Coming home from a day at the beach, our driver decides to stop for a bite to eat at the auto-diner. The "Diner Xigitizer" was originally a Chinese/French LTD to market Indian fast food in 2139 but went bankrupt and was purchased by some Brazilians who then sold it to some Australian bank which sold it to some Norwegian group which in turn... well you get the idea and you have tasted their food and seen their holo-sign.

First of all, you write like a French intellectual. There is, for many english readers, the vague sense that one.is not quite 'getting it'. This is not an attack, I get this feeling from, for example, Eliade, Battaille, and Foucault.

Hi Jon,
First, all my apologizes for not replying sooner :I've been busy this week with the hotel . I am not astonished by what you write here : Foucault has had a big influence on me, I have studdied him a lot, specially concerning the work I made on psychiatry and control systems. I have not read Bataille, nor Eliade (may be one book by this one).
Also, the whole page on money and economy is based upon general semantics, and this is a summing up of years of data I learnt. So I can understand that it might take some times to get into it and is not obvious immediately.
Now I have been very astonished to state that Foucault is very famous in US and Japan, and certainly more appreciated there than in France.

> When I was a Marxist, the French Marxists left me with the same vague sense of confusion. Several non French speaking friends have described the same feeling, while friends who are bilingual don't seem to know what I mean. Despite what appears to be a language problem, I believe that you and I continue to agree on almost everything. Let me see if I can rephrase some of your major points.

1.) The art trade is evil.

"Evil" is not the right word to me. Let's say that , without any judgement of value, art trade rests on the ignorance in our civilisation of the magic function of art. And the use of money, on the ignorance of its symbolic function.
It's not due to an evil will of anybody really, but on the fact that Western civilisation has not learnt to use symbols properly. So it's more a question of evolution.
The crazy thing is that we are still emprisonned in Aristotle's postulates, and those ones have maintained us at a blocked level of evolution in human domains :
we are able to build things in the domain of matter, but due to the breach between matter and spirit, it seems that we keep on reproducting the same mechanisms in spite of our material and scientific evolution.

> The business of buying and selling art is corrupt. We are not interested in being a part of this business. By creating a class of professional artists, the art business sets the artist apart from the ordinary person in such way that the
ordinary person is barred from showing personal creativity. By creating a class of wealthy art consumers, the art business denies the non wealthy the ability to appreciate art.

Yes, I agree with this.

> The zone should not be an appendage of the art business.

I think that we should try to make it correctly : it seems legitimate to me that artists earn their life with their work, like anybody else.
I do not agree with artists starving and other people earning money with their work : Agent Zero is living this since some years. I consider that his painting is great, he is a real painter, so if the Zone can help him to live with his art, then great.
Also if we put our art at anybody's disposal, then great too.

I think that art trade should be taken in hands by artists themselves instead of agents.

> 2.)Capitalism is inhuman. For anything worthwhile to be done with the zone's resources it is both possible and necessary that our business be conducted in a human way. Business practices, with, of course, exceptions like bookkeeping, will not allow the zone to conduct its work. However, we are not volunteers. Individual effort should be compensated in terms that are agreed to in advance.

Yes, very true.

> 3.) As a group, we are capable of bending our will to these ends.

Yes. Now we got to find the ways to make it . The problem is that there is no pre-written answer, no authority to refer to : we are in a non explored land. So nobody can come and say 'this is the right way to make it". We just got to share our visions here, and as usual, they are complementary : the answers come from the gathering of data from a set of people.

> I hope that I haven't oversimplified to the point of distortion, or left out some significant element that has stripped your 'clarific's' meaning.

No, I do not think so. I thank you very much for sharing your point of view here. this is very necessary.

Yes. We all have different references. The point is to take the valuable sides of all, and to see how they can complete each other.

Personally, I don't feel like a participant in the zone, so much as a fan of your work. I have contributed nothing that I can imagine having anything but personal value. I am also reasonably content with my economic situation.

Well, all the zoners are not broke.

> Although I like the idea of investing in the hotel, I am not looking for a better way to support myself. I am neither rich nor poor. I am compelled to work, but not to be subservient. I do not exempt myself from Adam's fall, but I am required to bow before no one but God. An economic debate over the future of the zone would have no effect on my situation.

I consider the Zone in some way as a laboratory for the next step of evolution. The most interesting side of dealing with economy is not, for me, to make money really , but to see if we can solve here problems that we face and which have not been solved before. It's a bit like a game : are we able to make it better ? Let's try.
I also find very funny to find, at the Zone's scale, answers,which have not been soved before by the big heads who rule us.
Most of us are despised for all kind of reasons (gays, addicts, people on the edge, or not into formal patterns, etc.). But we are more brainy and support each other, which is great really.

> I would like to develop some means whereby you can be compensated for your work. I'm not sure what that means might be, but you have volunteered enough. Those of us who make use of your work, should be paying you somehow. I have no suggestions on that idea, it just seems fair. I doubt that you could make a living off of any of this, but you should see something for your trouble.

My work in the Zone has nothing to do with money since the beguinning. More like a link with Burroughs and my personal work in different areas since some years.

We are a community which I keep together in some way through the coordination. So the result is enough to me. I never expected it could succeed so well.
Now the question of the money comes when I find myself in the present situation. I can work anyway with a formal job, but if I make it, I cannot go on with the zone work, nor the hotel, so I prefer to get the pension, which seems ok until now, and go on with what I'm involved in.

Now, with the commercial site, we can start to sell out stuff. Even if it does not work, at least, we have tried, for a munimum investment (70 $ for 2 years is ok).

Love

Izzy

As for the zone not making any money.... I don't see money as the zones
goal, aim, and as such within the capitalist system we live it isn't likely
to happen. If it does then to me the zone has become something else.
HOWEVER, that's not to say that within the zone there are busines and
networks and people helping each other out - that is what the zone is about.
I was perhaps overly sarcastic over the whole publishing thing. I am really
not that bothered about getting published - I'm more bothered by how little
time i have to sit down and write and how little writing I've done over the
past four years.

How you doing anyway? What's the eclipse going to be like where you are?
Love Gary

Isabelle Manager ! Golden girl ! CAC 40 ! Plans sociaux ! Mais J Pest bien Gérant d'immeubles, et il applique gaiment les principes de la SG à ses réunions de copropriétaires, et ça marche, et ça aide les gens ; pourquoi un management qui aurait nettement rompu avec le taylorisme ne pourrait-il mettre la SG en pratique, plus efficacement que ne le font certains informaticiens et certains biologistes....

Le projet est séduisant. Je manque trop de connaissances en économie pour juger dans quelle mesure il est possible de créer une niche d'activités, où se partagent et se diffusent les intérêts et les produits communs, niche où l'argent n'occuperait que la place qu'il "mérite" d'occuper : un moyen commode, plus commode que le troc, de rembourser les gens de ce qu'ils ont avancé en temps, en efforts, en compétences, alors que par ailleurs ils
doivent pouvoir gagner leur vie en évitant les angoisses de la précarité.

Mais cette niche peut-elle garder son autonomie, alors qu'elle vit à l'intérieur d'un système économique qui a sa propre logique ? Je pense aux difficultés des SEL, les réseaux d'échanges, que certains artisans accusent de leur retirer le pain de la bouche, de créer du chômage. Interzone n'en est pas là : la profession d'éditeur n'est pas menacée par ses textes on-line.

Peut-être au contraire (mais là encore je manque d'arguments "scientifiques") ce mode de production, avec le tout petit flux de pépètes qui l'irrigue, aurait un effet stimulant sur l'envie de chercher, l'envie d'écrire, l'envie de trouver. Voyant qu'ils peuvent ainsi s'exprimer de façon plus libre et spontanée qu'en se soumettant à la lourde machine des gros éditeurs, aux copinages des comités de lecture, aux limites imposées par leurs actionnaires, aux diktat de l'air-du-temps, les créateurs éventuels contribueraient à diversifier les textes, et en fin de compte à
rendre vigueur à l'édition classique.

Comme tu le vois, dans ma tête les arguments sont plus wishful que rigoureusement chiffrés ! Tant pis, je ne peux faire mieux.
Let's keep in touch, ' touch' de clavier, faute de nous voir !
Je t'embrasse,
Mireille

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hi,

Making the price list of our productions, here are some propositions about the ways to make it :
- about the books : we can sell them under two shapes : in files people can download, and under printed shape.
Here publishers on the net seem to use the same method for the printing : printing each book when the orders come. They sell double price the printed version.

About the comics and illustration books, I can make them myself when I get a good printer. Definitely this system is much cheaper than a publisher or printer, and easy to make. Just requires a bit of time.

Let me know the price you want for your productions, so I can add it to the price list. For the money, the most practical would be that you deal yourself with the buyers, as I am not gonna get money to send it to you afterwards.

So I put your E-mails in the price-list, and people can get in touch with you directly.

For the anthology, how are we gonna make it ?
I'm ok to take a percentage for my work and time if I print the books, and getting the money back for the expenses (paper and ink), but for your work, we got to consider it altogether . In the English tomes, I did not write anything, this is all yours. How are we gonna fix this ?
Suggestions and ideas welcome.

The aim of this site is that we collectively manage to product and sell our arts ourseves instead of having intermediaries to pay (agents), or using the formal path, which definitely seem more expensive.

Best
Izzy

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