OAK #6 IS NOW AVAILABLE!
(an anti-civilization journal)

www.oakjournal.org
or send $21 (cash only) to
PO Box 485 Wardensville, WV 26851
or contact: oakjournal@protonmail.com
(New Orders Ship Starting September)

Some highlights from OAK #6 include:
“Deserting The Tender Tyranny Of Techno-Totalitarianism: An Invitation (?)” by Wolfie Mae Landstreicher
“… There Must Be No Rivers, Birds, Or Trees Either” by Sascha Engel
“Against Relevance” by Ocean
“The Controlled Opposition Of NPC Comrades” by Jason Rodgers
“Under Our Feet, Not Over Our Heads” by Invecchiare Selvatico
“Returning Songs: Three Invitations From A Monistic World” by Tamarix and Bree
“Abreaction And Hide Tanning” by VOF
“Recalibration Towards Anarchy: A Rereading of Ayn Rand’s Anthem” by The Unconquered Golden One
“Might (Rodgers On Ragnar Redbeard Part Two)” by Jason Rodgers
“Technocrat’s Guide To Necromancy” by anonymous

… and so much more, including essays, poems, rants, reviews, report backs, letters, and original provocative imagery filling well-over 100-pages of anti-civilization meditation and provocation!

————

Oak: Left and Right of Center
(editorial)

It seems increasingly no one can hit the mark. The bull’s-eye. The previous era’s conceit of precision and accuracy has retreated to a swirling utopian formlessness.  Not a utopia where truth disappears but where it endlessly proliferates, and all arguments are arguments of absolute certainty.  My truth is true because its velocity is undeniable! Pathetic. Stupid. Ubiquitous.

All liberation, from sex to morality, has a final resting point of endless meaning (it’s ALL evaluative!).  Every thing is given to the world of meaning and proof of purpose. Every single petty ideology laid on the alter of its theoretical functionality.  Every single ideology expressed as a nodal brand, a simulation of singularity and self which provides the endless copy of degraded and tortured truth.  You believe what you believe and so does everyone else. A total egalitarianism of mental and informational obesity.

Years ago there was a letter complaining about the “green” in Green Anarchy (they should consider another color!) and the absurdity of that letter did not diagnose the writer -- the absurdity itself and all our deep chuckles diagnosed that “age.”   We once could separate absurdity from supposed reality.  We could know that there were, at base, if we looked hard enough, sides to choose.  

Now one can survey the whole field of critical writing and generally assume that none of it is worth reading.  Oak struggles against this onslaught of recycled contortion – a spell which pulls all potential thought into mechanization and all sense of self to nullity.  All political issues now resolve solely  based on their position in the poli-astrological universe, everything sits under a complexity of signs which hides under a veil of technicality.  Technology’s mythological character (in Roland Barthes’ sense) of interlocking widgets of selfhood is perfectly obvious from a detached perspective.  The masses are nowhere and that is really frightening.   No more masses turned by the power of a singular propaganda, no more man of action and belief and conviction -- in other words we won a perverse victory. Not quite pyrrhic.  But not too far off either.  The “new radicalism” diagnosed by Christopher Lasch and now battered around by anachronistic YouTube personalities was perfectly capable of a total liberation of all strains of oppression, delivering them all to absolute zero.  Frozen in the immovable cold.  An evaporation of the atmosphere which potentiated authentic thought. Everywhere the chains are broken and the cages rearranged and no one seems even the slightest interested in talking about anything other than Trump and the reenactment of global conflict, which our molecularly dispersed imperial center cries over (unless it’s a dead Russian).

The Subject, the center of nodal existence (supposedly), consumed by the object of its existence becomes, as Jason Rodgers has it, a nonplayer character (NPC).  No more mass, only roles; no more crowd, only convergence of quantized belief. A slick nothing which we slip through, a gamified void which you pass through at such a speed that victory itself is perilous…a free-fall populated with coins and candy and the chiming terror of convenience.

But perhaps we should have a moment of contemplation here before we start the issue, if anyone reads these things in order.  Let us reflect on some failures, some obvious ones and, importantly, projects that failed at their own stated goals.  

Let’s be sober adventurers on this macabre journey and perhaps we can find ways to burrow beneath and fly above this insidious zombification which touches all who pass on this McCarthyesque Road of desolation.  Am I taking things too far or not far enough?

How about police abolition?  Oh how quickly the approved “anarchist” voices evaporated from NPR.  Clearly being used, but almost always masochists anyway, these anarchists had a real moment four years ago.  Supposedly, if you listened to the prophetic voices of the media apparatus, we were on the edge of a massive change in policing.  On the edge of something monumental to cleanse the perverse history of America and reinstall the good conscience of liberal elites.  

What we were on the edge of, it turns out, was installing an even more permanent class of asshole police, now armed with their own special class of grievance.  Oh what joy have we unleashed!  Following through is never a strong suit but invigorating the Leviathan comes easy enough.  What was given the police, and what has therefore ended policing under the pretext of law at all (now the constitutionalists practically sound like sovereign citizens), is a therapeutic mandate.  That is to say, at once they are both more aggrieved and frustrated while being more sweeping in their charge.  

Abolish the Police will ironically be the marker for a new, far more authoritarian, era where the madness of the grievance-led-snowflake becomes liberated for the police to also experience (looking past the FOP long having incubated this grievance politics, but that’s for another time).  Everyone’s absolute equality of viewpoint in the virtual ironically liberates simulations of the state while feeding on the vestiges of power.  Cops are reduced to pure force and grievance, whiny little assholes like the rest of us.  The cops aren’t elites, they are widgets of power.  All the body armor (now all the time -- always a catastrophe broods! They should team up with that child-no-more, Greta) is to put a veneer over the nothingness, the utter lack of legitimacy, the degradation of all “legitimate authority” -- now at the point of dust and bone.  Here we are with all these materials and a new psychic era of smartphone psychosis.  Here we are with the vestiges and artifacts of the state.  Here we are to reenact from a point of complete idiocy all the pretenses of power.  

These people, and I mean all the cops, from the badged to the petty authoritarian (who’s recruitment seems to grow daily much faster than cop enrollment) are plainly insufferable, in fact that is their point.  They exist to grind against things, to prove by constant technical friction that they, yes, they themselves, actually exist and matter!  So no surprise the police do not vanish and nothing is abolished (in any sense, in this example), rather we have liberated policing to the masses.  An internal and intimate proliferation of sub-culturally specific gun-toting mall cops.

So our victories seem in short supply or out of stock but we continue on anyway.  Calls for political action, policy… any dead end achievement to give us the illusion of an end, a finality -- collapse itself, as the eternal drama always escaping us, is there more to comfort our meaninglessness than to invigorate our action -- ring as hollow simulations.  Hey man, we are making a difference!  The difference of a Lego moved from one set to another.

Political nihilism is almost unavoidable, if it weren’t for the fact of the system’s own nihilism decomposing all value constantly we would almost certainly have to take it up just as a point of antagonism and strategy.  But let’s not be so naïve.  The system has deconstructed everything perfectly well on its own and the tired voices calling for a resurrection of value and ideals seem destined to occupy, ironically, the subcultural space allotted exactly for their emotivist passion. Abolish the Police?  Sure, who cares, it doesn’t matter anymore.

How about the great inauguration protest legacy or the even more pathetic Bernie Bros who screamed in everyone’s ear that this was “the moment” (for what? They didn’t know either) and criticism of Sanders displayed ignorance of his positions and a lack of solidarity?   So it was that solidarity performed its final disappearing act.  Since politics is always lagging behind it is only at the Reality Show stage of dialectics and still uses the tools of cable television to understand itself (this isn’t about ratings).  Jean Baudrillard briefly hypothesized that Reality TV was so popular because of its stupidity.  The viewers took pleasure in “feeling less stupid than the show.”  A media strategy to “offer shows that are dumber than reality” is certainly appealing but I have to agree with Jean that it gives the imbeciles running TV (or politics) “credit for a lot of imagination.”  Nevertheless, this hypothesis has new evidence in Biden/Trump/Kennedy – all three are grievance-fueled and empty and most assuredly stupid.  Biden, a sort of endpoint of politics in his stammering mumble, his stupidity almost must be intentional.  The whispering of the masses coalescing to keep him in office…”look, guys, we’re smarter than the president!”  Trump, a felon, a fallen angel condemned by the center!  He’s like the guy you wanted to win The Survivor!  This is what Baudrillard called “radical democracy.”  All the pretense of qualification is lost and we are left with the “beatification of the man without qualities.”  

No one on, either side, will believe the “truth” of the election (and they shouldn’t, when did radicals get so prude about “election integrity” anyway?) but they will follow around, in Pavlovian fashion, the sweet crisp digital ring of the bell of stupidity.  Their own private microtone of discipline.  All the talk of “civil war” was precisely at the moment when the hypothesis proved the opposite.  There is not “civil war”!  There is a dreadful, unending, mournful and obscene civil peace!  Everywhere we go customs and morality have faded... but abandoned to no vacuum, simply replaced by the digital and virtual strategies of automatic manners (and the equally bad inversion of those manners, see ANews).

So even after the rioting (will there even be more?) and the opposition and the crying and the pathetic handwringing over every infinitesimal nothingness in policy we still have the prospect of being witness to this further degradation.  What a shame.  At least this time we really, truly, honestly, faithfully, can avoid bailing out the rioters since the nullity of their simulation of rebellion is just too close to the last one to spin off any illusory effectiveness or sympathy.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  There are a lot of ideas in here you may disagree with, and plenty that might make your blood boil and your heart race like you’re actually alive.  Maybe some of it will bore you.  Maybe some of it is an objective failure.  Maybe some of it is worthless, useless, fatalistic and despicable -- maybe we’re finally doing something right.
 
Or maybe some tender allusion to peace of mind jumps through the pages and you are left with the humble thought that in some extreme tendency of rejection you are not alone at all, simply lost from one another in an endless refraction of that little death called data.

OAK JOURNAL
PO BOX 485
WARDENSVILLE, WV 26851
www.oakjournal.org
oakjournal@protonmail.com

Comments

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 09:56

awesome. this is the most important anti-civ journal since Green Anarchy.

... eat shit leftists!

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 10:21

Refreshing rant, loved the poetic " Technology’s mythological character of interlocking widgets of selfhood" !
I aM nOt aLOnE!!

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 10:32

so tired of engaging with (stuff) in order to critique or refute said (stuff)... and yet here we are.

babies, here's the thing - they are going to find a way to dig up the last bit of cobalt, pump the last drop of oil, cut down the last tree. they have a world view where this is fine because they think technology or God or a high fence & a panic room, will save them from what they set in motion with their firm belief in the separation of The Human from nature.

it really does seem as if the only brake on this process will be the degradation of systems of nature (the jet stream, seasons, and the like). unless we (non-Human) all disengage as much as possible and turn toward learning how to take care of each other, which probably won't halt environmental degradation but will mean we can dance and play together through our death throes.

Klaatu (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 11:39

In reply to by anon (not verified)

> unless we (non-Human)

How do you do, fellow non-Human? Thank you for providing all the wisdom and answers. We (fellow non-Humans) will utilize these morsels to do more nothing about anything.

Klaatu barada nikto!

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 11:54

In reply to by Klaatu (not verified)

look, this bullshit is getting hella tedious. if you want to make a point make it. but of course you have no actual point.

the word Human has a history you would do well to learn. the idiots who coined the term left out women, Africans, Indigenous peoples, anyone not male & white/European, from their definition. the non-Human, the more-than-human are the rest of us.

doing nothing is, truly, the only move left to us. as another movie says, the only winning move is not to play the game.

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 16:21

In reply to by anon (not verified)

"the word Human has a history you would do well to learn. the idiots who coined the term left out women, Africans, Indigenous peoples, anyone not male & white/European, from their definition. the non-Human, the more-than-human are the rest of us. "

It's not. Etymology relates to a synonym for "Men", or "from Men", or and "earthling". Man, unlike "men", doesn't have to be gendered. There's nothing racial in the word even if some theorists have come up with their own exclusive definition of it. Furthermore you're here reinforcing their racist and sexist view by excluding all those non-White or non-males from being defined as "human", equally to other "humans".

Also you don't tell us how doing nothing is all there's "left" to do, you authoritarian dick. You know jack shit about it and got a tiny-brained imagination and weakling's motivation; a byproduct of your authoritarian upbringing, dawg.

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 17:07

In reply to by anon (not verified)

not talking about etymology. talking about exactly the racist, sexist legal coining / framing of the concept from ~the 16th & 17th century. how else did our ancestors justify slavery and genocide but to claim those they were slaughtering were not, in fact, human but something lesser?

from that time, the word has had this racist connotation and fighting to be included into the category has mostly proven to be a trap of the highest order.

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 19:26

In reply to by anon (not verified)

You're kinda like using this archaic racist & sexist view of humans -one that is officially gone for the most part, despite thee are still latent tendencies and structures perpetuating- and reifying it, instead of treating it as the past, increasingly-derelict view that it is, therefore attempting to frame it as the one and only view of "Human" there is, and at the same time reifying the very same racist and sexist divisions they asserted (you just said it in your first comment). That is the "trap".

Liberals ever since the 19th century have had a universalist view of "human" that contradicts the older, imperialist one defined by Malthus and Gobineau, which was tied to Euro colonial monarchic systems.

Radicals had different framings based on social context (for Marxists) or of more philosophical nature (Stirner, Nietzsche, Phenomenologists, Existentialism and a few other unrelated philosophers). None of these, while not always asserting the "human' were attempting to reinforce the old racial and sexist divides, even if from the "outside".

Trick question: What is the genetic group you belong to?

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 20:51

In reply to by anon (not verified)

i used the phrase 'we (non-Human)' to try to make plain who i mean by 'we'.

i capitalized the h in human to try to signal a specific meaning for 'human'.

i clarified that i mean by 'Human' those people that still consider themselves the only humans.

i mean then by 'non-Human' those humans who are not exclusive in our definition of human and (which is the part you are missing) AND all other beings on the planet.

i am not making claims to exclusivity of definitions, i am just letting you know what definitions i am intending.

Zhachev Wed, 08/21/2024 - 05:06

In reply to by anon (not verified)

“Go outside”—such an imperative, a beckoning call to escape the digital fog and technocratic entrapment, assuming the guise of a return to a pristine, unmediated wilderness. Yet, lurking beneath this simplistic maxim lies a conceptual mire, a pathetic adherence to a duality that has become redundant: the interior versus the exterior. This categorical distinction falters and collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, demonstrating its inherent frailty. The notion of an untouched exterior—a realm separated from urban sprawl, technological decay, and the relentless march of civilization—is a grand illusion manufactured by those desperate to disentangle themselves from the complexities of existence.

To invoke “going outside” as a means of liberation is to cling to a humanist construct that stubbornly posits the self as an isolated entity, standing apart from the world it inhabits. This psychological stance epitomizes the failure to grasp that the so-called “outside” is never untouched; it has been sedimented with human history, narratives of dominance, and ecological manipulation. Nature, far from being a pristine backdrop for human activity, is a field of continuous interaction, a site of entanglement where every moment reverberates with the echoes of existence.

The call to escape into nature emerges not from a genuine engagement but from an existential malaise—a reflexive recoil from the complexities of civilization. Yet this flight is illusory, a frail attempt to evade the chaotic web of interconnection that binds human and non-human entities alike. The very idea of “going outside” distorts the landscape of human experience, proposing a simplistic narrative where purity can be reclaimed by merely stepping beyond the threshold of the civilized world.

In this worldview, escape becomes a mirage, a promise of authenticity that evaporates upon approach. There is no return to Eden; the illusion of an untainted exterior collapses under the scrutiny of ecological reality. Every tree, every river, has borne the markings of human presence. The anthropogenic imprint has seeped into the very marrow of the terrestrial, making a mockery of the desire to disengage from modernity’s grip. What’s left in the wake of this escape fantasy? A hollow aestheticism that romanticizes the wild while neglecting the messy reality of our entanglement with it.

Rejecting the complexity of our current condition in favor of a fictionalized “natural” existence ignores the profound ethical and philosophical implications in which the human and non-human intermingle. Rather than recognizing the balance of violence and beauty inherent in these interactions, returning to a primal state becomes an exercise in selective nostalgia, a fetishization of the so-called primitive untainted by technological commodification, while ignoring the darker undercurrents of that existence.

We must dismantle the wife of this imaginary boundary, for the dichotomy of interior and exterior is but a façade. Our experiences of the “outside” are enmeshed with our perceptions, woven into the very fabric of our psyche. Interior space is not an enclave of solitude, nor is it a sanctuary away from the world; rather, it is a complex nexus of interactions—an interface where the violence of civilization colludes with the raw unpredictability of life. We dwell neither in isolation nor escape; we exist in a dynamic and perpetually shifting plane that defies those boundaries.

The unsettling truth is that to engage with the "outside" is to confront the abyss of life itself, an abyss swirling with uncertainties and existential dread. It calls forth the specter of the unknown, invoking a confrontation with the self. Here lies a richer engagement with existence, one that transcends the banal escapism of going outside and instead fosters an awareness of the haunting presence of non-human forces shaping our world.

Zhachev Wed, 08/21/2024 - 05:07

In reply to by Zhachev

The primitivist fantasy of a return to origin—where humans lived harmoniously within nature—evades the truths of adaptation, survival, and the nuanced violence embedded in all life forms. It ignores the entropic forces within ecosystems where predation, growth, and decay intermingle without care for idyllic narratives. Illusions do not prepare us for what lies beyond our perceived boundaries; they only serve to fortify our estrangement.

This is not merely a critique but a call toward a more profound embrace of the chaotic interdependencies that define our reality. The urge to flee to an imagined exterior places us in a paradoxical cage: the more we seek liberation in the wilderness, the more we assert our dominance over it.

The notion of “going outside” as a solution to our existential plight is both naive and reductive. It reduces life to a series of binary distinctions that crumble under the forces of global interconnectedness. Nature exists not as a separate realm, nor as an exterior refuge but as an inextricable web of interrelation, where the human and the non-human engage in a continual dance of creation and destruction.

We cannot step "outside" ourselves; all we can do is inhabit the tangled dynamics of existence, recognizing ourselves as part and parcel of this chaotic interplay. True engagement arises not from an idealized return but through acknowledgment of our place within the entangled realities of the world—embracing, rather than escaping, the darkness, the beauty, and the relentless unpredictability that define our shared existence. In this acceptance lies the potential for genuine understanding and transformation, far beyond the empty promise of the motto to “go outside."

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 19:16

Erm what the sigma? Mods salty and delete comments cuz Zerzan is so fanum tax skibidi toilet Ohio rizzler. Weak AF

anon (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2024 - 22:22

Wow what a predictable, pompuous load of hipster claptrap from 2014. And it's even bordering on bootlicking!

Ok, so you wrote that at this year's Burning Man thinking you're found the Crux of Anarchy? Awesoooome.

anon (not verified) Wed, 08/21/2024 - 08:37

In reply to by anon (not verified)

what is hipster about it?

just because it is over your head?

ok kt

(cashapp: blackandgreenpress venmo and paypal: blackandgreen).

anon (not verified) Wed, 08/21/2024 - 08:46

Ayn Rand?
Ragnar Redbeard?
escape?
tribalism?
going outside?

"A total egalitarianism of mental and informational obesity"

These fashies need to be stopped now before they put out another issue...

anon (not verified) Wed, 08/21/2024 - 15:55

In reply to by anon (not verified)

What ya gonna do to stop it?
You make no point at all. The format of a number of keywords/tags followed by a question mark is simply an anemic version of that old logical fallacy begging the question. Your assumption is embedded in the question, a notoriously authoritarian tactic. Hell, I could make assumptions about you from this post. Authoritarian logic, weak disinformation. Are you an alt-right troll? Maybe

anon (not verified) Wed, 08/21/2024 - 15:57

In reply to by anon (not verified)

PS fascie is the sensible slang term for a fascist. Fashie sounds like a term for someone fashionable.

anon (not verified) Wed, 08/21/2024 - 15:31

so, i wonder if anyone on this particular thread has any interest in the OAK publication.

or if they can even read something that is not text-speak garbage, and you really can't meme complicated ideas...

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/26/2024 - 21:26

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Well I read parts of this text and while it's not text-speak garbage (do you mean, like, LEGIBLE writing form? what's your issue with it?), it is classic hot garbage. A montage of shitty ham-fisted word salads aimed only at impressing or confusing or displaying pseudo-intellectual prowess to some vague audience. And a mediocre exercise in intellectual masturbation too.

anon (not verified) Thu, 08/22/2024 - 14:48

"All liberation, from sex to morality, has a final resting point of endless meaning (it’s ALL evaluative!).  Every thing is given to the world of meaning and proof of purpose. Every single petty ideology laid on the alter of its theoretical functionality.  Every single ideology expressed as a nodal brand, a simulation of singularity and self which provides the endless copy of degraded and tortured truth.  You believe what you believe and so does everyone else. A total egalitarianism of mental and informational obesity."

this says it all about the current anarchist space.

can't wait for my copy

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/26/2024 - 15:52

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Yes
And you can send donations to his cashapp in support. Endorsements require a lot of snacks

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/26/2024 - 17:41

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Fat shaming and neurodivergent bullying on Anews?? Whaaat?

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/26/2024 - 18:05

In reply to by anon (not verified)

No one said anything about Kevin’s weight. If he was a more tolerable person we might even invite him to bear week. This sounds like a joke about his constant fund raising scams. Might as well be an old school televangelist.

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/26/2024 - 08:21

just got a copy and just finished reading “The Controlled Opposition Of NPC Comrades” by Jason Rodgers
(focused on crimethinc)

JR never disappoints in their analysis.

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/26/2024 - 16:45

no, i won't contribute to the dumbing down of people who only know how to regurgitate and text.

try again. slow, it is ok if you need to use your lips too.

anon (not verified) Mon, 08/26/2024 - 18:58

Thanks to the moderators for protecting us from the crypto-racist troll's comments that we weren't totally handling ourselves because we're totally not adults that can't handle ourselves. Thanks. Two lines!

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