The Anthropik Network
Categories: Movies
Tags: civilization, fantasy, technophilism
REWILD.info Conversations
The Library collects important essays and articles for primitivism and rewilding into a single archive.
Have we podfaded? Honestly, yes. We still harbor plans to bring back the podcast, once we have a place where we can record! Expect us back sometime in 2008.
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Hey, taxes, hunting & fishing licenses and all the rest cost money. Besides, you'll need field guides, books, and some other gear anyway. The indigenous peoples of the world have spoken: the most useful thing to come out of civilization is the t-shirt.
Coming soon.
So, until he started talking about what motivates terrorists, it seems pretty horrific. But then it turned pleasantly into something ridiculously amusing. Am I alone in this?
Comment by jhereg — 31 May 2007 @ 11:23 AM
Nope.
But he is right, reasonable values in the Drake equation suggests there should be hundreds of thousands of these Type I, II and III civilizations about. These aren’t the kinds of things you’d really hide, either. A Dyson sphere? Complete control over the total energy output of a whole galaxy? Or could it be that L—the lifespan of civilizations—is self-limiting, because wherever you go, civilization is unsustainable? Nah, couldn’t be it. Must be the terrorists. Because tolerance means wiping out every living thing on the planet that isn’t Homo sapiens.
It’s stuff like this that reminds you how insane civilization really is.
It’s worth noting that the notion of complexity as a function of energy goes back to the work of Leslie White and White’s Law, which states, C = ET, where C is cultural complexity, E is energy consumed per capita per year, and T is a measure of the technical efficiency of energy consumption. That also inspired the Kardashev scale that’s being discussed in the video, the silly ranking of non-existent, theoretical types of advanced civilizations. The Kardashev scale is also important to the idea of “the Singularity.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 May 2007 @ 11:30 AM
A quote from R.D. Laing’s Politics of Experience comes to mind:
[quote]In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.’s if possible.[/quote]
If that guy isn’t an imbecile with a high I.Q. then I don’t know who is. The problem is that so many people in this culture buy into this crap. We quite clearly won’t ‘progress’ from type zero to type 1 civilization, but we are killing the planet trying to do so, and we might just end up killing ourselves, or at the very least, we’ll wind up making the quality of life for the survivors of this mess far lower than it needed to be.
Comment by Hasha — 31 May 2007 @ 12:41 PM
Is it the goal of humanity to create robots and advance mechanical automation?
Are the hopes, fears, desires and emotions, human values of truth ,love to be sacrificed on the altar of “progressive science” that really sucks,suns,planets and galaxies dry of all life?
Are humans robots or is it the goal of humans to only create robots?
Do we have any love and compassion for the plants,animals and earth around us or are those empty words?
Doe Jeans and madonna make a culture? if this culture spreads allover the world, what Other culture will be left to be “tolerant” about?
This guy frightens me…yes ..I am very afraid.
Comment by Hari — 31 May 2007 @ 12:56 PM
This diatribe sounds like it’s coming from the Transhumanist mindset. If neoprimitivism has an ontological true opposite, then TH would be it. Here’s Ran Prieur’s excellent dissection of these teachings (if the spam filter, will let it through, of course).
Comment by venuspluto67 — 31 May 2007 @ 1:18 PM
Intellectual styrofoam.
Comment by thistle — 31 May 2007 @ 4:33 PM
And it’s brought to you by consumer debt. Sweet.
Comment by thistle — 31 May 2007 @ 4:39 PM
Well spank my ass and call me a bitch!
Yeah I’ve seen this guy (Michio Kaku) say things like this on a bunch of tv programs on Discovery and History channels. He was on a Discovery channel miniseries called 2057 a few months back that took a look at what life and technology will be like in 50 years. Needless to say the whole show was bullshit.
Comment by Andy — 31 May 2007 @ 5:56 PM
“The internet is the beginnings of a type one telephone system, that’s all it is.” - Ummm, heard of an ivory tower intellectual?
So I take it he isn’t a radical?
Of course, transitioning in a hundred years assumes we don’t kill ourselves first, regardless of what terrorists do.
This was scary, I was laughing, but grimacing at the same time. Can some body say ‘worst case scenario’?
Comment by Matt — 31 May 2007 @ 8:47 PM
Andy, you just made my day.
You and Jim, for his Depends comment in the “Primitivism: The Movie” thread.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 1 June 2007 @ 12:06 AM
Ran Prieur has stated on more than one occasion that he is not a primitivist, largely because he finds the philosophy too constricting. A few quotes from his site:
So, he is a critic of civilization, but he is also skeptical of primitivism. I find myself in agreement with him far more often than with the Anthropik crew.
Comment by Robert — 1 June 2007 @ 4:49 AM
Though he might be underestimating the complexity of full-on primitive society. From what little I know of some of them, they are quite complex, especially when it comes to the relationships between things.
What scares me more than this guy is the number of people who, upon watching this, went, “YEAH!” Doesn’t what he’s describing with the robots sound similar to a virus?
Wait, weren’t the Empire folk the BAD GUYS in Star Wars? Why would we want to emulate them? Especially if Hollywood is going to be our monoculture, I should hope we’d at least try to LEARN something from it.
Pardon me, I’ve got to run out and get the latest Madonna cd…
Comment by raku — 1 June 2007 @ 1:34 PM
Yeah, I suppose it’s sad, but my biggest jolt of terror came after his “Arnie” & Madonna comment….
Comment by jhereg — 1 June 2007 @ 2:09 PM