Interview with Anthrotechne author Lance Miller

Interview with Anthrotechne author Lance Miller at Dangerous:Movement:News

Anarchy in L.A.

I hate Anarchism. Pure and simple. I hate the intellectual ( and anti-intellectual ) constructs. I've known quite a few while living in Olympia WA.

Here is a sample of the Northwest Anarchist ideology:

The focus .... is to draw analysis and proposals as a fervent critique of the current anarchist* milieu in the Northwest specifically (looking at situations nationally and internationally). Drawing upon a praxis - theory into action - and an experimentation of tactics towards a complete social transformation. One towards the total destruction of society, capital, technology, morals, ideology, civilization (call it what one will) and the lineage of the existent. link

Woo-woo,total destruction of society, how badass. Its no surprise most are young, full of testosterone, and have few real social ties beyond their bong buddies and ideological echo chamber.

I've just written a meme-bomb for them and planted it on seattle.indymedia.org. here.

My Book: Who it is about, What it is about

I have published a 26 page book through Amazon.com's publishing company, and is now on sale. The book is called "Post-Apocalyptic Industrialization". It can be read for free here, and is purchasable here.

In the book I mention enslaving pacifist communities and killing anarchist communities ( in Chapter 2-D ). I want to offer up why this is in the book. First off, the book is a fiction about the future, so nothing in it is literal. The book's 50% goal is a memetic attack on a political agenda called Anarcho-Primitivism, Post-Apocalyptic Eco-Anarchism, and simply Primitivism. ( Google and Wikipedia are your friends on researching this ). My relationship to that community of activists is personal and first-hand, especially while attending Evergreen State College and/or living in Olympia Washington.

My memetic attack is not meant for a more generic anarchist, or pacifist, or person living in a more natural lifestyle. My book is a meme, and it lives to attack a people and their vision. The specific vision I attack is expressed in EXHIBIT A of this post. That rant is totally inline with language and reasonings I've heard from dozens while at anti-war meetings, house parties, and classroom seminar discussions in Olympia.

To cut to the chase, I am an enemy of Primitivists. I am not wealthy, tied to organized religion, nor like the bland, ugly landscape east of the Mississippi River. I am functionally poor, sort of anarchist in social reasoning, atheistic, and demand the presence of big nature in the form 14,000 ft mountains and the Inside Passage. My preferences and marginalization put me in a space perfect for the Primitivist sales pitch. I've listened to the sales pitch, turned down the offer, and the salesmen still keep harassing the whole planet to buy their offer. It's time to X those salesmen out of this world, and my meme is designed to do that.

One assumption in the Primitivist mind is when the big powers ( police, military, corporations ) are in decline or gone the Primitivist ethos, lifestyle, and ideology will gain a reinforcing loop of ascendence. My meme is intended as a bomb in the middle of that reinforcing loop. The power of that bomb is not corporate technology or money, but rather an anarchic type of geek unhindered by the current paradigm of morals and social constraints. In a circular kind of story line reminiscent of Planet of the Apes, my meme could provide some of the initialization of such a geek culture preying on the weak, defenseless Primitivist camps of the Pacific Northwest. That is why it is published in old-school media of paperback, rather than solely digital meme. As a book, it could survive a computer destroying apocalypse, and resurface in the hands of people capable of carrying out its mission.

Exhibit A: Anarcho-Primitivist Stance

You call for a cultural transformation to save civilization, yet there is nothing worth saving. You want to save something which is based on the destruction of the natural world, you're a hypocrite. You say we're wanting suicide but the very nature of continuing civilization is suicidal. Civilization isn't going to be brought down by us, it is going to collapse, and that is all we can do is aid in bringing the collapse faster because the sooner it does collapse, the better off this species will be. Yes, many people have to die, but many people are going to die if we keep with this civilization. How many people a year are dying as a result of carwrecks? Of preventable diseases? Of sickness' from the food? Of police attacks (and yes, police are a result of civilization)? How many a year die of starvation? How many will die because of global warming (which will continue if we keep up with this way of life)? Christ, how many sharks die per year because of this civilization? Are you seriously willing to accept the continual murder of the ocean? Your solution to the problem still is including industrial civilization which is insane. What do you suggest, alternative energy? There isn't enough alternative energy to meet the energy demands of this world, even if we go with the unrealistic options of ethanol and biodiesel. You recognize that civilization is unsustainable, yet you are stupid enough to believe we should continue on with it anyways? Do you understand what that means when something isn't sustainable? As anarchists should we just accept Libertarian thought and go with "lesser" government until we are finally left with no government? Or should we just abolish the whole fucking State? The point being, civilization leads to domination and hierarchy, we all should recognize this by now. It leads to work, exploitation, slavery, war, etc. Your argument of tribal wars ignores that there was no such thing as tribal wars before the rise in agriculture which also created the concepts of priviate property, ownership, and settlement. Primitivism argues that we should go back to living in hunter-gatherer societies. You're calling for a slow change, gradual change, which is completely illogical, and doesn't take into account that we don't have the time to make a gradual change for one, and that it's not worth making. The Earth is being killed and you're willing to accept that because you are too afraid to live without civilization. I'm not. We need this Earth to survive and your leftist bullshit ideas are not going to save us, you can have all the energy efficient lightbulbs you want, but if our lifestyle is still unsustainable then it doesn't fucking matter. If I can't drink the water, breathe the air, and live, then it doesn't matter what kind of world we live in. Read Derrick Jensen's Endgame, or something by John Zerzan, at least figure out what the hell you're attacking before you attack it, this essay is full of flaws and doesn't understand at all the thoughts of primitivists. -posting from anon at http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/2786

Bourgeoisie-Technologist versus Anarcho-Primitivism

Bourgeoisie-Technologists are a growing class symbiotically dependent on a global economy. These are non-elite equipped with mobility and communications, untethered to local circumstances of others, and symbiotically dependent on people not in their racial, religious, or national profile. This system methodically subordinates the natural world, constructing a world fit for machines and symbolic analysts.

Anarcho-Primitivists denounce modern technology completely. They see it as a complex system involving division of labor, resource extraction, and exploitation for the benefit of those who implement its process. They argue that the interface with and result of modern technology is always an alienated, mediated, and distorted reality. Modern technology too, like science, is seen as non-neutral. The values and goals of those who produce and control technology are believed to always be embedded within it. Modern technology is held by primitivists to be distinct from simple tools in many regards. A simple tool is considered a temporary usage of an element within our immediate surroundings used for a specific task. Tools are not viewed as involving complex systems which alienate the user from the act. Primitivists claim that implicit in technology is this separation, creating an unhealthy and mediated experience which leads to various forms of authority. Domination is said to increase every time a modern “time-saving” technology is created, as primitivists claim it necessitates the construction of more technology to support, fuel, maintain and repair the original technology. It is argued by primitivists that this leads very rapidly to the establishment of a complex technological system that seems to have an existence independent of the humans who created it. Primitivists believe that this system methodically destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, constructing a world fit only for machines.

Marshal Plans, Postmodernism, and Anarchists vs Evangelical Anarchists

Today, fools talk of rescuing the world through an ideology. The greatest fools simultaneously believe we are in a postmodern age and also believe small groups can change larger society. The link from small group to larger society isn't there, by the very definition of postmodernism.

For American counterculture intelligentsia this has to be a painful realization. Agendas for growing a pacific or humanist ethos out from small local DIY communities or from the marketing campaigns of NGO's has hit spatial territorial limits, with the ethos having saturation in many cities/states (e.g. San Francisco, Vermont) and almost no presence in the rest of the USA.

An Iron Law of Postmodernism has emerged: The tribe is only important to themselves, and a mere object for exploitation or ridicule to others. Members of my tribe are people, other tribes are just wet, speaking meat. To prove my point, note how the Celebrate Diversity camp talk about their nemesis archetypes the Nazis, the Moral Majority and the Bush administration.^{an example}

In the fluidity of these postmodern times Bush II and his voter base properly wielded the Iron Law of Postmodernism. They taxed the pants off hippies, and expanded the military-industrial complex both in size and in geography by locating the new additions to the "industry" in redneck and suburban zones of the US. Bush and Co. must have had an orgasm every time a tax paying anti-war protester declares "Not my President". That protest statement was a sign the postmodern White House was working as expected, taxing the wet meat of the opposing tribe.

There is not going to be another Marshall Plan for centrally mandating (and following through with) the repairing of societies or spreading such themes as Democracy, Freedom, Women's Rights, Protestant Theology or New Age Benevolence. A fully developed vision of this is at Global Guerillas blog:

"It should be clear, as we watch the gyrations and excesses of global markets, that no organization/state/group has any meaningful control over its direction. The same is true for almost every other aspect of globalization, from the environment to transnational crime to energy flows. In short, we've lost control and our collective future is in the hands of a morally neutral system that is operating in ways that we don't fully understand (nor will we). The best defense against this emerging situation is not to call for new Manhattan projects or global treaties or Marshall plans, which won't work since we can neither marshal the resources necessary nor collectively agree on anything other than the most basic rules of connectivity, it is to slowly introduce organic stability into out global system. The concept I've latched onto as a solution is what I call the resilient community."
The Resilient Community, John Robb, Jan 30 2008.

Anarchists, wow its going to hurt when their agenda recursively reacts on them. I've had several years since living in the Northwest in which I was in a political action with anarchists. Their Northwest USA species goes like this: We need to be hunter-gatherers, that if we are hunter-gatherers there will be no perpetrators of violence, all sense of linear time and objective punctuality are bunk, and industrialization is the devil.

Like the postmodern Bush II crushing the postmodern idealists, there may be an anarchist type that kills Anarcho-Primitivists for sport or profit. There is a growing awareness amongst less idealistic anarchists that if the fall of industrialism occurs, the world will default to an iron age. This means the military gear of the Middle Ages. A simple review of the Middle Ages should remind any Anarcho-Primitivists of one wide-spread phenomenon: the easy butchering of neolithic people by small bands of sword carrying men. There are more examples in history than the same old colonialist stories. The metal owning Huns invaded what is now called Hungary and exterminated almost the entire population of primarily peasant class agrarians. This extermination was without drama, less than 5 Huns would manage the chopping off heads in a whole zone of a neighborhood. Docile, unarmed populations without mobility are easy to manage that way.

No one cares about, or will care about, Anarcho-Primitivists anyway, so moving on. What I find interesting in a stereotype breaking sort of way is talk amongst suburban, middle-to-upper-class, evangelical leaders of embracing Anarchy. Here is one major leader's blog entry: God, Government, and Christianity. Who knows where this Evangelical Anarchy thing might go? Maybe in 2015 we could see amoral outliers of the Evangelical Anarchists killing or selling Anarcho-Primitivists. History has stranger stories.

Antithesis

Worldwide systems intervention may still be possible, but the little possibility there is seems most promising from Dubai hedge fund managers and the President of China. They are the only entities with the intellectual and monetary horsepower to accomplish the task.