War Is the Air We Breathe

I’m sitting in an old 1830s farmhouse near the border between New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It’s over 90° and quite humid, as it has been since I arrived five days ago. It seems the heat wave will only intensify in the next days. I spent a lot of time here in the 1980s and early 1990s before my daughter was born and then when she was a child we spent most summers here. I passed through once in the early 2000s, but haven’t spent time here for more than 25 years. It’s delightful to be with my granddaughters, who are now 7 and 4 and at the peak of enjoyment for a lazy summer in New England on a sprawling farm with a swimming pool, birds and bugs galore, and plenty of attentive adults to engage with as needed. I feel quite blessed to have this time with them, it passes SO quickly, and they are growing emotionally and intellectually by leaps and bounds. It’s great fun to watch it up close.

Salisbury Beach on a 90 degree day in July…

Discovering a baby bird in the barn…

Meanwhile, I’ve been groping towards writing something for my blog. I haven’t felt uninspired exactly. More that I’m lacking focus. I’ve read another ten books that I think deserve discussion and analysis as I usually do here. But unlike some times when the connections between the books seem clear and what I have to say helps link them into a larger (hopefully cohering) essay, my thoughts have not been gelling this time.

I attended a gathering of neo-Luddites at the Blue Mountain Center in the first week of June. Perhaps I should clarify that Luddism doesn’t mean what most people take it to mean: an uncritical knee-jerk refusal or rejection of all technology or “progress.” That would be a meaningless position. As Brian Merchant makes clear in his excellent Blood in the Machine that I talked about in a previous post, the actual workers in early 1800s England who attacked various factories and machines were quite selective. They went after machines that they identified as worsening their lives and making their exploitation more extreme. They did not attack all machinery, and actually were adept at choosing technologies that improved their lives and made their work lives more pleasant, more endurable. It was primarily a class struggle against those who owned the new factories and were imposing new machinery to speed up and intensify the work process without taking into account the effects on those who would run the machines. Ultimately the original movement (under the name of a mythological General Ned Ludd) was brutally crushed by the British government using capital punishment for all sorts of relatively trivial property crimes. Since the 1810s, the term ‘Luddite’ has been thrown at any and every group or individual who suggests that the decisions about technologies, labor processes, economic organization, etc. are misguided and should be critically considered. The idea that we have taken wrong paths again and again in the interests of private profit can hardly be controversial at this stage in history. And yet, every challenge that arises from anyone who doesn’t own enough wealth to make unilateral decisions that affect us all is met with derision and the dismissive term “Luddite!” In its slightly watered down version, critics are accused of standing in the way of Progress. (Read my “The Progress Club: 1934 and Class Memory” for a clear look at how this worked in San Francisco’s 20th century history.)

I anticipated meeting super interesting people at the Blue Mountain Center meeting—which I did—but I did not imagine we would find enough commonality that we’d leave there with a shared mission. As it turns out, most of the attendees endorsed a two-part agenda to follow through on. Part one, that I participated in, focused on finding a way to document and record the history of the past half century of tech criticism and neo-Luddite actions. This might include an extensive internal bibliography (since so many of the folks in the larger community already have huge libraries and have produced so much interesting writing and other works of tech criticism), as well as an annotated selected bibliography to publish online that would be a convenient “one-stop shop” for those who are beginning the exploration of these themes. The future website should include histories of past conferences, past anthologies, past publications, as well as documenting the ongoing campaigns that are fundamental challenges to the direction of technological development in our current era—I frame it as a battle over the direction of the General Intellect. Whether we’re talking about the overarching challenge to the petro-chemical industries who are primarily responsible for the unfolding climate catastrophe, cancer epidemic, and much of the biodiversity collapse too, or the burgeoning efforts to challenge the rollout of AI in the context of a rapacious surveillance capitalism dominated by a few monopoly tech firms, or the global (and tech worker) rejection of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza using state-of-the-art armaments paid for by U.S. taxpayers or produced by the only dynamic sector in Israel’s domestic economy, war tech. There are many more examples of movements “from below” contesting the design and uses of technologies, the purposes to which our shared technosphere is put. Biomedical research is another area that is presented as a benign series of technological breakthroughs, but simmering within and without are social actors who reject the resurgent eugenicist agendas bolstering much of this work, who recognize the absurd patriarchal and heteronormative assumptions that underly all of modern medicine. Peasant movements connecting with agroecologists are crossing the global north-south boundaries to contest the multinational grain and drug companies who dominate an unsustainable and ecocidal industrial agricultural system. And so on.

My granddaughters’ great-great-grandfather was Al Capp, cartoonist of the L’il Abner strip that was extremely popular from the 1930s to the 1970s. Here in 1948 he introduced his metaphor for generalized abundance, the Shmoo!

Amidst all this is the peculiar emergence of the quasi-religious bundle of ideas labeled TESCREAL (for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (modern) Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism) that in various ways underlies the mad rush fueling the AI race, the (privatized) space race, and the resurgent Eugenics projects that are thinly veiled in modern synthetic biology, medical research, and border policing.

Anyway, our Tech Critics Network has roots in previous gatherings that I could not dig up via online searching, called together by Jerry Mander and others with crucial funding from Doug Tompkins, recently profiled in Jonathan Franklin’s well-written biography A Wild Idea. (Read about the bitter Chinatown strike that Doug Tompkins was involved in during his years as a kind of Steve Jobs of retail clothing.) Those prior gatherings took place in the early 1980s and early 1990s, the latter leading to the anthology edited by Stephanie Mills Turning Away From Technology. Stephanie was with us at Blue Mountain Center, where she held to her identity as a “romantic pastoralist,” and represented one of the longer threads going back through the decades that led to our get-together. The other side of the group came up with some plans to intervene in public this fall in New York and other cities, but I won’t say more since it’s in the works, and not ready for prime-time…

The oligarchs panic!

Koohan Paik-Mander (along with Jim Thomas) led the effort to bring together this new constellation of critical voices. She is particularly focused on fighting the war industries that colonized the entire Pacific, and the particular horrors that the use of AI in war technologies brings. One book I read recently was written by Jairus Victor Grove, a neighbor to Koohan in Hawaii who I thought was coming to Blue Mountain Center but didn’t make it. It’s called Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World. It stopped me in my tracks. There are a number of themes that come up in the course of the slim volume, but the main point I took from it is that we are living in the Eurocene, a 500-year civil war that sent the barbaric Europeans across the planet where they slaughtered countless millions directly and indirectly by way of their microbial fellow travelers.

The Eurocene names a practical problem not captured by the Anthropocene. Eurocentrism, more than a worldview, is a five-hundred-year project of violent terraforming and atmospheric engineering. (p. 43) … For 90 percent of the planet, this is a five-hundred-year emergency with catastrophic punctuations of disease, famine, and warfare. Insomuch as there is a “we,” we do not live in a contemporary emergency of decades but a centuries-long present of slow violence. (p. 48)… And as this is a book about the martial character of homogenization, it should come as no surprise that I think warfare, or homogenization by organized violence, plays a central role in the making of the contemporary global system. Significantly, warfare, as a driver of mutation and change, is largely left out of the contemporary debates about the Anthropocene. (p. 59) … To put it a bit more bluntly, politics, colonialism, settlement, capitalism, ecological destruction, racism, and misogynies are not wars by other means—they are war. War is not a metaphor; it is an intensive fabric of relations making the Eurocene. (p. 61) There is no Eurocene without the capability to lay waste to whole civilizations, there is no settlement without extermination, and there is no globalization without homogenization and expansion backed by navies and freelance violence entrepreneurs. (p. 81)

Grove’s arguments come fast and furious at different junctures of his book. But he repeatedly comes back to the apocalypse we face, a planet being destroyed by a world system that has been gaining momentum for five centuries. He too recognizes that the General Intellect (the embodied intelligence in the physical infrastructure that confronts us, including the human capacity to live in and reproduce this complexity) is in play, but unlike the vast majority of Marxists who use the term, he asserts that “War and security are the most significant financial, creative, social, cultural, technological and political investments of almost every nation-state on Earth. The general intellect is a martial intellect.” (emphasis added) Full stop! I’ve spent years thinking about this and developing arguments in Nowtopia and various essays about the social struggle over the direction of science and technology, i.e. the general intellect. And I’ve written plenty about militarism and the long sordid history of United States colonialism in particular, including the economic dependence of our society on war ever since WWII. But Grove captures the essence in a way I had never really put together before.

Grove goes further. Uniting the critique of the Eurocene with the related analysis of modern technological society, he traces the earliest impetus for the capitalist take-off not to markets or inherent technological paths, but to the omnipresent drive to destroy through warfare.

As a matter of historical development, the industrialization of war preceded the industrialization of civilian factories. The two most important components of industrialization—interchangeable parts and the assembly line—were developed because of the demands of larger and larger armies, not larger and larger civilian markets. Furthermore, the demand for American industrialization was not the result of an “invisible hand” but a directive of the War Department to create operations for arms production using interchangeable parts. (p. 106)

In another book, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Labor, and the Transcontinental Railroad, Manu Karuka makes a parallel argument about the conquest of the U.S. west:

The earliest technical labor for U.S. railroads originated in the U.S. Army. Amid a shortage in engineers, U.S. railroad companies turned to engineers from West Point, who surveyed more than twenty railroads between 1827 and 1838. Many of those engineers would leave the army to work directly for the railroad companies, some of the moving on to supervise railroad construction in other empires. The U.S. Army is one place to look for the rise of management bureaucracies and administrative hierarchies, both understood as hallmarks of the industrial corporation. The history of the corporation cannot be separated from the history of colonial warfare. (p. 42)

I’ve written extensively about the role of the Pentagon in financing and shaping the modern tech economy. All the gadgets, games, and gizmos that fill our lives, absorb our attention, and demand our constant subordination have their origins in military spending and war imposed on other parts of the planet. That remains largely invisible to most people. But crucially, the actual inventing and producing of anything and everything is also largely unknown. The stupid myths of great men, genius inventors, specially talented individuals who somehow think up every good idea, are patently ridiculous. Elon Musk is a delusional schoolboy obsessed with 1950s pulp science fiction. Nothing he’s bought has departed from the ideas he developed while a child in apartheid South Africa, and his politics increasingly reveal those racist roots. As Ed Zitron ably demonstrates in a not-to-be-missed two-parter on his podcast Better Offline, the shareholder capitalism that Jack Welsh of General Electric shaped in the 1970s and 80s is now fully running the show. The much-vaunted tech leaders at OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Apple, etc. are MBAs sitting on pyramids of self-promoting managers, and light years from inventors or even capable technical innovators, and their only obsession is with growing “shareholder value” at the expense of any other metric. The truth about how we got to this moment of our general intellect, the forces that really shaped our technosphere and the knowledge and assumptions that make it possible for us to persist in this environment, have much more prosaic roots. As Grove puts it:

This rhythm of creativity organizes people, matter, technology, cities, spaces, geography, and flow toward disruptive innovation. Tinkerers, artisans, and inventors participate in a nomad science that is neck deep in the assembly of things. Reassembly and reorganization rather than ex nihilo invention is the mode of production for the constant tactical factor. (p. 127)

I wrote about this in depth in Nowtopia 15 years ago. Almost every breakthrough in science and technological development starts with tinkerers and artisans messing around with the materials at hand until something new emerges, usually completely unexpected and often at first unnoticed. But even where concerted efforts are made to pursue a specific technological path, we easily forget the interventions made at multiple points by choice or serendipity that closed off alternate paths. Grove’s expansive ruminations contribute further:

It is important to take seriously that other technological lines of development have been marginalized, even driven extinct, not because they are less functional or less innovative but because a particularly abstracted and mechanistic view of technology grounded in Western Enlightenment got lucky. To mistake the fortuitous contagion of 1492 with the superiority of a European techne is as much a failure of facts as it is a failure of ethics. Instead, the contemporary line of technological innovation more closely resembles the trilobyte explosion just before the Great Dying, in which changes in the environment benefited only one species. (p. 197) . . . the accelerationist accounts of technology are about as diverse as Monsanto corn. Like the aristocracy of the Habsburg empire, the insular and parochial trajectory of technological thought is bereft with recessive traits. While I share the view that the “left must become literate in … technical fields,” I am less convinced that “big data” will be as important as Hawaiian sustainable fish farming or the capacity to proliferate wilder forms of life in the intensifying apocalypse of our time. (p. 209)

It seems a bit weird to be writing about all this while we watch a gerontocratic plutocracy imploding under the scorching heat dome covering half of North America. The grifter’s hand-picked sycophantic judges have done their job and protected him from prosecution on multiple fronts. The doddering president, with ever less to hold on to, has embraced his inner malignant narcissist and mirrored the grifter’s claims that he alone can save us. The liberal focus on defeating the left ensures a free reign for the rising tide of fascism. Elected lefties like Bernie and AOC tighten their embrace of the already finished Biden, knowing that the rest of the liberal spectrum is much more horrified by what they represent than actual fascism. Looking at the machinations of those who would try to save a crippled ship sinking into the demonstrable apocalypse boiling our waters, bombing and strafing the innocent, while filling our air and land with toxic sludge, I can’t make sense of it. It resembles the collapse of the Soviet Union, and yet so much goes on outside the spectacle of power that I truly can’t know where we’re headed. Since I don’t have to have an “answer” here on my blog, I’ll give the last word to another Grove quote that somehow strikes a hopeful note:

The third and fourth industrial revolutions depend on sterile labs and rare earth minerals, which when assembled for computation are fatally allergic to heat and water, and entirely dependent on luxurious amounts of electricity. In a world that is getting hotter and wetter, and where energy is scarce, one would hope that other technologies as well as other forms of life are possible. (p. 223) … In the end, who will decide and for whom, and at what scale and character the technical transformations will take places, is anything but technical. (p. 211)

The bucolic countryside along the border of Massachusetts and New Hampshire…