tactical dice game where players design bioengineered war robots and fight them in an arena. It’s well-written and tightly designed, and introduces an innovative dice-rolling system. It’s a game that feeds the enthusiasms of a select group of gamers, a niche within a niche, but it’s not a game that will generate enough profit to be worth printing. Not on a traditional retail model, at least.

But Stolze re-imagined his audience. Instead of a group of individual customers, he saw them as a collective. He wanted to harness the support of the gaming community to sell the game to the community. They didn’t all have to buy as individuals – they just had to offer enough collectively. So he decided to hold the game for ransom.

In December of 2004, he announced that the game had been written, and would be released into the public domain when he received $600 for it. It was a small start – the game itself was only ten pages, and Stolze set the price by determining all the expenses and then paying himself four cents a word, the low end for game writing. Solis set up a ransom website with a PayPal button, and they set a deadline of September 2005. If the ransom wasn’t collected by then, the game wouldn’t be released, and whatever money had been raised would be turned over to a homeless shelter.

Ransoming a game was a novel idea, and no one knew how it would work. After a strong start, donations slowed to a trickle, but they kept coming in. The $600 goal was achieved in five months, half the time allotted, and the game was released as a free download in April 2005.

With this success under their belts, Stolze and Solis went on to produce …In Spaaace!, a comic role-playing game of space shenanigans. Like Meatbot Massacre, it was an innovative system, based this time on bidding with tokens instead of rolling any dice. And like Meatbot Massacre, while it would find a hearty welcome in a certain narrow audience, it would never be profitable for retail.

They set the ransom in July 2005, this time at $750 for a fifteen page game, still paying Stolze less than five cents a word. Instead of ten months, however, they set the deadline at six weeks, and it only took four to collect.

There was another big difference in this ransom, apart from the shorter time period. Instead of running their own site and collecting PayPal donations, Stolze and Solis moved their operation to a new site, www.fundable.org. Describing itself, Fundable says it “lets groups of people pool funds to make purchases or raise money.” It collects pledges, not actual payments, towards whatever goal the group leader sets. When the goal is met, the money is collected, Fundable collects 7%, and the remainder is sent to the group leader by PayPal (or by check, for a $10 fee.). If the goal isn’t met, the pledges are released and no money changes hands.

Greg Stolze went on to release two more games on Fundable. Soon after the success of …In Spaaace!, he teamed up with four other writers and designers to produce Executive Decision, in which characters are Oval Office advisors who compete for the President’s ear while pursuing their own agendas. It was offered in September 2005 as a fundraiser for the Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina. In one month, it met its goal of $1000, which was devoted to relief efforts.

Then in February 2006, Stolze and fellow game developer Dennis Detwiller offered Nemesis for a $1000 ransom. In this case, there was a 25-day deadline that was met in just 11 days. Nemesis was the largest yet, at 56 pages, and it was also an important release for other reasons.

Stolze and Detwiller had worked together before, notably on 2002′s Godlike, a superhero role-playing game set in World War II. For this game, Stolze developed the dice mechanic that would become the One-Roll Engine (ORE), a generic game system that could accommodate any setting. Stolze and Detwiller would release Wild Talents, the sequel to Godlike, at the end of 2006, but in the meantime Godlike was all there was.

Nemesis was the ORE, stripped of superpowers, spliced to a system for madness from Stolze’s earlier work on the Unknown Armies game, and placed in a horror setting reminiscent of the Cthulhu mythos. It was the first ORE release since Godlike, and by working with characters who were ordinary mortals, it made the system accessible to a much broader range of settings than a superhero game could be. It served as a default system document for the ORE, and continues to fill an important function within the system.

But Nemesis only set the stage for Stolze’s next project. Reign was to be his long-awaited fantasy adaptation of the ORE, with a new set of rules for characters to build organizations and play on a much larger scale. It was to be a full-size core rulebook, over 350 pages, far larger than anything that had been published by ransom. Stolze didn’t want to stretch the ransom model to the breaking point, but he couldn’t afford to print the books himself either. He chose instead to use Lulu.com for print-on-demand (POD).

Reign came out on Lulu in May 2007. It came in four editions: hard or soft cover, and with a choice of cover art by Daniel Solis or Dennis Detwiller. The softcover editions ran into trouble with some misprints, which took several months to clear up. Also, POD can’t offer the price breaks of mass production, so the books were spendy: $36.89 for the soft covers and $49.30 for the hard, with more tacked on for postage. This compares to $29.95 for hardcovers of the core D&D books, and $39.95 for the hardcover of Godlike from the small press Arc Dream Publishing.

Despite the problems and the cost, Reign has sold well for POD. In October of 2007, Stolze reported on his website that he’d sold 675 copies. Not a lot compared to D&D, but a decent showing for an independent game. He reported that he’d currently made over $12,000 from Lulu, selling the four editions of Reign and one small book of short stories. None of that money included what he made from the supplements.

Traditionally, role-playing games offer one or more hefty rulebooks, followed by a number of supplements. Managed well, new supplements can continue to bring in money once the core books have leveled off. But from the player’s perspective, the constant flow of supplements sometimes feels like being milked for every available penny.

At the end of the Reign rulebook, Stolze makes a promise: “You’re holding in your hands the last Reign product to be released solely as a print book with a fixed price. Everything else is going to come out via the Ransom Model.”

From June to October 2007, Stolze offered for supplements for a ransom of $1000 each. Each one had a deadline of 25 days. The first three made their goals; the last one came up $20 short but was released anyway. More are said to be in the works.

Stolze seems to have dedicated himself to building a new model of making and selling games, one with the potential to reach players directly, saving the game’s creator the overhead of printing and distribution and bypassing the fight for retail shelf-space. He’s made a good start, but important questions remain.

Stolze and his collaborators were already well-known in the gaming community. Stolze had worked for White Wolf Publishing, the main competitor to Wizards of the Coast, as well as the smaller Atlas Games, where he had worked on the seminal Unknown Armies. The ransom model depends largely on his well-established reputation, which also helps to overcome the high price of print-on-demand. But will his model work for a writer without his reputation? What happens to a designer without a built-in audience? How will a system based on reputation allow for new blood to enter the field?

It also remains to be seen if this model will work for Stolze in the long run. Will ransom continue to work when the novelty wears off, and will it allow him to establish a regular source of income? Other than coming up $20 short on one Reign supplement, he hasn’t failed to achieve a ransom yet. What will happen when he does? The system looks good when it succeeds, but is it robust enough to handle failure?

Finally, what else can the ransom model support? Fundable’s primary market seems to be non-profit fundraising and group purchases. It also boasts of supporting books, music and film. How far can this approach be taken, and can it be optimized for particular types of products? Game design has such a narrow audience that it may have to ride the coattails of more popular fields, such as independent musicians.

Stolze’s efforts may succeed and grow, or they may become another internet casualty. But in the meantime, they’ve already put good innovative games in the hands of players, and broadened the range of what can be done with gaming. Long-range success is by no means assured, but Greg Stolze is doing his best to find a new way for his industry to work.

RESOURCES:
www.gregstolze.com
www.gregstolze.com/downloads.html
www.fundable.org
www.lulu.com
stores.lulu.com/gregstolze

Johnny Brainwash only talks about gaming and riding his bike. johnnybrainwash@hotmail.com

from OVO 18 MONEY (April 2008)

Triangle, circle, pyramid, egg.
Triangle, circle, pyramid, egg.
Triangle, circle, sheared Ziggurat annulled ovum.
Praying hands, clenched sphincter.

Triangle, circle, serpent’s tooth, serpent’s egg.
Bites through the shell, sucks out the translucent ooze. BITE IT.
Ooze, ooze, baby. Oooh baby, your digits, your zeros, your commas, I WANT THEM ALL!

Let’s get digital. Count off by ones.
Boy-girl, boy-girl. Ones and zeros, ones and zeros, marching endlessly to the horizon.

He’s bone, she’s stone. One on one, T for 2, three’s company. For unto us a child is given. THEN TAKEN AWAY.
Coitus Interruptus. Annuit Coeptis.
God has favored our understanding.
Great Seal of the United States.
Obverse / reverse. Heads or tails.
The greenback’s back.

Great Seal: for your protection.
Pierce the membrane, pull back the skin. Nothing there.
Nothing up my sleeve.
This is the null set, signifying Nothing.
Peel a few bills off your wad.
King Piston, Magic wand, Orb and Scepter.
WAD RULES. Money from nowhere.
Pennies from heaven. Penis from Hell.

T-bill, E-bone, ebony baboon
Barbary ape climbing the pyramid with a rose and eros clenched between his teeth.
Black bristle back, furry tongue, pink gums and prehensile prepuce.
Foreskin of the gods, 3-toed sloth, too much fun being alive.
One triangulated eyeball surveys the infinite distances.
Light carries forever. They eye looks round the world. The eye sees itself, mapped onto itself.
Retinal membrane – film.
The skin of sight.

Eye See You. I know what you do.
ICU. Intensive Care Unit.
Dead Presidents on parade.
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson.
N to the Nth degree. Three dimensions, lust, power and hunger steam-rolled down to two. Printed on magic paper, trimmed.
Dead Presidents 1, 2, 5, 10, 20.
Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer.
Einz 57 varieties of nothing.
E Pluribus Unum.
One hundred channels and nothing on.

Uni-dimensional. Black hole.
Infinitely hot and dense dot burning a hole in your pocket.
Your dizzy little digit is twitching up a storm, but playing pocket pool in the Temple of Cool is sure as Sheol not the answer.
You got a crazy little finger
You got a crazy little thumb
You got a crazy little organ
I think I’m gonna get me some

Cash in your chips, Buddy.
Red hot poker, pookah ghost money.
Phantom funds, joss dollars burnt and sent to the next world.
Talking, trash, spending cash
A pillar of fire and a mountain of ash.

Money reigns supreme
Mazuma’s revenge. Solvent?
Liquid assets running down your leg.
A cataract of filthy lucre
Niagra Falls of body mud.
A flood of intestinal tears.
CRY CRY CRY your life away
WHY? WHY? WHY? time to pay and pray.
It must be rainin’ cuz man’s not supposed to cry.
A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
Money to burn?
BURN YOUR MONEY.

from OVO 18 MONEY (April 2008)

See also:
OVO 15 SPERM February 2005

From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.

Mike Diana: Attack of the Giant Killer Sperm
from OVO 15 SPERM (February 2005)

See also:
OVO 10 MAYHEM (July 1991)

Chris Cilla: Sperm Trek
from OVO 15 SPERM (February 2005)

See also:
OVO 7 INFORMATION (October 1989)

Dmitry Babenko: The Sperm.
2004. 6″ x 8.5″. Paint, ink, paper, adhesive.
from OVO 15 SPERM (February 2005)

About the artist:
I was born in 1970 in Krasnodar city of Russia. In 1996 I graduated from the Faculty of the Artistic and Technical Drawing of the Kuban State University. Since 1994 I am taking part in Mail Art projects. The basic spheres of my creative activity are visual poetry, artistbook and Mail Art. For the present I took part in approximately 300 Mail Art projects, in roughly 20 countries of the world. My works had been purchased and kept in the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete Visual Poetry. In 2003 my works were exhibited in Miami Art Museum within the bounds of project “Visual Poetics: Art and the Word.”

Dmitry Babenko
P. Box 1670
Krasnodar-80
RUSSIA

From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.

17 July 1990 interview with V. Vale, publisher of Search and Destroy, co-founder of Re/Search Publications.

OVO: What is the main source for the information that you publish?

VALE: We never tire of saying that our main influences were surrealism and situationism, and surrealism as you know placed a great deal of influence on objective chance and randomness and insanity and systems for deciphering the world that are a-logical systems We will admit that a lot of it is just purely chance. But of course through the years we have friends and our friends really help us. For example, the film book [Re/Search #10 Incredibly Strange Films] which was actually the first book that broke out of our small industrial music underground audience, that was done just because we got a letter from Jim Morton, who had been collecting these incredible films all his life but particularly since the advent of VCR. He wrote us, and then we went over to his house every Saturday night for years and watched two or three of four movies there and ate popcorn. It took four or five years he guest-edited the Incredibly Strange Films book and we put it out. We wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t known Jim Morton, let’s face it.

OVO: What is the purpose of Re/Search?

VALE: The surrealists had a slogan, something like “Matter Over Mind,” but what it meant was it is a mistake just to assume that one proceeds from the idea to the material reality. Very often its just the opposite. You might say the material reality suggests the theory, shall we say, and frankly I got started publishing back in ’77 because of punk rock. Of course it wasn’t called that then but it was very exciting, as undifferentiated and undefined and unlimited as it appeared to be because it was revolt, it was the youth revolt or revolution (if you dare to use that word) of the ’70s. And I was involved right from the very beginning before it had become codified and more or less set in amber. And so for me it was like a vehicle, it was an opportunity to… I don’t know, I just did it. My main motivation was kind of anger at the status quo. I’d always been angry at the status quo anyway, but, you know, what do you do? A lot of people just become criminals or whatever, or drug addicts, or they just can’t cope for a lot of good reasons. Society gives us all plenty of reasons but it also provides the narcotics in the form of television and actual narcotics so that we can “adapt,” shall we say.  And so yes, it’s definitely a struggle against mind control, against conditioning, against banal information.  We were born with the birthright of curiosity and there’s nothing more natural than to be curious, but of course this faculty is extinguished early in life.  It seems like society does everything it can to either extinguish this faculty or to channel it only along channels of consumption rather than you yourself doing something creative on your own, something creative and original and obsessive and unique on your own.  I don’t think society can really handle that, because it’s too destabilizing.  It’s like we’re in a vast consumption machine, we’re part of it, and society would function (it thinks) better if we would just go along with the programs.  And so obviously anyone who is a lover of freedom is going to go against that in all its manifestations.  And yet it’s not just enough to fight, whatever that means.  You have to eventually start doing something.  And in our case we more or less accidentally discovered that we could do something and sort of realize our own identities and destinies by becoming publishers.  Re/Search however is not the same as Search and Destroy.  Re/Search happened when I met Andrea [Juno] back in 1980, after we’d been very depressed for a year by what we thought was the death of punk rock.  It was certainly the death of punk rock as we knew it, that is as a viable underground, a microcosmos of society.  We were depressed for a year but then realized that this shouldn’t be the end of publishing.

OVO: Are the Re/Search archives open to the public?

Vale: No, because we’re not public figures.  If all we were to do were to run a library we’d never get any work done, and obviously our work comes first.  It’s hard enough as it is right now just to deal with all the business aspects let alone function as some sort of archive.  It so happens that we’ve been attacked by Jesse Helms [R-NC] and Dana Rohrabacher [R-CA] and entered into the Congressional Record because they don’t like our book Modern Primitives, which is yet another Re/Search publication which is advocating a certain theory of self-liberation or exploration.  That’s all it was intended to do, provide theory for this kind of activity, but apparently the powers that be would like to have this kind of theory and information repressed.

OVO: What kind of trouble have they been giving you?

VALE: Actually we should context this in a much wider overview that obviously America right now is under (thanks to less than probably one-tenth of one percent of the population) which is these very organized fundamentalist Christian fascists who have nothing to do with their lives but write letters all day to their congressman and call up advertisers threatening to boycott things like The Simpsons.  In other words, a minority group trying to pretend and camouflaging themselves as some kind of vox populi majority, which they are not. They’re mostly these very ignorant people in the South, people who have long since shut off any creative potential in their lives.  They’re just consumed by envy and they want to control all the rest of the population, who might be having more fun than them in some way. The Reagan agenda was to turn the country back to the McCarthy ’50s, since he was an informer for McCarthy, and to take away all the gains of the ’60s.  That complex agenda is still being realized. Every day there’s some new article in the paper on page 40 how 160 stores in the deep South took away Playboy Magazine from their stands. Little things like that don’t even get reported here on the West Coast. Thing like that are happening all the time but the more you find out about it the scarier it gets.

OVO: Yesterday a group called AIDS Response Knoxville had their office fire bombed. I just found out about that this morning.

VALE: If you could send me the clipping… see, that was not in our paper today. It doesn’t surprise me. So what you have now is a great deal of information containment going on. We’re living in the illusion that all the information is available, that were living in a global village and all that, but most people get their information from TV news, which is of course extremely compressed and bowdlerized and operates by omission. We should all be subscribing to our own little clipping services I suppose to get the kind of news such as the incident you told me about just now.

OVO: I didn’t find out about it from the paper. I found out about it from a friend and he said there’s only a tiny article about it.

VALE: That’s perfect, that’s exactly the way things happen and are happening. The propaganda techniques which Hitler initiated in terms of mass media control of the population, they‘re real good now. Helms is a master of negative campaigning, in which life gets simplified down to whether you’re for child pornography and obscenity or… Helms’ voting record is incredible, he’s a madman, the total enemy of liberty. But even when Helms is gone there‘ll always be someone to take his place. This kind of control mentality will apparently always be with us but yet we’re trying to do a small campaign so that all the minority papers across the country will at least have a copy of his voting record and also start to get a larger overview of all these isolated little incidents that’ve been happening, which together paint an extremely depressing picture of the abridgment of our freedoms.

OVO: Have there been specific incidents of you having trouble with Modern Primitives?

VALE: Knock on wood, no. We had two art shows based on the book, and that‘s how it started. If you don’t have any information on this I’ll send it to you.

OVO: No, I don’t have any.

VALE: Okay, I’ll send you the whole little press packet on that, with all the articles that’ve come out. See, that’s what l mean, someone as relatively hip and aware as you don’t know. Multiply this by about a thousand for all the little environmental groups all over. Their little news things never get reported. I just found out today that all the searches that the FBI did of all these Earth First houses, the people involved with Earth First because of two people blown up by a bomb, the FBI keeps reporting to the news that they blew themselves up rather than what they should be doing which is trying to find out who really did it. I didn’t realize until I read the paper today that all the searches the FBI did of people who deal with Earth First were all warrantless. To me that is really frightening. Did you know that? Do you think that means anything? And we only found out because our good friend Jock Sturges, a photographer, got busted recently. We’ve known Jock for years. For the last twenty years he has specifically focused on, shall we say, beautiful adolescent girls who are developing. But they are not pornography, he’s not the head of a kiddie porn ring by any means. He’s got the most incredibly beautiful negatives you’ve ever seen, eight by ten inch view camera negatives blown up to twenty by twenty-four inch prints that have a million gray tones in them. And we only found out from him that basically the First and Fourth Amendments are dead. The Fourth Amendment is unreasonable searches and seizures. Because the FBI just busted into his house without a search warrant. And this was all done, as Burroughs has kept us appraised of and warned us against all these years, in the name of fighting the “drug problem.” Because here’s what they can say now: they can come in because (a) they have a reason to believe you are about to destroy evidence and (b) they have a right to watch you because they have reason to believe you might try to commit suicide or commit harm to yourself. Isn’t that nice?

OVO: They’ve certainly got our best interests in mind.

VALE: Yes, of course.

OVO: How do you prevent Re/Search from becoming a part of the process of -

VALE: – co-option and assimilation? You’re dealing with what McLuhan called a very cool medium (or is it hot, I can never get that straight), but you’re dealing with a medium that is a book, and do you realize how few people read anymore? The numbers are incredible, how much reading has declined even though the population has doubled. When people do read, what do they read? They mostly lead these airport kind of books. It’s really frightening. The reason most people avoid books is because, let’s face it, there’s only a minority that reads any more, almost everyone else watches television and gets their information from TV. And in order to read effectively I find that l must have complete silence, as much as possible, and this is not the modem way. A lot of people these days, it’s like a conspiracy to keep them from thinking. As soon as they get up in the morning they have their radio blaring or put on a tape or something. We’ve all known people who’ve had the TV on eight hours a day. Of course we don’t know people like that any more, but they’re out there, like zombies or something. And so I still think that if you’re putting something out in a book you have more of a chance of making it with some kind of integrity. Because books aren’t you, Re/Search is not me or Andrea; it’s on its own. And if it has some ideas that light up your brain and catalyze in some way, which is the best that one can hope for… the books really do have a life of their own. And we’re just putting out a combination of information, images and ideas, hopefully, as well as trying to direct people to other books, which continue the same kind of inspiration.

Re/Search
20 Romolo Street #B
San Franslsco CA 94133 USA
http://researchpubs.com/

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)

Update, February 2011
Jim Morton writes about films, pop culture, and advertising.
http://popvoid.blogspot.com/

Boyd Rice was formerly credited as guest editor for Re/Search #10 Incredibly Strange Films.
http://www.boydrice.com/

Andrea Juno founded Juno Books.
http://twitter.com/AnimaJuno

Jesse Alexander Helms, Jr. died in 2008.

Dana Tyron Rohrabacher is the U.S. Representative for California’s 46th Congressional district.

AIDS Response Knoxville served at least between 1987 and 1999 and may still exist.

Jock Sturges’ studio was the subject of an FBI raid on 25 April 1990. Accused of child pornography, a Grand Jury did not bring an indictment against him.

Wikipedia, Judi Bari Car Bombing:

In 1990, a bomb exploded in Judi Bari’s car, shattering her pelvis and also injuring fellow activist Darryl Cherney. Bari and Cherney were later arrested after police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation suspected that they had been transporting the bomb when it accidentally exploded. The case against them was eventually dropped due to lack of evidence. Bari died in 1997 of cancer, but her federal lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland, California police resulted in a 2002 jury verdict awarding her estate and Darryl Cherney a total of $4.4 million. Eighty percent of the damages were for violation of their First Amendment rights by the FBI and police trying to discredit them in the media as violent extremists despite ample evidence to the contrary. The bombing remains unsolved.

House of the United States of America:
Warbucks Intra-Family Communique

I know that you don’t like to think this, but we are much like humans. We are subject to the human frailties. We forget. We get slip-shod. We fall short of our disciplines. You have selected me to be the family coordinator and I agreed to be, at least until someone better comes along. So that’s why I’m now reminding you of some of our basic principles for handling slaves.

Our slaves can get bored easily. When bored, they get restless. They start thinking, and questioning order. Therefore it is necessary for us to direct their thinking into areas which keep them dependent on our leadership. We must make them feel dependent on society for all their needs. Make them feel important to the Great Whole to which they belong. Keep them too deep in debt to have any spare time to experiment with principles of self-sufficiency, or even just getting out of hole.

A few of the slaves who refuse to conform are squatting in various places and planting their apple seeds, plum pits, grape seeds, avocado pits, orange seeds, nuts of all kinds and vegetables. They are not using our hybrid seeds. They found organic natural seeds more productive. They are creating Gardens of Eden, with free food, no rent and and acceptance of the Golden Rule instead of Government. So far, only a few of the smarter nonconformists are doing this. This gets them off our case; however, we must not give them any publicity, as it might encourage more our workers to not conform.

The family came up with a great innovation when they first decided to “allow” the peons to “own” land. Ownership gives them roots ties them down and makes it a easier to find them. It also gives us a classification of slave known as landlords. They serve us by forcing people to pay them rent in order to have a space to sleep on this planet. Thus they all work for us for the rest of their lives. We must always make them think that this is normal and that everyone has always had to pay rent and that they always will.

If the slaves deviate from present thought patterns, they might think it strange that they “agree” to work for us for 30 years to buy a place to sleep. They might wonder why some “primitive” people are able to build their homes from the material at hand in a couple of weeks and have no mortgage to pay. They might even find it simpler, more enjoyable and even more adventuresome to walk to where they wish to go instead of working for us to earn money to make perpetual car payments to us, so that they can get to a job to make the money to make their car payments. To say nothing of the car maintenance costs and depreciation. We must constantly entice them to buy. They make much better workers if are always in debt.

If we allow them space to think, they may question the vehicle with which they are killing themselves: 50,800 persons dead and 1,900,000 disabled in 1981 in the United States alone.They may see how machines and their present manufacturing processes are destroying their life-support system. They may see that all the processed junk food we’re selling them is making them sick and costing them more; see that their boring, unsatisfying jobs are driving many of them crazy. They might even discover the simplest unprocessed foods which are cheap and healthful.

As it is recorded in our family archives, one of our forefathers, Galus Julius Caesaer once sald: “Give them breed and circuses, to keep them from rebelling.” It is a simple matter to give them food, but it takes a little more imagination to give them circuses. I guess this is the creative part of being slave masters – to create diversions to keep their gullible little minds busy.

Our Watergate Scandal was a fine circus. It kept them thinking and talking along safe lines for years. We are still getting some mileage out of the Kennedy Assassination and they still aren’t sure whether we shot the real Kennedy, his double or a dummy. We have fine show going on Central America and in the Middle East, some still lingering in Germany, others in Vietnam, the USSR and China.

We may use the recent invasion to start another World War. It will be a challenge to attempt to involve our sheep in another big war, so soon after the last one. However, we may be able to pull it off, to get them angry enough to fight. We wouldn’t need to use the older nuclear bombs, as they could be dangerous to our families’ health. We might use a few of our cleaner H-Bombs. It will be a creative, fun time for us. Wars are truly the sport of kings. They are more fun to stage and run than chess games, or are hum-drum activities of production or politics.

Creating straw men for slaves to knock down is one of our best numbers. We set it up and let them tear it down. It diverts much of their creative energy. We create another excellent diversion by resisting their efforts to tear it down.

We learned long ago that people can think only one thought line at a time. We feed them thoughts and they either fight them or go along with them.

Music has always been an effective tool for setting their moods, their pace and leading their thoughts. While dancing they learn to step to the beat of our drummer and keep the pace we set. This teaches them to obey orders. The drum has always been useful for this. We let them touch each other during the dance. They seem to enjoy touching and they feel successful when they keep in step, so this training process becomes self-perpetuating. It also serves as an excellent distraction.

They must occupy their minds with keeping in step to the beat and with how they are going to entice their partners to deb. If they are constantly bombarded with distractions they will have no time to do any real thinking. They will only be aware of that which we make them aware.

Our closest guarded secret is the fact that slavery still exists in every country on this planet.

Laborers, farmers, traders, professionals, managers, directors and presidents – all take pay, so they must obey our orders. They are not aware of their bondage. Some are vaguely aware of the idea that “big money” runs everything. But they are unable to relate to the idea that they are part of that “everything.”

They think that they are free people, making all their own decisions We allow them to make the unimportant ones. The important ones we cover in their laws, and in their customs and religious and moral codes. We have even trained them to punish their own kind when they do not conform.

We have been masters for a long, long, time. We teach kids how to work, to be submissive and to obey orders. These kids grow up to he good slaves, like their parents. Most of the parents even go so far as to break their own kid’s spirits. So by the time they are of work age, them are docile, gullible and easy to manipulate.

Through all our media, including books, we give them a substitute for living. For example, we encourage them to live vicariously through the exciting adventures of fiction. This puts their fantasy life through an exciting energy drain which seems to satisfy some of their emotional hunger.

This substitute fills one of those spaces in time which they might have used to go out and experience life first-hand. Distractions keep them from discovering the bondage they are in. We must continue to titillate them to want to watch television and movies, to read newspapers, magazines and books to listen to radio and music.

We use the mass media not only for a distraction but also to help create their basic beliefs and expectations. Of course, the schools and churches serve this purpose too, as do popular songs and music. We use the media to create the desire to buy. In this way we motivate them to work for us.

They continue to administer to our needs as they did to Caeser’s and as they did for the priests in the time of the great pyamids. Our ancestors really knew how to handle people! As slaves get more education it takes a little more finesse to keep on top of them; however, it’s basically the same even today. Keep them fearful; fearful of death, fearful of pain, fearful of each other. Always encourage competition: it’s like fighting, separates people and keeps them fearful of losing.

We have made them afraid of death by telling them that they have spirits which live on after their death. If they obey our rules, which we tell them were inspired by God, their spirits will be assured entrance into Heaven or reincarnated into a better existence, depending on which of our religions they have chosen. This makes them afraid to die, because they know they haven’t obeyed all the rules (which we deliberately made too difficult to always be obeyed). If they can be kept afraid they are more easy to manage. Then they look to us for guidance and protection.

Promoting fear of pain is another distraction we have always used. We must not give them time to discover that pain is their body’s method of alerting them to the fact that they are doing something wrong to it. So before they can check out the reason for the pain, we channel them to a doctor who will attempt to numb the pain. The doctor will take up time and money doing so. It creates a great diversion, and debt. Some people talk about their pain constantly. The patients’ pain will usually return (sometimes to a different part of their body) after their cure. Doctors usually don’t remove the cause of pains. This would put them out of business.

We hire some of the slaves to act as police and soldiers so that we can threaten to inflict pain and imprisonment on the others. They literally enforce their own slavery when they take jobs in law enforcement and the military. We keep them too busy and too broke to realize this.

Sports and gambling have always been good spectacle. Sex may rate second place, drugs third. We have achieved a sort mass hypnosis by using movies, TV and music, with which we have been able to implant suggestions and beliefs without their being aware of it.

We may need to give our ecology program front page coverage again soon. It can take up the Slack to hold their attention in case it is untimely to start a war now.

Remember, the Warbucks family has ruled on this planet for six thousand years, so it is our right and destiny to continue doing so. Keep up the good work and if you have any problems, contract Alexandria or Ernest, as I’m taking a little vacation.

- Cleopatra Warbucks

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)

See also:
OVO 2 (1987)

Trevor Blake: LFRA February 2011. Plastic bottles, tape.

From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.

From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.

via youtube
See Brooklyn Feral Cat one year ago.

Let us examine the consequences of irrationalism [...] The irrationalist insists that emotions and passions rather than reason are the mainsprings of human action. To the rationalist’s reply that, though this may be so, we should do what we can to remedy it, and should try to make reason play as large a part as it possibly can, the irrationalist would rejoin (if he condescends to a discussion) that this attitude is hopelessly unrealistic. For it does not consider the weakness of ‘human nature,’ the feeble intellectual endowment of most men and their obvious dependence upon emotions and passions.

It is my firm conviction that this irrational emphasis upon emotion and passion leads ultimately to what I can only describe as crime. One reason for this opinion is that this attitude, which is at best one of resignation towards the irrational nature of human beings, at worst one of scorn for human reason, must lead to an appeal to violence and brutal force as the ultimate arbiter in any dispute. For if a dispute arises, then this means that those more constructive emotions and passions which might in principle help to get over it, reverence, love, devotion to a common cause, etc., have shown themselves incapable of solving the problem. But if that is so, then what is left to the irrationalist except the appeal to other and less constructive emotions and passions, to fear, hatred, envy, and ultimately, to violence? This tendency is very much strengthened by another and perhaps even more important attitude which also is in my opinion inherent in irrationalism, namely, the stress on the inequality of men.

It cannot, of course, be denied that human individuals are, like all other things in our world, in very many respects very unequal. Nor can it be doubted that this inequality is of great importance and even in many respects highly desirable. (The fear that the development of mass production and collectivization may react upon men by destroying their inequality or individuality is one of the nightmares of our times.) But all this simply has no bearing upon the question whether or not we should decide to treat men, especially in political issues, as equals, or as much like equals as is possible; that is to say, as possessing equal rights, and equal claims to equal treatment; and it has no bearing upon the question whether we ought to construct political institutions accordingly. ‘Equality before the law’ is not a fact but a political demand based upon a moral decision; and it is quite independent of the theory – which is probably false – that ‘all men are born equal.’ Now I do not intend to say that the adoption of this humanitarian attitude of impartiality is a direct consequence of a decision in favour of rationalism. But a tendency towards impartiality is closely related to rationalism, and can hardly be excluded from the rationalist creed. Again, I do not intend to say that an irrationalist could not consistently adopt an equalitarian or impartial attitude; and even if he could not do so consistently, he is not bound to be consistent. But I do wish to stress the fact that the irrationalist attitude can hardly avoid becoming entangled with the attitude that is opposed to equalitarianism. This fact is connected with its emphasis upon emotions and passions; for we cannot feel the same emotions towards everybody. Emotionally, we all divide men into those who are near to us, and those who are far from us. The division of mankind into friend and foe is a most obvious emotional division; and this division is even recognized in the Christian commandment, ‘Love thy enemies!’ Even the best Christian who really lives up to this commandment (there are not many, as is shown by the attitude of the average good Christian towards ‘materialists’ and ‘atheists’), even he cannot feel equal love for all men. We cannot really love ‘in the abstract;’ we can love only those whom we know. Thus the appeal even to our best emotions, love and compassion, can only tend to divide mankind into different categories. And this will be more true if the appeal is made to lesser emotions and passions. Our ‘natural’ reaction will be to divide mankind into friend and foe; into those who belong to our tribe, to our emotional community, and those who stand outside it; into believers and unbelievers; into compatriots and aliens; into class comrades and class enemies; and into leaders and led.

From The Open Society and its Enemies Volume 2. Princeton University Press 1966

Kerry W. Thornley
The Idle Warriors
Atlanta: IllumiNet Press 1991

Written between 1959 and 1961, The Idle Warriors is the story of a troop of Marines in the Far East getting laid, pulling pranks, eating and talking about life. It’s a story similar to any number of films and books from that time both in style and content. But there are two significant qualities in this book that set it apart from, say a Bowery Boys film (which is what it reminds me of the most).

First, it is written by Kerry Thornley.  I’ve been reading Kerry’s work since 1979 and have always found him insightful and interesting.  I also consider him a friend and it’s always good to see a friend make it.

Second, one of the characters in the novel, Johnny Shelburn, is based on a friend Kerry had in the Marines named Lee Harvey Oswald.  In his introduction Kerry said he was trying to explain why Lee defected to the USSR.  In hindsight he said he failed, and I agree.  But the book is still a sort of eerie novelty, like the appearance of Fidel Castro as an extra in a Busby Berkeley film.  Kerry’s introduction by itself makes the book well worth reading.

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)
see also OVO 17 The Dreadlock Recollections (January 2007)

Harold S. Long
Surviving in Prison
Port Townsend, Washington: Loompanics Unlimited, 1990

Surviving in Prison is a record of one man’s experiences in prison, offered as a guide for physical survival in a system designed to break and control lives.

The book describes prison from conviction to incarceration to the hole.  It describes the inhumanity of prisons, the humiliation and the petty rules that demand exaggerated penalties for violation.  The factual nature of the writing, presented without evaluation in the knowledge that the horrors of prison speak for themselves, are so descriptive that one feels the shutting off of light and hope as they are systematically removed from the author.

This book is of great utility to anyone who believes they might end up in prison for any reason, or who is a supporter of prisoners’ rights.  It is far outside the arena of “political correctness.”  Prisons do not make such subtle distinctions in their oppression and the author does not either.  This book proves most completely that there is no life in prison, only survival, and the insight the author has to survival in prison is of unique value.

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)

Via youtube.