<nettime> Peter Lamborn WIlson 1945 -2022

["Konrad Becker" <konrad@t0.or.at>]

Peter Lamborn Wilson died in his apartment in Saugerties in upstate New York
last night, reportedly from a heart attack. 

A "Cyberguru" in the nineties he had no email address and wrote his pieces
by hand, or an old typewriter. With 70+ books and titles like "Pirate
Utopia" he inspired several generations.  However, his visceral abhorrence
of digital media was softened by his clever use of resources in a digital
savvy environment. As the author of "Temporary Autonomous Zone" he was guest
at the inauguration of Public Netbase and a regular visitor here in Vienna. 

Sadly, despite his personal integrity, his fame and colorful queer identity
also triggered offending smears and innuendo hard to oppose. In his last
months he spoke self-depreciatingly of himself as an old hippy, maybe he
was, I just wish there were more of this kind. While many drift into
senility in their early forties, he was bright as a button until his last
day and had more clever things to say about the electronic media realm than
most of the new media experts I ever met.

Following up on his contribution to the book "Digital Unconscious - Nervous
Systems and Uncanny Predictions!" and with the support of Autonomedia, Felix
Stalder and me ventured into a series of deeper inquiries into the fabric of
media un/consciousness. 

There is a general narrowing and flattening of the imagination due to the
global spread of consumerism and the increasing abstraction and
quantification through which the social world is constructed. PLW work can
be understood as an exploration of alternative ways of being in the world
that could offer escape routes. 

We, by way of Jim Flemming and Fred Barney Taylor, conducted the last
interview just a few days ago. In his last interviews he liked to talk of
the end of the world which he defined as an ongoing process. His lucid
analysis what went wrong in the last few thousand years was not defeatist
but a call to arms. 

As he liked to say: Even if you are going to die tomorrow, plant a tree
today. The rebellious spirit of PLW and his alter Ego Hakim Bey will be
immensely missed.





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