The Open Source Walking Project and the TAZ

The internet enables large numbers of people to contribute to a project without top down management. We have seen it with computing, mainly, but the idea can be applied to many things. In conversations with various friends including Rich Lisney, of Bimbler fame, the following has emerged.

I have long been intrigued with the idea of long distance walks. I’ve done, or half done, a few official ones: Cleveland Way, Ridgeway, Mackenzie Way, GR10, GR65. However, despite the fun of doing an established walk, it is more challenging to design your own long distance walk. And then name it and pepper the stiles/trees/fence posts with little circular walking arrow signs, produce a guide book/web site and encourage others to walk your walk. 

Ideally people who live near to each section of the walk will get the directions from the web site and walk their section. They will add signs and wear down paths to indicate the way. (The way should probably follow existing paths or rights of way). The more people who walk your route the better it will become as people will make improvements and label them with signs they have downloaded or bought from the website.

In the past, creating a long distance walk was a huge project requiring a lot of top down administration. Now it can happen almost instantly, and painlessly. Once the idea is out there anyone can start walking sections straight away.

No doubt some people will object- that always happens- but the people on the ground for that section will deal with these objections not the website operators whose role is simply to inspire and inform a thousand walkers to take up their bedrolls and boots and head out there, criss-crossing the planet with myriad new trails.

I think it is time to update the concept of the temporary autonomous zone -TAZ- which has seen its greatest recent development in the festival field. The TAZ, briefly, is an idea by anarchistic thinker Hakim Bey, that states that true and authentic interactions are only possible in situations that are not monitored and weighed down by government interference, red tape, officiousness, pettiness, routine. Parties, raves and festivals are obvious examples of TAZs. But with the internet, which makes a TAZ so easy to organise, comes the burden of unofficialdom, which occurs more and more at festivals these days. Burning Man was cool when it was a few hundred, but 25,000 people off their heads? Too successful for their own boots? Maybe; or it could be the bandwagon effect, now the routinemeisters and dull badgers have leapt aboard the festival bus, using the internet to plan and monitor their events I’ve seen a creeping sense of boredom/ ‘they’ world bullshit/officiousness seep into festivals of all colour and stripe.

As always a wake-up call to move on, the real bus never halts forever. The new and viable option for a TAZ, which uses the internet effectively without being strangled by it, is the creation of instant long distance walks, the MORE the BETTER. Out walking with your friends, doing something bigger than just a ramble but still something with some vitality and genuine lifeforce about it, the open source walking project suggests a new direction for sustained grass roots activity immune from the vampiric attentions of those who seek to control...

following an invisible track

A track may not be obvious. There may be few signs even if the tracker knows what to look for. But just as important as what is on the ground is what is in the tracker’s head- his ‘rich context’ so to speak. It is just as Kant suggested- perception is about what is OUT THERE and also about how we conceptualise what we see. Kant is never better exemplified than when someone points at an object far distant and says, “What’s that?” Everyone  looks and makes suggestions. At this stage it is just a strange shape an anomaly, an incongruity in the mostly unsurprising vista or landscape. Then someone will get it- a car, a tree, ‘just’ a rock, a man walking. With the concept we can then all ‘see’ what it really is. Sometimes you have the wrong concept working quite happily for hours. That oil drum you’ve been walking towards suddenly appears much quicker than you’d have expected and turns out to be a bearing case from a lorry axle. The object instantly transforms- as quickly as the duck becomes the rabbit in the famous ambiguous duck/rabbit drawing. In a world of odd objects, strange journeys, new sights- in the desert world- you understand just how much we as humans bring to what we see in the world.

As well as bringing our knowledge of shape and colour we import meaning to what we see. The ‘rich context’ is all the knowledge we have about something. It is all the ways we can relate it to other things we know about in our lives. To the experienced tracker there is much more to see than what is obviously in front of one’s eyes. And once you know the direction of a track, have figured a reason why the track is going in that direction, then you can guess its route between track signs accurately- and by looking in likely places find evidence of the track you suspected.

I am no tracker but I remember following a track of a fennec fox in the area north of the Gilf Kebir. It is known for tektite glass- that lies glinting on the surface of the sand. I followed the fennec tracks, like those of a small dog, easily across the sand. But on the stony gravelly base of the dune corridor I lost him. I tried for the first time to look ‘sideways’. A bedouin had told me this was a way to see better. You sort of half close your eyes and defocus on details in the hope of seeing a pattern, a track. It was early morning and all I saw were the many glinting pieces of natural glass spread out in front of me. By looking sideways at this confusing sight I picked up a line of absences of reflected light. Maybe here the fox had knocked a stone or two, kicked them out of place where the wind kept them clear of drift sand. I managed to see this faintest of lines and walked it- sure enough on the only piece of sand big enough to hold a print there was one. And yet the line I had been following had been almost imaginary. It brought to mind, for some reason, that famous ‘torch drawing’ of Picasso where the artist depicts the image of a bull using a swirling flashlight and a camera on a long exposure to capture the track of the light, to make a picture from nothing but rapidly moving light.

The track can be almost imaginary, inside your head and you can still follow it. The track becomes a path, in the mystical sense of the word perhaps. The context of the track, if it is richly endowed with meanings, allows such feats of navigation through thin air, featureless desert.

man is a track following creature

A human being can perish so easily in the desert. To slightly mix metaphors, it’s like being underwater, holding your breath. Sooner or later you must come to the surface. Sooner or later the desert survivor must drink, he must drink to survive. How does he find his way to water? His way out? How does he escape the certainty of a waterless death in the desert? He follows tracks. He follows any track he can find, any prints, any marks, any alem (stone markers) even the strange wavering line left by rootless dry bushes, windblown and rolling like tumbleweed in a Western. Man is a track following creature. He will follow any track, even the wrong one, to his death- or lucky escape from the burning hell, the inferno that is the desert without water.

You see it early on, driving with others. “Oh there’s a track,” you find yourself saying, pointing it out as the double line of tyre tracks unspools across faultless curving dunes. I’ve been with very very experienced drivers. They all succumb to the fond idea that the track maker must know more than they do. But chances are the track maker is just as ignorant. That doesn’t matter. The tracks are there- follow them. Westerners, Easterners, Bedouin- we’re all the same. It’s universal- see a track and follow it. Why? Because we’re followers by nature? Because we might meet the trackmaker? There is a slight practicality- if the tracks suddenly squidge out, show signs of the driver having been stuck we have a warning. But the comfort is psychological rather than real. You usually find out pretty soon that sand is too soft. And good drivers avoid areas that are risky- the tops of flat dunes, the dells and dips between boxed in dunes, also the reverse: the strange hard wave like forms of sand that look soft but are actually very hard and bumpy. Knowing this is probably as much as following a track- but still we follow. It’s psychological. Of course it’s nice to make tracks too, be the first. And its GREAT when there are NO TRACKS and you’re on a camel. Then you know you’re the first person – for a while at least- and the tracks you leave make far less impact than car tracks, though I’ve followed camel tracks weeks old across the kind of surface that fills with fine windblown sand ensuring the footprint remains. A car track is more obvious but camel tracks, with footprints alongside are also easily followed unless avoidance of people is sought. I don’t know why we do it, it’s pat of being human- following the crowd even when it’s a crowd of one.

The two people who never followed tracks in my presence were a Bedouin and an Egyptian army officer. Both knew the desert very well, both were excellent drivers. Both were cocky, probably thinking they were the best drivers around. Both were used to being the person breaking ground, making the route (though plenty of leaders follow tracks). The army officer told me that first he followed tracks, then he used a sun compass, now he uses GPS. But GPS allows some leeway and what happens is that you pick up a track that is going your way and you follow it. Then when it wavers off course you correct and drive on your own, of course looking out for new tracks. When you find one you follow it, repeating the procedure. The Army officer didn’t do this. He went his own way. And so did the Bedouin- once the general direction was decided.

I think it’s worth thinking about. We probably act like this in all walks of life. Even when we know the way, the right way for us, we look for someone else to follow, someone who may not know the way any better than we do.

spiral thinking and walking

When we circle a subject we often end up going round and round in circles. When we spiral a subject we end up with a better result. Walking seems to add forward momentum to thinking- stretching a circle out into a spiral. Charles Dickens considered it 'immoral' to write for more hours than he walked. Walking was how he solved the problems which, sitting at a desk, would have just remained in a circle chasing its tail around his head. People have used walking to come up with new solutions for centuries but by adding the image of spiralling a subject as you walk you'll find your abilities to think things up kick started in a useful way.