by Troy Williams
The future happened yesterday and the tower came tumbling down. Queer activism is in the process of a major reboot. The old antiquated operating systems are broken and a system-wide upgrade is underway. Yee-haw! Many people are asking “where is the next Harvey Milk?” That question is so yester-gay. It misses the larger truth: we already have Harvey Milk. In the 21st Century there will be no gay neo-savior to rise up and light the way to liberation. Something other is emerging. The old top-down model of political organization is over. R.I.P. As anti-gay measures and propositions continue to pass across the country, it has become obvious that the old organizations have failed. Why? They coveted the privilege of our oppressors. Not for the universal “all”, but rather for the select few only. They (and by extension we) fought to gain access to the failing institutions of the hetero-dysfunctional marriage club. But we were repeatedly blocked, unable to hack the code.
Messianic hopes can now be piled on the trash-heap of patriarchy. Activism has now gone viral. On November 5th 2008, something new was born. In the fire of our oppression we awakened. Our global electro-queer brain fired up. Suddenly the old rules changed. The national gay institutions that desired to model white heterosexual power suddenly were exposed for their obsolescence. The grassroots net-generation logged on. And they where everywhere; wikiqueers, cyber-dykes, digi-fags, tranny-bloggers and homotextuals. A spontaneous, global network of peers R now online and in the streets. The geeks have come to inherit the earth.
The first decade of the new millennium will end with a total transformation of everything we thought we knew about activist politics. Our first order of business: replace all anachronistic hierarchies with horizontal, leaderless organization. Wikiqueers have restored the Commons. Rallies are mobilized, information shared and emails exchanged. Viral vigils followed by meta-marches. National orgs now take cues from our local PACS. This is the pop-future of activism. From now on, we restructure everything from the bottom up.
Our consensual hallucination has been shattered. These old mavens of assimilation – these boring, washed-up standard bearers of the status quo may fear the wikiqueer. They may even seek to silence these strange transgressive gender chimeras. They are occupied by their own self-importance as the world marches on without them.
Rewind thirty years. Harvey Milk was a prophet before his time. A human with an expanded universal consciousness. A cultural frontrunner who understood that gay liberation would never be achieved on it’s own. It would by necessity only arrive arm in arm (hyper-linked and networked) with broader agents of social change. Peace activism. Labor rights. Racial justice. The old boorish gay leadership viewed Milk with suspicion. They rejected his message in spite of his success. They deleted his life from our collective memory while they returned to the politics of assimilation. They hijacked our movement with their matrimonial myopia – oblivious that it only benefited the privileged few who happened to be coupled. They were cautious. Conservative. Analogue. Always careful never to make waves. Old school organizing sans retro hip panache. We forgot our radical roots.
The queers of Stonewall would no doubt be denounced today for their unruly behavior. Histrionic lesbian legislators (scared to offend her masters) might yell at rascal rioters, “you have gone too far! You are too radical!” LOL. These assimilationists are content to be a docile market demographic programmed to consume the wares of a commodity culture. They want us to be nice fags w/ queer eyes for straight guys. Trans kids need not apply. Give that queen an M-16. F#*k that. The role of the queer in society is to collapse boundaries and destabilize established binaries of subjugation. What does that mean? The rusty hegemonies are to be dislodged by the new politics of radical inclusion. We fight not just for a few select and privileged gays, but rather for ALL humankind. We have allowed these unelected leaders to erase the radicalism of our purpose. But no longer. We R Bored by U. We are impatient with your non-stop buffering and impossibly slow connection speeds. We are hacking the party and overwriting the operating system.
In the new millennium technology will continue evolving. The global brain of the worldwide web morphed into Web 2.0. Digital citizens now became creators of content. Virtual mash-ups of unlimited creativity inspired MyWikiTubiabook. A peer2peer hypercortex of possibility. This is the promise of the next decade. We have now witnessed the birth of Activism 2.0. Wiki-queers don’t need leaders. We need collaboration, creativity and community. Imagine a world without hierarchies. Without gender rankings. Where the top is as valued as the bottom (u r so hot baby!). Imagine new platforms of radical public expression. Political software that allow users to edit content. Imagine an expansive bandwith massive enough to include every global queer regardless of color, class, or non-conforming presentation. These are the mega trends of the cyber-space savants. We are encoding new realities into a multivalic virtual genderverse. Revolution on demand.
BTW, Harvey Milk did not die in 1978. His consciousness was uploaded into the noosphere – the collective totality of all information, language and imagination that is wiring together the global mind. A critical mass is emerging. Smart mobs are coalescing. We are accessing the genius of all ages. Time is collapsing and compressing. The loneliness of the isolated individual will be submerged in the collective interdependence of the whole. Think Techno-Zen with a transgender interface. Integral platforms will transcend while simultaneously including the foundational building blocks of this new society. Holonic realities alter every perception of the real. We are all information technology. Ones and zeroes ad infinitum. We all belong now. In this moment. Every fringe-freak has a place in the Queer World Order. Yes – even the old tired DOS bound suburban lesbi-gays will belong. They can join our party. Someone has to bring the wine. ;)
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