What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Author:Kevin Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

Then came civilization and all the ills (literally) of the Earth:Civilization inaugurated warfare, the subjugation of women, population growth, drudge work, concepts of property, entrenched hierarchies, and virtually every known disease, to name a few of its devastating derivatives.

Among the green anarchists there’s talk of recovering your soul, of making fire by rubbing sticks together, discussions of whether vegetarianism is a good idea for hunters, but there is no outline of how groups of people go beyond survival mode, or whether they do. We are supposed to aim for “rewilding” but the rewilders are shy about describing what life is like in this rewild state. One prolific green anarchy author whom I spoke to, Derrick Jensen, dismisses the lack of alternatives to civilization and told me simply, “I do not provide alternatives because there is no need. The alternatives already exist, and they have existed—and worked—for thousands and tens of thousands of years.” He means, of course, tribal life, but not modern tribal; he means tribal as in no agriculture, no antibiotics, no nothing beyond wood, fur, and stone.

The great difficulty of the anticivilizationists is that a sustainable, desirable alternative to civilization is unimaginable. We cannot picture it. We cannot see how it would be a place we’d like to move to. We can’t imagine how this primitive arrangement of stone and fur would satisfy each of our individual talents. And because we cannot imagine it, it will never happen, because nothing has ever been created without being imagined first.

Despite their inability to imagine a desirable, coherent alternative, the anarcho-primitivists all agree that some combination of being in tune with nature, eating low-calorie diets, owning very little, and using only things you make yourself will bring on a level of contentment, happiness, and meaning we have not seen for 10,000 years.

But if this state of happy poverty is so desirable and good for the soul, why do none of the anticivilizationists live like this? As far as I can tell from my research and personal interviews with them, all self-identifying anarcho-primitivists live in modernity. They are living in the trap identified by the Unabomber. They compose their rants against the machine on very fast desktop machines. While they sip coffee. Their routines are only marginally different from mine. They have not relinquished the conveniences of civilization for the better shores of nomadic hunter-gathering.

Except, perhaps, one purist: the Unabomber. Kaczynski went further than other critics in living the story he believed in. At first glance his story seems promising, but on second look, it collapses into the familiar conclusion: He was living off the fat of civilization. The Unabomber’s shack was crammed with stuff he purchased from the machine: snow-shoes, boots, sweatshirts, food, explosives, mattresses, plastic jugs and buckets, etc.—all things that he could have made himself but did not. After 25 years on the job, why did he not make his own tools separate from the system? Based on photographs of his cabin’s untidy interior, it looks like he shopped at Wal-Mart.

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