The Anarchist Library

Anti-Copyright

The Unprogram
Goals and Principles of Freedom Club

UNCFC
17 November 2014

UNCFC
The Unprogram
Goals and Principles of Freedom Club
17 November 2014
Retrieved on 17 November 2014 from
http://uncfc.org/unprogram/

Published by UNCFC, an anti-industrial and ecological student

group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
theanarchistlibrary.org

Contents
Prelude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Aside: From the Journal of Richard Hamming .
Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Aside: Technology is a system. . . . . . . . . .
Mythology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Aside: An Urban Wildness? . . . . . . . . . . .
A Signpost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

5
6
7
8
9
11
12

of the things that has yet to be investigated by those with antitechnological views is the possibility of an urban wildness. This is
one of the questions Freedom Club is excited to explore.

A Signpost
This is a signpost for all who have stopped believing in this civilizations myths. It is the beginning of a heartfelt and honest conversation about where we are and where we can go from here.
The heart of this project, Freedom Club, will be the FC Journal,
a publication that will be issued twice a year and will accept submissions from anyone who wants to engage in uncivilized mythmaking, to write essays about modernity and the actions some are
taking against it, and to share stories about communities who are
figuring out new ways to relate to themselves and the earth. The
FC Journal is intended to be a printed dialogue, a journey through
the decline of industrial civilization and away from it.
Joining Freedom Club is a possibility for anyone who wants to
edit the journal or start a new project, but just as important are
the people who contribute to the discussion informally. This might
be through words, such as submitting an essay to the journal, or
it might be through actions, such as putting on an anti-technology
puppet show. The important part is that we who feel the wounds
of industry connect with each other.
The path to take from there is unknown, but it will no doubt be
an adventure.

12

They all say

Im a child of few words
This I dont deny
But actually
Whether I speak or not
With this society Ill still
Conflict
Xu Lizhi

Prelude
In the beginning humans lived as members of small communities
that fought, played, and made love together. It wasnt all comfortable, but it was fulfilling, and it was free. Then a new method of
controlling the earth was discovered, and some humans formed a
mythology that, like a disease, began eating away at all the beauty
and freedom in the world.
The humans began to think that somehow, with enough technology, they could escape the inescapable elements of human existence, the fundamental aspects of a human life. And yet, even
now, on the bleeding edge of progress, fulfillment can still be found
where it always was: in the laughter around a campfire, in a hard
days work, or in the drawings of a child.
And progresswell, that has brought us the atomic bomb.
Nowadays, most people can sense that the old myths no longer
hold their power. Modern life is characterized by a quiet uneasiness,
a pervasive tip-of-the-tongue feeling, and right as we have found
a way to articulate it, we are interrupted by an ad or a notification.
And left without space to tell new stories, we can do nothing but
surround the old ones in quotation marksan age of irony.
Its time to let go of all that.
5

Hidden by our current irony is a deep, soul-wrenching despair.

We have lost so much already. Undeniably, civilization has left some
scars that will never heal.
But with that despair we can still find hope. There are new stories
yet. A new life is pulsing underneath the slabs of city concrete, and
it is waiting to be freed by a poet with a pickaxe.

Aside: From the Journal of Richard Hamming

Richard Hamming was one of the many scientists who worked on
the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. In his 1998 essay
Mathematics on a Distant Planet, he describes an experience there
indicative of the way scientists irresponsibly put the entire complex
biosphere on the lineand do it casually:
Shortly before the first field test (you realize that no
small scale experiment can be doneeither you have
a critical mass or you do not), a man asked me to check
some arithmetic he had done, and I agreed, thinking to
fob it off on some subordinate. When I asked what it
was, he said, It is the probability that the test bomb
will ignite the whole atmosphere. I decided I would
check it myself! The next day when he came for the
answers I remarked to him, The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for
the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen
after all, there could be no experiments at the needed
energy levels. He replied, like a physicist talking to a
mathematician, that he wanted me to check the arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, What
have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking
all of life that is known in the Universe, and you do not
know much of an essential part? I was pacing up and
down the corridor when a friend asked me what was
6

to sustain themand if sociological research is anything to go by,

this is precisely what is happening. Outside of the cynical cities
there is a worldwide rise in fanaticism, fundamentalism, and fascism, movements consisting of people who, despite progress, still
have irrational needs that technological environments simply do
not satisfy, and that fundamentalism does.
But there has to be a better answer to these questions.

Aside: An Urban Wildness?

Liking nature means nothing by itself. In fact, some people try
to replace every instance of God with nature, every instance of
illegal with unnatural, inevitably ending up some place that is
downright repulsive. We must remember that the Nazis professed
to love nature, too.
The real key to moving forward with an anti-technological critique is focusing not on nature, but on wildness. Wild environments are intrinsically different from technological environments,
operating according to the interests of their constituent parts
rather than despite them. Wildness inspires mythologies based on
relatedness, while technological environments reduce all things to
cogs in a machine or nodes in a network.
The word nature alone often reinforces the idea that nature is
somehow separate from humans, a myth that belongs only to civilization. But it is wild nature that is important. In wild nature we
can see most clearly how free life can be and how free it once was.
This is why traditionally anti-technological stances have accompanied a rootedness in wilderness living.
But wildness can exist in more than just a forest. Those who
dare to explore the secret corners of the city have already experienced this. The graffiti artist decorates an abandoned industrial
factory with the same wild impulse as the caveman who painted
on stone walls. Unmaintained sidewalks being torn apart by tree
roots are indicative of the same wild spirit that floods the Nile. One
11

as a resource. Animals, who to primitive people spoke languages,

are silent in the modern world.
Other myths have driven civilization forward as well. The myth
of whiteness and the construction of races was a huge step forward
in justifying slavery and colonialism, both of which pushed technological efficiency to its historical limits. Later, capitalism and its
evaluation of profit and utility as supreme values catalyzed technological growth like nothing before it. All along the way, specific
social divisions were deemed necessary for the efficiency of the
technological system, and new values and stories developed as justifications for these divisions.
But at least since the first nuclear bomb and certainly since
the Cold War, uneasiness with modern life has spread from small
groups to most of society. Generations who experienced rapid technological change began to realize that the same things were bringing them fulfillment, purpose, and adventure, but the ways to kill
and maim and destroy were rapidly growing in number. The revelation of the Doomsday Clock marked a major shift in consciousness as people realized that all complex life on Earth could easily
be eradicated by the wrong move of a stranger. And in contemporary times, climate change and extreme natural disasters have
snapped people back into a reality where nature matters and is to
be respected.
The old myths, lacking their former power, left whole generations with deep, existential questions. Artistic, philosophical, literary, and religious movements sprung up all around the world
to cope with these new questions, but most of them, like existentialism and absurdism, ended their investigation with the question,
calling it unanswerable, or simply answering the question with despair. In response to this and to the wars that tore the world apart
in later years, writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon revealed the macabre aspects of modernity with irony and cynicism.
But humans cannot live stable lives within quotation marks. The
unfulfilling aspects of the city will kill a person without any myths
10

bothering me. I told him. His reply was, Never mind,

Hamming, no one will ever blame you.

Technology

The center of modern life is technology, an all-consuming system

that organizes our social relationships, controls our economy, and
determines our mythologies. To some extent, technology can be
said to simply be material infrastructure or products: power-lines,
phones, plumbing. But that would be like saying capitalism is only
products on a shelf. Technology, like capitalism, has a very obvious
hand in organizing the world, and it is similarly allowed to exist
only because people buy into specific stories it tells. A computer
7

is inseparable from the myth of human separateness from nature.

Plumbing infrastructure is inseparable from the division of labor
that enables it or the technologies of management and law and
order that protect it.
This way of life subjects all things to indignities and gives them
no way out. There is no opt-out button: global warming affects everyone, as does mass surveillance, automation, and GMOs. And
avoiding technological progress is always eventually impossible. A
person could refuse to have a phone for a while, but because phones
made the technological system more efficient, phone technologies
spread throughout the globe and even our social relationships became dependent on them.
These developments cannot be resisted because technology demands that it is preserved for its own sake. Unlike primitive techniques, modern technology assumes the position of mediator of
reality. Instead of going to the forest for food and engaging in a
tangible process of gathering it, modern humans engage only in
abstract processes: they go to work where they have little choice
in what they do, they go to stores to pick up pre-made dinners, and
they sit on the couch to stare at some sort of screen that tells them
what they should buy with their extra moneyif they have any.

Aside: Technology is a system.

Because there are quite a few misunderstandings about technology, it helps to consistently remember that technology is a system:
it consists not only of the material, but of the social and ideological
as well. When first learning about these ideas, that can be hard to
remember, especially when the word technology is used in many
different, sometimes contradictory ways. But a good way to evaluate
statements about technology and their absurdity or helpfulness is to
replace technology with capitalism.
Technology is a tool; it can be used for good or for ill.
8

Technology has produced good things, so the problem isnt

capitalism itself, but certain kinds of capitalism.
Technology could have been different, so critiquing capitalism is too broad.
versus
Capitalism is a tool; it can be used for good or for ill.
Capitalism has produced good things, so the problem isnt
capitalism itself, but certain kinds of capitalism.
Capitalism could have been different, so critiquing capitalism is too broad.

Mythology
Obviously, there are plenty of reasons to reject the technological world. But one might wonder whyif technological society has
shown itself to humiliate and dominate living creatureswhy have
humans not decided to turn away from it already? The answer lies
in the myths that sustain technology.
Progress is an almost religious concept that drives all technological growth. This myth is intertwined with many others, and it
goes something like this: Once upon a time humans were all brutes,
living in poverty, violently attacking each other to solve their differences, and constantly hungering for food. One day, agricultural
technology appeared and fixed all that, and since then technology
has become more and more advanced, allowing humans to have
more leisure time, longer lives, and healthier lives.
Intrinsic to the idea of progress is the idea of human separateness
from nature. In this myth, humans are above nature because of
superior intelligence, and they are therefore entitled to use nature
9