1) Isn’t it hypocritical to be against civilization and have a website/use a computer?
Yes, it is hypocritical. So what? Because if you care about life (nonhuman or/and human, including Earth) in modern society, it is impossible to not exhibit some contradictions. If you think you’re living a “cruelty free” lifestyle or that you’re not causing great harm with the way you live, you need to delve deeper. It can be appropriate and acceptable, probably even necessary, to use technology to undermine the systems of control and domination that surround us. To use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. No sane person would argue with the slave that he or she should not use whatever means necessary, including turning the violence of the master back against him, using his whips or firearms, to help free themselves. Similarly, it is fine for those opposed to technology to use it as a tool–so long as we only looked at these technologies as tools. Things to be discarded when no longer useful, when they cease to serve our landbases and those we are trying to protect. Using a computer is destructive. It uses fossil fuel energy, emits greenhouse gases, takes an enormous amount of resources to produce (including tens of thousands of gallons of water), and helps give cancer to poor women in Asian countries who disassemble them when they’re discarded. Our goal should be to do more good than harm and use these technologies to assist in undermining the dominant culture.
The most important thing is not to try to tread as lightly as possible, because that will have a negligible positive effect given the enormity of the human population and the destruction civilized humans are causing. The thing of primary importance is to effectively resist and dismantle the industrial megamachine.
2) But you’re advocating for the collapse of civilization. Won’t this result in millions or even billions of humans’ deaths?
First, civilization is already causing millions of deaths. Think of everyone who dies in the workplace (upwards of 50,000 in the U.S. alone, every year), everyone who is killed by automobiles, everyone who dies of the “diseases of civilization” like pollution-related cancers. Second, the only reason the human population is able to be so far beyond the carrying capacity of the planet is because of fossil fuels. Our entire electrical infrastructure, the vast majority of our food and water systems, all of our production–not to mention that the U.S. military, which uses HALF of all oil in the U.S., is necessary as a global police force to continue obtaining all this oil. This is also a horrendously anthropocentric (human-centered) and speciesist proposition; we are causing the largest mass extinction of plants and animals since the dinosaurs. It is estimated that some 120 species go extinct every day. Extinction is not the end of life; it is the death of birth. The only reason 6.8 billion humans can live on this planet is because we’re crowding out countless nonhumans, destroying their habitat, making it impossible for them to survive.
I love the example Derrick Jensen uses in my interview with him in the “Other Writings” section. As anti-civ folks, we get this a LOT. Things like, “We’re on a plane that’s going down and you want to kill the pilot.” No. The much better analogy that he uses is that we’re on a train with a lot of momentum–headed toward a cliff, say. It’s going to crash. And the tracks are made of the bodies of those we love. If we take down civilization–if we stop the train–just one day sooner, that is a huge number of lives saved. 120 species, for example. Or one day sooner than that. The sooner we stop it, the more biodiversity will be left on the planet, which means the greater chance we will have for survival. We’re not just causing a global holocaust of nonhumans and humans. We’re imperiling our own future, and those of our (well not mine, but our collective) future generations.
A place where 10-15 of the most common criticisms/claims used to disregard the anti-civilization/green anarchist movement will be addressed in detail–
More coming soon…
