#technology primitivism

[paperw0rmz]

I <3 CRT

[kazimirkharza]

Had a little chat with Artxmis from the Uncivilized Podcast recently. We discussed my thoughts on Kaczynski's idea of the anti-tech revolution, my "Myth of Human Weakness" essay, and the sociopolitical state of the Balkans. Give it a listen.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

I don't like Kevin Tucker as a person but this is his band and his writing.

[scarubaru]

Hnng I love the marriage of modern medical technology and process and manufacturing engineering. I love having cheap and abundant supplies of antibiotics, I love vaccine stockpiles, I love being able to buy 12 boxes sterilized gauze at the supermarket, I love slathering Neosporin all over my clumsy body.

[carl-tabora]

The Necron and the Baby

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ImaginaryWarhammer/comments/1exlig3/commission_babys_first_necron_drawn_by_carl_tabora/

"An-nakhrimun awkwardly stares at the tiny human in her hand, confused and unsure. The human stares back, extending tiny hands towards her while making incoherent noises, clearly unafraid of the soulless Necron.

What is she supposed to do, is she supposed to eat her? She quickly glances up, seeking instruction from the mature human couple, yet to her dismay only receiving their smiles.

Ever since awoke from the Great Sleep and subsequent exile by Illuminor Szeras, she has been drowning in despair and sadness, wallowing at the memory of her failing her entire species and the terrible fate upon herself and her mother. Landing her ship on this nameless planet, she sat upon the top of her ship's exterior and fell into unmoving catatonia, with only the maintenance of her mother, now a mindless warrior, drove her to act slightly.

Not even herself realized how long it had been, but before she realized, an alien race that called themselves “human” appeared. Time has been hard to grasp for An-nakhrimun, as the humans have been in a completely different state each time she paid attention to them. From colonizing the planet, building gleaming cities, fighting among themselves against their robotic servants, collapsing into primitivism, and rebuilding their society with even more inferior technology. She is the only unchanged constant on this planet.

Humans have long used to her presence, sometimes even scaling her ship to try to communicate with her. Now, with her ship buried under dirt, humans have built a park around her seat, these interactions only became more frequent. Sometimes when she pays attention, she could even see humans sketching her figure with primitive pen and papers.

Most of the interaction has been quiet and distanced, but only once, she was forced into physical confrontation.

On a heavy snowy night, two tiny humans, male and female, wearing tattered clothes, stumbled to her seat, cold and shaking. They have no home to return to, and in the winter’s chill, they will not see tomorrow’s sunrise. They embraced the metal alien lady, waiting to die, instead, they found a warm energy dome around her. An-nakhrimun, frozen in confusion and flustered at the tiny humans grabbing onto her, channeled a deflection shield to repel the coldness, in order to try scaring them away.

She sighed a silent relief when they finally left when the sun rise, and didn’t even realize just for that night, she paid so much attention to those two humans, she even forgot to wallow in her own sadness.

Since then, An-nakhrimun sometimes would find small trinkets and items on herself and her mother, scarf, small flower, sachet. She does not understand the purpose, yet keeps them as it might be of some significance she doesn’t get.

Now the two humans have matured, and they came to her with their own offspring, like a female feline eager to show its master what she produced, and asked her to join them on a “family dinner”.

The word sounds so foreign, yet so familiar. Though she lacks the flesh to consume food anymore, she remembers how her mother used to be smiling at the dinner table even with barely any food. She glances at her mindless mother, and allows both of them to be dragged out of the park.

The interaction with humans has distracted her from her own sadness, and she doesn’t hate it.

Yet, such a time would be short lived, as the current Terra time is 850.M30, and the 16th legion of power armoured genetic soldiers, serving the self-proclaimed Emperor of Mankind, will be arriving into the system in less than a year…

Scene art for my tabletop campaign, depicting the pre-campaign story of Lone Cryptek An-Nakhrimun, who sat on a planet being depressed for 10k+ years until Great Crusade came knocking. And the baby that would become the origin of her fake human face."

[spaghettioverdose]

Lovely how there's just blogs like "hello I'm the ecofascism blog. I just love ecofascism so much! We need to retvrn to primitivism just like all of those indigenous people who were like super primitive and had no civilization or agriculture or technology (totally not racist because I think it's a good thing)! Abandon your technology now! Don't be silly nuclear power and renewables are useless and the only way to save the planet is by somehow wiping out all industrial production and everyone who relies on modern medicine along with it! Yes this is a totally sane and normal position and btw did you read this book by a guy who lived in a cabin in the woods and made mail bombs yet?" and then tumblr anarchists will just reblog this shit either because they saw some edgy post by the ecofascism blog that said some vaguely leftist shit or because they just straight up agree with a lot of the views of the ecofascism blog. Like it's startling how many tumblr anarchists are straight up anprims at this point.

[taliabhattwrites]

Thoughts on post-civ anarchism? It isn't primitivism nor a rejection of technology, if you wanna learn about it, here! ^-^ https://polcompballanarchy.miraheze.org/wiki/Post-Civilizationism

So I stopped having opinions on the various genres of leftism ever since I speedran Wittig's disillusionment with leftists, given their neglect of women's issues.

Despite the increasing proletarianization of women the world over, I've seen far too much rhetoric on how women don't have "real jobs" or worthy of organizing with, and the pervasive issues of misogyny and sexual abuse in nearly all organizing spaces irrespective of the specific ideology is particularly telling.

I saw a leaflet that one of the communist parties in Kerala had to print once, chiding men for preventing their wives from attending org meetings and also for treating those meetings like a place to find women to marry, instead of treating women like comrades.

Which is really cutting to the heart of the issues for me: No matter how much an ML tells an anarchist to read Engels, a lot of leftist men have a worse analysis of women's plight than an English factory-owner had in the 19th century. They don't see women as comrades, as fellow proletarians waging a common struggle with them, and they by and large still value the patriarchal benefits of naturalizing the labor women do and want to preserve that.

When they invent a tendency where that isn't the common attitude amongst leftist men, I'll take a look.

[transmutationisms]

can you expand on the ted kaczynski stuff 💀

ted k was an ecofascist, historical change is not a linear process of either progress or regression, the nature–technology dichotomy is artificial, the 'industrial revolution' is a highly contested term temporally and philosophically, technology is not determinative of social forms or historical change and its adoption depends on a dizzying array of social and economic factors and motives. every time kaczynski's name comes up i see nominal leftists semi-ironically valorising him because they, like, think that twitter is causing cultural degeneracy. these are fascist ideas and facile historical thinking. once again, primitivism engages in the same narrativising and myth-making as the most chauvinistic, whiggish, positivist anglo histories of the 19th and 20th centuries, only with the valences imputed to 'civilisation' inverted.

[elbiotipo]

whats your perspective on anarcho-primitivism?

I dislike it.

When I think of a better society, I don't think to return to hunter-gatherer tribes or breaking our backs working in pseudo-medieval village communes. I think of education, medicine, housing, food, being available to everyone and without anyone hoarding them. This can be accomplished by the right implementation of politics and technology, which does imply a state and industrial civilization. Anarcho-primitivism is reactionary, it's just a 'leftist' version of "everyone should go to church" fantasizing of the Middle Ages. Luckily, it's only the domain of some boring writers and some 'humanity is a cancer' people on Twitter (lol) but I think it's worth discussing because it reveals some biases.

Industry is not inherently bad. People can have decent, comfortable lifestyles if industry, instead of being guided towards profit, is guided towards the welfare of people: avoiding waste, planned obsolescence, consumerism, enviromental destruction. To accomplish this, you must have something (a state) that controls what is done and how (the means of production). To make the state works for the welfare of the people and the planet, it needs to be built on those principles. I'm sure you can figure out where I'm going with this.

Every human activity has an enviromental impact, from mining to agriculture. I simply do not believe this is inmoral, like many anprims seem to believe. I think it is harmful and yes, possibly inmoral that our current rates of consumption are damaging the global ecosystem, but I do not think farming or mining or using electronics is inmoral, when all those things can be done in ways that reduce impact as much as possible and allow people to have comfortable lives. And, this is key, industrial civilization and a state that provides for the common benefit of the people is what allows people to live good lives, to not worry about spending all their time doing farming and leaving other pursuits to a very privileged class, and importantly, not to die from disease or suffer by the abuses of a feudal class that would develop in such a situation.

Because let's face this: if anarcho-primitivism is implement, billions would die. You cannot feed the current human population without industrial farming (and I'm not even talking about GMOs or agrochemicals here, I'm saying stuff like tractors), and a transition to subsistence farmer civilization will only cause untold suffering and death. I do not even need to tell you that people who depend in modern medicine would die without the very complex industries that produce current medications and treatment. And if we go all the way to the extreme and abolish agriculture itself, not only humanity would be reduced to hunter-gatherer bands, but the enviromental devastation would be untold. An anprim society would be a decline on human quality of life like we've seen in the worst episodes of human history. All this for what? A moralistic, pure version of the past that not even far-righters have dreamed of? A medieval village but with D&D night instead of church? Thank you, I'll pass.

Also, and this is personal: I love space exploration, and I think humanity's future is among the stars. Any ideology that does not allow for that is worthless to me. Yuri Gagarin didn't touch the skies for people to tell me that it's proper leftism to stay down here in feudal farms forever.

[caprice-nisei-enjoyer]

Unfortunately anarcho-primitivism is completely untenable because, I would simply re-invent Government and Technology.

[paperw0rmz]

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

So I replayed Mother 3 very recently. Had a good time with it. Beyond everything else, I think that Mother 3 is actually a pretty good game, and one of Nintendo's better games in its line-up. Despite a lot of what I am going to say about it down below, coming from a perspective that has learned a lot since I originally played the game, this remains a very distinctive title for Nintendo. It is both intensely political and has some of the most prominent queer characters in their library, and in many ways, it is the type of game I want Nintendo to be making. It is a game that is actually saying something.

But, I think that I've found myself more critical of what exactly it's saying now than I have in the past.

The Politics of Mother 3

This is an interesting point to start off with, because Mother 3 is pretty transparently a very anti-capitalist work. It directly associates the introduction of money and capitalism to Tazmily Village by Porky and the Pigmask Army with the illness in society that takes root afterwards. This does immediately though beg the question of what exactly is the solution to the issue? If not a capitalist society, what is the best way for society to be ordered?

In strict accordance with its canon, the answer is an unknown. The climax of the game involves pulling the seventh and final needle, and causing the rebirth of the world. However, we the player are not given any indication as to what this rebirth of the world actually entails, merely being told during the fake-out end screen that everything is going to be okay. Lucas, the boy with the good and pure heart, pulled the final needle, so everything is going to be okay. Of course, we are only told this. Lucas, as a silent protagonist, is given no real motivations of his own, merely acting as a vessel for the other characters with moral statements: Alec, Wess, Kumatora, and the Ma[*******]. Lucas can really be argued to not be much different than Claus is. Lucas is given no real motivation to pull out the needles, and as a result, the end result of the world is similarly empty. You, the Player, Lucas's Porky Minch, are asked to imagine what a world that might look like.

Except. That's not really the whole story, is it?

After you beat the game, you get the title you see at the beginning of the post, replacing this one in the end card. On some level, this is obviously intended to be a callback to the titles of both Mother 1 and Mother 2, in particular with the image of the Earth acting as the O. But one must contrast it with the original title and there's an obvious message. By the end of the game, your rebirth has healed the world, removing its metallic pieces and allowing the natural world to flourish again.

Mother 3 is anti-capitalist, but it is also pastoralist, and I would even argue flirts with primitivism quite often. The replacement of the metal in the logo with wood here is not accidental, and it resonates with the themes and ideas that the game has been telling you for quite some time. While the fate of the world is ambiguous in the narrative, thematically speaking, Mother 3 has an idea of what the world should look like.

Life in Tazmily Village is quite simply by the time that Fassad and the Pigmask Army show up. There's very little in the ways of modern technology, and there's also no sense of money or a market. The items that you find in Thomas's Bazaar are all free of charge, and can be taken freely. This is deliberate, as is revealed very late into the story, as the village is full of survivors of an apocalyptic scenario and blamed their current lifestyles for causing it. They choose then to take on the role of a small, quiet village, the kind of lives they all wanted. While it is not clear whether that society was capitalist to the same extent as what would come afterwards, the message is pretty clear. The pastoral lifestyle that Tazmily exists in is considered the ideal, it is what several characters, including Lucas, fight for.

This, by itself, puts a bit of a conservative spin on the work as a whole. Mother 3 is not anti-capitalist in the same way that a communist or a socialist would be. It is not concerned with the plight of the workers, or even generally for society's well-being. You perform no meaningful anti-capitalist action in the entire game. You cannot improve the lives of the elderly that were placed in Old Man's Paradise, a decrepit and falling down nursing home. You cannot stand up for the exploitation of the workers of Tazmily Village. You engage with the capitalist system of shops and labor with no real alarm.

But where this gets really interesting is in the social messaging. A conversation that initially struck me as quite odd replaying this game was the conversation in Chapter 4 involving Mike in the nursing home.

Mike: I can't keep burdening Lisa forever, but I do have a Happy Box and nice-bodied girls like Nan and Linda here to keep me company, so I'm pretty happy in my own way. Linda: I'm sorry, Mike, but that's called sexual harassment these days. Mike: This is a hard world we live in now. How disappointing.

This scene is obviously meant as a joke at Mike's expense here. You're not really supposed to take his side here, but let's break this down a bit more here given the context of the entire game.

Mother 3 gives literally nothing to the Pigmask Army what so ever. The game never, ever, tries to play anything they do as a positive. The encroaching of capitalism and suburbanization is not presented as a net zero, it is presented as entirely negative. Nothing good came out of it, the world is worse off for it. Wildlife is mutilated for sport, people become engrossed in their pursuit of happiness (another point we'll get into shortly), and the people of Tazmily drift away from each other, becoming more rude and more curt to each other, especially towards those deemed "undesirable".

But the scene reads strangely in this context. The constant here is Mike's inappropriate comments about women's bodies, not their nonacceptance. It is explicitly marked as a change to the world that the concept of sexual harassment even exists, and there's no other source for it than the Pigmasks. The Pigmasks introduced feminism to Tazmily, and in the overarching narrative of the story, that's a bad thing. The game makes no concessions towards any good result happening, so every impact must be bad. While in a vacuum, the butt of the joke is Mike, the narrative actually vindicates him.

To give another example of the game's conservative bent, let's look at family structures that are present in the game. One might expect that family structures would be much more loose in the pastoral Tazmily Village than in the suburbanized Tazmily Village. After all, the nuclear family as it exists today is entirely an invention of capitalism, and specifically, came about because of cultural shifts after WWII in response to the growing Cold War.

But if you paid attention, the family dynamics don't actually shift at all. Families in Tazmily remain nuclear the entire time. This makes sense given the canonical explanation, that Tazmily was a rush job and these people were probably coming from a culture that had nuclear family dynamics, but it grates roughly with the idea that Tazmily Village is an ideal. What goes unstated is that the nuclear family is inherently a part of that. Sure, the gender roles become more clear past Chapter 4, where men go off to work and the women stay home, but in truth, it really wasn't that much different in the past.

Then there is the Happy Boxes. In the narrative of the story, the Happy Boxes are dubiously brainwashing devices. They emit odd lights and noises, and at least a couple of characters are enraptured with them to the exclusion of all else. They are the devices planted in Tazmily to begin its metamorphosis into a suburban town. But, there is actual brainwashing later on in the game, so I'm hesitant to merely take them at that. Rather, what do the Happy Boxes represent thematically? I believe the answer to that is propaganda.

Visually, the Happy Boxes resemble CRT screens, either TVs or computer monitors, and this is pretty consistent with their placement in homes as well, often being central to living areas. The introduction of television revolutionized the ability to disseminate propaganda to people, as now the same message could be sent to millions of people worldwide with basically no downside. in addition, there's no direct changes as a result of the Happy Boxes existing. People are more rude, more dismissive, and a bit meaner than they were previously, but they maintain their dominant personalities. Some people, such as Abbot and Abbey, are remarkably similar. The message in the Happy Boxes is a more subtextual one. The Happy Boxes are supposed to bring happiness to you, so the act of getting one is the desire for happiness.

This, to Mother 3, is a key poison. It is Fassad who sells the Happy Boxes to the people of Tazmily on the idea that we want to be happy, and there's nothing wrong with wanting happiness. This of course being Fassad, we are inclined to as the viewers see their words as deceptive in nature. Since the core part of Mother 3's politics is pastoralism and anti-capitalism, it makes pursuing happiness a moral ill. This is probably why there's no real sympathy given to any of the workers in the story. They were the ones who chose to pursue happiness, chose to get a Happy Box, and chose to listen to Fassad's words. They should have remained resolute in not getting a Happy Box. Working in the system is being part of it. It's being complicit.

(In a way that is, of course, separate from the ways in which the main party are also working in and complicit in the system.)

This isn't to say to end this that Mother 3's politics are wholly bad. It provides, for example, the important connotation that suburbanization comes at a cost. The happy, suburban lifestyle comes at the mistreatment of the elderly, the outsiders, and of queer people.

Oh yeah we haven't talked about that hu-

QUEERNESS AND MOTHER 3

So we're going to have to talk about the Magypsies. For the remainder of this post I am not going to call them that, because their name just straight out includes a slur used against the Roma, and given that they play into the mysticism tropes of them in media. This post isn't about that, but it is worth bringing up here and it's why I censored their name earlier.

(As an aside, there's an entire post to be made talking about specifically Fassad, and the ways in which he is coded quite bizarrely as Islamic, from Fassad's dress and name, to his focus on bananas, and his proper introductory chapter taking place in a desert and being in charge of a pair of monkeys. In addition, the fact that Fassad is associated with the introduction of money and being a propaganda mouthpiece is...concerning. This isn't strictly the point of this section but it would feel remiss to not include this in some place, and this felt like the best.)

What specifically the Ma[*******] are in the narrative is never defined. They are left somewhat gender ambiguous, although undeniably queer.

This, to me however, is limiting to an understanding of them, and honestly I think we should just say it here.

They're meant to be a facsimile of trans women.

Now, whether or not specifically they are trans women or are meant to merely be in drag is up in the air, and I don't think either option is actually good. Any claims of gender ambiguity go out the window given that they are all effeminate looking men, refer to each other as women, and face either general ambivalence or outright derision by other characters in the story. "Is it a he or a she?" is not really meant kindly. They are also in a whirlpool of homoerotic innuendo, and when discussing them being facsimiles, whether or not they are actually trans women or men in drag is pointless. Those are the same things when presented this way.

Mother 3 also doesn't really know what to do with them or how it even really feels about them. They are both intended to be comedic and also magical protectors of the land. They are part of the protagonist faction but are entirely passive, figures that merely guide and help awaken powers in the actual protagonists before being pre-determinately fridged as the story progresses. There is one exception.

Locria, or really, Fassad, the con-artist formerly known as Locria. The game reveals very, very late into the story through a floor in the Porky Tower and in Miracle Fassad's use of PK Starstorm that Fassad is very likely Locria, a traitor to her other friends and assistant of the Porky Empire. At no point ever is Fassad's gender or sex ever in question. He is referred to entirely with male pronouns, is discussed as a guy, and even once his identity is revealed as Locria, the mouse that he lived with still refers to him with male pronouns. This to me is kind of critical to my distinction of them as facsimiles of trans women, because there would be no reason to make Fassad explicitly always male. Fassad betrayed the others, and assimilated into what the capitalist army needed of him.

Or, well, that's a nice way of thinking about it. The Ma[*******] existed on the Nowhere Islands for much longer than the people of Tazmily Village. In Mother 3, there is basically no other meaningful signifier of queerness to be seen in the entire game. There are no gay men, there are no gay women, and there is no other gender ambiguity. Even Kumatora, who was raised by Ionia, is basically a tomboy in her appearance.

The people of Tazmily Village are seemingly completely unaware of their presence until later in the game, as it seems to be that they are completely unaware of queerness. The message the game tells here is that queerness essentially exists outside both the pastoral idealism and the capitalist dystopia that exist as the two main points of reference. They willingly self-sacrifice to see the world change, but while they are invested in the world not being destroyed, the time will come no matter what. They aren't shown to be reborn in the new world either, as none of the textboxes can be attributed to them.

Is it positive? Is it negative!? Who knows! I don't think I have come to particularly like their depiction in this game as a trans woman, they aren't really uniquely hated or loved by the game's narrative. If anything, the game just seems to regard them as existing, and pretty okay people, if not very weird in their queerness.

Conclusions I guess, I don't know, I wasn't intended for this post to essentially become an ess-

While I have a lot to say about how Mother 3 gives its messaging and what messaging that is, it is still a good game from the fundamentals. The characters are well written, the game has a good sense of tension and delivery, etc. I think the game makes missteps, and I do want to be clear here, I think this is a game with good intentions but limited by writers who are probably somewhat conservative and couldn't imagine what a better world would be. But it still takes a pretty massive risk by talking about what it does. In a gaming climate where Nintendo games often try to talk about as little as possible, in order to be consumable vessels for entertainment, I think Mother 3 stands out in a good way. This post isn't even going into the ideas of grief, loss, and motherhood that are central to the story as well. I just wanted to talk politics lmao.

[dailyanarchistposts]

E.1.1 Is industry the cause of environmental problems?

Some environmentalists argue that the root cause of our ecological crisis lies in industry and technology. This leads them to stress that “industrialism” is the problem and that needs to be eliminated. An extreme example of this is primitivism (see section A.3.9), although it does appear in the works of “deep ecologists” and liberal greens. However, most anarchists are unconvinced and agree with Bookchin when he noted that “cries against ‘technology’ and ‘industrial society’ [are] two very safe, socially natural targets against which even the bourgeoisie can inveigh in Earth Day celebrations, as long as minimal attention is paid to the social relations in which the mechanisation of society is rooted.” Instead, ecology needs “a confrontational stance toward capitalism and hierarchical society” in order to be effective and fix the root causes of our problems. [The Ecology of Freedom, p. 54]

Claiming that “industrialism” rather than “capitalism” is the cause of our ecological problems allowed greens to point to both the west and the so-called “socialist” countries and draw out what was common to both (i.e. terrible environmental records and a growth mentality). In addition, it allowed green parties and thinkers to portray themselves as being “above” the “old” conflicts between socialism and capitalism (hence the slogan “Neither Right nor Left, but in front”). Yet this position rarely convinced anyone as any serious green thinker soon notes that the social roots of our environmental problems need to be addressed and that brings green ideas into conflict with the status quo (it is no coincidence that many on the right dismiss green issues as nothing more than a form of socialism or, in America, “liberalism”). However, by refusing to clearly indicate opposition to capitalism this position allowed many reactionary ideas (and people!) to be smuggled into the green movement (the population myth being a prime example). As for “industrialism” exposing the similarities between capitalism and Stalinism, it would have been far better to do as anarchists had done since 1918 and call the USSR and related regimes what they actually were, namely “state capitalism.”

Some greens (like many defenders of capitalism) point to the terrible ecological legacy of the Stalinist countries of Eastern Europe and elsewhere. For supporters of capitalism, this was due to the lack of private property in these systems while, for greens, it showed that environmental concerns where above both capitalism and “socialism.” Needless to say, by “capitalism” anarchists mean both private and state forms of that system. As we argued in section B.3.5, under Stalinism the state bureaucracy controlled and so effectively owned the means of production. As under private capitalism, an elite monopolised decision making and aimed to maximise their income by oppressing and exploiting the working class. Unsurprisingly, they had as little consideration “first nature” (the environment) as they had for “second nature” (humanity) and dominated, oppressed and exploited both (just as private capitalism does).

As Bookchin emphasised the ecological crisis stems not only from private property but from the principle of domination itself — a principle embodied in institutional hierarchies and relations of command and obedience which pervade society at many different levels. Thus, ”[w]ithout changing the most molecular relationships in society — notably, those between men and women, adults and children, whites and other ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is considerable) — society will be riddled by domination even in a socialistic ‘classless’ and ‘non-exploitative’ form. It would be infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of ‘people’s democracies,’ ‘socialism’ and the ‘public ownership’ of ‘natural resources,’ And as long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.” [Toward an Ecological Society, p. 76]

Given this, the real reasons for why the environmental record of Stalinist regimes were worse that private capitalism can easily be found. Firstly, any opposition was more easily silenced by the police state and so the ruling bureaucrats had far more lee-way to pollute than in most western countries. In other words, a sound environment requires freedom, the freedom of people to participate and protest. Secondly, such dictatorships can implement centralised, top-down planning which renders their ecological impact more systematic and widespread (James C. Scott explores this at great length in his excellent book Seeing like a State).

Fundamentally, though, there is no real difference between private and state capitalism. That this is the case can be seen from the willingness of capitalist firms to invest in, say, China in order to take advantage of their weaker environmental laws and regulations plus the lack of opposition. It can also be seen from the gutting of environmental laws and regulation in the west in order to gain competitive advantages. Unsurprisingly, laws to restrict protest have been increasingly passed in many countries as they have embraced the neo-liberal agenda with the Thatcher regime in the UK and its successors trail-blazing this process. The centralisation of power which accompanies such neo-liberal experiments reduces social pressures on the state and ensures that business interests take precedence.

As we argued in section D.10, the way that technology is used and evolves will reflect the power relations within society. Given a hierarchical society, we would expect a given technology to be used in repressive ways regardless of the nature of that technology itself. Bookchin points to the difference between the Iroquois and the Inca. Both societies used the same forms of technology, but the former was a fairly democratic and egalitarian federation while the latter was a highly despotic empire. As such, technology “does not fully or even adequately account for the institutional differences” between societies. [The Ecology of Freedom, p. 331] This means that technology does not explain the causes for ecological harm and it is possible to have an anti-ecological system based on small-scale technologies:

“Some of the most dehumanising and centralised social systems were fashioned out of very ‘small’ technologies; but bureaucracies, monarchies, and military forces turned these systems into brutalising cudgels to subdue humankind and, later, to try to subdue nature. To be sure, a large-scale technics will foster the development of an oppressively large-scale society; but every warped society follows the dialectic of its own pathology of domination, irrespective of the scale of its technics. It can organise the ‘small’ into the repellent as surely as it can imprint an arrogant sneer on the faces of the elites who administer it … Unfortunately, a preoccupation with technical size, scale, and even artistry deflects our attention away from the most significant problems of technics — notably, its ties with the ideals and social structures of freedom.” [Bookchin, Op. Cit., pp. 325–6]

In other words, “small-scale” technology will not transform an authoritarian society into an ecological one. Nor will applying ecologically friendly technology to capitalism reduce its drive to grow at the expense of the planet and the people who inhabit it. This means that technology is an aspect of a wider society rather than a socially neutral instrument which will always have the same (usually negative) results. As Bookchin stressed, a “liberatory technology presupposes liberatory institutions; a liberatory sensibility requires a liberatory society. By the same token, artistic crafts are difficult to conceive without an artistically crafted society, and the ‘inversion of tools’ is impossible with a radical inversion of all social and productive relationships.” [Op. Cit., pp. 328–9]

Finally, it should be stressed that attempts to blame technology or industry for our ecological problems have another negative effect than just obscuring the real causes of those problems and turning attention away from the elites who implement specific forms of technology to further their aims. It also means denying that technology can be transformed and new forms created which can help produce an ecologically balanced society:

“The knowledge and physical instruments for promoting a harmonisation of humanity with nature and of human with human are largely at hand or could easily be devised. Many of the physical principles used to construct such patently harmful facilities as conventional power plants, energy-consuming vehicles, surface-mining equipment and the like could be directed to the construction of small-scale solar and wind energy devices, efficient means of transportation, and energy-saving shelters.” [Bookchin, Op. Cit., p. 83]

We must understand that “the very idea of dominating first nature has its origins in the domination of human by human” otherwise “we will lose what little understanding we have of the social origin of our most serious ecological problems.” It this happens then we cannot solve these problems, as it “will grossly distort humanity’s potentialities to play a creative role in non-human as well as human development.” For “the human capacity to reason conceptually, to fashion tools and devise extraordinary technologies” can all “be used for the good of the biosphere, not simply for harming it. What is of pivotal importance in determining whether human beings will creatively foster the evolution of first nature or whether they will be highly destructive to non-human and human beings alike is precisely the kind of society we establish, not only the kind of sensibility we develop.” [Op. Cit., p. 34]

[polyamorouspunk]

So today I watched a 2 hour video breaking down this chart:

Because like what else are you gonna do when you’re trying to check out of reality BUT I wanted to mention that personally the ones I found most interesting were rooted in the idea of “trade-based societies” but something I realized was… I don’t actually know how that looks in the modern day.

Like. When I think of a “trade-based society” I think of like. Back In The Old Days (like the really old days) or like. The Walking Dead. The Hunger Games. Etc. Isn’t that interesting? That all of it is some form of primitivism in my mind? Either from before technology or in a hypothetical world where a lot of technology is useless/not the same. It’s very hard for me to imagine how this would look in modern day America. It’s easy enough to separate out groups like “the farmers” “the clothing makers” etc. But would there be a whole group for just vacuum cleaners? What are vacuum cleaners lumped into? You know?

Another thing about the mental image I���m presented with is the sheer lack of people in these situations. Trade-based societies trade with groups outside of their own, but in not seen day USA we pretty much all live on top of each other. You can’t really geographically separate people into trade-based groups like you see in The Hunger Games or The Walking Dead or something similar.

It’s worth pointing out that just before watching this video I was reading a post apocalyptic book where the world separates into two main societies, which might be why this mental image is in my head and that’s what I’m drawn to. It’s just interesting how many political ideologies there are and how when you are so used to the system that’s in place it can be VERY hard to realistically replace that image in your mind with a new system.

There’s no overarching lesson or anything here. Just something I noticed while watching the video. I opened up tabs in my phone’s browser on ideologies I found interesting and wanted to look into more, so I’ll probably make a post on those later. If you want to reblog this you can but like really I’m not trying to make any point here I’m just looking at my own biases and being like ‘huh isn’t that interesting’.

[thesovietbroadcast]

What are your thoughts on primitivism?

Even though it raises some valid criticisms on certain elements of capitalism such as the modernist optimism in the capacity of technology to alleviate ecological crisis without diminishing productivity, it fundamentally ignores the root cause, downplays the role played by colonialism, and the alternative it provides is returning to old social orders which is outright impossible.

In other words, primitivism - as an ideology - is what happens when first world anti-capitalists see the immense, unsustainable excess of value transferred to their countries, and the resources they have open access to but fail to conjure a materialist framework to analyse it and provide a proper answer. Not to mention much of the ‘historical’ basis for primitivism has been rendered obsolete thanks to new insights in anthropology and the existence of ‘communistic’ agricultural societies (which contradicts the crackpot theory that settlements and the development of agriculture doomed humanity). It is a profound manifestation of euro-amerikan centric thought with a lot of racist baggage as expected.

Once again, the issue is not the industrial society or the advent of agriculture and cities (as prophesied by these ideological crackers) but global capitalism, the division of the world between oppressors and oppressed, and how a small percentage of the Earth’s population enjoys a comfortable life whilst billions of human beings in the third world are shackled to an endless cycle of immiseration.

[youzicha]

@raginrayguns

If yo're trying gto make real pmedical progress what you do will be determined by... god this sounds like such a cliche... facts, reality, whatever. As opposed to what? Stories and hype I guess? WE can imagine an extrapolation of medical prgoress where we extend life not just temporarily but indefinitely, but the mode of thought we're using to imagine that is quite differnt from the scientific one that we use to solve the immediate puzzles of biology and medical technology. I'm not sure what the extrapolation really gets me. I mean, sure, by studying nature let's see what we can do, waht the opportuniteis are. As Epicurus said, life is a value at any age, so let's try not to die, by exploiting whatever opportunities our study of nature reveals. The concept of immortality doesn't seem to come into it.

I think the main payoff here is maybe to the "progress, good or bad" question. Like, in the past you've said that this doesn't make sense and it's better to just consider each technology in isolation, but I'm still favorable to the "try to just do more high-tech sounding stuff in general" approach. I guess that really goes for the whole science-fiction vision in general, it ties into the question of accelerationism vs primitivism. Your view about how bad death is will influence whether you think the current state of affairs is bad so we should rush onwards, or if it's good so we should be conservative to protect it.