William Gillis 🏴 @rechelon@mastodon.social

Those in favor of secession to small intentional communities and who themselves mean to attack and destroy lines of contact between individuals (and thus lines of flight), are *on the side of power*.

Ripping apart the network, slowing it down, is the only hope power has.

There's a reason authoritarian technocrats like you find around nrx keep turning to borders, "smaller societies," and fantasies of warlords. They want to slice away complexity, reduce the network size, reduce the scope of impact every individual can have.

This is why, in practice, primitivism is functionally aligned with power.

Our power systems are being pressed closer and closer to dissolution, they want to rip up and destroy or at least limit the information technologies that are setting various feedback loops beyond control.

There are significant dangers and risks, of course. Freedom always involves risk. In the grand conflict between power and liberty, between death and agency, the stakes have never been higher. Survival is on the table.

Primitivism tries to retreat, to embrace maximal *control*.

The fearful desperation for a fixed stable uncomplicated lifeway is an understandable homo sapiens response. We have pleistocene brains with limits. The unpredictable complexity we are unleashing with technology and science is to wild to be controlled. It is dissolving much.

Reading recent primitivist texts explicitly turn to embracing "human nature" and rejecting anarchy as an ideal is in some sense refreshing, but it creates such a strong tension with their dismissal of technology as tools to "control."

Control is about *limiting* possibility.

The tension between primitivism and transhumanism is between A) big slow feedback loops that operate so slowly things appear fixed to human minds and we're not stressed by complexity, and B) the ever-tightening short fast feedback loops of rational thought rather than evolution.

What I've tried to emphasize in discussing the "social singularity" is that the singularity is not about the surrender of agency, there is no point where everything is locked in. Rather the stakes only grow. The novelty and complexity of the world grow. Our responsibilities grow.

This perhaps also marks an interesting rhetorical break between anarchist and non-anarchist transhumanisms.

The notion of being drawn inexorably towards something in an irreversible way is just "the rapture of the nerds", we sit back and magical tech/AI solves everything for us.

The "singularity" as a term entered transhumanist discourse as a way of denoting escalating complexity and a break with predictability or control. But popular associations tied it to black holes (and conflated with event horizons) which I think engenders an unproductive fatalism.