AGAINST TECHNOLOGY

Technology Leads to Our Extinction
By: David Lane

Over the many years that I've watched and participated in the resistance to the genocide practiced against the White race, many tactics have been tried. Among them were attempts by the religious and national entities to the resistance.

But today, let's talk about some less obvious but infinitely more important motivators. Almost exclusively, those who have not resorted to nationalistic or religious dogma as a motivation to resist genocide have relied on the history of our technological achievements, extrapolating that future advances in so-called civilization depend upon White racial survival. This could be called the "intellectual" approach. And it has gotten us nowhere, neither in the number of recruits or in achieving our goals. The fact is, men are motivated by more primal instincts, such as sexual lust, than by projected technologies of the future.

But let us explore in depth why the "intellectual" approach has failed. As this treatise unfolds, please don't think it is meant to belittle the works of men such as Galileo, Copernicus, Edison, etc. Certainly there are not many of us who would want to return to an age with no anesthetics for surgery or dentistry. And, indoor plumbing with flush toilets will not lead us to total decadence. But equally apparent is the unfortunate reality that, as usual, the pendulum has swung too far. In Hermetic teachings, an imbalance between reason and instinct is called "The Fall of Lucifer." Lucifer, from the Latin, meaning "Bringer of Reason." By the malicious design of priest-crafters and of state-crafters, we have been programmed with false intellectualization to suppress or ignore Nature given instincts and true wisdom. Abstract theory overrides practical good sense. In high school, some forty-five years ago, I was subjected to classes on the abstract, although true, theorems of solid geometry. However, at all times my greater interest, a thousand times over, was in the perfect solid geometry evidenced in the legs and figure of a girl in a seat nearby. If we are to survive as a unique biological entity, we must deal with, and return to, basic instincts. First of all, because men are motivated by emotions, especially sex. Dry statistics do not inspire heroes or heroic efforts. Secondly, because we are not attempting to save biological computers called brains. At least 99% of my reason for taking up the 14 word struggle can be summed up in my personal 14 word motivator, to wit: "Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth." This motivation is based on aesthetics and the primal sexual lust imparted by Nature to all male mammals for the singular purpose of reproduction and thus specie preservation. Any remaining motivation for fighting the materialistic system that rules all nations, is preservation of this spaceship we call Earth. Because, at the exponentially escalating rate at which we are now destroying our precious planet, there will soon be no quality of life for our folk, even if we do survive the genocidal plans of the world's rulers.

I frankly don't give a tinker's damn about Mars, the moon, or space stations. Life in prison is bad enough. Living in sealed containers on inhospitable planets, breathing bottled air, drinking recycled urine, eating preserved foods, not hearing birds sing, not smelling fresh breezes blowing through pine trees, not seeing our Earth's natural displays of beauty, all sounds to me like extreme torture. And that is what so-called "space exploration" really is. Meanwhile, our rocket ships blow holes in our ozone.

Billions of dollars are extracted from taxpayers so that techno-nerds can play spaceman games. Sixty railroad tankers of fossil fuel are wasted and blown into the air with each launching. In the mythological (perhaps) story of Atlantis, the continent is sunk because the inhabitants used some advanced technology wrongfully. Some versions say errors caused them to destroy themselves, while others indicate that they were punished by "the Gods," whatever that may actually mean, or symbolize.

At any rate, we again live in a world in which technology has run amok. In religious terms we might say we are not spiritually capable of handling the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons we have developed. Even worse, the materialist, genocidal and maniacal tribe that rules the world, also controls most of these weapons; weapons with the capability of destroying the planet and all life upon it. Those genies are, of course, out of their bottles now, and we have to deal with it. At some time in the future, if we accomplish the 14 Words and take control of the Earth's affairs, we will have to deal with what has been created. But for now, let us understand that harmonious balance of reason and instinct needed so that future generations may learn from our mistakes.

Again, while honoring those who brought us to a certain level of civilization, let us look at limits. In my opinion, in America at least, we reached the pinnacle of balance around the late 1950's. Let us consider automobiles for an example. Cars like 1957 Fords and Chevrolets had comfort, style, and simplicity but, instead of proper improvements, we spent hundreds of billions of dollars every decade on cosmetic changes. It was a status game. If those billions had been spent on seals, metallurgy, safety inventions, and efficiency, undoubtedly today we would all be driving 1957 Fords or Chevys that lasted a million miles, that got 100 miles per gallon mileage, that cost a fraction of what today's vehicles cost, that were virtually indestructible in accidents, and that had plug-in replacement parts. But, of course, planned obsolescence was part of the materialist plan of the world's rulers. And the wasting of Earth's resources didn't matter. The 16th Precept says, "Discernment is a sign of a healthy people." In a sick or dying nation, civilization, culture or race, substance is abandoned in favor of appearance. We were led by the liars we call leaders to abandon all substance in favor of appearance.

Speaking of liars, let me insert here that all preachers, politicians, lawyers, media personnel and others who make their living from words rather than honest labor, are liars. See the 59th Precept. Let us consider a Christian preacher for example. They are fond of this deceiving phrase, "In the certainty of life everafter through Jesus Christ." With all due respect to the "beliefs" of any religion, that is bald-faced lying. No true Wotanist will ever say for "certain" that there is eternal life or re-incarnation, or any such "belief." Many will tell you that such is common "belief" among Wotanists. But he who expounds an unproveable "belief" as a certainty is a priest-crafting, lying whore for either money or self-interest or the system. Next, let's discuss a lie told by all the prevaricators of the system. That lie being that "labor saving devices" are inherently good. Once again, I am not attacking all modern inventions. But when we have channel changers for our television sets, remote control garage door openers, power windows in our cars, and on and on, it becomes ridiculous. We lay around like couch potatoes, becoming ever more fat, ugly and lazy. Then, one day, we look in the mirror and in horror, we go spend thousands of dollars to join a health club. There we exchange the "drudgery" of honest labor, for the expensive drudgery of a treadmill or sit-ups or push-ups.

At age 15, I spent all summer working on a farm, at times stacking hay bales for 12 hours a day and I was not fat. A couple years later, I enjoyed changing the oil on my 1939 Plymouth, or tuning it up, greasing it, and making general repairs. Honest labor is not drudgery in all circumstances. However, our society tells us you must be a liar in a suit or with a degree, twisting words to make a living, or you are not successful. And perhaps, the ultimate gauge of success is the number of technological gadgets you possess; most of them being either to escape physical exertion or to show off for other shallow-minded, endless consumers of Earth's precious resources. The facts are that "comfort is the great destroyer." Beauty, wisdom and strength grow out of physical and mental struggle. Character is forged on the anvil of adversity. Beauty is formed from physical struggle and weeding out the ugly and unfit. The physical and mental cannot be separated without destroying both.

Consider health; because of technology such as chemical fertilizers we have destroyed America's topsoil. Now, grains have a fraction of the nutrients they once had. So, we eat several times as much as we once did to satisfy our bodies' cravings. So, a huge percentage of our people are fat and many are outright obese. We get fatter, unhealthier and uglier by the year. But, of course, we don't have to plow our own fields or do physical labor anymore. We can wear fine synthetic fiber clothes and call ourselves, "fullfigured" instead of fat. We even lie to ourselves. Technology gives government computers to follow and control every aspect of our lives. It gives police power chips to install in our bodies, surveillance of even the insides of our houses, chemical and surgical lobotomies and exotic weapons without end. Then, there are the health risks and moral implications of genetically altered grains, animals and even humans as the days of cloning advance.

I'll leave you with the thought that Aryan technology has increased Earth's population from a few tens of millions to six billion plus and growing. We use technology for birth control among our folk and other races use it to reproduce exponentially. Our technology leads to our extinction. 100 years ago we were 60% of the Earth's population. Today, after 100 years of unprecedented technological growth, we are 8% and hopelessly mixed with others due to the modern communications and transportation development. So, was technology a boon or a curse? The question must be answered honestly even by those to whom scientific advances are a dogma as rigid as any religion.

The UNIBOMEBR MANIFESTO (INTRODUCTION)
By Theodore Kaczynski

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries.

2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence: it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can't predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.

5. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important.
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The Modern Anti-World
by John Zerzan

There now exists only one civilization, a single global domestication machine. Modernity’s continuing efforts to disenchant and instrumentalize the non-cultural natural world have produced a reality in which there is virtually nothing left outside the system. This trajectory was already visible by the time of the first urbanites. Since those Neolithic times we have moved ever closer to the complete de-realization of nature, culminating in a state of world emergency today. Approaching ruin is the commonplace vista, our obvious non-future.

It’s hardly necessary to point out that none of the claims of modernity/Enlightenment (regarding freedom, reason, the individual) are valid. Modernity is inherently globalizing, massifying, standardizing. The self-evident conclusion that an indefinite expansion of productive forces will be fatal deals the final blow to belief in progress. As China’s industrialization efforts go into hyper-drive, we have another graphic case in point.

Since the Neolithic, there has been a steadily increasing dependence on technology, civilization’s material culture. As Horkheimer and Adorno pointed out, the history of civilization is the history of renunciation. One gets less than one puts in. This is the fraud of technoculture, and the hidden core of domestication: the growing impoverishment of self, society, and Earth. Meanwhile, modern subjects hope that somehow the promise of yet more modernity will heal the wounds that afflict them.

A defining feature of the present world is built-in disaster, now announcing itself on a daily basis. But the crisis facing the biosphere is arguably less noticeable and compelling, in the First World at least, than everyday alienation, despair, and entrapment in a routinized, meaningless control grid.

Influence over even the smallest event or circumstance drains steadily away, as global systems of production and exchange destroy local particularity, distinctiveness, and custom. Gone is an earlier pre-eminence of place, increasingly replaced by what Pico Ayer calls “airport culture”––rootless, urban, homogenized.

Modernity finds its original basis in colonialism, just as civilization itself is founded on domination––at an ever more basic level. Some would like to forget this pivotal element of conquest, or else “transcend” it, as in Enrique Dussel’s facile “new trans-modernity” pseudo-resolution. Scott Lash employs somewhat similar sleight-of-hand in Another Modernity: A Different Rationality, a feeble nonsense title given his affirmation of the world of technoculture. One more tortuous failure is Alternative Modernity (1995), in which Andrew Feenberg sagely observes that “technology is not a particular value one must choose for or against, but a challenge to evolve and multiply worlds without end.” The triumphant world of technicized civilization––known to us as modernization, globalization, or capitalism––has nothing to fear from such empty evasiveness.

Paradoxically, most contemporary works of social analysis provide grounds for an indictment of the modern world, yet fail to confront the consequences of the context they develop. David Abrams’ The Spell of the Sensuous, for example, provides a very critical overview of the roots of the anti-life totality, only to conclude on an absurd note. Ducking the logical conclusion of his entire book (which should be a call to oppose the horrific contours of techno-civilization), Abrams decides that this movement toward the abyss is, after all, earth-based and “organic.” Thus “sooner or later [it] must accept the invitation of gravity and settle back into the land.” An astoundingly irresponsible way to conclude his analysis.

Richard Stivers has studied the dominant contemporary ethos of loneliness, boredom, mental illness, etc., especially in his Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of Technological Society. But this work fizzles out into quietism, just as his critique in Technology as Magic ends with a similar avoidance: “the struggle is not against technology, which is a simplistic understanding of the problem, but against a technological system that is now our life-milieu.”

The Enigma of Health by Hans Georg Gadamer advises us to bring “the achievements of modern society, with all of its automated, bureaucratic and technological apparatus, back into the service of that fundamental rhythm which sustains the proper order of bodily life”. Nine pages earlier, Gadamer observes that it is precisely this apparatus of objectification that produces our “violent estrangement from ourselves.”

The list of examples could fill a small library––and the horror show goes on. One datum among thousands is this society’s staggering level of dependence on drug technology. Work, sleep, recreation, non-anxiety/depression, sexual function, sports performance––what is exempt? Anti-depressant use among preschoolers––preschoolers––is surging, for example.

Aside from the double-talk of countless semi-critical “theorists”, however, is the simple weight of unapologetic inertia: the countless voices who counsel that modernity is simply inescapable and we should desist from questioning it. It’s clear that there is no escaping modernization anywhere in the world, they say, and that is unalterable. Such fatalism is well captured by the title of Michel Dertourzos’ What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives.

Small wonder that nostalgia is so prevalent, that passionate yearning for all that has been stripped from our lives. Ubiquitous loss mounts, along with protest against our uprootedness, and calls for a return home. As ever, partisans of deepening domestication tell us to abandon our desires and grow up. Norman Jacobson (“Escape from Alienation: Challenges to the Nation-State,” Representations 84: 2004) warns that nostalgia becomes dangerous, a hazard to the State, if it leaves the world of art or legend. This craven leftist counsels “realism” not fantasies: “Learning to live with alienation is the equivalent in the political sphere of the relinquishment of the security blanket of our infancy.”

Civilization, as Freud knew, must be defended against the individual; all of its institutions are part of that defense.

But how do we get out of here—off this death ship? Nostalgia alone is hardly adequate to the project of emancipation. The biggest obstacle to taking the first step is as obvious as it is profound. If understanding comes first, it should be clear that one cannot accept the totality and also formulate an authentic critique and a qualitatively different vision of that totality. This fundamental inconsistency results in the glaring incoherence of some of the works cited above.

I return to Walter Benjamin’s striking allegory of the meaning of modernity:

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (1940)

There was a time when this storm was not raging, when nature was not an adversary to be conquered and tamed into everything that is barren and ersatz. But we’ve been traveling at increasing speed, with rising gusts of progress at our backs, to even further disenchantment, whose impoverished totality now severely imperils both life and health.

Systematic complexity fragments, colonizes, debases daily life. Division of labor, its motor, diminishes humanness in its very depths, dis-abling and pacifying us. This de-skilling specialization, which gives us the illusion of competence, is a key, enabling predicate of domestication.

Before domestication, Ernest Gellner noted, “there simply was no possibility of a growth in scale and in complexity of the division of labour and social differentiation.” Of course, there is still an enforced consensus that a “regression” from civilization would entail too high a cost––bolstered by fictitious scary scenarios, most of them resembling nothing so much as the current products of modernity.

People have begun to interrogate modernity. Already a specter is haunting its now crumbling façade. In the 1980s, Jurgen Habermas feared that the “ideas of antimodernity, together with an additional touch of premodernity,” had already attained some popularity. A great tide of such thinking seems all but inevitable, and is beginning to resonate in popular films, novels, music, zines, TV shows, etc.

And it is also a sad fact that accumulated damage has caused a widespread loss of optimism and hope. Refusal to break with the totality crowns and solidifies this suicide-inducing pessimism. Only visions completely undefined by the current reality constitute our first steps to liberation. We cannot allow ourselves to continue to operate on the enemy’s terms.

Marx understood modern society as a state of “permanent revolution,” in perpetual, innovating movement. Postmodernity brings more of the same, as accelerating change renders everything human (such as our closest relationships) frail and undone. The reality of this motion and fluidity has been raised to a virtue by postmodern thinkers, who celebrate undecidability as a universal condition. All is in flux, and context-free; every image or viewpoint is as ephemeral and as valid as any other.

This outlook is the postmodern totality, the position from which postmodernists condemn all other viewpoints. Postmodernism’s historic ground is unknown to itself, because of a founding aversion to overviews and totalities. Unaware of Kaczynski’s central idea that meaning and freedom are progressively banished by modern technological society, postmodernists would be equally uninterested in the fact that Max Weber wrote the same thing almost a century before. Or that the movement of society, so described, is the historical truth of what postmodernists analyze so abstractly, as if it were a novelty they alone (partially) understand.

Shrinking from any grasp of the logic of the system as a whole, via a host of forbidden areas of thought, the anti-totality stance of these embarrassing frauds is ridiculed by a reality that is more totalized and global than ever. The surrender of the postmodernists is an exact reflection of feelings of helplessness that pervade the culture. Ethical indifference and aesthetic self-absorption join hands with moral paralysis, in the postmodern rejection of resistance. It is no surprise that a non-Westerner such as Ziauddin Sardan judges that postmodernism “preserves—indeed enhances—all the classical and modern structures of oppression and domination.”

This prevailing fashion of culture may not enjoy much more of a shelf life. It is, after all, only the latest retail offering in the marketplace of representation. By its very nature, symbolic culture generates distance and mediation, supposedly inescapable burdens of the human condition. The self has always only been a trick of language, says Althusser. We are sentenced to be no more than the modes through which language autonomously passes, Derrida informs us.

The outcome of the imperialism of the symbolic is the sad commonplace that human embodiment plays no essential role in the functions of mind or reason. Conversely, it’s vital to rule out the possibility that things have ever been different. Postmodernism resolutely bans the subject of origins, the notion that we were not always defined and reified by symbolic culture. Computer simulation is the latest advance in representation, its disembodied power fantasies exactly paralleling modernity’s central essence.

The postmodernist stance refuses to admit stark reality, with discernible roots and essential dynamics. Benjamin’s “storm” of progress is pressing forward on all fronts. Endless aesthetic-textual evasions amount to rank cowardice. Thomas Lamarre serves up a typical postmodern apologetic on the subject: “Modernity appears as a process or rupture and reinscription; alternative modernities entail an opening of otherness within Western modernity, in the very process of repeating or reinscribing it. It is as if modernity itself is deconstruction.”

Except that it isn’t, as if anyone needed to point that out. Alas, deconstruction and detotalization have nothing in common. Deconstruction plays its role in keeping the whole system going, which is a real catastrophe, the actual, ongoing one.

The era of virtual communication coincides with the postmodern abdication, an age of enfeebled symbolic culture. Weakened and cheapened connectivity finds its analogue in the fetishization of ever-shifting, debased textual “meaning.” Swallowed in an environment that is more and more one immense aggregate of symbols, deconstruction embraces this prison and declares it to be the only possible world. But the depreciation of the symbolic, including illiteracy and a cynicism about narrative in general, may lead in the direction of bringing the whole civilizational project into question. Civilization’s failure at this most fundamental level is becoming as clear as its deadly and multiplying personal, social, and environmental effects.

“Sentences will be confined to museums if the emptiness of writing persists,” predicted Georges Bataille. Language and the symbolic are the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, according to Derrida and the rest. Yet we see at the same time an ever-diminishing vista of understanding. The seeming paradox of an engulfing dimension of representation and a shrinking amount of meaning finally causes the former to become susceptible––first to doubt, then to subversion.

Husserl tried to establish an approach to meaning based on respecting experience/ phenomena just as it is delivered to us, before it is re-presented by the logic of symbolism. Small surprise that this effort has been a central target of postmodernists, who have understood the need to extirpate such a vision. Jean-Luc Nancy expresses this opposition succinctly, decreeing that “We have no idea, no memory, no presentiment of a world that holds man [sic] in its bosom". How desperately do those who collaborate with the reigning nightmare resist the fact that during the two million years before civilization, this earth was precisely a place that did not abandon us and did hold us to its bosom.

Beset with information sickness and time fever, our challenge is to explode the continuum of history, as Benjamin realized in his final and best thinking. Empty, homogenous, uniform time must give way to the singularity of the non-exchangeable present. Historical progress is made of time, which has steadily become a monstrous materiality, ruling and measuring life. The “time” of non-domestication, of non-time, will allow each moment to be full of awareness, feeling, wisdom, and re-enchantment. The true duration of things can be restored when time and the other mediations of the symbolic are put to flight. Derrida, sworn enemy of such a possibility, grounds his refusal of a rupture on the nature and allegedly eternal existence of symbolic culture: history cannot end, because the constant play of symbolic movement cannot end. This auto-da-fé is a pledge against presence, authenticity, and all that is direct, embodied, particular, unique, and free. To be trapped in the symbolic is only our current condition, not an eternal sentence.

It is language that speaks, in Heidegger’s phrase. But was it always so? This world is over-full of images, simulations—a result of choices that may seem irreversible. A species has, in a few thousand years, destroyed community and created a ruin. A ruin called culture. The bonds of closeness to the earth and to each other—outside of domestication, cities, war, etc.—have been sundered, but can they not heal?

Under the sign of a unitary civilization, the possibly fatal onslaught against anything alive and distinctive has been fully unleashed for all to see. Globalization has in fact only intensified what was underway well before modernity. The tirelessly systematized colonization and uniformity, first set in motion by the decision to control and tame, now has enemies who see it for what it is and for the ending it will surely bring, unless it is defeated. The choice at the beginning of history was, as now, that of presence versus representation.

Gadamer describes medicine as, at base, the restoration of what belongs to nature. Healing as removing whatever works against life’s wonderful capacity to renew itself. The spirit of anarchy, I believe, is similar. Remove what blocks our way and it’s all there, waiting for us.