I think the ideas of John Zerzan are about to undergo an imminent resurgence of appeal. There are stories abound of recent college graduates booing commencement speakers who are keen to champion AI. A recent NYT headline noted that Anthropic ‘secretly’ called for a halt in all AI research as a ““brake pedal” was needed to protect humanity from self-improving models.” We have set sail on a course very few of us asked for or had any say in. We are on death ship sailing toward a flat-earth horizon.
AI aside, we continue to pollute the planet, deplete natural resources, isolate ourselves from each other, make the rich richer, and fund endless wars, all because we cannot see beyond this absolutely ludicrous socio-economic arrangement. Resistance is largely muted, drowning in infighting and lack of creative vision. Our imaginations have been hijacked by basic survival, the daily grind, consumer desires and endless meaningless distractions. But I think that is about to change.
A growing sense that we are living in end times is now not all that radical of a thought. Thinkers from many different political viewpoints echo this sentiment but most still fail to offer a root understanding of how we got here and what life has looked like for most of our existence as a species.
Marx got a sense of it as did the early anarchists who split from the First International, arguing an anti-authoritarian transition from Capitalism to Communism was needed immediately. The anarchists posited that not only the economic system be dismantled out but also the State. By the mid to late Twenty century some anarchists were looking to move beyond the limits of Leftist politics all together and finally some post-Left anarchists arrived at the conclusion that what was really needed was a criticism of mass-society itself. Civilization. And finally, some of them began looking at what human existence looked like before the beginnings of mass-society, pre-domestication i.e. Gatherer-Hunter nomadic tribes. Anarchy in its natural and most familiar form that is still within us.
One fascinating question Zerzan poses time and time again and throughout this book is, why is it that other radical thinkers get so closer to actual critiques of civilization but then always seem to fall short. Just as we wonder why we domesticated in the first place? Its worth asking why we often can’t see beyond (or going back to) the wild once again?
Zerzan’s autobiography traces his own political evolution from conservative small Oregon town to Bay Area counter culture, to radical union organizing to anarchism to post-Leftism and finally to Green Anarchy. Now more than ever, the well-being and survival of the planet and its inhabitants need to think beyond the voting booth, beyond reforming the economy and the state and take a total look at the horror we are in. It’s hard for people to imagine rejecting civilization at this point but it is even harder to see how this death ship can reset course to somewhere even remotely sustainable.
My only criticism of the book is a couple of chapters that go into a bit too much whimsical detail of some of his speaking tours. These tours do seem necessary to mention but I would rather have heard a bit more about debates and discussions and the exchange of ideas that were had.
All in all, Zerzan’s ideas are worth a revisit. Get your hands on any of his essay collections or the "Against Civilization" compilation he edited and then come back to this memoir to see how he got here.
(*I don’t know why but I believe Feral House was supposed to originally publish this memoir. They had a far better book cover than the one that ended up being used IMO, so I used it for this blog post.)
