For me I'm thinking that a weekly sabbath from all tech is the starting point for engaging with it properly. Longer term I think we need to copy the Amish and use their systems for assessing tech.
This is the 'tools of the master' question. Personally I think that any digital engagement tool is skewed heavily against what is required next e.g. consensus building, nuance, complexity etc. You can pick up their gun but it will only keep shooting in one direction no matter where you point it. I wrote a long version of this in 2022/23 which is linked to summary here https://larger.us/ideas/revolution-will-not-be-on-social-media/
Indeed. My substack seems to be full of people writing about getting off digital platforms (myself included). I am also working with someone on building other approaches. But I keep coming back to the niggle that perhaps it just requires a more analogue approach. We should probably all be out saving pubs
Having just been in a situation sans progress ie no electricity or internet,I can say from experience that spiking the guns is not an option for 99% of people. Turning their guns on them is also difficult but not impossible.
There are historical parallels for this in the creation of the Irish State in 1920, Michael Collins both a) conducted a highly successful guerilla war and b)created alternative institutions in parallel including an alternative legal system (unfortunately this did not last long after independence). This two pronged approach (which I'm aware not everyone's politics will agree with but I'm using it as an example) was the first time that the British Empire had been successfully challenged, and it paved the way for its eventual collapse. India's independence campaign ran on similar lines, challenge the status quo but also provide people with alternatives. Unfortunately after Gandhi's death the new state became the old state v.20 and it is still is.
I keep thinking lately of Star Wars (the original). The Death Star had a fatal flaw contained in it, our Death Star does too, it thinks that it knows everything. Again I can't help thinking of the words of Pearse (again, not to everyone's political taste) but you could say the same about modernity.
'They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and, while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace'.
Also, I think our American cousins would posit that they successfully challenged the British Empire long before the Irish, though in saying that, the American Revolution was of course greatly helped by the thousands of "Scots-Irish" Presbyterian migrants from Ulster, who had had enough of living under the thumb of the crown here in Ireland and then in America ;-)
There are certainly parallels here mate, probably more so in the fact that the vast majority of Irish people were against the cited rebellion, magnitudes more of course fought for the British than ever fought against them. This will also be the case in the war against the megamachine, the majority is content enough with the status quo. The war of independence that you mention is indeed illustrative, as it was a small vanguard of rebels who dragged the rest of the country (well the rest of part of the country) with them, like all revolutions and perhaps like our own, it is always a small militant vanguard who lead the way. Other lessons from early 20th century Ireland are also apt, the fact that the afore mentioned Collins was murdered by those who (even after his heroics) seen him as a compromiser. This tragedy shows us that no matter who far we go in resisting there will always be those more militant (They found this out in Russia too after 1917) who may in fact plunge the knife in our backs for not going far enough. An even greater tragedy than the murder of Collins was of course the Civil War that ensued after the war of independence, where the Irish showed that they could be just a brutal to each other as the British were. There are so many lessons to be learned from the history of this wee island, so many in fact that we still haven't learned the half of them ourselves.
I completely agree. Up to a third of the British Army in the nineteenth century was Irish and the 1916 rebellion was initially deeply unpopular. Most Irish people at the time were not onboard with the project until a combination of a hugely unpopular mass conscription policy as well as the backlash against the executions of the leaders.
And the deaths of Pearse and Collins are illustrative of the fact that any rebellion against the Machine is deeply dangerous, something both men were fully aware of. There is a story that on signing the treaty, Birkenhead said 'I have signed my political death warrant', and Collins replied 'I have signed my actual death warrant'. And he knew that those pulling the trigger would not be British but Irish.
Robert Bellah said:
'The quality of a culture may be changed when two percent of its people have a new vision.”
I would agree with him but the lesson I would draw from Irish history was that for a successful resistance you need to give people new myths and leaders they will follow, Pearse was a rubbish military leader, but he nailed the imaginative qualities of the movement (being a poet definitely helped). Collins was an administrative genius, but he was also an inspiring figure, even today there is a penumbra of mythology around him.
So for a successful resistance as well as a Jedi mythology, we might need to find Princess Leia and Obi Wan Kenobi!
No conscription was ever enforced in Ireland, it was never in place here, it was of course proposed and even became law in 1918 (two years after the rising) and caused a bit of a backlash, but it was never enforced. This fact again illustrates that hundreds of thousands of Irishmen volunteered (were not conscripted) to fight for the British, whereas only a few thousand would fight against them. A vanguard with quality leaders is indeed the need of the hour.
You are correct, it was never enforced, but it was proposed and was deeply unpopular, the timing was very bad in the wake of 1916. I think it was one of the key contributing factors to Sinn Fein’s victory in 1918 and the subsequent War of Independence. I agree thousands of Irish men (among them my own ancestors) fought in WWI, but there was sudden tipping point in Ireland around 1918 where the dominant narrative suddenly changed and new things became possible.
Something similar happened in the Soviet Union in 1989, there were a number of factors- Chernobyl being one of them. But the difference was that when the collapse came there wasn’t anything to replace it, leading to the present gangster state we’ve got now in Russia. So, to reiterate my previous point, imo we need new myths as well as new leaders, so that when things fall apart we can point to alternatives. Quiet work community building might be far more important than any of us realise.
"So, to reiterate my previous point, imo we need new myths as well as new leaders, so that when things fall apart we can point to alternatives." Case in point being the Gaelic revival laying the groundwork (new/old myth) for an Ireland free of British rule..
I don’t want to hog your time, you have been so generous in your replies, but imo just getting people to say the same things in a different language is not going to change anything. I have noticed that incrementally the island is being prepared for unification in subtle ways, the weather forecast in the South is now for the whole island, the electricity grid now encompasses the whole landmass. There is no debate about this, which I find unsettling.
I get the impression (and I’m not alone) that Someone Has Decided That Ireland Will be Unified, and the rest of us will get the memo when it happens. This is not democracy….Northern Ireland Division of Ireland Inc is not better, it’s just New Boss Same As the Old Boss Except the Letterboxes Are Green. Pretty sure that’s not what Pearse or Collins wanted, and died for either.
oh baby... of course the Algo would put this first on my feed, as it is exactly where much of my thinking often lies. The fact that the very sharp point of post modern neo Luddite thought... say a Kingsnorth.... using social media to present his article, shows the depth of how much even the true believers ( I very much enjoy Kingsnorth) has been sucked into the whirlpool of modern media.
The dominance is total. Besides the amish, who have been around for quite a while, I'm still waiting to hear about a community who is able to withstand caving in to the internet. Not one it seems... across the entire globe... which is strange because there are so many countless voices, especially here on substack, myself included, who bemoan the state of things in comparison to what felt healthier in the past.
question Ive struggled with for a long time. dropped out of college in 99 after being influenced by Ellul and the Unabomber manifesto. Had a large family as a sort of protest against the denigration of the trad family that was echoed in the old media frequently. Took up a construction trade for a living that was utterly analog form of making a living. But honestly all those roads seem to be dead ends in some ways.... more a focus on the outer structures of existence. having a lot of children ( which has been great) didn't make me a great father. Doing an ancient trade didn't improve my heart more than a computer programmer I don't think.. Living in a cabin in the woods of Alaska and carrying buckets of water every morning.... don't think that elevated me into a morally superior position either. In fact, I think being a teacher in the heart of the city would have been just as uplifting and outside the tech/false progress paradigm as anything.
In 2020 we went back to Alaska to build out the offgrid homestead/farm. with seven kids. I think some of the kids ( it was during covid ) spent more time on line there than they ever did in Philadelphia. and for myself, who leans towards the attempt to create a " forest passage" type of place outside the currents of society... the more isolated one is... the more enjoyable it is to find some connection online. Not to mention how superior the content is nowadays compared to analog TV.
yet reading Ellul is very dangerous i've come to learn. All the reading and thinking that tends to castigate society for the direction it is headed in. So easy to get self righteously sucked into becoming a " world controller' in our own little minds..... and coming up with the remedies that is going to set everything right.... and so often those remedies focus on outer forms... economy... tech.... for me those are the two paradigms that have always captured my attention... alongside the impact of those two institutions on community.
but the thought strikes me that on some levels there is a focus on bringing the spiritual kingdom down the earthly level. But the Kingdom is not of this world.
All the movements to bring paradise to this earth...at scale.... never seems to work that way... and if we could pull the plug on the internet, and screens in general.... maybe the truth is that would do nothing, suffering would re arrange itself and clans of close knit men would be planning on cross town raids to pillage and murder. Humans have this damn tendency to murder.
But on the individual level, some people do seem to get it. To achieve harmony and resonance to their lives, full of meaning, purpose love and commitment - and I think these are the ones who enter into the Kingdom. It can be done anywhere, regardless of tech development. Just like the hell of earth of resentment, fear anxiety and toxic judgmentalism can be found anywhere regardless of tech development.
The outer forms are sick to the bone and very likely in some sort of implosion period... but this may be just a reflection of the corruption of the inner... and the total inability for so many do the inner work that the spiritual masters talk about. I haven't done it, and reading intellectual books about fixing society is not going to do it for me.
To have any effect on the outside, we must go inside. An old story. Easier said than done. but maybe the hardest part is the refusal to let go
Wow, what an amazing comment, this comment should in fact be the article, so well written and so balanced and nuanced something that isn't always easy to convey in articles. Thank you so much for this Vincent, a lot to ponder here.
I've adopted a hybrid approach. I'm using substack here for the digital reach but the main thing I do is make a cassette magazine, which is mail to people for free.
I also think that hosting your own website is also fine. Cory Doctorow does this. But there is a always the problem of starting from 0. And the platforms are good at driving engagement as you've been mentioning.
I've been seeing here a big resurgence in printed zines and the like so I think many people are trying the hybrid approach.
Using digital to scale, but analog for connection.
As someone who went almost entirely offline (only using the local library once a week, no home internet and nothing on my phone) for a few months last year this is an important question, and one I can weigh in on by saying that once you step out of it you also lose the desire to look back even to attack.
But I think really there needs to be, and this isn't a cop-out, but all three at the same time but with different kinds of people pushing back in their own way. Those who want to spike the guns, do so; Those who want to attack, do so; those who want to build better alternatives, do so. It's sort of like how great religions have a place for every type of person, whether it's the moon-gazing mystic, or the warrior.
One thing that spiking the guns does, as a first point, is remove a good deal of the meat from the grinder. It doesn't matter how much sabotage you perform if you've still got people with skin in the game (or more accurately, believing they have skin in the game), so maybe the correct answer would be all three, and in the order you list them?
It's been said -most people are like fish in water. Don't know that they are in water, if told, mock the thought that they are in water, can't see any other existence. We are a voice in the wilderness. Tighten your belt and keep your power dry.
I recently found myself on a zoom call where out of nowhere a message popped up ‘It sounds as if you’re speaking English. Please confirm your language. I used the drop down menu to respond Chinese (simple). Goodness knows what that might do to the algorithm
Thanks for this post. It definitely sparks conversation!
I feel none of the pole options work for me.
Across centuries, there are clear aspects that continually get targeted.
1. Our connection to spirit
2. Our connection to the land
3. media gets hijacked (main and social)
4. division into separate antagonistic groups
5. means of existence (energy and food)
6. our inner moral compass becomes fragmented
For me, until we address these, individually and culturally, we will always struggle. The good news is they are straightforward to address, many have gone ahead of us and laid the groundwork.
For me I'm thinking that a weekly sabbath from all tech is the starting point for engaging with it properly. Longer term I think we need to copy the Amish and use their systems for assessing tech.
This is the 'tools of the master' question. Personally I think that any digital engagement tool is skewed heavily against what is required next e.g. consensus building, nuance, complexity etc. You can pick up their gun but it will only keep shooting in one direction no matter where you point it. I wrote a long version of this in 2022/23 which is linked to summary here https://larger.us/ideas/revolution-will-not-be-on-social-media/
Your are probably right Hugh, yet here we are!
Indeed. My substack seems to be full of people writing about getting off digital platforms (myself included). I am also working with someone on building other approaches. But I keep coming back to the niggle that perhaps it just requires a more analogue approach. We should probably all be out saving pubs
Yes I do intend to do a bit of "Pub Saving" myself this weekend :-)
brave, selfless and worthwhile.
Stunning and Brave! :-)
Having just been in a situation sans progress ie no electricity or internet,I can say from experience that spiking the guns is not an option for 99% of people. Turning their guns on them is also difficult but not impossible.
There are historical parallels for this in the creation of the Irish State in 1920, Michael Collins both a) conducted a highly successful guerilla war and b)created alternative institutions in parallel including an alternative legal system (unfortunately this did not last long after independence). This two pronged approach (which I'm aware not everyone's politics will agree with but I'm using it as an example) was the first time that the British Empire had been successfully challenged, and it paved the way for its eventual collapse. India's independence campaign ran on similar lines, challenge the status quo but also provide people with alternatives. Unfortunately after Gandhi's death the new state became the old state v.20 and it is still is.
I keep thinking lately of Star Wars (the original). The Death Star had a fatal flaw contained in it, our Death Star does too, it thinks that it knows everything. Again I can't help thinking of the words of Pearse (again, not to everyone's political taste) but you could say the same about modernity.
'They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and, while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace'.
Also, I think our American cousins would posit that they successfully challenged the British Empire long before the Irish, though in saying that, the American Revolution was of course greatly helped by the thousands of "Scots-Irish" Presbyterian migrants from Ulster, who had had enough of living under the thumb of the crown here in Ireland and then in America ;-)
There are certainly parallels here mate, probably more so in the fact that the vast majority of Irish people were against the cited rebellion, magnitudes more of course fought for the British than ever fought against them. This will also be the case in the war against the megamachine, the majority is content enough with the status quo. The war of independence that you mention is indeed illustrative, as it was a small vanguard of rebels who dragged the rest of the country (well the rest of part of the country) with them, like all revolutions and perhaps like our own, it is always a small militant vanguard who lead the way. Other lessons from early 20th century Ireland are also apt, the fact that the afore mentioned Collins was murdered by those who (even after his heroics) seen him as a compromiser. This tragedy shows us that no matter who far we go in resisting there will always be those more militant (They found this out in Russia too after 1917) who may in fact plunge the knife in our backs for not going far enough. An even greater tragedy than the murder of Collins was of course the Civil War that ensued after the war of independence, where the Irish showed that they could be just a brutal to each other as the British were. There are so many lessons to be learned from the history of this wee island, so many in fact that we still haven't learned the half of them ourselves.
I completely agree. Up to a third of the British Army in the nineteenth century was Irish and the 1916 rebellion was initially deeply unpopular. Most Irish people at the time were not onboard with the project until a combination of a hugely unpopular mass conscription policy as well as the backlash against the executions of the leaders.
And the deaths of Pearse and Collins are illustrative of the fact that any rebellion against the Machine is deeply dangerous, something both men were fully aware of. There is a story that on signing the treaty, Birkenhead said 'I have signed my political death warrant', and Collins replied 'I have signed my actual death warrant'. And he knew that those pulling the trigger would not be British but Irish.
Robert Bellah said:
'The quality of a culture may be changed when two percent of its people have a new vision.”
I would agree with him but the lesson I would draw from Irish history was that for a successful resistance you need to give people new myths and leaders they will follow, Pearse was a rubbish military leader, but he nailed the imaginative qualities of the movement (being a poet definitely helped). Collins was an administrative genius, but he was also an inspiring figure, even today there is a penumbra of mythology around him.
So for a successful resistance as well as a Jedi mythology, we might need to find Princess Leia and Obi Wan Kenobi!
No conscription was ever enforced in Ireland, it was never in place here, it was of course proposed and even became law in 1918 (two years after the rising) and caused a bit of a backlash, but it was never enforced. This fact again illustrates that hundreds of thousands of Irishmen volunteered (were not conscripted) to fight for the British, whereas only a few thousand would fight against them. A vanguard with quality leaders is indeed the need of the hour.
https://www.theirishstory.com/2018/04/24/a-declaration-of-war-on-the-irish-people-the-conscription-crisis-of-1918/
You are correct, it was never enforced, but it was proposed and was deeply unpopular, the timing was very bad in the wake of 1916. I think it was one of the key contributing factors to Sinn Fein’s victory in 1918 and the subsequent War of Independence. I agree thousands of Irish men (among them my own ancestors) fought in WWI, but there was sudden tipping point in Ireland around 1918 where the dominant narrative suddenly changed and new things became possible.
Something similar happened in the Soviet Union in 1989, there were a number of factors- Chernobyl being one of them. But the difference was that when the collapse came there wasn’t anything to replace it, leading to the present gangster state we’ve got now in Russia. So, to reiterate my previous point, imo we need new myths as well as new leaders, so that when things fall apart we can point to alternatives. Quiet work community building might be far more important than any of us realise.
"So, to reiterate my previous point, imo we need new myths as well as new leaders, so that when things fall apart we can point to alternatives." Case in point being the Gaelic revival laying the groundwork (new/old myth) for an Ireland free of British rule..
https://allthatssolid.substack.com/p/did-that-play-of-mine-send-out
Indeed, and I wrote about that here ;)
I don’t want to hog your time, you have been so generous in your replies, but imo just getting people to say the same things in a different language is not going to change anything. I have noticed that incrementally the island is being prepared for unification in subtle ways, the weather forecast in the South is now for the whole island, the electricity grid now encompasses the whole landmass. There is no debate about this, which I find unsettling.
I get the impression (and I’m not alone) that Someone Has Decided That Ireland Will be Unified, and the rest of us will get the memo when it happens. This is not democracy….Northern Ireland Division of Ireland Inc is not better, it’s just New Boss Same As the Old Boss Except the Letterboxes Are Green. Pretty sure that’s not what Pearse or Collins wanted, and died for either.
oh baby... of course the Algo would put this first on my feed, as it is exactly where much of my thinking often lies. The fact that the very sharp point of post modern neo Luddite thought... say a Kingsnorth.... using social media to present his article, shows the depth of how much even the true believers ( I very much enjoy Kingsnorth) has been sucked into the whirlpool of modern media.
The dominance is total. Besides the amish, who have been around for quite a while, I'm still waiting to hear about a community who is able to withstand caving in to the internet. Not one it seems... across the entire globe... which is strange because there are so many countless voices, especially here on substack, myself included, who bemoan the state of things in comparison to what felt healthier in the past.
question Ive struggled with for a long time. dropped out of college in 99 after being influenced by Ellul and the Unabomber manifesto. Had a large family as a sort of protest against the denigration of the trad family that was echoed in the old media frequently. Took up a construction trade for a living that was utterly analog form of making a living. But honestly all those roads seem to be dead ends in some ways.... more a focus on the outer structures of existence. having a lot of children ( which has been great) didn't make me a great father. Doing an ancient trade didn't improve my heart more than a computer programmer I don't think.. Living in a cabin in the woods of Alaska and carrying buckets of water every morning.... don't think that elevated me into a morally superior position either. In fact, I think being a teacher in the heart of the city would have been just as uplifting and outside the tech/false progress paradigm as anything.
In 2020 we went back to Alaska to build out the offgrid homestead/farm. with seven kids. I think some of the kids ( it was during covid ) spent more time on line there than they ever did in Philadelphia. and for myself, who leans towards the attempt to create a " forest passage" type of place outside the currents of society... the more isolated one is... the more enjoyable it is to find some connection online. Not to mention how superior the content is nowadays compared to analog TV.
yet reading Ellul is very dangerous i've come to learn. All the reading and thinking that tends to castigate society for the direction it is headed in. So easy to get self righteously sucked into becoming a " world controller' in our own little minds..... and coming up with the remedies that is going to set everything right.... and so often those remedies focus on outer forms... economy... tech.... for me those are the two paradigms that have always captured my attention... alongside the impact of those two institutions on community.
but the thought strikes me that on some levels there is a focus on bringing the spiritual kingdom down the earthly level. But the Kingdom is not of this world.
All the movements to bring paradise to this earth...at scale.... never seems to work that way... and if we could pull the plug on the internet, and screens in general.... maybe the truth is that would do nothing, suffering would re arrange itself and clans of close knit men would be planning on cross town raids to pillage and murder. Humans have this damn tendency to murder.
But on the individual level, some people do seem to get it. To achieve harmony and resonance to their lives, full of meaning, purpose love and commitment - and I think these are the ones who enter into the Kingdom. It can be done anywhere, regardless of tech development. Just like the hell of earth of resentment, fear anxiety and toxic judgmentalism can be found anywhere regardless of tech development.
The outer forms are sick to the bone and very likely in some sort of implosion period... but this may be just a reflection of the corruption of the inner... and the total inability for so many do the inner work that the spiritual masters talk about. I haven't done it, and reading intellectual books about fixing society is not going to do it for me.
To have any effect on the outside, we must go inside. An old story. Easier said than done. but maybe the hardest part is the refusal to let go
Wow, what an amazing comment, this comment should in fact be the article, so well written and so balanced and nuanced something that isn't always easy to convey in articles. Thank you so much for this Vincent, a lot to ponder here.
I've adopted a hybrid approach. I'm using substack here for the digital reach but the main thing I do is make a cassette magazine, which is mail to people for free.
I also think that hosting your own website is also fine. Cory Doctorow does this. But there is a always the problem of starting from 0. And the platforms are good at driving engagement as you've been mentioning.
I've been seeing here a big resurgence in printed zines and the like so I think many people are trying the hybrid approach.
Using digital to scale, but analog for connection.
Turn the guns on them initially, then also build our own stuff.
As someone who went almost entirely offline (only using the local library once a week, no home internet and nothing on my phone) for a few months last year this is an important question, and one I can weigh in on by saying that once you step out of it you also lose the desire to look back even to attack.
But I think really there needs to be, and this isn't a cop-out, but all three at the same time but with different kinds of people pushing back in their own way. Those who want to spike the guns, do so; Those who want to attack, do so; those who want to build better alternatives, do so. It's sort of like how great religions have a place for every type of person, whether it's the moon-gazing mystic, or the warrior.
One thing that spiking the guns does, as a first point, is remove a good deal of the meat from the grinder. It doesn't matter how much sabotage you perform if you've still got people with skin in the game (or more accurately, believing they have skin in the game), so maybe the correct answer would be all three, and in the order you list them?
It's been said -most people are like fish in water. Don't know that they are in water, if told, mock the thought that they are in water, can't see any other existence. We are a voice in the wilderness. Tighten your belt and keep your power dry.
Good luck, gentlemen.
I recently found myself on a zoom call where out of nowhere a message popped up ‘It sounds as if you’re speaking English. Please confirm your language. I used the drop down menu to respond Chinese (simple). Goodness knows what that might do to the algorithm
Keep up the good work!!
Thanks for this post. It definitely sparks conversation!
I feel none of the pole options work for me.
Across centuries, there are clear aspects that continually get targeted.
1. Our connection to spirit
2. Our connection to the land
3. media gets hijacked (main and social)
4. division into separate antagonistic groups
5. means of existence (energy and food)
6. our inner moral compass becomes fragmented
For me, until we address these, individually and culturally, we will always struggle. The good news is they are straightforward to address, many have gone ahead of us and laid the groundwork.