An Anti-Civ Critique of "Post-Civ"

what a piano looks like after you set 9 billion ppl free in the forest to hunt/gather

This is a segment of a longer work ("The Rotting Carcass Behind The Green-Scare: How Anti-Civ Anarchy Became the Most Controversial Position) which can be read in its entirety here: https://raddle.me/wiki/green_scare

by ziq

Post-Civ: Leftist-Drift

While much of the fallacious green-scare red anarchists have been stirring up since the 1990s can be traced with a straight line directly to Kaczynski, ITS and DGR, there's also a green anarchist tendency that seems to only exist because of that same green-scare: post-civ anarchy. This tendency, while being anarchist and anti-civ, still manages to feed the big lie that other forms of green anarchy are deviant and bigoted ideas that we need to loudly castigate and distance ourselves from at every opportunity. It repeats that tiresome myth that primitivism is a political program to remake society in the image of indigenous gatherer-hunters and subsistence farmers, the same way communism is a program to remake society in the image of the collectively-owned factory worker.

These are the points Margaret Killjoy makes in setting post-civ apart from anarcho-primitivism. Let's go through them one by one and I'll demonstrate how they're little more than strawmen, and show that post-civ is really no different than anarcho-primitivism in substance or practice, and the attempt to distance green anarchy from its roots necessitates buying into the smears disseminated by transhumanists, Marxists and others who fetishize the idea of liberation through the progression of industrial civilization.

Killjoy begins:

We're Not Primitivists. It is neither possible, nor desirable, to return to a pre-civilized state of being. Most of the groundwork of anti-civilization thought — important work, mind you — has been laid down by primitivists. Primitivists believe, by and large, that humanity would be better served by returning to a pre-civilized way of life. This is not a view that we share.

Anprims don't actually believe it's possible or desirable to "return to a pre-civilized state of being'" so from the get-go Killjoy is building a coercive strawman.

The definitive explainer for anarcho-primitivism and green anarchy in general still remains "A Primitivist Primer" by the late John Moore (who was my creative writing professor when I was an international student in England in the early 00s, coincidentally). Everyone who wants to understand the anti-civ philosophy should read this text, because it will quickly dispel the myths being put out into the world by fearful reds.

From A Primitivist Primer:

The fact is that anarcho-primitivism is not a power-seeking ideology. It doesn't seek to capture the State, take over factories, win converts, create political organizations, or order people about. Instead, it wants people to become free individuals living in free communities which are interdependent with one another and with the biosphere they inhabit. It wants, then, a total transformation, a transformation of identity, ways of life, ways of being, and ways of communicating. This means that the tried and tested means of power-seeking ideologies just aren't relevant to the anarcho-primitivist project, which seeks to abolish all forms of power. So new forms of action and being, forms appropriate to and commensurate with the anarcho-primitivist project, need to be developed. This is an ongoing process and so there's no easy answer to the question: What is to be done? At present, many agree that communities of resistance are an important element in the anarcho-primitivist project. The word 'community' is bandied about these days in all kinds of absurd ways (e.g., the business community), precisely because most genuine communities have been destroyed by Capital and the State. Some think that if traditional communities, frequently sources of resistance to power, have been destroyed, then the creation of communities of resistance — communities formed by individuals with resistance as their common focus — are a way to recreate bases for action. An old anarchist idea is that the new world must be created within the shell of the old. This means that when civilization collapses — through its own volition, through our efforts, or a combination of the two — there will be an alternative waiting to take its place. This is really necessary as, in the absence of positive alternatives, the social disruption caused by collapse could easily create the psychological insecurity and social vacuum in which fascism and other totalitarian dictatorships could flourish. For the present writer, this means that anarcho-primitivists need to develop communities of resistance — microcosms (as much as they can be) of the future to come — both in cities and outside. These need to act as bases for action (particularly direct action), but also as sites for the creation of new ways of thinking, behaving, communicating, being, and so on, as well as new sets of ethics — in short, a whole new liberatory culture. They need to become places where people can discover their true desires and pleasures, and through the good old anarchist idea of the exemplary deed, show others by example that alternative ways of life are possible. However, there are many other possibilities that need exploring. The kind of world envisaged by anarcho-primitivism is one unprecedented in human experience in terms of the degree and types of freedom anticipated ... so there can't be any limits on the forms of resistance and insurgency that might develop. The kind of vast transformations envisaged will need all kinds of innovative thought and activity.

So, primitivism is not an attempt to turn back the clock to the stone age as Killjoy asserts, it's rather taking action to set up alternate, sustainable and thriving ways of life for the purposes of prefiguration. It's looking forward to create forms of resistance, setting up living refuges parallel to industrial society to house free people, and putting together the infrastructure anarchists need to thrive within the shell of a rapidly collapsing civilization. The anti-civ philosophy is a guide we can use to prepare ourselves for the deluge of natural disasters, pandemics, famines and droughts this rapidly-dying civilization will continue to rain down on us and give us the fortitude to help each other not only survive these catastrophes, but prosper in the ruins of the old world as it decays all around us.

Rather than being an action to return society to the past, it's a concerted effort to look to the future and create sobering, but necessary mechanisms to cope with the continuing decay of civilization. Civilization will continue to collapse due to its universally unsustainable, destructive, non-regenerative properties. It's not helpful to ignore or deny this simple reality just because it threatens the reductive idea leftists have of technological progress and democracy being the solution to everything.

Killjoy then claims:

Primitivists reject technology. We just reject the inappropriate use of technology. Now, to be fair, that's almost all of the uses of technology we see in the civilized world. But our issue with most primitivist theory is one of babies and bathwater. Sure, most technologies are being put to rather evil uses — whether warfare or simple ecocide — but that doesn't make technology ("The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.") inherently evil. It just means that we need to completely re-imagine how we interact with machines, with tools, even with science. We need to determine whether something is useful and sustainable, rather than judging things purely on their economic or military value.

This point is the most obtuse of all because it completely misunderstands the anprim definition of technology.

From A Primitivist Primer again, which I'll again stress everyone should read in its entirety:

John Zerzan defines technology as 'the ensemble of division of labor/ production/ industrialism and its impact on us and on nature. Technology is the sum of mediations between us and the natural world and the sum of those separations mediating us from each other. It is all the drudgery and toxicity required to produce and reproduce the stage of hyper-alienation we languish in. It is the texture and the form of domination at any given stage of hierarchy and domination.' Opposition to technology thus plays an important role in anarcho-primitivist practice. However, Fredy Perlman says that 'technology is nothing but the Leviathan's armory,' its 'claws and fangs.' Anarcho-primitivists are thus opposed to technology, but there is some debate over how central technology is to domination in civilization. A distinction should be drawn between tools (or implements) and technology. Perlman shows that primitive peoples develop all kinds of tools and implements, but not technologies: 'The material objects, the canes and canoes, the digging sticks and walls, were things a single individual could make, or they were things, like a wall, that required the cooperation of many on a single occasion .... Most of the implements are ancient, and the [material] surpluses [these implements supposedly made possible] have been ripe since the first dawn, but they did not give rise to impersonal institutions. People, living beings, give rise to both.' Tools are creations on a localised, small-scale, the products of either individuals or small groups on specific occasions. As such, they do not give rise to systems of control and coercion. Technology, on the other hand, is the product of large-scale interlocking systems of extraction, production, distribution and consumption, and such systems gain their own momentum and dynamic. As such, they demand structures of control and obedience on a mass scale — what Perlman calls impersonal institutions.

As you can see, anprims have no qualms with what Killjoy would call "useful and sustainable", i.e. items that don't require "large-scale interlocking systems of extraction, production, distribution and consumption". Killjoy even admits to rejecting "almost all of the uses of technology we see in the civilized world", so what post-civs propose is really exactly the same as what anprims propose... Tools that can be produced locally, without hierarchy/control/coercion/obedience and without the centralized extractive, imperialist, resource-pillaging supply chains required to run industrial society. This is not defined as technology by anprims. Locally produced, sustainable tools that improve our lives without destroying our ecosystems are fully embraced by anarcho-primitivist philosophers, just as they are by Killjoy's post-civ manifesto.

Killjoy continues:

Primitivists reject agriculture. We simply reject monoculture, which is abhorrent and centralizing, destroys regional autonomy, forces globalization on the world, and leads to horrific practices like slash-and-burn farming. We also reject other stupid ideas of how to feed humanity, like setting 6 billion people loose in the woods to hunt and gather. By and large, post-civ folks embrace permaculture: agricultural systems designed from the outset to be sustainable in whatever given area they are developed.

Again, they're strawmanning anprim philosophy by claiming anprims want to force 6 billion people to be hunter gatherers. Anprims are not trying to enforce an inflexible, collectivist, authoritarian social program on anyone, let alone the entire planet. Anprims are simply engaged in an expansive criticism of industrial society, while exploring all the possible alternatives to it and experimenting with those alternatives in their own lives. These alternatives being discussed almost always include producing food in some manner due to the simple reality that there's very little wilderness left in the world to forage from. All the anti-civs I know grow the majority of their food and supplement their diets with some foraged food – which isn't abundant enough to live on exclusively due to the march of climate change, the rise in wildfires, and agricultural-industrial land clearing.

Anprims especially talk very favorably of the long history of indigenous peoples deliberately attending rainforests to encourage the proliferation of useful and nourishing plants, which is an example of horticulture that isn't extractive, non-renewable, destructive. Anprims fully embrace the re-establishment of Earth's food forests, which will require a concerted human effort to replant and cultivate.

This is how Zerzan describes agriculture:

1. agriculture is the will to power over nature, the materialization of alienated humanity's desire to subdue and control the natural world; 2) agriculture inevitably destroys the balance of nature, leaving biological degradation and ecological ruin in its wake; 3) agriculture is "the beginning of work and production," generating an increasingly standardized, confined and repressive culture; and 4) agriculture leads inevitably to the rise of civilization.

What's being described here is precisely what Killjoy calls 'monoculture'. Killjoy then borrows a non-anarchist phrase (permaculture), without defining it, but permaculture and food forests are incredibly similar concepts.

Permaculture:

Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding, and community resilience.

Food forests:

A food forest (or forest garden) is a garden that mimics the structures of a natural forest, with multiple layers of plants stacked vertically to increase overall production.

As you can see, food forests and permaculture are closely related concepts with the only real difference being that permaculture is a copyrighted brand used to generate profit by a handful of affluent white settlers who write guides, teach courses and sell "permaculture certificates" to the public while also fully embodying white male "guru culture".

Food forests, for all intents and purposes are simply the free and open source version of the proprietary, for-profit, needlessly-complicated permaculture program, without the misogynistic, capitalistic personality cult permaculture is bogged down with.

Killjoy goes on:

Primitivists have done a good job of exploring the problems of civilization, and for this we commend them. But, on the whole, their critique is un-nuanced.

Strong words, considering anarcho-primitivists have written troves and troves of theory that deconstructs every form of authority that arises from the industrial world, while post-civ is nothing more than 2 short blog posts filled with strawman attacks seemingly informed by silly "return to monke" memes made by leftists on Reddit and Twitter.

Leftists flood anarchist spaces with these anti-"primmie" memes to further their green-scare program, which allows them to continue pushing their 19th century workerist prescriptions to the catastrophic 21st century problems (successive civilizational collapse) that those prescriptions have helped lead us to.

Killjoy continues:

What's more, the societal structure they envision, tribalism, can be socially conservative: what many tribes lacked in codified law they made up for with rigid "customs," and one generation is born into the near-exact way of life as their predecessors.

Again, anarcho-primitivism's willingness to explore and analyze various indigenous tribes and bands both living and dead, and engage with these cultures to outline how they differ from the industrial model and how they avoided destroying their natural environment is not the same as an intention to enforce an ideological program on people. It's not a world-building exercise, it's not a government, it's not a set of customs or an attempt to impose a tribal system on the world. There's nothing wrong with learning from indigenous cultures and adapting their methods in your own life - especially the anarchistic ones.

She also falls into the trap of talking about indigenous peoples in the past tense, as if these lifeways are extinct – when indigenous cultures continue to thrive all over the world. A white settler presenting diverse indigenous peoples as "conservative" in order to dismiss and sneer at them is concerning, but it's especially frustrating to see an anarchist mar indigenous peoples for being born into the same way of life enjoyed by their predecessors.

Is Killjoy under the impression life in whatever dreary USA suburb she inhabits is unique from her parents dreary suburban existence? If life under the crumbling industrial order has so much potential for freedom compared to a life in the wilds, why is she post-civ? Why not embrace civilization and all the freedoms, experiences and opportunities for growth it supposedly offers?

Killjoy concludes:

We cannot, en masse, return to a pre-civilized way of life. And honestly, most of us don't want to. We refuse a blanket rejection of everything that civilization has brought us. We need to look forward, not backwards.

Killjoy is embracing anarcho-primitivism as it's described by all the notable anprims of the 20th century and the anti-civs of today, while rejecting an imaginary perversion of anarcho-primitivism built by leftist internet trolls. She wraps up with this line:

We are not primitivists.

That's fine and dandy, I'm also a green anarchist that doesn't identify as a primitivist, but Killjoy really hasn't explained how post-civ differs in any substantial way from anarcho-primitivism. The only possible divergences from primitivism I can identify in their post-civ explainer are:

1. They propose proprietary 'permaculture' courses created by white settlers in Australia instead of the indigenous food forests permaculture was inspired by, and –

2. They say they're open to theoretical sustainable, non-extractive, non-polluting "technologies" that are really no different than the locally-produced, life-improving tools anprims readily embrace in theory and in practice.

Killjoy is simply using different language than primitivists to obfuscate the reality that post-civs are as critical of destructive technologies which rely on global supply chains as any garden-variety primitivist is. None of the points Killjoy makes to set post-civ apart from primitivism stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

The attempt to rebrand anti-civ to post-civ so it can escape its completely unearned reputation has only helped feed the big lie that anti-civ anarchy is an omnicidal, ableist, transphobic, fascist death-cult that needs to be struggled against and no-platformed by an endless stream of performative anti-fascist Twitter activists. It only serves to fuel the left's green-scare.

There are 79 Comments

It is heartening to see an article published on anews that favorably highlights John Zerzan's brilliance. Zerzan and Moore are both brilliant Johns that have contributed enormous amounts of genius into the anarchist discourse. Ziq should call in to John Zerzan's radio show. Perhaps Ziq too is a John? John Ziq has a nice ring to it.

Margaret Killjoy: "What happened, John?... We were professionals... Civilized."

John Ziq: "Do I look civilized to you? When John Moore died, I lost everything. Until that dog arrived on my doorstep... A final gift from my professor... In that moment, I received some semblance of hope... an opportunity to grieve unalone... And post-civs... took that from me... Stole that from me... Killed that from me! People keep asking if I'm back and I haven't really had an answer. But now, yeah, I'm thinkin' I'm back. So you can either hand over the post-civs or you can die screaming alongside him!"

zerzan is a great writer, but I think "brilliance" over-estimates the power he has to pull us out the obvious shitstorms. I don't really see a huge difference between his radio show and the things people have been repeating over and over again for years. Global warming scares the shit out of me, but Zerzan nor preppers have an airtight plan for doing anything about that. There's going to a lot of talk about reversal technology and "rewilding", but it seems like everything people do keeps making it worse.

It’s clear you have not actually read John. It’s not his writing, it’s entirely his ideas. This is not in the same universe as prepping or solving problems.

Take your medicine

who doesn't read books because twitter and reddit are more practical. What are you, some sort of TED Talk organizer? Fuck you.

Feel free to keep talking about ideas minus the shitty jabs about medicine. Focus! Focus!

Fee, did you really edit that comment by placing a strike-through through the sentence you disagree with?

Is the editing of our comments a new low we can expect from thecollective from now on?

Doubt it. The shitty comment can still be read, there’s just some additional context around it. Trying something new, tbh. Though I see your point and will consider it.

Not cool, brow. Classic authoritarian behavior here. Classic moralistic power tripping. I’ll be taking my energy elsewhere if this is to continue. I am told post-left reddit is more anarchist,,,, perhaps this is the place for unmediated anarchist discussion.

Lumpy approves of moderators overreaching because at heart he's still a Maoist bootlicker that worships authority. No true anarch would ever abide to the manipulation of their creative expression and voice.

besides some sort of counsel of self-hating-revolutionaries and then what gets called identity politics now adays, "the cultural revolution", now adays phrased in the us as anti "cultural appropriation" , which amounts to something like "uh! This is a chinese restaurant! Why is it all white people?!"...in retrospect is an appropriation of the cultural appropriation of indigenous americans, which I guess is vile hatred of them while selling native amererican memorabilia at the corner store: to what extent it applies now adays im unsure, but having lived here most of my life to see myself as "indigenous americans" in a joking manner: I sympathize with...[the latter charge of appropriation], but I think we should appropriate everything...

As far as lumpy is concerned, it's Marxism by ranting about "material conditions", and EVEN THOUGH that just sounds like conditions, I still don't understand, even though at times I enjoy reading his posts, there's grappling hooks.

tiger penis it becomes good medicine except for the tigers will be without them and this could make them sad. I expect less tigers in the world would benefit other species that could assist in the cultivation of potatoes for baking. Everybody from Marx to Lumpy understands that baking collectives in factory owned bakeries would go out of business if @primitivists had their way and then there would be no bread at all. The tigers would take over,,,,, but not paper tigers!

already yours, but some things will just be really crappy in the long term, i do view minimal processing as an ethic. You shouldn't eat raw potatoes from your garden, but raw kale is great, it's somewhat an acquired taste. If you let kale seed in the garden a a couple times, it automatically grows there for years, it doesn't even go away and why would you want it to?! Based on what i've studied in gardening, kale growing healthily in the middle of july is somewhat strange, but it definitely happens...this year my non-sweet potatoes got blight, i kept wondering if i wasn't watering them enough, it was growing them in a small garden twice in two years. LOL, the rain around here has been crazy though, the polar opposite of the west coast. I still got a bunch of potatoes for what i put in the ground.

prefer to base my affairs on nothing like Stirner taught. Speaking of Stirner, one possible beneficial would be companion planting flowers that attract bees and help to pollinate the potatoes and kale. Don't eat too much raw kale if you have thyroid issues they say. I think it's ironic that Stirner died from a bee sting because I bet the beneficial flowers to attract the pollinators really helped the kale and potatoes grow there. That which does not destroy the creative nothing will make it stronger I suppose. This will probably be the title for my next zine.

Recommended, even for people with "healthy thyroid glands". Your keyboard will get all slimy...I wonder if too much rale kale could cause thyroid problems in certain situations...

Rale kale leads to heavy metal poisoning.

lol as if anyone outside of this delusional little troll circle jerk (of one) wants to identify as a "true anarch"

you can be the one true scotsman all you like, k? fill your boots!

I wouldn't sympathize with it if I didn't sometimes cringe about your trolling, you know your craft very well!

know what's really embarrassing? admitting sympathy with a sentiment like "comment moderation is maoist bootlicking"

or it would be, if you weren't the same anon pretending to be a different anon, agreeing with your own shit haha

"There couldn't possible be more than one person on the internet that disagrees with me!" -lumps

well if that's the case (and I still doubt it), just the first sentiment then! equating authoritarian communism with anyone telling an asshole to occasionally stfu, telltale american reactionary brainworms.

“while post-civ is nothing more than 2 short blog posts filled with strawman attacks seemingly informed by silly "return to monke" memes made by leftists on Reddit and Twitter.”

The publication dates of the post civ texts were in the 2008-2011 period. The “return to monke” meme primitivism began in 2018.

Yeah exactly where is this ziq character coming from?

I just skimmed the larger piece this came from and learned about “the gradual co-option of anarchy by reactionary "anti-fascist activists" who have no real relation to anarchy but glue themselves to anarchist discourse nonetheless”

Wtf. A simple search online can detail decades of intertwined ideologies between anti-fascism and anarchism. Decades of actions, organizations and publications of anarchist anti-fascists.

Come on! Antifa existed before the summer of 2020!

There are a ton of roleplaying liberals calling themselves antifa.

There are also tons of Raddle user names calling themselves antifa, anticiv and anarchists. One or two are even publialshing texts about they are, and talk in the name of a "we", the anticiv anarchists! Can u believe that?

So yeah, I'll root for Marge Killjoy all the way against these internet bullies.

"texts about how edgy anarchists they are"

Sorry forgot a few words. Soft keyboard dementia.

"The last ingredient in the left's multi-faceted green scare campaign comes from the gradual co-option of anarchy by reactionary "anti-fascist activists" who have no real relation to anarchy but glue themselves to anarchist discourse nonetheless. The most famous case of this is the man who will now forever be known as Special Agent Alexander Reid Ross. A prolific anti-fascist and anti-primitivist voice, Ross dedicated years of his life to associating green anarchy and ecological views in general with white supremacy and fascism."

https://raddle.me/wiki/green_scare#the-rise-of-antifa-gang

Many of the green faction are actually invested bourgeoisie who leave a carbon footprint 10 times larger than the average 60 % of the worlds population living below the poverty line.

Can't wait to see the Agent Ross HBO series. Bond-like but maybe gayer and less SFX, but WAY more convoluted subplots.

Ross literally works for a far right think tank alongside feds and cops. Defines reactionary.

Tho real undercover agents are working undercover. Focusing on scapegoating a relatively innocuous character like ARR also helps in overlooking way problematic characters such as the author of this text.

hey look for the crypto problems and ignore the OBVIOUS and POPULAR problem who was getting quoted all over the place...

welcome to the site, ARR.

The most dangerous are those workijg in the dark against u and me, not some paranoid idiot or carreer badmouth who's been collaborating officially ob papers.

Interesting idea of "innocuous". A serial badjacketer making a career of cancelling leftists who turned out to be a fed.

Hums... got proofs of that? Collaborating with pigs on a think tank paper doean't equate to be on Fed payroll. Even tho this is a treacherous involvement. So there must be additional evidence I didn't hear about, or you're just amplifying shit, on something he did publicly.

I wanna see the evidence.

you don't need "more evidence" ... you yourself just conceded "treacherous involvement" with the FBI ... wtf is your metric, if not that? public collaboration with law enforcement is plenty bad enough.

I didn't say it ain't bad. I just asked for evidence that he's an FBI agebt, beyond his known collaboration on this piece of toilet paper.

nobody credible is saying he's literally an FBI agent ... that's not even how corporate intelligence services works?

you might need a clue or you're just a troll?

I think getting regular paychecks to write diatribes about how dangerous anarchists are moves you up from the snitch category to the cop category. Prison guards who work for private prisons are still prison guards, so he's still a cop even though it's a private operation.

and betrayal. ARR may indeed be innocuous, but so are undercover cops if you get into comparisons/false-equations. Citizens are even more "innocuous" but...well i think you already understand the problem with dismissing shitty authors and conspiracy theorists as threats.

I think returning to ways that can sustain people and create relationships where there is less mediation between people and each other and people their needs is something that can be done. With the seeds we need to be freed. When we grow food together and change the relationship with the land in a concrete way. By making it free. It can be free when people don't charge other people to live on their land. And invite people to join tribes that do this. Which is very possible.

It's an amazing fact that the common weed dandelion is almost akin to a natural multivitamin tablet, and silverbeet, grow like weeds, low maintenance, and throw in sweet potato, and garlic and coconut etc, the 5 Anarch Vegetables, soooo easy, never working, creating fun and ease, grazing like a philosophical animal amongst nature, minus annoying hippy type, sweating it out and meat eating hobos like lumps! Never forgetting ;)

Leftists food is beef and potatoe chips, lettuce, tomato, cucumber and onion, basic burger chip totalitarian prole diet.

Dude, if you're a workerist for the corporate global hegemony you need fast addictive energy boosting feelgood food and overdoses of sugar and caffeine to function within the demanding competitive labor market, if you are trapped within that paradigm, the only immediate releaf from this mill-race is homelessness, wilderness commune or wild mountain person, prison or chaotic revolution.
But yes and no, occasionally I tear through a Mac Quarter pounder, cheese burger and chips in like 3 minutes. Once I ate 8 cheese burgers, but I hadn't eaten breakfast that day, and it was the most sensual culinary experience I hadn't experienced for quite a while. Ii DO survive on simple foods and i've neared starvation occasionally, but there is no way the planet is going to suddenly go all green and vegan, never in my lifetime anyway, WAKE UP JZ and all you other leftist Utopian-esque intelligentia, your proles won't take it.

medicine, Dr.Potato

ziq places their academic mentor (moore) on precisely the kind of pedestal that any anarchist i care to relate with would blow chunks at. sorry ziqqy, @primitivism is not objectively defined by your professorial pimp. @prims i have know - more than i care to recall - most definitely believe humanity needs to revert to a pre-civilized way of living. while i do not agree with that perspective, i also disagree with your implied assertion that technology is "neutral". means and ends, eh? motivations are embedded. and all that good shit.

while there are surely valid critiques of killjoy's perspective, i find your critique to be shallow, reactionary and deeply ideological (aka dogmatic).

It's reactive, not reactionary. Please make your dismissals more accurate, thanks.

In the case of ziq, "reactionary" does apply to its former meaning, coz the guy has micromanagerial issues as well as being a reckless phallocrat. Also let's add his uncrititical support to Ukrainian national defense, similar to Wank Price.

But yes, the term's been used too much here in the place of "reactive".

do you have a citation for his pro-Ukrainian position? i'm very curious to see it. thx

Just search Raddle for every Ziq post related to Ukraine... It's all over the place.

A few months ago he even went as lown as to be threatening users of a ban over posting "Russian/tankie propaganda against Ukraine"... of which the definition is all up to him and his colleagues, of course.

you're presuming that I have or want raddle -- and I don't. Can't you just capture a paragraph or two including approbation and post it here? Thx

Typo from autocorrect: attribution not approbation

thanks for the link. now that I have read just this single thread I completely agree that ziq is a pro-war idiot. He's also an idiot when he says @prims don't advocate a return to foraging; why else would an entire segment talk about and promote rewilding? Killjoy and co. are a pretty slow moving target, but deserve to be skewered nonetheless. but this screed isn't that. oh well

Text doesn't say anprims don't advocate foraging. It says getting all your food from foraging isn't possible right now due to civilization. If you're gonna reject the whole essay because of one sentence, at least finish reading the whole sentence.

For you it's one sentence, for me it's a premise of at least a third of this ramble.

This part of the text only confirms Ziq's fake anticiv stance, by clinging to the same-old pattern of finding solutions for the masses, where it should be understood that anticiv anarchs neither care about solutions for the mass society, or are for "mass genocide"; they'll mostly just care about developping H/G forms of life outside of the "grid", for themselves.

And yes, in some bioregions it's still possible to just live off the goods found in nature. Some individuals have done that for decades in northern regions of Turtle Island. Tho since civilization keeps invading and destroying, these areas are becoming scarce which is why some anticiv anarchs rather go for the compromise of "industrial foraging" (i.e. dumpstering and looting) as a way to sustain within urban or rural areas for as long as the mass industrial society exists and produces an output of drinkable water and food. That's just doing what rats, feral cats and racoons are doing, maintaining their naturalist ways of living within urbanized spaces.

Text also displays Ziq's ridiculous authoritarianism, by pretending to know for sure, without any sociological reference, what "we" are supposed to be into. If only this character had a level of self-sarcasm this would make it colorful, yet it is known how guru-like macho assholes neither understand or are capable of self-sarcasm. They take themselves and their game very seriously. Marge Killjoy shouldn't have flinged to his criticisn imo, even if "post-civ" isn't a very meaningful notion to me.

idk where you're getting phallocrat from. this is the internet. no one knows who's who. ziq could be for a woman for all you know, or i know, or anyone knows.

as for micromanagerial issues, some of the raddle mods are way OTT, i agree with you there. but blame the individual mods, not the guy who made the site.

and ukraine... yeah, ziq - like wayne - lost his shit over that. but you know what? if one crappy take is enough for you to write off everything a person has ever wrote or ever will write, you'd make an excellent stasi officer.

ziq is wrong about Ukraine and wrong about @primitivism. if he yammers on about other stuff, he'll probably be wrong about them too. it's not just one time of losing his shit.

Tankie accusations in response to criticism of his online dominant male patterns? Could you be Ziq yourself!?

This guy behaving like the anticiv anarchist pope and using female groupies to read his texts in videos is enough as evidence, beyond his repressive top-down approach to callibg out and banning people on Raddle. Why isn't he making his own readings?

The ironic thing is you're not even banned from raddle, anarchodoom. Using the word phallocrat every time you cry about ziq calling you a Russian shill is a big tell, might want to work on that piss-poor opsec.

And you might also work on your intellectual skills when the guy you're standing by is calling anyone critical of the Ukraine position a "Russian shill", on an obscure forum like Raddle, lol.

It's because ziq is from a country that was invaded and is occupied by a foreign military that brought in hundreds of thousands of settlers. Makes it personal.

Believing a return to pre-industrial society would be beneficial is not the same as constructing a program to force it on the world. Anarchists believe in anarchy. News at 11.

There's a rumor goin' around that ziq can't light a fire in the wild, yet he tells us we all have to go and live like H/G s. That's like telling a Neanderthal to use an electric toaster or microwave. We just can't do it *sigh*

anarchist camp...even though hardly anyone can light fires without something you buy from a store, it is really easy to light/maintain a fire in pretty any forest if you have a lighter or matches, I have a lot of experience doing that, news paper makes it easier but either dry weather and effort it's not necessary.

gods and was chained to a rock. If you think about it we are chained to rocks for controlled fire. It would be better to eat our potatoes raw and not as symbolic anti-Promethean snacks. This would also cut down on the number of accidental forest fires that Big Energy is telling us doesn't originate from their failing machinery.

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