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Title: Everywhere and Nowhere
Author: Kevin Tucker
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, primitivism, green, technology
Source: Retrieved on December 26th, 2013 from Kevin Tucker’s Facebook page

Kevin Tucker

Everywhere and Nowhere

“In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to

destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to

imagine what is beyond, our noses.” — R.D. Laing [1]

“There’s no light at the end of the Carpal Tunnel.” — Bob Black [2]

Technology is about taking. It always has been and always will be.

Whether we’re talking about relatively regional civilizations or our

global civilization, the irrigation canals of Cahokia or the tanks of

the U.S. Army, technology is about a system that always requires more.

More fuel, more resources, more operators, more consumers, more

attention, more devotion: more everything and anything.

And that excess comes from somewhere. Somewhere and everywhere there are

‘necessary evils’ (work, rent, bills, war), but we overlook them. We see

it as give and take: we work, they give us toys, we spend more hours

working to make more money to buy things that are supposed to save us

time, we pour into this system, this technological system, so that we

can get stuff in return. So that we can take part in history in the

making: we can internalize the Machine and its Progress. It becomes our

pride, it gives us meaning while it takes it away, and it becomes our

basis for identity.

Technology is power materialized. Without taking and giving something

very real, that is things you can see, feel, hear, and smell, the

domesticators would have never been able to enact the power their gods

only spoke of. Like god, technology became something to fear and love.

It became another thing to turn to so that we don’t see, feel, hear, and

sense the world of and around us. From the steel plow to self-heating

coffee mugs, we become absorbed by the technological system.

And we’re blinded by the halogen light. The larger the system, the less

able we are of seeing the consequences. We don’t see where the taking is

or where the losses are. But we don’t have to look far for either. We

just have to learn how to look and step back to see outside of the mass

produced visions of the domesticators, to walk away from the 24-hour

neon crucifix, power locks and heated seats to understand the nature of

the machine: it must grow and it must absorb or eliminate everything

that stands before it.

Through this absorption, our communities, our world and our being are

what is being taken away. We are absorbed into something larger than our

selves, larger than our bioregionally rooted minds and cultures, and

drawn into the fate of a self-destructive culture.

On April 12, 1893 in the arid lands of southern Africa, the

technological system laid one of many monuments to its own efficiency. A

camp of 90 Witbooi women, children and some men was sleeping as the sun

arose. As they slept the colonizing German army crept up to deliver

their final compromise in the struggle over the land that those Witbooi

and their ancestors had lived on for thousands of years: a struggle

immersing from two cultures who would have never known about each other

only decades before.

In a matter of 30 minutes, 16,000 rounds were fired from 200 rifles,

laying the entire camp to rest.[3] The Gatling gun, in its 32^(nd) year

of existence, made colonization a much faster and more efficient ordeal.

The expanding German Empire and the globalizing European civilization

which spawned it needed more resources. And more must always come from

somewhere. On that day, the ‘somewhere’ was in southern Africa, which

today remains one of the largest suppliers of such technological

necessities as gold and diamonds. The 90 Witbooi killed just happened to

stand in the way.

That same year the motion picture made its premiere.

Take and give.

If anyone is familiar with the consequences of technology, the ones we

are psychologically incapable of comprehending, they are those who have

historically lived without it. That is earth based cultures, the

gatherer-hunters, the small scale horticulturalists, and minor

pastoralists.

These are societies who are no stranger to tool use (like most animals).

But tools are different. Made from stone, wood, bone, and hide, they can

be and are by necessity, mechanically simple. They require skill and

knowledge over resources. A knapped flint blade leaves behind smaller

pieces of flint, not industrial waste. This kind of tool use is

reflective of their cultures which can face any amount of ecological and

social turbulence, but are lasting.

That is, are lasting so long as they aren’t destroyed by another

culture. One which, as one Huaorani man put it: “killed by destroying

the source of all life”.[4] From flourishing through thousands of years,

these are cultures faced most recently with the threat of extermination

at the hands of a techno-industrial civilization reaching back less than

two centuries. Ethnocide, or culture-death, for the Huaorani is just one

cost “for the sake of enough oil to meet U.S. energy needs for thirteen

days”.[5]

Thirteen days, one country for one culture.

It would be worse if it weren’t an isolated case. Indigenous communities

throughout Northern America face ethnocide, removal, and genocide to

make way for coal, uranium, copper, gold, silver, bauxite, molybdenum,

and zeolite mines, oil and natural gas, logging, dams, and their homes

are turned into locations for power plants and waste sites.[6] Trains

and guns were once used to exterminate buffalo herds to deprive plains

Indians, now toxic waste turn fish into carcinogens, global warming

melts ice sheets and drowns polar bears, and lead contamination from

strip mines makes ground water lethal.

You have the same story throughout the world. Before urban development

stretched into the Amazon, colonization came through road building to

clear land for ranchers and to harvest rubber trees, bringing in logging

and mining, and, more recently massive hydro-electric dams.[7] What

started in Asia, Northern Africa and Europe spread throughout the world

as technology became more advanced and continually required more to

carry on: to carry on the process of growth and expansion. It moves,

uprooting communities along the way, leaving processed and domesticated

grains, morality and clothing, and steel tools in its wake.

Taking and giving. Rising and falling.

Destroying to produce nothingness.

And for what? What are the benefits of this great and mighty system that

can turn the earth into another thing, another consumable and rejectable

object?

We try to justify what we’ve gotten from the process. And so called

radicals have even tried to save those positives from the rest of the

technological system. But while they agree that colonization and

destruction like that talked about above is horrid and, they believe,

unnecessary elements of a technological society, they ignore the reality

of technology: it destroys in far more ways than one.

Some of the worst damage wrought by the technological system is what it

does to our minds. As the ever expanding boundaries of the technological

reality spread out and connect with more people, the more we become

enmeshed in the system, and the more isolated we become.

Humans, like all animals, are bioregional and communal by nature. We

need community and the way earth based cultures live promotes this.

Technology is about isolation: the system demands specialization. To

produce a ‘labor saving’ technology like steel tools, iron must be

mined, the ore must be smelted and it must be reshaped into something

useful. Those doing the mining, smelting, reshaping, or those involved

in the shipping or distributing of the materials or the finished

product, or those doing the bartering or selling of that product, aren’t

likely to be the ones putting it to use if it is a plow or something

used directly in the production of food. There is a new distance that is

created and the person selling those tools isn’t going to see the same

amount of destruction that the miner will see on a daily basis or notice

the consequences of that mine like someone directly involved with

providing food will. Nor will they necessarily know about the use of

other steel tools in clearing out more land for more mines.

That kind of disconnect is inherent in the system. And the psychological

disconnect is the same. In earth based communities, culture is shaped

over hundreds and thousands of years and is inseparable from the lack of

mediation from the earth and from each other. These cultures have

adapted responses and methods for dealing with any problems that are

likely to arise.

Let’s look at warfare. Warfare is something particular to domesticated

societies, whether they are earth based or not. Nomadic gatherer-hunters

lack warfare because they are freer from concepts of territoriality and

without dependence on rooted gardens or storehouses, can simply move,

split up or merge with surrounding camps during times of ecological

hardship. There is little to be staked out and defended and, even more

importantly, with looser kin and social relationships between bands,

even less to defend against. Kin based identity becomes more important

only when gardens and storehouses and their surrounding hunting

territory arise. That is, when people become rooted to a particular spot

to the point that its use by others is competitive rather than

collective.

As societies settle, or become domesticated, scarcity becomes a problem.

The more dependent a society becomes on particular plants, animals, or

weather patterns, the more they have to fear. If a horticulturalist

village expands and its neighbors are expanding or aren’t moving, then

eventually there will be a problem.

There’s an ecological term for this: carrying capacity. Carrying

capacity is how much life can be supported by any given bioregion at any

particular time. But it’s more than an ecological concept; it’s the

reality that every living being must answer to if they push too far. And

that does happen from time to time. It doesn’t have to be a major issue,

but some human societies created a larger problem because storing and

domesticating foods bends carrying capacity. That makes a village

possible where a band had previously only camped before.

This is not without consequence. The bioregion and what is grown or

taken from it becomes a resource and others are competitors. And this

begins the cycles of war that characterize domesticated societies.

Though domesticated, small scale horticultural and pastoral societies

are still earth based; they are still without a technological system

such as metal tools, irrigation and urbanization. The kind of social and

ecological stresses they feel are hardly abstract: there are too many

mouths to feed on too little land. War, in the form of raids or battles,

is the initial response, and becomes a primary occupation of the culture

at large. A preference for male warriors leads to higher rates of female

infanticide, revenge for lives lost in battle spur raids, and the result

is less mouths to feed and the occasional shattering of villages into

new places or to be absorbed by other villages.[8]

You see this happening over and over again in horticultural and pastoral

societies from South America through North America, Africa, Eurasia,

Polynesia, and Micronesia.

Brutal as it might sound, this is the culture that these societies have

grown into and the one they have and will continue to fight to maintain.

But we’re kidding ourselves when we think that this is somehow an

archaic arrangement. As the death toll in Iraq has well passed 20,000

lives lost, we should consider the words of a more open U.S. President

Jimmy Carter in response to attacks in 1980 on what he called one of the

“vital interests of the United States of America”, the Persian Gulf and

its oil: attacks “will be repelled by any means necessary, including

military force.”[9] That’s a response that the U.S. and other oil hungry

countries have surely not backed away from. We could just as easily

point to villages bulldozed and fenced off in Mexico that force a move

and dependence on Maquilladoras, or sweat shops with company stores and

their debt, or to the plight of the eastern Cougar, or to any number of

the places mentioned earlier.

The eternal somewhere, nowhere and everywhere: the shit fields of the

technological system.

At least the warring horticulturalists know whose blood is on their

hands.

But we have more in common with the horticulturalists and pastoralists

than their cycles of warfare: they too have suffered the consequences of

modern technology.

The mediation, the distance and isolation of technology is about more

than just pulling us away from the rest of the world. It is about

uprooting our community and bioregionally defined being from its very

essence. The result is a blood thirsty, unchecked insanity. Like Joseph

Conrad’s Col. Kurtz, we destroy because nothing is stopping us.

Technology turns our hearts to the darkness it creates.

For artic hunters, like the Inuit, technology turned the vitally

communal seal hunts into a solitary act where the only companionship a

hunter has is with his gun and outboard motor. He returns to smaller and

smaller camps, in many places even the dogs are replaced by snowmobiles.

Community disappears and culture becomes a warped mirror of what it once

was.[10] Depression reigns, canned foods bring the highest rate of

diabetes in any human population, and the tools that one artic hunter

used can be seen on display in places like the Carnegie Museum of

Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Where the bastard

godchildren of industrialists can see relics of the community they’re

searching for, but never able to see.

The gun, the imported food in steel cans, the outboard engine and its

oil.

Harpoons, dog sleds, community, seal skin kayaks.

Giving and taking.

The Carnegie Museum built its altar to the gods of Progress on soil

stained in the blood of the technological system. Like the artic, it is

the place where culture was and is being killed by forced relocation and

an influx of technology. But unlike the artic hunters, the lives of the

Monongahela were not lost to any direct trade. They were

horticulturalists, like the Erie to the north, the Susquehannocks to the

east and the nations of the Haudousaunee to the Northeast.

Like the other horticulturalists we’ve looked at already, there was a

rough pattern of affinity and warring that created a rather static state

of existence throughout what would be called the northeastern United

States. You had these cycles of war, kept in check by a degree of

inefficient weaponry and the lack of mediation that the faceless warfare

technology makes possible.

That changed in the early 1600’s.

The growing, stratified technological system of Western Europe was

expanding and needed more resources. Sadly the invention of quicker

transportation over water made it possible for the dense populations of

cod in the Atlantic coast to be caught, stored and sold in shops in

Britain. The fishers began setting up inland camps where they met local

Algonkians: a people with no technology, but a sudden interest in what

these fishers had to offer. The fishers took an equal interest in the

furs of the natives and set in motion one of the most tragic stories of

our history: the American Fur trade.

The new steel tools and other mass produced junk of Empire flooded into

Algonkian hands at the expense of a demand for furs that the natives had

neither known nor had to deal with before. The rough boundaries and

alliances of a quickly declining era were radically altered by the

demand for trapping grounds and another resource war took place. But

unlike past wars, there was a new element: the gun.

The gun, like the trades, created a new kind of society where power was

granted by property and trade alone and where age old affiliations and

kin networks were tossed aside to recreate a mirror of European

politics. A new kind of political economy emerged as European nations

used the natives as pawns for their own ongoing territorial battles. The

Iroquoian Empire was created by the British in 1677 to stake a rightful

claim of discovery against the French. While Europeans battled this out,

it was native blood being spilled.

Technology is the key factor: the age old system of alliances and war

kept things in check, but there was no precedent for the kind of damage

technology could inflict. There was never a reason to create checks

against a technology that never existed before and so the natives had no

way to realize or cope with the nature of technology until it was far

too late. Too late came quickly: by 1660, every Iroquois who could own a

gun did. And in a war of the Iroquois against the Susquehannock over

access to central Pennsylvania into Ohio for trapping, the Erie and

Monongahela were wiped out between 1630 and 1680.

They never had to meet a European to fall victim to the consequences of

their technological system.[11]

And for the Iroquois themselves, the dependence on the new technology

caused a break up in bands into smaller kin groups and warrior sects.

The loss of culture and community allowed the missionaries that followed

in the footsteps of the fishers to finish the civilizing that guns and

steel tools had started.

This unfolds over and over again throughout the world where cultural

traditions clash with the technology of modernity. For the notorious

Amazonian horticulturalists, the Yanomami, access to steel tools became

the primary motivation for the warfare that won them the title of ‘the

Fierce People’ and became the subject of sociobiological arguments for

aggressiveness as the basis for humanity. No doubt, the irony of the

situation has still never fully come to light.[12]

And that clash has taken on more literal terms.

The Maori of New Zealand are one example. Their culture is the product

of a system of fishing, hunting, and horticulture that created a heavy

dependence on surplus. Social stratification was firmly rooted in a

highly divided society where kings and religions leaders could not even

be touched by impure hands or tools. Like any society where the

socio-political elite are untouchable, the same will apply for their

gods.

In the early 1800s, muskets became a normalized part of the Maori

warfare complex. But, like with the Iroquois, that distribution was

never equal. Politicians would take powerful Maori warrior-chiefs on

world tours and school them in the European political-war system. In one

case, one Maori chief got 300 guns with ample ammo from a sympathetic

British commander resulting in the death toll of over 2,000 enemy Maori

with an equal number taken as slaves from a 3 month campaign.[13]

But before the guns were even efficient in themselves, they pulled on

the traditional culture and ideas of gods for their power. As

anthropologist Andrew Vayda observed, guns gave advantage in warfare

“not so much because of the numbers killed…as because of the panic

affected as a result by killing any of them.” He continues: “when

defenders heard the noise of the guns without, as far as they could see,

having been struck, they concluded that supernatural forces were at

work.”[14]

This is an important point. As I said earlier, the warfare of earth

based cultures was never faceless. The changing pattern of affiliations

and war still had enemies, but they were known enemies. The consequence

of killing was rooted in cultural understandings of what happens to the

dead and how they are to be avenged. But what constitutes killing is

also culturally defined. If someone is killed by a spear, arrow or

through witchcraft, everyone knows what is going on and what is going to

happen. You respond in kind.

Technology, being outside of the realm of direct experience and

relationships, challenges this. The pastoral/horticultural Nuer of Sudan

now know this too well. Guns flooded their culture as Nuer boys and men

were drafted as soldiers in the SPLA, the Sudanese People’s Liberation

Army. That is, as a part of a violent nation-state turned ethnic war

created by European nations battling for control over the region. The

guns, not surprisingly, brought an extreme upsurge in Nuer homicide and

the loss of culture. Not necessarily through killing alone, but because

the technology is so alien to their long standing cultural

understandings of the world: ones patterned by hundreds of years of

bioregional and ecological influence.

Nuer responses and accountability for homicide were a part of their

elaborately outlined spiritual world. It involved consequences for the

deceased, the murderer and their cattle. But this was all tied to one

thing: the Nuer concept of killing. The death of Nuer, by other Nuer or

outsiders, had no place in their cosmology: there was no understanding

of where this left the living or the dead. Like the Iroquoian warriors,

this opened the door for the missionaries.[15]

Souls lost to the machine, taken again by the god that built them.

Genocide, ethnocide, omnicide: is it shocking to know that Sudan is one

vital source for the Nile River? That is, the land the Nuer live on is

the primary source for the most valued resource in northeastern Africa:

water.[16] The very building block of life becomes another resource,

another reason to take lives. All for industry. All for Progress. All to

feed the Machine.

From the view of the modernizers and the technocrats, you have to give

to take. And this is what we and those being taken from are told we are

all seeing.

The necessary evils. The broken eggs of Progress.

And ultimately the salvation of the Machine.

It’s easy to look at these things and see them as a tragic misconception

or faults of indigenous societies to stop their complacency in their

ethnocide and genocide. We can look at these ‘downsides’ of technology

in use or ignore the relationship between all of this and the necessary

expansion of the technological system.

But if we think that we are any different or any more prepared to deal

with technology, then Stanley Milgram proved us wrong.

Milgram was a social psychologist with a particular interest in

obedience. His interests led to what would become one of the most

controversial experiments and analysis of the last century. The

experiment brought in random people who were, as they would believe,

going to give another experimental subject a series of electrical shocks

as dictated by the conductor of the experiment. The person receiving the

shocks was an actor who would respond how any person would if given the

relative amount of electrocution: from initial reactions along the lines

of ‘what is going on here’ to protests to agonizing screams. What

Milgram found was shocking: nearly all the subjects would give strong to

extremely intense shocks before they would refuse to give them as told

and twice as many would carry on if the actor was further away, but

could still be heard.[17]

The experiment was focused on obedience to authority, but there are two

things in particular that apply to this subject: the authority granted

to the experimenter through their technology and the disconnection

between the person giving the shocks and the screams of the victim

through the technology.

You don’t need a lab to remind ourselves of how powerful these things

are. When some technology exists, it is treated as something that just

is and always will be. In a fatalistic sense, it is accepted as a part

of reality. Genetic engineering, for example, gets its share of protest,

but little to no outrage, even as diseases have nearly doubled in the

short period since they’ve become widely used. We could look even closer

to everyday technologies like sewage systems and garbage. We don’t think

about what happens when we can simply toss things to the curb or in a

dumpster. We don’t have to think about how the psycho-active sedatives

that are so widely taken are being pissed out and run back into the

water supply with no method of filtration for them. That goes back into

the rivers, lakes, streams and oceans and finds its way back into the

soil. Nor are we confronted with the consequences of household

chemicals, like fertilizers, insecticides and fungicides which anyone in

most countries could go to the store and pick up and spray outside at

anytime. Nor do we think about the coal plants, strip mines, nuclear

power plants and the carnage they reap when we flip on a switch.

We can wonder and be philosophically opposed, but these things are all

just there. And their presence alone grants them a kind of authority

that comes with the fatalistic view that’s been instilled in our minds.

The necessary evils haunt us into inaction. They are the electric

lullaby.

And it is the distance that a technological system that makes it

possible for us to go on ignoring all of this. To continue acting like

there are no consequences for our actions while everyday life remains an

on going catastrophe.

Milgram was interested in the study of obedience for a particular

reason: are there evil and good people, or are people just following

orders. What he saw from Hitler’s concentration camps, Stalin’s gulags,

and, at that time, the ongoing war in Vietnam disturbed him. And what he

learned through interviews with those who took part in this wholesale

destruction of life brings us back to the essence of technology: in

order to inflict pain directly, they had to “counteranthropomophorize”

their victims. That is they had to remove any human qualities from the

people they would be destroying.

And there is another fitting term for this: reification, the process of

turning life into ‘things’, lifeless objects. This is exactly what the

technological system does, and exactly what the domesticators teach us

to do. We must be disconnected from our being to cause this kind of

destruction. No full being could ever tolerate this loss just as how we

cannot comprehend what is really being lost.

So long as we are plugged in, we will never be able to come to this

understanding.

As the Iroquois and Maori unwittingly took part in the destruction of

their culture, we unwittingly take part in the destruction of life, the

uprooting of communities, and the dismemberment of our being.

This is the technological system. This is the consequence of its

necessary disconnection.

And this is what we are given in return for a wholeness that we can no

longer even contemplate.

It is a whole package that cannot be taken in parts. There is no good

and bad technology: just as there are no consequence-free actions. We

are thrown into a global world that we are psychologically incapable of

understanding, where destruction is out of sight and out of mind.

But our bioregional, communal selves still lurk beneath the machinery.

We are not different. And we can’t wait any longer for a nice way to

slowly turn the power off on this system or to try and put it to good

use. The switch will never be willingly flipped.

It is up to us to pull the plug and let the system collapse.

Footnotes:

[1] RD Laing, The Politics of Experience. New Jersey: Pantheon, 1967.

Pgs. 57–58.

[2] Bob Black, Anarchy after Leftism. Columbia: CAL Press, 1997.

[3] Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold. New York: Grove, 1998.

Pgs. 3–4.

[4] Joe Kane, Savages. New York: Vintage, 1996. Pg. 7.

[5] Ibid, pg. 5.

[6] Ward Churchill, Struggle for the Land. Winnipeg: Arbiter Ring, 1999.

Donald Grinde and Bruce Johansen, Ecocide of Native America. Santa Fe:

Clear Light, 1995.

[7] Linda Rabben, Unnatural Selection. Seattle: University of Washington

Press, 1998. John Bodley, Victims of Progress. Menlo Park: Cummings,

1975.

[8] This can be observed from nearly any ethnography on

horticulturalists and pastoralists. A few cases that have elaborated on

it as such are; Roy Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors (Prospect Heights,

IL: Waveland Press, 1984), Kenneth Good, Into the Heart (New York: Simon

and Schuster, 1991), Andrew Vayda, Maori Warfare (New Plymouth, NZ:

Avery Press, 1960) and Warfare in Ecological Perspective (New York:

Plenum Press, 1976), Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches (New

York: Vintage, 1989), and is further elaborated in my book-inprogress,

Catalyst: the birth and death of civilization.

[9] Quoted in Michael Klare, Resource Wars. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.

Pg. 4.

[10] NOVA, Hunters of the Seal [film]. 1978.

[11] Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1982. Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous

Iroquois Empire. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984.

[12]

R. Brian Ferguson, Yanomami Warfare. Santa Fe: SAR Press, 1995.

[13] Andrew Vayda, Maori Warfare. Pgs. 91–2.

[14] Ibid. Pg. 60

[15] Sharon Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1996.

[16] Klare, Resource Wars.

[17] Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper, 1975.