Whose future? by John Zerzan

My advice or exhortation is the same to everyone, but especially to you who have the most to lose: Fight Back.

We're on a death march with the destination coming into clear view.

Bill Joy, founding CEO and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, says we have maybe thirty years before genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics become fully self-replicating. The high-tech Brave New World will then rule us directly.

One hundred species of plant and animal life go extinct every day, and that number continues to inch upward. The oceans are dying. Proliferating studies tell us that global warming, increasing steadily, will kill the biosphere within a few decades. Ozone holes get bigger, and cancer has become epidemic as air, water, and soil became increasingly toxic.

From the age of two children are now liable to be prescribed Ritalin and/or anti-depressants to drug them into compliance with an ever more empty, unhealthy life-world. Kids shooting kids at school has become almost a commonplace, joining the horror of multiple-homicide rampages at home, work, or Burger King. The teenage suicide rate has tripled over the past three decades, and forty to fifty million Americans are on Prozac. "Mystery" afflictions-for which there is no known cause-from chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia to False Memory Syndrome torture millions, as do eating disorders, health-threatening obesity, and a host of other kinds of immiseration. A sterile, isolating, technicized society, truly pathological in its engulfing impoverishment.

Resist. Break ranks. Trust your desires. It's not you who's fucked up.

The cancer-like domination of technology and capital must be stopped and dismantled.

After thirty years a current of radical opposition is developing and it needs you.
The new movement is anarchy, which is about freedom, health, authenticity. Crossing the threshold into your adult years, how much freedom, health and authenticity do you think the Megamachine will make possible for you? Does it not offer, instead, a "life" of mediation, hierarchy, and isolation on a dying planet?

We humans didn't always live like this. Our ancestors, who used fire to cook fibrous vegetables 1.7 million years ago, had a qualitatively different existence until just 10,000 years ago. Our adoption of agriculture brought division of labor and domestication. Until then, humans lived in keeping with an egalitarian ethos with ample leisure time, gender equality, and no organized violence. Archeological studies in various parts of the world demonstrate this, our true history.

Unknown to most, this has been the mainstream view presented in anthropology and archeology textbooks for the past few decades. It sounds utopian, but it's now the generally accepted paradigm, and has had heartening implications for a growing number of us in the new culture of opposition. If we once-and for so long-lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again. The catastrophe that's overtaking us has deep roots, but our previous state of natural anarchy reaches much further into our shared history.

Check out your life, as sold to you by this lying system. For you, and for all of us, we must break the spell of denial and reclaim our birthright.

Come alive and fight!