Storm King’s Grim Omen codes in. Car beep, virile codification of the human subject into identity fragmentation. Repetitive synth articulating the content-future of a thousand-thousand docile subjects. Enjoy your stay. Skin numb to the device writhing into arteries. Pale flesh drifts downward into hive-sleep. The background muzak assembles LA-street hymns into a sombre, paranoid evening sweat. 70’s Cop Car chase ignites momentary spinal sensation, passers by de-click from screen sleep and gaze upon the epileptic moment. They drift out of sight and the crowds return to the hum and warmth of k-addiction, k-time.
Marshall Sahlins writes “If economics is the dismal science, the study of hunting-gathering economics must be its most advanced branch.” (The Original Affluent Society) and herein lies my trajectory for shoehorning multiple thinkers and writings into a Decelerationist/Primitivist mash. To begin with even the idea of a pre-industrial, or more aptly, primitivist-economics poses an interesting question with regards to primitivist capital? Within a primitivist society does capital lie? It’s not money, for this does not exist. Potentially food, or tools etc. though these things seem to be taken care of and a part of an egalitarian system as opposed to a bartering system. One could argue that knowledge/intelligence is the true form of capital and thus primitivist societies are not free from its grasp. Yet, primitivist societies inherently wish to move/progress further than point X, and thus to systematically streamline or machinize the work up to X would be fruitless, superfluous, for if techno/industrial/religious/ideological progress or progress-in-general is not your aim what’s the point in rushing. The very act of rushing is entirely deconstructed within a society which has no desire to accelerate. Capital has little room for contentment or complacency.
Cleanse the Metropolis, a prayer to the group of cyber-teens squandering time. Leaning against glitching douglas firs their eyelids flicker to the rhythm of derelict neon. Synth emanates the mall, waking none from the caustic glow of a dying consumer-chapel. Bodily micro-vibrations akin to old cartoons; “Mom! Garfield’s legs are rotting, why is the screen green and blur and over…” Brain chemistry frenzy. Cross-referenced memories collide in bio-space causing time to splinter – “Hey kids, you don’t even know when you are.”
So this leads towards that which can be deceleration, which is namely that which can remove the desire for capital all together. Within a primitivist society the act of work is wrongly named ‘work’. For the connotations connected with the term ‘work’ are now heavily burdened by a post-industrial society, or, you’re thinking of a shoddy 9-5, you’re thinking of that which is done as a means for survival in the 21st century, money in the bank, rent paid, groceries bought. Yet the work of a primitivist society – often romanticized – is in itself an act of immanence, a process which draws multiple lines between humans and nature; not the act of erecting a fence, but the act of accepting the presence of what is now not-Other, a bird or squirrel etc. Post-industrial labour is merely lost being. Taken labour, taken soul.
//LOAD_VR: nostalgia2_1986.exp a multiplicity of Simpsons stills melt atop the closing shutters. You can’t remember the last time your eyes weren’t heavy, the last time you smelt an origin, the last time panic was a possibility. The beat here jolts accordingly to the memoirs of youth sat before the Atari’s warm glow, a better time found within the truth of polygons. Fade back to the mall. Slow and too steady. If you stare forward long enough it combines into a tech-nothingness, false balsa wood, beige roof patterns, off-white gloss, radio tremble and the smell of dry rain, nostalgia for the bland.
Quite honestly I didn’t see myself leaning from accelerationism, at least in the abstract, quite so violently and quite so quickly. But as – one of many – exit options for myself is that of a homestead, the ideology of primitivism, or potentially paleo-Agorism, seems quite agreeable. One cannot deny not just the potency but the astonishing eruditeness of Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and its Future (ISAIF). The connection between progress-for-progress sake and leftist inferiority complex is quite revealing. The continual need for a ‘minority’ holds within it the leftist belief that in fact there is a hierarchy. They must see and accept for otherwise they would not know who to help, they need the lower rungs of the ladder to use for their own signalling.
Mama Don’t Like A Tattle-Tale. Hey now, hey kids, hey now, buy this…buy this. Glam-rockers arrive on your lawn. Stiff-glitching vertically, side-to-side, Their hair can’t keep-up. 1986 called, it wants its lag back. You feel that first layer of 30’s fat rolling over your jeans. Eddie Van Halen jumps into cyber-death, identity-pixel-blitz eruption and the 80’s die.
And yet what Kaczynski’s magnum opus revealed to me, even more so than its primitivist attitudes or anti-leftism, is the trajectory freedom and the idea of freedom takes under an industrialized society. The immediate thought that sprung into mind mid-read was that – quite ironically – of the possibility of a contemporary western nomad. What of he whom wishes to exit, though it has been said many times, what of he who truly wishes to? Even if it means he succumbs to a societally perceived regression? Or, what of he whom wishes to simply leave and live in peace in a forest or clearing, in an un-used quiet peace of land, he whom wishes to be he own. If a man cannot just go into the woods and live off his own back without ‘state’ intervention, then be sure that man is not free.
v a p o r l o u n g e 2 0 4 8. Wild nature filtered into a palm tree past. 33 waiting rooms layered into a single dental visit, the receptionist keeps locking eyes, you’re sweating. As you go to caress the tooth of pain you swirl into the sticky leather. The palm trees leaves begin to jive. Reverend Abscess arrives playing a jazz-organ. “Hey boy! Lemme look at them there whites. Open wide.” You’ve become sofa, and your mouth cranks open. “Damn son, you be vapin’…keep at it.”
Meaning comes so easily to Kaczynski. Within ISAIF meaning is synonymous with purpose. And as such Kaczynski sees our contemporary ‘leisure’ activities as ‘surrogate’ activities, that which is extra and thus not of direct importance, yet his emphasis here is upon a world in which there exists only surrogate activities. For the primary acts of survival, of gaining water, food and shelter are catered for practically atop a silver platter. Ones day long hunt for a few rabbits is condensed to a medicinal shopping aisle of pre-packet gunk-meat. A multi-month harvest is altered to tinned carrots, tinned peas and tinned corn. Contemporary labour takes away soul, because contemporary labour has little, if not nothing to do with your life. The metaphysical lacuna between the act of filing insurance papers and the act of harvesting ones of own veg patch is so vast that there can never be a connection.
Witchburner And the roots shall rise into industry and demachinize the cogs. The ferns shall grow through glass, shattering layer upon layer of progress. Wild nature…wild acidic nature simultaneously takes its damn time and is quicker than you’ll ever be. Every curb, every concrete void succumbing to the rampant spread of green! Hail king Dandelion! Master of the collapse. Bunkered down, hunkered down the humans tremble as the grass grows tall. Collaboration between oil, sky and greenery. A thick covering of prim-smog. Long live the Earth’s flesh!
Upon further inspection one finds that the majority of data pertains to the fact that ‘health’, actual meaningful, soulful health was far better before industrialization. Not just physical, but mental health. The majority of contemporary anxieties arising from physically non-existent bureacratic acts of bitterness, worry, hate and depression stemming from the hellish reverberation between what one can and cannot do. The list of things upon the latter list grows day by day, week by week…as the former shortens, a continual penning-in of a race once accepting of its nature.
Analog Human Resistance there exists a commander, deep underground, he listens to Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds nightly, he thinks himself a proto-John Connor vs NatureNet. Standing upon a mound of boxed fidget spinners and vapes he proclaims: “Let us take back from nature what was never ours!” The analog hour is now!” And so come the grunts, the apathy of a billion useless humans, content to die in a world no longer bending to their whim. Humans cannot resist their home. Human conciousness dissolved into media-pulp. It is over.
“Contemporary records indicate that, more than once, both rich and poor wished that the barbarians would deliver them from the (Roman) Empire. While some of the civilian population resisted the barbarians (with varying degrees of earnestness), and many more were simply inert in the presence of the invaders, some actively fought for the barbarians. In 378, for example, Balkan miners went over en masse to the Visigoths. In Gaul the invaders were sometimes welcomed as liberators from the Imperial burden, and were even invited to occupy territory.” – Joseph Tainter
FIAT GLADIO gladiator arise from the non-burning, arise from the under and overgrowth, arise into the a world born-natural, into the world without mask. Tech-Gladio programmed by Arthurian legend, master of the stone, the industrial from the natural, a true proclaimer for continuation of the abusers! March towards the evolving mall-wrecks, the cars-turned-orchids, the satellites-cum-fly-traps. Pre-programmed human-history detritus stood before wild perfection!
He laughs as he clicks the ‘order’ button for another pallet of sardines. Smashing the toaster into a thousands pieces “Primitivists don’t have toast, Earth rules!” Naked, covered in tar atop the kitchen table he screams.
Culture Terror walking forth into physical memory. The parks gone, swingset eroded and nostalgia sodomized by the agency of the grand Mother. Gladio marches year upon year, finding nothing but the remains of apathetic industry. Slowing, trembling, slowing and cursing, to a crawl…to a stop. Bug-covered, rusting and leg-vined, Gladio halts a final time, physically unable to move from the undergrowth. The final robotic remnant of humanity forever encased in a labyrinth of wild-thicket, eternity passes before its eyes.
Let’s see where this goes…
Corruptor/Depopulator oh what terrors eternity can bring! My son you shall witness, oh my eternal robotic human misery witness, witness, witness the rise and rise of Mother! Gladio’s steel lids held apart by dampened leaves. Never look away, never can you un-see the acidic terror of a wild nature unfurled! See your past, your future, your time entire splinter into non-recognizable patches of nature! Fields of green! Seas of green! Wooden supports holding up the Natura Aeternum!
Storm King Interview with Nishiki
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