2 around which to organise. We create no positive models for anyone to identify with, let alone follow. Our al-
liances are still relatively loose with a tendency to fragment into an infinite number of gangs and subcultures. This why we
still do not have this “world federation of tactical media practitioners”. Perhaps we are just a diverse collection of weir-
does both men and women, who are off-topic by nature. Of course there is an element of pleasure in knowing that you are
with your 20 dearest friends on your own "real audio" channel but this is swiftly accompanied by the realisation that it will
be indefinitely confined to these twenty friends and what seemed like an opportunity has become a ghetto. We are then
faced with the question of how to leave the safety of our own self created biosphere.

So we begin again, looking for new coalitions while trying to avoid falling into the traps and limits of institutionalised pol-
itics. Unfortunately, the Internet has not freed us from the necessity or perils of having to deal with institutional politics.
Indeed there is no Internet without power, cable policy, money and access rights.

Beyond analysis and judgement the tactical is also about reclaiming imagination and fantasy. The classical rituals of re-
sistance are no longer reaching large parts of the population, this is the crisis of direct action, which is in part a failure of
imagination. An exception is the epidemic of pie throwing. The ritualised humiliation of power with a pie in the face. A
highly mediatised practice, the pie does not exist without the image, its only meaning is as a media event. We could see
it as a primal way of attacking power. You identify a locus of power and you pie him (http://www.gloup.gloup.com) A leap
into perfect simulacra, creating the perfect sign, or rather the Poisonous countersign. The pie is the perfect poisonous
Countersign. The secret wisdom of the tactics of radical alienation, in which the further you go, the more likely you are to
implode into reality. Its time to intensify our semiotic guerrilla wars on corporate images.

Tactical media in the context of The Next 5 Minutes is a deliberately slippery term, a tool for creating “temporary consen-
Sus zones” based on unexpected alliances with people whom you might normally never meet based on a desire to be re-
leased from the tiredness of self satisfied groups and communities. But at the same retaining the right, when the time has
come, to disconnect. Our aim is to retain our mobility, and our velocity, to avoid the paralysis induced by the essentialis-
tic questioning of everything, in which everyone is an object of suspicion and nothing is any longer possible.

One of the most well trodden of tactical routes remains hybridisation, connecting’ old with new, the street and the virtual.
We should be clear that hybridity is neither our ideology or our goal it is more like our dirty realism. Hybridisation is often
Seen as per se good, generative of infinite possibilities to switch between channels, mix up the signals, intentions and dis-
ciplines, naturally operating in accordance with the economic and technological shift towards synergy. Let us be clear, in
our case hybridisation is about survival, it is not really our choice. For those who make the mistake of treating it as an ide-
ology, there is simply no way back, there is no place for negativism. Taking this route we inevitably arrive at the dialectic
free zone of Europe's new politics. Hybridity in this world is about connectivity in the sense of promiscuously connecting
everything with everything, the neo-liberal idea of anything goes as long as its connects. In this world the critic is seen as
a destructive trouble-maker, failing in their sacred duty to connect. This is where tactics end and choices will have to be
made. Is this the end of the roaring media age? Not for the time being... But for sure a reconsideration what we are actu-
ally intending to transmit on all these channels.

HRA HHHHHHHHHHH HHH