John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

Whenever I read non-contemporary nonfiction, especially when it 's engaged in diagnosing social ills and forecasting social change, I feel like I'm living an alternative timeline. It's a bit like time travel, except that it's a visit from a future unconceived of by the book's author, and I can rarely predict how I'm going to feel about it all.

I'm confident that John Zerzan would hate that description of how I found myself reacting to his 2008 Twilight of the Machines, a non-copyrighted collection from Feral House Press, but here we are.

And where I am, to be clear, is Canada in 2026, which is to say a time and place haunted and horrified by American political chaos, the rampaging of tech billionaires, annual cataclysmic wildfire seasons radically unlike what we'd come to think of as usual, chatbots known to be assisting in teen suicide and in the cultivation of psychosis, Gaza and Ukraine and Greenland and Venezuela, and all of it under the shadow of climate change.

John Zerzan, in 2008 but still at the present time, is convinced that civilization was at heart a bad decision. An avowed and careful anarcho-primitivist, he's intensely anti-industrialist and anti-technological. When I sit with everything I've listed in the previous paragraph, it can feel hard to disagree. Still, it's been 18 years since this book's publication, almost 30 since the epochal Against Civilization, the collection of primary sources Zerzan brought together. So, so much that flows from the tech industry is best described as at best fascism-adjacent, and yet somehow we've collectively failed to resist the lie that our best future will come from choosing the best ways for so-called AI to destroy our independence, our individuality, and our ability to understand ourselves as belonging to a genuine community. The refrain I keep coming back to, simply, is what on Earth do we think we're doing here?

In other words, I read John Zerzan and Twilight of the Machines through a haze of wish-fulfillment, rage, and social-media neuroses. His clarity of thought, like the force of his characteristic phrasing, is refreshing and empowering, except that (or possibly even though?) the succeeding decades have seen the cultural baseline shift ever further from anarcho-primitivism and toward tech triumphalism.

At times, though, it does feel to me like inflection points are within reach for some of these things: ICE has a large number of liberals questioning the meaning of privilege, rather than emptily acknowledging it; a few of my students are deliberately (and in some cases noisily) refusing various tech manifestations; AI haters are feeling a lot more comfortable expressing their hatred.

We are always in the midst of revolution.

It's just that we don't always know which revolution we're fighting, or which side we're on (or how many sides there are), or what outcome is most likely to flow from our actions.

Most of us, at least. I suspect that Zerzan has more confidence than I do. I found this to be a really useful article and interview, though I'm a long way from being aligned with Zerzan's principles.

Hell of a book, this. Fight on, friends. It's the only way to get the world we want.