💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › william-gillis-15-post-primitivist-theses.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:40:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: 15 Post-Primitivist Theses
Author: William Gillis 
Date: 2006
Language: en
Topics: anarcho-transhumanism, critique 
Source: Retrieved on July 12, 2014 from http://humaniterations.net/2006/06/13/15-post-primitivist-theses/

William Gillis

15 Post-Primitivist Theses

Introduction

Twenty years ago a group of Detroit anarchists began work on a new

synthesis of environmental and anti-authoritarian thought.

Distinguishing themselves from other burgeoning ecological movements in

the eighties anarchopunk scene they sought to draw inspiration directly

from our primitive roots. Anarchy, they declared, should not be

considered in terms of an abstract state to be politically won, but

rather a living experience and extensive historical reality.

Reevaluating the ideologies and dogma of the classic anarchist movement

they turned attention to the archaeological record and existing

indigenous societies. By building on post-left critiques they

passionately worked to bring attention to a much wider context and

history of mental, social and physical expressions of totalitarianism.

And finally, taking a stunningly broad stance that framed humanity’s

neolithic embrace of mass society in terms of the mythological Fall from

Eden, the movement chose to target as a single whole both the virulent

social hierarchies that accompanied the onset of agrarianism and the

entirety of technological development since.

The radical core of a vast green anarchist awakening,

anarcho-primitivism blossomed across the North American

anti-authoritarian community and then beyond.

High-profile operations such as Earth First’s creation of the Cascadia

Free State to block old-growth logging built an international momentum

around green anarchy. At the same time intellectuals like John Zerzan

gained public exposure in defense and support of Unabomber Ted

Kaczynski’s anti-civilization politics. In the Seattle riots against the

WTO primitivist group from Eugene stole the media spotlight. Today

various bundlings of green anarchist thought have become diffuse and

deeply integral in the broader anarchist movement and, despite some

dramatically turning tides, primitivism still enjoys a significant

influence.

Naturally this has provoked sizable criticism.

Within the traditionally socialist and unabashedly leftist veins writers

such as Michael Albert and Murray Bookchin have been repulsed at the

movement’s radical rejection of everyday basic technology and

universally accepted constructs like language itself. And on the ground

many activists deride a lack of engagement with or sympathy and

awareness of social realities. Furthermore, identity issues and

accusations of irrelevancy have plagued the mainly

economically-privileged white anglophone movement.

Despite this, or perhaps because of these critiques and their limited

nature, the primitivist discourse has continued seeping out to wider

audiences beyond anarchism through things like the growing infatuation

of liberal conspiracy types with peak oil and Derrick Jensen’s

popularization of ecological struggle.

Serious intellectual resistance, where it has come, has been less

theoretically inspired than socially motivated. For many radicals the

most tangible effects of primitivism have been cultural. Predictions of

an inevitable and permanent crash of civilization have sapped the

perceived need for revolutionary action and differing degrees of

survivalist elitism have mixed with already rampant shallow and

self-preoccupied competitive moralisms to the effect of even greater

disconnect. A sort of DIY green capitalism has been recreated by certain

radical circles in which presumably if you collect enough survival

skills tokens you get to retire to your very own plush post-collapse

bungalow with a panoramic view of everyone you ever had drama with

dying.

This is obviously all very concerning. But, as with any political

philosophy or revolutionary paradigm, the demographics and particular

social consequences are far less important than what primitivism

actually has to say. Neither extremism nor radicalism are ever reasons

for rejection unto themselves, nor are even impracticality or a fumbled

enactment – whatever tactics might be concluded from an assertion, if

the underlying idea is inviolate, the consequence of it should not blind

us to that reality.

The actual argument behind anarcho-primitivism is fierce. It is

intelligent and complex, yet beautifully simple at root… And it is

ultimately wrong.

In giving flesh to these fifteen theses I seek not to call out the

radical green movement wholesale. Nor do I mean to limit myself to some

official orthodoxy of primitivism proper. Rather I mean to address

several core and recurring strands of thought in primitivism today and

the deep failings that have come to define it as a whole.

Biological concepts & Distinctions aren’t Particularly fundamental

It’s no secret we, as a society, have a bad case of

cosmology-through-taxonomy. The industrial revolution in particular saw

an explosion of categorization and demarcation between abstractions.

From animal/vegetable/mineral we got sub-parthenons. phylas, compounds,

infraclasses and a host of other cognitive divisions. It was a profound

and expansive campaign of centralization and itemization and, like all

others, it was mostly about control.

Just as has been true since the very first person mucked around with

language: naming is power.

It was not enough to build a massive physical infrastructure by which to

apply social hierarchies. Humanity itself had to be broken down and

controlled. The greatest tools of coercion and control that had ever

been available—the needs and frailties of our own bodies—were to be so

thoroughly itemized as give charge to the second greatest tool of

coercion and control: a religion.

Biology over-asserted its association with hard sciences like chemistry

and physics and brought that unearned legitimacy to bear in the social

realm. Even as forests were clearcut and species exterminated, Europe’s

expanding ecosystem of social hierarchy launched a barrage of taxonomic

declarations to convince the people that it best understood their

interactions, place and role within the world. We may not understand the

processes killing you, but we can pick its name off a chart.

Though it gave no true strength, such taxonomic knowledge provided a

numbing security. A sense of personal control over the world through the

ingestion of structure.

The synthesis of this pursuit of taxonomy with the valuation of position

and power can of course be seen in the constructions applied to race and

sex. And “Social Darwinism” justified social stratification more broadly

by applying emerging biological concepts as fully descriptive and

absolute laws of nature in realms they had no business in describing.

The general assurance provided by taxonomy spurred an overreach that

still deeply affects our discourse. Mainstream notions of ethics—long

corrupted by the church to remove any foundation save appeals to

authority— reacted to the increasing potency of biological explanations

by simply swapping authorities. Nature was swapped in to fill the place

of god. And the fulfillment of one’s role set out for them by nature was

positioned as the moral good. Homosexuality, for example, gets attacked

for being “unnatural” more often than “unholy.”

The early field of biology, as it was appealed to and applied in the

social realm, excelled in layered complex arcana, rituals and miracles.

What it needed was a touch of divinity, something that could be

personally mystified until it swallowed up all existential questions.

And then it would be possible to draw lines and slice up whatever was

left on the metaphysical level. Thus the arbitrary category of “living”

was canonized as an absolute on par with the charge of an electron, even

though abstractions like “self-replicating system” were obviously

subjective as all hell. We saw patterns that could be easily and

pragmatically described and pretended they were prefect and fundamental

descriptions. So the chemically subjective impression of “life” is

declared to begin at conception, et cetera, et cetera.

The churches bought in real fast.

Yet if self-replication is somehow an entropy-breaking signature of a

divinely separate force, what of the stars? They grow, collapse and, in

doing so, seed their own re-growth among the nebulae. Every piece of

matter around us is part of that cycle. Likewise, a mystification of the

information patterns of DNA breaks down in the form of RNA and

quasi-nucleaic-acid carriers on the frayed edge of what’s a complex

molecule and what was declared easily recognizable by a lab technician.

What counts as the “sameness” between one cell and another?Why not

include the sublimation of minerals?

It can seem an inane difficulty, but these notions come to bear again

and again in our political and ecological discourse in ways that can be

deeply problematic, yet are rarely called out.

One tradition of primitivist thought appeals strongly to the notion of

“complexity”, something well defined in say computer science (where the

arbitrary abstractions we choose automatically have real meaning), but

not so clear-cut in the realm of cultures and biomes. You get authors

like Jason Godesky arguing points that depend on humo sapiens being more

“complex” than dinosaurs and dinosaurs more complex than say coral

reefs. But for what definition of “complex”? We judge complexity based

on how many “parts” we see in a system, but what exactly constitutes a

part is itself hugely subjective on anything other than fundamental

particles. We chose to talk and think in terms of particular abstracts

agglomerates based on how useful such schemes are for us, not because

things become suddenly magically more than the sum of their parts at say

the cellular level. If dinosaurs are considered “less complex” than

primates it’s because we have more intricate naming systems for physical

and behavioral details closer to our own experience. But from another

perspective a coral reef can be seen as far, far more complex than a

human being.

My point is that significant abstraction based in such taxonomies can

end up worse than useless. While on a some levels—in the pragmatic

service of some goals—they can be useful, we need to remain explicit

about those constraints. There can be just as much, say, fundamental

“diversity” between a given spotted owl & lemur as between two lemurs.

Narrowly focused on similarities between patterns of DNA or macroscopic

physical trends in physiology, our concept of “diversity” might even be

applicable in the way we want it to be. But it won’t necessarily get us

beyond the assumptions, the working parameters, and the social

hierarchies a given taxonomic framework is couched in. It’s all too easy

to slide into making too much out of false dichotomies between ‘living’

and non-’living’ systems or ‘natural’ and non-’natural’ arrangements.

While pragmatic on certain levels of discussion, abstractions of any

deep ethical, ontological or existential significance that are

predicated on Biology’s conceptual distinctions are likely to be deeply

problematic. Instead of copping out with loose and ultimately arbitrary

abstractions, it behooves us to think in terms of the exact particulars

and only speak of systemic distinctions that are grounded in objective

fundamentals.

The biosphere is not inherently good, just highly dynamic

Between the solar wind and its molten iron core, the Earth has a thin

layer of water and nitrogen. Around 3.5 billion years ago, after the

planet finished aggregating, this layer of fluid locked into a sort of

homeostasis around the solid mantel. The various elements caught up in

this turbulent process were forced into far closer interaction than

they’d seen as dust between the stars. Due to the nature of the

planetary formation much of the surface experienced large and decidedly

uneven outbursts of energy. Unusually extended molecules were formed and

destroyed as fundamental particles followed entropy to lower energy

states all while pressed up against uncountable trillions of their

fellows.

Eventually the most violent energy outbursts died down and the resulting

elemental muck settled into more efficient and locally sustainable

patterns of relational structure. The free-floating O2 molecule became a

quite popular pattern of arrangement as erosive molecular aggregates

liberated it from the surface’s iron rocks. Another popular arrangement

that stood the test of all those trillions of interacting particles and

molecules was the amino acid. Of course, this was a far broader

generalization of inter-atomic structure and, unlike the simplistic O2,

its existence depended on a much higher degree of interaction with the

surrounding muck. Such increased interaction, in fact, that, as entropy

played out the Earth’s ocean/atmosphere, it emerged primarily in close

conjunction with much larger agglomerations of closely interdependent

molecules. In the background of all this an almost unnoticeable mass of

sugars rolled themselves out and transmitted structural information to

their surrounding proteins. The planet cooled and these sluggish

uber-massive molecular arrangements gained ground against the more fiery

radical arrangements of yester-eon. Today about two trillion tons of

matter on the surface of the earth is intimately associated with these

deoxyribonucleic acids. And the sum total of these fluidly interrelating

positional structures of matter is today referred to as the Biosphere.

There are many cosmically descriptive attributes that could be applied

to this planet’s scummy outer film, but the most important is by far its

dynamicism.

Neither an expansive vacuum of distant, weak and slow interactions nor a

positionally locked, brittle over-structure, the biosphere is

characterized by relatively in fluid change. That is to say interacting

forces play out with significantly sped up changes in relative

positions. Of course that’s not to ascribe to it the properties of some

perfectly dynamic super-fluid.

Rather, the Earth is simply dynamic enough to buffer the emergence and

mobile propagation of rough, low-density information structures. Like

us.

Our biosphere is organized in stratified layers of fluidity. From

particles to molecules to cells to organisms. Given any arbitrarily

limited system and the intention to convey information in the form of

spatial relations able to withstand externalities, some fluid behavior

is crucial. Those arrangements which survive and flourish in such

dynamic systems do so though grassroots propagation. And the resulting

landscapes are characterized by redundancy. By coalescing into

autonomous actors they achieve a sort of distributed adaptability that

morph around blunt obstacles and seep into their surroundings.

Compared to a rock, a puddle of water is very dynamic. A maple tree’s

probably going to be a whole lot less dynamic than the puddle of water.

But the rock’s not going to do much at all. The information structure

contained within the arrangement of its particles isn’t really going to

apply itself to the surrounding world as be applied upon.

The rock, of course, can store quite a bit of positional information.

These days we, as a society, spend quite a lot of time saving porn and

MP3s to rocks. Because, it’s worth pointing out, the structures in the

rock generally don’t spontaneously flow apart. At the same time,

however, such brittle frozen structures are incredibly unstable in the

face applied contact and motion. But that’s okay because though dynamic

systems erode entrenched structure, there are still ways to convey and

apply positional information.

The maple tree’s DNA, for example, in proportion to its total resulting

weight, may not pack away an impressive number of gigs per cubic inch.

But it preserves and applies such informational structures in such a way

that an ipod, abandoned on mountainside, would be hard pressed to match.

Through dynamic engagement with environmental complexities, structure

can be rooted with more survivability and consequence than a less

dynamic one would find. The structure of a hunk of concrete is not very

dynamic, and a brittle hunk of concrete embedded in a far more dynamic

system will not last very long.

The positional structure of say, concrete overpasses, doesn’t have as

strong a history of dynamic participation in the Earth’s scummy outer

film as say, humanity. And, as the human body is an emergent structure

highly interconnected and participant within a rather dynamic system,

our own structures are somewhat colossally interdependent with all the

other watery stuff whirling around us.

From our vantage point as homo sapiens, the Earth’s dynamic system

usually looks great! But let’s remember that there are no huge

metaphysical engines driving the whole thing just to sustain the crude

information structure of ‘humanishly’ arranged deoxyribonucleic acids

bumping about in scummy water sacks. The Earth wasn’t made for human

bodies. Human bodies were made for the Earth.

And all that means is that our template survived two million years of

stabbing rabbits to death and picking strawberries. It does not mean

that going back to stabbing and strawberries would still cut it for us

in another thousand years (even if we had never taken up our new

dastardly practice of planting carrots and wheeling around carts). Who

knows? Fact of the matter is some dynamic turbulence in the Biosphere

could spontaneously wipe us out any day. Following our original position

within the greater biosphere (even with some mild evolution) guarantees

nothing. It is simply an informed shot in the dark. Good chances but a

rather hands off abandonment to fate.

Yet, at the same time, it should be so obvious as to go without saying

that suddenly slapping concrete over 1/10^(th) of the Earth’s surface

will almost certainly effect a non-human-friendly result. No matter how

many of your summer homes you make out of cob.

Humans can choose our dynamics

We exist immersed within a dynamic system and remain deeply dependent on

its conditions. At the same time there’s no denying that we can affect

both our local conditions and the system as a whole.

On the face of it, this appears to present us with the two extremes: We

can strive to interact with our external environment in as close to the

same manner as worked twenty thousand years ago. Or we can seek

different ways of engaging with it.

To the degree that we choose the first, we throw up our hands at the

thought of out thinking millions of years of evolution. Uncountable

trillions of calculations were involved in the formation of our bodies

and ecology. Granted, the Earth isn’t finished processing through all

the fluid interactions of its scummy crust—and when it is, there will be

nothing left—but, in the short term, it’s certainly amenable to assume

that enough of the overarching patterns of equilibrium involved in our

upkeep will be maintained for a few dozen more millennia. …Provided we

continue to participate in roughly the same manner.

The second option, deviation, is, at least evolutionarily, a great

tactic. But the most efficient processes of evolution take steps

inversely proportional to the evolving structure’s size. The greater the

trial, the greater the error. Large scale structures have more net

components involved and thus more points of interaction with the

external dynamic system. A single misstep has larger consequences.

The best way to sneak around this dangerous process of physical trial

and error is conceptual modeling. We can think through possible changes

to way we interact with the world. We simplify perceptions into

cognitive structures and then allow them to evolve against one another

in our minds. The resulting successful structures we then translate back

into external form.

This is technology.

It’s the process of how we choose to arrange our interactions with the

material world. Loose every day associations of bulldozers and computers

aside, this is pretty all that the word “technology” means.

Problem is, the greater the abstraction involved the greater the

imperfection. Symbolic representations diverge from material behavior

as, by nature of their comparative simplicity, they cannot calculate

every interaction in a fluid system. “Chaotic” behavior thus emerges as

a phantom remainder, left behind to torment the carefully calculated and

brittle structures we so proudly abstracted.

It’s one thing when it results in a snapped vine rope, it’s quite

another when the structure at hand coats the entire Earth. But,

regardless of degree, in every technological channel we might use to

interact with the material world, whether it be through our traditional

biological bodies, adopted behavioral patterns, symbolic logic,

mechanical tools, or agglomerate ecosystem, our ultimate choice is

between fluidly integrated structures and clunky or tractionless

structures.

This is the greater truth. Our choices are ultimately a matter of

dynamics. Rather than a choice between two sets of patterns,

“technology” and “non-technology,” every manner of interaction with the

world is a kind of technology. What matters is their efficiency in

providing the most fluid contact with the world.

Role-filling is an ethical abdication

We do not consider “I was just following orders” to ever be a good

excuse or moral justification. Neither is, “I was just following my role

in nature.”

Though of course it’s ludicrous to imagine our ecosystem personally

issuing commands to Nazi stormtroopers, the basic issue of abdicating

personal spirit and responsibility to external authority is the same.

Outsourcing our lives into the control of external systems is a

surprisingly accepted practice in our society and whole swathes of

people have come to believe that in doing so we can escape the energy of

vigilance and self-animation. So vast is the acceptance, that there’s a

general sense that actions committed while self-placed under some

external authority are, in some manner, of less personal responsibility

than would be otherwise true. As if the choice to abdicate choice could

ever be less egregious. Whenever we accept a form of external authority,

we chew away at the personal processes of thinking and living in a sort

of selective internal suicide. But rarely does it stay internal. And

what once might have been abstract and largely benign, if still a

centrally accepted personal axiom, begins to noticeably seep out into

our actions and intentions.

It’s no secret that our most glamorous hierarchies and evils are

assisted, if not entirely held up, by such abdications.

Some of the most instantly recognizable and specific cases of

role-filling passed as morality come from the Christian church. From

semi-broad conceptions of manners of personal position within a larger

system as moral goods, to actual behavioral code pounded into rocks,

such conceptions of external morality have been adopted and fleshed out

by many sincere people striving independently. …And, of course,

inexorably lead to empowered hierarchies and the justification of

outright law.

In contrast, the extreme back-to-basics of ecological role-filling do

not directly lay down the specifics of some universal moral code, nor do

they posit precise moment-to-moment structures of action. What is done

instead is far more insidious, it embraces a generalized sense of

external authority. The broad presupposition that we have a place within

a larger system, and that our following of that externally defined role

is a moral good.

In short, that the external world should rule us.

The fact that these external notions are more material than social is an

important detail, but does not change the underlying movement towards

abrogation of personal spirit and responsibility. (And the mediation of

material structures into guidelines for one’s personal intent and action

often comes through social instruments.)

By supporting chains of governance in the abstract, such ecological

role-filling ultimately throws away agency in self-definition and

self-determination …even though it may not have yet settled on

particular rigid structures of personal participation.

The inescapable problem is that after embedding oneself in external

causal sequences one cannot be assured of any moral force remaining in

them much less being inherent. Reframing and constructing one’s life

according to say ecological equations or drug-induced instructions from

an owl-spirit, though superficially different in structural source, are

identical in nature. They can justify anything.

And over many iterations, though such external forces may have been

first broadly interpreted so as to produce anti-authoritarian behavior,

without an internally emergent motivation, they will justify anything.

The rejection of civilization and technology in favor of ecological

role-filling, on the face of it, can’t help but appear socially

conservative. Still, most if not the overwhelming majority of

primitivists have imported enlightenments from progressive movements of

deconstruction, seeking to meld anarchist branches of queer theory

within the critique of civilization. Despite anarcho-primitivism’s macho

appearance and reputation within the community, progressive perspectives

and deconstruction of sexuality are widely embedded with the banner of

green anarchy and some of the most energetic advances and

popularizations of anarchism’s interpersonal insights have come via

green anarchist ventures. (Nothing makes folks face gender roles like a

winter in the forest together.) But, while there’s been some dancing

around biological role-filling in regards to gender, one universal line

been drawn, as it is inescapable from the most basic premise of

anti-technology: However much primitivism’s role-filling might be

stretched to embrace the variance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and even

some limited queer identities, trans folk are right out.

Because one’s biological body is a component of one’s role in the

greater system that can’t truly be changed without technology. The

greater alteration of one’s body’s dynamics, the more dynamic (and from

our point of view complex) the applied technology must be. This occasion

of an anti-civilization interpretation of the environment’s orders is

but one sharp and early consequence of primitivism’s broader-embrace of

role-filling. Even worse ones are certain to come.

As primitivism turns outward for direction from (interpretations of)

ecological systems, the divergence between their resulting codes of

action and our common feeling of a moral world will deepen. And one can

only begin to imagine the depth to the insidious changes capable of

spreading after a crash. When the touch of role-filling becomes more

immediate. The embrace of one’s position within a system internalizes

and emphasizes one’s connections to the system until the core person is

subsumed and replaced by them.

Individuals flourish with increases to their dynamic connections

When our relationships to external material structures become poorly

integrated, brittle and characterized by rigid control we become

imprisoned.

A starving child, trapped alone, say, on a seemingly endless expanse of

clay left by sudden drought, is obviously overwhelmed and overpowered by

the change of integration with environment. We can even imagine such a

doomed child perhaps only finding extended survival by listlessly

licking up mud for nutrients. Not exactly a free mode of life, most

would agree. And so too is the villager who simply follows the same

processes in life endlessly with no real deviation or exploration—even

in times of plenty when such chores are unneeded—pretty far from a

liberated life. Furthermore, such internalized repetition of behavior

might prove more than unnecessary, and, in fact, destructive to the

whole community’s relation with their surroundings.

On the flip side, it’s clear that fluid contact with our environment

helps us positively spread and grow. At heart, we like to touch. We like

to see, feel and know our world. We like to reach out and explore.

That’s not to say that locking ourselves out of the world can’t be

useful in situations of oppressive tactile structures. When our

environment strays into systems of behavior we can’t integrate with,

limited strength and intensity of contact is often a positive survival

method.

We might flee a hurricane for a concrete bunker or, when struggling

through a winter, slow our bodies down in degrees of hibernation. The

villager who mechanizes repetition of the same task in order to survive

a bad period withdraws from sensory engagement in a similar manner.

But again with the mechanized villager we see how locking ourselves away

can sometimes provide its own powerful form of role-filling. The classic

caricature of a suburban businessman might come to mind, someone who

locks himself away behind sterile, contact depriving doors, striving

progressively to do away with any manner of fluid interaction. replacing

contact’1 and engagement with air conditioned SUVs and neatly packaged

television shows.

There are stronger and weaker degrees (and of course forms or

directions) of such contact possible with the world. Certain examples

are obvious. The hunter who embraces the wilderness and, though more

fluidly integrated sensation, feels interactions spreading out from the

brushed fern to the owl fluttering off in the distance. The same

villager considered before, who just washes clothes in the river and

doesn’t stray much beyond the functioning of established processes, has

internalized a greater barrier to contact, interaction, connection, and

integration with the external environment. And, of course, the much

lamented World of Warcraft addict, isolated in dark room, may perhaps

enjoy great social contact but still little more than faint stimuli in

matters of physical reality.

It’s no coincidence that the examples given are characterized by

decreasingly dynamic connections as the ostensible trappings of

civilization are more pronounced. Modern civilization has acquired

layers of structural blanketing that encompasses and confines our

everyday lives. In every conceivable realm we have taken to throwing

down fences and slinking into set patterns and channels of behavior. We

still interact with the world, but the dynamics are greatly confined.

How often do we sit quietly and feel the trees move? How often do we pay

attention to what exactly is in the room with us, rather than reducing

our reality into crudely simplified concepts of functional relationship?

How often do we touch the world rather than ignoring or itemizing it?

When was the last time you turned your head up and actually looked at

the stars?

No wonder our minds and bodies rot today, we function within set

patterns because they can be useful. But we only truly flourish with

deeper contact. It’s no secret that such brittle structures and

role-filling are unstable and corrosive, but in the other direction,

when we approach our connections dynamically we can spread channels of

stronger, more fluidic and organic tactile contact.

There is no fundamental limit to this contact.

Certain local realities provide a bunch of pragmatic limitations, but

they can be worked around. In much the same way that the hunter can feel

the dancing wind patterns far stronger than his skin or the rustling

foliage might otherwise reveal by choosing to throw up some downy

feathers and watch their interaction with the twisting air currents. Or

a apple-gatherer use stilts to stride between tree branches. Or an

ancient lens crafter build a telescope. Or a geneticist hack the human

genome to give his skin stronger light-awareness.

We want stronger and more versatile contact, and thus we’ve built

technology.

Rather than from a drive to rigidly control and master, technology has

always been, at root, formed by the desire for greater dynamic contact.

Not the divorced-from-the-world laziness that sometimes emerges from

later abdications once the tools have been acquired. But from the desire

to touch, feel and explore. Because the primal creation involved is

necessarily rooted in an act of ingenuity and imagination.

The systems engineer who designs and builds a bridge across a ravine

with her own hands applies herself in a deeply connected fashion. The

world is felt and worked with smoothly. Rock is shifted. A new channel

of contact becomes stronger. It’s easier to move from place to place. To

engage with a wider swath of the world.

The onset of our hierarchical methods of industry, though they

facilitated greater and greater power and exploitation, partially stem

from the human desire for deeper and more dynamic contact with the

world. We don’t like being confined. Or that is to say, we rot when

limited or relegated to some removed subspace. We flourish with the

intensity and immediacy of our more dynamic connections to the world.

Moving beyond the same socially perpetuated processes of behavior, we

strive to understand and deepen our relationship, our interaction with

the seeds and bushes we gather from. We try for greater contact, attempt

a more fluid integration. And so we help plant the berry bushes we need

closer to us…

Symbolic structures can facilitate greater fluidity. So long as they,

themselves, are treated fluidly. The moment they become rigid, when we

remove or replace ourselves with mechanization, our interactions with

the world grow rigid and brittle.

Understanding is not dependent on process but capacity to experience

We live in a watery world. Every particle interacts with everything

else. The patterns of “structure” that emerge from this turbulent fluid

do so in a (relatively) constantly shifting, redundant, and

interdependent way. Organic, you might say.

The intensity of interaction–more specifically the high degree of and

constant change of relative position internally–found in systems defined

by a distribution of particles is the basic premise for the generation

of information structures within the system. In the seminal “game of

life” demonstrations programmers seeded low level algorithms in a

complex environment and turned up the intensity of the environment’s

internal interactions. The consequence was “spontaneously” “generated”

more “complex” or “diverse” informational “structures.” A whole

“complex” ecosystem of interacting informational systems.

But of course we should examine these terms critically. “Complex” can be

something of a misnomer given its modern connotations of rigidity

sometimes plain unnaturalness (think of the thick owner’s manual to a

car or a vast board of circuits). Instead it might be better to consider

the hurricane. Or the chaotic feedback found in a small backyard creek;

the ripples and eddies forming from smaller masses of interactions and

they, themselves, interrelating. Sometimes to form greater

agglomerations.

This is a far better representation of the human body, the animal cell,

bioregion or net ecosystem. We are each hurricanes in a way. Fractal

agglomerates of the positional information of particles in a fluid muck.

We thrive with motion and connection. Plop us in stellar vacuum or

granite mountainside and, with no connection or absolutely rigidly

controlling connections, our informational patterns don’t do that well.

Without dynamic integration to the world we have no channels to exist

through. We cannot touch. And without the capacity to touch the world we

cannot understand.

We all recognize ‘understanding’ as more than compartmentalized

knowledge. More than a tally sheet of discrete informational structures

built out of rigid neurons. Something more generalized. Something

vaguer, but more tactile. The impression left by a lover’s skin.

The refraction and internalization of the external. The breaking down of

a self that might have been discretely itemized by the empty other, not

in acceptance or allegiance to emptiness, but through the blossoming

enrapture of the other into the self. Until there is no hollow, deathly,

meaningless other. Only the universalized self.

This is the arrow of understanding.

Given that the only tangible truth is the internal, understanding is

birthed not by attempts to kill of the internal, but reaching out and

finding truth by making everything internal. To take in truth. To breath

in a lover’s sweat and eradicate the lies between you. Between you and

you.

Technology, on the other hand, is defined by process. The process of

poking a stick into an ant mound or hunting a bear or applying

linguistic constructs or working through a math problem under a certain

axiomatic framework or chugging through Javascript or poking an object

and recording the responses you notice… it doesn’t matter. Regardless of

how dynamically some technology functions in a given situation, it’s no

more than the details of applied interactions. Codified processes. There

doesn’t have to be any degree of contact through them. The channels can

be left empty, the same processes of interaction can be under-utilized

or embraced. Technology alone is not understanding.

But here’s the trick. Technology can facilitate the capacity to

experience. Which is the basic requirement for the creation of

understanding.

A hearing aid. Glasses. A microscope. A telescope. Pictures of animals

from far away. Pictures of plants. A fine saw blade revealing the layers

inside a quartz rock. Satellite contour mappings of valleys and water

systems across an entire continent…

The more venues for and the stronger the tactile connections, the

greater the capacity for experience.

Today we can actually feel individual molecules with our hands. We can

caress the fringe star clusters of distant galaxies with our eyes. We

can see the insides of our own bodies and recognize the pheromones

dripping off our shoulders. See sound waves. Pick apart flavors and the

patterned buzzing of our own nerves.

Understanding is perhaps simply the most dynamic and abstract fluid

impressions of the external, it’s that which most effectively mentally

grasps the fabric of existence.

We actively want greater understanding, thus we’ve strived for science.

When what we call ‘science’ gets rigid or imperialistic in the classic

sense it becomes useless, but in its most dynamic it allows us channels

to press up against the face of reality. More intense experience of

reality giving strength to understanding. We want to touch the world

around us so that we can get a stronger feel for reality. Into those

nooks and crannies that require stronger dynamic channels of

information.

Can there be modes and forms of understanding without industrial or even

agrarian technology? Obviously yes. But increases in technology

facilitate understanding. Confined to some frail bundle of six senses

within a limited framework of allowable experiences there comes with

that an inherent limitation to understanding. If you bound off sections

of the world. Outlaw the advanced technology necessary to reach into and

grasp the microscopic or the unbelievably macroscopic and distant… you

ingrain a limitation on possible experience and thus understanding.

Physical limitation inspires and triggers social oppression

The problem with the rejection of technology (or more precisely, an

allegiance to one limited set of possible technologies) is that scarcity

and restraint is built in. The greater the technological limitation, the

greater the constraint imposed.

Because our given bodies require certain forms of environmental

integration and because we desire greater connection, we’ve historically

traded for this on a fractured, individual level, at the expense of

greater social freedom and equality. For all the reasons and things

discussed earlier, the restraints of rigid-technologies naturally chafe

people and inspire them to take short cuts by utilizing that which is at

hand by turning people into their technology. Enter alienation and all

forms of oppression.

It’s a simple reality that want and dependency together progressively

facilitate the psychosis of power.

Certainly want can be reduced significantly, but there is an inherent

and significant limit. Being restricted in your integration with the

environment (having limited technology) means that there is a much more

finite limit on survival knowledge carrying capacity and yet

simultaneously restrictions on adaptability. Being limited to a very

small area of the total dynamic system means that natural chaotic

systems dynamics can occur beyond the periphery of one’s limits only to

suddenly and drastically effect that within. Sudden regional change is a

fundamental reality of the biosphere. It’s dynamic.

Want will happen. And it will do so sharply. Because society will be

more regionalized. The total sum of humanity won’t be able to flow

around and mesh with the biosphere as a whole, it will be broken into

components that will have much less scope and fluidity. Society will be

more compartmentalized into autonomous cells, and these cells will be

more rigid. We can argue about degree, but the point is there will be

some non-insignificant degree of this.

This is where interdependency exits the realm of mutual aid and develops

the potential for serious nastiness. Where there is social want and

where the fulfillment of individual want is deeply dependent upon

others, there is much greater temptation on the part of the individual

to drastically simplify their operating processes. To become machines in

pursuit of survival. And, perhaps most importantly, to simplify away the

presence of other individuals. To reinterpret them as machines as well.

With every biological mechanism shouting at a cacophony of simplistic

structural procedures. (Get water. Get food. Etc.) It’s very easy for

the individual to despairingly become progressively rigidly locked. They

start applying such rigid structures to their interactions with people.

Bang. Dehumanization. Faith. Power structures. Social oppression.

Where does alienation originate? It is instilled by the overwhelming

omni-presence of rigid structure. A lack of fluid, dynamic integration

with the world. Baseline human biological structures have certain

limitations to dynamic integration built in. Certain structural

predispositions. We can’t just realign our genes and grow chlorophyll to

take in sunlight through our backs or weave wings to glide through

canyons hunting deer. The baseline human body is relatively rigid

technology.

And people are inspired by limitation, by want, by the encroachment of

rigidity, to oppress.

Limitation upon understanding likewise has this effect.

Limitations to our capacity to experience have been consistently

surpassed throughout history, a flower bursting through concrete. But

when others are left frozen in the concrete they can bear the brunt of

such blossoming understanding.

In order for a Victorian Physicist to reach out, to explore and make

discoveries involving vacuum, thousands of man hours were needed. To get

the rubber, the pump, the glass, the metal… all the tools necessary to

peel away the air and peer beyond the norms of our immediate

environment, a massive amount of matter had to be positionally

reorganized. But it would be inconvenient to educate, explain and get

everyone to consent on the benefit of achieving this vector of increased

integration with the world, and because most of the people in the world

were still far more entrapped by more fundamental physical wants, it was

very easy for the Victorians to put the wants and flourishing of the

rest of humanity aside. Because the Physicist’s own rigid technological

and structural entrappings have promoted an alienation from others,

limited connection fails to fully reveal the effects of his actions, and

centuries of aggregated social psychoses have ground down his empathy.

Thus, through a diffuse system of intermediaries, Congolese miners are

enslaved, ship hands are whipped and a colossal monster of wood and

metal is driven across the ocean. Though the desire for integration and

understanding persists, when framed by such alienating structures it can

be rechanneled into driving social oppression.

Though the imagery of such Victorian Imperialism is dramatic, it is not

particularly original or even that worse than similar processes on less

visually epic scale.

Think of the elder whose pursuit of understanding seduces the tribe into

recognizing his role and position, turning the product of their work and

efforts into tendrils of his own tech. Can’t spend all day on mushrooms

unless there’s folk who’re gonna provide you with food. You get social

stratification. In order to preserve the elder’s high degree of

mushroom-related pursuits it’s real easy to apply social coercion,

personal and cultural power structures so that even in a period of want,

others are forced into sacrificing their own food to the self-proclaimed

elder.

Physical limitation doesn’t directly ordain social subjugation. What it

does is grease the gears. It makes it easier to adopt the psychoses of

power. Makes them progressively more alluring. Physical rigidity leading

to mental and social rigidity. The more physical rigidity, the more and

more likely social oppression will spontaneously emerge from all facets.

Spatial limitation ingrains social hierarchy

What tears apart the prisons within our minds is the roaring vacuum

beyond. The unexplored frontier chased down past the horizon each night

by the sun.

The first step in control is the securing of borders. Otherwise the

people you seek to dominate could just walk away.

It is said that, in a simple world, a single empire can only reach as

far as a horse can ride. But of course the idea of empire knows no such

restrictions. One border inspires another.

It is a far more important truth that, in a simple world, a refugee can

only travel as far as their feet can carry them. And the final periphery

beyond the locally interrelating agglomerates of tribal power is often

unreachable. In Europe’s dark ages the refugees lacked the capability to

flee beyond all of infected Europe and so they hid between, taking to

the forests, much as we always have. And thus the forests were

eventually cleared. The only available free space encircled and crushed.

This happened because priests, kings and bureaucrats had mills and

horses while the serfs had none. But more specifically it all happened

because the peasants were spatially limited. They were effectively

fenced within authoritarianism as a result of their own limited mobility

and positioning.

If we remove all the particularly non-individualized technologies that

benefited Europe’s centralized powers, the same reality would remain.

The spatial limitation of the peasants was both relative to that of the

king’s men and absolute. Power need not be so dramatically centralized

and hierarchical to still be as oppressive. Remove the tools of the

power zombies and they would simply organize more localized

authoritarianism. And the high cost of spatial redistribution of

individuals (a single individual moving from point A to point B takes

more time and energy) means that society’s natural resistance to power

is lessened.

Perhaps an example is in order. When a husband beats his wife in the

apartment beside mine the situation is immediate and so is my reaction.

I am able to recognize it within seconds. I can move to their door in

very little time and, as a consequence, I am able to take whatever

action I take much sooner. Furthermore the wife can choose to

immediately relocate herself into the presence of safe, protective

people. All these things are spatial matters. And remain effectively the

same if we replace the aggregate of nearby apartments with more distant

tree houses and give the individuals involved bicycles. (The

communication of the situation is slightly different matter and will be

covered in the next essay.)

If you relocate the aforementioned people into the forest without

significant technological choice then interpersonal power structures can

leech off the high costs of relative relocation to restrain subjects.

This can happen with couple removed far from any others or an entire

tribe.

Because of scarcity, hunter-gatherer tribes naturally aggregate with a

good deal of separation between them. When the psychoses of power take

root in a tribe they are emboldened and strengthened by such spatial

limitation.

Individuals can flee for other tribes, they can, as the

anarcho-capitalists might say, choose their government on the market.

Choose the lives they want to live and choose the people they want to

live them with. And, yes, in a relatively open market of infinite

options this tends to work pretty well. Oppression just isn’t that

appealing. But, and here’s the kicker. Because of their spatial

limitation, their choices certainly do not constitute a free market.

They have rather limited available options. Because by nature of the

necessary hunter-gatherer distribution, the number of other individuals

they can reach to associate with is very, very finite. And each

relocation, each encounter costs them a whole lot more time.

Furthermore, when oppressive concepts spread further than their

“discrete” embodiments, when multiple tribes (forced by famine or

battered by climate change, say) adopt a regional consensus of power

archetype, the effective boundary of such an aggregate of mini-empires

can surpass the traveling capacity of the potential refugee. (And let’s

not even mention the even harsher inherent restrictions applied to

families.)

Those on the outside of such a travesty could and normally would

overwhelm and grind down such cancerous cultures. But a lack of

individualized transport technology changes the odds. Simple geometry

makes it harder to organize resistance around the edge of a periphery.

Centralized power meanwhile retains the local advantage; it doesn’t have

to travel much of anywhere.

Given a generalized anarchy, broken only by the occasional tragic

psychological misstep that inspires coercive sociological rigidity,

society’s most crucial healing factor lies in its ability to flee and

isolate the cancer.

Our natural defense against power is free association. The ability to

re-form, to route around hierarchy, bypass the malicious and fluidly

create new relationships.

For this to be possible there has to be a high degree of positional

interrelation. That is to say, people have to be able to relocate around

one another easily.

Vacuous distance or overbearing proximity are both inconducive to such

dynamicism. And tribal clusters are the worst of both worlds. The only

solution is choice. Where distances between people can be overcome

easily at will. Where we can rearrange ourselves with respect to the

rest of humanity at a moment’s notice. When we are deprived this

ability, cancerous hierarchies grow.

Communication and Freedom of information is necessary for free

societies

Central to every interaction between individuals is the conveyance of

information. Of course, in a certain sense, its impossible to transfer

meaning from one individual to another. We each create that

individually. But what we create stems from the informational structures

we have at hand, the material reality between ourselves. The nature of

connection to our environment, the channels by which we experience, by

which we touch the rest of the world, are thus critical factors in the

macroscopic behavior of a society.

Our interactions with each other are mediated through the physical

realities of our environment and are wholly comprised of informational

structures. We construct physical systems of contact, whether by

movement of skin on skin, electrons in logic circuits, or common neural

models and vibrating air. As a result, the nature of our interactions

with one another is inherently dependent upon our relationship to our

physical environment. In order to interact dynamically with one another

we require strong channels of dynamic integration with the world around

us.

Communication (although not necessarily through strict processes of

symbolic logic or language) is the defining aspect of society. However

you cut it, we interact through information.

If there are restrictions or limitations to our communication with one

another those conditions will shape the total internal interactions of

our society.

In the previous essay I glanced over some of the emergent methodologies

by which societies heal the power psychosis. Central to all of these is

the internal dynamic integration of the society at hand. In order to

correct an injustice you have to first actually hear about it. When we

make decisions pertaining to our associations with others we like to be

informed. Free societies function because we’re not all fumbling in the

dark. We can make knowledgeable choices and respond quickly to changes.

We don’t lose sight of what the economists call the “externalities” of

our interactions. Other people’s lives are immediate and tactile to our

own. As a result we don’t marginalize others beyond a periphery.

Contact is the most vital component of society. We can only help or

assist those we can touch. Those we can communicate with.

Resistance needs veins. Empathy needs arms.

Dictators know this altogether too well. Free information brings down

tyrants and heals cancers. The tools, technologies and processes of

communication are antithetical to control. Control can only take root

through isolation and strangulation. Governments are critically

dependent on keeping their actions quiet. Keeping their citizens

distributed and incapable of communication past a certain degree.

In China the country’s integration into the world economic standard has,

as a byproduct, allowed its citizens to increasingly surpass physical

impediments to communication. To fill the place of this physical

limitation the government has found itself forced to wage an uphill

battle of sociological domination. To survive the PRC has to expend

increasingly vast amounts of energy on ingraining social psychoses to

fill the restrictive roles of former technological limitations or

absences.

But once the fiber-optic cable is laid (or better yet the mesh WiFi

networks) the only thing ultimately keeping a Guangzhou school girl

trading instant messages about fashion rather than insurrection is the

cop/consumer in her head. At the end of the day it’s just in her head.

Deeper channels of communication do simultaneously open avenues for

memetic control and vapidly suicidal mental structures. …But why take

chances? Outright tyrannies like Zimbabwe and Cuba know full well how

reliant they are on the viscosity of their societies. They simply

haven’t the energy to keep up with the more complex and elaborate

mechanisms of the world’s surviving power structures. Opening the door

to more dynamic interaction within and without would be akin to gutting

themselves. So in many cases they’ve done the efficient thing and simply

removed the technology.

Look closely and all social power systems stem from impediments to

communication.

To return to an example in the previous essay, if there’s injustice or

oppression but those involved are removed or dis-integrated from the

rest of humanity how can recourse take place? All the self-repairing

mechanisms championed by free societies depend vitally upon the capacity

to convey information (speedily, effectively and across great distance)

within that society. In order for an even slightly free society to

function, a strong degree of contact must be possible between all

individuals.

It’s the same old axiom of system dynamics: Rigid structures of

interaction are bad. But so is isolation. Free societies function

through the free conveyance of information. The rigid fermentation of

this interaction is bad for the total dynamicism of a society, but so it

the separation and isolation of it into parts. Fragmented or localized

societies marginalize others (those who they are denied an intensity of

material contact with) and in doing so alienate themselves, making

oppression inevitable. The dissolution and regionalization of

significant informational contact is an inherent and inescapable reality

of hunter-gatherer life.

In practice this is blindingly obvious.

By the very nature of communication a society’s freedom is dependent

upon its physical relations with the material world. Inherent physical

limitations makes for inherent social limitation, restraint and

oppression.

It’s impossible to speak of regional anarchy

The idea that some parts of humanity can be free while others are not is

conceptually incoherent. Insomuch as anyone anywhere is oppressed, I am

oppressed. I mean that not as a trite greeting card summary of

solidarity in liberty, but in recognition of a basic psychological

principle. To speak of being personally “free” in any sense while others

are not is to leave whatever remains of the “self” a laughably

meaningless shell.

Far from being revolutionary, such thinking is the definition of

alienation.

Power is a social psychosis and, as such, it is ultimately something we

can only dissolve away individually. But even the possibility of

inaction or satisfaction in the face of such power structures is

ultimately the acceptance of them in ourselves. The internal dissolution

of our personal power psychoses is inseparable from external action.

You can’t coherently talk of achieving any measure of liberty in the

absence of empathy, and empathy presupposes some semblance of

universalized identity. Without such one person’s freedom would

necessarily impinge on another’s and any strong notion of liberty would

collapse. We refrain from swinging our fist into another person’s face

not because of some arbitrary external structure or law, but because we

recognize ourself in that person. We seek not freedom from one another,

but freedom from rule. To attack ourself would be to surrender to some

rule, structure and limitation. In hitting another person we of course

decrease the net capacity for dynamic connection and integration in our

society, but more saliently we internalize a psychological approach to

the world that is irreconcilable with anything other than structures of

control. The only situation in which we could speak of some people

having completely abolished the power psychosis in their own lives is

one in which everyone else has as well.

Empathy (and consequently morality, ethics and everything else created

from its inspiration) stems from the abstract possibility of

transitivity of selfhood. It’s why we instinctively frown on punching

teddy bears or torturing squirrels; the cognitive structures we

associate with our sensations of them are a reflected version of

ourselves. The child who acts out violence against her teddy bear isn’t

physically hurting anyone, not even from a panpsychic viewpoint, but

such external actions are indicative of an internal intent of violence

against society and, by proxy, herself.

We interact with the world by neurologically forming imprints of the

world around us. We simplify our perceptions into informational

structures, into Darwinianly evolving models that allow for greater

traction in our contact with the world. Modeling rigid systems of

limited complexity in our minds is easy, the interaction of uncountable

billions of atoms can be simplified into a “lever” or “pulley.” And,

accordingly, we can demonstrate a great deal of control over such

systems. But systems of non-linear dynamics pose a greater challenge.

Other people are preposterously, if not infinitely, inhibitory to the

successful creation of such macroscopic constructs.

The way we all initiate substantive contact with other people is to, on

some level, see ourselves in them. We can only deal with other people by

shedding off the contextual trappings of our own position within the

world and reconstructing theirs around us. As a consequence, to accept

their enslavement or oppression is to accept our own.

The king, by his participation in the kingdom, is still very much a

slave to the power psychosis. But so to is the monk who gathers berries

in the forest, even though the king’s men may not be able to find him

for torment. That there could be an entire band of monks gathering

berries far from the kingdom does not make them more free. Nor does it

really make the sum society more free. That a thousand could live freely

while one man chains another is impossible. By inaction they accept, in

acceptance they are complicit, and in complicity there is nothing but

arbitrary moderation. The presence of regionally inconstant degrees of

overt acts of physical oppression does not make for varying degrees of

liberty. We are all on the same level there. Whereas if one man chains

another and we do react, so long as we remain in action rather than

completion, our actions and our own lives are still bound by that chain.

Only when the chain is actually gone can we speak of achieving greater

liberty, and even then it is a universal reality, not regionalized.

Tribal dispersion, though it may present some of us immediately with

some of the trappings of a truer anarchy, is inherently oppressive.

Given that we have knowledge of the rest of humanity, the choice to

withdraw and concentrate all our efforts within some social sub-set

leaves us not only complicit in the oppression of those we push off

beyond the periphery but also in violence against ourselves. To preempt

this by erasing our knowledge of the rest of humanity would be even more

direct violence and contribute nothing but cowardice to the same

reality. No tribe, commune or region can truly flourish in their own

anarchy while the rest of world sees violence and oppression. The

psychological effect of alienation from others, of such localized

preoccupation, is the internalization of a certain rigidity. The

acceptance of structure. Turning people into our technology.

The fermentation of rigid social structure is a direct result of

alienation.

Any society that dismisses externalities and focuses social value on

those near at hand is really making social value a result of context and

physical structure. As such it is redefining others into nothing more

than the structure of their relationships and functional value to other

structures. As a result, the we become nothing more than a hollow

structure, the organic human soul transmuted into a structural identity.

In such a world, I am this structure and you are another structure that

may or may not function to the benefit and sustainability of my own

structure.

The resulting society looses its warmly integrated dynamics and its

internal relationships instead become matters of incredibly complex, yet

rigid, mechanism. Because of the internal rigidity of personal identity

all interactions are polarized towards the control of that identity’s

(ie informational structure) environment. Small rigid structures can be

controlled, but other people’s identity structures are too complex. If

both extended systems are rigid then both will collapse violently.

No matter how pretty an isolated section of society may behave in

contrast to the rest, oppression without will eventually manifest

within. In the face of gross oppression worldwide, regional secession or

ingrowth is capitulation and the collapse of such tribes inevitable.

Any society that embraces death will embrace oppression

To accept the inevitability of death or limitation is to accept an

arbitrary degree of it. Because once the precedent has been truly set in

the mind there remains no innate resistance to it. You can’t accept

giving up a finite portion of your soul. You can’t really accept some

oppression without beginning to accept all oppression.

It is willfully blind to believe that a society that accepts, much less

embraces, the deaths of six and a half billion people will ever know

peace let alone any substantive anarchy. It is demonstratively

irrational to suppose that any society bound by innate physical

limitations will ever achieve more than a fraction of their potential.

Physical realities are inseparable from social realities. The embrace of

physical realities that restrict, control and rule our individual and

collective lives is the cowardly embrace of dictatorship by

environmental proxy.

Life—not in biological or taxonomic sense but rather as the blossoming

act of existence itself—is an inability to accept death or rigidity.

Life is motion and touch.

A transhumanist once summed up her support for the life-extension

struggle in one sentence: “Existence is wonderful.” It is. Mine, yours

and all the possessives you can think of. Every heartbeat is a

alternating symphony of resistance and hope.

But you cannot have partial resistance. You cannot have partial hope.

You either have it or you do not. If you close the door somewhere you

close the door everywhere.

If you wall off a portion of it, if you set a limit to what is possible,

the day will come when you reap nothing but. Where nothing is left but

death. Where we have nothing left to look forward to shaping. Our

acceptance of death is our alienation from ourselves. It is our

alienation from life.

When we, in our incessant and inherent desire for contact, experience

and understanding, press up against that wall of limitation… We will

conduct its rigidity back throughout our society.

Technology can be applied dynamically

Language can be a real downer. Words and concepts gather associations

that weigh heavily upon us and can obscure the underlying reality. We

make simplifications and structures to deal with a given context. To the

degree that these structures are integrated with the world around us

they can facilitate stronger and more dexterous connections. To the

degree that they become more rigid or desolate, such structures prove

disastrously dis-integrated with the dynamics surrounding us.

So too, when constructing language and theoretical models around a basic

reality is it vitally important that our mental structures be deeply

rooted in that reality. Blindly accepting and working from previous or

popular macroscopic simplifications can only result in a structure that

is out of touch with the underlying dynamics.

Although concepts like “civilization” and “technology” can be simplified

into some of their popular associations, any significant analysis built

off of such structures will be critically unable to integrate with the

root realities touched by said associations. References to “technology”

as the rigid and brittle structures so obvious in today’s society can be

said to effectively encompass the most visible aspects of what currently

exists. But such focus obscures what could exist. …As well as some of

the finer points of what is already in effect, but still overshadowed.

By attacking the dominate rigid forms of technology under the premise of

all “technology”, the anarcho-primitivist discourse builds itself around

macroscopic simplifications and blinds itself to details. Though a

popular abstraction of “technology” is what is adroitly attacked, the

actual and full definition of technology is what’s consequently thrown

out. Rigidity is critiqued but, through the misapplication of broad

language and concept, human agency in our environmental integration is

what’s ultimately dismissed.

As such, “technology” is misidentified as stemming from a desire of

control rather than contact, experience and understanding.

But the reality is, given its popular breadth as a concept, technology

actually refers simply to how we interact with the world. And it is the

nature of this how is the real issue, not that there is a how in the

first place. There will always be a how. By attacking the very idea of

hows we simply choose to blind ourselves to the hows we’re already

using. And then they use us.

So the real question is what nature of technologies should we turn to.

And, yes, our options include the few primitive technologies our species

was once born with as well as the wide variety of structures that have

been developed and applied since, but not just those.

Of course, I think we would all agree that today’s dominate

technological infrastructures are unacceptable, or, at very least, less

than they could be. Today most acts of creation are perverted towards

structures of control before they even leave the inventor’s mind. We

open up new avenues of contact and then work harder and harder to force

methods of control upon them.

But the point is not all desire for contact is a false-face for the

pursuit of control. In fact one might say that control makes contact

impossible. We can never really know those or that which we control.

Rather our worship of control is always one of surrender to security.

Control is about imposing rigidity. It’s about orchestrating the world

around us so that it can’t interfere with the structure within. We do

this so that we might cling to this remaining structure and claim it as

an identity. Control is about creating a husk to die in. To truly touch,

to have contact with the world around us is irreconcilable with such. It

smashes through structures of control and rebuilds them as veins and

currents.

Contact is conducted though dynamic systems. And this includes systems

that we popularly classify as “advanced technology.”

Telescopes, microscopes, radios and phones. Fiber-optic cables, wifi

mesh networks, satellites and infrared sensors. The more complex, the

more dynamic. The more points of inter-contact. The more fluid and

organic such systems become. The more adaptable.

As our new structures and approaches become more dynamically refined,

the better they’re able to integrate with the realities of their

operating environment. In fact, beyond a certain point the technologies

we create can become more dynamic than this frail, scummy planet-skin we

were born into. Nanotech and biochemistry embody the current cutting

edge of this drive to offer stronger and finer degrees of contact

through our own bodies. (Although with both, just as with anything else,

the impulsive, blind pursuit of control in such areas rejects

understanding and meaningful contact at the cost of potentially

catastrophic results.) We are finally gaining choice in all the myriad

workings of our material world. No longer content with clunky

macroscopic abstractions and simplifications, we are finally grounding

the roots of our interactions and integration with the world around us.

It’s a move to stop beating the world with a crude hammer and instead

begin to stroking its skin.

And, with such fine understanding and contact, we are opening up

possibilities previously closed. The deaf can hear. The blind can see.

The crippled can walk. The old folks can get it on.

As we’ve seen the drive for experience, for pleasure and life itself are

matters of technology, the methods and structures of our interaction

with the world. Information and communication technologies,

transportation technologies and science itself (science in the “pursuit

of understanding through touch” sense, not the “imperialism” sense) all

demonstrate such emerging tendencies.

Core to the primitivist mantra is the assertion that these means of

“artificial” communication and the like are, at the end of the day,

utterly dismal, leaving us disconnected and constantly enslaved. It’s

the least eloquent assertion and almost entirely dependent upon populist

“common sense” appeals. …Because it’s completely fucking ridiculous.

Whose fault is it if you can’t turn off your cellphone to just enjoy

some natural solitude? Stop blaming the phone (or the blasted dagnum

computer with its “email”) and take responsibility for the way you

integrate with such technology. If our society doesn’t facilitate long

uninterrupted walks on the beach then change society, don’t launch a

crusade to abolish our ability to play with such fun toys.

Personally, I abhor phones. I just dislike the way they unevenly filter

our preexisting social language. In person I’m all about the body

language, hand gestures and facial quirks. But that’s just me. In

contrast, I love the bulletin-board format. I was prolifically using the

internet long before I really started making phone calls and I feel

deeply at home with its social intricacies.

Although personal, face-to-face contact provides a lot more bandwidth,

at the end of the day it’s only a matter of bandwidth. There isn’t

anything any more magical about so called “direct” physical contact. And

any connection is a dramatic improvement over nothing. Being able to

still contact friends, no matter how distant their desires take them, is

a wonderful thing. To reach out and touch Bangkok and Berlin, to be a

shoulder to cry on or a ecstatic confident, to watch a volcano explode

on another continent or pick out the wobbles of a distant star… Such

connection is a thing of liberation. We really do feel better for our

use of advanced technologies. All that’s required is a shedding off of

our own rigidities and a refusal to lazily feed ourselves to new ones.

But, of course, with the more spiritual, psychological, sociological or

philosophical claims against technology for which it is famous,

anarcho-primitivism has developed two pragmatic arguments as crutches.

The first is that of diminishing returns. With “technology” we are said

to inevitably work harder and harder to take smaller and smaller steps

(something noticeable in limited frameworks such as agriculture where

more energy exerted on the same amount of land is said to produce less

and less per-investment). This is wrong of course, and the

misapplication of the “diminishing returns” inference upon the whole of

our drive towards more dynamic technologies stems from a

misunderstanding of the root reality. The reason some “areas” of

technology demonstrate such behavior while others do not is not because

things like computer manufacturing have yet to hit some inevitable

barrier (although certainly, the universe has an informational carrying

capacity), it’s because things like “agriculture” are not discrete

species of technological development but cast off, inherently limited,

sections of a single progression. Computers are one of the rare

technologies that haven’t yet reached diminishing returns, because

there’s no limit to what a “computer” is! Yeah, when the length and

breath of a single limited structure has been explored it sees less and

less growth within those arbitrary boundaries. So fucking what? There

can still be growth somewhere else! The conceptual division of

technology into discrete fields creates the limitation that is then

identified. And, ultimately, the accelerating “areas” of technology like

nanotech computing will inevitably turn around and drastically

revitalize lagging areas like “agriculture,” letting us take in

sustenance by, say, chlorophyll in our backs, leaving behind the awkward

and brittle orchards we once mistakenly built to rewild themselves.

The second argument appeals to the authoritarian nature of today’s

technological infrastructures. It’s sometimes boiled down into

sloganeering with phrases like “who’s going to go down into the caves to

get your iron?” Of course the instantaneous response of “we’ll build

machines to do that” is spot-on. There’s a reason modern capitalism

feeds so ravenously on human labor when it could easily provide comfort.

Socially we place value in power rather than liberation and thus market

forces move at a relative snail’s pace towards post-scarcity. If we

really cared about it, we could immediately make huge strides towards

abolishing even the frailest degree of “work” without anyone sacrificing

a steadily advancing first-world living standard. This much is, at least

in part, plainly obvious to just about everyone. And the perpetual

response of primitivism, that mechanization isn’t a real solution

because someone would still have to occasionally fix the machines, is a

cop-out. I’d much rather be playing around with the gears of mining

machines than wheezing out my lungs in some coal mine. And then I could

move on to something else. I would be free to learn another role. But

all of this talk of new mining processes is irrelevant. It doesn’t

matter if we have the machinery or not. If there are no telescopes in

the whole fucking world, I’d more than gladly go down into the mine

myself and personally complete all the so called “work” required to

build it myself. And you know what? I’d be more than willing to share

it. That’s the whole fucking point.

The advancement towards more and more dynamic technology has never

innately required and does not innately require any oppression

whatsoever.

Nor, in fact, does such advancement make for any inherent catastrophes

or sacrifices. The pursuit of dynamic technology is grounded in the

valuing of knowledge and adaptability. It has never been about diddling

around with our surroundings until we find something immediately

gratifying. That’s not “technology,” that’s a just single methodology of

developing technology. And in such behavior no conscious or creative

effort is involved, it’s simply the mechanistic/entropic eating up of

that which is around you. Entirely focused towards power, profit and

control now, understanding later.

But why not understanding first and action later?

Primitivism is famous for its hesitancy, conflict and sketchiness on

what constitutes appropriate technology.

Reaching into an anthill with a stick, fashioning a bow, grunting

sweetly or meanly, utilizing symbolic mental structures, teaching a

mother to pat a baby over her shoulder, building a hut, drawing in the

mud… and god forbid we talk about permaculture or bicycles!

On the whole its most obvious weakness (and yet best rhetorical defense)

is that there is no clear line. Folks talk of “that which doesn’t start

to control you” but never really stop to deeply analyze that. They take

it to obviously call for the abolishment of satellites, airplanes,

computers and genetic engineering, but that’s not necessarily true.

Such control is a choice. We don’t have to be controlled by our

technology, no more than we have to crank out and obey rigid mental

structures. Just as internal rigidity is a consequence of our choices so

is the resulting external rigidity. In every moment in our lives we can

choose life or undeath. We choose to be governed by the environmental

structures we interact with or we can choose to move through them as we

desire, unhindered. The internalization of rigid structure is not innate

to dealing with structures. We can change and create them and ourselves.

We can be rather than accepting the world and our relations to it as is.

We can constantly reshape and redefine our relations to the world.

Rather than following input, we can become fountains of output.

If we are sincere in our rewilding, we cannot turn to something as

limiting as primitivism.

Why not nanotech, space tech, permaculture, and dynamic technology in

general? Think about how we might have built civilization if we’d been

true anarchists from the beginning! Wide-eyed technological lovers oft

receive fiery denouncements for wanting to play god. By seeking deeper

contact and understanding, of each wanting to be gods. But if one

accepts the universe of Einstein and Spinoza where existence is god. Is

this such a bad thing? Rather than reject and hide from our birthright

as part of the universe should we not instead finally embrace it in all

of its glory? To be more godly? To be more integrated with the world

around us. Is not the embrace of some random, rigid biological structure

alone ultimately a embrace of alienation from the universe?

Many techno-utopians fall into a similar rut as the primitivists by

treating technological progress as an undeniable external force. A

salvation that will inevitably arrive someday. Both attitudes smack of

an “I’m only on this side because our victory is assured” morality. A

legacy borrowed from the Marxists’ perpetual wait for The Revolution,

and before them, the Christians’ perpetual wait for the Rapture. The

reality is that our technologies are just the embodiment of our choices.

The solution? Be smarter!

Choose to think rather than abdicating from it at every opportunity.

Radiate life in your every process and action.

The failings of technologies are the failings of ourselves. Our laziness

and nihilism. Our greed and hate. All these are ultimately consequences

of mental rigidity. Is it any wonder we excrete this stuff in physical

form? The rigidity of our technology stems from psychoses that we have

the agency to overcome. To surpass. To shed off. Some primitivists have

outright argued that we simply don’t have the neurological capacity for

mass society, the capacity for more than a certain amount of contact or

freedom.

Why not? What’s stopping us? What enforces this limited capacity? We

make ourselves. Unshackled, we practically burst with creativity. Why

should we snuff it out?

As long as we are alive there is no such thing as an inevitability.

We do not live in a closed system

Although its certainly true our current mass infrastructure cannot and

will not survive any prolonged contact with the basic laws of physics, a

permanent or catastrophic collapse is not inevitable.

The biosphere is a complex nonlinear system and concrete parking lots

are not. Because our most physically dominant technologies are less

‘complex’ (or, as I have been using the term, ‘dynamic’) than their

surrounding environment by relatively infinite orders of magnitude, they

are deeply unstable. Furthermore, the blunt macroscopic construction of

our technological systems and infrastructure leaves them especially

vulnerable to entropy as the easiest resources are depleted.

Our response to the inadequacies of our infrastructure’s integration

with its environment is to build ever more extended structure on top of

it. Rather than abolishing and rebuilding, or just modifying our

existing technologies, we add endlessly to them. Concrete upon concrete.

Text upon text. Until the sheer mass of technostructure begins to rival

the biomass around it.

Our structures eat up dynamicism and replace it with rigidity. But this

process of expansion is the only thing that keeps those resulting rigid

structures intact. We use up what we can get to easily but as those

resources are depleted it becomes increasingly important to expend and

commit an exponentially greater proportion of our net civilization

towards the upkeep of what we’ve already built. Eventually, in a closed

system, the basic mathematical realities of chaos theory and entropy

will kick our ass and the catastrophic collapse of this rigid system

we’ve paved over the face of the earth will become an inevitability. Due

to the extremely over-extended and omnipresent nature of our

infrastructure, there will be no faucet of life in the biosphere

unaffected. Needless to say our 6.5 billion little frail sedentary

bodies will not do so well. In short, we are fucked.

…Except that we do not live in a closed system.

Although our civilization is in dire trouble and our technological

infrastructure is a hideous embarrassment, we are not doomed. The crash

is not an inevitability. And neither under the banner of

“sustainability” are any fundamental restrictions, be they sociological

or material, inevitable.

Although grinding into the Earth’s crust for specific resources is a

progressively harder and harder zero-sum game, the plain and simple

reality is that we have the capability to reach huge swathes of

resources in an extremely productive, cost-effective manner (far more

efficient, in fact, than any previous process available us in history).

What’s more, in an unprecedented (and probably unreasonable) act of

forgiveness on behalf of the universe, we don’t have to completely

destroy our rotting civilization in order to start acquiring them. We

can implement this new process of acquiring resources and use the

proceeds to gradually fluidly abolish the horrific structural cancers of

our civilization. All the while giving us footing to develop more

dynamic and integrateable technologies. And, if that weren’t enough, the

rigid structures we utilize in this process don’t inherently replace

biomass. Because we won’t be mining our resources from within a dynamic

biosphere.

We’ll be chewing up nature’s little bite-sized gifts and breathing in

the source of all energy on Earth, finally allowing us to bypass the

middlemen and stop fucking things up for them. Asteroids and solar

energy. It’s a real simple and practical solution.

Stop doing your fucking around in an infinitely complex non-linear

dynamic system you don’t yet understand. In 2020 there’s an asteroid

that’s going to swing by the Earth’s doorstep carrying Twenty Trillion

Dollars worth (today’s market) of precious metals vital to our advanced

electric circuitry based technology. Said asteroid is one of millions of

lifeless boulders spread across the sky. Rigid and desolate. Dead rocks

waiting to be ingested into the seeds of life. 3554 Amun will be far

easier to reach than the moon. If even the barest amount of today’s tech

is applied to its capture (and entrepreneurs are already lining up) it

will completely devalue the world’s financial markets. The roots of the

limits and restrictions, the scarcities that keep the Third World under

First World satellites, that keep the mythical “hundred dollar laptop”

at something as high as one hundred dollars, will begin to dissolve.

That is, if all the people waiting for it are still there when it

arrives.

If the world’s superpowers and their multinational corporate apparatus

are ready with legal restrictions, subsidies and financial treaties, the

resulting materials will be funneled into existing power-structures and

their material detritus (our progressively fucked up global

infrastructure).

But far worse than such a continuance of today’s near-fascist

powerstructures is the possibility that no one will be waiting for 3554

Amun, or, for that matter, ever again look up at the sky with hope. That

our global infrastructure will finally be forced to the point of

absolute collapse.

Because, and here’s the problem, Derrik Jensen is right. We are playing

for the endgame. If our civilization collapses hard, it might very well

be impossible to rebuild. If we crash once and we crash bad,

civilization will be permanently limited. We will live in a closed

system. A permanent ceiling to our technology, be it dynamic or rigid.

Permanent restrictions felt in every aspect of society. Limits to what

we can do, who we can be, where we can go, how we can experience… limits

to our capacity to touch and understand.

The cheap resources that first spurred and allowed technological

development will be effectively depleted, and the remains will

progressively become useless. Our fossil fuels will be almost impossible

to reach and the little we acquire will have to work far harder to build

far less. If we fall there’s a very real chance we will never be able to

get up again. That will be it.

And make no mistake about it, the crash will suck.

Our lives will be, on the whole, more horrid than ever before in

history. You see, what’s being glossed over is that, though advanced

technology in the form of wifi mesh networks and space-elevators may

disappear permanently, we simply won’t lose all the technologies created

by this civilization project. In fact, it looks like we’ll default on

middle ages technology. With all the oppression that makes for. And

heavier restrictions on anarchist organizing or resistance.

Serious metallurgy will peak as will, obviously, fossil fuels, but metal

won’t peak as much. When the last major nation states succumb to entropy

and the survivalists’ bullets have finally run out, the resulting tech

level will not be pre-agrarian stone age, it will be a perpetual

iron-age. Although complicated endeavors will be hindered, the loose

distribution of scrap metal will democratize simplistic metallurgy.

Oxidization will eventually deplete vast amounts of scrap iron, but

enough mass deposits will remain immediately viable for millennia and

enough modern metallurgical compounds will resist oxidization to

likewise matter. Likewise, enough topsoil will be farmable in various

ways for forms of agriculture to continue (and it will, because six and

a half billion people don’t just give in to reductions in food supply).

Although it will be impossible to construct complicated circuits or

analyze proteins, it will be very easy to construct swords, hoes,

pitchforks, crossbows, and, to a lesser extent, guns. However the

acquisition and smelting process will lend itself more to social

hierarchies than to individualized knowledge. And with information

technologies essentially annihilated, anarchists will drowned out by the

fiefdoms around them. Paranoia stems from lackings in one’s knowledge

and, as information is restricted, old psychoses will take root. Some

tribes, by sheer luck, will end up isolated from one another and will

achieve some equilibrium of blandness. But most will not.

If civilization collapses what emerges will be pretty fucking simple.

The gun-nuts won’t fade away as their guns rust, they’ll fucking expand

little fiefdoms. If the crash is particularly bad on the environment

this’ll make for universal unending tribal violence (a few magnitudes

worse than pre-Colombian Northern America, but granted, not hyperbolic

road-warrior dystopia). If the crash is anything but utterly

catastrophic it’ll simply shatter the nation state system back into

feudal age principalities. The wealth, values and structures created by

civilization will still exist. The same dread forces encapsulated by

“civilization” will still exist. The only difference (besides the

incredibly horrific living conditions and death rates within) will be

the frail niche capacity for autonomous societies on the periphery.

But even if these autonomous zones are fully utilized, they will still

be incredibly dependent upon the horrific society around them. Deeply

intertwined in the ecology. They will be the new bourgeoisie. The

suburban autonomist paradises. Never mind that undermining the

overpacked ministates (and consequently accepting or dealing with

refugees from such) will not be in their best interests as the ecology

couldn’t handle influxes of hunter-gatherers our of slave-agrarian

societies and that inside/outside dichotomies would kill any potential

anarchism in the long term… The basic reality is that they will have

lived through the most traumatic and vicious event in Human history and

that, to even begin to function as a people, they will have to divorce

themselves from the rest of humanity. They will have to create

hierarchies of human value based upon relative positions and roles.

“Diversity” in whatever jumble of associations one has, will not be

desirable because it will not be sustainable. Small forms of localized

and specialized change will be accepted while any form of serious

deviation will carry with it a direct price in terms of energy or food.

And the ministates? They will simply assist in further ingraining the

memes and cultural psychoses of our current society. The logical

progression of our balkanized suburbs, a society that protectively

contracts into little closed zones of ingrown hierarchies. They will

finally know safety from the globalization process of communication and

competing ideas. Although the trite physical comforts of modern

civilization will disappear, it will ultimately be a huge relief to

many. Social hierarchies and oppressions will continue free from

dissonance, with reason to further march down the path of nihilistic

mental rigidity.

Furthermore, any serious technological collapse will bring with it a

vast ecological collapse.

And it’s a perfectly reasonable possibility that humanity, or even

mammals, will not survive such. Never mind the very real possibility of

nuclear winter (and no, your survival skills are not going to be able to

protect you from that kind of radiation) or the windows finally cracking

on the Pentagon’s biowarfare lab, the plain and simple reality is that

we’re in the middle of the greatest alteration to the biosphere since

before the fucking dinosaurs. And, as the computer guts decompose in the

abandoned suburban homes, as the last bits of localization self-imposed

by our civilization’s infrastructure breaks down and the sheer energy of

our chemical blasphemy finally merges into Earth’s outer fluid, a

fucking gazillion butterfly wings are going to flap with all their

might. As the biosphere’s non-linear dynamics reaction to these last few

centuries of sudden and violent alteration plays itself out, the

biosphere is going to change in a big way. You don’t make that degree of

drastic chemical and macro-physiological revisions without expecting

turbulence. Whether or not we peaceably and instantaneously evolve past

fossil fuels tomorrow or all die in some mega-collapse, the effect of

the shit we’ve been stirring into the pot is going to become more

pronounced. And on a biological level this is going to be catastrophic.

See the only defining feature of the biosphere is that it’s dynamic. A

big bundle of scummy fluid. Taxonomic conceptual structures like

“interdependent networks of species and fauna” are just incidental

arrangements of macroscopic structures. Fuck, what makes you think DNA

will naturally survive into the next iteration of the Earth’s crust?

The Earth’s scummy surface is just going through one mild iteration of

entropic chemistry. Frail semblances of repetitive structures and mild

plateaus in overall energetic interaction do not make for any realistic

security. And with the rise of our civilization we’ve just kicked the

shit out of whatever momentarily normalizing patterns may have been

buffering us.

There is no magical restoring force of equilibrium in the biosphere to

something in any way compatible with life, much less humanity. The

“natural state of things” is a vicious myth propagated by the church of

biology. There is no real probability that, come a collapse, there will

be a role for us or anything like us. And there certainly won’t be in a

few more million years.

To embrace that is to embrace death. To push our dependents, the rest of

society, our own dreams and desires beyond a periphery based on their

relevance to immediate physical guides. To embrace role-filling within

constraints. To embrace limitation. A finite set of possible existences.

A normalization away from contact, experimentation and evolution in

favor of immediate usefulness, our functionality as biological cogs.

The psychological and sociological effects of acceptance alone are

reason alone to fight the crash till our last breath.

But hope is more than rational, it is almost justified.

The limitations presented by the Earth alone are not reasonable

guidelines to the future. Vast and significant social forces, both

authoritarian and anti-authoritarian are very much in the processes of

following our desire for contact beyond our immediate puddle. And the

consequences of such are anything but disregardable. Closed system

analysis is simply an insufficient basis for declarations of

inevitability.

Furthermore, such space expansion is far from a simple postponement of

the same story. It’s simply impossible to apply the systematic

tendencies, constraints and realities of Earth to the heavens. Even if

we do decide to expand rather than just utilize astral resources as a

platform to fix our relationship with the biosphere, relativity will

immediately quash any empire building or any centralized civilization.

You see, the very nature of space-time dissolves rigid structures on

truly macroscopic scales. There can never be any galactic empires (even

ones that later crash from diminishing resource returns). It’s

impossible. Yet at the same time there can still be connection and

enough individuals immediately connected as to dissolve regional

oppression and authoritarianism. Furthermore, and here’s the absolutely

critical component, humanity will become truly distributed and redundant

rather than intractably interdependent. No longer trapped within a

biosphere pressed between walls of desolation and rigidity, we’ll

finally shed off this mistaken iteration of sedentary life and return as

hunter-gatherers between the stars. Tribes of lessening of material

interdependence, much larger sustainability and thus larger market pools

for anarchy to blossom. With perpetually plentiful resources for every

diverse desire.

Contrary to popular assertion, we are not machines grinding out the

inevitable, consequences of our environment, ultimately controlled by

everything around us. We are neither mere products of our food supply

nor inconsequential components of an already written collapse. We’re

smart people and we can make choices. We can reach out, explore, learn

and we can invent. We can choose connection rather than isolation and we

can choose to see the externalities of our actions clearly. We do not

yet live in a closed system. There is still hope.

Asserting otherwise does more than buy into insulting social mechanism,

it develops and reinforces such.

Hard though the struggle may be, the ease of partial victories will

always cost us more

Demand nothing less than everything and take whatever you can get. But

don’t take at the expense of gaining further ground. It’s a simple

premise. Take pie, but don’t trade way any hope of taking the pie

factory in the process. Take whatever scant freedom they allow but, for

the love of god, don’t ever cease fighting for infinity. We have a cuss

word specifically set aside for people who do that: Liberals.

Primitivism today exists at the nexus of a modern trend in Anarchism to

embrace only what’s “winnable” and dismiss the rest. The consequence is

a race-to-the-bottom in laziness. How to get the most dramatic of

victories with the least expenditure. The crash, of course, is the

natural endpoint of such regression. The promise of massive social

change with almost zero personal exertion. (And cinematic scenes of

explosions and mass struggle are always more aesthetically pleasing than

tame FNB gatherings.)

Don’t get me wrong, the problem with collapse is not that it’s too easy

a solution (no one should have to bleed to see change in this world,

martyrdom is for nihilists, people who give a shit what others think

about them and closet authoritarians). But even if we are to momentarily

ignore the fact that it’s impossible, the primitivist dream paradise

doesn’t go far enough. The nature of The Crash sets permanent

limitations to future generations. If logging CEOs don’t give a crap

about humanity 500 years from now, primitivists most definitely don’t

give a crap about humanity 100,000 years from now. Because somehow

violently murdering 6.5 Billion People to supposedly make a better world

500 years from now at the expense of our ancestors longing for

rocketships when the next meteor hits is supposedly better than killing

off some spotted owls to make a quick buck for one’s family. Christ.

Even thinking in those terms gives me a headache. I honestly have no

clue how the collapse cheerleaders can sleep at night. …They’re

certainly not sleeping with transsexuals, epileptics, women with small

birth canals, or anyone alive thanks to continued surgery, medication or

mechanical assistance.

So if not collapse, and not some sort of draconian social imposition of

arbitrary technological limitation, what are we left with?

Well, right away let’s make clear that a stasis with our current

technology via some unmitigated classical left-wing anarchism would be

unsustainable. Never mind that work is hierarchy in action, the very

factory infrastructure that many syndicalist and communist or schemes

revolve around is utterly illogical. Though primitivist societies may be

more oppressive, such doesn’t change the basic physics of our biosphere.

Technological change is needed.

It’s a pretty common flippant assertion on the part of primitivists that

the only endpoint for technological advance is a nightmare of fractal

chaos and mechanical death. I think this is some pretty fucking

ridiculous immature masturbatory nihilism. Certainly our technologies

could go all kinds of nasty places. But I don’t think the “upbound

technological curve” that futurists speak of these days is heading in

any of these directions. And I certainly don’t think a world of infinite

technological possibility would make fascism an inevitability.

If we are to presume continued technological advance in the general

direction of greater dynamic integration, we must consider the

consequences of more fluid information technologies, mechanical

refinement and biochemical mastery. (We can more or less ignore

transportation tech, as it doesn’t matter where or in what context we

locate a society, these same basic realities will remain.)

As far as information technologies go, it’s obvious that advances will

progressively bring about the dissolution of public privacy. Everything

you do in the presence of others will eventually be able to be

remembered in perfect clarity and such memories instantly transferred to

others. Inert matter will evolve a deeper capacity for recording. Our

footsteps will be apparent to anyone who cares to look.

To the degree that the government or any power structure manages to

secure control over this process they will gain absolute power to define

truth. And, of course, absolute knowledge of their constituents. Which

will threaten to permanently quash any semblance of resistance. Though

some distorted liberal populist democracy might survive in such a state

for as much as a century, the fascist tendency will evolve the

institution rapidly. And if the state successfully eradicates the

grassroots development of rival technologies, permanent perpetual

fascism will be assured. Humanity will be progressively regulated into

machinery and the sum structure will die a heat death, our unthinking

bodies locked in step or something. It doesn’t really matter. In the

onset of global fascism, whatever its form there is a point of

singularity past which we can only die. Don’t believe that insipid shit

about “so long as there is one beating heart.” Let me tell you, they’ll

have a big fucking board displaying every heart that dares to beat. And

then the robo-wolves will get ‘em.

However, to the degree that our accelerating information tech is

decentralized and access to it is equalized, our natural antibodies to

abuse, oppression and control will engage with extreme efficiency. The

externalities of our actions will become instantly apparent and there

the “tragedy of the commons” will cease. It’s worth noting that, in the

absence of centralized power, individual and consensually arranged

mutual privacy will continue. So long as anonymity is publicly desired

in any venue, basic market forces will supply it. But it won’t help you

get away with murder. The main result will be that, since access to any

information desired will be distributed and truth commonly valued, it

will be practically impossible to rule or coerce others.

Authority is derived from information scarcities and a post-scarcity

society would annihilate the very concept of state secrets. Freedom of

association and basic tools of defense would make prisons and, in fact,

all retributive systems of “justice” starkly purposeless. Through

uncountable processes the desire for freedom and social connection would

make any anarchy so effective as to make even the very idea of sitcoms

seem insanely dystopian.

…Which brings us to the second field of technological advance,

self-knowledge. As medical knowledge moves out of the bumbling

script-kiddie realm and into actual understanding, we’ll gain such

strength and security as to instantly abolish almost every major

cultural -archy. Sex, “race”, gender, prehensile-tail or no

prehensile-tail… all that stuff will dissolve. The most immediate

physical limitations that facilitate power psychoses will give way. When

we master biochemistry to the degree that we actually know what we’re

fucking with an incredibly potent window will open up to us.

Self-knowledge and agency in the workings of one’s own body is a big

deal, and unlike the destruction of public privacy it’s hard to imagine

any downsides to achieving having such. I mentioned how there’s not even

the barest of pretenses that primitivists are on the same side as

transfolk. But birth control is an even bigger issue. Would you really

trust your body with some herbal concoction? Oh, wait, nine times out of

ten the primitivists hawking “indigenous” forms of birth control are

talking about someone else’s body.

Of course it’s true that as things stand, with greater medical

refinement, the lethargic small-mindedness of our current market would

acquire greater potency. And, indeed, so long as a corporatist economy

has a hierarchical stranglehold on technological development (which

pretty much boils down to intellectual property), chances are we’ll be

fucked long before any honest, hard-working gene-hacker starts growing

his own glow-in-the-dark butterfly wings. We all know it’s probably only

a matter of time before some GM foods haxored by a greedy and lazy

corporate PhD spins out of control and kills us all. If corporate

capitalism persists.

Which brings us to nanotech and decentralized fabrication in general.

On the upside we’ve got both the absolute end of scarcity and the

fulfillment of the old dream wherein each and every “worker” controls

the means of production individually. The production not just of model

12, but of practically anything they desire. …On the downside it means

that one day each and every one of these “workers” will more or less

have their finger on the button to Armageddon. Today one can make

incredibly disruptive weapons if not outright WMDs with only a few

thousand dollars. Imagine what’ll be possible tomorrow.

So, yes, there’s a tension there. A need to make the world a better

place today, so that when such higher tech eventually becomes

omnipresent there aren’t any disgruntled folks to be cataclysmically

angry about something.

We’ve got four possible futures: Complete Annihilation. Permanent

Fascism. Permanent Post-Scarcity Anarchy. or Repeat Struggles Endlessly.

By embracing the drive towards more dynamic technology we reject

perpetual struggle and try to chance it between the first three (not

that Annihilation and Fascism are different in anything but cosmetics).

If we go with primitivism and somehow survive the cracked bio-warfare

labs we get Endless Struggle for a lengthy period followed inevitably by

Complete Annihilation. The human drive for greater contact and deeper

channels of experience will press up against the permanent technological

limitations of a post-collapse Earth and conduct such physical

limitation into the social realm. Oppression will be rampant.

But, yes, it will not even near the infinite amount of oppression we

risk if we continue to pursue technological advances. As technology

grows so do the stakes. Things run faster. Collapse, Armageddon, the

Police State… one deviation and any of them could take the entire world.

But they’re not the only ones.

The internet has seen far greater propagation of anarchist values than

anything else in history. With every technological advance the struggle

has been getting more intense. While the sane have built telescopes and

phones, the abusive spouses and tribal elders of prehistory have

progressively gained tanks and fighter jets. Hitler’s Germany couldn’t

even begin to rival the insidious powers rife across the world today.

But neither does the Spanish Revolution hold a fucking candle to the

anti-authoritarian insurrection bubbling in every city in the world

today. The strength brought to bear by today’s oppressive power

structures is utterly without comparison. And yet they aren’t winning.

We can march on Washington in an outright black bloc two thousand strong

and despite a military that amasses in every every continent on Earth,

despite enough nuclear missiles to vaporize the topsoil, despite an

economic system beaten into every child at birth, despite orbital

platforms that can trace the flight of dragonflies, despite mobile EMPs

that can cause car accidents without trace, despite an unprecedented

coordination between every major nationstate on Earth so that they can

archive 95% of their citizens electronic communications… they dare not

even mow us down with bullets.

We took Seattle and all they could use was clubs, pepper spray and tear

gas. We held Oaxaca for half a fucking year and yet they were so afraid

of public opinion they barely killed anyone. We kill cops in Greece,

blow up banks, prisons and police stations on an almost monthly basis,

and yet they barely dare to respond. We still have a union a million

strong in Spain. For a few months we were Argentina. We gather armies

and armed with nothing more than sticks evict the police from the

streets of South Korea. We write code in our mothers’ basements that

destroy their desperate, last minute, multi-billion dollar attempts to

control our technologies. We flagrantly run community centers,

libraries, schools, factories, radio stations, and gardens in full view

of the public in dozens upon dozens of countries around the world. We

fucking outright, absolutely, 100%, unabashedly, militantly, and

vocally, oppose every last power structure in the world. And they fight

for dear life just to tap our phones. Because we are but the tip of

billions. The radical blade of the entire world’s conscience.

And despite the hundreds of fucked up psychotics who’ve had their hand

on the keys to global annihilation we are all still here.

But let’s be fucking clear here. We’ve never had anything but the

slimmest margin of a chance. If you’re in the movement even the

slightest bit because you think it’s inevitably or even likely destined

for power, you’re in the wrong movement. Get the fuck out now.

The point isn’t that we’re fighting a losing battle with next to no

chance, oh poor martyrs us. The point is that we fucking have a chance.

The sheer ecstatic, miraculous implausibility of that. That, against all

odds, it is feasibly possible for good to actually win. All that’s

required is to, at the end of the day, have inspired each and every

single one of 6.5 billion people to become full-fledged anarchists. To

personally choose to throw away the power psychosis.

I’ve seen worse odds.

Knowing that we’ve got a shot. Knowing that we do have that choice.

Knowing that we do have agency in the world. That’s what makes me jump

out of bed in the wee hours of the morning to punch the sky, climb

dew-laden trees, dance through the empty city streets and cry out thanks

to the stars.

Though there may be near infinite night around, even the smallest drop

of light makes the darkness irrelevant.

The new is possible

The past has no monopoly on the possibilities of the future.

The perpetual self-justification of primitivism is that although six and

a half billion people dying might be a bad thing, it’s inevitable. The

concept of the inevitable runs core throughout primitivism which plays

perfectly into the nihilistic lethargy, but it’s also somewhat of an

inherent result given their theoretical focus on anthropology.

From what was originally a positive reevaluation that sought to

constructively take insights from indigenous and historical societies,

primitivism has become a self-reinforcing faith that our only options

lie in the past.

The trap is a simple one, and particularly effective as our movement

begins to institutionalize burnout. Certain primitive and indigenous

societies offer undeniable proof of anarchistic principles in action and

tangibility is such a mighty opiate as to leave further exploration and

critique undesired. I know that these essays have been received by some

as though I were kicking their puppy. Primitivism and green anarchy in

general has gotten wrapped in a certain immediate hope that red

anarchism just can’t match. (Except where red insurrectionists start

sympathizing with certain showy authoritarian right-wing

anti-imperialist terrorist groups, but we won’t talk about that. Because

it’s too embarrassing.) Burning condos offers immediate gratification,

whereas union organizing is a pain. Classical talk of an eventual

international rising five hundred or thousand years from now is simply

not as rewarding as a soon-to-come Crash that reverts things back to the

natural order of anarchy.

And, boy oh boy, does anthropology offer good case studies in the

realistic effectiveness of anarchistic societies. But for those

desperately seeking a glimmer of hope, the canonization of such

societies has become far too instinctive and negative qualities pass

without serious critique. Passing mention is made about “imperfections,”

without really seeking to address them. Part of this stems from an

inherited legacy of “cultural anti-imperialism” that really functions as

postmodernism and complete ethical abdication in disguise. (Although, to

his credit, John Zerzan long ago recognized that postmodernism was in

many ways antithetical to the primitivist project as well as to

anarchism in general.) But the biggest part of this stems from the sheer

relief of having actual anthropological evidence and being part of a far

bigger story.

Faced with the daily pressure of seeking, discovering and defending ways

forward, it’s far easier to declare the universe on your side. Yes,

formalized power structures piggybacked alongside our technological

innovations, the archaeological record clearly shows that (although it

also shows scattered examples of anti-authoritarian cities and agrarian

societies throughout civilization). But non-formalized interpersonal

power structures can be just as bad, if not more immediate and

controlling. Our relations with other people don’t have to be

systematically oppressive to still be oppressive. And the controlling

limitations of tribal life are very conducive to subtle but unbelievably

strong power psychoses. Physical limitations both inspire and facilitate

social oppression.

Of course many primitive societies demonstrate anarchistic principles.

Anarchy works! Get over it. It takes every last institution on Earth

struggling 24/7 to even begin to blind us to such a basic social

reality. Insofar as society even begins to function, it embodies a

degree of anarchism. And, yeah, certainly some components of our

society, both prehistorical and indigenous, were pretty decent. But why

should that be good enough?

Those who remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Those who get

wrapped up in the structures of the past will only operate within the

structures of the past. If you only accept as possible what has already

happened then, duh, any real technological progress past this point is

impossible. But it’s not. Looking back for ideas is wonderful, but let’s

not presume that the past has all, or even the best, answers.

Afterword

I scrawled these essays on napkins summer 2006 blitzed out of my mind at

4am in the back of a diner. It shows. The prose is tangled as all hell

and shot up with the spray of five-dollar words my brain spits up when

it can’t find the right one. In my defense my young head was filled to

the brim and riven with tension from my break with primitivism—I

desperately needed to get it all down on paper by any means necessary.

Surprising they actually had an effect. Perhaps folks were just starved

for any critique of primitivism thought more original than “that’s

impractical” and I just filled a niche at the right time, but traffic to

my little site took off and soon I was finding lines requoted in random

places, in foreign radical zines and twitter posts from strangers. Of

course the direct footprint of these essays wasn’t as big as I might

have wished, but attitudes in radical communities have been shifting.

Where certain primitivist assertions were once received uncritically, I

find folks are now at least aware of the existence of a much broader

radical discourse capable of contesting them. I’m happy to have helped

disseminate some of those ideas.

These days I and increasingly more than a few others in the scene with

roots in anarcho-primitivism have taken to identifying ourselves as

anarcho-transhumanists. The change in terminology may appear drastic,

but for most of us it wasn’t so much a reversal as a deepening. We still

retain and cherish much of the perspective primitivism gave us, our

horizons have just expanded. It feels good.

William Gillis