Anti-Tech Movement (Part 2)

I have been diving in to this as I become increasingly disillusioned with the internet, surveillance, age verification and the many issues that have arisen around technology over the past decade plus.

It is coming to a head for me to the point that, other than for musts, I am considering leaving the internet behind completely.

I have already stopped carrying a phone, smart or otherwise, outside of the home and have not been on social media for the best part of a decade due to the issues that have been painted widely, around companies such as Meta and Google. Advertising and privacy go hand in hand, and now might even be secondary to governmental control and surveillance through age verification which could be coming to operating systems as a whole, though Apple is out front with this as per usual when it comes to controlling users. Government and tech companies and who is leading the way, that is up for debate when it comes to our techno-feudal lords.

Let’s not forget the yearly, pretty much the same as last year, product push of the black mirror most of us carry, damaging not only pockets but the environment as a whole, while tracking our every move on and offline if you are uninitiated. See Graphene OS. I am almost tempted to do a Tails OS post at some point… Moving on…

I have put together a reading list, along with my usual, personally curated, RSS feeds to deep dive on the wider topic at hand and to try to understand where I stand when it actually comes down to anti-tech and even anarcho-primitivism as a whole.

Most of the books I have on my reading list can be found at the wonderful site Anti-Tech Collective and I link to their reading resources there.

Personally I am currently reading:

The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul

Endgame by Derrick Jensen

And one not on their resource list due to it being new I suspect:

Techno-Negative – A Long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser

I can also kind of recommend the /r/nosurf community on reddit for its occational insights and also /r/privacy and the website Privacy Guides

Also, the classic Surveillance Capitalism is not to be missed by Shoshana Zuboff along with Technofeudalism By Yanis Varoufakis

I think I can consider this a Part 2 to my previous post. I will, more than likely, create a part 3 with further thoughts, such as on China and its social credits system and where we might be headed.

Coin Locker Babies

Interested to see what a Japanese take by Ryu, from 1980, in particular; adds the permaculture of this genre.

Promises to be an interesting read by all accounts.

I shall return with a review, in the meantime; would love to know, what anyone who stumbles across this who has read it thinks.

Minimalism (+digital) and the Art of Conscious Consumption – 1

Minimalism gets a bad rap these days. It has become almost cliche… passé.

However when you break it down to the essence of what it is and means for individuals it couldn’t be more important as an ideal; with offshoots.

Looking at, for example, what could be considered the canonical text for us Westerners, Fumio Sasaki’s ‘Goodbye Things’; minimalism becomes a microcosm and the crux of the human dilemma with regards to the modern world and the phycological issues it presents to us humans. From the historical dualistic mind-body Christian misconception that formed through the idea of dominion and the industrial revolution, the modern world as we inhabit it was formed; and minimalism is an attempt at an antidote.

Hyper capitalism, and what Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism attempts to nutshell, for example, hold within the kernel, where we are. Eloquently and concisely illustrated by The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.

Consumers and cogs in the consumption machine with a data exhaust that can be recycled to facilitate the snake eating its tail.

Sherry Turkle, in Alone Together, rounds out some of the social corners and I intend to try to give my own holistic take through philosophical enquiry and logic.

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TBC and subject to change through minor edits.