Rage against the Tree
A dissection of luddites, tech bros and their escapism
The internet's epoch has brought about a deluge of changes. How humanity interacts with society has been changed, shaken to its foundations. Alongside this, several peculiar ideas have resurfaced. One uses the internet as a place to escape, where you can immerse yourself in a world and a social order. No longer escaping to fiction or fantasy, one can create a whole social group.
The ability to isolate oneself from the outside world has contributed to the revival of many obscure ideologies and ideations. One trend has been a reaction to technology, a revival of the old Luddite strain of tech hatred. The other is a grandiose techno-optimism grounded on false hopes of salvation from technology so advanced it has solved all of man’s problems. Both result in an ideal, an Icarian dream of escaping modern restrictions and, more often than not, its morality.
The modern Luddite, those enraptured by the idea of the rural, of the yeoman on the land, being self-sufficient. The universality of the Luddite, not restricted by ideology, from the regressive libertarians to the most progressive communards, everyone can picture either a commune of hippies living off the land in the woods, unrestricted by “the industrial dystopia” but also a lone cowboy defending and living on his land undisturbed by “the urban decay”. The survivalists fall under this, that want of destruction of modernity because the dystopia of modernity is just too dull to bear. The Survivalist is politically schizophrenic, ranging from far left to far right, Anarchists, Neo-Nazis, and extremists of all kinds. The Luddites' escapism always returns to the individual or the small community. They are reacting to their perpetually online behavior by wanting to turn the clock back when the community was more accessible to engage with in the real world. This nostalgia can range from the wannabe Twin Oaks types to wanting to return to the 1980s. Often, nostalgia isn’t even true nostalgia; it is a manufactured anemoia, relying on myths of the past for their idealized world.
This anemoia is shown through what these Luddites create. The mashups of Synthwave and Ted Kacyzinski, this contradictory usage of hypermodernist aesthetics to convey anti-modernist ideals. On some level, they’ve gotten used to the comforts of the now, and want to maintain those comforts, scared to actualize their beliefs because they know it will bite them in the ass. They are relying on tech to push their beliefs and their ideology while hating it when they could simply leave the city and go live in the state of nature at this very moment. But that would not match up to their idealized agrarian or primitivist world. The Luddite knows their desires cannot be fulfilled, so they don’t chase them. At most, they wait for a collapse, an apocalypse, so their story can “truly begin”, immersing themselves, in theory, more and more to rationalize their beliefs.
The tragic part is, that it would be so easy for a Luddite to actualize, outside of just leaving a city to the woods, the ability to be in a truly primitive, non-settled society is available to all of us. The Anarcho-Primitivist will never bother looking into this because it requires an amount of effort and discomfort that they can never bring themselves to. It’s why we have not seen ideological nomads wandering around on BLM1 land. Their lack of creativity is palpable, reliant on a mythical past to sustain them compared to innovating and testing out their beliefs, to try to force their ideology into practical being.
The contemporary Techno-optimist, amazed by the miracles of modern technology, lacks any reluctance towards it. There is a great belief that no matter what the future holds as far as gadgets and applications are concerned is always for the better. The dominating image of this trend is the unrealistic hope that all work and problems will be solved through technology. No sickness will be incurable, no distance too far, and no product too expensive if we take our foot off the brakes and adopt all emerging technology. Like with Luddites, Techno-optimists can be found across the political spectrum, from post-scarcity communists to cryptocurrency hyper-capitalists to literal techno-nazis.
The politics of the techno-optimist, while wide-ranging, still rely on the same idea of eliminating discomfort. What Techno-optimists find uncomfortable is what defines their politics. The “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communists” major discomfort is any oppression, admirable to despise but at the same time self-defeating nonetheless. This sort of tech-optimism on the left is in the process of abandonment with the rise of Degrowth Communism. At the same time, the hypercapitalist crypto libertarian is uncomfortable with their lack of power, reliant on climbing up the class system, praying to be aided by tech to do it. The Techno-Nazis aren’t precisely a defined group but would contain broad ideological categories like the Neo-Reactionaries. Their discomfort lay with the fact that the impoverished exist, a techno-optimism that is entirely on the side of the bourgeois but removed from liberal morality, where you end up with positions from theorists like Curtis Yarvin about putting poor people into a matrix. They are all bound by that one guiding thought that technology will deliver them to their personal utopia.
This mindset is at least laughable since there have been countless failed technologies, and taking a leap of faith for each can be, at best, wasteful and, at worst, the last thing humanity will do. It is not hard to see why. The fears of nuclear war and AI overtaking in media and pop culture are not wholly unfounded. The other fatal flaw of techno-optimists is their mistake in using digitalization for immortality. They recreate, upload, and (hope to) preserve people, ideas, knowledge and moments in digital form. The difference with immortality (which is impossible as per the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics), is that all digital information is housed in material hardware, the very thing they sought to escape from.
The Techno-optimist can be summarized simply as the desire to live in a Science Fiction novella. No want for anything, existing in a perfect stagnation, where in the ideal world, there is no labor, not even the labor of social interaction. One can live in a fiction designed for them by a computer, locking themselves away in their cavern to be an utter slave to their base desires.
At the end of the day, this is what both Luddites and Techno-optimists exist for Escapism. Escape from an imperfect world. Escape from a society that is being perceived as problematic. Escape to a place where all problems are under control-seducing people with different ideologies with their promises.
Bureau of Land Management
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