#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.

[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]

[paperw0rmz]

[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.

[alephskoteinos]

I'm not an anarcho-primitivist. I'm not saying I'm not anti-civ and I'm not in love with modern technological society, but I usually just talk about being primitivist as a joke, and meanwhile I tend to think of anarcho-primitivism as too Christian for me. It just seems like, at least if John Zerzan's work is anything to go by, it's impossible to escape the sense that anarcho-primitivism, and primitivism generally, is sort of a yearning to return to the garden of Eden. Its critique of civilization and technology predicates itself not only on the notion of technological hierarchy but also on a particular emphasis on even symbolic though and language as a kind of alienation from what might be perceived as the natural order of human life. But the root myth consists of our exile from Eden, viewed as a curse, a mistake, something to go back from, and Eden as something to be repatriated with. In this sense, it is entirely at odds with the serpent's whisper of apotheosis.

Nothing personal to the anprims out there. I just kind of think it's too Christian for me, and you can be anti-civ or be invested in the idea of the wild as worthy of its own existence without being anprim.