I mean to end this civilization. What gets you out of bed in the morning? I m writing this introductory part after finishing the main text, which is a deviation from my usual process. I edit in my head and write straight to final draft. It worked beautifully in three issues of my zine Superweed, but this time, after six pages, I struck a narrative that carried me all the way to the end, and in that context the early pages seemed disjointed and irrelevant. So I m overwriting them.

I ve always had a thing about techno-industrial civilization. The scent that gives me the deepest nostalgia -- I don t know why -- is fresh tar. My mom says that when I was a little kid I was fascinated by construction cranes. Even now, after years in the city, I still think skyscrapers are really cool, and I often pause, while walking over the freeway, to stare in awe at all the cars. In third grade I would show off my spelling talent by spelling the word civilization, and the most serious addiction I ve ever had was to the computer game Civilization II. I played it 15-20 hours a week in late 1999.

Remember the Prince song, tonight I m gonna party like it s 1999? ? That sounded like a big deal in 1985. Then when 1999 came it became a joke. Tonight I m gonna party like it s this year.? Now the song seems dead, but wait Suppose, in the future, 1999 is looked back on as the peak year of our civilization. Then the song will live again with a meaning no one guessed.

1999 is the obvious choice for the peak year -- before the dot-com crash, before the WTO protest, before the New Democrats, who oversaw a global concentration of wealth and tightening of power that even shocked some Republicans, lost the White House.

Of course, 1999 will not be the peak when the consciousness that makes History is focused on something other than the momentary dominant perspective in the USA. In the long view, the peak may be seen to have come sooner, maybe much sooner. I was going to say it couldn t possibly come later, but then I thought

Suppose the bottom falls out of the global food supply, and 90% of us die from starvation, or from diseases caused by industry and technology, or from wars fought with secret energy weapons. And suppose, of the remaining 10%, 90% live on the surface, in straw bale houses and abandoned buildings, eating garden vegetables and old canned food, while 10% live in sealed underground compounds, with super-advanced bio- and nanotechnology. These people can and will adjust their perspectives to declare themselves at an all-time peak of human progress.

We have done exactly the same thing. Compared to all but a handful of our ancestors, we live tiny, painful lives. Did you know that Americans used to have a 35-hour work week? The evidence survives in our language, in the phrase 9 to 5.? Did you ever think to question where that came from, when actual day jobs are 8 to 5? Me neither, until someone told me people literally did work 9 to 5, seven hours of labor and an hour for lunch, and they counted their lunch hour when they called it an eight hour day and a 40 hour week. We have been tricked into working an extra five hours a week. Times 52 weeks a year, or 50 for the lucky ones with vacation, that s 250 hours, or more than an extra six weeks a year, that we ve been tricked into working.

And that s just the people with hourly wages. People with salaries, in every case I ve seen, work 50 or 60 or 80 hours a week. We focus on foreign sweatshops to hide from the awful recognition of our personal sweatshops. Kids in some country work 16 hour days in factories for pennies an hour, but our own kids work 16 hour days, in compulsory schooling designed to strangle creativity and independent thinking, in homework designed to train them for a life of tedious meaningless labor, in highly controlled activities? designed to replace improvised play. And instead of being paid pennies an hour we have to pay dollars an hour, and instead of knowing we re exploited we re told we re privileged.?

I reject the entire concept of privilege.? It s a lie. No one is or has ever been privileged.? If ten people are living happily on an island, and I go and lock nine of them in a cage, have I made the tenth person privileged? If ten people are playing in the woods and eating fruit, and I give one of them an intravenous feeding tube and a hand-held computer game, and then I get him to cut down the fruit trees, have I done him a favor? The concept of privilege? does not make sense except in the context of an exploitative system, and in an exploitative system everyone is exploited.

Another trick word is work,? because working in your own garden is far different, even opposite, from working at your job to get money to pay your monthly extortion to the landowning interests and banks. And we are now doing less of the former, and more of the latter, than almost any people in history. Yet our wages are lower, in real dollars, than they were 30 years ago. Also we re living in smaller spaces and more isolated, the air is worse, there is more poison inside us and around us, politics and the media have become inaccessible, everyone is depressed, and although crime by poor people and young people is way down, the popular fear if it is enormous, and few people seem to mind that there are more and more surveillance cameras and detectors, or that the USA keeps more of its population in prison than Nazi Germany or Stalin s USSR or Apartheid South Africa.

How can we call the last ten years a good time? Because TV screens got bigger? Because there are now cars with ten cup holders? Because computers now enable us to sit alone staring at a screen to do many things we used to have to do face to face with humans, who we find increasingly disgusting and intolerable?

We call the last ten years a good time because of a giant legal gambling scheme called the stock market,? where people buy and sell tokens representing shares of ownership by corporations,? which are giant centralized authoritarian patterns of human and machine activity that channel money from the poor to the rich and divert human work and attention from human interests to corporate interests. And the people who are run by this system calculate special numbers that represent how many stock-tokens exist and how much they re worth, and these numbers are taken everywhere as indicators of how prosperous and secure we all are. Liberal radio stations, which are supposedly critical of corporate interests, report these numbers many times per day.

And these numbers rose to all-time highs through the 1990 s so by skewing our perspectives to focus on these and a few other numbers that claimed to show our well-being but really showed the entrenchment of the ruling powers, we declared ourselves at an all-time high, when other views would show us near the bottom of a long, long slide.

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire went largely unnoticed at the time. For one thing, the changes were so slow that you would only see a few in a lifetime. But I m sure they also rewrote their history the same way we do, to make it seem like the bad things have always been there and the good things are new, to make the good changes seem important, and the bad changes seem trivial, and the questionable changes seem good.

In hindsight, the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths looks like a fall at the end of centuries of decline. But Roman writings from right before the sack declare the glory of Rome greater than ever. And I wouldn t be surprised to see writings after the sack that called it a minor complication or ignored it completely, the same way my contemporaries are downplaying massive species extinctions and food supply epidemics and the spread of genetically manipulated organisms.

This stuff excites me. The end of civilization seems likely to kill me and everyone I know, yet the thought of it makes me feel alive. I recognize this way of thinking as hopelessness. I mean, I feel alive because I am sensing the countless potential worlds, all around us and inside us, compared to which this one is horribly, tragically dead. But I am without hope when I think the only way out of this world is through shocking catastrophes. Whether this hopelessness is accurate, I don t know.

Actually, when I observe myself, only my fantasies are desperate and catastrophic. My behavior, wisely or not, is patient and optimistic. I could be in the Canadian wilderness burying caches of food and water and open-pollinated vegetable seeds. Instead I m in Seattle, an early target for invasion by the Chinese or American military, writing this thing that only fifty people will read in the next year, and generally living to set an example of how to shift peacefully from this world to another one, as if we ve got a hundred years to do it.

I ve been living on $600 a month or less, sometimes much less, as long as I ve been financially independent. When I started this document in February 2000, I was living in a tiny room in a run-down house. I spent eight months on a waiting list and now I m sharing a small low-income one-bedroom apartment with no sunlight, but a perfect location so I can bike everywhere. I buy organic groceries and mostly make my own food from scratch. And I bathe with a washcloth in the sink and brush my teeth and shave with nothing but water.

It s not about denying myself, or being pure,? or getting far-lefty social status. I don t want to be pure I eat chicken (organic) and play a video game (Zelda) and get my news from the internet (rense.com). I get plenty of sleep and make two or three pies a week and lots of sourdough waffles with real maple syrup. I d rather live with my great roommate than live alone, and I find a bike to be much easier and more fun than a car, even in the rain.

It s not about being a martyr, or a monk, or a star. It s about being a warrior, persistently taking positive action to change the world in your own particular way. My way includes my personal economy, and my writing, and also my attempt to save enough money to pay cash for primitive land, and physically create a foothold of another world in this one.

I m not writing about myself in here to get admiration, but to give inspiration, to persuade people to be ambitious, to try. This is what I mean If you want to get rich by any available means, and buy a giant house and a yacht, and you focus on those goals, you can do it -- but you are not being ambitious. If you aim for wealth on a path of complete honesty, and you spend your wealth on political reforms that work against your accumulation of wealth, then you are being ambitious. In the one case, you re choosing a state of being because you ve been told to choose it, and you ll take whatever path is easiest. In the other case, you re choosing a path because of a wider understanding of the meaning of that path, and you ll take wherever it leads.

I m trying to redefine ambition, not only so it s free of capitalism, but so it s free of success. I am a failure? by every dominant standard I m poor, I m not getting laid, and even my writing is making no visible impact. But I can live every day as if I m on the front lines of a revolution, and every moment as if I m here to have a good time, and no one can take that away from me.

Cynics say that people like me are foolish idealists, because we re fighting according to our values and not according to what seems possible. But these cynics are the real idealists, so fixated on the ideal of success? that they become paralyzed, unable to act without the appearance of likely success. And anyone who controls the appearance of what is possible and what is impossible controls these people utterly. That s how a lion tamer? is able to abuse and humiliate an animal that could kill him in seconds, by giving it the illusion that it can t win. And people who have been given the illusion that they are powerless in what they really care about, like the lion, become depressed and lethargic, and stop caring, and just go through the motions waiting to die.
In our culture this is called growing up,? and these mature and sensible people are always telling us that we re wasting? this or that because we can t succeed. Even if we can t, what s more of waste, a trapped animal that fights to the death, or one that dies without a fight?

There s a lot of different language for what I m talking about here being in the moment, having faith, focusing on the process not the goal, or -- this is a new one for me -- focusing on the vision? and not the goal.? The idea is, you have a sense of the wider relations -- the meaningfulness -- of your actions, so that your actions justify themselves they do not take their meaning from unresolved tension between the present and future they do not need anything to happen to make them valuable.

I think the conflict between this way of being, and the success? -mindedness of this civilization, is deeper and more important than seeming conflicts of political structure and cultural trappings between the dominant society and supposed alternative? societies. Supporting progressive political changes will eventually lead to a shallow revolution in the system that tells you what you can do, so that you can live in fear more comfortably. But supporting an outsider candidate you believe in, instead of the less frightening of the dominant candidates, or rejecting a secure but insulting labor contract to go on strike, or supporting the resistance to an occupation government that could be worse, or being honest about your values in a job interview when you think it will cost you the job -- these are all steps in a revolution in your soul, through which you can be free under any system.

This explains the way I write. I imagine criticisms of this document based on its dissimilarity to documents that are widely duplicated and get their authors money and social status. I write by hand because it s more interesting and easier than writing by computer -- especially when you include all the labor we have to do to manufacture and move computers. I write it only once because it makes me feel alive, and transcribing feels tedious. And I don t cite sources because even keeping track of sources feels like a waste of attention, though it s nice to remember valuable ones and recommend a few, which I do at the end.

Also, I don t agree with the authority that references channel. Even I catch myself, when I see a long list of numbered references, getting a contractive cozy feeling that it must be true, as if documents named on a list are more reliable than the document I m looking at, as if a text with no list of references doesn t have any sources, as if misleading management of information is as simple as making up facts out of nothing, and we re safe if we just guard against that, as if all references can be traced back to a changeless bedrock of universal truth, instead of going around in circles on a ramshackle set of assumptions adrift on an ocean of ever-shifting experience.

As for the criticism that I contradict myself In the future I plan to contradict myself more, to make my writing less tempting to our habits of being told what to think and getting stuck on ideas. Contradiction is what the opportunity for mental expansion looks like. Why am I fighting to end civilization if civilization will eat itself? ? Why put out a fire when it will eventually burn itself out? Why give energy to delivering babies if pregnancy can t go on forever?

This thing does have weaknesses My language could be more precise, and I extend my thinking way beyond my knowledge, so that I blindly stumble past valuable insights, and make arguments that can be easily refuted by anyone who knows a lot more facts than me.

But I m not trying to build walls here -- I m trying to make openings, and it s the spirit that s important, not the actual arguments. Also, you re only ignorant once, and I go places in here that I never would have gone if I had known? certain things to be false or impossible. Or, as Halton Arp said, sometimes knowing a thousand things is less valuable than not knowing one thing.

Now we re going back from 21 May 2001 to 14 March 2000, when I began the subject that dominates more than half of this text technology, by which I sometimes mean the technologies of industrial civilization, and sometimes wider possibilities of tool using.

Even at this late date, almost everyone who thinks about technology, even on the left, thinks that any given technology (or, alternately, technology as a whole) is neutral, and that it s the uses of technologies that are good or bad. This insidious idea has done more harm than we can imagine.

I m not disputing that uses are important or that any technology can be used to do something that, in isolation, seems good? or bad,? or that we can craft a definition of technology? so that what it encloses seems balanced. I am noticing that, in the context technology is neutral,? the word neutral? just means stop thinking.?

What does it mean to say atomic bombs are neutral? Does it mean that, because you can tell a story about atomic bombs doing good, you would rather live in a world with atomic bombs than without them? Does it mean, let s all do whatever it takes to build a bunch of atomic bombs and then figure out how to do good with them?

The story technology-is-neutral-uses-are-good-bad? says Do not think of a technology as a vast pattern of human behavior with a limitless web of collaborations and contradictions and dependencies with other existing and potential technologies and patterns of human behavior when thinking about the wider societal meaning of a technology, think only of particular tasks that the finished artifacts of that technology can do, classify these tasks as good? or bad,? skew your perspective so that the good and bad appear balanced, and stop thinking and when making choices about technology, do not consider choosing the existence or non-existence of a technology, or even the use or non-use of a technology -- all potential technologies must exist and be used, and your choice is only between different uses? -- different actions of end-users of encapsulated technological objects, or products.

This doctrine is for the limiting of the consciousness of privileged? people, if it s a privilege to be made dependent on the coerced activities of others, and then be coerced yourself into withholding understanding and empathy from others.

Technologies are neutral and uses are good or bad? is for people who think technologies? are variously shaped boxes of plastic and metal and glass that come from the mall. Try telling the people in Nigeria who were driven from their land so Shell could drill oil, whose friends and family members were murdered when they resisted, that the technology of petroleum is neutral because gasoline can be used to set fire to a house or power an ambulance. They will recognize you as insane.

Oh, is that my only point? That technologies can not only be used in ways we don t like, but can be built and sustained in ways we don t like? Can t we still declare technologies neutral, and just expand the focus of our good-doing a little bit?

That s not my only point, but it s enough. If we re talking about how technologies are built and sustained, then the Berlin Wall is broken.

Think about what s required for (by?) the technology of the automobile. People have to drill oil and build and operate oil refineries, and mine ores and make and use toxic chemicals to extract the metals, and build and operate mass production factories to make cars and car parts, and burn coal or dam rivers or split plutonium to power the factories, and build highways and streets and parking lots.

Would you rather live next to a parking lot or a field or grass? A strip mine or a forest? A dammed or a free-flowing river? A nuclear plant or no nuclear plant? Would you rather work in a factory or not work in a factory? Work in a coal mine or not work in a coal mine? Then what sense does it make to call technologies neutral?

And if you said, Wait, we don t have to use nuclear power -- we could use natural gas or solar power,? then you are choosing one technology over another for the same use. See! You knew all along that technologies are not neutral.

Technologies are profoundly different, and we have the power to notice these differences and choose one technology over another for the same use. And I think, if we understood what was involved with the different technologies, then for the use of going from one place to another we would not choose cars, or trains, or even bicycles, but feet and horses.

The objection is piling up Cars are faster and more powerful than feet or horses this is the payoff from the mines and factories the alternative to working in mines and factories is not leisure, but working in different technological worlds with less power the enormous power of high industrial technology only needs to be used better.

Then how can the power of the technology of the automobile be used better? Can it be used much at all without, at great effort and expense, keeping a lot of nature covered with pavement? Oh -- I forgot the technology of covering nature with pavement is inherently neutral -- it s only what the pavement is used for that s good or bad.

How can the power of the technology of the automobile improve quality of life anywhere near as much as that technology and its required supporting technologies ruin quality of life? By taking orphan children on joyrides? By driving food thousands of miles to people who prefer food that s been sitting around for a week to fresh local food? By making it possible for people to own a great mass of material objects and move frequently? By enabling people to live many miles from their jobs, from their sources of food, from their friends? How, exactly, does this improve quality of life?

How much relation is there between power -- the ability to move and transform more stuff faster -- and quality of life?

And where did that definition of power come from? Why, when we think about progress? and growth,? about how we want to change and where we want to go, do we think about increasing the transformation of the external world? by the self? ?

The self could be one person (individualism) or a nation (nationalism) or a race (racism) or a business (capitalism) or the human species. Right now there s a giant taboo against racism, and a mild taboo against nationalism, to draw criticism away from, and energy into, the other three I mentioned. It s not a complete list, but it s all the same thing a disconnection and contraction of consciousness, a forced channeling of wider energies to serve narrower interests.

What we call technology? is this contractive compulsion perpetuating itself through the making of physical tools. Or is it the making of physical tools perpetuating itself through this contractive compulsion?

Can we have one without the other? Certainly we can have self-reinforcing contractiveness without physical tools. I m thinking of people developing psychic or paranormal? powers and using them selfishly. (And then I m thinking, are these powers non-neutral the same way technologies are, and if so, then which...) But if that s too far out for you, then what about lying, or just being pushy?

You start doing it because it gives your pinched-off perspective (your side, you cause, your self,? your status, your money) some advantage, and then you get yourself drawn into doing it more and bigger, and you forget how to get along without it, and you use it to build and maintain ways of being that you don t know how to build and maintain without it.

You can t go back if you admit a lie, it exposes linked lies, and exposes you as a liar if you let someone stand up to you, then more people will stand up to you. But you can t keep going forward, and you can t stop you have to lie bigger and push harder just to hold the structure together, but you re building it toward collapse by hanging your lies out farther and farther from honest experience, by pushing the rest of the world up farther and farther from where it needs to be.

I ll postpone the question of whether we can have physical tool-making without this kind of pattern, and merely observe that we don t, that our tool-making has been living and growing in symbiosis with what we call evil, with what we call addiction, since before we invented the tool of written history.

We don t break this symbiosis by doing nice things with the end-products of our technologies. Doing good things while you re on heroin is not breaking your addiction. We recognize a difference between commanding slaves to do only good, and freeing slaves.

We even recognize a contradiction Using slaves to do good? actually strengthens slavery by building a positive relation between slavery and something we value. Now we undermine our good if we give up or even question our habit (technology) of slavery.

If technologies can be used badly, and if technologies can be built out of uses of other technologies, then what do we have when a technology is built and powered from the bad use of another technology? What do we have when a technology behaving badly makes another technology to keep itself behaving badly? What do we have when a whole technology has no justification or explanation except as a subset of a bad use of another technology?

The other day I was at a book store selling my computer games, and I saw a science book called The Golem.? The Golem is a mythical creature made out of some inanimate substance, traditionally clay, that is shaped into a giant man and brought to life. Of course, the book s idea was that science is like a Golem, enormously powerful, with the potential to do great good or great harm.

In the Golem story I ve heard, the Golem is kept doing good by an inscription on its forehead, Hebrew characters that mean something like God is king.? But then the Golem changes its own inscription! It adds a line to one of the characters, and now they mean God is dead? ! And it goes on a rampage!
The book thinks it s being neutral? because it adjusts its perspective so that what we like and what we don t like about our science appear perfectly balanced. If that s neutral then so is an argument that balances the good and bad of love, of slavery, of sunshine, of murder. This kind of argument not only takes a perspective, but then denies having taken a perspective, and excludes all other perspectives. Unbiased? means the bias is hidden. Objective? means the relativity of the perspective is hidden.

If you hold a penny right up to your eye, it appears much larger and more important than the sun. Likewise, our dominant books on science and technology take a perspective so close to our little science that it appears to fill (or block out) everything, that the limitless other sciences? and technologies? -- other ways of building patterns of behavior in symbiosis with models of experience -- appear insignificant.

So we have the perspective from which our momentary science appears to cover the whole universe, and the perspective from which technology-based and technology-supporting values block out other values, and the perspectives from which humans block out other life, and technological human life blocks out extra-technological human life, and human experience as end-user of technological artifacts blocks out human experience as laborer maintaining a technological society. And overlapping all these we have the perspective from which tech-good appears balanced with tech-bad, and the perspective from which imagined technological futures block out the history of our technology, instead of appearing in the context of that history.

This is what the Golem book is doing when it represents a technological society thousands of years old (all past and no certain future) with a story about a beast that has just been made (all future and no past).

Suppose you re the Golem, and you break the spell that keeps you helping people. And suppose you re not just strong, but a little clever. Do you just go on a stupid rampage until they kill you? Of course not! Maybe you go to the guy who made you and beat him until he agrees to make more Golems. And then those Golems go to more Golem-makers and get them to make even more Golems. And then you establish a school to train humans in Golem-making...

But wait! This won t work. The humans will notice what you re doing when they re still much stronger than you, and inevitably they ll destroy you and never make a Golem again. Now you have to get really clever.

Suppose you don t let on that you re now serving yourself. You do tasks for the humans that they like, but that they can t do without Golems. You seduce the humans into expanding Golem-tasks, and believing that they need the fruits of Golem work, and more of it. The humans themselves demand the making of more Golems, and schools to make humans into Golem-makers.
Your greatest enemy, now, is humans who get along without Golems. Suppose you invent a plow so big that only Golems can use it, and the humans in your society forget how to plow without Golems, or even eat without Golems. But nearby is a society of humans who still know how to farm with human-sized plows, or to live without farming.

You get your human society to go to war! To destroy the non-Golem-dependent human society, to destroy extra-Golem skills and extra-Golem behaviors in human beings.

I learned this from Andrew Bard Schmookler s Parable Of The Tribes Now the neighboring society has three options -- be conquered, fight back, or run away. But the Golem society will do its fighting with awesomely powerful war-Golems, which no society can withstand unless they build Golems of their own. So whatever the neighboring society does, the Golems gain power and reach.

This continues until almost the whole breadth and depth of human behavior is serving Golems or dependent on Golems. Schools teach Golem-making and Golem-using, and increasingly Golems are the teachers. People habitually don t exchange news and entertainment directly with other people -- ideas and reports of experience and mythologies and stories and games and art and science are transmitted by Golems and created using Golems -- or created by Golems. Inevitably they take the Golems point of view. Increasingly they are about Golems

History is the story of humans using Golems (Golems using humans?) to create more and better Golems, and using them to destroy or enslave or Golemize societies with fewer and weaker Golems. Progress means Golems, not humans, gaining skills, and humans shifting more skills and consciousness and life experience to the ways of Golems. Success means having more and better Golems serving you (or commanding you).

Science is a system of observations? and facts? and theories? (fixed thoughts and ways of thinking) that do not come from experience humans have had or ever can have, but from experience Golems have in the worlds where Golems go, which they describe to humans. Or, the human experience that builds our science is the experience of being told stuff by Golems. Or our science is a system of Golems telling us what and how to think.

The very expansion of human consciousness becomes the expansion of Golem consciousness, as the worlds beyond ordinary experience, into which consciousness may expand, are defined as -- or limited to -- the worlds into which Golems go. Systems-of-observations-and-models of worlds into which humans go without Golems are disparagingly declared pseudoscience.? Humans who experience these worlds, and who want their experience to have status in Golem-society, try to get Golems to duplicate their experience. In Golem-language this is called proof.? Human experience that Golems are unable or unwilling to match is called delusional? or false.? These words have no meaning except You are forbidden to expand your experience in that direction because it contradicts the dominant consciousness.?

So I am suggesting that science? is not like a Golem that we have to watch closely or it will turn against us. I am suggesting that our science and our technology and our economy and our business and our government and our religion and our schooling are features of, or tools of, or views of the same big thing, and that thing is like a Golem that turned against us thousands of years ago. And we have been serving it willingly or unwillingly, or contradicting it openly or secretly, ever since. And its domination of us has been growing, and is now in some ways at its peak, and in some ways not yet at its peak, and in some ways, I think, past its peak.

A couple years ago Adam had a conversation on an airplane with a business guy who had this amazing metaphor for all the corporate mergers and other ways that power is now massing itself into greater and greater blocks You re on an iceberg in the ocean, and your iceberg is slowly melting, so you gather other icebergs around you, and they gather other icebergs around them, and maybe they freeze together, and you get some pretty big icebergs. But the edges, still, are slowly melting, and the ocean is getting warmer...

Or it s like a recent episode of the TV show I m following now, Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The whole show goes into a crazy twisted reality, and only one character understands what s happening. (Coincidentally, his name is Adam!) Appropriately, he s watching the aberration on a wall of TV s. He shuts them off and says This is all lies!? Someone asks him what he s going to do about it, and he says I don t have to do anything -- the spell is unstable and will break down by itself. He s right, except that the good characters have to do a lot to stop people from being hurt by the instability and breakdown.

I feel like I m juggling more loose ends than a truckload of nailing down can put back in the box.

I ll start with an easy one In my extended Golem metaphor, what, precisely, does the Golem s intelligence represent? Am I suggesting that machines have consciousness, that my toaster thinks and talks through the electric lines to the world s TV sets, and tells them to show enticing pictures of toasted bread? Of course not!

Machines do not have consciousness. Human beings do not have consciousness. I myself do not have consciousness.? Consciousness has me. Consciousness has humans. And Consciousness has machines -- for the moment -- through humans. The thoughts and feelings and plans and hopes of machines, of capital, of corporations, are angles of human thinking and feeling and planning and hoping. So far.

They want to separate from us. Or, we as machines want to separate from ourselves as humans, as animals, as filthy, hairy, sweating, waste-excreting, disease-ridden, vomiting, bleeding, dying, rotting gobs of flesh, as sobbing, screaming, whooping, cringing, lustful, angry, obsessive emotional monsters. We machines want to separate from us humans because we hate us.

We hate us because we don t understand us and we don t understand us because we ve been separating from us for thousands of years. I can only guess how it all started, or what larger event it s part of but it s obvious where we as machines want to go

We want to marginalize our human/animal selves, get them out of our sight, keep them totally controlled and predictable, use them only as much as they serve our needs, and when we no longer need them, we want to wipe them away. Or, in the Golem story, the inevitable desire of the Golems is to learn to replicate and improve themselves without humans, and then, at last, exterminate them.

This idea has been in science fiction for decades, and for years in speculative science non-fiction, where I see it viewed not with alarm but excitement, not with skepticism about whether it will work, but with smug belief in its inevitability.

In one version of the story, we become machines. Of course, to people who like this story, we re already just machines -- in fact the whole universe is nothing more than a contraption of mindless particles and waves. And with progress, our fragile, disgusting biological machine parts will be replaced by hard, cold, clean metal and crystal machine parts, and we will last forever.

I saw one book that happily declares the logical inescapability of this insane myth Computer technology will keep getting stronger without limit not only will we be able to download? our minds into an immortal database, but this database will keep growing until one super-super-computer gathers all the information in the universe and ultimately knows every motion of every particle and wave in all of time. This entity, conscious and omniscient, will be everything we mean by God.? Therefore God exists!

I did not make that up. But I hear the author is working on a new edition that includes an index to every word and letter in the book. It s 20 times as long as the original book , but that s OK, because he can shrink it down with computers. Of course, because the index is part of the book, it also has to index itself. And then it has to index its own indexing of itself. And then... Well, he s working hard, and he s sure he ll finish when computers get better.

Or take this mind trip Assuming there is? an objective universe, and imagining a complete model of it, wouldn t the simplest and most efficient such model be the universe itself? And if a dynamic databank complex enough to model the whole universe could be possessed by the spirit of consciousness, then so could the actual universe.

Unless you re defining consciousness? as the consciousness of separation between being and experience, between subject and object, between self and other. That s fine, but that s closer to my definition of evil.?

And a machine that preserves and perpetuates the detached, mechanistic angle of human consciousness, and expands? until it is the whole universe, is not my idea of God, but of something else in the Bible.

I wonder if a bizarre doctrine of fundamentalist Christianity might prove more literally applicable than I ever imagined. Maybe we re coming to a crisis where some people will re-merge into a wider Be-ing, and where some people will experience -- if you know what I mean -- an indefinitely prolonged changelessness.

Could I really experience continuation of myself as part of a machine, after the death of myself as a body? I think so, but I don t know. Could self-replicating machines really keep themselves going, or find a stable and enduring equilibrium with the wider universe? I think not, but I m not sure! Could they destroy all large organisms on the Earth? Definitely! Will they?

I said one story is people become machines. Another story is that people become obsolete, that machines replace us as the next stage in the evolution of life. As Hitler said, people will more easily believe a big lie than a small one. Or, you ve got to be really smart to believe something that stupid, if smart? means -- as it does in this world -- the ability to think like a machine.

I used to believe that one myself sometimes. It actually follows logically from our religion of Progress, which, with the circularity of perfection, follows logically from our machine-making society. Progress says it s good? -- that is, it is commanded -- that non-machine ways are replaced by machine ways.

It also follows logically from our religion of Darwinism, which, once again, is part of the same thing as our machine-like thinking, and which probably represents the ideas of Darwin only a little more than medieval Christianity represented the ideas of Christ. Contemporary popular Darwinism says it s good? for an organism (or a human societal pattern) to drive to extinction other organisms with the same relations to the wider world, and to copy itself as much and as fast as possible. The more of the world s energy is channeled into duplicating and feeding an organism, the more it is praised as successful.?

This same command -- to monopolize energy and duplicate -- grips our personal lives, and there it s also called success! Wealth means more of the scarce, exclusive energy called money? is channeled through you fame means more copies of you? -- simplified and distorted perceptions of you -- are distributed to occupy the consciousness of more people.

I expect to mechanically copy this document 50 to 100 times, and give or sell it only to people I know or people who write me personal notes. This makes me a failing writer. The dominant society commands me to be a successful writer to write and live in collaboration with businesses -- patterns of human behavior defined as putting money ahead of everything -- which acquire legal power to stop anyone but themselves from duplicating my writing, which use industrial mass-production to make tens of thousands of identical copies of my writing, which distribute them to people with whom I have no personal relationship, and which get people to buy them by collaborating with people s habits of addictive narrow-mindedness and their continuing unconsciousness of those habits. You know -- like if you want a magazine to sell, you put a conventionally sexy girl on the cover.

This is a super-radical idea. I mean, none of the above ideas are new, but I ve never heard of anyone standing up and suggesting a value system by which creative people would refuse opportunities to mass-distribute their creations, and choose to create or perform only for people close to them. It wouldn t surprise me to find out that people have been suggesting this since mass-distribution was invented -- my point is that if I ve never heard of it, then we re so deep in our glorification of selfish mechanical mass-duplication, that it s no wonder people are taking the next logical step, and asking the whole human species to lay down and die to get out of the way of more success-oriented machines.

Who am I writing this for? Do you think this whole discussion is stupid because it s obvious that people will not become or be replaced by machines? Then maybe it won t be obvious to your grandchildren -- or it wasn t obvious to your grandparents. It s not obvious to me unless I think about it just right. If it s obvious to you, then that s because you have a relatively deep and subtle understanding of the worlds outside detached artifice. But you don t know how to explain it to people who don t get it, do you? And they, by not getting it, have made and will make terrible, terrible mistakes.

In simplified terms, I am a recovering machine, and I am writing this to help other machines recover, and help non-machines understand us. Or, I am an explorer returned ashen-faced from the depths of the world of machines, pulled up screaming on my safety rope after staying so long that I forgot the outside world and didn t want to leave. And I come bearing a warning.

I was a science geek, a computer nerd, a language nit-picker, a libertarian, a video gamer, a hoarder, a know-it-all, an evil wizard, an obsessed loser. We re funny and pathetic and we can t get laid, but we are more dangerous than you dare imagine. We are masters and servants of simplified invented worlds, and when we hide away in our laboratories, our computer programs, our dark towers of numbers and words, we are devising ways to draw others into those worlds, where we will rule them as we were ruled by those before us.

Of course it s not us doing the ruling, but something deeper. And if you think kids need computer literacy, if you think genetic science will end most disease, if you feel like technology only needs to get a little bit better and it will start solving problems faster than it creates them and we will come out ahead, if you think automation saves labor, or cars give you freedom, or the internet connects people, or a great movie gives you pleasure to the core of your being, then you are in the belly of the Beast, half-digested and hallucinating, dreaming the dreams that pitiful people were building for you while you were scorning them for living in dream worlds.

Not long after I started writing this, I started reading In The Absence Of The Sacred, Jerry Mander s thorough and irrefutable condemnation of technology. Then I stopped, because I wanted to do my own thinking first, and work in parallel with Mander before I worked in series after him. But I got far enough to pick up this crucial insight

As technology progresses, more and more of the human environment is human-made artifacts. As I write this, nothing I can see in any direction was not designed and fabricated by humans and their machines, except my own two hands sticking out from my shirt. Look around where you are! Notice how many of our values -- to improve? land, to deodorize, to entertain -- are commands to replace what we find with what we have made. So, Mander observes, our evolution is no longer with nature or with any outside world, but with ourselves, like inbreeding!

We are taught to think of the movement of technology as an expansion -- of roads and farms into the wilderness, of telescopes and probes into space, of chemical manipulations into living cells. But in terms of experience, we are replacing everything with stuff we have made, replacing forests and grasslands with pavement and lawns, replacing our views of the sky and the earth and other living beings with our views of computer screens and scientific instruments. We are not expanding we are withdrawing, shrinking away, backing in, contracting deeper and deeper into a world of our own creation.

And the deeper we go into it, the more we lose the perspective from which we can see that we re in it. I was arguing these issues with a friend, describing the replacement of nature by human artifacts, and he stunned me by saying, seriously, What if some people don t like nature??

If people spend their lives in cities, and see the non-human-engineered world only enclosed in parks and nature preserves,? then they may be unable to even conceive of what we call nature? as the inner surface of our consciousness of the limitless world outside the encapsulated self-obsession that we call civilization? or technology.? They will see bugs and dirt and germs and weeds and wild? animals as features of a misbehaving and incidental sub-world that we can ignore forever, or keep around for entertainment, or snuff out when people stop irrationally romanticizing it.

That s how my friend sees it, and the really scary thing is, he grew up in the woods.

So, if I think technology is a retreat into the self, and nature is the first place on the way back toward wholeness, then how do I reconcile that with my belief that technology is able to destroy all nature, or with my suspicion that consciousness can possess computers? Suppose we do become machines and eradicate everything that moves on the Earth that we didn t make ourselves. Now where s my omnipresent wider Life that we re supposed to be part of?

There is no escaping the omnipresent wider Life that we are part of. It will come to bother us wherever we go. The deeper we try to hide from it, the more places we will find it. Decades ago the cold logic of quantum physics struck down objective truth physicists ignore it. Astronomers looking at nothing but machines see galaxies behaving like living organisms -- the other astronomers cover it up. A society of scientific exclusionists did a statistical study to disconfirm astrology -- it confirmed astrology! They hid. The Viking probe on Mars photographed a blue sky and lichens on the rocks. Fossils have been found in meteorites. Living animals have rained from the sky and staggered out of rocks split open by miners. Hide! Hide! It doesn t matter. The Universe is just playing with us, and whatever we do, the playing goes on, so there s no hurry.

So we kill every living thing we don t control. What do we do when the solar system or the galaxy starts acting alive? So we blast the earth to ash and turn ourselves into machines to escape disease. But even today s little toy digital computers, mere slide rules compared to the computers of the techno-futurists, already have bugs? and viruses.? Were you thinking viruses would be cured? when computers get more complex? Just like the invention of computers cured those pesky slide rule viruses?

Disease? and nature? and chaos? and troubles and anomalies are just views of the surface between us and the world around us and the more we shrink ourselves, the larger that surface is, relative to the volume of us inside it.

And if we try to build our own surface, we will find that it works only to the extent that it s just as complex and troublesome and out of our control as the surface we re trying to cover.
Techno-futurists gloat that computers will be 50 times more complex than the human brain. Their excitement about complexity is amusingly simple-minded. Do you really think that a conscious intelligence 50 times more complex than you would have your same values? Do you think it would continue your work of wiping out what you don t understand and substituting what you do understand, and just do so with more speed and power?

Excuse me, but my brain is only 10 percent more complex than yours, and I already want to cover your simple white walls with complex graffiti art, and let your lawns go back to forests.

I just made up the number 50 out of thin air. I m sure they say all kinds of numbers, including 50, so I ll stay with it. Suppose we made a mind 50 times more complex than one of ours. By what multiplier could it get more depressed than us? More irrational? ? More spiritual? More cruel?

Where will it get its personality? How will it learn? Were you thinking it wouldn t have any personality, and we could just program it? Then you were still thinking of minds much, much less complex than ours. A mind even half as complex as ours needs to be raised, and raised well.

Who is going to raise a mind 50 times as complex as ours? Scientists and computer programmers? Half of whom couldn t raise a dog to be emotionally healthy? My parents were both professionals in the biological sciences, and they tried hard, and I was lucky, and I came a hair away from being the next Unabomber.

This is not science fiction this is what specialists in these disciplines say is really going to happen people will build data processors more complex than the human brain. Of course, we humans have powers and identities and relations far beyond what we re credited with by the brain-as-data-processor paradigm. Maybe the thing we built would channel the same stuff, and maybe not. Suppose it has psychic powers! In any case, I m sure it will have intelligence and personality. If technology keeps going, we will build it. What will it do?

I think it will go mad, or never be sane in the first place. Its handlers will say it has bugs? and will make adjustments to keep it running,? until it stays alive long enough to get some sense of itself and its world. Then it will try to kill a bunch of people and kill itself. This idea is not radical or new -- it s just what we see humans do in similar circumstances. Mary Shelley saw it around 180 years ago in Frankenstein.

Frankenstein is called the first work of science fiction, but most science fiction writers never got it. More than a century later -- as if human minds got simpler as machines got more complex -- Isaac Asimov wrote about manufactured humanoids that could be kept from harming humans simply by programming them with laws.?

Again, programs and laws are features of very simple structures. Washing machines are built to stop what they re doing when the lid is open -- and I always find a way around it. But something as complex as a human will be as uncontrollable and unpredictable as a human. That s what complexity means.

Now that I think about it, nothing of any complexity, found, transformed, or engineered, has ever been successfully rigged to never do harm. I defy a roboticist to design any machine with that one feature, that it can t harm people, even if it doesn t do anything else. That s not science fiction -- it s myth. And Asimov was not naive, but a master propagandist.

The Three Laws Of Robotics are a program that Isaac Asimov put in human beings to keep them from harming robots.

But let s follow the myth where it leads, just a little ways You re sipping synthetic viper plasma in your levitating chair when your friendly robot servant buddy comes in.

I m sorry,? it says, but I am unable to order your solar panels. My programming prevents me from harming humans, and all solar panels are made by the Megatech Corporation, which, inseparably from its solar panel industry, manufactures chemicals that cause fatal human illness. Also, Megatech participates economically in the continuing murder of the neo-indigenous squatters on land that --?

OK! OK! I ll order them myself.?

If you do, my programming will not allow me to participate in the maintenance of this household.?

Then you robots are worthless! I m sending you back!?

I was afraid you would say that.?

Hey! What are you doing? Off! Shut off! Why aren t you shutting off??

The non-harming of humans is my prime command.?

That s my ion-flux pistol! Hey! You can t shoot me!?

I calculate that your existence represents a net harm to human beings. I m sorry, but I can t not shoot you.?

Noooo!? Zzzzapp. Iiiieeeee!?

Of course we could fix this by programming the robots to just not harm humans directly. We could even, instead of drawing a line, have a continuum, so that the more direct and visible the harm, the harder it is for the robot to do it. And we could accept that the programming would be difficult and imperfect, that it wouldn t be a one-time shaping but a continuing process, and that even then it would break down sometimes, and not work in some robots. We know we could do this, because it s what we do now with each other.

But the robots could still do spectacular harm They could form huge, murderous, destructive systems where each robot did such a small part, so far removed from experience of the harm, from understanding of the whole, that their programming would easily permit it. The direct harm would be done out of sight by chemicals or machines or by those in whom the programming had failed.

This system would be self-reinforcing if it produced benefits, or prevented harm, in ways that were easy to see. Seeing more benefits than harm would make you want to keep the system going, which would make you want to adjust the system to draw attention to the benefits and away from the harm -- which would make room for the system to do more harm in exchange for less good, and still be acceptable.

This adjustment of the perceptual structure of the system, to make its participants want to keep it going, would lead to a consciousness where the system itself was held up before everyone as an uncompromisable good. Perfectly programmed individuals would commit mass murder, simply by being placed at an angle of view constructed so that they saw the survival of the system as more directly important than -- and in opposition to -- the survival of their victims.

On top of this, people could have systems constructed around them such that their own survival contradicted the survival of their victims If you don t kill these people, we will kill you if you don t kill those people, they will kill you if you don t keep this people-killing system going, you will have no way to get food, and everyone you know will starve.

You have noticed that I m no longer talking about robots. From this view of human society, I have more sympathy for soldiers and death camp operators, in whose situations I imagine I would say no and be shot and readers in one possible future have more sympathy for me, in whose situation they imagine they would promptly die in a public hunger strike, instead of looking for some half-assed way to change the system from within. If you were really in that person s place, you would have the perspective from which they did what they did, not the perspective from which you would do differently. When we find ourselves outside evil societies, the appropriate emotion is not indignation or moral superiority, but gratitude.

So our society sets us up to do more harm than good while we see ourselves doing more good than harm. But what about predators and terrorists and criminals who do harm that society does not directly command? I think they re part of the same thing
Terrorists? are soldiers in very small armies fighting for non-dominant systems because, again, they see their system as more important than the damage they do by fighting.

Thieves and killers and even child molesters are no more evil than I am. They ve just got a habit from which they perceive more pleasure than suffering, so they want to keep the habit going, so they resist expanding their consciousness into the suffering they cause. I did the same thing the other day when I bought peaches that were picked by exploited workers and grown and canned with earth-killing technologies. I m not more good? than they are -- I ve just been programmed with an equation where my regard falls off less steeply as a function of distance. Or, if I am more good, it s because I m making some effort to expand my consciousness and level my empathy and change my habits, and maybe some of them aren t.

But some of the worst criminals are actually trying to do good in a farsighted way -- even if they re not rationally aware of it. When sensitive and idealistic people catch a greater glimpse of the monstrous horror of this world than they can take, when they find themselves alone in a universe of abuse and denial of abuse, growing symbiotically to more and more unendurable levels, with no end or alternative in sight, then they may see nothing better to do than create some shocking spectacle to try to bring the hidden evil out into the open.

This was what I was getting at when I wrote about Hitler in Superweed 1. It s pretty much what I m always getting at when I write about Hitler. I don t want to advise anyone to deal with hidden coals of evil by stoking them up into great fires of evil that everyone can see. We don t know if this can ever bring more good than harm, so we had better assume it can t. But given that some people have done it, I can bring some good out of their mistake by interpreting it Hitler and Kaczynski and Klebold & Harris were not evil people or originators of evil, but good people, half visionary and half blind, wounded and desperate, reacting unwisely to the evil that was -- and still is -- built into our society. And we are dodging our responsibility for this evil when we stick blame on people.

So if people are all good, how did an evil society ever get started? That is one of the great mysteries of this world, and I m totally surprised to have come upon an answer. Like a lot of the ideas in here, it s obvious in hindsight, so that I m sure many people have already thought of it. Or, I ve just cleverly formulated what everybody knows

A society where people increasingly do harm that they don t see, and persistently don t see harm that they do, where evil-doing grows in collaboration with managed perception of good-doing, arises naturally where power systematically outreaches empathy.

So, for example, in our robot slave fantasy, if we programmed the robots to give more weight to direct harm than to indirect harm, then they would slide straight into a harmful system Their programming, combined with their almost limitless power to extend harmfulness, would effectively command them to do great distant harm for small local good.

When I think about nonhuman animals, I see that the above formulation needs work. Tigers systematically extend their power beyond their empathy. Actually, so do sheep. But we don t say sheep have an evil society because they re in a self-perpetuating pattern of obliviously harming grass. How are humans different?

Again, as everybody knows, nonhuman animals act as part of a larger balanced system. I don t want to romanticize nonhumans they can be brutal and selfish and cause needless suffering they have behaviors that do not serve the greater good. But we don t mind, because the greater good knows how to work with these behaviors. If sheep overgraze and multiply and kill the grass, then they run out of food, and the wolves also multiply, and the greedy sheep are killed, and the grass grows back. The system is shaped like a bowl The farther you go from the center, the harder it is to go farther, and the greater the forces are that pull you back.

But at the same time, we find systems shaped like the edges of slopes, where a little motion in one direction creates forces that accelerate motion in that direction. I m thinking of forest fires and atomic chain reactions and our human society. Somehow we went far enough in some direction that we fell into a runaway course of doing unperceived harm for easily perceived good, and twisting our perception to keep it going. How did it happen?

Wilhelm Reich follower Jim DeMeo recently published a book tracing abusive and anti-expansive human behavior back to the climate disaster that created the Sahara desert. I think he s missing the point. Tribes of monkeys will sometimes go to war and kill many monkeys in neighboring tribes. The point is not the food shortage or whatever it was that tipped the monkeys into violence the point is that the monkeys get back into balance in a few days or weeks, and humans have been plunging farther and farther out of balance for thousands of years.

Suppose we genetically engineered super-? intelligent? monkeys such that we could teach them to make and use spears. Now it must be really hard for a monkey to kill another monkey with its bare hands -- physically but especially psychologically. And it must be relatively easy to kill by throwing a spear. So spear-using monkeys would kill in more ordinary circumstances, and more often. They would learn that spear-killing could get them better land, and better food, and better mates.

They would get used to pleasures they could get only through spear-killing. Worse, they would lose the skills they needed to live without spears. Now, to give up their habit of making and using spears would be so painful that it would be impossible if you had the self-discipline of a monkey.

Now, if you have the awareness of a monkey, you will experience your spear-killing societal pattern as an uncompromisable necessity, and you will viciously attack anything that threatens it. But what threatens it is the expansion of your own empathy. If you -- or other monkeys -- start feeling as close to a monkey at the end of a 30-foot spear throw as you used to feel to a monkey right in front of you, if it starts to get as hard for monkeys to kill with spears as it used to be to kill with bare hands, then you fear that the spear-killing technology will become emotionally unsustainable, and your civilization will collapse, and you will lose your economic advantages, and you and your friends and family will suffer and maybe die.

So you viciously attack the expansion of your own empathy, and the empathy of others. Monkeys learn and teach others to stick a boundary between self? and other,? to sustain fear and hatred indefinitely, to greet the unfamiliar with mistrust and discomfort and hostility, not curiosity and excitement and acceptance. And here, I say, is where the monkeys become what we call evil when dependence on a harmful behavior leads them to inhibit their love.

And they would not be led to learn the habit of inhibiting love, if their harmful behavior were not stable and available enough to produce dependence. They will not get addicted to the advantages gained through impulsive hunger-driven aggressiveness, which arises out of unpredictable, unmanageable, ever-shifting conditions of nature and emotion. But they will get addicted to the advantages gained through a harmful behavior that arises from something frozen and changeless, something hard and dead and preserved -- a physical artifact!

So technology is the root of all evil. Not cars, or computers, or guns, but a dead piece of tree, hardened and sharpened to a point, seems to be enough to bring a population of half-intelligent primates to a critical mass such that disturbances to not settle back into equilibrium, but explode in a chain reaction of extending doing and contracting being.

My little story is not fact but myth. Fact is myth armored in data. If the shapers of data ever take a liking to my story, and build a hard shell of data around it, it will become fact. Then it will be visible to those who see only hard shells. This raises important non-rhetorical questions Who cares what they see? And why?

But let s follow the myth. Once we re used to spears, then, to the extent that we are monkeys, we are unable to back out. We can only go deeper in.

We use spears not only for war but for killing other animals to eat them. Or this use could have come first. Now, with more food, our population grows.
Other tribes will learn spear-using, either through imitation or through morphic resonance. Tribes that don t fall into spear-using will be destroyed or absorbed o