bolo`bolo  by P.M.       The Idea, the book
                                                                        www.paranoiacity.ch

                  

How it all began bolo'bolo
A Big Hang-over: Something obviously went wrong.... asa’pili words can be written with signs:
The Planetary Work Machine: The monster that keeps our planet in grip ibu a lot of unnecassary complication
All or Nothing at All: ... these are the realist possibilities. bolo home on our spaceship
bolo'bolo... is a trip into second reality , like Yapfaz, Kwendolm, Takmas, and Ul-So sila: hospitality, existance guarentee, support obligation, tolerance, security
asa: earth, mankind
pili: understanding, science, magic, language, media, learning, teaching

 

A Big Hang-over

Life on this planet isn’t as agreeable as it could be. Something obviously went wrong on spaceship Earth, but what? Maybe it was a fundamental mistake when nature (or whatever it was) came up with the idea "Man." Why should an animal walk on two feet and start thinking? It seems we haven’t got much of a choice about that, though; we’ve got to cope with this error of nature, with ourselves. Mistakes are made in order to learn from them.
In prehistoric times our deal seems to have been not so bad. During the Old Stone Age (50,000 years ago) we were only few, food (game and plants) was abundant, and survival required only little working time and moderate efforts. To collect roots, nuts, fruits or berries (don’t forget mushrooms) and to kill (or easier still, trap) rabbits, kangaroos, fish, birds or deer, we spent about two or three hours a day. In our camps we shared meat and vegetables and enjoyed the rest of the time sleeping, dreaming, bathing, making love or telling stories. Some of us took to painting cave walls, carving bones or sticks, inventing new traps or songs. We used to roam (along our songlines) about the country in gangs of 25 or so. with as little baggage and property as possible. We preferred the mildest climates, like Africa’s, and there was no "civilization" to push us away into deserts, tundras, or mountains. The Old Stone Age must have been a good deal if we can trust the recent anthropological findings. That’s the reason we stuck it out for several hundred thousands of years - a long and happy period compared to the 200 years of the present industrial nightmare.
Then somebody must have started playing around with seeds and plants and invented agriculture. It seemed to be a good idea: we didn’t have to walk far away to get vegetables any more. But life became more complicated, and restrictive. We had to stay in the same place for at least several months, keep the seeds for the next crop, plan and organize work on the fields. The harvest also had to be defended against our nomadic gatherer/hunter cousins, who kept insisting that everything belonged to everybody. Conflicts between farmers, hunters and cattle breeders arose. We had to explain to others that we had "worked" to accumulate our provisions, and they didn’t even have a word for "work." With planning, withholding of food, defense, fences, organization and the necessity of self- discipline we opened the door to specialized social organisms like priesthoods, chiefs, armies. We created fertility religions with rituals in order to keep ourselves convinced of our newly chosen lifestyle. The temptation to return to the free life of gatherers/hunters must always have been a threat. Whether it was patriachate or matriarchate, we were on the road to statehood.
With the rise of the ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, India, China and Eygpt, the equilibrium between man and natural resources was definitely ruined. The future break-down of our spaceship was programmed. Centralized organisms developed their own dynamics; we became the victims of our own creations. Instead of the two hours per day, we worked ten hours and more on the fields and construction grounds of the pharaohs and the caesars. We died in their wars, were deported as slaves when they needed us for that. Those who tried to return to their former freedom were tortured, mutilated, crucified.
With the start of industrialization, things didn't get better. To crush the peasant rebellions and the growing independence of craftsmen in the towns, they introduced the factory system. Instead of foremen and whips, they used machines. They dictated to us our work rhythms, punished us automatically with accidents, kept us under control in huge halls. Once again "progress" meant working more and more under still more murderous conditions. From 1440 hours per year in 1300 work rose to 3650 hours in 1850 - in 1987 it was at 2152 and is rising. The whole society and the whole planet was turned into one big Work Machine. And this Work Machine was simultaneously a War Machine for anybody outside or inside who dared oppose it. War became industrial, just like work; indeed, peace and work have never been compatible. You can’t accept to be destroyed by work and prevent the machine you create with it from killing others. You can’t refuse your own freedom and not threaten the freedom of others. War became as absolute as work.
The early Work Machine produced strong illusions of a "better future". After all, if the present was so miserable, the future must be better. Even the working class organizations became convinced that industrialization would lay the basis for a society of more freedom, more free time, more pleasures. Utopians, socialists and communists believed in industry. Marx thought that with its help man would be able to hunt, make poetry, enjoy life again. (Why the big detour?) Lenin and Stalin, Castro and Mao, and all the others demanded More Sacrifice to build the new society. But even socialism only turned out to be another trick of the Work Machine, extending its power to areas where private capital couldn’t or wouldn’t go. The Work Machine doesn’t care if it is managed by transnational corporations or state bureaucracies, it’s goal is the same everywhere: steal our time to be able to steal the next generation's time.
The industrial Work and War Machine has definitely ruined our spaceship earth and its predictable future: the furniture (jungles, woods, lakes, seas) is torn to shreds; our playmates (whales, turtles, tigers, eagles) have been exterminated or are endangered; the air (smog, acid rain, ozone, industrial exhaust gases) stinks and has lost all sense of balance; the pantries (fossile fuels, coal, metals, water) are being emptied; complete self-destruction (nuclear holocaust) is being prepared for. We aren’t even able to distribute enough food to all the passengers of this wretched vessel. We’ve been made so nervous and irritable that we’re ready for the worst kind of nationalist, racial or religious wars. For many of us, nuclear holocaust isn’t any longer a threat, but rather a welcome deliverance from fear, boredom, oppression and drudgery.
Three thousand years of civilization and 200 years of accelerated industrial progress have left us with a terrible hang-over. "Economy" has become a goal in itself, and we’re about to be swallowed by it. This hotel terrorizes its guests. Even when we’re guests and hosts at the same time.

 

The Planetary Work Machine                                back

The name of the monster that we have let grow and that keeps our planet in its grips is: The Planetary Work Machine. If we want to transform our spaceship into an agreeable place again, we’ve got to dismantle this Machine, repair the damage it has done, and come to some basic agreements on a new start. So, our first question must be: how does the Planetary Work Machine manage to control us? How is it organized? What are its mechanisms and how can they be destroyed?
It is a Planetary Machine: it eats in Africa, digests in Asia, and shits in Europe. It is planned and regulated by international companies, the banking system, the circuit of fuels, raw materials and other goods. There are a lot of illusions about nations, states, blocs, First, Second, Third or Fourth Worlds, but these are only minor subdivisions, parts of the same machinery. Of course there are distinct wheels and transmissions that exert pressure, tensions, frictions on each other. The Machine is built on its inner contradictions: workers/capital; private capital/state capital (capitalism/socialism); development/underdevelopment; misery/waste; war/peace; women/men; etc. The Machine is not a homogenous structure; it uses its internal contradictions to expand its control and to refine its instruments. Unlike fascist or theocratic systems or like in Orwell’s 1984, the Work Machine permits a "sane" level of resistance, unrest, provocation and rebellion. It digests unions, radical parties, protest movements, demonstrations and democratic changes of regimes. If democracy doesn’t function, it uses a dictatorship. If its legitimation is in crisis, it has prisons, torture and camps in reserve. All these modalities are not essential to understand the functioning of the Machine.
The principle that governs all activities of the Machine is the economy. But what is economy? Impersonal indirect exchange of crystallized life-time. You spend your time to produce some part, which is used by somebody else you don’t know to assemble some device that is in turn bought by somebody else you dont’t know for goals also unknown to you. The circuit of these scraps of life is regulated according to the working time that has been invested in its raw materials, its production, and in you. The means of measurement is money. Those who produce and exchange have no control over their common product, and so it can happen that rebellious workers are shot with the exact guns they have helped to produce. Every piece of mechandise is a weapon against us, every supermarket an arsenal, every factory a battleground. This is the mechanism of the Work Machine: split a society into isolated individuals, blackmail them separately with wages or violence, use their working time according to its plan. Economy means: expansion of control by the Machine over its parts, making the parts more and more dependent on the Machine itself. We are all parts of the Planetary Work Machine we are the machine. We represent it against each other. Whether we’re developed or not, waged or not, wether we work alone or as employees we serve its purpose. Where there is no industry, we "produce" low-cost workers to export to industrial zones. Africa has produced slaves for the Americas, Turkey produces workers for Germany, Pakistan for Kuwait, Ghana for Nigeria, Morocco for France, Mexico for the U.S. Untouched areas can be used as sceneries for the international tourist buisiness: Indians on reservations, Polynesians, Balinese, aborigines. Those who try to get out of the Machine fulfill the function of picturesque "outsiders" (bums, hippies, yogis). So long as the Machine exists, we’re inside it. It has disintegrated or mutilated almost all traditional societies or driven them into demoralizing defensive situations. If you try to retreat to a "deserted" valley in order to live quietly on a bit of subsistence farming, you can be sure you’ll be found by a tax collector, somebody working for the local draft board, or by the police. With its tentacles, the Machine can reach virtually every place on this planet within just a few hours. Not even in the remotest parts of the Gobi Desert can you be assured of an unobserved shit.

 

All or Nothing at All                                    back

The Planetary Work Machine is omnipresent; it can’t be stopped by politicians. So will the Machine be our destiny, until we die of heart disease or cancer at 65 or 71? Will this have been Our Life? Have we imagined it like this? Is ironical resignation the only way out, hiding from ourselves our deceptions for the few rushing years we’ve got left? Maybe everythings’s really okay, and we’re just being over- dramatic?
Let’s not fool ourselves. Even if we mobilize all our spirit of sacrifice, all of our courage, we can achieve not a thing. The Machine is perfectly equipped against political kamikazes, as the fate of the Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades, the Moneneros and others has shown. It can coexist with armed resistance, even transform that energy into a motor for its own perfection. Our attitude isn’t a moral problem, not for us, much less for the Machine.
Whether we kill ourselves, whether we sell out in our own special deals, find an opening or a refuge, win the lottery or throw Molotov cocktails, join the Sparts or the Bhagwan, scratch our ears or run amok: we’re finished. This reality offers us nothing. Opportunism does not pay off. Careers are bad risks; they cause psychoses, marriages. Bailing out means self-exploitation in ghettoes, pan-handling on filthy street corners, crushing bugs between rocks out in the garden of the commune. Cleverness has grown fatiguing. Stupidity is annoying.
It would be logical to ask ourselves some questions like these: "How would I really like to live?" "In what kind of society (or nonsociety) would I feel most comfortable?" What dio I really want to do with myself?" "Regardless of their practicality, what are my true wishes and desires?"
.....

bolo`bolo                                    back

bolo`bolo is part of (my) second reality. It's strictly subjective, since the reality of dreams can never be objective. Is bolo`bolo all or nothing? It is both and neither. It's a trip into second reality , like Yapfaz, Kwendolm, Takmas, and Ul-So. Down there is a lot of room for many dreams. bolo`bolo is one of those unrealistic, amoral, egoistic maneuvres of diversion from the struggle against the worst.
bolo`bolo is also a modest proposal for the new arrangements on the spaceship after the Machine' s disappearence. Though it started as a mere collection of wishes, a lot of considerations about their realization have accumulated around it. bolo`bolo can be realized world-wide within five years, if we start now. It guarantees a soft landing in the second reality. Nobody will starve, freeze or die earlier than today in the transition period. There's very little risk.
Of course , general conceptions of a postindustrial society are not lacking these days. Be it the eruption of the Age of Aquarius, the change of paradigms, ecotopia, new networks, rhizoms, decentralized structures, soft society, the new poverty, small circuitry, third waves, or prosumer societies, the ecological or alternativist literature grows rapidly. Allegedly soft conspiracies are going on, and the new society is already beeing born in communes,sects, citizens'initiatives, alternative enterprises, block associations. In all these publications and experiments there are a lot of good and useful ideas, ready to be stolen and incorporated into bolo`bolo. But many of these futures (or "futuribles" as the French say) are not very appetizing: they stink of renunciation, moralism, new labors, toilsome rethinking, modesty and self limitation. Of course there are limits, but why should they be limits of pleasure and adventure? Why are most alternativists only talking about new responsabilities and almost never about new possebilities?
One of the slogans of the alternativists is : Think globally, act locally. Why not think and act globally and locally? There are lot of new concepts and ideas, but what is lacking is a practical global (and local) proposal, a kind of common language. There has to be some agreement on basic elements that we don't stumble into the Machine's next trap. In this regard, modesty and (academic) prudence is a virtue of that risks disarming us. Why be modest in face of impending catastrophe?
bolo`bolo might no be the best and most detailed or certainly a definite for a new arrangement on spaceship. But it's not so bad and acceptable to a lot of people. I'm for trying it as a first attempt and seeing what happens later....

asa'pili                                     back

asa’pili words can be written with signs ; no alphabet is needed. In the English edition of this book, Latin characters are only used for convenience-other alphabets (Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, etc.) could also be used.
The doubling of a word indicates an organic plural: bolo’bolo = all bolos, the network of bolos. With the apostrophe (’) composites can be formed at will. The first word determines the second (as in English): asa’pili ("world language"), fasi’ibu ("traveler"), yalu’gano ("restaurant"), etc.
Besides this small asa’pili (containing only about 30 words) there could be created a larger asa’pili for scientific exchange, international conventions, etc. It will be up to the planetary assembly to put up a dictionary and a grammar. Let’s hope it will be easy.

 

ibu                                     back

In fact, there is really only the ibu, and nothing else. But the ibu is unreliable, paradoxical, perverse. There is only one single ibu, but nevertheless it behaves as if there were 4 billion or so. The ibu also knows that it invented the world and reality by itself, yet it still firmly believes that these haluzinations are real. The ibu could have dreamed an agreeable, unproblematic reality, but it insisted on imaginig a miserable, brutish and contradictory world.
It has dreamed a reality in which it is constantly tormented by conflict, catastrophy, crisis. It is torn between extasy and boredom between enthusiasm and deception, between tranquility and agitation. It has a body that needs 2000 calories a day, that gets tired, cold, gets ill; it expels this body every 70 years or so - a lot of unnecassary complication.
...
In order to prevent itself from recognizing itself and finding out the dream character of its reality, the ibu has invented "others". It imagines that these artificial beings are like itself. As in an absurdist drama, it entertains "relations" with them, loving or hating them, even asking them for advice or philosophical explanations. So it flees from its own consciousness, delegating to others in order to be rid of it. It concretizes the "other" ibus by organizing them into institutions: couples, families, clubs, tribes, nations, mankind. It invents "society" for itself and subjects to its rules. The nightmare is perfect.
...

 

bolo                                     back

The ibu is still around, refusing nothingness, hoping for a new, better nightmare. It's still lonely, but it believes that it can overcome its lonelyness by some agreemnets with the "other" four billion ibus. Are they out there? You can never be sure ...
So, together with 300 to 500 ibus, the ibu joins a bolo. The bolo is its basic agreemnet with other ibus, a direct, personal context for living, producing, dying. The bolo replaces the old "agreemnet" called money. In and around the bolo the ibus can get there dayly 2000 calories, a living space, medical care, the basics of survival and indeed much more.
The ibu is born in a bolo, it passes its childhood there, is taken care of when it's ill learns certain things, tinkers around, is hugged and stroked when sad, takes care of other ibus, hangs out, disappears. No ibu can be expelled from a bolo. But it is always free to leave it and return. A bolo is the ibus home on our spaceship.
The ibu isn't obliged to join a bolo. It can stay truely alone, form smaller groups, conclude special agreemnets with bolos. If a substantial part of all ibus unite in bolos, money economy dies and can never return. The nearcomplete self-sufficiency of the bolo guarantees its independence. The bolos are the core of the new, personal, direct way of social exchange. Without bolos, the money economy must return and the ibu will be alone again, with its job, with its money, depenmdent on pensions, state, the police.
...

 

sila                                     back

From the point of view of the ibu, the bolo’s function is to guarantee its survival, to make its life enjoyable, to give it a home or hospitality when it’s traveling. The agreement between the whole of the bolos (bolo’bolo) and a single ibu is called sila. As the ibu hasn’t any money (nor a job!), nor any obligation to live in a bolo, all bolos have to guarantee hospitality to arriving single ibus. Evey bolo is a virtual hotel, any ibu a virtual non-paying guest. (We’re only guests on this planet, anyway.)
...

sila contains the following agreements:

 
taku Every ibu gets a container from its bolo that measures 5Ox5Ox1OO cm, and over whose contents it can dispose at its will.
yalu Any ibu can get from any bolo at least one daily ration of 2000 calories of local food.
gano Every ibu can get housing for at least one day in any holo.
bete Every ibu is entitled to appropriate medical care in any bolo.
fasi Every ibu can use public means of transportation anywhere at any moment-there are no borders.
nima Every ibu can choose, practice and propagandize for its own way of life, clothing style, language, sexual preferences, religion, philosophy, ideology, opinions, etc., wherever it wants and as long as it doesn't interfere.with other ibus doing the same.
yaka Every ibu can challenge any other ibu or a larger community to a duel, according to those rules.
nugo Every ibu gets a capsule with a deadly poison, and can commit suicide whenever it wants. It can also demand aid for this purpose.

 

The real basis of the sila are the bolos, because single ibus wouldn’t be able to guarantee these agreements on a permament basis. sila is a minimal guarantee of survival (and death) offered by the bolos to their members and to a certain proportion of guests. A bolo can refuse sila if there are more than 10% guests. A bolo has to produce 10% more food, housing, medicine, etc., than it needs for its residents. Larger communities (like the tega or fudo), which handle more resources, will help out if more than 10% guests show up.
Why should the bolos respect hospitality rules? Why should they work for others, for strangers? bolos consist of ibus and these ibus are potential guests or travelers, too; so everybody can take advantage of hospitality. The risk of abuse or exploitation of the resident ibus by the traveling ibus is very low. First, a nomadic life-style has its own disadvantages, since you can not entirely participate in the richer inner life of a bolo. A traveling ibu has to adapt to a new cuisine and culture, cannot take part in longterm enterprises, and can always be put on a minimum ration. On the other side, travelers can also benefit the visited community; traveling can even be considered a form of "work". Travelers are necessary for the circulation of news, fashions, ideas, know-how, stories, products, etc. Guests are interested in fulfilling these "functions" because they can expect better-than-minimal hospitality. Hospitality and travelling mean wealth via social exchange.
...

 

asa                                     back

asa is the name of the spaceship "Earth". The autonomous regions can be considered the different rooms of this spaceship, and most of them might be interested in joining the planetary assembly, asa’dala. Every region will send for this purpose two delegates ( 1 male, 1 female) to its meetings, taking place alternating between Quito and Beirut each year respectively. The planetary assembly is a forum for the regions for contacts, chatting, encounters, exchange of gifts or insults, concluding new agreements, learning languages, having parties and festivals, dancing, quarrelling, etc. Such a planetary assembly or specialized committees could take care of some planetary hobbies, such as the use of the seas, the distribution of fossil resources, the exploration of space, telecommunications, guarding dangerous deposits, intercontinental railroads, airlines, navigation, research programs, the control of epidemics, postal services, meteorology, the dictionary of a planetary auxiliary language (asa’pili), etc. The proceedings of the assembly will be broadcast world-wide so that all regions know what their delegates or others are talking about in Beirut or Quito. (Of course, somebody should ask these two cities whether they’d like to be hosts to such a crowd.)
A planetary assembly and its organisms can only do what the participating regions let them do. Whether they take part in it depends on their own interests. Any region can retire from planetary organisms and do without its services. The only basis of the functioning of planetary enterprises are the interests and passions of the regions. When agreements are not possible, there are problems. But due to the multiple networks of self-sufficiency, the situation should never become dangerous for a single region. In this regard factors like the reputation of a region, Its historic connections, its cultural identity, personal relationships will be as important as "practical" deliberations. (Nobody knows what "practical" really means.)
Planetary institutions will have very little influence on the everyday-life of bolos or regions. They will deal with a certain amount of left-overs that cannot be dealt with by local communities or that have no influence on any single region at all (seas, polar areas, the atmosphere, etc.). Without firmly established self-sufficiency for the regions, such a world-confederation would be a risky experiment, and could become a new form of domination, a new Work-and-Power-Machine.

 

pili                                     back

If the ibu decides to stick around, it will enter into a variety of forms of communication and exchange with its (surrogate) fellow-ibus. It will wink at them, talk to them, touch them, make love to them, work with them, tell them about its experiences and knowledge. All these are forms of pili, communication, education, exchange of information, expression of thoughts, feelings, desires.
The transmission and development of knowledge and cultural identities is itself part of such a cultural background (nima). Every culture is at the same time its own "pedagogics". The function of cultural transmission has been usurped by specialized State institutions such as schools, universities, prisons, etc. In the bolos there won’t be such institutions; learning and teaching will be an integrated element of life itself. Everybody will be a student and a teacher at the same time. As the young ibus will be around the older ones in the bolo-workshops, kitchens, farms, libraries, laboratories, etc., they can learn directly from practical situations. The transmission of wisdom, know-how, theories, styles will always accompany all productive or reflective processes. Everything can be "disturbed" by learning.
...
As the ibus have a lot of time at their disposal, the scientific, magical, practical and playful transmission of capabilities will expand considerably. Expansion of its cultural horizon will probably be the main activity of the ibu, but it will be without any formal character. The disappearance of centralized, high-energy, hightech systems will also make superfluous centralized, bureaucratic, formal science. But there’s no danger of a new "dark age". There will be more possibilities for information and research; science will be in the reach of everyone, and the traditional analytical methods will be possible, among others, without having the privileged status that they have today. The ibus will carefully avoid dependency upon specialists, and will prefer processes they master themselves.
As is the case with other specialities, there will be certain bolos or "academies" (nima’sadi) that become famous for the knowledge that can be acquired there, and which will be visited by ibus from all over the world. Masters, gurus, witches, magicians, sages, teachers of all kinds with big reputations (munu) in their fields will gather students around them. The world-wide rules of hospitality (sila) encourage this type of "scientific" tourism much more than can be done under today’s allowances. University will become universal.
Communication in itself will have a different character under the conditions of bolo’bolo. Today it is functional and centralized, hardly oriented towards mutual understanding, horizontal contacts or exchanges. The centers of information (TV, radio, publishing houses, electronic data-pools) decide what we need in order to fit our behavior to the functions of the Work-Machine. As the present system is based on specialization, isolation and centralization, information is needed in order to prevent it from collapse. News originates in the fact that nobody’s got the time to care about happenings in his or her own neighborhood. You have to listen to the radio to know what’s happening just down the block. The less time we’ve got to care about things, the more information we need. As we lose contact with the real world, we depend on the fake, surrogate reality that is produced by the mass media. At the same time we lose the ability to perceive our immediate environment.
...
bolo’bolo will not be an electronic civilization-computers are typical for centralized, depersonalized systems. bolos can be completely independent from electronics, for their autarky in most fields doesn’t require a lot of exchange of information. On the other side, the existing material and hardware could also be used by the bolos for certain purposes. Radio, television, computer data-pools and networks are energy-efficient and permit a better horizontal contact between users than other media. Local cable-TV networks, radio stations, video libraries, etc., can be installed by local organisms (see tega, fudo) and remain under the control of the collective users.
When electronics is used by bolos, very little material is needed; there will be few parallels to the case of under-used home computers today. A few factories (one or two per continent) could produce the necessary equipment and manage the exchange of parts. Already at this moment there’s a computer terminal for every bolo on the planet-no more production is necessary. The telephone network could also be completed in such a way that every bolo could have at least one station. This means that it could be connected with regional or planetary processors or data-banks. Of course, every bolo would have to decide on the basis of its cultural background whether it needs such means of communication or not.
As physical transportation will often be slower, less frequent and of lower capacity than today (see fasi) an electronic network of communication could be quite useful. If you want to contact a bolo you could just make a call-so every ibu could reach virtually every other ibu. Such a network of horizontal communication could be an ideal complement to self-sufficiency. Independence doesn’t have to become synonymous with isolation. For the bolos there’s little risk of becoming dependent upon technology and specialists - they can always fall back on their own expertise and personal contacts. (Without bolos and relative autarky, computer technology is just a means of control by the centralized machine.)
Quick and extensive information can mean additional wealth for the bolos, i.e., access to a larger variety of possibilities. Single bolos can call different "menus" from a data-bank-that is, they will know how to get certain goods, services or know-how at a reasonable distance and with the required quality. Hence gifts, permanent contracts of exchange, trips, etc., all can be easily arranged without any need of money.

                                    back