I had some fairly good discussions with a bio-primitivist who thinks the only hope for humanity is an anti-tech revolution. So, I just thought I'd copy some of the dialogue here to get people's feedback on whether they think the arguments would be useful for helping convince anti-tech sympathising people in their own life to reconsider some of their positions. Or at least that it might be elucidating in getting a better understanding of where anti-tech people are coming from. And obviously if you sympathise more with them, then we can carry on the discussion here too.

Their ideology is similar to some anarcho-primitivists in that essentially they'd like to just burn everything down to try and get as close to hunter-gatherer life as possible, 'hiding between the cracks' of the feudal war-lords that would rise up. But, crucially they accept the history of some tribes keeping slaves and like the idea of the able-bodied male dominance hierarchies that would likely occur.

Here's an index of the topics covered that I've copied over:

• A. Is primitive society superior to modern society?
  • Positive & Negative Liberties
  • The Cloud Virtue Hypothetical
• B) Do the problems with modern society arise due to Technology or are they due to other factors such as Capitalism/the state/Hierarchy.

And here's a link to the full discussion between multiple people:

A Collaboratively Edited Discussion on Anti-Tech Politics

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A. Is primitive society superior to modern society?

Positive & Negative Liberties

Theo: I think anprims are deluded in believing primitive life will be a life of egalitarian freedom, but it is what makes them anarchist in my mind, like still wanting to work towards a world of ending dominance hierarchies and maintaining positive liberties.

Potash: Primitive life has been proven to be far more free than modern life, if it is egalitarian is a different story. Positive Liberty is a vague-ry that doesn’t really mean anything.

Theo: Positive liberty is an essential concept, otherwise we’d have no frame of reference for many of the harms that people commit against each other.

At its most extreme, taking care of someone while they’re in a coma only to afterwards drop them in the middle of a desert to die of thirst is still harming them. Regardless of the fact they’d be free in a negative liberty sense of there being no government taking away their shoes for taxes in the desert or whatever.

Potash: I think the man in the desert would have plenty of freedom. He could use his natural ability to take advantage of his environment. It’s far from a death sentence. If he were able to survive, then subsequent freedom would ensure as he and no one else controls the path his life takes.

Theo: That wasn’t the kind of scenario I meant. I’ll try to be more clear:

You’re lying unconscious after being thrown from a dune buggy you wrecked. Whilst out driving a dune buggy myself I find you at the centre of these vast desert sand dunes that stretch out for 100s of miles of just pure layers and layers of shifting sand as far as the eye can see. I nurse you back to consciousness, but you’ve still got a broken leg, then rather than driving you out of the hills of sand dunes, I leave you to die.

Surely you think I’ve committed an unethical act by not offering you access to positive liberties?

You’re free from the constraints of oppressive governments in that scenario, but you’re not free to be able to do much of anything other than just waiting to die.

This is just basic tribal social contract stuff, a kid is drowning in quicksand, you can offer him a branch, which would increase his access to a tool that would increase his positive liberties to move around and breathe.

A strong and skilled hunter is all alone in the jungle having fun and able to kill lots of animals to grow fat, he comes across an emaciated kid who is going to be stunted for life due to malnutrition if you don’t share some of your hunted meat with him. You give him some meat, you increase his access to food, you increase his positive liberties in life.

Potash: Fair enough, but I don’t think positive liberty is as decisive in determining one’s level of freedom as negative liberty is in most cases.

Primitive societies certainly do not “trample” on positive liberties enough to make them less free than us. They still have far more freedom than we have.

In what ways do primitive societies deprive people of positive liberty?

Theo: No one in a primitive society has many positive liberties themselves, and so doesn’t have any ability to offer others much.

In modern societies there are often hospitals, libraries, public transit, etc. So these societies are superior by that metric.

And to take away modern people’s positive liberties and try and forever reduce people and all their progeny to a life without these positive liberties is cruel.

Potash: I don’t understand how not having access to public transit makes you a fake anarchist.

I think Modern society deprives us of positive liberty by taking away from us our right to live in our natural habitat, and by greatly devaluing community and relationships.

Theo: I think what would make someone a fake anarchist is the bombing people back to the stone age who don’t consent to that happening to them, whilst claiming to be an anarchist.

Potash: I think Modern society deprives us of positive liberty by taking away from us our right to live in our natural habitat, and by greatly devaluing community and relationships.

Theo: I agree it does that to a lot of people. I think we should organize to resist that, just in a way that preserves other positive liberties.

Potash: Not everything can be planned out in advance. Conditions, and not decisions, are the primary driver of any society.

The Cloud Virtue Hypothetical

Theo: I might bite the bullet on the quality of life being slightly worse for the average person day to day in modern capitalist societies vs. a fairly egalitarian tribe in the past living in ignorance of a different way of life. I just think there’s still more virtue in striving for a society beyond capitalism and unjustified hierarchies.

Many people are concerned with remedying a net pain vs. pleasure calculus first and foremost, whereas I’m mostly concerned with people being able to express capabilities that help them achieve goals that satisfy a higher order happy flourishing vs. painful stultifying dichotomy.

Happy flourishing (eudaimonia) is what’s pursued in virtue ethics, by formulating a working balance of character virtues which help you both know what would give you some meaning at a certain stage in your life experience and help you achieve it.

As opposed to preference utilitarianism which is less willing to accept a high degree of suffering and is more interested in getting everyone to a global calculus of their interests being fulfilled thereby achieving a good degree of wellbeing.

As opposed further to by hedonistic utilitarianism, which is even less willing to accept suffering, seeks global pleasure calculus.

As opposed even further by negative utilitarians who are simply concerned with the best ways of avoiding suffering and so are most often anti-natalists.

Primitive tribes might be experiencing the most consistent access to low-level happy flourishing, a perfect balance of not seeking out too much pleasure, and not worrying about small amounts of pain. So, I can see why for example to some depressed person this low level feeling of peace and tranquillity at just being able to find consistent access to small pleasures would be super appealing.

The problem is the lack of complex goals. High level cultural achievement. High level critical thinking. Replaying complex conversations one had in the day and having complex feeling about these international communications. The positive liberty to experience these things. The negative liberty not to have these experiences stripped away from you by a network of anti-tech revolutionaries.

So, by different metrics primitive society is superior, but for me it’s not.

Complex tasks are conducive to my bedrock philosophical interest to have the opportunity to experience high quality happy flourishing above all else.

Potash: Imagine there are two societies, one society where people do not have the ability to transform into clouds. And another where people can transform into clouds. Some people in the second society feel that transformation into a cloud is one of the most important character flourishing aspects of life, and that to not have this ability would be a deprivation of their positive liberties. But the people in the first society feel zero need to transform themselves into clouds and feel quite content with their lives as they are. There is no objective evidence as to if the ability to transform into a cloud is beneficial, and if we are worse off without it.

And so, as an objective observer, would it make sense to conclude that the people in the first society are being depraved of their positive liberties because they cannot transform themselves into clouds?

Theo: I wouldn’t use the word deprived as they’d be simply ignorant of that possibility, but I’d say on a metric of who has access to the most positive liberties the cloud people do yes, so it’s a superior society in my view.

Potash: I think I should elaborate on the cloud metaphor a little. Imagine that the people living in the first society are substantially more content and satisfied with their lives then the people living in the second society. Lets say that most of the people living in the second society do not transform themselves into clouds regularly, and that again there is no objective evidence that suggests that transforming oneself into a cloud is beneficial. Of course, those who transform themselves into clouds don’t feel that way, but they are obviously biased.

Theo: I don’t know, I thought in the initial way you described it, the only difference in the societies was that one could turn into clouds, and that it was a challenging task to master hence the personal testimonies of most flourishing experience of their lives, so regardless of the abstract nature of the experience, feels like it’s one positive liberty they have on the other society.

So what’s the difference now making the first society so much more contented?

Potash: Knowing that the people in the first society are objectively more satisfied with their lives, do you still consider the cloud bearers to be superior?

Theo: Ignorance that some people can master the skill of turning into clouds happens to make the first society more contented, and that’s the only difference? Probably still the cloud people are superior. Because I trust their testimony that even though they don’t have as much net contentment, they’re gaining happy flourishing that is more meaningful to them.

Potash: No, lets say that the mechanism which allows people to turn themselves into clouds has several reverberating effects which lead to the second society being less contented and that impacts everyone there, even those who don’t transform themselves into clouds. Does this change your answer?

Theo: I think by the metric of ability to achieve that high-level happy flourishing it’s superior, and if I had the choice of happening to be born into that situation I would, so long as I had hope I could work to make egalitarian access to it.

Potash: Now lets imagine that the people in the second society live lives that are under the control and regulation of large organizations which they are hopeless to influence. Such as the cloud company and the CSA (Cloud Safety Agency). Would you still consider the second society superior?

Theo: Depends if there’s a reasonable chance that people can successfully rebel against this agency whilst maintaining access to cloud mastery.

Potash: Lets say that these agencies are necessary for the functioning of the cloud society. Basically, what’s more important. Positive or Negative Liberty.

Would you agree that primitive societies have greater negative liberty then modern societies?

Theo: Yeah if there’s no reasonable hope of rebelling against the company and I just had to witness the company harming people with no ability to grow a movement to at some point stop it then I’d just prefer the society where it didn’t exist at all.

Potash: Would you agree that primitive societies have greater negative liberty then modern societies?

Theo: Probably on average yeah, compared to the average modern society today.

Though there’s a certain comradery to women and men, black and white all getting fucked by corporations, whereas it would depress me for the clan chief to be decreeing that women can’t come on the hunt, and the tribe next door are savages, etc.

Potash: XD c’mon man.

Theo: It was a mostly throwaway comment lol, I agree more negative liberty to get skilled up and run away to hunt on your own for the most part and stuff.

B. Do the problems with modern society arise due to Technology or are they due to other factors such as Capitalism/the state/Hierarchy.

Theo: At what point in time do you think we lost control/opened pandora’s box?

Potash: Probably around the industrial revolution.

Theo: Good quote on technological determinism:[7]

The technological imperative is a flawed concept espoused by determinists, which states that the use of any technology is inevitable and that once a technology is in place, it is irreversible. That is, if a technology is developed, then it will eventually be used and cannot be abandoned. Gun apologists lean heavily on this imperative, refusing to acquiesce any type of firearm technologies—even those that are particularly heinous and unnecessary, such as military-grade personal weaponry, bump stocks, and armor-piercing ammunition, which have no reasonable application for civilian use. A common refrain is the slippery slope argument that gun reformists will take away all guns if given the opportunity. This would not only would be virtually impossible to accomplish (there are more than 400 million guns in the United States) but unconstitutional as well. The technological imperative of guns is the wrongful assumption that because these weapons exist, we have no choice but to accept their place in society and we mustn’t regulate them in the slightest, for this would be an infringement upon our rights.

Contrary to the determinist’s view, however, is that we do in fact have dominion over our technologies. In his book Giving Up the Gun, Noel Perrin gives a detailed account of the sixteenth-century Japanese, who nearly abandoned all guns in their society. By this time in history, firearms were nearly ubiquitous throughout the modern world. The warrior class of Japan, however, saw long-range guns as cowardly and shameful weapons; firearms were more efficient than swords, but they “overshadow[ed] the men who use them.” Honor is an essential component of Japanese warrior culture, and at least for a short period of time, the use of firearms was relegated to lower-class soldiers only.

Upper-class nobility and the samurai fought with swords and spears in hand-to-hand combat. Swordplay was regarded as a “danger-laden ballet, while a scene of extended gunplay comes out as raw violence.” Despite this virtuous resistance to firearms, the Japanese did not abandon guns entirely. By the end of the sixteenth century, invasions mounted by Korea and China reintroduced firearms back into circulation so that Japan could remain competitive on the battlefield and stave off its enemies. Afterward, guns remained highly regulated in Japan, with manufacturing only permitted by special licensure from the government. In some ways, Japan had been able to nearly quit firearms altogether, but they were dragged back into gun culture because of the need for self-preservation. Perrin closes his book by saying, “This is to talk as if progress—however one defines that elusive concept—were something semidivine, an inexorable force outside of human control. And of course, it isn’t. It is something we can guide, and direct, and even stop. Men can choose to remember; they can also choose to forget.” Still today, Japan often ranks lowest compared to other countries in terms of firearm-related deaths, and guns remain mostly irrelevant in Asian countries.

Potash: Technologies which have failed to make headway have done such because they are too inefficient to be used, not out of any moral self righteousness.

Theo: I’ve just never read a convincing argument for how technology became this monolithic self-propagating system at some stage in our history, whether industrial revolution or agricultural or whenever, there’s no clear line in the sand, we brought tech into this world, we can also regulate and arrest it’s development.

Clay: I fully grant that due to the way all technologically advanced societies are organized today that there are a great many people for whom it can be said that they had very little choice but to help society keep trending towards technological development. So, it’s not nearly the same as someone who’s been a hunter-gatherer all their life with a bow and arrow choosing whether to learn to use a gun.

Still, a big-tent leftist movement, and the socialist movement within it, and the anarchist movement within it can work to opportunistically strike at all the right moments in which governments and corporations are weak. And in doing so bring about the kind of world socialist revolution Ellul envisioned, which can then finish off bringing about the kind of ‘spiritual’ anti-technique revolution Ellul envisioned. Such that people only engage with technology in creative ways they desire.

Potash: I didn’t know you were religious.

Theo: Clay isn't and neither am I, but I agree with this in the broad sense of the term spiritual, acknowledging the feat of ‘consciousness moving’ it would take.

Potash: I didn’t know you were religious.

Theo: I’m not, I’m just using a broad use of the term spiritual, to acknowledge the feat of ‘consciousness moving’ it would take.

Potash: The idea you are propagating is a deeply religious one. Well, an idea which has its roots in the same place as religion.

Theo: There’s an overlap for sure.

Potash: Tell me, why do you think the idea of a creator has had such a profound impact on human societies? Basically every people known to man has a religion. And even plenty of people who don’t subscribe to any religion personally still believe in/are open to a creator, such as deists or agnostics.

Theo: I’m talking more about transcendental feeling, not belief, where for example you watch a sunset and it helps you contemplate your smallness in the universe, and so take a more stoic attitude to your problems in your life, it’s viewing your life in reflection to cosmological forces, not tribal, and not necessarily supernatural or religious.

Potash: That’s different. Why do you think the idea of a creator is so appealing to us?

Theo: Lots of factors, including that we look for patterns to help us survive, like a tiger’s tracks in the mud, but it can lead us down dumb paths like conspiracy and fundi religion too.

Potash: That’s true, but I think we want to believe that everything is going according to a plan and that belief doesn’t end with religion. People vastly overestimate the power ascribed to governments/people in power. For example, anything happening under a certain president is typically considered to be his fault.

People want to believe that everything goes according to a plan. That our problems arise from the wrong people being in charge, and we can solve them by putting the right people in charge.

Or in short, that the path societies take is determined by decisions more so than conditions.

And so, by default most people will absolve technology from the blame for its results. Afterall, if decisions and not conditions are the source of our problems then how could technology (conditions) be to blame? Obviously, we’ve just been “using it wrong bro”

Theo: I’m full of contempt for people like this, like swing voters.

But you can be pessimistic about the difficulty of shifting material conditions, and still want to vote the lesser evil people in to have some small tiny difference. It just needs to be matched with a strong grassroots movement taking action like striking and ecotage.

This is like the argument that left-anarchists are naive about human nature, left-anarchists are so worried about environmental conditions being able to ferment monsters, like the nazi party that we want to put so much care into building strong institutions that offer loads of advantages to people at a young age: Anarchists Are Not Naive About Human Nature

Potash: This has very little to do with electoral politics, that was just an example of the overall principle.

Theo: I know you’re talking about broader trends, but it’s your go to example for how this manifests, and I’m agreeing partially that it does manifest in that way, but it can be subverted in that case, and it can be subverted more broadly socially also.

Potash: Not anarchists, everyone. Even me, even qpoop, even Ted. Though I’d like to think that we do so less so than most others.

Theo: That sounds like the more religiously dogmatic position.

Potash: This is something that is intrinsic in human nature. Just as confirmation bias, everyone has it, some just less so than others.

Theo: No one has proved we’re way more biological determined than environmentally determined, or that that would prescribe primitivism. You’re mashing together politics, philosophy and psychology in an incoherent way.

Potash: There are definitely ideas which people have that have a basis in biology. Confirmation Bias is universal in humans.

Theo: Even if that’s the case, there’s still a massive gulf of missing premises you’d need in order to build the argument that we need to have an anti-tech revolution.

Potash: You’re getting too out of hand with this. All I’m saying is that we are predisposed to believe that the world is planned out, and therefore that technology plays a negligible role in determining the shape of society.

Theo: Meh, marxists have been around for an age worrying about tech and exploitation keeping generations enslaved on a materially determined path, anprims like Zerzan who used to be marxists just took it the next level in wanting primitive communism.

Potash: That was me at first. That was what I believed when I was like 13.

Political Debates in 2025 will probably just be over Woke National Bolshevism or Futurist Italian Fascism is better at beheading judeo capitalists and implanting robo cocks.

Theo: I’m comfortable not knowing whether I’ll ever have an impact in shifting macro material conditions, I hope a pebble I throw has a domino effect in the long-long term after I’m dead, but who knows.

The memories that make me happy are like taking a 20 year old Slovakian kid from a squat in Nottingham to the west coast of Ireland to live with a farmer for a year and doing road blockades against a dangerous gas pipeline. Just showing people a dramatically different quality of life.